The Broken God. David Zindell
name. It was his duty to trade names and lineages at the first opportunity. He tapped his chest with his forefinger. ‘I am Danlo, son of Haidar.’
The black man holding him nodded his head severely. He poked Danlo in the chest and nodded again. ‘Danlo,’ he said. ‘Is that what they call you? What language are you speaking? Where did you come from that you can’t speak the language of the Civilized Worlds? Danlo the Wild. A wild boy from nowhere carrying a spear.’
Danlo, of course, understood nothing of what the man said, other than the sound of his own name. He didn’t know it was a crime to brandish weapons in the City. He couldn’t guess that with his wind-chewed face and his wild eyes, he had frightened the civilized men of Neverness. In truth, it was really he who was frightened; the men held him so tightly he could hardly breathe.
But the animal did not seem frightened at all. He was scarcely perturbed, looking at him in a kindly way and smiling. His large mouth fell easily into a kind of permanent, sardonic smile. ‘Danlo,’ he repeated, and he touched Danlo’s eyelids. His fingernails were black and shaped like claws, but otherwise his exceedingly long hands were almost human. ‘Danlo.’
He had almost killed that which may not be killed.
‘Oh, ho, Danlo, if that is your name, the men of the City call me Old Father.’ The animal-man placed his hand flat against his chest and repeated, ‘Old Father.’
More words, Danlo thought. What good were words when the mind couldn’t make sense of words? He shook his head back and forth, and tried to pull free. He wanted to leave this strange place where nothing made sense. The shadow-men had faces like his own, and the animal-man spoke strange, incomprehensible words, and he had almost killed that which may not be killed and therefore almost lost his soul.
Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul, he remembered.
The man-animal continued to speak to him, even though it was clear that Danlo couldn’t understand the words. Old Father explained that he was a Fravashi, one of the alien races who live in Neverness. He did this solely to soothe Danlo, for that is the way of the Fravashi, with their melodious voices and golden eyes, to soothe and reflect that which is most holy in human beings. In truth, the Fravashi have other ways, other reasons for dwelling in human cities. (The Fravashi are the most human of all aliens, and they live easily in human houses, apartments, and hospices so long as these abodes are unheated. So human are they, in their bodies and in their minds, that many believe them to be one of the lost, carked races of man.) In truth, the men surrounding Old Father were not hunters at all, but students. When Danlo surprised them with his spear, Old Father had been teaching them the art of thinking. Ironically, that morning in the blinding wind, he had been showing them the way of ostrenenie, which is the art of making the familiar seem strange in order to reveal its essence, to reveal hidden relationships, and above all, truth. And Danlo, of course, understood none of this. Even if he had known the language of the Civilized Worlds, its cultural intricacies would have escaped him. He knew only that Old Father must be very kind and very wise. He knew it suddenly deep in his aching throat, knew it with a direct, intuitive knowledge that Old Father would call buddhi. As Danlo was to learn in the coming days, Old Father placed great value on buddhi.
‘Lo los sibaru,’ Danlo said. Unintentionally, he groaned in pain. All the way up to his groin, his legs felt as cold as ice. ‘I’m so hungry – do you have any food?’ He sighed and slumped against the arms of the men still holding him. Speech was useless, he thought. ‘Old Father’ – whatever the incomprehensible syllables of that name really meant – couldn’t understand the simplest of questions.
Danlo was beginning to fall into the exhausted stupor of starvation when Old Father brought his stick up to his furry mouth and opened his lips. The stick was really a kind of long bamboo flute called a shakuhachi. He blew into the shakuhachi’s ivory mouthpiece. And then a beautiful, haunting music spread out over the beach. It was the same music Danlo had followed earlier, a piercing, numinous music at once infinitely sad yet full of infinite possibilities. The music overwhelmed him. And then everything – the music, the alien’s strange new words, the pain of his frozen feet – became unbearable. He fainted. After a while, he began to rise through the cold, snowy layers of consciousness where all world’s sensa are as hazy and inchoate as an ice-fog. He was too ravished with hunger to gain full lucidity, but one thing he would always remember: astonishingly, with infinite gentleness, Old Father reached out to open his clenched fist and then pressed the shakuhachi’s long, cool shaft into his hand. He gave it to him as a gift.
Why? Danlo wondered. Why had he almost killed that which may not be killed?
For an eternity he wondered about all the things that he knew, wondered about shaida and the sheer strangeness of the world. Then he clutched the shakuhachi in his hand, closed his eyes, and the cold dark tide of unknowing swept him under.
The Glavering
The Dark God feared that the Fravashi might one day see the universe as it really is, and so might come to challenge him. Therefore, he implanted in each one an organ called a glaver which would distort his perceptions and cause him to mistake illusion for reality.
‘How effective is the glaver?’ asks the Unfulfilled Father.
‘Go look in a mirror,’ answers the First Least Father, ‘and you will see the effectiveness of the glaver.’
– Fravashi parable
In a way, Danlo was very lucky to encounter Old Father and his students before any others. The Unreal City – its proper name is Neverness – can be a cold, harsh, inhospitable city to the many strangers who come to her seeking their fates. Neverness is roughly divided into four quarters, and the Zoo, where Danlo came to land, is the most inhospitable of them all, at least for human beings. The Darghinni District and the Fayoli Flats, the Elidi Mews – in which of the Zoo’s alien sanctuaries or strange-smelling dens could he have hoped for succour? While it is not true that the Scutari, for instance, murder men for their meat, neither are those wormlike, cannibalistic aliens famous for goodwill or aid to the wretched. Had Danlo wandered up from the Darghinni Sands into the Scutari District, he would have found a maze of cluster-cells. And in each cell, through translucent wax walls as high as a man, the many waiting eyes of a Scutari clutch staring at whatever passed by. Danlo would never have found his way out of the confusing mesh of streets; there he certainly would have died, of neglect or cold, or, if hunger further deranged his wits and he dared to break open a cluster-cell with his spear, he would have suffocated in a cloud of carbon monoxide. And then the Scutari would have eaten him, even the toenails and bones. Those peculiar aliens believe that meat must never be wasted, and more, they avow that they have a holy duty to scavenge meat whenever fate offers them the chance.
Old Father brought Danlo to his house in the Fravashi District. Or rather, he bade his students to carry Danlo. The Fathers of the Fravashi – the Least Fathers, the Unfulfilled and the Old Fathers – do not like to perform physical labour of any sort. They consider it beneath their dignity. And Old Father was in many ways a typical Fravashi. He liked to think, and he liked to teach, and mostly, he liked to teach human beings how to think. It was his reason for living, at least during this last, deep winter phase of his life. In truth, teaching was his joy. Like every Old Father, he lived with his students in one of the many sprawling, circular houses at the heart of the Farsider’s Quarter. (The Fravashi District is the only alien district not located in the Zoo. In every way it is unique. Only there do human beings and aliens live side by side. In fact, human beings have fairly taken over the district and greatly outnumber the Fravashi.) Old Father had a house just off the City Wild, which is the largest of all Neverness’s natural parks or woods. It was a one-storey, stone house: concentric, linking rooms built around a circular apartment that Old Father called his thinking chamber. In a city of densely arrayed spires and towers where space is valuable, such houses are – and were – an extravagance. But they