David Zindell - The Broken God

For twenty-nine days he travelled due east without mishap or incident. A civilized man making such a journey would have been bored by the monotony of ice and the seamless blue sky. But Danlo was not yet civilized; in his spirit he was wholly Alaloi, wholly taken with the elements of the world. And to his eyes there were many, many things to look at, not just sky and ice. There was soreesh , the fresh powder snow that fell every four or five days. When the wind blew out of the west and packed the snow so that it was fast and good for sledding, it became safel. The Alaloi have a hundred words for snow. To have a word for an object, idea or feeling is to distinguish that thing from all others, to enable one to perceive its unique qualities. For the Alaloi, as for all peoples, words literally create things, or rather, they create the way our minds divide and categorize the indivisible wholeness of the world into things. Too often, words determine what we do and do not see.

Ice and sky, sky and ice – when he awoke on the thirtieth morning of his journey, the ice surrounding his hut was ilka-so , frozen in a lovely, wind-driven ripple pattern. Farther out were bands of ilka-rada , great blocks of aquamarine ice heaved up by the contractions of the freezing sea. The sky itself was not purely blue; in places, at various times of the day, high above, there was a yellowish glare from light reflected off the snowfields. And the snowfields were not always white; sometimes, colonial algae and other organisms spread out through the top layers of snow and coloured it with violets and blues. These growths were called iceblooms, urashin , and Danlo could see the faint purple of the iceblooms off in the distance where the world curved into the sky. Kitikeesha birds were a white cloud above the iceblooms. The kitikeesha were snow eaters; at this time of the year, they made their living by scooping snow into their yellow bills and eating the snowworms, which in turn lived on the algae. (The furry, tunnelling sleekits, which could be found near any island or piece of land, also ate snow; sleekits would eat anything: algae, snowworms, or even snowworm droppings.) Danlo liked to stand with his hand shielding his eyes, looking at the iceblooms. Looking for Ahira. Sometimes, the snowy owls followed the kitikeesha flocks and preyed upon them. Ahira was always glad to sink his talons into a nice, plump kitikeesha chick, but on the thirtieth morning, Danlo looked for his doffel in vain. Ahira, he knew, was very wise and would not fly when a storm was near. ‘Ahira, Ahira,’ he called, but he received no reply. No direct reply, that is, no screeching or hooing or beating of wings. In silence, Ahira answered him. The Alaloi have five words for silence, and nona , the silence that portends danger, is as meaningful as a bellyful of words. In nona , Danlo turned his face to the wind and listened to things no civilized man could hear.

That day he did not travel. Instead, he cut snow blocks for a hut larger and sturdier than his usual nightly shelter. Into the hut he moved the food packets from the sled. He brought the dogs into the hut as well, bedding them down in the long tunnel that led to his living chamber. He made sure that there was snow to melt into drinking water and enough blubber to burn in the oilstone. And then he waited.

The storm began as a breath of wind out of the north. High wispy clouds called otetha whitened the sky. The wind blew for a long time, intensifying gradually into a hiss. It was the Serpent’s Breath, the sarsara that every traveller fears. Danlo listened to the wind inside his hut, listened as it sought out the chinks between the snowblocks and whistled through to strike at his soft, warm flesh. It was a cold wind, dead cold, so-named because it had killed many of his people. It drove glittering particles of spindrift into his hut. Soon, a layer of cold white powder covered his sleeping furs. The curled-up dogs were tougher than he, and didn’t really mind sleeping beneath a shroud of snow. But Danlo was shivering cold, and so he worked very hard to find and patch each chink with handfuls of malku , slush ice melted from the heat of his hand. After the malku had frozen in place – and this took only a moment – he could breathe more easily and settle back to ‘wait with a vengeance’, as the Alaloi say.

He waited ten days. It began snowing that evening. It was too cold to snow very much, but what little snow that the sky shed, the wind found and blew into drifts. ‘Snow is the frozen tears of Nashira, the sky,’ he told Jiro. He had called the dog closer to the oilstone and was playing tug-of-war with him. He pulled at one end of a braided leather rope while Jiro had the other end clamped between his teeth, growling and shaking his head back and forth. It was childish to pamper the dog with such play, but he excused himself from the usual travelling discipline with the thought that it was bad for a man – or a half-man – to be alone. ‘Today, the sky is sad because the Devaki have all gone over. And tomorrow too, I think, sad, and the next day as well. Jiro, Jiro, why is everything in the world so sad?’

The dog dropped the rope, whined, and poked his wet nose into his face. He licked the salt off of his cheeks. Danlo laughed and scratched behind Jiro’s ears. Dogs, he thought, were almost never sad. They were happy just to gobble down a little meat every day, happy sniffing the air or competing with each other to see who could get his leg up the highest and spray the most piss against the snowhut’s yellow wall. Dogs had no conception of shaida , and they were never troubled by it as people were.

While the storm built ever stronger and howled like a wolverine caught in a trap, he spent most of his time cocooned in his sleeping furs, thinking. In his mind, he searched for the source of shaida. Most of the Alaloi tribes believed that only a human being could be touched with shaida , or rather, that only a human being could bring shaida into the world. And shaida , itself, could infect only the outer part of a man, his face, which is the Alaloi term for persona, character, cultural imprinting, emotions, and the thinking mind. The deep self, his purusha , was as pure and clear as glacier ice; it could be neither altered nor sullied nor harmed in any way. He thought about his tribe’s most sacred teachings, and he asked himself a penetrating, heretical question: what if Haidar and the other dead fathers of his tribe had been wrong? Perhaps people were really like fragments of clear ice with cracks running through the centre. Perhaps shaida touched the deepest parts of each man and child. And since people (and his word for ‘people’ was simply ‘Devaki’) were of the world, he would have to journey into the very heart of the world to find shaida ’s true source. Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul , he thought. Only, how could the world ever lose its soul? What if the World-soul were not lost, but rather, inherently flawed with shaida ?

For most of a day and a night, like a thallow circling in search of prey, he skirted the track of this terrifying thought. If, as he had been taught, the world were continually being created, every moment being pushed screaming from the bloody womb of Time, that meant that shaida was being created, too. Every moment, then, impregnated with flaws that might eventually grow and fracture outward and shatter the world and all its creatures. If this were so, then there could be no evolution toward harmony, no balance of life and death, no help for pain. All that is not halla is shaida , he remembered. But if everything were shaida , then true halla could never be.