The Broken God (33 page)

'You will shave my beard now,' Pedar said. 'Here, with this razor, and careful you don't cut me.'

'You want me to shave your ... face, O Excellent One?'

Pedar was sitting slumped on a stool in the first floor bathing chamber. His hairless torso was flabby because he hated exercise; the skin across his chest was sallow from snorting too much jook, and he had large, loose nipples that looked like slices of raw liver. He pointed at the enamelled shaving basin. Water hissed from old pipes in a continuous jet, which struck the half-filled basin and sent up a hot, soapy spray. In the steam, a cadre of Pedar's friends stood around in a circle, intimidating Danlo with their hard, naked bodies should he attempt to flee. Danlo himself was clothed in an informal robe. He was miserably hot and sweating inside his baggy woollens, and he repeated, 'You want me to shave your face, O Excellent One?'

'I've tired of that title. You will begin calling me, "O Vastened One".'

'But O Vastened One,' Danlo protested, 'how can I shave your face without touching it?'

'Because, Wild Boy, I will give you permission to touch my face.'

As he said this, his friends, who had been jeering at Danlo, fell silent and looked at one another in surprise.

Danlo did not want to shave Pedar's face. He had finally learned that on many of the Civilized Worlds, it was the worst of insults to touch another's face. And, although he was coming to respect civilized customs, this was not his only reason for not wanting to touch him. 'I might cut you,' he said.

Indeed, it would have been impossible to shave Pedar's scraggly beard without cutting him. His face was an angry red landscape of pimples, scabs and irritated flesh. From temple to neck, volcanoes of infection rose up among the pockmarks and patchy scars. No area of his face (or on his chest and back) was free of abscess; it was impossible to find a smooth plane of skin to draw a razor across. And so, as Pedar stretched up his chin and glanced knowingly at his friends, Danlo tried to cut around the pimples. He used the razor's bevelled tip to sever the downy hair follicles almost one by one. He worked as painstakingly as any Alaloi man carving a piece of ivory, but at last his fingers grew tired and shaking, and he let the razor slip. He cut open a huge red pimple on Pedar's throat. Blood and pus thick as yellow cream erupted and dribbled down Pedar's neck. Pedar gave a jerk, and Danlo cut him again, this time a long, nasty gash through skin and scar running along his windpipe. There was blood everywhere, blood running down Pedar's chest to spatter on the white stool, blood sticky between Danlo's knuckles and congealing along the razor's smooth diamond blade.

'You've cut me!' Pedar shouted.

Danlo swished the razor in the basin's soapy water, and almost instantly flowers of red were sucked down the drain. Not knowing what else to do, he pressed the sleeve of his robe to Pedar's throat. 'It is not a deep cut, but it is bad to let the blood run, and I– '

'You've cut me, goddammit!'

'I am sorry.'

'Stupid Wild Boy.'

'I am truly sorry.'

Pedar jumped to his feet with his hand clamped to his neck. He glared at Danlo and shouted, 'You're truly sorry what?'

'I am truly sorry ... O Vastened One.'

'The Wild Boy has forgotten his etiquette,' Pedar said. He nodded to his six friends. They were each almost full men, and one of them, Arpiar Pogossian, with his blocky, cultivated muscles, was almost as large as Bardo the Just, who was the largest man Danlo had ever known. 'Let's teach him the proper etiquette,' Pedar said.

All at once, Pedar's friends fell on Danlo. They grabbed his arms and legs, throwing him to the floor. Danlo's ear smacked against the tile, and the pain of bruised cartilage made him angry. He struggled and thrashed like a shagshay bull being brought to the ice by wolves. He flailed out and kicked someone; someone shouted, 'Why did you let go his leg?'

'He's damn strong!' Arpiar huffed out. 'Too damn strong!'

Someone was groaning; as it happened, Danlo had kicked one of the boys' hands, breaking two fingers. Danlo could almost feel the sharp, grating pain of it in his own fingers. He was so ashamed of breaking ahimsa that his body fell slack and the other boys managed to pin him to the floor. Arpiar Pogossian was now kneeling on Danlo's thigh while the other boys each grasped one of his limbs.

'What's wrong with him?' Arpiar wanted to know. 'Why is he just lying there?'

Pedar crouched above Danlo and said, 'He was a student of a Fravashi Old Father. They say he's taken a vow of ahimsa.'

A sad-faced, ironic boy – his name was Rafael Wu – stood off by himself and held up his mangled hand. 'Ahimsa!' he shrieked out. 'I think my fingers are broken!'

Danlo lay with his spine and joints pressed to the tile. On top of him, crushing his chest and belly, were four naked, sweating boys. It was hard for him to breathe, but he smelled the soap and sweat running off Pedar's glistening skin. Pedar knelt over him, looking at him upside down. From this perspective, his eyes seemed as darkly patterned as kawa shells, hard and scarcely human. Because Danlo was Pedar's personal servant – because it was against all tradition and rules – Pedar was not permitted to touch Danlo. But he had invented other ways to torment him. He had his fingers up against the gash in his neck. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but he squeezed up some blood which ran over the point of his chin and dripped down into Danlo's face.

'No!' Danlo suddenly shouted. 'No!'

Pedar's fingers were working furiously across his inflamed, lacerated neck. By chance (or design) he squeezed a few pimples, which burst open, spraying pus and blood into Danlo's eyes. Danlo shut his eyes tightly. He shut his mouth so that none of Pedar's blood would get in. All of his life, long before he had vowed not to harm any living thing, he had known it was very bad to taste the blood of others, the worst kind of shaida. He wanted to cry out, 'No, no, this blood will defile both our spirits!', but his mouth was tightly closed, and he could not speak.

Finally Pedar stood up and the other boys let Danlo go. Pedar seemed suddenly ashamed and confused. 'Tomorrow evening,' he muttered, 'you'd better be more careful how you shave me.'

Danlo fled up the spiral stairway then. He fled into the vast, cool familiarity of his dormitory chamber. Hanuman, who was practising his killing art out on the floor, saw him covered in blood and froze with his fist pointed in the air. 'Danlo, what happened?'

As Danlo hurried into the bathing chamber, he shook his head in despair. After stripping off his befouled robe and washing the diseased blood from his face, he returned to the main chamber. There he huddled beneath his bed's blankets and shivered with hatred. He hated Pedar Sadi Sanat. He hated him with a black, bitter passion. And more, he hated a system – a civilization, world, or universe – that could produce such a boy. This hatred poisoned his spirit. And the worst part of his hatred was his contempt for himself, or rather, his contempt for being weak enough to hate at all. Silently, at the vital moment, he had turned his sight away from ahimsa. He was far from the harmony of life that he sought, as far away as death was from life.

'Danlo, Danlo,' he heard a voice say, 'what happened to you?' It was Hanuman standing above him, shaking his shoulder as he called his name.

'I ... broke my vow of ahimsa,' Danlo said at last. He sat up and threw back the covers. Many of his fellow novices milled about the room, sharpening their skates for the next day. The sound of ridged files being drawn against steel whined through the air. As the boys prepared for bed, they stole glances at him, but he ignored them. 'O blessed God ... why did I break my vow?'

He told Hanuman everything then. Hanuman stood there listening, biting at the callouses covering his knuckles. When he heard what Pedar had done to Danlo in the first floor bathing room, his face fell fearful and secretive. He spoke no word of reassurance, but in his eyes was a shared outrage. In truth, Danlo was immediately afraid of what his friend's silent rage might lead to.

'I must suffer Pedar and his little tortures,' Danlo said.

'I understand.'

'If I continue to hate him or wish him harm, how will I ever learn ahimsa?'

Hanuman bit his knuckle and tore loose a piece of yellow callous, which he spat onto the floor. 'I understand,' he repeated.

'It must be hard for you, too,' Danlo said. 'To serve Master Bardo.'

'It is hard,' Hanuman said. A strange look came over him. 'But it's possible to learn from such cruelty, isn't it? Someday, I'll have my revenge upon Bardo. As you will with Pedar.'

Danlo reached beneath the blankets and brought out his bamboo flute. He held it lightly between his fingers and looked at Hanuman. 'There is a saying I learned when I was young: Silu harya, manse ri damya. It means, "Children rage, men restrain themselves".'

'Just so, Danlo. The ability to control oneself is everything.'

'Yes,' Danlo agreed. 'But, Hanu, do we mean the same thing by this word "control"?'

As false winter ended and the first snows of winter fell cold and deep, Danlo had many opportunities to practise control; after some hundred days of Pedar's hazing had passed, Danlo had learned to restrain the worst of his hatred, and he began to understand the terrible patience and strength that ahimsa required of a man. Pedar never again defiled Danlo with his blood or other bodily substances, but found more subtle ways to torment him. In front of his friends, he ridiculed Danlo for wearing a bird's feather in his hair; he made Danlo polish his skates over and over until Danlo fell faint and sick from the smell of boot polish; he did everything possible to ruin Danlo's sleep. This was the cruellest part of his hazing, cruel in intent if not result. Every night after lights out, Pedar climbed the spiral stairs to Danlo's chamber. Since hazing was not officially permitted after the novices had gone to bed, he climbed quietly. And he climbed carefully, very carefully. Pedar had once slipped on the stairs as a first year novice; he always placed his feet exactly in the centre of the hard stone steps. Every night he would steal through the silent chamber where the youngest boys slept. He would rouse Danlo from his bed and lead him down the stairs to the first floor meditation room. There he would make Danlo sing the traditional canticles of the Order or perform the strenuous postures of body yoga or – and this was his favourite torture – he would read aloud the beginning stanzas of some famous ancient poem and then make Danlo supply the concluding lines; if Danlo failed this test, he would have to perform a Sufi dance for the other boys or hop up and down on one foot until he fell writhing to the floor with leg cramps. As many nights passed, Danlo applied his phenomenal memory toward learning by heart hundreds of ancient poems, and then hundreds of hundreds. It soon became almost impossible for Pedar to surprise him with an unfamiliar poem, even such as the poems of Indra Sen and other obscure poets of the Third Dark Age. Danlo's feats of memory naturally infuriated Pedar. And so he devised a new game, which was to make Danlo recite as many poems as he could for as long as he could. Pedar loved poetry, and he loved it the more Danlo's voice grew hoarse from forcing out line after line of poems composed many thousands of years ago on Old Earth or some other abandoned world. Pedar, of course, sacrificed little of his own sleep listening to ancient poetry. When he grew tired and drowsy, he left the meditation room for his bed, only to be replaced by Arpiar Pogossian or one of the other high novices. In this way, working in shifts, Pedar's friends often made Danlo stay awake the whole night.

One morning after a particularly excruciating session of poetry recitations, Hanuman caught Danlo stumbling into bed and told him, 'Oh, no, Danlo, look at you! There's nothing in tradition to allow Pedar to keep you awake like this. Why don't you go to Master Bardo and make a complaint? Or allow me to?'

Danlo glanced at Hanuman and yawned. He looked battered and gaunt, almost as if he'd had his nose broken. Dark half-moons bruised the skin beneath his eyes. The eyes themselves, however, were lively and seemed to hold a brightness at odds with his sleeplessness. 'Silu wanya, manse ri damya,' he said. 'Children complain, men restrain themselves.'

'Do your Alaloi people have a saying for everything?'

'Yes,' Danlo said, 'they are natural philosophers.'

'But you mustn't let Pedar ruin your sleep.'

'But if I complain to Master Bardo, he might punish Pedar.'

Hanuman grinned wickedly and said, 'I hope Master Bardo takes him out into Lavi Square and slaps his face. There should be a public rebuke.'

Danlo closed his eyes and shook his head. 'O, Hanu, this is what must not happen! Nothing I say, nothing I do, not even in my thinking must I cause him harm.'

'But you mustn't take this notion of ahimsa too far,' Hanuman said. 'Pedar is a pustule – why should you care if Master Bardo punishes him?'

'Pedar is a pustule,' Danlo agreed, 'but he is also something else.'

'And what would that be?'

'Something splendid, something rare.'

'But you hate him!'

'But I ... must not hate him.'

'Then I will hate him for you,' Hanuman said. He touched Danlo's forehead to see if he had a fever, then continued, 'Perhaps it's a noble exercise to restrain yourself from hating others. Perhaps. But you should keep your will to hate as sharp as a razor. Perhaps someday you'll give up ahimsa as an unworkable ethic – and then you'll need all your hate to protect yourself from Pedar or others like him.'

During this time of hazing, which grew worse through winter into deep winter and was much more severe for Danlo than the other boys, three things saved him from physical and mental ruin. First, as luck would have it (and Danlo was always a lucky man), it was the season of holidays. Triolet, The Day of Remembrance, The Tycho's Day, Mourning Night, The Festival of the Broken Dolls – three days out of ten were given over to rest and celebration. Danlo was not required to serve Pedar on these days, nor did he have any other duties. He was free to curl up beneath his warm blankets and sleep as long as he liked. Second, Danlo had an unusual attitude toward sleep. He could do without sleep when he had to. Often, as a boy hunting seals with Haidar out on the sea ice, he had stood awake above a seal's hole, stomping his feet to keep them from freezing, waiting and waiting. Often he had waited more than a day for Nunki to rise up out of the sea and impale himself on his harpoon. Just as often, though, in deep winter when the west wind blew swift and deadly, he had huddled in his cave and slept continually for a day and a night. In truth, he had a rare ability for sleeping. And, as a result of his experience with the autists, he was adept at descending into the cold, deep, healing waters of his dreams. More than once he dreamed of his other-self, the mysterious snowy owl. Ahira, with his orange eyes and shimmering white feathers, appeared to Danlo and told him that sleep was a rejoining with God and that he must seek this holy state whenever he could. And so, through the three nights and days of Triolet while the people of the City smoked toalache in celebration of the end of the War of Assassins, he slept in his bed, getting up only to relieve himself or to eat a little food. And when he finally awakened, clear-headed and fresh, he found Hanuman suffering the aftereffects of his first taste of toalache, and he said, 'Sleep is bliss, yes? As long as I can return to sleep, how can Pedar harm me?'