for a while, then Danlo asked, ‘Did you journey here to become a pilot? It is my fate to be a pilot, I think.’
‘Your fate?’
‘I have dreamed of being …’ Danlo began, and then fell silent. ‘I … I have always wanted to be a pilot.’
‘I also,’ Hanuman said. ‘To be a pilot, to interface with the ship’s computer, this continual vastening the pilots are allowed – that’s the beginning of everything.’
‘I had not thought of it that way.’ Danlo looked up at the Wolf and Thallow constellations and the other stars, and said, simply, ‘I will become a pilot so I can journey to the centre of the Great Circle, to see if the universe is halla or shaida.’
He closed his eyes and pressed his cold thumbs against his eyelids. To see the universe as it really is and say ‘yes’ to that truth, as man and as asarya – how could he explain his dream to anyone? In truth, the Alaloi are forbidden to reveal their nighttime dreams or visions, so how could he tell Hanuman that he had dreamed of becoming an asarya?
‘What is this word “halla” that you keep using?’ Hanuman asked.
Danlo listened to the wind rise and whoosh between the buildings. It fell over him, and he began to shiver. Despite his discomfort, he loved the chill of the wind against his face, the way it carried in the sea smells and a feeling of freedom. How exhilarating it was to talk long past midnight with such an aware, new friend! How reckless to talk beneath the novice’s ears with only the wind for cover! Suddenly, the utter strangeness of kneeling on a scratchy mat and waiting with three thousand other freezing boys and girls was too much. He found himself telling Hanuman about the death of his parents and his journey to Neverness. He tried to tell him about the harmony and beauty of life, then, but he found that the simple Alaloi concepts he had been taught sounded trite and naive when translated into civilized language. ‘Halla is the cry of the wolf when he calls to his brothers and sisters,’ he said. ‘And it is halla that the stars should shine at night when the sun falls beneath the mountains. Halla is the way … the way false winter takes away the cold, and the way false winter dies into the colder seasons so the animals do not become too many and crowd the ice. Halla is … oh, blessed halla! It is so fragile when you try to define it, like crossing morilka, the death ice. The greater weight you give it, the more likely it is to break. Halla is. Sometimes, lately, I think of it as pure isness. A way of simply being.’
Hanuman pressed his lips together as he turned his face away from the wind and tried not to cough. ‘I’ve never known anyone like you before,’ he marvelled. ‘To cross a thousand miles of ice looking for something you call halla – and to do it alone!’
‘Old Father warned me that if I told anyone, they might not believe me. You will not … tell anyone else?’
‘Of course I won’t. But you should know, I believe you.’
‘Yes?’
Hanuman stared at the feather in Danlo’s hair, then coughed and said, ‘Danlo the Wild – you look a little wild. And the way you see things, so wild. I’ll have to think about what you’ve said. Especially about being. Can it be enough just to be? I’ve always dreamed of becoming.’
‘Becoming … what?’
‘Becoming more,’ Hanuman said.
While Hanuman bent low with another coughing fit, Danlo touched the shakuhachi’s ivory mouthpiece with his lips. ‘But Hanu,’ he said, impulsively inventing a diminutive form of his name. He reached over and touched the boy’s forehead. It was burning hot. ‘Hanu, Hanu, you are not becoming. You are dying.’
‘No, that’s silly,’ Hanuman said hoarsely. ‘Please don’t say that.’
After that, he lost his voice and began coughing in great breaking waves. Danlo wondered why the novices or Bardo the Just, who strolled among the petitioners from time to time, didn’t take this unfortunate, dying boy inside somewhere to heal him. He decided that entering the Order must be a kind of passage. And like all passages into new levels of being, there must always be danger and the possibility of death.
‘Will you play your flute now?’ Hanuman whispered. ‘I can’t talk anymore.’
Danlo wet his lips and smiled. ‘It is soothing, yes?’
‘Soothing? No, it’s haunting, really. Haunting. There’s something about the way you play, the music. Something I can’t bear to hear. But something I have to hear. Do you understand?’
Danlo played his music, then, even though his mouth was so dry that the playing was difficult. He licked his lips for the hundredth time. He was very thirsty. Since the morning coffee, he had drunk nothing, and his tongue was dry against his teeth, as dry as old seal leather. Of course he was hungry, too, with his belly tightening up empty and aching, but the hunger wasn’t as bad as his need for water. And, in truth, he was colder than he was thirsty. Soon, perhaps, the thirst would grow angry and all-consuming, but now, as he played, the cold was more immediate, like a stiff, frozen fur touching every part of him. The wind blew down his neck, and the mat was icy against his legs. It was hard to move his fingers, especially the two smallest ones on his right hand: as a child, he had burned them in the oilstones, and they were stiff with scar over the knuckles and now almost numb. Somewhat clumsily, he played his music while Hanuman watched and listened. And on Hanuman’s delicate face, in his eyes, there was a look of anguish, whether from the music or cold it was hard to tell. Danlo played to the anguish, all the time thinking of Old Father and the ‘holy pain’ that he delighted in causing others. Danlo took no joy in others’ suffering, but he could appreciate the need for pain as a stimulant. Pain is the awareness of life – that was a saying of the Alaloi tribes. Life was pain, and in Hanuman’s pain, there was still an urge to life. This miracle of living, though, was such a delicate thing liable to end at any moment. He could see that Hanuman was dying – how much longer could his will and inner fury keep him alive? Death is the left hand of life, he thought, and death is halla, but suddenly he did not want Hanuman to die.
He set down the shakuhachi and whispered, ‘Hanu, Hanu, keep your hands inside your robe. Do not blow on them. Fingers claw the cold from the air – do you understand?’
Hanuman nodded and thrust his hands into either of his loose sleeves. He said nothing as he began to cough and shiver even more violently.
‘Hanu, Hanu, you were not made for the cold, were you?’
Danlo rolled the thin wool of his robe between his fingers and smiled grimly. The wind rose up and drove particles of ice across the Square. It seemed that everyone was shivering, even the tired novices in their white jackets. For a long time, as the wind continued to blow, he looked at Hanuman. Hanuman had spoken sophisticated words, and he had courage, but in truth he was still just a boy, uncut and unseasoned against the world’s bitterness. He was frail and sick, and he would go over soon. Danlo watched and waited for him to go over. He waited, all the while wondering what dread, mysterious affinity connected his life with Hanuman’s. He studied Hanuman’s fevered face, and, somewhat worried at the turn of his thoughts, he decided that he and Hanuman must share the same doffel. Surely Hanuman’s spirit animal must be the snowy owl or perhaps one of the other kinds of thallow. Then, in the deepest, coldest part of night with the wind dying and the world fallen silent, just before dawn, Danlo heard Ahira calling him. ‘Danlo, Danlo,’ his other-self said, ‘Hanuman is your brother spirit and you must not let him die.’ Rashly, almost without thought, Danlo shrugged off his robe. There was a smile
