eyes to see Soli staring at him. He drew his furs up around his naked shoulders. ‘What did my father look like?’ he asked. ‘Did you know my father? My mother? The mother of my blood?’
Soli sipped the last of his tea and bent to pour himself another cup. ‘Your father looked like you,’ he said. Then his face fell silent as if he were listening to something, some animal cry or sound far away. ‘Your father, with his long nose, and the hair – he never combed his hair. Yes, the wildness, too. But you have your mother’s eyes. She could see things clearly, your mother.’
‘You must have known them very well, if they lived with the tribe. Haidar must have known them, too.’
Danlo closed his eyes again and tried to shut out the wind whispering just beyond the snow blocks above his head. Inside him, there were other sounds, other whispers. He remembered the way Choclo and some of the other men would sometimes look at him strangely, the way their voices would drop into whispers whenever he surprised them in some dark corner of the cave. He had always imagined that everyone was talking about him when he wasn’t there to listen. There were darker memories, too: He had once overheard Chandra and Ayame talking about a satinka, a witch who had worked her evil and brought shaida to her people. He had thought the story was of the dreamtime, the time of the ancestors, the eternal, in-destructible time that was at once the history and the communal dreaming state of his people. He must have been wrong, he thought. Perhaps there had been a real satinka in the tribe. Perhaps this satinka had bewitched his blood mother and father.
‘Yes, Haidar knew your blood parents,’ Soli admitted.
‘Then what were their names? Why didn’t he tell me?’
‘He would have told you when you became a man, during your passage. There is more to the story, things a boy should not have to think about.’
‘I am almost a man,’ Danlo said. The set of his face was at once open and pained, innocent and hard. ‘Now that Haidar is dead, you must tell me.’
‘No, you are not a man yet.’
With his long fingernails, Danlo scraped frost off the ruff of his sleeping furs. He tried to make out his reflection in the glazed hut walls above him, but all he could see was his shadow, the outline of his face and wild hair darkening the milky white snow. ‘I am almost a man, yes?’
‘Next deep winter, after your passage, then you will be a man.’ Soli yawned and then said, ‘Now it is time to sleep. We must hunt tomorrow, or we will starve and join the rest of the tribe on the other side.’
Danlo thought hard for a while. He had a naturally keen mind made all the keener by the mind tools Soli had given him in secret. Ever since he could remember, Soli had taken him alone into the forest to draw figures in the hard-packed snow. He had taught him geometry; he had taught him about things called spheres and strange attractors and the infinities. Proof structures and topology, and above all the beautiful, crystalline logic which ordered the universe of number. Logic – even though Danlo found it a strange and wild way of thinking, he loved to argue logically with Soli.
He held his hand up to his mouth to cover a smile, then said, ‘The journey across the eastern ice to the Unreal City will be long and hard, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Soli said. ‘Very hard.’
‘Even a man might not complete such a journey – Totunye, the bear, may hunt him, or the Serpent’s Breath might strike him and kill him with cold, or –’
‘Yes, the journey will be dangerous,’ Soli broke in.
‘What if I were left alone to find the City?’ Danlo asked softly. ‘Or if the slow evil found you at last out on the ice? What if the shadow-men in the Unreal City do not know halla? Maybe the shadow-men would kill you for your meat. If you died before my passage, sir, how would I ever become a man?’
For Danlo, as for every Alaloi boy, the initiation into manhood is the third most important of life’s transformations and mysteries, the other two being birth and death.
Soli rubbed his temples and sighed. He was very tired but he must have clearly seen the logic of Danlo’s argument, that he would have to make his passage a year before his time. He smiled at him and said, ‘Do you think you are ready, Danlo? You are so young.’
‘I am almost fourteen.’
‘So young,’ Soli repeated. ‘Even fifteen years is sometimes too young. The cutting is very painful, and there have been many boys older than you who were not ready for the pain of the knife. And then, after the cutting …’ He let his voice die off and looked at Danlo.
‘And then there is the secret knowledge, yes? The Song of the Ancestors?’
‘No, after the pain, there is terror. Sheer terror.’
He knew that Soli was trying to frighten him, so he smiled to hide his fear. The air inside the hut was steamy from the boiling tea and from their rhythmic exhalations; it was selura, wet cold – not as absolutely cold as white cold, but cold enough to lap at his skin like a thirsty seal and make him shiver slightly. He pulled himself down into his furs, trying to keep warm. All his life, from the older boys and young men, he had heard rumours about the passage into manhood. It was like dying, Choclo had once said, dying transcendently, ur-alashara; it was like going over, not to the other side of day, but going over oneself to find a new, mysterious world within. He thought about what it would be like to go over, and he tried to sleep, but he was too full of death and life, too full of himself. All at once, his whole body was shivering beyond his control. He had an overwhelming sense that his life, every day and night, would be supremely dangerous, as if he were walking a snowbridge over a crevasse. He felt wild and fey in anticipation of making this eternal crossing. And then, deep inside, a new knowledge sudden and profound: he loved the dark, wild part of himself as he loved life. Ti-miura halla, follow your love, follow your fate – wasn’t this the teaching of a hundred generations of his people? If he died during his passage, died to himself or died the real death of blood and pain, he would die in search of life, and he thought this must be the most halla thing a man could do.
The shivering stopped, and he found himself smiling naturally. ‘Isn’t terror just the left hand of fate?’ he asked. ‘Will you take me through my passage tomorrow, sir?’
‘No, tomorrow we shall hunt shagshay. We shall hunt, then eat and sleep to regain our strength.’
‘And then?’
Soli rubbed his nose and looked at him. ‘And then, if you are strong enough and keep your courage, you will become a man.’
Four days later, at dusk, they strapped on their skis and made the short journey to Winter Pock, a nearby hill where the Devaki men held their secret ceremonies. Danlo was not allowed to speak, so he skied behind Soli in silence. As he planted his poles and pushed and glided through the snow, he listened to the sounds of the forest: the loons warbling with bellies full of yu berries; the clicking of the sleekits halfway out of their burrows, warning each other that danger was near; the wind keening across the hills, up through the great yu trees heavy with snow. It was strange the way he could hear the wind far off before he could feel it stinging his face. He listened for Haidar’s rough voice in the wind, and the voices of his other ancestors, too. But the wind was just the wind; it was only the cold, clean breath of the world. He hadn’t yet entered into the dreamtime, where his mother’s dying plaints and the moaning of the wind would be as one. He smelled sea ice and pine needles in the wind; as the light failed and the greens
