War in Heaven (59 page)

To return to the centre of the circle.

To move mile after mile across the brilliant snow was painful; perhaps the essence of pain was just movement itself, of atoms and consciousness, the way that ice crystals evaporated under a strong sun and even the hardest rocks cracked and eroded in time and washed as silt into the sea. Nothing could hold its form for ever. Although Danlo had always known this with his mind, only now was he beginning to sense the circulation of matter throughout the universe in a new kind of way. At that moment, as he paused to adjust his goggles against the ice's glare, a star exploded somewhere in the Harmony Group of galaxies some forty million light years away. He saw the flash of this supernova as a deep light behind his eyes and felt the fiery blast of photons, X-rays and plasma gas in the exhalation of his own breath. Nearer to him, on the planet Askling, a group of Ringists ignited a hydrogen bomb and vaporized a million people, while nearer still, three miles across the ocean's ice; a diving thallow drove its talons into a plump snow goose and carried it off to tear it apart. Even from this distance, he was sure that he could hear the goose's screams and frantically flapping wings and see the bright sprays of blood freezing red against the white snow. Beneath this same blessed snow he smelled the fermy droppings of the snowworms and sensed the iceblooms giving off oxygen in almost silent respiration. If he stared hard enough with his burning eyes, he could almost
see
the individual molecules of oxygen streaming out from between the shimmering snow crystals and whirling off into the sky to join with the wind. And all this was just the circle of life, and who was he to try to break it? It came to him, then, that no matter how great his awareness, no matter what pains he took with life, all his terrible (and beautiful) will wouldn't keep the atoms of his self from eventually flying apart and returning to the world. Even now, as he stood scanning the ice and sky, his breath escaped his lips in puffs of carbon dioxide and water vapour and vanished into the wind. Soon, he knew, in a day or a hundred more years, he would vanish, too, like a drop of rain returning to the ocean.

But nothing is lost
, he thought.
Nothing is ever lost.

That was the miracle of life, that although he and all living things must eventually die, they would remain always within the great circle. The atoms of his body would come together with those of a wolf, a worm and a snowy owl (and a rock, an ice crystal and a breath of the wind), and a new bit of life would be born. It was the purpose of atoms continually to organize themselves in consciousness of the world, to live, to take joy in the sunlight, ultimately to transcend into ever new forms and evolve. For Danlo, as for anyone, it was
shaida
to die at the wrong time, but ultimately dying itself was
halla
because out of this terrible necessity, life grew only vaster, the circle stronger, the world ever more magnificent and beautiful.

Nothing is lost.

There came a moment, then, in gazing at the marvellous blueness behind the deep blue sky, when he melted. His skin and muscles liquefied to water, and his eyes, and his blood flowed out of him to rejoin the salt water of the sea. He felt his breath and his mind and all the tissues of his being spreading out infinitely in all directions over the shimmering white ice. Then the whiteness broke apart into violet, yellow, aquamarine and chrome red, and quicksilver and gold, and the ice itself suddenly caught fire, trillions of tiny separate crystals blazing with a single, numinous flame. And for a moment, this fire was in him and he was this blessed fire, and there was no difference. He was the wild, whirling wind and the burning salt running through all the waters of the world and the clear, cold light pouring out of the depths of the ocean.

That night he built a house far out on the ice. He was so tired from his exertions in the cold that he almost collapsed on to his sleeping furs. For a long while he lay before his stove watching the flickering plasma lights and letting a little heat soak into his face and hands. Outside it was as cold as death, but inside his house the air began to warm almost to the melting point of ice. He managed to eat a few mouthfuls of bread, the last of what Tamara had given him. It wasn't nearly enough to fill him, but the goodness of it in his belly was enough to revive him so that he could go about his nightly chores. These were few enough. He had no dogs to care for, only himself. And so he hung his shagshay furs on the drying rack near the stove, and the felt liners of his boots as well. Then he set a large steel pot on the stove and filled it with snow. In truth, at that moment with his lips cracked and his tongue almost parched in dehydration, he felt the pain of thirst much more keenly than hunger. As it happened, the snow that he dumped into the pot would take away the first of these pains and part of the second, for it was a special, almost magical snow. Earlier that day, he had paused upon an icebloom to dig out great heaps of purplish snow and pack it into dozens of clear plastic bags. The blooms of algae running through the snow — in bands of blue-green as well as purple — were not dense enough to sustain him altogether. But the algae were a rich food full of life and healing virtue, and if he boiled down enough snow, he might make a kind of soup that was very good to eat. This he did. Then he made another pot of soup, and then another. He might have spent all night melting snow this way, and eating and drinking, but soon enough he emptied his last bag and went outside to make his piss-before-sleeping.

The next morning he awoke to terrible pangs of hunger. A man, working outside all day in the cold, might burn off as much as six thousand kilocalories of food energy. A very large man wearing the body of an Alaloi and pulling a sled in the freezing cold might require ten thousand kilocalories. According to Danlo's calculations, he would have been lucky if he had consumed a tenth of that amount. He might have searched out another icebloom to feed his famished body, but such labours would only progressively weaken him. In truth, he was already very weak. The magnificent body that Constancio had sculpted and fed from his own kitchens was already beginning to waste away. Any kind of movement, even tying the laces of his boots, hurt. This terrible weakness frightened him, for he knew that if he didn't find food soon, the starvation would progress to the stage when he could no longer trust his own body.

And so he knew he had to hunt. He looked out across the ice to the north, west, east and south, wondering where he might find a seal. Beneath the crusts of snow, he knew, should be many seal holes; all during winter when the sea froze, each seal kept open in the ice perhaps a dozen holes in order to breathe and to come up and rest from his journeys hunting fish in the dark, icy waters. In Danlo's youth, with his found-father Haidar, he had always used trained dogs to sniff out these hidden holes. But now he would have to find them another way. For a while, he stood taking in the wind through his nose. Although his sense of smell was nothing like a sled dog's, it had lately grown very keen. Perhaps hunger had driven him to drink in all the sights, sounds and scents of the world. Or perhaps it was only the ekkana drug stripping his nerves bare and rendering them exquisitely sensitive to the touch of floating molecules and sound waves and light. Whatever the causes of the deep changes rippling through the cells of his body, he could almost hear the worms eating their way through the iceblooms beneath the snow and the jewfish that swam beneath many feet of ice. And he could almost smell the seals. Theirs was a rich, musky scent that nearly permeated the snow and wafted up into the air. But try as he might he could not detect the source of this beguiling scent. He might have stood there beside his snowhut half the morning simply sniffing the air if he hadn't recalled a different method of searching for seals.

A shaida way
, he thought.
The way of the wormrunners.

From his sled, he removed a scanner, which he fitted over his eyes in place of his goggles. With this ugly machine he could see heat as infrared frequencies of light. It was the simplest thing to look out through the scanner over the miles of the sea and read the ice as patterns and shadings of red. Where the ice was thickest, and therefore coldest, the scanner showed crimson madder darkening to a deep maroon. And in other places, patches of cinnabar predominated, and the brighter reds, the clarets and scarlets and carmines. The seal holes appeared as points of a vivid, almost flame red, for there the ice gave way to the relative warmth of the ocean. He could even differentiate the active holes from the inactive ones that had been abandoned and allowed to freeze up. The active holes beneath the surface snowcrusts, were almost like windows to the ocean; the ice glazing the dark, hidden pools of water would be only a few inches thick. Within easy skiing distance of his snowhut, he saw at least five of these holes, like drops of bright, burning blood against the other infrared colours of the ice. All he had to do was take up his harpoon, stand over one of these holes and wait for a seal to come up from the ocean to breathe.

To wait to kill that which I must not kill.

After taking a deep breath of air, he put on his skis and went over to his sled. He pulled the harpoon out of its sheath. It was a long, murderous thing both terrible and beautiful to behold. Days before, when he had carved its wickedly barbed head, he had fashioned a ring at its base. Now, in the freezing cold of the morning, he removed a coil of rope from his pack and knotted the end of it through this ring. The head of the harpoon was detachable; the harpoon's shaft fitted snugly but unglued into the head's ivory socket. The basic idea behind hunting seals, as he had once hunted these splendid animals, was simple: when a seal came up into his hole, the hunter standing above would thrust his harpoon straight down through the snow crust and impale it. In the seal's writhing agony, the ivory head would work its way into flesh and bone and break away from the shaft. And then the hunter would pull on the rope with all his might and haul the seal out of the hole bellowing and bleeding up on to the ice. With luck, the harpoon would have penetrated the heart or lungs, almost instantly killing the seal. But more often, the hunter had to dispatch his prey with a blow of a stone axe to the head or by cutting his throat. As Danlo gripped the harpoon, he thought that he might be able to thrust it down through the hole at the unseen seal. But he didn't know how he could possibly crush the life out of the seal, especially if he chanced to look into the seal's bright, black eyes.

Never harming another, never killing; it is better to die oneself than to kill.

He made a silent prayer to the spirits of all seals everywhere: that they should understand his need and come swimming to leap upon his harpoon. Then, with his harpoon in one hand and bear spear in the other, he marched out across the ice to the nearest hole. He thrust the bear spear down into the snow with the point towards the sky. Although he didn't expect to be molested (most bears hibernated in snow caves through most of the winter), the hungriest bears might have awakened to prowl the ice and seek out active seal holes of their own. It was from the ice bears, he thought, that the Old Ones of the Alaloi tribes must have learned the art of seal hunting thousands of years before. And most of this art consisted simply of the patience to wait. Sometimes a man had to wait for most of a day for a seal to come to a particular hole; as a boy, Danlo had heard of the great Wilanu, who had once waited four days before killing his seal. Although Danlo did not have the stamina to wait so long, crouching above the snow-covered hole with his harpoon held ready, he would certainly have to wait a period of time. And so he cut blocks of snow and built a shield wall against the howling west wind; he stood with his back to this wall, looking down at the unmarked snow that hid the seal hole. This snow, warmed by the ocean beneath, appeared through his scanner as a bright, almost ruby red. All he had to do was to wait with his harpoon in hand for the seal to rise and the snow to flare into a flaming crimson with the heat of the seal's body.

It will look like the snow itself has caught fire
, he thought.
Or like a star exploding from beneath the ice.

He waited all day to see this terrible light. He listened to the wind burning across the ice and tried to count the individual particles of spindrift swirling above the seal's hole. After a long time, he gave up and counted the beats of his heart instead. Approximately three thousand beats marked the time of one hour; he waited almost motionless in the driving wind for some nine thousand beats before his raging thirst drove him to drink from one of his slip tubes. After another ten thousand beats, he realized that he hadn't brought enough water to last the day. Nor had he eaten enough food the night before to stand so long in the killing cold; he was so weak with hunger that his arm shook and all the muscles of his body trembled. He was afraid that he might collapse at any moment and fall crashing down through the seal's hole into the ocean below. But he had to stand, to stand and wait, and that was the hell of hunting seals. Twice his fingertips froze, and in the pain of thawing them in his mouth, he remembered how Jaroslav Bulba had driven the tip of his killing knife beneath his bloody nails. After yet another ten thousand heartbeats, his legs had grown so stiff that they seemed almost frozen. It hurt him to move, even slightly, but it hurt him even more to stand silent and still, as he must continue to stand if he didn't want to frighten his seal away. And all these agonies of his body, as terrible as they seemed, were not the worst of what he had to endure. As he counted out another ten thousand beats, one by one, he heard Jonathan's voice crying along the wind and calling him to hurry up and kill his seal. And he heard his own voice crying inside with each passing breath that he could never kill any animal.

Not even a sleekit, not even a worm crawling through the snow.

Finally, far into the night, he abandoned his vigil. In truth, he had really waited much too long, for his body was much too weak to stand for any time beneath the cold stars. He barely summoned the strength to return to his hut and crawl inside. On this night, he had nothing to drink but melted water and not even much of that. And no food at all. And so he lay inside his sleeping furs, sipping from a thermos cup and trying to thaw his icy digits. His body had grown so cold that he shivered, even inside layers of thick shagshay fur. But he could little afford this expenditure of his body's precious energy; he knew that if he didn't find a seal the next day, he would have to return to Neverness with an empty sled.