No, no – I am not. I am not, I am not, I am …
He suddenly knew that he was not remembrancing but only hallucinating. The shock to his brain had been very profound. The images now haunting him were only ghosts from his own memory, not the essence of the One memory itself. Although the forms of Haidar and Chandra and all the others of his tribe seemed utterly real, he knew that they were not. They were only vivid shapes and shades – shadows out of the deepest part of his mind.
No, no, please, no.
Somewhere in the heaven of the alam al-mithral – or in the hell that each man carries inside himself like a burning stone – a woman came nearer to Danlo. She was short and round with a beautifully animated face and brown eyes always full of love and compassion. She was Danlo’s found-mother, Chandra, and in life she had always liked to sit by the soup skins, telling the other women stories of Danlo’s daily adventures and always laughing. But now, here in this dark, dread space blazing like fire inside Danlo’s heart, she was not smiling. Her once-soft face was full of suffering, pain, death. For an eternity she looked at him with her sad, lovely eyes, which he had seen too often in his dreams. And then in a voice as deep and moist as the ocean, she asked him, ‘Why did you leave me, Danlo?’
‘But, Mother, I never left you!’ he heard himself say.
‘Why did you leave me to die?’
‘No, no, I would never–’
‘Why, Danlo, why?’
‘No, never, never, I….’
Then Haidar, with his black beard and great, bearlike shoulders, came up to Danlo. He held out his huge hand, which was covered with blood. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘does not leave his family to die. Not a true man.’
‘But Father,’ Danlo heard himself say, ‘I made you tea and rubbed hot seal oil on your forehead. While you were still alive, I never slept. I prayed until my voice flew from my mouth like a bird. I never left your side, unless it was to gather herbs or wood for the fire.’
‘Then why did I die, Danlo?’
‘I do not know.’
‘Why did you let us all die?’
Now the others of his tribe gathered close to him in a circle. There was Choclo, with his impish grin, and Mentina and Cilehe and his near-sisters and brothers. Choclo was not grinning now, but rather grimacing in terrible pain with his palm clasping his ear. When he drew his hand away, his fingers dripped blood. There was blood in his hair, blood staining his white shagshay furs. ‘I loved you as I did all my brothers,’ Choclo said. ‘But why did you bring the slow evil to our tribe?’
‘Oh, God, I. …’
‘Why did you live, Danlo? Why did you live when we all died?’
‘I do not know!’
Because Danlo’s head ached with a terrible pain, he pressed his hands hard over his eyes. After a while, he felt a burning moisture there, and he let his palms fall open before him. And in the deep bowl of his hands, there were no tears, but only blood. He began to sob, then, and drops of blood welled up in his eyes and seared his face like the touch of acid wire.
‘Danlo!’
‘No, no.’
‘Oh, Danlo, Danlo!’ This came from his found-mother, Chandra, who reached out to take hold of his hand. Her fingers were cold, and she gripped him with all the power of a coiling snake. ‘Do not leave us again.’
‘Stay with us,’ Haidar said. ‘We are your people, and we love you as the trees love the sun. Please stay with us.’
And then Choclo and Mentina and all the others of his tribe crowded still closer. They each held out their hands to touch him, and love flowed, from their fingers like hot oil rubbed over a wounded body. It warmed Danlo inside, bringing him to the edge of deep joy. ‘Stay with us, Danlo. Stay with us and be loved.’
Danlo noticed, then, that the terrible pain splitting his head was gone. For the first time in many years, no pain lurked like a tiger behind his eyes; he felt only peace, pleasure, and a contentment as deep as the cavernous black spaces between the stars.
I will stay with you, Danlo thought. I will stay with you here, always.
Madness, he knew then, need not be a descent into some fiery, screaming hell. Rather it could be like falling into a nurturing pool of love, as warm as blood, gently falling and falling forever.
‘Yes, Danlo, fall into our arms,’ Chandra said. ‘Fall into our hearts. Look into the ocean of love we hold in our eyes, and fall forever.’
‘Danlo,’ his found-father, Haidar said. ‘We are your family, and families are forever.’
And Rafael, his near-brother, and all the others cried out, ‘We are your family! Stay with us, Danlo. Oh, Danlo, Danlo!’
Yes, I must stay. I, too, must die now. Yes, yes.
‘No!’
Danlo heard himself cry out this single word, and the suddenness of the sound shocked him. It tore through his being like thunder, and yet it haunted him like the call of the snowy owl far out over the frozen sea. ‘No,’ he said again, ‘I will not stay.’
In the end, it was his will that saved him. He remembered that many other tribes of the Alaloi people had been touched with the slow evil. They would surely die of this disease, he thought, if he did not return someday soon to save them.
I will return. I … will.
He willed himself, then, to see himself just as he really was. There came a moment of stunning clarity as of stepping from a smoky cave outside into the bright winter air. He was falling mad, truly, but his very power to reflect upon this falling meant that he hadn’t yet plunged into total madness. He realized an important thing. His hallucinations of his family, as terrible (and beautiful) as they were, might be the key to unlock the door to this insane inner prison that Cheslav Iviongeon had programmed for him. If these ghosts from his memory could drive out the images of the dead Architects, then he himself held the power to create an interior world far more vivid and ‘real’ than any computer-generated surreality – even one so profound as the alam al-mithral. If, in his falling madness, he had unconsciously called up phasms of his dead family, why not then concentrate the whole of his awareness on a vision of his own choosing?
The whole art of journeying into the unknown, he remembered, is in knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.
Once, Leopold Soli – pilot, hunter, warrior and the blood-father of his true father – had taught him that when a man goes out into the wild (or inside to that dark and strange land of the soul), he must do three things. First he must learn to see the snowstorms and chaos of the world as signs of the unknown rather than as a call to panic. A true warrior, Soli had often told him, never fell into panic. And then, like a thallow winging his way skywards, he must shift to a higher state of awareness, both of himself and of the infinitely various seascapes below. Lastly, and most importantly, no matter how lost in darkness he might feel, he must trust that he held inside himself the brilliant constellations of light that would always point his way home.
I do know what to do. Truly, I do.
For a while, he let his adoptive mother and father speak to him and touch him as they would. He accepted the uncertainty and anguish of his feelings; he accepted the uncertainty of reality itself. He let all his senses fall free like a handful of feathers tossed into the wind. Choclo was telling him something now, reminding him of the first time they had ever hunted seals together. Something inside called out to Danlo then, and he knew that he should pay close attention to what Choclo was saying. No, that wasn’t quite right; rather he must see in his memory every nuance of snow and cloud of their journey out onto the sea’s ice. Somewhere in his marvellous memory, he knew, shone the one star that would lead him from this place of madness.
That day with Choclo, out beyond the Twin Sister Islands – that was the day in which I first saw Ahira.
As Danlo had waited on the cold sea ice, just before twilight with the wind rising and first stars showing silver over the mountains, he had caught sight of a wild white bird streaking into the sky. It was Ahira, Choclo had told him, the graceful
snowy owl who could fly higher than even the blue thallows of the Ten Thousand Islands. For a long time Danlo had stood frozen to the ice, utterly ravished by the beauty of this bird. It was a moment in his life he could never forget.
Ahira, Ahira.
This glorious image of winged whiteness, along with the faces of his family, blazed in Danlo’s mind. He could see Choclo as he was now, leaking blood from his ears and tormented in death, but he could also see the other Choclo of years past when he had first pointed to Ahira soaring above the sea. He let all his senses fall upon this younger, happier Choclo. He let his eyes drink in the sight of the snowy owl climbing ever higher into the sky. This magic animal drew all his awareness. All other images faded away and vanished from his vision. The whole of his world, and of all worlds, became this single bird and the twilight sky beyond. The whiteness of Ahira was as pure as snow and as lovely as starlight. Only two colours lit his awareness now, this dazzling white and the deep blue of the sky. Ahira flew ever higher pulling Danlo into blueness, into that marvellous blue beyond blue, so cool and perfect that it was like falling slowly into the clearest of ocean waters. There, in this endless sky, where all was silence and light, he could see only one colour. There shimmered only one substance, true and flawless and blue-black like a liquid jewel or cobalt glass melting into the sky’s infinite deeps. And now Danlo himself melted. Higher and higher he flew, and he felt his whole being vibrating at the frequency of blue light and dying into a blue inside blue inside …
Danlo wi Soli Ringess.
He would never be able to measure how much time he spent in this whisperless place. But he knew exactly how long he dwelled there: forever. A little while beyond forever, with the afterglow of perfect blueness still warming his tightly closed eyes, he fell back into time. He fell back into space and felt himself come into a more familiar consciousness. He was aware of himself breathing too slowly, lying back against his cold blankets inside the House of the Dead. His eyes and temples felt free of the weight of the crushing heaume. Someone, he thought, must have removed it. He could not imagine why Cheslav Iviongeon would have allowed him this escape from his mind-killing prison. And then, far off it seemed at first, from twenty feet away, he heard voices. He knew that he should pay close attention to these voices.
‘Danlo wi Soli Ringess,’ someone murmured. ‘The naman pilot is dead. Or as good as dead – his mind is totally gone. Did you see the computer model, where his brainwaves fell flat?’
Slowly, with infinite care, Danlo opened his eyes. Slowly he turned his head. There were other colours now: the black of nall plastic, sweat-stained white kimonos and dead grey light hanging heavy among the stacks of computers. There was scarlet, too. Sometime during his journey into the alam al-mithral, he must have bitten his tongue, for his throat burned and his lips were caked with blood. Neither Cheslav Iviongeon nor the other keepers, it seemed, had bothered to clean his face. He saw them standing across the room with their bald heads bowed, gazing at a display of lights, perhaps a model of his brain that some computer had made.
‘The pilot,’ Cheslav Iviongeon said, holding up the diamond disc inscribed with Danlo’s pallaton, ‘was faced into the alam al-mithral for two hours after the accelerations began. Two hours! He should have fallen mad after the first two minutes.’
One of the other keepers whispered something, then. Danlo, with his keen sense of hearing, gathered that Cheslav Iviongeon had let the murderous program run for a good hour more after Danlo’s mind had melted flat, as an insurance of his madness. Only after it had become impossible that Danlo would ever walk clear-eyed in the world again had Cheslav allowed one of his keepers to remove the heaume.
‘When a naman walks with the dead,’ Cheslav told the other keepers, ‘he should expect to die. It seems that he was not, after all, the bringer of light whom our Holy Ivi hoped for.’
Slowly, with much struggle and pain, Danlo kicked his blankets away. Slowly – but quietly – he sat up. He sat crosslegged, as his found-father had once taught him. Cheslav and the others had their backs to him, so they did not see him. During all the time of his journey into the alam al-mithral, he had held his shakuhachi close against his belly. He was holding it still, gently but firmly, as a snowy owl might clutch a nesting stick in his talons. This blessed flute was warm from his body’s heat and ready to play. After wiping the blood from his mouth, he touched the flute’s ivory mouthpiece to his lips and drew in a deep breath.
‘It’s time we told the Holy Ivi what has happened,’ Cheslav said. ‘She must decide what to do with his body, whether it should be kept alive for others of his Order who might search for him or cremated in the ovens.’
Suddenly, with all the power of his belly, Danlo blew a single, high, shrill note upon his flute. The effect of this otherworldly sound on the keepers was cruel. As if the House of Eternity had been struck with a hydrogen bomb, one of them clasped his hands to his ears and dived to the floor. Another – the Worthy Nikolaos – threw up his hands as if he himself had faced the ghosts of the alam al mithral and screamed in sudden terror. Even Cheslav Iviongeon was unnerved. He whirled about to sense the source of the terrible music rushing through the air. In so doing, when he saw Danlo sitting up fiercely playing his flute, the diamond disc slipped from his sweaty fingers and spun crashing against the base of one of the computers. The hard nall plastic – harder than diamond – caused the disc to shatter. All that remained of Danlo’s pallaton were bits of diamond glittering on the cold, black floor.
‘You – you’re alive!’ Cheslav cried out. ‘That’s impossible!’
‘Yes, I live,’ Danlo said, lowering his flute. ‘I am sorry.’
As quickly as he could, Danlo struggled to his feet. He held his flute straight out in his fist as if to warn Cheslav and the keepers away. He didn’t think that they would try to overpower him and force the dreaded heaume back over his head, but he had cheated death once that day, and once was enough.
‘Pilot, you’re shaking. After such an interface, you’re not yourself, so if you would only stay here with us for—’
‘No.’
Danlo spoke this single word softly, but with all the force of the wind. For a long time he stared at Cheslav as he might a boy who liked to pull the wings off flies. And then he turned his back on him and walked out of the House of the Dead.
When he opened the doors of the building, he found that it was late afternoon. Sunlight streamed down through the dome high above the zero level of Ornice Olorun. He stood for a moment in this golden light and felt all the goodness of life spreading through his body like fire. There was sound, too, a thunderous roar like the ocean in storm. He became aware, then, of many people crying out his name. ‘He lives!’ these voices shouted. ‘The pilot lives!’ Below the nall steps of the House of Eternity, spread out across the street and the nearby lawns, there still waited thousands of people, though not quite so many thousands as earlier that morning. Behind the light fence guarding the steps, Bertram Jaspari stood scowling as if one of his Iviomils had served him vinegar in place of wine. He exchanged a venomous look with Jedrek Iviongeon, who was Cheslav’s second brother. Next to these two princes of the Church waited Malaclypse Redring, calmly, with infinite patience, as if he would have waited a million years for Danlo’s return. He looked up at Danlo standing on the steps, and his violet eyes shone with a strange longing.
‘Indeed, Danlo wi Soli Ringess lives,’ Harrah Ivi en li Ede announced. She still sat behind her reading desk on the portico where Danlo stood. ‘We must ask if he has indeed walked with the dead.’
Now, behind Danlo, from out of the dark building, Cheslav Iviongeon appeared followed by the other keepers. Their once-white kimonos were grey with sweat. They stood near to Danlo – but not too near. Although the Worthy Nikolaos hung his head in shame as if he’d been made to participate in some evil program, Cheslav held his head high and glared at Danlo. He waited for him to speak.
‘Yes,’ Danlo said at last. His voice sounde
d distant and strange. ‘I have walked with the dead.’
‘You must please tell us what this was like,’ Harrah said. Her pleasant old face beamed triumph at Danlo, and she waited to hear what he might say. Bertram Jaspari and Malaclypse Redring and the brothers Iviongeon – and tens of thousands of Architects – all waited to hear what Danlo might say.
It was like walking into a room full of drill worms, he thought. It was like walking into a lake of fire.
For the count of twenty heartbeats, Danlo stood silent not knowing what he could tell these people. And then he chanced to remember the words of an ancient poem. He smiled sadly, and his eyes burned with tears. ‘The dead know only one thing,’ he said. ‘It is better to be alive.’
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