The Breath of the Sun Read online

  The Breath of the Sun

  Isaac R. Fellman

  Aqueduct Press

  PO Box 95787

  Seattle, WA 98145-2787

  www.aqueductpress.com

  This book is fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018, Rachel Fellman

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-61976-139-1

  First Edition, August 2018

  Cover illustration © 2018, Erika Steiskal

  http://erikasteiskal.com/

  Book Design by Kathryn Wilham

  I dedicated this book to my family, and by that I mean both biological and chosen. Aaron Fellman, my brother, was The Breath of the Sun’s first editor. He is always there when I need help, and unstintingly generous with the gifts of his witty and balanced mind. Lydia Moed, my literary agent, was able to find this book’s final shape and its ideal home at Aqueduct, while also giving life to her baby son. She has poured kindness and wisdom on me from the day that we met.

  I don’t know how to properly thank everyone who has given me help and care since I began this book, so I’ll leave it here. Just know, all of you, that you are Fellmans now.

  For my family.

  Chapter 1

  Asam came to the mountain grieving,

  and he left it joyfully.

  —The Gospel of the Worms

  Otile, my love,

  All metaphors are lying to you. The mountain is not like anything except itself. Even adjectives are suspect. White is safe. Gray is safe. Treeless is fine, though a little sketchy. And large has no use at all. Tell me, is the world large? I have looked down on it from God’s own shoulder, and even I could not tell you.

  It is much the same with Disaine. She came into my life suddenly, a whisk like a curtain, and I could never tell you if she was brilliant or kind or afraid or fanatical or a complete damn-ass phony. Those things, like the mountain being large, are the skin of a truth, but not the bones of it. I would like the two of us to stand over the truth and dissect it. You can be my teacher; I can be your guide. Come. Let us open the muscle of the neck.

  Let us meet Disaine.

  Back then I still ran the bar in my ex-husband’s village, eight thousand feet up the mountain, just over the knob of its toe. I hadn’t quite opened up yet, and I was crouched over the fireplace, banking the warm embers. Half an hour before that I had been on the mountain, and I still had the feeling of a night climb: hot muscle encased, smothered, by cold skin. I looked up when I heard the creak of the door, which stuck a little in the new heat of the fire.

  Her stick came into the bar before she did, but she was a fast walker and the tall staff of branched yew had barely thumped the ground before I was confronted with her stern face. It seemed carven of the same wood, peeled of its outer bark and laid out naked and austere.

  “Lamat Paed?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was used to being asked that, straight off, but not to knowing why. There were several potential reasons: I had climbed a good deal and written a book about climbing, and I was a guide as well. But she hadn’t said it like a fan, or a potential client, or even someone who’d vaguely heard of me and wondered if this building, unmarked like all the others, was the bar.

  She said it like police. But when I said “yes,” she just said, “I am Mother Disaine,” and that seemed introduction enough for her.

  I straightened up, still with the sense that this was a person of authority, although only a priest. I got a better look at her — she looked like a climber. Fried skin. A squint so fierce that the whole flesh of the face seemed thrust a little forward. She’d lost two fingers of her right hand — all that was left was the thumb, the middle, and the fourth finger, from which a holy order’s ring dangled a little, too big. Her robe was old, worn to real rags, and my first startled thought was that it must be the result of some oath, a vow to wear it until it fell from her. It was white and much patched at the shoulders with those bits of cloth the Arit Brotherhood (for that was her order) use to signal pilgrimages, conferences, papers published, and discoveries made.

  “What would you like?”

  “Hm?”

  “What would you like to drink?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Whatever people drink in this place.”

  I poured her a snowmelt vodka, the stuff I distilled for tourists, and I pushed it at her. “What brings you to town, Mother Disaine?”

  “I’m looking for some real help.”

  Instantly her eyes were wet. I tapped the bar and drew a little closer to her. The phrase had startled me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” she said, “I want to climb. Really climb, you understand?”

  I said, “Most people just want a guide up to the monastery.”

  “Oh, much higher than the monastery.” She took a pink gulp of her drink. “Lamat, I’ve come all this way just to meet you.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “Twelve Miles Up the Mountain moved me more than any book ever has, except for Mr. Trang, and you can hardly help that.” Slammed the glass down and smiled at me.

  “What’s Mr. Trang?”

  “An Enthusiast’s Guide to the Balloon, Its Workings and Applications. Usually the stuff that gets me the most involves diagrams. Stuff that most people would think was dry.”

  “Twelve Miles feels dry to me.”

  She gave me a level look. “You read it lately?”

  “No. Hope never to read it again. It’s served its purpose.”

  “Oh, I like you,” she said. And then, again, as if surprised: “I do!”

  The fact is that Twelve Miles is untrue, although I wrote it for the same reason I’m writing this one: to puzzle out the truth. But the truth on a mountain is always unstable. The snow at its feet is only a thin layer over a crevasse. The thought is dried and pulled from its brain by desperate altitudes. All of its choices are bad, and its memory is porous and bloody. That was why I lacked the strength to go back to that book. I had just now, many thousands of days later, built a life of my own, and I had no wish to go back to the shaky little person I was then, with the truth of that disastrous expedition trembling on my lips like a nervous kiss.

  “Then you’re a balloonist,” I said carefully.

  She brushed down the pilgrimage patches that covered her shoulders. “These are balloon silk. From my pilgrimages to the air.”

  “I just guessed that.”

  “And that’s where I lost these,” she said, and held up her claw of a hand, flexing the remaining fingers. “The whole arm went black as candlewick. Both of them did, and I should’ve suffered no ill effect, but I had to wrap it tight in one of my lines to get safely down again. Deadman’s switch, you know? If I passed out I’d pull the cord. And by the time I woke up again the fingers were dead. You know what altitude does to people. It’s like fizzy wine.”

  She was watching my face. I’ve lost so much of it to frostbite that most people are uncomfortable looking close, but Disaine was the other kind of person, the one who stares at the blasted surface as if it affords an easier path to the brain. It often strikes me as a cruelty in these people, jabbing through the gray earth where the dead are buried, but Disaine was too self-absorbed for that type of cruelty. Her face split into a smile again, bright and helpless.

  “I thought you might think it was cheating,” she said.

  “To use a balloon?”

  “Yes. I’ve been twice as high as you — is that fair to say? Sixty thousand feet, to your thirty or thirty-five?”r />
  “I won’t quibble.”

  “And yet you worked for it, and I didn’t — well, not in the air. But really all I did was pull a cord and fly, and I went to the same place you half-died to get to.”

  “It wasn’t cheating. You may as well say I cheated. I didn’t have to live with the fear of having nothing under me.”

  “Oh, exactly!” she said.

  I had neglected the opening of my bar. It was still late winter, and the sun had set early in the evening; I went to open the shades and add a log to the fire. Disaine watched me, sitting with her robe hitched up on one of my tall stools. She was tall herself, athletic, bent with age, but she knew how to use it — to make the stoop look only like an eager lean forward.

  And she had a crown. Have you ever met anyone like that? I call it a crown, like in a fairy tale. A mark that shimmers in the cheek when they turn. The sense of a mass of hot light floating over their head. When Disaine smiled at you, it was like a smile in a book. A smile that means something, that has hundreds of pages of character behind it, that’s the denouement of the whole action.

  “Have you ever ballooned?” she asked me, blowing on her second vodka as if it were hot.

  “No. I don’t go south much.”

  “You mean down off the mountain? That’s what you call it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “Nothing there for me.”

  “I suppose it’s not much of an adventure.”

  “It’s not my kind of adventure,” I said. “My ex-husband lives down there. The one from the book.”

  “The one? Have there been others?”

  “Fuck, no.”

  “And what is he doing now?”

  “He’s in the business.” I waited for her to catch the euphemism, but she was not one to catch verbal nuance; she was not at home with words. In my experience, using a lot of them has nothing to do with whether you’re comfortable with them or not.

  “Well. Tell me more.”

  “There’s nothing more to tell. I put it all in the book.”

  “Lamat.” And I saw her breathe in, and it was as if by this breath, she pulled air from my own lungs, pulled it to her. She looked at me eye to eye, bloodshot and quick-moving. “You can’t have put it all in the book.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must still want to do it. To summit. And to meet God.”

  “My God is under my feet,” I said, “and the last thing that God wants me to do is summit.”

  “I wonder,” she said lightly, and then the door blew open and my friend Dracani came in. I introduced him to Disaine, who raised her glass in salute and held his gaze for a long time. I’ll have more to say about him later, the bastard.

  She stayed and drank until past ten. She kept throwing me nervous looks, but she didn’t approach me again except for refills. The villagers ignored her; by old etiquette they didn’t approach strangers unless approached first. They carried on the life of the village, gaming and chatting in low voices, clustered about the fires. And so Disaine was left alone, looking into her vodkas as if scrying them, and tapping her bundle-of-bones hand on the counter.

  At the end of the night she asked me for a room. I showed her to my second-best one, hot from the big central chimney and acrid from the fur on the bed. She peeled back the corner of the bedspread. I put a flask of water on the night table.

  “You should have everything you need. Light out by midnight. The oil costs.”

  “I’ll be asleep long before then,” she said, and fell rather than sat on the bed, pawing at her shoes. “I keep climbers’ hours.”

  “Do you climb?”

  “Of course!”

  “You didn’t tell me you did. Only that you want to.”

  “I said I wanted to really climb,” she said, “and there’s a difference. I want to talk to you about it. Alone. I’m serious.”

  “Well, nothing makes you look more serious than saying you’re serious.”

  “I shouldn’t have got drunk,” she said savagely. “I was just trying to be sociable.”

  “You don’t need to be sociable with me.”

  “Yes,” she said, and looked up from the bed. “I knew I wouldn’t.”

  Such force in the woman, even like this. A force that held up her body from within, that held it up fiercely like a prize. She said, “You know what’s special in your book?”

  “What?”

  “I can tell you’re dying to be back there. Every moment of it. Even as your friends fall. Even as your husband snaps you like kindling. In all this time, why haven’t you?”

  “Well, I might be dying, but there’s no one to die for,” I said. Believe it or not, this is how I sound when I try to keep it light, but Disaine had no concept of that; her levity was always as heavy as gold.

  She looked at me now, ran her tongue over her teeth, and said, “That could change.”

  “Are you proposing yourself?”

  “Of course not. I don’t mean for either of us to die.”

  “Well, neither did my friends.”

  “I’ve got some plans that would’ve saved your friends,” she said. “And I’ll show them to you, tomorrow, when I’m sober.”

  “That’s a big claim.”

  “I don’t fuck around about this sort of thing,” she said. “Will you be around in the morning?”

  “I’m always around.”

  “Let’s see if we can’t change that,” she said, and blew out the light.

  That night I lay in my own bed and thought of nothing. Maybe I didn’t sleep at all; I often didn’t in those days. So long as you keep your eyes open, you can hold the room the way it is. If you focus on the glassy darkness, the lingering heat in the dead fireplace, the breadth (ten paces by ten) of the stone walls, the slit of the window — if you can take it all in at once, you can exclude the dead and the way they move in this room.

  This will be a book for us and only us, Otile. I no longer want to tell a story to anyone but you. Your little hands know the weight of a human heart, a tiny red kidney, the weak tissue of a lung. Now I want them to know the weight of this. More and more I feel that I don’t know it, though Disaine’s story is my heart, my kidney, my lung. So you must weigh it for me.

  Disaine made my life a lie. She made it not my own. And nothing I write can bring it back now. My last memoir taught me that. You can’t bring back the past you long for, by telling it to as many people as possible — but you might crack a whip whose bit comes back and hits you in the eye.

  So this is not a book. I wasn’t joking before: it is a set of notes on an autopsy. And I need you to join me at the table, like the good doctor you are, and make notes in your small firm script. Can you do that for me?1

  * * *

  1 Yes.

  * * *

  Morning came a few hours later. I was up for it, and swept the hard sharp night-snow from the steps of my bar. The light was pink and diffuse. I think of that place often, too often to describe it from life; besides, I am an adult, and I don’t have to do things I’ve already done. For a full description of my little village, see Twelve Miles Up the Mountain.2

  * * *

  2 LAMAT. I am sorry to intrude twice on my very first page, but I am an adult too and I hate looking things up in books you know I haven’t read, and actually you asked me not to read.

  OK, here is a full description of your little village:

  Snow and stone, stone and snow and a little water: I grew up in a place like this. The houses are low boxes, some with underground rooms bigger than themselves. Those rooms melt the snow above them, exposing ground that can be farmed a little in summer. Daila’s family had a house, but they rarely used it; they preferred to live over the bar, where they could have the vantage of the whole town. I came here to marry him, sight unseen, though he courted me anyway — stood in the doorway smiling and handed me a wind-bitten iris and said he’d heard I could climb.

  He w
ould never have heard such a thing. My mother had taken me out that summer, taught me the minimum a girl had to know. I had been married to Daila because nobody but my family could see that I was worthless, and so my dowry had been a bargain. But he was determined to make the best of it.

  A town of a hundred people. The bar was the biggest building, a half-palace of sloping stone, where people came to drink and game and flirt with their real lovers, a place that hummed with light and energy. People could sleep there, when they could afford no fire, and Daila’s parents kindly ignored them. The guest rooms were for travelers only.

  Outside in the day, there was a tentative feeling to the place, a sense that although these houses had hard walls and ancient cellars, they really had no more root than a mushroom — one hard pop and they’d be out. The view had no detail to it, just green below and white above. Sometimes you could glimpse a hunter stalking far off, below where the leaves began, or a herder with her goats. Sometimes the tram would be starting up its thin line, a bead of wood. You could go up to the terminus and meet whatever traveler came out, and I often did, telling them in my good accent to come to the bar. It wasn’t such a bad life, until Courer stepped out of the tram and offered me a better one.

  * * *

  “Lamat?”

  It was Disaine. I smelled liquor on her still. It was disappointing that she hadn’t measured her drinking to match the altitude — I could always tell my visitors’ seriousness by this alcoholic barometer, and I found that I wanted Disaine to be serious.

  But she was fully dressed, and the set of her head was erect and kind, like a bird’s. She came up behind me and said, “Beautiful morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to go up with me, in my balloon?”

  “I can’t afford to lose any more body parts.”

  “Looks to me like you only lost parts of parts,” she said lightly. “The tip of the nose, the gnawable parts of the cheek. But that’s involved with what I want to show you, and anyway we won’t go that high.”