Neverness (26 page)

   Yuri said, "My wife is happy to meet her near-sister, and who can blame her?" Then he looked into the sick yellow glow of the burning oilstones as if
he
were not happy at all. Plainly, he did not like my mother. To Soli he said, "Tell us of your journey, tell us of
Pelasalia
, the Blessed Isles."

   While Soli told the carefully forged lies, the fake story of our "miraculous" journey, the people of the Devaki gathered around us. Where they could not sit, they stood with necks stretched and ears turned toward Soli, hoping to hear his memorable words. When he had finished, there were surprised gasps and cries of woe. Wicent, who was Yuri's younger, shaggy brother, said, "It was a great tell. A sad tell, but a great tell. We will pray for the spirits of our near-mothers and fathers and children who died on the frozen sea."

   What Soli had told them was that Senwe had
not
found the Blessed Isles, that he had found instead a frozen, barren waste where the living was hard and grim. Soli's ancestors, he lied, had neither prospered nor multiplied. When his father, Mauli, had died, Soli said he had determined to return the survivors of the family to their ancestral home. "But Mallory's wife, Helena, and my three grandchildren took a fever and died on the journey. And Bardo's wife died in childbirth before we ever set out."

   I rubbed the side of my nose in embarrassment because it was hard to listen to such a fraudulent story. To my surprise (and, I suppose, satisfaction), the Devaki seemed to believe every word of it.

   "We will pray for the children especially," Yuri said. "When you arrived without your children I was afraid to ask you what had happened."

   With feigned bitterness Soli rubbed his temples and said, "The Blessed Isles are a dream. To the south there is nothing but bare rocks and ice; the ice goes on forever." He told them this, as we had planned, so that none of the Devaki would kill themselves journeying south, seeking a dream.

   But Liam, whose blue eyes were wild with bravery and dreams, said, "You should have gone farther south instead of returning to Kweitkel. South, where the ice is not endless but gives way to the Blessed Isles. The air is so warm, snow falls as water from the sky."

   "There is only ice and death to the south," Soli said.

   Liam looked at Katharine as she threw back the hood of her furs, and he mumbled, "Perhaps it is good that you came north."

   I did not like the pugnacity of his strong face; I did not like the way he looked at Katharine as she brought the bowl of soup to her lips and blew on the steaming broth. Even by civilized standards of beauty he was too handsome a man, with his straight nose and long, pretty eyelashes. His hair and his luxurious beard were golden, a color I never liked to see on a human being. I suppose he had a charming smile - everyone said he did - but when he opened his mouth to smile at Katharine, all I could think was that his teeth were too large and fine, his lips too red, too full, too sensual.

   "To the south," I said, for once agreeing with Soli, "There is only ice and death. Only a fool would seek death by ice."

   "It is said, what is foolishness to a weak man, a strong man does bravely."

   "After you've crossed a thousand miles of ice," I said, "and had to kill your lead dog, then you may speak of bravery."

   Liam looked at me quickly, as if realizing he could achieve more with flattery than insults. "Of course all the Senwelina were strong and brave to cross the frozen sea. To survive the storms, the cold of the Serpent's Breath. My near-brother, Mallory, is very brave, and my near-sister is very brave and beautiful. It is good you have returned home so that such a beautiful woman does not have to marry Bardo, her brave cousin."

   I hated the way Katharine smiled at him as he said this. It was a bold smile, an intimate smile laden with curiosity. I hated having to pose as her brother. I wanted to grab Liam by the collar, to shake him, to tell him that
I
was Katharine's cousin, not Bardo. I wanted to tell him, to tell everybody that as soon as we returned to the City, Katharine would marry her cousin, her real cousin. Instead I clamped my jaws shut and said nothing.

   Yuri got up and walked to the front of the cave. He removed several ropes of meat hanging from the spit above the fire. He carried these back to us slung over his arm, careless of the juices leaking from the cracks in the blackened flesh. One of these ropes he presented to Soli, while he kept one and handed the remaining one to his brother.

   "We watched you coming from the south," Yuri said. "It has been a poor year; the shagshay and the silk belly have fled to the Outer Islands, and Tuwa is so sick with mouthrot and his numbers so diminished that we may not hunt him." He brought the charcoaled meat to his nose and sniffed. "We've had to hunt
Nunki
, the seal. But his numbers too are diminished because the fish do not swim as they used to. Nunki does not leap to our spears. This seal meat is the last of our meat. Liam would have eaten it for breakfast, and who could blame him? But we saw you coming from the south; and we knew that if you were men, not spirits as Wicent said you must be, you would have a hunger for meat."

   So saying he threw back his head and opened his mouth. He dipped the meat rope in and severed a section of it with his strong, white teeth. The meat, I saw to my horror, was raw beneath the black crust, Yuri bit and chewed quickly and swallowed and bit again; he swallowed and chewed and blood from the near-living meat ran over his red lips. As he chewed he made a sucking, slobbering sound as of wetness being slapped against wetness. He chewed with his mouth open, gustily pulping the tough meat.

   Soli watched him carefully and then did as the old man did, devouring the meat like a beast. Yuri ate a few more mouthfuls of meat, and he passed what was left to his oldest son, Liam. Soli, with his face held rigidly impassive as his jaws worked, offered me the disgusting, mutilated rope of meat. But I could not touch it. I, who had so eagerly planned this romantic quest for the secret of life - I was sickened and frozen by the piece of life dangling from Soli's greasy fingers.

   Liam looked at me as he tore at his meat. Yuri, too, had his eye turned to me, obviously wondering why I did not accept the meat. "It is good, fat meat," he said as he winked at me and licked his mustache. "I hate to kill Nunki, but I love the taste of his meat."

   Soli was staring at me, and Wicent and his sons, Wemilo and Haidar, were staring too. My mother and Katharine and a hundred curious Devaki men and women - everyone was staring at me. Bardo, sitting cross-legged next to me, nudged me with his elbow. I reached out to take the meat. It was still warm from the fire, hard on the surface, hot and soft and yielding within. I held it lightly, as if afraid my nervous fingers would bruise the meat. Greasy juices oozed from the broken crust, running over my hands. I felt hot juices squirt inside my mouth, the sudden hot nausea deep in my throat. The smell of roasted meat made me want to retch. I turned my head, swallowing saliva, and I said, "I should give this meat to my cousin, Bardo. He is bigger than I and hungrier than a bear at the end of midwinter spring."

   I glanced at Bardo, who was indeed eyeing the meat as he chewed his mustache. Bardo, I thought, despite his layers of acquired culture and taste, despite the deep repugnance of a civilized man for anything other than cultured meat, despite the sheer
barbarity
of eating living meat, Bardo if he were hungry enough would eat anything.

   But Yuri shook his head back and forth and said, "Does a son refuse the life his mother and father gave him? No, and so he may not refuse the meat his father offers him nor the drink his mother makes. Are you sick, Mallory? Sometimes the cold and wind make a man so sick with hunger he cannot eat. Then his hunger dies and his meat falls away from his bones, and his hungry ghost is too eager to see the other side of day. I think you are a hungry man who has denied his hunger too long: This a blind man could see. Shall I send Anala to make some blood tea? To awaken your hunger?"

   I held the rope of meat in my hands and I swallowed back my vomit and I said, "No, I will eat the meat." From the lore of Rainer's akashic records I suddenly remembered the recipe for blood tea. Great as my disgust was at the eating of meat, I had a greater horror of drinking the tea, an unbelievable mixture of seal's blood, urine, and the bitter root of the shatterwood tree. I tilted my head back and dangled the meat above my mouth. I took a bite of meat.

   I will not pretend the meat tasted very different from the cultured meats my mother had made me eat as a child. It did not. True, the meat was fattier and rimed with char and much, much rarer than any meat should be. But it was still meat. "Meat's meat," Bardo said, stuffing himself with meat after I had eaten my share, No, it was not the taste of meat that bothered me; it was the idea of chewing flesh that had once jumped to the command of a living brain, flesh that had been alive. I chewed and swallowed slimy proteins little different from those cloned from de-brained muscle cells and cultured in vats. I ate my portion of meat horrified yet fascinated at this need of life to feed from other life. The tastes of iron and salt filled my mouth, and my cold, exhausted body awakened to its urge to life. I took another bite of meat and then another, and still another. It tasted good. I was so hungry I filled my mouth with bloody gobbets; I chewed so quickly I bit my cheeks, I swallowed my own blood along with that of the seal's and ate until I felt the urge to vomit. When I could eat no more I handed the meat to Bardo.

   The rest of our meal was even more disgusting. And worse, the old, decayed foods Anala and the women brought forth did not even taste good. The Devaki men and women, their children too, cracked baldo nuts between their teeth. They ate the plump nut-meats, which were yellow and moldy, covered with a white fuzz. Wicent's wife, Liluye, a skinny, nervous woman with stumpy yellow teeth, prepared us a soup of rotten thallow eggs. The big blue eggs had incubated too long, but the Devaki ate them anyway, straining out only the eyes of the embryos. (They did this because thallows are blind at birth, and they did not wish to acquire this blindness.) There were other foods as well, foods I could not believe a human could eat: raw chunks of seal fat swallowed as my mother would a ball of chocolate; the raw intestines of thallows and other birds; year-old mammoth bones which had been buried and allowed to soften and rot; and of course, the ever-present bowls of reeking blood tea. (I do not mean to imply that the Devaki took no care of the substances they swallowed. This was not so. Curiously, they would drink no water containing the tiniest particle of dirt. And as to the aforementioned foods, they ate them only because they were hungry. Hunger is the great spice of life. Later that winter, when we were nearly starving, worse horrors were to come.)

   After we finished our meal, Yuri massaged his belly and said a prayer for the souls of the animals we had eaten. "The winter has been cold and hard," he said. "And last winter was hard, and the one before that. And the winter before, when Merilee died, that was a bad year. But if you had come five winters ago you would have feasted on mammoth steaks." He yawned and squeezed Anala's thigh. She sat next to him searching through his head hair with her fingers. "But tomorrow Tuwa is sick with the mouthrot and the Devaki are hungry, and so we hunt the seal," Anala removed an insect - I think it was a louse - from the gray hair above his ear. She crushed it between her dirty fingernails and swallowed it. Yuri motioned to Soli, Bardo and myself "Are the men of the Senwelina, who are Devaki as I am Devaki, are they too tired to hunt the fat, gray seal with us tomorrow?"

   I should have let Soli answer since he was the supposed head of our family. But I was full of seal meat and horror, and I could not bear the thought of murdering so intelligent an animal as a seal. "We are tired," I blurted out. "We are tired and our dogs need rest."

   Soli flashed me a fierce look as Liam rubbed his greasy hands over the face of his younger brother, Seif (Was this a protection against the cold? A barbaric benediction? I searched my mind, but I had no memory of such a custom.) With a broken fingernail Liam pried a strand of meat from between his teeth. "You were not too tired to eat the seal," he pointed out.

   He bent over me suddenly, and I smelled his thick reek as he ran his calloused hand under my furs and tested the muscles of my neck and back. How I hated the Devaki customs! I hated this intimate touching; I hated the cold, greasy touch of a strange man's hands, the horror of another's skin touching mine. "Mallory is thin but still strong," he announced. "Strong enough to hunt the seal, I think. But he is tired; perhaps he should rest in his furs while his near-brothers bring him fat-rib and tenderloin and other delicate pieces of meat."

   I twisted away from him. How easy it would be, I thought, to grab his windpipe and tear it from his throat. I twisted and I pulled my collar tight around my neck, and then I said a thing that made Bardo and Soli, and the others from the City, look at me strangely.

   "We are tired," I said, "but not too tired to hunt. On the southern ice there are no mammoth so we hunt the seal often. I have killed many seals; tomorrow I shall kill a seal for Liam and give him the liver."

   As I said this I was reminded of my brag to penetrate the Entity. But where that brag had been impulsive and had nearly cost me my life, to Liam I had bragged to a purpose, I would kill a seal. Somehow I would kill a noble animal. I would do this in order to shame Liam into silence and to gain approval for my "family." Then, I thought, we might more quickly find what we were looking for and leave this filthy, barbaric place.

   We sat there on the furs for a while telling stories - false stories - of hunting seals on the southern seas, Anala's pretty daughter, Sanya, served blood tea, which the Devaki slurped noisily, smacking their lips and tongues. Later I was shocked to see Sanya's baby sucking milk from her nude, blue-veined breast. Everything seemed to shock me that night, especially the uninhibited cries of delight coming from the nearby huts of the Yelenalina. I overheard a woman gasping out intimate instructions to her husband - I hoped it was her husband - and I listened to the ragged breathing and rustling furs, the sounds of human beasts rutting. Immersed as I was in these new sensations, I hardly noticed Yuri moving closer to me. I stared at the faint petals of fire fluttering above the oilstone in front of me, and I was shocked when he softly said, "You should not kill the seal. Nunki is your
doffel
. That is why you had trouble eating seal meat - I should have seen this immediately."