“You don’t know where it is.”
But he was already half upstairs, and came down with a bag clutched in each hand. We went through them together, fur spilling out, and books and stray papers and a little money. I saw the dresses Disaine had bought me in Catchknot, crumpled tight as tissue. The vial came out, loose in his hand. He turned it over, and the spongy ash whirled.
“So the bitch will never roll back into town,” he said.
“Well, she’s with us now.”
He got up, cracking at the knees, clearing his throat. He was having a lot of mechanical trouble. I watched his slumped shoulders in their thin brown knit, and I wanted to press my hand to them — there was a little hunch there, like the clumsy folded wing of a bird. Dracani is always so much easier to approach from behind. He said quietly, “I never liked her, you know. I can’t help it.”
“I feel like ‘bitch’ covered that.”
“You knew.”
“I did. Well, I never liked her, either.”
“It doesn’t mean I wanted her dead.”
“Yeah, that’s basic shit.”
“I seriously,” he said, “would lose sleep over the idea of her body finally coming down in a landslide and filling the town with powder and her. Thank you for bringing her home.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Shit,” he said, “did you find Courer, too?”
“We burned her higher up,” I said with effort.
“And did you not bring her ashes?” He was gentler now. I think Dracani guessed most of how I felt about Courer, the memorials I might have wanted to make, in privacy.
“No. I let it all go up.”
He shook his head. He was not quite dismissing me. Trying, maybe, to rattle something out of the skull. Dracani never had the stomach for death; that was another reason he would never have made a guide. His eyes met mine, and I thought, sometimes the job of a friend is to accept the cold lumps we keep inside. Dissolve them in each other. It doesn’t always have to look clean; it doesn’t always have to sound good. Some wrongs can kill friendships like that, and some can’t. My excommunication couldn’t, but I think that if he had denied some things that he admitted that night, it would have been death.
I mean, maybe it’s a dead friendship now. We haven’t spoken since that night. But I keep a flame in the window for him.
He went behind the bar, rummaged at the shelves full of bric-a-brac and half-sets of glasses, the other half smashed years or decades ago. Daila’s Second Empire tumblers were still there, I saw. Dracani straightened up with an old spittoon, a thing of cardboardy gold metal, wrought in blurry lions.
“You want to do it now?”
“It’s been 8,973 days,” he said. “That’s a multiple of nine. We’re good.”
“Should I, like, turn around?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, and uncorked the vial of ashes. “I told you, if anyone’s Holoh, it’s you. I don’t care if God disagrees.”
Then my mouth opened and I told him the story of our burial in the avalanche, as the light dust of the ashes drifted upward. That particular dust, like smoke. I told him of the embrace of God’s hand, the soft crystallized hole in the snow before my eyes. I told him about Courer, too, and what Disaine had done, and how she had been burnt, and when I was done the ash had settled and Dracani was sitting down behind the bar.
“She’s a miracle maker,” he said.
I don’t know if you know of the Holoh word “miracle.” It means a sign of God’s will. The etymology refers to a closing of the eyes, a light hand on a fevered face, but it can mean anything that’s done to make sure we know of God. An avalanche, a storm, the death of a guide fifty feet from home, Saon’s death, the tent’s survival. So what he meant was to say was: Disaine speaks for God. Or: she seizes God’s title for herself. I don’t think he was sure, Dracani never being a great sport theologically, but it crystallized something I had already thought, and I nodded to him fervently.
“But pour the water,” I said. “That part, we know.”
He filled a pint glass at the tap, to the brim, and paused over the spittoon. It was old and clean and dry, but it had a scent of tobacco and spittle to it still, a meaning I caught. With the faint scent that came up, I felt that I could let go my disgust with Saon, which I am so sick of, and feel her instead as a perfume of adventure, a leathery smell, a woman who lived for God alone. I gripped his wrist and helped him pour the pint of cool water. (When it’s evaporated, the widower can marry again.) Then I helped him upstairs to his bedroom, a windowless and fireless closet that I’d never even used as a bedroom — God help him, Dracani never liked comfort. We put it at the head of the bed. He didn’t have the strength to get up, when he sat down to do that, and I let him lie down for a moment while I went downstairs and cleaned up. I was very tired, but the cleaning helped me. He came back down, and we did the last bit together.
“Are you staying a while?”
“I’d like to go down to Garnerberg.”
He looked at me keenly. His eyes seemed sharpened by tears, as if by a lens of water. “Going to write another book?”
“Maybe,” I said. It was the closest he came to asking about the summit, and the closest I came to telling him it was a lie.
The next morning I took the tram down to the mainland. When I stepped out of the swaying car, the air was wild and rich, and the heat of the sun felt wet on my face and shoulders. Still, there was a familiarity in the feeling, and then I realized, of course — the suits had been calibrated to give me mainland air, and I had grown used to it. I had become as lost at high altitude as Disaine.
The tram station was quiet and empty, made of unfinished wood. All there was to it was the terminus of the tram and a slim set of rails for the Garnerberg train, and I waited until I saw the train and the tram moving toward me in the distance, as if headed to smash together.
I rode into Garnerberg. This car, too, was empty, and I enjoyed the solitude, the fantasy of climbing about the earth alone. The early winter light slanted against the wooden seats, bringing shadows with it, and a cold smell, and then the night.
I stepped out of the train into the mild chill of the city. As exhausted as I was, as bitter at the loss of the summit, I was exhilarated, too. I was without attachments, anonymous and rich. The cash Disaine had given me crackled with potential; it was six months of life crammed together in a rough pile. I could have had a real rest. Instead I found a hotel for the night, and when I came out I went to a bookshop I knew, which sold my work and which was run by an old guiding client, a man who had done the Wrack, and whom I trusted. I asked him to find me a job for the winter, some sort of caretaking job, as far from people as possible.
He was worried, I think, but not puzzled. People are drawn to the adventuring life for all sorts of reasons. He was the type who only wanted to attend to the furry hills and low, water-soaked wastes of the country, and who saw his life here as largely illusory. He talked to a friend, who talked to a friend, and soon I had departed for a muddy campground, used in the summers by riders and hunters and Arit conventioneers. There was a lodge of heaped gray stone, with animals’ bones on the walls, and a lot of platforms of white wood to pitch your tent on, and furled canvas to keep free of spiders. I could think and write, and read, and look at the mountain, and keep myself busy sweeping the platforms and crushing the spiders.
In this way I spent the first half of the winter and did not have to touch my bribe. There were many nights when I was tempted to burn it, as Disaine would have. Sometimes I would take it out and count it, and then wash my hands — you could almost see Daila’s and Disaine’s fingertips in it, the way it was crumpled, the way it broke. But I kept it. It wasn’t Courer’s body, burnt to free us both; it was only a packet of cold paper, and I would need it later on.
My mistake was coming back to Garnerberg halfway through the winter. I had to fill up on supplies. I didn’t want to, but I had no way to send a message from the camp. And s
o I hiked to the edge of town with my old pack on my back and saw Disaine’s name on a newspaper displayed above the cans of pork and jars of water. From then on I was involved again.
CATCHKNOT — Erathe Sirayan won’t let you call her by name.
“Disaine” is the holy name she was given when she entered the Arit priesthood thirty-five years ago. Despite the fact that she has long since departed that priesthood in disgrace, it’s still the only name she will accept from a reporter who comes to visit her in her rented office here in central Catchknot. The view from the broad windows is good, and the morning sun is bright, but it faces away from the mountain.
“We have to economize,” she says, “in some ways.” I have already offended her by using the wrong name, but she charitably sits down behind her desk anyway. She has a kindly air, magisterial, as if her judgment is the one that matters.
Some of the facts about her are not in dispute. Sirayan and her guide, the author and mountaineer Lamat Paed, set off to climb the Sublime Mount on the first Fowl Day in the month of Tribus, an early set-off, still in avalanche season. They were gone for several months, until the month of Saibao, when they were found at 12,700 feet by a rescue party of scientists from the nearby observatory. The astronomers had seen the light in their tent go out. Both women were emaciated and exhausted, and when they were brought out of the tent and carried back to the observatory, Sirayan shocked everyone by declaring that they had been to the top of the mountain. They had overcome the dangerous pressure and thin, dizzying air with an ingenious invention of Sirayan’s, a suit that provided breath and pressure through a combination of physical constriction, bottled oxygen, and a condensation of air. The suits were since tested at ground level and in balloons, and it was found that they worked, though they were in very poor repair.
Sirayan and Paed parted ways just after their arrival at the observatory, apparently acrimoniously. An astronomer there told me that, upon being informed that Sirayan had accepted an offer to lecture on her discoveries, Paed laughed and told him to “watch out for her.” When asked about Paed’s statement, Sirayan’s face clouds over.
“I never knew Lamat felt that way,” she says. “I’ve been up and down the mountain with her, and I don’t know her any better than after I read her book. Less, maybe.”
Was Paed casting doubt on her claims?
“She wouldn’t do that.”
Had Sirayan really been to the top of the mountain?
“Yes.”
Well, what is it like up there?
“Like nothing at all,” she says. “No air. A little disc of sun. Like the mind before a thought.”
No ether? No fog? No amniotic miasma? Not to put too fine a point on it, no house of God?
“Certainly there’s no ether.” She puts something unseen down in the drawer of her desk and shuts it. “But do you imagine that if you climbed the mountain, you’d find God’s house? With God’s chimney, and God’s tea mugs, and God’s cat?”
I tell her, no, of course not.
“I did not climb the mountain thinking I would personally meet God.”
Then, assuming this is true, why does she want to climb it again?
(Here, I, Lamat, said “What?” aloud in the open store. A wave of frustration ran over me. The clerk was coming in from her smoke, in the white winter sun that I find so attractive, and there was a sample of frigid air, and the tinkle of a bell. This woman was used to people coming in from the wilderness; it was that kind of store, that sold jerky and pre-sugared tea. I think she was used, also, to frostbitten people scowling at the news, just on principle, for she asked me nothing about it when I paid and did not ask me to buy the paper. This account is from the copy in your scrapbook.)
She doesn’t want to climb it again. She corrects me irritably; she is used to correcting. She wants to revisit the mountain by technological means, with a device she introduces to me as if this were the first time she had explained it. I feel a certain thrill as I get the speech, which is the same one I have read in other journalists’ articles about Sirayan, to the word, with the jokes. There is a city silence, smoothed out by traffic.
You know the plan: the small capsule, the balloon, the series of controlled explosions. The plan to not only depart the earth in a rip of fire, but to circle it twice before landing on the top of the mountain and stepping out, in one of those leather suits, to touch the earth. To prove, she says, that anyone can do it. This is, she says, the apotheosis of the Arit movement. Replication. To get a result and then to get it again.
“But to let the magic in,” she says, adamant. “Not to see it as a toy. To make a science of it.”
I complain that it is hardly a replication to come to the summit this way, and she scowls at me, but has no answer.
The plan relies on the ingenuity of several men who achieved their peak after Sirayan’s time. There is Nobus Bliesche in rocketry, Anton Sprigwill in meteorology, and the magical discoveries recently made by Father Nove-Anjust, a mention of whose name makes her eyes and mouth narrow.
“Nove-Anjust first published while I was on the mountain,” she says. “I’ve advanced far beyond his ideas. I raised the dead to dig me out of an avalanche. Why is it that the moment I come out with a serious theory of magic, you haul out a twenty-year-old Arit who’s dabbled in it as proof that I wasn’t first?”
Erathe Sirayan can speak in italics.
I explain to her that in some Arit circles, magic is no longer considered a toy. That Nove-Anjust and his team have begun to investigate it seriously. That her idea of how the Arit view magic comes from her own past, not the institution’s future. I refrain from bringing up her own record, and the reasons she may not be familiar with current events in the Brotherhood, which are also the reasons I suspect that she may be more familiar than she says she is. But she cuts me off, asks me, “Have you seen me speak?”
I tell her I have not.
“You should. You should give me room to explain myself.” Her face is suddenly raw. She has seen what I felt. She does have mystic power, albeit of the ordinary sort that some women and fortune-tellers do: the power to read emotion, to tell people’s strife at a touch, especially provided a few hours of advance research. For a moment, we stare at each other, and I see her plain face wet with honest tears, and I wish I were wrong about the woman who calls herself Mother Disaine.
“Bitch,” I said, and “whore” — epithets applied not to the writer and not to Disaine, but in the Holoh fashion, to the situation at large. I refolded the paper, which was hot and crumpled, and tried to blow my adrenaline out through my mouth. It didn’t work.
And I didn’t use the food I paid for. Through the heat-haze of my anger at Disaine and my anger for Disaine, I quit my job at the campground as soon as I could get a letter posted, and I was on the train to Catchknot the next day, with no particular plan in mind.
Chapter 13
All of Asam’s miracles were worked unseen, because that is the way of miracles. As he climbed, his bones glowed hot as bones in cremation, and he was warmed by them, even so that the snow melted when he touched it, and he felt the firm rock beneath, and he profited by all this so that he could climb without dying.
—The Gospel of the Waters
The Catchknot train was fast and crowded, but I found two seats facing each other and slung my pack onto one of them. Nobody ever sat opposite me on a train until I met you; people are alarmed by my scars, and then ashamed that they were alarmed, and then they take another seat. And so, in a space lit by evening sun and vibrated by talk, I sat alone and listened.
In particular, I watched a couple in the next seats over. He was a large earnest man in snug gray; she was a strand or two of frizzy hair, which I glimpsed occasionally over his shoulder. Periodically his arm would reach out and tensely thumb the window lever as if he were steering the train with it.
“The woman is a habitual liar,” he was telling her earnestly. “That’s the whole foundation of her life, you can tell from r
eading any interview, any article. She took in Paed —”
“How do you know she took in Paed? Paed disappeared.”
“Well, she agreed to climb the mountain with her. Why would she have done that, if she wasn’t taken in?”
“We don’t know anything about Paed. We don’t even know if Sirayan was telling the truth about climbing with her.”
“Well, I don’t know how she could have got that far alone.”
“Do you think she made it or don’t you?”
“I don’t know!” He shrank back a little, defensive. “Nobody does. That’s your point.”
“My point is that nobody is looking at this objectively.”
“How can you look objectively at something that might not have happened?”
“Look objectively at the story of it,” she said patiently. “Read what everyone’s written. Go see her. We are going to see her. Sift it to the bottom...if it happened, I mean. Jo. Imagine if it happened.”
The train took a curve just then, and the mountain came into view. The couple fell silent, for the view was drenched in the light of evening, dusty and brackish and vast. It was far enough away now to merely dominate the scene, and I was aware of every moment my eyes left it — every blink, every glance across at the couple again, because to return my gaze to it was to return to God’s impious might. You did not see the mountain; it was revealed to you. The couple had fallen silent, holding hands, and I imagined the feeling of fingers in fingers against that holy light, and nostalgia took my breath away.
We got off the train in the dark, and I glanced back to see my fellow-passengers as a group of dark blobs silhouetted in the pink light of the train door, passing into the night. I adjusted my pack, with its yellow webbing and its smell of frozen hemp, and made my way out in no particular direction. I thought I’d try to find the hotel where we’d stayed before the climb. My sense of the place was muddled as in a dream, and eventually I went into a cheap inn, greasy brick floors and men separately collapsed on the bar, just to have a place to stay. The little whitewashed bedroom seemed embarrassingly public, and I slept very little. In the morning I realized I was getting ill. I ought to have known; for me, illness is always led by a sense of nostalgia.
The Breath of the Sun Page 21
