Neverness

by David Zindell

  “Shhh, keep your voice low!” I said.

  “No one can hear me!”

  But obviously someone had heard him. Either that or the two women had spread the news of his turgid condition throughout the cave. Yuri and his brother Wicent entered the hut and looked at Bardo in astonishment. “We heard your shouts,” Yuri said. I will never forget the helpless expression on Bardo’s face as Yuri examined his membrum, freely feeling the shaft with his greasy fingers. “Whoever initiated you was very careful,” Yuri said. “A great shaman made these scars, but then he had a great spear to carve on. Truly, Bardo has a mammoth spear, Seratha and Oma did not exaggerate.”

  Bardo pulled away from him and began putting on his furs. His face was as red as a bloodfruit.

  “The women are curious to view such a spear,” Yuri said. “And who could blame them?” He leaned closer to Bardo, speaking in a low, confidential voice. “They are too curious, I think. We would not want the married women sneaking into your hut to verify the greatness of your spear, would we? That would cause disharmony. You must satisfy their curiosity now while they are sick of sex and men’s spears. What is seen and known often creates less desire than the hidden. Come outside the hut; Anala and Liluye are waiting.”

  Bardo stared at him and did not move.

  “Quickly now, before it softens like a worm.”

  Bardo looked at me as an array of emotions crossed his face. One who did not know him would have thought he was too modest to expose himself to the women’s stares. But he was not a modest man. He was afraid, I thought, that Soli and the others would view his engorged membrum and thus witness Mehtar’s humiliating revenge. It seemed unlikely, though, that anyone except me, and possibly my mother, had studied ancient Japanese. I nodded to him reassuringly. He must have somehow understood because he shrugged and said, “I hope they don’t faint at the sight of this,” and he backed out of the hut. With a shagshay fur thrown like a cape across his massive shoulders, he strode nearly naked among the glowing huts, stopping to pose and preen in front of the Old Man of the Cave. The Devaki women—there must have been fifty of them—surrounded him. (I should add that the men were also very curious. They stood peering from behind the women’s shoulders, plainly envious.) A few of the more fascinated women, Anala and nervous Liluye among them, pointed and gasped and vied with one another to grasp his membrum, as if to palpably verify its size. A sea of snakelike arms reached out for him, touching, fondling. Most of the women, however, groaned and sadly shook their heads and looked away. Bardo ignored them. He paraded around making obscene thrusting motions with his hips as he announced, “Tuwa the mammoth does not have a bigger spear. Behold!” And then he recited a little poem that was a favorite of his:

  Short and thin

  Has little in;

  It’s long and thick

  That does the trick.

  Muliya, who was Mentina’s fat, cross–eyed mother, laughed and asked, “Does a woman lie down with a beast?”

  Anala stroked her gray hair and said, “You are supposed to make fire inside a woman, not kill her with your spear.” And everyone, including Bardo, laughed.

  “Ah, but it’s cold,” he said, all the while strutting with his hands on his hips.

  “So cold,” someone called out, “that your spear is frozen.”

  This seemed to remind him of the seriousness of his condition. “Ah, yes...frozen. Too bad.” He winked at me, shivered, and returned to the hut to fetch his clothes.

  The men and women joked for a while and went back to their feasting and sleeping. Yuri caught me by the arm and said, “Bardo is a strange man. All the men of the southern ice—you sons of Senwe are strange. Brave and strong, but strange.”

  I didn’t say anything because I was worried Bardo’s obscene antics, and perhaps my own foolish inhibitions, had caused him to suspect our civilized origins. But he continued and it was clear that Bardo and I weren’t the only ones he considered strange: “Soli, too, is a strange man. Never have I seen anyone take so little joy from living. He loves Justine like the sun loves the world, but when he discovers she cannot reflect the wholeness of his radiance, he grows as cold as a star. He forgets that such love is the soul’s hopeless attempt to escape its own loneliness. Strange. And you, Mallory, the strangest of all—you have murdered your own doffel. What strangenesses will come of all this?” He looked at me with his deep, single eye, plainly worried. “I do not know,” he said, “I do not know.”

  I stared over his shoulder at the huts of the Manwelina. As he spoke, Liam emerged from the nearest hut. He combed back his long, blond hair and went over to the meat pit where he picked up an axe and hacked at a piece of seal meat. Moments later Katharine backed out of the hut’s tunnelway. She stood up and smiled at him in a way that made me want to grind rock between my teeth. She began walking towards the entrance fires. I stepped into the shadow of the Old Man of the Cave so she wouldn’t see me. I quickly looked back at Yuri. “I don’t know either,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  * * * * *

  I followed Katharine back to our hut. I didn’t want her to think that I was a spy, so I waited a while before joining her inside. As silently as I could, I crept through the dark, icy tunnelway. When I reached the main chamber, all the oilstones were lit and the interior was awash in a sea of golden light. Soli was gone, probably out feeding the dogs or skiing through the forest, which he liked to do at daybreak. I did not know where Justine could have been. I pushed my belly close to the snow, watching. Katharine was kneeling above her snow bed, looking around at the white, curving walls as if to examine them for flaws. She lifted back the fur draped over the edge of the bed, exposing the bare, packed snow. She began to dig. It was so quiet I could hear her deep breathing above the sounds that her fingers made scooping out clumps of snow. In little time she had excavated a hollow perhaps two feet deep. She pulled her head back—despite my jealousy I could not help thinking how beautiful she was—she looked around the hut once more before reaching into her secret crypt. One by one she removed five krydda spheres, which were each a translucent green and slightly smaller than a snow loon’s egg. She opened the first sphere carefully. Very carefully, from the inner pocket of her fur, she removed a snipping of blond hair. She twisted it into a golden ball and pushed it into the sphere. She performed a similar procedure with the other spheres in turn, storing in them nail parings, a child’s tooth, and, amazingly, the blackened, amputated little toe of Jinje, whose flesh had run to gangrene after his feet had thawed. The last thing she did I could not see clearly because she was squatting with her back to me. She reached down into her furs below her stomach and removed something. I guessed it was a pessary, no doubt full of Liam’s seed. I think she emptied it into the last sphere. When she finished this private work, she replaced the spheres and closed the hole beneath her bed.

  I was so angry I forgot that I was not supposed to be spying on her. I stood up and said, “I hope you have enough samples.”

  She jumped suddenly; her whole body contracted at once as it sometimes did at night when she lay near me in that floating state of consciousness just before sleep. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know you were...” She pulled the fur over her handiwork and sat on the bed. She thrust her hands beneath her crossed arms to warm them.

  I wanted to take her cold hands in mine, to let the flush and heat flow into them. But I was very angry so I asked, “How many samples do you have?”

  “I’m not sure I know.”

  “You’ve had three days to skulk about the cave,” I said. “How much longer do you think you’ll need?” Originally, we had planned to take at least twenty samples of the Devaki’s plasm and tissues, five from each of the four families. According to the master imprimatur, that should have contained a sufficient expression of the tribe’s chromosomes.

  “I’m not sure,” she repeated.

  “Why don’t we count the samples, then?”

  “Why are you always so obsessed with numbers?”
/>
  “I’m a mathematical man.”

  She rubbed her naked hands together and blew on them. The air was steamy with her breath. “You mean to ask how many men I’ve been with—not enough, do you see?” And then, that infuriating saying of the scryers: “What will happen has happened; what has been will be.” She flexed her intertwined fingers and said, “I’m not Bardo; I haven’t counted my—”

  “How many?” I asked.

  She looked straight at me. “It would be cruel of me to tell you,” she said.

  “How many men?” I asked. “Seven? Eight? The barbaric orgy lasted three days.”

  “Fewer than you might think. I don’t like men as well as you or Bardo like women.”

  I crossed the space between us and grasped her hands. “Two? Three? I couldn’t find you for days,” I said. “How many?”

  She smiled sadly as I held her hands. “There was only one man, don’t you see?”

  I did see. All at once the hateful images of her and Liam naked together came unbidden into my mind. I tried to think of other things, but I could not. My beautiful Katharine lying beneath him, pulling at his buttocks with her hands—this image burned inside me. It was an obscene image, like the lewd and colorful flesh frescoes which writhe beneath the pale skins of farsider whores. I clenched my teeth and asked, “You spent all your time with Liam? Why?”

  “It’s best I don’t tell you,” she said. “It would be cruel of me to tell…”

  It was stupid of me to insist that she tell me, but I was stupid that day, so I repeated, “Why?”

  She twisted her hands away and said, “Liam...he’s different than other men, different than civilized men.”

  “Men are men,” I said, rubbing my nose. I was thinking furiously. I asked, “Different how?”

  “When I’m...when he’s...when we’re together, he isn’t thinking of diseases or of other men I’ve been with or the consequences of...he isn’t always thinking, don’t you see? Do you know what it’s like to be with someone who exists in the moment solely with you? Solely for you?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “What is it like?”

  “Ecstasy,” she said.

  I was silent and I stared into her eyes. “Ecstasy,” I repeated. I was so sick with jealousy the veins in my neck ached.

  “With Liam, it’s as natural as breathing...he’s patient, do you see?”

  Ecstasy. I closed my eyes, and I could see it all too easily, this ecstasy of Katharine’s. I saw her with her eyes tightly closed, with her head thrown back, lost in pleasure. Perversely, my jealousy began to change into desire even as my anger gave way to the quick swelling of lust. There was a pressure all through my body, the heaviness of pounding blood. Despite the excitement of the past three days, perhaps because of it, I was eager to swive her; I was dying to swive her. I found myself whispering apologies in her ear while I lost my hand in the raw silk of her hair. Barbarically, I kissed her neck. And all the while—even as I pulled the furs from her—she stared at me with eyes both open and blind. She nodded suddenly as if she had seen a clear and vivid image of her own. She pressed her palms against my cheeks and slowly said, “It’s...so...dangerous!” But I didn’t care about danger just then; I trembled with a need to act and do, so I threw off my furs and began caressing her. “You don’t see,” she murmured, “you don’t...” She lay back against the bed, and like a farsider whore, she threw her arms up above her head and bent her knees to reveal the dark wedge of hair between her legs. The tendons strained beneath her skin, and she smelled of sex. “Mallory,” she said, and I rested my knees between hers, and I did not care that I heard scraping sounds outside the hut; I did not care at all.

  How can I explain this mysterious impulse that overcame us every time we were alone? We used to joke that although we often didn’t like each other, the cells of her body loved the cells of mine. It was love, I like to think, that drove us together that day in the hut. We rutted quickly like beasts, and it was an artless but ecstatic copulation. Unlike most women, Katharine was quick and easy to arouse. However, once her blood was hot she liked to spread her pleasure out for hours, savoring each moment one by one. This had often annoyed me because I was always eager for the finish, for that blinding moment when our ecstasy crescendoed and we died the little death together. I was eager for ecstasy, and we had only a few moments, so we thrust furiously, in rhythm, pushing and panting and sweating. Her heels were hard against the backs of my legs as she urged on and on. I must have kicked aside the old furs covering the floor because I felt my naked toes gripping and digging into the snow. I was dying to be done, and I moved faster, moaning like a beast. “No, wait,” she said, and I opened my eyes, and she opened hers, staring through me into herself, into her luminous, crystalline interior where she could view her own pleasure as a voyeur peers at a rutting couple through a crack in an icy wall. But I was dying and I couldn’t think of waiting; I couldn’t think of anything at all. I gasped to feel myself hot and alive inside her, burning drops of life leaving me in spasms. We gasped together too loud and too long, but I did not care.

  Afterwards she lay still for a long time, clutching the back of my neck, opening and closing her fingers. She seemed both sad and amused; her face was open with resignation and anxiety, but with happiness, too. “Oh, Mallory,” she said, “poor Mallory.” I wondered if what we had done had happened against her will, but then I remembered she was a scryer who denied her individual will. “It’s all so intense for you, isn’t it?” she said. When she held her hands over her eyes and shook with both laughter and tears, I realized that I would never understand her.

  She separated from me and stood up to dress. She turned to me, whispering her scryer’s whisper: “How I loved the memory of the last you; how I always shall.” Then she fled from the hut, leaving me to renew the oilstones’ flames, which had burned too brightly and were pale yellow and dim.

  13

  Hunger

  If we become too many, we will kill all the mammoth and have to hunt silk belly and shagshay for food. And when they are gone, we will have to cut holes in the ice of the sea so to spear the seals when they come up to breathe. When the seals are gone, we will be forced to murder Kikilia, the whale, who is wiser than we and as strong as God. When all the animals are gone, we will dig tangleroot and eat the larvae of furflys and break our teeth gnawing the lichen from the rocks. At last we will be so many, we will murder the forests to plant snow apple so that men will come to lust for land, and some men will come to have more land than others. And when there is no land left, the stronger men will get their sustenance from the labor of weaker men, who will have to sell their women and children so that they might have mash to eat. The strongest men will make war on each other so that they might have still more land. Thus we will become hunters of men and be doomed to hell in living and hell on the other side. And then, as it did on Earth in the time before the Swarming, fire will rain from the sky, and the Devaki will be no more.

  from the Life of Lokni the Unlucky, as told by Yuri the Wise

  A few days later I confessed everything to Bardo. Because he was as terrified of his own mortality as anyone I have ever known, he pretended to boredom and a false calm when I told him of my experience in Shanidar’s chamber, my great “vastation,” as he called it. But he was more than curious to hear the details of my tryst with Katharine. Upon learning that we had been lovers since the night we received our pilot’s rings, he was full of advice.

  “Your jealousy unmans you, Little Fellow. Let her swive as many men as she needs to—why else did we come here? A man should love women, of course, but he should not love a woman too well. It poisons him to do so.” We were standing in the woods outside the cave, drilling yellow holes in the snow as we performed our “piss–after–drinking–the–morning–tea.” The wind was up, blowing in gusts from the south. This made our urination awkward and perilous, because as I have said, the Devaki must always face south when they relieve themselves. Bardo shook him
self dry and said, “By God, it’s cruel the way this wind blows down the trousers.” And then, “Poisons! I should tell you this poison of Mehtar’s is peculiar, indeed. Here, look at this,” he said showing me his membrum, which was limp and wrinkled, though still very large. “Who ever heard of such a poison? During the day it hangs like the hammer of a bell, and there is nothing I or these hairy women can do to make it rise. But at night—ah, at night it splits the air, so what else is there to do but find a woman to drain it dry? You should be glad the Devaki share their sex so freely, my friend. Do you want some advice? I will give you some advice: Let Katharine collect her samples, and then we’ll go home.”

  Katharine, I should mention, was not the only one who managed to collect bits and pieces of Devaki flesh. As head of our family, Soli was called to help hold Jinje when Yuri decided that his frozen, rotten toes must come off. I was not present at the amputation so I never learned how Soli pocketed one of the toes and smuggled it to Katharine for storage in her krydda sphere. And of course I was not allowed near Marya at the rear of the cave when she gave birth to her baby boy. The men, being men, were forbidden to witness this deepest of feminine mysteries. But my mother was there helping (I would not doubt that she took charge of the entire labor), and she returned to our hut with a small section of Marya’s afterbirth. Even though I had instigated, had once believed in this expedition, I found it difficult to think there could be any great secret hidden in the slelled tissues of an afterbirth. Surely, I thought, the Entity had deceived me. Surely it was all a joke, or perhaps a game in which we were pieces to be moved, frozen, starved or sliced into parts at the caprice of the goddess or according to the whimsy of the greater gods. Surely there was no secret at all.

  Our life among the Devaki soon settled into a routine. After we had finished the last of the seal meat, every morning the men would arise, ice the sleds, and go off hunting on the ice or skiing through the dark forest. Although we had bad luck with the animals, I came to cherish these moments of clean air and exhilaration away from the smoky cave, away from Katharine’s nightly forays into the huts of different Devaki men. Out on the ice there was peace and privacy, even in waiting for the seals that never came. And in the forests where the shagshay used to herd, I came to love the hunters’ keen whistles ringing across the ridges; I loved the feel of the silky snow beneath my skis; I loved the silence of the morning trees, the greenness against the quiet white, and above the trees and the snow and the silence, the blue window of the winter sky. I often think of those rugged hills beneath Kweitkel, for it was there that I first began to see the Devaki for what they were. To watch Yuri stalking an arctic fox or setting his snares for the eiders and other birds was to appreciate the care which attended every aspect and moment of the hunt. The Devaki were neither wanton murderers nor butchers, nor did they do their killing without thought. When a seal was taken, water had to be passed from the hunter’s lips into the seal’s mouth, or else his anima would have to go over to the other side thirsty. A kittiwake’s eyes had to be rubbed with ice, and so on. There were a hundred rituals to be performed, one for each of the different animals. The Devaki, I realized, did not really see the animals as meat at all, at least not as long as their spirits remained to be honored. They loved the animals; they could not conceive of life or the world without animals; they even thought of themselves as animals, or rather, as spirits who had duties and responsibilities to the spirits of each of the animals they hunted. They were intimately connected to the world of animals, and to the world itself, in countless different ways.