The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  We left Catchknot that same week. I was very glad to go, though I had laid some of the foundation for the love I feel for the city now — a love that has always, unlike ours, been work. Ours is made of work, to an extent. I’ve scrubbed floors beside you, seen you on hands and knees, your whole body vibrating and cursing with the effort of getting some student’s spilled crud off the rough stone. (And God knows they get enough shit on the floor, from blood to cocoa.) I’ve worked beside you at the dissection-table and at the clinic desk, trading papers back and forth, in public places where I could not even press the remainder of my nose to your shoulder and inhale the smell of you. You smell like formaldehyde, and over that perfume, always sprayed in quick precise amounts at your vanity desk upstairs — frown at yourself in the mirror, and smell your wrist, and then a quick bit more. All of this work, to clean and to learn and to hide. But the feeling that twines around it is ether. It has no substance. It could be accused of not existing, if one of us ceased to believe.16

  * * *

  16 To me it’s not made of work at all, it’s made of silly jokes — I never thought I could be as fucking silly as I am with you. This is totally not something you portray in the book, and I can’t tell if we see it differently or if you just want to keep it private — I think we’ve both started to imagine that this book could be published someday, maybe when we’re dead. But even when we scrub those floors we’re clowning and yelling, and I have the female friend I never had when I was a teenager, the kind of teenager who kissed two boys just to feel the effect on their heart rate!! That’s what people underestimate about relationships. It’s a friend who lives with you and shares everything, your jokes, your shorthanded private sorrows. I’m glad I got to have that, after never having it before. I’m glad Courer got to have it, too. Because I think she did.

  * * *

  But my love for Catchknot is a substance. I built it block by sticky block. We all build the city for ourselves, an artificial mountain. And that was true even then, though I felt at the time that there was no future for me, no future anywhere, and the best I could hope for would be a pure good death like going to sleep.

  I felt that there was no reality but the mountain, and my blood coursed fast at the thought of returning. I still saw Catchknot as a book — only that — storybook, fairytale, of empire and money, with the mountain tearing through its surface like an honest truth. I saw the tension of the mountain. It is a strain on the land, a spike that has not quite broken the skin. And though I was afraid to go back and see my old life from the outside — a ragged, limited warmth, like a person’s — when we finally pushed off for home with Daila’s money, I was painfully glad.

  Chapter 9

  When Asam was with God and breathing the good breath of angels, he felt a sweet weakness in him, and he said, “What is this?” And God said, “I am giving you peace; I am breaking you apart like good bread, and I am placing you amidst everything, in the places from which you were taken.”

  —The Gospel of the Arit

  The tram stopped outside the village, and we stumbled out of it, putting down our luggage first and then stepping out of the unsteady car. A light late-winter snow dusted the ground. The only break in the blue evening clouds was a pale strip of light to the east, and all around us the houses were lighting up, flicker and glow of lanterns and candles.

  The village is at its most beautiful in late winter, when other towns are burnt out with the long cold and covered in muddy slush. The snow falls here for longer, and the snow of late winter is powdery and pure, dusting every surface eyelash-fine.

  It is beautiful also because it is the season of avalanches. Despite the rows of fencing above the village and the hard daily work of tramping down the path, the potential of that dark river of snow is suspended in the air, and gives it a charged feeling, a sense of possibility. As I walked through the low stone houses now, seeing the snow melted over their underground rooms, I was richly aware of my own excommunication and the way that my new invisibility to God was protecting the village, too. The peak from here was a shard of broken glass, unnaturally white, and still bright in the fading sky.

  Dracani was at the bar when we walked in. Some men I knew were gathered at the corner, playing a game of chert and lime; I gave them some shit about excommunicating me, and they gave Dracani some shit about the weakness of his cocktails compared to mine. Nobody was prepared to offer me any shit at all, and after one whiskey I was ready to go to my room, though I had no idea what I’d do there.

  Disaine followed me out, and we hauled our gear up the stairs. Dracani tried to help, but we waved him off, saying that if we couldn’t get it up there — balloon and all — we hardly had any right to be on the mountain. He had given me my old room to sleep in, and when I opened the door, I realized he had not done anything to it, not even changed the linen. It smelled harsh and musty now, and the hearth was so much cold stone.

  “Oh, well done, Dracani,” I said, and Disaine disappeared downstairs for wood and kindling. Soon we had a blaze, and we cooked some of her stupider provisions, cans of soup and tinned biscuit, and were camping inside like children.

  “I’m excited still,” she said soberly. “I’m trying to find the strength to show how excited.”

  “Save it. I understand.”

  We had spent long hours running through the parks of Catchknot; we had pulled ourselves up on the bars of hotel closets and done push-ups on floors that rumbled with the noise of chambermaids’ carts in the hall. I was as strong as I had been when we’d first set out, though it was still only a simulation of the strength one naturally gets by climbing. Disaine had never been so strong at all. She lifted our bags like a young woman, as if all potential tiredness had gone out of her, and her eyes and breath were clear.

  She laid the suits out on the floor, checking for weaknesses and for all of their parts, preparatory to rolling them back up and stashing them. There was something good about her that night, something shy and masterful and teasing.

  The suits fell into elegant folds, but stiff ones too, like folds in a painting. The helmets were clean and clear, no longer bowls of streaky glass, but neat things that cupped the back of the head with rubber and sat very close to the face. You could pass food in through a neat little device in the throat; you could even crap in them, through an awkward little bottle-thing that you had to attach and then empty. To wear one was to be cared for like a baby, and they even came with the same faint scent of powder, the same firm fierce clutch of love.

  Well, we waited, we acclimatized. We made short climbs, night climbs— I had missed the darkness that moved in the wind two hundred feet above the village, and the light of Garnerberg and distant Catchknot, whose blaze-shapes felt connected to me now. It was obvious now why the Holoh use the image of a jewel to discuss the fallen, for what else, famously, do city lights look like? Look at any set phrase long enough, and it’ll shiver into focus; you’ll see its original maker, in his tiny workshop, portentously pairing a jewel with a city, patching his threadbare darkness with velvet. Then back to the bar, to take a glass, and then to bed. We never stayed downstairs long for obvious reasons, though the men at the bar were able to spare a little shit for me by the end of the winter. They were the ones I felt bad for — they didn’t know where we stood, and they even had to remember how to address me. Not being in the tourist trade, they had hardly ever used the outsider-words, the special pronouns and forms of address. It pulled them entirely out of their natural shape. Whereas I had the benefit of being able to be myself, and being in the place where most of my memories were set.

  You’d think it would be poison for me now, wouldn’t you? But it never was. What I realized in that last month before the climb was that I had never cared about exile from the village. There were people there I liked, Dracani most of all (though it was telling that my best friend there was a half-exile, always wandering off to hunt, forcing people to leave half-cooked meals and friends in trouble in order to scramble up the
mountain and compensate for his movements below the village). But the people I’d been close to, the people who had made me feel lit with love or hatred, were all dead or transformed. The only exile I cared about was my exile from God, and even if the village had clutched me close in the dark, that would not have been helped.

  And so, on the first bright day of spring, we set off.

  The peak looked bright and detailed that day. At the other side of all that distance, I could see the different strains of rock, the cruel incurve of the western face, giving way to the relative temperance of the southern one, the only real way to approach God on Their throne. Of course it is all very Southern of me (capital-S) to talk of God being at the top on a throne and so forth; I’m surprised I’m not calling Them a man, and just being done with it. But I can’t help my influences, and that day I felt as if I were advancing along a pale carpet toward a figure so distant that I could make out nothing of Them, besides the light glinting from Their crown. A light that shone so steadily that it was like nothing else in nature, which flits and changes with the days. The mathematical light with which the sun-shadow traversed the peak, a long smooth undivided day, the only unit of time that the Holoh acknowledge.

  Disaine climbed beautifully, as she always did when she was undistracted. I watched her pile her way up the mountain, and I thought: where does this easy running come from? She is as certain as water, and as clear. It’s because she is not thinking of the peak, but only of the next step, and so she moves like an avalanche. No calculation, knowing the simplest path, her mind like God’s mind. That’s the right way to climb, and you must fight to hang on to it. A billion steps and then, with one final fresh footprint, the shock of the peak.

  In the evenings she would begin to talk. It began after we’d made camp and laid out the food, and it happened all at once, as if she were setting an oil fire to burn off an excess of thought.

  All the conditioning had prepared us well for the climb, and at night we felt alive with a rubbery energy that kept us up, even after we’d lain down in our sleeping bags and felt our tired muscles clamp and tingle. It was then that Disaine would explain things. Her mind was a storehouse of half-decayed facts, and she would talk to me in a rapid murmur that rose and fell and emphasized things peculiarly, explaining her theories, reiterating that as we came to the top slopes of the mountain we would grow lighter, that at the top we would be weightless and the laws of this world would cease to apply to us.

  “We’ll be able to float about,” she said. “And in theory we could even push off and leave, only if we did that and we flew too low, we’d fall like normal, so it’s not really a plausible way to get back down again. Still, it could change how people move — eventually. The sky at that height is a glassy disc of black, not a dome at all. Its edges move so quickly that they catch a sort of fire — I’m simplifying this for you, of course — and that’s the illusion we call the sun.”

  “Will we see the disc up close?”

  She laughed at me. “It’s hard to know what we’ll see. The followers of Mishal say that God is a being all covered with eyes. In reality, of course, those eyes would implode under the conditions up there, unless God manipulates magic to keep Himself safe, but that seems stupid to me, doesn’t it to you? Why would He stoop to something so petty as magic, or eyes? I think He’s a breath, a breath all around you, air that shouldn’t exist. The disc might be something we can see, and it might not. That’s why we’re going, Lamat — going somewhere people have never been. To bask in the unfiltered sun. To float without touching anything. It’s going to be so different from our lives so far that we’ll feel that we’ve awakened from a dream, into a hot day indeed, where everything grows.”

  We passed the tent with Courer’s body at midday. I had organized the climb that way. Disaine had protested briefly, because it meant a short climb the day before, making camp in the full light, but then she figured it out — I saw her do it — and shut her mouth and held it shut. I saw her tongue probing her lips as if it were actually trying to get out. We spent that evening lying in the sun, letting it charge us and fill our black-gloved hands with hot purpose. It was as if we were basking, as the students do, on the roof of a building, heedless of people going over them on the tram.

  When we came to the tent the next day it was noon, the hour when pain is only a spiky thing, raw in the sun and casting no shadow. It is in the evening that the shadows come, and then in the night it is hard to tell the shadow from the pain itself.

  We sat down to rest outside it. Disaine sat down in the exact spot where Courer had died and looked about with a curious air, straining her neck to see the mountain from every angle. I said, “It was a whiteout blizzard, Disaine. This isn’t the view she would’ve had.”

  “You’re calling me out,” she said slowly, “on the inaccuracy of my sentiment. Good grief.”

  “It’s not sentiment, it’s —”

  “How do you know what it is? It’s mine.”

  “You mean,” I said, “it’s an attempt to understand how she felt.”

  “What it’s like to be on this spot. I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to think I could understand how she felt.”

  “Well,” I said, and pulled up my knees to my chest. The suit pulled tight against my back, but I didn’t mind — it was that swaddled feeling, and I felt it closing my eyes. “You could do it, but you’d need to spend two weeks imagining the storm.”

  “Two weeks?”

  “That’s how long we were up there.” There was a slim rusted bit of metal on the ground next to me, part of a broken crampon. “Two weeks, no cheating. If you lost track, you’d have to start again.”

  “That’s how the Gospel of the Worms people meditate,” she said. “Did you get that idea from them?”

  “No — what do they think about?”

  “Decay, of course.” She snorted, long and deep, as if inhaling some important substance. “Dying and being buried and decaying. I don’t understand how that’s living — spending your whole life getting comfortable with death. Letting yourself blur into death. You don’t blur into life, do you? You come into it screaming.”

  “The Holoh seem pretty fucking weird to most outsiders. I feel somehow that I don’t want to judge them.”

  “You like them, is all. You like them the most of any Southern sect.”

  “It’s not unjust,” I said, thinking of the old priest I had guided once, his talk of mixing with the earth. There was a neat simplicity to him that I had loved. His face, which I have said was inoffensive because it was so much like a skull, bore no malice except what the viewer put into it — that was how his mind was, too. A bone of faith, not sharp.

  This idea of imagining the storm has stayed with me. What would it be, to sit with my eyes shut, in a tent somewhere, and imagine the pain-bright cold, the grains of snow that tumble inside like dust? The wet snow that falls thickly outside, pressing down and bearing me to earth? The way that the snow rhymes with the sparks that fly behind my eyelids when I am passing out? The rubbery half-darkness in the tent, and the breaking noise of its flapping in the wind?

  No one can imagine it for long. Touch, sensation, would extend it. If you could wet a blanket for me and pass it in — and come in yourself, heedless of the students and their demands on your time, on this imagined winter night — then I might lie there, disturbed by your damaged warmth and the intermittent faintness of your pulse as you press your neck to my back, coming and going against the wet wool.

  That was Courer. Talking against the back of my neck of the blanket of snow that we would find above the storm, if we could find it in us to climb through the masses of snow, through loosening stones that we could not see. If we could climb deaf and blind, snow in our ears, water in our eyes, out of God’s pain and Their anger, which Daila and I knew could find us anywhere.

  You knew Courer. You remember her plain speech, her plain face, plain paleish hair, the liquid elegance of her eye deep-set behind a long nose. You remember
how she never tinkered with her words. She would never use so much as a metaphor unless it was life and death. And yet there in that tent, kept alive by our fevers alone — “blanket of snow” — the phrase again and again. It was the most important thing to her. She pressed her strength around me as if to transfer it, and she repeated it in my ear until Daila said, “Shut up.”

  I remember the crazed flecks of frostbite around his nose and eyes, the goggles lifted, a month of beard smeared over his face and everything red and black. I remember that he was sobbing, though there were no tears possible. He hated her, hated her as he has never had the energy to hate anyone else. And they fought through the night until she crawled out of the tent into infinity, to sit and freeze outside, and I had no strength to stop her.

  And in the morning the snow was clear, as if Courer were the price of our safety, although she was the one of the three of us whom God could not see. I held her stiff body and tried to weep, but I was too dehydrated — dry tears, tears of air or snow. Daila hit me, the only time he ever has, slapped my face hard and kicked me in the small of my back, until I came away and we came back down.