joined them in the dreamtime. The dreamtime was now, the shall-be and always-was. The dreamtime occurred in the Now-moment, the true time in which the world was forever created anew.
‘Ali wos Ayeye,’ Soli chanted. ‘God is a great, silver thallow whose wings touch at the far ends of the universe.’
Danlo listened to the Song of Life’s sixty-fourth line. Now, and over the next three days, he must learn every line exactly as Soli chanted it because someday he would repeat the Song to a son or near-son of his own. Pain was the most potent of mnemonics; pain had awakened him to record the rise and fall and each liquid vowel; pain, and the intensity of pain, had prepared his mind and spirit to remember perfectly.
‘All animals remember …’ Soli sang out, and his voice began to tremble and crack. ‘All animals remember the first morning of the world.’ He stopped suddenly, rubbing the back of his neck. His face had fallen as grey as old seal grease. He licked his lips and continued with difficulty. After a while, he came to the first of the Twelve Riddles, chanting: ‘How do you capture a beautiful bird without killing its spirit?’
Danlo waited for Soli to supply the answer in the second line of the couplet, but Soli could not speak. He groaned and clutched at his stomach and looked at Danlo.
‘Sir, what is wrong?’ Danlo asked. He didn’t want to speak because he sensed that the uttering of words would remove him from the dreamtime. But Soli suddenly heaved over gasping for breath, and he had to find out what was wrong. Now that he knew the way, he could make the journey into the dreamtime whenever he must. ‘Sir, here, let me loosen your hood’s drawstring – it is too tight.’
It was obvious that Soli was gravely ill. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his nose was bleeding. His eyes were the eyes of a whale caught unexpectedly in the freezing ice of the sea. Danlo stood up, and the rush of blood into his cut membrum was agony. He helped Soli lie down on the bloody platform where he had so recently surrendered up his childhood flesh. The Alaloi are not an ironic people, but he appreciated the deep irony of their reversed positions.
‘Sir, are you all right?’
‘No,’ Soli gasped, ‘never … again.’ He regained his wind, and spoke slowly. ‘Listen, Danlo, you must know. At a boy’s passage, one of the men must be the Beast. The Beast … the mask.’
With difficulty he bent over and stuck his hand into the leather bag. He removed a mask made of glued-together bones, fur, teeth and feathers. He rattled the mask in front of Danlo.
‘But it is sometimes hard to become the Beast,’ Soli said. ‘If the boy moves or cries out … then he must be slain. It is hard to become the Beast by wearing the mask alone. Help is needed. For some men, help. On the afternoon before the boy’s passage, the liver of the jewfish must be eaten. The liver gives terrible vision, terrible power. But it is dangerous, to eat it. Sometimes the power is too great. It consumes.’
Danlo took Soli’s hand; even though he himself was cold and half-naked, with only a shagshay skin draped loosely across his shoulders, Soli’s hand felt colder still. ‘What can I do? Is there no cure? Should I make some blood-tea to give you strength?’
‘No, that would not help.’
‘Does it hurt? Oh, sir, what can I do?’
‘I … believe,’ Soli said, ‘I believe that Haidar knew of a cure, but he has gone over, hasn’t he? All the men – the women, too.’
Danlo blinked away the pain in his eyes, and he found that he could see things very clearly. And on Soli’s face, in his tired, anguished eyes, there was only death. Soli would go over soon, he knew, there could be no help for that. It was shaida for a man to die too soon, but Soli’s death would not be shaida because it was clear that he was dying at the right time.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘ti-alasharia, you too, why, why?’
‘Yes,’ Soli said. And then he stretched out his hand and pointed upwards. ‘The stars, you must be told about the stars.’
Danlo looked up through the bitterly cold air at the heavens. He pulled the shagshay fur tightly around himself, let out a long steamy breath, and said, ‘The stars are eyes of the Old Ones. Even a child knows that.’
‘No, the stars are … something other.’
‘Does the Song of Life tell of the stars?’
Soli coughed deeply a few times; it seemed that he might begin gasping again. ‘Yes, the Song of Life, but that is only one song, the song of our people. There are other songs. The stars shine with eyelight, yes, but that is just a metaphor. A symbol, like the symbols for numbers we used to draw in the snow. There is an otherness about the stars that I … I must tell you.’
‘Please, sir.’
‘This will be hard to explain.’
‘Please.’
Soli sighed, then said, ‘Each star is like Sawel, the sun. A burning, a fusion of hydrogen into light. Five hundred billion fusion fires in this galaxy alone. And the galaxies … so many. Who could have dreamed the universe would make so many?’
Danlo pressed his knuckles against his forehead. He felt sick inside, dizzy and disoriented. Once, when he was eight years old, he and Haidar had been caught out on the sea in a morateth. The sky had closed in, white and low over the endless whiteness of the ice. After ten days, he hadn’t been able to distinguish right from left, up from down. Now he felt lost again, as if a morateth of the spirit were crushing him under.
‘I do not understand.’
‘The stars are like fires burning across space. Across the black, frozen sea. Men can cross from star to star in boats called lightships. Such men – and women – are called pilots. Your father was a pilot, Danlo.’
‘My father? My blood father? What was his name?’ He took Soli’s hand and whispered, ‘Who is my blessed father?’
But Soli didn’t seem to hear him. He began to speak of things that Danlo couldn’t comprehend. He told of the galaxy’s many wonders, of the great black hole at the core, and of that brilliant, doomed region of the galaxy called the Vild. Human beings, he explained, had learned to make stars explode into supernovae; even as they spoke together, beneath the dying sky, ten thousand spheres of light were expanding outward to the ends of the universe. ‘So many stars,’ Soli said, ‘so much light.’
Danlo, of course, couldn’t comprehend that this wild starlight would eventually reach his world and kill all of the plants and animals on Icefall’s surface. He knew only that Soli was dying, and seeing visions of impossible things.
‘Sir, who is my father?’ he repeated.
But now Soli had lapsed into a private, final vision, and his words made no sense at all. ‘The rings,’ Soli forced out. ‘The rings. Of light. The rings of eternity, and I … I, oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!’
Quite possibly he was trying to tell Danlo that he was his grandfather, but he failed, and soon his lips fell blue and silent, and he would never utter any words again.
‘Soli, Soli!’
Again, Soli began gasping for air, and very soon he stopped breathing altogether. He lay
