They descended from the plateau to the wide floor of valley. The road was concrete, ancient, yet in better condition than most of the tracks they’d followed up to now. Here, there was hardly any vegetation left to destroy it. The radiation counter bleeped intermittently for the first hour or so, then settled into a prolonged, irritating whine. That was just a preliminary warning—the Zone engineer had calibrated it to go louder if the short-term exposure levels became truly dangerous.
After sitting on a old dry-stone wall and deciding against eating or drinking, they unfolded the protective suits and masks from their backpacks. The reflective material felt slick and cold as they pulled it over their clothing, and crackled slightly as they walked. The masks made their breathing congested and loud. They passed wrecked vehicles along the road, tires mingled with remains. And here, as John and Laurie walked through the canyon of this glimmering world, was a shrine, a washing line of tin cans, garish strips of plastic, and wind-picked bones clanging in the wind, and a rough table of rock on which crystals and stones from other planets were piled.
He tried to remember what the net’s projections had shown of this desolate area on the far side of the Northern Mountains, but he’d never imagined they’d have to come this far. Anyway the data—or, as Laurie would have put it, the net’s level of interest—were scant. But there had been a road, a road that was once a main route through these mountains and now blocked in a score of places by rockfalls, broken bridges, collapsed tunnels. Even before he had made any connection with Ifri Gotal, John remembered thinking that it must have been along roads such as this that the great migrations flowed north from the dying wastes. Now, the signs were all around them. Broken trucks and wagons and handcarts poking out of the dust. The debris of people on the move: migrating, dragging their lives behind them. Shoes. Spoons. The limbs of a plastic doll. Tatters of clothing. Broken bottles.
The valley narrowed to a cliff face on either side. With the piled wreckage, the road grew almost impassable. Clambering up over the top of a van, John caught a glimpse inside of hunched, mummified bodies, eyeless sockets staring out at him. Laurie’s movements through the wreckage beside him were slow, and her face was barely discernible beneath the mask. Ifri Gotal: maybe this was it. Maybe they should turn back now. But Laurie was pushing on towards another dip and turn.
Here, where the road crested, the valley widened into a huge, ash-colored bowl. John stood swaying from exertion, looking down. As the haze of his mask began to clear, he saw that the expanse before him consisted mainly of human bones. Grayish white, a lapping shore reaching mountainside to mountainside.
So this was Ifri Gotal. The radiation counter was screaming in his backpack now, and he began to shiver. On impulse, he pulled off his mask. Laurie did the same. Now, real at last, the end of all speculation, Ifri Gotal lay all around them, the chattering wind and the powdery smell of death like an unremitting ache. His shivering was starting to get beyond control. Briefly, Laurie put an arm around him, and they stood together in the wind blowing from a sea of femurs, skulls, rags of clothing, broken possessions, teeth.
They stayed at Ifri Gotal for an hour, their breather masks back on as they struggled with the sampler scoops, hearing only the wind and the clink of disturbed rocks and the close hard sound of their own breathing. John lifted a stone to weigh down a small sampler that buzzed into the dust, but the stone turned out to be light and hollow, not a stone at all but a child’s skull. He placed it back, trying to concentrate on the work he was doing, to see only what he needed to see. It was a trick he’d done his best to develop, focusing on the matter-of-fact details before him, shutting out everything else.
Later, he stood up and looked at the graveyard around him, knowing that he should pray. But all he saw were the fruits of an ancient conflict, the wind-picked bones of a people who had long ceased to be mourned. It seemed to him that all acts of violence, even ones as atrocious as this, eventually merged with the dust of history. What was truly terrible was the way that good and bad ultimately lost their distinction.
He stared at the child’s skull. Meeting a bland empty gaze of sockets that had once contained flesh and life, he wondered why he had fought so hard to keep his faith. Laurie was right: if you ceased to expect purpose or meaning from the universe, then the knowledge of horrors such as this became a little easier to bear. You could forget, get on with your life.
He set to work again.
Squatting under her umbrella, Hettie was waiting at the rise in the rocky valley where she left them.
Driven on flakes of soot, a dry dusk was shining in the rain-bowed puddles. They had dumped their suits and masks on the way from Ifri Gotal, but their backpacks were heavier now with foil-shielded packages of samples. John had had to pull out the batteries of the radiation counter to stop its screaming.
“Ah fond?”
Yes, they’d found. Hettie studied them, her eyes gleaming in the shade of her umbrella, a fringe of glass and bone. Then, nodding to herself, she turned again to the north.
John and Laurie followed between the rocks and the high cliff walls. The sky overhead billowed and churned, but here in the valley it was almost windless, still.
Full darkness came. Hettie lit a chemlight and pushed it onto the tip of her umbrella, waving it over her head, jumping over puddles and from rock to rock as she led the way. The shadows slid back and forth, leaped over the cliffs—a witches’ Sabbath—but John kept his eyes mostly at his feet, picking his way, occasionally stooping to collect another sample of stone or dry powder. When he looked up and saw the giant faces carved on the crags around Hettie’s home, they too were demonic, with sightless stone eyes.
Watched by Hettie, John and Laurie removed and shook off their outer clothing beside the cut-stone steps leading to her cave. Then they climbed the stairway into the rock past the carvings of long-dead beasts, the whorled innards of stone, and they breathed the rank and yet now oddly refreshing human odors of smoke, sweat, urine.
John unslung his backpack and slumped down in a corner. Incinerating his gloves and wiping off with dysol the grit that had worked beneath them, he watched as Hettie prepared dinner. Laurie was holding a pan for her over the flames. Her arms, shoulders, and legs were bare, and he saw the play of light over and along them. Her hair was tangled, greasy, almost the same no-color now as Hettie’s—and no doubt as his. She chewed at a strand of it as she swished melting fat in the pan, then asked Hettie a rising-falling question and reached into the pan, pushing at a barely warm scrap of meat with her finger. The stoop of her brown back raised notches. Hettie said something. Laurie smiled and shook her head. She scratched beneath her arm, pressed something dead with her fingernails, threw it into the flames. Spat, a little fusillade of sparks. Smoke drifted, and the smell of curried meat slowly rose.
Leaning more against the rock, he felt something dig into his shoulder but ignored it. It was good to be back amid life.
“Here.” Laurie handed him a plate. She and Hettie sat closer to the fire, their faces shifting and changing like the stone giants outside.
“Ask her,” he said, when the two of them finally fell to tooth-picking silence, “how she became chicahta—a witch-woman.”
In response to Laurie’s question, Hettie smiled and held her hands to the flames. She swayed as she spoke, and her voice was like a scatter of pebbles.
“She says it was when she was a girl,” Laurie began. “On a night just before the rains, when the whole Endless City lies still and the sounds carry over miles, and people sweat in their beds and the air is like the breath of a dog panting close to your face…”
“She said that?”
“Shush, John. Listen—I know what it’s like too. Hettie was up in her room at night, lying between her sisters, trying to lose the heat and get to sleep, when she heard this sound coming through the open window, singing like water. The tip-tapping of drums. It was faint, but so close too that it was almost inside her head. She crept from the room and do
wn the stairs. She went out into the empty street dressed as she was.
“She walked barefoot through the dust. There was no one about. The world seemed different, but the sound that drew her was something she recognized even though she’d never heard it before. She followed it up the hill, and the sound grew louder in her head rather than in the air, and everything else was so quiet and empty that she thought she might be dreaming. But there were the clattering drums and cymbals and bells, so she walked on through the night, the cool sound drawing her…
“She found the witchwomen in a square, gathered around a fire, their shadows huge across the buildings behind them. As she drew closer, she realized that what the fire gave off wasn’t heat, but it was like the music, refreshing and cool, and when the witchwomen drew her into their circle, she felt both rested and drowsy. She stayed with them for the rest of the night…”
Silent now as Laurie finished her tale, Hettie smiled, shivered, and drew her hands back from the flames.
“And they took her with them?” John asked. “She became a witchwoman?”
“No,” Laurie said after Hettie spoke some more. “She went home in the morning, and her parents were furious. She didn’t become a witchwoman until she’d had children of her own and they grew old enough to leave her. But it was then that she knew, that she decided.”
Later into the night, Hettie grabbed up a seemingly random pile of electronics and shooed the red mites out of a large nervebox. Crouching over it, licking at the wires and pushing in the connectors, weaving it all together like a tapestry, she persuaded tiny green lights to glow. Music began to fill the cave. The looping strings of an orchestra…It started, stopped, played with a long and easy melody, drawing the listener on and in. John recognized it, although he couldn’t quite place the name. Perhaps a Strauss waltz…
His eyes stinging with smoke and tiredness, he watched as Laurie and Hettie linked arms and danced, laughing, around the cave.
Hettie took them as far as Lall next morning. It grew warmer as they descended, and the high slopes around them were suddenly green and alive. Once or twice, watched by Hettie, John stopped to gather more samples. As far as he knew, Laurie had made no effort to explain the real purpose of their journey, yet the witchwoman, though curious, seemed to accept everything they did. He imagined that she thought the sample-taking was some priestly ritual; she’d naturally look upon their journey to Ifri Gotal as a pilgrimage.
The air grew brighter as they descended the widening valleys along the southern flanks of the mountains. A hawk circled. Rabbits darted under the gorse. And now, singly at first then in clumps amid the tall ragged grass, grew koiyl bushes. He could now smell the tarry, sweet pollen from the small white flowers that bowed and lifted here, sheltered from the wind that drove towards Europe.
When they reached the sharp rim of an overhanging valley that framed the toy village of Lall below, and the barking of dogs, the sawing of wood, the beat of generators, and the shouts of children filled the air, Hettie announced that she would leave them.
“We haven’t talked about payment,” John said.
“She says she doesn’t want any.”
“That’s absurd—we have to give her something.”
“I’ll ask her again—if you really want me to offend her.”
He shook his head. “But tell her…Tell her.” He turned to Hettie, who was standing a little apart and watching them with her head cocked expectantly. “Hettie, thanks. Bona I, ah can help, hep…”
Hettie muttered something to Laurie.
“She says she understands.”
He nodded and looked at the witchwoman, her deep brown eyes, her wrinkled, mannish face. The koiyl-scented wind blew between them.
“Bye Fatoo.”
She hugged Laurie, waved to John, then turned and began to climb the valley side—not back the way they’d come but up towards the grim wind-whistling peaks of the gray-blue mountains to the east. From a crag, she turned and waved to them once more, then continued her climb, umbrella balanced in one hand, black clothes flapping as she moved swiftly from perch to perch up the bare rock.
When she’d finally gone from sight, John and Laurie zigzagged down the slope to Lall. As they approached, the people came running out of their huts, shouting and waving to others who were working in the stony fields nearby and in the animal pens. Look! The girl! The fatoo-baraka! They’ve returned!
John and Laurie were clustered around, smiled at, offered water from the well, food from the smokinghouse, drink from the still. And would the fatoo-baraka like more koiyl? Perhaps some of the flowers. The flowers were special, the plant’s greatest gift…
“You may as well take them,” Laurie muttered, “in the interests of science.”
She accepted them for him, and added them to the load on his back. Declining the offer of a meal, Laurie said they’d have to push on if they were to get to Tiir before nightfall. The villagers nodded. And would they need a guide—or a protector? No, they’d be fine. Waving, smiling, still nodding their thanks, John and Laurie walked through the village, past the low stone wall, across the footbridge over the stream, and along the path that led out of the Northern Mountains.
“What will happen to those people?” Laurie asked when they stopped to rest an hour later. “How can you stop the trade in their koiyl without destroying them?”
“Should we give up?”
“No…” She squinted back the way they’d come, where the path dissolved up the valley amid rich clusters of soft green and white. “But they’re happy.”
It was evening by the time they saw the lights of Tiir in the windy bowl of the hills. A donkey train had passed them hours before, going up into the mountains with jingling bells, swaying empty panniers, and the straw smell of the animals. The driver had scowled at them and hurried on, averting his eyes, saying nothing.
Down the final slope there were smoking lanterns, a gate, a guard, explanations to be offered, money to be paid. They went down the stone-paved streets to check that the van was where they had left it. It was untouched, but neither of them wanted to travel farther, or to have to sleep inside it. They went back up the steps and through the gates into the town, past the castle walls and the wide, empty space where Hettie and the other witchwomen had gathered three days before. The streets were almost empty. A few men and women crouched cross-legged around steaming hookahs and chemlights in the shelter of narrow alleys, engrossed in a complex game involving slow chanting and the tossing of colored stones. Few turned their heads, but John sensed from the shapes at windows and half-open doors that he was watched as he passed by.
A large graystone building leaned against the town’s outer wall. A strip of lights proclaimed H EL, but the door seemed locked. Laurie banged and pushed until it gave way. They entered a bar of sorts, the tables and roof oddly bisected by the buttresses that presumably kept the front of the building from falling. They were shown up an irregular stairway to a room with a bare floor that heaved and sagged like a restless sea. One window was an unglazed arrowslit that looked out across the gray-lit valley through the thickness of Tiir’s outer wall, while the other framed the dim street up which they had walked. Despite the insistent, wheezy rumbling of a nearby generator, there was no other source of light.
There were several pallets and a stone tub that the straining floor bellied down to accommodate. After considerable negotiation, Laurie agreed on a price for the provision of soap and the filling of the tub with water, and John and Laurie watched as the hotel’s three children made a solemn procession up and down the stairs bearing a variety of buckets and bowls.
When the children were gone, Laurie flapped out the mottled blankets from one of the larger pallets, coughed and wiped her eyes in an invisible cloud of dust, smoothed out the blankets, and lay down. “You go first,” she said, almost disappearing in the sag of mattress and floor.
John destroyed his gloves, then pulled off his clothes. Over the last few days, they’d stiffened and
begun to mold themselves around him. He stepped into the bowl. The water was cloudy, knee-deep, and it stung. They hadn’t been given the soap they’d asked for, but he supposed the pungent disinfectant would be strong enough to lift off the grime. Outside, through the larger window, he saw heaps of rubbish by a dead-end wall and heard the hum of insects that would probably turn to a roar when morning broke. When he crouched, a joist groaned. Splashing the oddly slimy water over his back and shoulders, he plucked away something that clung there and scrubbed at himself with his nails.
Stepping out, he reached for the nearest blanket, thought better of it, and tried to shake himself dry like a dog. Laurie chuckled. She was sitting up now, watching him.
“You’re enjoying this?” he said, rummaging in his bag for a new shirt, finding that there were none left.
“Yes.” She was cross-legged and smiling. “Aren’t you?”
Sniffing experimentally at an old shirt, giving up, he picked his way naked over the boards. And yes, he was enjoying this, enjoying the sense of purpose that he’d sought throughout his life, even though, after seeing Lall and Ifri Gotal, he felt guilty about it.
He flattened out the bedclothes of a pallet that lay on a rise in the floor and lay down, expecting softness but feeling only boards beneath him. The blankets were greasy and gave off a sour vegetable smell. He could feel the billowing passage of air from the arrowslit window over his shoulders and face. He turned and saw Laurie washing, the gleam of her flesh in the light from the larger window. She was brisk, matter-of-fact. Her hair was wet, smoothed back over her ears and flat over her narrow shoulders, which jutted up and out as her arms moved. She turned slightly, balancing. Stripes of shining water trickled between her breasts and down the curve of her belly. As he watched, there was a soft, drunken kind of stirring within him. Something that he’d grown used to forgetting over the years; that he’d isolated and studied and put aside.
The Great Wheel Page 16
