The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  She came out of the tent then in some style, supporting herself on the astronomer’s arm, which was firm as furniture. She inhaled the clean quiet air as if it were her first drink for weeks, and pressed her head to his shoulder.

  He said, “Did you summit, Disaine?”

  She said, “Yes,” and her flushed face irradiated the air around her. I took a step back, fumbling at my goggles and scarf; I realized now that she’d given them to me so that nobody would see my face. This would have been my moment to deny it and avert everything, but I was simply so confused, so overwhelmed by the faces and the breath and the bodies and by Disaine’s aura of certainty. It was a real thing; it rang all around her like metal. I was behind most of the astronomers now, and I saw them tense forward a bit, all of them, and then break out into spontaneous applause. Their mittened hands turned the clap into a thump, and the sound was like that of horses.

  Then we were conducted down to the observatory. I was put in a room by myself, with a monk’s bed that tapered toward the feet, and one of those single-squeeze chemical showers that they paid Holoh to haul up here in the early summer. The air at this latitude felt watery and firm. I took off all of my clothes for the first time in months, feeling like something cracked open, and I stood in the shower’s lukewarm bucket and cleaned myself up. Frostnipped fingers and toes, lines of emaciation, long heavy hair. Three toes looked worse than frostnipped; they looked like skins full of wax. I should have seen that earlier, but after so long on the mountain you shrink into the snow and forget the proper care of bodies. You forget to separate yourself from your surroundings.

  The shower had just stopped, and I was still standing in the pan of water when the knock came. I said, “Not decent!” — strange how these formal phrases pop into our heads in this kind of crisis — and Disaine said, “I’ve seen it before.”

  “Wait.” I toweled my hair and got into the robe the observatory people had provided me, a luxurious robe of fur, the raw skin pierced by threads of silk. She pushed the door open when I was finally stepping out onto the damp carpet.

  “You should get those toes looked at,” she said.

  “They only need a thawing,” I said.

  “How long have they been frostbitten?”

  “They’re not black yet. They’ll be fine.” I was getting into the bed, still in my robe. “You look better.”

  She had bathed too and changed out of her climbing things and back into her old cassock, with its stains whose shapes I knew. Her three-fingered hand clutched an incongruous drink, pale brown and steaming with a slice of dried orange peel in it. She put it on the bedside table and sat down. The narrow window showed only a patch of snow, darkening already.

  “How long have you been planning to lie?” I asked her, but in a whisper — I think that was the moment that she realized I wouldn’t stop her, at least not right away, and her face spasmed and then relaxed again. “Since the avalanche?”

  “Since rather soon after we passed Courer’s tent.”

  “Then all of this has been a sham, for God knows how long.”

  “It wasn’t a sham,” she said, and took up her drink, but did not sip from it. “Lamat, I wouldn’t bring you to the brink of death for that.”

  “We weren’t on the brink of death.”

  “My God, could you not see that? I knew I was weak, too weak to manage this myself. I was depending on my theories being correct — well, not just mine. The gravity didn’t lighten as I expected. I told you that.”

  “You’ve been almost as high in a balloon as we’ve been on the mountain.”

  She finally drank from her glass, and as she tipped it high, I glimpsed her distorted teeth and lips. “The line is held to be at seventy thousand feet. That’s when the effect begins, a little outside of the envelope where a balloon can function.”

  “So you gave up long before you knew you were wrong.”

  “Lamat, you gave up too.”

  “I haven’t given up,” I said. “We got twice as high this time as last.”

  “It was the last climb for me,” she said, and put the glass down again. She forgot it there for the rest of the night; I took it to the kitchen in the morning. “We haven’t talked about how you want your fee.”

  “I didn’t do this for the fee.”

  “If you want to carry on the climbing, you may as well take the money,” she said, and her face flushed again. “Just don’t tell anyone. Let me do what I have to do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Come to God,” she said, and in the set of her mouth I saw something hard, something that struck together.

  “You don’t have to pay me off to get me on your side, Disaine. I’m always on your side.”

  The effect of this was striking — a kind of loosening, an unexpected humor. She sat there with lips parted and said nothing. I said, “What do I care about any of these people? I care about you. But how is lying going to do this for you?”

  “You will see,” she said. “You will absolutely see.”

  “I’m afraid that isn’t good enough.”

  “Not even with the absolutely?” she asked, and quirked her mouth at me.

  “No.”

  “I’ll use machinery and magic. I’ll need vast sums of money for the research. I’ll get there in the end.”

  “Disaine, you’ve already stolen vast sums of money. However are you going to get away with that, to begin with, once you’re the famous summiter?”

  “From the queen.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The queen is going to pay me off,” she said. “The queen is going to pay everyone off. She’s very interested in exploration, and she’s very interested in the fate of women. She’ll listen to what I have to say. She will love me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the sorts of people she endows.”

  “Then why weren’t you one of them?”

  “Because she didn’t choose them,” said Disaine. “Because people choose for her, the sorts of scientists whose work she’d like, and they didn’t notice me because they’re fucking stupid. But now she’ll look at me directly. I’ve sent a letter out already, to the papers. Talking about what we’ve seen.”

  “You’re scum,” I said admiringly, but Disaine took it seriously — her face crumpled, a soft square. I said, “I meant that in a good way.”

  “You’re always saying these flippant things,” she said, and touched the corner of her eye with the corner of her robe. “And I know you mean it in a nice way, because you don’t value what I value, but it still makes me feel like shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I was irritated more than sorry. “That’s how I talk to my friends — that’s how I talk to Dracani.”

  “Dracani is not your friend, and you’re not his.” The flow of tears was serious now, and the hem of her robe could not stanch it. I had nothing clean about me; I let her leave, saying something about finding a handkerchief, but she did not come back. I went to sleep worried about all sorts of things. I was very tired.

  Chapter 12

  They were coming to Asam to be blessed. And Asam meditated for a time in his tent and came out, and he preached of many things, but mainly of the idea that the body is already blessed, that each of us was twisted into shape in the womb by God. He said, “I have no right to bless what is already blessed. My blessing would corrupt His. There is no I, only another vessel of God’s idea. All I have is given by Him, and He can take it when He likes. There is no self to which to be false, but there is a God to whom to be true.”

  —The Gospel of the Stave

  When I woke up, she was gone, though I didn’t know it yet. It was late in the day; the light canted oddly, nothing like the light at home. I had begun to think of 70,000 feet as home.

  My toes had thawed in the blankets overnight, and looked better. I must have been truly exhausted, to sleep through the pain of it, and I thought, there is a place in sleep that you never break
into on the mountain, a room of true rest that grows neglected and dusty in your absence.

  As I sat up, I thought of Courer. I suddenly missed her so, her soft cold hand on my back and her face full of trouble. I thought about how foolish it had been of me, not to speak of her all these years, because that meant not speaking to her.

  No one had ever talked to me about it. That was the strange thing. To blame me or to absolve me — for letting Daila drag us both up the mountain, for teaching her to climb in the first place, for letting her climb, although I knew she was not well. Who would I talk to? Only Daila knew the whole story, and I didn’t want to remind him that he knew it.

  So I had kept the story sealed up in my head, like the meat inside an egg. It had got me into the habit of secrecy, although I had made a career of the book I had written. There was a whole part — the feeling part — that I had kept out, and which had made people like the book, I think, in the end. People like a story told without feeling, written with numb fingers and spat out by numb lips. They think they want something else, but feeling is exhausting, especially other people’s. I feel that way too. The truth is that you can substitute bodily action, or tight prose, or the chalky strawberry layer of sentiment, every time without being noticed, and even while being praised. Even the most sophisticated reader cannot detect real feeling except to feel frustrated by it. When you suspect that the book is a little self-indulgent, that’s how you know feeling has come into it. I do all this, too. We can only forgive it in our loved ones. That’s why my new thing is writing books that only you will read.

  I had nothing to wear but the fur robe — now that I had them off, I could tell that my clothes were too disgusting for society — so I ventured into the halls barefoot and bare-necked. Almost at once I came upon our rescuer of the previous day, he of the solid beard, and he scolded me as if I were febrile and carried me off to my bed again, literally I mean. Only as he lay me down in it could I make myself understood: I was fine, I was well, I wanted only clothing and to see Disaine.

  “Disaine’s left,” he said, and stood back a little from the bed, as if to admire the effect. “She said she was going on tour.”

  I laughed — a cough of a laugh, full of bile. “She what?”

  “She said she was going on a lecture tour of Catchknot and Garnerberg, to start. That she spoke to you about it already.”

  “She did not,” I said. “But perhaps I was too ill to catch her meaning.”

  “Maybe,” he said uncertainly. “You’re better than I thought you were. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. He was such a tender animal of a man, with tiny anxious eyes. “We’ve been in a bad way for a long while.”

  “I wonder that she even survived.”

  “Oh, Disaine’s a brute,” I said. “That she might survive another trip — no, probably not. But you underestimate her strength, you underestimate her sinews. She’s full of blood. Watch out for her.”

  “She’s a phenomenal woman,” he said, and now his eyes filled with tears.

  I descended from the observatory once I was well enough, in a stranger’s furs and with Disaine’s money in my pocket. She had left it by my bed, and though I could turn down an offer of cash, I could not turn down an envelope of it. (How did she manage it on the mountain? Banked it, I suppose, with the priests or the astronomers. Disaine, like Daila, always thought of banks.)

  I never found out how she got down, in as bad shape as she was — by the time we saw each other again, the subject wasn’t at the top of my mind anymore. But after I had my breath and my fluids back, I was ready at least for a quick glissade down to the monastery, and from there I could push my torn ligaments and leaking bones down to my village.

  I was out until late in the evening, having disregarded all of my own rules about climbing at night. I knew this route, with its broken early-winter snow and night-frozen mud, as well as I knew the bar, and I could navigate its hazards more nimbly.

  Easy climbing, then, down to the village; easy climbing that I’d once commanded good fees for guiding along, since when you can’t climb, the mountain looks like a solid slap of slippery, pale stuff, impossible to move along. The snow was deeper now than when I’d left, the kind of thick winter snow that would turn to avalanche snow in spring. As I got closer to the village it started falling heavily, so that while I glissaded the final hundred feet it flew past me like white stars.

  It was after midnight. The bar had that dingy light that I associate with the hour just before and after closure. I saw Dracani, his hair shrunk to shoulder-length, standing meditatively at the back door with a tray of dregs, emptying the last inch of each ruined drink into the snow, leaving a cavity of brown. He stopped when he saw me standing there.

  Before my frostbite, I had a cute little face. It was a continuous surprise for people, because I’d always been sort of dour and difficult, and they’d imagine me looking dour and difficult even if we were apart for an hour or an instant, only to be confronted again with my round ready eyes, my dimpled smile. Even after the extraneous flesh of my nose was bitten away and time washed the cheeks a little plainer, I think I retained some of that essential “cuteness,” such that the face that looked back at Dracani out of the darkness had some of the terrible mischief of a young ghost. This might have explained why he shrieked a little, and threw a glass at my head, although he should have known me.

  I hacked and gurgled and wiped at my face, the temple lit up with pain where the glass had hit me. Without looking at him I went into the bar and shut the door, and for a moment the great dying fire and the rows of glasses rainbowed with oily stains were mine again, and I felt a relief so deep that my bones lit up with it. I would gladly have given up the whole past year for the chance to drop into one of those leather chairs and sink into the fire. Then the door opened and Dracani came back in.

  He looked tired and clean, the loose skin of his face as pale and delicate as if it had been stretched over a fine cheekbone. I sat down in one of the chairs anyway, although I had paid nothing for it, and put my feet up close to the fire. I had never been so tired, I thought, not even while we were clinging to the side of the mountain, at the end.

  He went behind the bar, made me a hot punch — slowly, methodically, as if consulting a recipe book in his head; Dracani was never much of a bartender, and he placed the final wedge of lemon as if it were a bit of spackle. He brought it to me, and I burned my hand on the hot edge of the cup and then placed it by the fire. We sat there together in silence, and I thought of Disaine’s remark that he was not my friend nor I his.

  “How’s the bar doing?” I finally asked him, lifelessly.

  “Oh, it’ll always do well,” he said. “You understood why I took it?”

  “’Cause you’re an asshole?”

  “Everyone has to come inside sometime.” There was self-pity in his voice, and something hard and dry that I recognized less well.

  “And that’s how you bought your ticket in? By pushing to excommunicate me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “At least we can be honest with each other,” I said, and closed my eyes. They were hot, and the fire was hot, and yet somehow it felt good to close them. The dryness of the leather behind my shoulder blades, the smell of smoke, the fire against the soles of my feet — a rest after dishonest labor. I felt like weeping, and I knew that Disaine’s lie had cut me off from what even excommunication couldn’t.

  Of course, I had the choice to be honest. I always did, in the same way that when climbing an ice shelf I always technically have the choice of whether to continue or stay where I am, crampons punched into the ice and muscles fading with the sun. But from the first moment, I knew I wouldn’t take it. I could not willfully choose to hurt Disaine — it would be humiliation on a level she thought only she was used to. I have known a few great frauds in my time. I have found people out myself, who claimed to be skilled climbers and ready for places like Aneroyse’
s Wrack. I don’t think they even mean to lie; some people think it’s enough to feel skilled, and stone will break for you like wet earth. But you cannot change the solidity of the stone, its lack of footholds, and you cannot change the way people look when they’re found out. A crude smile, jarring as a body breaking on rock. I don’t know — it felt like a choice between hurting myself a little and hurting her a lot, so I chose to hurt myself a little, at the time. My toes had recovered; I had some energy to spare for it.

  I had stored a few bags with Dracani when we’d left, and now I asked him if he still had them.

  “Course, but don’t ask for them right now.” He had his legs stretched out and propped up on the chimney, over the fire. What must it be like to have legs like that, all that long muscle, a strength you don’t even need. God made me too economically for a strength like that.

  “I’ve got some of Saon’s ashes is all,” I said.

  For a moment he seemed to disbelieve me. His lips parted, and they were like Saon’s lips, wet in firelight, a line of spittle dwindling between them. Married couples always become a little alike.

  Then he said, “You didn’t tell me that you found her.”

  “Of course we did. The mountain’s not that big.”

  “God is big enough for me,” he said. “From Their hand.” Garbled holy words. He took down his legs and sat up and looked at me. “On the first trip, even.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We had our minds on other things.”

  “So you took her ashes — what, down to the mainland? And did whatever you did —”

  “Yes. Do you want them?”

  “She’s been here all along,” he said.

  “Upstairs. Yes.”

  “Upstairs,” he murmured, and then got up with a long man’s effort. “Well, I guess she was upstairs since she died, in a way.” The mountain as a sort of high thin house is not an uncommon metaphor for us to come up with independently; it might sound a little silly from Dracani, but I assure you, to him the mountain was a fabulous and impossible home, just as it was for me. “Well, let me get it.”