War in Heaven (68 page)

"No, I can't."

"We must bury him before it grows too cold."

Tamara wept again at the reality of Jonathan's body lying dead in Danlo's arms. She stood swaying in the snow, shaking her head back and forth against the wind. And then she composed herself and said, "Couldn't we just uncover him and let him freeze? After the war, there will be drugs again, and the cryologists might be able to revive him and cure his infection."

"No, it is too late," Danlo said. "When one has died from being sick so long the way that Jonathan was sick, such revivals are impossible. The cryologists refuse even to try. It is against their ethics. The brain — "

"Please, Danlo."

"Tamara, Tamara," he said softly, "not even the Agathanians could bring him back to life."

"But didn't you once tell me that the Solid State Entity had such powers? Couldn't you carry Jonathan frozen in the hold of your ship and hope that the Entity might restore him?"

The Solid State Entity, he thought, possibly
could
make him live again. At least She — the goddess whom he had known as Kalinda — might be able to create an almost perfect copy of the son they had loved. But he knew that if She did, he would never truly be the same.

"He would be different, in his soul," he explained to Tamara. He stared off at the stars as he remembered his sojourn on the earthlike world that the Entity had created. "Some day, in looking at his eyes, in touching his breath with your own, you would discover this difference. And it would tear out your heart."

"But shouldn't we
try?
"

"No, it is too late," he said again. "He died at the right time."

"How can there ever be a right time for a child to die?"

"I ... do not know. But for everything, there is a time. Even for the gods."

"I just can't stop hoping."

"I ... am sorry."

"I can't just walk away and leave him as if he no longer exists."

"In a way, he will always exist," he said. "Nothing is lost."

"Oh, Danlo, I wish I could believe that."

Danlo took a deep breath of air, and then he explained to her how all the breaths of Jonathan's life still circled the world in the swirling wind. He told her of his theory that the universe remembers everything, but it gave her little solace. She just wept, and shook her head, and touched her fingers to Jonathan's closed eyes as she said, "No, he's gone."

"No, Tamara, he is — "

"Gone, gone — I suppose I know that nothing can bring him back. But if he
is
gone, I don't want to bury him beneath the snow. That's such a ghastly, barbaric thing. He'd only remain frozen for ever like the body of Ede."

"But what do you want to do, then?"

"Return him to the world, like his breath."

"By taking him to one of the crematoria?"

"I suppose there's no other choice."

"There might be another way," he said. He looked down at Jonathan lying so quiet and still in his aching arms. Although his son was almost as light as air, he had gradually grown very heavy. "We could make a pyre and cremate him ourselves."

"Now? Here?"

"Yes, why not?"

"It would have to be a very big fire," she said.

Danlo looked off at the bonewood thickets and yu trees above the beach. He said, "There is much wood in the forest."

"All right," she said. "Let's make a pyre, then."

And so Danlo walked up into the forest and returned carrying bunches of dry bonewood in his arms. He trudged across the dunes weighed down by this load until he came to the frozen waves at the edge of the beach. There, on the moonlit ice, he set down the wood, sighed and drew in a breath of cold air. Then he went back up to the forest to find more wood. Many times he made this tiresome journey between the forest and the sea. In truth, he worked long into the night, gathering bundles of sticks and hauling logs over the crunching snow. Danlo built the pyre wide and high; by midnight, it had almost reached the level of his eyes. And all this time Tamara sat watching the pyre grow. She sat holding Jonathan's cold body against hers, holding him tightly as she rocked back and forth in front of the fire. She let her head fall against his as she sang him songs and sobbed terribly when her words failed her; it was her way of saying goodbye.

After Danlo had heaped the last log on the pyre, he returned to where Tamara was sitting and took Jonathan's fur-wrapped body from her. Together, in the moonlight, they walked back down the beach. Because it would be unseemly to treat Jonathan's body as if it were only a bundle of wood, Danlo cradled it with one hand while using the other to climb to the top of the pyre. There he lay it between two logs facing towards the west. One last time, he kissed his son on his cold lips. Then he climbed down and stood on the ice as he looked at Tamara.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

Weeping softly now, Tamara could only nod her head in assent.

"All right, then," he said. He pulled a box of matches from his pocket and struck one into flame. He held it to the tinder which he had stuffed into a pocket of twigs near the base of the pyre; almost instantly, the tinder and the surrounding wood caught fire and began crackling with a bright orange light. With a whoosh, the combustion sucked oxygen from the blowing wind. In moments, it seemed, the flames leapt from stick to stick and from log to log, and soon the whole pyre roared with bright, blazing fire.

"
Mi alasharia la shantih,
" Danlo said. "Sleep in peace, my son."

And Tamara, standing by his side, murmured, "Goodbye, goodbye."

For a long time they watched the pyre burn. The leaping flames lit up the beach and shot off into the sky. The wood, dry as bone, popped and snapped and sent showers of sparks spinning into the night. So intense did the fire's red heat become that Danlo and Tamara had to step back a good many paces to keep from singeing their furs. In little time, it began to consume Jonathan's furs and then his body. Danlo tried not notice the pungent smell of roasting flesh. In truth, he tried not to breathe, but the wind blew the fire's smoke straight towards his face. It fell over him (and Tamara) in dense, dark, bittersweet clouds. After a while, Danlo gave up and simply endured the burning in his lungs and his eyes.

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

He drew out his flute, then, and played a requiem for Jonathan. As the flames built brighter and brighter and the pyre's smoke vanished in the wind, he played a sad, clear song that soared above the beach with all the beauty of a flock of thallows. Tamara joined him. She sang softly to the music, words of love and light that might guide Jonathan on his journey to the other side of day. For many moments, there was nothing in all the world except this playing and singing. The fire reached its peak in ferocity and heat, and then slowly fell off as it consumed its fuel. After thousands of beats of Danlo's heart, it grew dimmer and cooler and began to die. And all this time, Danlo played and played in remembrance of Jonathan as he gave his breath to the world.

Nothing is lost.

Long past midnight, when the pyre had burned down to nothing more than a few glowing coals and cold black ashes, Danlo finally put away his flute. He stepped down to the edge of the beach where the fire's intense heat had melted the ice of the sea itself. He used his naked hand to sift ashes, but he could find nothing left of Jonathan's body, not even a fragment of a bone. In places, the ashes had mixed with the melted sea water, forming a kind of mud. He scooped up some of this dark matter, then, and smeared a slashing mark across his forehead. Almost instantly, the bitter wind froze the wet ashes to his skin.

Ashes — there is nothing left but ashes
, he thought. And then,
Everything is lost.

He stood up and walked across the snow, swaying in the wind like a drunken man. He came over to Tamara and fell against her; he pressed his head next to hers and wept bitterly with her for a long, long time.

The Ringess

I must speak to you of the god within each of us. This god is lord of fire and light. This god
is
fire and light, and is nothing but fire and light. Each of us is this god. Each man and woman is a star that burns on and on with infinite possibilities. I must speak tonight of becoming this star, this eternal and infinite flame. Only by becoming fire will you ever be free from burning. Only by becoming fire will you become free of pain, free of fear, free of hatred, sorrow, lamentation, suffering and despair. This is the way of the gods. This is the way of the Ringess, to burn with the fire of a new being, to shine with a new consciousness as bright as all the stars, as vast and perfect and indestructible as all the universe. This is the way of Mallory Ringess, who watches over all the people in the City where he was once as human as you and me.

— from the Fire Sermon of Hanuman li Tosh

The coming of morning brought no joy to Danlo or Tamara. At first light, having completed their vigil by the sea, they returned in silence to the apartment. As soon as they had shut the door behind them, Tamara stumbled into her sleeping chamber and fell sobbing against her bed. Nothing that Danlo could do or say eased her suffering even slightly. After she had wrung her body dry of tears, she lay silently staring at the cold, empty neverness of her life as if she were willing herself to die. It was a terrible thing to see. In truth, Danlo feared for her life. He feared that she would use her cooking knife to open the veins of her wrist or simply walk out of the door without her furs and find some dark, abandoned alley where she could lie down upon the ice and let the cold carry her over to the other side of day.

And so Danlo kept a watch over her. And as he watched, he waited for his own pain to cool from the red heat of glowing iron to a more bearable degree of suffering. But it did not. For as he sat by Tamara drinking cup after cup of blood tea, all the while staring at Tamara's untouched cup, he tried to remember all the moments that he had ever spent with Jonathan. Because he had an almost perfect memory of pictures he could quite easily see Jonathan playing with his toy lightship or the wonder in his eyes when Danlo told him about the shimmering colours (and terrors) of the manifold. And all this memory haunted him. Memory, as he discovered, could be a truly terrible thing. Over and over he replayed in his mind each of his decisions and actions leading up to Jonathan's death. He saw with perfect clarity the night that he and Tamara had created Jonathan out of lust and love, and he looked once again upon his denial of the possibility that Tamara might have been with child when he had abandoned Neverness for the mission to the Vild. If only he had found Tamara and stayed to protect her and Jonathan as he grew from babe into a bright-eyed boy, then perhaps he might have seen the war coming and would have left the city for some safer place. Or, having returned years later, if only he had found them sooner or hadn't delayed so long in hunting for food, then Jonathan might not have frozen his toes and sickened and died. If only, if only ... If only he could keep himself from remembering, then the images burning through the back of his eye into his brain might go away, and the terrible pain in his head might stop. He realized then that all this terrible memory was his way of journeying into the past in order to change it, as if he could thereby restore Jonathan to him and create a different present. Once, years before, he had wanted to become an asarya, a great-souled human being who might say yes to all things. But now he dwelled in the dark cavern of remembrance, grasping at glowing phasms as they streaked through the blackness inside him, and this was just the opposite of affirmation. In truth, it was the essence of hell, and as he sat pressing his thumb against his aching eye, he thought he would go on and on falling through the void for ever.

Later that night, as if shaking herself out of a nightmare, Tamara finally roused herself. She sat up rubbing her swollen eyes and gripping her belly, which had cramped into a hard knot of pain. And then she looked straight at Danlo.

"Thank you for sitting with me," she said, "but there's really no point in your staying here any longer."

He smiled sadly and shook his head. "There is all the point in the world. You — "

"I shall be all right," she broke in. "I've decided that I have to be."

"Truly?"

"I'm not the only mother who has lost a child in this terrible war. In this city alone there must be hundreds."

"I am afraid that there must be thousands."

"And there are children who have lost their mothers — their fathers, too. I've decided to remain to help them."

"To remain here in Neverness?"

"To remain among the living, Danlo."

"I ... see."

"The war won't last much longer, you know," she said. She picked up her cold cup of tea and took a sip. "It
can't
last much longer. And when we've won, or lost, and there's food in the city again, I shall be free."

"No, no," he murmured. He touched her tangled, tear-stained hair. "I do not want to lose you, too."

"I know this must be hard for you," she said. "But really, you lost me years ago when Hanuman took away my memories."

"I do not want to lose you again — not this way."

"I'm sorry, Danlo."

"Hanuman," he whispered as if uttering some forbidden word. "The more deeply I look into the past, the more clearly I see him staring back at me with his
shaida
eyes."

"You must hate him now more than ever."

"No, it is just the opposite. I must find a way
not
to hate him. I must find a way to forgive him, with all the force of my will."

"
I
can't forgive him," Tamara said. "I wish that it was he whom we burned last night and not Jonathan."

Danlo shook his head sadly and said, "No, no — never killing, never hating or harming anyone no matter what he has done to you."

"After all that has happened, you're still devoted to ahimsa?"

"I ... must be. More than ever."