Danlo – along with two thousand other boys – was led across the high professional’s college, Lara Sig, to a large hemispherical structure called the Ice Dome. Inside the Ice Dome were figure rings, sled courts, and icefields on which was played that murderously fast game known as hokkee. That morning, however, the icefields were empty of skaters; for hundreds of yards across the icefields, beneath the curving, triangular panes of the dome, the novices had stacked many bundles of worn white robes. Next to each bundle was a heap of sandals of varying sizes. The sandals were paired, left foot to right, tied together around the toe thongs with a single white ribbon. Danlo smelled old wool and the rancid thickness of leather stained with human sweat. One of the elder novices – he was actually the Head Novice, Sahale Featherstone, a tall boy with a shaved head and a serious face – directed Danlo and the others each to choose a robe and a pair of sandals. ‘Listen, now, listen,’ the novice said to a group of boys standing nearby. ‘You must remove all your clothes and put on the petitioner’s robe.’
‘But it’s too damn cold in here!’ an unhappy boy next to Danlo protested. ‘Are we supposed to stand barefoot on ice while we rummage through a bunch of stinking old shoes? Our damned feet will freeze!’
The Head Novice ignored him, as did most of the other boys; at least, they did not pay him obvious attention. Few were pleased at having to strip naked in such a chill, open place, but neither did most of them want to be singled out as complainers. The boys did as they were told. The air was suddenly full of sound: zippers being pulled open, the swish of woven fabrics, clacking skates, and the buzz of a thousand voices. It was cold enough inside the Dome to steam the breath; everywhere Danlo looked, puffs of silvery vapour escaped from trembling lips and vanished into the air. Novices went among the naked boys, collecting clothes and skates and giving each of them a number in return. ‘Your number is 729,’ a pimply novice said as he wrapped Danlo’s jacket around his skates and tied the bundle together. ‘You must remember this number to reclaim your clothes after the competition.’ He didn’t explain that new clothes would be given to those few who were admitted to Borja. Plainly, he did not expect Danlo to be among the chosen.
Soon, all the boys were naked, and many were shivering, their brown or white or black skins stippled with goose bumps. The ice around the stacks of robes was crowded, but even so, each of the boys took care to keep a space around himself and not brush against any of his fellow petitioners. As they waited their turns at the stacks, they furtively glanced from body to naked body, comparing and reflecting, silently judging.
‘Hurry, please, I’m freezing to death!’
This came from a plump boy who had his arms clapped across his chest. He had dark brown skin the colour of coffee, and his eyes were full of fear; alternately, he lifted one knee high and then the other, up and down, touching the ice with his tender-soled feet as quickly and as briefly as possible. He looked silly and pathetic, like a strange insect dancing atop a blister of hot, shiny oil.
‘Please hurry!’
Ahead of Danlo was a frenzy of boys ripping through robes and sizing sandals to their feet. Everywhere, cast-off white ribbons from the sandals carpeted the ice. Danlo found that by kicking some of the ribbons together he could stand on them and not feel the ilka-hara, the burn of naked ice against flesh. He stood clutching his bamboo shakuhachi in his hand, patiently waiting his turn, watching and waiting, and all the while he was aware that many of the boys were watching him, too. They stared at his loins, at the membrum that Three-Fingered Soli had cut and marked with coloured scars. This unique mutilation riveted their stares. And Danlo stared at the other boys, or rather, he quickly surveyed the contours of the smooth, civilized bodies all around him. None of the boys had been cut; they each retained foreskins sheathing the bulbs of their membrums, and thus they were truly boys, not men. Some of the boys had yet to begin their growth; their chests were slight and narrow, and their membrums were almost as small as Danlo’s little finger. But even the older boys, with their large, fully developed membrums, were uncut. Despite his training in the perils of glavering, he could not take them as equals. (In truth, he worried at his own manhood, for how could he ever become a full man until he completed his passage and listened to the complete and whole Song of Life?) No, he was very different from all the others, and he was at once ashamed and proud of this difference. No one else seemed quite so tall, or as tough and hardy in the body. He stood calm and waiting, fairly inured to the cold. He was still too lean from his starvation the previous year; the sinews and bones stood out beneath his weathered skin, and long flat bands of muscle quivered with every breath taken and released. Most of the boys were weak-looking, as thin and white as snowworms or layered with fat like seals. Even the few athletes among them, with their carefully cultivated physiques, seemed pampered and soft. They looked at him – at the various parts of his body – with a mixture of horror, envy, and awe.
There was one other boy, however, who also stood out from the others, though mostly for different reasons. As Danlo donned a loose, scratchy wool robe and kicked on a pair of sandals, he overheard this boy talking about Ede the God and the Cybernetic Universal Church, a subject that interested him endlessly. He slipped through the crowded icefield until he came upon a short, thin boy who held the attention of others standing around him. ‘Of course, all the Cybernetic Churches worship Ede as God,’ the boy was saying. ‘But it’s the Architects of the original church who have created the Vild.’
In a low voice Danlo said a prayer, then whispered, ‘Shantih, shantih.’
The boy – his name was Hanuman li Tosh – must have overheard what Danlo said, for he turned and bowed his head politely. He had the oldest young face imaginable, smooth like new white ice and indecently unmarked even for a fifteen-year-old. At the same time, he seemed strangely jaded, as if he’d lived a thousand times before, and each life full of disappointments, boredom, anguish, madness, and desperate love. With his full, sensual lips, he smiled at Danlo; it was a beautiful smile, at once shy and compelling. In many ways, he was a beautiful boy. There was a delicateness to his finely-made face bones, an almost otherworldly grace. Danlo thought he must be either half an angel or half demon. His hair was yellow-white, the colour of an iceblink, and his skin was so white that it was almost translucent, a thin shell of flesh that could scarcely protect him from the coldness and cruelties of the world. Except for his eyes, he was really too beautiful. His eyes were a pale blue, vivid and clear like those of a sled dog. Danlo had never imagined seeing such eyes in a human being. There was too much sensitivity and suffering there, as well as passion and fury. In truth, Danlo instantly hated the sight of those hellish, shaida eyes. He thought of this strange boy as the ‘Hell-eyes’, a pale fury he should either flee from immediately or kill.
But the circle of chattering boys surrounding Hanuman pressed close and caught Danlo up in civilized conversation; he was caught, too, by Hanuman’s silver tongue and his charm.
‘I’m Hanuman li Tosh, off Catava. What does this word “shantih” mean? It’s a beautiful word, and the way you say it – beautiful and haunting.’
How could Danlo explain the peace beyond peace to a civilized boy with eyes out of his deepest nightmares? Hanuman was shivering in his sandals and his robe, looking at him expectantly. Despite the seeming frailty of his long neck and naked limbs where they stuck out of his robe, he bore the cold well. There was something about him that the other boys lacked, some inner fire or intensity of purpose. He had his fist up to his mouth coughing at the cold air, but even in his pain, he seemed very determined and very aware of Danlo looking at him.
‘Shantih,’ Danlo said, ‘is a word … my father taught me. It is really the formal ending to a prayer.’
‘And what language would that be? What religion?’
Danlo had been warned not to reveal his past so he evaded the question. ‘I have not presented myself,’ he said. ‘I am