The Breath of the Sun

by Rachel Fellman

  Sneezing all the while, I went downstairs with my pack, paid for the room. I went out with the vague thought of honeyed tea and saw Disaine’s name on every street corner, on playbills for a lecture. She would speak and preach tonight of her journey up the mountain. A set of special extended dates had been added.

  My illness got worse through the day, which I spent half-sitting, half-lying in coffee shop chairs, on benches in the great Catchknot parks, an easy warmth in my blood and a rubbery weakness in all my joints. I suppose I was due for it; months and months climbing had cleansed me of illness, and now the fluids that painted my lungs showed up stark and red.

  Honestly, though, I welcome being sick. I detest weakness; I detest having my skin run rough with mucus and the wreck of my nose turn red; I detest calling attention to myself with the harsh clap of a cough or the clearance of a throat — the sound of an old man calling a sloppy room to order. But sickness dulls the perceptions. When you are used to living a life where you jump at the opposite of shadows — at every bright hint of sun on the mountainside — when every time you inhale you are pierced by the cold granules, sharp as sugar, of bad weather and coming snow — when you, in short, have had something lever your brain permanently a little too open, then it is not unpleasant to breathe with difficulty. It is not unpleasant to expel air. It is not unpleasant to feel the world shrink to the size of yourself, and grow within yourself too, for sickness does that, or at least it does that to me. The amber stuff inside your head is all that there is.

  Towards evening, I went out with the wind raw on my cheeks. First I stopped at a bodega and bought one of those white sickness-masks that hook over the ears and cover most of the face. I have never seen these outside of Catchknot, and I cannot think why, because they work admirably to soothe the sick with the feeling of their own breath against cottony paper, and to disguise people with heavily frostbitten faces. Then I went to the opera house to hear Disaine.

  My seat was up in the highest balcony, far above the point where the room has given up and become vertical, so that when I looked down at the stage, I mostly saw the bright flowing glass that decorated it and a horizontal slot below just tall enough for a person. The house was quite full tonight, and I worried about fires. Up where I was, there was no exit but ten flights of stairs.

  The seats around me were filling up, and I realized that the other people in this high balcony were all climbers. I heard it in their breath. They could walk up ten flights of stairs without being short of it; they were even talking, calm and happy on the dry carpet of the steps, certain for once that there would be no avalanches or cliffs of ice. And then, when they sat down around me — practical shoes, informal clothes, a lot of wool and leather exuding used and foody smells. Their hearty shyness. I knew them, might have known them personally. I leaned forward until my face was just above the iron balcony and waited.

  I had never been to a play before, nor to the opera, but I had read enough to know what a final encore was like — sweaty, teary, the arms weary of the shock of clapping, and you’re bored, too, because you’re trying to work your way back into a moment that flashed and died fifteen minutes back. The applause when Disaine came out was like that. I realized that many of these people had been here before, that there was a continuity here with the applause that had rolled at the end of the last lecture, a pulse that beat on a schedule of days. A very Holoh idea.

  She was all in white. Had it been so bright when I’d seen her last? White as the shape of sunshine on snow. No, these were the clothes I’d always known, the pilgrimage patches of balloon silk. I recognized the last piece of red that trailed the others on her elbow.

  She stood, smiled, waited it out. For a moment the thought wavered in my head that she was as impatient as we were, that everyone in the room was waiting for something big that we knew we wouldn’t see tonight, and it was something she had in common. I also kept feeling — illness and poor sleep — that she didn’t look small because she was far away, but because she was actually miniaturized, a perfectly realized woman the size of my thumb, looking up, licking her lips, visibly tensing herself for action. Then the pressed mouth opened, and her hand reached out as if to thump something that would quiet the audience down, and then we did quiet down. She said, “I don’t want to be here.”

  I pulled my lips in, between my teeth, tasted salt.

  “And I don’t think you do, either. Whatever ‘here’ is, whether it means making your money, or being with that person, or living at all. If you wanted to be here, then you wouldn’t be here. But I personally will admit that I don’t want to be in this room. I want to be on top of the mountain, experiencing full four-color bliss. The loss of that place kills me, it needles me through. I’m here to talk to you about it because, after that, being here is the next best thing.”

  She had used magic to enhance her voice. It wasn’t much louder than it should have been — Disaine was always proud of the natural force of her voice, its melodic ability to fill every crack and container of a building — but I could hear the details of it, as sharp and precise as if I had been inside her body. It had been ill-used by travel and much speech, and at the end of each line there was a faint high cutoff of breath, like the wheeze between two coughs. But she spoke with force.

  “So,” she said. “First things first. We made the summit —”

  (A burst of applause.)

  “Don’t do that. Don’t tell me you liked to hear that. I know, you know. God damn.”

  The applause shrank down. Near me I heard an intake of breath, and someone hissed, “She doesn’t know what that means.”

  “Oh, I know what it means,” said Disaine conversationally. “I just don’t want to be praised for saying something — I want to be praised for doing something. We made the summit on the second Spear Day of the month of Demed. It was almost exactly four months after we set off, four months of hard labor. For I am not a climber, and I don’t know the romance of the thing, and so to me it was only hard labor — forgive me my sacrilege.” Her voice was hard and dripping with sarcasm. “For Lamat, my partner and guide, it was always something much more. Lamat —” and here she raised her voice a little, so that instead of it sounding like the ordinary voice in your head, it sounded like the voice of self-hatred. “Lamat, I want you to know that I love you dearly, and I never would have come down without you. I know you did your best to save my life. ...If you are here tonight, know that. And if you see her, tell her.”

  And how people have told me! People who didn’t know I was there that night, and people who did, and people who weren’t there themselves. They have told me by way of consolation and by way of argument, and by way of a sort of accusation, in empty classrooms and consultation rooms, and at meals. They have always presented it as a surprise.

  At the time, I only drew in breath and flushed a terrible flush, as if a bright light were turned on me. Sad though it is, these words moved me to tears, and I dug through the handkerchiefs I’d bought for my dripping nose, to find a clean one. The woman next to me actually rested her hand on my back — she thought I was only moved by the idea of Lamat, who had run off and who was still thanked and loved. I wanted to lean into her side, the same way I almost wanted to jump from the balcony and alight on the stage and be part of Disaine’s show, this thing everyone loved her for now, finally, and without me. I realized then that I wanted to be a part of her story. It didn’t matter the terms. At least then we would both know the secret, and I would not have to be alone with it. But I could not make that leap, like Nel, into space. All I could do for now was sit, because even as I wept, Disaine drew herself up and concentrated her forces. She shifted. Like the crack of a whip. Like a song transposed into a higher key. And then we were all climbing together.

  I won’t set down the whole lecture, partly because I have set down parts of it already. Whole passages of what I’ve written here — I can’t avoid it — are plagiarized from her. She set my whole idea of the first climb, especially, to h
er own music, and if I remember my initial doubts, it is because she shared them. Her words have become my idea of the tent in the blizzard, of Courer with her hair whitened by cold and decay, of the creak and flap of the tent, of its ancient smell.

  And it felt like the truth, the parts that were true and the parts that were not. She could talk like a book. Sometimes she talked like my book. But she could also strike to the side, double back, get stuck on an idea. It was like the rhetorical trick of deliberately misstating a quotation, so as to seem as if you have not needed to look it up. And then she would take ahold of all this rich stuff, pull at the loose ends, force them together. Make a truth of them. It didn’t matter that it was a rough and threadbare one. Fine truth was made in factories. Bad truth came from home.

  She stopped, started again, returned to the theme of the piercing qualities of the mountain. How it seemed so flat from down below, a plane of white, but when you got closer to it, you found that it had a million sharp points — that each crag, each ridge, the very points and edges of the flakes of snow, were sharp. And then, without warning, we were in the blasted tent with Courer’s body outside, and I heard Daila’s name, and then I realized that he was here.

  It all happened at once. Disaine was saying, “It was here that Lamat’s husband and her best friend had argued, and here that that friend had run off and died, in a storm much like this one — oh, you’d better bet we were scared. I had a child’s understanding of magic at that time, but an adult’s understanding of narrative, and I knew how stories go. This one had entrapped us.” [A quick sigh from behind me, a leathery shift in the seat.] “I felt — do you know — stuck in Lamat’s head, as if this were actually one of her memories. She shrank to nothing in there, and in the end I had to go out into the water of the sky and haul Courer away, to save Lamat the pain, and to save the tent. Maybe I thought I could haul us out of her memory by burying the dead. Maybe it was only something to do. I don’t take well to waiting. Outside it was night and blackout. No moon, and the blizzard was thick and heavy, so the only sensory awareness you had was wet snow pounding against you — and even then, I had the suit on. I felt that I could have leapt up then, only a little distance, and found myself in the sky. There was no difference between earth and air, and the snow fell away from my boots in a light flow.

  “I picked up Courer. In the dark, and muffled in my leather and helmet, there was no horror to it, except that her body was so cold and loosely wrought. Her head fell back, and I went off behind the tent, deeper into the cave, shuffling around the perimeter to keep from getting lost. And as I did that, I felt free. My leg brushed against Lamat’s body, huddled on the other side of the tent wall, and I thought — if she could only come out, she’d realize that that thing gives her no real protection. The tent was like the body, a tissue that encloses us, which we might huddle in and might fight to escape, but really only a thin pulp. The outside was black and wild, but there was life there. And as Courer shifted in my arms, I sensed something, a coil of something, about her heart — but back then I did not know what it meant.”

  And all the while, I knew Daila was there.

  I felt myself begin to sweat, my head bowed as if expecting punishment. I could not put the two thoughts together, the image of Courer’s body and the image of Daila there, older, beautiful, tired, ready to reach out and massage my shoulders or break my neck. The man who had played darts with Dracani, and black chess with me, until late, with bottles of cider in our mouths and then our hands and then our teeth. The man who had screamed at Courer for two solid hours in a cold tent while we were dying.

  I wasn’t sure if he knew it was me; my hair had grown long on the mountain, and I was wearing clothes unfamiliar to him. But I thought that he must know, as surely as I knew the whistle of the breath in his nose, the slope of my shoulders and the part of my hair. So there we were. And on the stage, Disaine was breaking my helmet, and I was screaming, which I don’t remember being able to do.

  “We are going to pass over a period of time,” said Disaine, “when we were off the mountain, down south as the Holoh say, getting supplies, rebuilding the suits, and finding further funds. I had done some fucking unethical things to get the first trip funded — which I’ve made up for, partly, now, thanks to my excellent audiences — and I was determined to do this one right, no strings, or at least no strings that were attached to people’s necks. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I begged the right people, and then we were back where we were, in the cave with Courer. I trust that you have it in you to understand when the story is being warped a little, and not to press at the warped places. If you really want to probe the buckled parts of my narrative, you’ll break through it to the truth, and I assure you the truth is warm and pulpy and you don’t want to put your hand in it. So. The avalanche changed everything.”

  She paced back and forth on the stage for a few moments, her hands behind her back — large, curved, frail hands, hands I knew, lit up bright, age spots and small bloody wounds from who-knew-what. As if in a museum of hands. Then they flew apart, and she was standing still again and said, “It was Lamat’s error and my solution. I say this because that was the moment that it became that way. Heretofore, Lamat had advised, and always been right, and I had bent to her word. But we should not have rested in such a vulnerable spot, I don’t know what her excuse was, I don’t care. The snow came down like a white river and buried us both in an instant, and we had to rely on the dead to unbury us.”

  All I could think, as I heard her recount it — count my failings up again — was that at least I might have come up with a better metaphor than “white river.” An avalanche is not at all like that, like a river of milk. It is not a liquid and not a solid — if anything it is like a gas — light poison dissolved in the air.

  “We lay there in the snow. My head was lower than the rest of me, and all the blood in my body was draining, helpless, from my hands and feet into my shoulders and back and brain. Could already feel them turning blue. Lamat was there. She seemed to have given up, is the madness of it. We never talked about it, but I think she felt that she was with God. The Holoh are like that. Every threat of death from the mountain is God’s tickling finger. You know, if there’s anything I found out about the Holoh, it’s that they’re nothing like they’re supposed to be — except in one way — they’re a suicidal people. I never met one who didn’t look to the mountain with more longing than resignation. While I, myself — I still feared death, and so I closed my eyes and felt the trickle of blood up my spine, and I said to her, you must give me Courer.

  “You read Lamat’s book, right?” A gratifying cheer, despite it all. “You suspected — well, that there was something going on there, right?” Did Daila stiffen, behind me? “Well, she told me the story of it. It was a long story, and a sad one. Lamat miscarried a son. Courer helped her through it. That was how they became so close, through that bond of the body — that opposite of conception, you might say — but just as intimate. There was plenty to work with there! Let me tell you, magic is blood, it’s placenta, it’s all the fluids of the flesh. It’s anger, it’s need. The need to listen to someone who stands ready to hit you. The need for love. And you can draw all that to you, and fashion it into a knot, and use it to take a grip on something that no one living today knows is grippable.”

  She took and released a deep breath, pacing the stage, looking at the front rows, as if judging their readiness to hear what she was about to say.

  “I did not use Courer’s body to pull us out of that corpse-white snow. I did not use it. I asked her. And she answered. There was something left in her — very faint — about the heart — people will tell you that the center of thought is in the brain, but we only think that because our eyes are in our heads. The last remains of a person who has died are in the heart and the spine. Nerves, a crust of blood, the remainder of thoughts, of hungers. There is life in us after we die.”

  Disaine paused. I swallowed saliva through a raw throat, t
rying not to cough, to blow my nose — any sound would have carried out through the room, a pale clap. A wave of laughter went through me, suppressed too — everything kept constrained, still. Absurd idea, ridiculous image. And yet I had seen it. I had seen her.

  “Most people I’ve spoken to haven’t been ready for it,” said Disaine. “You’re different, because you’re here. Most of us are very comfortable thinking of death as a quick merge into blackness. The brain turns to dirt. Everything’s gone. But I’m here to tell you that something is remembered — that God is not the only person who remembers you — that your friends do not have to bear that burden alone. That there are memories. That there is no end to human life. Lamat loved Courer. Courer loved Lamat too. And Courer came, once again, to save her.”

  Tears flowed from my eyes.

  You would expect me to be angry, and I was, but only about what she said about the Holoh and the faith of the mountain. The feeling of resignation, there under the snow, was the most powerful repose of my life. There is nothing left like it, just as there is nothing like the feeling of having your faith mocked and the crowd agreeing. I prefer not to dwell on that awful moment, the way I could dwell on a sharp cliff with the prospect of blood at its base. But to have Disaine tell the world that I loved Courer, and Courer loved me — that was a lifting.

  “People who say that I am lying,” said Disaine, loud and sharp, “who will always be with us, say that I should have stopped at saying I climbed the mountain. If you are going to lie, lie only once. But I think that you need to understand what I have done, to understand what I did later. Once you have raised the dead, and proven that their strength is still in them, then you will see no particular barriers to doing anything else. To climbing to God’s — to crawling to God’s door. To talking to Him as a brother or a father or a friend — I who had no brother, not much of a father, and only one — true — friend. And so I tell about Courer, although people doubt it so. It is the heart of my story, it is what makes it real. If the rest of my story died, that heart would live still.”