Neverness (34 page)

   Katharine, I should mention, was not the only one who managed to collect bits and pieces of Devaki flesh. As head of our family, Soli was called to help hold Jinje when Yuri decided that his frozen, rotten toes must come off. I was not present at the amputation so I never learned how Soli pocketed one of the toes and smuggled it to Katharine for storage in her krydda sphere. And of course I was not allowed near Marya at the rear of the cave when she gave birth to her baby boy. The men, being men, were forbidden to witness this deepest of feminine mysteries. But my mother was there helping (I would not doubt that she took charge of the entire labor), and she returned to our hut with a small section of Marya's afterbirth. Even though I had instigated, had once believed in this expedition, I found it difficult to think there could be any great secret hidden in the slelled tissues of an afterbirth. Surely, I thought, the Entity had deceived me. Surely it was all a joke, or perhaps a game in which we were pieces to be moved, frozen, starved or sliced into parts at the caprice of the goddess or according to the whimsy of the greater gods. Surely there was no secret at all.

   Our life among the Devaki soon settled into a routine. After we had finished the last of the seal meat, every morning the men would arise, ice the sleds, and go off hunting on the ice or skiing through the dark forest. Although we had bad luck with the animals, I came to cherish these moments of clean air and exhilaration away from the smoky cave, away from Katharine's nightly forays into the huts of different Devaki men. Out on the ice there was peace and privacy, even in waiting for the seals that never came. And in the forests where the shagshay used to herd, I came to love the hunters' keen whistles ringing across the ridges; I loved the feel of the silky snow beneath my skis; I loved the silence of the morning trees, the greenness against the quiet white, and above the trees and the snow and the silence, the blue window of the winter sky. I often think of those Tugged hills beneath Kweitkel, for it was there that I first began to see the Devaki for what they were. To watch Yuri stalking an arctic fox or setting his snares for the eiders and other birds was to appreciate the
care
which attended every aspect and moment of the hunt. The Devaki were neither wanton murderers nor butchers, nor did they do their killing without thought. When a seal was taken, water had to be passed from the hunter's lips into the seal's mouth, or else his anima would have to go over to the other side thirsty. A kittiwake's eyes had to be rubbed with ice, and so on. There were a hundred rituals to be performed, one for each of the different animals. The Devaki, I realized, did not really see the animals as meat at all, at least not as long as their spirits remained to be honored. They loved the animals; they could not conceive of life or the world without animals; they even thought of themselves as animals, or rather, as spirits who had duties and responsibilities to the spirits of each of the animals they hunted. They were intimately connected to the world of animals, and to the world itself, in countless different ways.

   Once, on a cold day near the end of deep winter when we were all a little hungry, I watched Yuri let a white bear escape from the ring of spears pointed at her chest. Why did he do this? Because, as he observed, the bear's third claw on the right paw was broken, and everyone knew (or should have known) that such bears were
imakla
, magic animals who may not be killed. Killing, I discovered, was not the real purpose or end of the hunt. This was a hard lesson for me to learn. I spent many bad moments hating that I must kill to live. Most of all I hated the rush of intense aliveness which pumped through me like a drug whenever I speared an innocent animal and I saw the spurting of his blood as drink that would soon quicken my own. The Devaki did not share my hatred, although I believe they never felt so alive as when they were close to killing their prey. I do not claim I was ever able to enter into the hunter's mindset, but I think I glimpsed at least a portion of their worldview: To hunt was to absorb the wind's myriad sounds or the distant smell of the mammoths, to see the patterns in the ermine's droppings and scratchings in the snow, to see patterns in the folds of ice and in the undulations of the land and sky and world; to hunt was to be a part of this pattern, just as the rocks and trees and birds were parts, too. Nothing was so important as the perception of this pattern, of the beauty that is the intention of the World-soul. And nothing the hunter said or thought or did should disturb this beauty, this halla.

   "It is better to go over to the other side hungry," Yuri said as he watched the bear disappear into her snowcave, "than to go over deranged and drunk with the blood of an imakla blinding our souls."

   This attention to the interconnectedness of all the animals, events and things of their world was not a question of morality, but of survival. The Devaki believe they can only survive moment by moment, generation by generation, if they pay attention to what the world requires of them. And by behaving, by learning to perceive what is halla and what is not. I do not mean that any of the Devaki learned this art perfectly. There were always imperfections, uncertainties and little evils in their everyday life. Someone, I remembered, had killed Shanidar's thallow for food even though all thallows were imakla. Certain of the Devaki, although they knew the rules of impeccable behavior, could not conceive of a world in which they had to starve while the thallows soared free. How could such a world be halla? And so they killed the sacred birds, or killed imakla bears, or, rarely, they killed seals or other animals which happened to be their doffels.

   In truth, the Devaki never really starved. The forest was not really empty, but rather like a cafe which had run out of the choicer foods. When we were hungry we began eating those disgusting things we had so far disdained. We ate - I should say the Manwelina and the other families bolted down this slime, for we of the City held back as long as we could - we ate unbelievable things. Wicent and his son Wemilo uncovered a cache of fish heads they had buried during the previous false winter. The sharp bones had decayed to a dead grayish-white and were as soft as flesh. Liluye collected the rotten bones in a bowl and kneaded the reeking mass into a paste from which she made small round cakes, flipping them back and forth between her nervous little hands. She baked them in the glowing coals of the fire, and the men ate them slowly as if they were being forced to eat dirt. Other foods were worse. The dogs were fed slime scraped from old hides stinking of the putrefied brains used in the tanning process. Yuri killed a silk belly, and with his single eye half shut and twitching, he gobbled down the contents of the stomach, all the while smacking his lips and insisting, for the benefit of the children, that the goo tasted sweet as roasted nuts. The children often foraged through the snow for whatever they could find. Often they ate sleekit droppings, which they munched like berries. Yuri's cousin, Jaywe, split apart years-old mammoth bones swarming with maggots. Jaywe, a short, funny man whose peculiar palate had led him to savor the slip of birds' eggs, licked his lips and sucked down handfuls of squirming white maggots and said that they were more delicate than year-old snow loon embryos. I did not doubt him. Thereafter the rest of his family jokingly referred to him as Jaywe Maggoteater. I myself ventured to eat thawed oysters. The squishy blobs of meat ruptured inside my mouth; the squirt of juices and salt instantly reminded me of my experiences inside the Entity. I marveled that the taste of real oysters was exactly the same as the taste the Entity had placed inside my mind - just as real and just as bad.

   In truth, the Devaki were - and are - a smart, resourceful people. They are tough and hard to kill. During our brief stay in the cave, I heard tens of stories of resourcefulness and survival. Yuri once told me that when he was a boy, his immediate family had almost been exterminated while crossing the ice in early false winter.

   "When I was five years old," Yuri told me, "my father and my mother decided to make the pilgrimage to Imakel, where my mother's ancestors are buried. But one night the ice opened unexpectedly, as it sometimes does. We lost one of our sleds, and all of our harpoons, furs, oilstones, spears - everything. And we lost most of our dogs, too. My father had only his snowknife, and my mother - her name was Eliora - had nothing but her teeth and a few old sealskins. We had no way to spear seals, to hunt, or even to make a fire. I was afraid, and who could blame me? But my mother and father never lost their courage."

   I will not relate the whole story here because it is too long. But briefly, Nuri, who was Yuri's father, fished his dead dogs out of the sea (his heavy sled had sunk like rock), and he and his family and the remaining dogs ate them. Somehow they managed to reach the nearest island, which was so small and barren that it had no name. With his snow-knife Nuri cut blocks of snow and built a hut. Somehow, Nuri and Eliora made new weapons and tools from the poor materials they found on the island. Nuri hunted and Eliora skinned the animals he killed, and she made their clothing. They ate snow hare and sleekits, and kittiwakes, gulls and chinocha - anything they could find. They fed themselves, and they fed their dogs; Yuri grew quickly and one of the dogs bore a litter the following false winter. The two of them, husband and wife, over the course of that winter and the winters that followed, re-created from almost nothing most of the tools and artifacts of their culture. It took them three years of collecting pieces of driftwood and saving bones to gather together the materials to build a new sled. They improvised and invented new ways of putting together hides and bones, and when they were done, they did not return to Kweitkel. They continued on to Imakel, completing their pilgrimage. They placed fireflowers on the grave of Eliora's grandfather and grandmother. They visited with Eliora's family. And when Eliora's father, Narain, offered to give them a sled for their journey home, Nuri pointed at his patchwork creation and told him, "Thank you, but you see, the Manwelina know how to build sleds." And everyone laughed because his sled could not have carried them another mile, let alone the two hundred miles back to Kweitkel.

   I often thought that this ability to shape random materials into useful things lay at the heart of the Alaloi's culture. Given the requirements of their world, there was nothing they could not make. If a tool or item of clothing required a particular combination of flexibility, strength, texture or insulative properties, they would experiment until they discovered the right combination. Their knowledge of the things of the world was detailed and precise: Lubricants were extracted from the shagshay hoof because they had discovered the fats in the joints furthest from the body froze at lower temperatures; they made the windows of their huts (when they desired windows) from the tough, translucent intestines of the bearded seal; shagshay horns were flexible and so were bent into the side prongs of fish spears; and so on. They were geniuses at making things, the women as much so as the men. Among other things, the women were responsible for making and caring for that most vital of all survival tools: the marvelous Alaloi clothing.

   At night after hunting - and this, too, was part of our daily routine - we would sit around the oilstones, eating what food we had, talking, watching the women making our clothes. The women's mouths were always busy because they were either chatting about the events of the day or chewing skins with their stubby, worn teeth. Their teeth were tools, and they used them effectively, to soften the frozen parkas of their husbands and to work new skins into leather. By early midwinter spring, with the first storms of the new year blowing outside the cave, my mother and Justine, Katharine too, had become used to this grueling work. They had also become experts at sewing waterproof sealskins into boots, or making waterproof kamelaikas, or tailoring the ruffs of the shagshay parkas with wolf fur, a fur which would shed the ice crystals condensed from one's breath. With their bone needles and sinews they made their precise stitches, stitches which would swell when wet, keeping cold and moisture from entering the clothing. I was glad they had imprinted these skills because an Alaloi hunter is utterly dependent upon the women in his family. As my mother put it one night, holding a half-made kamelaika up to my shoulders, "Where would Yuri be today? If not for the skills of his mother? If not for the clothes she made, the fish spears, the oilstones, if not for her milk, the very flesh of his flesh? Is there anything a woman cannot make?"

   There was one part of our daily routine I wish I could forget. During this cold, hard time of hungers and chilblain and petty miseries, I began suffering another misery, in some ways the most miserable misery of all. I discovered I had lice. The hair of my body and head and pubes was crawling with these tiny, flat insects. It was the price of swiving dirty, savage women, I thought, and I twitched and scratched until I bled, and I rubbed ash mud over my body from ankle to neck but nothing helped until I submitted to my mother for what would come to be the nightly delousing. Every night, I would rest my head on my mother's lap while she danced her fingers through my hair, searching for lice. She had sharp eyes, my mother did, to pick them out with only the oilstones' dim light illuminating my black hair. I felt her sharp fingernails like a tweezers crushing the lice and, occasionally, plucking from my itchy scalp a few hairs which she said were as gray as Yuri's.

   Her grooming did little good, however, because the cave and all the furs were full of nits waiting to hatch. The other members of my family became infested as well, although they seemed to have fewer lice and a greater tolerance for this petty torture than I did. (Bardo, for some inexplicable, unjust reason - he ridiculously claimed that the poisons from his gonads had soured his skin, rendering him unappealing to crawling insects - remained free of lice.) It was not the prickling pain or itch that bothered me; it was the
idea
of the lice thrusting their tiny mouthparts into my skin that sent me shuddering and twitching. I loathed the
idea
of insects drinking my blood, of life living off other life. I considered shaving my body with sharp blades of flint. But I did not do so. I recalled that there were whole segments of humanity out towards Gamina Luz who had purged their systems of bacteria and other parasites only to discover they had to enclose themselves in made-worlds lest they contaminate their sterile bodies with the dirt of civilization. This isolation, however, had weakened their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to bizarre diseases. Who knew what natural balances I might disturb if I did not live as the Alaloi lived? There was another reason, too, why I did not shave myself: The flint flakes we made were so sharp I might easily cut my skin, opening it to infection. And infection among the Alaloi, as Jinje had proven with his rotting toes, could be very bad.