The Broken God (35 page)

'Well?' Pedar said. He strained to hold the foto straight out without letting his arm tremble.

As Danlo studied the foto, he was aware of the novices chattering and pressing closer. He heard someone say, 'Danlo the Wild doesn't know what a foto is!'

'Here, take it,' Pedar said at last.

Danlo held the foto in his naked, gloveless hands. It had the heft and feel of a piece of bonewood. The four corners of the foto were sharp against his skin, and its surface was as glossy as ilka-kweitling, the young white ice.

'That is the Ringess!' Sherborn said as he nudged Danlo and jabbed his finger at the foto. 'Mallory Ringess! And Bardo the Just, before he became Master of Novices. He looks so young!'

Pedar edged up very close to Danlo. He was so close that Danlo could see each of the large pores puncturing his cheeks and smell the metallic acridness of jook wafting off his breath. Pedar had been addicted to jook his whole life, ever since he was a fetus floating in his mother's jook-tainted womb. If Danlo had known of Pedar's bondage to jook, he might have pitied rather than hated him.

'Well?' Pedar said as he looked Danlo eye to eye. 'Are you the bastard son of Mallory Ringess?'

Again Danlo returned to looking at the foto. He tried to make sense of its pretty colours; he tried to see faces in the chaos of shape, shimmer and shadow. He could see no faces. He wondered that Sherborn and others seemed to perceive the likeness of Bardo the Just near the edge of the foto. Danlo had keen eyes – he could pick out the ominous silhouette of a great white bear across nearly five miles of sea ice – and so he wondered why he could not begin to see what others could perceive so easily. Then he remembered a saying of Old Father's: Seeing is an act of will accomplished by the brain. What was wrong with his will to vision, he wondered, that he could not see what was before him?

'Danlo!' This came from Hanuman who was standing by his side, looking back and forth between Pedar and the foto. 'Danlo, give the foto back to him – you don't have to look at it.'

At these words, Pedar shot Hanuman a hateful look, but he said nothing.

Danlo smiled and shook his head. He gazed at the foto, utterly entranced by what he was struggling to apprehend. The deep winter light – low streaks of silver off the polished ice – was dazzling, but it wasn't the sunlight which interfered with his vision. He dropped his head to the side and whispered, 'Hanu, Hanu, it is not enough to see a thing just as it is, if I cannot make sense of what I see.'

'You shouldn't blame yourself,' Hanuman whispered. 'It's a matter of the synapses linking up in the first year of life. As a child you never learned to abstract reality from these kind of images.'

Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind, Danlo thought. And then he said, 'But I am a man now. Should a child be able to see what a man cannot?'

Without taking his eyes from the foto, there on the ice of Lavi Square with the voices of fifty curious children humming in his ear, Danlo silently vowed that he would develop his sense of vision no matter the difficulty, no matter the terror (or shame) of what he might see.

'Don't pretend to ignorance, Wild Boy,' Pedar said at last. Although he was the taller of the two, his posture was lax, and he slumped so that he stood face to face with Danlo. 'Don't tell me you can't see the resemblance between yourself and the Ringess!'

From the middle of the crowd, Rihana Brandreth Tal's voice shrilled out, 'It's true, Danlo has the Ringess hair – look at the strands of red in what's left of his beautiful hair.' She was as small and quick as a sleekit, and one of her hands darted out and grasped Danlo's queue where it dangled beneath his cap. 'Black and red – who has ever had hair like that?'

'And his eyes,' someone said, 'his face – it's sharp as a falcon's!'

Arpiar Pogossian nudged Pedar and said, 'The Wild Boy does have a lean and predatory look, doesn't he?'

'No, it's a fierce look,' Rihana said. 'He's fiercely beautiful, like his father – if it's really true that Mallory Ringess is his father. And that's why you've been hazing him, everyone knows. You're afraid of him or envious. Or both.'

'He is the bastard child of the Ringess,' Pedar said and he looked at Danlo. 'Bastard child – do you want to hear the evidence?'

Hanuman held his palm out toward Pedar's chest. He said, 'Please don't stand so close.'

'First year novices,' Arpiar said as he pointed a white-gloved finger at Hanuman, 'don't tell high novices what to do.'

For a moment, Danlo closed his eyes and let his belly pump in a stream of clear, cold air. Then he looked at Hanuman and said, 'O Hanu, why can't I see it? Is there a man, the Mallory Ringess, in this foto?'

Hanuman cupped his hand over the back of Danlo's knuckles, and he pulled both hand and foto nearer in order to get a better look. 'Of course it's the Ringess,' he said. He traced his forefinger along the foto, picking out facial features. 'This is his nose, and here, his hair – it's as black as a pilot's robe. Can you see it, falling over his forehead? And his lips, and his eyes– '

'I see him!' Danlo suddenly cried out. He had been looking deeply into memory and mystery when the veil of chaos was ripped away from the foto and the images embedded there suddenly 'popped' into vision and made sense. There were three women in the foto, and three men each dressed in black robes. The man at the centre was tall and sinewy; with his long, high nose and eyes of blue ice, he looked as fierce as a thallow. 'He is splendid! He does look like me, yes?'

Danlo glanced up from the foto and exchanged a knowing look with Hanuman. Clearly the time had come for Danlo to confess that he had been adopted as a child into the Devaki tribe of the Alaloi. He could not imagine how Pedar had guessed this, though he was eager to hear his 'evidence'. And he could not imagine why he should be ashamed of such a father.

'Danlo the Wild,' Pedar called out, addressing the novices assembled in the warming pavilion, 'did not come to Neverness from an elite school, as you have. Nor did he come from any of the Civilized Worlds. I've been to the Hollow Fields and spoken to the Master of Ships; there's no record of his immigration. Therefore he must be a child of the City, as I am. But Danlo did not attend the elite school on Neverness – I should know. If he were a child of the City, why didn't he attend the elite school? Why? Why was he permitted to petition for special admittance to Borja if he'd been eligible to attend an elite school? What's the answer to this mystery? Please listen, I have a hypothesis.'

And so Pedar strutted among the novices, and he delivered his theory as to Danlo's mysterious origins. Because he was an unsightly, unpopular boy the other novices practically fell over each other trying to get out of his way. He glided here and there, ground his toe pick into the ice, spun about and stroked his short jerky strokes, all the while waving his hands and gesticulating crudely. 'Danlo the Wild has been heard speaking the Alaloi language,' he declared. 'I believe he was raised among the Alaloi.' Pedar told them of the City's expedition to the Alaloi sixteen years previously, the quest to find the Elder Eddas embroidered within humanity's oldest DNA, that of the primitive Alaloi tribes. The expedition, he told them, had been a disaster. A scryer named Katharine had died in the cave of the Devaki. A spear had killed Bardo the Just (the City cryologists, of course, had later brought his frozen body back to life), and there had been a murder of a Devaki man. The expedition,' Pedar said, 'lasted almost a year. In that time, is it or isn't it possible that Mallory Ringess fathered a child?'

'But Danlo doesn't look at all like an Alaloi,' Rihana protested. She held a white linen to her tiny, runny nose, which was red and chafed due to constant rubbing. 'If Mallory Ringess mated with a primitive woman – they're as hairy as apes, aren't they? – wouldn't Danlo bear half her chromosomes?'

Pedar picked at a pimple below his lip and said, 'It's my hypothesis that Mallory Ringess had a child by Katharine the Scryer.'

As he said this, Rihana and many of the novices fell silent and stared at Danlo. That his lineage had finally been proclaimed pleased Danlo, though he couldn't guess why everyone was staring at him so strangely.

'If Mallory Ringess and Katharine created a child together,' Rihana finally said, 'if Danlo is that child, why didn't they bring him home to the City? Why didn't the Ringess and the others bring him home?'

'Well, Katharine died and the Ringess abandoned the child – that's my hypothesis.'

Danlo, who had listened in silence to this reconstruction of his personal history, suddenly touched the feather in his hair and whispered, 'Oh, Ahira, Ahira, is it true?' Even as he spoke the words, he knew it must be true. Some part of him, deep in his chest where his anima cried out in pain, recognized a kinship with Katharine the Scryer and the man whom others called Mallory Ringess. Again Danlo looked at the foto flat in his hand, and it was like looking through a window of ice into the dark, churning waters of memory. The foto's shifting colours had captured the images of six people. Danlo had eyes only for these people; the sights, sounds and smells of the world diminished into insignificance, as of an unreal city seen from very far away. While he studied the foto, remembering, a few journeymen eschatologists and masters had come up to the warming pavilion, but he ignored them. He ignored the chiming noon bells, the hushed explanations falling from lip to lip, , and the white, icy glare hard in his eyes. The brain, he remembered, is like a fine, woven cloth, a tapestry of silken synapses which filter out noise in order to concentrate on vital information. He looked at the foto. There he recognized the huge, bearded bulk of Bardo the Just. He was surprised and amused to learn that Bardo had known his father. He learned the names of two of the women, Justine Ringess and Dama Moira Ringess. They were radiant, intelligent-looking women, aunt and mother, respectively, of the Ringess. The third woman was Katharine the Scryer, she who must be his mother, his blood mother. It hurt Danlo to look at her wise, beautiful, mutilated face. (Or rather, at the image of her face.) She had no eyes because she had blinded herself as a young woman. She had done this, at her initiation as a scryer, in order to see visions of the future. Everything about her face was a study of contrast and paradox: the shimmering black hair falling over her white cheeks and neck, the eye hollows black and mysterious beneath the white plane of her forehead, the passion and calmness stamped deeply into her lips. Danlo had seen his true mother only once before, and he had no clear memory of her face. But at last he understood the story of his birth, of how he had been born laughing. Katharine the Scryer was a woman who could laugh at any pain or presentiment of doom. And he, who was indeed her son as surely as day is the child of the night, must have inherited this loveliest of all her spirit's lovely qualities.

'Mi pela lot-Mudda,' Danlo whispered. 'O blessed Mother of my blood, shantih.' Then he turned to Hanuman, tapped his finger against the foto, and asked, 'Do you know who this man is?'

Hanuman, who was holding both of his arms out stiff as he tried to keep the people away, said, 'That's Leopold Soli. He was the father of the Ringess.'

Near the centre of the foto, between Katharine and Mal-

lory Ringess, stood a man who looked enough like the Ringess to be his brother. He, too, had eyes of ice smashed deeply into the bones of his sharp browridges and his long nose. He, too, bore the family fierceness and a silent, sad look that spoke of a too-deep contemplation of life's meaning – or lack of meaning.

'What did you say his name is?' Danlo asked.

There was much shouting and shoving in the crowd around Danlo. The air was thick with burning toalache and tobacco, body smells and curses. Someone spilled a mug of coffee over Hanuman's boots, and the dark brown liquid instantly dripped down and burned holes into the ice. 'Leopold Soli,' Hanuman repeated, 'was Lord Pilot before Mallory Ringess deposed him. It's known that Lord Soli was Mallory Ringess' father.'

Pedar, whose boots were also dripping with splashed coffee, touched the foto and asked, 'You've never heard of Leopold Soli?'

'Soli,' Danlo said softly. 'Yes, I knew a man by that name.'

As he said this, the foto began to blur. The reds, whites and blacks began to lose their distinctive hues, and they ran together. As Danlo watched, the faces and images set into the foto melted into each other and dissolved into a sea of muddy brown.

'Look!' Rihana said. 'The foto is mutating. I wonder what the next scene will be?'

'It's a foto of the Alaloi expedition,' Pedar explained. 'The next scene is after Mallory Ringess and his family are sculpted. Watch this.'

Danlo couldn't help watching the transmutations occurring beneath the foto's tough, clear, outer skin. Most of the other boys and girls knew the story of the expedition to the Alaloi, of how the Ringess family had been sculpted in their bodies and faces to look like Alaloi, but for Danlo the transmutation of civilized features into those of the rugged, primitive Alaloi was a revelation. The sculpting of a modern human being into a Neanderthal is no easy thing, and yet each of the six expedition members had undergone such a sculpting in order to win the acceptance of the Devaki tribe. Bones must be steened and thickened, muscles stimulated to grow, the browridges built up like rock overhangs around the eyes. New, thicker teeth must be implanted in the jaws. When the sculpting is done, the whole face will project at a greater angle outward from the skull. Some say the Alaloi are brutish-looking, with their hairy limbs and their overwhelming, open faces. Danlo, however, had always admired the primal beauty of his adoptive brothers and sisters, even before his brain had been imprinted with the word 'primal'. He loved the way his blood mother, Katharine, looked after she had been sculpted. Out of the colours and chaos of the foto, a beautiful woman took shape and emerged. She was tall and serene, and she wore a parka made of white shagshay fur. And she was blind no longer. Into her beautiful face, new eyes had been sculpted. Her eyes were blue beyond blue, eyes he had once seen in his dreams. In truth, he had first beheld the deep blueness of her eyes looking into the bathroom mirror in Old Father's house. Looking at himself. 'But you have your mother's eyes,' Three-Fingered Soli had said to him once on a cold night of death and despair. 'Yujena oyu – eyes that see too deeply and too much.'