“But the population changes every day,” said Disaine. “Like an experiment.”
“Everyone flinging each other at everyone else. And I was a mountain guide.” He sighed, rolled his soft expressive eyes with a deliberate motion. “All the papers, the news. All the water deals and what the queen was funding. I came out and saw the lake — well, Lamat, you must feel the same looking at the pool.”
“Yes,” I said, surprised at being addressed. Then I realized that he had been inclusive in the same way that you’d try to be inclusive to a child if you didn’t know children well — tossing off an aside that required no real response, a token nod.
“And they didn’t like me,” he pressed on. “You know why.”
“Nobody likes a prince in exile,” said Disaine. “Without meaning to say I’ve felt as you do — there’s something about obvious poverty combined with regal bearing — girls in romances like it, but nobody else does, they think you’re getting above yourself.”
“I was eager to get above myself as quickly as possible,” said Daila. “I shed the name quick. Lamat’s book was not kind, and you don’t seem to understand, running my mother’s fucking bar and stuffing the royalties under the mattress, that your book was a bestseller, Lamat.”
“Dracani didn’t find much under the mattress, Daila.”
“Then where did the money go? Did you spend it all on new shotglasses? Or were you just royally fucked by the publisher?”
I looked up. He was focused on me, a look level and searching, whose iron brought out the gray in his hair. There was an authority in it that utterly shut his beauty down, that removed it like a translucent shell and folded it away.
“I never got much money from it,” I said, faltering. “I certainly — spent most of it on the bar — but there wasn’t much.”
“How much?”
“Maybe nine hundred dhlal — over the years.”
“Nine hundred,” he said, and swept his gaze back to Disaine.
They sat there for a time and nibbled their breakfast. I debated slipping all the way into the pool, which made my feet feel as if they were dissolving. That was the sense I always had, those first days in the South: that old Holoh ice had held me together, as it had held Saon before me, and that I was melting now, my tissues spreading, separating into weak cord.
Finally Daila said, distantly: “Excommunication is not so bad.”
“Oh?” I wasn’t looking at them anymore, but I imagined Disaine raising her eyebrows. She never could raise just one.
“The terms aren’t harsh. You’re not forbidden to go back, just to live there. I could even climb, if I wanted, though I’ve lost the heart for it. I...” A long silence. I heard Disaine bite into a final apple slice. Then he continued, “I wouldn’t fund this if you weren’t both excommunicate. You by birth and her by...design, maybe. Only an excommunicate person can climb freely. Only an excommunicate person can climb without hurting anyone. The problem was that we didn’t care about hurting anyone, or God, and apparently Lamat didn’t care even as recently as this last climb. But now she can’t hurt anyone. And that’s important.”
My head grew hot and sore. I slid into the pool rather than hear Disaine’s reply.
It was pathetic how in love I was with Daila, once. I remember one eager night at the bar, after everyone else had gone to sleep. I had sat on a stool in the flushed light and enumerated the exact ways in which he was like a rose. There were a lot of them, I seem to recall, although I was sober. I had not grown up with liquor, and I did not like it yet. Looking back, my ideas were not bad ones — the tint of his cheek was roselike, and its texture. He had that very soft, very faint down, and a sense that the skin is whisper-thin and does not quite connect to the reaching thumb. And the limbs — the taut hard snap of skin below the neck — with sharp bits that caught. Those were his teeth and his hair-tips and his long fingernails.
He listened with patience at first. I did not see that the patience was feigned, that the way he propped his head on his fist pulled his mouth into a faint frown of interest. I could tell that something was wrong, that he had gone too long without moving, but I was so eager to be there, so happy to be away from my family and a woman at last, soft in bed, smelling the fire. I was so delighted with him, as with a new toy that would do the same trick whenever you pulled the string, that I could not resist pulling it. That night it snapped. He didn’t use a gesture; he just let me see it in his face. And that night when we went to bed I knew to lie quietly and not touch him.
When I came out of the pool Disaine was bending over me. She seized my wet arm, and our eyes met. She said, “He’s doing it, if you’d come out to hear about it.”
“Good,” I said, and I might have been weeping again, or anyway the water on my face felt hotter than the water on my arms and chest. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
Daila was gone. Disaine hauled me up, and we left the house. Her grip was tight and triumphal; I thought in the moment that she might have kissed me. I was wearing the same heavy blue silk shirt and trousers that I had worn since the monastery. They were wrinkled now and wet, and Disaine insisted on taking us first to a tailor’s shop and buying me a white cotton readymade, of the sort that Catchknot women wear as underwear in winter and as dresses in summer. I protested that it would take up most of our remaining cash, and Disaine said, “It doesn’t matter.”
The shop was busy, and I stood in its pale wood dressing room, surveying myself. The dress was knee-length, belted at the waist, and I looked grotesque in it in a way that I never had in Holoh clothes. Holoh clothes are of soft colors, neutral, with the dimples of knits or the ragged edges of fur, and they complement a scarred face far better than this crisp shift. But Disaine said, “Show me.”
I opened the door.
“You look like a real Catchknot girl.”
“I will never be a real Catchknot girl,” I said in outrage, in disbelief. I felt that some tension had broken and my ends were loose and raw.
The saleswoman laughed — she had been standing nearby, not quite part of the conversation, and she said to Disaine, “Your daughter?”
“My best friend,” said Disaine. “She’s of Holoh extraction.”
“Oh! Well, there’s a trend for that kind of stuff.” And she brought me two dresses that suited me better — one of them is the wide-strapped navy chemise I still have today. Disaine bought all of them, beggaring us, and once we were on the street again she said, “He’ll get the money at his bank, and you are going to have to accept it.”
“Me?”
“He has some parting words for you.” She gripped my shoulders tightly. “You can do it.”
“Disaine, I don’t know what all of this is. I can’t live here, I can’t.”
“You don’t have to live here,” she said, and the words were light as pastry in her mouth. “You can come back to the mountain and stay with me for as long as it takes. You just have to do a little more. I see how he treats you, but he’ll be gone so soon you won’t even see it. So fast it’ll be a blink. A clap. And then we’ll be all done.”
“I would like to be done,” I said, and I thought I would weep again, even again, after all that time and all those tears, in the middle of the white Catchknot street with its mossy streaks and fallen petals, with Disaine staring desperately into my eyes. Hangdog, I thought. She looks hangdog.
I said, “You didn’t even need me.”
“So let’s go to where I do,” she said, and embraced me. We stood there in the street, and then she walked me back toward the mountain. I saw it in the distance, a plume of tinkling snow flying from its flank like a flag of victory, and I said again, “I can’t live here, I can’t live here.”
She said nothing to that, just held my hand and kept me aimed at the mountain, and slowly I began to remember who I was.
“Daila’s a bit of a baby,” she said quietly. “He’s sulky when he doesn’t get his way. He still honestly doesn’t understand why he can’t, ev
en if it’s life and death. He...” Whatever she was going to say, it was gone. She was distracted, or thought better of it. Finally she turned to me with a fresh look and said, “I was expecting someone more formidable.”
“Babies are formidable,” I said. It was the most complete thought I’d had since we’d arrived here. “One nearly killed me once. And think of an angry baby; imagine that force in a man.”
“You were almost killed by a baby?”
“I miscarried him, Disaine.”
“Oh.” Her eyes flickered down and her face slackened. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago,” I said. I was determined to get it right, about time.
“Well, you’re right. He is formidable. Because he’s guilty and childish, and full of regard for his own perfect teeth.” Disaine bared hers, which were ridged in the sunlight and uneven. There was a bit of nutshell stuck in one. Not nut, nutshell. “But we got what we wanted. Because we are brilliantly clever.” She touched my hand — hers was cool and dry. “Look at those clouds. You see those?”
They were white, blank, wispy, the sort that don’t pose a threat on the mountain — clouds you can’t possibly fit weather into. “I see them.”
“Clouds are my favorite kind of beauty,” she said. “Because they have no solidity, and they’re absolutely just for you.”
Later that day I went to the bank, but Daila wasn’t there. I don’t know if he ever meant to give me his parting words, or if he couldn’t think of any. There was no note with the money. I asked for it by my name and his, as if it were a marriage in reverse, but they didn’t know my name; I had to use Disaine’s. I talked to a quiet professional woman in stockings for more than half an hour. And in the end I had an envelope of cash the size of a courier’s bag. I went out into the street, feeling the bag like a heavy pillow, so obviously something of Daila’s. I hailed a cab and used one of the bills to pay for it. My change was almost as much paper as the rest of the bills, and I came into our hotel clutching it in my arms, frightened of the clerk with his red-flowered lapel, who gestured mechanically toward me, and of the man at the bar, who ignored me. I hammered at the door with my head because my arms were too full of money, and when Disaine opened it I pressed it to her.
Disaine took the money away and organized it into stacks. We went shopping again, and she bought several bags full of fabric and leather and esoteric constrictions of metal. She dumped them out on the bed and savagely explained them, one by one, until late in the day.
I don’t think it was anger at me, nor at Daila, but at herself for some reason. There was an impersonal quality to it that, after all the aggressive seeing of the past few days, I found very welcome. I huddled into a chair until I had built up, so to speak, the emotional cover to go and get a book, and then I took it and went to bed, although the light was still the hot dust of the early evening.
Disaine wrote in her diary at some point in all this, and I think you might like to see what it was. I wish I could reach into the story to hold you, although maybe it would have been worse? Because they were treating you like a child, all of them, and not the way a good parent treats a child either. I think you saw that in them. In fact, I think you usually read people right, Lamat, and that is the highest compliment I know how to pay to a person. I can’t say I’m so good at it myself, but when you speak in your low voice and without passion, people listen. The girls listen, the students I mean, and some of them have avoided mistakes because of it. Maybe that’s why people work so hard to elbow you down, because they can tell that if they don’t shut your mouth with glue or dough, you’ll use it. And that scares them.
But I do want to know something. What, ultimately, is Disaine’s deal? I can’t read treacly things like her line about the clouds and take them seriously, but I know you did, and I know you’re not stupid. I can only conclude that there was something about her that you needed to see to understand, some essential innocence preserved in brine. But when I read things like this, I only see the sourness and salt.
Lamat is now in play, with Daila. Or whatever I’m supposed to call him; Lord knows I’m tired of calling him anything. Such a tiring man. Of course what’s worse is having to keep all the balls in the air at once, or the plates spinning, when the ways to handle them directly contradict each other. Lamat is easy to set spinning, easy to keep spinning, and you can trust her to keep spinning even when your attention is on other things, which I love about her, I really do. I’ve watched her being insulted or ignored by Daila, who actually is very easy to set to spinning as well — but he falls over, bam, if you let go of him for a moment. That’s what’s tiring. I get the sense that his new wife is in charge of everything and he’s not used to holding himself up, and that’s the missing part in him, that’s what gets him involved. He wants to be looked at with admiration and told interesting things.
But Lamat — Lamat you can charge up, fill with energy, and she’ll keep going forever. To switch metaphors, there’s something magical about her, in the way that magic loops, that it’s self-sustaining. It has a core that runs on eternally, like blood in the body. Ostracize Lamat, insult her, ignore others’ insults to her — she stays involved, interested, full of desire. Like one of those toys with the round base, you knock it down and it comes up smiling the same smile. I admire that so deeply.
She had a new diary by now, the small shiny red book that was mailed to us after she was gone. I suppose she did it on purpose; I suppose it was a sort of apology – O.
I read books about the Holoh in a large shop at the center of the town, where no one bothered me because no one came to that section. The dust shone in the sun like snow as I took down Eraeus’ The Hollow People, Arimosat’s Evolution of Ho-loh Ritual, and Leguiur’s Holo and Empire.
The Holoh alphabet was swept away, in the time of the First Empire, by a hand strong enough to break a city but delicate enough to pulverize an alphabet. Since then there have been as many ways of writing our name as there are scholars — people trying to reach across five centuries to connect stray words with stray pictograms. The Holoh write “Holoh,” when we need to write to Southerners at all. We have always liked palindromes and disliked puns.
It was the Second Empire that destroyed our city, which sent the survivors up the mountain. We were destroyed because we were too hard and solid to fit into an empire. We needed to be crushed to dust before we could be made into a mixture, and the Holoh cannot be crushed, only killed. Each of us is a strong unit, with nothing granular about it. That’s what I was taught at school. As the last empire ebbed and washed about the skirts of the mountain, as Asam’s various cults were tempered and shattered, the Holoh stayed the same, driven to the place of our greatest strength and abandoned there.
But I learned from these new books that Southerners think we are really rather sad. They have an idea of a people dwelling on a mountain, inbred, lonely, mysterious; that we ritually climb and descend, and make sacrifices, and burn eternal flames, and send bridal parties from village to village in the spring so men like Daila can impregnate women like me, all in order to placate something implacable. They see our culture as rich, in the same way perhaps that a seam of ancient ore is rich — because of compression and repression. They imagine that we drink a lot, even more than we do (and it is a thing I learned from the bar, that they drink as much as we, that every culture that’s discovered alcohol drinks too much) and that we are poorer than we are because only a few of us sell anything to them. A melancholy drunken land, a land of storytellers, a land of sly jokes, an Asam-hating land, and nothing like the land I remembered.
It was as if someone had constructed a scaffolding around us, and then removed us and written only about the scaffolding. The more I read, the more the materials of the scaffolding — splintered wood, narrow pipes of metal — slid into the hollows of my bones. I knew that the next time I went to the mountain, I would have a stranger’s mind in mine. Though I walked in streets I had known since girlhood, I would never again b
e able to step upon them without an erudite word in my head and a bracing of metal in my marrow.
Good, I thought. Good. Let me be one of them. Let me judge like one of them. Let me not understand any of this. Just don’t take the mountain from me.
Disaine remade the suits. They were gorgeous things. I wish you could have seen them — with your interest in bodies, they would have impressed you as artificial flesh. The new leather was as thin and bright as fishskin. The stitching was virtuosic; it seemed to run beneath the surface like something just beneath water. The Holoh had no leatherwork like that. We could have learned to do it, but we don’t see survival as an art. Only a Southerner can do that, because they don’t work to survive. Our lousy parkas are the price of independence. Fine leather comes from factories; bad leather is made at home.
Disaine also bought some things that, as usual, were really silly: experimental dried foods, scientific instruments too delicate to survive rough climbing, lousy ropes on sale — which we then had to replace at great expense. And fuel for the balloon, some to test the suits, but more just so she could fly and think, and make sketches, and take in the loose heady air of the high altitudes.
She took me along on the final test. It was my first time wearing one, and she showed me — bad breath hissing in my ear, strong fingers yanking at the leather — how to put them on, how the new ones did not have to be laced up but adapted themselves to the body, how it was necessary only to smear the finger along a line of stitching to seal them completely. Then we ascended in the creaking basket, over a patch of parkland at dawn.
“When you wear these,” she said, “you’re part me.”
“How so?” I asked. I had on everything except the helmet and was running the heater high. It was winter in Catchknot now, and the cold of Catchknot is different from the cold of the mountain, dull and wet and hard to take.
The Breath of the Sun Page 12
