The Broken God (34 page)

The third thing which saved Danlo from ruin was Hanuman's growing love for him. Due to Hanuman's secretive nature, this love was not manifested openly, with words or the crude gestures of hand-slapping favoured by the other boys. But in a hundred ways Hanuman acknowledged the deep correspondence between them. With a quick exchange of glances or a slight, almost imperceptible head bow, he would indicate his love of Danlo's playfulness, his passion for life, his essential wildness. He admired the wild, dangerous side of Danlo's spirit, even though that wildness had nearly led to his drowning the day they had wrestled together in the hot pool. Many years later, when their friendship had grown beyond love into a profound and terrible understanding of each other, he would record in his universal computer: 'I used to like watching Danlo skate – do I remember too clearly how he practically tore up the ice of Borja's glidderies? These bittersweet images so impossible to forget: the sunlight reflecting off his skate blades, his muscles bunching and flowing beneath his kamelaika. And his deep, quick eyes, the way he processed information: nuances of temperature, minutiae, a subtle change in the colour, planarity or texture of the ice that others couldn't see. He had such a reckless speed stroke, light and quick – I should say, "lightning quick" – but there was always the power in his legs, the fluid, unpredictable power. Madhava li Shing used to say he was showing off, but no, he just loved skating too fast. It's strange, isn't it, how much of a man is revealed in the way he moves? Soul and selfness are the most elusive conceits, but from the first, I could see in Danlo's soul what always attracted (and repelled) me: his strength and verve. He was wilder than I, and beautiful in his wildness, like the strange white owl bird that he always emulated. And that always terrified me. Nothing is so terrifying as a man who possesses the innocence, the wildness and grace of an animal.' Above all, Hanuman admired Danlo's courage and will to endure in the face of Pedar's petty tortures. A man's will, he believed, the will to power over himself, was a singular, godlike quality. But will flows from life, and Hanuman well remembered how fragile life could be. And so, out of love and friendship, he secretly vowed to do what he must to preserve Danlo's life and keep him from harm.

One day, on the forty-ninth of deep winter, Pedar summoned Danlo to the meditation room and said, 'I don't like your friend.'

Danlo was kneeling on one of the room's wool mats, in the hated position of politeness. He stared at the lovely black and red walls, appreciating the whorls and finegrained texture of the jewood panels. The meditation room was full of silences and good smells, and he would have loved sitting in this ancient chamber but for the cruelties inflicted on him there. 'Which friend, O Exalted One?'

'Hanuman li Tosh,' Pedar spat out. 'I don't like the way he looks at me.'

'O Exalted One, how does he look at you?'

'I'm tired of that. Call me, "The Omniscient One".'

'Yes, O Omniscient One.'

'Your friend,' Pedar said, 'looks at me as one looks at a piece of ancient sculpture. Or worse, he looks at me as if I were a Scutari or some other loathsome alien. And worse yet, whenever I greet him on the stairs, he refuses to look at me at all.'

'Perhaps, O Omniscient One, he cannot bear the sight of your pimply face.'

As Danlo said this, Pedar blushed in rage, which caused the pimples across his cheeks and forehead to flare up red as blood. Danlo couldn't help smiling the rebellious, mocking smile that he had learned in Old Father's house. Ahimsa, as he understood it, required only that he never harm another's body or spirit. To inflict mind pain on another in order to provoke understanding was a Fravashi tradition that he cherished.

In truth, he liked fighting Pedar with words. Deep in his belly he continued to hate Pedar. And deeper still, roaring like an ocean in the dark unknown part of himself – in truth, bred into his chromosomes – was an urge to destroy that which he hated.

'What did I hear you say?' Pedar screamed out. He balled his fist and made a move to strike Danlo's head. But he must have remembered that the penalty for such an act might be banishment from the Order, because he pulled his punch up short and smacked his fist into the palm of his hand.

'Your face,' Danlo said, 'as splendid as it is– '

'Never mind! Never mind, Wild Boy. Won't you ever learn your etiquette? Goddamn you! Tonight you'll think about etiquette while you're scraping slime off the tiles in the bathing room.'

'O thank you!' Danlo said.

'Thank you what?'

'For yet another opportunity to practise restraint, thank you, O Pimpled One.'

That night Danlo scraped the tiles of the first floor bathing room, or rather, he scraped the black lines of bacteria growing between the tiles. Pedar provided neither scrubbing-brush nor liquid solvents to digest the bacteria. Danlo had to use his long fingernails to scrape, dig, and ream. By the time morning came, he had cleaned between only two hundred of the room's 12,608 tiles. Most of his fingernails were splintered, broken down to the quick and stained black with a sticky, evil-smelling filth.

'You'll report here every night until you have finished,' Pedar said as he examined Danlo's work. The morning sunlight, in faint filaments of silver, was diffusing through the frosted window panes high along the room's eastern wall. 'Do you understand?'

And Danlo yawned, smiled, and then replied, 'Yes, O Pimpled One, I do understand.'

Later that morning, an exasperated Hanuman cried out, 'He's given you an impossible task!'

Hanuman's outrage mirrored the feelings of the other first year novices. Madhava li Shing was aghast when he heard of Danlo's 'sentence', as he called it. He was a small boy, smaller even than Hanuman, but he had the arrogant, black, almond-shaped eyes and the sardonic superiority of Shing World's academician ruling class. This is very much an injustice,' he said in his calm, unperturbable manner. 'Something must be done.' Other boys – Adan Dur li Kadir, Javier Miro and Sherborn of Darkmoon – agreed with him. Through the snowy days of winter, they had witnessed Danlo's fierce stubbornness, and most had come to respect him. Their initial suspicion had given way to admiration, sympathy and, in quite a few of them, devotion. Danlo was a natural leader; there was something about him which compelled people to want to share his passions and his vision. Madhava would have gone to the Master of Novices in protest at Pedar's barbaric hazing, but Danlo enjoined him and his new friends to silence and secrecy.

Somehow, though, word of Danlo's struggle spread throughout Borja. Probably a high novice, one of Pedar's acquaintances or enemies on the first floor, talked too freely. Every boy and girl in the college, not only in Perilous Hall but those of Stone Row, The Hermitage and other dormitories, learned that Pedar Sadi Sanat was testing Danlo's will to ahimsa. Some novices, of course, those from the more obscure Civilized Worlds, knew little of the Fravashi or their concept of ahimsa. (In fact, ahimsa is an ancient Sanskrit word and was a hallowed belief of Old Earth's Jain religion. The Jains wore gauze masks over their noses and mouths to keep from accidentally inhaling and killing the various flying insects which swarmed over the hotter regions of the Asian continent. Fravashi mores do not demand such strict reverence of life. For the Fravashi, the great wrong is the intentional harming of life's possibilities, without sufficient cause.) Most people, however, appreciated the ideal of ahimsa, even if they thought it was unworkable as a rule to guide one's life. Hanuman was the first to observe ahimsa's irony. 'Pedar,' he said to Danlo one day, 'has a pustule in place of a heart. You vow to harm no one, and he uses your compassion against you, to do you harm.'

Inevitably, the story of Danlo's sufferings reached the Master of Novices. Bardo the Just immediately summoned Pedar to the Novices' Sanctuary. There, somewhere inside that fortress of stone and tradition, he chastised him. No records have been kept of Pedar's 'interview' with Master Bardo, but soon a rumour circulated around the college that Pedar's punishment had been severe, private and quite painful. Pedar was ordered to stop hazing Danlo. 'By God!' someone heard Master Bardo bellowing through closed doors. 'Isn't life cruel enough without adding barbarism to the barbaric happenstance of birth? Ah, why didn't I see to it that Danlo served a worthy novice? I must have been drunk when I let the Head Novice make the assignations, too bad.'

Pedar should have left Danlo alone after that, but he did not. Irrationally, he blamed Danlo for his humiliation in Master Bardo's chambers. He was indeed a cruel and vengeful boy, and worse, he was proud beyond all reason. Although his origins were the lowest of the low (both his parents were harijan who had come to Neverness in the mistaken belief that drugs such as jook or jambool and access to the cetic's infamous brain machines were free to all) he fancied that farther back along his genetic lines, the imprint of a ronin warrior-poet, neurologician, or an exemplar graced his chromosomes. How else to explain his surprising intelligence and the fact that he, a harijan boy, had won for himself a place at Borja? Would an exemplar allow a lesser breed of human being to insult him? Would a warrior-poet, those most fearless of assassins, fear the outbursts of the bloated, bombastic Master of Novices? Out of respect for his pretend ancestors – one day he actually admitted this to Arpiar Pogossian – he planned to humiliate Danlo. He would respect the letter of Master Bardo's injunction against further hazing. But he would repay shame with shame and remind Danlo of his place and the proper respect due his superiors.

And so Pedar began collecting stories about Danlo. At night, after lights out, he crept up the shadowed stairs and crouched near the top, listening to whispers and murmurs of the younger boys talking bed to bed. In truth, he employed various means of spying on Danlo. He knew a journeyman horologe at Lara Sig who knew a courtesan whose friend was one of Old Father's students. There were many wild rumours about Danlo, and he tried to trace each one to its source. From the first day in Lavi Square, he had thought there was something mysterious about Danlo and his past, something dark, powerful and profound. Because Pedar was a clever boy and expert at research (it was his ambition to become Lord Historian of the Order), he soon pieced together an explanation of this mystery.

On the 64th of deep winter, he confronted Danlo in Lavi Square. It was one of those blue-cold, perfectly clear days in which the things of the world – the ice sculptures, the orange and red lichens etching the buildings, the individual needles of the yu trees – stand out almost too vividly. It was really too cold to be outside for very long, but the women and men (and children) of the City like to bask in the noonday sun no matter the season, and so, near the centre of the Square a warming pavilion had been set up. Beneath a half-dome of clary supported by wood pillars, scores of novices gathered to discuss the events of the day. Their white furs were open to the warm air gusting up from grates in the ice. They stood about kicking their skate blades against the grates as they looked for familiar faces in the stream of novices and masters passing through the Square. Every day after lunch, Danlo and a few of his friends from Perilous Hall would meet together beneath the pavilion with the other novices of Borja. 64th day was a day much like any other – Danlo stood near the cooler air at the edge of the pavilion taking in the ring of steel against steel, skates click-clacking, and the fresh, hard smell of chiselled ice. Hanuman, Madhava li Shing, Sherborn of Darkmoon and three girls who lived in The Hermitage surrounded him. He had just begun debating the paradoxes of causality with one of these girls, Rihana Brandreth Tal, when Hanuman pointed towards the corner of the Square and said, 'Oh, no. Look, Danlo, it's the Pimple and his friends.'

Two glidderies scissored the white ice, marking the Square from corner to corner with a giant red 'X'. Danlo looked along the line of Hanuman's rigid finger down one of the glidderies. He saw Pedar Sadi Sanat, Arpiar Pogossian and Rafael Wu skating purposefully toward them. Pedar, in the lead, skated right up to the warming pavilion. Without pause or greeting, from the inner pocket of his furs he removed a stiff rectangular object – it was, in fact, a foto – and held it up in front of Danlo's face. 'Is this man your father?' Pedar asked. He pitched his voice so that it carried through the pavilion out into the Square. 'The man standing at the centre of this foto – is he your father?'

'Look!' someone said. 'It's a foto of Mallory Ringess.' Danlo drew in a breath of cold air as he wondered how Pedar had guessed his true lineage. He looked at the foto, at the swirl of colours which formed up beneath its clear outer skin. In the better fotos, of course, the millions of coloured pixels sense which part of the foto a person is looking at and highlight and magnify this part. But because Danlo couldn't focus on any particular feature – he had never seen a foto before – the foto remained undefined. He could make out the greens and whites of what might have been a mountain; he beheld dark shapes, flesh-coloured pigments and a blue beyond blue. The foto held little jewelled specks of a deeper blueness than anything he had ever seen outside of his night-time dreams. In truth, no object of the natural world, neither the eggshell of Ayeye, the thallow, nor even the midnight sky, was so deeply and perfectly blue.

'It's lovely!' he exclaimed. 'What is it?'

Arpiar Pogossian came up behind Pedar and knocked his skates against one of the pillars to remove the ice shavings. To Danlo, he huffed out, 'Remember your etiquette!'

Danlo favoured him with a quick head bow, turned to Pedar and repeated, 'What is it, O Enlightened One?'

'It's a foto,' Pedar said.

Danlo continued staring at the beautiful colours spread beneath the surface of the shiny rectangle before him. 'And what is a foto, O Enlightened One?'

'It's a foto of Mallory Ringess' expedition to the Alaloi. Haven't you ever seen a foto?'

In Drisana's little shop, when Danlo had imprinted the Language of the Civilized Worlds, he had learned the word 'foto'. A foto, he remembered, was a two-dimensional array of images representing point for point – capturing in shape and colour – the objects of the real world. In some ways, a foto was like a cave painting. Only a foto was more exact, more faithful to the surfaces and edges of reality, where the paintings of his ancestors revealed the truth and essence of Ayeye, Sabra, or Berura, the hooded seal and the other animals of the world.