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.
Even though Danlo was young, he sensed that such logical thinking was itself flawed in some basic way, for it led to despair of life, and try as he could, he couldn’t help feeling the life inside where it surged, all hot and eager and good. Perhaps his assumptions were wrong; perhaps he did not understand the true nature of shaida and halla; perhaps logic was not as keen a tool as Soli had taught him it could be. If only Soli hadn’t died so suddenly, he might have heard the whole Song of Life and learned a way of affirmation beyond logic.
When he grew frustrated with pure thought, he turned to other pursuits. He spent most of three days carving a piece of ivory into a likeness of the snowy owl. He told animal stories to the dogs; he explained how Manwe, on the long tenth morning of the world, had changed into the shape of the wolf, into snowworm and sleekit, and then into the great white bear and all the other animals. Manwe had done this magical thing in order to truly understand the animals he must one day hunt. And, too, because a man must know in his bones that his true spirit was as mutable as ivory or clay. Danlo loved enacting these stories. He was a wonderful mimic. He would get down on all fours and howl like a wolf, or suddenly rear up like a cornered bear, bellowing and swatting at the air. Sometimes he frightened the dogs this way, for it was no fun merely to act like a snow tiger or thallow or bear; he had to become these animals in every nuance and attitude of his body – and in his love of killing and blood. Once or twice he even frightened himself, and if he had had a mirror or pool of water to gaze into, it wouldn’t have surprised him to see fangs glistening inside his jaws, or fur sprouting all white and thick across his wild face.
But perhaps his favourite diversion was the study of mathematics. Often he would amuse himself drawing circles in the hard-packed snow of his bed. The art of geometry he adored because it was full of startling harmonies and beauty that arose out of the simplest axioms. The wind shifted to the northwest and keened for days, and he lay half out of his sleeping furs, etching figures with his long fingernail. Jiro liked to watch him scurf off a patch of snow; he liked to stick his black nose into a mound of scraped-off powder, to sniff and bark and blow the cold stuff all over Danlo’s chest. (Like all the Alaloi, Danlo slept nude. Unlike his near-brothers, however, he had always found the snowhuts too cold for crawling around without clothes, so he kept to his sleeping furs whenever he could.) It was the dog’s way of letting him know he was hungry. Danlo hated feeding the dogs, not only because it meant a separation from his warm bed, but because they were steadily running out of food. It pained him every time he opened another crackling, frozen packet of meat. He wished he had had better luck spearing fatfish for the dogs because fatfish were more sustaining than the lean shagshay meat and seemed to last longer. Though, in truth, he loathed taking dogs inside the hut whenever their only food was fish. It was bad enough that the hut already stank of rotten meat, piss, and dung. Having to scoop out the seven piles of dung which every day collected in the tunnel was bad indeed, but at least the dung was meat-dog-dung and not the awful smelling fish-dog-dung that the dogs themselves were reluctant to sniff. Nothing in the world was so foul as fish-dog-dung.
On the eighth morning of the storm, he fed them their final rations of food. His food – baldo nuts, a little silk belly meat, and blood-tea – would last a little longer, perhaps another tenday, that is, if he didn’t share it with the dogs. And he would have to share, or else the dogs would have no strength for sled pulling. Of course, he could sacrifice one of the dogs and butcher him up to feed the others, but the truth is, he had always liked his dogs more than an Alaloi should, and he dreaded the need for killing them. He whistled to coax the sun out of his bed and prayed, ‘O Sawel, aparia-la!’ But there was only snow and wind, the ragged, hissing wind that devours even the sun.
One night, though, there was silence. Danlo awakened to wonoon, the white silence of a new world waiting to take its first breath. He sat up and listened a while before deciding to get dressed. He slipped the light, soft underfur over his head, and then he put on his shagshay furs, his trousers and parka. He took care that his still sore membrum was properly tucked to the left, into the pouch his found-mother had sewn into his trousers. Next, he pulled his waterproof sealskin boots snug over his calves. Then he crawled through the tunnel where the dogs slept, dislodged the entrance snowblock, and stepped outside.
The sky was brilliant with stars; he had never seen so many stars. The lights in the sky were stars, and far off, falling out into space where it curved black and deep, points of light swirled together as densely as an ice-mist. The sight made him instantly sad, instantly cold and numinous with longing. Who could stare out into the vast light-distances and not feel a little holy? Who could stand alone in the starlight and not suffer the terrible nearness of infinity? Each man and woman is a star, he remembered. Many stars, such as Behira, Alaula, and Kalinda, he knew by name. To the north, he beheld the Bear, Fish, and Thallow constellations; to the west, the Lone White Wolf bared his glittering teeth. Two strange stars shined in the east, balls of white light as big as moons, whatever moons really were. (Soli had told him that the moons of the night were other worlds, icy mirrors reflecting the light of the sun, but how could this be?) Nonablinka and Shurablinka were strange indeed, supernovae that had exploded years ago in one of the galaxy’s spiral arms. Danlo, of course, understood almost nothing of exploding stars. He called them simply blinkans, stars which, from time to time, would appear from nowhere, burn brightly for a while and then disappear into the blackness from which they came. In the east, too, was the strangest light in the sky. It had no name that he knew, but he thought