The Broken God. David Zindell

with his face pressing his mat, shivering beyond control. If he didn’t give up and seek shelter soon he would surely die. But Hanuman didn’t look as if he were ready to give up. The hard straw had cut parallel marks into his forehead and cheek; his eyes were open to the light of the flame globes shining at the edge of the Square. Such eyes he had, a pale blue burning as the hellish blinkans in the sky burned, strangely and with terrible intensity. Something terrible and beautiful inside Hanuman was holding him to his mat, keeping him coughing in the cold. Danlo could almost see this thing, this pure, luminous will of Hanuman’s beyond even the will to life. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and something brilliant and beautiful about Hanuman’s spirit attracted him, just as a fritillary is compelled to seek a woodfire’s fatal light.

      ‘Hanuman!’ he whispered. He couldn’t help himself. The urge to speak to this wilful boy before he died was greater than his fear of being dismissed as a petitioner. He had a strange, overwhelming feeling that if he could somehow see the true Hanuman, he would learn everything about shaida and halla. Waiting until none of the novices was near, he whispered again, ‘Hanuman, it is best not to touch your head to the ice. The ice, even through the mat – it is very cold. Colder than the air, yes?’

      Through his chattering teeth, Hanuman forced out, ‘I’ve … never … been so cold.’

      Danlo looked around him. Most of the nearby mats were empty, and those few petitioners who were within listening distance were curled up like dogs and seemed to be asleep. He pitched his voice low and said, ‘I have seen too many people go over. And you, you will go over soon, I think, unless you –’

      ‘No, I won’t quit!’

      ‘But your life,’ Danlo whispered, ‘to keep it warm and quick, your life is –’

      ‘My life’s worth nothing unless I can live it as I must!’

      ‘But you do not know how to live … in the cold.’

      ‘I’ll have to learn, then, won’t I?’

      Danlo smiled into the darkness. He squeezed the cold bamboo shaft of the shakuhachi and said, ‘Can you wait a little longer? It will be morning soon. False winter nights are short.’

      ‘Why are you talking to me?’ Hanuman suddenly wanted to know. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being caught?’

      ‘Yes,’ Danlo said in a soft voice. ‘I know we should not be talking.’

      ‘You’re different from the others.’ Hanuman swept his arm in an arc, waving at the motionless petitioners slumped down on their mats. ‘Look at them, asleep on the most important night of their lives. None of them would take such a chance – you’re not like them at all.’

      Danlo touched Ahira’s feather and thought back to the night of his passage into manhood. ‘It is hard to be different, yes?’

      ‘It’s hard to have a sense of yourself. Most people don’t know who they are.’

      ‘It is as if they were lost in a sarsara,’ Danlo agreed. ‘But it is hard to see yourself, the truth. Who am I, after all? Who is anyone?’

      Hanuman coughed wickedly, then laughed. ‘If you can ask that question, you already know.’

      ‘But I do not really know anything.’

      ‘And that’s the deepest knowledge of all.’

      They looked at each other knowingly and broke into soft laughter. Immediately, though, their laughter died when a novice clacked across the Square ten rows behind them. As they waited for him to pass, Hanuman blew on his hands and began shivering again.

      When it seemed safe, Danlo asked, ‘You would risk your life to enter the Academy?’

      ‘My life?’ Hanuman rasped out. ‘No, I’m not as ready to die as you seem to think.’

      He coughed for a while, then Danlo asked, ‘Did you journey here to become a pilot? It is my fate to be a pilot, I think.’

      ‘Your fate?’

      ‘I have dreamed of being …’ Danlo began, and then fell silent. ‘I … I have always wanted to be a pilot.’

      ‘I also,’ Hanuman said. ‘To be a pilot, to interface with the ship’s computer, this continual vastening the pilots are allowed – that’s the beginning of everything.’

      ‘I had not thought of it that way.’ Danlo looked up at the Wolf and Thallow constellations and the other stars, and said, simply, ‘I will become a pilot so I can journey to the centre of the Great Circle, to see if the universe is halla or shaida.’

      He closed his eyes and pressed his cold thumbs against his eyelids. To see the universe as it really is and say ‘yes’ to that truth, as man and as asarya – how could he explain his dream to anyone? In truth, the Alaloi are forbidden to reveal their nighttime dreams or visions, so how could he tell Hanuman that he had dreamed of becoming an asarya?

      ‘What is this word “halla” that you keep using?’ Hanuman asked.

      Danlo listened to the wind rise and whoosh between the buildings. It fell over him, and he began to shiver. Despite his discomfort, he loved the chill of the wind against his face, the way it carried in the sea smells and a feeling of freedom. How exhilarating it was to talk long past midnight with such an aware, new friend! How reckless to talk beneath the novice’s ears with only the wind for cover! Suddenly, the utter strangeness of kneeling on a scratchy mat and waiting with three thousand other freezing boys and girls was too much. He found himself telling Hanuman about the death of his parents and his journey to Neverness. He tried to tell him about the harmony and beauty of life, then, but he found that the simple Alaloi concepts he had been taught sounded trite and naive when translated into civilized language. ‘Halla is the cry of the wolf when he calls to his brothers and sisters,’ he said. ‘And it is halla that the stars should shine at night when the sun falls beneath the mountains. Halla is the way … the way false winter takes away the cold, and the way false winter dies into the colder seasons so the animals do not become too many and crowd the ice. Halla is … oh, blessed halla! It is so fragile when you try to define it, like crossing morilka, the death ice. The greater weight you give it, the more likely it is to break. Halla is. Sometimes, lately, I think of it as pure isness. A way of simply being.’

      Hanuman pressed his lips together as he turned his face away from the wind and tried not to cough. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you before,’ he marvelled. ‘To cross a thousand miles of ice looking for something you call halla – and to do it alone!’

      ‘Old Father warned me that if I told anyone, they might not believe me. You will not … tell anyone else?’

      ‘Of course I won’t. But you should know, I believe you.’

      ‘Yes?’

      Hanuman stared at the feather in Danlo’s hair, then coughed and said, ‘Danlo the Wild – you look a little wild. And the way you see things, so wild. I’ll have to think about what you’ve said. Especially about being. Can it be enough just to be? I’ve always dreamed of becoming.’

      ‘Becoming … what?’

      ‘Becoming more,’ Hanuman said.

      While Hanuman bent low with another coughing fit, Danlo touched the shakuhachi’s ivory mouthpiece with his lips. ‘But Hanu,’ he said, impulsively inventing a diminutive form of his name. He reached over and touched the boy’s forehead. It was burning hot. ‘Hanu, Hanu, you are not becoming. You are dying.’

      ‘No, that’s silly,’ Hanuman said hoarsely. ‘Please don’t say that.’

      After that, he lost his voice and began coughing in great breaking waves. Danlo wondered why the novices or Bardo the Just, who strolled among the petitioners from time to time, didn’t take this unfortunate, dying boy inside somewhere to heal him.