while they did their work. Never again would they sleep in the cave. ‘What will we do now?’ Danlo asked.
‘Tomorrow, we will hunt again,’ Soli said. ‘We will hunt and eat and continue to pray.’
Danlo was quiet while he stared at the cold snowhut that would provide shelter for a night, or perhaps many nights. And then he said, ‘But, sir, what will we do?’
They crawled through the tunnel of the hut. The tunnel was dark and icy, and barely wide enough to allow Soli passage. The main chamber was larger, though not so large that either of them could stand up without breaking through the top of the little snow dome. In the half-darkness, Danlo moved carefully lest he knock against the snow blocks that formed the hut’s walls. He spread his sleeping furs atop his bed of hard-packed snow. Soli added chunks of seal blubber to the oilstone, a bowl of scooped stone which was always kept burning, however faintly. The blubber melted and caught fire, and Danlo gazed at the small pearly flame floating on a pool of dark oil. Soon the curved white walls of the hut glowed with a warm, yellow light.
‘Yes, what to do now,’ Soli said. The oilstone grew hotter, and he began boiling water in a small clay pot. It was his habit to drink some blood-tea before sleeping.
Danlo thought he was a strange man, at heart a wild man like himself, or rather, like he would be if he ever became a man. He felt an affinity to this wildness. Hadn’t Soli’s great-great-grandfather left the tribe a few generations ago to journey across the southern ice? Hadn’t Soli and his now-dead family returned from the fabled Blessed Isles with fantastic stories of air so warm that the snow fell from the sky as water? It was told that Soli had once journeyed across the eastern ice to the Unreal City where the shadow-men lived in mountainous stone huts. Danlo wondered if these stories were true, just as he wondered at the secret, wild knowledge of numbers and circles that Soli had taught him. He thought Soli was a mysterious, wild man, and then a startling idea came to him: perhaps this is why the slow evil had avoided him, too.
Danlo scooped some frozen seal blood out of a skin and dumped the blackish, crystalline mass into Soli’s pot. He said, ‘We will have to journey west to Sawelsalia or Rilril, won’t we? We have many far-cousins among the Patwin, I have heard it said. Or perhaps the Olorun – which of the tribes do you think will welcome us, sir?’
He felt uncomfortable talking so much because it was unseemly for a boy to talk so freely in front of a man. But he was uncertain and afraid for the future, and in truth, he had always liked to talk. Especially with Soli: if he didn’t initiate conversation, Soli was likely to remain as silent as a stone.
After a long time, Soli said, ‘To journey west – that may not be wise.’ He took a long drink of blood-tea. Danlo watched him hold his cup up to his mouth; it seemed that his eyes were hooded in steam off the tea, and in secretiveness.
‘What else can we do?’
‘We can remain here on Kweitkel. This is our home.’
Danlo held his hand to his eyes and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat; it felt like a piece of meat was stuck there. ‘No, sir, how can we remain here? There are no women left to make our clothes; there are no more girls to grow into wives. There is nothing left of life, so how can we remain?’
While Soli sipped his tea silently, Danlo continued, ‘It is wrong to let life end, yes? To grow old and never have children? To let it all die – isn’t that shaida, too?’
‘Yes, life, shaida,’ Soli said finally. ‘Shaida.’
Something in the way Soli stared into his tea made Danlo feel a sharp pain inside, over his liver. He worried that Soli secretly blamed him for bringing shaida to their tribe. Was such a thing possible, he wondered? Could he, with his strange young face and his wildness, bring the slow evil to the Patwin tribe as well? He felt shame at these thoughts, then, felt it deep in his chest and burning up behind his eyes. He tried to speak, but for once, his voice had left him.
Soli stirred his lukewarm tea with his forefinger. The two fingers next to it were cut off; the scars over the knuckle stumps were white and shiny. ‘To the east,’ he said at last, ‘is the Unreal City. Some call it the City of Light, or … Neverness. We could go there.’
Danlo had slumped down into his furs; he was as tired as a boy could be and still remain among the living. But when he heard Soli speak of the mythical Unreal City, he was suddenly awake. He was suddenly aware of his heart beating away as it did when he was about to spear a charging shagshay bull. He sat up and said, ‘The Unreal City! Have you really been there? Is it true that shadow-men live there? Men who were never born and never die?’
‘All men die,’ Soli said softly. ‘But in the Unreal City, some men live almost forever.’
In truth, Soli knew all about the Unreal City because he had spent a good part of his life there. And he knew everything about Danlo. He knew that Danlo’s blood parents were really Katharine the Scryer and Mallory Ringess, who had also lived in the City. He knew these things because he was Danlo’s true grandfather. But he chose not to tell Danlo the details of his heritage. Instead, he sipped his tea and cleared his throat. And then he said, ‘There is something you must know. Haidar would have told you next year when you became a man, but Haidar has gone over, and now there is no one left to tell you except me.’
Outside the hut, the wind was blowing full keen, and Danlo listened to the wind. Haidar had taught him patience; he could be patient when he had to be, even when the wind was blowing wild and desperately, even when it was hard to be patient. Danlo watched Soli sipping his tea, and he was sure that something desperately important was about to be revealed.
‘Haidar and Chandra,’ Soli forced out, ‘were not your blood parents. Your blood parents came from the Unreal City. Came to the tribe fifteen years ago. Your mother died during your birth, and Haidar and Chandra adopted you. That is why you are different from your brothers and sisters. Most men of the City look as you do, Danlo.’
Danlo’s throat ached so badly he could barely speak. He rubbed his eyes and said simply, ‘My blood parents … There are others who look like me, yes?’
‘Yes, in the Unreal City. It is not shaida to have a face such as yours; you did not bring this shaida to our people.’
Soli’s explanation cooled Danlo’s shame of being left alive. But it brought to mind a hundred other questions. ‘Why did my blood parents come to Kweitkel? Why? Why wasn’t I born Devaki as all Devaki are born? Why, sir?’
‘You don’t remember?’
Danlo shut his burning eyes against the oilstone’s light. He remembered something. He had an excellent memory, in some ways a truly remarkable memory. He had inherited his mother’s ‘memory of pictures’: when he closed his eyes, he could conjure up in exact colour and contour almost every event of his life. Once, two winters ago, against Haidar’s warnings, he had rashly gone out to hunt silk belly by himself. A silk belly boar had found him in a copse of young shatterwood trees; the boar had charged and laid open his thigh with his tusk before Danlo could get his spear up. He was lucky to be alive, but it wasn’t his luck that he most remembered. No, what he saw whenever he thought about that day was Chandra’s fine needlework as she sewed shut his wound. He could see the bone needle pulling through the bloody, stretched-out skin, the precision stitching, each loop of the distinctive knot Chandra used to tie off his wound. Inside him was a whole universe of such knots of memories, but for some reason, he had almost no memory of the first four years of his life. Somewhere deep inside there was a faint image of a man, a man with piercing blue eyes and a sad look on his face.
