The Wild (37 page)

'It is always difficult for strangers,' Reina An said, 'to understand that everything must be given to God.'

Ede, in his translation of this simple sentence, hesitated a moment because the Sani word for 'stranger' was the same as 'enemy'. It was this way with many of what he called the primitive languages. Indeed, since the Sani had come into existence only two hundred years before as an isolated people on a lost Earth, it was curious that they should even have a word for 'stranger'.

Ki Lin Shang nodded his head in agreement with Reina An. 'Once,' he said, 'my beautiful wife, Laam Su, found a blue rose growing in the forest. She wanted to pick it for me, but instead she left it on its stem as a gift to God.'

This statement of Ki Lin's piqued Danlo's curiosity for two reasons. First, because of Ki Lin's assertion that blue roses grew wild on this Earth. And second, because Ki Lin had referred to Laam Su as beautiful. Certainly, it was hard for even Danlo to see much beauty in Laam Su. Like Reina An, she tried to sit straight before the fire, but due to some bone disease (or perhaps just old age) her spine was bent and deformed. She huddled at her husband's side, hunched over and squinting at Danlo with her good eye. Her other eye, he saw, had been mostly destroyed in some kind of accident. Indeed, the whole left side of her face was twisted with a patchwork of scars as if she had been burnt by a lightning stroke or had perhaps stumbled into an open fire-pit as a child. She sat in the drizzling rain, shivering like a dog and silent in her concentration upon her own miseries. She would not meet Danlo's eyes, nor did she look at any of the other Sani surrounding her. She seemed to hate the necessity of sitting in council on such a cold and ugly day; in truth, she seemed to hate everything about her life. And most of all, she hated the requirement of the law that she hate absolutely nothing in the world – or at least that she hide these forbidden hates from other people and the eyes of God.

Beauty is only skin deep, but ugliness penetrates to the bone – Danlo remembered his friend, Hanuman li Tosh, saying this about another woman they had known in Neverness years before. And then, while Danlo stared through the dead grey air at poor Laam Su, her husband turned to see what Danlo might be looking at so intently. Suddenly, as if someone had thrown a heap of dry sticks into the fire, there was a flash of light. Laam Su's tired old face suddenly came alive and shone with a deep and lovely light. Danlo finally saw her, then, as her husband saw her, perhaps as she really was: she was beautiful because she loved Ki Lin and he loved her, and more, because she had survived some seventy years of a hard and uncertain life. In truth, she was beautiful simply because she existed at all, as one shining part of God's marvellous and infinitely various creation. All things, in their secret nature, shimmered with a terrible beauty, and the beholding of this truth was the essential part of the Sani's sacred law.

The way to look at all things is with a naked eye, Danlo remembered. With the mind's eye naked to the universe.

Danlo's eyes played over the weathered old skin of Laam Su's body, and he suddenly understood why the Sani went about their lives unclothed in such cold and rainy clime. The only way to look at the human form – and everything – was in nakedness. To clothe oneself was to hide one's beauty, and thus to scorn God's loveliest handiwork.

'There is nothing we must not surrender up to God,' Ki Lin Shang affirmed. 'Especially pride and the layers of the self that separate us from Him.'

Without further pause, Danlo bent low to pull off his leather boots. Then he rose up and removed his glittering black rain robe; he dropped this rather sophisticated garment on the steaming earth below him. Lastly, he freed himself from his black, wool kamelaika and the undersilks that he always wore close to the skin. When he was finished divesting himself of his layers of clothing, he stood naked in front of the fire. His skin shimmered with a golden light, and he felt the heat of the flames licking at him. At the same time, though, it was cold – a wet, drizzly cold pinging at his heated flesh and rolling down his back in long, snakelike tracks.

'May all the Sani be beautiful' – he heard a young woman say this even as Reina An nodded her head in approval of his act of disrobing. The Sani, then, crowded closer to get a better look at Danlo's body. He had a truly beautiful body: long, lean, graceful, and yet quickened with a terrible power like that of a young tiger. Now, at last, some of the bolder Sani dared to touch him. Two boys and an old woman pressed close and ran their fishy-smelling fingers over his shoulders. All the Sani, he suddenly noticed, seemed to smell of old salmon. The smell wafted from the smoke pits and pervaded the village; it called his memory to similar smells that had comforted him as a child. It was the smell of life, a good, pungent, organic smell, though somewhat hard to take if one were unused to it. Although Danlo had vowed never to eat meat again, he never minded its smell, not even when a young woman rubbed her hand over him, thus rubbing her greasy fish essence into the fine black hair covering his chest and belly. That hair of any sort grew from Danlo's body seemed to astonish the Sani, who were as smooth in the flesh as dolphins. They were astonished, too, by Danlo's scars. The young woman – her name was Kameko Luan – boldly ran her finger up the long, white scar on his thigh where the silk-belly boar had once wounded him. Others were looking at his burnt knuckles and the chin scar he had earned during a particularly vicious game of hokkee. For a moment, Reina An caught his eyes and then stared at him strangely, at the lightning bolt scar that he had once cut into his own forehead. Most of the Sani, however, were staring between his legs. They obviously wanted to know how (and why) Danlo's membrum had come to be circumcized and decorated with tiny, coloured scars. If they found this sign of Danlo's passage into manhood to be beautiful, they did not say. For a long time everyone stood there in silence, and the only sounds were the rushing of the river, the hiss of the fire, and the soft silvery music of the falling rain.

'May God behold our beauty and smile always upon us,' Reina An said. She beckoned for Danlo to rejoin her on her bearskin, where he had left the devotionary computer silently flickering in its colours.

'Will you tell me more about ... God?' Danlo asked. He sat back down on his heels with his spine straight, in the position of formal politeness that his masters had taught him as a novice in Neverness.

'I could tell more about God,' Reina An admitted as she nodded her head. 'About the Master of the Universe, there is always more to tell.'

'The Master of the Universe,' Danlo said softly. 'Then you believe that the universe was created by God, yes?'

Reina An shook her head. 'No, the stars and all that we see on a clear night have always been and will always be. How is it that you, a man from the stars, do not know this?'

It surprised Danlo to hear Reina An speak so easily of his origins among the stars. He had wondered if the Sani would even know of other stars and other worlds – and the many other human beings who lived elsewhere.

'I do not know why ...' Danlo said. 'It is hard to know about the universe, yes?'

Danlo was uncertain as to what the words 'stars' and 'universe' actually meant to Reina An. After all, as a child, he had once thought that the stars were the eyes of his ancestors watching over him.

'It is God,' Reina An said, 'who was created by the universe.'

'And yet you refer to Him as the creator of the world.'

'Of course – God created our world.'

'Your ... world,' Danlo said.

'Our beautiful Earth that spins around our star.'

At first, Danlo had supposed that the Sani might use a single word for both 'universe' and 'world', that Ede was merely translating in context for his benefit. But clearly, Reina An understood these celestial concepts in quite a sophisticated way.

'It must be a difficult thing to create a world,' Danlo said. Here he looked at the Ede imago, whose glittering face was as silent as stone.

'Well, God is God,' Reina An said. 'He is the Master of the Universe.'

'Has God created other worlds, then?'

Reina An bent her head over to confer with Ki Lin Shang. They whispered furiously back and forth to each other for a while, then Reina An straightened up and said, 'God has created many Earths. Twelve times twelve is their number. Someday He will create new stars, whole oceans of stars. At the end of time, when all the universe acknowledges Him as Master, he will create other universes – twelve billion times twelve billion in number.'

'Your creator must be almost impossibly powerful,' Danlo said. He continued to look at the hologram of Ede, who translated his words mechanically, as if he were nothing more than a simple language program running the circuitry of a common computer. He did not look at Danlo, nor did he betray any emotion – nor any sign that his computer-generated face was even capable of displaying such a human trait. 'Your God – he is splendid, yes?'

'God is beauty,' Reina An recited. 'All that He creates is beautiful, and yet ...'

'Yes?'

'God is our Creator and Sustainer, but God is the Destroyer, too.'

At this, Ki Lin Shang nodded his head and intoned, 'May all that is not beautiful perish from the Earth.'

Although most of the men and women near Danlo immediately repeated this line from the Yasa, he thought that there was little enthusiasm in their voices. Indeed many of the Sani – particularly the children – seemed fearful and disturbed.

'May all worlds that are not beautiful perish from the stars,' Ki Lin said.

After Reina An had repeated the obligatory 'Hai!' she smiled sadly. To Danlo she said, 'The Master of the Universe destroyed a world to make our beautiful Earth.'

'He is Destroyer of All,' Ki Lin Shang said.

'He is Destroyer of All that is not beautiful,' Reina An corrected.

The two elders of the Sani tribe traded pained looks as if they had disputed the exact words of the Yasa many times before. But clearly neither wished to pursue theological fine points in front of a stranger. Ki Lin Shang cleared his throat, looked at Danlo, and recited, 'May all stars that are not beautiful perish from the universe.'

Danlo, who had fallen across thirty thousand light-years of space encompassing millions of stars, wanted to cry out: 'But each star is beautiful – the stars are splendid with light!' However he kept his silence and waited to hear how Reina An would respond.

'God is Destroyer of Stars,' she said. 'He must destroy to create.'

'God is Destroyer of People,' Ki Lin said. 'All the peoples of the Earth rush into God's fiery jaws like moths into a burning flame.'

Danlo was unsure of Ede's translation of this last, and so he looked at Ki Lin Shang and asked, 'Does God destroy all people, then, or all ... peoples?'

'Certainly he destroys all people,' Ki Lin said. 'All must live and all must die.'

Reina An nodded her head, then added, 'All peoples must die, too. All who are not beautiful.'

Danlo, kneeling silently on his bearskin, wondered if the Sani word for 'beautiful' and 'perfect' were one and the same. He would have asked Ede this, but he did not want to interrupt the flow of conversation.

'Other peoples have walked the Earth before the Sani,' Reina An continued. 'And now they are gone.'

'Gatei, gatei,' Ki Lin said. 'Gone, gone.'

'And that is why the Sani must always be beautiful – or else we will be gone, too.' As Reina An told Danlo this, there was a note of terrible sadness in her voice, and something other, as well.

After a long pause, the standing Sani crowded even closer to hear what Reina An and Ki Lin Shang might say next to this beautiful stranger, who sat naked as any other man beneath the beautifully misty sky.

'You seem to have ... a rare knowledge of God,' Danlo said to Reina An.

'Well, I am old and I have had many years to learn the Yasa,' she said. She smiled nicely at Danlo's compliment.

Danlo hesitated for a moment, not wishing to utter words that the Sani might regard as blasphemy. Finally, he drew in a breath of air and said, 'It is almost as if ... you had spoken to God.'

But Reina An took no offence at his question. She only sighed and told him, 'Once when I was a young girl, when my mother took me down to the sea, while listening to the waves I almost thought I did. But no. God does not speak to the Sani any longer.'

'Any ... longer?'

'Once a time, God spoke to us, but that was long ago.'

'Do you mean, before you were born?'

'Before the life of any Sani who now walks the Earth. But when my mother's grandmother's great-grandmother was first born – her name was Niu An – God spoke to us. Niu An remembered His words to tell the rest of the tribe.'

'I see,' Danlo said. 'Then God spoke to Niu An when she was a newborn child?'

'It seems strange, I know, but Niu An was not born of a mother as you or I.'

'How was she born, then?'

'She was born from the breath of God.'

'Truly?'

'She was born out of the Earth, from the clay and sea-water that God shaped with His own hands. When God breathed the breath of life into her, she came alive and took her first step upon the Earth.'

'That ... is a beautiful story,' Danlo said. In truth, he didn't doubt what Reina An had told him, remembering as he did how the Solid State Entity had created an incarnation of Tamara in an amritsar tank on another Earth far away.

'All the firstborn came into life in this way,' Reina An said. 'Niu An was born as a full woman – she never knew what it was like to be a child.'

'But she knew God?'

'She talked with God.'

'She heard his voice, then?'

'She saw His face.'

'His ... face?'

Reina An nodded her head. 'On the beach, out over the waters, the sea was burning and there was a great flash of light. And God appeared to Niu An.'

'I ... have always wondered what God would look like,' Danlo said. He glanced down at the impassive face of Nikolos Daru Ede, and he almost smiled.

'God's face blazes like the sun,' Reina An said. 'His eyes shine like stars, and his lips burn with fire.'