The Great Wheel Page 2

  Remember what? For whom? He gazed up at the face of Our Lady. She was smiling and sad, self-absorbed, and her carved lips always seemed to be holding back the same eternal secret. He wiped the rusty stand and then the main altar rail with a fresh dysol-impregnated cloth from the pack he always carried with him, an anointing that was part of the ritual of reassurance that took place between Borderer and European even when there were no witnesses. Then he changed gloves. Pulling at the thread and dropping the old pair to the floor, he watched them flare and dissolve, and brushed away the ash with the toe of his shoe.

  He destroyed the unused wafers. Normally he would have gone through at least two of the sealed packs in an evening service, but today the congregation had been limited to a few old women, a few old men, and the babies that they’d agreed to look after while the rest of the people enjoyed the carnival. He’d had half a mind to acknowledge the fact during the service, even try—through the translat, or by testing his own stumbling command of the dialect—to crack a joke. But when he gazed down at those strange eyes, and at those warm and gnarled hands that he could never touch, the silence had closed in.

  Freewheeling, his cassock flapping, he cycled down the cobbled hill from church.

  These empty zigzag streets had once belonged to a town with its own name and history. The Endless City stretched along the north coast of old Africa, reaching through the dried-up regions of the Nile and the ancient battlefields of the Holy Land as far as the Black Sea before finally tapering out in the frozen wilderness of the Russian Plains. For the most part, the urban sprawl was narrow, hemmed in by mountains and the wildfire desert, pressed up against the gray waters of what had once been called the Mediterranean and was now named the Breathless Ocean. In this easterly part known as the Magulf, where John worked, the coastlines of Europe and old Africa almost touched. It had once been called Morocco—or possibly Algeria. The maps had blurred long ago.

  Typically by this time on a warm, reddish dark spring Magulf evening, the candles and the cooking flames and the chemlights would be glowing, the streets would be spilling with beggars, vendors, fights, snake charmers, family arguments, scurrying children. Tonight it was much quieter. The alleyways were empty—even the dogs were single and furtive. Everyone who could manage to get there was farther down the hill in the old plazas, the bombsites, the open spaces. Enjoying the carnival.

  He slowed and dismounted where the slick cobbles steepened and broke into a stairway of rubble between the houses, joined halfway down by the flow of what had probably started out as a stream somewhere up in the Northern Mountains. He picked his way with care, lifting the bicycle over a rock and banging his ankle in the process, conscious of the gaze of an old Borderer woman sitting at a window above him. She was watching the carnival’s flickering lights, listening to the squawk of untuned trumpets and the thump of drums and firecrackers that filtered up along this damp maze.

  “Hello,” he called, looking up. “Gunafana. What can you see up there?”

  He’d asked the question slowly, but the woman only blinked back at him. He was considering raising his voice or turning on the translat, when she spoke.

  “Go home, baraka. We don’t want you here,” she said. “Get back to your own hell.”

  She pursed her thin lips and spat. The saliva plopped on a mossy stone beside his feet, stained red from her chewing the koiyl leaf.

  Then, with more accuracy, she spat again.

  He had two calls to make that evening. He visited the homes of a few of his parishioners each day, even though those Borderers who were prepared to embrace the faith he represented were often unwilling to accept him personally. The only invariable exception came when someone was seriously ill. Then, the Borderers wanted him, and not simply because of the clinic he ran each morning from the old post office in the Plaza Princesa next to the bombed-out towerblock. Even when the doctor’s medicines and scans had been exhausted, they wanted John to pray and touch his silver cross and mutter to Jesus, Mary, and the Lord.

  His first call was down the hill on the Cruz de Marcenado, one of the main streets that bisected this part of the Endless City in line with the coast. Here, the music was louder—he was closer to the carnival’s glittering fringe. Cooking smoke was rising over the patched rooftops, the light in it gleaming on the rancid lakes of winter mud that still filled the middle of the thoroughfare. A couple ran out towards him from an alleyway, laughing, hand in hand, the boy pulling the girl against a show of weak reluctance, her shirt flapping open to show her sweat-shining breasts. Riding his bicycle along the sticky pavement, John stopped; for a moment he thought that they hadn’t noticed him. But the boy and girl had the same unerring sense for the presence of a European that all Borderers had. They halted and turned, their laughter momentarily stilled. Under a starless Magulf sky, they studied him with grave and questioning eyes. Then, laughing again, they ran on.

  John propped his bicycle against the wall in a nameless street, leaving it unlocked in the certain knowledge that its obvious cost and newness would warn any light-fingered Borderer kids to keep clear. He banged hard on an old doorframe. After a pause, the burlap nailed over it was jerked aside.

  “Fatoo. You here. Please, he get worse.”

  He hesitated. Then, turning the translat to Transmit, he followed the woman inside.

  She led him down a low corridor and into the one ground-floor room that was home for her and her family. He heard the familiar scurrying rustle of departing cockroaches as she turned up the lantern.

  The air stank of sickness. There was a cheap, newish sofabed, a methane cooker in an alcove topped by a few cans of Quicklunch, the drip of a water purifier in the corner. A screen hung at a slight angle on the wall, and in it hovering figures moved with a distorted impression of depth. She was picking up some faint transmission from Europe: through the jittery fuzz, he recognized the tanned, smiling faces. The silver eyes.

  He asked, “How is he?”

  A moment later, the translat’s electronic voice declared How ice uhe? To John, it seemed a reasonable rendition of the Magulf dialect, but he didn’t doubt that, booming out in this hot, dank place, it sounded as artificial to the woman as the translat’s European sounded to him.

  “He’s worse, Father.” She pulled back the blanket that screened off one corner of the room to show him her son. “Have you brought any medicine?”

  “No. No medicine.”

  …meed-shun.

  He studied the little figure that lay before him. The boy was about six or seven—the woman’s only son. His name was Daudi. And her name, he how remembered, was Juanita. Unlike many of the Borderers who came to his morning clinics, Juanita had already been one of the regulars at Santa Cristina when her son fell ill. Usually it was the other way around. They’d turn up at the clinic, and if a treatment worked, they’d show an interest in Christianity. Even if things continued to get worse, the Borderers would often offer to take the sacrament in case John was holding something back from those patients who didn’t embrace his faith.

  “Will he live?”

  She’d asked him that question several times before—even that first morning when she brought Daudi to the clinic. Then, Daudi had still been able to walk, although he was weak, dazed and bleeding from the gums and colon. After the buzzings and drillings of its consultation, the clinic’s doctor, which for once had been almost fully operational, confirmed John’s fears of acute myeloid leukemia.

  “Will he live?”

  “He’s very ill. It’s cancer, a disease that can’t be cured. It’s a cancer of the blood, leukemia.”

  …bludrut.

  “In Europe? Even in Europe, he can’t be cured?”

  “In Europe, cancer is different.”

  “There is no cancer?”

  He took a deep breath, feeling the sour wash of his own body heat. Juanita was standing at the usual safe distance the Borderers assumed, two or three steps from him—which in here meant that she was on the opposite side
of the room.

  “No,” he said, “not in Europe—not until we grow old. There are these things, Juanita, special viruses in our blood, implants along our spines, inside our bodies. That’s why I can’t…”

  Her brown eyes stared back at him as the translat repeated his words.

  “I’m sorry, Juanita. Daudi’s going to die.”

  “Will you pray for him?”

  “Yes…of course.”

  “Then pray for him. Pray for him now.”

  John looked down at the child on the bed. He’d dealt with several leukemia cases and in his own laymanish way had become a kind of expert. The first case he’d had was a woman with lush, jet-black skin, still young enough to possess the bloom of beauty that Borderer women so rapidly lost. She’d come to him as they always did—too late. He still attempted treatment, but the ancient cytotoxic drugs that Tim Purdoe in the European Zone at Bab Mensor had synthesized for him were never intended for use outside a hospital, and the woman died anyway—pretty much as Tim had told him she would—but probably more horribly, from the green fungal growth of some secondary infection. He’d learned his lesson then; that the desire to help in useless cases was a selfish attempt to deal with his own guilt.

  He unscrewed a flask of holy water and reached out towards the stained, sunken bed. The woman let out an instinctive gasp, but he knew she wouldn’t stop him from touching her son. At least not as long as he kept his gloves on. His sheathed fingers brushed the boy’s forehead, the skin as thin and pale as the bone it scarcely covered. Daudi was comatose, but for a moment the sunken eyelids seemed to quiver.

  Speaking the too familiar words, pausing after each line for the translat to repeat them in a form that Juanita would recognize if not understand, John felt a sudden impulse to rip off the gloves. To heal, to touch. He shook his head and continued…

  In the name of God the almighty Father who created you.

  In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you.

  In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you.

  Go forth, faithful Christian.

  As he spoke, the hot, silent room seemed to whiten.

  The other call he’d planned to make was also on the edge of oldtown. Even he, a European, avoided going too far out in the Endless City at night, but he felt he was starting to acquire some feeling for navigation in the sprawling, unmapped, and ever-changing slum. It came from a mixture of many things: from the position of the sun when its glow could be discerned through the clouds, from the gritty feel of the almost constant southerly wind, from landmarks like the broken minaret of the Moulay Mosque and the rotted tower of his own Santa Cristina—or from the strength of the distinctive reek of the kelpbeds.

  Down through the gateway in the old medina wall. A glimpse between the buildings of a tangled roof-fall all the way to the shores of the Breathless Ocean, where the kelpbeds gleamed in a break of moonlight like shattered green ice. And then right, and right again—into the blaze of the carnival in the Plaza El-Halili.

  Too late, he realized the way he’d come. Inextricably entangled with the surrounding alleys, souks, and streets, the Plaza El-Halili was one of the bigger squares in the lower part of oldtown and usually crowded. But he’d never seen it like this. The buildings swam in a haze of light and smoke. People were everywhere. Bells and iron pots, drums and pipes were tooting and clanging. And there were the conflicting smells of incense, booze, the reek of stalls piled with fish, the fumes from fires, the sweet, teeth-aching aroma that came off graveyard piles of sugarballs in the shape of skulls, the smoke from tubes, the sweat-steam that sprayed off dancing bodies.

  The instant that he stepped from the shade of an archway out into the light, the Borderers noticed him. They paused in their dancing, in their selling of wares and picking of pockets, in their arguments and their laughter. They fanned back and away. The sense of his presence passed through the square in a chilly, inaudible whisper.

  Blue, green, and brown eyes studied him. Mothers reached down to grab the hands of children. Nearby music stopped, hanging on a discord. He nodded pointless thanks, wheeling his expensive bicycle through the space that parted for him, the battery coil slung beneath its crossbar and glowing, the big soft tires plowing through mud and litter.

  Down the slope of the square, away from the frigid sphere of his influence, a stage had been erected against the castellated walls of the old Kasbah. The rusty scaffolding was draped with silks and flags, colored with smoky-pink chemlights, drifting fluorescent globes, endless shimmering ribbons. A play was in progress. A huge, leering mask loomed over a shrieking band of children. Their faces were blackened and their thin bodies smeared with ash. Their shrieks sounded alarmingly real.

  “Hey, Fatoo,” someone shouted out.

  He saw a Borderer youth towering over the hunchback woman nearest him. The youth’s hair was tangled with beads, and a cosmetic implant pulsed bluish red through the skin beneath his rib cage, like a second heart.

  “Fatoo, you come anyway, huh? You here, and join in? Tonight…”

  The lad was smiling—and John could see no trace of irony in the smile. Borderers weren’t like Europeans anyway; they usually said exactly what they meant. The people around John began to nod and laugh. To beckon. The invitation spread. Koiyl-stained teeth grinned. Someone else laughed and pointed at the sky. Yes, come on, Fatoo. Join in. Skay. Come and share with us. Cum. Share…

  John shook his head and pushed on towards the escape of the nearest archway. He passed quickly into the shadows, away from the carnival to where the blind walls and windows glistened in the faint red light of the Magulf sky and rats and caroni birds fought over something in the mud and the pulse of light and music faded.

  He turned on his bicycle’s front light, kicked in the standby motor, and rode slowly uphill. He could remember harvest carnivals back in Hemhill when he was a child, the great painted wagons, the good smell of the corn in the church beforehand, the Sunday perfume of the women, the beery breath of the men. And he remembered laughing and wrestling with Hal in the churchyard grass when the service ended, the two of them tumbling down the hill towards bright canopies, clangorous carnival engines, all the sweet discord of the fair. Thinking of vast European grainfields, the smell of dust, the hum of the compound in the valley that signified the end of summer, John dismounted from his bicycle in a dank Magulf square.

  It was steeply enclosed on all sides, and in the center was the mouth of a communal sewer. His ears still rang from the carnival, but that only increased the sense of silence. Could everyone have possibly gone out tonight? Surely there had to be people other than the ill, the infirm, and the odd European priest who didn’t want to participate.

  He climbed the sagging steps and found the right door. It was open. Inside, he had to rely on touch. There was a passageway—a left turn?—definitely another set of stairs. He stumbled on through the darkness. The silence around him was no longer absolute. There were the creaks and stirrings that came from the flexing of the jelt floor and walls—also from the disturbance his passage was causing to the old building’s many nonhuman inhabitants. He paused. Normally, there would be lights, kids in the corridors, music blaring…

  But for the glow of his gloves—now pale red at the tips—and the faint light that came from the small personal monitoring screen of the watch set into the flesh just above his left wrist, the darkness was absolute. A few more steps, and he had to stop. Perhaps he should go back. He’d visit old Banori on the way to the clinic tomorrow morning. After all, the difference was only one night…But then he heard a sound, a low moaning that could have come from the livestock that the Borderers sometimes kept in their homes, but could just as easily have been human. He took another step forward. His right foot banged something, and he reached out to grab a wobbly stair rail. He began to climb.

  The landing was illuminated in the glow of a chemlight from the one open door, and he saw the dim shapes of waste barrels and of
the water butts that in times of rain were fed from the roof by an elaborate system of pipes; otherwise they were filled laboriously by bucket from the pump in the yard. Such arrangements were always the subject of much local argument. It sometimes struck him that this was almost their primary purpose, especially as the things regularly broke through the weak floors to either comic or disastrous effect.

  The open door was the one he wanted. He crossed the landing towards the light and entered.

  He saw instantly that he’d come too late. Banori’s corpse sat facing him from the old high-backed chair, its eyes already sunken and lifeless in the chemlight’s dying radiance. The room was in an odd kind of mess, but John had picked his way around the furniture towards the body before the truth dawned. Even in the soupy atmosphere of a Borderer tenement, the place was filled with the bland, salty reek of blood. Black sprays of it garlanded the walls. They were still wet, scrawled by a strong, sweeping hand into hieroglyphs whose meaning he couldn’t even guess at.

  He looked around. He crossed himself. Whatever else it was that witchwomen did for the death rite, they generally left the place looking like an abattoir—although, as far as he could tell without undertaking a pointless analysis, the blood hadn’t been the old man’s. Not that it mattered now. In death, Banori smiled. He was wearing his best clothes, with his white hair slicked neatly down. He also had a set of teeth in, something John could never remember him wearing in life. Or perhaps the teeth were just another part of the ritual. They’d probably end up with all the other teeth in the chapel of the Inmaculada at Santa Cristina.

  By Felipe’s account, Banori had been a church regular even before John’s arrival in the Magulf, a true Christian, turning up every Sunday at Mass propped on his walking stick until a succession of strokes finally grounded him to his flat. The neighbors complained about his cantankerous and unsanitary ways, but as far as John could tell, they had always made sure that he had the necessities to live. And every week or so, John looked in. Usually, he offered to say prayers or Mass, and Banori would decline—in an accent that strained even the abilities of the translat—saying that he was close enough to God, to Scuro Rey, to be past that kind of thing.