War in Heaven (60 page)

But I am not a hunter of seals.

All his life, he had had bad luck hunting seals. He had never quite known why. Perhaps (this is how he had thought as a child) one of his ancestors had once killed a rare white seal, an
imakla
animal, and the stain of this
shaida
act had touched all his descendants. Was it truly possible that the bad luck of his childhood and his adoptive ancestors' misfortunes could touch him now? He didn't know. Perhaps it was only the machines and the murderous expeditions of the wormrunners that had driven off the seals. If this were so, then it would be best for him to break camp at first light, to move his sled farther to the west where the wormrunners were unlikely to have gone.

But if it is my fate not to find a seal I will never return.

Already, he thought, it would be hard enough for him to ski the thirty miles back to Neverness, even if he abandoned his sled and all his other things. It would be a desperate chance to journey in the opposite direction towards the setting sun. Of course, everything about this hunting of seals had been desperate from the very beginning, so how was he to weigh one thin chance against another? He would have to listen to the wind blowing in deadly gusts from the west and Jonathan calling him across miles of ice to the east; he would listen to his breath and his shivering body and the calculations of his brain. In the end, he knew, he must listen to his heart and make his choice.

I must trust my fate, whatever that might be
, he thought.
I must choose my fate and make it be.

In the end, it was his fate that saved him. He awoke the next morning resolved to find a seal further to the west.

He promised himself that he would somehow stand and wait by the next seal hole until he killed his seal — either that or stand and die. But when he crawled from the tunnel of his house, he saw something that changed his mind. For there in the snow, all around his house, were the paw prints of an ice bear. There was no mistaking this spoor, for each of the prints was more than a foot wide and half again as long, and no other animal (except the mammoths of the far islands) made such a huge impression in the snow. He had slept so deeply that he hadn't sensed the bear sniffing at his house. As he stood examining one of the bear's prints and measured the size of the five curving claws, he wondered why this bear hadn't simply crashed his way through his house and grabbed him in his sleep. Perhaps, he thought, the bear had once killed a wormrunner and hated the taste of man. Or perhaps something in Danlo's scent had put the bear off; just as he would never hunt a white seal no matter how hungry he was, perhaps the ice bears could sniff out something strange and rare about certain men and would regard them as
imakla
animals that they may not kill.

The Old Ones are very wise
, he thought.
Very strong and very wise.

He wondered if the wisest bears might have developed an aesthetics of scent so exquisitely attuned to the world that it would serve them as a kind of worship or faith. For a while he knelt there on the snow laughing because this notion was so incredible that it might be true. And then he realized that he was very hungry and not thinking clearly; the most likely explanation for why the bear had left him alone was also the simplest: that he just wasn't worth killing. Bears preferred to eat seals, and when they caught one, after tearing it open, they most often devoured only the skin and fat, leaving the meat behind. Although Danlo still had some meat left to him, there was almost no fat; his whole body was like leather rope wrapped around bone. A starving body burned its own muscle for energy, an inefficient metabolic process that created ketones as a waste product. With each contraction of his lungs, he exhaled millions of these stinking molecules, and if he could smell his own breath, then so could the bear, even through the snow blocks of his house. Could a bear be wise enough to connect this scent with starvation and thus sense the leanness of his body? Truly, he thought, the Old Ones must have such powers of mind, for why else would the bear have let him live?

Thara soma anima, Totunye
, he thought.
Thank you for my life.

That this bear was one of the Old Ones he knew from the size of its prints. And he was certain that it was a male; it would probably stand ten feet tall on its hind legs and weigh as much as a thousand pounds. And this, he suddenly realized, was a lot of meat. Although it shamed him to think of this great animal only as potential food moving on paws silently across the ice, he could not help himself, for he was very hungry. He stood up, then, and looked off towards the west where the prints disappeared into the dark ice of the horizon. As the sun rose, he would be able to see these peculiar curving-inward prints more clearly. Following them across the gleaming
safel
snow would not be difficult. And here was more shame, that he would contemplate hunting a noble old bear who had let him live. But what else could he do? He might hunt seals for a year and not find one, whereas this bear was probably prowling the ice only a few miles away.

It is one thing to hunt a bear
, he thought.
But it is another to kill it.

He went back into his house, then, and came back out a few moments later gripping his long bear spear. He thrust it down into the snow for a moment while he rummaged in his sled for the scanner. He began to lift it towards his eyes when it occurred to him that searching for a bear in this way would bring him even more shame. And so he tucked the scanner back into his pack. And then, after a moment of thought, he realized that his shame was nothing against the pain of Jonathan's frozen feet and starving body. Was it really so wrong to use this machine in the service of life?

It will not matter to the bear how I find him if in the end he dies.

Again he lifted the scanner from his pack and brought it towards his face. And then, as he gazed at its hellish, glittering lenses, he knew that he could never again put this
shaida
thing over his eyes. He would hunt the bear as the Devaki tribe had hunted bears for five thousand years.

There was an art to hunting, an attunement to the shapes and sounds of the world and all the animals who lived in it. A wormrunner, firing his laser at a pack of wolves from the safety of a hovering windjammer, had no such attunement. His way was all science and slaughter, the mechanical production of vast quantities of fur and meat. A wormrunner would scorn the tracking of a bear over the ice by his spoor just as he would laugh at the Alaloi hunter's superstitious prayers to the spirit of the hunted animal. But Danlo knew that the spirits of all animals called to each other, sometimes even to human beings. In truth, each spirit was interconnected with every other in complex ways, even as the
halla
nature of the world shimmered everywhere like the interwoven strands of a spider's web, if only one knew how to see it. As Danlo put away the scanner for the second time, he realized that he had been trained since his early childhood in this rare art of seeing. The Alaloi worldview was not only a lens allowing him to behold the world more truly than he could by looking through a wormrunner's scanner, but a way of living among the ice-locked islands of the western ocean. A wormrunner could never live this way, so close to the ice and sky. A wormrunner would die where an Alaloi child would thrive, and that was why the wormrunners and other civilized human beings set out into the wild with their lasers and heated parkas and windjammers. And that was why Danlo would not use the scanner. Not because it was morally wrong to do so, but because this machine would be like a dark, necromantic crystal pulling him from one worldview into another. He would hunt the bear with a flint-tipped spear and all the strength of his muscles; he would slide his skis over the snow much as any Alaloi man, and anything that broke this close connection with the world might cause him to fail or even kill him.

Lo luratha lani, Totunye
, he prayed.
Siliji ni moranath.

Then he bent over his pack and pulled out a pair of goggles different from the polarized ones that he had worn on his journey from Neverness. These were nothing more than a leather headband and a single curving piece of wood that fitted over his eyes. A narrow slit running across the centre of the wood let in a little of the world's light, not enough to make him snowblind, but enough so that he could see. He had carved the goggles one night as he had sat telling stories to Jonathan; he hadn't been sure why, nor why he had brought them on his journey out on to the ice. But now, as he fastened them around his head, he was very glad to have them. Now, he thought, he would be able to look at the marvellous, frozen world and see it just as it was. He realized that something deep and mysterious had driven him to make the goggles and hunt as an Alaloi man; even now as he picked up his bear spear and faced the rushing wind, he could almost hear his fate calling him.

He tracked the bear for most of the morning straight towards the west. The spoor ran over the hard pack snow almost as straight as the East-West Sliddery, curving in places only to avoid an open crevasse or a patch of
ilka-rada.
As the sun rose higher, the iceblinks appeared in the sky, wispy saffron brush-strokes against deep cobalt blue, and the air warmed slightly. Danlo felt this warmth in gentle gusts of wind that poured through the slits in his goggles and touched his naked eyes; in truth, his whole body felt warm, strangely warm as if the thrill of hunting the bear had fired his heart and blood where food alone could not. He felt himself suddenly more awake, more alert more alive. He could almost smell the bear's thick, smoky scent on the wind; he could almost hear the bear's black claws slicing through the snow somewhere ahead of him. Although beneath this new-found vitality he was still very weak, he used his skis to skate over the fast snow, pushing and gliding over the silky whiteness at a speed that the bear couldn't match. With every mile that he moved over the frozen tissues of the ocean, he seemed only to grow stronger, as if the reflected light off the purple iceblooms sustained him and the wind breathed new life into his mouth and nose. He felt the veneer of civilization falling away from him, peeling back in layers to reveal a wilder and deeper self. The world before him became like a mirror, a vast shimmering circle of white ice that showed him to himself: a truly splendid and powerful animal hunting another animal with all the wild joy that was his by right of birth.

I am Danlo, son of Haidar, the Tiger Slayer
, he remembered.
I am Danlo the Wild, son of Mallory Ringess.

He realized that it was the last of his energy. It came only as a result of
lotsara
, the burning of the blood, that rare art of metabolizing the body's remaining fat reserves in order to lend it a final burst of life. All Alaloi men are taught this art upon coming into manhood, and they use it to keep from freezing to death when caught in the fierce winds of a
sarsara
or in other extreme situations when they must fight for their lives. Danlo had starved too long, and so the marvellous heat he felt burning up from his belly and rushing out to his arms and fingers would fade, and soon. But he almost didn't care, for before him lay the whole world and all the things in it: the ice frozen in wind-ripple patterns; the wispy
shetha
clouds high in the sky; the swirling
anasha
snow. There was bear sign, too, things that the bear left behind him other than his huge tracks: a piece of paw fur ripped off by a patch of razor ice; a bit of blood frozen into ruby crystals; an eyelash; the tip of one of his black claws, broken off where the bear had scratched at a feather trapped in a block of clear
kleensu
ice. Danlo tasted a drop of this frozen blood; it burst into fire in his mouth with the tang of burning iron, and the power of it spread through his body like a magical elixir. He also tasted the bear's piss, frozen into yellow slush like a patch of
malku
snow. From its rank-salt flavour, he knew that the bear must have been eating the iceblooms, a food he would consume only if he could find no seals. He confirmed this when he broke open a piece of the bear's dung and saw the blue spiricules of a snowworm twisting through the darker matter. Perhaps, he thought, this bear had become a connoisseur of snowworms and knew the richest iceblooms where he would most likely find them.

Oh, bear, where are you going? Please tell me where you are going.

A couple of miles into his quest, he came across a huge impression in the snow where the bear had lain down, perhaps to take a nap. He thought that the bear, like himself, might be very tired and weak with hunger. Or perhaps the bear had only been basking in the sun. He remembered that bear fur, although it looked white, was really quite colourless. Each of the millions of hairs from the nose to tail was nothing more than a very thin, clear tube allowing sunlight to pass through it to the black skin beneath. Some of the sunlight would refract off the hairs and scatter in all directions — hence the bear's seeming white hue. But much of it would be absorbed as heat by the skin's blackness, and in this way the great white bears had evolved a very efficient way to keep warm. As Danlo paused a moment himself to rest and to scan the ice ahead of him, he began remembering everything that he had ever learned about bears, especially their powers: he remembered that a bear could walk over the icepack continuously for days or swim in the ocean for a hundred miles without stopping to eat or sleep. A bear, sniffing at the blue cold air, could smell a live seal three miles away, and a dead, decaying one at a distance of more than twenty miles.

I must be very careful in stalking this bear
, he thought.
For if the wind shifts and he smells me, he may stalk me.

So far, his stalking had been easy and relatively safe, for he had skied almost straight west, into the wind. But the wind might suddenly die, or the bear might veer off towards the north or south — or perhaps circle back along his path to seek out an icebloom or favourite seal hole. The night before, he thought, this bear had let him live for some unknown reason. But today, he might suddenly decide to hunt him, perhaps just for the sport of it. Sometimes bears were like that. With bears, one never quite knew what they would do. And so, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, Danlo became ever more aware of the nuances of snow and ice and the movements of the wind. Almost as if he were a bear himself, he paused more often to sniff the air and look about him at the four points of the world.