The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  The stars here in the desert seem to fizz and leak, they are so bright. Their colors are discernible here, which they were not at home, with the faint film of pollution that came out of the town. And the constellations are subtly different here in the south. I can see the Kite and the Man of Fire, but the Swans are all out of alignment. Curiously, I can still see the Sailor’s Despair. I wonder whether this is because it is really a planet, and if so, why I no longer see the Maiden’s Hope. I have tried asking questions like this, but they don’t act as if mine are very clever questions.

  Second Fish Day, Demed, 986

  In the physics laboratory there is a machine that breathes. That’s all it does, and maybe “breathe” is a fanciful word: it’s a tube of very clear glass, clearer than most air, with a bladder of pink rubber in it that rises and falls with the rhythm of breath. There is also an effort like breath. You can see it hesitate for the moment at the bottom of the tube, and somehow it seems to compress before it finds the strength to go on again.

  I sat for a long time looking at the tube and the pink rubber thing in it. I thought that if I pressed it in my fist it would probably be so soft that it was unpleasant. The tube seemed to glow by itself. It was very hot, and I’m glad I only touched it with a mitt on. These are my observations.

  The bench it’s on isn’t one that’s normally used. I’m going to go there after morning prayers to have a look at who stands there now. I want to know how it does that, how it has the quirk of a person like the quirk of lips, how it moves against gravity. I swear I saw it speed up sometimes, as if in exertion. Then it was once again calm and slow.

  Second Plant Day, Demed, 986

  I found out what the rubber thing was.

  I was going back to clean after morning prayers today, and then a priest came in, earlier than the others. I do not know this one yet; she is new to the monastery and her name is Mother Haelene. No pilgrimage patches except just one, red, on the shoulder, like an epaulette. She had a nice gentle face, square and pink, and I liked her right away. I said, “Excuse me, Mother, is this your machine?”

  “It’s not really a machine.” She put on gloves and took it up, and it breathed all the while in its little glass case. “It’s made with magic. Just a toy.”

  “Then what’s the fun of it?”

  “Just to see what I can make. What I can do. Here,” she said, and hoisted it a little higher in her hands, and told me how she had made the bladder move, how she had inflated it with her own breath, how the air in the tube had been modified to drag it up and down, how even the little hungry movements that it made, like a body, had been consciously chosen. Then she carried the case to the big sink and, still gently smiling, hurled it down with great force. The sink was filled with shattered glass; the air was hot and sulfuric, and the little pink bladder flopped and twitched among the debris like a dying thing. I cried to see it there. The tears came too sudden to bite back, and I made to grab it, at least, out of the broken glass.

  She seized my wrist and took up the bladder with her other hand, squeezing it until it popped. She was still looking at me calmly and steadily. She said, “Don’t mistake this for something alive, Erathe. I broke that to show you.”

  I was still crying. I couldn’t help it, I was so far from home. She sighed and washed her hands at the sink, and brought me a clean dry towel and made me sit down. Then she knelt before me and took my hands, as if I were a child.

  “Erathe,” she said again. “Don’t confuse magic with life. Or with your work, God forbid — it is not something that can be studied. It’s irrational, it’s light, it’s something to use for pleasure. It’s a way to cut out steps, but in the dance of science, the steps are the point. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know what you mean. I know all the methods.” And I quoted her, “Inquiry, investigation, invariability.” (But I should have said something about wanting to put in inspiration.)

  “Look.” And she stood up, bracing herself on the edge of the worktable. “You may be only a child, Erathe, but you’re probably my senior in study. I’m one of the new women. The queen gave us permission to become priests retroactively, because it wasn’t allowed when we came of age. Before then I was a maid in the monastery of Lorians. The hours were long, the priests were unkind. I was a brilliant girl once, and I know that I don’t have that kind of power anymore, because it really is taken from you if enough people treat you like you have nothing to add. Do you know what it taught me, though? Besides patience?”

  “Respect for the system,” I said numbly.

  “Reverence,” she said. “Love, even. For science, for the scientific process. I’m not heartless. It bothered me to break that thing I made as much as it bothered you. But it was only magic. Magic is individual. We all come to it in different ways, and you need to find your own language for talking to it. But science speaks all languages, and once it’s done and done right, the advance you make is free, and it belongs to everyone. And to know more is to be more like God. We are enabling people — many of them not yet born — to advance, not only in our understanding of God’s world, but our understanding of God’s mind. All magic does is teach you what your own mind is like already. You don’t need to agree with all this, but I want you to think about it, and write it down, if you keep a diary. It’s something I wish I’d known when I was your age. Do you promise to think about it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I meant it. I know she was right, I know why I came here, but the bit of rubber made such an awful snapping sound, and I keep thinking of how it had moved among the broken glass. Haelene held me, and I cried myself out into her shoulder. I think she thought I was only homesick.

  Chapter 2

  Asam came from the edge of the continent, from the dusty beaches no empire wants. He came among the people and preached kindness and simplicity. They say he was nervous; they say he loved the poor. They say he wanted to know God, and was wise enough to see that the mountain was not His body but only His home. They say he wanted to climb the mountain, and that he thought that this was wrong. This is what we know about Asam.

  There were many who called him charlatan because he sold nothing, and who called him hypocrite because he was both a charlatan and a kind man, and who called him evil because he was both a charlatan and a hypocrite. And as these slanders built, Asam wept in confusion, for God had given him force but not strength; he was a statue of great height, but hollow within. It would be surmise to say that as he wept he looked to the mountain, which was not hollow.

  —The Gospel of the Unseen

  Disaine and I had landed in a tilled field, and we crushed the spring crops as we deflated and stored the balloon. We dragged it — pulling up roots behind it and leaving a deep track of earth — to the nearest road, and there, with dust now staining the basket with brilliant brown, we mounted it on a wheeled item Disaine kept for this purpose and began to drag it by ropes towards Garnerberg. The air down here was marvelously wet and thick. Its heat seemed a presence, and when I complained of it, Disaine gave me a spare robe, stained by pale dust and mud in colors unfamiliar to me. This was light and cool, and we proceeded to town identically arrayed.

  Disaine was silent for a while, hauling, and then said, “I’ll tell you another thing. The mountain goes higher than the air does.”

  “Of course. That’s common sense.”

  “You’d be surprised how hard common sense is to prove.”

  “You proved it?”

  She shrugged. “A man named Sprigwill proved it.”

  “Oh, right, I’ve heard of Sprigwill.”

  “And I did it seven years before him, but no one took me seriously. He did it from an armchair; I did it in a balloon. Hard, painstaking work that I built my own instruments for, because nobody else was even thinking about how to measure altitude all that precisely, much less the weight of the air, and it turns out the weight is the key to the height, not the other way
around. And believe me, there aren’t many who will concede that it’s common sense that the mountain goes above the air.”

  “Well, you won’t find anyone back home who disagrees. If God doesn’t go higher than the air, They’re not a very good sort of god.”

  “You wrote in your book,” she said after a while, “that you have a saying: don’t step on God’s face to climb higher.”

  “We do.”

  “But nearly all of you have climbed some of the mountain, if only to the monastery.”

  “Well, below a certain point, it’s not God’s face, is it? It’s Their back, or even Their hinder parts.”

  “I didn’t expect you’d be so flip about it.”

  I weighed my response before continuing, watching the sweat on the back of her neck, the way it slid into the raw silk of her collar. “I know the thing too well not to be flip about it.”

  “Of course,” she said, but I thought I caught a touch of disappointment in her voice.

  “Why on earth did you think I was an atheist?”

  She laughed. “Look, it’s complicated. I don’t believe in your faith. I doubted that you did —”

  “Because you liked me in the book, so you wanted to think I was rational like you.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’ve met a lot of fans. But at the same time, you also want me to believe it all, because you like a little superstition. It’s colorful.”

  “That is not at all fair.”

  “But it is true, right?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “What is it like?”

  She was silent. Her deep-set eyes were calm, but they held a certain look of betrayal; the calculation of words was failing her.

  “The truth is,” I said, “that I don’t know how to reconcile my faith with my life. I think about Saon and especially about Courer every damn day, about how the expedition ended, and I don’t know how I feel at all. Whether we were being hurt because we’d hurt God, because we’d stepped on Their sore wet body. Or whether I was right or wrong about — Them wanting other things for us. I have no idea. It all seems so much bigger than me. The big sundial of God’s shadow versus the little ticks of my heart, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Wow,” she said, and stopped abruptly and turned to me. The balloon skittered forward on the uneven ground, then stopped. “No wonder you don’t know how you feel, if you never stop thinking about it.”

  “Thinking and feeling aren’t opposites.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that thinking about a thing without stopping is a wonderful way to strip away all the reality from it.”

  “So far no luck.”

  “Ha,” she said, without mirth. “I think this could work, Lamat.”

  “Me too.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I love your book. The clear, pure spires of ice, and the bony granite, and the little priest who looked through a little window. But I wasn’t sure I’d like you.”

  “I doubt I’d like me either.”

  Her eyes glazed over — no, there was a glaze to her whole face, the bright color faded for a moment, blood pinched and drawn away. She said, “You’ve got real humility. You’re the one who should’ve been a priest, Lamat.”

  “I am a priest. Every Holoh is a priest.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “That’s how we see it.”

  She sighed and turned to pull at the rope again, but it didn’t seem to work. “I wish I could be humble, even for a moment. It would be restful. But if I let it happen, I know the world would haul me down like a flag.”

  “We can take a break.”

  “No,” she said, and gave the rope such a yank that the balloon hurled forward and almost ran into me. I took up my end and ran to catch up with her. “If I can’t do this, then I’m going to fail when the mountain tests me.”

  “Everyone fails,” I said. “That’s the idea. But we may fail later than some.”

  “Asam failed,” she said. “I’m certain of it. But to feel like Asam felt — even partly — he’s the only mystery left worth solving, Lamat. I’ve followed him all my life, or tried to. Now I’m ready to follow him the rest of the way.”

  “He mostly felt like shit,” I said, “if I know climbing.”

  She gave a little rattling laugh. “Well, I’ll know soon. The mysticism and the science both. The mountain may exhale clouds; I can read them. The glaciers may shed — what was it — clots of earth like tears —”

  “Clumps,” I said. “I had it clumps. Or dots. I wouldn’t have done clots and tears; those don’t match.”

  “Well, I can make tears by my own self,” she said, and gave the rope a fresh pull.

  We finally hauled the damn balloon into Garnerberg, which was once the Holoh’s city. Nobody knows that, so I bring it up whenever I mention the place, and someday maybe the memory will take root again in somebody. God, it’s a beautiful town. Alien to us now, of course, but it had a loose, vaporous quality like nothing on the mountain did — a lakeshore place, half roads and half canals. When it was warm, as it was today, it smelt of silt and roots, and we settled onto a park bench by a tree still blowing warm wet droplets from the morning’s rain.

  She was massaging her mutilated hand tenderly; my own hands were rather sore, even after a lifetime of handling rope. The ropes that we’d used to haul the balloon into town were heavy and coarse, very unlike the lean tools we use to climb the mountain. People looked at us as we sat, two robed women, one missing half a hand, the other half a face.

  “What’s in ’em?” I asked her. “The suits. Mechanics or magic?”

  She looked me dead in the eye and said, “Magic.”

  Chapter 3

  Asam said, “God’s home is not at the top of the mountain, but God’s home can be seen from there. The tip of the mountain is the piercing of the world; it is the pricking of God’s finger.”

  They asked him, “Is not God hurt,” for all the people were like Holoh then, and very afraid.

  And Asam said, “Nothing we do can hurt Him,” and tears came to his eyes.

  —The Gospel of the Waters

  She paid our tickets back up the mountain. We rode up to the village first class, in a sphere of tortured dark wood that leaked heat with every jolt. The bar was closed for the night by the time we arrived, but Dracani was still there, and we sat up with ginger gin after Disaine went to bed.

  I had first gotten close to Dracani because my husband was sleeping with his wife, and it had left both of us with little to do in the evenings. Now we sat in the low inescapable armchairs by the hearth and talked in the fragmented manner of old friends, shreds of unrelated chat brought up to warm at the fire and then set down again. I told him about the balloon, but nothing else.

  The spaces between my words and Dracani’s got longer until I heard him fall asleep. Then I went back out again, with beer to pour on Saon and Courer’s cairns. The earth must have been saturated with frozen booze, under those empty and symbolic graves — a body of ice, to replace the body of flesh. They hadn’t lived long enough to switch to the hard stuff.

  Well, we prepared for the climb. We started with short runs up and down the mountain’s main tourist track — to the monastery, and past it to the observatory, though Disaine refused to enter either of those places. She told me that there were people there she didn’t want to see, and God knows I understand what that’s like. But we climbed to them, came up to their gates, and turned back. She needed to acclimatize, and I needed to see her strength and her gait and her knowledge of the gear.

  All of them were adequate. And I was happy with that adequacy. It suggested the average of a fair amount of experience, rather than skills so freshly acquired that everything is either perfect or terrible. Her climbing resume wasn’t long, and she would always emphasize the wrong parts — Mt. Ksethari, for example, a sad-sack little hill of which she was inordinately proud. But her techniques were solid, and her patience
strong, and that was really all she needed.

  Because — and the Holoh try not to let this get around, to cut down on the idiots — but the mountain is not technically difficult. There are passages that are, foremost among them Asam’s Step, but much of it is like reading a long book: a great pane of white that must be traversed, and without skimming, because you may break yourself on the word you miss.

  I knew Disaine could take the Step, because she had done glaciers in the Huwlands and seemed to have no earthly idea that these were far more impressive climbs than Ksethari, or that she had learned from a master — Alois Misch, whom I had never met because our mountain was not dangerous enough for him. She even asked me if I knew Misch. Casually, like you’d ask any climber if they knew another climber. In response I declared her ready, and we turned our efforts to supplying.

  Disaine had a plan for this. We would make a series of small balloons and send them up, to be blown against the mountain at intervals by its murderous winds. I liked the idea of the balloons but complained of having to put them together — I have learned my stitches again, since I came to your school of medicine, but back then I did not sew. I had made a few parkas and sets of leggings for myself as a child, as we’re all taught, but since then I’d just bought them from Mabb the seamstress, as we all do. And Disaine got testy when I suggested hiring Mabb. She said that the first rule of ballooning is that every balloonist sews their own, and she ignored me when I said that these would be unmanned. So we worked at the fabric, and the worst of it was that she was so good at it. I was always skittering the needle over the cloth to stick it into my own flesh, sometimes so deep that I needed Disaine’s stronger fingers to pull it out. You needed great force to get it through that stuff — God knows what it was — and it was awful when that force was misdirected.