The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  Then the salesgirl came up and said that I looked Holoh, and she was so happy to be right that I let her drape the cheap summer coat over my shoulders and smooth the ratty velvet, and rent it at a ten percent discount. Disaine was still in the dressing room when I had finished paying. I went to stand at her door and said quietly, “He’s not here.”

  “Well, he might not be. You hear that his sort like to come here and meet at night. If he isn’t here, we’ll look other places.”

  “We don’t have the money to stay in Catchknot for long. And anyway, I know he’s not. There’s two sets of clothes for every kind of person, right? There’s two Holoh sets here.”

  “He’s here,” said the salesgirl suddenly. I looked over at her through the haze of perfume. She was pulling a length of cloth between her fingers. “A Holoh gentleman, he comes here almost every week. He has his own outfit.”

  “Lamat!” called Disaine, and flung open the door to the dressing room. “Look at this!”

  She had on a wonderful dress with all sorts of puffs and irregularities, pale blue, with pompomed gloves. It brought out the curve of her body; it made her raw face look like a man’s, though right now that face was streaming wet and transformed with pleasure. “Som — by-the-Waterrrrrr!”

  We went out into the garden. The heat drummed down; flashes of bodies and clothing moved among the trees in the late red sunlight. My fingertips buzzed, and the edges of my vision were dark. I thought I might pass out, from altitude or from fear. In all the world I think he was the only thing I was really afraid of.

  Then we saw him. He was advancing toward us down a narrow concrete path, looking at the ground. I called out his name, and he raised his noble head and looked at us for a moment — again like an animal, I thought, surprised at drink.

  He had been as fair as spring when I had left him. Now he was a summer beauty, the colors of his face full-blown, with a humid quality to him. His teeth looked warm and, in their whiteness, strangely soft. This is what happens to some plants taken off the mountain. They take root here and grow verdant, and you would not have known that they were the same species that put out three precise gray leaves outside your house in the village.

  He wore a coat like mine, but finer and better-fitting, made really for him — with a proper shirt underneath of sky-pink silk, and wide sleeves cut to let the summer in. I imagined the relief of the breeze on his arms. He raised a hand in greeting, and when he reached us he spread the backs of his fingers to us in the southern style.

  “Lamat,” he said.

  His face was thinner than the one I had known, as if burnt down a little by its rising color. He raised his fingers higher and clumsily I took them, lacing my fingertips briefly through his. When it was Disaine’s turn she smiled as if someone had placed candy on her tongue, and executed the maneuver with real grace.

  “Mother Disaine,” she said. “And you are Daila Paed?”

  “I don’t use that name,” he said. He had picked up a stranger’s accent, and a light strain in his voice. “You can, though, if you want.”

  We walked a little distance through the garden, with its tracks of pale gray faintly illuminated by the orange sun. This part of it was shadowed by heavy trees; it was only in the lower part of the park that the grass spread out shallow and green, entangling the feet. I found that he was still nice to look at. I found that I could breathe. I found that I could even imagine asking him for money, for anything, although I could not imagine him saying yes. He had been so outsized to me for so long, and his anger outsized too. That anger always took the form of disbelief — that you would do this to him; that you would distract him from his purpose.

  I saw glints of that anger now. I would have recognized it in darkness, from the crinkle of his sleeve, from the raw touch of his breath. But I saw less of it than I had expected. He seemed amused more than angry, though not very much amused. I saw the archness with which he wore his costume, in which he looked more Holoh than Holoh. The thought flashed into my mind that an arch is the strongest shape in architecture. It can withstand a blow from above.

  “Well,” he said. “Lamat, who is this woman.”

  “I’m Lamat’s climbing partner,” said Disaine. “We’re here to talk to you about an expedition.”

  Daila laughed, a big delighted laugh that hit his face with sudden red. “I don’t climb anymore except socially.”

  “We’re not here to recruit you for it.”

  “I see.” He was mock-grave, though only I could see it. Daila is like — like one of those lenticular pictures, where if you stand to one side you see one thing, and if you stand to the other side, you see another. He was always like that. I liked it when we were young, because he could use it to tell a joke only I would get, because he could make me feel like I was all he saw. I always associated it with his right eye that wandered, because it seemed he could look in two places at once.

  He pushed up his sleeves now, and I saw the hard bands of muscle and scarring. A guide’s arm, burned by sun and rope. He looked out over the Black Garden, toward the mountain. The attraction of the Garden is that at sunset you can see the mountain pierce the sun and consume it. “Lamat, where did you find a priest?”

  “I was the one who found her,” said Disaine, and now there was an edge to her voice.

  “Well, it can’t have been that hard. There’s a book about her.”

  He was still smiling, left over from his laugh. Disaine said, “That’s true. It’s a great book.”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  “Daila,” I said. “I’m sorry. Disaine is a fine climber. And she’s invented some devices.” I faltered; Daila was looking at me with both eyes. “Some very good devices, which let us climb in safety practically as high as you can go.”

  “Practically,” said Disaine in offense, and then reconsidered. “Yes! Practically is the word. It makes the climb practical, for the first time.”

  He was looking at us in incomprehension. Finally, of the various things that he might have said, he chose, “Why are you talking to me?”

  “Because you’re the only person we know who has money,” said Disaine. Good, I thought — Daila wants the honest answer at moments like that. “We’ve climbed part way once. But we don’t have the money to do it again. And we need you. This wasn’t easy for Lamat —”

  “I don’t care how it is for Lamat,” he said, gently, informationally. “I don’t think you have anything on me, ladies. I mean if you’re going to tell the authorities that I’m involved in organized crime, they know.”

  “Nothing like that,” said Disaine. “Nothing like that!”

  “So this is an ordinary business proposition? You want to sell me these things you’ve made, maybe, so I can use them to smuggle booze underwater and the like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t think this out, did you?”

  “Listen, Lamat was fucking excommunicated yesterday.”

  “Twenty years too late,” he said, and each letter, each syllable, was a bruiseless blow. “Good, then. So you’re coming to me like two peddlers, here to talk up the virtues of your knives and thread. But these are magical knives and thread, which can cut stone and sew broken hearts.”

  “They are,” said Disaine. “They are magical. I don’t know why you’re not just letting me talk—”

  She meant it, and he laughed.

  “People being able to live above the clouds,” she said, “people breathing where there’s no air —”

  “What happened to the money from the bar, Lamat? Did you run the bar into the ground?”

  “They took the money, Daila, you know how it works. They took yours.”

  “You took mine,” he said. “And you wasted it, and now you want more.”

  It was all too much. I walked away from him, from them, to drop into the tall grass. I don’t know what my plan was, but they didn’t follow me, and when I sat down I found myself facing the mountain. The grass was too green, the
sun too bright, the mountain shiny-black in shadow, an infected sheen. No one stopped to talk to me, though there were legs all around. I was starting to recognize the loneliness of the city, its privacy, the way you could lie on a hillside like a scavenged thing and nobody would touch you. I didn’t know how I could live in a place like this, with so much mass and noise and detail. I sat there and cried and felt the hot wind on my back, blowing me toward the mountain across the emptiness in between, and wiped my nose on my rented sleeve. Suddenly I couldn’t stand the wool itch of the jacket’s embroidery anymore — the pattern was a crude attempt at the Holoh square-stitch, with the vagueness of a dream — and I flung it off, leaving me in my undershirt. At once the air touched me, and everything was all right. I blew my nose again into the fabric. Let them launder it, I thought viciously, and then Disaine was coming up behind me; I heard her firm boot under the lacy froth of her dress.

  “Lamat,” she said and sat beside me, holding my arm. “We’re going to his house. Are you good to go?”

  A shock ran through me. Disaine kneaded the back of my neck, and I touched her hand to make her stop. “How?”

  “By coach.”

  “How did you do it, Disaine?”

  “Oh!” Her blue eyes opened up rounder than I had ever seen them, despite the glare of the sun. “I don’t know! But I’ve got him.”

  “Okay,” I said, and got unsteadily up.

  Disaine wrote about how she did that, though I’m not entirely convinced by her account. – O

  “That was unfair,” I told him, watching Lamat go. She was stumbling off toward the cliff, very unlike the climber I knew — seemed almost to be making a point of letting her knees buckle, her feet run too stiff over broken rock, as if this were a dance. I mean, I know that Lamat is completely guileless, but I think that’s what Daila saw, because next he said, “Same manipulative bitch.”

  “Not a bit of it,” I said loyally. “Lamat’s saved my life, and I’ve saved hers.”

  “You saved hers,” he said with interest. That was the grace of the man, I sensed — his curiosity. “How?”

  “The first suits broke down, and I had to smash her helmet.”

  “You’re not doing a very good job selling them.”

  “I’m not a salesman,” I said. “I’m an inventor. I don’t need to be good at anything else. And anyway, you should give us money because you love climbing, not for any selfish reason.”

  He was watching Lamat cry, watching her shoulders and back hunched close to the ground, the sun reflecting wetly off of her blue tunic. She was far enough away that we heard nothing, all her noise mingled with the crowd who picked up and put down their feet around her.

  “I didn’t want to marry that woman,” he said. “My parents took her in out of pity.”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone pitying Lamat,” I said. It’s true. She gives off such anger, such self-sufficiency, that even as I held her in the train yesterday I was aware mostly of the strength of her forearm as it pressed against my side. Lamat, with a thick ribbon of black hair pressed to her cheek. Such a feminine woman, though I don’t think she feels that way. She cannot help it, her formal quality, how even after I broke her helmet she seemed to wear a collar of smashed glass.

  It was painful not to go to her, but I knew I had to keep talking to him; something had opened up in him and I needed to seize it.

  “Yes, I agree,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine anyone having pity for her.”

  “Why are you so pissed off at her?”

  I don’t think he’d been asked directly in a long time. He seemed to struggle with the whole conversation, as if he were trying to remember a line. Now he relaxed a little in his loose robe, and thought for a moment, and said, “I did not want to marry her. Pity, and a cheap bride-price. I tried my very best to make her happy anyway, to make her comfortable, because I believe in trying to see what’s good and admirable in everyone. So I talked her up to herself, told her she could climb, that she spoke well, encouraged her to read and write. And she listened, and in the end she could read and write and talk and climb so well that she had my inheritance and I had to come down here.”

  “But what,” I asked, “did she do?”

  “Wrote a book,” he said impatiently. I knew it, and he knew it, but I needed him to say it; I needed to get all of his emotions to the surface, like the bloom of a blush. I saw no way to get anything out of him without that. “The mountain fell apart that season. I realize it was my fault, but it was our fault, all of us, and she got to stay because she wrote the damn book, which makes it sound as if I took Courer’s neck right in my leathery fists and snapped it, and because people were coming to meet her and bringing all sorts of money, none of which it appears she has managed to hold onto.”

  “Well, it’s not as if they were jamming it into the till. And anyway, it’s all Dracani’s now.”

  “Dracani?” he said, and then, “I don’t care. I know they would’ve taken it. But she never banked any? Invested any? Nobody on the mountain would have known or cared about any of that. What offends me about her is that she’s so good at taking, but so bad at keeping. All grab, no grip.”

  Lamat had ceased to weep and was sitting patiently on the ground. The mountain had pierced the sun, and it was impressive enough, though I thought it was rather a runny effect, as if the sun were bleeding heat over everything. I had expected something more precise, geometric, like a flag. But light doesn’t work like it works in our imagination.

  “Look,” said Daila after a long few minutes of this. I smelled fragrant flowers, dry sunburnt skin, the stink of the city lifting over the hilltop. “You’re a woman of the world. I can’t just leave her crying. We should come back to my place to get her quieted down.”

  Back to you. – O

  We rode in Daila’s coach. The light outside was turning from orange to sweet violet, and the houses, low white places that seemed built of salt, were getting grander and higher and more encrusted with flowers and jewels. Daila’s own house was decorated with opaque gems set in the shape of blue mountains. We stepped from the coach into a shadowed courtyard barred with thick iron and stood there in the breeze while Daila led his horses back to their stables.

  His house was big but empty. He took us into a little chamber, with a small window that looked out on dusty trees. Its walls were raw white, of that same salty rock, and the floor was clean pink granite. The two sofas were mismatched, and the round granite table was meant for games; it was as if he had put us all into storage. He poured us little glasses of drinking oil, and I took mine and held it between my fingers.

  “I can’t take that stuff,” said Disaine.

  “It’s very good once you get used to it,” he told her gravely.

  “I am used to it.”

  “Mother Disaine,” he said, the loose eye darting towards her, “you told me that you are a magician.”

  She flushed for some reason, in shame or pleasure. Or maybe it was only because it was hot in the little room. “Yes.”

  “How did you come to study it? I thought the Arit disdained it.”

  “We do,” she said. In her voice there was a little slur or blunder. “But I kept doing it, sort of by accident at first.”

  “How does one do magic by accident?”

  “Well,” she said. “I would use it to fake up results.”

  Daila laughed. “You have a voice made for the pulpit, and then you use it to say things like that.”

  “It was complicated,” she said, twisting the fabric of her robe between her fingers. She did it methodically, a fold and then another. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Not at first?”

  “Not ever. I tried to stay away from the stuff entirely. I was well trained not to take it seriously, and since I was deeply interested in it, I had to abstain, you know?” Another twist of the fabric. “But it crept into everything I did. I would work magic without knowing it. I really didn’t know it for years — until I was already d
rummed out of the Arit Brotherhood.” The robe reached the limit of its folding, and she smoothed it out again. “I would run experiments that seemed to be successful, present on them, write about them, but then nobody would ever be able to repeat them. The first time people saw it as bad luck. A good idea, but I had flaws in my process. People were still able to get something out of it. But then it started happening again and again. All my atmospheric work, my work on gasses. Hours in the lab — building my experiments, writing them up. Everything would seem so clean and sweet. Completely within my grasp, and I knew that, this time, people would be able to understand it, be able to do it for themselves. But as soon as I put it out into the light, nobody could. They started to see me as this crazy woman, and/or this liar, who would come out year after year with results it was safe to ignore. People stopped even trying to replicate what I did. And when I did have a solid, untainted idea, someone else would feel safe stealing it.”

  She sighed, looked down at the little cups of oil. “Do you have vinegar?”

  “Of course,” said Daila, a little thrown, and got up to get a little set of vinegars. They briefly discoursed on them, and he poured one out for her. I sat silent, took a drink, felt the gummy oil on my tongue, folded my legs up into my chair. Disaine went on.

  “Well, I started to feel like I was really crazy, or like God was mocking me. Everything I said, everything I thought, would always break down. Ha.” She smiled tightly. “But I understood, in the end. When I started to look at magic years later. It felt just the same — exultant and still hungry — when I began to work magic as when I’d been in my lab, and that was when I realized I’d been working it all along. I had been manipulating my results myself, because I wanted so badly to succeed. And the more desperate I got, the worse it became. My own ambitions were what destroyed me.”