Part 6 (2/2)

Danlo, who had finally fought free of the rope binding them, tried to come to his aid.

He too leaped toward the lamb. But the explosive force of the tiger's strike knocked him aside as he collided with her. There was a shock of bunched muscles and bone, a rage of orange and black fur and slas.h.i.+ng claws. Danlo smelled the tiger's fermy cat scent and caught wind of her hot b.l.o.o.d.y breath. Her glorious face, all open with fury and gleaming white fangs, flashed in front of his. The lamb screamed and screamed and tried to leap away dragging the golden rope behind him. Then the tiger sank her claws into his side as she pulled him to the ground, and the terrible screaming suddenly stopped. The lamb fell into a gla.s.sy-eyed motionlessness, offering no more resistance. Again, Danlo leaped at the tiger, grabbing the loose skin at the back of her neck and trying to pull her off the lamb. He sank his fingers into her thick fur, and he pulled and pulled. The tiger's deep-throated growls vibrated through her chest; Danlo felt the great power that vibrated through her entire body. Through the brilliance of another flash of lightning, he saw the tiger open her jaws to bite the lamb's neck. He remembered then how Wemilo had once been mauled by a snow tiger. Once in deep winter, Danlo's found-father, Haidar, had brought Wemilo all broken and b.l.o.o.d.y back to their cave, and Wemilo had told an incredible story. Even as Haidar had held a burning brand to Wemilo's face to cauterize his wounds, this great hunter had claimed that at the supreme moment of his ordeal, with the tiger tearing at him, he had felt neither fear nor pain. He said that he had fallen into a kind of dreaminess in which he was aware of the tiger biting open his shoulder but did not really care. The laying bare of his shoulder bones, he said, seemed almost as if it were happening to someone other than himself. And now, above the beach as the lightning flashed, as Danlo pulled vainly at two handfuls of quivering flesh, this tiger was about to make her kill, and Danlo could only hope that the lamb had entered into the final dreamtime before death. All his life he had wondered what lay beyond the threshold of that particular doorway. Perhaps there was joy in being released from life, a deep and brilliant joy that lasted forever. Perhaps there was only blackness, nothingness, neverness. Danlo wondered if he himself might be very close to following the lamb upon her journey to the other side, and then at last the tiger struck down with her long fangs. Her teeth were like knives which she used with great precision. She bit through the lamb's neck, tearing open the throat with such force that Danlo felt the shock of tooth upon bone run down the whole length of the tiger's body. Blood sprayed over the tiger's face and chest, and over Danlo who still clung desperately to the back of the tiger's neck. The lamb lay crushed beneath the tiger's paws, and his dark eye was lightless as a stone.

Danlo should have let go then and tried to run, but the tiger suddenly jumped up from her kill and whirled about. With a single great convulsion of muscles, she whirled and rolled and roared, trying to shake Danlo loose. She drove him straight back to the sand. The force of their fall knocked his breath away. If the sand hadn't been so soft, the tiger might have broken his back. For a moment, Danlo was pinned beneath her.

The tiger's arching spine drove back into his belly and chest nearly crus.h.i.+ng him.

There was blood and fur in his mouth, and he could feel the tiger's powerful rumblings vibrate deeply in his own throat. And all the while the tiger roared and snapped her jaws and clawed the air. She continued to roll, spinning along the beach until she pulled Danlo off and found her feet. She crouched in the sand scarce three feet away. Her breath fell over Danlo's face. He, too, was now crouching, up on one knee as he held the bruised ribs above his belly and gasped for air. He waited for the tiger to spring. But the tiger did not move. During a flash of lightning, she found his eyes and stared at him. It lasted only a moment, this intense, knowing look, but in that time something pa.s.sed between them. She stared at him, strangely, deeply, and at last she found her fear of the mysterious fire that she saw blazing in Danlo's eyes. She turned her head away from him, then. She stood and turned back toward the lamb who lay crumpled in the sand. With her teeth, she took him up by his broken neck as gently as she might have carried one of her cubs. The lamb dangled from her teeth, swaying in the wind. Without a backward glance, she padded off up the dunes toward the dark forest beyond, and then she was gone.

For a while Danlo knelt on the beach and watched the heavens. He faced west, looking up at the black sky, listening to the wind and decided to say a prayer for the lamb's spirit. But he did not know the true name of the lamb; on the islands west of Neverness there are no lambs, nor any animals very much like lambs. Without a true name to tell the world, Danlo could not pray properly, but he could still pray, and so he said, 'Ki anima pela makala mi alasharia la shantih'. He touched his fingers to his lips, then. His hands were wet with the lamb's fresh blood, and he opened his mouth to touch his tongue. It had been a long time since he had tasted the blood of an animal. The lamb's blood was warm and sweet, full of life. Danlo swallowed this dark, red elixir, and thanked the lamb for his life, for giving him his blessed life. Soon after this it began to rain. The sky finally opened and founts of water fell down upon the beach in endless waves. Danlo turned his face to the sky, letting this fierce cold rain wash the blood from his lips, from his beard and hair, from his forehead and aching eyes. He scooped up some wet sand and used it to scour the blood off his hands. As lightning flashed all around him and the storm intensified, he watched the lamb's blood run off him and wash into the earth. He thought the rain would wash the blood through the sand, ultimately down to the sea. He thought that even now the lamb's spirit had rejoined with the wind blowing out of the west, the wild wind that cried in the sky and circled the world forever.

That night, when Danlo returned to his house, he had dreams. He lay sweating on a soft fur before a blazing fire, and he dreamed that a tall grey man was cutting at his flesh, sculpting his body into some dread new form. There was a knife, and pain and blood. With a sculptor's art, the tall grey man cut at Danlo's nerves and twisted his sinews and hammered at the bones around his brain. And when the sculptor was done with this excruciating surgery and Danlo looked into his little silver mirror, he could not quite recognize himself, for he no longer wore the body of a man. All through this terrible dream that wouldn't end, Danlo stared and stared at the mirror. And always staring back at him, burning brightly with a fearful fire, was the face of a beautiful and blessed tiger.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Miracle.

Memory can be created but not destroyed.

saying of the remembrancers.

Danlo might have hoped that this encounter on the beach would have been his last test, but it was not to be so. In arrays of ideoplasts glittering through the house's medi- tation room or sometimes in words whispered in his ear the Ent.i.ty said that he must prepare himself for many difficult moments still to come. But She gave him not the slightest inkling of the difficulties he might face, hinting only that, as with the test of his faithfulness to ahimsa, part of the test would be his ability to discover the true nature of the test and why he was being tested.

At first, after several days of walking the beach and looking for animal prints or blood in the sand, he wondered if the Ent.i.ty might not be testing him to see how much loneliness he could endure. As much as he loved being alone with the turtles and the pretty white gulls along the water's edge, he was a gregarious man who also loved human company. With no one to say his name with no one to remind him that he was a pilot of a great Order who had once drunk cinnamon coffee in the cafes of Neverness and conversed with other journeymen who dreamed of going to the stars he began to develop a strange sense of himself. In many ways it was a deeper and truer self, a secret consciousness articulated only in the cries of the seabirds or in the immense sound of the ocean beating rhythmically against the land. Once or twice, as he stood in the waters near the offsh.o.r.e rocks, he felt himself very close to this memory of who he really was. It was as if the ocean itself were somehow melting away the golden face of his being, dissolving all his cares, his emotions, his ideals, the very way in which he saw himself as both human being and a man. With the wind in his hair and the salty spray stinging his eyes, he felt himself awakening to a strange new world inside himself. At these times, he didn't mind that he had nearly forgotten his hatred of Hanuman li Tosh for disfiguring Tamara's soul. But at other times he felt otherwise. Very often he stared out at the endless blue horizon, and dreaded that he might forget his vow to find the planet called Tannahill; possibly he might even forget his promise to cure the Alaloi tribes of the virus that had doomed them. Such thoughts brought him immediately back to the world of purposes and plans, of black silk and lights.h.i.+ps and great stone cathedrals s.h.i.+mmering beneath the stars. He remembered, then, his burning need to take part in the purpose of his race. He remembered that although human beings would always need the wild, they would always need each other, too, or else they could not be truly human.

One day, when he returned from a long walk around the rocky headland to the north, he discovered that he was no longer alone. As was his habit, at dusk, he opened the door to the house, pulled off his boots, and touched the second highest of the doorway's stones, the white granite stone whose flecks of black mica and fine cracks reminded him of one of the sacred stones set into the entrance of the cave in which he had been born. Immediately, he knew that there was someone in the house. Although the hallway looked exactly as it always did just a short corridor of bare wall stones and a red wool carpet leading to the meditation room he sensed a subtle change in the movements of the air, possibly a warmness of breath emanating from somewhere inside. With a few quick steps, he hurried past the doorways of the empty kitchen, the empty tearoom and the fireroom. He came into the meditation room. And there, wearing a travelling robe of Summerworld silk, standing by the windows overlooking the sea, was the only woman whom he had ever truly loved.

'Tamara!' he cried out. 'It is not possible!'

In the half-light of the dusk, in a room whose fireplace was cold and black, he could not be certain at first of her ident.i.ty. But when she turned to him and he caught sight of her lovely dark eyes, he could scarcely breathe. He could not see how this mysterious woman could be anyone other than Tamara. She had Tamara's long, strong nose and quick smile. Her hair, long and golden and flowing freely, was Tamara's as were the high cheekbones, the unlined forehead, each downy lobe of her little ears.

He thought he remembered perfectly well her sensuous red lips and the sinuous muscles of her neck. She beckoned him closer, and he suddenly remembered that she had once been a courtesan whose lovely hand gestures flowed like water. In truth, he had always loved watching her move. Her limbs were long and lithe; when she stepped toward him quickly and almost too easily, it was with all the grace of a tiger.

With more than a little irony, he remembered how he had always thought of her as very like the snow tigers of his home: impulsive and playful and full of a primeval vitality. She was a woman of rare powers, he remembered, and he ached to feel once more the silken clasp and urgent strength of her body. He moved forward to embrace her, then. And she moved toward him. Because their last meeting had been full of sorrow and a great distance between their souls, he was afraid to touch her. And she seemed almost afraid to touch him. But then, in less than a moment, they were hugging each other fiercely, enfolding each other, touching lips and each other's face with the heat of their breath. He kissed her forehead and her eyes, and she kissed him.

Now, despite all his hatred and despair, despite light years of empty black s.p.a.ce and the bitter memories that burned inside his brain, it seemed the day had finally come for kisses and caresses and other miracles.

'Tamara, Tamara,' he said. He brushed his fingers lightly over her forehead. He touched her temples, her eyes, her cheek, the pulsing artery along her throat. While she stood very still, almost like a statue, he circled around her and cupped his hand over the hollow at the back of her neck. He stroked her long golden hair and touched her face, circling and looking at her deeply and always touching as if to make sure it was really she.

'Danlo, Danlo,' she replied at last, and her voice was dulcet and low, just as he remembered it. She pulled back to look at him and then smiled nicely. She had a lovely smile, wide and sparkling and open, although slightly too full of pride. He wondered why the outrages she had endured hadn't tempered her terrible pride, but apparently the deeper parts of herself (and perhaps her surface happiness as well) remained untouched by her misfortunes. She seemed as sweet as he had known her at their first meeting, as warm and charming and full of life.

'I ... did not see you,' he said. 'When I came up the beach, I should have seen you standing by the window.'

'Well, it's dark in this room. Through the gla.s.s, darkly, the reflections you couldn't have seen very much.'

'But I did not even think ... to look inside the house.'

'But how should you have? You're not omniscient, you know.'

He smiled at this and said, 'We used to joke that we were like magnets who could always sense each other's presence.'

'We did, didn't we? Oh yes and once you said that when we were together, we completed something. A cosmic field of joy, of love, like a magnetic field I the south pole and you the north. I think you're the most romantic man I've ever known.'

Danlo stood close to her holding both her hands between his. He looked deeply into her eyes and said, 'You ... remember this?'She nodded her head then smiled. 'I have so much to tell you. So much has happened and I-'

'But how did you come to be here? In this house, on this planet, now, here how is this possible?'

'Please,' she said. 'It's cold in this room would you mind if we light a fire before we talk? I've always loathed being cold.'

While Danlo stacked a few logs on the grate inside the fireplace, Tamara went into the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. She was familiar with the house, of course, much more familiar than he. It did not take her long to return carrying a tray laden with a teapot, honey bowl, silver spoons and two little blue cups. She set the tray down before the blazing fire that Danlo had lit, then pulled up two cus.h.i.+ons and set them on the hard wooden floor in front of the fireplace, one cus.h.i.+on on either side of the tea service. Because the meditation room was heating up rather quickly, she removed her travelling robe and sat on one of the cus.h.i.+ons. She invited Danlo to do the same. In this way, sitting crosslegged on the soft cus.h.i.+ons with the tea service between them, they could look into each other's eyes as the fire warmed the sides of their faces.

'You must know I left Neverness,' she said. She took in a breath of air and then hesitated a moment as if she was unsure of herself, or perhaps unsure of what she could allow herself to tell him. 'After our last meeting, I couldn't bear being in a city where I had so many memories and where so many of the memories most important to me were gone. The truth is, I think I was afraid of meeting you somewhere, on the street or buying a plate of kurmash or even skating circles at one of the ice rings. I'm sorry, Danlo. You must know why it was impossible for me to see you. You'd been so much a part of my old life, before the fever burned my memories away but my old life was gone. I had to have a new life. To make a new life somewhere other than Neverness. Sometimes, after I realized what I'd lost when I lost you, I wanted to die.

But even more, I suppose, I wanted to live. To love, to live and live and live and live until I was myself again. Oh, I don't mean I hoped I could get my memories back.

I never hoped that. But my sanity, my soul I had to remember who I really was, if I remembered anything. I was afraid I'd lost my soul, don't you see? So I left Neverness to find it. That sounds so romantic, I know. So vain. Because you can never lose your soul. It's always there if you look deeply enough. The love. The life. Even the memories, too they're always there, waiting, like pearls in a dark drawer. You were right, after all. The master remembrancers were right, too. It's so strange that I had to leave Neverness to learn that. It's so strange how my life led me here, halfway across the galaxy, to you. I never thought I'd see you again. I never thought I'd love you again, I never dared hope that. But love, to love and love without restraint, to be loved it's what we were born for, don't you think? It's what I was born for, Danlo. I never really doubted that.'

While Tamara poured the golden peppermint tea into their cups, Danlo listened. He did not interrupt or try to correct her when she ascribed her memory loss to the Catavan Fever. He had never told of his discovery that it was Hanuman li Tosh who had really destroyed her memories, not some manufactured mind virus from Catava.

He decided not to tell her now. This was her time for telling, not his. And so he sat straight and quiet on his cotton cus.h.i.+on, sipping sweet tea from a little blue cup. He listened to her tell of her journey from Neverness to Avalon and then on to Larondiss.e.m.e.nt, Simoom, Summerworld and Urradeth, where she had nearly lost herself in one of the arhats' famous meditation schools. Finally, she said, she had made her way to Solsken, that bright and happy planet which lies near the end of the Fallaways. Of all the Civilized Worlds, Solsken is the nearest the galactic core, just as Farfara is the farthest. The stars in the night sky of Solsken are as dense and brilliant as grains of sand along a tropical beach, which is perhaps why the men and women of Solsken wors.h.i.+p the night as do no other people. On Solsken, during the season called Midsummer's Dream, there are always festivals and religious rites lasting from dusk until dawn. And there is always a need for musicians to beat the drums and play the flutes and pluck the strings of the gosharps which sanctify the Dance of the Night.

Tamara, of course, in her training as a courtesan had gained proficiency with many musical instruments. In fact, she had played with some of the best harpists in Neverness: with Zohra Iviatsui, Ramona Chu and once, even with the great Ivaranan.

Although her talent for s.e.xual ecstasy had vanished with the rape of her memories, strangely her musical gifts had only deepened. And so the exemplars and ritual masters of Solsken were very glad to have such an accomplished woman play for them, and Tamara spent many nights singing the holy songs, using her perfect golden voice as a precise instrument that vibrated through the sacred groves and resonated with the strings of the great golden gosharps. In this way, she sang to her lost soul, and with her voice alone plucked the ten thousand strings and made an unearthly music the mystic chords of the sacred canticles which the faithful believed to be perfectly tuned to the wavelengths of starlight falling over the world. She might have spent the rest of her life there beneath the brilliant stars of Solsken, dancing and remembering and singing her sad, beautiful songs. But then one night, during the Night of the Long Dance, a man dressed all in grey had come out of the mult.i.tudes on the hillside and approached her. His name was Sivan wi Mawi Sarkissian, and he said that he had been sent to find her.

'I can't tell you how surprised I was,' Tamara said as she stirred a tiny spoonful of honey into her second cup of tea. She would have preferred adding more, much more, but she avoided sweets the way a speed skater might potholes in the ice. 'I had told no one my travel plans. Before I began my journey, I didn't know them myself. I never dreamed I'd come to Solsken that was something of an accident. Or a miracle I'm not sure which. Oh, I do know, really, but this is hard to say. You see, I've come to believe in miracles. I've had to. It's a miracle, I think, when a G.o.ddess takes pity on a soul-sick woman and promises to heal her.'

At this, Danlo sipped his tea and nodded his head. He looked at her strangely and asked, 'Do you know where we are, then?'

'Of course I do. We're on a planet made by the G.o.ddess the Solid State Ent.i.ty.

We're in the centre of this Ent.i.ty, I think. This planet is there. Here this Earth. Sivan told me that after he introduced himself. He said that he'd nearly died in the manifold, inside the nebula of the Ent.i.ty where the stars are strange. In what you pilots call a chaos storm, I think. He was very open with me. He said the Ent.i.ty had saved him.

And in return, the Ent.i.ty asked him if he would agree to save me. As a mission of pity, of course, but I believe it was also supposed to be some sort of test. Sivan said the Ent.i.ty was testing him, as She did all pilots who come to Her.'

Danlo let a few drops of cool-hot tea roll across his tongue before swallowing. And then he asked, 'And you believed this renegade pilot?'

'He prefers to be known as a ronin pilot. And yes, I did believe him.'

'But his story must have sounded ... utterly fantastic. Impossible.'

'Well, there was something about him.'

After waiting a moment, Danlo said, 'Yes?'

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