War in Heaven (49 page)

As Danlo awaited the surgeries that would shape him into the form of his father, he might have done best to avoid the city's dangerous streets. But even if it had become impossible to find the smallest kernel of kurmash or rotten bloodfruit, he still burned with the desire to fulfil a more private quest. And so every day he made the journey through the City Wild and skated the icy glidderies looking for Tamara. And the harder that he looked, the greater and more poignant grew the feeling that she was looking for him as well. Once he thought that he saw her. He was skating among a throng of richly dressed diplomats, pilgrims and farsiders when he felt a strange tingling sensation at the back of his neck, as if someone were tickling the flesh there with an electrical current or the tip of a knife — or with her eyes. He suddenly ground his skates into the ice and turned. And there, past the many panicked people hoping to find a meal in one of the nearby hotels, he saw a flash of blonde hair and lovely dark eyes out of his deepest dreams. Then the vision melted into the manswarms so quickly and completely that even though he darted between other skaters in pursuit of her as fast and gracefully as he could, he lost her yet again.

And there was something else, too. Later, when he would relive the moment in his mind in all the vivid colours and textures of a phantast's painting, he would remember seeing a pair of long, naked hands and flashing red rings. His sense of propriety told him that his memory must be faulty, that no one except an autist would go about ungloved in such deadly cold weather. And no one except a warrior-poet (and only one warrior-poet at that)

would dare to wear red rings for all to see. He wondered if his brain, weak with hunger, had only hallucinated these brilliant images. Or perhaps he had only drunk in various fragmented sensa of the street and reassembled the pieces into a pattern with special meaning to him. And yet, his memory
was
his memory. He had come to trust this window to deep reality as he did the truth of his own eyes. And so thereafter, in skating the streets from the Bell to the Fravashi District, whenever he felt the cold, burning touch of another's eyes upon him, he made it his habit to turn and look for Tamara, to watch and wait and listen.

And then one day, by purest chance it seemed, he found her. It was the day before his scheduled return to Constancio's house for his first cutting. The sky rippled with a deep, liquid blueness, and it was cold, in truth too cold to be wandering the streets on any business less important than immediate survival. Nevertheless, late in the afternoon, with the sun slanting pale yellow over the mountains to the west, he took his time skating down the Street of Musicians. A few times he paused before the warming pavilions to listen to the sweet notes of the kytherals and ocarinas spilling out into the air. Near the Street of the Common Whores he even found a flautist from Solsken who played a shakuhachi similar in sound to his own. There he lingered for a long while, his skate blades fairly frozen to the red ice as he drank in this beautiful music of the breath and soul. Few others, however, stood there with him. And fewer still had money to spare for even the finest of virtuosos or improvisatori. He himself had only a handful of baldo nuts, which he had found in the forest beneath crusts of snow. It was as he was placing these nuts in the flautist's thanksgiving bowl that he heard a sound that filled his throat with old pain and intense longing. From far off down the street it came, like the peals of a golden bell and a viola's vibrating strings, all at once. He well remembered this lovely music made upon a gosharp, for Tamara had played this barbaric instrument with all the passion and grace of a master courtesan.

In only moments he found himself a block further along the Street of Musicians. And there, in front of a private restaurant with its closed, steel doors, he saw her sitting on a white shagshay fur playing for a group of aficionados. She had the hood of her dark furs thrown back, the better to hear the music that she made, and her long, blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders like sunlight. Her eyes were as dark and brown as coffee; ten thousand times during the past years he had seen these lovely eyes looking at him in hope and longing when he closed his own. Her face showed signs of bitter seasons and want: an older and leaner face, truly, but one that radiated all of Tamara's wild joy of life. Tamara, he remembered, had always lived as joyfully as a tiger playing in the sun. And like a tiger, she'd always had her claws sunk deeply into life — it was one of things that he loved most in her.

"Tamara, Tamara," he whispered. But with the air itself moving with the gosharp's music, no one heard him.

He stood there on the street watching Tamara's long fingers play over the gosharp's strings with all the fluidity and grace of running water; he marvelled that she could move her fingers at all, for her hands were naked to the icy air. He attributed her hardiness to
animajii
, the pure fire of life flowing through her limbs and driving her to make such soulful music despite the terrible cold. He well-remembered the fire that filled her inside; he remembered himself filling her with his own wild fire, and he fairly trembled to take her beneath the furs of her bed as he had on the night that they first met so many years ago.

Tamara. Tamara.

After a while, she finished playing and put down her harp. One watcher dug in his pockets for some money to give her, nothing so precious as a city disk, but he was nonetheless pleased to drop a few gold davins into her bowl. An astrier man astonished everyone by taking off his platinum chain and coiling it like a long silver snake next to the coins. He bowed to her and said, "I've never heard a harpist play so well; perhaps you can use this to buy a little food." Others gave other things: a twist of toalache, a bag of dried snow apples, a fireflower picked earlier from the Hyacinth Gardens. They bowed, too, and hurried off to complete their errands. Danlo was the last to give thanks for Tamara's music. He stood there staring at his empty hands, ashamed that he had nothing to put into her bowl. And then he remembered the stone that he had found five days before as he wandered the sands near Tamara's old house on North Beach. He took it out of his pocket and held it gleaming in the light. It was smooth and round and not much larger than a baldo nut; swirls of crystal white cut though a cool, blue-grey in a lovely pattern like a thallow's nest. Tamara, he remembered, had once kept seven oiled sea stones on the windowsill of her tea room. He thought that she might like this stone, so he placed it in her thanksgiving bowl.

"Oh, that's beautiful!" she said as she sorted through her bowl. She held Danlo's gift in her naked hand, and she seemed more pleased with this simple stone than with either the gold coins or the platinum chain. "I've always loved beautiful stones."

"I ... had hoped that you might," Danlo said. He stood there in his white furs and black mask, all the while gazing at Tamara's face. For the moment, only the two of them remained on this part of the street. "I wish I had more to give you; you will not be able to buy any food with a stone."

"No," Tamara agreed, weighing the coins and the platinum chain in her other hand. "But there's almost no food to buy anyway. I rarely receive such gifts as these, you know, but even so, who's willing to trade a bag of rice for mere gold?"

Danlo looked at her for a while, and then said, "You must be hungry. I am sorry."

Then Tamara smiled at him sadly and said, "You must be hungry, too. Almost everyone is."

"Truly, I
am
hungry," he said. "But in listening to you play, the beauty of the music, like silver waves, like the sea singing to the stars ... there were moments when I forgot my hunger."

Tamara, who had always loved compliments almost as much as chocolate candies, laughed softly for a while. It was her old laugh: a little sadder, perhaps, but still rich and warm and full of life. "You speak so beautifully," she said. She looked at him strangely. "Such a beautiful voice, too — have we met before?"

"I have heard you play before."

"Oh, really? — I've only recently begun playing on the streets. But I was a courtesan once years ago — perhaps we made a contract together?"

A sudden pain blossomed behind his left eye as he remembered how Tamara had once given her promise to marry him. Because he couldn't speak just then, he looked down at their shadows wavering upon the ice.

"My name is Tamara Ten Ashtoreth," she said. "But I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage. Why don't you take off your mask so that I might see whom I'm talking to?"

Danlo stood with his head bowed, unable to move. He looked for his reflection in the ice, but the dull, red gliddery showed little sign of how Tamara must have seen him: the white ruff of his furs, his black facemask, his deep blue eyes overflowing with warm salt water and light.

"Why don't you take your mask off?" she said softly.

At last, with his heart beating against his ribs like a fist, with a single swift motion, he ripped the mask from his face. And then he looked up and locked eyes with her.

"Oh, no!" she gasped. She had begun wiping her harp with a silk cloth, but when she saw Danlo for who he really was, she put it aside and stood up as if to flee. "Oh, Danlo — I thought I'd never see you again."

"I ... always prayed that I would see you."

She stared at the lightning bolt scar cut into his forehead and the other more subtle scars of suffering and experience that time had cut into his face. She said, "I'd heard that you had left the city. That you were one of the pilots chosen for the Vild Mission. There was to have been a second academy established somewhere in the Vild, wasn't there? I thought you'd never return."

"I ... had to return."

He took a step closer to her, but she suddenly remembered her need to keep a distance between them, and she held out her hand. "No, Pilot — please."

"Tamara, Tamara ... "

"No, Pilot, no, no."

Danlo stood there clenching his fingers into fists, not knowing what to do. And then he said, "It is very cold. Would you like to sit a while in a cafe? I have not been able to find one that serves coffee, but there is still hot tea if you do not mind drinking it without honey."

"That
would
be nice," Tamara said. "But I'm waiting for someone."

A shard of steel sharper and colder than a warrior-poet's killing knife drove through Danlo's left eye just then. He winced and said, "I see."

Something in his voice must have touched her, for she suddenly decided to step closer to touch
him
, and she let her cold fingers slowly burn down his face from his eye to his chin. "Oh, Pilot, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that nothing has changed."

"You still don't remember me, then?"

"I remember only our last meeting in the Mother's house."

"But in all this time there has been nothing else?"

"I'm sorry."

"No images, no dreams of the moments that we spent together?"

"Well, I do remember saying farewell in the Mother's house," Tamara said gently. "Perhaps it would have been best if that really
had
been our farewell."

"No, no," Danlo said. "Seeing you here, now, your eyes, your blessed breath ... it is like finding the sun after years of falling through black space."

She laughed for a moment and said, "You're a beautiful man — it's not hard to see why I must have loved you."

"Do you remember the word,
imaklana?
This love magic between a man and a woman that is instantaneous and yet eternal, too?"

"I remember that you've spoken of this before."

"And you do not believe that it is true?"

She looked at him sadly and said, "I suppose a part of me must still love you. But I can't
feel
it. And I think I really don't want to. I'm sorry."

"I ... am sorry, too."

He closed his eyes against the hot tears that he felt welling there. He remembered how Hanuman's rape of Tamara's memories had destroyed much else in her that was beautiful and good. He raged, then. His tears dried up like pools of water beneath a blazing sun, and when he looked again upon Tamara and the harsh winter light pouring down upon the street, his eyes were full of nothing but wrath.

"Oh, Pilot, you're still so angry." Tamara took a step backwards, almost to the edge of the fur spread over the icy street. "You've still so much hate. So much despair."

"Yes," Danlo said, and the sound of this single word escaped his lips with all the force of a death wind blowing in across the sea.

"And I'm still afraid of this hate, you know. I'm still afraid of you."

At that moment, Danlo's eyes were like blue-black holes into his soul. Because he didn't want Tamara to see the bottomlessness of his emotions, he looked down at the skate tracks in the street and said, "I have always wanted to find a way to stop hating."

"But why hate at all?" Tamara asked. "Why hate the world just because I happened to contract a virus that destroyed my memory?"

"It is not the world that I hate," Danlo almost whispered. "It is a man."

"But why? Who is it then?"

"It does not matter."

"Please tell me."

"I cannot."

"Is it Hanuman?"

Danlo smiled at the lively intelligence that he saw in her eyes, the way that her mind loved to move. He looked at her for a long time but said nothing.

"Well, I suppose a lot of people hate him," she said. "Because of the war, because of what he's done."

He bowed his head in acknowledgement of Hanuman's perverting of the Way of Ringess, but still he remained silent.

"But that's not why
you
hate him, is it?"

"No," he said.

"But why, Pilot? Please tell me."

"No."

"Is it because Hanuman fell into love with me that first night, too?"

"Then you remember things about you and Hanuman, yes?"

"I remember that I never loved him. That I never
could
have loved him."

"I see."

"So you needn't hate him because of me."

Danlo watched the sunlight playing on her golden hair, and he smiled sadly.