War in Heaven (63 page)

"Jonathan," he said, softly. "It is Jonathan, yes?"

"What do you mean?"

He stood facing the door of the sleeping chamber, his nostrils opening and closing. He almost whispered, "I have smelled this before."

The smell centre of his brain, touched into life by a few powerful molecules floating in the air, triggered a cascade of memories which he had tried to forget.

"I really can't smell anything," Tamara said, looking at him. "You must have keener senses than I."

"It is the frostbite, yes? His toes. Then the drugs did not help?"

"I wasn't able to buy any, Danlo. It seems that with all the cold this winter, everyone has frozen ears or toes and has needed drugs. Pilar and I tried all the cutting shops from the Merripen Green to the Long Glissade, and even the wormrunners, those who are still doing business. No one has any drugs."

"I see."

"I gave him an herbal tea." Tamara's eyes were glazed and dull with pain, and she suddenly seemed much older than her years. "I've tried to feed him what I could and keep him warm. I even prayed for him — I've done everything I could think of."

"I know that you must have," Danlo said.

"He's been asking for you, you know. Every day — really, every hour."

"I would like to see him."

"Now?"

"Yes. Even if he is sleeping, we should wake him and feed him some blood tea as soon as it is ready."

Tamara bent her head in agreement, and she moved off to open a bag of frozen blood and prepare a pot of tea. When she had finished melting this dark, crystalline mass and mixing it with teartree paste, she poured out the steaming red liquid into a mug and then stepped towards the sleeping chamber.

"Wait," Danlo said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "You should drink this yourself. And then bring Jonathan his tea."

"No, Jonathan first — I'm not really hungry."

Danlo looked at the stark lines of her face, the sunken eyes and cheekbones standing out beneath the pale skin. Truly, he thought, she was very hungry. He said, "There is plenty of food now. You should not be afraid to eat. Please."

"All right," Tamara finally said. She drank the mug of tea, quickly, almost compulsively, blowing on it between gulps to keep from burning her mouth. And when she had finished, she poured herself another mug and would have drunk that, too, if Danlo hadn't stopped her.

"You should give you stomach some time before drinking more," he said. "Or else you will lose what you have drunk."

She nodded her head and led him into the sleeping chamber. And instantly, the smells in the room fell over Danlo like a dark, heavy cloud and choked him so that he almost vomited. Jonathan lay beneath two thick shagshay furs sleeping fitfully, curled up like a babe inside a womb. Danlo held his breath and peeled back the furs to look at his son's frostbitten toes.

Ti-anasa daivam.

As he had feared, the toes on both feet had fallen black with gangrene. And worse, the blackness had spread almost to the ankles, where bands of dark blue and streaks of red gave way to the paler, still-healthy tissues. His son's feet were rotting off his body, and they stank of decay and death.

Ti-anasa daivam.

Just then Jonathan moved his legs and moaned in his sleep, and Danlo dropped back the covers. "Jonathan, Jonathan," he whispered.

"I'm sorry," Tamara said, standing by Danlo's side. "I think I've waited too long."

"Yes," Danlo said. But there was only compassion in his voice.

"I kept hoping that I'd find a cryologist or cutter who had the drugs to heal this," she said. "And then, when it began to spread past the toes, I hoped that you'd return, with meat, of course, or any kind of food that we could give him to build up his strength before ... Oh, Danlo, I just couldn't
bear
to take him to the cutters like this. I wanted to save his toes, and now I'm afraid that he'll lose both feet. But he's so weak, he's not ready for that. I don't even want to take him outside on the streets, and I'm so afraid, Danlo, so stupidly, stupidly afraid."

She wept, then, and she and Danlo stood above the bed holding each other and watching Jonathan sleep. After a while, she began to whisper her deepest fears. She told him of a cutter down on Nirvana Street who had dealt with the results of the season's cold weather in the cruellest and crudest of ways. Even before his drugs had run out, where other treatment might have been possible, this cutter had fallen into an amputation frenzy, hacking off fingers, ears, noses and toes at the first sign of frostbite. He claimed thus to have saved many lives. But many there were who wandered about the city crippled in their limbs and missing parts of their faces. And many more, it was said, had died of infections after submitting to such horrible surgeries. As Tamara told Danlo, she feared taking Jonathan to such a cutter almost more than she feared for his life.

"There is one cutter who might be able to help him," Danlo said. "He would still have the cryonic drugs. And antibiotics and immunosols as well."

"The cutter who changed you?" Tamara quietly asked.

"Yes. And if he cannot save the feet, he can at least keep Jonathan from pain and infection."

"I can't bear for him to lose his feet."

"I know," he said, touching her face. "But after the war is over, he can always have his feet regrown."

"By your cutter?"

"No — he would ask too much money. But the Order will have to persuade the city's other cutters to restore everyone who has lost fingers or toes to frostbite."

"Won't
your
cutter ask for money to heal Jonathan's feet?"

"He might. Do you have any money?"

Tamara nodded her head and stepped into the other room for a moment. She returned carrying a bag of gold coins. "It's all I have left."

Danlo hefted the jingling coins in his hand and then tucked them into the pocket of his kamelaika. He said, "It is almost dawn. After Jonathan has had his tea, I will take him to the cutter."

"I'll come with you, then," she said.

"All right — if you'd like."

"He's my son," she said. "He's all I have."

After that, she gently shook Jonathan awake. At first, he seemed dazed and confused, the lethargy of sleep combining with the apathy of starvation. But when he saw Danlo kneeling on his bed, he smiled weakly and tried to sit up. For a moment, the furs fell back to reveal his starved body. Danlo was shocked at the changes that only seven days had wrought in his son, for he seemed little more than a skeleton covered with skin. He stared at Danlo with his sad brown eyes, the lenses of which had clouded over and the whites were discoloured with an unusual bluish hue.

"Father," he said, "you're home."

"Yes, I am home."

Danlo moved over to pull the furs around Jonathan and hold him while Tamara pressed the mug of tea to his lips. Although he was so weak and light in his body that Danlo wanted to weep, he drank the blood tea as greedily as a wolf pup sucking down his mother's milk.

"Did you kill a seal, then?" he asked after he had finished his tea. "Mama said that you went out on the sea to hunt seals."

For a while they sat there on the bed as Danlo recounted his killing of the bear. Twice, Tamara got up to pour another mug of tea for Jonathan — and for Danlo and herself. Jonathan would have drunk even more of this bloody elixir, but he seemed suddenly sick, and Danlo told him that he must wait before eating anything more. And so they waited. Danlo drew forth his flute and played a song. And when he had finished, Jonathan asked for another, and he lay all curled up listening to the music that filled the room like lovely, floating pearls. With the rising of the sun, the white curtains over the window began to glow with a deep light. Tamara stared at this reddish glow as if she dreaded the breaking of the new day. And then, while Danlo breathed into his flute and counted his heartbeats, she sighed and closed her eyes, staring inside herself. She seemed to be looking for a different kind of light that might give her strength to face the coming ordeal.

When morning finally arrived, they dressed Jonathan in his kamelaika, a tortuous task since they had to work the tight fabric up and over his swollen feet. Once, he jerked uncontrollably at the cold, and this sudden motion caused the leg zipper to scrape across his foot. He screamed, then, a soft, high, strangled sound terrible to hear. He pleaded with Tamara to let him stay in bed. So great was his fear of cutters that he grabbed at the bed's furs, refusing to leave. But Tamara told him that Danlo had found a cutter who would be gentle with him. This man, she said, had drugs that would heal his feet. At last, Jonathan let go the covers and clutched at Tamara instead. He buried his face in her breasts and murmured, "No, no, he'll hurt me — I don't want to die, Mama."

Tamara looked at Danlo in silent despair then, as she tried to blink away her tears.

"I will not let you die," Danlo said, laying his hand on Jonathan's head. "I promise."

For a long time Danlo and Jonathan looked at each other. Something bright and fiery in Danlo's eyes must have given Jonathan hope, for after that he made no further complaint as Danlo bundled him with the two bed furs, wrapping him up as snugly as a fritillary in a cocoon, and lifted Jonathan in his arms. The boy seemed as light as a bag of feathers. Although he would have to carry him a long way through the city, he wished that he was much heavier.

It was a bitter morning and really much too early to be skating about on the uncertain streets. The air smothered them like ice water, a temperature that Danlo knew as
hurdu
, a wet blue cold falling quickly to dead cold. The frozen glidderies seemed as darkly purple as a bruise. The sky itself was darkening with grey-white bands of
ilketha.
Later that day, he feared, would come the
moratetha
, the death clouds of a full winter storm. Already the wind had begun gusting from the south, driving tiny ice crystals against the windows of the shops. Danlo, dressed only in his thin kamelaika, since he did not dare to wear his blood-stained furs in the daylight, should have been very cold. But the heat of Jonathan close against him and his own intense inner fire kept him from shivering. Even so, Tamara insisted on stopping at a clothing shop down on Silver Street, one of the few free ones that were still open. Tamara, who was always wiser in the ways of money than Danlo, paid the shopkeeper a small bribe to dig out a fine shagshay fur that he had hidden at the back of the store. The thick white fur would keep Danlo warm and, almost as important, keep any passerby from wondering who would be skating about the city almost naked in a black kamelaika.

They made the journey down the Serpentine to the Ashtoreth District without incident. Despite the many layers of fur wrapped around Jonathan, somewhere near the Winter Ring he began shivering from the cold. He lay quietly in Danlo's arms trying not to cry out when Danlo hit a sudden bump in the ice or shifted to adjust his weight, looking up at Danlo with an almost infinite trust brightening his clouded eyes.

On almost every street, it seemed, smoke issued from the plasma ovens burning the bodies of those who had died during the night. Although Danlo covered Jonathan's face against the taint of charred flesh and burnt blood, the boy couldn't help trembling with fear. Danlo felt close to trembling himself, with fear for Jonathan, and with love. He felt his own feet all warm and quick with life; if he could have pulled them from his boots and sawed them off to save Jonathan's feet, he would have. But in the end, each of us must bear the pain of life alone, no matter that there are those who would suffer with us. In the end, all Danlo could do was to skate, to hold Jonathan close to him and pray that he would choose some other morning to make the journey to the other side of day.

When they turned on to the Street of Mansions, Tamara gave a start of recognition, for she had once lived in a fine house just off the nearby Long Glissade. In truth, her mother and many of her brothers and sisters still lived there — and hundreds of her cousins and her greater family lived in the surrounding neighbourhoods. They were all astriers and good Architects of one of the Cybernetic Reformed Churches. And they had all turned away from Tamara; when she had left her family to become a courtesan, they had disseized her, formally denying her bread, salt, wine and communion with any of the Church's holy computers. To them, it was as if she had never been born. She was less than dead — as was her son and any other children she might ever bear.

"I went to my mother," Tamara said as they glided down the tree-lined street. "When the hunger began, I begged her for food — you might not know it, but the Church asks all astriers to keep a seven-year store of food. Most keep less than a year's worth, but my mother is the
Worthy
Victoria One Ashtoreth, and she always followed the eight duties so terribly strictly. There's
plenty
of food in her house. I know. But my mother wouldn't even open the door for me. Or for her own grandson. She pretended not to see us. Oh, Danlo, how can anyone be so cruel?"

But Danlo had no answer for her. She seemed lost in her memories, and her usually soft, brown eyes had fallen almost bright black with anger. In the face of her deep pride, it was astonishing that she had gone to her mother for help. Only her love (and fear) for Jonathan could have driven her to such a desperate act. Hers was truly a deep, deep love, pure and elemental; gazing into her darkly savage eyes just then was like looking through cracks in the ice down through layers of rock into the fiery heart of the world. As he watched her skating in step by his side, all the while stealing fiercely adoring glances at Jonathan, he thought that she would do almost anything to keep him from harm. Where he had killed a bear for Jonathan, she might possibly slay another human being in defence of his life. Certainly, she would die for him; as Danlo felt the weight of her son pressed up against his own heart, he marvelled once again at the terrible and beautiful power of love.

Ti-anasa daivam.

At last they came to Constancio of Alesar's house, with its surrounding wall and shiny steel gate. Danlo banged his fist against the steel bars, and a harsh grating sound rang out on to the street. He waited a few moments and then knocked again. After a while the tall blond guard whom Danlo had befriended during his previous visits came out of the nearby warming pavilion. He seemed irritable and tired. He skated up to the gate with his hands held out as if to shoo them away. But when he saw Danlo's familiar facemask and the eyes that stared out at him from beneath it, he frowned a moment, and then smiled.