The Broken God

‘Quiet now,’ Soli said, and he ruffled Danlo’s hair. ‘There will be time for praying later.’

‘No.’

‘Danlo!’

‘No!’

Soli shrugged his shoulders and stared into the depths of the cave where the firelight reflected off the shiny black walls. His voice sounded low and hollow as he said, ‘The sleds have to be iced. Join me outside when you are done, and we will bury the Devaki.’

That evening, they began burying their tribe. They worked as quickly as they could, stripping the bodies naked and rubbing them with seal grease from toe to forehead. Danlo knew that it would be cold on their spirits’ journey to the other side of day, and the grease would help against the cold. Loading the bodies on the sleds and hauling them up to the burial grounds above the cave was gruesome, exhausting work. Some of his near-sisters had died many days earlier, and their flesh had run dark and soft as rotten bloodfruit. It would have been less horrible to remove the bodies all at once and place them in the snowdrifts where they would freeze hard and fast. But there were bears in the forest and packs of wolves; as it was, they had to gather bunches of dead wood to keep the cave’s entrance fires burning, to keep the wild animals at bay. Of course the sled dogs were familiar with fire, and they had little fear of it. And so Danlo and Soli decided to spend a couple of days hunting shagshay while most of their people awaited burial. They had to flay the great, white, fleecy animals and cut them up for food, or else the starving dogs might have gnawed off their leashes and gone sniffing for carrion in the cave. After that, they returned to work. One by one, they placed the bodies on the icy, treeless burial field. They oriented them with their heads to the north.

They heaped boulders atop each body; they built many stone pyramids to keep the animals away and to remind them that each living thing must return to the earth from which it is born. Their labour took ten days. There were too few boulders close to the cave, so they had to tie the dogs to their traces and drive sleds down through the forest to an icy stream where they found many smooth, rounded rocks. And then back up to the burial ground again with sleds full of rocks, back and forth for many trips. When they were finished at last, they found some anda bushes and picked orange and red fireflowers to place atop the graves. And then they prayed for the dead, prayed until their voices fell hoarse and their tears were frozen sheets over their cheeks; they prayed far into the night until the cold off the sea ice chilled their bones.

‘Mi alasharia,’ Danlo said one last time, and he turned to Soli. ‘It is done, yes?’

They began walking down through the dark graves, down through the snowdrifts and the swaying yu trees. There were stars in the sky, and everywhere snow covered the forest. After a while they came to the stream where they had built a little snowhut to live in while they did their work. Never again would they sleep in the cave. ‘What will we do now?’ Danlo asked.

‘Tomorrow, we will hunt again,’ Soli said. ‘We will hunt and eat and continue to pray.’

Danlo was quiet while he stared at the cold snowhut that would provide shelter for a night, or perhaps many nights. And then he said, ‘But, sir, what will we do?’

They crawled through the tunnel of the hut. The tunnel was dark and icy, and barely wide enough to allow Soli passage. The main chamber was larger, though not so large that either of them could stand up without breaking through the top of the little snow dome. In the half-darkness, Danlo moved carefully lest he knock against the snow blocks that formed the hut’s walls. He spread his sleeping furs atop his bed of hard-packed snow. Soli added chunks of seal blubber to the oilstone, a bowl of scooped stone which was always kept burning, however faintly. The blubber melted and caught fire, and Danlo gazed at the small pearly flame floating on a pool of dark oil. Soon the curved white walls of the hut glowed with a warm, yellow light.

‘Yes, what to do now,’ Soli said. The oilstone grew hotter, and he began boiling water in a small clay pot. It was his habit to drink some blood-tea before sleeping.

Danlo thought he was a strange man, at heart a wild man like himself, or rather, like he would be if he ever became a man. He felt an affinity to this wildness. Hadn’t Soli’s great-great-grandfather left the tribe a few generations ago to journey across the southern ice? Hadn’t Soli and his now-dead family returned from the fabled Blessed Isles with fantastic stories of air so warm that the snow fell from the sky as water? It was told that Soli had once journeyed across the eastern ice to the Unreal City where the shadow-men lived in mountainous stone huts. Danlo wondered if these stories were true, just as he wondered at the secret, wild knowledge of numbers and circles that Soli had taught him. He thought Soli was a mysterious, wild man, and then a startling idea came to him: perhaps this is why the slow evil had avoided him, too.

Danlo scooped some frozen seal blood out of a skin and dumped the blackish, crystalline mass into Soli’s pot. He said, ‘We will have to journey west to Sawelsalia or Rilril, won’t we? We have many far-cousins among the Patwin, I have heard it said. Or perhaps the Olorun – which of the tribes do you think will welcome us, sir?’

He felt uncomfortable talking so much because it was unseemly for a boy to talk so freely in front of a man. But he was uncertain and afraid for the future, and in truth, he had always liked to talk. Especially with Soli: if he didn’t initiate conversation, Soli was likely to remain as silent as a stone.

After a long time, Soli said, ‘To journey west – that may not be wise.’ He took a long drink of blood-tea. Danlo watched him hold his cup up to his mouth; it seemed that his eyes were hooded in steam off the tea, and in secretiveness.

‘What else can we do?’

‘We can remain here on Kweitkel. This is our home.’

Danlo held his hand to his eyes and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat; it felt like a piece of meat was stuck there. ‘No, sir, how can we remain here? There are no women left to make our clothes; there are no more girls to grow into wives. There is nothing left of life, so how can we remain?’

While Soli sipped his tea silently, Danlo continued, ‘It is wrong to let life end, yes? To grow old and never have children? To let it all die – isn’t that shaida, too?’

‘Yes, life, shaida,’ Soli said finally. ‘Shaida.’

Something in the way Soli stared into his tea made Danlo feel a sharp pain inside, over his liver. He worried that Soli secretly blamed him for bringing shaida to their tribe. Was such a thing possible, he wondered? Could he, with his strange young face and his wildness, bring the slow evil to the Patwin tribe as well? He felt shame at these thoughts, then, felt it deep in his chest and burning up behind his eyes. He tried to speak, but for once, his voice had left him.

Soli stirred his lukewarm tea with his forefinger. The two fingers next to it were cut off; the scars over the knuckle stumps were white and shiny. ‘To the east,’ he said at last, ‘is the Unreal City. Some call it the City of Light, or … Neverness. We could go there.’

Danlo had slumped down into his furs; he was as tired as a boy could be and still remain among the living. But when he heard Soli speak of the mythical Unreal City, he was suddenly awake. He was suddenly aware of his heart beating away as it did when he was about to spear a charging shagshay bull. He sat up and said, ‘The Unreal City! Have you really been there? Is it true that shadow-men live there? Men who were never born and never die?’

‘All men die,’ Soli said softly. ‘But in the Unreal City, some men live almost forever.’

In truth, Soli knew all about the Unreal City because he had spent a good part of his life there. And he knew everything about Danlo. He knew that Danlo’s blood parents were really Katharine the Scryer and Mallory Ringess, who had also lived in the City. He knew these things because he was Danlo’s true grandfather. But he chose not to tell Danlo the details of his heritage. Instead, he sipped his tea and cleared his throat. And then he said, ‘There is something you must know. Haidar would have told you next year when you became a man, but Haidar has gone over, and now there is no one left to tell you except me.’

Outside the hut, the wind was blowing full keen, and Danlo listened to the wind. Haidar had taught him patience; he could be patient when he had to be, even when the wind was blowing wild and desperately, even when it was hard to be patient. Danlo watched Soli sipping his tea, and he was sure that something desperately important was about to be revealed.

‘Haidar and Chandra,’ Soli forced out, ‘were not your blood parents. Your blood parents came from the Unreal City. Came to the tribe fifteen years ago. Your mother died during your birth, and Haidar and Chandra adopted you. That is why you are different from your brothers and sisters. Most men of the City look as you do, Danlo.’

Danlo’s throat ached so badly he could barely speak. He rubbed his eyes and said simply, ‘My blood parents … There are others who look like me, yes?’

‘Yes, in the Unreal City. It is not shaida to have a face such as yours; you did not bring this shaida to our people.’

Soli’s explanation cooled Danlo’s shame of being left alive. But it brought to mind a hundred other questions. ‘Why did my blood parents come to Kweitkel? Why? Why wasn’t I born Devaki as all Devaki are born? Why, sir?’

‘You don’t remember?’

Danlo shut his burning eyes against the oilstone’s light. He remembered something. He had an excellent memory, in some ways a truly remarkable memory. He had inherited his mother’s ‘memory of pictures’: when he closed his eyes, he could conjure up in exact colour and contour almost every event of his life. Once, two winters ago, against Haidar’s warnings, he had rashly gone out to hunt silk belly by himself. A silk belly boar had found him in a copse of young shatterwood trees; the boar had charged and laid open his thigh with his tusk before Danlo could get his spear up. He was lucky to be alive, but it wasn’t his luck that he most remembered. No, what he saw whenever he thought about that day was Chandra’s fine needlework as she sewed shut his wound. He could see the bone needle pulling through the bloody, stretched-out skin, the precision stitching, each loop of the distinctive knot Chandra used to tie off his wound. Inside him was a whole universe of such knots of memories, but for some reason, he had almost no memory of the first four years of his life. Somewhere deep inside there was a faint image of a man, a man with piercing blue eyes and a sad look on his face. He couldn’t bring the image to full clarity, though; he couldn’t quite see it.

He opened his eyes to see Soli staring at him. He drew his furs up around his naked shoulders. ‘What did my father look like?’ he asked. ‘Did you know my father? My mother? The mother of my blood?’

Soli sipped the last of his tea and bent to pour himself another cup. ‘Your father looked like you,’ he said. Then his face fell silent as if he were listening to something, some animal cry or sound far away. ‘Your father, with his long nose, and the hair – he never combed his hair. Yes, the wildness, too. But you have your mother’s eyes. She could see things clearly, your mother.’

‘You must have known them very well, if they lived with the tribe. Haidar must have known them, too.’

Danlo closed his eyes again and tried to shut out the wind whispering just beyond the snow blocks above his head. Inside him, there were other sounds, other whispers. He remembered the way Choclo and some of the other men would sometimes look at him strangely, the way their voices would drop into whispers whenever he surprised them in some dark corner of the cave. He had always imagined that everyone was talking about him when he wasn’t there to listen. There were darker memories, too: He had once overheard Chandra and Ayame talking about a satinka, a witch who had worked her evil and brought shaida to her people. He had thought the story was of the dreamtime, the time of the ancestors, the eternal, in-destructible time that was at once the history and the communal dreaming state of his people. He must have been wrong, he thought. Perhaps there had been a real satinka in the tribe. Perhaps this satinka had bewitched his blood mother and father.

‘Yes, Haidar knew your blood parents,’ Soli admitted.

‘Then what were their names? Why didn’t he tell me?’

‘He would have told you when you became a man, during your passage. There is more to the story, things a boy should not have to think about.’

‘I am almost a man,’ Danlo said. The set of his face was at once open and pained, innocent and hard. ‘Now that Haidar is dead, you must tell me.’

‘No, you are not a man yet.’

With his long fingernails, Danlo scraped frost off the ruff of his sleeping furs. He tried to make out his reflection in the glazed hut walls above him, but all he could see was his shadow, the outline of his face and wild hair darkening the milky white snow. ‘I am almost a man, yes?’

‘Next deep winter, after your passage, then you will be a man.’ Soli yawned and then said, ‘Now it is time to sleep. We must hunt tomorrow, or we will starve and join the rest of the tribe on the other side.’

Danlo thought hard for a while. He had a naturally keen mind made all the keener by the mind tools Soli had given him in secret. Ever since he could remember, Soli had taken him alone into the forest to draw figures in the hard-packed snow. He had taught him geometry; he had taught him about things called spheres and strange attractors and the infinities. Proof structures and topology, and above all the beautiful, crystalline logic which ordered the universe of number. Logic – even though Danlo found it a strange and wild way of thinking, he loved to argue logically with Soli.

He held his hand up to his mouth to cover a smile, then said, ‘The journey across the eastern ice to the Unreal City will be long and hard, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Soli said. ‘Very hard.’

‘Even a man might not complete such a journey – Totunye, the bear, may hunt him, or the Serpent’s Breath might strike him and kill him with cold, or –’

‘Yes, the journey will be dangerous,’ Soli broke in.

‘What if I were left alone to find the City?’ Danlo asked softly. ‘Or if the slow evil found you at last out on the ice? What if the shadow-men in the Unreal City do not know halla? Maybe the shadow-men would kill you for your meat. If you died before my passage, sir, how would I ever become a man?’

For Danlo, as for every Alaloi boy, the initiation into manhood is the third most important of life’s transformations and mysteries, the other two being birth and death.

Soli rubbed his temples and sighed. He was very tired but he must have clearly seen the logic of Danlo’s argument, that he would have to make his passage a year before his time. He smiled at him and said, ‘Do you think you are ready, Danlo? You are so young.’

‘I am almost fourteen.’

‘So young,’ Soli repeated. ‘Even fifteen years is sometimes too young. The cutting is very painful, and there have been many boys older than you who were not ready for the pain of the knife. And then, after the cutting …’ He let his voice die off and looked at Danlo.

‘And then there is the secret knowledge, yes? The Song of the Ancestors?’

‘No, after the pain, there is terror. Sheer terror.’

He knew that Soli was trying to frighten him, so he smiled to hide his fear. The air inside the hut was steamy from the boiling tea and from their rhythmic exhalations; it was selura, wet cold – not as absolutely cold as white cold, but cold enough to lap at his skin like a thirsty seal and make him shiver slightly. He pulled himself down into his furs, trying to keep warm. All his life, from the older boys and young men, he had heard rumours about the passage into manhood. It was like dying, Choclo had once said, dying transcendently, ur-alashara; it was like going over, not to the other side of day, but going over oneself to find a new, mysterious world within. He thought about what it would be like to go over, and he tried to sleep, but he was too full of death and life, too full of himself. All at once, his whole body was shivering beyond his control. He had an overwhelming sense that his life, every day and night, would be supremely dangerous, as if he were walking a snowbridge over a crevasse. He felt wild and fey in anticipation of making this eternal crossing. And then, deep inside, a new knowledge sudden and profound: he loved the dark, wild part of himself as he loved life. Ti-miura halla, follow your love, follow your fate – wasn’t this the teaching of a hundred generations of his people? If he died during his passage, died to himself or died the real death of blood and pain, he would die in search of life, and he thought this must be the most halla thing a man could do.

The shivering stopped, and he found himself smiling naturally. ‘Isn’t terror just the left hand of fate?’ he asked. ‘Will you take me through my passage tomorrow, sir?’

‘No, tomorrow we shall hunt shagshay. We shall hunt, then eat and sleep to regain our strength.’

‘And then?’

Soli rubbed his nose and looked at him. ‘And then, if you are strong enough and keep your courage, you will become a man.’

Four days later, at dusk, they strapped on their skis and made the short journey to Winter Pock, a nearby hill where the Devaki men held their secret ceremonies. Danlo was not allowed to speak, so he skied behind Soli in silence. As he planted his poles and pushed and glided through the snow, he listened to the sounds of the forest: the loons warbling with bellies full of yu berries; the clicking of the sleekits halfway out of their burrows, warning each other that danger was near; the wind keening across the hills, up through the great yu trees heavy with snow. It was strange the way he could hear the wind far off before he could feel it stinging his face. He listened for Haidar’s rough voice in the wind, and the voices of his other ancestors, too. But the wind was just the wind; it was only the cold, clean breath of the world. He hadn’t yet entered into the dreamtime, where his mother’s dying plaints and the moaning of the wind would be as one. He smelled sea ice and pine needles in the wind; as the light failed and the greens and reds bled away from the trees, the whole forest was rich with the smells of the freezing night and with life.

In silence, they climbed up the gentle slopes of Winter Pock. The hill was treeless and barren at the top, like an old man whose hair has fallen off the crown of his head. Set into the snow around a large circle were wooden stakes. Each stake was topped with the skull of a different animal. There were a hundred different skulls: the great, tusked skull of Tuwa, the mammoth; the skulls of Nunki and long, pointed skulls of the snow fox and wolf; there were many, many smaller skulls, those of the birds, Ayeye, the thallow, and Gunda and Rakri, and Ahira, the snowy owl. Danlo had never seen such a sight in all of his life, for the boys of the tribe were not allowed to approach Winter Pock. In the twilight, the circle of greyish-white skulls looked ominous and terrifying. Danlo knew that each man, after his cutting, would look up at the skulls to find his doffel, his other-self, the one special animal he would never again hunt. His doffel would guide him into the dreamtime, and later, through all the days of his life. Beyond this bit of common knowledge, Danlo knew almost nothing of what was to come.

Soli kicked off his skis and led him inside the circle of skulls. At the circle’s centre, oriented east to west, was a platform of packed snow. ‘When we begin,’ Soli said, ‘you must lie here facing the stars.’ He explained that it was traditional for the initiate boy to lie on the backs of four kneeling men, but since the men had all gone over, the platform would have to do. Around the platform were many piles of wood. Soli held a glowing coal to each pile in turn, and soon there were dozens of fires blazing. The fires would keep Danlo from freezing to death.

‘And now we begin,’ Soli said. He spread a white shag-shay fur over the platform and bade Danlo to remove his clothes. Night had fallen, and a million stars twinkled against the blackness of the sky. Danlo lay down on his back, with his head toward the east as in any important ceremony. He looked up at the stars. The lean muscles of his thighs, belly and chest were hard beneath his ivory skin. Despite the fires’ flickering heat, he was instantly cold.

‘You may not move,’ Soli said. ‘No matter what you hear, you may not turn your head. And you may not close your eyes. Above all, on pain of death, you may not cry out. On pain of death, Danlo.’

Soli left him alone, then, and Danlo stared up at the deep dome of the sky. The world and the sky, he thought – two halves of the great circle of halla enfolding all living things. He knew that the lights in the sky were the eyes of his ancestors, the Old Ones, who had come out this night to watch him become a man. There were many, many lights; Soli had taught him the art of counting, but he could not count the number of Old Ones who had lain here before him because it would be unseemly to count the spirits of dead men as one did pebbles or shells by the sea. He looked up at the stars, and he saw the eyes of his father, and his father’s fathers, and he prayed that he would not break the great circle with cries of pain.

After a while he began to hear sounds. There came sharp, clacking sounds, as of two rocks being struck together. As the fires burned over him, the rhythm of the clacking quickened; it grew louder and nearer. The sound split the night. Danlo’s right half knew that it must be Soli making this unnerving sound, but his left half began to wonder. He could not move his head; it seemed that the eyelight of the Old Ones was streaming out of the blackness, dazzling him with light. The clacking hurt his ear now and was very close. He could not move his head to look, and he feared that the Old Ones were coming to test him with terror. Suddenly, the clacking stopped. Silence fell over him. He waited a long time, and all he could hear was his deep breathing and the drumbeat of his heart. Then there came a dreadful whirring and whooshing that he had never experienced before; the air itself seemed to be splitting apart with the sound. The Old Ones were coming for him, his left side whispered. He dare not move or else they would know that he was still just a frightened boy. How could Soli be making such a sound, his right side wanted to know? He dare not move or Soli would have to do a terrible thing.

‘Danlo!’ a voice screamed out of the darkness. ‘Danlo-mi!’ It was not Soli who called to him; it was not the voice of a man. ‘Danlo, dorona ti-lot! Danlo, we require your blood, now!’

It was the voice of a terrible animal he had never heard before. It screamed like a thallow and roared like a bear, all at once. He began to tremble, or perhaps he was just shivering, he couldn’t tell which. Despite the intense cold, drops of sweat burst from his skin all across his forehead, chest, and belly. The animal screamed again, and Danlo waited motionless for it to tear at the throbbing arteries of his throat. He held his head rigid, pressing it down into the fur. He wanted to close his eyes and scream, but he could not. Straight up at the dazzling lights he stared, and suddenly the lights were gone. The animal was standing over him, bending low, blocking out the night sky. It wasn’t really an animal at all; it was the Beast of the young men’s stories. It had horns and great conical teeth like a killer whale; its cruel, hooked beak was dipping toward his face; its claws were the claws of the snow tiger, and they were sweeping down toward his belly and groin. He had never seen a man wearing a mask before, but even if he had, his left side would still be shouting that the Beast was about to rip away at him. He held himself very still.