The Broken God (2 page)

'It is cold,' Soli said, stamping his feet. 'It is cold and I am tired.'

He turned to step toward the cave and Danlo followed him. He, too, was tired, so tired that his tendons ached up and down his limbs and he felt sick in his belly, as if he had eaten bad meat. For thirteen years of his life, ever since he could remember, entering the cave from the outside world had always been a moment full of warmth, certitude, and quiet joy. But now nothing would ever be the same again, and even the familiar stones of the entranceway – the circular, holy stones of white granite that his ancestors had set there – were no comfort to him. The cave itself was just as it had been for a million years: a vast lava tube opening into the side of the mountain; it was a natural cathedral of gleaming obsidian, flowing rock pendants hanging from ceiling to floor, and deep silences. Now, in the cave of his ancestors, there was too much silence and too much light. While Danlo had slept in the snow, Soli had gathered faggots of bonewood and placed them at fifty-foot intervals around the cave walls. He had set them afire. The whole of the cave was awash with light, flickering orange and ruby lights falling off the animal paintings on the walls, falling deep into the cave's dark womb where the cold floor rose up to meet the ceiling. Danlo smelled woodsmoke, pungent and sweet, and the firelight itself was so intense it seemed to have a fragrance all its own. And then he smelled something else layered beneath the smells of wood, fur, and snow. Touching every rock and crack of the cave, all around him and through him, was the stench of death. Though he breathed through his mouth and sometimes held his breath, he could not escape this terrible stench. The bodies of the dead were everywhere. All across the snow-packed floor, his near-brothers and sisters lay together in no particular order or pattern, a heap of bent arms, hair, furs, rotting blood, thick black beards, and dead eyes. They reminded Danlo of a shagshay herd driven off a cliff. Leaving them inside their snowhuts until burial would have been less work, but Soli had decided to move them. The huts, the fifteen domes built of shaped snow blocks in the belly of the cave, had kept the bodies too warm. The smell of rotting flesh was driving the dogs mad and howling with hunger, and so Soli had dragged the bodies one by one to the cave's centre where they might freeze. Danlo worried that Soli, tired as he was, might have left someone inside one of the snowhuts by mistake. He told Soli of this worry, and Soli quickly counted the bodies; there were eighty-eight of them, the whole of the Devaki tribe. Danlo thought it was wrong to count his kin one by one, to assign abstract numerals to human beings who had so recently breathed air and walked over the brilliant icefields of the world. He knew that each of them had a proper name (except, of course, for the babies and very little children who were known simply as 'Son of Choclo' or 'Mentina's Second Daughter'), and he knew the names of each of them, and he stood over the dead calling their names. 'Sanya,' he said, 'Yukio, Choclo, Jemmu ... ' After a while his voice grew thin and dry, and he began to whisper. Finally, he grew as silent as Soli, who was standing beside him. He couldn't see the faces of everyone to say their names. Some of the dead lay face down, half buried in the snow. Others – usually they were babies – were covered by the bodies of their mothers. Danlo walked among the dead, looking for the man he called his father. He found Haidar next to Chandra, the woman who had adopted him when he was a newborn only a few moments old. They were lying together, surrounded by Cilehe, Choclo and Old Liluye, and others of their family. Haidar was a short man, though remarkably broad and muscular; he had always been remarkably patient, canny and kind, and Danlo could not understand how such a great man had so inexorably died. In death, with his anima passed from his lips, Haidar seemed smaller and diminished. Danlo knelt beside him, between him and Chandra. Haidar's hand was stretched out, resting across Chandra's forehead. Danlo took Haidar's hand in his own. It was a huge hand, but there was no strength there, no tone or vitality. It was as cold as meat, almost cold enough to begin hardening up like ice. Chandra's face was cold, too. The hair around her ears was crusted with layers of a pale red fluid. Some of this fluid had dried days before; the freshest, the blood of her death agony scarcely hours old, was now beginning to freeze. Danlo combed the thick hair away from her forehead and looked at her lovely brown eyes, which were open and nearly as hard as stones. There was nothing in her eyes, neither joy nor light nor pain. That was the remarkable thing about death, Danlo thought, how quickly pain fled the body along with its anima. He turned and touched Haidar's cold forehead, then, and he closed his own eyes against the tears burning there. He wanted to ask Haidar the simplest of questions: why, if death was so peaceful and painless, did all living things prefer life to death?

'Danlo, it is time to ice the sleds.' This came from Soli, who was standing above him, speaking gently.

'No,' Danlo said, 'not yet.'

'Please help me with the sleds – we still have much to do.'

'No.' Danlo sat down on the cave floor, and he rested one hand over Haidar's eyes, the other over Chandra's. 'Haidar, alasharia la shantih,' he said. And then, 'Chandra, my Mother, go over now in peace.'

'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.'