The Great Wheel (21 page)

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.

Laurie stooped to wash her feet and shins, and between her buttocks and thighs he saw the downy line of her vulva. He looked away, at the wall, then up through the arrowslit at the dizzying movements of the clouds, and thought of the satellites somewhere beyond, the great wings shining against the moon…But he could still feel his penis hardening, pressing painfully against the rough blankets, and his heart racing.

He heard the drip and sigh of water as Laurie stepped out from the tub, then the pat of her wet footsteps as she crossed the hilly floor. The seal hissed when she opened her bag, which lay on her pallet near the far wall. There followed many wing-beats of silence. The night seemed to turn and race. He almost expected to feel the air shifting, the room changing, to see the sky start to tumble and blur, the lights of the passing vehicles to fan across the walls. Hal to be there beside him. Then the silence broke. Again, Laurie’s footsteps: the scuff of her bare feet, growing louder as she came towards him.

He turned and looked up. She stood over his pallet. Her shoulders were sloped, and in the darkness her face was blank, without expectation, staring through him. He sat up a little and pulled back the scratchy sheets. In silence, she stooped and rolled in beside him, still cold and a little wet, smelling of the disinfectant. And she was shivering—or perhaps it was him. Perhaps they were both shivering.

She put her arms around him. Across his shoulder and down to the small of his back, the tips of her fingers rested on the scar. He put his own right arm around her, and saw the spinning quaternary lights in his watch gleaming on the moisture that still beaded her shoulder. But his left arm didn’t seem to belong quite anywhere, pinned awkwardly between them. He’d forgotten how strange it was, to hold someone else’s body against your own.

He was observing himself, wondering where all this would lead, would end. Faint on her breath was the nutty odor of the biscuits they’d eaten back at the van. And she smelled warm and womanly too, clean and human, yet misty and so very different, of the sea, as Borderers always smelled, even when they lived in the Zone and didn’t eat kelp. He was lying with his hips held a little away from her, conscious of the pressure of his erection. But then she drew in and pressed her hand harder against his back, pulling him closer, settling the wings of her hips against his, and in this strange and sudden contact he imagined his erection fading, could even feel the soft, apologetic space it would leave between them. He saw how she would roll back from him and away across the dark room. Morning would come, and the moment would be gone, easily forgotten.

But no. He closed his eyes and felt her breath and the sharing of their skin. She shifted a little, and there was the soft friction of her belly against him. Involuntarily, he pressed too, and she leaned her head to his from the unfocused dark and opened her lips against his mouth. He reached to touch her wet hair, the nape of her neck, traced the smoothly ridged line of her back and buttocks. As he did so, her breath grew in his throat and her mouth widened and she pressed harder against him. It seemed so natural now. He knew, too, as she raised and lifted her leg a little and his hand slid around and his fingers explored and parted the opening of her vulva that this moment would send cracks and ripples through his life. But it felt too sweet and plain and natural to be anything more than what it was: the joining of two people.

Their mouths popped apart. She rolled forward and eased herself higher up against him, offering her breasts. He took a nipple into his mouth, and her hand went around his penis and a finger traced a line and he wondered for a moment if he wasn’t about to come.

But no. She settled back, drawing away more of the stiff blankets, lying with her legs raised and parted. He clambered around her knee and eased himself over her. She guided him in, and he pushed gently deeper, in no hurry now, looking down at her in the ribbon of arrowslit light as her throat arched and her eyelids quivered and the generator sounded somewhere even though there were no lights here and the south wind blew towards the Endless City. There was the sound, too, as he sunk and pressed deeper and their hips rolled, of soft slow moaning in her throat. A singing, almost. The sound Laurie Kalmar made in her dreams. The sound she made to the net.

She was far away now. Pushing deep with him. He could feel that his own moment was approaching too. The air shimmered. A series of shocks, jolts, close to pain. Yes. And even now. Far more than he’d expected. He looked down at Laurie. She’d ceased to push, was smiling. Had she come too? He hoped so. But he was no expert, he was Father John, a priest; there was no way of his telling. She squeezed his penis in farewell as he diminished inside her. He lay back, grabbing the edge of the sheet, pulling it over them.

Laurie turned over and pressed herself against him with her chin on his shoulder, her knee drawn over his thigh. He could feel her breathing, and knew from the pressure of her face against his neck that she was smiling. And how could this ever be wrong? The arguments and recriminations that he’d expected seemed reluctant to stir. No, you couldn’t give yourself to everyone, equally. Not all the time…

“What made you decide?” he asked.

“When? Just now…?”

“I mean when you saw me in Trinity Gardens after the rain. What made you come over?”

“You looked lost,” she said.

He closed his eyes. Somewhere in the hills outside the town, a bird or animal was screeching. Then the wind. He could feel it on his face, coming with the night through the arrowslit, cooling his sweat. Hot liquid was somehow filling his eyes. He felt a tear trickle down his cheek, meeting Laurie’s mouth. He felt her tongue lick it away. And why was he crying? And what was that sound? Again, it was just the wind. The wind.

F
EELING SLEEPLESS, HAPPY, PUZZLED
, John collected his belongings in the morning gray of their many-bedded room. Laurie had already straightened the blankets of the pallet where they’d lain—as if it mattered, and the people wouldn’t burn everything. Now her head was stooped while she reordered the contents of her bag, the fall of her hair parting to show the back of her neck and a pale line of scalp.

“Shouldn’t we check about the koiyl market here?” she said, fishing for a tissue and then blowing her nose.

He shook his head. After last night he wanted to move on quickly. “The leaf hasn’t been harvested yet. Who would there be to talk to?”

“As you say.” Laurie walked over to him. She put her arms across his shoulders and looked up at him. Her scent was dark, real, sweet. He could feel the air from the arrowslit brushing his hands as he placed them on her warm hips. He could feel the whole planet revolving.

“You didn’t sleep much,” she said, “did you? I mean, after we had…” She paused, careful. “After making love.”