The Great Wheel (38 page)

But the motor kept puttering, and the water broke in a curve of glass at the prow, and Hal looked ahead and said nothing. They were heading, John realized, straight for the horizon.

“That gull…” he began. “It’s a kind of madness, Hal. A release. I think I understand that now…”

His voice trailed off. Far ahead, where there should have been nothing but water and the planetary curve, there were glinting mountains. White and sharp, clear yet distant.

Once or twice in his life, he’d seen them: on a pale and windy day, when people were standing on Ley’s promenade, holding up binoculars and cameras, and then on the net, in a news story of how, by some trick of the tide, an iceberg had actually come ashore. In the screen, the white mountain had been gray and dirty, pocked, smelling of old fish. But this, John thought as he looked over his brother’s shoulder, was how icebergs should be. Clear and pure and distant as the mountains of the moon.

“I think,” he said, “we should go back now.”

This time, he exercised some control. He wasn’t quite able to counter his brother’s will and turn the boat back yet, but at least he killed the motor. Sudden silence. The waves slapped. He felt the cooling water, pushing, rising. They were adrift.

“I think we should go back now.”

A booming detonation came from far off, from the ice. Unless he did something, the boat would drift rapidly. He could feel it moving, turning already. Quickly he rewound the starter rope, smoothing out the kinks. He tensed it, pulled sharply the way Hal had shown him, and the outboard barked back into life. But as he reached for the tiller to turn back to the shore, Hal half-stood in the prow and—barely rocking the boat as he did so—tipped himself over the gunwale, into the water. The River Ocean sighed its surprise. For a moment, Hal floated beside the boat, his body slick and smooth now, neither clothed nor naked but coated in creamy gray. Then he kicked out easily, arms glistening, lifting and falling, towards the icebergs, and for a while he seemed to grow larger as well as smaller. He paused, raised a hand for the last time, then flopped back to eject a gleaming arc of water from his mouth before swimming on towards the whiteness at the horizon.

T
HE TAXI HISSED ALONG
Gran Vía, trailing plumes of water. Encased in steam and chattering beads, his feet wet and his gloved palms clammy, John swallowed down the tarry residue that had formed in the back of his throat, and his fingers squealed a space in the window. In the fractional moment before the glass misted over, he saw black figures on bobbing duckboards, sheet water cascading from gutters, an alley that had become a fast-running slide of mud. The wipers thwacked. The fans growled. The driver, his bony shoulders hunched almost to the level of the cockerel-like crest of his hair, peered ahead.

John realized he was shivering. He’d never felt cold before in the Endless City—this weather front came from the rain-sodden air that was diverted from Europe when the corn there was ripe, brittle, and erect and the big machines moved in. But the people here, despite the chill and the discomfort, actually seemed to welcome it. It was a different discomfort, in any case, to the heat: like shifting your buttocks on a bed of nails. Prized duckboards, sandbags, pumps, and rickety walkways were dragged out from storehouses and lofts; discussed, tutted over, compared, and arrayed. Bridges, ladders, and ropes stretched at improbable heights between the buildings while Bella, humming snatches of Felipe’s ditties, splashed around the presbytery in boots to distribute and empty the pots that caught the many drips, and she wiped down the bizarre flowerings of mold that draped the ceilings and walls like Christmas decorations. The clinic and the church, at least, were both on higher ground, above the brown and frankly turd-infested waters. The markets had been selling stomach remedies and T-cell injections for at least a month in anticipation of what John had thought would be a rapid increase in cholera and nematodes, but the rains were a yearly occurrence here and the Borderers knew how to deal with them. The sky itself provided a plentiful supply of distilled, if gritty, water. Still, he wondered what else was blown in by the storms.

“Here, Fatoo.”

He paid the driver and climbed out. Water instantly began to leak through his supposedly rainproof cape. Black acres of umbrella jumbled around him; a steaming, hidden city of feet and heads and sodden shopping. He looked over them at the gleaming buildings and a fallen stretch of the medina wall, then took shelter beneath an archway. When he shifted his arms, the water from the cuffs ran down inside. A reddish river coiled and uncoiled across the cobbles at his feet like a lazy whip.

He hadn’t thought that Ryat had meant much by his offer of help at Seagates. Ryat was, after all, a major local figure. The message that had come through on the presbytery’s airwave suggesting that they meet here still had the feeling of a fluke, a chance twist of the ether. John really didn’t believe that it was in Ryat’s interest to upset the delicate balance of Magulf trade—but, then, he was finding it hard to accept anyone’s good faith at the moment.

“Father John.”

Ryat stood in the archway, his skull beaded wet, droplets hanging from his nose and the metal tips of every finger.

“I’m truly grateful—” John began, but Ryat waved it away. They stepped out into the rain. Ryat made no effort, John saw, to keep himself dry; whatever clothes he had on were plastered colorless against his body. The air, John knew, wasn’t really that cold, despite the chill that had worked its way into him. He followed Ryat to the end of the narrowing street and then across a puddled and treacherous stretch of wasteland. Ahead of them in the rain, jaggedly shaped buildings rose and fell like the undulations of an angry sea.

“This is new to you?” Ryat asked as they climbed over the remains of a broken barrier. Looking up at the black pylons that vanished into mist, John shook his head. This was Kushiel. The ground here, consisting of curving concrete, was slimy and treacherous, punctuated occasionally by small crooked chimneys that spouted clouds of steam into the rain. The ragged mouth of a tunnel reared up, and they splashed down steps and through a low doorway, where a dense, warm wave broke over them. The rain here was a dull rumble. Chains of lights and pipes stretched before them.

“This,” Ryat said in an almost reverent whisper, “is where the koiyl is dried.”

He rattled the tines of his fingers along the pipe that ran beside them, and they waited. John could feel hot air rising, billowing against the low ceiling, and smelled a deep, intrusive smell that was a mixture of growth and decay.

Ahh. Fatoo. Outer
…

Faces peered at them. Glinting teeth and eyes and tongues, skin the texture of well-tanned leather. John waited as Ryat conversed. He heard the word
koiyl,
but they were speaking too quickly for him to catch much else.

Div, far
…

He and Ryat followed a woman who waddled along the passageway on dropsy-laden legs. Here and there he saw pots seething with beetles, heard the chuckle of water, and smelled, overpowering even in this air, the reek of drains. At first, the walls and ceiling were one curved, fused surface. Then the passage widened, and they pushed their way through dangling fronds of fungi. In many places there were no pipes; the warmth came simply from the walls, which seemed to be giving off a deep red light close to the borders of vision. Lightless plants reared up. Beetles scuttled, chomped, and burrowed in the mulch. Ryat and John crossed a junction of tunnels where the currents stirred and embraced. Here, although the light was almost too dim to focus, dream colors formed. There were neon chrysanthemums, albino ferns like comet tails. Drowsy red buddleia hissed and swayed their lips of moisture-swollen petals.

“This is for the carnival,” Ryat said, cupping and inhaling a pink rose that shone in his hands. “After the rains.”

“It seems a waste.”

“What?”

“A waste, when staple food could be grown down here.”

“But you do not live on just food? Is there some saying like that—in your Bible?”

Ryat turned and walked on.

“So when does it happen?” John asked, following. “This carnival?”

“A week or so. It will come when the rain stops.”

Blue hyacinths studded the walls and covered even the ceiling, their upwards-growth gene suppressed either by happy accident or design. Beyond were steps, doors, and curtains leading to softer odors. There, shimmering in the faintest imaginable light, shadow waves of koiyl leaves lay heaped.

“In these tunnels,” Ryat explained, “the leaf must lose moisture or it will rot. There must be heat and no light for perhaps two, three months…”

John kept his head lowered as they moved slowly along the tunnels, expecting at any moment to crack his skull on some invisible obstruction. He felt a growling pain in his back.

Ryat paused, muttered, and extended his arm to John.

“Here. Try. These ones are ready.”

John reached out. His gloved fingers, as the spines left a radiance hanging in the darkness behind them, touched metal, then the outline of the leaf. He could tell simply from the shape that it wasn’t from Lall, but he took a bite anyway, another, and crammed the whole thing into his mouth. He’d been salivating from their scent, and the red wetness slid easily between his teeth and tongue. His cheeks bulged. The pain in his back and the pricking flashes of heat and cold began to recede. Even his sight improved a little. Aroused by his and Ryat’s presence, the Borderers who cured the koiyl began to shuffle from the darkness. They were stooped, muttering in softer accents than those heard on the surface, and wide-eyed. Faces from a painting by Rembrandt—
The Night Watch.
Ryat was asking about Lall. A pump was humming somewhere, and John had to put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. A red blur, the wall seemed to pass through a layer of mist without finding substance.

“Are you feeling well?” Ryat asked.

“Yes…” He swallowed, in the absence of a spittoon, most of the leaf and felt it rise and sink in his throat, then, with a warm blush like a falling firework, go all the way down. “It’s just the heat.”

Another tunnel, another pattern of leaves. Speaking slowly enough for John to catch most of his meaning, one of the curers was explaining that the Lall leaf was
ca bona
—one of the best—but hard to get. They were grown in a holy place, had special healing properties. The man reached, still talking, to take a leaf. He bit and chewed at the tip with a quick, rabbitlike motion, and spat it out in a black stream. Much, John thought, as would any European winetaster. And why, Ryat asked, why was the place holy? The man frowned and shook his head. The whole thing sounded, John thought, forcing his mind back into concentration, like little more than a salespitch. If prompted, these leaf curers could probably suggest special properties for all the leaf-growing areas. But the aroma seemed stronger here, reminiscent of an apothecary’s shop where amid the jars there was a promise not just of healing but of a little wisdom. A trick, perhaps, that would turn base metal into gold—or at the very least summon the face of a loved one from the heart of a fire…

Ryat was chewing a Lall leaf. He offered another to John, who bit just a quarter off this time and pocketed the rest. This was a small tunnel, no more than an offshoot of what appeared to be the main drying rooms, and John now had to bend his knees as well as his head and back. Pushing the damp wad of koiyl towards his molars, he felt it thicken and enlarge as the walls shrank around him. His head was swelling. As they climbed, the tunnel seemed steeper. He had to lean forward to keep from falling.

They ducked through a curtain, and the tunnel cooled and widened in a pale glow. Faintly again, he could hear the hiss of the rain. A man stepped aside to let John and Ryat pass, his hands sheltering his puckered eyes as if from a blazing sun. Squinting himself, his head pulsing, John saw that the man’s upper lip was scarred where a piece had been lasered off. There had been some kind of growth, probably.

And how much of the leaf from Lall, Ryat was asking, still keeping his words slow and distinct so that John could follow, do you have down here? How much of this year’s crop? The man made a vertical gesture with his tannin-browned hands, which suggested that they had less than a quarter. And what about the rest? Was it here—or elsewhere in the Kushiel tunnels? Did one of the other curers perhaps have it? No. Definitely no. They trusted each other, they worked together.

Ryat thanked him, and he and John climbed back up to the surface. Outside, rainswept Kushiel seemed almost white, and Ryat stood watching as John blinked and spat his wad of koiyl into a gutter. Then he began to cough, and had to swallow the vomit that tried to follow it.

“It seems,” Ryat said, “that we have but a portion of the crop here, Father John.”

John blinked again, his head swimming.
Potion?
Portion. His ears boomed. Whiteness poured around him as the rain, with cold impartial fingers, explored his back.

“Perhaps they were suspicious. Of course…” Ryat shrugged elaborately, in a spray of steel, his clothes still steaming from the heat. “But they are speaking the truth.”

“When the leaves from Lall are taken to Seagates, will you let them be sold?” John sniffed as a cloud of richly scented steam from one of the low crooked chimneys passed over his face, and a shiver, bigger than the ones that had preceded it, ran through him. The rain rattled in the puddles. But at least the whiteness was fading. Kushiel had sunk back to gray. He looked around and saw twisted powerlines and fallen fences, the illegible signs and the faint blackened ruins. He felt a dull and distant humming, a sense of power.

“I have other obligations, Father John. I have partners. And this year’s leaf—you saw yourself—most of it is not here.” Ryat clicked his fingers. He seemed amused. “I will see. It is a time of goodwill, with the carnival.
Gonenanh
…”

John stood watching as Ryat walked away. Steam and smoke, gusting through the rain from the chimneys of the half-buried drying sheds, formed the shapes of imaginary continents. Farther off, just where the gleaming backs of the houses began, was an odd and rusty dome-shaped building, and a blue light that rippled from the haze. He walked towards it.