I don’t know if that helps.
Disaine’s form at that height was beautiful. I had never seen her climb so well. I watched how skillfully and almost fashionably she secured her ropes, festooning the mountain with red hemp, although there was no one to see but me. She could muddle her boot along the finest of ledges now; she could balance the weight of her limbs with patience and mantle with perfect form, as neat and supple as a goat. The boredom of the long ridges no longer tempted her to exhaust herself by going too fast, and the ice cliffs daunted her no more than assemblages of gemstones or fancy cakes designed to look like mountainsides.
And I had never had a better climbing partner. We moved like two hands roped together by nerves. No need for an intervening brain, just automatic motion, toggle and flex. So it was all the more shock to me when she gave up. Like a stroke, the left hand there and then gone.
That night we made camp early. There was a festive air to the way Disaine did it; she made me sit on my pack in the snow while she set up the pressure tent and prepared what was inside. I sat there working at the valve in my throat, letting out stale air and pushing in the funneled air of the atmosphere. It took a long time; there was not much left.
Disaine took a while to set up the tent, since it was usually my job. But when it was ready, I found it softly lit and warm, with a fragile checked cloth spread out on the floor that kept getting wrinkled by my boots, and a little meal of biscuit and sugar already set up.
“Sit and eat,” she said. “I thought we should have a little celebration.”
“Is it a holiday?”
“It’s Halem,” she said gently, and I cast my mind about for the meaning of the phrase. You may laugh, but every fact except the essential ones recedes on the mountain — even vocabulary becomes simpler and relies more on words that sound like the thing they are. Rope, gash, crunch.
“The feast of Asam’s setting-off.”
“The one from the ground, or the one when the Holoh left him, or the one where God took him up?”
“Eat your biscuit.”
I snapped off a bite of it — fresh from a new tin. “Which one, though?”
“Where the Holoh left him.”
“Is it an important holiday to you?” I had not seen her observe one before; holy days seemed irrelevant to Disaine, who was so busy squeezing life tightly in her gloved hands that she tended to compress it together.
“No. But I was working on my calendar and saw that it was coming, and I had a little extra energy, so why not?”
She pushed her face at me a little, dirty and eager. I ate my biscuit in silence, aware that something was up, but not willing to ask.
“Lamat,” she said, “I know you know a lot about theology and stuff, but will you permit me an explanation of something?”
“What?”
“Well. Every follower of Asam agrees about one thing, right?”
“That he climbed the mountain.”
“That he approached God,” she said. “You’ve heard the phrase.”
“I’ve even talked to grown-ups about it, yes.”
Her eyes flashed — Disaine could do that, could make her eyes flash and eyes light up; we only think that these are metaphors. It’s a darting motion, a second of introspection before she fixes again on you, and in certain lights that makes a quick brightness.
“You just asked me what Halem is — all right?”
“They all blur together,” I said. “I read about them in books, like the Halem scene in The Son of Swans, but they’re just feelings — bread and sugar and, in that case, acute sexual subtext, okay? ‘The blur of the blossoms on the wind.’ It’s not a holiday when pilgrims come to the monastery, so I barely know when it is.”
“Late summer,” she said quietly.
“Then it seems strange that blossoms are blowing in the wind.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“You’ve sat me down to tell me something.”
“Lamat,” she said. “We are never going to summit.”
A splinter of bone went through me. I said, “You have no fucking idea if that’s true.”
“I am running out of strength,” she said with a low force. “You may not be; your people are stronger than mine, but I am. And the mountain is not.”
“The mountain isn’t our enemy.”
“That’s true,” she said, and unfolded her legs, stretched them out in front of her. “These are.”
“We haven’t reached the end of our strength.”
“Don’t we need half of it to get back down?”
“I take that into account, Disaine. I’m talking about our climbing-strength, not our falling-strength. I just — you climbed so well today. I know it’s unlikely, but why now — when we’re running before the wind? Why bring this up now?”
“I did not start climbing this mountain to get to the top,” she said.
“You did it to feel what Asam felt.”
“That’s not all of it, and you know it. I did it to approach God. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. Everybody asks this — how do we come to Him? Do we strive for a perfect understanding of nature, to have a mind that is like His mind, lined with fruit like a cellar in winter? That’s the Arit way. Do we try to do it through public service, like the followers of the Gospel of the Waters — which has never made any sense to me, by the way, since the only thing God ever did for us was make us. It’s more logical, if you want to actually imitate God, to go to the Mothers of Amisal and push out the worshippers’ kids. But you won’t approach God by imitating Him.”
She looked at me, and I saw her face as if for the first time. Wolfish and clear. Cheeks scraped raw by lamplight.
“Now, the one thing people agree about Asam was that whatever he did, he approached God correctly. And some say that just means he did his rituals right. Bowed at the right angle and triggered the locks. Some say it’s because he gave in to his obsession and it turned out to be a holy call, and some say it’s because that obsession was wrong and he knew it, but God loves our weaknesses — finds ’em endearing — always forgives. Very patronizing of God in that case. Some will tell you that God wants us to seek Him personally, in high places and lonely places.”
She sighed and added, “I can feel the heart starting to drop.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Don’t we share one? By this point?”
“No,” I said.
“Serves me right,” she said carelessly, and her eyes went out of focus — those stern, pale, matte eyes. She picked up her biscuit in her tridactyl hand and bit it tight, the first bite she had thought to take. Chewed, drank water, swallowed. (You had to hydrate those biscuits in your mouth, turn them into a sort of salty porridge, to swallow them.) Then she said, “I thought this was approaching God. But it turns out it’s only a strenuous sort of ordinary living.”
“That is what approaching God is,” I said, and I talked to her a little about my theory of ice climbing, about building your home with the hammer and the adze. About facets. She listened intently.
“Not true for me.”
“I think you’re making a huge mistake, and I don’t even understand why.”
“Do you usually understand why people make huge mistakes?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve made every one I could.”
“Well, if my quitting is a mistake, it’s not one you’d make, so why should you be able to recognize it? You talk a mean game about assessing risk, but you can get lost in the atmosphere and never come home again. Furthermore you are a follower and can’t lead. Those are your bad habits.”
“By God, that was fucking low.”
I don’t know what it was about Disaine, but I could always argue with her. You know? Even during the initial give-and-take — sometimes I was afraid to ask her something, to pose a question to that face of peeling wood, but it was only ever because I knew I wouldn’t like the answer. There’s a difference between giving people shit, which is what the Holoh do
to keep from snapping, and arguing, which is sharp and unsafe. The people I can argue with are few.
And, strangely enough, mostly people I’ve guided. Yes, it’s priests I feel safe arguing with. You can push them and they don’t seem to get hurt, mostly because they don’t know you. I feel somehow that this is something else that all the priests of the Southern Church have in common. It’s reassuring, it puts me to sleep.22
* * *
22 I like to argue, myself, as you know, but I wouldn’t want to do it with you. If I’m going to be together with someone, I want someone from a world so different that we have nothing to argue about. Sometimes I think I’m driven to fight just because I’m maddened by the little fence I’m stuck behind, and it’s not the way I am in my heart, or would be if I had all sorts of grand pastures to run in, and some little village that would take my advice, and a house to come home to at the end of the day. That’s what I think about when I am trying to sleep. It’s sentimental enough — like, these people in the village, what do they farm, what sect are they, how did they contact us? I don’t know. But I can see every block of the house and the bricks in the floor, which are not like the bricks in the floor of the morgue and dissecting-room here. They are old, mossy, and I love them.
* * *
“But,” said Disaine, “like Daila before you, you’re a superb climber. And I am honored to have climbed with you.”
“I can’t make you change your mind.”
“I’m glad you know that,” she said, and her face wrinkled tight with sorrow and had difficulty smoothing out again. “I didn’t make it up with a whole lot of joy.”
I think now that Disaine was right. I never was a leader. I was a guide. A leader loves her followers; a guide loves the terrain. And they are different in another way. A leader’s job is to bring you to glory. A guide’s job is to save you.
I have never been able to save anybody. Oh, physically, yes. I have arrested falling climbers; with one sharp dig of my axe I have pinned two, even three falling people to the mountain and to life. I suppose I’ve saved a few patients too, here at the Shilaad School, though here it’s never as clear. But did I save Courer? Or Disaine? No, never. I made it worse.
Chapter 11
“Salvation is a fine thing,” said Asam, “but take care that you don’t mistake something else for it. The pelican brings the fish out of the sea, but it does not save it from drowning.”
—The Gospel of the Worms
We spent the whole rest of the summer on the mountain, and much of the autumn. It was, in total, 189 days. I was forced to acknowledge that Disaine really did not want to summit any longer, that she had retreated into some other world from which she smiled vaguely out at me. This other world had a very specific location, but I never asked because I did not want to. I was bitterly disappointed in her. Yet what could I do? She didn’t want to go further; I could not force her, and I could not abandon her.
She stopped climbing vertically at all. She did keep exploring the mountain, this high patch of it upon which we had found ourselves, spending our strength slowly. She spent a lot of time at her telescope, looking at the summit or the sky, taking bits of notes on a piece of wind-brittle paper, which she faithfully transcribed, indoors and mittenless.
She kept us up there until far too late in the year. There was always a new thing to try, a new “experiment”; she had a barometer to plant overnight in a very specific place, or a new modification to the suits, something that would pull in oxygen more efficiently, “for the next try.” She seemed, at times, to have forgotten that she’d told me we would never summit and still to be reaching, albeit into the abstraction of the future, where you do not need to breathe.
I realized that she always climbed best when she had given up on climbing. That was the pattern in all her form.
I am reminded that the word desperate comes from the Parnossian desapa, which has the same root as disparate — someone outside of society, a berserker, literally dead-eyed — while despair has quite a different root, brought overseas with the aristocrats of the First Empire. Languages have old metaphors entombed in them. Despair’s comes from spaïr, a verb, to settle, as if to the bottom of the sea.
There was always a paradox with Disaine. When she was desperate, she climbed like a southerner. When she was in despair, a Holoh.
I resigned myself to mapping and to testing myself, the sad second-prize things that people do when they’ve already explored all that there is to explore, although the peak hung there, still and tantalizing, an ornament for the air, a grand hallucination. I would take a canister of oxygen — you needed only one for the whole day; the suits took it in slowly, savored it, made it melt — and speed-run ten thousand feet, twenty thousand, stopping only to notate the shape of the mountain in my own visual language, an inverted V for an overhang, a long series of I’s for a slope, a row of X’s for a clifftop with something interesting on it. I would sit at the edges of four-hundred-foot drops and look at the rich clouds below, the primordial broth of mist and water, or sometimes at the brief explosive view of the land, with light vapor passing around my head.
Those were times of wonderful isolation. I could always return to the tent to sleep, to warm my toes, to take a deeper drink of oxygen, but otherwise I could climb all day, amidst the absence of bodies, learning the high stones and the rich inhalable look of the snow. Sometimes I would see Disaine below me, toiling for rock samples or fixing the telescope on something — never on me. My strength came back, now that I could rest, and despite myself I found myself increasingly attached to this new model of climbing. I really was starting to envision myself as the first of a race of climbers who would use subtler magics than this to live in little havens of tents, high on the walls of the world, to push further up the mountain, until one glorious day they could pass a climber all the way to the summit. By now I had fully committed to the idea that this was the best way to find God. I still believe that with all my heart. When have I ever let another’s anger keep me from loving them?23
* * *
23 I’m honestly not sure if that’s a deeply Asamlike thing to say, or if he’d sit you down and tell you to change your life.
* * *
Because despite it all, I am an optimist, I suppose. I still believe someone will summit the mountain someday, even if what Disaine has done since will make it meaningless, and even if more nice churchmen are bitterly insulted, more Holoh made excommunicate, in the process. I would like it to be me, I still dream of it being me, but I don’t see much chance of that.
Winter was closing on us now, and we had to start rationing our food. The mountain below fifty thousand feet — we had camped at seventy, I had touched as high as ninety — would be a plunge back into the storm. We were eating the equivalent of kindling, dried fruit bars and other quick burns of sugar, because we had no dried meat left. It was time to leave.
The descent was slow and weary. Disaine was tired; I saw it in the deeper hunch of her back, in the cavity-like slump of her body. It was the kind of tired that you can’t push through. At night she slept a deep boggy sleep, and I spent so much energy making her eat that I had no strength for my own meals. My teeth were loosening.
We crept down slowly. We rested all day, some days. The rubberized tent glowed red, and the pressurizer worked hard to give us sweet downslope air to replace the mud in our heads. I would try to give Disaine advice, to give her all the strength I had, but her complaints had done their work, and I no longer felt like I knew what to say.
We bivouacked for the last time a few thousand feet above the observatory, in a dark crag midway up a rocky pass. The air was thick enough to breathe unassisted, but sharp and wet, and we were glad to get into the tent. I did not turn on the lamp or think to worry about food. Instead I only lay down and had neat chronological nightmares, and then I woke to a hand opening the tent.
It had been so long since I’d seen anyone but Disaine that my first thought was that we had reproduced. The hand
was tearing at the knots, which since it was tied from the inside necessitated that the whole hand and wrist be thrust in, in a heavy black glove that was shortly peeled off, leaving behind something hairy and overcooked.
The rescuer was a man from the observatory. They had spotted our tent the previous night, and though it had looked like the kind of tent that has corpses in it, he and his friends had trekked all the way up here, put rags to their faces, and torn open the side of our home to find a pair of crumpled figures, eyes bright red with burst vessels, quite alive.
Our rescuer was an astronomer, a strong man in late middle age with a solid beard and eyes that seemed to brim with fat. His team were indistinguishable in little black and red snowsuits. I had the same feeling that I always have when I come back from climbing. I wanted to climb back up again — back into those maplike mornings that reminded me of perfect sunrises in the bar, into a morning like a clear glass cup of tea and an egg, when no one had taken a room and the previous night’s ashes were still downstairs and out of sight. A morning like a set of ideal forms.
“They’re alive!” he shouted back to the team, who I could see crouched to either side of him, some heads, some limbs. “It’s Disaine and Lamat. Here — sorry, ladies, I’m letting the cold in.”
“We can come out,” I said. I really was very tired. I took his outstretched hand and let him lead me out of the tent, and I stood there in the late-morning light in my parka, feeling naked to the breeze. Long ago I had lost the distinction between this fur and the hair of my own body. Then from the open mouth of the tent issued my scarf and goggles and gloves — Disaine had thrown them — and I picked them up and put them on, inhaling the comforting rankness of my own old breath, the familiar crust.
The Breath of the Sun Page 19
