Neverness

‘Have I forgotten?’ he said, breaking his taboo and flinching as he shouted out the forbidden pronoun. ‘Listen, Boy, I’ve forgotten nothing.’

The word ‘nothing’ seemed to hang in the air along with the hollow ringing of the railing as Soli stared at me and I at him. Then there came too-loud laughter from the street outside, and the door suddenly opened. Three tall, heavy men, each of them with pale yellow hair and drooping moustaches, each of them wearing light black furs dusted with snow, ejected their skate blades and stomped into the bar. They came up to Lionel and Soli and grasped each other’s hands. The largest of the three, a master pilot who had terrorized Bardo during our novice years at Borja, called for three mugs of kvass. ‘It’s spiky cold outside,’ he said.

Bardo leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Time to go, I think.’

I shook my head.

The master pilots – their names were Neith, Seth and Tomoth – were brothers. They had their backs to us, and they seemed not to have noticed us.

‘I’ll pay for six nights of master courtesans,’ Bardo mumbled.

The novice banged three mugs of steaming hot black beer down on the bar. Tomoth backed a few steps closer to the fire and shook the melting snow from his furs. Like some of the older pilots who had gone blind from old age, he wore jewelled, mechanical eyes. He had just returned from the edge of the Vild, and he said to Soli, ‘Your Ieldra were right, my friend. The Gallivare Binary and Cerise Luz have exploded. Nothing left but dirty hard dust and light.’

‘Dust and light,’ his brother Neith said, and he burned his mouth with hot kvass and cursed.

‘Dust and light,’ Seth repeated. ‘Sodervarld and her twenty millions caught in a storm of radioactive dust and light. We tried to get them off but we were too late.’

Sodervarld orbits Enola Luz, which is – had been – the star nearest the Gallivare Binary. Seth told us that the supernova had baked the surface of Sodervarld, killing off every bit of life except the ground worms. The small master pilot’s bar suddenly seemed stultifyingly tiny. The three brothers, I recalled, had been born on Sodervarld.

‘To our mother,’ Seth said as he clinked mugs with Soli, Lionel and his brothers.

‘To our father,’ Tomoth said.

‘Freyd.’ This came from Neith who inclined his head so slightly that I was not sure if he had actually nodded or if his image had wavered in the firelight. ‘To Yuleth and Elath.’

‘Time to go,’ I said to Bardo.

We made ready to leave, but Neith fell weeping against Tomoth, who turned our way as he caught his brother. His jewelled eyes gleamed in the half-light when he saw us. ‘What’s this?’ he shouted.

‘Why are there journeymen in our bar?’ Seth wanted to know.

Neith brushed yellow hair from his wet eyes and said, ‘My God, it’s the Bastard and his fat friend – what’s his name? – Burpo? Lardo?’

‘Bardo,’ Bardo said.

‘They were just about to leave,’ Soli said.

I suddenly did not feel like leaving. My mouth was dry, and there was a pressure behind my eyes.

‘Don’t call him “Bardo”,’ Neith said. ‘When we tutored him at Borja, everyone called him Piss-All Lal because he used to piss in his bed every night.’

It was true, Bardo’s birth name was Pesheval Lal. When he first came to Neverness, he had been a skinny, terrified, homesick boy who had loved to recite romantic poetry and who had pissed in his bed every night. Half of the novices and masters had called him ‘Bardo,’ and the other half, ‘Piss-All.’ But after he had begun lifting heavy weights above his head and had taken to spending the nights with bought women so that he wet his bed with the liquids of lust instead of piss, few had dared to call him anything but ‘Bardo.’

‘Well,’ Tomoth said as he clapped his hands at the novice behind the bar. ‘Piss-All and the Bastard will toast with us before they leave.’

The novice filled our mugs and tumblers. Bardo looked at me; I wondered if he could hear the blood pounding in my throat or see the tears burning in my eyes.

‘Freyd,’ Tomoth said. ‘To the dead of Sodervarld.’

I was afraid I was about to cry from rage and shame, and so, looking straight into Tomoth’s ugly metal eyes, I picked up my tumbler and tried to swallow the fiery skotch in a single gulp. It was the wrong thing to do. I gagged and coughed and spat all at once, spraying Tomoth’s face and yellow moustache with tiny globules of amber spit. He must have thought that I was mocking him and defiling the memory of his family because he came at me without thought or hesitation, came straight for my eyes with one hand and for my throat with the other. There was a ragged burning beneath my eyebrow. Suddenly there were fists and blood and elbows as Tomoth and his brothers swept me under like an avalanche. Everything was cold and hard: cold tile ground against my spine, and hard bone broke against my teeth; someone’s hard nails were gouging into my eyelid. Blindly, I pushed against Tomoth’s face. For a moment, I thought that cowardly Bardo must have slipped out the door. Then he bellowed as if he had suddenly remembered he was Bardo, not Piss-All, and there was the meaty slap of flesh on flesh, and I was free. I found my feet and punched at Tomoth’s head, a quick, vicious, hooking punch that the Timekeeper had taught me. My knuckles broke and pain burned up my arm into my shoulder joint. Tomoth grabbed his head, dropping to one knee.

Soli was behind him. ‘Moira’s son,’ he said as he bent over and reached for the collar of Tomoth’s fur to keep him from falling. Then I made a mistake, the second worst mistake, I think, of my life. I swung again at Tomoth, but I hit Soli instead, smashing his proud, long nose as if it were a ripe bloodfruit. To this day, I can see the look of astonishment and betrayal (and pain) on his face. He went mad, then. He ground his teeth and snorted blood out of his nose. He attacked me with such a fury that he got me from behind in a head hold and tried to snap my neck. If Bardo had not come between us, peeling Soli’s steely hands away from the base of my skull, he would have killed me.

‘Easy there, Lord Pilot,’ Bardo said. He massaged the back of my neck with his great, blunt hand and eased me towards the door. Everyone stood panting, looking at each other, not quite knowing what to do next.

There were apologies and explanations, then. Lionel, who had held himself away from the melee, told Tomoth and his brothers that I had never drunk skotch before and that I had certainly meant them no insult. After the novice refilled the mugs and tumblers, I said a requiem for the Sodervarld dead. Bardo toasted Tomoth, and Tomoth toasted Soli’s discovery. And all the while, our Lord Pilot stared at me as blood trickled from his broken nose down his hard lips and chin.

‘Your mother hates me, so there should be no surprise that you do too.’

‘I’m sorry, Lord Pilot. I swear it was an accident. Here, use this to wipe your nose.’

I offered him my handkerchief, but he pretended not to see my outstretched hand. I shrugged my shoulders, and I crumpled the linen to sponge the blood out of my eye. ‘To the quest for the Elder Eddas,’ I said as I raised my tumbler. ‘You’ll drink to that, won’t you, Lord Pilot?’

‘What hope does a journeyman have of finding the Eddas?’

‘Tomorrow I’ll be a pilot,’ I said. ‘I’ve as much a chance as any pilot.’

‘Yes, chance. What chance does a young fool of a pilot have of discovering the secret of life? Where will you look? In some safe place, no doubt, where you’ve no chance of finding anything at all.’

‘Perhaps I’ll search where bitter and jaded master pilots are afraid to.’

The room grew so quiet that I heard the spatter of my uncle’s blood-drops against the floor.

‘And where would that be?’ he asked. ‘Beneath the folds of your mother’s robes?’

I wanted to hit him again. Tomoth and his brother laughed as they slapped each other on the back, and I wanted to break my uncle’s bleeding, arrogant face. I have always felt the hot pus of anger too keenly and quickly. I wondered if it had been an accident that I had hit him; perhaps it was my fate (or secret desire) to have hit him. I stood there on trembling legs staring at him as I wondered about chance and fate. The heat of the glowing fire was suddenly oppressive. My head was pounding with blood and skotch, and my eye felt like molten lava, and my tongue was like syrup as I made the worst mistake of my life. ‘No, Lord Pilot,’ I blurted out. ‘I’ll journey beyond the Eta Carina nebula. I intend to penetrate and map the Solid State Entity.’

‘Don’t joke with me.’

‘I’m not joking. I don’t like your kind of jokes; I’m not joking.’

‘You are joking,’ he said as he stepped closer to me. ‘It’s just the silly brag of a foolish journeyman pilot, isn’t it?’

Through the haze of my good eye, I saw that everyone, even the young bartender, was staring at me.

‘Of course it was a joke.’ Bardo’s voice boomed as he farted. ‘Tell him it was a joke, Little Fellow, and let’s leave.’

I looked into Soli’s intense, fierce eyes and said, ‘I swear to you I’m not joking.’

He grabbed my forearm with his long fingers. ‘You swear it?’

‘Yes, Lord Pilot.’

‘You’ll swear it, formally?’

I pulled away from him and said, ‘Yes, Lord Pilot.’

‘Swear it, then. Say, “I, Mallory Ringess, by the canons and vows of our Order, in fulfilment of the Timekeeper’s summons to quest, swear to my Lord Pilot I will map the pathways of the Solid State Entity.” Swear it to me!’