The Broken God

‘Yes, life, shaida,’ Soli said finally. ‘Shaida.’

Something in the way Soli stared into his tea made Danlo feel a sharp pain inside, over his liver. He worried that Soli secretly blamed him for bringing shaida to their tribe. Was such a thing possible, he wondered? Could he, with his strange young face and his wildness, bring the slow evil to the Patwin tribe as well? He felt shame at these thoughts, then, felt it deep in his chest and burning up behind his eyes. He tried to speak, but for once, his voice had left him.

Soli stirred his lukewarm tea with his forefinger. The two fingers next to it were cut off; the scars over the knuckle stumps were white and shiny. ‘To the east,’ he said at last, ‘is the Unreal City. Some call it the City of Light, or … Neverness. We could go there.’

Danlo had slumped down into his furs; he was as tired as a boy could be and still remain among the living. But when he heard Soli speak of the mythical Unreal City, he was suddenly awake. He was suddenly aware of his heart beating away as it did when he was about to spear a charging shagshay bull. He sat up and said, ‘The Unreal City! Have you really been there? Is it true that shadow-men live there? Men who were never born and never die?’

‘All men die,’ Soli said softly. ‘But in the Unreal City, some men live almost forever.’

In truth, Soli knew all about the Unreal City because he had spent a good part of his life there. And he knew everything about Danlo. He knew that Danlo’s blood parents were really Katharine the Scryer and Mallory Ringess, who had also lived in the City. He knew these things because he was Danlo’s true grandfather. But he chose not to tell Danlo the details of his heritage. Instead, he sipped his tea and cleared his throat. And then he said, ‘There is something you must know. Haidar would have told you next year when you became a man, but Haidar has gone over, and now there is no one left to tell you except me.’

Outside the hut, the wind was blowing full keen, and Danlo listened to the wind. Haidar had taught him patience; he could be patient when he had to be, even when the wind was blowing wild and desperately, even when it was hard to be patient. Danlo watched Soli sipping his tea, and he was sure that something desperately important was about to be revealed.

‘Haidar and Chandra,’ Soli forced out, ‘were not your blood parents. Your blood parents came from the Unreal City. Came to the tribe fifteen years ago. Your mother died during your birth, and Haidar and Chandra adopted you. That is why you are different from your brothers and sisters. Most men of the City look as you do, Danlo.’

Danlo’s throat ached so badly he could barely speak. He rubbed his eyes and said simply, ‘My blood parents … There are others who look like me, yes?’

‘Yes, in the Unreal City. It is not shaida to have a face such as yours; you did not bring this shaida to our people.’

Soli’s explanation cooled Danlo’s shame of being left alive. But it brought to mind a hundred other questions. ‘Why did my blood parents come to Kweitkel? Why? Why wasn’t I born Devaki as all Devaki are born? Why, sir?’

‘You don’t remember?’

Danlo shut his burning eyes against the oilstone’s light. He remembered something. He had an excellent memory, in some ways a truly remarkable memory. He had inherited his mother’s ‘memory of pictures’: when he closed his eyes, he could conjure up in exact colour and contour almost every event of his life. Once, two winters ago, against Haidar’s warnings, he had rashly gone out to hunt silk belly by himself. A silk belly boar had found him in a copse of young shatterwood trees; the boar had charged and laid open his thigh with his tusk before Danlo could get his spear up. He was lucky to be alive, but it wasn’t his luck that he most remembered. No, what he saw whenever he thought about that day was Chandra’s fine needlework as she sewed shut his wound. He could see the bone needle pulling through the bloody, stretched-out skin, the precision stitching, each loop of the distinctive knot Chandra used to tie off his wound. Inside him was a whole universe of such knots of memories, but for some reason, he had almost no memory of the first four years of his life. Somewhere deep inside there was a faint image of a man, a man with piercing blue eyes and a sad look on his face. He couldn’t bring the image to full clarity, though; he couldn’t quite see it.

He opened his eyes to see Soli staring at him. He drew his furs up around his naked shoulders. ‘What did my father look like?’ he asked. ‘Did you know my father? My mother? The mother of my blood?’

Soli sipped the last of his tea and bent to pour himself another cup. ‘Your father looked like you,’ he said. Then his face fell silent as if he were listening to something, some animal cry or sound far away. ‘Your father, with his long nose, and the hair – he never combed his hair. Yes, the wildness, too. But you have your mother’s eyes. She could see things clearly, your mother.’

‘You must have known them very well, if they lived with the tribe. Haidar must have known them, too.’

Danlo closed his eyes again and tried to shut out the wind whispering just beyond the snow blocks above his head. Inside him, there were other sounds, other whispers. He remembered the way Choclo and some of the other men would sometimes look at him strangely, the way their voices would drop into whispers whenever he surprised them in some dark corner of the cave. He had always imagined that everyone was talking about him when he wasn’t there to listen. There were darker memories, too: He had once overheard Chandra and Ayame talking about a satinka, a witch who had worked her evil and brought shaida to her people. He had thought the story was of the dreamtime, the time of the ancestors, the eternal, in-destructible time that was at once the history and the communal dreaming state of his people. He must have been wrong, he thought. Perhaps there had been a real satinka in the tribe. Perhaps this satinka had bewitched his blood mother and father.

‘Yes, Haidar knew your blood parents,’ Soli admitted.

‘Then what were their names? Why didn’t he tell me?’

‘He would have told you when you became a man, during your passage. There is more to the story, things a boy should not have to think about.’

‘I am almost a man,’ Danlo said. The set of his face was at once open and pained, innocent and hard. ‘Now that Haidar is dead, you must tell me.’

‘No, you are not a man yet.’

With his long fingernails, Danlo scraped frost off the ruff of his sleeping furs. He tried to make out his reflection in the glazed hut walls above him, but all he could see was his shadow, the outline of his face and wild hair darkening the milky white snow. ‘I am almost a man, yes?’

‘Next deep winter, after your passage, then you will be a man.’ Soli yawned and then said, ‘Now it is time to sleep. We must hunt tomorrow, or we will starve and join the rest of the tribe on the other side.’

Danlo thought hard for a while. He had a naturally keen mind made all the keener by the mind tools Soli had given him in secret. Ever since he could remember, Soli had taken him alone into the forest to draw figures in the hard-packed snow. He had taught him geometry; he had taught him about things called spheres and strange attractors and the infinities. Proof structures and topology, and above all the beautiful, crystalline logic which ordered the universe of number. Logic – even though Danlo found it a strange and wild way of thinking, he loved to argue logically with Soli.

He held his hand up to his mouth to cover a smile, then said, ‘The journey across the eastern ice to the Unreal City will be long and hard, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Soli said. ‘Very hard.’

‘Even a man might not complete such a journey – Totunye, the bear, may hunt him, or the Serpent’s Breath might strike him and kill him with cold, or –’

‘Yes, the journey will be dangerous,’ Soli broke in.

‘What if I were left alone to find the City?’ Danlo asked softly. ‘Or if the slow evil found you at last out on the ice? What if the shadow-men in the Unreal City do not know halla? Maybe the shadow-men would kill you for your meat. If you died before my passage, sir, how would I ever become a man?’

For Danlo, as for every Alaloi boy, the initiation into manhood is the third most important of life’s transformations and mysteries, the other two being birth and death.

Soli rubbed his temples and sighed. He was very tired but he must have clearly seen the logic of Danlo’s argument, that he would have to make his passage a year before his time. He smiled at him and said, ‘Do you think you are ready, Danlo? You are so young.’

‘I am almost fourteen.’

‘So young,’ Soli repeated. ‘Even fifteen years is sometimes too young. The cutting is very painful, and there have been many boys older than you who were not ready for the pain of the knife. And then, after the cutting …’ He let his voice die off and looked at Danlo.

‘And then there is the secret knowledge, yes? The Song of the Ancestors?’

‘No, after the pain, there is terror. Sheer terror.’

He knew that Soli was trying to frighten him, so he smiled to hide his fear. The air inside the hut was steamy from the boiling tea and from their rhythmic exhalations; it was selura, wet cold – not as absolutely cold as white cold, but cold enough to lap at his skin like a thirsty seal and make him shiver slightly. He pulled himself down into his furs, trying to keep warm. All his life, from the older boys and young men, he had heard rumours about the passage into manhood. It was like dying, Choclo had once said, dying transcendently, ur-alashara; it was like going over, not to the other side of day, but going over oneself to find a new, mysterious world within. He thought about what it would be like to go over, and he tried to sleep, but he was too full of death and life, too full of himself. All at once, his whole body was shivering beyond his control. He had an overwhelming sense that his life, every day and night, would be supremely dangerous, as if he were walking a snowbridge over a crevasse. He felt wild and fey in anticipation of making this eternal crossing. And then, deep inside, a new knowledge sudden and profound: he loved the dark, wild part of himself as he loved life. Ti-miura halla, follow your love, follow your fate – wasn’t this the teaching of a hundred generations of his people? If he died during his passage, died to himself or died the real death of blood and pain, he would die in search of life, and he thought this must be the most halla thing a man could do.

The shivering stopped, and he found himself smiling naturally. ‘Isn’t terror just the left hand of fate?’ he asked. ‘Will you take me through my passage tomorrow, sir?’

‘No, tomorrow we shall hunt shagshay. We shall hunt, then eat and sleep to regain our strength.’

‘And then?’

Soli rubbed his nose and looked at him. ‘And then, if you are strong enough and keep your courage, you will become a man.’

Four days later, at dusk, they strapped on their skis and made the short journey to Winter Pock, a nearby hill where the Devaki men held their secret ceremonies. Danlo was not allowed to speak, so he skied behind Soli in silence. As he planted his poles and pushed and glided through the snow, he listened to the sounds of the forest: the loons warbling with bellies full of yu berries; the clicking of the sleekits halfway out of their burrows, warning each other that danger was near; the wind keening across the hills, up through the great yu trees heavy with snow. It was strange the way he could hear the wind far off before he could feel it stinging his face. He listened for Haidar’s rough voice in the wind, and the voices of his other ancestors, too. But the wind was just the wind; it was only the cold, clean breath of the world. He hadn’t yet entered into the dreamtime, where his mother’s dying plaints and the moaning of the wind would be as one. He smelled sea ice and pine needles in the wind; as the light failed and the greens and reds bled away from the trees, the whole forest was rich with the smells of the freezing night and with life.

In silence, they climbed up the gentle slopes of Winter Pock. The hill was treeless and barren at the top, like an old man whose hair has fallen off the crown of his head. Set into the snow around a large circle were wooden stakes. Each stake was topped with the skull of a different animal. There were a hundred different skulls: the great, tusked skull of Tuwa, the mammoth; the skulls of Nunki and long, pointed skulls of the snow fox and wolf; there were many, many smaller skulls, those of the birds, Ayeye, the thallow, and Gunda and Rakri, and Ahira, the snowy owl. Danlo had never seen such a sight in all of his life, for the boys of the tribe were not allowed to approach Winter Pock. In the twilight, the circle of greyish-white skulls looked ominous and terrifying. Danlo knew that each man, after his cutting, would look up at the skulls to find his doffel, his other-self, the one special animal he would never again hunt. His doffel would guide him into the dreamtime, and later, through all the days of his life. Beyond this bit of common knowledge, Danlo knew almost nothing of what was to come.

Soli kicked off his skis and led him inside the circle of skulls. At the circle’s centre, oriented east to west, was a platform of packed snow. ‘When we begin,’ Soli said, ‘you must lie here facing the stars.’ He explained that it was traditional for the initiate boy to lie on the backs of four kneeling men, but since the men had all gone over, the platform would have to do. Around the platform were many piles of wood. Soli held a glowing coal to each pile in turn, and soon there were dozens of fires blazing. The fires would keep Danlo from freezing to death.

‘And now we begin,’ Soli said. He spread a white shag-shay fur over the platform and bade Danlo to remove his clothes. Night had fallen, and a million stars twinkled against the blackness of the sky. Danlo lay down on his back, with his head toward the east as in any important ceremony. He looked up at the stars. The lean muscles of his thighs, belly and chest were hard beneath his ivory skin. Despite the fires’ flickering heat, he was instantly cold.

‘You may not move,’ Soli said. ‘No matter what you hear, you may not turn your head. And you may not close your eyes. Above all, on pain of death, you may not cry out. On pain of death, Danlo.’

Soli left him alone, then, and Danlo stared up at the deep dome of the sky. The world and the sky, he thought – two halves of the great circle of halla enfolding all living things. He knew that the lights in the sky were the eyes of his ancestors, the Old Ones, who had come out this night to watch him become a man. There were many, many lights; Soli had taught him the art of counting, but he could not count the number of Old Ones who had lain here before him because it would be unseemly to count the spirits of dead men as one did pebbles or shells by the sea. He looked up at the stars, and he saw the eyes of his father, and his father’s fathers, and he prayed that he would not break the great circle with cries of pain.

After a while he began to hear sounds. There came sharp, clacking sounds, as of two rocks being struck together. As the fires burned over him, the rhythm of the clacking quickened; it grew louder and nearer. The sound split the night. Danlo’s right half knew that it must be Soli making this unnerving sound, but his left half began to wonder. He could not move his head; it seemed that the eyelight of the Old Ones was streaming out of the blackness, dazzling him with light. The clacking hurt his ear now and was very close. He could not move his head to look, and he feared that the Old Ones were coming to test him with terror. Suddenly, the clacking stopped. Silence fell over him. He waited a long time, and all he could hear was his deep breathing and the drumbeat of his heart. Then there came a dreadful whirring and whooshing that he had never experienced before; the air itself seemed to be splitting apart with the sound. The Old Ones were coming for him, his left side whispered. He dare not move or else they would know that he was still just a frightened boy. How could Soli be making such a sound, his right side wanted to know? He dare not move or Soli would have to do a terrible thing.

‘Danlo!’ a voice screamed out of the darkness. ‘Danlo-mi!’ It was not Soli who called to him; it was not the voice of a man. ‘Danlo, dorona ti-lot! Danlo, we require your blood, now!’

It was the voice of a terrible animal he had never heard before. It screamed like a thallow and roared like a bear, all at once. He began to tremble, or perhaps he was just shivering, he couldn’t tell which. Despite the intense cold, drops of sweat burst from his skin all across his forehead, chest, and belly. The animal screamed again, and Danlo waited motionless for it to tear at the throbbing arteries of his throat. He held his head rigid, pressing it down into the fur. He wanted to close his eyes and scream, but he could not. Straight up at the dazzling lights he stared, and suddenly the lights were gone. The animal was standing over him, bending low, blocking out the night sky. It wasn’t really an animal at all; it was the Beast of the young men’s stories. It had horns and great conical teeth like a killer whale; its cruel, hooked beak was dipping toward his face; its claws were the claws of the snow tiger, and they were sweeping down toward his belly and groin. He had never seen a man wearing a mask before, but even if he had, his left side would still be shouting that the Beast was about to rip away at him. He held himself very still.

‘Danlo, we require your blood!’ the Beast growled out again.

To live, I die, he thought, silently repeating the Devaki prayer of initiation.

Ever since he could remember, ever since he had seen the older men naked and looked between their legs with dread and wonder, he had known this moment must come. The Beast reached down and grasped his membrum. Its claws were cold and sharp against the shaft. In his fear and cold, his unprotected stones tightened up in their sac. He was very afraid; never had he known such a belly-tightening fear, not even when Haidar fell sick from the slow evil and began bleeding from his ears. The fear was all over him, like dead cold air falling down from the sky, suffocating him, clutching in his lungs. He was afraid the Beast would cut him, yes, afraid of the pain, but even more he dreaded convulsing like a frightened snow hare and trying to run away. And if he did that, he would be slain. The Beast would kill him for giving in to his fear. This thought, in turn, fed his fear, intensified it until the sweat poured off his ribs and soaked the furs beneath him. The wind began to blow, chilling him to the core, and he despaired because he felt himself falling through a black bottomless night from which there is no escape. Fear is the consciousness of the child – he remembered Haidar saying this once when they were lost out at sea. He stared up at the brilliant stars, waiting for the Beast to cut him, or tear open his throat, and in a moment of exhilaration he realized that he was here to surrender up his fear, or rather, to lose a part of himself, to let die his childish conception of himself as a separate being terrified of the world. All men must be tested this way, he knew, or else they could never become full men. Just then the Beast roared something into the night, a huge, angry sound that rattled the skulls surrounding him. He felt his foreskin being pulled away from the bulb of his membrum, and there was a tearing, hot pain. He clenched his jaws so hard he thought his teeth would break off in splinters and be driven into his gums; his muscles strained to rip apart his bones, and instantly, his eyes were burning so badly he could not see. He could still hear, though, and in many ways that was the worst of it, the crunching, ripping sound of his foreskin being torn away from his membrum. It hurts! he silently screamed. Oh, God, it hurts! The pain was a red flame burning up his membrum into his belly and spine. The pain ate him alive; the world was nothing but fire and pain. There came a moment when his body was like a single nerve connected to a vastly greater ganglia and webwork of living things: trees and stars and the wolves howling in the valleys below. He could hear the death scream of churo and yaga, and all the animals he had ever killed exploding from his own throat; he remembered the story of a Patwin boy who had died during his passage, and he felt a sudden pressure below his ribs, as if a spear or claw had pierced his liver. In one blinding moment, he saw again the faces of each member of his tribe as they prayed to be freed of the slow evil. The hurt of all these peoples and things, and everything, flowed into him like a river of molten stone. He ached to move, to scream, to pull himself up and run away. Only now, wholly consumed by the terrible pain that is the awareness of life, he was no longer afraid. Beyond pain, there was only death. Death was the left hand of life, and suddenly he beheld its long, cold fingers and deep lines with a clarity of vision that astonished him. Seen from one perspective, death was cruel and dreadful like a murderer’s hand held over a baby’s face; but from another, death was as familiar and non-frightening as the whorls of his father’s open palm. He would die, tonight or ten thousand nights hence – he could almost see the moment when the light would flee his eyes and join all the other lights in the sky. Even now, as the Beast tore at him, he was dying, but strangely he had never been so alive. He held himself quiet and still, listening to the wind beating through the trees and over the mountains. He heard a voice whispering that his membrum’s red bulb must be exposed to the cold air, just as the man within must finally shed his childlike skin of wishes and certitude and come to know the world as it really is. That was the way of all life, he heard the voice say. Life was always lived with death close at hand, and it was continually shedding death even as it made itself over to be born anew.

To live, I die, he told himself.

And inside him, despite the pain, at the centre of his deepest self was just sheer joy at being alive. In some sense, he would always be alive, no matter the killing coldness of the wind or fatal illnesses or any of a thousand other fates that he might suffer.

‘Danlo!’ the Beast howled out. ‘Your blood is red and flows like a man’s!’

Danlo listened to his deep breathing as other cuts were carved into his flesh, tiny cuts up and down the length of his membrum. He realized that it was Soli making these cuts and rubbing various coloured powders into them. The cuts would fester and then heal, and soon his membrum would be like that of any other Alaloi man: long and thick, and decorated with dozens of green and ochre scars.

‘Danlo, are you ready now?’

He felt something soft being wrapped around his membrum; it felt like feather moss held in place with a newl skin.

‘Danlo, you must gather your strength for the journey,’ a voice called out of the darkness. Then the Beast stood above him, gripping a gobbet of flesh between its bloody claws. ‘This piece of meat will sustain you. Open your mouth and swallow it without chewing.’

Danlo did as he was told. Like a baby bird, he opened his mouth and waited. Suddenly, he felt the raw bit of meat pressed into his mouth, back against his tongue. He swallowed once, convulsively, and he tasted fresh warm blood.

‘Danlo, this is the skin of your childhood. It will impregnate you like a seed. From the child grows the man. Are you ready to be a man, now?’

Again Danlo swallowed against the hot salty slickness of his own blood.

‘Danlo, wi Ieldra sena! Ti ur-alashareth. The ancestors are coming! It is time for you to go over now.’

His eyes were now calm and clear, and he looked up at the stars to see a million points of light streaming toward him.

‘Danlo, you may turn your head.’

Danlo blinked his eyes slowly. He turned and there was Soli standing over him. He was dressed as usual, in his winter furs; the terrible Beast was gone. ‘You have done well,’ he said.

He helped Danlo sit up and wrapped him in a fresh shagshay skin. There was blood everywhere, dark red soaking into the white furs. Danlo looked through the flickering red fires up at the circle of skulls. He must find the one animal who was his doffel. Soli would help him if his vision faltered, but it would be better if he came to his other-self unaided and alone.

‘Danlo, can you see?’

‘Yes.’

He was six thousand feet above men and time. He turned his head in a half-circle, and he could see many things. Below him were the dark forest and the starlit hills of his childhood, and farther out where the island’s ragged shore came up against the ocean, he beheld the faint, silvery shimmer of sea ice falling off to infinity. There were nearer sights. Soli’s face was drawn out ghastly and pale; he looked at once fey and ill, as if he were ready to die. Pain is the awareness of life, Danlo thought. His body still burned with pain, but his spirit had begun the journey through pain into a deeper world. He was beginning to see himself as he really was. Every act of his passage had been designed to bring him to this moment. His childish picture of himself, his old ways of thinking – shattered, like ice crystals beneath a hammer stone. There was a sudden clarity, an intensity of colour, shape, and meaning. Far above him, in the sky, the stars burned with a pale blue fire, and nearer, spread over his thighs and belly, was his deep red blood. Again, he looked up at the circle of skulls, at the bits of ivory gleaming in the blackness. Each skull was his skull; life was connected to life in ways he was just beginning to see. One skull, though, seemed to shimmer under the watchful eyes of the Old Ones. One skull called out to him. It was the skull of Ahira, the snowy owl. Ahira, the wisest and wildest of the animals. No other animal was so alive and free. And no other animal was so perilous to one’s spirit. In truth, he dreaded discovering that Ahira was his doffel, his other-self, for only once in ten generations was one born whose other-self is Ahira. He stared on and on waiting for this splendid bird to stop calling him, but at last he was sure that Ahira was his doffel. Ahira must guide him and help him go over to the trackless, unknown world where his deepest self lived.

Soli saw Danlo gazing at Ahira’s small, round skull. That the Devaki fathers had acquired a skull at all was something of a miracle, for Ahira was the rarest of all birds and hunters did not often catch sight of him.

‘This bird?’ Soli said. ‘Are you sure, Danlo?’

‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Ahira, the snowy owl.’

‘Full men know this bird as the white thallow. You should call him that, too.’

Everyone knew, of course, that owls were thallows, just as they knew that God was a great thallow whose body made up the universe. But among the Alaloi elders, from tribe to tribe, there was a dispute as to whether God was a silver thallow, or the blue thallow, or the rare white thallow whom children referred to as the snowy owl.

‘Ahira is my doffel,’ Danlo said.

‘Very well,’ Soli said. Then he magically produced a musty leather bag stuffed with various objects. He rummaged around in the bag and removed a single, white feather. He gave it to Danlo, placing it between his folded hands. ‘This is the wing feather of the white thallow,’ he said. ‘The white thallow is your doffel.’

Danlo looked down at the feather. Its whiteness was as pure as snow. Along its edge it was rough and fuzzy, the better to muffle the sound of Ahira’s beating wings. Ahira was a magnificent hunter, and he could swoop down toward his prey in almost total silence. With a little bone clip that Soli gave him, Danlo fastened the feather to his long hair. Soli began to chant, then, and a world whose snowfields were pure and vast opened before him. Danlo entered into the dreamtime, into the altjiranga mitjina of his people. The shock of pain and terror (and his newfound ability to overcome his attachment to terror) had hurled him into this world. He listened to Soli chant, listened as the Old Ones began to speak to him. New knowledge was revealed to him, secrets that only a man may know. Soli chanted the lines of the Song of Life. The Song was a new way of structuring reality, a system of symbol and meaning connecting all things of the world to the great circle of halla. There are four thousand and ninety-six lines to this song; Soli chanted quickly, his deep voice rasping out the music. He told of how the lesser god, Kweitkel, had created the world from single pieces of rock and ice. He told of Kweitkel’s wedding with Devaki, and of their children, Yelena, Reina and Manwe. Danlo learned that on the third morning of the world, wise Ahira had befriended Manwe and taught him to love flying, hunting, and mating, and the other things of life. Manwe and Ahira – the Two Friends, two of the oldest of the Old Ones. Danlo listened to the Song of Life, and he joined them in the dreamtime. The dreamtime was now, the shall-be and always-was. The dreamtime occurred in the Now-moment, the true time in which the world was forever created anew.

‘Ali wos Ayeye,’ Soli chanted. ‘God is a great, silver thallow whose wings touch at the far ends of the universe.’

Danlo listened to the Song of Life’s sixty-fourth line. Now, and over the next three days, he must learn every line exactly as Soli chanted it because someday he would repeat the Song to a son or near-son of his own. Pain was the most potent of mnemonics; pain had awakened him to record the rise and fall and each liquid vowel; pain, and the intensity of pain, had prepared his mind and spirit to remember perfectly.