‘Danlo!’ a voice screamed out of the darkness. ‘Danlo-mi!’ It was not Soli who called to him; it was not the voice of a man. ‘Danlo, dorona ti-lot! Danlo, we require your blood, now!’
It was the voice of a terrible animal he had never heard before. It screamed like a thallow and roared like a bear, all at once. He began to tremble, or perhaps he was just shivering, he couldn’t tell which. Despite the intense cold, drops of sweat burst from his skin all across his forehead, chest, and belly. The animal screamed again, and Danlo waited motionless for it to tear at the throbbing arteries of his throat. He held his head rigid, pressing it down into the fur. He wanted to close his eyes and scream, but he could not. Straight up at the dazzling lights he stared, and suddenly the lights were gone. The animal was standing over him, bending low, blocking out the night sky. It wasn’t really an animal at all; it was the Beast of the young men’s stories. It had horns and great conical teeth like a killer whale; its cruel, hooked beak was dipping toward his face; its claws were the claws of the snow tiger, and they were sweeping down toward his belly and groin. He had never seen a man wearing a mask before, but even if he had, his left side would still be shouting that the Beast was about to rip away at him. He held himself very still.
‘Danlo, we require your blood!’ the Beast growled out again.
To live, I die, he thought, silently repeating the Devaki prayer of initiation.
Ever since he could remember, ever since he had seen the older men naked and looked between their legs with dread and wonder, he had known this moment must come. The Beast reached down and grasped his membrum. Its claws were cold and sharp against the shaft. In his fear and cold, his unprotected stones tightened up in their sac. He was very afraid; never had he known such a belly-tightening fear, not even when Haidar fell sick from the slow evil and began bleeding from his ears. The fear was all over him, like dead cold air falling down from the sky, suffocating him, clutching in his lungs. He was afraid the Beast would cut him, yes, afraid of the pain, but even more he dreaded convulsing like a frightened snow hare and trying to run away. And if he did that, he would be slain. The Beast would kill him for giving in to his fear. This thought, in turn, fed his fear, intensified it until the sweat poured off his ribs and soaked the furs beneath him. The wind began to blow, chilling him to the core, and he despaired because he felt himself falling through a black bottomless night from which there is no escape. Fear is the consciousness of the child – he remembered Haidar saying this once when they were lost out at sea. He stared up at the brilliant stars, waiting for the Beast to cut him, or tear open his throat, and in a moment of exhilaration he realized that he was here to surrender up his fear, or rather, to lose a part of himself, to let die his childish conception of himself as a separate being terrified of the world. All men must be tested this way, he knew, or else they could never become full men. Just then the Beast roared something into the night, a huge, angry sound that rattled the skulls surrounding him. He felt his foreskin being pulled away from the bulb of his membrum, and there was a tearing, hot pain. He clenched his jaws so hard he thought his teeth would break off in splinters and be driven into his gums; his muscles strained to rip apart his bones, and instantly, his eyes were burning so badly he could not see. He could still hear, though, and in many ways that was the worst of it, the crunching, ripping sound of his foreskin being torn away from his membrum. It hurts! he silently screamed. Oh, God, it hurts! The pain was a red flame burning up his membrum into his belly and spine. The pain ate him alive; the world was nothing but fire and pain. There came a moment when his body was like a single nerve connected to a vastly greater ganglia and webwork of living things: trees and stars and the wolves howling in the valleys below. He could hear the death scream of churo and yaga, and all the animals he had ever killed exploding from his own throat; he remembered the story of a Patwin boy who had died during his passage, and he felt a sudden pressure below his ribs, as if a spear or claw had pierced his liver. In one blinding moment, he saw again the faces of each member of his tribe as they prayed to be freed of the slow evil. The hurt of all these peoples and things, and everything, flowed into him like a river of molten stone. He ached to move, to scream, to pull himself up and run away. Only now, wholly consumed by the terrible pain that is the awareness of life, he was no longer afraid. Beyond pain, there was only death. Death was the left hand of life, and suddenly he beheld its long, cold fingers and deep lines with a clarity of vision that astonished him. Seen from one perspective, death was cruel and dreadful like a murderer’s hand held over a baby’s face; but from another, death was as familiar and non-frightening as the whorls of his father’s open palm. He would die, tonight or ten thousand nights hence – he could almost see the moment when the light would flee his eyes and join all the other lights in the sky. Even now, as the Beast tore at him, he was dying, but strangely he had never been so alive. He held himself quiet and still, listening to the wind beating through the trees and over the mountains. He heard a voice whispering that his membrum’s red bulb must be exposed to the cold air, just as the man within must finally shed his childlike skin of wishes and certitude and come to know the world as it really is. That was the way of all life, he heard the voice say. Life was always lived with death close at hand, and it was continually shedding death even as it made itself over to be born anew.
To live, I die, he told himself.
And inside him, despite the pain, at the centre of his deepest self was just sheer joy at being alive. In some sense, he would always be alive, no matter the killing coldness of the wind or fatal illnesses or any of a thousand other fates that he might suffer.
‘Danlo!’ the Beast howled out. ‘Your blood is red and flows like a man’s!’
Danlo listened to his deep breathing as other cuts were carved into his flesh, tiny cuts up and down the length of his membrum. He realized that it was Soli making these cuts and rubbing various coloured powders into them. The cuts would fester and then heal, and soon his membrum would be like that of any other Alaloi man: long and thick, and decorated with dozens of green and ochre scars.
‘Danlo, are you ready now?’
He felt something soft being wrapped around his membrum; it felt like feather moss held in place with a newl skin.
‘Danlo, you must gather your strength for the journey,’ a voice called out of the darkness. Then the Beast stood above him, gripping a gobbet of flesh between its bloody claws. ‘This piece of meat will sustain you. Open your mouth and swallow it without chewing.’
Danlo did as he was told. Like a baby bird, he opened his mouth and waited. Suddenly, he felt the raw bit of meat pressed into his mouth, back against his tongue. He swallowed once, convulsively, and he tasted fresh warm blood.
‘Danlo, this is the skin of your childhood. It will impregnate you like a seed. From the child grows the man. Are you ready to be a man, now?’
Again Danlo swallowed against the hot salty slickness of his own blood.
‘Danlo, wi Ieldra sena! Ti ur-alashareth. The ancestors are coming! It is time for you to go over now.’
His eyes were now calm and clear, and he looked up at the stars to see a million points of light streaming toward him.
‘Danlo, you may turn your head.’
Danlo blinked his eyes slowly. He turned and there was Soli standing over him. He was dressed as usual, in his winter furs; the terrible Beast was gone. ‘You have done well,’ he said.
He helped Danlo sit up and wrapped him in a fresh shagshay skin. There was blood everywhere, dark red soaking into the white furs. Danlo looked through the flickering red fires up at the circle of skulls. He must find the one animal who was his doffel. Soli would help him if his vision faltered, but it would be better if he came to his other-self unaided and alone.
‘Danlo, can you see?’
‘Yes.’