'Marriage is the most horrible of all traps,' she said. 'Once a woman begins having babies, there are too many details to attend to, and no time for ecstasy.'
Danlo stroked her hand and said, 'But doesn't it seem to you that astrier marriages ... are extreme?'
'Marriage is marriage,' she said. 'Even your Alaloi bear a good many children.'
'Yes, they do,' he said. He touched the scar above his eye as he thought about the Alaloi tribes. 'But many of the children die before they are named.'
'And so the women continue having more babies.'
'Yes ... but not to replace those who have gone over. At least, not just to replace them.' He held his hand over his forehead, remembering. The women of my tribe were very passionate. Their cries, coming from the snow huts deep in the cave – this could keep us awake all night, especially in deep winter when there is almost no end to night. The wives of the men – they knew about ecstasy. They did not need religion to encourage them to lie with their husbands.'
Tamara pulled at the dark hairs on his forearm, then she said, 'Did the Devaki marry for life?'
'They married for eternity,' he said. As he ate succulent pieces of bloodfruit, he told her something of the Alaloi beliefs concerning the world of spirits. A man's spirit, he explained – his first self – came into the world naked and alone, cut off from selves of all living things. But each man had a doffel, an other-self, a special and magical animal that he was not permitted to hunt. It was a man's first duty, when his membrum was cut and he first became a man, to enter into the dreamtime and identify this other-self. If he were a full man, his spirit would merge with that of his other-self, mystically, and he would become his deep self, his true self that lived in eternity. He would become a part of the World-Soul. Only then could his deep self seek out that of the one woman fated to be his wife. How an Alaloi woman became her deepest self was a secret that he did not know. He knew only that the completed spirits of man and woman would share eternity together, and they would give birth to other spirits, the spirits of their children, and in this way life went on.
'The Alaloi theology is complex but very beautiful,' she said. Her face was glowing and her eyes were alive with interest. 'Your Alaloi are a romantic people.'
'Yes ... they can be,' he said. He listened carefully to the way she said the word 'romantic'. He sensed that, at heart, she was a romantic woman who had concealed many of her desires.
'You're still an Alaloi man in your soul, aren't you?' she asked. 'A wild, wild man.'
In truth, Tamara Ten Ashtoreth loved men as she did life, and for many years she had dreamed of making a marriage based on the merging of two souls. She had even dreamed of bearing children, two children, a boy and a girl. She had kept this dream a secret; she regarded it as a silly notion of her childhood self, and she was ashamed of longing for a kind of union that her mother would have called 'a selfish desire and really quite impossible'. In an age when few married for love, and fewer still for life, this was certainly an impractical desire, if not quite impossible. She must have dreaded that Danlo would reawaken this desire in her, only to abandon her, perhaps for the sake of his various quests, or to become a god, or because he had found something coiled in the secret part of her: a ravenous and terrible beauty that one day might quicken into life and devour him.
'You really wouldn't want to marry me,' she said.
'I think ... I do,' Danlo said.
Slowly, she ate a slice of bloodfruit as she looked at him. 'Would you give up your quest, the whole Vild mission, to marry?'
The room was quiet for a long time before he finally said, 'Yes, I think I would.'
'Well, you shouldn't even consider such things,' she said. 'You shouldn't ever abandon your dreams.'
'But I have ... another dream, now.'
'And your people? The Alaloi?'
'Lalashu,' he said, 'the blessed People ... are doomed. I think I have known that for five years.'
'But could you just abandon them without being certain?'
Danlo stood and paced around the room, then. The wooden floor tiles squeaked in rhythm with his heavy footsteps. After a while, he paused before the window and stared out at the frozen sea. 'No,' he finally said, 'I could not abandon them. Even if they are doomed. Especially ... if they are fated to die.'
'And I couldn't turn away from the Society,' Tamara said. She stood up and came over beside him. 'Not now.'
'Because you have a calling,' he said. He licked his teeth, which were coated with the bittersweet taste of bloodfruit.
'I'm involved with the Way of Ringess,' she said. 'Many of us are.'
Danlo laughed softly, then said, 'It is ironic: Bardo thinks he is converting the courtesans ... but it is really the reverse, yes?'
'We don't try to convert anyone.'
'Hanuman believes differently.'
'Hanuman,' she said. 'He's such a difficult man.'
'Is that why you avoid him?'
'But he's impossible to avoid, I think. He's quite insistent about what he wants.'
'He wants to make a new religion,' Danlo said.
'But we're all making this religion, aren't we? All of us who are involved in the Way. Even you, Danlo. We can make it a living religion, or let it die, like so many others have died.'
'And then?'
'What do you mean?'
'If I completed my quest,' he said, 'and if your calling were successful and you awakened every Ringist in the galaxy ... what then?'
'Then it would be then,' she said.
'If I quit the Order, would you quit the Society?'
'To marry you?'
'To marry ... yes.'
She faced him and reached out to stroke the long hair behind his neck. She kissed his lips, then she smiled and said, 'I can't look into the future the way you can. Now it's now, and that's all that really matters. It's very late, you know. Why don't we sleep now and forget about things that may or may not ever happen?'
She took his hand and led him back into the fire room, which doubled as her sleeping chamber. The fires had burned down to red embers, and the room was now almost dark and much too cool for sweating. In fact, it was quite cold, and they needed to pull sheets and blankets over their bottom fur to keep warm. They lay holding each other in their silky bed, and soon Tamara was asleep, breathing softly over his face as he watched her breasts rise and fall. He lay awake watching her for a long time as he thought about the way that nowness would always become thenness, as surely as day followed night, on and on through a universe without end.
For the next couple of tendays, even as others were contemplating new doctrines and technologies that would forever change the Way of Ringess, Danlo could not forget his dream of marrying Tamara. While drinking coffee in the morning, or learning his mathematics, or, as an exer-
cise, interfacing his lightship where it rested deep within the Lightship Caverns – many times each day he thought of his conversation with her. He concluded that she must have regarded his talk of marriage as insincere. And, in a way, he had been insincere. He had given her no promise to marry, no ring or disk or firestone, or other pledge of his devotion to her. He had learned enough of civilized customs to know that such pledges are not always given, that people often marry as easily and unceremoniously as they might walk into a cafe and place an order for roasted meatnuts. But, as Tamara had observed, he was still an Alaloi in his heart, and Alaloi men always give pledges to the women they intend to marry. They give them alaya shells or amethysts or rings of carved ivory. Sometimes they give them pearls. Danlo remembered quite clearly the night he had met Tamara, the way he had blurted out his desire to give her a pearl to wear around her neck. She had thought him insincere then, too. But he was not insincere. Nor had he spoken idly. He was the poorest of men, much too poor to buy pearls or gemstones, but since the moment he had first seen her, he had been thinking of a way that he might give her a real pearl.
On the morning of the 61st, he went down to the Quay where the ice schooners were harboured in neat, colourful rows along West Beach. He arranged with the boat master to take a sleek, red schooner out onto the ice. From a supply hut near the mooring slips, he picked out the few supplies that he would need for a brief journey: sleeping furs; a heated tent; a cooking stove and steel utensils; ropes and climbing paraphernalia; a compass, sextant and maps; a hammer, ice drill, a shovel, chisels, knives and a heatjet; and enough food – mainly baldo nuts, dried snowapples and cheese – to last twelve days. He planned to be gone no more than four days, but when travelling in deep winter, it was always wisest to apply the rule of three: that one should always carry three times as much food as should be needed. No one knew better than Danlo what it was like to starve while waiting out a storm far from shore. The boat master, when he saw the quantity of stores that Danlo was stowing into the schooner, warned him of the dangers of sailing alone in deep winter. He was a thin man with a high, reedy voice nearly lost to the early morning wind that whipped along the beach: 'I shouldn't let you go, but you're a journeyman, and there's no telling journeymen what to do. Especially you pilots – what's the saying in your college? Journeymen Die – is that right? Be careful, Young Pilot. The sea is more dangerous than deep space. Stay close to the coast, and keep the mountains in sight. I don't imagine you could know what it's like to be lost out on the ice.'
It might have been safer for him take a dog sled instead of a schooner. As Danlo had walked down the beach, he had passed snow-covered sleds and kennels full of soft, whining dogs. He had not liked the look of these dogs; the city people used them only for sport and recreation, and he did not wish to entrust his life to ill-trained dogs he did not know. In truth, ever since his journey to Neverness, he could not look at a dog without his stomach knotting up tight and hard as a baldo nut. And so he balanced his gear in his schooner and hoisted the bright blue lateen sail. He put on his goggles and said farewell to the boat master, and then he was off, running before the wind. The towers of the City vanished behind him, grey stone points lost into a grey-white glare; ahead was deep blue sky and hard air and open ice that went on mile after mile. And always there was the wind that blew at his back and filled his sail and set the spun-diamond mast singing. The wind blew him due south. Most icemen who took out schooners sailed north across the Sound and then tacked against the cold, constant wind, slowly working their way up the west side of the island. The west coast of Neverness Island, cut with fiords, glaciers and green-fir mountains, has long been known for its beauty. But that day Danlo was seeking beauty of a different kind, and so he sailed south across the open sea where the people of the City were not permitted to go.
He travelled very quickly. That is the charm of these graceful, delicate boats, to be able to move quickly across the ice. Some iceboats, the smaller skeeters or skimmers, when sailing over glass ice can reach a speed three times that of the wind. Since the wind blowing out of the northwest in deep winter is a fast, murderous wind, Danlo's concern was not keeping up his speed but controlling it. To be sure, his schooner, with its flat, ski-like runners in place of steel blades, was the slowest and steadiest of all icecraft, but it was still no vehicle for the weak-brained or the cowardly. He sat low in the schooner's cockpit, clutching at the tiller as it leaped at every rill and bump. He pushed it left or right, at an instant's warning, to swerve the boat and avoid the fissures that opened in the ice just ahead of him. Very often, it was hard to see, with particles of spindrift rattling against his face mask and goggles. It was hard to breathe; he thought that everything about ice schooning was hard and cold and utterly exhilarating. The seascape, in its colours of white and silver and aquamarine, flew past beneath him at tremendous speed. The steering blade vibrated like a saw catching at the ice; the scrape of the runners over the ice shivered along his legs and up through his scrotum. More than once, the wind shifted suddenly, stealing his breath away and nearly flipping the schooner end over end. As he pulled further away from the shore, the ice grew faster, and in places, even rougher. He schussed across sets of frozen waves called sastrugi, and the quick stuttering bumps hurt his teeth and pounded at his spine. Ten miles out, the sea was covered with hard-packed snow, safel, as the Alaloi call it, the fast, smooth snow that is good for sledding. It was good for schooning, too, and in little time Danlo reached the thirty-mile markers that demarcate the boundary of Neverness Island. Ahead of him, planted in the ice at intervals of a thousand feet, was a line of red poles curving off to either horizon, east and west. The poles were bent before the wind, pointing south, as if beckoning for him to continue his journey. Long ago the Lords of the Order had made a covenant with the Alaloi people that no civilized person would venture beyond these bounds. Except for the island that Neverness is built upon, the whole of the planet named Icefall was to be touched by none but the Alaloi, forever. Because Danlo would always think of himself as one of the People – and because he intended to touch land forbidden to those of the City – he sailed past the poles with the speed of the wind, and he said the prayer of ail travellers setting out for unseen islands: 'Ali alli-lo kiro lisalia.'
Seventy miles south of Neverness there is an island famous for the profusion and fecundity of its bird life. The Alaloi call it Avisalia. It is a small island of mountains, cliffs and wide, sandy beaches. It stands between Neverness Island and the Great Southern Ocean. There, where the warm Mishima current flows close to the land shelf, the sea birds come to feed upon vast schools of herring, shoko fish, and arctic cod. Each winter, flocks of birds numbering in the tens of thousands migrate from the northern islands and build their nests there. The air above Avisalia, in deep winter, is often white with clouds of puffins, thallows, ospreys, shirkirts and terns. And kestrels, skuas, loons and twenty other species of birds. The thunder of their wings and their harsh hunting calls can be heard from miles away. Most of these birds overwinter on the island's sunny southern slopes. They bask in the low, slanting sun, and they fly out over the beaches, and they use their talons or beaks to pluck silvery fish from the ocean. On the southern side of the island, the ocean flows fast and warm and it rarely freezes. On the island's northern side, however, there live different birds. There the kitikeesha come to eat the snow atop the frozen sea, and the snowy owls come to eat the kitikeesha. The gulls – the snow gulls and hunting gulls – make their roosts on the steep grey cliffs above the sea. In deep winter, when they cannot get at the meaty treasures locked up beneath the shore ice, they scavenge the leavings of bears or of other birds, or, if they get hungry enough, they turn on their own kind and peck each other to death. But each year, in false winter when the ice breaks up, the shallow sea bed yields up an abundance of food, and then the gulls feast. The shallows along Avisalia's north shore teem with ice crabs, spirali, and with tens of species of molluscs. And, of course, with palpulve. At low tide, the wide beach is carpeted with millions of purple-shelled palpulve. The hunting gulls like no other food better; it is their instinct to grab up a living palpulve and soar high into the air, only to drop it and dash it on the rocks below. In this way, the gulls break open the shells to get at the meat inside. In hatching season when their young constantly cry for food and give them no peace, the gulls fill their crops with the meat of hundreds of palpulve each day. Perhaps one palpulve in ten contains a shiny bit of matter walled off from its living tissues: a pearl that grows inside it like a gleaming, stony egg. The gulls, rapacious animals that they are, gobble down palpulve meats like candy, and they make no complaint if they also swallow a pearl. It is these lustrous silvery or black pearls of the palpulve that are prized across the Civilized Worlds as the second most beautiful of all pearls. For generations, worm-runners from Neverness had flown their windjammers out to Avisalia to poach these pearls. Each false winter, they would use diamond knives to open thousands of palpulve and cut the pearls free, leaving the meat for the gulls. Each season the gulls gleefully await the coming of the wormrunners, for it saves them the work of opening the palpulve themselves.