The Broken God (31 page)

'No!' Hanuman said. He jerked his head back and turned to face Danlo. 'Leave me alone!'

Again, Danlo stretched out his hand to Hanuman, this time to touch his forehead, to touch away the anger that he had unwittingly aroused. It was a quintessential Alaloi gesture, an act of reconciliation and kindness, but it was the wrong thing to do. Suddenly, with a remarkable power for one so slight, Hanuman hammered the edge of his fist against Danlo's arm, knocking it away. A sharp pain shot up Danlo's forearm into his elbow; he could hardly move his arm, so deep was the shock of nerves compressed against bone. Something happened to Hanuman, then. In striking Danlo, it was as if he had unlocked a door to a room that should never have been opened. Again, he struck out at Danlo, with his feet and his knees and his fists. Danlo moved closer to him to fend off these blows, or to grab his wrists and shake him back to his senses. As Danlo grappled with Hanuman, hand to hand, hand to neck, he became aware of many things at once: the sound of falling water, boys gathering around him, gesticulating and shouting through a thick veil of steam, the soapy tiles slick beneath his feet, and most of all, the terrible thing.

the madness running wild in Hanuman's pale eyes. This madness seemed to come out of nowhere, like lava welling up from a rent in the ground. At first, Danlo thought that Hanuman had fallen into a blind rage, like that of a rabid dog slavering and snapping and slashing at anything that came his way; perhaps, Danlo told himself, Hanuman had mistaken him for Pedar, or mistaken his remembrance of the recent past for the reality of the present moment. And then he bumped foreheads with Hanuman, and they locked eyes together, and he knew that this was not so. In truth, he had somehow violated Hanuman's person in a way that Pedar had not. He didn't know, in his mind, what he had done to unleash such fury. But another part of him knew, and he knew it deeply, and even in his madness Hanuman knew it too. Again and again, he struck Danlo, wilfully, knowingly, as if he had freely accepted the part of himself that was pure energy and annihilation. Much later, when Danlo was able to remember events exactly, this image of Hanuman so clear-eyed and aware would haunt him. But now there was only fury, elbows and fists, drops of blood flung out into the steamy air. Hanuman's face was terrible with concentration as he kicked at Danlo and fell into the motions of his killing art. Hanuman punched him hard in the belly; he drove his knee into his exposed membrum and stones. There was a pain then, a quick, blinding agony that jumped along Danlo's spine and left him gasping for air. He doubled over, and as he fell he kept a hold on Hanuman's neck and pulled him closer. They fell together, hard, down against the tiles edging the hot pool. Something – the tile or perhaps Hanuman's fist – struck Danlo's chin. His teeth cracked together, and he bit his tongue and tasted blood, and suddenly he was in the water holding Hanuman's head tightly against his chest. The water burned his skin and sloshed into his mouth as he panted in pain. He choked on the water, and he might have gone under, then, clutching at his groin and belly like a wounded beast. Even though the water was shallow, no higher than his belly, he might have breathed water and drowned. Death is the left hand of life, his body seemed to cry out, and with death close at hand, as he choked and thrashed in the burning water, he felt a great surge of life running strong as an ocean inside him. It was his anima deep within the cells of brain and blood, a pure will to life beyond the agony in his groin, beyond hatred, shock, or pain. In a way, fighting for life was a fusion of both terror and joy. He found his feet, suddenly. He gasped for air, and blood sprayed from his mouth. He was still holding Hanuman by the neck. And Hanuman was still fighting furiously, clawing at Danlo's throat and trying to hook his fingers into his eyes. Many times when he was younger, in the cave of his ancestors, Danlo had wrestled with other boys, but never like this, never with such wildness and abandon. And now he was as wild as any sea animal, and he felt the strength of his life flowing along his arms. He was stronger than Hanuman. With the water dragging heavy against their legs, neither of them could move freely, but Danlo was taller and much stronger. He got an arm up and wrestled behind Hanuman; he held him fast in a head lock with Hanuman's face inches above the churning water.

Life is the right hand of death – he thought someone was saying these words, but then he realized that it was Madhava or one of the other boys standing by the edge of the pool, shouting, 'Let him go, you're killing him!'

He tightened his grip on the back of Hanuman's head. The scalp was slippery with hot water and blood, and he felt fine stubbles of hair that Madhava had missed shaving. By chance, his fingertips edged the bleeding gash along Hanuman's temple. Beneath his fingertips was bone and brain, and beneath everything, stiffening Hanuman's frail body like sheets of ice, fear. Hanuman's body was rigid with fear; he, too, was fighting to live, and Danlo could not quite force his face beneath the water. He knew he should kill Hanuman there and then, in the moment, with the passion for killing so urgent inside him. He was an Alaloi man (or half a man), and killing was a terrible necessity of life. But he could not kill him. In the water beneath him, blood from his bitten tongue spread out into hundreds of silken red strands, and strand to strand, touched Hanuman's blood. He saw the deep correspondence that existed between them. In the surging waves beating against his chest, through the hot, churning water he felt a connectedness to Hanuman that could never be broken. Tat tvam asi, he thought, that thou art. All things were connected to all things, heart to heart and atom to atom, and in every part of Hanuman – in the pain of his twisting, thrashing body and in his frantic eyes – Danlo saw himself. He could not harm Hanuman without harming himself. It is better to die oneself than kill He thought of Old Father's teaching of ahimsa, then, and he knew that he could not kill him; he could not kill anything, ever again.

'Hanu, Hanu,' he said, gasping, 'be still!'

'No! Leave me alone!'

Danlo stood behind Hanuman with the boy's head clamped in his long hands. His tongue hurt on the side where he had bitten it, and it was hard for him to speak clearly. 'Hanu, Hanu, ti alashareth la shantih. Be still! I am your friend, not your enemy!'

'Go away.'

Again Danlo prayed, 'Ti alashareth la shantih,' and he held his hand over Hanuman's mouth. After a while the madness went out of Hanuman, and he fell still. Danlo held him tightly, his chest pressing the rib bones of Hanuman's slender back; he felt this stillness as an unexpected letting-go that passed from Hanuman's flesh into his own. Although Danlo could not know it, it was the first time since Hanuman's infancy that he had relaxed in the presence of another. Something passed between them, then, a deep trust that neither of them would ever again harm the other.

'Why did you strike me?' Danlo whispered. 'I am your friend, not your enemy.'

Hanuman struggled to speak, and Danlo let his hand fall away from Hanuman's face, into the rolling water. Hot waves lapped at his fingers. From somewhere above him, through the steamy air, came the sound of feet slapping against wet tile and one of the boys shouting at them. 'Hit him again!' someone cried out. 'Hold his face under water until he drowns!'

'Be quiet!' Madhava li Shing said. 'Be quiet, or the high novices will hear us and throw us in the pool.'

But most of the boys were not calling for further violence. In truth, they seemed in awe of what they had just witnessed. They stared down at Danlo and Hanuman as if they were afraid for these two wild boys to emerge from the pool.

Danlo ignored their chatter and whispered in Hanuman's ear, 'What is wrong?'

'Oh, no,' Hanuman began, and his voice was lost to the sound of water running into the pool. 'I'm sorry – are you hurt?'

Danlo let Hanuman go. While Madhava li Shing called for them to come out of the pool, they faced each other across the water. 'I think ... I bit my tongue,' Danlo said.

'I'm sorry I hurt you.' Hanuman laved some water over his bleeding scalp, then said, 'But I thought you wanted to kill me.'

'Kill you?'

'I should explain,' Hanuman said. He looked down at the hot water for a moment. 'I should explain, but I'm sorry, I can't talk here, with everyone listening. Can you wait until after everyone has gone to bed?'

Danlo reached back and pulled his queue of hair so it fell over his shoulder across his chest. Ahira's tail feather, he saw, was somewhat torn and bedraggled; only the wax he had rubbed into it each day since his passage into manhood had kept it from ruin. 'Yes,' he said as he pressed his fingers against the feather's hard quill. 'I can wait.'

Later, after Madhava had glued Hanuman's scalp wound closed with a pungent-smelling collagen, after Borja's evening bells long since had rung and the cold flame globes had darkened and everyone was asleep, much later, Danlo and Hanuman stole from their beds and made their way to the centre of the sleeping chamber. There the stairwell opened before them like a black hole in space. They crept down a few stairs, not so far as to emerge into the chamber below where the second year novices slept, but far enough so that the thick stone floor above them would muffle their voices.

'I'm sorry I struck you,' Hanuman murmured into the darkness. 'I didn't mean to. It's just that I was so mad, and afraid. There's something about you. Your strength, your past, your courage, and – forgive me – your strangeness. You were going to touch my face, weren't you? My head. It's silly of me to be so bound by my past, but on Catava, no one ever touches anyone else, if they can help it. You must think this inhibition is odious. I do, when I think about it. I know I should overcome myself. I want to, I will. Oh, this is hard. It seems so indecent to talk about myself this way. So vainglorious. I think about myself too much, anyway. But I have to believe we have complete will over ourselves. If we're completely mindful. There's something about me, too, I know. And knowing it, I can control it. I'd never strike you again. Please. I'd rather die than hurt you.'

Danlo listened to Hanuman's voice spilling like liquid silver out of the darkness. He could hear the truth in the words, as well as an immense sadness; he sensed that Hanuman was afraid to be alone with himself, and worse, he seemed to be always watching himself, as if he were standing guard against a murderer who slips through open windows during the night. If Danlo had been prudent, he might have accepted Hanuman's apology – only to flee into that frigidness of the soul that people betray when they wish to sever an awkward or dangerous friendship. But this Danlo could not do. Because of his experience with the Dreamers – or perhaps due to the terrible things he had seen when his tribe fell ill in their brains – he had an immense tolerance for madness. And so he smiled to himself as Hanuman talked; he sat on the cold stone steps and listened as Hanuman told him things that no one else had ever known.

'I'm sorry I struck your face,' Hanuman said at last. 'And the groin strike – are you all right?'

'Yes,' Danlo said. He reached beneath his robe, down between his legs as if to reassure himself that he was still whole. 'Now my stones have been hammered to match the cutting of my membrum.'

'I'm sorry – I've wounded you.'

Danlo was faintly nauseous due to his aching groin and the minty, collagenous odour of the glue wafting from Hanuman's head. On the dark stairs where they sat, the smells and sounds around them seemed very close. 'Wounds heal,' he said.

Hanuman was silent for a long time before whispering, 'Ilove him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience: thus he goes gladly over the world.'

'You are quoting from your blessed book again, yes?'

'Some things are impossible to say otherwise.'

'You can say anything to a friend,' Danlo told him.

'Are we to be friends?'

'O blessed Hanu! We have been friends since the first day. Friendship is halla, like the circle of the world. It cannot be broken.'

In the quiet of the stairwell where their whispers fell out into the open blackness, in friendship, they touched each other's forehead. For a long time they sat there talking about their lives and their fates. Because Danlo trusted Hanuman to keep secrets, he told him of his quest to affirm life wherever he found it. 'Life,' he confided, 'is so strange, so splendid, so rare. To see it, quickening, life. This is what my Fravashi Old Father has taught: never killing or hurting any living thing, not even in one's thoughts. To affirm life this way, utterly, with all one's spirit – this must be a way to becoming an asarya, yes?'

They returned to the main chamber, then, and Danlo lay awake listening to the wind outside and to the breathing of nineteen boys sleeping down the length of the room. Far into the night, in the bed next to his, Hanuman began tossing and murmuring in his sleep. He had fallen into one of his nightmares. 'No, no, Father!' he called out. 'No, no, no!'

Danlo kicked the blankets off himself and stepped over to Hanuman. The floor stones were icy against his bare feet, so he knelt on Hanuman's bed. Starlight silvered the windows above them and fell in faint streamers into the room. Hanuman's pale, delicate face was rigid with suffering. With life, Danlo thought, and in the Alaloi manner, he gently pressed his hand over the boy's mouth. 'You must not wake the others!' he whispered. 'Shhh, mi alasharia la, shantih, shantih. Go to sleep now, my brother, go to sleep.'

They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in.

– from The Bhagavad Gita

In the uncertain first days of their novitiate that followed, Danlo and Hanuman became best of friends. As friends do, Danlo chose to blind himself to the worst of Hanuman's faults while cherishing those rare qualities which distinguished him from the other novices: his mindfulness, his intense will and his loyalty. Hanuman, once he had accepted Danlo as a friend, proved astonishingly loyal. On the sunny glidderies of Borja, in the dormitories, or in Lavi Square where the people swarmed the ice after breakfast, Hanuman championed Danlo to the other novices. With charm, wit, and subtle intimidation (no one, after witnessing Hanuman's ferocity in the bathing room, wanted to provoke him to violence), he won a tentative acceptance for Danlo. It helped that Danlo was easy to like and that he liked to laugh at himself, even when the others pointed out his various peculiarities. Indeed, in many of his habits and daily devotions, Danlo gave the others much to laugh at. Each morning he arose with the sun, went outside into the frozen air and bowed to the four points of the world. And each night, just before the cold flame globes were extinguished, he bent low, grunting as he lifted his bed and turned it perpendicular to Hanuman's bed. He did this so he could sleep with his head to the north; the other boys slept toward the windows oriented west to east, and Danlo knew (or believed) that such sleeping positions could lead to blood diseases, constipation, or even madness. Because he also believed it was harmful to hold his water, whenever he felt the need, he insisted on promptly pissing to the south, whether or not proper lavatory facilities were at hand. Once, a master horologe caught him outside behind the College of Lords drilling yellow holes in a gliddery's red ice, and his reputation for eccentricity was established. This reputation grew to almost mythic proportions when, one day before dinner, he forgot his promise to himself in the hot pool and ate the larvae of a fritillary butterfly. It was an easy enough mistake for him to make: after a long day of learning to use the tutelary computers in the library, he was talking with Madhava li Shing and some other novices outside that most massive of buildings. He was tired and hungry, and so, without really thinking, he had peeled open the bark of a shatterwood tree to find three fat fritillary larvae, each as thick as his thumb. Out of habit he had scooped these delicacies out of their burrow and popped them into his mouth before realizing that he had vowed never to harm another living creature. Since he had already killed them with his teeth and it would be a shame to waste a mouthful of good meat, he swallowed the larvae. He had eaten the young of the fritillary a thousand times during his boyhood; they tasted delicious, juicy and sweet, just as they should.