hand of life, and suddenly he beheld its long, cold fingers and deep lines with a clarity of vision that astonished him. Seen from one perspective, death was cruel and dreadful like a murderer’s hand held over a baby’s face; but from another, death was as familiar and non-frightening as the whorls of his father’s open palm. He would die, tonight or ten thousand nights hence – he could almost see the moment when the light would flee his eyes and join all the other lights in the sky. Even now, as the Beast tore at him, he was dying, but strangely he had never been so alive. He held himself quiet and still, listening to the wind beating through the trees and over the mountains. He heard a voice whispering that his membrum’s red bulb must be exposed to the cold air, just as the man within must finally shed his childlike skin of wishes and certitude and come to know the world as it really is. That was the way of all life, he heard the voice say. Life was always lived with death close at hand, and it was continually shedding death even as it made itself over to be born anew.
To live, I die, he told himself.
And inside him, despite the pain, at the centre of his deepest self was just sheer joy at being alive. In some sense, he would always be alive, no matter the killing coldness of the wind or fatal illnesses or any of a thousand other fates that he might suffer.
‘Danlo!’ the Beast howled out. ‘Your blood is red and flows like a man’s!’
Danlo listened to his deep breathing as other cuts were carved into his flesh, tiny cuts up and down the length of his membrum. He realized that it was Soli making these cuts and rubbing various coloured powders into them. The cuts would fester and then heal, and soon his membrum would be like that of any other Alaloi man: long and thick, and decorated with dozens of green and ochre scars.
‘Danlo, are you ready now?’
He felt something soft being wrapped around his membrum; it felt like feather moss held in place with a newl skin.
‘Danlo, you must gather your strength for the journey,’ a voice called out of the darkness. Then the Beast stood above him, gripping a gobbet of flesh between its bloody claws. ‘This piece of meat will sustain you. Open your mouth and swallow it without chewing.’
Danlo did as he was told. Like a baby bird, he opened his mouth and waited. Suddenly, he felt the raw bit of meat pressed into his mouth, back against his tongue. He swallowed once, convulsively, and he tasted fresh warm blood.
‘Danlo, this is the skin of your childhood. It will impregnate you like a seed. From the child grows the man. Are you ready to be a man, now?’
Again Danlo swallowed against the hot salty slickness of his own blood.
‘Danlo, wi Ieldra sena! Ti ur-alashareth. The ancestors are coming! It is time for you to go over now.’
His eyes were now calm and clear, and he looked up at the stars to see a million points of light streaming toward him.
‘Danlo, you may turn your head.’
Danlo blinked his eyes slowly. He turned and there was Soli standing over him. He was dressed as usual, in his winter furs; the terrible Beast was gone. ‘You have done well,’ he said.
He helped Danlo sit up and wrapped him in a fresh shagshay skin. There was blood everywhere, dark red soaking into the white furs. Danlo looked through the flickering red fires up at the circle of skulls. He must find the one animal who was his doffel. Soli would help him if his vision faltered, but it would be better if he came to his other-self unaided and alone.
‘Danlo, can you see?’
‘Yes.’
He was six thousand feet above men and time. He turned his head in a half-circle, and he could see many things. Below him were the dark forest and the starlit hills of his childhood, and farther out where the island’s ragged shore came up against the ocean, he beheld the faint, silvery shimmer of sea ice falling off to infinity. There were nearer sights. Soli’s face was drawn out ghastly and pale; he looked at once fey and ill, as if he were ready to die. Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo thought. His body still burned with pain, but his spirit had begun the journey through pain into a deeper world. He was beginning to see himself as he really was. Every act of his passage had been designed to bring him to this moment. His childish picture of himself, his old ways of thinking – shattered, like ice crystals beneath a hammer stone. There was a sudden clarity, an intensity of colour, shape, and meaning. Far above him, in the sky, the stars burned with a pale blue fire, and nearer, spread over his thighs and belly, was his deep red blood. Again, he looked up at the circle of skulls, at the bits of ivory gleaming in the blackness. Each skull was his skull; life was connected to life in ways he was just beginning to see. One skull, though, seemed to shimmer under the watchful eyes of the Old Ones. One skull called out to him. It was the skull of Ahira, the snowy owl. Ahira, the wisest and wildest of the animals. No other animal was so alive and free. And no other animal was so perilous to one’s spirit. In truth, he dreaded discovering that Ahira was his doffel, his other-self, for only once in ten generations was one born whose other-self is Ahira. He stared on and on waiting for this splendid bird to stop calling him, but at last he was sure that Ahira was his doffel. Ahira must guide him and help him go over to the trackless, unknown world where his deepest self lived.
Soli saw Danlo gazing at Ahira’s small, round skull. That the Devaki fathers had acquired a skull at all was something of a miracle, for Ahira was the rarest of all birds and hunters did not often catch sight of him.
‘This bird?’ Soli said. ‘Are you sure, Danlo?’
‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Ahira, the snowy owl.’
‘Full men know this bird as the white thallow. You should call him that, too.’
Everyone knew, of course, that owls were thallows, just as they knew that God was a great thallow whose body made up the universe. But among the Alaloi elders, from tribe to tribe, there was a dispute as to whether God was a silver thallow, or the blue thallow, or the rare white thallow whom children referred to as the snowy owl.
‘Ahira is my doffel,’ Danlo said.
‘Very well,’ Soli said. Then he magically produced a musty leather bag stuffed with various objects. He rummaged around in the bag and removed a single, white feather. He gave it to Danlo, placing it between his folded hands. ‘This is the wing feather of the white thallow,’ he said. ‘The white thallow is your doffel.’
Danlo looked down at the feather. Its whiteness was as pure as snow. Along its edge it was rough and fuzzy, the better to muffle the sound of Ahira’s beating wings. Ahira was a magnificent hunter, and he could swoop down toward his prey in almost total silence. With a little bone clip that Soli gave him, Danlo fastened the feather to his long hair. Soli began to chant, then, and a world whose snowfields were pure and vast opened before him. Danlo entered into the dreamtime, into the altjiranga mitjina of his people. The shock of pain and terror (and his newfound ability to overcome his attachment to terror) had hurled him into this world. He listened to Soli chant, listened as the Old Ones began to speak to him. New knowledge was revealed to him, secrets that only a man may know. Soli chanted the lines of the Song of Life. The Song was a new way of structuring reality, a system of symbol and meaning connecting all things of the world to the great circle of halla. There are four thousand and ninety-six lines to this song; Soli chanted quickly, his deep voice rasping out the music. He told of how the lesser god, Kweitkel, had created the world from single pieces of rock and ice. He told of Kweitkel’s wedding with Devaki, and of their children, Yelena, Reina and Manwe. Danlo learned that on the third morning of the world, wise Ahira
