“He could never hate us. We’re his blood.”
(Strange as it may seem, arrogant as it may seem from a Lamat who then was young, untested, undisfigured, virtually undamaged — I was right, that the excommunicate cannot hate the Holoh. I miss the mountain fiercely, miss the age of the bar, its sense of being virtually a feature of the mountain, a prosthetic limb of God’s body, or a tattoo. But, yes, they are my blood, and I can’t be angry at them any more than I can be angry at my body. It’s let me down, they’ve let me down, Disaine has let me down. It’s all right. You can let me down, if you grow too tired to carry me, although you haven’t yet.)20
* * *
20 But I don’t carry you. Just a token protest. As always.
* * *
She just said, “Maybe. If he did, he never let on.”
“What sort of man was he?”
“It was hard to tell,” she said. “When I was a kid, I didn’t have any insight, and he kind of fell away from me when I grew up. He wouldn’t let me into his house for years. He staged every moment that we knew each other very carefully, because he had so much to hide. I think he felt that the hiding was a loving thing.”
We sat silently amid the snow. I took the shells of the seeds we’d discarded and pressed them into it, in a pattern.
“When the empire was a looser place and we were strong, they gave us some trade privileges, because it was easier than fighting us. Then, when the empire got tighter and we were weak, they made war on us over those privileges, and we had to flee. That’s how empires work, in the long run. They give you something and then a hundred years later they notice you’ve got something and suck it out of your hand. They’re beasts with no memory.”
“So people tell you.”
“Yep.”
“I came up here to know the mountain for myself,” she said. “Not just in terms of what people tell me. Does that make sense?”
“Of course. I feel the same way about it.”
She smiled and took my hand, and for the first time I felt that our hands were weighted equally — that hers was not the hand of authority and mine was not the hand of welcome. She told me later that she had liked to hear me say that I didn’t understand the mountain, even having lived there all my life. Any Holoh would have told her the same and meant it, but I’m glad she thought that what I said was special, because it was the first spark that rose between us. It was the first time I saw her face open.
I taught her to climb, taught her to walk around the breakdowns. My life right then was full of opening holes. I was scrambling around trying to be natural when all about me were fissures, crevasses. It occurs to me that disaine itself sounds as if it might mean fissure, a word to go with moraine, the fine silt left behind by a glacier, a word that comes from the Marault word moren, loneliness or abandonment. The language of our kingdom is itself a moraine, the dust of other tongues.
She was not a natural climber. I thought sometimes that her Holoh half and her Southern half were physically in conflict, that she had bones the wrong size for her muscles and teeth that failed to mesh, that the instincts worked into us by centuries of falling were thrown all sideways in her. But there was a rhyme in our approaches, an intellectual sort of climbing, one that finds a weakness and cleaves the snow scalpel-fashion, and in climbing we found the same sort of friendship that other people find over novels or cookbooks.
Dracani and I became close in those days, through our agreements to separate. He would descend while I climbed with Courer, so that we made one woman up, one man down, according to the law. While he was wandering below the village he would hunt, and this became the work of his life. He had been a waster in his mother’s house, embarrassed in his marriage to Saon and without the love of people that guiding demanded. You must love people to be a good guide, I think — not just like them. It keeps you careful. And Dracani was never good with people, because he was a man who could see subtle things but not obvious ones. But hunting rewarded that. It let him track and think of fur and ignore everything else, the grosser and sadder emotions that make up a human life.
And so we were all happy that summer. As Courer and I went again and again to the monastery, and I did the unnecessary labors of teaching her to climb seriously — the cliffs scaled when a switchback was handy; the ice screws hammered in close by a solid crag — he killed wolves and bears and squirrels, and for a few months it was a kind of tapestry, wooly figures toiling in three layers, life being grown, sheared, carded, out in the hot flat sun.
My memory of Courer has been partly covered over by my memory of Disaine. They were alike in manner — analytical and precise — but different in substance; Courer was humble in ways Disaine could never be. Disaine was so determined never to be humble that she never noticed that it was impossible for her anyway. Whereas Courer was too humble even to become a good doctor. To operate seemed to her an imposition. She always had a certain jitteriness about the inside of herself. It was only on the mountain, when we were dying together, that she seemed to roll over and grow comfortable with it, with the rushing, inefficient human body and the many ways it can shut down.
But still — how alike, how alike they were, with their bluntness, with their certain way of looking at me, at once fond and wary, like a cat that licks your arm clean. How alike in their love of learning, and of learning the same things over again. How alike in their climbing, sticklike and stiff, and yet worming up the mountain in their way, making good time despite it all, knowing how to use their bodies for other valuable things and therefore to make a guess at this.
I fell in love with Courer after we were already friends. I didn’t recognize the feeling at first, and then it upset me. Daila might have made a joke of our marriage, but I didn’t want to laugh at it. And I didn’t want to put her in his way — I knew he was a jealous man, one who wanted to be looked at exclusively, even if he only glanced back at me on occasion, and then only to make sure.
I had always been shallow in love, had always been drawn to a certain clean, conventional beauty, an obvious masculine beauty. But with Courer it was different. I simply underwent a process by which the things I found ordinary or ugly in her — her dirty hands, her bony nose and lantern jaw, her dry skin and her pinched way of looking — became sweet, became like the things that were ordinary and ugly in my own body.
Her breath was sweet, too; I was always surprised, when I bent close to her, by the faint scent of honey that arose. I have since learned that the smell of honey on the breath suggests illness. Multiple deaths were on their way to Courer. I would feel them as we sat on her sofa, cross-legged, because she had never fixed the rotten floor, and bent together over a medical book, which she would patiently explain to me, tracing her pale fingertips over the crude diagrams of a male body, a female body, bodies of indifferent sex. It would be dark in her ruined house, and I would glance at a green vein in her neck, and then I’d see the gathering dust and the small jars of herbs that she’d gathered and let rot without drying, and the little stones that she had begun to collect and lay out in a pattern on the floor. In that stirring of dust, in the smell of honey, in the clear warm look that she gave to me, I could see her deaths coming.
Did she know I loved her? I couldn’t tell you. I prefer to think she didn’t know, because if she did, then she did not act on it. If she didn’t know, the possibility remains that she returned my love. Not that it matters, when she is ash among cloud. But possibility does not die with us. Possibility remains; it beats about, scenting the air, making its sounds, and it stirs the dust and water up. Like a clipped-wing bird, a pet. I don’t mind it being there. All those little pets, nostalgia, resentment. There’s nothing wrong with them; they comfort us in little ways, as animals do.
Eventually I began to neglect my public duties, the evenings of hosting at the bar, in which Daila and I had to display solidarity. I would be at Courer’s, and I would find it impossible, suddenly, to leave just to pour cold drinks, just to stoke a fire, just to smil
e at Daila, who after all preferred someone else to smile at him. That was when he decided that we were all going to be friends.
It began in our bed, in the middle of a long restless night — I had not known that he was awake too until his voice came out fully formed and said, “I’d like to climb with you and Courer next neutral day.”
I shuddered in the rough sheet, because the sound of him had surprised me. “Why?”
“I want to connect back up with you. I want to get to know your friend.”
I thought about it, feeling the weight of my leg against my other leg, as I lay there on my side facing him. It was one of those nights in early spring where the cold has cracked open and let out something surprisingly light, and we were lying in sheets and one pale quilt.
“You can’t think of a reason why not, can you?”
“Not a real one.”
“Just the three of us, then.” And he reached over and touched my back.
The climbing day came, a treacherous warm one, where the layers of snow and the layers of air were crunched and interlocked, and the mountain ached for avalanche. Courer was already waiting, in her doctor’s robe and trousers and boots, on the big stone by the switchback that led up the trail. I thought that she looked very fine, leaning back on her arms, her back a little arched as if to crack it, her long faded hair dangling dry.
Daila had decided that we would climb Aneroyse’s Wrack, the rock cliff set in the mountainside some distance below the monastery. From a distance, Aneroyse’s Wrack has the vague collapsed look of a face in pain; up close, it is all smooth undulations of stone, very difficult climbing, and far beyond what I’d seen Courer do.
He climbed lead. Courer followed, short-roped to me. It was a glorious day, moving over the clean muscle of the mountain, hearing the cracking of snow far above — like a rope letting go its burden — and knowing that some distant slope was tearing itself apart. Daila was lost in the climb and did not bother us. It was then that we established climbing as the neutral ground in all our wars against each other.
Climbing, I could even tolerate Saon. I am sick of insulting her by this point in the story, but really, you must understand that there was something about her that I found as grotesque as a fruit, picked up at market, that has a dry wound in the side your fingers close around. Her never-shut mouth, her rubber-band energy, her sense of perpetually twirling something in her clammy hands. But climbing, not talking, only working together, her body was just another substance that filled out the fragility of Courer’s, and my mourning and confusion and broken-up love were wiped away in Daila’s eyes, and he saw only the confident wife he was supposed to want, the bold wife who would give him a big white-toothed family.
I saw him that way, too, through the lens of the snow. There is something about climbing that makes fairytales of us all. It made Courer seem stable and ready, as her foot muddled over a knob of stone, face set; it made every ragged part of Saon recede; it made Daila into a serious and composed leader, although in my heart I know him to be a man of phantoms. But no matter, up there. The mountain gilded us with its special light, which comes from every direction at once — sun, snow, ice — and gives the body an extra reality. If you happen to be a man of phantoms, that light will give them skin. And if you have only ever lived with such people, everything will finally look right.
As I sit in this bright tiny office in our rooms in Catchknot, I am watched by a skeleton. It is not the genuine item; it is made of a cheap sculptural foam, correct in every detail but hopelessly wrong in its texture and weight. Its surface looks like that of a sponge, and it weighs less than one. If a student puts its hand on your shoulder for a prank, its touch is soft and gentle, and the prank doesn’t come off.
There are times when change is possible, I think. They are simply the times when you’re pulled so far away from your real world, your real milieu, that — like setting a bone, which is what I’m getting at here — you can place yourself in a new position. What’s painful is healing that way, at a new angle and with plenty of bruising pain, disjointed marrow. But if you stay quite motionless, it is possible to wake one day as a somewhat different person.
My climb with Disaine went on, weakened though we were from our long burial. We took longer breaks, though we slept less. The suits held up. And despair began to take hold of my friend.
What is the height of the mountain? Recall that by the Holoh it is held to be the height of the world, which we say is 330,000 feet. By what measurement or prophecy we came to this — or measurement remembered as prophecy — I do not know. We adapted the idea, when we learned that the world is a sphere and gravity exists, to be that the mountain is the height of the atmosphere.
The Arit say fifty thousand, and they are flat wrong. Most everyone else says a hundred, and it soon became clear to us, as Disaine came out of the tent every evening and recorded the height with her altimeter, that they were wrong as well. But we had no answer of our own. At seventy thousand feet, the mountain looked the same as it had from the ground.
Just as, in a sneaking way, I had felt delight when we were buried by the avalanche, I now felt a hidden joy. I began to understand the truth of myself. All I had ever wanted was to climb forever. I had spoken facetiously of the different parts of the mountain being the different parts of God’s body — Their face, Their shoulder, and so forth — but God’s body does not have to be like our bodies; it does not have the same restrictions. You could see Them in every fragment of snow, every plane of rock. Every facet of the mountain was the face of God.
But Disaine began to break apart. Oh, we chatted in the evenings, and she would explain things to me, as I sat wrapped in fur — would talk airily of the sun or the formation of crystals. One day it was the dynamics of bird flight, and she tore pages from a book and folded them into wings, to show me how gliding worked, and her eyes in the firelight were damp and hot.
Another day she spoke of Asam. She said, “He was a doubter. And yet he led an unselfish life. I don’t know how that can happen — to have doubt push you that way. My own life has been selfish. But he took that feeling and let it move the needle of his soul toward other people, toward the real north. He gave away everything he had; when people offered him something, a rag, a sword, he’d give that away too. Eventually it became overwhelming, I think. That’s the cruelty of being a really unselfish person. People come to you, and they will give you things. Partly just for the spectacle of seeing you pass them on. Partly almost out of sadism. And people doubt you, because you preach that possessions hinder us, and yet you don’t destroy them, you give them to people who say they need them. And they doubt you because nobody can really be that good. Asam listened. That’s the other thing people don’t talk about when they talk about him, besides his work with the poor. Which is remarkable because he was poor himself. He was not looking at their problems from the outside. Poverty had no novelty for him. But he listened like it did. Like every person was new. Asam was — never — bored. But then he had to climb the mountain because his doubts ate at him. The same doubts that made him such a good man. Because he knew at heart that God’s gaze, which is supposed to level the world in the end, might not exist. So he had to level it himself. But it was too much to ask, don’t you see. And he had no faith. To carry him. So he climbed the mountain to find God or to die, and I don’t know if he found God, but he died.”
It all came out like that, halting, as if she were having trouble with her oxygen. And when I asked her if that was the Arit orthodoxy about Asam, or just her own, and if she doubted God too, she just said, “I don’t know. All I know is that the closer we get to God, the more I know I’m further from Him than ever.”
She was writing volubly enough, though. – O
L asleep. (I can finally reduce her to the letter; there are no other “L”s here, or “D”s, or “E”s, or anything). She goes out like a match these days, light one moment and then only darkness and a faint smoke. I envy her; her sleep so brief, so deep, so p
ermanent. It makes you believe in the Holoh god — or in some magic that they use without knowing it — that she can live on the mountain so well, although her people came here so recently, in the scheme of things. But if the Holoh know magic, know it even unconsciously, what does it mean that they so often die in avalanches? Perhaps it’s best not to go down that path too far, though I have learned that the paths with the largest warning signs are so often the ones that lead to the ripest and lowest-hanging fruit. And as you bite into it, that grape or that solid pear, you realize that the path is untended and the best fruit unplucked because the one who left the sign is long dead, and you’re the only one with the sense to suspect it.
I am trying to think of how to tell her that we will never summit. Even writing this makes the pen shake on the page and sketch a little graph of anxiety.21 She believes it, and there is so little left for Lamat to believe. There is no evil like taking someone’s faith from them, though now that I write that down I realize that you can’t, or someone would have tried it. But you can do the next best thing. Nobody can make a mold grow, for example, but you can make a warm wet closed-off place, with sugar, or honey — and in that same way, I could tell Lamat that I am too weak for this, that I was wrong about the gravity and all sorts of things, that the supply depots come too thick at this altitude for there to be many left above. And that little faith, so hard-won after so many betrayals, would be gone.
* * *
21 The pen is NOT SHAKING.
* * *
She is my guide, and should know. But she really doesn’t. She is deep in it. Her very eyes’ whites are snow-white, and the blacks are sky-black. She is doing what she was meant to do, or rather has meant to do. Never trust fate to assign you. Lamat doesn’t. She is almost growing taller. But for me, I am done. Dead, just don’t know it yet.
The Breath of the Sun Page 18