The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  Eventually I found the strength to get up again. I set up the pressure tent, sliding the leather and canvas of it across the aching new snow and inflating it through the airlock. The tent was always strange and messy inside — we left things in it, pans, blankets, which were crumpled or thrown about when it was reinflated — but the air was good and strong, and I dragged Disaine into it and took off our helmets. The sun had almost made its daily run over our heads by the time she awoke.

  I had made myself some sugary tea and was sitting over the stove. She said, “Can I have some of that?” Her voice was a loud croak, forceful but dead. I brought her a lukewarm mug, and she worked at it for a while, mouth not seeming to work right.

  I had felt so little while I was waiting. I had been strangely calm. To go through all that, to see Courer again, to save Disaine when she was blue on blue, and now to sit here in the tent with the sunlight beating through the translucent horn of the airlock, had only been part of life, and the terror of life comes when you start to think about it. As long as I had been alone — and I had never been so wonderfully alone — there was no thought, nothing.

  But now she was up, and I felt and thought again. And I could tell that she didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to argue, and neither did I, so I just said it: “Disaine, burn her.”

  “We went over this.”

  “We won’t go over it again. I never want her to be used that way again. She’s been run ragged, wrung dry, all after she was dead, and she’s saved us one final time, and you’re going to give her her rest. That worm, or whatever it was, I want it gone.”

  “I’m very tired, Lamat.”

  “Burn her tomorrow.”

  “Give me something to eat.”

  So I brought her porridge and nuts and a sugar bar, and she ate methodically and then said, “I can’t erase her. I can’t make sure it’s gone.”

  “That’s not what I want,” I said. “Burn her like a Holoh.”

  “Well, so long as you want it, I suppose I can make fire without air.”

  “I know you can do it; by God, you brought her back to life.”

  “I used what was left in her,” she said quietly, and I sensed the rock of a conviction, though I don’t know what conviction it was.

  She burnt her that night, in the middle of the dark. She shook me awake, and while I was still paralyzed she was half out of the airlock, and I had to fasten my helmet without doing my checks. By the time I got outside Courer was going up bright and clean, an impossible flame at that height, edged as sharp as shadow.

  I’m sorry, here’s something I just wrote, nothing from Disaine’s book or anything – O

  I have had to sit out in the light after reading this. In fact I went down to the night desk and told Celest she could take the rest of the evening off, and sat there on the soft bricks with the door open, just to let in the streetlight and I suppose take in as much of it as possible.

  I was at a birth tonight. I still have the stink of it on me. I don’t know how I can speak of a birth, though, when in the end nothing was born. When I arrived the woman had been in labor for a week, and she was already dying — the canal was obstructed, there was nothing I could do but an emergency procedure, which only meant that she died screaming at me that I had killed her, calling me a cunt and an idiot. Then I tried to cut the baby out, but when I had cleared the flesh I realized it was long dead. And I came home, my hands shaking to the elbow, cold as the child, hoping for relief in your book — and instead, this. Lamat, you wrote this weeks ago, you lived through some of it decades ago. These things are locked behind your smooth forehead, which always gives off such a feverish heat. How do they stay there?

  The family were not angry, or at least they didn’t show it. I don’t know how it was possible. I was working at that dry socket, long drained of amniotic fluid, trying to save one life out of two and only making a mess. Her husband told me I had done my best — patronizingly, I know, but still, it’s remarkable he had something for me at all. He seemed rested. Sleek, calm. Is it possible that he was happy to be rid of her? And yet he might only have slept the sleep of misery. If you had been there, you would know, but I am glad you were not.

  He offered me the body to dissect. He was happy to be rid of her, wasn’t he. Or perhaps — well, people are weird about bodies, aren’t they? You wanted Courer burned, then buried, then burned, and it wasn’t because you were reluctant to decide, but because you had an inkling of what Disaine came to understand. So you wanted more than anything to give her rest, you just didn’t know how.

  And so maybe he thought that was best — to have her dispersed, as if by ceremony, though if he came to watch he would find no faith here. They say that over the sea, where the aristocrats of the Second Empire came from, they pull the body into its constituent parts and put each into a wet clay jar with a lid of the same clay, and dry it out in the sun and put it in a tower. People want to work hard to make a bed for their loved one. So maybe he had that in mind, the idea that if I could puncture her lung, she’d give a final sigh.

  The body is downstairs now, in the morgue. I will look at it tomorrow — I can wait no longer, in this weather. Right now I hope I don’t learn anything. Don’t tell anyone. Just because if it turned out that there was an obvious solution, some piece of cartilage to snap that would have sent her screaming but set the child free, I would be so ashamed.

  I had a talk with the midwife while we were washing up. She had been up with this woman the whole week, only taking a little sleep on the third day, in the little ebb between exhaustion and the second wave of cold energy that comes over you when you’re desperate. I suppose Disaine would say that this wave is magic. I would rather think that it comes from me, and that I can find it if I try. Lift it out of me with a little hook. Invent the hook.

  Anyway, we were cleaning up that poor woman, only flesh now, and she was weeping, so that her small plump hand was doing its work blind. I have never been very good with weeping, and so I said nothing until I realized that they were tears of anger, and that a little voice was coming up above the sobs, slowly becoming clear. She told me that they should’ve called me days ago, that I could have saved the baby, but the mother had cried out against it — said that what we do is bullshit, that we bring a death that clings to our clothes and fingers,19 that we’re dirty and cruel and that we root around in the body and chatter about the lumps we find. The usual stuff, but I let it patter out of her. Sometimes people need to drain the poison. Afterward you’re still poisoned but you feel that you’ve done something. I talked to her about coming to study with us on the weekend, but she said with a final wet hiccup that she couldn’t. Later on, as we were leaving, she said, “You see, you ladies work hard and there are certain simple ways that it’s useful. The surgery would have been useful. But I don’t think you can see a person’s thoughts by cutting open their brain, so how do we know how the body works by cutting open the body?” I couldn’t answer. It was too dumb a question, and if she’s going to be like that, I don’t have anything to teach her.

  * * *

  19 And if I was right about the Holoh and the hot water, this might be not untrue.

  * * *

  So many women die trying to give life, and I’m not sure how many of them wanted to do it in the first place. I never did, but if I had been with a man, that would have been my risk. It’s like a war. Some sign up and some are drafted and some are impressed (ha — boys trying to impress a girl...). Forgive me for joking, I’ll slip into bed in the morning and tell you all this, and I bet you’ll joke too, that’s why I love you...

  Really, though, how can I ask you to joke now that I know how you lost your baby? That’s the thing about black humor, you can have black humor about a thing if you’ve been through it and also if you haven’t, but they’re separate types. How can I go on about childbed being like a war when I’ve never been to war — or maybe I’m just a soldier on the opposing side.

  I am glad Courer knew you. I think
you were the right person to unlock certain things in her, give her those cool hands and that comfort with blood which, you’ll laugh, but she never really had at school. Courer was always best at dissection, worst with live people. There was something in us that escaped her. Or maybe it was just that she needed to go be with the Holoh, who’d understand her in a way that we couldn’t.

  I can hear Celest moving around upstairs; I think I’ll ask her to get back on the desk so I can go to bed. I wasn’t asleep when they came to wake me, and by God, my back aches. I’m glad it can ache; I’m glad the nerves that whip through me are alive. Really this study of medicine must be so frustrating for you, like climbing fifty feet and descending, and climbing fifty feet and descending, all just to get to know the same little hill of dirt, while all the while the mountain is sitting there all snow, scrubbed and white and unattainable. Well, God, right now it’s all I can do to go up two brick staircases to you.

  Chapter 10

  Asam went to the mountain, and he is there still.

  —The Gospel of the Worms

  The climb from there was hard and painful, the worse for our ordeal. We needed a day to recover from our imprisonment in the snow, and then for the next week at least, we were too tired to climb well. And we were nervous of more avalanches. Where we had been too cavalier, we now were too cautious, and we kept to the ridges even when the slopes were short and light. The scrambling over rocks took its toll on our bodies and our brains, whose very fringes, whose damp edge, began to feel ragged and sore.

  I have said that when the new suits were fresh, they felt like our own bodies. They did still, but disgustingly strong and healthy bodies, which we weak souls needed somehow to inflate and hold up. You bumped around inside that big body, hauling it like a martyr’s burden, among rivulets of snow pouring from rotten ice, and up harsh narrow corners of cliffs that ran up a hundred feet, and you scraped them through tiny passes that always led up, up, up. The oxygen made it easier — the oxygen made it possible. But it could not haul those bodies for us, any more than it could haul our own.

  It was hard work. It was hard thinking. It was like the effort of reading a new book for the first time after reading only one, over and over, all your life. Or like tasting for the first time. I imagine that this is not a good feeling. It’s tingling, sharp in a way you can’t quite localize, and everything tastes a little like the blood that pumps through the thin membrane about your mouth.

  One night in the tent, after we had taken off our helmets and swabbed our sweaty faces and hair with warm water and lain down to dry out, Disaine said, “I was wrong about so much. I see that already.”

  “How?”

  “The climb should be getting easier by now.” (We were clearing sixty thousand feet, most air gone, the land below increasingly arid, desiccated, abstract.) “I thought the gravity would start to decrease, but it’s the same as it was. I think sometimes that it would be easier to do the impossible — to use magic to get up there, just a straight shot into the heavens. You’ve seen what I can do.”

  “It would be meaningless,” I said. “This is better. The effort, the work. Isn’t that what ‘approaching God’ is all about?”

  “It’s not always hard to be good,” said Disaine, but wistfully. “The few good things I’ve done for other people were really easy.”

  I thought back on the good things I’d done for other people: climbing lessons, a hug in a cold place, an avalanche digout, some sex and some cocktails. It was a short list. None of it had felt easy. I’ve always felt that to be kind for me is a struggle, something you don’t need to be strong to do, but do need to be brave. I marveled at Disaine, with her mild talk of ease.

  She spoke without my needing to say anything. “Lamat, I’ve been meaning to say how sorry I am about your baby.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “That is a fact,” she said, “but I am sorry nonetheless.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Finishing him would have killed me, so I can’t be sorry, just fucked-up and sad. It was the worst night of my life.”

  “And Daila wasn’t there?”

  “Daila was with Saon. He always was afraid of weakness, all that stuff. I terrified him. Probably not for the last time.”

  “Afraid of weakness and in love with strength,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. He wasn’t afraid of weakness because he felt weak; it was about me. He was afraid I would die.”

  “So he fucked around on you with Saon. That follows.”

  “Daila’s not that smart,” I said. “He thinks he can cancel something with something else. Something makes him feel disgusted and confused and stupid. So he spends some time with something that makes him feel handsome and clever, and he thinks he’s scrubbed it off.”

  “Hm,” she said. “Up here you’re much meaner to him.”

  “The further I am, the meaner I get. It’s just math.”

  A sigh and the crunch of a head on a pillow. “So what happened after the baby?”

  “Oh — the same. Things with Daila got worse.”

  “Did things with Courer get better?”

  “They were already good,” I said. “But I suppose they did.”

  Being a Southerner, Courer was exempt from ritual climbing — when the mountain felt her firm steps, it was as if she were a bird or a tumbling rock, a random pressure that averaged out to nothing. So on festival days she stayed behind in the village, scraping the wan tube of a feather to make a pen or reading a decrepit medical tract that she already had by heart. When the women left the village, she was alone with the men; when the men left, she was alone with the women.

  Her long wrapped robe caught the dust easily, the leaves, the spots of bracken. There was very little that could live up there in the winter, but what lived, she carried around. In this, too, she was birdlike, pollinating things, eating mostly seeds from bags, all her looks dense and tense. It wasn’t that I sought her out, especially, after the miscarriage. It was just that I noticed her, and she seemed to be drawn especially brightly — in glossy paint. The world is all matte up here, stone and snow and skin, but there was a sheen to Courer.

  “So why’d you come back here, when your father died?” I asked her. We were on the outside steps of her rotten house, sitting on cushions dragged from the broken sofa. When I had knocked at the door, she had been eating from her bag of seeds and extended it to me in wide-eyed automatic hospitality, one still pressed between her teeth. Now we had eaten them all and eaten up the small talk, too, and the ragged shells were scattered in the snow. It was half-dark, blue snow, black cloth, and spots of firelight.

  “It wasn’t a ‘back,’” she said. “I’d never been here. It was a lot of things. I was tired of being exotic, and I was tired of not being taken seriously because I didn’t go to the monasteries to study.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t believe in God.”

  I thought of God, of snaking lines of lanterned people braiding patiently in the early fall, of spots of snow that landed on my eyelids, of the breath of the mountain and its bleeding — the plume of snow that blew from it in winter, the streams that lightened its exhausted body in the spring. At the time I could not conceive of someone who did not believe in God.

  “You must be very stubborn,” I said, landing on the word almost at random.

  She rooted around in the bag for a final seed. I sucked salt from under my fingernails.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s one word. I knew I’d suffer for it if I didn’t go. I just couldn’t make myself lie. I can’t help it, and I don’t mind people who do, but there’s always been a void where that’s supposed to be. My father lost his faith when he was excommunicated. The mountain became just a picture to him. I think a void can be one of the finest things to look at, anyway. All stars and velvet.” She looked at me, and for the first time since we’d met, there was something naughty and sulky and mean in her glance. “I should a
dd, ‘and shit,’ to show how irreverent I am.”

  “What’s more irreverent than an atheist?”

  “Good. I like people I don’t have to prove myself to over and over.” She finally located her seed, cracked it between her stained front teeth. I briefly contemplated the void the baby had left and found that it contained neither velvet nor stars. “What words d’you like, Lamat?”

  “Words like arid and fervid,” I said. This was a question I had considered in advance. “Words that take their etymology from old Parnossian, mostly. I like the delicacy and the sharpness of them. You have to pronounce them with a certain care.”

  “Any Holoh ones?”

  “Parnossian words are Holoh words. This isn’t something your father taught you?”

  “My father didn’t teach me much,” she said. “He was very kind to me, but he had his own problems.”

  “The Holoh didn’t always live on the mountain,” I said. “The Holoh used to count it taboo even to touch the mountain. And believe me, we had rules about where the land stopped and the mountain started. But we were driven up here, by the Second Empire, from our city and our lands — that’s what Garnerberg used to be. Garner is the man who bought most of it up from the people who were forced to leave. We weren’t made to come up here, but we felt that this was a place they would never try to tear us off of, and we were right. We worked out the ways to live here without offending God, who was kind enough to accept us, and who has very little concept of kindness otherwise. In the dark we feel Their chill. He didn’t teach you that?”

  “My father was excommunicate,” she said calmly. “As I have said. Isn’t it enough that he didn’t teach me to hate you?”