The Broken God (80 page)

'Kill it now,' Danlo pleaded. 'Please, now.'

But the chef only smiled at him with her tight, thin lips, and she poured an amber liquid over the length of the worm. The liquid – it was probably cognac or some other spirit of alcohol – hissed and steamed. The chef used a little hand light to ignite the liquid, and now the worm writhed inside a shroud of hot blue flames.

'Tell her to kill it,' Danlo said. He looked fiercely into Hanuman's eyes for a moment, then back at the worm.

'I can't do that,' Hanuman said.

'Tell her!'

'But that would be pointless. In a few seconds, she'll slice the worm into segments, and it will be over.'

'Not... over,' Danlo gasped out. 'You cannot kill a worm that way. Each segment ... has its own life. The chef can slice aulii onto your plate, but the parts will still be alive.'

'That's the way this dish is eaten,' Hanuman said. There was no emotion in his voice and nothing in his eyes except the reflection of a worm writhing through blue flames.

'But first the worm must be killed!'

'I'm sure the chef doesn't know how.'

'It must be killed!' Danlo repeated.

'Then perhaps you should kill it.'

'I cannot,' Danlo said. 'You know I cannot.'

'No, that would be an ignoble act,' Hanuman said. 'Out of compassion for all living things, you've sworn never to harm anything, not even a dying snowworm.'

For what seemed a long time Danlo could not move. Then he looked at the snowworm again, and his heart was suddenly on fire. He fairly leaped out of his chair, leaned far over the table, and he plunged his hands through the blue alcohol flames. He grabbed the snowworm. As quickly as he could, he squeezed one end of it between his forefinger and thumb, and then, in the Alaloi way, he ran his fingers up and down the worm, squeezing deeply, popping the nerve tube segment by segment. When he was done, he dropped the worm in front of Hanuman. He stood holding his burned, greasy hands open in the air. 'What is wrong with you!' he shouted at Hanuman.

And Hanuman just smiled at him; he looked at the worm and said, 'Now you understand.'

And Danlo did understand, and the understanding was a pain burning inside him more urgently than any pain he had ever known. He fell deep into hatred then, hatred for Hanuman and the bewildered aficionados, hatred for himself. His face was like a burning mask of skin smothering and blinding him. He leaned forward and grasped the edge of the table. It was wrought of dense black wood and gold and it was shockingly heavy, but with a single convulsion of muscles and popping spine, Danlo straightened up and threw the table over. It crashed to the floor. Wine goblets and plates and the table's flower vase shattered, and shards of porcelain sprayed out into the dark room. Without pause or thought, Danlo sprang over to another table where a chef was frying some prawns, and he threw that table down, too. And then he found a stew table where a lobster was boiling inside a great clary kettle, and over it went, and he didn't hear the screams of the aficionados splashed with boiling water, couldn't see their outraged faces. Two of the chefs tried to block his way and subdue him, but he knocked them aside and ran from the room. He barely had enough sense to grab his furs before rushing into the snowstorm that blew through the streets outside.

When he had lost himself in the dark, twisting glidderies of the Bell, at last he stopped and gasped out, 'Oh, Hanu, Hanu, why did I break my vow?'

He looked into a street light, and there, tongued in the pretty, coloured flames he saw an image of Hanuman's face smiling at him. A part of him, on his right side, expected to see Hanuman rushing from the restaurant to make his apologies. But the left half of him whispered that he would never come. He stood on a nameless street listening for the sound of skate blades against ice. He felt the snow breaking and melting against his face, and he waited a long time in silence before setting out toward the Old City. He had to find a cafe before it grew too late; he was now very cold, very weary, and very, very hungry.

Then The Awakened One, having dwelt in Uruvela as long as he wished, proceeded on his wanderings in the direction of Gaya Head, accompanied by a great congregation of priests, a thousand in number, who had all of them aforetime been monks with matted hair. And there in Gaya, on Gaya Head, The Awakened One dwelt with the thousand priests.

And there The Awakened One addressed the priests: –

'All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire?

'The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that too is on fire.'

– from The Teachings of The Awakened One

On the second day of deep winter, Bardo completed negotiations on a cathedral in the Old City. It was indeed a glorious building of sweeping arches and ancient stone. A sect of Kristians, during the lordship of Jemmu Flowtow, had built it near the Academy in the hope of attracting young novices to the worship of a god-man they called the Messiah. But Kristianity was a decrepit, tottering and sickly religion; its ancient doctrines and rituals had as little vitality as a toothless old man who has long since undergone his last return to youth. The Kristians could not establish themselves on Neverness, and so they had sold their beautiful church and abandoned the City. Various investors and owners, for thirteen centuries, had kept it in good repair. Bardo acquired it from a group of Architects known as the Universal Church of Ede. They, too, had abandoned Neverness, and quite recently, not because their religion was dying, but because they feared that the light from the Vild would soon destroy the City. In fact, since they had owned the cathedral a scant twenty years and had never made use of it, they were desperate to sell it. And so Bardo paid much less money for it than it was worth. To celebrate this mercantile victory – and to prepare for the anniversary of Mallory Ringess' supposed ascension to godhood – he declared a holiday. On the 19th of deep winter, at the Ring of Fire, the Way of Ringess would hold a mass joyance, the greatest gathering and party the City had ever seen.

All Are Welcome! – This was the message recorded on the invitation disks that Bardo's followers distributed throughout the four quarters of the City. Although no one knew how many people might attend an outdoor joyance in the deeps of winter, Bardo had chosen the largest of the City's ice rings to accommodate the hoped-for crowds. Naturally, when Lord Ciceron learned that thousands of the religiously curious would be swarming into the ice ring nearest the Academy, he was irate. But there was little he could do. Each of the City ice rings was, by canon law, a commons; while the Order's zambonis maintained every street and ring in the City (except the illegal ones), keeping the ice clear and smooth, the Lords of the Order could not forbid the people to gather upon them. Of course, they could forbid all Ordermen to attend the joyance, but Lord Ciceron perceived that such a forbiddance might be disobeyed, and so he wisely restrained the Lords of the Tetrad from issuing a formal injunction. In many ways, however, he made it known that the Order disapproved of the joyance: he refused to lend Bardo's church any of the Order's movable warming pavilions; for fifteen days preceding the event, he kept the zambonis away from the Ring of Fire and its surrounding streets so that the ice throughout the entire district would run to seed and become nearly impassable; he peevishly announced that all the Order's restaurants and multrums near the ice ring would be closed. It must have galled him that Bardo thwarted each of these measures and turned adversity to his advantage.

The 19th of deep winter dawned clear and bitterly cold. The sky was a perfect blue-black circle hung in silence over the Ring of Fire. The ring itself – a circle of ice a quarter mile in diameter – shone like a red mirror with the light of the sun rising over the mountains. Around the rim of the ice ring were many warming pavilions, great open tents of scarlet silk that flapped and rippled in the wind. Bardo's followers had worked through the night erecting them. Bardo had paid for the pavilions with money collected from new Ringists, just as he had paid for the kiosks and food pavilions that dotted the ice ring. He had hired chefs from the City's best restaurants; from the vendors in the Farsider's Quarter, he had bought vast quantities of food and drink. As the morning wanned and the first people ventured into the ring, the smells of roasting sweetmeats and bread spread out from kiosk to kiosk. And jambalaya and hot curries and fairy foods for those wishing to gorge, and a hundred other dishes, and with each hour, more people gathered together eating their steaming delicacies and drinking coffee and chocolate and hot ale. By noon there were three thousand people there. Then, from a wooden stage built near the ring's southern rim, musicians began to play and the sound of gosharps and booming drums could be heard across the City. People began swarming into the streets leading to the ring. Since the ice of these glidderies was rotten and in places packed with snow, they had to eject their skate blades and make their way by boot toward the joyance. Bardo eased their impatience by having hundreds of new Ringists go among them with billies full of beer and wine. He distributed other drugs as well. Freely, from his own stores, he gave away dried triya seeds and teonancatl mushrooms; he provided little silk bags full of tobacco, toalache, bhang, and other plants that might be smoked. To walk up the Serpentine, where it curved around the northern rim of the ring, was to move slowly through clouds of blue smoke, to see a hundred pipes glowing red and orange, and to hear millions of the little triya seeds popping as they burned and released psychedelic vapours into the air. People everywhere were laughing and singing, and they buoyed each other along in unbroken streams. Most of them, by the time they entered the ice ring, were slightly drunk from this smoke. And there they gathered shoulder to shoulder before the stage as the music of the mantra musicians vibrated through their bellies and up their spines. There were rich astriers dressed in chukkas and capes; and ill-clad autists with their bare, frozen feet; and wormrunners, aphasics, warrior-poets, nimspinners and arhats; and many, many academicians bedraped in their bright-coloured furs. Almost half the Ordermen in Neverness were there, and they stood easily among the hibakusha and the harijan and the other peoples of the City. Throughout the afternoon they gathered, a great rippling swarm of humanity (and even a few curious Darghinni and Fravashi) who never stopped eating and singing and smoking and spinning and dancing.

'By God, there must be eighty thousand people here!' Bardo said. He stood in the opening of a huge warming pavilion at the rear of the stage. The mantra musicians had ceased playing, and the stage was empty, which allowed a clear line of sight out over the ice ring. He gazed at the sea of people swaying and waiting below him, and he started to laugh. 'Perhaps as many as ninety thousand – ah, this will be a night to remember!'

At his right side stood Danlo, and on his left, Hanuman li Tosh. Since the night in the restaurant they had not spoken to each other; now there was a wall between them of little politenesses, formalities, and anxious silence.

Danlo, too, looked out over the manswarm, counting. It was almost dark, but he could still see the people's black and white and brown faces shining before him. At any moment, at various points across the ice ring, little orange lights would flare quickly before dying. They looked like hundreds of fireflies winking on and off. But it was only the flames from matches striking, he realized; in a crowd so vast, there would always be a few people lighting their pipes.

'I count... ninety-six thousand people,' Danlo said. He had to shout against the roar of voices filling the ice ring. 'And forty-nine aliens.'

Bardo ahhhed and hmmmed, and he stroked his beard and seemed very pleased. In his black fur gown and cape, which were trimmed out in gold, he was an impressive figure of a man. All the Ringists in the warming pavilion – Surya Lal and Thomas Rane and the inner circle, as well as many godchildren serving hot drinks and making important errands – looked to him to orchestrate the evening's events. He smiled at Hanuman, belched, then said, 'So many people – who's ever faced so many before?'

Hanuman was brazenly dressed in his formal cetic's robe; atop his head was an orange satin toque. He hated wearing hats of any sort, even on cold, windy nights. He wore it only for camouflage. Beneath the floppy toque was a headgear of another kind: a common cetic's heaume, a chromium cap of neurologics that gleamed from his brows across his head to the back of his neck. Or rather, it would have gleamed had he dared to take his hat off.

There are ninety-six thousand, three hundred and ninety-one people here,' he said. His eyes were wide open, but blind with the intensity of computer interface. The cetic's heaume generated an intense field, suffusing his brain with information. 'And even as we speak, more are arriving.'

'It's time we started the testaments,' Bardo said. 'Before it falls too cold.'

Now Hanuman's eyes began to clear, and he scrutinized the people below them. It was obvious to Danlo that he had faced away from his computer, for the moment, and was now seeing with the eyes of a cetic.

'I should think we might open them more,' Hanuman said.

'With more music?' Bardo's voice boomed out.

Hanuman nodded his head. 'However I'd dispense with the improvisatori altogether and reschedule the song masters for a later time. Now it would be best to call up the concertists. They should play no more than a quarter hour.'

'And then the testaments?'

'And then the testaments,' Hanuman said. 'But there should be no more than five of them.'

'Including my own?' Bardo asked. He frowned and stamped his boots up and down on the wood with such vigour that the whole stage vibrated and shook.