Corvus

  'Are you OK?' Pani asks. 'Maybe we ought to go back.'

  'A bit cold, that's all.'

  Unconvinced, Pani shakes his head. 'Your face is too pale.' He'd of course know the signs of frostbite.

  'Stop fussing, I'm fine. Let's give it one more try.'

  Pani regards Zach a moment longer, then lays his harpoon aside and tugs at Zach's sleeve. 'Bend down,' he orders, and proceeds to blow on Zach's face till it begins to sting; on his eyes—his eyes, why hasn't he thought of that?

  'Pani, do things sometimes looked blurred to you?'

  'Not close up.'

  'How close?'

  'Arm's length, I guess.'

  What kind of cruel joke is this? Program a young hunter to need glasses in a world where there's none to be had.

  Pani roots in his pouch and hands Zach a piece of frozen blubber. 'Here, this will warm you.' Zach dislikes the fibrous consistency and especially the tracery of blood—the nutty flavour isn't actually unpleasant—but he chews on it as much to please Pani as to replenish his own energy while mulling the eyesight problem.

  'You haven't answered me, Zach. About your name.'

  Persistent little bugger. 'It comes from an ancient language nobody speaks any more.'

  'Old like all good names. And it means?'

  Zach's thoughts retreat before the barrage of questions, though it's hardly Pani's fault that the Purists are lobbying for their so-called simonym legislation—a proposal to rename all simus in accordance with strict guidelines which would make traditional forenames illegal, even as nicknames. Still hotly debated, yet more and more likely to be passed. Zach rubs a fist across his tattoo. 'Someday I'll have it removed surgically,' he told Laura. 'No, don't,' she said. 'I like it. It's part of you, you mustn't obliterate it.'

  'A shaman's name, I reckon,' Pani says.

  'No. It means God remembers.'

  Persistent sly little bugger. One of these days somebody will knock that grin off his face if he's not careful. When Pani bends to retrieve his harpoon, Zach scoops up a handful of snow.

  'You fight dirty,' Pani says a while later in surrender.

  Zach turns away, memory lying in ambush behind every hummock and every pressure ridge like a council bleb with his snowball filled with shot. Removing a mitt, Zach stoops to run his fingers through the layer of windblown snow. Though Pani says nothing, Zach can feel his disapproval. Ice crystals are far more complex than described in school geography, even their names suggest a lyrical complexity: plates, stellars, columns, needles, spatial dendrites, capped columns, rimed, bullet rosettes, irregulars. This love of taxonomy—how much does it explain, how much conceal of the mystery of ice? It's staggering that no two crystals are identical when composed of nothing more than water, than a hexagonal latticework of H2O molecules nucleated under supercooling. Again Zach scrapes up some of the astonishing stuff to study before it melts, as though he could somehow magnify the flakes to reveal their exquisite fingerprints.

  'Stop that!' This time Pani feels obliged to interfere. Zach wipes his hand on a sleeve and slides it back into his mitt. The air is surprisingly dry, and between them they empty the seal-flipper water pouch which Pani is carrying under his parka. Drinking is meant to help keep the skin from freezing; Zach wonders if any simus were included in the trials. Pani goes for a refill from a nearby drift—unmelted snow only increases your thirst, he warns—while Zach turns back to the polynya to pee. As a man it's wicked enough to lower his trousers at these temperatures; what must it be like for a woman! The splash of laughter, unmistakable, is disconcerting enough to spray his boots.

  He swings round, hastily sorting out his unfinished business. Pani is staring out over the pack ice, and Zach can tell from his stance, a taut predatory stillness, that the boy is all attention. There's something he's trying to make out. If someone laughed, it wasn't Pani.

  'What is it?' Zach calls. 'A seal?' The wind snatches away his words. Skirting a finger of the polynya to move closer, he hears a low grinding noise which brings him to a standstill—a primeval sound of rupture, he'll tell himself later, and the memory will become the septic forceps of sweat-drenched nightmare, tearing him from sleep. But now there's no time to think, and no time to take fright, no time to register the frantic movements of a figure emerging from the distant iglu, the scrambling and frenzied barking of the dogs, no time to hesitate or prognosticate or levitate while, in slowtime, the ice buckles and folds beneath his feet, folds and buckles and tears the caul of time in this thin cold place.

  'Pani!' he cries, and leaps towards the boy.

  And then there is only silence, and cold, and suffocating snow.

  'He was born with a caul.' Slowly Zach raises his head against the snowy weight of memory, his mother's words overheard long ago, then explained and soon forgotten; frozen words, jarred loose by the quake.

  The light is blue, so deep and pervasive a blue that at first he sees nothing but blue. He spits snows from his mouth, shakes his head, extracts the clumps jammed into the neckline of his parka and beginning to trickle down his back, then works himself to all fours. His own cap, oddly enough, still covers his ears though the hood has slipped back. If anything is broken, he's too numb (or concussed) to feel it. More confidently he scrambles to his feet. Above him stretch high, near-vertical walls of ice and a jagged shard of the sky. In the strange light it's difficult to guess how far he's fallen. 'Pani! Where are you? Are you OK?'

  'Zach?' Pani's face appears at the edge of the crevasse and he begins to laugh with predictable resilience. 'You look like a snowman.'

  So they build those too.

  'Better covered in snow than blood,' Zach mutters but pulls off a mitt to wipe his face and cap, then right his hood. 'What was that? An earthquake?'

  Pani shakes his head. 'An ivu.'

  Zach has read about them: ice shoves driven by wind and sea currents to ram violently and often precipitously onto shorefast ice, surging landwards like a tsunami; the terror of Arctic hunters.

  'I don't think I can climb out of here on my own. You'll have to get help.'

  Pani wriggles further over the lip to look for himself.

  'Mind you don't fall in,' Zach says. 'Then we'll be in real trouble.'

  'I already am,' Pani says, resigned to the hiding he'll undoubtedly get from his father. 'Move round to keep warm. I'll hurry.' He disappears from sight, then reappears with his food pouch. 'Here, catch. There's not a lot left, but eat it up.'

  With Pani gone, Zach sets out to explore his icebox, though without much hope of finding anything to use in lieu of a ladder or ice screws. He checks for his pocket knife, whose presence is more comforting than utilitarian under the circumstances. If Pani had thought to throw down his panak, it might have been possible to cut and stack some blocks of snow—far too few, however, to reach above his head, not to mention ground level. Could he score holds into the ice working one-handed? No hunter in the Arctic, boy or man, relinquishes his most important tool without a compelling reason.

  The floor inclines downwards and Zach treads carefully, fearing further instability or fissures concealed by snow. A programmer's sjambok might have laid open the ice, so whiplike is the shape of the crevasse. He reaches its far end, only to be confronted with a narrow opening through which fresh light wells. It stains the air, the snow, his skin the way a death stains the living. To staunch its course, he shuts his eyes, shuts them and listens. If you listen long enough, the ice will always speak. 'Laura,' he whispers.

  In years to come he will cross the ice barrier many times; his White Time cycle will become the first cognoscens music to supplant the primitive interface; one of his granddaughters will marry Max's grandson, and their daughter will bear the true if nascent Levian gift; Pani, and Lev, and most of all Laura will never be far from him; such are the whispers crossing time's chill rift.

  The walls hem his shoulders but soon widen enough for him to walk more quickly despite the gradient, though in fact he slows time and again to take in
the eerie beauty of the formations. The subtle variations of colour—here, sapphire, and here, turquoise, and here, lapis lazuli, and everywhere thalassic hues as fluent as the ice itself—pale in comparison to the contours. At one point he has to sidle carefully round lethally sharp icicles suspended like cathedral organ pipes from the roof; at another he can't stop himself from giving a tentative prod to a bubblewrap encrustation surrounding a vertical cleft, curious if the hemispheres will pop (they don't); but mostly he simply gazes at the ice, whose chance carvings surpass any a master sculptor could tool. However frosty his breath, he doesn't feel particularly cold. At a delicate, glittering, frozen waterfall he halts to listen once more.

  The ice is ancient, Lev says. It contains questions none of us can answer.

  Underfoot the passage is slick, gradually steepening so that his body tilts forward slightly, but never once does he slip or wish for a set of crampons. If anything, it feels as though he's skating along virgin ice on immaterial blades; almost floating. Every now and then he can hear a distant creaking, but not the deep groans he's become used to above ground. When playing at his most concentrated, or composing, or making love, his sense of time is suspended, his consciousness supersaturated at the metastable boundary between now and forever; so too this journey. Yet at the least disruption water vapour can precipitate from supersaturation to freefall. A familiar sound begins to intrude, then to baffle him: how can there be running water down here?

  How indeed, Zach? says Lev. How can there be light?

  A sharp bend in the passage is screened by a projecting fold with the translucent grace of a Shoji panel in blue. Striations in the walls suggest enormous pressure, as though one muscled glacier has slammed itself against another, stress fractures and torn ligaments requiring millennia to heal. The soothing flow of water is louder now, with a dreamlike quality that in itself is hypnotic. There is no stark simplicity to ice: even without temple and earthquake, this is an empire of beauty and brutality, of gratuitous light and darkness.

  And still he is unprepared for the sight—the preposterous sight—which confronts him. He remembers his joy upon first discovering the cave. He remembers his renewed delight each time he's gone back. He remembers Laura's astonishment when she opened her eyes, and regardless of snakebite, regardless of police and parents, regardless of everything, her unabated wonder upon their return. The steam rising from the pool drifts on a current of air, thins for a glimpse of the water, thins and wafts upwards even as it regenerates itself in sleepy drifts. He takes a step forwards, then startles at the sound of wings.

  Chapter 39

  History favours the grandiose—the magnificent failures no less than the heroes. Zach would never imagine himself as either one, but by the time of his final run at Fulgur, he will have already become an urban legend; hated by many, idolised by many others. In time the explosive power of his grief will engage historians as well as alternate historians, a conundrum like an unending time loop: what if he hadn't undertaken the run? The moment you realise there are some things you can't alter is the moment you leave childhood behind; so they used to say. Of all his many bad decisions Zach will torment himself most savagely about yielding to Laura over the matter of the Rex. And yet the Rex will become the first cognoscens museum; almost, a shrine.

  *****

  Tuesday. A morose afternoon, grey snow underfoot and the light already failing. Laura barely noticed the clutch of younger kids just beyond the school gates when she came out of the building, Owen at her side.

  'What's that crossfuck doing back here?' Tim snarled, loud enough to carry. 'Sod this for a lark!'

  'Too right, time to get rid of him for good,' came a loyal echo.

  The group of wannabe bikers parted as Zach lowered the kickstand, tossed back his hair, swung his leg over the saddle, and advanced on Tim. Already other kids were drawing near like iron filings towards a magnet, though the lines of flux had yet to be fixed. Already the excited whispers were beginning. Everybody, it seemed, loved a fight.

  Zach stopped within spitting range of Tim.

  'Care to hit me again?' Zach asked.

  'Zach—' Laura began.

  He turned his gaze on her for the first time. 'Choose,' he said.

  'What?' she asked.

  'Right here, right now. In front of all your mates. Choose. I'm on my way to a meeting. You can come with me if you're prepared to stand up on the podium and take sides, not hang about near the exit. Or you can return my key.'

  'You've got a key to his flat?' Owen asked in disbelief.

  Laura ignored Owen. 'I thought you didn't want me at your meetings.'

  'I've changed my mind.' Zach gave her a humourless smile. 'Or are only monkeys granted that prerogative?'

  'Don't call us dirty names or I'll shove them down your gob!' Tim said hotly.

  'Tim, be quiet.' Laura took a step towards Zach. 'What's wrong?' she asked softly.

  His gaze shifted inwards for a moment. Then with finality, 'Choose.'

  From the corner of her eye Laura caught the look on Olivia's face, the same glazed look she'd seen her friend give a triple-dip chocolate fudge ice cream cone before taking her first lick. Laura knew Zach had slept with plenty of girls; had any one of them ever held him when he shivered? (Had he slept with Olivia?)

  She took a deep breath, preparing herself for the icy plunge; this pool was unheated.

  'Hey, mulac, how come you got away? Word's out on the net they blew up an entire classroom block in that fancypants school of yours.' Everyone within range swivelled to stare at Cormac, an outer with more mouth than brains; and more swiffled than stone cold sane. All except Laura, who kept her eyes fastened on Zach. 'Hidin' in the bog like a nerdy turdy while your mates are screechin' and bleedin' and scrabblin' for their body parts?'

  A gust of wind blew Zach's hair across his face. Her own eyes tearing in the cold, her cheeks stinging, Laura could see his gloved hands tremble slightly as he wrangled with it. She tugged off her gloves and woollen cap, plucked the elastic from her ponytail, and jammed her gloves into a pocket and her cap back in place. One step, and she was at his side.

  'Bend down, you idiot. And where's your helmet?'

  As he ducked his head, no smile appeared on his face, no gleam of satisfaction. His hair felt alive in her hands, warmer than it should be in this weather, and sinuous as an electric reelingout of whiplash sound. You couldn't hold it. It slipped from your grasp, and you reached for it again, this time your fingers tingling with the shock of naked, disembodied song as though skin were a tympanic membrane. The clarinet's reedy voice sang in your inner ear till you thought it would shatter. E. electricus has no need of scales, its stacked electroplaques fire both to defend itself and to communicate; to choose a mate.

  For a barless measure Laura held her breath, listening. Rare, the attended moment; rare, 'the music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts'. Laura had never read T.S. Eliot, had in fact never read a single poem outside school till Zach handed her that first slim volume, but there are quartets which sing in the meanwhile of wordy time; quartets which electrify even the silt of neural dark.

  'Zach,' she whispered, 'I'll always hear your music.'

  With her hands still tangled in his hair he said, 'You're the reason I still hear it.'

  Laura took a step backwards, a few strands of his hair caught in her fingers. She glanced round. Had they heard? The crowd was watchful, curious, greedy for some high drama. For a moment she was tempted to scream a delicious 'fuck off 'at them but caution clamped its hand round her vocal cords as she caught sight of Owen's belligerent face; Tim's ecstatic one—he was primed for a thunderous, preferably final drum roll.

  'Owen,' she began in a conciliatory tone, 'I'm sorry but—'

  Derek elbowed his way to the front. 'Hey Tim, we're not going to allow some auger cunt to treat Owen like this, are we now?'

  There was an instant of silence. Laura's heart began to thud, and if
her anorak weren't so thick, those nearby would have surely heard its ominous beat. She forced herself to face Owen. 'Please.' She swallowed, steadied her voice. 'Owen, please. Don't let them do this.'

  Uncertainly he dropped his eyes, but Tim, prancing in place, grabbed Owen by the sleeve and jerked him towards Laura. 'Hold her, while Derek and I take care of the auger.' Owen shook off Tim's hand and looked round the waiting crowd; muttering, a growing buzz, open smirking, a whistle, some catcalls. One or two girls eyeing Owen speculatively. A few kids slinking away, but most jostling closer, the thin frail layer of snow beneath their stamping feet already trampled and muddied.

  Owen's eyes returned to Laura. Expressionless, as though waiting to be filled.

  'Owen,' she said in a rush, 'you've got it wrong. I'm not going anywhere with him. I felt sorry for him, that's all.' She turned to her friend. 'Livs—'

  There was an ugly laugh from Derek. 'Damn right you're not going anywhere.' He made a crude gesture, then moved sideward to flank Zach from the left. 'Come on, Owen, let's not chickenshit any longer.'

  What happened next happened so fast that most of the onlookers missed it, though they'd be talking about it for days afterwards, each version more elaborate than the last: 'Did you see when he cartwheeled in midair . . .' 'A perfect butterfly kick . . .' 'Three metres, he was practically flying . . .'

  'Behind me,' Zach ordered. Instinctively, Laura supposed, since there was a blur of movement and then Derek was sprawled on his back, winded, his nose bleeding, while Tim lay curled up in the slush, groaning, his face twisted in agony and his hands cupping his genitals.

  Zach stood near the centre of the arena, midway between the fallen gladiators. For a long moment he was still, vapour feathering his nostrils. Then with a small but audible sigh, he raised his head and slowly scanned the crowd, 'Anyone else?' He spoke quietly, neither taunt nor triumph in his voice; rather, the kind of weary resignation which in a lesser person would border on arrogance. Nor was he out of breath.