The Great Wheel Read Free

whispering Madre. He thought of Saint Paul in Athens, of the shrines and idols in that city full of unknown gods. Did they represent false images—or other pathways towards the light? Paul had been clear enough in his condemnation, but after all these centuries, after the death in the poisoned weather of half the world and with it the other great religions that had once vied with Christianity, there was still no real answer.
    On a rusty stand beside the altar was a plate for offerings and prayers. As usual, it was well stocked. Each card crackled out its message as he picked it up. He could only make sense of a few on first hearing. The cards were thin and cheap—and even when his parishioners tried to speak clear European, the clotted Magulf vowels still came through.
    A woman, with the sound of a baby crying in the background. “To Lady. Pray the soul of our son Josh.”
    Another woman. Something about the roof of her shack blowing in.
    A man, in tears, too choked to say anything at all.
    To get anywhere near understanding the rest, John had to take the translat from his belt and hold it close. Each time a card spoke, the translat’s screen flickered and the power meter sagged before it barked out the words. The translat didn’t get on well with the speech cards, but its flat, Eurospeak voice eventually echoed each message.
    “Please mercy and forgiving. In the name of the gods.”
    “Pray now for rain, and for my friend Delo. As it was in time of the Dark King. Amen.”
    One card had pinned to the back of it a small plastic bag filled with titanium bolts. “For Jesus,” it chirped, and the translat gave a clear but tinny echo a moment later. “Please remember.”
    Remember what? For whom? He gazed up at the face of Our Lady. She was smiling and sad, self-absorbed, and her carved lips always seemed to be holding back the same eternal secret. He wiped the rusty stand and then the main altar rail with a fresh dysol-impregnated cloth from the pack he always carried with him, an anointing that was part of the ritual of reassurance that took place between Borderer and European even when there were no witnesses. Then he changed gloves. Pulling at the thread and dropping the old pair to the floor, he watched them flare and dissolve, and brushed away the ash with the toe of his shoe.
    He destroyed the unused wafers. Normally he would have gone through at least two of the sealed packs in an evening service, but today the congregation had been limited to a few old women, a few old men, and the babies that they’d agreed to look after while the rest of the people enjoyed the carnival. He’d had half a mind to acknowledge the fact during the service, even try—through the translat, or by testing his own stumbling command of the dialect—to crack a joke. But when he gazed down at those strange eyes, and at those warm and gnarled hands that he could never touch, the silence had closed in.
    Freewheeling, his cassock flapping, he cycled down the cobbled hill from church.
    These empty zigzag streets had once belonged to a town with its own name and history. The Endless City stretched along the north coast of old Africa, reaching through the dried-up regions of the Nile and the ancient battlefields of the Holy Land as far as the Black Sea before finally tapering out in the frozen wilderness of the Russian Plains. For the most part, the urban sprawl was narrow, hemmed in by mountains and the wildfire desert, pressed up against the gray waters of what had once been called the Mediterranean and was now named the Breathless Ocean. In this easterly part known as the Magulf, where John worked, the coastlines of Europe and old Africa almost touched. It had once been called Morocco—or possibly Algeria. The maps had blurred long ago.
    Typically by this time on a warm, reddish dark spring Magulf evening, the candles and the cooking flames and the chemlights would be glowing, the streets would be spilling with beggars, vendors, fights,