colour. ‘Yes, silence!’ his voice boomed out, echoing the novice’s injunction. He was a huge man, and he had a huge voice. He sternly looked from petitioner to petitioner. He had cunning, superb eyes that didn’t miss very much when it came to judging human character. Occasionally he would favour one of the petitioners with a smile and a slight head bow. He strolled about with a ponderous, heavy gait, as if he were hugely bored with himself and the impromptu judgements he had to make.
‘Silence!’ he shouted, and his voice vibrated from building to building across the Square. ‘You’ll be silent while I explain the rules of this year’s test. The rules are simple. No one will be allowed off his mat except to relieve himself. Ah … or herself. There will be no eating or drinking. Anyone caught talking will be immediately dismissed. Anything not forbidden is permitted. It’s a simple test, by God! You’re here to wait.’
And so they waited. Seven thousand children, not one of whom was older than fifteen years, waited in the warmth of the false winter sun. Mostly they waited in silence. Hanuman, of course, couldn’t help coughing, but none of the officious novices patrolling up and down the rows of petitioners seemed to bear him any ill feelings. Danlo listened to this coughing, and he worried how Hanuman would stand the bite of the evening air. He thought to distract Hanuman’s ailing spirit with a little music, to take him out of himself. He removed the shakuhachi from beneath his robe and began to play. The low, breathy melody he composed caught the attention of everyone around him. Most of the petitioners seemed to enjoy the music; the novices, though, were not pleased. They shot Danlo poisonous looks, as if they were insulted that he had found a clever way around Bardo’s injunction to silence. To be sure, he was not talking, but in many ways the music he made was a purer communication than mere words.
In this manner, kneeling on his straw mat, blowing continuously down his long bamboo flute, Danlo whiled away the endless afternoon. It was a beautiful day, really, a day of warmth and pungent air wafting down from the mountains. The shih trees beneath the buildings were snowy with white blossoms, and clouds of newly hatched fritillaries sipped nectar and filled the air with an explosion of bright violet wings. It wasn’t hard for him to wait, with the sun burning hot against the clear sky. A million needles of light stung his neck and face. He closed his eyes and played on and on, taking little notice of the sun as it grew large and crimson in the west. When twilight fell, the first chill of evening stole over the petitioners, but he was still warm and fluid inside with the music of dreamtime. Then the stars came out, and it was cold. The cold touched him, gently at first, and then more urgently. He opened his eyes to darkness and cold air. There, above the City’s eastern edge, the sky was almost clear of light pollution; the sky was black and full of stars. In unseen waves, heat escaped the City and radiated upward into the sky. There were no clouds or moisture in the air to hold in the heat.
‘It’s cold! I can’t stand this cold!’
Danlo noticed the boy named Konrad sitting ten yards in front of him, sitting and cursing as he beat his legs to keep warm. A cadre of novices converged on him and grasped his robe. ‘Your face!’ Konrad shouted. ‘Your rotting face!’ But the novices took no notice of his bad manners or profanity; they immediately escorted him from the Square.
If Konrad was the first to forget his patience and hope, he was not the last. As if a signal had been given, children in ones and twos began standing and leaving the Square. And then groups of ten or a hundred gave up en masse, abandoning their fellows, and so abandoned their quest to enter the Order. By the time night had grown full and deep, only some three thousand petitioners remained.
Just before midnight, a wicked round of coughing alerted Danlo as to the gravity of Hanuman’s illness. It wasn’t very cold – at least it was no colder than the interior of a snow hut – but Hanuman was shivering as he coughed, bent low with his face pressing his mat, shivering beyond control. If he didn’t give up and seek shelter soon he would surely die. But Hanuman didn’t look as if he were ready to give up. The hard straw had cut parallel marks into his forehead and cheek; his eyes were open to the light of the flame globes shining at the edge of the Square. Such eyes he had, a pale blue burning as the hellish blinkans in the sky burned, strangely and with terrible intensity. Something terrible and beautiful inside Hanuman was holding him to his mat, keeping him coughing in the cold. Danlo could almost see this thing, this pure, luminous will of Hanuman’s beyond even the will to life. Each man and woman is a star, he remembered, and something brilliant and beautiful about Hanuman’s spirit attracted him, just as a fritillary is compelled to seek a woodfire’s fatal light.
‘Hanuman!’ he whispered. He couldn’t help himself. The urge to speak to this wilful boy before he died was greater than his fear of being dismissed as a petitioner. He had a strange, overwhelming feeling that if he could somehow see the true Hanuman, he would learn everything about shaida and halla. Waiting until none of the novices was near, he whispered again, ‘Hanuman, it is best not to touch your head to the ice. The ice, even through the mat – it is very cold. Colder than the air, yes?’
Through his chattering teeth, Hanuman forced out, ‘I’ve … never … been so cold.’
Danlo looked around him. Most of the nearby mats were empty, and those few petitioners who were within listening distance were curled up like dogs and seemed to be asleep. He pitched his voice low and said, ‘I have seen too many people go over. And you, you will go over soon, I think, unless you –’
‘No, I won’t quit!’
‘But your life,’ Danlo whispered, ‘to keep it warm and quick, your life is –’
‘My life’s worth nothing unless I can live it as I must!’
‘But you do not know how to live … in the cold.’
‘I’ll have to learn, then, won’t I?’
Danlo smiled into the darkness. He squeezed the cold bamboo shaft of the shakuhachi and said, ‘Can you wait a little longer? It will be morning soon. False winter nights are short.’
‘Why are you talking to me?’ Hanuman suddenly wanted to know. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being caught?’
‘Yes,’ Danlo said in a soft voice. ‘I know we should not be talking.’
‘You’re different from the others.’ Hanuman swept his arm in an arc, waving at the motionless petitioners slumped down on their mats. ‘Look at them, asleep on the most important night of their lives. None of them would take such a chance – you’re not like them at all.’
Danlo touched Ahira’s feather and thought back to the night of his passage into manhood. ‘It is hard to be different, yes?’
‘It’s hard to have a sense of yourself. Most people don’t know who they are.’
‘It is as if they were lost in a sarsara,’ Danlo agreed. ‘But it is hard to see yourself, the truth. Who am I, after all? Who is anyone?’
Hanuman coughed wickedly, then laughed. ‘If you can ask that question, you already know.’
‘But I do not really know anything.’
‘And that’s the deepest knowledge of all.’
They looked at each other knowingly and broke into soft laughter. Immediately, though, their laughter died when a novice clacked across the Square ten rows behind them. As they waited for him to pass, Hanuman blew on his hands and began shivering again.
When it seemed safe, Danlo asked, ‘You would risk your life to enter the Academy?’
‘My
