The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  The monastery. My God, it was a mad project. Two thousand feet above the highest Holoh village, an oval of stone built of the mountain itself — one winces to think of it, that wound in God’s thigh, the tissues light and soft as the tissues in the heads of the Southern priests, unused to the height and yet dwelling here in the fine rare air. Everything hurting everything else. Dry air, air whose masses you could practically catch on your tongue like snow. Disaine told me about masses, later and higher, and I have never been able to stop thinking of them since. The soft molecular grit of which we all are made.

  I used to do a good business guiding priests up to the monastery, in high summer when the snow began to run. All the splintered sects of the Southern Church have it as a holy place, and they go up there to play the pilgrim, to pray, and to fight — the people who are drawn there are the ones who are already querulous, vibrating with suppressed argument, the ones who are sick of harmony. That is why it is sometimes so hard to recognize the ones who want to die.

  I once guided an old priest of the Gospel of the Worms, who complained to me of Disaine’s order as I labored with him up the wet snow. His voice was soft and pitchy, and he said, “The Arit Brotherhood think that if you pile enough shit into a person’s skull, you can grow God in it.”

  I said, “They always seem like the opposite, to me. They’re only interested in knowledge, and knowledge is very dry soil. They don’t seem like they want to grow anything.”

  “No, no,” he said. I was holding out a patient hand to help him over a patch of snow, but he only stood there, dismayed. “You must respect them more than that.”

  “You don’t seem to.”

  “They think you can approach God by trying to know what God knows.” He made a little gesture, finally took my hand, and I hauled him along. “That only sets them apart from God, and it is because they are trying to be individual. The communion doesn’t happen until we mix with the earth, Lamat. The Holoh are right, to worship the mountain — the mountain is earth, it’s the flesh of the earth.”

  I was always glad when these trips were over, though I liked talking to all the priests, in my way. They were all eager to be liked, to curry a sort of favor. But I was happy to turn back and glissade down in silence, surrounded by light on all sides. The mountain on these rare sunny days is the very breath of the sun; the white snow reflects the sun and absorbs nothing.

  We got in just before the gates closed for the night. I knew the place well from guiding: stone shacks in the stone ring, lashed over with ropes and climbers’ detritus, and a great fire on a raised plinth in the center. It was a ceremonial fire, too high for anyone to use or enjoy, but it cast an attractive light on the tired granite of the buildings and over the snow, a feasty orange glow that spread out a long way beyond the wall and down the mountain.

  A mass of people were always here, in their separate huts and sanctuaries, priests and monks and pilgrims of all the disparate orders, scrumming and scrapping. The Arit hut was the biggest, with its booth selling the monastery’s pilgrimage patch. It was an attractive thing, dyed indigo by flowers that did not grow on the mountain, and meant to reflect the special quality of the sky by day.

  We rested in our room for a while, down on the first floor, with a thick window out into the courtyard. Disaine lay down on her side and stretched her long bones. It was early evening, the snow in the courtyard just starting to break into shadows, with the longer shadow of the wall moving to cover them. Soon it would be time for the cacophony of the evening prayer, but for now things were hushed and soft. Disaine looked as if she had something to say to me for a moment, and then she let her head fall to the pillow and her hand rest in front of her. The room was musty, and the evening light got caught in the old green brocades of our bedspreads.

  So the time passed. Now the priests were gathering themselves to pray, coming out of the walls and huts in their ceremonial silks or sackcloths or loincloths or furs, lighting incense on tin plates and at the ends of long sticks. Disaine heaved herself up and put on her robe over her sweater.

  “Going out?”

  “Feel like I have to.” And she went out the door, fingertips pressing her collar to her throat, walking in her rangy way. I went over and sat cross-legged on her bed. (And how my legs complained! I felt ancient, I felt dried-up, in a way that was not unpleasant.) Outside some of the priests were starting into their soft prayers, though the Arit were holding back. Theirs is one of the later definitions of sunset — the strict astronomical one, just before the sun disappears, because for a few moments afterward all we are seeing is the ghost of the sun.

  And from across the courtyard, I saw an old Arit priest approach Disaine. She was standing in an alcove, trying to be inconspicuous, her long feet in soft boots touching at the toes. But he saw her, and he came over — in his robe so patched that it looked clotted with red and blue, with his hair combed back in finite lines.

  They argued. She was tense, pushed back against the wall, her fingers spread over it, and then with one swift movement she pulled the robe from her neck and threw it in his face. He clutched at it, trying to pull it away, lost in the fabric. Then she was off, running back to our room, changing her mind, looking at the monastery gate, finding it closed, finally coming back in here and getting in bed and climbing under the covers. She said no more until after dark.

  I lay down and couldn’t sleep. I thought I was only hungry, so I ate some tinned biscuit, but it didn’t help. The darkness inside and the light outside both oppressed me. I said, “Disaine?”

  Silence.

  “You’re not an Arit any longer, are you.”

  Silence.

  “It’s okay. I’d kind of guessed.”

  All right, she was asleep, or faking it. So I got up and went outside.

  The monastery was quiet now, with only a few priests out on vigil, prayerbooks open before torches or lanterns, hooded heads bent low. (Some were priests and some were monks or nuns; honestly, I never knew the difference, and since the Arit call everyone priest, I never learned it from Disaine.) But there was a ladder up to the top of the wall, and I climbed this, needing to look at the snow and hear the quiet. It is difficult for me to come down off the mountain and back to the society of people. They always seem very small and mean before they lengthen out and become themselves again.

  The view was very fine tonight. The moon was bright, and there were furrows of hot white in the snow where climbers had glissaded down toward the village. Scars in God’s face. You would have loved this, to see those scars. You were born for slicing elegant lines, born for the view. I know you’d say that scars on a person are more interesting than scars on a landscape, but trust me, if you saw a really perfect view, you’d know how to look at it.9

  * * *

  9 I feel like I should say something romantic here, like, “Girl, I’ve seen one.” You are a view to me, though, you know. I don’t understand how someone like you, whose very breath is a cool breeze, can be here with us. I understand you when we’re studying, when you point out that a person we’re treating has a darkening mole, when you’re talking to me about drinking or bartending, gravely pointing out the layers of flavor and acid in a cocktail — I know your mind, sure and methodical as it is. But sometimes you scent the breeze or look at a staircase, even, with that flash of calculation, and then I feel like — how can we possibly know each other, when you’ve seen all that you’ve seen? How can someone I go to bed with every night have such a store of bitter history within her, such that were I even to slit you with a thumbnail, it would break out?

  * * *

  The Arit priest who had argued with Disaine was sitting in a folding chair on the wide top of the wall. When I saw him I hesitated for too long, and he saw me. He said, “Lamat Paed.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think I’ve actually had the honor. I was in your book.” And then, “Don’t you remember me?”

  “Not by name.”

  “A little priest in a l
ittle window, pink-faced and pink-scalped,” he recited.

  Looking at him now, very detailed and precise in the folded-paper lines of his skull, I felt apologetic about writing him into the book as half a shape. I said, “Disaine quoted that line to me.”

  “Oh,” he said, “Disaine.”

  He took a sip of his tea and then spat a line of brown into the snow below the wall.

  “Cold?”

  “Yes.” He put the cup down by his side. “My name is Father Alused. I knew Disaine years ago. Or Erathe, I suppose I should say. I always forget not to use the holy name.”

  He took a moment to murmur a prayer, a soft vibration in the cold air, and then he was silent, as if he had forgotten what he was saying or avoiding. He looked tired, too used to being out here in the night, a little bashful before the sky. Just when I thought to take my leave, he said, “It was when we were young. When her star was rising. She was a phenomenon then. She dazzled everyone.”

  “I didn’t get the impression she was much liked.”

  “Oh, no. She was adored. She was, for a brief while, the Arit of Arit. Or we thought she was. It was — a strange thing, how she changed. Or maybe she’d always been that way.”

  “Been what way?”

  “A liar.”

  “I don’t care if she’s a liar,” I said. I don’t know why, but I really didn’t — I still don’t. My body was hot with anger. “She saved my life.”

  “That’s good,” he said, quiet, abstracted. “I’m glad she has a friend, still.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well — half the things she talked about, half her research, couldn’t be replicated or even understood. For a long time we were standing on the hair, you know, about whether she was a genius or just completely outside of normal understanding of things. And before you say you can be both, it doesn’t matter if you’re a genius if you’re also completely outside the normal understanding of things. But after a while we realized it couldn’t be true, even if she believed it was. And she treated research money like her own — by the end, she outright stole it. For flying, for her balloons. By then she didn’t care about her vocation at all. She was on to the next thing.”

  “But the suits work,” I said.

  “What the hell do they do?” he said, and I saw the Arit in him, that glittering curiosity that couldn’t be dulled. “They give you sweet air?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like God gave to Asam,” he said quietly. “There really is something about her, still. She has her finger on it.”

  “Did you argue about her wearing her robe?”

  “How did you know?” He looked out at the snow again. He murmured another prayer. Then he said, “I wanted her to be right. I wanted to be kind to her today. I succeeded at neither. She’s not an Arit now — and not by her choice. I couldn’t let her wear it within these walls.”

  A long moment went by, and a few more timed prayers. Then he wiped at his face, got up, picked up his chair.

  “Is that it for the night?”

  “For me, yes.” He looked at me, and I saw the weary hooks of flesh around his mouth. “Lamat. Does it hurt you, to have us live in this — this fortress, on your god?”

  “The mountain isn’t God,” I said. “It’s the body of God.”

  “And the distinction matters?”

  “In a way. If someone hurts your body, if someone even touches you in a sore spot, you howl; you lash out. God is good, but even God can’t resist anger when you wound Their body. But...”

  “I want to hear it,” he said, “and I’m quite tired.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me if you build here, nor to Them. I mean, it’s unsightly, and I am sure it does hurt. But only the Holoh can really hurt God. That’s part of the deal, too.”

  “I will never understand that.”

  “And I’ll never understand you. You think you’ve moved past having a God who has flesh, as if that’s something you just graduate from. But if you divorce the spirit too much from the body, you lose your grip on everything.”

  “I see.” He shifted the chair in his hand. “You may be right. I don’t know.”

  “It’s good to hear that,” I said. “Honestly. That ‘may.’”

  “Let me give you my blessing.”

  I hesitated. He added, “Oh, you may as well. Sometimes you do well to take blessing from other people’s faiths. They have that mystic air that our own tend to lack.”

  “All right, then.” I made as if to get up, but he motioned me back down onto the bare snow of the wall, made his gestures, clasped his hands as if around something thin and frightened, and parted them abruptly.

  “So I stole the money for this trip,” Disaine said through her scarf, as we climbed down toward the village. “And most of it’s gone.”

  “Fuf,” I said, or some approximation of that. I was sucking on the inside of my own scarf, a terrible habit I’d had since childhood, and now I spat the fibrous mass out.

  “Is that cool with you?”

  “Why would it ever be cool with me?”

  “I guess there’s a reason I wasn’t straight about it.”

  “Well, Father Alused told me you’d done it before.”

  “Oh — Alused.” We were descending a thick straight slope, but below us there was glacial ice, and she took out her axe, twirled it in her hand. “I should have known he’d tell you something.”

  “He said he knew you once. Admired you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.” She stuck the axe into the snow and leaned there resting, looking out over the clear blue of the glacier to the greener lands beneath. After so long looking only at white and gray, green can sear the eye, too. “You guessed I got kicked out of the Arit Brotherhood?”

  “Well — I suspected.”

  “How long did you suspect me and not say anything?”

  “Disaine, it doesn’t matter.”

  “So it matters that I stole, but not that I lied?”

  “Lying is a victimless crime.”

  “It was more complicated than that,” she said. “I didn’t wholly know —”

  “I want to have this argument in front of a fire,” I said, and took up my axe and motioned for her to do the same. She didn’t move.

  “You want to hear about the first time I stole?”

  “I repeat my point about the fire.”

  “Oh, fine, then!” she said, and snatched up her axe, but as we began to cross the glacier — a shallow slope that gathered strength as you descended, firm new ice without much crevassing — she kept talking. “I was in Garnerberg, doing some research on noctilucent clouds. Do you know what those are?”

  “No.”

  “They’re the clouds you see at sunrise and sunset, very high, very thin — made of ice. I hope to see some from above when we get closer to the summit, hoping to God that we ever get to climb again. I was doing a lot of records reviewing, and it wasn’t going well, so I went to this demonstration in the park. It only went up about a hundred feet, and it was on a rope. The balloonist was flattered to have a priest on board, I think. Nobody understood then what balloons could do for meteorological research; they were stupid then, and they’re stupid now. But what I found up there wasn’t knowledge. It was ecstasy.”

  Her probing axe-handle found a narrow crevasse, perhaps a foot wide, but very deep. We stepped over and then had a tricky walk over some older ice, almost rotten ice, that this newish glacier must have captured and carried with it down the mountain.

  “I hadn’t seen ecstasy since I was eighteen,” she said in a low voice. “The air was thick and rich as honey, and the silence was perfect. It wasn’t that I took the money deliberately to hurt anyone, or even deliberately to steal. It’s just that I needed to save my soul, which had barely breathed for years. Do you know what it is, to give up and then to find hope again?”

  “Nope. Hold on. We should rappel the rest of this.”

  “We don’t need to. It’s shallow enoug
h.”

  “You can talk while I put in the screws,” I said, and she seemed to accept that. She put her pack down on the ice, and I set up the rope while she told me the rest of the story.

  “It’s really good, Lamat. It is a fairly good feeling.” Just a touch of bitter humor.

  “Which is it, then, real or fair?”

  “You’re testy today.”

  “You didn’t tell me we were out of money.”

  “We had other goddamn things to think about.”

  “Well, that was back when you left the Arit,” I said. “Where’d you get the money for this?”

  She looked up and away, and there was a softness in her flat gray eyes that I had not seen before. They were eyes made for hardness, with a sharp edge to the iris. “Oh, it’s not easy to talk about. It was — these people.” She sat down on her pack. “Do you mind if I don’t say much?”

  “Go on, Disaine.”

  “For the past five years or so, I’ve been living in a convent. Followers of the Gospel of the Chord. Do you know them?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “I didn’t expect so,” she said softly. “There’s just a few of them, and they never come up to the mountain.”

  Silence, wind in her fur.

  “They were a really serious poverty order,” she said. “And they took me in when nobody else would, after I lost my first balloon. See, I had a fire. Two people died.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Tourists,” she said, a little bitterly. “Women who wanted to sketch the mountain and the treeline. One of them had to convince the other, I seem to remember. ‘Oh, it’ll be fun!’”

  “So, the fire...”

  “Blown into a tree,” she said. “When we were descending. Kicked the balloon right in the head; there was smoke and ash everywhere. I was the strongest of the three of us, and I got out of the basket and into the branches. One of them was pleading with me, but she was too scared to really move, and whenever I took her hand, it was just a hand. No force in the muscle. Finally I had to leave her.” I heard her swallow. “I always think — what it must have been like to see me so ineffectual. I built a lot on my reputation and my look in those days; I know what I look like. To see this strong old priest who’s supposed to take you up on a Rat Day, as dry and good as bread, and she can’t save you — in your final moments she’s just a picture to you. A portrait with an awkward smile.” She paused and then said vehemently, “I deserved it. Son of a bitch.”