The Broken God. David Zindell

steamy breath, and said, ‘The stars are eyes of the Old Ones. Even a child knows that.’

      ‘No, the stars are … something other.’

      ‘Does the Song of Life tell of the stars?’

      Soli coughed deeply a few times; it seemed that he might begin gasping again. ‘Yes, the Song of Life, but that is only one song, the song of our people. There are other songs. The stars shine with eyelight, yes, but that is just a metaphor. A symbol, like the symbols for numbers we used to draw in the snow. There is an otherness about the stars that I … I must tell you.’

      ‘Please, sir.’

      ‘This will be hard to explain.’

      ‘Please.’

      Soli sighed, then said, ‘Each star is like Sawel, the sun. A burning, a fusion of hydrogen into light. Five hundred billion fusion fires in this galaxy alone. And the galaxies … so many. Who could have dreamed the universe would make so many?’

      Danlo pressed his knuckles against his forehead. He felt sick inside, dizzy and disoriented. Once, when he was eight years old, he and Haidar had been caught out on the sea in a morateth. The sky had closed in, white and low over the endless whiteness of the ice. After ten days, he hadn’t been able to distinguish right from left, up from down. Now he felt lost again, as if a morateth of the spirit were crushing him under.

      ‘I do not understand.’

      ‘The stars are like fires burning across space. Across the black, frozen sea. Men can cross from star to star in boats called lightships. Such men – and women – are called pilots. Your father was a pilot, Danlo.’

      ‘My father? My blood father? What was his name?’ He took Soli’s hand and whispered, ‘Who is my blessed father?’

      But Soli didn’t seem to hear him. He began to speak of things that Danlo couldn’t comprehend. He told of the galaxy’s many wonders, of the great black hole at the core, and of that brilliant, doomed region of the galaxy called the Vild. Human beings, he explained, had learned to make stars explode into supernovae; even as they spoke together, beneath the dying sky, ten thousand spheres of light were expanding outward to the ends of the universe. ‘So many stars,’ Soli said, ‘so much light.’

      Danlo, of course, couldn’t comprehend that this wild starlight would eventually reach his world and kill all of the plants and animals on Icefall’s surface. He knew only that Soli was dying, and seeing visions of impossible things.

      ‘Sir, who is my father?’ he repeated.

      But now Soli had lapsed into a private, final vision, and his words made no sense at all. ‘The rings,’ Soli forced out. ‘The rings. Of light. The rings of eternity, and I … I, oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!’

      Quite possibly he was trying to tell Danlo that he was his grandfather, but he failed, and soon his lips fell blue and silent, and he would never utter any words again.

      ‘Soli, Soli!’

      Again, Soli began gasping for air, and very soon he stopped breathing altogether. He lay still with his eyes fixed on the stars. Danlo was surprised at how quickly he had died.

      ‘Soli, mi alasharia la shantih Devaki.’

      How many times, Danlo wondered, had he said that prayer? How many times must he say it again?

      He closed Soli’s eyes and kissed them. ‘Shantih, Soli, may your spirit find the way to the other side.’

      Then the enormity of all that had occurred during the past days overwhelmed him. He jumped up and threw off his fur, standing naked to the world. ‘No!’ he cried out. ‘No!’ But there was no one to listen to him. The fires had burnt low, dim orange glimmerings lost into the blackness of night. It was very cold. He watched the fires die, and he began to shiver violently. ‘No,’ he whispered, and the wind stole the breath from his lips and swept it away. His body hurt so urgently that he welcomed numbness, but next to the pain of his spirit, it was almost nothing. How would he live now, he wondered, what would he do? He had been cut, and part of him had died, and so he was no longer of the onabara, the once-born children. But until he completed his passage, he would remain unfinished, like a spearpoint without an edge; he would never be of the diabara, the twice-born men. And because he knew that only a twice-born man who had learned the whole Song of Life could be wholly alive, he almost despaired.

      Later that night, above the cave, he buried Soli with the others. After he had hefted the last frozen boulder onto his grave, he prayed. ‘Soli, pela ur-padda, mi alasharia, shantih.’ He pressed his eyes hard before shaking his head and crying out, ‘Oh, Ahira, what shall I do?’

      He fell into the dreamtime, then, and the wind through the trees answered him. There was a rush of air carrying the deep-throated hooing of the snowy owl. It was Ahira, his other-self. Perched high on a yu tree’s silvery branch, across the snow-covered graveyard, Ahira was looking through the darkness for him.

      ‘Ahira, Ahira.’

      The owl’s snowy round head turned toward him. His eyes were orange and black, wild and infinitely wise.

      ‘Danlo, Danlo.’ The owl turned his head again, and there was a shimmer of starlight off his eyes. And Danlo suddenly beheld a part of the circle of halla: the World-soul did not intend for him to join the Patwin tribe, nor any other tribe of the islands to the west. Who was he to bear the taint of shaida to his uncles and cousins? No, he would not burden his people with such unspeakable sorrows. No matter how badly he needed to hear the whole Song of Life, his future and his fate did not lie in that direction.

      I must journey east, he thought. I must go to the Unreal City alone.

      Somehow he must make the impossible journey to the city called Neverness. And someday, to the stars. If the stars really were fusion fires burning in the night, they were part of a vast, larger world that must know halla, too.

      To Ahira, he solemnly bowed his head. ‘Mi alasharetha,’ Danlo said, praying for that part of himself that had died. ‘Shantih.’

      Then he turned his back to the wind and wept for a long time.

CHAPTER TWO

       Danlo the Wild

       The organism is a theory of its environment.

      – Walter Wiener, Holocaust Century Ecologist

      It took Danlo nine days to prepare for his journey. Five days he spent in his snowhut, recovering from his cutting. He begrudged every day of it because he knew that the sledding across the eastern ice would be dangerous and long. According to Soli’s stories, the Unreal City lay at least forty days away – perhaps more. Since it was already 82nd day in deep winter, he couldn’t hope to reach the City until the middle of midwinter spring. And midwinter spring was the worst season for travel. Who could say when a fierce sarsara, the Serpent’s Breath, would blow in from the north, heralding many days of blizzard? If the storms delayed his crossing too long, he might be stranded far out on the Starnbergersee when false winter’s hot sun came out and melted the sea ice. And then he and his dogs would die. No, he thought, he must find the City long before then.

      And so, when he deemed himself healed, he went out to hunt shagshay. Skiing through the valleys below Kweitkel was now very painful, since every push and glide caused his membrum to chafe against the inside of his trousers. Pissing could be an agony. The air stung the exposed red tip of his membrum whenever he paused to empty himself. Even so he hunted diligently and often because he needed a lot of meat. (Ice fishing through a hole in the stream’s ice would have been an easier source of food, but he found that the fatfish were not running that year.) He cut the meat and scant blubber into rations; he sealed the rich blood into waterproof skins; he entered the cave and raided the winter barrels of baldo nuts. Into