The Broken God. David Zindell
out of his lips into the dog’s open mouth. He cried, then, allowing himself a time of tears because a dog’s spirit is really very much the same as a man’s.
‘Jiro, Jiro,’ he said, ‘farewell.’
He placed his hand over his eyes and blinked to clear them. Just then he chanced to look up from the snow into the east. It was hard to see, with the sun so brilliant and blinding off the ice. But through the tears and the hazy glare, in the distance, stood a mountain. Its outline was faint and wavered like water. Perhaps it wasn’t a mountain after all, he worried; perhaps it was only the mithral-landia, a traveller’s snow-delirious hallucination. He blinked and stared, and he blinked again. No, it was certainly a mountain, a jagged white tooth of ice biting the sky. He knew it must be the island of the shadow-men, for there was no other land in that direction. At last, perhaps some five or six days’ journey eastward, the Unreal City.
He looked down at the dog lying still in the snow. He stroked his sharp grey ears all the while breathing slowly: everything seemed to smell of sunlight and wet, rank dog fur.
‘Why did you have to die so soon?’ he asked. He knew he would have to eat the dog now, but he didn’t want to eat him. Jiro was his friend; how could he eat a friend?
He pressed his fist against his belly, which was now nothing more than a shrunken bag of acid and pain. Just then the wind came up, and he thought he heard Ahira calling to him from the island, calling him to the terrible necessity of life. ‘Danlo, Danlo,’ he heard his other-self say, ‘if you go over now, you will never know halla.’
And so, after due care and contemplation, he took out his knife and did what he had to. The dog was only bones and fur and a little bit of stringy muscle. He ate the dog, ate most of him that day, and the rest over the next several days. The liver he did not eat, nor the nose nor paws. Dog liver was poisonous, and as for the other parts, everyone knew that eating them was bad luck. Everything else, even the tongue, he devoured. (Many Alaloi, mostly those of the far western tribes, will not eat the tongue under any circumstances because they are afraid it will make them bark like a dog.) He made a pack out of his sleeping furs. From the sled he chose only those items vital for survival: the oilstone, snowsaw, his bag of carving flints, and bear spear. He strapped on his skis. Into the east he journeyed, abandoning his sled without another thought. In the Unreal City, on the island of the shadow-men, he could always gather whalebone and cut wood to make another sled.
In his later years he was to remember only poorly those next few days of skiing across the ice. Memory is the most mysterious of phenomena. For a boy to remember vividly, he must experience the world with the deepest engagement of his senses, and this Danlo could not do because he was weak of limb and blurry of eye and clouded and numb in his mind.
Every morning he slid one ski ahead of the other, crunching through the frozen slush in endless alternation; every night he built a hut and slept alone. He followed the shining mountain eastward until it grew from a tooth to a huge, snow-encrusted horn rising out of the sea. Waaskel, he remembered, was what the shadow-men called it. As he drew closer he could see that Waaskel was joined by two brother peaks whose names Soli had neglected to tell him – this half ring of mountains dwarfed the island. He couldn’t make out much of the island itself because a bank of grey clouds lay over the forests and the mountains’ lower slopes. It was at the end of his journey’s ninetieth day that the clouds began clearing and he first caught sight of the City. He had just finished building his nightly hut (it was a pity, he thought, to have to build a hut with the island so close, no more than half a day’s skiing away) when he saw a light in the distance. The twilight was freezing fast, and the stars were coming out, and something was wrong with the stars. At times, during flickering instants when the clouds billowed and shifted, there were stars below the dark outline of the mountains. He looked more closely. To his left stood the ghost-grey horn of Waaskel; to his right, across a silver, frozen tongue of water that appeared to be a sound or bay, there was something strange. Then the wind came up and blew the last clouds away. There, on a narrow peninsula of land jutting out into the ocean, the Unreal City was revealed. In truth, it was not unreal at all. There were a million lights and a thousand towering needles of stone, and the lights were burning inside the stone needles, burning like yellow lights inside an oilstone, yet radiating outward so that each needle caught the light of every other and the whole City shimmered with light.
‘O blessed God!’ Danlo muttered to the wind. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, this City of Light so startling and splendid against the night time sky. It was beautiful, yes, but it was not a halla beauty, for something in the grand array of stone buildings hinted of pride and discord and a terrible longing completely at odds with halla.
‘Losas shona,’ he said. Shona – the beauty of light; the beauty that is pleasing to the eye.
He studied the City while the wind began to hiss. He marvelled at the variety and size of the buildings, which he thought of as immense stone huts flung up into the naked air with a grace and art beyond all comprehension. There were marble towers as bright as milk-ice, black glass needles, and spires of intricately carved granite and basalt and other dark stones; and at the edge of the sound where the sea swept up against frozen city, he beheld the glittering curves of a great crystal dome a hundred times larger than the largest snowhut. Who could have built such impossibilities, he wondered? Who could cut the millions of stone blocks and fit them together?
For a long time he stood there awestruck, trying to count the lights of the City. He rubbed his eyes and peeled some dead skin off his nose as the wind began to build. The wind cut his face. It hissed in his ears and chilled his throat. Out of the north it howled, blowing dark sheets of spindrift and despair. With his ice-encrusted mitten, he covered his eyes, bowed his head, and listened with dread to the rising wind. It was a sarsara, perhaps the beginning of a tenday storm. Danlo had thought it was too late in the season for a sarsara, but there could be no mistaking the sharpness of this icy wind which he had learned to fear and hate. He should go into his hut, he reminded himself. He should light the oilstone; he should eat and pray and wait for the wind to die. But there was no food left to eat, not even a mouldy baldo nut. If he waited, his hut would become an icy tomb.
And so, with the island of the shadow-men so near, he struck out into the storm. It was a desperate thing to do, and the need to keep moving through the darkness made him sick deep inside his throat. The wind was now a wall of stinging ice and blackness which closed off any light. He couldn’t see his feet beneath him, couldn’t get a feel for the uneven snow as he glided and stumbled onward. The wind cut his eyes and would have blinded him, so he squinted and ducked his head. Even though he was delirious with hunger, he had a plan. He tried to ski straight ahead by summoning up his sense of dead reckoning (so-called because if he didn’t reckon correctly, he would be dead). He steered straight toward the bay that separated the mountain, Waaskel, from the City. If it were the World-soul’s intention, he thought, he would find the island. He could build a hut beneath some yu trees, kill a few sleekits, rob their mounds of baldo nuts, and he might survive.
He skied all night. At first, he had worried about the great white bears that haunt the sea ice after the world has grown dark. But even old, toothless bears were never so desperate or hungry that they would stalk a human being through such a storm. After many long moments of pushing and gliding, gliding and pushing, he had neither thought for bears, nor for worry, nor for anything except his need to keep moving through the endless snow. The storm gradually built to a full blizzard, and it grew hard to breathe. Particles of ice broke against the soft tissues inside his nose and mouth. With every gasp stolen from the ferocious wind, he became weaker, more delirious. He heard Ahira screaming in the wind. Somewhere ahead, in the sea of blackness, Ahira was calling him to the land of his new home. ‘Ahira, Ahira!’ He tried to answer back, but he couldn’t feel his lips to move them. The blizzard was wild with snow and death; this wildness chilled him inside, and he felt a terrible urge to keep moving, even though all movement was agony. His arms and legs seemed infinitely heavy, his bones as dense and cold as stone. Only bone remembers pain – that was a saying of Haidar’s. Very well, he thought, if he lived, his bones would have much to remember. His eye sockets hurt, and whenever he sucked in a frigid breath, his nose, teeth, and jaw