The Broken God (38 page)

Hanuman relaxed his grip slowly before letting go altogether. He looked at his glove, now blood-stained and ruined. He made a fist and punched the air. 'Why can't you apply this rule of ahimsa to yourself?' he said. And then, 'Why did Pedar have to show you that silly foto?'

'It was not Pedar who killed the Devaki,' Danlo said.

'No.'

No – such a simple sentiment and declaration, and Danlo thought that he had never listened to a word uttered with so much contempt.

'Please,' he said, 'you must not blame Pedar. He is just– '

'He's a nihility,' Hanuman said. 'He tries to shame you because he can't bear his own shame. His weakness, his ignobility. He can't bear his suffering, either, as feeble as it is. And so he tries to share it with you.'

'And you hate him for that.'

'How should I not? Between his kind and ours, there's always been enmity and war.'

'But the law of ahimsa requires– '

'Ahimsa!' Hanuman snapped. His face was white with fury. 'That's no law for a human being!'

'But never killing– '

'Listen, Danlo, please: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."'

'But ... whose law?'

'Our law.'

'O blessed Hanu!'

With his hand flung up to his forehead, Danlo turned to the west where the sun was lost behind the clouds. He covered his eyes then, trying to listen to what Hanuman was saying: 'A few human beings prepared by evolution, each with unique abilities ... your own father, Mallory Ringess ... this ontogenesis of man into god, the genius to create a true self.' Hanuman's smooth words of explanation barely penetrated the dome of sound enclosing Danlo. In the sky, somewhere, an ivory gull called to his mate. This hrark-hrarking cry frightened the teal-eyes in their winter nests; the trees were full of fluttering wings and a nervous warbling which fell out into the air. A fresh, strong wind swooped down the mountain in a steady flow over the scree fields and glaciers; it rushed through the shih leaves, thousands of shih leaves vibrating like sheets of silver, almost ringing in the wind. Danlo submerged himself in these sounds, but finally, he couldn't ignore the brilliance of Hanuman's voice:

'... the true self, discovering it, the true will to one's fate.' These quick, clever words filled him with dread and made his blood jump along his veins. Hanuman, more than any person he had ever seen, had an urge to embrace the future, to love his fate no matter how tragic or terrible.

Ti-miura halla, he thought. Follow your fate, follow your deepest will to life. Only, what if one's will led to the ruin of other life?

They left the Shih Grove, then, skating below the icefalls and the great, looming ice sculptures of the Elf Gardens. Hanuman still wanted to escort Danlo to the college's infirmary, but Danlo did not want to explain the meaning of his gashed forehead, and so the two of them made their way along the Academy's easternmost gliddery to Perilous Hall. There, in the deserted fourth floor bathing room, Hanuman glued shut the flaps of skin lying ragged and open against Danlo's skull. But he applied the pungent shaving glue inexpertly: ever after, when Danlo's wound had healed, above his left eye he would bear a vivid scar shaped like the zig-zag of a lightning bolt.

'Thank you,' Danlo said when they were done. 'Shantih.' Since it was too late in the afternoon to resume their studies, Danlo sat on his bed playing his shakuhachi, brooding over the strange events of the day.

'Do you feel faint?' Hanuman asked as he pulled on his spare set of woollens and gloves. 'Does it hurt very much?'

'It throbs,' Danlo admitted. 'But between heartbeats, there is no pain.'

'Shall I bring you back an analgesic or narcotic?'

Danlo shook his head as he forced a laugh. The slight back and forth motion sent a pounding surge of pain into his skull. And then he asked, 'Where are you going?'

'I have a few errands to make before dinner,' Hanuman said.

That evening was the strangest Danlo had spent since taking up residence in Perilous Hall. After their daily games of hokkee and bump-and-skate, the other boys returned to the dormitory. A couple of them – Madhava li Shing and Sherborn of Darkmoon – tried to engage him in conversation. But when they saw the jagged wound on his forehead and beheld the private passion with which he played the shakuhachi, they left him alone. They went down to eat their dinners, where they were joined by Hanuman and the boys from the other three floors. Danlo went hungry that night. And so he was not present to witness the tension as Pedar and his friends sat down at one of the long dining tables to a meal of cultured meats, bread, fruit and ice-wine. He never saw, with his own eyes, the expression of guilt and mortification on Pedar's face when boys at every table began clinking their wine glasses together and speaking in awed, hushed tones of Danlo's lineage. While the others sipped their wine three floors below him, he remained sitting cross-legged on his bed, playing his bamboo flute, and he never suspected that Pedar's plan to humiliate him had gone awry. Indeed, the novices – and many of the journeymen and masters of the Academy as well – were enchanted with the idea of his being the bastard son of a god. In the cold, deserted sleeping chamber, he played his music alone, and with every breath taken and then released into his flute's cool, ivory mouthpiece, he felt a hollowness inside him, a terrible doubt and presentiment of doom. He should have paid close attention to these feelings. He was the son of Katharine the Scryer, after all, and he had inherited some of his mother's sensitivity to the future. He should have seen the dark, chaotic images inside him as visions of moments soon to be. (Or as vivid omens that Ahira had put into his third eye behind his forehead.) But he closed his eyes and played his shakuhachi, and in the flute's bottomless sound was a dread and estrangement that recalled only the tragedies of the past.

Later, long after the evening bells had rung and all the novices had returned, bathed and shaved, and were safe in their beds, Danlo slept fitfully. He had dreams. In truth, his sleep was with nightmare, a hellish time of twisting and turning between his hot sheets. His descent into the molten, blood-red sea of dreamspace was excruciating and endless. It seemed he would never wake up. And then there was a screaming. 'Go away, go away!' Deep within the muscle-lock of nightmare, he thought that he, himself, must be screaming. Suddenly, with a terrible snap, he came to consciousness trembling and slick with sweat. There was total blackness around him, and the silence spread over the sleeping chamber was as deep and cold as ice.

But only for a moment.

'Light the flame globes!' someone shouted, and the lights came on. Hanuman, in the bed next to his, was sitting bolt upright, blinking, looking down the row of beds toward the centre of the chamber. All the boys were now awake, and every one had his head turned to the dark, open stairwell leading to the lower floors. From the stairwell came muffled cries and sounds of panic. 'He looks like he fell!' a voice from the second floor echoed into the room. And then, other voices, a whole sea of frightened voices as the panic spread from floor to floor and the dormitory came awake: 'He's dead, look at all the blood! He fell down the stairs! Look at him, he's dead!'

Danlo was the first to jump out of his bed and rush down the winding stairway; Hanuman and Madhava li Shing followed groggily behind him. As if a signal had been given, each floor emptied of boys wanting to see who had fallen down the infamous stairs of Perilous Hall.

'Send for a cutter!' someone called out.

'No, a cryologist. Freeze the body – maybe the cryologists can bring him back.'

And then another voice answered him, 'It's too late. He's beyond help – can't you see he's bashed out his brains?'

When Danlo reached the bottom of the stairs and pushed his way through the gathering circle of high novices, he came upon an incredible sight. There, in the centre of the first floor's main hall, crushed against the grey floorstones, was the body of Pedar Sadi Sanat. He had apparently fallen headfirst down the stairwell: His face had been smashed to the meat, and his skull had come apart against the sharp edges of the two bottom steps. Danlo wouldn't have recognized him if it hadn't been for the boils and pimples on his broken neck. He stood over Pedar's body and then tilted his head back. The stairway was a dark grey ribbon of stone winding around and above him. And on almost every step, there was a curious novice looking over the stairway's inner edge. In the light of the cold flame globes their skulls gleamed with greens and reds, a spiral of sixty rainbow skulls staring down at him. The sight of the boys' horrified faces disoriented Danlo and made him feel dizzy.

'How could he have fallen? He was always so careful on the steps!' This came from Rafael Wu, the boy whose fingers Danlo had kicked and broken during his torment in the first floor bathing room. Rafael, too, stood over Pedar's body. Next to him was Arpiar Pogossian, who was yawning as he rubbed his thick neck. They both looked at Danlo. 'Did you push him, Wild Boy?'

Danlo pressed his fist into the pit of his naked belly; across the hall, the main door of the dormitory was ajar, banging against the jamb with each gust of wind, and he stood there naked and shivering in the draught. Unlike the other boys, all of whom wore long, quilted sleeping robes, he always slept naked. 'Never killing or hurting another,' he whispered, 'not even in one's thoughts.'

'What did you say?' Rafael wanted to know.

Arpiar Pogossian shouldered Rafael aside and looked at Danlo. 'I don't think the Wild Boy pushed him. I was awake when Pedar went up to the fourth floor. I heard what he shouted, didn't anyone else? It was something like, "Monsters, they're all bloody, monsters go away!" Didn't anyone else hear Pedar screaming about monsters?'

As it happened, at least four other boys had heard Pedar screaming about monsters. The boys all began to talk at once, a cacophony of voices shouting from floor to floor:

'He must have tripped.'

'Why did he trip?'

'If you hallucinated a bloody monster in the middle of the night, you'd trip, too.'

'Who cares if he did trip? He shouldn't have been on the stairs after lights out.'

'That's right!'

'He was on his way up to see Danlo.'

'I'm glad he's dead.'

'Quiet now – how would you like to fall on your thin head?'

Arpiar Pogossian shrugged his shoulders sadly and looked at Rafael. 'I told him a hundred times he should purge himself of the jook.'

While Arpiar and Rafael debated the hallucinogenic properties of jook and other drugs that Pedar had been fond of, Hanuman threaded his way down the steps. He came up to Danlo, and his face was as white as ice. He was carrying a sleeping robe, which Danlo pulled on and zipped closed. Everyone stood around, occasionally glancing at Pedar (or trying not to); no one wanted to touch the body. Many of the boys had never seen a dead person before, and no one seemed to know what to do.

Never killing, Danlo thought as he looked at Pedar. It is to die oneself than kill.

He turned to Hanuman, half expecting him to be ill at the sight of so much blood. But Hanuman's face was empty of emotion and impossible to read.

Just then, the great wooden doors banged open. Bardo the Just, accompanied by the novice who had gone to inform him of Pedar's accident, strolled into the hallway. Bardo's eyes were bleary and bloodshot, and a patina of snow sparkled atop his fur cape. He looked impatient, as if he had been disturbed from sex or sleep. With his massive black-gloved hand, he rubbed his eyes, rubbed his bulging forehead, and lastly, he rubbed the condensation droplets from his bulbous purple nose. 'By God, one of my boys is dead!' he boomed. 'Too bad.'

Bardo walked slowly, measuredly through the hallway. High on the walls, halfway to the high, arched ceiling, the cold flame globes were all ablaze. Their light spilled out over a row of paintings, dreamy landscapes of Old Earth, Arcite and Icefall. Spaced evenly between the paintings, every ten feet or so, were rosewood stands holding up the busts of famous pilots and academicians, all of whom had once been novices in Perilous Hall. 'Tradition,' Bardo's huge voice thundered, 'tradition demands that I execute an inquest as to this poor boy's death. Who can tell me how he fell?'

For a short while – a very short while considering the gravity of the moment – he questioned Danlo, Hanuman, Arpiar and various other boys. Some of them, those from the second and third floors, he sent immediately back to their beds. He strolled up and down the hallway, and at last, he knelt above Pedar. He looked up the stairwell, measuring angles and distances with his quick brown eyes. He noted the brain matter spread over steps and stones, and the blood. Pedar's head and torso were practically floating in a puddle of blood. A nervous boy named Timin Wang, in the first moments of confusion after Pedar had screamed, in the dark had stepped in the blood and tracked it about the hall. Little bloody footprints led past the first floor sleeping chamber to the bathing room where Timin had reportedly washed the blood from his feet. Bardo measured Timin's answers to his questions, just as he weighed and evaluated Madhava li Shing's assertion that both Danlo and Hanuman had been in bed at the time of the fall. He came to an immediate, official (and quite mistaken) judgement as to the events of Pedar's death: sometime after dinner, on the 64th night of deep winter in the year 2947, Pedar had decided to apologize to Danlo for all the injustices he had inflicted upon him. He had come to this surprising decision because he could see that Danlo, no matter how he tried to hurt or defame him, was destined to become a popular boy, perhaps even a famous and powerful man. And, in truth, Danlo's toughness and faithfulness to ahimsa had changed Pedar. In the Fravashi manner, Danlo sought always to reflect the best parts of everyone he met, even his enemies. Pedar, in knowing Danlo, had finally seen himself as he might be: bright, devoted to truth rather than vengeance, magnanimous in defeat. And so Pedar vowed to make a public apology. As was his habit, after everyone had gone to sleep, he started up the steps to rouse Danlo from his bed. (Pedar, of course, could not wholly rid himself of cruelty merely by wishing it so. Pedar – this is what Arpiar Pogossian told Bardo the Just – wanted to frighten Danlo out of his sleep one last time only to surprise him with an apology and offer of friendship. This is why he stole up the stairs like a slel necker in the night.) Somewhere near the top of the stairs, however, well above the third floor, he hallucinated his 'bloody monsters'. Most likely he slipped in panic and thus fell to his death.