On the morning of the convocation, Danlo donned his uncomfortable formal clothing. The formal robe, cut all of a piece, was roomy enough below the waist, where the pantaloons billowed out to allow his legs free play for skating. But, because his body had thickened with muscle since his first days at Borja, the fine white wool pulled too tightly across his chest and shoulders. In fact, the robe was so tight that he had to ask for Madhava li Shing's help in working the zipper closed up his back.
'May I touch you?' Madhava asked in his sarcastic but friendly way. 'May I touch the only novice in the history of the Order who has defeated a warrior-poet?'
Danlo smiled sadly as he put on the tight wool jacket, his cap, gloves and fur cloak that completed his attire. He fastened the steel chains holding his cloak in place, and he said, somewhat mysteriously, 'I ... defeated no one. In the end, the warrior-poet had his triumph.'
He met Bardo beneath the cold flame globes lining the steps of that square, white building called the College of the Lords. The air was frigid and harsh with little sounds: ice being chipped away from stone steps, skate blades ringing and the faraway music of children's voices. Although the clocks of the City had marked the beginning of a new day, by Danlo's reckoning it was still night. It was late in the darkest of seasons, and the deep winter sun would not rise for hours. Below them, thirty yards to the north, the Shih Grove's hundred and twelve trees glittered silver under the intense starlight.
'Ah, Danlo, there you are!' Bardo called out. 'Listen, there's something I should warn you about. A few nights ago, I drank too much beer, as I sometimes do. There is the slightest possibility that I might have told the story of you defeating the warrior-poet to certain persons of low character who can't keep secrets. Perhaps they told their friends. You should prepare yourself for questions – I think there'll be many gossips who'll want to know how you remembered that goddamned poem. Ah, why is it my fate to always be making legends of other people?'
Danlo smiled at him and said, 'Thank you for warning me.'
Bardo snorted and stamped his huge boots against the white-granite steps. 'By God, Little Fellow, it's cold! Let's go inside and drink coffee while we wait – likely the lords will keep us waiting all day before they blather their way to a decision.'
Bardo was dressed brilliantly, in black sable and gold, but his furs stank of spilled beer. His breath was yeasty with alcoholic vapours, his eyes bleary and red as if he'd been drinking all night. Up the steps he plodded, and at every fourth or fifth step, he let loose a resounding belch. Twice he farted, loudly. Danlo, who was beginning to wonder how this huge buffoon of a man could help save the Alaloi people when he couldn't even save himself from stupefaction, followed close behind. He was afraid that Bardo would at any moment stumble and break open his head. Bardo, though, was used to drinking great quantities of his beer drug, and he kept his feet. In his great, booming voice he called out for the College doors to be opened, and the doors were opened. A novice dressed in formal robes met them at the top of the steps. He bowed to Bardo, nodded at Danlo, and he led them through the doorway, down a long draughty hall and into an anteroom off the main council chamber. There they found a blue pot of coffee and two blue mugs set out atop a plain wooden table. There was no other furniture, nor rugs, nor decoration of any sort in the plain, cold room.
'By God, this is an insult!' Bardo huffed out. He poured coffee into the mugs, and with an unsteady hand, held one of them out to Danlo. 'I should call for chairs – do they expect us to sit on stone? Or keep us standing all day?'
As it happened, the lords did not keep them waiting all day; although it might have been better if they had. If Bardo's bodily tissues had been allowed more time to metabolize the beer poisoning his brain, he might have knelt before the Lords' College with clear eyes and tight lips, and the future of the Order and Neverness might have unfolded in a very different way. If – the subtlest of all words. As the scryers teach, though, ifness is an illusion. Or rather, it is our belief in pure chance that is illusory. According to the ancient metaphor, the events of one's life, each of the billion billion 'ifs' and moments of possibility are like water molecules tumbling along a river. However chaotic the little whorls and eddies may seem, the river itself flows in only one direction, towards the sea. As with life: whatever has happened will have happened, the scryers say. And so, in the deepest sense, Bardo chose his own future and drew it forth roaring into reality by the force of his will alone.
Before either of them had finished their first coffee, the novice returned and said, 'It's time; the College will decide your petition now. Master Pilot, Wild Danlo, if you please, come with me.'
The novice crossed the room and slid open the rear door. Danlo followed him and Bardo out into the main council chamber. All at once, as when stepping from a cave into the open, Danlo was overwhelmed by new sensations: there was light everywhere, streaming in cold colours from the flame globes, filling the huge chamber with reflected reds and blues and golds. The circular walls were polished white granite; high above him, where the chaotic noises of the room bounced around and fell through the open spaces, a great clary dome let in the starlight. There was a coldness in the air, emanating in waves off the black floor stones, and Danlo thought of the chamber as a very inhuman place, even though many people were waiting for him there. The Lords of the Order – there were one hundred and ten gathered there that day – sat behind tables of glistening jewood. The crescent-shaped tables were arrayed in concentric half-circles around the far side of the chamber; four or five lords shared each table. As Danlo made his way nearer, the eyes of each lord fell upon him. He heard many voices, the muffled rush of a hundred breaths, and there was a gradual silence. The novice invited Bardo and him to kneel on a square Fravashi carpet in the chamber's very centre. The lords were close all around him, close enough that he could see their black or brown or blue eyes staring down from their stern faces. Many of the lords were ancient, some of them with their second or third remade bodies. He smelled the sickly sweet decay of oldness and the pungent hormone perfumes concocted to neutralize and mask the stench. The jewood tables reeked of lemon oil polish. So powerful were these smells – and Bardo's beery aroma and his own acrid sweat – that he scarcely heard the novice announce them: 'My Lords, the Master Pilot and Master of Novices, Pesheval Lal, called "Bardo" and the novice, Danlo wi Soli Ringess.'
At the centre table, directly in front of Danlo and aligned facing the chamber's great double doors, sat the four lords known as the Tetrad.
One of them, a tall thin, delicate man with cropped hair and black teeth, looked straight at Danlo. He was Chanoth Chen Ciceron, the Lord Pilot, and he said: 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess, we are pleased you could join us today. Even though Master Lal has approached us on your behalf, since you are in fact the primary petitioner, the College will direct its remarks to you. Is this agreeable to you, Young Novice?'
Danlo looked at Lord Ciceron's soft face and thought of what Bardo had said about him: that here was a man, the oldest of all the pilots, who lied out of habit as easily as a boy squashes flies, who was often devious without being clever, voluble but rarely speaking what others thought of as the truth.
He was also, for all his years, an impatient man. When Danlo did not respond immediately, he repeated, 'Young Novice, is this agreeable to you?'
'Yes,' Danlo finally said.
'Excellent.'
'Well, Lord Pilot,' Bardo's voice boomed out, 'it's not agreeable to me! What am I, a lump of stone to bounce your words off? The Alaloi have been infected by a filthy virus; I'm involved in their fate, by God!'
He knelt there sweating and glowering at Chanoth Chen Ciceron. He did not explain that he, Bardo the Bull, who was famous as a rakehell and swiver of women, had infected many of the young Alaloi women with his semen, if not with the plague virus itself.
Lord Ciceron turned and nodded to the other Lords of the Tetrad. On his right sat the Lord Ecologist, Mariam Erendira Vasquez and Nikolos the Elder. Nikolos was a plump, quiet man whose natural tendency toward timidity was balanced, in times of crisis, by a staunchness and a steely will to action. He was famous for helping to organize the schism that had led to the Pilots' War and the Timekeeper's downfall thirteen years previously. Of the four lords of the Tetrad, he was the most respected, the most well liked. And Audric Pall, the Lord Cetic, sitting at Lord Ciceron's left, was the most feared. Lord Pall suffered from the rare genetic malady of albinism: his skin and hair were the colour of bleached bone and his eyes were pink, as if the irises had been smeared with a mixture of milk and blood. He was very old. Now that the Timekeeper was dead, he claimed to be the oldest person in the City. He exchanged glances with Lord Ciceron and made an intricate sign with his gnarled fingers. Lord Pall never uttered a word. He was well known for communicating only in signs, or in the secret facial language of the cetics. Some said that he had been born a mute; others – and these were mostly his students – held that he merely had lost the habit of speaking and his vocal cords had withered from neglect and nonuse. Danlo knelt on the carpet and stared up at this horrible old man; he thought Lord Pall must be possessed of sublime and corrupt inner powers, truly a man of shaida: cynical, jaded, brilliant and barely human.
Lord Ciceron rapped his pilot's ring against the table and spoke to Bardo. 'Lord Pall reminds us, Master Pilot, that, much as we all desire to be enlightened by your opinions, you may not speak here unless a question is directed at you. Is this agreeable to you?'
'As agreeable as drinking piss,' Bardo muttered.
'What did I hear you say?'
Danlo, kneeling straight-spined on his carpet, looked back and forth between Lord Ciceron and Bardo. He knew that there had been enmity between the two men even before they had taken opposite sides in the Pilots' War. During Bardo's journeyman years at Resa, Lord Ciceron had been the harshest and cruellest of all Bardo's tutors. Then, too, Lord Ciceron's elevation to the lordship of the pilots still obviously rankled Bardo – everyone knew that he had coveted that highest of ranks for himself and resented everything about Chanoth Chen Ciceron. Bardo's cheeks were puffed out, his face flushed purple from too much beer. He glared at Lord Ciceron, then called out, 'How should I know what you heard me say?'
Bardo's belligerence did not make a good impression on the Tetrad, nor on the rest of the lords. They sat at their tables, shaking their heads and whispering to one another. Kolenya Mor, the Lord Eschatologist, and Jonath Parsons, Rodrigo Diaz, Mahivira Netis and Burgos Harsha, with his serious, glass-pocked face – the greatest Lords of the Order admonished Bardo with their disapproving countenances. They looked down at Danlo as if they pitied anyone whose fate was interwoven with such a rude man.
'Master Pilot,' Chanoth Chen Ciceron said to Bardo, 'is it wise to insult those from whom you beg such extraordinary favours?'
Bardo turned to Danlo and laid his heavy arm across his shoulders. He tilted his head until it touched Danlo's. All the lords, as Danlo was keenly aware, were watching the two of them. Although he could scarcely breathe and wanted to push Bardo away, he held himself rigid, in the posture of formal politeness. And then he heard Bardo whisper, 'Piss on him! Ah, but this Lord Ciceron is a man of lies and pretensions: he pretends that our actions, our words or demeanour, can still sway the College. Well, look at their faces, Little Fellow! You don't have to be a cetic to see that the old bones have already made their decision, too bad.'
Danlo looked up at the lords, resplendent in their formal robes of amber, indigo, grey, and a hundred other colours.
Their faces, he saw, were indeed hard with resolve and decision.
'Master Pilot, you may not speak to the boy – is this understood? If you can't restrain yourself, you'll be removed from this convocation.'
At this, Bardo let loose a belch and glowered at Lord Ciceron, but for the moment, he kept his silence.
'And now,' Chanoth Chen Ciceron said, 'we invite Lord Vasquez to address the petitioners.'
Sitting next to Lord Ciceron, the fourth lord of the Tetrad, Mariam Erendira Vasquez, smoothed out the folds of her viridian robe. She had a square, cheerful face and a reputation for clear thinking and pragmatism. She smiled at Danlo, and he liked her immediately, even though her first words discouraged him: 'Danlo wi Soli Ringess, we are sorry to say that your petition to the Lords' College to suspend the eighth covenant has been made with false assumptions and false hopes. Before we vote your petition, yes or no, we must explicate the nature of this falsity.'
In her clear, cold voice, Lord Vasquez spoke of the War of the Faces and of the plague virus that the Architects of the Old Cybernetic Church – with the help of the warrior-poets – had designed to murder their enemies. She kneaded her small, square hands together and half-turned in her chair, addressing the Lords of the College, as well as Danlo. She described the way in which the virus DNA had embroidered itself into its victims' chromosomes, becoming, inevitably, a part of every civilized person's genetic inheritance. The virus can be thought of as a genetic disease that has remained dormant in most human beings for nearly a thousand years. And now, unfortunately, the tribes of pseudo-primitives known as the Alaloi most probably have been infected with the plague virus. A virus which, in them, is non-dormant. This is a disaster for these people because this is a disease that has no cure.'
A disease that has no cure – Danlo silently repeated this phrase to himself, and his fists clenched, and his collar was suddenly too tight against his throat. Listening to the Lord Ecologist speak of the Alaloi's certain death concentrated and intensified his awareness: he heard the wind driving ice particles against the dome, while nearer to him Bardo grunted in anger and Chanoth Chen Ciceron sucked at his blackened teeth and sighed. Many of the lords were sighing; many of them were facing Danlo, eye to eye, and their eyes were hard with pity. All around him, the cracked granite walls and pillars bespoke the rigidity of an Order which, across the millennia, had made too many hard decisions. Lord Vasquez's clear voice echoed off the walls: 'A disease that has no cure.' Danlo closed his eyes, then, and he remembered one of the hardest sayings of his tribe: Ti-anasa daivam – love your fate. For the first time he reflected how strange it was that the word, anasa, as the Alaloi used it, could mean either to love or to suffer.