Could it be that Haidar had told him and the other children false stories about the animals, about the birth and life of the World? Could it be that everything he knew was wrong? Perhaps only full men were able to see that the World-soul’s intention was shaida; perhaps this was what Soli meant by blind fate.
‘It is cold,’ Soli said, stamping his feet. ‘It is cold and I am tired.’
He turned to step toward the cave and Danlo followed him. He, too, was tired, so tired that his tendons ached up and down his limbs and he felt sick in his belly, as if he had eaten bad meat. For thirteen years of his life, ever since he could remember, entering the cave from the outside world had always been a moment full of warmth, certitude, and quiet joy. But now nothing would ever be the same again, and even the familiar stones of the entranceway – the circular, holy stones of white granite that his ancestors had set there – were no comfort to him. The cave itself was just as it had been for a million years: a vast lava tube opening into the side of the mountain; it was a natural cathedral of gleaming obsidian, flowing rock pendants hanging from ceiling to floor, and deep silences. Now, in the cave of his ancestors, there was too much silence and too much light. While Danlo had slept in the snow, Soli had gathered faggots of bonewood and placed them at fifty-foot intervals around the cave walls. He had set them afire. The whole of the cave was awash with light, flickering orange and ruby lights falling off the animal paintings on the walls, falling deep into the cave’s dark womb where the cold floor rose up to meet the ceiling. Danlo smelled woodsmoke, pungent and sweet, and the firelight itself was so intense it seemed to have a fragrance all its own. And then he smelled something else layered beneath the smells of wood, fur, and snow. Touching every rock and crack of the cave, all around him and through him, was the stench of death. Though he breathed through his mouth and sometimes held his breath, he could not escape this terrible stench. The bodies of the dead were everywhere. All across the snow-packed floor, his near-brothers and sisters lay together in no particular order or pattern, a heap of bent arms, hair, furs, rotting blood, thick black beards, and dead eyes. They reminded Danlo of a shagshay herd driven off a cliff. Leaving them inside their snowhuts until burial would have been less work, but Soli had decided to move them. The huts, the fifteen domes built of shaped snow blocks in the belly of the cave, had kept the bodies too warm. The smell of rotting flesh was driving the dogs mad and howling with hunger, and so Soli had dragged the bodies one by one to the cave’s centre where they might freeze. Danlo worried that Soli, tired as he was, might have left someone inside one of the snowhuts by mistake. He told Soli of this worry, and Soli quickly counted the bodies; there were eighty-eight of them, the whole of the Devaki tribe. Danlo thought it was wrong to count his kin one by one, to assign abstract numerals to human beings who had so recently breathed air and walked over the brilliant icefields of the world. He knew that each of them had a proper name (except, of course, for the babies and very little children who were known simply as ‘Son of Choclo’ or ‘Mentina’s Second Daughter’), and he knew the names of each of them, and he stood over the dead calling their names. ‘Sanya,’ he said, ‘Yukio, Choclo, Jemmu …’ After a while his voice grew thin and dry, and he began to whisper. Finally, he grew as silent as Soli, who was standing beside him. He couldn’t see the faces of everyone to say their names. Some of the dead lay face down, half buried in the snow. Others – usually they were babies – were covered by the bodies of their mothers. Danlo walked among the dead, looking for the man he called his father. He found Haidar next to Chandra, the woman who had adopted him when he was a newborn only a few moments old. They were lying together, surrounded by Cilehe, Choclo and Old Liluye, and others of their family. Haidar was a short man, though remarkably broad and muscular; he had always been remarkably patient, canny and kind, and Danlo could not understand how such a great man had so inexorably died. In death, with his anima passed from his lips, Haidar seemed smaller and diminished. Danlo knelt beside him, between him and Chandra. Haidar’s hand was stretched out, resting across Chandra’s forehead. Danlo took Haidar’s hand in his own. It was a huge hand, but there was no strength there, no tone or vitality. It was as cold as meat, almost cold enough to begin hardening up like ice. Chandra’s face was cold, too. The hair around her ears was crusted with layers of a pale red fluid. Some of this fluid had dried days before; the freshest, the blood of her death agony scarcely hours old, was now beginning to freeze. Danlo combed the thick hair away from her forehead and looked at her lovely brown eyes, which were open and nearly as hard as stones. There was nothing in her eyes, neither joy nor light nor pain. That was the remarkable thing about death, Danlo thought, how quickly pain fled the body along with its anima. He turned and touched Haidar’s cold forehead, then, and he closed his own eyes against the tears burning there. He wanted to ask Haidar the simplest of questions: why, if death was so peaceful and painless, did all living things prefer life to death?
‘Danlo, it is time to ice the sleds.’ This came from Soli, who was standing above him, speaking gently.
‘No,’ Danlo said, ‘not yet.’
‘Please help me with the sleds – we still have much to do.’
‘No.’ Danlo sat down on the cave floor, and he rested one hand over Haidar’s eyes, the other over Chandra’s. ‘Haidar, alasharia la shantih,’ he said. And then, ‘Chandra, my Mother, go over now in peace.’
‘Quiet now,’ Soli said, and he ruffled Danlo’s hair. ‘There will be time for praying later.’
‘No.’
‘Danlo!’
‘No!’
Soli shrugged his shoulders and stared into the depths of the cave where the firelight reflected off the shiny black walls. His voice sounded low and hollow as he said, ‘The sleds have to be iced. Join me outside when you are done, and we will bury the Devaki.’
That evening, they began burying their tribe. They worked as quickly as they could, stripping the bodies naked and rubbing them with seal grease from toe to forehead. Danlo knew that it would be cold on their spirits’ journey to the other side of day, and the grease would help against the cold. Loading the bodies on the sleds and hauling them up to the burial grounds above the cave was gruesome, exhausting work. Some of his near-sisters had died many days earlier, and their flesh had run dark and soft as rotten bloodfruit. It would have been less horrible to remove the bodies all at once and place them in the snowdrifts where they would freeze hard and fast. But there were bears in the forest and packs of wolves; as it was, they had to gather bunches of dead wood to keep the cave’s entrance fires burning, to keep the wild animals at bay. Of course the sled dogs were familiar with fire, and they had little fear of it. And so Danlo and Soli decided to spend a couple of days hunting shagshay while most of their people awaited burial. They had to flay the great, white, fleecy animals and cut them up for food, or else the starving dogs might have gnawed off their leashes and gone sniffing for carrion in the cave. After that, they returned to work. One by one, they placed the bodies on the icy, treeless burial field. They oriented them with their heads to the north.
They heaped boulders atop each body; they built many stone pyramids to keep the animals away and to remind them that each living thing must return to the earth from which it is born. Their labour took ten days. There were too few boulders close to the cave, so they had to tie the dogs to their traces and drive sleds down through the forest to an icy stream where they found many smooth, rounded rocks. And then back up to the burial ground again with sleds full of rocks, back and forth for many trips. When they were finished at last, they found some anda bushes and picked orange and red fireflowers to place atop the graves. And then they prayed for the dead, prayed until their voices fell hoarse and their tears were frozen sheets over their cheeks; they prayed far into the night until the cold off the sea ice chilled their bones.
‘Mi alasharia,’ Danlo said one last time, and he turned to Soli. ‘It is done, yes?’
They began walking down through the dark graves, down through the snowdrifts and the swaying yu trees.
