The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  * * *

  17 I know you mean to footnote this, Otile, but this is a footnote of my own: I don’t know what it is about children’s things that is so sad to me. I have spoken of this before. It’s not, NOT, because I lost a baby or because my own childhood was a sad one. It is a fiercer sadness, and it has to do with decay, and it goes slim as a blade into the heart of me. I would not give it up for love or for money. I love you.

  * * *

  At this height and at this depth and I would never come down to the village, never be seen again

  And a silence and a great emptiness in my mouth

  And a throat rough as snow

  And all of this in the second between her words and mine.

  “Do you want to die?” Her voice broke through, and I heard the click of her tongue against a button. “In order not to die you must use whatever you’ve got. That’s why most people look like they’re not doing — anything.”

  I felt myself closing around Courer’s memory. It’s true: after the first shock and the first fear, I was ready for death. Death was there like lightning in my muscles. I should have gone already. The suit had bought me a few hours, and I was ready to hold those hours in my mouth like sugar-candy, letting them dissolve, neither sucking the life from them nor spitting them out prematurely. It seemed hardly worth it to give up that memory, to let it out, when I was so close to finally sealing it up. But she said, “Lamat, please,” and pity came over me and opened my eyes, and I thought that while I still had someone to offer another person, I could not let myself be quiet.

  I’ll spare you my cracked little telling in the snow. I would rather lay the whole thing out, now that I have time to fling around. So, listen, you must do some work, and I know you love to work, so you won’t mind: imagine this, and at the same time imagine me croaking out every third word of it, in the fading green light, until at last what I see turns to cloud and then to blackness. See it with one eye, and my dying lips with the other eye, and bring the two together; see the image in stereo.

  In the fall I married Daila, and Daila was beautiful and seductive, and by the ringing winter I was with child. From the beginning it was a difficult pregnancy. I knew that I was pregnant before I should even have bled, because I couldn’t eat, because my knees gave out at ordinary times, in the middle of ordinary tasks, and I would fall while carrying a tray of glasses across the room, or burn myself on solder while I tried to repair my gear. This largely confirmed the existing public opinion of me.

  And I could never get warm, when I was making that baby. It was as if all the heat in my body had concentrated in a tight knot where he was being created. People talked about it. I was still new in the village then, and I didn’t know many people and liked fewer. They said that I was making myself weaker than I was, in order to be made much of, so that I could nestle in furs and eat sweets. They met each other’s eyes, sly and warm, and said that Daila and I were newlyweds.

  But Daila, to his credit, knew that something was wrong, and so he went to Courer. She lived in her father’s house, which had lain abandoned since his excommunication and flight to Catchknot, where he had married a rich patient and given his only child the archetypal Holoh name of Courer. It is as common there as Hayal is here, or even Kimabe, since the queen’s coronation. He had then gone mad and died. She had come here to try to remember him, to try to find him. She believed quite literally in spirits. It was one of the first signs that her father’s madness was hereditary.

  His house had rotted out. The stone walls held, being as old as the village, but the inside was a ruin. There was a fireplace, and an old sofa of surprising fortitude whose strong legs had fallen through the wreck of the floorboards, such that the surface of it — which became Courer’s bed, desk, and examination table — was almost flush with the floor. She never seemed to care about it, which is not a sign of madness, only of thrift.

  Daila’s fear overflowed him that day. He would have sent for a Holoh doctor, but the only one at the time was far away, and so he crossed the village to Courer’s father’s house, and she opened the door to him. He had been told, too, that he was an over-tender bridegroom, and he believed it, since Daila generally believed that he treated me with too much kindness. But I really looked awful. My pregnancy was showing already, at three months, because the body around it was dropping to bone.

  It was a white winter’s day, snowy and bright, the sun illuminating the clouds as if they were only a shell the earth needed to crack. Courer came in in a burst of cold air. Her body looked smart in her gray starched coat; her hair was weak and flyaway, though, and she had a pale difficult stare. She smiled at me, brilliantly, and began to strip away my blankets.

  Her hands were cold and unwashed — I was used to Holoh medicine, where the doctor soaks his hands in herbed hot water, so that they can touch pure. I still soak my own hands before I see a patient, if only for the sake of the heat, and I do think it comforts them and helps them heal. But Courer was fresh from the Shilaad School of Medicine, and she did not truck with superstition except as it pertained to ghosts.18 She examined me with fingers that still had the weather on them, and when she was finished she asked me if I was happy about the baby.

  * * *

  18 You might have a point there. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Lamat, but your patients die less. Blunt fact. I wonder if there is something on human hands that brings infection, and that this cleaning washes away. Like the bloom on a fresh egg, which my mother always told me I shouldn’t wipe off, because it protects the yolk. But this is something that — although you can’t see it, although you can’t feel it — has the opposite effect. Something insalubrious that we make by living.

  I really hate this idea, to be honest, because I don’t truck with the invisible. I’m an atheist, and even magic, I think is something they’ll explain someday. Drag it into the visible world, build a lens that can see it. But either the hands of the Holoh are pure as ice, or it is something like a bloom. And if anything’s more bullshit-sounding than the idea that disease can spread from a touch, it’s the idea that the Holoh body works differently from any other body.

  * * *

  I had never been asked such a question before. From earliest childhood I had been told I would have babies someday; the Holoh are quite serious about that, as you might imagine. As a matter of fact, I was not happy. That was what the women in the bar had seen and were wishing that they hadn’t seen. The only person who really didn’t know it was me.

  Courer had a chill, wondering look about her in those days. To me that long nose always looked as if it were stretching her fine skin to a pallor at the tip, as if something else, some emotion, were trying to get out of her. She covered me up again, ignoring my silence.

  “Well,” I said at last, “I’ll be happy when it’s born. So I am pregnant? Daila was worried I had a cancer, I was so sick.”

  “No, you are.” She sighed. “I wish I could do more for you. All I can really do is give you ginger tea and something to sleep. It would help if you can think of the future, think of what this means. A new person, your person.”

  “I’d rather not even imagine it yet. I don’t want to blame it.”

  She went to wash up in the corner, and then she counted out pills for me from a bottle. I watched her, face intently pointed down at the table, mouth moving with the count. I could feel her cold fingers still — I feel them still today — but I liked her presence; I found it calming. She was so inward. There was nothing in her that judged.

  The bitter pills she gave me for sleep worked, but my dreams were nauseated dreams, all cold caves and my-fault pain and waking up steaming with fever, and I felt drowsy all day after I took it. I stopped after the first night.

  The baby found me as irritating as I found him.

  Daila had long ago stopped sleeping in bed with me, ostensibly because he would wake me too often. Really it was because he had already begun his attentions to Saon. I always knew everything that went on be
tween them, from Saon herself — she always confided incontinently, and as if it were a form of atonement.

  But though I wish he had chosen a woman I liked, I was never able to stay angry at Daila. For one thing, matters of infidelity really are less serious among the Holoh, so long as you keep having children, and — look! — here we were. For another, we were never close, he and I. The bond had never strengthened as it ought. I always felt that we were playing at marriage, not as children do, but as actors do. So when he was unable to deal any longer with my wasting body and turned instead to Saon’s ripe and simple one, which could not conceive at all — I was bitter, but I was not surprised.

  And so I was alone when the baby went, alone except for a little spot of flesh the size of a pea, which might have died inside or out; I am not sure. What no one told me was that I would see it. It came out, in a wad of hot red tissue, and I held it in my hand. I closed my fingers over it and wept. I wept as if I were trying to match the volume of blood with a volume of tears — and there was so much blood, bright and arterial, a slit throat’s worth.

  After a long while, I needed to get up for the toilet, and so I got out of bed and fell at once to the floor, managing to keep the little thing safe in my fist — I had looked at it once, its big head and curled body, and I didn’t want to look at it again. I went on my knees across the room, in my nightshirt, trailing dark slick tissue, and I found the drawer of clean handkerchiefs. I wrapped it in layers and layers of cotton and wool, worried I’d crush it, worried when I was finished that I’d misremembered the last five minutes, that I’d instead thrown it into the toilet or thrust it into my mouth. I didn’t know what to do with it after that, so I left it on the floor and kept crawling. On my way I passed out.

  The next morning, I woke up alone, but with clean bandages stanching the bleeding and a whiteness through the window, the fire out, the wad of handkerchiefs gone, my sheets changed. From the silence of the building, cold and without creak or settlement, I could tell that no one was in the bar. I felt that all the mess of last night had vanished back into my body.

  I found that I had the strength to get up, to dress crudely, and to go downstairs. I felt strangely whole and well, without the nausea that had filled me to overflowing for the past two months. I felt that I could have a drink; I felt that I could go outside, into the snow, and let it cool me. Of these two options, the first sounded the more rational, so I found some strong mash and tipped an inch into one of those wide cut-glass tumblers, Second Empire, which Daila saved for family, and I was toasting the kid when Courer walked in.

  “Lamat,” she said tenderly, and came to touch my back — I think she was alarmed that I was sitting on a barstool, but my balance was back, I thought. “How are you doing?”

  I thought I’d resent her, that voice too soft, her brief noise of sympathy like a tiny hot pill, but when the hand touched my back I felt warmth radiating from it — I must have been that cold myself, to feel warmth from Courer.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You should be in bed.”

  “It’s over. It was yesterday.”

  “Look, I know you hate being fragile, but right now you are fragile. You can be strong again, but you need to accept this now.”

  “I’ve been fragile since this shit started,” I said. “I’ve been throwing up. I haven’t even been able to have a drink like an adult, because the alcohol made me feel like my stomach was bleeding. Either I should get a kid out of it or I should be allowed to deal with it my own fucking way.”

  “Lamat, how old are you?”

  “You really are a Southerner, aren’t you?” I asked her in disbelief. “You take after your father, but you ask me how old I am.”

  “You can’t really not know,” she said. “You read Southern books, you have a Southern schoolteacher, there’s a major monastery of the Southern faith that half of you make your money by guiding people to. You’re citizens of Reaot. Surely you know how old you are.”

  A wave of anger and nausea came over me, and I put my head in my arms on the counter. She reacted with another medical-trained grunt, this time of approval, and removed her hand from my back.

  “Was that a thing they tell you to do? Get me mad so I’ll rest my head?”

  “No, but it was a nice accident, wasn’t it?”

  I had lost sight of her question by then — thoughts were flying out of my head like sparks — but I told her later — well, we know and we don’t know. You live a life where you’re a citizen of this kingdom and at the mercy of the queen and could be called out anytime for wars or building projects or the plague. And you live a life where you know all of that is mad, and irrelevant, and it hardly matters what the forces are that are trying to pull you off the mountain. You know the count of the days means nothing to you, that you are to use them only as a metronome to help you keep the rhythm. You think the southern worship of the sun as the counter-out of lives is madness. And you know that if you were not Holoh your number would be seventeen, and that is a very little number.

  I began to sob, big blurry sobs that soaked the wooden surface of the bar, which was already more or less permanently saturated with ancient drinks, and which was capable of actually icing over if we let the fire go out in winter. That was in danger of happening now, actually, and I tried to tell Courer to bank it, knowing — and not knowing — that I was weeping absurdly. That doubling is the essence of crisis, I think. You are as removed and as sincere as a fine actor engaged in tragedy.

  I let her pick me up and carry me back to my bed, and then I felt the gradually growing warmth as she shored the fire up. And we sat there, her by the fire and me in the bed, and I let myself be weak.

  These thin layers of memory like thin layers of snow. Faint crystallized snow, the kind you can almost brush away. But a day and then the next day and the next, and the forms are already vague, and then they are only dim lumps, and then gone. Southerners’ time is like that too. It buries you.

  In the dark again, and now Disaine’s breathing was harder and colder than ever. My head was buzzing and sore, and I realized I could not go on with my story, that perhaps I had stopped speaking earlier than I thought I had, had perhaps stopped speaking before I even began to talk about the baby. Certainly all I could hear now was Disaine’s breathing and mine, two discordant beats, and another crunch of melting snow. I tried to speak again, but my mouth was dry as skin. I took water from the straw but could not swallow it. The darkness, which had been so close to my face, seemed far off now and narrow.

  Then I felt the impact of a foot on snow above me, and a pause, and then the sound of digging. I gasped for breath, choked on the water, finally forced it down. My face would have been streaming with sweat had I not been so dehydrated. The digging was frantic now, but my breath and heart were louder.

  I already knew it was her. I was there in the dark, dying of the sweat under my skin, and I knew it was Courer. That I had taught her well. That what remained of her, that blasted body and ruined face, had climbed the mountain as lightly as a piece of fluff or skin, something that trees in Catchknot cast off into the wet wind. That this was what Disaine had done. I knew because I know how Courer’s hands move when she is determined. I tried to scream, there in the snow, a living woman unearthed by a corpse, but I could not move any longer; my mouth lost the strength to close and I felt a line of new saliva gliding down to my ear. All I could do now was close my eyes, the lids hot and abrasive, so that I would not see her.

  She broke through to me, and I kept my eyes shut, all the control I had left concentrated into that one motion. I had seen her dead before — the translucent lips, still pressed cold and serene, with someone else’s wicked smile forcing through — but I had so lately seen her alive, so lately pictured the real force of her with her nerveless care and the hands I had thought were cold, felt the press of her embrace in the press of the snow, that it seemed an unbearable cruelty to see them now. But there was no time to think even that. She had broken throug
h, and I could feel the pressure of her hand against my helmet. The hand sticky and raw. Trying to break through. Cold — even drenched in snow I could tell how cold. And then I had to open my eyes, because the strength went from that hand, and I knew it was over.

  Most of her body still lay atop the snow, but her skeletal hand was splayed in its half-coating of skin across the front of my helmet, the arm dangling into the pit where I lay. It was still night, and the hand was very black at its core, the wispy skin lit up in gray. I found that I could move, once the first shock had passed — I could swim for my life through the remains of the snow — I could struggle to the surface and by instinct make the quick motion that brought my suit back to life.

  I lay there, unearthed, Courer’s hand thrown now from my face, and I looked to the side and I realized that she was lying there with her face in the snow, as if for comfort. The hand that pressed my helmet as if to snap the bubble of it — that hand had been meant for comfort too. She had not wanted me to see her.

  I lay there breathing, knowing I needed to find Disaine, who was still under the snow, but unable as yet to move. Thin icy air whistled into the valve of my suit. I touched the switch with my tongue again to open it all the way, distill, distill, distill, and then I was breathing so hard that I felt how tightly the suit constricted me.

  Disaine had passed out. I could hear her breathing under my own. And so I rolled and shoved myself back into the pit of snow and clawed along the speaking-tube (which, in the end, saved both our lives, and all honor to it) until I came to her blue face in the dawn and threw her air-distiller open wide, and hauled her to the surface.

  She was a long time coming to. I sat there with those two prone bodies, and gazed about me at the day. The snow of the avalanche had been buried for centuries beneath other snow, and now it was as something precious that had been mined — bright and loose, tumbling in white pebbles. The sunlight bounced off it without losing any power, and I looked down the graceful curve into which it had fallen. No one had ever seen this curve, and I doubt anyone else will. I used as much of it as I wanted.