The Broken God (25 page)

'It's cold! I can't stand this cold!'

Danlo noticed the boy named Konrad sitting ten yards in front of him, sitting and cursing as he beat his legs to keep warm. A cadre of novices converged on him and grasped his robe. 'Your face!' Konrad shouted. 'Your rotting face!' But the novices took no notice of his bad manners or profanity; they immediately escorted him from the Square.

If Konrad was the first to forget his patience and hope, he was not the last. As if a signal had been given, children in ones and twos began standing and leaving the Square. And then groups of ten or a hundred gave up en masse, abandoning their fellows, and so abandoned their quest to enter the Order. By the time night had grown full and deep, only some three thousand petitioners remained.

Just before midnight, a wicked round of coughing alerted Danlo as to the gravity of Hanuman's illness. It wasn't very cold – at least it was no colder than the interior of a snow hut – but Hanuman was shivering as he coughed bent low with his face pressing his mat, shivering beyond control. If he didn't give up and seek shelter soon he would surely die. But Hanuman didn't look as if he were ready to give up. The hard straw had cut parallel marks into his forehead and cheek; his eyes were open to the light of the flame globes shining at the edge of the Square. Such eyes he had, a pale blue burning as the hellish blinkans in the sky burned, strangely and with terrible intensity. Something terrible and beautiful inside Hanuman was holding him to his mat, keeping him coughing in the cold. Danlo could almost see this thing, this pure, luminous will of Hanuman's beyond even the will to life. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and something brilliant and beautiful about Hanuman's spirit attracted him, just as a fritillary is compelled to seek a woodfire's fatal light.

'Hanuman!' he whispered. He couldn't help himself. The urge to speak to this wilful boy before he died was greater than his fear of being dismissed as a petitioner. He had a strange, overwhelming feeling that if he could somehow see the true Hanuman, he would learn everything about shaida and halla. Waiting until none of the novices was near, he whispered again, 'Hanuman, it is best not to touch your head to the ice. The ice, even through the mat – it is very cold. Colder than the air, yes?'

Through his chattering teeth, Hanuman forced out, 'I've ... never ... been so cold.'

Danlo looked around him. Most of the nearby mats were empty, and those few petitioners who were within listening distance were curled up like dogs and seemed to be asleep. He pitched his voice low and said, 'I have seen too many people go over. And you, you will go over soon, I think, unless you– '

'No, I won't quit!'

'But your life,' Danlo whispered, 'to keep it warm and quick, your life is– '

'My life's worth nothing unless I can live it as I must!'

'But you do not know how to live ... in the cold.'

'I'll have to learn, then, won't I?'

Danlo smiled into the darkness. He squeezed the cold bamboo shaft of the shakuhachi and said, 'Can you wait a little longer? It will be morning soon. False winter nights are short.'

'Why are you talking to me?' Hanuman suddenly wanted to know. 'Aren't you afraid of being caught?'

'Yes,' Danlo said in a soft voice. 'I know we should not be talking.'

'You're different from the others.' Hanuman swept his arm in an arc, waving at the motionless petitioners slumped down on their mats. 'Look at them, asleep on the most important night of their lives. None of them would take such a chance – you're not like them at all.'

Danlo touched Ahira's feather and thought back to the night of his passage into manhood. 'It is hard to be different, yes?'

'It's hard to have a sense of yourself. Most people don't know who they are.'

'It is as if they were lost in a sarsara,' Danlo agreed. 'But it is hard to see yourself, the truth. Who am I, after all? Who is anyone?'

Hanuman coughed wickedly, then laughed. 'If you can ask that question, you already know.'

'But I do not really know anything.'

'And that's the deepest knowledge of all.'

They looked at each other knowingly and broke into soft laughter. Immediately, though, their laughter died when a novice clacked across the Square ten rows behind them. As they waited for him to pass, Hanuman blew on his hands and began shivering again.

When it seemed safe, Danlo asked, 'You would risk your life to enter the Academy?'

'My life?' Hanuman rasped out. 'No, I'm not as ready to die as you seem to think.'

He coughed for a while, then Danlo asked, 'Did you journey here to become a pilot? It is my fate to be a pilot, I think.'

'Your fate?'

'I have dreamed of being...' Danlo began, and then fell silent. 'I... I have always wanted to be a pilot.'

'I also,' Hanuman said. 'To be a pilot, to interface with the ship's computer, this continual vastening the pilots are allowed – that's the beginning of everything.'

'I had not thought of it that way.' Danlo looked up at the Wolf and Thallow constellations and the other stars, and said, simply, 'I will become a pilot so I can journey to the centre of the Great Circle, to see if the universe is halla or shaida.'

He closed his eyes and pressed his cold thumbs against his eyelids. To see the universe as it really is and say 'yes' to that truth, as man and as asarya – how could he explain his dream to anyone? In truth, the Alaloi are forbidden to reveal their nighttime dreams or visions, so how could he tell Hanuman that he had dreamed of becoming an asarya?

'What is this word "halla" that you keep using?' Hanuman asked.

Danlo listened to the wind rise and whoosh between the buildings. It fell over him, and he began to shiver. Despite his discomfort, he loved the chill of the wind against his face, the way it carried in the sea smells and a feeling of freedom. How exhilarating it was to talk long past midnight with such an aware, new friend! How reckless to talk beneath the novice's ears with only the wind for cover! Suddenly, the utter strangeness of kneeling on a scratchy mat and waiting with three thousand other freezing boys and girls was too much. He found himself telling Hanuman about the death of his parents and his journey to Neverness. He tried to tell him about the harmony and beauty of life, then, but he found that the simple Alaloi concepts he had been taught sounded trite and naive when translated into civilized language. 'Halla is the cry of the wolf when he calls to his brothers and sisters,' he said. 'And it is halla that the stars should shine at night when the sun falls beneath the mountains. Halla is the way ... the way false winter takes away the cold, and the way false winter dies into the colder seasons so the animals do not become too many and crowd the ice. Halla is ... oh, blessed halla! It is so fragile when you try to define it, like crossing morilka, the death ice. The greater weight you give it, the more likely it is to break. Halla is. Sometimes, lately, I think of it as pure isness. A way of simply being.'

Hanuman pressed his lips together as he turned his face away from the wind and tried not to cough. 'I've never known anyone like you before,' he marvelled. 'To cross a thousand miles of ice looking for something you call halla – and to do it alone!'

'Old Father warned me that if I told anyone, they might not believe me. You will not ... tell anyone else?'

'Of course I won't. But you should know, I believe you.'

'Yes?'

Hanuman stared at the feather in Danlo's hair, then coughed and said, 'Danlo the Wild – you look a little wild. And the way you see things, so wild. I'll have to think about what you've said. Especially about being. Can it be enough just to be? I've always dreamed of becoming.'

'Becoming ... what?'

'Becoming more,' Hanuman said.

While Hanuman bent low with another coughing fit, Danlo touched the shakuhachi's ivory mouthpiece with his lips. 'But Hanu,' he said, impulsively inventing a diminutive form of his name. He reached over and touched the boy's forehead. It was burning hot. 'Hanu, Hanu, you are not becoming. You are dying.'

'No, that's silly,' Hanuman said hoarsely. 'Please don't say that.'

After that, he lost his voice and began coughing in great breaking waves. Danlo wondered why the novices or Bardo the Just, who strolled among the petitioners from time to time, didn't take this unfortunate, dying boy inside somewhere to heal him. He decided that entering the Order must be a kind of passage. And like all passages into new levels of being, there must always be danger and the possibility of death.

'Will you play your flute now?' Hanuman whispered. 'I can't talk anymore.'

Danlo wet his lips and smiled. 'It is soothing, yes?'

'Soothing? No, it's haunting, really. Haunting. There's something about the way you play, the music. Something I can't bear to hear. But something I have to hear. Do you understand?'

Danlo played his music, then, even though his mouth was so dry that the playing was difficult. He licked his lips for the hundredth time. He was very thirsty. Since the morning coffee, he had drunk nothing, and his tongue was dry against his teeth, as dry as old seal leather. Of course he was hungry, too, with his belly tightening up empty and aching, but the hunger wasn't as bad as his need for water. And, in truth, he was colder than he was thirsty. Soon, perhaps, the thirst would grow angry and all-consuming, but now, as he played, the cold was more immediate, like a stiff, frozen fur touching every part of him. The wind blew down his neck, and the mat was icy against his legs. It was hard to move his fingers, especially the two smallest ones on his right hand: as a child, he had burned them in the oilstones, and they were stiff with scar over the knuckles and now almost numb. Somewhat clumsily, he played his music while Hanuman watched and listened. And on Hanuman's delicate face, in his eyes, there was a look of anguish, whether from the music or cold it was hard to tell. Danlo played to the anguish, all the time thinking of Old Father and the 'holy pain' that he delighted in causing others. Danlo took no joy in others' suffering, but he could appreciate the need for pain as a stimulant. Pain is the awareness of life – that was a saying of the Alaloi tribes. Life was pain, and in Hanuman's pain there was still an urge to life. This miracle of living, though, was such a delicate thing liable to end at any moment. He could see that Hanuman was dying – how much longer could his will and inner fury keep him alive? Death is the left hand of life, he thought, and death is halla, but suddenly he did not want Hanuman to die.

He set down the shakuhachi and whispered, 'Hanu, Hanu, keep your hands inside your robe. Do not blow on them. Fingers claw the cold from the air – do you understand?'

Hanuman nodded and thrust his hands into either of his loose sleeves. He said nothing as he began to cough and shiver even more violently.

'Hanu, Hanu, you were not made for the cold, were you?'

Danlo rolled the thin wool of his robe between his fingers and smiled grimly. The wind rose up and drove particles of ice across the Square. It seemed that everyone was shivering, even the tired novices in their white jackets. For a long time, as the wind continued to blow, he looked at Hanuman. Hanuman had spoken sophisticated words, and he had courage, but in truth he was still just a boy, uncut and unseasoned against the world's bitterness. He was frail and sick, and he would go over soon. Danlo watched and waited for him to go over. He waited, all the while wondering what dread, mysterious affinity connected his life with Hanuman's. He studied Hanuman's fevered face, and, somewhat worried at the turn of his thoughts, he decided that he and Hanuman must share the same doffel. Surely Hanuman's spirit animal must be the snowy owl or perhaps one of the other kinds of thallow. Then, in the deepest, coldest part of night with the wind dying and the world fallen silent, just before dawn, Danlo heard Ahira calling him. 'Danlo, Danlo,' his other-self said, 'Hanuman is your brother spirit and you must not let him die.' Rashly, almost without thought, Danlo shrugged off his robe. There was a smile on his lips, grim necessity in his eyes. Then he leaned closer to Hanuman and worked the rough wool over his head, down over his trembling body. He knelt back down on his own mat, freezing and naked, astonished at what he had done.

Hanuman stared at him and smiled faintly. After a while he closed his eyes in exhaustion. Danlo scooped up a few of the nearby mats and built a half-pyramid over him. The overlapping mats – and his robe – might keep the wind from killing him.

'Danlo, Danlo, there is no pain as terrible as cold,' Ahira whispered to him.

While Danlo clenched his fists to keep from shivering, Hanuman fell into unconsciousness and began to dream. It was obvious he was dreaming: his eyelids fluttered like the wings of a fritillary, and he moved his cracked, bleeding lips silently. Then he began to murmur in his sleep, to call out for his father. 'No, no, Father,' he said. 'No, no.'

'Hanu, you must be quiet!' Danlo whispered. He looked around to see if any of the other petitioners had been awakened. Among the Alaloi it is taboo to disturb the sleep of others with one's own dreams. Sleep is the sacred time, the return to the natural state, which is at once the source and sustenance of the spirit. To reveal a dream is to infect another's spirit with images which must remain secret. If dreams weren't kept sacred, Danlo believed, the spirits of all men and women would fall into confusion and madness. 'Hanu, Hanu, wake up if you cannot sleep!'

But Hanuman was now lost into nightmare. There was sweat on his face, terror on his lips. 'Father, Father!' he began to cry out. 'No, no, no– '

His shouts were cut off abruptly when Danlo leaned over and clamped his hand over his mouth. 'Shhh!' Danlo said. His cold hand hurt with the breath burning out of Hanuman's nose. 'Shhh, go to sleep now!' he whispered. 'Shantih, go to sleep.'

He cradled Hanuman's head in the crook of his arm as he held his hand hard over the boy's mouth. He was afraid one of the novices might hear the muffled cries. But the nearest novice was fifty yards away leaning against the trunk of a shih tree and heard nothing. Soon, to the whispered supplication of, 'Shantih, go to sleep!', Hanuman fell into dreamlessness and peace. When he was quiet and still, Danlo let him go and returned to kneeling on his mat. He looked at the thousands of mats lining the ice of Lavi Square, at the thousands of suffering children; never in his life had he felt so cold, so abandoned, so utterly alone.