Courer was not Holoh. God could not have seen her, or cared about her, unless it was through me — through the force of my caring, through the effort of my mind and flesh. I can only imagine that that was what it was, why God folded Their hand about her and pulled her in. That she became Holoh because I surrounded her, myself, and set her moving, made her a person with history, set the story unreeling until it reached its end.
What would I be trying to do, by pulling back this memory? I can see you asking now, a sliver of tooth visible through your sweet cracked mouth. You’re like and unlike the gentle priests of the Worms — you are used to death, although you strive to stop it with every bit of strength in you. You try to lift it, as a fallen beam from a crushed baby, after the earthquake is spent. And sometimes, with knowledge and strength and adrenaline, you lift it, and the baby lives. And so maybe this will make sense to you, will seem something other than silly madness: if I imagine it well enough, I could give it a different ending, just for a moment.
Disaine asked if I wanted to burn Courer, but I said, “No, leave her here.”
“Are you sure? You weren’t that excited about it last time.”
“It’s hard to get excited about burying your friends. It’s right for her to rest here — God took her, let God have her.”
“Wasn’t she not Holoh? Born excommunicate?”
“There’s excommunicates and excommunicates,” I said, and turned out toward the view. The fires of the village were visible, a thin aristocratic plume — I thought almost that I could smell them, above the cold killing smell of the mountain, a note of honey and wood. “We threw her out after she was dead, just in case. In case we were wrong, and she really counted as Holoh because her father was. But it was a technicality and a desperation. Nothing is ever simple. Like, are you an Arit or not? Answer me that.”
“That’s simple! I am.”
“We have to go,” I said. “Disaine, let her stay.”
That night we were restive, insufficiently drained after the short day before, the long rest at noon. I lay in bed without quite knowing what sleep was supposed to be, and then after a long while I found myself awake, as one does in some insomnias. There is no sense that you were asleep, just a stiffness in your mouth and a fresh wave of anger, but there is a gap in time. Disaine was gone.
We were using the pressure tent every night by now. We did not leave it for toileting; it had its own device for that, inside a little flap of tent that you could swaddle yourself in and button up. I assure you that after the facilities in the first suits, it was a damp little paradise. So if Disaine was gone, she was gone. I patted at the cloth of her sleeping bag, looking for her or her suit, and found nothing but a few bits of food and tubing which she had neglected to screw in. A short trip, then, without need for anything but breath.
I knelt there for a while, on my sleeping bag still cold and deformed from the second trip up Asam’s Step. I was trying to decide whether it was worth going after her. Probably it was some bit of standard Disainery, and I’d find her writing notes on the snow or measuring the moon. (I think she sometimes “did science” just for looks or pleasure.) But I had never known her to leave the tent without telling me. And the air was dank and close, the stove unlit. I resolved to put on my suit and exercise my limbs. Wring some sleep out of myself with pressing work.
Outside I felt much better. The night was crowned by a fine white moon, hanging narrow and elegant. I have always thought that the moon looks like part of a building, a bit of a column or part of an arch, which someone has put up there by accident. An understandable error, a human mistake. Its light spread down over the mountain and lit the broad snow, and I could see another light that someone had struck somewhere below. Disaine had returned to the place of Courer’s death.
My first thought was that she had dug her up to burn her after all. Goddamn, but I never met such a person for burning things as Disaine. When she was done with a book, into the fire it went. It was as if she had a mania for being the last to read things, for controlling whose eyes lingered after hers — but there was no mania about the way she did it, only care and precision. If she had been a fire, she would have burnt carefully and precisely too. Down in Catchknot you say burn your bridges; on the mountain we say cut your rope, but the intent is the same. Anything she had touched might ensnare her. The diary and the balloon and the robe and the spare robe stayed. Everything else went eventually, especially the money, which she hated and feared most of all.
But this was no funeral pyre. It was only an ordinary fire, of the sort that could only just live at this height, clinging and blue, almost blotted out by moonlight. I crept closer, bellied over a ledge that afforded me a good view into the shallow cave where the old tent had been pitched. I say had been, because she had collapsed it, folded it into a neat square. The frozen blankets were cast aside in a solid mass. Courer’s grave was a dark heap of stones, deeper into the cave, and Disaine was cross-legged before it, head bowed.
I was too weary after all to climb back down, especially at night. The moonlight sharply shadowed the way down, outlined and almost caricatured every foothold, made the descent look like something designed to be easy for beginners. A cartoon of a climb. I knew that it was not, that the shadows only hid nuances, made the mountain illegible. I wanted to shout down to Disaine, tell her to spend the night where she was, but of course she had never improved on the speaking-tube, and she would never be able to hear me. So I just sat there until I was cold, and then went up, hoping for a hint of sunrise spreading over the snow so I could collapse the pressure tent. Get rid of that bubble of damp anxiety, pop it open, expose the raw mountainside again for what it was.
Disaine showed up at breakfast time, when I was sitting on my pack eating dried chicken and biscuit through the tube in my suit. Too late I remembered — addled by false sleep — that she had not finished putting her suit on and could not eat, and I had to watch her partially inflate the tent so she could set herself up in safety. When she came out I made her hook up the tube. The sounds of eating were loud in our ears, wet crunching sounds, and, all in all, we were both thoroughly irritated by the time I said, “What were you doing?”
She hesitated and then said, “I was talking to Courer. There’s still something of her in there.”
You can imagine the horror I felt. She said it calmly, and that made it worse — the idea of life after death, of life-in-death, something persisting when we are gone, some sticky internal motion. I think at times that in all my hours dissecting bodies with you, learning the nuances of anatomy from the dead, that all I am doing is looking for that final tic of the heart or the lung so that I can stop it. It speaks of my trust in Disaine that I believed her. To me Disaine is a powerful eye, someone who can see above things and inside things, and what she says is true is absolutely true. I know you disagree.
“How?” I could not bear to ask a longer question.
“Nothing that seems dead is all dead,” she said. “Nothing that seems living is all living... I don’t know how to put it, it’s too — I am growing, Lamat. Not literally, not figuratively either, but sort of like a plant grows. Parts of me that seemed vital are turning out redundant, and parts of me that seemed all brown have sprouted up green. I think that’s the danger of letting the magic in. You start to grow again, which is strange in the old...”
“You make it sound like it’s thinking. Like it can think.”
“It can’t think,” she said firmly. “And neither can what’s left of Courer.”
“Thank God.”
“Are you sure? She was a thinking woman, wasn’t she? Wouldn’t she want that, to have something of her thinking forever?”
“No,” I said. “Imagine being there, in the same place —”
“Ah, yes. You talked about that, the first time we argued about burying her.” She turned her attention for a moment to the bit of dried meat affixed to the inside of her helmet, and I saw her hands flex on her knees, as if eating handless was something that s
he couldn’t bear.
“I don’t remember us arguing.”
“Yes, you do. We talked about it twice.”
“Oh, well, talking.”
“Lamat,” she said impatiently. “I’ve just told you the best news you’ll ever hear. Imagine, if this is the beginning, where this idea could end.”
I felt my mouth working. The fact was that I had no way of forcing what Disaine was saying into my mind, no way to judge it, no way to warm or wet it so that I could work with its clay. I said, “What is it like?”
“Like a worm or a warmth. Close to the heart. Like I showed you — at the wrist.”
I traced my own wrist with my gloved hand, remembering the band of muscle that had been Daila’s embrace. “Can you take it out?”
“You always want things to be neat, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t want people to suffer. And if there’s anything of Courer left, I want to keep it.”
“Oh,” she said, “I see.”
“Did I put that in terms you could understand?”
“There’s no need to say it that way.”
“You keep telling me I don’t get it.”
“All right, I’ll stop, my God.”
We were rising now into the true light, above most clouds. The ice was fragmented and sharp, seeming to draw into itself with the cold; we could not have survived for long without the suits. Soon, as we exited into the pale snow beyond the weather, there would be no air at all — no option but perfection and death, which is to say, two perfect options.
Courer was right. Just above the tent where she died, the storms all stopped. If we had climbed two thousand vertical feet, perhaps, we would have trod into a warm sheet of sunlight. But it would have been two thousand feet in the ruins of snow, our bodies weakened by illness and long waiting. There were great sloping fields of ice, and cliffs as tough as gristle, and lonely ridges with a drop of five hundred feet below one side, six hundred below the other. We inched our way up, unbalanced, staggering through the snow in the real climber’s instinctive step, which wasted no bit of energy. At the end of each day we huddled in the pressure tent, where the temperature was a comfortable freezing and Disaine always fell asleep at once. We would awaken to drips of water on our faces, purified remains of our melted breath.
Because the mountain had tenderness, too. With one hand it would pull aside a ridge we were climbing to reveal a sudden vista of flat cloud and black stone; with another, it would gesture a strong wind away from us, to beat a plume of snow away from some promontory. The cracking of seracs, which so famously sound like tinkling bells, would call us to prayer, and the cold air in our hot mouths and the sound of the ice made me think of summer. We hauled ourselves up moment by moment, now knee-deep in the soft powder, now ankle-deep, now fist-deep, our whole bodies floundering.
The glaciers dried up now that we were above the bulk of the weather, but there was still ice and snow, albeit shallower and drier as we rose up — sometimes it was more like sand than snow, though deceptively slippery when the foot broke through its surface texture. The supply depots were still splattered on the mountainside at regular intervals. Disaine had put books into them, to be read and destroyed, although our fires were low now and blue, and moved sluggishly over the pages without consenting to burn.
It was now that the great crisis of the climb arrived. In literature, the crisis strikes toward the end; in life, it strikes early, before you understand what it is. That was how it was for me, anyway.
We were taking a rest around noon, leaning on our packs, the soft speaking tube connecting our helmets. Disaine was licking a bit of sugar-bar, and I had mine inserted into my helmet but still untouched. She was stretching out her long legs, first one, then the other, the wet leather brilliant in the sun, when I heard the soft thump of avalanche.
I was up, and the pull on the tube yanked up Disaine, too; I heard her squawk and saw her stumble, and I seized her hand. We were fortunate that we had kept our packs on. Otherwise I would have run and abandoned them, as I would have lower on the mountain, and only later realized that we were without supplies.
We ran toward the higher spots, the bare ridges away from the flow of the snow, and I reflected on my stupidity: I had thought that the snow at this height, so thin and brittle, could not sustain avalanche, but there must have been stores of ice beneath it that I could not guess at, delicate layers of ancient snow that had never been triggered because they had never been touched. The dead snow moved. We moved too, and then we moved with it, on and under the soft crest of the snow, and then it caught at us and we were still.
I wish I could show you what avalanches look like. They have something in common with waterfalls, and something with clouds. There is the swift breakage of snow — is there anything finer than the crisp edge of broken snow? — and the crash of the hillside, and the watery flow of the snow, boiling into clouds tossed in the air and into your eyes like sand. I have watched many of them, from places of safety, but I did not see this one, because my eyes were on the ground, the better to run. And in the end that running saved us, though it could not save us from burial.
Our breath was hot and loud, and, in a long slow tumble, through a whiteness that turned and then whistled away, we were deep in the snow. The light filtered through, but it was blue-green, subterranean. I breathed fast and hard and laughed because I was in an avalanche and still breathing; my hand had reached instinctively to make a pocket of air before my mouth, and there that pocket was still, outside my helmet, my hand trapped inside it. In my ears, Disaine’s ragged panting, too hard and too fast. I shouted, “All right! All right! Calm down.”
She struggled harder. I tried to shift my limbs, but of course they were held fast except for that dangling hand; I could not tell whether she was above or below or beside me, though by the blood in my head I thought it was lower than my feet. I said, “Disaine, we’re alive. Don’t jinx it.”
Slowly her breath calmed, and I closed my eyes in relief, but opened them in terror. To be unable to move is terrible; to be unable to move, and in the dark, is the closest thing to death. Disaine spoke at last; she said, “I can’t move.”
“That’s how it works.”
“Can rattle around inside the suit a little.”
“I’ve never had this happen before.” I was still gasping, laughing almost, because really, I hadn’t — I had never thought to live through an avalanche. Here I was, buried in snow as hard and solid as dried mud, and I was alive, and I could breathe.
Slowly I came back to myself. It was late in the afternoon, and at this time of the year the afternoons were short. Disaine was some distance away. I was paralyzed and getting colder — the suit’s heater had been on medium, thank God, because we had been resting, but now I was surrounded by wet snow, and I could feel the heat draining from the back of my head, the cold crunch of snow there. I pressed my tongue to the button that switched the suit to bottled oxygen only and whispered to Disaine: “Are you in pain? Do you think anything’s broken?”
“I’m in a bad position,” she said, and now she sounded muffled, perhaps by the effort of not crying. “I’m all crunched up, and I think upside down. Ass in the air. But I don’t hurt.”
“Then let’s make a plan.”
“They always tell me just not to get in an avalanche.”
“Is there any part of you that you can move, even a little, except inside the suit?”
“No.”
“How’s your oxy level?”
“Half full.”
“What about the vents?” The suits vented our stale exhalations from a grille on our chests, creating a soft, damp breeze.
“I don’t think they’re working. Do you?”
“I think we’d feel something, if they were melting the snow.”
“So do I.” She sighed. “I can’t think. My head aches...”
“Do you think you’re hurt?”
“No, no, it’s not like getting a knock. It’s just
sore. Might not be venting very well. Have you got a headache?”
Now that she said it, I could feel the beginnings of one, pushing at my temples, a testing pain. “A little bit.”
I heard her breathe for a little while. The light was already beginning to go out of the snow above my head — green fading deeper, gemlike.
Then she said, “Tell me about Courer.”
In the green half-light, the bubble of air before my helmet was beautiful. I saw the rough edge of the snow and the wet edge of my glove. A little home. I closed my eyes again and thought that after all it would not be so bad to die here in God’s embrace, a bubble in Their blood. Perhaps I had been wrong when I had said that God wanted us to climb. Or perhaps what we thought was God’s anger was Their attempt at an embrace. The kindness of the great can often be clumsy; Disaine proved that.
“Why?”
Her voice came in a strangled hiss. “Because this is it for us, and I don’t have anything I want to remember.”
“Disaine,” I said. “You’re going to use magic.”
A long silence, and then an even softer voice: “I don’t want to die.”
God’s embrace. The longer I lay, the more certain I grew that this was the logical end. Time was speeding or lagging, I’m still not sure. There seemed to be long deep gaps between my thoughts, long deep gaps to leap over slowly. Here I was, at this height and at this depth. I thought of how the reward of life is a long deep gap like that, a past that only you remember. (Soft aquamarine snow with pale blurry edges. Motionlessness. Breath.) A story that’s personalized and not identical to anyone else’s, even if they were conjoined to you, even if you breathed your whole lives into each other’s mouths. When I was a child one of my books had blanks to be filled in with a child’s name, so that the story would be about you. It was filled in with the name of another child; it was an old book. Taira. Could be a Southern name or a Holoh name. It was only in pencil, but I felt bad about erasing.17
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