They heated packs of stew inside the van. Laurie dropped a wine tablet into their water flask, then added two more. The cold deepened. Banging elbows, they climbed into their sleeping bags, reclining the seats and setting the keys for maximum heat. The scratchy darkness thickened, and the wind made the dead treetops click and rattle.
“I wonder how far you have to go,” Laurie said, “until there’s really nothing.”
John shifted in the fragile warmth of his bag. He heard a pop as she opened a tube. In here, with the windows up, he guessed that he’d have to share whatever mood it created. “I mean, John, do you really believe there’s something out there beyond what you can see and feel? Look at this place—you go so far and find it’s just us. And after that, nothing…What else is there to believe in?”
“What about the witchwomen, the rituals, the moonrocks, the carnivals?”
“That’s like a dance, John—something you let take over for a while. That’s about the thrill of this world, not the hope of some other. It’s a madness, too. The witchwomen take a burden from us. That’s why we give them gifts and accept their strangeness. If you really think about the way things are, maybe madness is the only sane response.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry—you don’t find this easy, do you, talking about what everything means?”
“It’s my job.”
“I mean your own faith. What you feel, what you are.”
“Believing in God is like being in love, Laurie. You can’t rationalize it. It has nothing to do with what’s in your head.”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with emptiness.” Laurie ground out her tube and snuggled deeper into her seat, closing her eyes. “This world, and nothing else. Think about it. Is that really so bad?”
At one point, he awoke, hearing some other sound. Strange, half musical. He shifted and opened his eyes, gazing out at the witchy trees. Then he realized that it was Laurie. She was singing to the net, humming in her sleep.
They were back on the road before the light next morning and reached the walled town of Tiir at midday. The cold that had come in the night remained, and the wind still blew at them from the south. But it was different here. The air was scented with mountain sap and the tang of rain.
Tiir would have seemed a desolate place to anyone who hadn’t crossed the plains. The houses were the same gray as the cliffs and outcrops they were built on. Flapping sheets covered the doorways of the stony houses; washed-out jelt alternated with mossy thatch as a roof covering. The smoke that wafted from stubby chimneys smelled of grass and donkey dung and charcoal from the burnt-out forest below. Faces peered at them from narrow unglazed windows, and small crowds hovered around corners. The people here wore brown capes woven with threads of indigo, crimson, chrome yellow. The women had beads in their hair, the colors vibrant in the gray light beneath the mountains.
Tiir was a place of transition, a buffer between the Endless City and the desert wastes beyond. The squat walls that surrounded the town were well maintained, and the guards who stopped and questioned John and Laurie at the gateway carried ancient rifles that obviously weren’t for show. People from the coast, the koiyl merchants, the hawkers and dealers—John and Laurie, even—were admitted because they brought the trade on which the town depended. But the skulls in niches in the cliffs and outer walls declared that the others, the starving wanderers who still drifted in from beyond the Last Hammada, were as likely to be killed as sent away.
There was a market in the main square, overshadowed by the walls of an ancient castle keep. Wandering along the aisles, Laurie caused as much disruption as John: a Borderer walking close to a European! But the vendors shouted after them both and cheerily offered their wares. John was surprised not to find more hostility towards him from these people living on the fringe of Europe.
There were strung lines of cooking pans clanging in the wind, the wormy carcasses of lambs and hares, brilliant orange gourds, and scraps of European technology—screens, night-sights, transmitters, and sexual aids. They found a stall of the woven capes that they saw worn all around them. The cloth was stiff, warm, smelling richly of sheep oil. Watched by giggling, disbelieving children, they bought one each and pulled the capes over their dusty clothes. But they found no koiyl. The crop, Laurie was told by the stallkeeper, hadn’t been harvested yet. But, yes, it would be gathered soon and sold here before it was taken down to the Endless City.
They already knew that Tiir would be the end of the line for the van, and had left it parked on a patch of ground outside the walls with a barrier field humming around it. From now on, they would have to go on foot—and would need a guide to show them the way.
It was hard to make sense of what was happening in the shadow of the keep where witchwomen had gathered. Bells were clanging, smoke was trailing. The air reeked of old sweat. The witchwomen, squatting under tented rugs, chattered, thumped goatskin drums, fanned the smoke from chalices. A few moaned and swayed, apparently in a trance. Others looked simply drunk. Laurie spat on a Magulf dollar and tossed it into a, brass bowl. Then she began to pick her way between their nests of possessions.
“How do we know which one to choose?” John shouted after her.
She continued walking. “They’ll choose us.”
Glancing around him, John saw that a nearby witchwoman was tending a sore on a young man’s thigh. He winced as he watched her prod at the open flesh with grubby fingernails and then, using a twig as a spool, begin to extract a long white length of worm. He hurried to catch up with Laurie.
She was asking questions in an unfamiliar dialect of Borderer. Whenever they paused by a ring of chemlights or a row of dried chickenheads, people pointed them on towards the far corner of the keep. There, a little apart at the end of the line, the last witchwoman sat. She was squatting alone, not under a tented rug but under a large black umbrella hung with rodent skulls.
Seeing John and Laurie, she beckoned for them to sit down on the paving. She leaned across the usual litter of figurines and glowing incense cones to peer closely at them. Although she must have registered the color of John’s eyes, she looked at him in a way that was uncommon among Borderers; she actually seemed to study his features. Her own eyes were moist in the depths of a cracked face, and even the whites were brown. Then she nodded slowly to herself, muttering something.
John sat back as Laurie and the witchwoman began to talk, wishing he hadn’t decided not to bring his translat on this journey. He couldn’t make out a word of it: the accent here was strange, softer and quicker than the one he’d grown used to hearing in the Magulf, and he guessed from Laurie’s expression that even she was occasionally struggling.
After a while, she said to him, “Her name’s Hettie. She says you’re a strange kind of baraka.”
He smiled and nodded to the witchwoman, and her mouth broke into a one-toothed smile. From what he could make out in the gloom of the keep and the shade of her umbrella, he guessed that Hettie was no more than middle-aged, and that exposure to the elements probably explained the ancient leather of her skin. Whatever color her clothes had started out, they were now mostly black, and she gave off the dull, salty aroma that Borderers who never changed or washed eventually acquired.
“Well?” he asked when she and Laurie slapped hands in some sort of agreement. “Will she do it? Will she take us?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
Laurie said something more to Hettie, then leaned back. “She says we must go right away.”
“We’ve only got two or three hours of daylight left.”
“She says, exactly.”
“Does she want payment?”
“Not yet. I think she wants to get a better idea of how much we’re worth.”
Hettie licked her lips, turned slowly towards John.
She swallowed, wiped her mouth, licked her lips again.
“That right, Fatoo,” she said.
Pausing on the steep track, John looked back one la
st time at the lights of Tiir in the bowl of the hills below. Where the path hooked around the ravine ahead, he could just make out Laurie as she clambered over a rock and, more faintly, the shape of Hettie still holding her umbrella aloft. Shifting the straps of his backpack until they bit into a different place on his shoulders, he forced his legs to continue on and up the dim path.
Hettie had managed to cram her entire belongings into an old carpetbag, but John and Laurie were more heavily burdened. After much agonizing at the van, they’d dumped the second barrier-field generator and a large portion of their spare clothing and replaced the food and water purifier with a tube of fizzy tablets they’d bought in the market. That still left a satellite transmitter for emergencies, a filter mask each, the radiation counter, and endless seemingly vital odds and ends. And after the cold of the dead forest the night before, neither of them wanted to leave their heated sleeping bags behind.
It was growing darker by the minute, and John’s unease at stumbling along the brink of shadowed drops was tempered only by the thought that they would soon have to stop. But he was wrong; skipping ahead, waving her umbrella through the dusk, Hettie obviously knew the way blindfold. He increased his pace to catch up with Laurie, then fought for his breath.
“What’s the problem?” Laurie’s eyes glittered at him. “Come on!”
She turned and headed quickly up the path. His legs aching, John trudged on behind her.
Hettie lit a fire when they finally camped. By then their breath was making clouds, and the sweat that had drenched John’s clothing seemed about to freeze. They all crouched around the flames, their arms outstretched, shadows and smoke twining up over the rocks surrounding them.
Hettie wandered off, peering under stones. When she came back, she was swinging a bundle. As she stooped into the firelight and finally put down her umbrella, John saw that the bundle consisted of a bunch of lizards gripped by their tails, and that they were all still alive. One by one, Hettie tossed them onto the fire. He imagined that she was indulging in some kind of ritual until she found a stick to fish one out, lopped off its head and tail with a knife, ripped out the steaming guts, and began to eat. Her mouth full, blood and grease running down her wattled chin, she gestured for John and Laurie to do the same.
The thin sticks on the fire didn’t last; cold darkness soon closed in. John climbed without much expectation into his sleeping bag, feeling queasiness in his belly and the rocky ground prodding his shoulders. He gazed up at a sky that, even in this darkness, churned with wind and movement, and felt himself falling up into it, as if, one by one, the strings of doubt, discomfort, and tiredness that bound him to the earth were snapping away. Sleep came easily.
He woke only once and saw Hettie sitting there, her umbrella swaying as she sang to herself, gently rocking to and fro. Closing his eyes, feeling the chill prickle of frost settling on his face, he tumbled back into a seamless dream.
Next morning, in exchange for the roast lizards of the night before, Laurie offered Hettie one of her foodpacks of sweet porridge. Hettie nodded eagerly. She obviously had no compunctions about sharing food. And once or twice she had even poked at John with a bare, bony finger. Remembering the witchwoman who’d confronted him in Banori’s room, he wondered if this absence of fear, this willingness to come close, wasn’t a part of their madness.
Puncturing the heat catalyst, Laurie handed the foodpack to Hettie and demonstrated how to slit it open. Hettie did so, sniffed the contents, and scooped out a blob on the tip of her finger. She studied the steaming oatmeal, put it into her mouth for a moment, spat it out into her palm, stirred the mash with her finger, and then began to eat in her usual lip-smacking way.
They packed their bags and began to climb. The ravine widened to a high valley floor where a small stream ran amid rocks, disappearing underground, reemerging, disappearing again. There were stunted conifers, meadows of tufted grass, and small bell-shaped flowers that shivered silver in the wind. The swift clouds were big-bellied with moisture. Far above, a hawk rode the thermals.
These living mountains seemed almost unchanged, but in truth they were a fluke, an unsought consequence of European climate control. The air that the satellites pulled across Africa contained little moisture, and much of that was used as a vast filter for the northeasterly flow of the Gulf Stream across the River Ocean. But the satellites and the millions of absorption panels couldn’t rewrite the laws of nature entirely. Air cooled as it rose over these mountains, causing rain to fall, and the rain brought life, and the life held moisture, darkened the slopes, stabilized the temperature, and in turn encouraged more rain. Still, the cycle was as artificial as the wind from the south that brought it. Even to John’s untrained eyes, there was a sameness about the vegetation here.
They were able to walk three abreast along the valley floor and talk, Laurie acting as intermediary between John and Hettie. Hettie explained that the village they were heading towards was called Lall. Her own dwelling lay a few kilometers beyond, and not far beyond that, where the pass began to dip down to the desert, the Last Hammada, was a site of special fear and significance. It was called Ifri Gotal, the place of fury.
John and Laurie exchanged glances. Had Hettie been to Ifri Gotal? Of course, but only once—nobody went there more than once. It was a terrible place. And would she show them the way? Hettie shrugged, and the skulls and bells of her umbrella jingled; from where she was going to take them, any fool could find Ifri Gotal. Even an Outer, a European.
They walked on, across an old stone bridge. A stream raced beneath. John began to see greenish purple clumps on the valley sides, which he guessed were koiyl.
By mid-morning, there were signs of habitation. Climbing a stairway of rock beside a waterfall, they reached a higher sweep of the valley. Here, where mountain peaks surrounded them through drifts of cloud, the lower, greener slopes were roughly walled into fields containing long-haired sheep. A figure stood watching them pass from the top of a high mesa, carrying a rifle. Hettie waved and shouted something. The figure waved back.
Patches of koiyl were common now, although John was careful not to show too obvious an interest. The koiyl bush grew semiwild, but it was still a crop; on the coast, one leaf would be worth a quarter of a day’s wage. Undried, the leaves of this mutant succulent were plump, each a little larger than his thumb, bisected by a thick stem, covered with faint purple fuzz. The bushes were just coming into flower, and the blooms were tiny and off-white. They had a pleasant, musty odor.
The village of Lall lay over a final ridge. Cooking smoke rose, dogs barked, babies cried, and the tearing sound of a powersaw came from the open doors of a barn as they picked their way down the slope. Adults and young children emerged to watch. There was no sense of surprise in their stance; word of the approach of the three had obviously gone ahead.
“What do we do now?” John asked.
“Hettie says we should be amikay—accept their hospitality.”
A large black dog ran up to him. Planting its paws on his thighs and nearly knocking him over, it tried to lick at his strange hands. An old woman in a shawl gave a whistle, and the dog ran back, its tail spiraling. As she leaned down and rubbed the creature behind its ears, John wondered whether the reports reaching Lall had omitted the fact that an Outer was coming. But when he drew nearer the muddy circle of low stone buildings, he saw that the villagers shuffled back from him, discreetly making the sign against the evil eye even before they could see the silver of his irises.
Laurie, Hettie, and John were seated out-of-doors around a large, flat-topped rock that served as a communal table. Soon, most of the village was sitting there too, and plates of food were being passed. In the circle there was a gap between John and Hettie. She ate voraciously, talking at the same time. He presumed that she was regaling the villagers with news from Tiir. There was certainly a fair amount of laughter. He glanced around. Whenever he met someone’s eye, the person would nod politely, raise a beaker, try to smile.
> The meal consisted of fatty lumps of lamb. The beer that came with it was better, but all of it weighed heavily in his stomach. What could these people possibly have to do with Daudi and Martínez, the river of death that flowed down into the Magulf? He thought of Tim, the blossoms falling from the cherry trees along the Zone’s Main Avenue as Tim sat eating a mountainous dessert at Thrials, saying, John, just what do you expect to do with the truth if you find it?
Laurie was saying something to him. He turned.
“They say they’ve heard you’re a baraka.”
He raised his beaker and nodded.
“They want you to offer a prayer to your god.”
“A prayer for what?”
“This year’s harvest.”
He gazed around at the expectant faces. Women nursing babies, men with faces scarred from disease, the old, the young, the frail.
“Go on, John. You must have something suitable.” Bringing his hands together, he recited:
The lord is my shepherd:
I shall not want…
When the food was finished and the goatskin of beer had been emptied, a large red-glazed bowl was produced, offered first to Hettie, then to Laurie. It contained fresh koiyl leaves. Nodding thanks, Laurie took two.
“Here’s your big chance to try.” She handed John a leaf.
The dried koiyl leaves sold in the Endless City were often small enough to be chewed entire, but a fresh one was too big. He watched Laurie bite off an end and drag it back over her teeth to remove the inedible stem, rather as if she were eating the leaf of an artichoke. He did the same. He knew that even for her there was no risk from one koiyl leaf—a harmful buildup of isotopes took years. But still he felt an odd frisson. The koiyl tasted…briefly strong, almost like nutmeg, and then a little like coal-tar soap. Then the flavor disappeared as the sap released some kind of anesthetic. His mouth went numb. He imagined that at least part of the skill of chewing koiyl involved learning not to bite your tongue. He swallowed and wiped his lips, certain that he was drooling. By now, he was beginning to experience the full effect of the leaf. The pain from his blistered feet and shoulders dissolved. The many aches in his limbs vanished. He felt both cool-headed and drunk. It was as when he had lain down the night before, looked up at the racing sky, and felt the ties of the earth snapping. Perhaps the influence was strong because the leaves were fresh, or because the drug was new to his system. Either way, if this was the effect that koiyl produced, it was easy to understand its popularity.
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