The Great Wheel

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Laurie said, “They want to know what you think.”

  “Tell them bona—it works.”

  Laurie relayed the comment. There was general, red-toothed laughter. He looked around. In the flush of the koiyl, these villagers of Lall truly did seem to be a happy people. He saw a mother nursing a child, the dogs who were scolded as they hung around for scraps at the table, the old people, their faces lined with smiles. He looked up the hill at the unmistakable mounds where the dead were buried, at the well and the cooking houses, at the piled bricks and bloodied stones of a shrine, the tinkling foil and skulls, the ancient gauntlet of a spacesuit. The baby that the mother had been nursing was wailing now, opening the round red toothless O of its mouth, kicking and waving the smooth handless sausages of its arms.

  The clouds that had obscured the mountains were now rolling down into the valley, bringing flurries of rain. John and Laurie were in no hurry to go on that day, but as usual Hettie was insistent. Didn’t the Fatoo want to see her home? It was only a short way. She prodded her dripping umbrella in the direction of swirling mist, a steep hillside. Unsure that the villagers of Lall would welcome their continued presence, Laurie and John were in no position to argue.

  Before they left, the village elder presented John with a bag of koiyl leaves. As they plodded up the valley behind Hettie, Lall and its waving villagers were soon lost in the mist. This time, even Laurie seemed to have little appetite for the climb.

  The rain increased. Night came. They were still ascending. Once, skidding on the wet rubble that fringed some unguessable drop, John’s feet went out from under him and he began a sickening slide until Laurie grabbed his flailing hand. He walked on, trying to still the shaking in his legs.

  It hadn’t occurred to him to ask Hettie what kind of home she kept in the mountains. It would probably have been impolite, anyway, but up here it was hard to imagine finding anything that resembled a roof and walls.

  They entered a gorge. Even in the darkness, glistening rock was visible on either side. Finally, when it seemed as though night would soon turn into morning, Hettie began to climb a loose stairway in the cliffs. Every now and then there were handholds, but sometimes it was like scaling a sheet of wet ice. They passed a hole in the rock. Another hole. The mouth of a cave. John’s questing hands touched odd outlines and depressions in the stone: carvings of some kind.

  Hettie shouted something, then disappeared into the cliff face. Laurie followed, then John. Blissfully out of the rain.

  Hettie poked along a fissure with the ferrule of her umbrella. Finding a pack of chemlights, she broke one open. The catalysts fizzed against the damp, then slowly brightened. The cave they stood in had been fashioned into walls, a floor, a stairway. There were friezes of men and animals, birds and lions and baboons, trees and flowers; scenes from a time when these mountains had been a vast forest of cedar and pine.

  Hettie held the chemlight aloft. Gesturing to John and Laurie to follow, she went up stone steps intricately carved with ropes and whorls. The breath of the three smoked ahead of them, and the sound and the smell of the rain faded. They reached another chamber in the cliff. It was obvious from the smell alone that this was where Hettie lived. Crouching on a rug, she lit a foline lamp with the heat from her chemlight, pumping up the pressure until a sphere of light filled the chamber.

  Most of the bare rock was covered with carpets and hangings. There were sagging tables and heaped cushions, corners filled with clean white deadfalls of bone, niches crammed with jars and oddments, dried and stuffed animals, broken mirrors, faded paper flowers, figurines, books, and bells. There were also bowls and spoons and neatly stacked tins of food, looking both reassuringly homely and oddly out of place amid all this witchwoman paraphernalia, and several small receivers, screens, and cameras in various states of disrepair. Peeling off the sodden top layers of her clothing, oily rivulets rolling down her surprisingly muscular arms, Hettie started a fire in a soot-blackened alcove. A natural chimney led up through the rock, drawing off the worst of the smoke.

  John offered a blisterpack of tablets that swelled into biscuits when immersed in water, and Laurie produced a plump freeze-dried pack of processed steak. Soaking the steak and cooking it in an iron pan hooked over the fire, Hettie stirred various nuts and vegetables into the spitting juices. The firelight pulsed, briefly filling more corners of the chamber. John glimpsed a wooden crucifix about half a meter long hanging from the bare rock, nailed with the skeleton of a lizard.

  After the food and the warmth of the fire had pushed out the cold, the three of them settled down in the smoky light, still steaming, smelling like wet dogs. Laurie dropped a handful of wine tablets into a jug of water. She offered it to Hettie to taste. Taking a sip, the witchwoman beamed.

  “She says she has something similar that we should try.”

  “What does similar mean?”

  “You’ll see—it’ll be fun.”

  Hettie produced a plastic jug. Filling it from a goatskin, she carefully dunked into it a fibrous lump on the end of a string, then tipped the contents into three crackle-glazed mugs, passing two to Laurie.

  “Ghea!”

  “Thanks—bona.” In the darkness, John couldn’t even guess at the color of the liquid that Laurie had passed to him, and his sense of smell had departed in the aromatic smoke from the fire and in the steam that came off their bodies. “Ghea…”

  He drank. The fire spat and rose, pouring out more smoke and light, revealing a shelf filled with poisonous jars of red Martian soil, lumps of moonrock, comet juice.

  “Hettie wants to know what you’re doing here.”

  John swayed forward, his eyes stinging, his vision blurred. Up here in the Northern Mountains, he’d sometimes actually felt that he was drifting closer to God. “The thing is, Hettie,” he said, half convinced that the two of them would be able to understand each other if he spoke slowly enough, “it’s a question of finding the truth. Do you think you’re closer to it here? That place called”—he turned to Laurie—“what was it?”

  “Ifri Gotal.”

  “Right. Ifri Gotal.”

  Hettie nodded vigorously and said something incomprehensible. Laurie shrugged. John smiled and shook his head, wondering whether it was some stray draft or a fluke in his own perception that made the tapestries around the walls belly in and out.

  “I think she means her question more broadly.”

  “You mean, why are any of us here?”

  “No, no.” As Laurie tipped up her mug and drank, John gazed at the stray rivulets that ran down the soft geometries of her neck and shoulders. She banged the mug down. Hettie quickly refilled it. “What Hettie means is—why are you here in the Magulf?”

  He placed his own mug on a tray, well out reach of Hettie’s bottomless jug. “I’m here,” he said, “because the bishop sent me here.”

  “No, it’s a serious question.”

  Suddenly the only sound was the fire, the breathing of the two women, his own racing heartbeat.

  “Why?”

  Laurie’s hair was a snake’s nest—as wild as Hettie’s—and somewhere in the last hours she’d thrown several necklaces of bells and skulls around her neck. The faces of the two women danced with soot and shadows, as if they were the same person caught at different ages.

  “Why? Why did you come here?”

  Hettie bent towards John, closer than she’d ever been, closer than any Borderer. He could feel her warmth. Her flesh. Her smell. They were breathing the same air. When she spoke, her spittle misted his face. “Tell truth,” she said. “Fatoo is here for the truth.”

  Slowly, John nodded. “The truth. That’s right. The truth.”

  “Let Hettie show.”

  He felt fingers tugging at the glove that enclosed his right hand. Sliding the sheath of plastic away, snapping each of the spines. Warm flesh closed around his own. The motion was so smooth, so deep, that it was a long moment before he shuddered and tried to jerk his hand out of reach.
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  “It’s all right, John.” Laurie smiled, her lips and her voice close to his ear. Her fingers were twined with his, squeezing gently. “Coming this far, how can you be afraid of the truth?”

  There was a curtained alcove. It gave off a stingingly strong aroma of earth and decay. When Hettie hooked back the cloth, he saw that it contained the blackened carcass of a goat. A few white growths sprouted from what had once been skin and fur—the fruiting bodies of some fungus.

  Hettie plucked one, slicing off its tangle of roots with a knife. She pressed the white knob of fungus to her lips and inhaled. Her eyelids fluttered.

  “What is it?”

  “Trust.”

  “Memory.”

  “Memory?”

  “The truth.”

  He discovered that he was sitting again before the fire and that Laurie was beside him. The fungus nesting in Hettie’s outstretched palm was dimpled, innocuous. A puffball, little different from those that grew in the leafmold of Hemhill’s woods.

  But as she leaned forward, the cracked nails of her dirt-marbled hands pressing, breaking open the flesh to liberate the cloudy spores, the puffball swelled and changed. Grew larger and smoother, flattened at the top where it had been left to cool on greased paper, speared lopsidedly by a candy-spiraled stick. It was an apple dipped in toffee, gleaming with all the colors of carnival light.

  He took it, and began to eat.

  “SKIDDLE? ARE YOU STILL AWAKE?”

  John turned in his bed. The door was ajar. As he watched and waited, it seemed to breathe and widen. Everything about the house on this late summer’s night—the scent and the feel of the air, the dry whispering that came from the trees that stirred outside his window, even the pressure of the old mattress against his spine—was strange and unreclaimed. They’d only got back from Ley that afternoon, and nothing yet really felt as it should. The long-dormant cleaner would be fussing over mountains of dirty washing in the kitchen. Fishing kit and Wellingtons were stacked in the hall. The smell of sand and salt and dried-on seaweed and fishscale competed with the odor of closed rooms. It was a time of year that he always wished would go quickly, impatient for this sense of strange unbelonging to dissolve in the closing of the days, the browning of the trees, the harvest, the carnival, the coming of the Borderers, the restarting of school: impatient for the turning, as he always thought of it, of the year.

  “Is it late?”

  Hal came into the room, a darker shadow.

  “Depends…”

  “I couldn’t sleep anyhow,” John said.

  “It’s always like this.” Hal sat down on the bed, a soft weight. The unsettled world shifted and formed a new center of gravity. “Coming back—home never feels like home.”

  “Are Mum and Dad still up?”

  “Still sorting themselves out. Still looking for disasters. Dad, anyway…” The two brothers smiled at each other through the darkness, sharing the memory of their father’s holiday-long obsession. All the time they’d been at Ley, he’d fretted that he’d somehow turned the house’s systems up before they left. He tried calling through the net on the little booth along the quayside but was never quite able to make the final link and check the settings. Their mother kept saying that they’d be bound to have heard if the house exploded, froze, or burned down, that if it bothered him so much, all he had to do was call one of the neighbors. But their father being their father, he could never do anything as simple as that. He just carried on worrying. All things considered, their summer at Ley had been typical enough.

  For a while John and Hal talked of the things they’d done and the things they’d do. They were reestablishing the old Hemhill ground rules. Coming home and waking the house from the hot long sleep of summer, preparing for autumn, having their separate lives and possessions again, friendships and pursuits that no longer depended on each other’s presence, they always needed to rediscover their relationship. This autumn, an even greater transition loomed; in a few weeks’ time, Hal would be leaving home, moving to London. Studying something called structural communication, an esoteric field that he’d never quite been able to explain to John or their parents. But it took good grades, and you could end up working on the satellites. No one was complaining.

  “It seems funny to be coming back here…”

  “I thought you’d go and see Annie tonight,” John said.

  “I called her. Told her I was too tired. I suppose I am,” Hal said, almost admitting a rare lie. “Restless tonight anyway. You know.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s as if…”

  John looked up at Hal, waiting for the sentence to finish. But Hal was staring away, his hand resting heavily like something forgotten on the blanket by John’s chest. As if what? So unlike Hal to leave anything unresolved.

  The silence hung, hissed, emptied, turned over. John could feel his bed and the whole dark house around him shifting like an animal relaxing into sleep. The quartzy sand was dissolving from his socks and shoes; his summer clothes were folding themselves back into the cupboards; the stale, slightly damp smell of unbreathed air was fading. Hal still sat unmoving at his bedside, but time—the nights, anyway—was shifting, draining, flickering by. The house was lived-in now and taken for granted, and the sheets no longer smelled soapy-fresh. Part of him understood. This could only mean he wasn’t really here in bed, at night, at home, in Hemhill. This contraction of time meant that from somewhere, somehow, he was looking back.

  As if…

  Hal turned his head in the changing air, the sentence still unfinished as he looked at John. It was another night, and John could tell that Hal had returned from being out with Annie. He could see the near-fluorescent whiteness of the shirt his brother was wearing, slightly crumpled now, smelling of outdoors and the couple of beers he’d had. Smelling, too, of the lovely sea-lavender scent of Annie’s hair.

  Everyone agreed that they made a devastatingly good couple, but since Hal came back from Ley this year, a coldness had come between them. John suspected they were staying together now in this odd transitory time between Ley and London only because they didn’t want to let down the people who so liked to see them together. Of course, when Hal did go to London, he’d call Annie and he’d still visit Hemhill with respectable regularity to see her and his parents and catch up with his old school friends. But the going out, the touching, the kissing, the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing, that was over.

  “What are you going to do Skiddle, eh?”

  “When?”

  “Next week. Tomorrow. Next year. The year after.” Hal got up from the bed—and once more the gravity of the room shifted, the nights turned. John realized that the question hadn’t really been meant for him anyway. It was some inward thing that Hal was chasing. Sighing, his brother went to the window and touched the control to let in more of the night. It was another night. Turning. Now Hal was in the faded denim shirt he always wore when he was dicking around with the wires and crystals and nerve fibers in his room. His passing wake no longer bore Annie’s scent; it bore the soft, coaly odor of sweat and soldering crab oil. And outside the window, John saw that the nights were slipping by. The trees became a cloudy blur; the cars and vans passing along the road were silent silver lines; the stars up in the deep darkness were streaks, smears, gray comets. Autumn was nearly here.

  Leaning at the window, Hal gazed out for some time at the murmuring, spinning night. Faint shadows orbited the room.

  “What do you do, Skiddle? How much is enough?” The air remained hot, close. John could see the wide sweatstains that stretched down and across Hal’s shoulders and back like predatory wings.

  “I was out with Annie this afternoon,” he said. “I mean, you know how warm it’s been here, to finish off the ripening. How hot. It’d be a shame not to go out on a day like this, and it was so quiet in the village anyway that Annie got the afternoon off. We went out for a drive in the old Elysian with the top down, and we stopped by Ludgate Hill and walked across th
e fields to take in the very last of the summer. The sky…” He gazed up through the window of John’s bedroom. Amid the blur of the shifting stars hung a scowling, hooded moon. “…was blue, an incredible blue. And I was holding Annie’s hand, and the corn they grow there was like a tall golden wood around us, and the skylarks were singing.

  “We found this place to sit down. In the dell down by the pond where Gerry Barry almost drowned last summer. Or was it the summer before? The sky was so blue up there through the trees, shimmering like something underwater. We tried to think of a word for that blue. I mean, not a real word because there isn’t one, but some new, better word for the blue of the summer sky that people would understand just from hearing the sound. And all the time, all the time, off in the grass beside the ruined millhouse we could hardly see because of all the hawthorn, there was this old agripede that someone had dumped.

  The thing settled down on its rotting tires. And I couldn’t help looking at it. My eyes just kept going back. Someone had broken open the controller, and the nerve tissue had seeped out in those thick green and purple strings with the flies buzzing around them. And there we were. There I was. With Annie lying back in the grass looking up at the sky though the trees on a late summer’s afternoon, and all I could see in the dell were the flies buzzing around that broken nerve box. The one ugly thing. The rest of it—I don’t know. I just can’t break…”