Neverness

by David Zindell

  I listened but the only sound was the sigh of the wind sifting through the forest below. From the western slope of Kweitkel came the howl of a wolf calling out to the sky. I stood there for a while listening and watching, watching and waiting. After a while I turned back to the cave. Tomorrow I would kill a seal and perhaps understand, if not the secret of life, the meaning of death.

  10

  The Aklia

  Man cannot bear too little reality.

  saying of the cetics

  Early the next morning I awoke to a chorus of coughing and spitting, the sounds the women and men of the Reinalina family in the huts across the cave made as they hawked–up clots of phlegm and cleared their sore thoats. My throat, too, was raw from the intensely cold air of the previous day’s journey. (Was it only a day ago, I wondered, that the thallow had killed Liko? It seemed like a year.) Dressing was painful. My leg was so stiff I could hardly straighten it. Although I was very hungry, I could not eat the nuts Justine offered me. “All our throats are sore,” she said while she roasted nuts over the fire at the center of the hut. “It hurts to swallow them, I know, but they don’t taste bad if you chew them quickly, and you’ll need your strength if you’re really going to hunt a seal. Are you?”

  Katharine, who was on her knees dressing, looked at me as if she knew exactly what I would do. She said nothing. Soli sat by the oilstones scraping ice from his furs. I marvelled at how erect and straight he could hold himself even when sitting—and this despite the pain of his newly sculpted spine. (For some reason, Soli had taken longer to heal than the rest of us. Mehtar had hypothesized that there was a limit to the resiliency of rejuvenated cells and that Soli, who had thrice been brought back to youth, was close to that limit.) He looked up, and for a moment his eyes moved over the objects and features of the hut: the rectangular block of snow used to stop the tunnelway against the drilling wind, the cracked, peeling, drying rack above the oilstones, the long, serrated snow–knife, the hide–scrapers, spears, bowls, drills and other tools stacked against the curving walls, the soft, still–warm sleeping furs atop the snow bed on which he and Justine had so recently lain. He said, “Yes, Mallory will hunt the seal.”

  I looked at him and lowered my voice, “We spent half a year planning this expedition but we forgot one thing.”

  He contracted his black eyebrows and stroked his beard. “What thing?”

  “Coffee,” I said, feeling the ache in my head. “I’m dying for the taste of coffee.”

  “You’re hungry,” he said. “That’s why your head aches.”

  “I didn’t say my head aches.”

  “You didn’t have to say anything.” And then, “Do you think you’re the only one who craves coffee?”

  I coughed and looked at Katharine combing her long, black hair. I said, “Perhaps this journey was a stupid idea.”

  “Eat some nuts,” Soli said. “Eat; don’t think about coffee or your stupidity. You’ll have time enough for both when we return to Neverness.”

  I picked up a handful of nuts and popped them in my mouth. They tasted dry and bitter.

  “You have to chew them,” Justine said. To Soli she held out a bowl of roasted nuts, which he took in the following manner: He placed his long hands over hers and watched her eyes as she slowly drew her hands away, slowly allowing him to take the weight of the bowl. With this intimate gesture they touched each other’s skin and caressed with their eyes. Obviously, despite their very different motivations and dreams, despite years of mutual neglect and rancor, despite the bitterness of crueltime, they loved each other deeply. It was a love, I thought, renewed by their sense of isolation, by the clarity of frozen ice and open sky. And how not to love the beautiful Justine with her endless optimism, her zest and happiness at merely being alive? Yes, I could see why Soli loved her, because we all loved her; what I could not understand was why she loved him.

  After we had munched down our breakfast, Bardo and my mother crowded into our hut to drink a few bowls of herb tea. What a strange little group we were, sitting elbow to elbow in a circle, hunched over, sipping from our bone bowls, pretending to be Alaloi! What a miracle that we had fooled the Devaki into believing we were their near–brothers! In a way, I was glad enough to be posing as Soli’s son. Everyone had accepted Soli as my father, whereas Liam had made jokes about Bardo’s conception.

  “I don’t like that man,” Bardo said to me, all the while rubbing the sleep from his large, brown eyes. (It was a pity, I thought, that Mehtar had little altered the ugliness of his great bulging forehead or his bulbous nose.) “Did you hear what Liam said? He said your mother shouldn’t be left alone when we go hunting, or else she might be raped again by a bear and give birth to another Bardo. What a joke!”

  I was glad none of the Devaki knew I was my mother’s son, not Justine’s. If they had known, they probably would have joked that Soli had raped my mother. “If they knew my mother,” I whispered to Bardo, “they’d feel sorry for any bear—or anyone else—who tried to rape her.” As far as I knew, my mother had lain with a man only once in her life, the night she had conceived me.

  Soli finished his tea and announced it was time to go. He reached for his seal spears. “Yuri and his family will be waiting.” He was frowning, looking at Katharine when he said, “We’ll leave you women to do your...women’s work.”

  Somehow I did not think Soli was referring to the sewing of skins or the suckling of babies, the everyday work of the Devaki women. Clearly, he suspected that Katharine and I were lovers. Clearly, he wanted to torment me with thoughts of her lying beneath the Devaki men. Either that or he wanted to torment himself—I am not sure which. But I did not think Katharine would have much of a chance to “do her work” that day. Most of the men would be away hunting, and I did not think she would have any luck collecting semen from young boys.

  As we put on our furs, my mother was looking from me to Soli to Katharine, and then back at me. I did not like the way she looked at Katharine. It was a look, I thought, of envy, probably because Katharine was capable of work that she was not. “Go hunt your seals,” my mother said. “And while you are gone we women will prepare your beds. To lie in when you return.”

  We joined the other men and boys of the Manwelina family at the entrance of the cave. The many teams of dogs gobbled their food as the men laid out the harnesses and iced the runners of their sleds. The work was cold and painful in the pink light of the dawn. Beneath ice–glazed boulders and fir trees heavy with snow, Yuri and Wicent, and Liam, Seif, Haidar, Jinje and the other men of the Manwelina, had their sleds belly–up towards the still dark sky. Since ice would not adhere directly to bone, they plastered a paste of vegetable muck and pulverized dirt mixed with water and urine over the runners, repairing the nicks and divots with a thick shoeing of frozen mud. The morning air was so cold that the paste froze immediately upon contact, making it difficult to shape and smooth. It was frustrating work. I expected to hear grumbling and curses, but the Devaki men joked and laughed, all the while dipping their fingers into the bag of warm mud they wore inside their furs next to their skins. Quickly, precisely and quickly, they daubed blobs of mud over bone. Ten feet from me Liam artfully smoothed over a divot with his fingers and then quickly stuck them in his mouth so they wouldn’t freeze. The air was thick with little shouts and puffs of steam and muddy spittle as the men sucked their fingers and laughed and talked and spat. Bardo was having a difficult time with his sled, and so was I. He moved over next to me and muttered, “Isn’t it romantic? The cold, clear air, the lonesome cry of the wolf, peace, nature’s sweet kiss, serenity—and the taste of pissy muck. Thank you, Little Fellow, for bringing me to this enlightened place.”

  I watched Liam spray lukewarm water from his mouth. He smeared the quickly freezing liquid over the mud shoeing. In little time, the runners of his sled glistened with layers of ice. I looked around the clearing. Yuri’s cousins, Arani and Bodhi, and their sons, Yukio, Jemmu and Jinje, were spraying their sleds, too.r />
  Bardo shook his head at Jaywe and Arwe, who were also Yuri’s cousins, and he said, “They’ve had a lifetime of this stinking work. How do they stand it?” Then he bent and spat water along the runners of his sled, doing as he saw the others do, binding ice to frozen mud. “This is what I truly hate,” he said as he hefted his waterskin. “I loathe having to carry this bag of water next to my belly. What is man—a heat machine to keep water from freezing? The damn sloshing galls me, by God!”

  Soli saw us whispering and strode over to us. “Quiet,” he said. And then, “Silu wanya, manse ri damya,” which might be translated as: Children complain; men restrain (themselves).

  We loaded the sleds and harnessed the dogs, and Yuri gathered his family around him. He said, “Mallory has promised to take a seal, and so Mallory must tell us where Nunki is waiting.”

  The men looked at me, and I remembered that among the Alaloi promises to take meat are not made lightly. A hunter may promise a kill only when he perceives that his meat animal is ready to “leap to his spear.” To do this he must fall into the state of auvania, or open–waiting, a sort of trance state in which he feels wild and fey and can see through the black sea of death to the other side of day. Such visions he may not seek; they are a gift of the to–be–slain animal’s living spirit, his anima. I faced Kweitkel’s white cone and let my eyes focus on infinity. I tried to practice this seeing, tried to askeer, as the Alaloi say; I tried too hard. No vision came to me. But the men were waiting, so I pretended the seal’s anima had appeared before me. I said—I lied: “Lo askaratha li Nunki, mi anaslan, lo moratha wi Nunkiyanima.” I sagely pointed west because the western islands, Takel and Alisalia, seemed like golden mountains of snow and I felt an urge to be closer to them.

  Yuri nodded his head and turned his eyes east to greet dawn. “Lura sawel,” he said, and we repeated after him, “Lura sawel,” all the time standing in that curious position in which the Alaloi do reverence to the sun: Like insects I had once seen in the zoo, we stood with our arms together and raised to the sun, our fingers closed and pointed towards the snowy ground. With our heads bowed, we stood on one leg, the other leg bent up behind. We stood in this ridiculous position for a long time because the great Manwe, on the tenth morning of the world, had so honored his uncle, the sun. Then Yuri grasped the rails of his sled, whistled to his dogs and we were off.

  The day broke cold and calm with the hills smothered in near–silence. The only sounds were the schussing of the sleds and the snow loons’ warbling as they glided and circled, circled and dived, looking for their morning meals. On the far ridges the shagged limbs of the fir trees stood out clearly, so clearly I could almost distinguish the separate needles. We drove straight down the gently sloping forest to the sea. The land was folded and in places cut with ravines and granite cliffs. I was wary of those cliffs because thallows made their aeries there, above the dark green trees. There were no thallows that day, however, even though the snow hares and sleekits were busy digging for berries. Once I saw an arctic fox, and more than once we came upon wolf tracks frozen in the snow. But they were old tracks; most of the wolves, Yuri said, had abandoned the island to follow the shagshay herds.

  When we reached the sea there was some trouble crossing the frozen breakers, though far less than we had encountered the previous day on the ragged southern shore. By late morning we were free of the icy jungle, running fast over the cotton cake snow of the Starnbergersee. About five miles from land I nodded to Yuri and we scattered. I say “about” because the air was heavy as liquid over the ice, a huge, blue lens distorting distances, making far things seem near. Four sleds glided northwest towards Alisalia, which wavered on the horizon across miles of white ocean; nine sleds—Yuri’s and Liam’s among them—headed in the direction of Jakel and Waasalia. We fanned out over a circle of ice perhaps two miles in diameter. I halted my sled at a likely spot. I presumed all the other hunters did the same. I unharnessed Nura, who had been trained to sniff out seal holes. To the north, some fifty yards away, Bardo had his seal dog leashed, though it was not clear who was leading whom. The powerful Samsa pulled Bardo in jerks across the snow, trotting this way and that, occasionally sticking his black nose in the snow and blowing out a cloud of white powder. To the south was Soli, and to the west, across the brilliant ice, Yuri and his sons had apparently found their holes and were cutting snow blocks to build a wall against the wind.

  The Alaloi call the seal’s hole the aklia. I held Nura on a leash of braided leather as he pawed the snow and sniffed, searching for his aklia. He seemed happy to be free from the sled; twice he lifted his leg and yellowed the snow just for the fun of it. Then he caught a scent, let out an excited bark, and lunged at the leash. He started digging at the snow. After marking the spot with a stick, I dragged the disappointed dog downwind and staked him to the ice. I did the same with my other dogs, Rufo, Sanuye and Tusa. Seals are practically blind but their sense of hearing is extraordinarily keen, and I did not want the dogs’ barks to alert my seal. I returned to the aklia carrying my feeler–stick and icesaw, and other more murderous gear.

  Seals, being earth–type mammals, cannot breathe water, as can certain peculiar orders of carked mammals bred to the seas of Agathange and Balaniki and other watery worlds. They must have air, and so each seal keeps many holes in the ice open throughout the winter. A bull seal—and perhaps a cow—will bob up and down in the water as the ice crusts are forming in early winter, breaking and rebreaking the thin, frozen sheets as the ice builds and builds around the aklia. He visits his many holes, bobbing up and plunging down, breaking through to the air, breathing and swimming on to his next hole. When winter deepens to its longest, coldest days, the walls of the hole are nearly ten feet thick. As the snows fall and blow and freeze and melt and refreeze, a snow–bridge forms over the hole, obscuring it from the eyes of the hunter, but not from the dogs’ sensitive noses. Beneath the snowbridge, the seal comes up to sit on the sloping ice ledges on either side of the hole. There, under the arch of packed snow, in midwinter spring, the cows give birth to their furry pups. There the seals huddle and play, safe from the wind and drowning and the teeth of the killer whales—but not safe from men.

  I took my curved feeler–stick and pushed it down through the snowbridge, down into the hole I could not see. By rotating it around in a circle I felt out the size of the hole and determined its center. Then I lifted my face to the north wind, which stung me even through layers of grease. It was cold, not so cold as deep cold, but colder than blue cold. My eyes watered and my toes were a little numb. I thought it might be a long wait for the seal, so I cut blocks of snow and built a wall around the north rim of the aklia to shield against the killing wind. Next I slid my wooden marker–bob down through the center of the hole until it touched the water. As the seal came up to breathe, he—I prayed it would be a bull because I dreaded killing a pregnant female—he would displace a large quantity of water, causing the marker to bob up. When it sank, I would know the water had fallen back to the ocean’s surface and the seal had risen.

  “Lo luratha lani Nunki,” I prayed, and I spread a square of silk belly fur in front of the hole. I stood on it wiggling my stiff toes, hoping its insulation would keep my feet from freezing like blocks of ice. The last thing I did was to rest my harpoon across two forked sticks that I shoved into the crusty snow. The detachable head of the harpoon, the wickedly sharp, barbed, murderous head, was made of whalebone and had a carved ring at its base. Knotted to this ring was a long, braided leather cord. I wrapped the end of the cord around my hand and watched the marker–bob. When it rose I would pick up my harpoon, and when it fell—when the seal had risen and the marker fell—I would thrust the harpoon into the center of the aklia. I would do this murderous thing because in my jealousy and pride I had promised to do so

  And so I waited. Precisely how long I waited I do not know. What is time without a clock with which to measure it? How long did I stand in that difficult attitude of the hunter, fe
et together, buttocks high, looking down, always down, watching the marker–bob in the seal’s hole? How long, pela Nunki? How long must a hungry man wait until his emptiness is filled?

  “Three days,” Yuri had told me the night before. “Three days is not too long to wait because Nunki has many holes. At the last moment his anima might be too frightened to make the great journey, and so he will make the shorter journey to another hole.”

  I watched and I waited bent over like a crippled old man. I stood absolutely still while the muscles along the back of my legs began to knot and burn; I waited a long time.

  It is said that patience is the supreme virtue of the hunter. Very well, I told myself, I would be patient. I listened to the wind slash across the ice; I listened to the individual whorls and eddies which flowed together into gusts and then nearly died before building and surprising me with stronger, colder blasts. Occasionally the wind would die altogether, and there would be silence. These long spells filled me with unease and restless anticipation. I did not want to hear the murmur of my own heart, nor was I eager for the explosive rush of air when the seal came up to breathe, when he came, if he came at all. There were many things I did not want to hear. I knew that the great white bears hunted seals and hunted humans, too. According to Yuri, Totunye liked to sneak up close to an aklia, to lie in wait before pouncing and bashing in the hunter’s head with his murderous paw. When stalking across the snowdrifts the bears are impossible to see, and they make almost no noise. I listened for the swish of bear fur against ice, waiting. From the north there came a distant moan. It was the wind again, and it swelled into a low howl, whipped across the ice and began to roar. I waited a long time and I was very cold. My bladder filled. Far above me the yellowish glare off the icefields vibrated against the blueness of the sky. The Devaki call this cold shimmer of yellow–chrome an iceblink, I suppose because the brightness makes them blink. I blinked my eyes, all the while staring at the marker–bob set into the aklia. I thought of the pain in my bladder and the pain of the bear’s teeth, and other pains. I tried to concentrate. I imagined the seal’s anima was whispering in my ears, calling out to me, but it was only the wind. The wind cut my face, and I waited, and I blinked my eyes, and...