The Broken God. David Zindell
beyond the dark edge of the world. Five years ago, it had been born as a speck of golden light; for five years it had slowly grown outward, opening up into space like a fireflower. The various golden hues flowed and changed colour as he watched; they rippled and seemed alive with pattern and purpose. And then he had an astonishing thought, astonishing because it happened to be true: Perhaps the Golden Flower really was alive. If men could journey past the stars, he thought, then surely other living things could as well, things that might be like flowers or birds or butterflies. Someday, if he became a pilot, he must ask these strange creatures their names and tell them his own; he must ask them if they ached when the stellar winds blew cold or longed to join the great oceans of life which must flow outward toward the end of the universe, that is, if the universe came to an end instead of going on and on forever.
O blessed God! he prayed, how much farther was the Unreal City? What if he missed it by sledding too far north or south? Haidar had taught him to steer by the stars, and according to the stories, the Unreal City lay due east of Kweitkel. He looked off into the east, out across the starlit seascape. The drift ice and snowfields gleamed faintly; dunes of new snow rose up in sweeping, swirling shapes, half in silver-white and half lost in shadow. It was very beautiful, the cold, sad, fleeting beauty of shona-lara, the beauty that hints of death. Now the midwinter storms would blow one after the other, and snow would smother the iceblooms, which would die. And the snowworms would starve, and the sleekits – those who weren’t quick enough to flee to the islands – would starve, too. The birds would fly to miurasalia and the other islands of the north, because very soon, after the storms were done, the harsh sun would come out, and there would be no more snow or ice or starvation because there would be nothing left to starve.
Later that day, at first light, he went out to hunt seals. Each hooded seal – or ringed or grey seal – keeps many holes open in the sea ice; the ice of the sea, east and west, is everywhere pocked by their holes. But the holes are sometimes scarce and irregularly spaced. Snow always covers them, making them hard to find. Danlo leashed his best seal dog, Siegfried, and together they zigzagged this way and that across the pearl grey-snow. Siegfried, with his keen nose, should have been able to sniff out at least a few seal holes. But their luck was bad, and they found no holes that day. Nor the next day, nor the day after that. On the forty-third morning of his journey, Danlo decided that he must sled on, even though now he only had baldo nuts to eat and the dogs had nothing. It was a hard decision. He could stay and hope to find seals by searching the ice to the north. But if he wasted too many days and found no seals, the storms would come and kill him. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he said aloud, to the sky, ‘where will I find food?’ This time, however, his doffel didn’t answer him, not even in silence. He knew that although the snowy owl has the most far-seeing eyes of any animal, his sense of smell is poor. Ahira could not tell him what to do.
And so Danlo and his dogs began to starve in earnest. Even though he had eaten well all his life, he had heard many stories about starvation. And instinctively, he knew what it is like to starve – all men and animals do. When there is no food, the body itself becomes food. Flesh falls inward. The body’s various tissues are burnt like seal blubber inside a sac of loose, collapsing skin, burnt solely to keep the brain fresh and the heart beating a while longer. All animals will flee starvation, and so Danlo sledded due east into another storm, which didn’t last as long as the first storm, but lasted long enough. Bodi was the first dog to die, probably from a stroke fighting with Siegfried over some bloody, frozen wrappings he had given them to gnaw on. Danlo cut up Bodi and roasted him over the oilstone. He was surprised at how good he tasted. There was little life in the lean, desiccated meat of one scrawny dog, but it was enough to keep him and the remaining dogs sledding east into other storms. The snows of midwinter spring turned heavier and wet; the thick, clumpy maleesh was hard to pull through because it froze and stuck to the runners of the sled. It froze to the fur inside the dogs’ paws. Danlo tied leather socks around their cracked, bleeding paws, but the famished dogs ate them off and ate the scabs as well. Luyu, Noe, and Atal each died from bleeding paws, or rather, from the black rot that sets in when the flesh is too weak to fight infection. In truth, Danlo helped them over with a spear through the throat because they were in pain, whining and yelping terribly. Their meat did not taste as good as Bodi’s, and there was less of it. Kono and Siegfried would not eat this tainted meat, probably because they no longer cared if they lived or died. Or perhaps they were ill and could no longer tolerate food. For days the two dogs lay in the snowhut staring listlessly until they were too weak even to stare. That was the way of starvation: after too much of the flesh had fallen off and gone over, the remaining half desired nothing so much as reunion and wholeness on the other side of day.
‘Mi Kono eth mi Siegfried,’ Danlo said, praying for the dogs’ spirits, ‘alasharia-la huzigi anima.’ Again, he brought out his seal knife and butchered the dead animals. This time he and Jiro ate many chunks of roasted dog, for they were very hungry, and it is the Alaloi way to gorge whenever fresh meat is at hand. After they had finished their feast, Danlo cut the remaining meat into rations and put it away.
‘Jiro, Jiro,’ he said, calling his last dog over to him. With only the two of them left, the little snowhut seemed too big.
Jiro waddled closer, his belly bulging and distended. He rested his head on Danlo’s leg and let him scratch his ears.
‘My friend, we have had forty-six days of sledding and twenty-two days of storm. When will we find the Unreal City?’
The dog began licking his bleeding paws, licking and whining. Danlo coughed and bent over the oilstone to ladle out some hot dog grease melting in the pot. It was hard for him to move his arms because he was very tired, very weak. He rubbed his chest with the grease. He hated to touch his chest, hated the feel of his rib bones and wasted muscles, but everyone knew that hot grease was good for coughing fits. It was also good for frostbite, so he rubbed more grease over his face, over those burning patches where the dead, white skin had sloughed off. That was another thing about starvation: the body burnt too little food to keep the tissues from freezing.
‘Perhaps the Unreal City was just a dream of Soli’s; perhaps the Unreal City does not exist.’
The next day, he helped Jiro pull the sled. Even though it was lighter, with only twelve food packets stowed among the ice saw, sleeping furs, hide scraper, oilstone, it was still too heavy. He puffed and sweated and strained for a few miles before deciding to throw away the hide scraper, the spare carving wood and ivory, and the fishing lines. He would have no time for fishing now, and if he reached the Unreal City, he could make new fishing gear and the other tools he might need to live. He pulled the lightened sled with all his strength, and Jiro pulled too, pulled with his pink tongue lolling out and his chest hard against the leather harness, but they were not strong enough to move it very far or very fast. One boy-man and a starved dog cannot match the work of an entire sled team. The gruelling labour all day in the cold was killing them. Jiro whined in frustration, and Danlo felt like crying. But he couldn’t cry because the tears would freeze, and men (and women) weren’t allowed to cry over hardships. No, crying was unseemly, he thought, unless of course one of the tribe had died and gone over – then a man could cry an ocean of tears; then a true man was required to cry.
Soon, he thought, he too would be dead. The coming of his death was as certain as the next storm; it bothered him only that there would be no one left to cry for him, to bury him or to pray for his spirit. (Though Jiro might whine and howl for a while before eating the meat from his emaciated bones. Although it is not the Alaloi way to allow animals to desecrate their corpses, after all that had happened, Danlo did not begrudge the dog a little taste of human meat.)
‘Unreal City,’ he repeated over and over as he stared off into the blinding eastern snowfields, ‘unreal, unreal.’
But it was not the World-soul’s intention that Jiro eat him. Day by day the sledding became harder, and then impossible. It was very late in the season. The sun, during the day, burned too hotly. The snow turned to fareesh, round, granular particles of snow melted and refrozen each day and night. In many places, the sea ice was topped with thick layers of malku. On the eighty-fifth day of their journey, after a brutal morning of pulling through this frozen slush, Jiro fell dead in his harness. Danlo untied him, lifted him into