The Broken God (86 page)

Had Danlo sailed to Avisalia in false winter, it is likely that he would have been greeted by hungry gulls circling above his head and crying out their raucous cries. Had he gone crunching across the tidal flats in search of palpulve pearls, it is also likely that the wormrunners would have greeted him with laser fire or quick diamond knives slipped between his ribs. But he came to the island's north shore in the deepest part of deep winter, when all the world was frozen and peaceful. His journey from Neverness had taken less than a day. A hundred feet from the beach, he struck his sail and anchored his schooner onto long screws that he twisted into the ice. He erected his heated tent. Out of nostalgia for his youth, he considered building a snow hut to sleep in, but he had no ice saw for the cutting of snow blocks, nor did he have the tools to make such a saw. In truth, a heated tent was much roomier and more comfortable than any snow hut, and so he hauled his sleeping furs inside his tent, and he spent the night listening to the clary fabric flapping in the wind and to the gulls calling to each other on the cliffs high above the beach. The next morning, he ate a cold, quick breakfast of cheese and flat bread, and went to work.

Onto a small red sled, the kind a child might use to slide down a snowy hillside, he lashed his shovel, buckets, heat gun, knives, and other gear. He faced south, toward the cliffs where the gulls roosted. Their cries rose high on the morning wind. He could see them at the edge of the island, thousands of little white specks against the broken rocks. He counted ninety-thousand of them before he gave up and began surveying the cliffs. The cliffs were a dark grey wall that ran along the beach for two miles. Above the cliffs there were snowfields and shatterwood forests and the dark blue sky. He looped a rope around his mittens and pulled the sled straight for the cliffs. He pulled it across frozen waves and thick-ribbed snow. Below him, beneath twelve feet of ice, were millions of palpulve, hibernating through the winter. He might have chopped through this ice and brought them up in buckets; he might have used his knife to cut them open, but that would have killed them, and this he could not do. From his early years of watching sea birds, he knew of another way of finding pearls. He pulled his sled across the shoreline, up across the frozen sands and dune scarp. Now he was closer to the foot of the cliffs, and now the screaming of the gulls drowned out all other sound. Despite the bitter cold, the rich nitrogen smell of bird droppings was overpowering. There were droppings everywhere. The whitish guano was spattered over rocks, and streaked against the cliff face, and piled up in great stinking mounds many feet thick. Up and down the beach, there were miles of guano mounds that had accumulated in layers over the years. The topmost layer was as thin as a sheet of skin; it was moist and slimy, and it was being laid down by the birds above him even as he stood there. Fresh bird droppings fell over him like warm rain, smearing his furs, spattering the lenses of his goggles. He dragged his sled across the mounds, and his boots made a squelch-squirch sound as the gooey new guano sucked at them and made for perilous walking. Closer to the base of the cliffs, he picked up his shovel and began digging. He cleared away the surface droppings to reveal the permanently frozen guano below. He used his heatjet to thaw this guano, layer after layer, and he dug it up and sieved through it for the pearls. Over the next two days he found many pearls. He filled his buckets with them. Each of these pearls had passed through the gizzard and vent of a palpulve-eating gull. Most of them were of poor quality, too small or misshapen or scoured by the stomach acids of the gulls. He examined and discarded 1,038 pearls before he found one that he liked. After cleaning this pearl with fresh snow, he held it up to the sunlight. It was a large pearl the size of his thumb-tip; it was of an iridescent, purplish-grey colour that the Alaloi call lila. It was not a perfect pearl, neither perfectly round nor uniform in hue. The Alaloi mistrust perfection in pearls; perfect pearls they find coldly beautiful but uninteresting. Danlo's pearl was shaped like a teardrop and in various places around its smooth surface it gleamed with soft pink undertones. 'As the jewellers in the Diamond District say, it was 'the kind of pearl you can look into forever and it will never end'.

After looking at it through most of an afternoon, he decided that he had found his pearl. He used a laser drill then, to burn a tiny hole through the narrowest part of it. Through this hole he threaded strands of his long black hair that he had plucked from his head and twisted into a string. He cemented the ends of the string together with some shaving glue, and when he had finished, he had a pearl pendant that Tamara might slip over her head and wear around her neck. He dropped the pendant into a silk bag, the kind that Bardo employed to distribute strands of toalache or triya seeds. He pulled tight the bag's drawstrings and put it in his pocket. And then he prepared to return to Neverness.

His journey back across the ice was uneventful, though it took him two full days. The wind blew mostly from due north and he had to tack against it, beating northeast or northwest, or sometimes due west when the wind shifted suddenly. He paused once to explore a tiny, nameless island equidistant between Avisalia and Neverness. On this island he came across the naked white bones of a walrus washed up on the rocky beach. He was lucky enough to find one of the walrus' tusks whole and undamaged. He scavenged this tusk and stowed it in his schooner. The best part of his expedition had been the rediscovery of his natural passion for making things. The moment that he saw the tusk, he devised a plan to carve it, into rings and a pipe and animal sculptures, and most of all, into an ivory chess piece to replace the missing god in Hanuman's set. It was his hope that he might heal the wounds in their friendship by giving him a gift that he had made himself. And so he returned to the City, full of his success and dreams of the future. He burned his ruined furs and spent half a day in the hot pool of his dormitory, cleaning himself of guano and showing the pearl pendant to his friends. After sleeping for a night and half the next day, he made arrangements to visit Tamara late in the following afternoon.

He met her in her tea room, where they sat together as she served him coffee and grilled breads. It had been a day of bright, clear air and high spirits and sunlight streaming golden through the windows. Tamara basked in the last of this sunlight, naked as an animal, with only her long golden hair covering her. She liked to watch the play of the light rays through her lace curtains as the sun fell slowly into the west.

'I have been away from the City these past days,' Danlo said to her.

'In the lightship of yours that you call The Snowy Owl? Have you taken it into the manifold?'

'No,' he said, 'I took a schooner out onto the sea.' He quickly told her of his journey, and then he pulled his silk bag from his pocket and set it on the table. 'I have brought you something ... to wear around your neck.'

She picked up the bag and used her long fingernails to tease open the drawstring. She spilled the pearl pendant into her hand, and her eyes jumped with light as she looked at it. 'Oh, it's very beautiful!' she said. 'I've never seen such a beautiful pearl.'

She looked at him and smiled, and then they were both laughing together as if they had just tasted some new, euphoric drug. She held the black pearl in her hand, and the contrast it made with her ivory skin was striking.

'It should slip over your head,' Danlo said to her. 'I made the string long ... so that it would slip over easily.'

'I can see it's thoughtfully designed,' she said. She rubbed her finger up and down the shiny string.

'I made the string ... with my own hair. It is a custom of the Alaloi.'

'It's beautiful,' she said. She reached out to stroke the hair on his head. 'I suppose I guessed that you made it that way. You have such beautiful hair, so long and thick. I've always thought that hair like yours shouldn't be wasted on a man.'

'Someday I might be old and bald,' he said. 'But if I have a wife ... she would still wear this pearl.'

Tamara smiled as she set the pendant atop the table, next to her coffee pot. She stood up and said, 'I've something to show you.' She stepped into her meditation room, for a moment, and then returned carrying a long, flat shatterwood box. It was hinged at the back, and it opened like a palpulve shell. This came for me this morning,' she said. 'I thought you might like to see it.'

Danlo took the box and sat looking at her.

'Why don't you open it, please?'

He opened the box and peered inside. There, against a padding of black velvet, was a necklace of creamy pearls. The pearls were graded by size and matched by colour, and each pearl was a work of perfect symmetry. There were thirty-three pearls along a strand of platinum. Danlo knew nothing about modern jewellery, but he suspected that the necklace must be very valuable.

'They are ... splendid,' he said.

'They're Gilada pearls,' she said.

Of all the pearls of the Civilized Worlds, Gilada pearls are the most prized. They are fabricated on the artificial world of Gilada, which lies at the edge of the Vild. They are assembled molecule by molecule in a vacuum without light or sound or any vibration. There, deep in space where there is no gravity to deform the iridescent nacre as it is layered down around a single seed molecule, the Gilada jewellers make perfectly spherical pearls. The making of a single pearl can take more than a year. Gilada pearls are famed for their perfect beauty, but also because no one except the perfectly rich can afford them.

'This must have come from a merchant-prince,' Danlo said.

'No, I've never consorted with Trians,' she said. 'It's from Hanuman.'

'Hanuman! Hanuman ... li Tosh? But how could he get the money to buy such pearls?'

'I don't know,' she said.

Danlo rubbed his finger over the largest of Hanuman's pearls, accidentally leaving skin oils to smear its perfect surface. 'It is a remarkable coincidence that Hanuman sent you these pearls ... this morning.'

'Did you tell him you were going to give me a pearl?'

'I never ... talked to him. We do not talk any more. But I showed the pearl to my friends. It is possible one of them told him.'

'Then there's the secret of your coincidence.'

'Yes, it must be. But why would Hanuman give you pearls?'

'Well, he's been wooing me since the night we met.'

'Wooing you ... to marry?'

'I don't think so. But there are many ways of wooing, you know.'

'The night at the party, do you remember?' Danlo said. 'The way Hanuman looked at you – it was obvious that he burned for you.'

'Oh, the poor incandescent man!'

'You say that so coldly.'

'Do I? I don't mean to.'

'You do not like Hanuman very much, I think.'

'It's not true that I don't like him,' she said. She looked down at the box that Danlo was holding, at the strand of pearls. 'I'm afraid of him.'

'Because he is a cetic?'

'Because he's so controlled,' she said. 'I've never known anyone to have such control of himself.'

'But the cetics strive to master all their emotions. All their thoughts ... what they call their programs.'

'It seems he's succeeded too well.'

'Perhaps he only wants people to think that.'

'And people do,' she said.

'Hanuman has his passions like anyone else. But the greater the passion ... the greater the need for control.'

'Do you remember what he said during the sermon?

"Only by becoming fire will we ever be free from burning". I don't think his passion is women, not any more.'

Danlo smiled to himself, and he thought that he understood a thing about her. He saw her as a completely beautiful woman, the kind of woman who had always commanded the affections of men. Such women, he supposed, naturally mistrusted any man over whom they had no sexual hold. That Hanuman could cut himself off at will from all sexual desire must have horrified her and insulted her sense of her own special powers.

'You would never consider making a contract with him, then?'

'Oh, I've considered it,' she said. 'A courtesan has to consider such things, even if it's quite impossible that she'd ever carry through with such considerations.'

'Of all the men in Neverness,' Danlo said, 'who else has need of your art as Hanuman does?'

'Aren't you jealous of him even slightly?'

Danlo smiled and shook his head. 'When I was a boy, my found-father taught me that jealousy is shaida. It poisons the soul.'

'But Hanuman is so dead inside. He's all coldness and ashes.'

'You could wake him up,' Danlo said. 'Make him alive again, yes?'

Tamara tapped her fingernail against the rim of her coffee cup. She seemed to be contemplating the patches of light that floated atop the coffee's dark surface. 'You must love him very much, to say such a thing.'

'I love him ... as I would love my brother,' Danlo said.

'Would you give me away so easily?'

'When an Alaloi hunter visits another tribe,' Danlo said, 'often he must leave his wife at home. He makes his journey across the ice, alone, many miles and many days. When he arrives at his destination, he is cold and hungry. Often, one of his near-brothers will lend him his wife for a few nights. To warm him inside and ease his hunger.'

'But we're not Alaloi,' she said. 'At least, I'm not.'

'No, that is true.'

'And I'm not yours to give.'

'Even among the Alaloi,' he admitted, 'the wife must make a gift of herself, or else the hunter must bear the cold.'

'I could never give myself to Hanuman,' she said. 'Any other man, but not him.'

Danlo rapped his knuckles against the wooden box that Hanuman had sent her. He looked at the necklace of Gilada pearls, glittering in the light. He said, 'Then you will send back the pearls?'

'I wish I could,' she said. She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. 'I wish things could be so simple.'

'Is it that you do not want to wound his heart?'

'Oh, I think his emotional organs are beyond such delicacy.'