The Wild

by David Zindell

  If Danlo had any doubt as to the evidence of his eyes, one day he heard a lone male roaring deep in the forest. The tiger, he estimated from his throaty sound, was at least a mile away. Perhaps he was calling the she-tigers to mate with him or calling other males to share his kill. Danlo suddenly remembered, then, how certain tigers sometimes hunted men. Because he had no wish to meet a hungry tiger on the open beach, he thought to arm himself with drug darts or sound bombs or lasers. But he was a pilot, after all, not a wormrunner, and his ship carried no such weapons. He might have made a spear out of whalebone and wood, but he remembered that his vow of ahimsa forbade him to harm any animal, even a desperate tiger, even in defence of his own blessed life. The most prudent course of action would have been to keep to the house while waiting for the days to pass until his test. But this he could not do. And so in the end, on his daily walks along the beach, he began carrying a long piece of driftwood that he found. He would never, of course, use this as a club to beat against living flesh. If he encountered a tiger he would only brandish this ugly stick, waving it about and shouting like a madman in hope of scaring the beast away.

  The presence of tigers on this lovely beach reminded Danlo of the dark side of nature. It reminded him of the dark side of himself. All his life he had seen a marvellous consciousness in all things, in sand and trees as well as the intelligent animals with their bright yellow eyes. But consciousness itself was not all sunlight and flowers; in the essence of pure consciousness there was something other, something dangerous and dark like the swelling of the sea beneath the bottomless winter moon. All things partook of this danger. And if he was of the world, then so did he. Because he was a man, like other men, he sometimes wanted to deny this knowledge of himself. Sometimes, when he grew faithless and weak, he was tempted to see himself as a golden and godlike creature forced merely to live in the world until he might complete his evolution and make a better world – either that or transcend the darkness of rocks and blood and matter altogether. But always, when he opened the door of his house and stepped outside into the shock of the cold salt air, he returned to himself. That was the magic of all wild places. Always, at the edge of the ocean, there was a wakefulness, a watching and a waiting. All the animals, he thought – the kittiwakes and seagulls, the otters and whelks and orcas – were always calling to each other with a curious, wary excitement, waiting to touch each other with eyes or tongues or their glittering white teeth. Life always longed to envelope other life, to hold, to taste, to merge tissue upon tissue and consume other things. He saw this down in the tidepools, the way the crabs patiently used their strong claws to break open the razor clams a bit of shell at a time. He saw it in the way the great orange sea-stars clasped the mussels in their five strong arms and slowly suctioned them open, and then, with an almost sexual strategem, extruded their stomachs through their mouths in order to envelope the naked mussels inside their shells and digest them. All life trembled with a terrible love for all other living things, and sometimes this love was almost hate, not the simple loathing of a man for the dirt and gore of organic life, but rather the deep and true hate of being abandoned and lost and utterly consumed. The bone-melting ferocity with which nature was always trying to consume itself was truly an awesome thing. To be slain and eaten and absorbed by a fierce animal was the terror that all creatures must face, but being absorbed into the participation with all other life was the joy and wildness of the world. This sense of oneness with other life, he thought, was the essence of love. He saw love in the dance of the bee and flower and in the way that the algae and fungi combined to form the symbiotic lichens that grew over the rocks in bright bursts of ochre and orange. It was as if life, in its longing to love, must continually seek out other living things in order to share its nectar, its secrets, its memories, its wonderful sense of being alive.

  But for a man, that glorious and doomed being halfway between ape and god, it was always too possible to fall out of love. Always, for all men and women across all the worlds of the galaxy’s many stars, there was the danger of living along the knifeblade edge between a craven terror of nature and the urge to isolate oneself from the world, ultimately to dominate and destroy it. Along this fine and terrible edge was the wildness of the soul, its nobility and passion, neither cowering nor controlling but simply living, bravely, freely, like a sparrowhawk racing along the wind. This was the challenge of the wild. But few human beings have ever dared to live this way. For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated – but never looked upon clearly face to face.

  If Danlo was able to see the darkness (and splendour) of life more deeply than most men, this gift had been won at great cost. As a child he had grown up within the fear of ice and wind and the cunning white bears that stalked the islands of his home. As a young man he had suffered wounds and sacrificed part of his flesh that he might face the world as a full man. And once, on a night of broken lips and blood, he had taken a vow of ahimsa. Many thought of ahimsa as merely a strict moral code that forbade people to harm other life; as a tight, silky cocoon of words and conceits that restricted one’s actions and yet allowed a man to feel superior to others. But for Danlo, ahimsa was pure freedom. Although the keeping of his vow sometimes required tremendous will, his reward was the fearlessness of life and more, the greatest reward of all, to share in its joy. There was a word that Danlo remembered, animajii, wild joy, life’s overflowing delight in itself. Along this cold, misty shore, he sensed animajii everywhere, in the red cedars and hemlock trees straight and silent as spires, in the death-cup mushrooms and earthstars, in the butterflies and spiders and waterworms, and perhaps most of all, in the great whales that dove beneath the ocean’s waves. He loved looking out to sea as the sun died and melted over the golden waters. All too often he stood frozen and helpless on soft sands as he drank in all this wild joy around him and marvelled that the Entity could have made this Earth so perfectly. The goddess, he thought, must surely know all there was to know about joy, about beauty, about men, about life.

  One day, late on the forty-first afternoon of his sojourn on the planet, a distant sound far off in the heavens startled him out of his usual ritual of drinking peppermint tea. At first he thought it was thunder, not the omnipresent thunder of the crashing surf but rather that of lightning and ozone and superheated air. When he looked out the window at the heavy grey clouds hanging low over the sea, he thought that this might be the beginning of a storm. But when he listened more closely, he heard a great rolling sound more like drum music than thunder, as if the whole of the sea was booming out low, deep, angry notes that reverberated from horizon to shore. Then the terrible sound intensified, shaking the house and rattling the windows. Because Danlo remembered other windows in other places, he quickly covered his face with his hands lest the glass suddenly shatter inward. And then, a moment later, the thunder died into a whisper. Turn his head as he might, from right to left, from left to right, he could not divine the source of this whisper. It seemed to float along the beach and fall down over him from the skylights in the roof; he heard the whisper of wind whooshing down the blackened fireplace, and then a strange voice whispered words in his ear. The voice gradually grew clearer and more insistent. It filled the fireroom, and then all the rooms of the house. It was a lovely voice, sweet and feminine though coloured with undertones of darkness, passion, and a terrible pride. Only a goddess, he thought, could command such a voice. Only a goddess could speak to him, and sing to him, and recite words of beautiful poetry to him, all at the same time.

  Danlo, Danlo, my brave pilot – are you ready?

  Danlo stood holding his ears, but still he could hear the Entity’s voice. In acceptance of Her considerable powers, he dropped his hands away from his head and smiled. ‘I … will be tested now, yes?’

  Oh, my beautiful man – yes, yes, yes, yes! Go down to the beach where the Cathe
dral Rock rises from the sea. You must go out toward this rock now; you know the way.

  Indeed, Danlo did know the way. Although he had not yet named the offshore rocks visible from the house, there was one rock that pushed straight up out of the water like a cathedral’s spire, a great shining needle of basalt speckled white with the gulls and other birds who nested there. Some days earlier he had tried to climb the cracked face of this rock, only to slip and fall and plunge thirty feet downward into cold, killing sea. He had been lucky not to break his back or drown in the fierce riptide. As it was, the shock of the icy water had nearly stopped his heart; it was only with great difficulty that he had managed to swim to shore. He could not guess why the Entity wanted him to return to this rock. Perhaps She would require him to climb it once more. And so, pausing only to gulp a mouthful of hot tea, he hurried to dress himself in his boots, his kamelaika and his rain robe. He vowed that if he must climb this treacherous rock again, he would not slip. And then, because he had fallen into the strange self-consciousness of remembrance, he smiled and prayed to the spirit of rocks and went down to the sea.

  He made his way over the dunes and the hardpack where the sandpipers hopped along singing their high, squeaky chirrups. At the water’s edge he stood in the wet sand and looked out at this so-called Cathedral Rock rising up before him. He saw immediately that he would have little trouble hiking out to it. At low tide the sea pulled back its blankets of water to uncover a bed of rocks: twelve large, flat-topped rocks leading like a path from the shore out into the ocean’s shallows. The tide was now at its lowest, and the rocks were shagged with red and green seaweeds, a living carpet rippling in the wind. Along the sides of the rocks and in the tidepools between them were twenty types of seaweed, the kelps and red-purple Iavers, and a species called desmarestia that used poison to ward off predators. Danlo smelled the faint rotten-egg reek of sulphuric acid, salt and bird droppings and the sweet decay of broken clams. In the tidepools before him there were tubeworms and barnacles and mussels, sea-stars and crabs, anemones and urchins and clams filtering the water for the plankton larvae that they like to eat. He took in all this bright, incredible life in a glance. But he was aware of it only dimly because he had eyes only for another bit of life farther out along the rocks. From the beach, almost back at the house when he had first crested the dunes, he had espied an animal lying flat on top of the twelfth rock, the last in the pathway and the one nearest Cathedral Rock. At first he had thought it must be a seal, though a part of him knew immediately that it was not. Now that he stood with the sea almost sucking at his feet, he could see this animal clearly. It was, in truth, a lamb. It had a curly, woolly fur as white as snow. He had never seen a lamb before, in the flesh, but he recognized the species from his history lessons. The lamb was trussed in a kind of golden rope that wound around its body and legs like some great serpent. It was completely helpless, and it could not move. But it could cry out, pitifully, a soft bleating sound almost lost to the roaring of the sea. It was desperately afraid of the strange ancient sea and perhaps of something other. Although the tide was low, it was a day of wind, and the surf raged and churned and broke into white pieces against Cathedral Rock; soon the sea would return to land and drown the lesser rocks in a fathom of water.

  Go out to the lamb now, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.

  The godvoice was no longer a sweet song in Danlo’s ears. Now it fell down from the sky and thundered over the water. The sound of the wind and the sea was bottomless and vast, but this voice was vaster still.

  Go now. Or are you afraid to save the lamb from its terror?

  Danlo faced the wind blowing off the sea. Faintly, he smelled the lamb, its soft, woolly scent, and its fear.

  Go. go, please go, my wild man. If you would please me, you must go.

  Because Danlo’s rain robe was flapping in the wind, he bent low and snapped it tight around his ankles and knees, the better to allow his legs free play for difficult movements. Then he climbed out onto the first of the twelve rocks. Strands of thick, rubbery seaweed crunched and popped and slipped beneath his boots. With a little running jump, he leaped the distance over the tidepool to the second rock, and then to the third, and so on. He had his walking stick for balance against the slippery rocks, and his awe of the ocean for a different kind of balance, inside. The further out he went, the deeper the water grew around the base of the rocks. In little time, running and leaping against the offshore wind, he reached the twelfth rock. Of all the rocks, this was the largest, except for Cathedral Rock itself. It was fifty feet long and twenty feet wide, and it rose up scarcely five feet above the streaming tide. Above the west end of the rock, toward the sea, across a few feet of open space and dark, gurgling water, Cathedral Rock stood like a small mountain. On Danlo’s last visit here, he had leaped this distance onto the face of Cathedral Rock in his vain attempt to climb it. He had made this leap from a low, seaweed-covered shelf at the very edge of the twelfth rock. This shelf was something like a great greenish stair; it was also something like an altar. For on top of the seaweed and the dripping rock the lamb lay. To its left was a pile of driftwood, grey-brown and dry as bone. To the lamb’s right, almost touching its black nose, a dagger gleamed against the rock shelf. It had a long blade of diamond steel and a black shatterwood handle, much like the killing knives that the warrior-poets use. Danlo immediately hated the sight of this dagger and dreaded the implications of its nearness to the helpless lamb.

  Go up to the lamb, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.

  Out of the wind came a terrible voice, and the wind was this dark, beautiful voice, the sound and soul of a goddess. Danlo moved almost without thinking. It was almost as if the deeps of the ocean were pulling at his muscles. He came up close to the shelf; the lip of it was slightly higher than his waist. The lamb, he saw, was a young male and it was bleating louder now; each time he opened his mouth to cry out, a puff of steam escaped into the cold air. Danlo smelled milk and panic on the lamb’s breath; he was aware of the minty scent of his own. The lamb, sensing Danlo’s nearness, struggled to lift its head up and look at him. But the golden rope encircled him in tight coils, forcing and folding his legs up against his belly. Danlo reached out to touch the lamb’s neck, lacing his fingers through the soft wool covering the arteries of the throat. The lamb bleated at this touch, shuddering and convulsing against his bonds, and he lifted his head to fix Danlo with his bright black eye. He was only a baby, as Danlo was all too aware as he stroked the lamb’s head and felt the tremors of the animal’s bleating deep inside his throat.

  Take up the knife in your hand, my sweet, gentle Danlo.

  Danlo looked down at the long knife. He looked over to his left at the heap of driftwood and dry pine twigs. And then, for the tenth time, he looked at the lamb. How had these things come to be here, on a natural altar of rock uncovered by the daily motions of the sea? And somehow his house had been stocked with furniture and furs, with fruits and coffee and bread and other foods. Most likely, he thought, the Entity must be interfaced with some sort of robots who could roam the planet’s surface according to Her programs and plans. Above all else a goddess must be able to manipulate the elements of common matter; and so even a goddess the size of a star cluster must have human-sized hands to move sticks of wood and knives and lambs, and other such living things.

  Take up the knife in your hand and slay the lamb. You know the way. You must cut open his throat and let his blood run down the rock into the ocean. I am thirsty, and all streams of life must run into me.

  Danlo looked down at the knife. In the uneven sunlight, it gleamed like a silver leaf. He marvelled at the perfect symmetry of the blade, the way the two edges curved up long and sharp toward an incredibly fine point. He wanted to reach his hand out and touch this deadly diamond point, but he could not.

  Take up the knife, my Warrior-Pilot. You must cut out the lamb’s heart and make me a burnt offering. I am hungry, and all creatures must rush into my fiery jaws like moths into a flame.
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br />   Danlo looked long and deeply at this impossible knife. Then from the sky, the late sun broke through the clouds and slanted low over the ocean to fall over the offshore rocks, over Danlo, over the knife. The blade caught the light, and for a moment, it glowed red as if it had just been removed from some hellish forge. Danlo thought that if he touched the knife his skin would sizzle and blacken, and then the terrible fire would leap up his arm and into his flesh, touching every part of him with unutterable pain, consuming him, burning him alive.

  Is it your wish to die? All the warriors of life must slay or be slain, and so must you.

  Danlo looked down at this lovely knife that he longed to touch but dared not. He looked at the altar, at the trembling lamb, at the Cathedral Rock and the dark ocean beyond. He suddenly realized that he was facing west, and he remembered a piece of knowledge from his childhood. A man, he had been taught, must sleep with his head to the north, piss to the south, and conduct all important ceremonies facing east. But he must die to the west. When his moment came – when it was the right time to die – he must turn his face to the western sky and breathe his last breath. Only then could his anima pass from his lips and rejoin with the wild wind that was the life and breath of the world.

  Slay the lamb now or prepare to be slain yourself.

  Danlo looked down and down at this warrior’s knife. He could not pick it up. Did the Entity truly believe that he would forsake his vow of ahimsa merely upon the threat of death? In truth, he could not break this deepest promise to himself. He would not. He would stand here upon this naked rock, for a moment or forever, watching the sunlight play like fire over the knife. His life meant everything to him and yet nothing – of what value was life if he must always live in dread of losing it? He would not pick up the knife, he told himself. He would stand here as the wind rose and the dark storm clouds rolled in from the sea. He would wait for the sea itself to rise and drown him in lungfuls of icy salt water, or he would wait for a bolt of lightning to fall down from the sky and burn his bones and brain. Somehow, he supposed, the Entity must command the lightning electrical storms of angry thoughts that flashed through Her dread brain, and so when She had at last grown vengeful and wroth, She would lift Her invisible hand against him and strike him dead.