The Broken God (26 page)

With dawn came a rising of the wind and the sun. 'Lura Sawel,' Danlo whispered. 'O blessed sun, be quick to take away the teeth of the wind.' But the sun was not quick that morning, and the wind was still cold. The sky was salmon red, frozen with high, wispy clouds. Soon after first light, with the sun still lost behind the mountains to the east, Bardo the Just appeared to take inventory of the night's attrition. He sent the novices scurrying up and down the ranks and rows. They counted the petitioners on their mats. Most of the mats were empty. Only one thousand twenty-two petitioners remained. And of these, only one thousand and twenty would continue the competition into the next day – during the night, two girls had died. The novices found them dead on their mats, seemingly asleep.

They found something else, too. A cadre of novices on skates surrounded Hanuman and Danlo. 'Look!' One of them pointed. 'This boy is naked!'

Bardo made his way carefully among the petitioners. Despite his girth, he was light on his feet and adept at moving across ice. He waggled a finger at Hanuman, half covered with mats and still unconscious. 'And this boy,' he said, 'is wearing two robes. Why is he wearing two robes?' He turned to Danlo, and his carmine lips were tight with disapproval. 'You're naked, by God! – do you understand me, boy? Incline your head once if the answer is "yes": Did you give this other boy your robe?'

Danlo nodded his head. He was kneeling low with his thighs pressing his chest. His skin was ivory in the early light, and along his naked back and sides, the muscles quivered like the strings of a gosharp. He hated it that everyone was looking at him.

'Extraordinary!' Bardo thundered. 'Remarkable – this is worthy of remark: in all my years as Master of Novices, I've never seen such a selfless act. Who would have thought anyone would strip off his robe and give it to another? Why did you do that, boy? Ah, excuse me, you may not speak. Such a selfless act – and reckless! How do you think to last another day? It's damn cold out here!'

Danlo looked up, saying nothing. Something in his deep blue eyes must have irritated Bardo, for he snapped, 'Don't stare at me, boy, it's impolite! Ah, why, why, why must I suffer these impolitenesses?'

Danlo continued to stare, not at Bardo, with his black beard and sad, self-pitying face, but rather through him, up at the sky. Ti-miura halla, he thought, follow your fate. He stared at the beautiful circle of the sky, at the cloud patterns and colours. Ti-miura halla.

Obviously, Bardo the Just mistook this unspoken, open-eyed prayer of Danlo's as a sign of defiance. 'Impolite boy!' he said. 'Does anyone know this boy's name?'

A conceited-seeming novice named Pedar came closer and said, 'I saw him in the Ice Dome – they call him Danlo the Wild.'

'Then stay close to this wild boy for the rest of the day,' Bardo said. 'Watch him – I'll be dining at the Hofgarten, so you'll have to watch him closely.' He looked back and forth between Danlo and Hanuman, all the while muttering, 'Impolite boy!'

And so Danlo knelt beneath the watchful eyes of the novice, Pedar Sadi Sanat. Pedar was the oldest of the high novices patrolling the Square; he was a diligent boy with hard little eyes and a face covered with pimples and pock-marks. Like some of the high novices, he liked to torment first year novices and petitioners. He kept a vigil over Danlo and Hanuman. From time to time, to his passing friends, he would call out witticisms such as: 'Behold the Boy of Ice! How does he keep from freezing to death? Has he had his blood carked with juf? With drugs? Behold Danlo the Wild!'

Some of the other novices skated closer to gawk at Danlo. Soon, word of his deed spread throughout Borja. Novices fresh from their morning thought exercises took a few moments to pass through Lavi Square. Danlo was surrounded with girls and boys laughing, pointing at him. Hundreds of steel blades cracked the ice near him and flung up patches of chiselled snow. Hunched over as he was in the unfamiliar kneeling posture, his muscles began to ache and cramp. He longed to move, to stretch out his stiff legs, but he did not want anyone to view the cuts and scars of his manhood.

'I've never seen a naked boy before!' a pretty novice giggled. 'His arms, his back, the muscles – he looks like a sculpture of a god!'

Another girl stood next to her beneath a shih tree. She was older, a yellow-haired journeyman holist almost womanly in the fullness of her body. She craned her neck to get a better view and said, 'Well I have seen naked boys before. This Danlo the Wild, whoever he is – he's splendid.'

Many of the petitioners were up on their mats, watching him too. And as the morning passed, quite a few masters from Lara Sig and Upplysa came to see what could be causing such a commotion. One of them, the famous remembrancer Thomas Rane, chastised Pedar for his cruelty. Master Thomas Rane, who had a fine head of silvery hair and noble face, smoothed out the folds of his silver robe and said, 'Pedar, don't you remember when you began your novitiate three years ago? What was it they called you – "Pedar the Pimple"? And now you accuse this boy of carking his flesh with juf. Yes, there are substances to keep the blood from freezing, but they are no help against cold and hypothermia. He gave his robe to another! You should applaud his act, not deride him for it.'

In truth, many of the people standing over Danlo seemed to be in awe of his toughness and resolve, as well as his selflessness. 'He gave his robe to his friend,' one novice or another would explain to the continuous stream of arriving spectators. 'He's been like this all night, naked as ice.' Pedar shooed away a couple of novices who were standing too close. He stripped off his white glove, then bent over and felt Danlo's back. 'And his skin is cold as ice,' he announced.

'What about the other boy?'

'His face is hot,' Pedar said as he held his fingers to Hanuman's cheek. 'He's sick. I don't know how either of them will last the day.'

One of Pedar's fellow novices agreed. 'Not this day – that's certain. I think it will snow before nightfall.'

Indeed, the sky was full of snow sign; Danlo had known since first light that there would be snow that day. He smelled moisture in the air, the ominous shifting of the wind to the south. And then there was no wind, and the clouds thickened up, the silver wisps growing out of nowhere into an impenetrable, icy grey. A wet cold descended over the world. Eesha-kaleth, as the Alaloi named it. On many mornings of his life, he had felt the coldness before snow. And now, waiting beneath the grey, gravid sky, there was a foreboding that recalled his deepest memories, distant childhood images of chilled teeth, bewilderment, and dread. He feared the snow. No man (or boy), he thought, should have to bare his flesh to the snow. Suddenly, in shivering waves tearing down his chest and belly, he was afraid of snow as he had never been before. That afternoon snow began to fall. Large sharp flakes broke against his back and melted. Ice water pooled against his spine, and in freezing rivulets, ran down his side. Every particle of melted snow stole a little heat from his body, and there were many, many particles of snow. His numbed skin, his throat, his eyes – everything about him hurt. There no pain so terrible as cold, he thought. Soon, he would stop shivering, and then he must ask to be carried inside, either that or die.

He might have quit, then, but he remembered that he was engaged in a competition. Beside him, deep in fever, Hanuman still slept. Often, Danlo thought his sleep was with death. Each time when he had almost given up hope, however, Hanuman would cough, and the snowy mats covering him would rattle and shake. The fever was saving the boy, keeping him warm beneath layers of robes, mats and snow. All the others around him, of course, were also being covered with snow. And they each wore robes, but there was no real heat in clothing. Clothing could keep heat in; it could not make heat. Only a living thing such as a star or a body's inner fires could make heat.

'Look at them quit!' Danlo heard one of the novices exclaim. 'A little snow and they can't stand it.'

Many petitioners began standing up, brushing snow from their sodden robes, and leaving the Square. All but a few of the mats within fifty yards of Danlo and Hanuman were empty. Danlo lifted his head to count the remaining petitioners. A stand of yu trees obscured his vision; he couldn't see much of the Square's southern half. But from what he could see – rows of abandoned mats broken here and there by a miserable, shivering, snow-covered child – he estimated that only two hundred of them were left. Two hundred out of seven thousand! How much longer, he wondered, would Bardo the Just allow the competition to go on?

'Behold the boy of ice!' Pedar called out. There was vindictiveness in his voice, and darker emotions. Despite Master Rane's chastisement – or because of it – he obviously had decided to hate Danlo. 'Why not quit? Shall I take you inside where it's warm? Why not quit now, while you can, Wild Boy? Danlo the Wild, the Nameless Child – don't you think you should quit?'

Snow covered Danlo's head and back; even the upturned soles of his feet were layered with snow. His skin had fallen blue cold, too cold to melt the snow. 'Quit now! Wouldn't it be so easy to quit?'

Danlo was breathing hard, almost gasping for air. He had stopped shivering. His muscles had hardened up like knots of cold shatterwood; he didn't know if he could move to stand, even if he were willing to quit. His belly ached with cold. The cold mat cut his kneecaps. The cold was like a stone point being hammered into his bones. Soon even his bones would grow numb, but now there was agony along his legs and spine. Cold and pain, pain and cold – it seemed that the world was made of nothing else. He tried to think of a way out of the cycle of pain, but his thoughts were sluggish, as opaque and slow-moving as glacier ice. Why should he care about the world's pain, or even his own? He began falling into a deep well of torpor and insensibility. He remembered, dimly, something he had once heard as a child. While the snow fell silently over him and his will to live cooled, he remembered that certain hunters of his tribe had spoken of a discipline called lotsara. Lotsara, the burning of the blood. There was a way to look within, to light the body's inner fires and burn with warmth. Anyone could learn this way. Any man, that is. He knew that the art of lotsara was part of the Song of Life, a small part of the lore he would have been taught had he completed his passage into manhood. Only a man could apprehend the ebb and flow of the world's energies. (He wondered if the women taught such arts in their ceremonies, but he didn't know.) Only a man could have enough experience of himself to look inward at that secret place where the fires of being burst into life.

Only a man ... He remembered certain things that Haidar had once told him about lotsara. As in the open-waiting attitude of the hunter, the face of being must be cleared. But instead of looking through to the other side of day with clear vision, he must look deep within for his anima;

specifically, he must look for the life fire that is the most vital part of anima, and in so doing, he must face himself.

Because the world was only a swirling cloud of snow – because his sight was failing – he closed his eyes. There was darkness and silence as vast as the night. He descended into himself; it was like venturing into an unknown, unexplored cavern. Unknown, and yet he seemed instinctively to know the way. The remembered stories of his elders guided him; he could almost hear Haidar chanting, 'Ti-miura anima, ti-miura wilu sibana: to follow your anima, follow the hunger of your will.' Deep in his belly, he found the place where the anima dwelt. Behind his navel, almost touching his spine – that was the secret place. At birth, the navel of man was cut off from creation's fires, but deeper inside a part of the sacred flame always burned. And now the flame was as tenuous and dim as that of a dying oilstone; now he must make it burn more brightly. He envisioned the fat tissues of his body. Between skin and muscle, in his chest, belly and groin, along the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands, was a thin layer of fat. He was as lean as knotted rope leather, but even bodies that have once starved retain a trace of fat. There was scant fat, but what little there was, he envisioned melting like blubber inside an oilstone. Melting, heating, flowing inside him, catching fire. There was a fire in his belly, then, and it was hot. It burned and grew hotter, touched his blood. The fire of life raced along his blood. His veins were burning vessels of fire, burning and branching down his legs and arms, quickening even his numbed fingertips with heat. Into his skin came a hot, red flush. The snow atop his back began to thaw. Soon the snow was falling down his sides in slushy clumps. Snowflakes striking his bare, red skin dissolved instantly into drops of water. But the water was not cold; he felt life rushing hot in every part of him, and he couldn't imagine ever being cold again.

'Look!' someone said. 'Look how red his skin is! The snow's melting off him.'

Pedar worked his skates closer to Danlo and felt his arm. 'It's hot,' he said. 'It was cold, and now it's hot.'

'I've heard of such things,' another said. 'Down in the Farsider's Quarter, some of the avadhutas soak their robes in water. And sit outside in winter all night long. They dry their robes with their body heat. Do you think he's an avadhuta?'

'Who knows?' Pedar said. He picked at one of the pimples on his cheek. He did not seem pleased. 'It must be a trick, though. A drug. No one could melt snow like this without drugs.'

The crowd surrounding Danlo broke into tens of arguments. Most of the novices wanted to believe that he hadn't used drugs, though no one seemed to know what else could be the source of his heat.

Just then, Bardo the Just returned, wobbling on his skates. Despite the snow, his bulging forehead was dripping with sweat. His huge nose, which was shot with a webwork of tiny broken veins, glistened purple-black. He liked to drink beer at any time of the day; the novices knew this, and they tried to avoid him when he was drunk. 'By God, what do any of you know about drugs!' he shouted as he heaved closer and wrapped his moist, meaty hand around the back of Danlo's neck. 'He is hot,' he pronounced. 'But it can't be the result of a drug. When have the petitioners ever been tested by cold before, eh? Until the day before yesterday, I myself, Bardo the Just, didn't know what this year's test would be. How could this wild boy know? No, it's something else, something remarkable. Ah ... strange. There are ancient disciplines – this Danlo the Wild has been taught things.'