War in Heaven (58 page)

"Find some drugs for Jonathan," he told her. "Sell your pearl, if you must."

"All right, then," she said, nodding her head.

"I must say goodbye now. Please tell Jonathan that I will return soon."

"But how soon?"

"Two or three days, perhaps five — I do not know."

Tamara bent over and removed one of the whole loaves of bread from the basket. She held it towards him and said, "Please take this."

"No," he said softly, "I cannot."

"But you'll need all your strength if you're to hunt seals. You can't go without eating for five more days."

"Neither can Jonathan. Or you."

"But there might be a harvest from the food factories. Or a shipment might get through. Or — "

"Or you might have nothing more than this bread until I return."

"But without this bread, you might not return with any meat. If you're so hungry that you stumble into a crevasse or can't wait out a storm, you might not return at all."

"I will be all right."

"But if you're
not
all right, we won't be either. Didn't you once say that a hunter sometimes must eat the best food for the good of the tribe?"

"Yes — sometimes the few must die so that the tribe will live. But you and Jonathan are my tribe now, my whole tribe. If you should die, there would be no point to my hunting a seal."

"I understand," Tamara said. Then she broke off the end of one of the loaves and handed it to him. "But please take this — you should have
something
in you before you leave."

"If you'd like," Danlo said, putting the bread into the pocket of his kamelaika. "Thank you."

He embraced her, and put on his facemask and furs. He went out on to the streets where the air was so cold that he could barely stand it. All the way back to his snow house beneath the fir trees in the City Wild, his mouth watered and his belly groaned as he thought about this bread. Tomorrow early in the morning, he would make a quick breakfast of it. And then, with a little food energy brightening his veins — no less Tamara's love — he would ski out on to the ice of the sea to harpoon a beautiful animal.

In the very earliest time,
When both people and animals lived on earth,
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
And an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
And sometimes animals
And there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
Might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
And what people wanted to happen could happen —
All you had to do was say it.
Nobody can explain this;
That's the way it was.

— after Nalungiaq

At the edge of the city, where the sea meets the rocky shore, lies a collection of stone huts, wooden docks and great clary hangars known as the Quay. In good times — indeed, in all the days since the founding of Neverness except the Dark Year — the Quay had always been a place of bustle and excitement, where men and women came to borrow windjammers, catamarans, ice schooners and other craft with which to venture out on to the sea. During the time of Goshevan of Summerworld a few generations earlier, the sport of dog sledding had become popular, and so the kennels and sled runs had been added to the north of the main docks. Even in deep winter, there were always those wild spirits who relished swift motion over ice and snow and the bite of cold wind in their faces. Some loved being pulled along at great speed by a colourfully rigged schooner while others preferred the yapping and whines of a team of dogs. And so almost every morning for centuries, when the sea froze hard and fast, the people of the city had crowded the mooring slips and sled runs hoping to take a bit of pleasure for the day.

The war, however, had changed everything. As Danlo saw in the early light when he skated nearer the Quay, many of the hangars had been melted and blackened by bombs, perhaps in some raid of Benjamin Hur and his ringkeepers. All the jammers and many of the schooners had long since been misappropriated by the wormrunners using them to bring back their poached animals from the northern part of Neverness Island. The remaining ice boats sat frozen in their mooring slips, shagged with layers of snow. As for the dog sleds, Danlo found many of them intact inside one of the larger stone huts. They were neatly set out in rows, dozens of wooden frames with attached leather harnesses. And the wood was all polished, the runners waxed, the leather traces in good repair. But there were no dogs. Although Danlo searched each of the kennels one by one, it seemed that other raids by hungry people must have carried away the dogs to the cooking pots of the city's apartments and underground restaurants. This did not surprise him. In truth, he was only too happy to find usable sleds, for he had feared that he might have to make one of his own from pieces of wood scavenged from the forest and various materials that he might find in the shops near the Serpentine. That he would need
some
sort of vehicle for his private quest he had known from the moment that he had announced his intention to hunt. It would be hard enough for him to carry much further the carving flints, knives, sleeping furs, ice saw, stove, spare clothing, and all the other things that he had stowed that morning into a large nylon pack. And it would be almost impossible for him to bring back a seal without a sled with which to pull it. A fully grown seal, as he remembered, weighed hundreds of pounds, and even he in his powerful new body would not have the strength to carry one more than a few yards.

And so he chose one of the smaller sleds and dragged it outside into the cold salt air. He tied his pack and harpoon securely to the centre of the sled; his bear spear, the one that he had recently made from his old flint spearpoint and a new shatterwood sapling, he rigged more loosely in a kind of a sheath. He wanted to be able to grab it quickly at need should some wandering ice bear chance upon him. He still didn't know if he could kill
any
animal, much less a great bear with its soulful eyes and great cunning brain. But with a single spear he might transform himself from a nearly helpless prey animal into a predator that even the Old White Great Ones might fear.

It did not take him long to cut the harness and rig it so that it fitted neatly over his shoulders and chest. Although it would constrain him to be thus attached to the sled as if he were a dog, he did not think that it would be truly hard work pulling it unless he managed to kill one or more seals. Then the weight of dead muscle and bone would make the steel runners slice deeply into the snow and freeze fast if he should pause too long to catch his breath. But until that time the sledding shouldn't be too difficult. With a pole in either hand, all he had to do was to lean forwards against the harness and slide one ski ahead of the other, over and over, always pulling his light load over the smooth and hard-packed snow. If he were lucky — if the weather held clear and the snow remained fast and good — he might cover more than thirty miles in a day. He hoped that he might find the seals of the deep ocean close in to Neverness Island, for he feared that he would not have the strength for much more than a couple of days of such work, unless he chanced upon a little food with which to fire his starving body. And if he journeyed
too
far to the west with nothing to eat and found no seals (or found that he lacked the will to take up his harpoon and kill one), his situation would become critical. He might easily collapse in exhaustion, too weak to return to Neverness. Then, spear or no spear, the ice bears would sniff him out and slay him. Or the murderous west wind would fall over him like a great, cold hand crushing him to the ice. Then at last he would return to the world that had given him birth, and his plans and dreams for a golden future would come to an end out on the bitter, frozen sea.

It was very cold when he started out.
All journeys begin with the first step
, he thought. And then he remembered the coda to this saying supplied by Justine the Wise:
unless you can fly.
In the loneliness of the deserted docks, with the dead sails of the ice schooners flapping in the wind, he wished for wings so that he might simply fly over the ice with all the freedom of a thallow. He wished, too, that he might descry a dead seal lying upon the ice and magically transport it back to Neverness. But he knew that
this
journey would not be so easy. And so as he faced the dark, blue western sky and slid one ski ahead of the other, he prayed for all the courage and strength of life, which was the only true magic there was.

He travelled due west, straight into the wild. With every stroke over the cold squeaking snow, the great circle of the world opened before him and drew him closer to its centre. He stood upon the frozen ocean, and everywhere he looked, he saw this ocean. In the sky above him wispy clouds called
sirateth
lay like a white fur over the still-dark horizon. What were clouds, he wondered, if not the ocean evaporated and condensed out into the air? Behind him, in the light of the rising sun, the mountains of Neverness Island blurred into a white and indigo massif edged in flame red. The white, of course, was snow, and what was snow if not the ocean's water crystallized into lovely, six-pointed flakes and blown to the four points of the world? As the early morning wind blew soft and steady and the spindrift snow swirled over the ice in beautiful patterns, he had much time to reflect upon the great circle of water and the world, which was nothing less than the circle of life itself.

Terrible beauty.

All his life, it seemed, ever since he could remember, he had marvelled at these two aspects of life, the terrible and the beautiful. The beautiful,
halla
half of the world, lay ever before him waiting for him to reach out with his eyes and simply behold. There was a deep beauty in the way that the sun touched the sea and caused the ice to glow red like heated copper, even though the air was almost dead cold. Beautiful, too, were the iceblooms, the colonies of algae colouring the snow plum and purple and brightening to amethyst as the sun rose higher and the world began to sparkle as if made of billions of tiny jewels. By mid-morning, the sky began to show the yellowish reflection of light off the ice; these iceblinks, or
shonashin
as he had known them in his childhood, had been named because they shimmered so beautifully. It seemed to him, in looking from heaven to earth, that the world was always trying to arrange itself so that he might marvel at its beauty. But the world had other purposes, too, and with every mile that he skied away from Neverness over the endless sea, he became more aware of the terrible nature of life, the
shaida
, the way that the wind and snow and ice seemed always ready to grab him up with their cold; killing claws.

Terrible beauty.

Some miles out beneath the naked sky, he came upon huge, crystalline pyramids flung up and frozen in the sea.
Ilka-rada
he had once called these striking, turquoise ice-forms, and he marvelled at the way the world also arranged itself to kill him with such beautiful things. For if he tried to take his sled through this maze of fissures, spires, blocks and bergs, the slightest misstep might send him plunging into a crevasse or impale him on a jagged spear of ice. Here, too, in all its deadliness and
shaida
splendour, was the ocean. He felt it calling to him even as the world itself called; in the pull of gravity against his blood, he sensed that the world was always trying to reclaim itself even as the ocean sought to re-absorb its water.

Water, water, everywhere
, he thought, recalling the lines of an ancient poem.
The world is mostly water.

He himself, in his straining muscles and steamy breath, was also mostly water. In a way, he was nothing more (and nothing less) than a wave of water moving upon the surface of the ocean. After he had turned south to avoid the band of icebergs, he came across a patch of
sastrugi
, frozen waves making a rippling pattern across the ocean's ice. What, if anything, he wondered, was the essential difference between himself and these pale blue waves? Well, most obviously, he moved — but then so would the waves once midwinter spring came and the ocean's ice melted. Then even a child might apprehend the truth that a wave is the ocean and the ocean a wave. For a while, as he bumped his way across the
sastrugi
field, he consoled himself with the thought that the ocean moved according to the wind and the pull of the moons, whereas he moved himself. He had will; he might conceive of a great purpose such as the hunting of a seal, and thus will his tired limbs to push and glide, to keep moving one ski ahead of the other. As the day wore on and he began to feel faint with hunger, however, it occurred to him that he would need all his will simply to keep from lying down and freezing like one of the
sastrugi
waves. Always and for ever, he must keep the atoms of his being moving in precise patterns inside himself, whipping them with his will, for in the moment that he fell into unconsciousness of life, he would begin his journey to the other side of day.

Pain is the awareness of life
, he remembered.

It was a rule of life that the greater the awareness, the greater the pain. Certainly he had pain enough, in his body and soul, to last the rest of his life. Almost everything about him hurt. His toes and fingers stung with the cold, as did his face, even beneath a layer of grease and his black leather mask. His teeth ached fiercely, as did his left eye, with a special, stabbing pain that sometimes took his breath away. Towards mid-afternoon, after perhaps twenty miles of sledding over mostly hard-packed
safel
snow, the wind grew stronger and blew particles of spindrift pinging against his goggles. It was this icy wind, he thought, that chilled him and caused his limbs such torment. Or perhaps it was Constancio's sculptings of his deep tissues, or the ekkana drug, or simply hunger that sent streamers of fire shooting along his bones and burning through his joints. Only by dwelling on greater pains could he mute the screaming agonies of his flesh. And so he thought about Jonathan looking at him with his dark, hungry eyes and the dead eyes of all the Devaki tribe who had gone on to the other side of day. He called up burning images of all the men, women and children of the Alaloi who might be dying of a
shaida
virus at that very moment. And then he let into his heart and lungs and soul the greatest pain of all. This was just the pain of the world, the pain of all life. It lay outside him in cold white ice crystals and seabirds crying in the wind; it howled inside his blood with every cell and each carbon atom spinning in consciousness of its fate to return home.