The Wild. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 glassy-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 bloody 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 crushing 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 passed 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 meditation room – or sometimes in words whispered in his ear – the Entity 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 Entity 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 cafés 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 offshore 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 lightships and great stone cathedrals shimmering beneath the stars. He remembered, СКАЧАТЬ