The Broken God (55 page)

'Why are you so angry?' Danlo asked

'You think I'm angry?'

'Truly, you are angry, your face– '

'Why should you always have to tell the truth? To try to see it? Can't you ever lie, a little?'

'I do not want to see you ... become a cetic.'

'Perhaps it's my fate,' Hanuman said.

'Your fate?'

'I should love my fate – isn't this what you like to say?'

'But you cannot know your fate!' Danlo said.

'Well, I know I've decided to become a cetic. Just now –thank you for helping me decide.'

'No, you must not become a cetic.'

'I shall, however, become one. I'm sorry.'

'But, Hanu, why?'

They sat staring at each other as they had done on the day of their meeting, in Lavi Square; neither of them wanted to be the first to break eyelock. Then Madhava li Shing called out that it was time to play the sixth chukka, and Danlo and Hanuman – and the eighteen other boys from Perilous Hall – skated out onto the polo field. With much chatter, grinding skates and scurfed-up patches of ice, they took their places behind their goal line. Up ice, at the field's exact centre, someone had placed the polo puck inside a small violet circle. All faces were now turned toward this puck, Danlo's and his hallmates', and, behind their own goal line, the tense faces of the Stone Row novices at the field's upper end. The boys fell quiet, their hands gripping the shafts of their mallets. From other parts of the Dome, from the sled courts and figure rings, came the slicing softness of steel over ice; but when Madhava gave the signal for the face-off, these little sounds were obliterated by the moment's tumult: mallets being slapped against the ice, whoops of exhilaration and relief, clacking skates, and breath exploding from the lips of the boys all around Danlo. The two teams raced together, up ice and down, toward the puck at the centre of the field. Danlo and Hanuman, who were the fastest of the Perilous Hall novices, were the first to reach it. Almost immediately, however, three Stone Row skaters blocked them and as the teams came crashing together there was a flurry of mallets, skates flailing, shouts and boys crying out in pain.

Danlo managed to break out of the mêlée, using his mallet blade to smoothly guide the puck up ice. And then he passed the puck to Hanuman. The strategy of the Perilous Hall novices called for him to skate as right point while Hanuman took the left point. Because they had been unable to co-ordinate their attack, however, for most of the game Madhava (who was stroking desperately ten yards behind Danlo), Alesar Roth and others had taken on the brunt of the offence. But now a curious thing happened. Ahead of Danlo, to his left, Hanuman was trying to break free from a swarm of Stone Row skaters. Danlo became aware of him, not just with his eyes, but with a finer, truer organ of perception, as if his sense of life were seeking out across the ice to find his friend's secret fire. And Hanuman, who burned bright as any star, was seeking him; Danlo could feel it in Hanuman's flashing eyes, and in the angle of his neck, and in the pattern of his furious mallet work, and in the way his own heart beat to the rhythm of their pounding skates. Something – perhaps their anger at each other or their fear (and love) of fate – had renewed the connectedness between them. They skated together up ice, and all the while an invisible cord grew between them, a numinous tissue of kinship connecting them belly to belly and mind to mind. In the brilliance of this bond there was a mutual anticipation of act and movement, intimations of the future as it unravelled moment by moment. The ice flowed beneath Danlo like a gleaming sheet of satin and through it he felt Hanuman's skate blades striking, left foot and right, gliding and striking. The beat of the steel rang out as separate and distinct from all the other sounds around him: the mallets clacking together, the groans, gasps of breath and Madhava's faraway, sing-song voice calling out instructions to his hallmates. Just then Hanuman found an opening. Danlo found it at the same instant, even before Hanuman's mallet flicked out and slapped the puck through. The puck, a circle of red jewood much dinged and scarred, shot directly at Danlo, who whipped down his mallet blade to intercept it. Two novices wearing the flowery seal of Stone Row on their kamelaikas immediately bore down upon him. Danlo pulled sharply to his left even as Hanuman pulled away from the skaters swarming him. Danlo passed him the puck. As he accelerated up ice, a sudden wind chilled his face, cutting his eyes, and there was a reddish blur as Hanuman passed the puck back to him. Together, almost in lock-step, they raced toward the Stone Row goal box, passing the puck back and forth, like a corpuscle of blood, back and forth. Among the Stone Row novices they dodged and darted and their sense of space and time was uncanny. 'Hanu, Hanu!' Danlo cried out in his mind as he passed the puck again. Hanuman reached his mallet out, slowing the puck and then, with a lightning stroke, he fired it across fifteen yards of ice into the goal box. It was the first of the goals they would make during the chukka.

'Luck!' one of the Stone Row novices called out as he banged his mallet against the ice in frustration. He was a good-looking boy with reddish black skin and a look of pride colouring his face. 'That was a lucky shot.'

One of his hallmates held up his middle finger – knuckle side facing outward – at Hanuman. 'We're still winning by one goal,' he reminded him.

Sherborn of Darkmoon, who was leaning against his mallet, sweating and panting for breath, held up his own middle finger. He said, 'One more goal is all we need to tie the score.' Again, at the Stone Row novices circling about, he thrust his finger into the air. 'And one more goal after that, you lose the game.'

The novices each returned to their goal lines then. The proud boy from Stone Row – his name was Lais Motega Mohammad – called the signal for the chukka's second face-off. Again the boys rushed together pell-mell, converging on the puck as carrion birds over a corpse. There was a frantic mêlée. The violence of scything mallets, boots, and elbows flowed around Danlo, who pursued the puck with glee and abandon. He had no care for himself. Of all the boys he was the quickest and toughest, the most wild. This wildness, many times during the past season, had caused him to injure the other boys. And many times, he'd considered giving up the game altogether. Once, after he'd caught a Lavi Hall boy in the face with his mallet, breaking his jaw and knocking out four bloody, splintered teeth, he despaired of ever wholly honouring his vow of ahimsa. But he reasoned that ahimsa, as Old Father taught the doctrine, required that he never harm anyone intentionally. In truth, he hated harming others, and he never did so if he could help it; it was only his recklessness and love of intense motion that caused the novices (even those from his own hall) to fear the boy they called Danlo the Wild. As for himself, however, he had no fear. He sustained injuries frequently and in the first moments of the mêlée, Lais Mohammad scraped the end of his mallet across Danlo's eye. The pain of it burned like fire; his eye immediately blurred with tears. But he was used to pain and never minded it as much as the civilized boys did. Pain is the awareness of life – this saying was as near to him as the throbbing of his own heart, which he could feel pounding up behind his eye. It was his way to become his pain, to let it wash through him like the burning of ice water. Half-blinded in pain, in the middle of a sea of flashing mallets and skates, he found the puck and touched it along with his mallet. All around him was the press of hard bodies, ice grinding and cries of anger. He entered into this violent stream of chaos roiling across the polo field. He let it sweep him along. This was his genius and his strength, to become himself a part of the chaos rather than resisting it or trying to control it. He, who had spent his childhood in ice and wind, called upon his animal senses to feel his way across the field, and he skated with a rare and vital grace.

Suddenly, he heard Hanuman cry out, 'Danlo!' In the tangle of limbs near him, an opening appeared. He knocked the puck through, and Hanuman took it with his mallet, and then the opening closed, as the sea closes in around a stone. The mêlée's flow shifted away from Danlo, moving in a swarm of bodies across the field. It engulfed Hanuman. Danlo saw him skating at the centre of ten or twelve boys, trying to break free.

'Pass the puck!' Madhava shrilled out. 'Pass it now!'

'Hanu, Hanu!' Danlo said as he pushed his skates against the ice and ducked between two boys from Stone Row. He felt the secret cord between Hanuman and him tighten, pulling him back into the mêlée. There was a moment, he saw, when Hanuman might have passed him the puck. 'Hanu, Hanu,' he whispered, but Hanuman was intent on defending the puck from the Stone Row novices' darting mallets. He was very good at defence. Where some feared Danlo for his wildness, the novices of Borja's dormitories were terrified of Hanuman because he skated with a fury and a will to harm others. This was the logic of his life, his tragedy and fate. With his malice and his mallet (or with his fists and murderous aura when unarmed), he sought always to keep a space about himself, an impenetrable sphere of violence whose centre was himself. Thus he protected himself – and the puck – from others, but in doing so he cut himself off from the stream of the game as it flowed around him. From across twenty yards of ice, Danlo watched him pass the puck to Madhava and then artfully slice his mallet into the kneecap of a Stone Row novice who had got too close. Hanuman made it seem an accident, as if he couldn't check the force of his stroke. The Stone Row novice fell to the ice then, grabbing at his knee, screaming, shaking his head from side to side as his eyes streamed tears. And on Hanuman's face there was a terrible look, a mask of fear that Danlo had glimpsed at their first meeting. He was perhaps the only one to see it. While some of novices skated over and crowded around the screaming boy, Danlo stared at Hanuman's face. With his eyes, and with a deeper sense of seeing for which he as yet had no name, he became aware of the essential paradox of Hanuman's existence: Hanuman was truly afraid of others, of the hard icy otherness of all things outside his person and self. This fear compelled him to cut himself off from life, as a protection, and yet it was this very act of severance that made him feel vulnerable and alone. And so he feared, and so he hated, hated and harmed any who threatened him. When Lais Mohammad drew himself up and pointed his mallet at him, accusing him of cruelty and cowardice, Hanuman immediately used his own mallet to knock it away. The force of the blow deflected the mallet into the cheek of one of Lais Mohammad's hallmates, a small boy with the eyes of a terrified shagshay ewe. He bleated out in pain, and he flailed his mallet back and forth in front of his face, striking Sherborn of Darkmoon in the jowls around his neck. All at once, like a tidal wave spreading out over the sea, the violence overwhelmed the boys of Perilous Hall and Stone Row, and they flew at each other with mallets and kicking boots and spit whipping out of their mouths as they shouted and cursed and screamed. Danlo stroked over and pushed his way into the brawl. He used his arms to ward off blows, but he was careful not to skive any of the fallen boys with his skate blades nor to deliver blows of his own, even when striking out would have been the simplest way of defending himself. The cord between him and Hanuman was now so tight it seemed he could feel his friend's heart beating inside his own chest. He came up close to Hanuman, almost close enough to touch him. Then someone whacked Danlo's ear; a sour-faced boy whose name he didn't know rammed the knob of his mallet into his solar plexus. As Danlo pulled his elbows in toward his belly, gasping for breath, he saw Hanuman strike the boy's temple. The boy dropped to the ice as if his legs had been chopped away. Perhaps he was dead, Danlo thought; the blow might have killed anyone. And Hanuman was angry enough to kill, Danlo could see it in his cold, mad eyes, in the way he singled out his victims and attacked them, with mallet and skate blades and a will to annihilation. No one, of choice, would have stood before him, but the crush of skaters was too thick for anyone to flee. Just then Hanuman, with his uncanny sense of space, found Lais Mohammad working his way behind him. He whirled about and brought his mallet up. Mallet clacked against mallet as the two boys tried to club each other. Lais Mohammad swung his mallet blade at Hanuman's nose; no doubt he wanted to shatter his bones, to ruin his fine, delicate face. He swung his mallet, and Hanuman blocked it, his eyes pale with death.

'Hanu, Hanu!' Danlo cried out and he threw himself across the ice. To the boys struggling nearby, if any looked his way, Hanuman's face must have seemed only a mask of fury, for he attacked Lais Mohammad with lightning strokes, high and low, exulting in the exercise of his killing art. But Danlo could see that his friend's face, for all the hatred there, was really frozen with fear. In fear, Hanuman drove his mallet against Lais Mohammad's mallet, again and again, hacking as if he were desperate to fell a tree, knocking and beating down until the wood splintered suddenly and his mallet thwacked into his enemy's chest. And with every stroke of his mallet, he winced as if in pain, as if meting out such violence mutilated his deepest self and caused him agony. It was this agony that he feared. Above all things he feared the will to power over himself, even as he loved it and called it his fate.

Danlo came up between Lais Mohammad and Hanuman, then, and he could feel the fear in the centre of his friend's belly, rippling along the cord connecting them. He wrenched the mallet from Hanuman's hands. And Lais Mohammad threw down his broken mallet with a skidding clatter of wood, and grabbed another from one of his hallmates and rained blows against Danlo's back, cursing as he tried to get at Hanuman. Danlo fell against Hanuman and bore him down, almost straight backwards, down with a grunt and a slap against the hard, misty ice. He covered him with his body. Lais Mohammad's mallet cracked against Danlo's spine, and the sudden, jumping agony of bruised nerves and bone recalled the wounding of the deeper tissues of Hanuman's soul.

Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo remembered. In a single, enduring moment of pain he became aware of the most fundamental thing about Hanuman's life: his best friend, this pale fury with whom he would be bonded until death, was by nature a compassionate and gentle boy. But he had mutilated his own nature. Or rather, he had tried to sear away and annihilate this gentleness, much as one might murder an unwanted baby by plunging it into a pool of lava. He did this with a will, because he was possessed of a bold and furious will, a will to overcome himself and be greater. And it was Danlo who had excited the will to power in him, who had quickened it and made it stronger. This is why he loved Danlo. He loved Danlo's wildness, his vitality and grace, and above all, his fearlessness of life. And yet he hated these very qualities because he himself lacked them.