The Broken God (7 page)

And so Danlo and his dogs began to starve in earnest. Even though he had eaten well all his life, he had heard many stories about starvation. And instinctively, he knew what it is like to starve – all men and animals do. When there is no food, the body itself becomes food. Flesh falls inward. The body's various tissues are burnt like seal blubber inside a sac of loose, collapsing skin, burnt solely to keep the brain fresh and the heart beating a while longer. All animals will flee starvation, and so Danlo sledded due east into another storm, which didn't last as long as the first storm, but lasted long enough. Bodi was the first dog to die, probably from a stroke fighting with Siegfried over some bloody, frozen wrappings he had given them to gnaw on. Danlo cut up Bodi and roasted him over the oilstone. He was surprised at how good he tasted. There was little life in the lean, desiccated meat of one scrawny dog, but it was enough to keep him and the remaining dogs sledding east into other storms. The snows of midwinter spring turned heavier and wet; the thick, clumpy maleesh was hard to pull through because it froze and stuck to the runners of the sled. It froze to the fur inside the dogs' paws. Danlo tied leather socks around their cracked, bleeding paws, but the famished dogs ate them off and ate the scabs as well. Luyu, Noe, and Atal each died from bleeding paws, or rather, from the black rot that sets in when the flesh is too weak to fight infection. In truth, Danlo helped them over with a spear through the throat because they were in pain, whining and yelping terribly. Their meat did not taste as good as Bodi's, and there was less of it. Kono and Siegfried would not eat this tainted meat, probably because they no longer cared if they lived or died. Or perhaps they were ill and could no longer tolerate food. For days the two dogs lay in the snowhut staring listlessly until they were too weak even to stare. That was the way of starvation: after too much of the flesh had fallen off and gone over, the remaining half desired nothing so much as reunion and wholeness on the other side of day.

'Mi Kono eth mi Siegfried,' Danlo said, praying for the dogs' spirits, 'alasharia-la huzigi anima.' Again, he brought out his seal knife and butchered the dead animals. This time he and Jiro ate many chunks of roasted dog, for they were very hungry, and it is the Alaloi way to gorge whenever fresh meat is at hand. After they had finished their feast, Danlo cut the remaining meat into rations and put it away.

'Jiro, Jiro,' he said, calling his last dog over to him. With only the two of them left, the little snowhut seemed too big.

Jiro waddled closer, his belly bulging and distended. He rested his head on Danlo's leg and let him scratch his ears.

'My friend, we have had forty-six days of sledding and twenty-two days of storm. When will we find the Unreal City?'

The dog began licking his bleeding paws, licking and whining. Danlo coughed and bent over the oilstone to ladle out some hot dog grease melting in the pot. It was hard for him to move his arms because he was very tired, very weak. He rubbed his chest with the grease. He hated to touch his chest, hated the feel of his rib bones and wasted muscles, but everyone knew that hot grease was good for coughing fits. It was also good for frostbite, so he rubbed more grease over his face, over those burning patches where the dead, white skin had sloughed off. That was another thing about starvation: the body burnt too little food to keep the tissues from freezing.

'Perhaps the Unreal City was just a dream of Soli's; perhaps the Unreal City does not exist.'

The next day, he helped Jiro pull the sled. Even though it was lighter, with only twelve food packets stowed among the ice saw, sleeping furs, hide scraper, oilstone, it was still too heavy. He puffed and sweated and strained for a few miles before deciding to throw away the hide scraper, the spare carving wood and ivory, and the fishing lines. He would have no time for fishing now, and if he reached the Unreal City, he could make new fishing gear and the other tools he might need to live. He pulled the lightened sled with all his strength, and Jiro pulled too, pulled with his pink tongue lolling out and his chest hard against the leather harness, but they were not strong enough to move it very far or very fast. One boy-man and a starved dog cannot match the work of an entire sled team. The gruelling labour all day in the cold was killing them. Jiro whined in frustration, and Danlo felt like crying. But he couldn't cry because the tears would freeze, and men (and women) weren't allowed to cry over hardships. No, crying was unseemly, he thought, unless of course one of the tribe had died and gone over – then a man could cry an ocean of tears; then a true man was required to cry.

Soon, he thought, he too would be dead. The coming of his death was as certain as the next storm; it bothered him only that there would be no one left to cry for him, to bury him or to pray for his spirit. (Though Jiro might whine and howl for a while before eating the meat from his emaciated bones. Although it is not the Alaloi way to allow animals to desecrate their corpses, after all that had happened, Danlo did not begrudge the dog a little taste of human meat.)

'Unreal City,' he repeated over and over as he stared off into the blinding eastern snowfields, 'unreal, unreal.'

But it was not the World-soul's intention that Jiro eat him. Day by day the sledding became harder, and then impossible. It was very late in the season. The sun, during the day, burned too hotly. The snow turned to fareesh, round, granular particles of snow melted and refrozen each day and night. In many places, the sea ice was topped with thick layers of malku. On the eighty-fifth day of their journey, after a brutal morning of pulling through this frozen slush, Jiro fell dead in his harness. Danlo untied him, lifted him into his lap and gave him a last drink of water by letting some snowmelt spill 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 ached. He tried each moment to find the best of his quickness and strength, to flee the terrible cold, but each moment the cold intensified and hardened all around him, and through him, until even his blood grew heavy and thick with cold. Numbness crept from his toes into his feet; he could barely feel his feet. Twice, his toes turned hard with frostbite, and he had to stop, to sit down in the snow, bare each foot in turn, and thrust his icy toes into his mouth. He had no way to thaw them properly. After he had resumed pushing through the snowdrifts, his toes froze again. Soon, he knew, his feet would freeze all the way up to his ankles, freeze as hard as ice. There was nothing he could do. Most likely, a few days after they were thawed, his feet would run to rot. And then he – or one of the City's shadow-men – would have to cut them off.