Neverness

by David Zindell

  After a while, Soli whistled to his lead dog, and I realized it was time to go. Since I was pretending to be an Alaloi, I thought I should practice their rituals. I turned to the four points of the world, giving thanks for the morning. In the east there was a low, red light the color of glowing blood where the ice joined the sky. Wisps of pink and gray hung from the blue–black dome, illuminated by the sun beyond the curve of the world. To the south, gray mist and endless ice. The west was dark, the outline of Sawelsalia still lost into the fold of night. I bowed to the north, and there was Kweitkel rising in the distance like a massive, white god. (The word “kel”, which means mountain, is also the Devaki word for god.) Its lower slopes were green and dark white, almost slaty against the sky, but the snowfields of the upper cone glared orange in the streaming light. “Kweitkel, nu la lurishia,” I whispered, hoping no one would overhear me greeting the mountain. “Shantih, shantih.”

  We pointed our sleds north and whistled four short low notes followed by a long, keening, high note, that peculiar tiralee by which the Devaki urge their dogs forward when they wish to spare the lash. The dogs, with their black noses and lolling pink tongues, leapt at their harnesses and dug their feet into the snow. Soli drove the lead sled followed by Bardo. Most of the time the women rode in the beds of the sleds. At least twice that morning, though, my mother pestered me to take the rails of my sled. But I would not let her. Devaki women, I told her to her annoyance, do not drive sleds. I had the rear sled, which was the easiest to handle for two reasons: firstly, my lead dog, Liko, was by far the smartest and strongest of the dogs, and secondly because I had only to follow the track already broken by Soli and Bardo. The snow itself was hard–packed and clean; the iced runners of our sleds glided smoothly in their parallel grooves. The Devaki call such snow saffel, fast snow, and fast it was. By midmorning we had covered most of the distance to the island, and we would have gone even further but for the ragged and pitiful condition of the dogs.

  I must admit here that I was to blame for starving the dogs. From the first, this cruelty was my plan. Of all the hurtful things I have done in my life—and there have been many things, many—in some ways I regret this torture of innocent beasts most of all. It was necessary, so I told myself and the others, necessary that we put forth the appearance of having traveled a great distance. If we had really crossed a thousand miles of ice, as we were pretending we had, our dogs would be thin with toil and hungry from eating half–rations for too many days. To this end, against Soli’s wishes, I had demanded that the dogs be fed very little. Furthermore, I had—I myself did this—before we left the City I had rubbed salty, frozen slush into their paws until they bled and froze. As they whined and looked at me with their trusting eyes, I had starved and maimed them; I did this so the Devaki would accept us as brothers, and we might discover the secret of life. (I am not, I know, forgiven this barbarity merely because I starved myself. The others did the same. What is man but that being who can stand any barbarity, misery or pain?)

  It was a pity, too, that Bardo and I had to whip the dogs. All the way to the island, Bardo used his whip freely. He shouted and cursed and flailed at the hindquarters of his rear dog. Curiously, Soli, whose dogs had the task of breaking trail, did not use his whip. He had learned another trick from Lionel, learned it better than Lionel himself. I remember how Soli’s clear whistle pierced the morning air. It was a beautiful whistle, full of music; to this day I can hear the keening of his whistle. There was an urgency in the clean, high notes and also an understanding, as if Soli well knew the agony of shrunken bellies and freezing, bleeding paws. He whistled over and over the short tiralee, and his dogs panted and pulled hard at their traces. Soon, I hoped, if our luck held, they would be rewarded with a roaring fire and bloody hunks of fresh–killed meat.

  Thus we approached the rocky shore of the island. There was a thrilling spray of wind, the scrape and glide of the sled over the snow. My face was so numb from the cold I could barely speak. But there was little to say and much to listen to: the yelping of the dogs and Bardo’s blustering voice; the screams of the thallows as they dived from the cliffs beyond us and beat their wings against the wind; the ice particles etching the rock promontories rising out of the sea; and when the wind died and the living things were quiet for a moment, the sudden rush of silence, vast and profound.

  About a mile from the shore, I saw that there would be difficulty with our landfall. The southern coast of Kweitkel was broken with high cliffs; spires of volcanic rock pushed out of the coastal waters like great, ragged, black fingers eaten away by a disease of salt and snow. At the high strand, the sea was frozen upon the rocks, the ice crusty and folded and thick, glazed ripples runnling across the beach in uneven bands of white and blue. I thought we would do better to circle the island and drive our sleds up the gentle slope of the western coast. When we stopped for our midday meal of baldo nuts and cold water, Soli disagreed, saying, “If we pretend we’re of the far south, we must be seen to approach from the south.”

  “But the western slope would be quicker,” I said in a voice slurry with cold.

  “You’re always hurrying, aren’t you?”

  “Perhaps the Devaki have been watching us approach,” I said. “They’ve had the whole morning to watch us.” I looked at the stark southern cliffs, and I felt a rawness in my throat, a presentiment of disaster and doom. But I was no scryer, so all I said was, “I don’t like these cliffs.”

  I wondered how our three sleds would have appeared as seen from the ridge above the Devaki cave. There could be nothing as tiny and insignificant as men and the artifacts of men moving against the spread of the endless ice. Three tiny lines strung out across infinite whiteness, creeping more slowly than a snow worm—that, I imagined, is what anyone would have seen looking out to sea.

  Soli tightened his lips, which were shiny with grease. “The universe doesn’t turn around Mallory Ringess or any of us.” As if to reassure himself, he looked at Justine, who was sitting on his sled’s bed. “Why should the Devaki be watching us?”

  I rubbed the side of my nose; the hardened grease was sticky and cold. I said, “If we take our dogs up through the cliffs, they’ll think we’re stupid.”

  “No, that’s not so.” He held his hand over his brows, squinting as he picked apart sections of the beach with his hard eyes. He pointed at a break in the sea cliffs where the beach rose up to meet the forest. “There,” he said, speaking the Devaki language as if born to it. “We will drive our sleds along the tongue of ice where it licks the edge of the forest.”

  “It will be hard going.”

  “Yes, that is true,” he said.

  That afternoon we performed the hardest work of our lives. Near the island, the sea was frozen into a patchwork of green and blue ice blocks, a jungle of crystals the size of a house, of cracks and humps and jagged spears of ice which snagged the harnesses, almost impaling the dogs. There were moments when the sleds jammed against the fissures and folds of the ice ridges, or worse, dangled over the edge while the dogs howled in frustration and fear. At least three times we had to unharness the dogs and stand at the top of a ridge, pulling hand over hand at the leather traces, hauling our loads up and over. Once we had to unload the sleds completely. Bardo, of course, hated effort of any sort which did not occur in bed, and at every opportunity he bellowed and cursed the instance of his birth. Each of us, in his or her own way, reacted according to type: Justine sang a cheerful little tune and laughed at every difficulty just because she loved being outside in the snow next to her husband; Katharine, distracted and disassociated from her labor, was fascinated by the ice’s glitter and the texture of the distant forest, and she could not stop looking all around at the things of the world; Soli seemed to relish problems of any sort, probably as a test of his cleverness and ability to endure pain. Only my mother—and here was one of the great surprises of my life—seemed at ease with the muscle–popping work. She moved across the dangerous ice crusts lithely and surel
y; she seemed to relish the strength of her new, Alaloi body. This newfound pleasure of being was apparent in the relaxed way she pulled at the harness traces and leaned into the wind, driving forward with her hips as she set her boots against the slippery ice; it was apparent in the set of her sculpted face, which, for all its thickness of nose and jaw, was very beautiful.

  It was late afternoon when we reached the edge of the forest. The muscles along my forearms were swollen and burning. I had strained my knee when Katharine lost her footing and slipped, and the whole weight of the near–dangling sled had fallen upon me. I had slipped too, twisting the joint with a ligament–tearing force. I owed it to Mehtar, I knew, that the ligaments had held. I limped along the snowline where the beach gave way to the dark forest, and I found myself—absurdly—giving thanks to the tubist cutter that I was not a cripple.

  Bardo, who pretended to be crippled with exhaustion, sat on a rock holding his head in his hands as he moaned, “By God, I’m tired! See my hands? Why can’t I close them? This is madness. Ah...but it’s cold, cold enough to freeze your piss before it hits the ground as I’d show you if I weren’t too tired to stand. Goddamn Shiva Lal and goddamn Drisana Lal for spreading her legs and having him and having me. Damn Govinda Lal and damn Timur, too, and Hanif and...” He went on in this manner cursing his ancestors for inflicting upon him the pain of living; he went on for quite a while. The princes of Summerworid, I knew too well, had an excellent memory of their lineage. He cursed his great–grandfather’s grandfather, and he cursed the unreasonableness of water for permitting itself to freeze into the greenish–white icicles hanging down his mustache. At that moment I did not pity him, even though I knew that before coming to Neverness he had never seen snow or ice.

  While my mother took one of the dogs and went into the woods on skis to survey the terrain, Justine began wrapping skins around the other dogs’ bloody paws. Katharine, I noticed with a mixture of annoyance and wonder, bent over a bristly bush, holding her naked hands spread above the petals of a fireflower. “It’s warm,” she said. “The colors, look how they change, red into burning carmine, carmine into…”

  Soli crunched up the beach over to me, and we immediately started to argue. I was eager to drive on to the Devaki’s cave, but he shook his head and said, “It’s late. The forest is no place to be at night.”

  “By nightfall,” I said, “we’ll be in the Devaki’s cave. There’s only four miles of easy forest ahead.”

  “Yes, if Rainer’s memory is true.”

  “Don’t you have faith?” I asked him slyly.

  “Faith!” he said, and he knocked the snow from his boots.

  “We’ve two hours before twilight.”

  “Do we, Pilot?”

  I looked to the west but we were too near the base of the cliff to see the position of the sun. I wished we had brought a clock with us. It would have been an easy thing to do. I remembered seeing in the Timekeeper’s Tower a clock no bigger than the nail of my little finger. (The nail of my little finger, that is, before Mehtar carved my hands.) The clock was a wafer of some alive substance which glowed and shifted colors to mark the passing of the seconds and hours, much as Katharine’s flowers mutated from magenta to flame–purple. If I had hidden one of these wafers in my furs, I could have predicted the moment when the turning edge of the world would obliterate the sun.

  “We could have had the tinker attach a clock to the radio,” I said, reopening the old argument. “But you wouldn’t break the Timekeeper’s edict.”

  The radio itself was hidden inside the false bottom of Soli’s sled along with the spheres of krydda we would need to preserve the culled Devaki tissues. Of course, it was not easy to get at the radio; we would use it only to signal the windjammer when we had finished this dangerous business of posing as cavemen.

  It seemed that Soli regretted he had not broken the Timekeeper’s edict against clocks. It must be difficult, I thought, to be the Lord Pilot. He stared at the base of the cliff, at the banded layers of rock; it was as if he were staring through ancient marls and sediments down to the heart of the world. “The Timekeeper is right, isn’t he, to hate time? Why should we care what time it is? Why do we need a clock when we have Mallory Ringess to reassure us we have two hours before the light dies?”

  When my mother returned to report that the way through the woods was clear and not very steep, our decision was made. “There’s deep snow,” she said. “But the crust is thick. Look at Ivar. With his hard, little paws—he didn’t break through the crust.”

  It was while we were harnessing the dogs for our final run through the forest that a terrible thing happened. I should have been forewarned because Katharine suddenly dropped the traces, stood erect and gazed off into the sky as if she were looking at a painting. But I was tired, too busy with Liko to realize she was gazing at the reenactment of a past vision. I was pulling the harness around Liko’s deep chest when there came a flurry from behind a rock near the edge of the forest. A snow hare, its ears laid back flat, bounded across the snow in a wild zig–zag. Liko let out a tremendous bark, and before I could grab hold, he bolted after the hare.

  What happened next is difficult to tell. Difficult not only because my memory is disturbed and opaque but because the telling of it hurts. Liko sprinted across the snow, a blur of near–white against white pursuing a bounding ball of white. Bardo was up off his rock, looking skyward, shouting, “By God, look at it!” There came another blur from over the lip of the cliff. The hare hopped nearer to the forest, and I looked up to see a great blue shape spread against the blueness of the sky. It was a thallow with its talons pointed, diving towards the hare, diving towards Liko, diving towards one or the other—I did not know which—but diving fast and true, its rear talon pointed like a falling spear. It drove the talon into Liko’s neck. There was a terrible high cry. Or perhaps it was the mingling of two cries: the victorious cry of the great bird joining Liko’s terrified yelp—I do not know. The dog dropped to the snow, squealing, working his jaws. I was running towards him, and I wondered why he didn’t try to escape the thallow. I was running toward him, too blind from the dazzling snow and fear to realize that the thallow had probably broken his neck. While I was running towards him, intent on pulling the wings from the thallow and breaking its neck, the bird looked at me with its bright eye as it dug its talons into Liko’s side. It turned its head as if puzzled, and then it dipped its hooked beak into Liko’s frothy mouth. There was another terrible scream, and then silence. The thallow held its head up—and all this time, which was almost no time, I was running—the thallow held Liko’s pink tongue in its beak. It snapped its head suddenly, swallowing the bloody tidbit, and it fixed me with its eye. It dipped its beak again, as if it had endless time to perform this violation. I heard myself scream, and the tip of the beak tore into Liko’s eye, which all the time had been open and alive with terror. I beat the air with my fists; the thallow threw back its head and opened its throat, and then, looking almost leisurely at me, it sprang into the air with a cry and a thunder of wings and soared off into the sky.

  I stood over Liko, opening and closing my hands, helpless.

  Soli came over to me, and Bardo, and the others came too. Soli looked at Liko, who was whimpering, and he said, “Can’t you see he’s dying?”

  I was silent, staring at the red stains on the snow. “Your dog, Pilot, he’s your dog.”

  The bloody slush froze while I watched, and Soli said, “You’ll have to kill him.”

  No, I thought, I can’t kill Liko, my lead dog, my friend.

  “Do it now, Pilot. Quickly.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

  Soli, who rarely cursed, shouted, “Damn you!” and he bent quickly as he whipped his balled fist with a terrible force against Liko’s head. I heard the skull crack, and Liko was still, a piece of fur and meat lying dead against the snow. Soli cursed again, and he bowed his head and pressed the flat of his hand against his temple as he walked away.
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br />   Bardo came over to me, and I said, “Liko’s dead.”

  He draped his heavy arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Little Fellow,” he said.

  I tried to look at Liko but I could not. “He was alive,” I whispered, “and now he’s dead.”

  Bardo dropped to his knees. He removed his mitten and felt beneath Liko’s fur for a heartbeat. “Too bad,” he muttered as he shook his head. “Too bad.”

  I wanted to throw my arms around Liko, to touch his fur, to hold my hand against his freezing nose. But I could not touch him. He was not an alive being to be touched; he was a thing of fur and hardening blood and hone, and soon, when the thallow returned or the wolves worked at his meat, he would be nothing more than a stain on the snow.

  “He was so pretty,” Justine said. And then, so softly her words were nearly lost to the wind, she said, “Liko, mi alasharia la shantih,” which is the Devaki prayer for the dead.

  I tried to repeat the prayer, but I could not make my lips form the words. I had never before seen an animal die. I did not believe that Liko’s spirit would rest in peace on the other side of day. “There’s no glory when the ticking stops,” the Timekeeper had told me. “There’s only blackness and the hell of everlasting nothingness.” I looked at the dog’s body, and I saw nothingness. The wind roared in my ear and rippled through his fur like waves upon false winter’s sea, and I remembered I had seen death before. Once, when I was a boy on the beach outside the Hofgarten, I had seen a seagull pecking the corpse of one of his brothers. I remembered this first vision of death very well: the torn, oily feathers dirty with seafoam and sand, the bright red jewels of meat holding my fascinated stare. And later that same day, the day I had ended my solitary walks on the beach, I had seen the skeleton of a beached whale revealed by the ebb–tide as it withdrew into the sea. I remembered the great fingers of white bone curving upward from the wet sand as if to grasp the wind’s breath from the sky. Yes, I had seen death before, but never the dying, never. The broken seagull’s wings, the whale’s naked ribs—these were things capriciously cast upon the beach, bone reminders that there was a horror and final mystery to be avoided at any cost. I looked at Liko’s fine body, the thick neck, the deep chest, and I saw that he was at once a thing and something more; he was a unique being I had watched pass from life into death. It was this passage that terrified me. It was the dying that made my teeth ache and robbed my muscles of will. I looked at Liko and felt tears freezing in my eyes; I looked at Liko and I despised myself because I realized he was far beyond my pity or pain.