Читать книгу The Broken God - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 7

All that is not halla is shaida.

For a man to kill what he cannot eat, that is shaida;

For a man to kill an imakla animal, that is shaida, too.

It is shaida for a man to die too soon;

It is shaida for a man to die too late.

Shaida is the way of the man who kills other men;

Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul.

– from the Devaki Song of Life

This is the story of my son, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. I came to know him very well, though it was his fate (and my own) that he grew up wild, a lost manchild living apart from his true people. Until he came to Neverness, he knew almost nothing of his heritage or the civilized ways of the City of Light; in truth, he did not really know he was a human being. He thought of himself as an Alaloi, as one of that carked race of men and women who live on the icy islands west of Neverness. His adoptive brothers and sisters bore the signature of chromosomes altered long ago; they each had strong, primal faces of jutting browridges and deep-set eyes; their bodies were hairy and powerful, covered with the skins of once-living animals; they were more robust and vital, and in many ways much wiser, than modern human beings. For a time, their world and Danlo’s were the same. It was a world of early morning hunts through frozen forests, a world of pristine ice and wind and sea birds flocking in white waves across the sky. A world of variety and abundance. Above all, it was a world of halla, which is the Alaloi name for the harmony and beauty of life. It was Danlo’s tragedy to have to learn of halla’s fragile nature at an early age. Had he not done so, however, he might never have made the journey home to the city of his origins, and to his father. Had he not made the journey all men and women must make, his small, cold world and the universe which contains it might have known a very different fate.

Danlo came to manhood among Alaloi’s Devaki tribe, who lived on the mountainous island of Kweitkel. It had been the Devaki’s home for untold generations, and no one remembered that their ancestors had fled the civilized ruins of Old Earth thousands of years before. No one remembered the long journey across the cold, shimmering lens of the galaxy or that the lights in the sky were stars. No one knew that civilized human beings called their planet ‘Icefall’. None of the Devaki or the other tribes remembered these things because their ancestors had wanted to forget the shaida of a universe gone mad with sickness and war. They wanted only to live as natural human beings in harmony with life. And so they had carked their flesh and imprinted their minds with the lore and ways of Old Earth’s most ancient peoples, and after they were done, they had destroyed their great, silvery deepship. And now, many thousands of years later, the Devaki women gathered baldo nuts to roast in wood fires, and the men hunted mammoths or shagshay or even Totunye, the great white bear. Sometimes, when the sea ice froze hard and thick, Totunye came to land and hunted them. Like all living things, the Devaki knew cold and pain, birth and joy and death. Death – was it not a Devaki saying, as old as the cave in which they lived, that death is the left hand of life? They knew well and intimately almost everything about death: the cry of Nunki, the seal, when the spear pierces his heart; the wailing of an old woman’s death song; the dread silence of the child who dies in the night. They knew the natural death that makes room for more life, but about the evil that comes from nowhere and kills even the strongest of the men, about the true nature of shaida, they knew nothing.

When Danlo was nearly fourteen years old, a terrible illness called the ‘slow evil’ fell upon the Devaki. One day, during deep winter, the men and women sickened all at once with a mysterious, frothing fever. It was a fever that stole away sense and lucidity, leaving its hosts paralysed and leaking fluids from the ears. Of all the tribe, only Danlo and one strange man named Three-Fingered Soli remained untouched. It fell to them to hunt and prepare the food, to melt snow for drinking water, to keep the oilstones burning so there might be a little light to warm the sick inside their snow huts. Danlo and Three-Fingered Soli loved their near-brothers and sisters as they loved life, and for six days they worked like madmen to perform the hundreds of little daily devotions necessary to keep their tribe from going over too soon. But since there were eighty-eight Devaki and only two of them, it was an impossible task. Slowly – for the Alaloi are a tenacious, stubborn people – slowly Danlo’s tribe began to die. His near-sister, Cilehe, was one of the first to make the journey to the other side of day. And then his near-fathers Wemilo and Choclo died, and Old Liluye and many others. Soon the cave was full of rotting bodies waiting to be buried. Danlo tried to ignore them, even though, for the Devaki, the care of the dead is nearly as important as that of the living. He lavished his energies on his found-father, Haidar, and on Chandra, the only woman he had ever known as a mother. He made blood-tea and dribbled the thick, lukewarm liquid down their throats; he rubbed hot seal oil on their foreheads; he prayed for their spirits; he did everything he could to keep them from going over. But to no avail. At last, the slow evil stole them from life. Danlo prayed and wept, and he left their hut intending to go outside the cave to find some fireflowers to put on their grave. But he was so exhausted that he tripped into a snowdrift and fell at once into a deep, dreamless sleep. Later that day, Three-Fingered Soli found him there, covered with layers of fresh new snow.

‘Danlo,’ Soli said as he brushed the sparkling soreesh from the boy’s furs, ‘wo lania-ti? Are you all right?’

‘I was just sleeping, sir,’ Danlo said. ‘Mi talu los wamorashu. I was so tired.’ He rubbed his eyes with his powdered mittens. Even sitting in the snow, he was tall for a boy thirteen years old; he was taller, leaner and more angular than any of his near-brothers. In truth, he did not look like an Alaloi at all. He had the long nose and bold face bones of his father. His eyes were his mother’s eyes, dark blue like liquefied jewels, and even though he was very tired, they were full of light. In almost any city of the Civilized Worlds, his fellow human beings would have found him fiercely handsome. But he had never seen a true human being, and he thought of himself as being different from his near-brothers. Not exactly ugly, but rather strange and delicately deformed, as if he were a thallow born into a nest of sparrowhawks.

‘You should not sleep in the snow,’ Soli said as he brushed back his grey and black hair. Like most Alaloi men, he was large and muscular. Today, he was very tired. His shoulders were slumped, and there was a faraway, broody look about his eyes. He seemed very worried. ‘Only dogs sleep in the snow.’

‘But, sir, I was only going to pick fireflowers,’ Danlo said. ‘I do not know what happened.’

‘You might have slept too long and never awakened.’

Soli pulled him to his feet. They were standing near the mouth of the cave. Thirty feet away, the sled dogs of twelve families were tied to their stakes in the snow; they were pulling at their leashes, whining, begging for their evening meal. Danlo couldn’t remember the last time he had fed them. He couldn’t remember the last time he had fed himself. It was late afternoon and the sun was low in the sky. The air was blue cold, as clear as silka, the new ice. He looked out over the valley below the cave. The forest was already lost in shadows of dark green and grey – tomorrow, he thought, he might hunt shagshay, but tonight the dogs would go hungry again.

‘Haidar and Chandra have gone over,’ Danlo said. He looked at Soli.

‘Yes, they were the last.’

‘Haidar and Chandra,’ Danlo repeated, and he wiped a clump of melting snow away from his forehead. And then he said a prayer for his found-parents’ spirits: ‘Haidar eth Chandra, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki.’

Soli rubbed his nose with his three-fingered hand and said, ‘Shantih, shantih.’

‘And Sanya,’ Danlo said, ‘and Mahira, they have gone over, too.’

‘Shantih,’ Soli said.

‘And Irisha, Yukio and Jemmu – all alasharu.’

‘Shantih.’

‘And Rafael, Choclo and Anevay. And Mentina, they have all made the great journey.’

‘Yes,’ Soli said, ‘shantih.’

‘They are all dead.’

‘Yes.’

‘Ten days ago, all alive and fat with life, even Old Anala, and now –’

‘Do not speak of it. Words are only words – there is no purpose.’

Danlo took off his mittens and pressed his eyes; the hot water there burned his cold thumbs. ‘I am so tired,’ he said. And then, ‘The blessed Devaki – the whole tribe, sir. How can this be?’

Soli turned his face to the north, saying nothing.

Danlo followed his gaze outward, upward to where the pointed summit of Kweitkel rose above them. It was a great shining mountain marbled in granite and ice, a god watching over them. Four thousand years ago the first Devaki had named the island after the mountain forming its centre. Generation upon generation of Danlo’s ancestors were buried here. He closed his eyes as the wind came up and whipped his hair wildly about his head. There was ice in the wind, the smell of pine needles, salt, and death. ‘Kweitkel, shantih,’ he whispered. Soon he must bury his people in the graveyard above the cave, and after that, the Devaki would be buried on Kweitkel no longer.

‘It was bad luck,’ Soli said at last, rubbing the thick brows of his forehead. ‘Yes, bad luck.’

‘I think it was shaida,’ Danlo said. ‘It is shaida for our people to die too soon, yes?’

‘No, it was just bad luck.’

Danlo held his hand over his forehead to keep his hair from lashing into his eyes. He had thick black hair shot with strands of red. ‘In all the stories Haidar told over the oilstones, in all your stories, too, I have never heard of a whole tribe going over all at once. I never thought it was possible. I … never thought. Where has this shaida come from? What is wrong with the world that everyone could die like this? “Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul” – why is the world crying of shaida, sir?’

Soli put his arm around him, and touched his head. Danlo wept freely, then, wept for a long time into Soli’s stiff, frozen furs until a cold thought sobered him. He was only thirteen years old, but among the Devaki, thirteen is almost old enough to be a man. He looked at Soli, whose icy blue eyes were also full of tears. ‘Why us, Soli? Why didn’t the slow evil carry us over, too?’

Soli looked down at the ground. ‘It was luck,’ he said. ‘Just bad luck.’

Danlo heard the pity and pain in Soli’s voice, and it carried him close to despair. Soli, too, was ready for death. Anyone, even a child could see that. There was madness and death in his eyes and all over his haggard, grey face. The wind blowing through the forest and over the icy boulders all around them was very cold, almost dead cold, and Danlo felt like dying himself. But he couldn’t let himself die because he loved life too much. Wasn’t it shaida to die too soon? Hadn’t he seen as much of shaida as he could bear? He blew on his chilled, purple fingers and put his mittens back on. Yes, he must live because it was not time for him to go over yet, he was still young and full of life, still just a boy who suddenly knew that he had to find an answer to shaida.

He looked into the cave, at the great, black gash in the side of the hill where Jonath and his other near-brothers lay entombed. ‘It is strange that the slow evil did not take me, yes? Perhaps the slow evil is afraid of wildness. I have always been a little wild, I think. Haidar used to say I was wild, with all my talk of driving a sled east into the sunrise. He used to say I listened to you too much. When I was a boy –’

‘Shhh, you talk too much.’

‘But I have to ask you this, sir; I must know a thing.’

‘What is that?’

‘When I was a boy, I wanted to find the bed of Sawel from where he arises each morning to light the world. Pure wildness, as Haidar always warned. Tell me, sir, you must know – was I born with this wild face? My face is so different than the faces of my brothers. And they were so much stronger and hardier in their bodies; they never seemed to feel the cold. Why did they go over and not I?’

Soli looked at him and said, ‘It was fate. Just blind fate.’

Danlo was disturbed by the way Soli spoke of fate. There was galia, he knew, the World-soul, and one could certainly speak of the wilu-galia, the intention of the World-soul, but how could the World-soul be blind? No, he thought, only people or animals (or God, himself) could be blind. As Haidar had taught him, he shut his eyes again and breathed frigid air to clear his inner sight. He tried to askeerawa wilu-galia, to see the intention of the World-soul, but he could not. There was only darkness in front of him, as deep and black as a cave without light. He opened his eyes; the cold needles of wind made him blink. Could it be that Haidar had told him and the other children false stories about the animals, about the birth and life of the World? Could it be that everything he knew was wrong? Perhaps only full men were able to see that the World-soul’s intention was shaida; perhaps this was what Soli meant by blind fate.

‘It is cold,’ Soli said, stamping his feet. ‘It is cold and I am tired.’

He turned to step toward the cave and Danlo followed him. He, too, was tired, so tired that his tendons ached up and down his limbs and he felt sick in his belly, as if he had eaten bad meat. For thirteen years of his life, ever since he could remember, entering the cave from the outside world had always been a moment full of warmth, certitude, and quiet joy. But now nothing would ever be the same again, and even the familiar stones of the entranceway – the circular, holy stones of white granite that his ancestors had set there – were no comfort to him. The cave itself was just as it had been for a million years: a vast lava tube opening into the side of the mountain; it was a natural cathedral of gleaming obsidian, flowing rock pendants hanging from ceiling to floor, and deep silences. Now, in the cave of his ancestors, there was too much silence and too much light. While Danlo had slept in the snow, Soli had gathered faggots of bonewood and placed them at fifty-foot intervals around the cave walls. He had set them afire. The whole of the cave was awash with light, flickering orange and ruby lights falling off the animal paintings on the walls, falling deep into the cave’s dark womb where the cold floor rose up to meet the ceiling. Danlo smelled woodsmoke, pungent and sweet, and the firelight itself was so intense it seemed to have a fragrance all its own. And then he smelled something else layered beneath the smells of wood, fur, and snow. Touching every rock and crack of the cave, all around him and through him, was the stench of death. Though he breathed through his mouth and sometimes held his breath, he could not escape this terrible stench. The bodies of the dead were everywhere. All across the snow-packed floor, his near-brothers and sisters lay together in no particular order or pattern, a heap of bent arms, hair, furs, rotting blood, thick black beards, and dead eyes. They reminded Danlo of a shagshay herd driven off a cliff. Leaving them inside their snowhuts until burial would have been less work, but Soli had decided to move them. The huts, the fifteen domes built of shaped snow blocks in the belly of the cave, had kept the bodies too warm. The smell of rotting flesh was driving the dogs mad and howling with hunger, and so Soli had dragged the bodies one by one to the cave’s centre where they might freeze. Danlo worried that Soli, tired as he was, might have left someone inside one of the snowhuts by mistake. He told Soli of this worry, and Soli quickly counted the bodies; there were eighty-eight of them, the whole of the Devaki tribe. Danlo thought it was wrong to count his kin one by one, to assign abstract numerals to human beings who had so recently breathed air and walked over the brilliant icefields of the world. He knew that each of them had a proper name (except, of course, for the babies and very little children who were known simply as ‘Son of Choclo’ or ‘Mentina’s Second Daughter’), and he knew the names of each of them, and he stood over the dead calling their names. ‘Sanya,’ he said, ‘Yukio, Choclo, Jemmu …’ After a while his voice grew thin and dry, and he began to whisper. Finally, he grew as silent as Soli, who was standing beside him. He couldn’t see the faces of everyone to say their names. Some of the dead lay face down, half buried in the snow. Others – usually they were babies – were covered by the bodies of their mothers. Danlo walked among the dead, looking for the man he called his father. He found Haidar next to Chandra, the woman who had adopted him when he was a newborn only a few moments old. They were lying together, surrounded by Cilehe, Choclo and Old Liluye, and others of their family. Haidar was a short man, though remarkably broad and muscular; he had always been remarkably patient, canny and kind, and Danlo could not understand how such a great man had so inexorably died. In death, with his anima passed from his lips, Haidar seemed smaller and diminished. Danlo knelt beside him, between him and Chandra. Haidar’s hand was stretched out, resting across Chandra’s forehead. Danlo took Haidar’s hand in his own. It was a huge hand, but there was no strength there, no tone or vitality. It was as cold as meat, almost cold enough to begin hardening up like ice. Chandra’s face was cold, too. The hair around her ears was crusted with layers of a pale red fluid. Some of this fluid had dried days before; the freshest, the blood of her death agony scarcely hours old, was now beginning to freeze. Danlo combed the thick hair away from her forehead and looked at her lovely brown eyes, which were open and nearly as hard as stones. There was nothing in her eyes, neither joy nor light nor pain. That was the remarkable thing about death, Danlo thought, how quickly pain fled the body along with its anima. He turned and touched Haidar’s cold forehead, then, and he closed his own eyes against the tears burning there. He wanted to ask Haidar the simplest of questions: why, if death was so peaceful and painless, did all living things prefer life to death?

‘Danlo, it is time to ice the sleds.’ This came from Soli, who was standing above him, speaking gently.

‘No,’ Danlo said, ‘not yet.’

‘Please help me with the sleds – we still have much to do.’

‘No.’ Danlo sat down on the cave floor, and he rested one hand over Haidar’s eyes, the other over Chandra’s. ‘Haidar, alasharia la shantih,’ he said. And then, ‘Chandra, my Mother, go over now in peace.’

‘Quiet now,’ Soli said, and he ruffled Danlo’s hair. ‘There will be time for praying later.’

‘No.’

‘Danlo!’

‘No!’

Soli shrugged his shoulders and stared into the depths of the cave where the firelight reflected off the shiny black walls. His voice sounded low and hollow as he said, ‘The sleds have to be iced. Join me outside when you are done, and we will bury the Devaki.’

That evening, they began burying their tribe. They worked as quickly as they could, stripping the bodies naked and rubbing them with seal grease from toe to forehead. Danlo knew that it would be cold on their spirits’ journey to the other side of day, and the grease would help against the cold. Loading the bodies on the sleds and hauling them up to the burial grounds above the cave was gruesome, exhausting work. Some of his near-sisters had died many days earlier, and their flesh had run dark and soft as rotten bloodfruit. It would have been less horrible to remove the bodies all at once and place them in the snowdrifts where they would freeze hard and fast. But there were bears in the forest and packs of wolves; as it was, they had to gather bunches of dead wood to keep the cave’s entrance fires burning, to keep the wild animals at bay. Of course the sled dogs were familiar with fire, and they had little fear of it. And so Danlo and Soli decided to spend a couple of days hunting shagshay while most of their people awaited burial. They had to flay the great, white, fleecy animals and cut them up for food, or else the starving dogs might have gnawed off their leashes and gone sniffing for carrion in the cave. After that, they returned to work. One by one, they placed the bodies on the icy, treeless burial field. They oriented them with their heads to the north.

They heaped boulders atop each body; they built many stone pyramids to keep the animals away and to remind them that each living thing must return to the earth from which it is born. Their labour took ten days. There were too few boulders close to the cave, so they had to tie the dogs to their traces and drive sleds down through the forest to an icy stream where they found many smooth, rounded rocks. And then back up to the burial ground again with sleds full of rocks, back and forth for many trips. When they were finished at last, they found some anda bushes and picked orange and red fireflowers to place atop the graves. And then they prayed for the dead, prayed until their voices fell hoarse and their tears were frozen sheets over their cheeks; they prayed far into the night until the cold off the sea ice chilled their bones.

‘Mi alasharia,’ Danlo said one last time, and he turned to Soli. ‘It is done, yes?’

They began walking down through the dark graves, down through the snowdrifts and the swaying yu trees. There were stars in the sky, and everywhere snow covered the forest. After a while they came to the stream where they had built a little snowhut to live in while they did their work. Never again would they sleep in the cave. ‘What will we do now?’ Danlo asked.

‘Tomorrow, we will hunt again,’ Soli said. ‘We will hunt and eat and continue to pray.’

Danlo was quiet while he stared at the cold snowhut that would provide shelter for a night, or perhaps many nights. And then he said, ‘But, sir, what will we do?’

They crawled through the tunnel of the hut. The tunnel was dark and icy, and barely wide enough to allow Soli passage. The main chamber was larger, though not so large that either of them could stand up without breaking through the top of the little snow dome. In the half-darkness, Danlo moved carefully lest he knock against the snow blocks that formed the hut’s walls. He spread his sleeping furs atop his bed of hard-packed snow. Soli added chunks of seal blubber to the oilstone, a bowl of scooped stone which was always kept burning, however faintly. The blubber melted and caught fire, and Danlo gazed at the small pearly flame floating on a pool of dark oil. Soon the curved white walls of the hut glowed with a warm, yellow light.

‘Yes, what to do now,’ Soli said. The oilstone grew hotter, and he began boiling water in a small clay pot. It was his habit to drink some blood-tea before sleeping.

Danlo thought he was a strange man, at heart a wild man like himself, or rather, like he would be if he ever became a man. He felt an affinity to this wildness. Hadn’t Soli’s great-great-grandfather left the tribe a few generations ago to journey across the southern ice? Hadn’t Soli and his now-dead family returned from the fabled Blessed Isles with fantastic stories of air so warm that the snow fell from the sky as water? It was told that Soli had once journeyed across the eastern ice to the Unreal City where the shadow-men lived in mountainous stone huts. Danlo wondered if these stories were true, just as he wondered at the secret, wild knowledge of numbers and circles that Soli had taught him. He thought Soli was a mysterious, wild man, and then a startling idea came to him: perhaps this is why the slow evil had avoided him, too.

Danlo scooped some frozen seal blood out of a skin and dumped the blackish, crystalline mass into Soli’s pot. He said, ‘We will have to journey west to Sawelsalia or Rilril, won’t we? We have many far-cousins among the Patwin, I have heard it said. Or perhaps the Olorun – which of the tribes do you think will welcome us, sir?’

He felt uncomfortable talking so much because it was unseemly for a boy to talk so freely in front of a man. But he was uncertain and afraid for the future, and in truth, he had always liked to talk. Especially with Soli: if he didn’t initiate conversation, Soli was likely to remain as silent as a stone.

After a long time, Soli said, ‘To journey west – that may not be wise.’ He took a long drink of blood-tea. Danlo watched him hold his cup up to his mouth; it seemed that his eyes were hooded in steam off the tea, and in secretiveness.

‘What else can we do?’

‘We can remain here on Kweitkel. This is our home.’

Danlo held his hand to his eyes and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat; it felt like a piece of meat was stuck there. ‘No, sir, how can we remain here? There are no women left to make our clothes; there are no more girls to grow into wives. There is nothing left of life, so how can we remain?’

While Soli sipped his tea silently, Danlo continued, ‘It is wrong to let life end, yes? To grow old and never have children? To let it all die – isn’t that shaida, too?’

‘Yes, life, shaida,’ Soli said finally. ‘Shaida.’

Something in the way Soli stared into his tea made Danlo feel a sharp pain inside, over his liver. He worried that Soli secretly blamed him for bringing shaida to their tribe. Was such a thing possible, he wondered? Could he, with his strange young face and his wildness, bring the slow evil to the Patwin tribe as well? He felt shame at these thoughts, then, felt it deep in his chest and burning up behind his eyes. He tried to speak, but for once, his voice had left him.

Soli stirred his lukewarm tea with his forefinger. The two fingers next to it were cut off; the scars over the knuckle stumps were white and shiny. ‘To the east,’ he said at last, ‘is the Unreal City. Some call it the City of Light, or … Neverness. We could go there.’

Danlo had slumped down into his furs; he was as tired as a boy could be and still remain among the living. But when he heard Soli speak of the mythical Unreal City, he was suddenly awake. He was suddenly aware of his heart beating away as it did when he was about to spear a charging shagshay bull. He sat up and said, ‘The Unreal City! Have you really been there? Is it true that shadow-men live there? Men who were never born and never die?’

‘All men die,’ Soli said softly. ‘But in the Unreal City, some men live almost forever.’

In truth, Soli knew all about the Unreal City because he had spent a good part of his life there. And he knew everything about Danlo. He knew that Danlo’s blood parents were really Katharine the Scryer and Mallory Ringess, who had also lived in the City. He knew these things because he was Danlo’s true grandfather. But he chose not to tell Danlo the details of his heritage. Instead, he sipped his tea and cleared his throat. And then he said, ‘There is something you must know. Haidar would have told you next year when you became a man, but Haidar has gone over, and now there is no one left to tell you except me.’

Outside the hut, the wind was blowing full keen, and Danlo listened to the wind. Haidar had taught him patience; he could be patient when he had to be, even when the wind was blowing wild and desperately, even when it was hard to be patient. Danlo watched Soli sipping his tea, and he was sure that something desperately important was about to be revealed.

‘Haidar and Chandra,’ Soli forced out, ‘were not your blood parents. Your blood parents came from the Unreal City. Came to the tribe fifteen years ago. Your mother died during your birth, and Haidar and Chandra adopted you. That is why you are different from your brothers and sisters. Most men of the City look as you do, Danlo.’

Danlo’s throat ached so badly he could barely speak. He rubbed his eyes and said simply, ‘My blood parents … There are others who look like me, yes?’

‘Yes, in the Unreal City. It is not shaida to have a face such as yours; you did not bring this shaida to our people.’

Soli’s explanation cooled Danlo’s shame of being left alive. But it brought to mind a hundred other questions. ‘Why did my blood parents come to Kweitkel? Why? Why wasn’t I born Devaki as all Devaki are born? Why, sir?’

‘You don’t remember?’

Danlo shut his burning eyes against the oilstone’s light. He remembered something. He had an excellent memory, in some ways a truly remarkable memory. He had inherited his mother’s ‘memory of pictures’: when he closed his eyes, he could conjure up in exact colour and contour almost every event of his life. Once, two winters ago, against Haidar’s warnings, he had rashly gone out to hunt silk belly by himself. A silk belly boar had found him in a copse of young shatterwood trees; the boar had charged and laid open his thigh with his tusk before Danlo could get his spear up. He was lucky to be alive, but it wasn’t his luck that he most remembered. No, what he saw whenever he thought about that day was Chandra’s fine needlework as she sewed shut his wound. He could see the bone needle pulling through the bloody, stretched-out skin, the precision stitching, each loop of the distinctive knot Chandra used to tie off his wound. Inside him was a whole universe of such knots of memories, but for some reason, he had almost no memory of the first four years of his life. Somewhere deep inside there was a faint image of a man, a man with piercing blue eyes and a sad look on his face. He couldn’t bring the image to full clarity, though; he couldn’t quite see it.

He opened his eyes to see Soli staring at him. He drew his furs up around his naked shoulders. ‘What did my father look like?’ he asked. ‘Did you know my father? My mother? The mother of my blood?’

Soli sipped the last of his tea and bent to pour himself another cup. ‘Your father looked like you,’ he said. Then his face fell silent as if he were listening to something, some animal cry or sound far away. ‘Your father, with his long nose, and the hair – he never combed his hair. Yes, the wildness, too. But you have your mother’s eyes. She could see things clearly, your mother.’

‘You must have known them very well, if they lived with the tribe. Haidar must have known them, too.’

Danlo closed his eyes again and tried to shut out the wind whispering just beyond the snow blocks above his head. Inside him, there were other sounds, other whispers. He remembered the way Choclo and some of the other men would sometimes look at him strangely, the way their voices would drop into whispers whenever he surprised them in some dark corner of the cave. He had always imagined that everyone was talking about him when he wasn’t there to listen. There were darker memories, too: He had once overheard Chandra and Ayame talking about a satinka, a witch who had worked her evil and brought shaida to her people. He had thought the story was of the dreamtime, the time of the ancestors, the eternal, in-destructible time that was at once the history and the communal dreaming state of his people. He must have been wrong, he thought. Perhaps there had been a real satinka in the tribe. Perhaps this satinka had bewitched his blood mother and father.

‘Yes, Haidar knew your blood parents,’ Soli admitted.

‘Then what were their names? Why didn’t he tell me?’

‘He would have told you when you became a man, during your passage. There is more to the story, things a boy should not have to think about.’

‘I am almost a man,’ Danlo said. The set of his face was at once open and pained, innocent and hard. ‘Now that Haidar is dead, you must tell me.’

‘No, you are not a man yet.’

With his long fingernails, Danlo scraped frost off the ruff of his sleeping furs. He tried to make out his reflection in the glazed hut walls above him, but all he could see was his shadow, the outline of his face and wild hair darkening the milky white snow. ‘I am almost a man, yes?’

‘Next deep winter, after your passage, then you will be a man.’ Soli yawned and then said, ‘Now it is time to sleep. We must hunt tomorrow, or we will starve and join the rest of the tribe on the other side.’

Danlo thought hard for a while. He had a naturally keen mind made all the keener by the mind tools Soli had given him in secret. Ever since he could remember, Soli had taken him alone into the forest to draw figures in the hard-packed snow. He had taught him geometry; he had taught him about things called spheres and strange attractors and the infinities. Proof structures and topology, and above all the beautiful, crystalline logic which ordered the universe of number. Logic – even though Danlo found it a strange and wild way of thinking, he loved to argue logically with Soli.

He held his hand up to his mouth to cover a smile, then said, ‘The journey across the eastern ice to the Unreal City will be long and hard, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Soli said. ‘Very hard.’

‘Even a man might not complete such a journey – Totunye, the bear, may hunt him, or the Serpent’s Breath might strike him and kill him with cold, or –’

‘Yes, the journey will be dangerous,’ Soli broke in.

‘What if I were left alone to find the City?’ Danlo asked softly. ‘Or if the slow evil found you at last out on the ice? What if the shadow-men in the Unreal City do not know halla? Maybe the shadow-men would kill you for your meat. If you died before my passage, sir, how would I ever become a man?’

For Danlo, as for every Alaloi boy, the initiation into manhood is the third most important of life’s transformations and mysteries, the other two being birth and death.

Soli rubbed his temples and sighed. He was very tired but he must have clearly seen the logic of Danlo’s argument, that he would have to make his passage a year before his time. He smiled at him and said, ‘Do you think you are ready, Danlo? You are so young.’

‘I am almost fourteen.’

‘So young,’ Soli repeated. ‘Even fifteen years is sometimes too young. The cutting is very painful, and there have been many boys older than you who were not ready for the pain of the knife. And then, after the cutting …’ He let his voice die off and looked at Danlo.

‘And then there is the secret knowledge, yes? The Song of the Ancestors?’

‘No, after the pain, there is terror. Sheer terror.’

He knew that Soli was trying to frighten him, so he smiled to hide his fear. The air inside the hut was steamy from the boiling tea and from their rhythmic exhalations; it was selura, wet cold – not as absolutely cold as white cold, but cold enough to lap at his skin like a thirsty seal and make him shiver slightly. He pulled himself down into his furs, trying to keep warm. All his life, from the older boys and young men, he had heard rumours about the passage into manhood. It was like dying, Choclo had once said, dying transcendently, ur-alashara; it was like going over, not to the other side of day, but going over oneself to find a new, mysterious world within. He thought about what it would be like to go over, and he tried to sleep, but he was too full of death and life, too full of himself. All at once, his whole body was shivering beyond his control. He had an overwhelming sense that his life, every day and night, would be supremely dangerous, as if he were walking a snowbridge over a crevasse. He felt wild and fey in anticipation of making this eternal crossing. And then, deep inside, a new knowledge sudden and profound: he loved the dark, wild part of himself as he loved life. Ti-miura halla, follow your love, follow your fate – wasn’t this the teaching of a hundred generations of his people? If he died during his passage, died to himself or died the real death of blood and pain, he would die in search of life, and he thought this must be the most halla thing a man could do.

The shivering stopped, and he found himself smiling naturally. ‘Isn’t terror just the left hand of fate?’ he asked. ‘Will you take me through my passage tomorrow, sir?’

‘No, tomorrow we shall hunt shagshay. We shall hunt, then eat and sleep to regain our strength.’

‘And then?’

Soli rubbed his nose and looked at him. ‘And then, if you are strong enough and keep your courage, you will become a man.’

Four days later, at dusk, they strapped on their skis and made the short journey to Winter Pock, a nearby hill where the Devaki men held their secret ceremonies. Danlo was not allowed to speak, so he skied behind Soli in silence. As he planted his poles and pushed and glided through the snow, he listened to the sounds of the forest: the loons warbling with bellies full of yu berries; the clicking of the sleekits halfway out of their burrows, warning each other that danger was near; the wind keening across the hills, up through the great yu trees heavy with snow. It was strange the way he could hear the wind far off before he could feel it stinging his face. He listened for Haidar’s rough voice in the wind, and the voices of his other ancestors, too. But the wind was just the wind; it was only the cold, clean breath of the world. He hadn’t yet entered into the dreamtime, where his mother’s dying plaints and the moaning of the wind would be as one. He smelled sea ice and pine needles in the wind; as the light failed and the greens and reds bled away from the trees, the whole forest was rich with the smells of the freezing night and with life.

In silence, they climbed up the gentle slopes of Winter Pock. The hill was treeless and barren at the top, like an old man whose hair has fallen off the crown of his head. Set into the snow around a large circle were wooden stakes. Each stake was topped with the skull of a different animal. There were a hundred different skulls: the great, tusked skull of Tuwa, the mammoth; the skulls of Nunki and long, pointed skulls of the snow fox and wolf; there were many, many smaller skulls, those of the birds, Ayeye, the thallow, and Gunda and Rakri, and Ahira, the snowy owl. Danlo had never seen such a sight in all of his life, for the boys of the tribe were not allowed to approach Winter Pock. In the twilight, the circle of greyish-white skulls looked ominous and terrifying. Danlo knew that each man, after his cutting, would look up at the skulls to find his doffel, his other-self, the one special animal he would never again hunt. His doffel would guide him into the dreamtime, and later, through all the days of his life. Beyond this bit of common knowledge, Danlo knew almost nothing of what was to come.

Soli kicked off his skis and led him inside the circle of skulls. At the circle’s centre, oriented east to west, was a platform of packed snow. ‘When we begin,’ Soli said, ‘you must lie here facing the stars.’ He explained that it was traditional for the initiate boy to lie on the backs of four kneeling men, but since the men had all gone over, the platform would have to do. Around the platform were many piles of wood. Soli held a glowing coal to each pile in turn, and soon there were dozens of fires blazing. The fires would keep Danlo from freezing to death.

‘And now we begin,’ Soli said. He spread a white shag-shay fur over the platform and bade Danlo to remove his clothes. Night had fallen, and a million stars twinkled against the blackness of the sky. Danlo lay down on his back, with his head toward the east as in any important ceremony. He looked up at the stars. The lean muscles of his thighs, belly and chest were hard beneath his ivory skin. Despite the fires’ flickering heat, he was instantly cold.

‘You may not move,’ Soli said. ‘No matter what you hear, you may not turn your head. And you may not close your eyes. Above all, on pain of death, you may not cry out. On pain of death, Danlo.’

Soli left him alone, then, and Danlo stared up at the deep dome of the sky. The world and the sky, he thought – two halves of the great circle of halla enfolding all living things. He knew that the lights in the sky were the eyes of his ancestors, the Old Ones, who had come out this night to watch him become a man. There were many, many lights; Soli had taught him the art of counting, but he could not count the number of Old Ones who had lain here before him because it would be unseemly to count the spirits of dead men as one did pebbles or shells by the sea. He looked up at the stars, and he saw the eyes of his father, and his father’s fathers, and he prayed that he would not break the great circle with cries of pain.

After a while he began to hear sounds. There came sharp, clacking sounds, as of two rocks being struck together. As the fires burned over him, the rhythm of the clacking quickened; it grew louder and nearer. The sound split the night. Danlo’s right half knew that it must be Soli making this unnerving sound, but his left half began to wonder. He could not move his head; it seemed that the eyelight of the Old Ones was streaming out of the blackness, dazzling him with light. The clacking hurt his ear now and was very close. He could not move his head to look, and he feared that the Old Ones were coming to test him with terror. Suddenly, the clacking stopped. Silence fell over him. He waited a long time, and all he could hear was his deep breathing and the drumbeat of his heart. Then there came a dreadful whirring and whooshing that he had never experienced before; the air itself seemed to be splitting apart with the sound. The Old Ones were coming for him, his left side whispered. He dare not move or else they would know that he was still just a frightened boy. How could Soli be making such a sound, his right side wanted to know? He dare not move or Soli would have to do a terrible thing.

‘Danlo!’ a voice screamed out of the darkness. ‘Danlo-mi!’ It was not Soli who called to him; it was not the voice of a man. ‘Danlo, dorona ti-lot! Danlo, we require your blood, now!’

It was the voice of a terrible animal he had never heard before. It screamed like a thallow and roared like a bear, all at once. He began to tremble, or perhaps he was just shivering, he couldn’t tell which. Despite the intense cold, drops of sweat burst from his skin all across his forehead, chest, and belly. The animal screamed again, and Danlo waited motionless for it to tear at the throbbing arteries of his throat. He held his head rigid, pressing it down into the fur. He wanted to close his eyes and scream, but he could not. Straight up at the dazzling lights he stared, and suddenly the lights were gone. The animal was standing over him, bending low, blocking out the night sky. It wasn’t really an animal at all; it was the Beast of the young men’s stories. It had horns and great conical teeth like a killer whale; its cruel, hooked beak was dipping toward his face; its claws were the claws of the snow tiger, and they were sweeping down toward his belly and groin. He had never seen a man wearing a mask before, but even if he had, his left side would still be shouting that the Beast was about to rip away at him. He held himself very still.

‘Danlo, we require your blood!’ the Beast growled out again.

To live, I die, he thought, silently repeating the Devaki prayer of initiation.

Ever since he could remember, ever since he had seen the older men naked and looked between their legs with dread and wonder, he had known this moment must come. The Beast reached down and grasped his membrum. Its claws were cold and sharp against the shaft. In his fear and cold, his unprotected stones tightened up in their sac. He was very afraid; never had he known such a belly-tightening fear, not even when Haidar fell sick from the slow evil and began bleeding from his ears. The fear was all over him, like dead cold air falling down from the sky, suffocating him, clutching in his lungs. He was afraid the Beast would cut him, yes, afraid of the pain, but even more he dreaded convulsing like a frightened snow hare and trying to run away. And if he did that, he would be slain. The Beast would kill him for giving in to his fear. This thought, in turn, fed his fear, intensified it until the sweat poured off his ribs and soaked the furs beneath him. The wind began to blow, chilling him to the core, and he despaired because he felt himself falling through a black bottomless night from which there is no escape. Fear is the consciousness of the child – he remembered Haidar saying this once when they were lost out at sea. He stared up at the brilliant stars, waiting for the Beast to cut him, or tear open his throat, and in a moment of exhilaration he realized that he was here to surrender up his fear, or rather, to lose a part of himself, to let die his childish conception of himself as a separate being terrified of the world. All men must be tested this way, he knew, or else they could never become full men. Just then the Beast roared something into the night, a huge, angry sound that rattled the skulls surrounding him. He felt his foreskin being pulled away from the bulb of his membrum, and there was a tearing, hot pain. He clenched his jaws so hard he thought his teeth would break off in splinters and be driven into his gums; his muscles strained to rip apart his bones, and instantly, his eyes were burning so badly he could not see. He could still hear, though, and in many ways that was the worst of it, the crunching, ripping sound of his foreskin being torn away from his membrum. It hurts! he silently screamed. Oh, God, it hurts! The pain was a red flame burning up his membrum into his belly and spine. The pain ate him alive; the world was nothing but fire and pain. There came a moment when his body was like a single nerve connected to a vastly greater ganglia and webwork of living things: trees and stars and the wolves howling in the valleys below. He could hear the death scream of churo and yaga, and all the animals he had ever killed exploding from his own throat; he remembered the story of a Patwin boy who had died during his passage, and he felt a sudden pressure below his ribs, as if a spear or claw had pierced his liver. In one blinding moment, he saw again the faces of each member of his tribe as they prayed to be freed of the slow evil. The hurt of all these peoples and things, and everything, flowed into him like a river of molten stone. He ached to move, to scream, to pull himself up and run away. Only now, wholly consumed by the terrible pain that is the awareness of life, he was no longer afraid. Beyond pain, there was only death. Death was the left hand of life, and suddenly he beheld its long, cold fingers and deep lines with a clarity of vision that astonished him. Seen from one perspective, death was cruel and dreadful like a murderer’s hand held over a baby’s face; but from another, death was as familiar and non-frightening as the whorls of his father’s open palm. He would die, tonight or ten thousand nights hence – he could almost see the moment when the light would flee his eyes and join all the other lights in the sky. Even now, as the Beast tore at him, he was dying, but strangely he had never been so alive. He held himself quiet and still, listening to the wind beating through the trees and over the mountains. He heard a voice whispering that his membrum’s red bulb must be exposed to the cold air, just as the man within must finally shed his childlike skin of wishes and certitude and come to know the world as it really is. That was the way of all life, he heard the voice say. Life was always lived with death close at hand, and it was continually shedding death even as it made itself over to be born anew.

To live, I die, he told himself.

And inside him, despite the pain, at the centre of his deepest self was just sheer joy at being alive. In some sense, he would always be alive, no matter the killing coldness of the wind or fatal illnesses or any of a thousand other fates that he might suffer.

‘Danlo!’ the Beast howled out. ‘Your blood is red and flows like a man’s!’

Danlo listened to his deep breathing as other cuts were carved into his flesh, tiny cuts up and down the length of his membrum. He realized that it was Soli making these cuts and rubbing various coloured powders into them. The cuts would fester and then heal, and soon his membrum would be like that of any other Alaloi man: long and thick, and decorated with dozens of green and ochre scars.

‘Danlo, are you ready now?’

He felt something soft being wrapped around his membrum; it felt like feather moss held in place with a newl skin.

‘Danlo, you must gather your strength for the journey,’ a voice called out of the darkness. Then the Beast stood above him, gripping a gobbet of flesh between its bloody claws. ‘This piece of meat will sustain you. Open your mouth and swallow it without chewing.’

Danlo did as he was told. Like a baby bird, he opened his mouth and waited. Suddenly, he felt the raw bit of meat pressed into his mouth, back against his tongue. He swallowed once, convulsively, and he tasted fresh warm blood.

‘Danlo, this is the skin of your childhood. It will impregnate you like a seed. From the child grows the man. Are you ready to be a man, now?’

Again Danlo swallowed against the hot salty slickness of his own blood.

‘Danlo, wi Ieldra sena! Ti ur-alashareth. The ancestors are coming! It is time for you to go over now.’

His eyes were now calm and clear, and he looked up at the stars to see a million points of light streaming toward him.

‘Danlo, you may turn your head.’

Danlo blinked his eyes slowly. He turned and there was Soli standing over him. He was dressed as usual, in his winter furs; the terrible Beast was gone. ‘You have done well,’ he said.

He helped Danlo sit up and wrapped him in a fresh shagshay skin. There was blood everywhere, dark red soaking into the white furs. Danlo looked through the flickering red fires up at the circle of skulls. He must find the one animal who was his doffel. Soli would help him if his vision faltered, but it would be better if he came to his other-self unaided and alone.

‘Danlo, can you see?’

‘Yes.’

He was six thousand feet above men and time. He turned his head in a half-circle, and he could see many things. Below him were the dark forest and the starlit hills of his childhood, and farther out where the island’s ragged shore came up against the ocean, he beheld the faint, silvery shimmer of sea ice falling off to infinity. There were nearer sights. Soli’s face was drawn out ghastly and pale; he looked at once fey and ill, as if he were ready to die. Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo thought. His body still burned with pain, but his spirit had begun the journey through pain into a deeper world. He was beginning to see himself as he really was. Every act of his passage had been designed to bring him to this moment. His childish picture of himself, his old ways of thinking – shattered, like ice crystals beneath a hammer stone. There was a sudden clarity, an intensity of colour, shape, and meaning. Far above him, in the sky, the stars burned with a pale blue fire, and nearer, spread over his thighs and belly, was his deep red blood. Again, he looked up at the circle of skulls, at the bits of ivory gleaming in the blackness. Each skull was his skull; life was connected to life in ways he was just beginning to see. One skull, though, seemed to shimmer under the watchful eyes of the Old Ones. One skull called out to him. It was the skull of Ahira, the snowy owl. Ahira, the wisest and wildest of the animals. No other animal was so alive and free. And no other animal was so perilous to one’s spirit. In truth, he dreaded discovering that Ahira was his doffel, his other-self, for only once in ten generations was one born whose other-self is Ahira. He stared on and on waiting for this splendid bird to stop calling him, but at last he was sure that Ahira was his doffel. Ahira must guide him and help him go over to the trackless, unknown world where his deepest self lived.

Soli saw Danlo gazing at Ahira’s small, round skull. That the Devaki fathers had acquired a skull at all was something of a miracle, for Ahira was the rarest of all birds and hunters did not often catch sight of him.

‘This bird?’ Soli said. ‘Are you sure, Danlo?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Ahira, the snowy owl.’

‘Full men know this bird as the white thallow. You should call him that, too.’

Everyone knew, of course, that owls were thallows, just as they knew that God was a great thallow whose body made up the universe. But among the Alaloi elders, from tribe to tribe, there was a dispute as to whether God was a silver thallow, or the blue thallow, or the rare white thallow whom children referred to as the snowy owl.

‘Ahira is my doffel,’ Danlo said.

‘Very well,’ Soli said. Then he magically produced a musty leather bag stuffed with various objects. He rummaged around in the bag and removed a single, white feather. He gave it to Danlo, placing it between his folded hands. ‘This is the wing feather of the white thallow,’ he said. ‘The white thallow is your doffel.’

Danlo looked down at the feather. Its whiteness was as pure as snow. Along its edge it was rough and fuzzy, the better to muffle the sound of Ahira’s beating wings. Ahira was a magnificent hunter, and he could swoop down toward his prey in almost total silence. With a little bone clip that Soli gave him, Danlo fastened the feather to his long hair. Soli began to chant, then, and a world whose snowfields were pure and vast opened before him. Danlo entered into the dreamtime, into the altjiranga mitjina of his people. The shock of pain and terror (and his newfound ability to overcome his attachment to terror) had hurled him into this world. He listened to Soli chant, listened as the Old Ones began to speak to him. New knowledge was revealed to him, secrets that only a man may know. Soli chanted the lines of the Song of Life. The Song was a new way of structuring reality, a system of symbol and meaning connecting all things of the world to the great circle of halla. There are four thousand and ninety-six lines to this song; Soli chanted quickly, his deep voice rasping out the music. He told of how the lesser god, Kweitkel, had created the world from single pieces of rock and ice. He told of Kweitkel’s wedding with Devaki, and of their children, Yelena, Reina and Manwe. Danlo learned that on the third morning of the world, wise Ahira had befriended Manwe and taught him to love flying, hunting, and mating, and the other things of life. Manwe and Ahira – the Two Friends, two of the oldest of the Old Ones. Danlo listened to the Song of Life, and he joined them in the dreamtime. The dreamtime was now, the shall-be and always-was. The dreamtime occurred in the Now-moment, the true time in which the world was forever created anew.

‘Ali wos Ayeye,’ Soli chanted. ‘God is a great, silver thallow whose wings touch at the far ends of the universe.’

Danlo listened to the Song of Life’s sixty-fourth line. Now, and over the next three days, he must learn every line exactly as Soli chanted it because someday he would repeat the Song to a son or near-son of his own. Pain was the most potent of mnemonics; pain had awakened him to record the rise and fall and each liquid vowel; pain, and the intensity of pain, had prepared his mind and spirit to remember perfectly.

‘All animals remember …’ Soli sang out, and his voice began to tremble and crack. ‘All animals remember the first morning of the world.’ He stopped suddenly, rubbing the back of his neck. His face had fallen as grey as old seal grease. He licked his lips and continued with difficulty. After a while, he came to the first of the Twelve Riddles, chanting: ‘How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?’

Danlo waited for Soli to supply the answer in the second line of the couplet, but Soli could not speak. He groaned and clutched at his stomach and looked at Danlo.

‘Sir, what is wrong?’ Danlo asked. He didn’t want to speak because he sensed that the uttering of words would remove him from the dreamtime. But Soli suddenly heaved over gasping for breath, and he had to find out what was wrong. Now that he knew the way, he could make the journey into the dreamtime whenever he must. ‘Sir, here, let me loosen your hood’s drawstring – it is too tight.’

It was obvious that Soli was gravely ill. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his nose was bleeding. His eyes were the eyes of a whale caught unexpectedly in the freezing ice of the sea. Danlo stood up, and the rush of blood into his cut membrum was agony. He helped Soli lie down on the bloody platform where he had so recently surrendered up his childhood flesh. The Alaloi are not an ironic people, but he appreciated the deep irony of their reversed positions.

‘Sir, are you all right?’

‘No,’ Soli gasped, ‘never … again.’ He regained his wind, and spoke slowly. ‘Listen, Danlo, you must know. At a boy’s passage, one of the men must be the Beast. The Beast … the mask.’

With difficulty he bent over and stuck his hand into the leather bag. He removed a mask made of glued-together bones, fur, teeth and feathers. He rattled the mask in front of Danlo.

‘But it is sometimes hard to become the Beast,’ Soli said. ‘If the boy moves or cries out … then he must be slain. It is hard to become the Beast by wearing the mask alone. Help is needed. For some men, help. On the afternoon before the boy’s passage, the liver of the jewfish must be eaten. The liver gives terrible vision, terrible power. But it is dangerous, to eat it. Sometimes the power is too great. It consumes.’

Danlo took Soli’s hand; even though he himself was cold and half-naked, with only a shagshay skin draped loosely across his shoulders, Soli’s hand felt colder still. ‘What can I do? Is there no cure? Should I make some blood-tea to give you strength?’

‘No, that would not help.’

‘Does it hurt? Oh, sir, what can I do?’

‘I … believe,’ Soli said, ‘I believe that Haidar knew of a cure, but he has gone over, hasn’t he? All the men – the women, too.’

Danlo blinked away the pain in his eyes, and he found that he could see things very clearly. And on Soli’s face, in his tired, anguished eyes, there was only death. Soli would go over soon, he knew, there could be no help for that. It was shaida for a man to die too soon, but Soli’s death would not be shaida because it was clear that he was dying at the right time.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘ti-alasharia, you too, why, why?’

‘Yes,’ Soli said. And then he stretched out his hand and pointed upwards. ‘The stars, you must be told about the stars.’

Danlo looked up through the bitterly cold air at the heavens. He pulled the shagshay fur tightly around himself, let out a long steamy breath, and said, ‘The stars are eyes of the Old Ones. Even a child knows that.’

‘No, the stars are … something other.’

‘Does the Song of Life tell of the stars?’

Soli coughed deeply a few times; it seemed that he might begin gasping again. ‘Yes, the Song of Life, but that is only one song, the song of our people. There are other songs. The stars shine with eyelight, yes, but that is just a metaphor. A symbol, like the symbols for numbers we used to draw in the snow. There is an otherness about the stars that I … I must tell you.’

‘Please, sir.’

‘This will be hard to explain.’

‘Please.’

Soli sighed, then said, ‘Each star is like Sawel, the sun. A burning, a fusion of hydrogen into light. Five hundred billion fusion fires in this galaxy alone. And the galaxies … so many. Who could have dreamed the universe would make so many?’

Danlo pressed his knuckles against his forehead. He felt sick inside, dizzy and disoriented. Once, when he was eight years old, he and Haidar had been caught out on the sea in a morateth. The sky had closed in, white and low over the endless whiteness of the ice. After ten days, he hadn’t been able to distinguish right from left, up from down. Now he felt lost again, as if a morateth of the spirit were crushing him under.

‘I do not understand.’

‘The stars are like fires burning across space. Across the black, frozen sea. Men can cross from star to star in boats called lightships. Such men – and women – are called pilots. Your father was a pilot, Danlo.’

‘My father? My blood father? What was his name?’ He took Soli’s hand and whispered, ‘Who is my blessed father?’

But Soli didn’t seem to hear him. He began to speak of things that Danlo couldn’t comprehend. He told of the galaxy’s many wonders, of the great black hole at the core, and of that brilliant, doomed region of the galaxy called the Vild. Human beings, he explained, had learned to make stars explode into supernovae; even as they spoke together, beneath the dying sky, ten thousand spheres of light were expanding outward to the ends of the universe. ‘So many stars,’ Soli said, ‘so much light.’

Danlo, of course, couldn’t comprehend that this wild starlight would eventually reach his world and kill all of the plants and animals on Icefall’s surface. He knew only that Soli was dying, and seeing visions of impossible things.

‘Sir, who is my father?’ he repeated.

But now Soli had lapsed into a private, final vision, and his words made no sense at all. ‘The rings,’ Soli forced out. ‘The rings. Of light. The rings of eternity, and I … I, oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!’

Quite possibly he was trying to tell Danlo that he was his grandfather, but he failed, and soon his lips fell blue and silent, and he would never utter any words again.

‘Soli, Soli!’

Again, Soli began gasping for air, and very soon he stopped breathing altogether. He lay still with his eyes fixed on the stars. Danlo was surprised at how quickly he had died.

‘Soli, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki.’

How many times, Danlo wondered, had he said that prayer? How many times must he say it again?

He closed Soli’s eyes and kissed them. ‘Shantih, Soli, may your spirit find the way to the other side.’

Then the enormity of all that had occurred during the past days overwhelmed him. He jumped up and threw off his fur, standing naked to the world. ‘No!’ he cried out. ‘No!’ But there was no one to listen to him. The fires had burnt low, dim orange glimmerings lost into the blackness of night. It was very cold. He watched the fires die, and he began to shiver violently. ‘No,’ he whispered, and the wind stole the breath from his lips and swept it away. His body hurt so urgently that he welcomed numbness, but next to the pain of his spirit, it was almost nothing. How would he live now, he wondered, what would he do? He had been cut, and part of him had died, and so he was no longer of the onabara, the once-born children. But until he completed his passage, he would remain unfinished, like a spearpoint without an edge; he would never be of the diabara, the twice-born men. And because he knew that only a twice-born man who had learned the whole Song of Life could be wholly alive, he almost despaired.

Later that night, above the cave, he buried Soli with the others. After he had hefted the last frozen boulder onto his grave, he prayed. ‘Soli, pela ur-padda, mi alasharia, shantih.’ He pressed his eyes hard before shaking his head and crying out, ‘Oh, Ahira, what shall I do?’

He fell into the dreamtime, then, and the wind through the trees answered him. There was a rush of air carrying the deep-throated hooing of the snowy owl. It was Ahira, his other-self. Perched high on a yu tree’s silvery branch, across the snow-covered graveyard, Ahira was looking through the darkness for him.

‘Ahira, Ahira.’

The owl’s snowy round head turned toward him. His eyes were orange and black, wild and infinitely wise.

‘Danlo, Danlo.’ The owl turned his head again, and there was a shimmer of starlight off his eyes. And Danlo suddenly beheld a part of the circle of halla: the World-soul did not intend for him to join the Patwin tribe, nor any other tribe of the islands to the west. Who was he to bear the taint of shaida to his uncles and cousins? No, he would not burden his people with such unspeakable sorrows. No matter how badly he needed to hear the whole Song of Life, his future and his fate did not lie in that direction.

I must journey east, he thought. I must go to the Unreal City alone.

Somehow he must make the impossible journey to the city called Neverness. And someday, to the stars. If the stars really were fusion fires burning in the night, they were part of a vast, larger world that must know halla, too.

To Ahira, he solemnly bowed his head. ‘Mi alasharetha,’ Danlo said, praying for that part of himself that had died. ‘Shantih.’

Then he turned his back to the wind and wept for a long time.