“Maybe we all feel that way,” said Daila softly, “all those who were ambitious.”
“Unless we succeed. But you and I, we didn’t succeed.”
“And now this is what you want,” said Daila. “Another chance.”
“Exactly.”
“But why the mountain, then?”
“Oh, do you really want to go into that?” she asked him, but with a friendly growl in her throat. “I’m old, Daila. I came late to this recognition, that all along I haven’t been a piece of shit scientist, but actually a pretty good magician. I’ve only got time for one experiment left, so it’s going to be the big one. What’s up there? And how did Asam, blessed be his memory, feel when he found it?”
Her words hung there. Daila sat back and put down his vinegar, flecked with golden oil. He wiped his mouth absentmindedly with his fingers. Finally he said, “Let me sleep on this.”
Disaine’s face lit. I had never seen a face do that before — it had been flat, and now it was solid and human, and there was something golden in it, as if I could see all the rich minerals that we all are made of, shining in the moments of her flesh. She breathed, “Okay!”
“Stay here.”
“Are you going to go get something?” asked Disaine, brightening again at the idea of a present.
“Stay here for the night.”
“We’re at the Melpole. All our stuff —”
“If one night of discomfort is going to bother you,” he said, “what will happen on the mountain? Think of it as an easy test.”
“Why?” said Disaine, and then immediately, “Okay.”
“I’m alone tonight and don’t want to be.”
“Why is that?” She saw his face and added, “If I can ask.”
“You can’t ask,” he said.
He put me in a room at the heart of the house, windowless but opulent. The walls were paneled in dark wood and hung with tapestries. A little rose-colored glass of water at the bedside looked as if it had been there for months; it was nearly drained, a mineral crust on the inside, a lip-print on the edge.
The house, all of solid stone, did not settle at night, and the air was cold and still. Somewhere a clock ticked, and each tick bit at the edge of my mind, keeping me from sleep. So when Daila came to visit me, I heard him coming from a long way away.
He knocked lightly and came in. I was sitting up in bed. He wore a light sleeping robe of wavering silk, and warm candlelight floated from his hand to his face. I was aware of the species that had been our marriage, its crude sexual dimorphism: the red canary and the sturdy wren.
“Lamat,” he said without preamble. “I was harsh.”
“I’ve been through worse.”
“I guess you have,” he said, and a little look of recognition came over him and then faded. “Do you have a plan?”
“For the climb?”
“For the rest of your life.”
He sat down on the room’s one chair, a low thing of velvet. The chair’s height made him perch, bent forward, as if on the starting line of a race.
“Really,” he said, “what are you going to do?”
“I could work in a bar,” I said. “I’m a bartender, I know cocktails.”
“You could work in a bar,” he said, as if really considering it. “Yes, I suppose so. But bartenders are a little different down here — they’re supposed to be pretty, and flirty, in addition to knowing how to pour two measures of whiskey to one of water. To put on a bit of a show. I can’t see you in one of those places.”
“I was pretty once, Daila.”
“I was a climber once. That doesn’t mean I can make money off it now.”
“So you do this.”
“And I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve made real money; I’ve gotten the things I need. I have a wife I love, a son — an adopted son. Or more of an employee. But, still, sometimes it’s best to have some distance from our children.”
“I’m glad you married again,” I said, and I felt my voice high and hesitant, a register I hadn’t known I could still use — it was as if all the time I had been without him was gone. This is the painful side of the Holoh idea of time. Time doesn’t build up; it vanishes. “Tell me about that?”
He told me about it, brightening to his subject. I sat back on the bed, but he got up, and I watched him pacing, breathing and dankish, so very tired. I had sensed his exhaustion since the garden; I had seen the false lines of his body that tiredness had made, the sense that he was using muscles meant for work or pleasure just to hold himself up because the core of him was gone. I’d learned long ago that Daila was kindest if I could get him to keep talking. He spoke of his patron, who was also his wife; of his protégé, who he saw as a son — a whole new family, pinned together by force. He spoke of envying this boy, who was twenty — “When I began to reckon my age, I was already twenty-six. I’ll never be twenty.” The dates, the ages, the reckoning of them, were second nature to him now. A second nature, to replace the first. He spoke of politics. “A shitshow,” he said, “a shitshow.”
Then he was done with his pacing, seemed worn out even by that. He sat next to me on the bed. He said, “You have the face you deserve now. You’re ugly in and out.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that you’re being honest.” I felt, not cold, but frozen.
At Daila’s funeral, we could barely light the effigy. The air was so wet with snow that if you stumbled away from the group and into the white, you would find yourself alone, all sound dampened by the wind and the steady thrum of the snow, which fell at a sharp angle and made the world unsteady. We held hands to keep ourselves together. Daila finally had to light it himself. He did it with flint and tinder, after the rest of us had given up even on matches — I remember the pile of spent matches wet on the pyre, wet with snow, and his determined face. Daila had only one face for when he was intent on anything. He had worn it when he’d argued with Courer, when we’d fought in the tent, when his sharp rubbery fingers had closed on my throat and Courer had kicked him in the head with a doctor’s precision. It was a strict face, sorrowful. Now he had been waiting to be burnt for an hour, and the chants were long over, and the body on the pyre (“body of straw, to replace the body of flesh”) was beneath an inch of snow, and he struck the flame himself, and as it finally came up it shone bright against his tears. They seemed to burn his eyes, that liquid red and orange. His face was tight with misery, no attempt to hide it, and his mother touched his back and he snapped at her hard. I moved near but thought better of it. At the time I saw only good in his excommunication, which would free me from the marriage and free Courer’s memory, and free us all from God’s fury. I felt blessed — I felt that God’s desires and mine were aligned, to let Daila go.
“But your friend is remarkable,” he said now.
“She is.”
“I might do something for her. She reminds me of myself when I was young. How has she kept it all? Most of us lose it so quickly.”
I saw his self-pity, which only made others pity him more, and for a moment I felt like myself instead of the woman who had married him.
He took up the covers and slipped into the bed, with the raw frustrated gestures of a man who was only cold and wanted to get where it was warm. It was his bed, after all, and his walls, and his tapestries — he had come a long way from a man who had only owned a pyre and an effigy. I waited a long time for him to sleep and then slipped off the bed and sat down in the chair.
Courer was still new to climbing when we set off, but she was a forceful woman — not forceful like a sword, but forceful like a rock, something you could break teeth against. Daila was forceful like a sword. It was a bad combination.
But the climbing, as always, was fantastic. Sometimes it’s like that, even with people who don’t know each other. An eight-legged staggering monster becomes one sinuous spine — or people who love each other will be about as compatible on the mountain as a goat and a rat, and his crampon will slip from the clif
fside and rip open the tissue of her neck, and there’s no helping it. Daila and I and Courer and Saon — we were the good kind.
But after Saon died, the balance broke. An animal can get used to walking on three legs, but it doesn’t happen overnight, and there is a quick wound where the leg should be. It was very cold that night, and the three of us sat around her in the tent, with an open fire smoking out a hole in the top. We had been pitching camp before we realized anything was wrong — it was that subtle, and Holoh don’t get altitude sickness, and we didn’t recognize that she was dying until we saw her feverish face and heard her babble excitedly, drunkenly, in words that none of us understood. She seemed excited about everything and tried to climb again. We bundled around her and helped her descend, over her passionate protests, before at last she fell into lassitude and we realized that we had lost her. We kept trying, dragging her down over the slick snow, but she died a few hours into the night.
Her body changed when she died. It’s hard to define why, through five layers of cloth and fur, but all of a sudden she felt light and dry, something that might blow away in the wind.
He volunteered to go back up for the tent. Courer and I sat with the body, which we rolled facedown in the snow as if to soothe her brain, which I imagined was still throbbing hot in her cooling flesh. There was a small moon that night, a stick of a moon, and the snow was a deep navy blue even under the bright starlight — a long itch of stars across the center of the sky. Courer and I sat on our packs and looked out over the clouds and the sleeping towns. She hugged me fiercely, and her mouth was against my ear, and I recoiled in shock — not that it seemed disrespectful, but just that she’d done it, and it was a strange feeling, the hyperconcentrated wet life of her mouth in all that darkness and cold. And I am probably repeating Twelve Miles now but I don’t care.12
* * *
12 In Twelve Miles she dies in a paragraph.
* * *
Daila brought the tent down and we set it up, and held our vigil around her body, and he said, in the absence of wood for a pyre, that we would leave the body weighted by stones and come back for it on the way down. We sat there and watched him, I staring in my usual puzzled defeat, and Courer tense, ready for anger but not ready to show it. I realized later that he was talking and talking to clothe a situation that, suddenly, was too naked. Corpses are always naked. It is absurd for them to wear clothes like living people, clothes that warm nothing and protect nothing, that just sit there over numb skin. And the body changes size in death, bloats and shrinks and skeletonizes, which makes a mockery of what it wears.
Courer said, “Shouldn’t we turn back?”
Daila started. He had been flushed and animated, stumbling over his words, acting as Saon had in her last moments, as if her sickness were contagious. Courer was staring at him, composed and tight, with her dry hands in her lap. Saon lay between us, her skin still creamy, her flesh set and firm.
He said, “Why should we? We’re alive.”
“To bring her down, Daila.”
“We can bring her down later.” He knew, as I knew, that we would never be able to bring her down — that the best we could do would be to make a bonfire of what gear we had left, to ensure that the mountain did not feel the hurt of her body. But we would need our gear to live, our packs and furs that at any rate were always soaked with snow. We had not thought of what to do if someone died.13
* * *
13 Nobody ever does, though.
* * *
I was exhilarated with climbing, despite the horror of the night — the icy wind had torn away every unnecessary part of me, so that I offered no resistance. It was hard to keep my mind focused on what had happened, inconceivable as it was, and committed as I was to going on.
I’ve always told myself that it was all Daila’s doing. He was the leader; he did not even think of turning back. When Courer argued with him, when she did her trick of clutching the knees of her leggings, sitting with her body stiff and straight, when she tensed and tore into him, he spoke to her as if to himself. As if he were imagining her.
It wasn’t that he didn’t feel Saon’s death. He had slept alongside that woman thirty nights out of sixty; he knew the style of her body, the heat of her back against the pressure of his nose, the ripping warmth of her political opinions (she came from a staunch Separationist family, and there was never anything she said that she didn’t want to say again). He knew her completely, clinically, every temperature and every width and length. But he knew the mountain better. I mean, not knew in the sense of understood, but knew in the sense of lived with, couldn’t leave. And so did I.
It was the same argument that killed her. In the tent, in the storm. Neither of them thought we could go on at that point. We were trapped; we were probably going to die. But Courer wanted us to ascend or descend — anything to get out of that land of snow and water, that particular level of atmosphere that seemed permanently broken into its constituent parts, into smashed water and ice and shattered wind. Daila wanted to wait.
You can imagine how it was. Daila had been raised to venerate the mountain, and Courer to think of it as nothing more than a particularly dazzling heap of rock. She had been raised without faith entirely. Climbing for her was an intellectual challenge, but not a matter of gods. And you need to see climbing as a matter of gods. You need it even if you are raised godless. You cannot climb in anything but fear and awe, and I wish I’d told her that, just as I wish I’d told off Daila for shouting that she was stupid to consider it. We were all shouting. We could only shout; we were deafened.
How shall I put it? To both of them it was simple. To her it was a “simple” matter of ascending one hundred feet, by feel if necessary but not without deliberation, to what she called a “blanket of snow” — again and again that same phrase, as she weakened and sobbed. Not easy, but simple, and how could he not see — but he did, he saw that it was “simple” that we only needed to wait the storm out, as we had been waiting for fourteen days already. It had begun, and it would end. All anger is exhausted eventually.
In the end she went off to climb alone, or said she did. When the storm cleared the next day, we found her sitting cross-legged outside the tent, staring with shriveled eyes out at the horizon. Her hair was still streaming water, and the hail had bruised her face.
I did not sleep at all, that night Daila spent in my room. I sat there in the chair and thought about all this. And I thought, in turn, that I was thirsty, and that I should drink the water in the lip-printed cup — half an inch of cold water displayed there for me — and that I could not drink it, and that I should get up and find the kitchen, and that I was too tired to get up.
I never knew when dawn came, enclosed in the house as we were. I learned that it was time to get up when Disaine scratched at the door and yelled, “It’s nine!”
“Was there somewhere to be at nine?”
“No, but it’s late, and I’ve been up for two hours.”
“I didn’t sleep,” I said.
“Oh — really? It’s so lovely for sleeping here, dark and cool.”
Daila was waking slowly; I heard rather than saw it, because the lamp had burnt out and there was no natural light in the room. His body rustled softly in the deep bed, and there was a smell of sweat, as of strong exertion. I thought with surprise that he had never really adapted to this climate, that his body would always refuse the heat, would send it out in rivulets to leave his core cool and dry.
“Get her away from the door,” he murmured.
“Disaine, I’ll be out in a little bit. Can you find us something to eat?”
“He doesn’t have shit in the kitchen. He’s just a boy.”
It was all too much — a bedroom farce without the farce. I heaved myself up and stood there stiff and hurting. My body still held the exact quantum of exhaustion from last night, held it like an oil, but it was too late for sleep now; I had to face the day.
Daila’s house had a courtyard with a swimming p
ool. I had read about them but never seen one before. I crouched down and looked at the water. It was a pale morning, the soil all around the edges of the pool in a gritty dust. Water in a big pool is so different from water in a glass, or even a tub. The whole surface is alive with tensions, the water pressing against itself and the air and wind. Once an Arit on his way to the monastery had brought a flask of mercury to the bar, poured it out and showed me how a bit of it jumped in his hand, how it formed perfect circles when you poured it out. Seeing the pool was like that, fresh and alarming.
Daila had ordered in a breakfast, and he brought it out on a tray to the dirty white table that sat at the edge of the pool. It was an untidy heap of miscellaneous food — rolls and dates and apples with an unpleasant touch of lemon-juice to them, boiled eggs. Disaine had a rigid and elaborate system for what to eat, and she set about hunting for the right egg, the right bits of fruit. She was hovering over one of the two chairs, and he had already sat down in the other, so I took a plate and sat back down by the edge of the pool. The day was still cool, but I stuck my feet into it to see how it would feel. It was like ice, but without the stickiness of ice.
He seemed greatly refreshed by his sleep and was reminiscing to Disaine. “You know, I came to this city with nothing. My mother snuck me the fare for the funicular and the train. I spent the rest of it on food — you know the food on the train, popcorn and sweets at three dhlal the bag. I lived on that shit all the way to Catchknot.”
“You must’ve been buzzing,” said Disaine, with complete attention. I stared at my food, and suddenly I hated him, I really did, as I had never had the courage to hate him before.
“Yes, and then when I arrived — ten thousand people around me. The station’s like a big town—”
The Breath of the Sun Page 11