The Broken God (56 page)

All this Danlo saw in an instant, as he lay against Hanuman belly to belly shielding him from Lais Mohammad's busy mallet. And all the time Hanuman kicked out beneath him trying to heave Danlo off, right leg and left, the staccato of his skate blades against the ice exploding showers of snow and glittering chips, and sending through its crystalline layers secret tremors of rage and helplessness and hate. Hatred is the left hand of love, Danlo remembered, and with this thought the whole course of their future came to him in a wave of sudden inevitability, although it would be years before he could articulate this vision or see it clearly.

'Danlo, get off me!' Hanuman screamed.

One of the Stone Row novices had come up behind Lais Mohammad and was holding him, keeping him away from Danlo. Slowly, Danlo stood up and faced Lais Mohammad. He said, 'I am sorry.'

'Get back!' Lais Mohammad shouted at Danlo. He was trying to break free from the boy holding him. He twisted and grunted and raised his mallet.

Now Hanuman, too, was on his feet, shaking and furiously searching the ice for his mallet. But Danlo looked at him and said, 'Hanu, no!'

For a moment, Hanuman froze, staring at Danlo. 'Hanu, Hanu,' Danlo whispered. Lais Mohammad, too, looked at Danlo, and then a gradual calm fell over the novices on the polo field. Danlo's faithfulness to ahimsa – and his obvious love for his friend (even one so feared as Hanuman li Tosh) – shamed and gentled the boys of Stone Row and Perilous Hall. Many of them threw down their mallets. From other parts of the Ice Dome came novices, journeymen, and even four master akashics red-faced and breathless from their game of skemmer on the sled courts. One of these, Paloma the Elder, an old woman with a young face and middling-old body, chided the boys for falling into violence. She dismissed their respective protestations of innocence and accusations of culpability, saying in a fussy old voice, 'In violence, there's no beginning and no end, and you're all to blame.' She saw to it that the injured were cared for, their torn muscles rubbed with quickly absorbent enzymes, their lacerations glued shut. A few of the boys had broken bones or fractured teeth; Paloma sent these off to the cutter for surgery and implanting. As it happened, the boy whom Hanuman had clubbed in the head was not dead at all but merely concussed. He bravely called for the game to continue. The boys returned to their benches, then, to take a rest before finishing the chukka.

'Are you badly hurt?' Hanuman asked Danlo as they stood near their hallmates' blue bench. The fury had gone out of him, and he reached out to touch Danlo's sleeve. 'Do you need ice? Let's see your back, get your kamelaika off.'

When Danlo unzipped his kamelaika and pulled down the shirt, a fire burned along his back: It felt as if someone were using a hot knife to flay the flesh away from his muscles. He hunched his shoulders over, resting his elbows on his knees. In the middle of his spine, at least one of the vertebrae hurt with a quick piercing pain every time he drew in a breath. His back was a welter of broken skin, livid patches and streaks upraised against ivory that would soon run to the blue and black of deep bruises. He could not see these bruises, but he felt them seaming him from buttocks to neck.

'You do need ice,' Hanuman said. The other boys were passing around a steel pail; inside it, thirty-one icicles clanged and sloshed about. Hanuman took an icicle – a cylinder of water frozen around a wooden stick – and he rubbed it up and down over Danlo's back. 'Oh, Danlo,' he said, 'your vow of ahimsa will get you killed one day.'

'But I had to come between you!' Danlo said, and then he ground his teeth together as Hanuman rubbed in a foul-smelling ointment. 'He might have murdered you or ... you might have murdered him.'

'Do you really think I have that much courage?' Hanuman asked.

Having finished a task that obviously distressed him –Hanuman always dreaded having to view or touch any sort of wound – he glided over a few feet to the violet line marking the edge of the polo field. With his skate blade, he kicked at the ice, reaming and grinding the toe point into the hole he made. His head was bowed, but his eyes were full of light.

'Hanu, please,' Danlo said, coming over to him. 'There is a thing I must ask you.'

Hanuman looked up in both calmness and dread, but he said nothing.

'In the library, just before the warrior-poet killed himself, he said a thing.' Danlo touched the sleeve of Hanuman's kamelaika and told him, 'I cannot forget ... what the poet said about Pedar.'

'And what did he say?'

'You do not remember?'

Hanuman hesitated only a moment before answering, 'No, I can't remember.'

'The poet said that you ... murdered Pedar.'

'Murdered him? Do you really think I murdered him?'

'I ... do not want to think that you did.'

'But how could I have murdered him?'

'I do not know.'

Hanuman looked straight into Danlo's eyes, and then he did an astonishing thing. He reached down and grasped Danlo's hand as he had done in the library, and he squeezed with all his strength, so powerfully and urgently that the bones of Danlo's hand hurt with a sharp, almost breaking pain. Hanuman brought his lips up close to Danlo's ear and whispered, 'The warrior-poet was wrong. Or perhaps he lied. No one murdered Pedar but himself.'

'In truth?'

'I promise you, Danlo.'

As they clasped hands, Hanuman held himself still and tried to smile. There was a vast comfort and sincerity in this smile, but there was something else, too. Beneath the surface of finely controlled muscles and easy emotions, like a boil deep within the flesh, Hanuman's face was full of torment. He might have cried out in agony at any moment if his need for self-control were not so great.

'I think that the cetics did not heal you, not... wholly,' Danlo said. 'It is not just the ekkana drug, is it? I think it must be something ... other.'

Hanuman broke away from him and ground his skate blade against the ice. 'You're too truthful – I've said that before. You're too earnest, too curious, too ... too many things. You don't care about yourself, do you? Your self. I don't have that kind of courage – who does? The wildness, Danlo. When we first met, and I saw it in you, in both of us, I thought I had the courage for it. I don't. It will kill me, unless I kill it first. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' Danlo said. His body ached with a spreading stiffness, and he suddenly felt cold. He closed his eyes, remembering when he had first come to love the danger and the wildness of his life; it had been during the cold night that he and Soli had buried the Devaki people. Then, after a moment of prayer and remembrance, to Hanuman, he whispered, 'No, I don't want to understand.'

Hanuman looked at him and quietly said, 'I don't have your grace. The way you accept everything, even your own wildness.'

'But I do not accept... everything. This is the problem with life, for human beings. For us, Hanu, don't you see? To say "yes". This would be true courage. But I cannot, not yet, be an asarya. Everywhere I look, at Bardo, at the blessed people, even at you – everything I see shouts "No!".'

'But you're still determined to be a pilot?'

'Bardo thinks this is my best hope for saving the people.'

'The Alaloi?'

'Yes, the blessed people.'

'But that isn't the only reason you want to become a pilot, is it?'

'No.'

'You told me once that you wanted to find the centre of the universe.'

Danlo looked off into the depths of the Ice Dome. All around him was the sound of sleds rocketing across their courts and water vapour hugging the ice like a wet grey fur. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, 'I used to think of the world, of the universe ... as a great circle. The great circle of halla. Sometimes I still believe that I might journey to the centre of this circle.'

'To see the universe just as it is?'

'Yes,' Danlo said. 'The world, as most people see it, the way they live life ... it is false, a deception, a lie.'

With his skate blade Hanuman began chopping at the mound of snow he had dug up. He said, 'And that's why I'll become a cetic. I have to uncover the centre of myself. To see if it's a lie.'

'And then?'

'And then war,' Hanuman said. 'I'm at war with myself, and I need to know if I'm capable of this kind of murder.'

That was all he said to Danlo then. He might have admitted more, much more, but he was good at keeping secrets, sometimes even from himself. It is probable that he wanted to tell Danlo the full truth about his decision to become a cetic. But truth, as the Fravashi say, is multiple and complex; finding the truth is like uncovering the most perfect grain of a beach's billions of glittering sands. In truth, Hanuman never understood that marvellous quality he called wildness. Wildness is that urge, trait, sense and part of the will which recognizes one's deep self in all the elements of creation and feels the fiery signature of the universe written deep inside oneself. True wildness kills. It pulls one into consciousness of all things, deeper into life, and thus into death, for death is the left hand of life and is always as close as the next heartbeat. There are quick deaths accomplished by climbers of mountains falling from the heights, or by lost pilots seeking the impossible whose lightships fall into the centres of blue giant stars; there is the slow death of the alcohol addict, the whoremonger's diseased life and death, the autist's sad death of dreams and the mad death of neurosingers who cannot face away from the cybernetic heaven of their computers. There is the timeless, recurring death of the Alaloi hunter far out on the sea ice, out in the great loneliness, who listens to the Song of Life and enters into that mystical land called the altjiranga mitjina. And then there is the hardest death of all. To feel the fire for the infinite inside and let it burn, to die each moment and each moment be reborn from the ashes of that holy inner fire, to create oneself anew in the image of one's deepest passions and vision – this is the death and life of a man who would become a god. All Hanuman's instincts pulled him toward this fate. Only, he lacked the courage for his best possibilities; he feared his own essential wildness. And so he clung furiously to his sense of himself, to his identity, to his ideals, emotions, and awareness, to all the parts of his being that Danlo would have called merely 'face', but which Hanuman revered as precious and immutable, and would not suffer to come to harm. Other qualities he sacrificed without mercy or shame. Because he thought himself fated for the hardest of paths, he wilfully – and tragically – annihilated precisely those passions which would have made him truly great. He, born a sensitive and gentle manchild, had tried to make himself the hardest of men. He, blessed with a rare will to life and compassion for others, had twisted his love for Danlo into hatred of his tormentor, and so he had made himself murder the novice Pedar Sadi Sanat. The warrior-poet had not lied, after all; Hanuman had truly executed this murder. He had done this deed not with the imaginings of his mind's eye, but with his hands and his will and his hateful heart.

On the evening after Danlo had slashed his forehead in the Shih Grove, after Hanuman had repaired this dreadful wound, he had gone into the Farsider's Quarter, down to the Street of Smugglers. With the last of the money he had brought to Neverness, he had purchased a dreammaker. A dreammaker: a shiny black device the size of a child's heart. An array of neurologics and chips of etched diamond programmed to produce a certain image field. Dreammakers were toys for adults jaded with the everyday world; dreammakers were also pedagogic tools of the cetics, who used them to test their students' ability to distinguish the simulated from the real. Hanuman had found a different use for his dreammaker. While the other boys were asleep, he had hidden the dreammaker beneath his covers. He had lain in wait for Pedar to pay his nightly visit. And then, just as Pedar crested the stairs, when he had a clear line of sight, Hanuman had aimed the dreammaker carefully. Certain images were infused directly into Pedar's visual cortex at the back of his head. Images of Scutari mothers eating their firstborn children. Dark, writhing, bloody aliens that Hanuman created to frighten Pedar and make him fall. To kill him – Hanuman did not like to lie to himself about his own deepest purposes. He murdered to save Danlo from further torment and shame. And he murdered because the very act of murder had always been hateful to him. And most of all, he murdered because he needed to sear away the secret weakness of his soul. This was the real reason he would become a cetic. He would use the sublime and powerful cetic arts to continue the fiery work of remaking himself. At the centre of his soul where the pain was the most urgent, he might find the source of his own suffering and burn it away, utterly. All this he longed to tell Danlo, but he was afraid he would be misunderstood. And then Madhava li Shing led their thirteen remaining hall-mates onto the ice of the polo field, and the moment was lost.

'Danlo, are you coming?'

Danlo stood at the field's edge, watching Hanuman force his way to the centre of his hallmates as they skated together in swarm. Oh, Hanu, Hanu! he thought. What have you done? The light streaming down through the Dome fell over Hanuman so that his face reflected the colours of white and gold. Because Hanuman's face was so terrible to behold just then, Danlo looked down at the ice. He looked away from the truth, much as one might look away from a beautiful but doomed star for fear that it might explode. He was aware of his heart beating, strongly, quickly, pushing him moment by moment into a future that he could never quite know. And then, from deep inside himself, there came a whisper like that of the wind through a grove of shatterwood trees. He heard himself answer the dread question that he had asked, but this one time in his life he did not listen.

'Danlo, are you coming?' Hanuman called out again. 'Yes,' Danlo said. And then he skated out onto the ice to finish the game of hokkee.

All of history is man's attempt to find his proper relationship to God.