The Breath of the Sun Read online

  “Won’t we be blown away from the mountain?

  “Yes. We’ll have to take the tram back up. My treat.”

  “There’s still a fire in my bar.”

  “Doesn’t anyone work for you?”

  “No.”

  “Can you put it out?”

  I hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

  I felt that I had to — however disturbed I was by the idea of all that space beneath me, and by the idea of the inn hot with ashes, unclean as morning skin. And however much I hated, ever, to put out the fire.

  The balloon took some time to fill. It came in a massive crate on skis, which she had dragged from the tram by herself — a horizontal distance of half a mile, on a path that was far from horizontal. It was of an unfamiliar fabric, faded black and with a fuzz on it that caught unpleasantly at the hand. I was made to stand at the balloon’s mouth and hold it open, which gave Dracani time to wander over and stare at it with me. He had come out of his house without washing or waxing his silky mustache, and hairs kept flying into his mouth as he talked in the wind.

  “Fuck me,” he said. “Are you really going up in that?”

  “Can you take care of the bar if I’m not back for a while?”

  He faltered a little, and then said, “Do you trust this woman?”

  “You know me. I’ll do all sorts of things before trust comes into it.”

  “Not lately,” he said. “But, sure, I can take the bar. I’ll give you whatever I make.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “No, I do. May — may God spit you clear.”

  “Yep.”

  And he coughed himself back home.

  Most of the villagers came out, though, over the next hour, to watch the balloon’s progress. None of us had ever seen one; they were still rare even in the cities, and at best we might have seen an engraving in a week-old paper. The thing still did not look much like a balloon by the time Disaine came back from inside the bar and took the reins from me. It lay limp on the ground, its surface crawling with each breeze.

  “Ready to fire the burner?”

  “Are we?”

  “Step on up,” she said, holding up a hand gloved in a material so thin that I saw every detail of her fingers. It was a custom job, tailored to her ruined hand. I stepped into the basket, whose gate was left open for me, and Disaine followed and hit a switch on the burner. Instantly a jet of fire six feet high melted the snow around the balloon and made my face flush; the canopy inflated the rest of the way with a hard snap. The floor of the basket danced on the sudden mud beneath us, and strained at the guide-ropes that held it down.

  She looked me up and down and pronounced my clothes — fur parka, fur trousers, and boots — to be warm enough, “so we can go any time.”

  “All right.”

  “You and you,” she said, and pointed out of the basket at the stronger members of the crowd, absentmindedly closing the gate as she did so. “Undo those ropes and hold us. You won’t be dragged up. All right. Ready?”

  It was a strange feeling to be held to the earth by human hands — within the movements of the balloon, nervous in the wind, were the movements of muscles. I gripped the edge of the basket, which was chest-high on me and a little lower on Disaine. She held out her hand, palm up — a grand gesture, the fingers horizontal.

  “Let go!” she thundered, and with her other hand threw out a sandbag that I had not realized she had been holding. A few more sandbags followed, amidst the general letting-go of the ropes, and we flew up so suddenly that when we slowed, I felt weightless. Disaine shut off the burner.

  It was warmer than I had expected. The air was crisp and icy, breaktooth air, but the sun on our shoulders was hot, with no wind to cool it down — we moved with the wind, and so we felt none. Everything was neutral, flat. We flew over the side of the mountain, at the level of the first milepost above the village, and below us ran the swollen veins of the ridges and rivers that made up its base. It’s still an alien sight to me, all that liquid water.

  The mountain looks the same at any distance between a yard and a hundred miles. It is not a mountain as other lands know them, but a wall that extends from horizon to horizon. Its mass grinds down the earth below it, and its peak disappears into the air with a surpassing lightness. It is snow-covered four hundred days out of the year, though there are windbent pines below the treeline and, above, the little swarms of life, the monastery and the observatory and my low village.

  Disaine seemed entirely sober now. It was as if the burner had torched away the remaining alcohol on her breath. She stood now with one hand on the cord that opened the balloon’s aperture, one on the handle that lit the fire. Her raw-looking skin was marvelously set off by the pinkness of the air, which was tinged with distant smoke.

  “Well?” she asked me, the word a probe.

  I said the word for indescribability that is also the name of the mountain. This word has served me well over the years, one of the few old Holoh words that has never been sucked into the language of the South; I translated it to her as best I could, in case she didn’t understand my bit of local color. “Sublime.”

  “Precisely,” she said with satisfaction. “I have always felt that sublime is the only word. In the sciences, to sublimate is to make a solid into a gas — isn’t that a perfect metaphor for ballooning? Now, listen — here’s my idea.”

  She knotted the line, let go of the burner, and reached into a neat little wickerwork locker at the bottom of the basket. Inside was an evil-looking snarl of rubber and glass that resolved itself into a mask, a plain insectile mask attached to a light canister.

  “Bottled air,” I said.

  “You’re clever.”

  “No, I know of it. You’re not the first to have the idea.”

  “But I believe I’m the first to have this idea,” she said triumphantly, and withdrew more coils of material — this time a whole suit of rubber-coated cloth that fitted to the mask, and a helmet last of all, of thick clotted brown glass. It was handblown stuff, enormously heavy.

  “All right. What does that do?”

  “The thing people die of on the mountain isn’t the thin air,” she said. “It’s the loss of pressure. Our bodies are designed to be surrounded by a certain quantity of stuff. Too much or too little stuff, we die. But with the right pressure, we can go anywhere — even all the way up the mountain. This won’t heat you terribly well. You’ll need to wear furs inside and out. But you’ll live.”

  I stood there, rolled my dry tongue around my dry mouth. She handed me the brown glass ball of the helmet, and I felt its inside, rough as old ice.

  “All the way up the mountain,” I said. “To the top of God’s head.”

  “Sure as shit,” she said.

  I raised my eyes and looked at her. She was standing calm and steady, with her three-fingered hand around the balloon’s control line. Her eyes were a very clean blue. I was reminded of Courer with such force that it was as if I felt the wind after all. A solid punch of air right to the chest. It was the steadiness that did it. Courer had looked at me with that same steadiness when she had sat in the bar that evening, a little apart from the crowd as always, but with all the fire’s light on her face, and said quietly, “Let’s the four of us climb. Let’s see how far we can get.”

  She shocked our faith. We weren’t rebels; we were three of the most orthodox young people you could imagine. There were rules for how you could climb without giving pain to God, and climbing loosely, freely, forever, was not against those rules but outside them. But the very transgression of what she’d said made it hard to answer, and that night after everyone else went home, and Saon and Daila and Courer and I went outside to have our last drink at midnight, we all looked to the top of the mountain. There was a loud darkness, shifting into the sky with a blue that billowed, and we all felt the hum of it.

  For a while, I thought it was the usual madness. Some people are driven like that; they make their excuses, faith or a
dventure or science, and then they climb without cease, till death, towards the mountain’s magnetic north. But this was not madness. Every time I closed my eyes, I knew that I could have stopped us. But I didn’t, and now Courer is dead.

  Now Disaine said, “I knew I had to ask you. And only you. Not just because you hold the record. Because you’ve climbed higher than anyone except — maybe — Asam. But because you wrote about it, and showed me one way to pursue God, who flees me. And maybe has good reason to.” She laughed a little, with unconvincing mischief. “I thought you were an atheist at first.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because Holoh aren’t supposed to climb —”

  “Without certain laws,” I said. “Certain ceremonies. Some of us need to descend when others climb.”

  “And you seemed to break that law so easily.”

  “It wasn’t that,” I said, and looked over the basket at the side of the mountain, with its billion footholds in the snow. Snow on God’s body, dry and fine. “It wasn’t easy to break at all. But I thought — and I still think, even though it was such a disaster, even though people died and marriages ended...”

  “Yes?”

  “I grew up being told that God doesn’t want us to climb. That we wound Them with our feet, that we blood Them with our fingernails. And that I’m not sure it’s true. The Holoh are the only people who are visible to God. Why would They choose us, if not so that we could someday see Them face to face?”

  It shocked me how clear and bold it felt to say it. I had thought it all for many years, but it was another matter to stand and let the words go. She looked at me with serious interest, letting the moment pass without further comment, and then she took up the suit again. “I’ve tested it in balloons up to about sixty thousand feet. That’s as high as you can go in one.”

  “That’s not an eighth of the way up the mountain.”

  “Ah, but what is an eighth of the way.” She smiled, her eyes alight now in their narrow orbits. “The Holoh say the mountain is three-thirty [330,000] feet. Nobody knows where you got that. The followers of most of the saner gospels — the Waters, even the Worms — say it’s a hundred thousand, and the Arit Brotherhood thinks all sorts of things at once. They’re sure no mountain higher than fifty thousand feet could ever make sense, it would throw the planet’s orbit out of whack, and yet the mountain is so patently much higher than that. I’ve sat at sixty, where your fucking saliva boils out of your mouth, and it looks the same as it does from the ground. The Gospel of the Unseen people say it’s infinite height, but they don’t even acknowledge the existence of space. Me, I think the Holoh are much more right than anyone knows. Why are you smiling?”

  “Priests are always telling me the Holoh are right about something.”

  “Oh!” she said, and looked flustered. “I hadn’t known.”

  “They think it helps.”

  “You are a sharp one,” she said, as if to herself. “Well, that’s why balloons were a fool’s errand. Never get high enough to get a sense of the thing. But I assure you, even when you get to the saliva-boiling part, in one of these you don’t feel anything. You feel absolutely great. It’ll work.”

  “Absolutely great,” I said absently, trying to remember the last time I’d felt that way, wondering if Disaine did it often. “So at thirty thousand you lost your fingers —”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “And then you made the suits.”

  “After I learned to sew without my index, yes.”

  She always said “thirty” for “thirty thousand feet” and “sixty” for “sixty thousand.” In my recounting of the story, I have had to add “feet” in order to make her meaning clear. She might as well have been citing ages, and indeed I came to recognize that the heights she’d reached were roughly commensurate with her age. She was a little over sixty years old; she had reached a height not much higher. Now she wanted to snap the rope that bound them.

  All this while the balloon was flying swiftly away from the mountain, caught in the icy clean wind that streaks objects and birds away, that purifies the mountain in its own plume of snow. Disaine had brought us steadily lower, in order not to take me too far from home, and now we were only a few hundred feet above the fields outside Garnerberg, and slowing. The breathless ride was almost over, and I found that I was not ready to go back to the world of labor and weight.

  “Even in your village, the pressure’s so low,” said Disaine, holding a rope tightly and scanning the ground. “You can put on a suit there and immediately feel better.”

  “You’d feel better. I’d feel woozy.”

  “Really? The full oxygen does that to you?”

  “The excess of oxygen. The ground has too much. It gives you strange ideas.”

  “People say the same about where you live. Maybe there’s no place on the planet that doesn’t. Maybe we all have strange ideas all the time, and we blame it on the weather.”

  She pulled the cord. The balloon descended with a sharp jar, and suddenly the ground was swishing past us, the basket grazing the tips of the young plants, and I knew our speed. The landing was hard, a sharp jab up the spine, then another, and then we came to rest, though my mind and body were still all a-rush.

  “You’ll be a little shaky on your pins,” she said, and opened the basket’s hatch, stepped out into the lush green, breathed deep of the air she’d been breathing all along. “That’s natural. Every time someone flies for the first time. Some get sick.”

  She had yanked off her gloves when we’d landed. Now she offered me her hand, and I took it, feeling bone and scar tissue. She escorted me off the balloon, and my feet sank into the soft, rich earth of the land around the mountain.

  It was terrifying to see the mountain so close. I lived on it, of course — I lived it. But when I was down in the world, amidst the petals of the flower of which the mountain is the stamen, it was always terrifying for me to see it still as close and grand, as encroaching, as perfumed, as if it were next to you or beneath you.

  “I’ve read your book,” she said. “Will you read mine?”

  “Your book?”

  “My diaries.”

  She was looking at me so beseechingly. I realized that the speech had been prepared well in advance, and I told her, “All right.”

  The balloon’s basket could be entirely opened on one side to form a sort of bench. We sat on this, on the basket’s gritty floor, and she handed me two leatherbound books, not large, very old. I already understood that it was typical of Disaine to decide to write a diary, to purchase the materials as a girl, and to keep everything compact, precise, in these same two books for the rest of her life.

  I never knew what to do with Disaine’s diary. I read parts of it that day, yes; I learned a little about the monastery where she had been educated, and the ones where she had served, and her long years of wandering after. But I really learned nothing. Even when she was writing about herself, even when she opened her rawest heart, she still seemed to talk mostly about things and other people. There was a cleanliness and a smile to it that I didn’t know how to break through, even if I rubbed it hard with a fingernail, even if I breathed on the page. I still have her diaries, I’ve read them through, but I don’t see Disaine in them.

  Maybe it’s just that I didn’t know her, but I thought there was a lot to learn from Disaine’s diaries. I’ve read them myself, now, except for the parts where the handwriting is too bad (not even right after she loses her fingers, either — it is barely worse in those months. Is it possible, Lamat, that she was ambidextrous? I have often found that ambidextrous people are skilled liars; I think there’s a suppleness in the connections between the two halves of the brain that facilitates lying.)

  Anyway, I think there are parts that are important to know. And don’t we often describe ourselves when we talk about other people? That’s a truism, isn’t it? Here’s the part you must have read that day. – O

  FROM THE JOURNALS [this was really what Disaine
had written, here on the first page] OF ERATHE SIRAYAN.

  [Then this, in a different pen and an altered hand.] LATER CALLED MOTHER DISAINE.

  It is very quiet in my cabin in the evening, and I have no friends here; therefore, I have begun this log of my days in order to provide myself something to do.

  I arrived at the monastery of Saint-Cythians two weeks ago. It is an arid, dry place, not the high desert of my imagination but the scrubby desert, the harsh desert, plants that cling to your robe and the ground and each other. There are five cabins for initiates and only four initiates, but they clump us all into one, four little rooms with a bed each, and that much privacy provided only to keep us from temptation, I suppose. Certainly there’s little enough among my fellow-travelers to tempt me. The rest of the time we are together, and the social muck of it all, having to talk until we all blur together, is wearing me down. I suppose that’s the point of it, to see if we have a secret heart, and then to quietly crush it. They want to make Nothing of us.

  Tonight is my sixteenth birthday. At home you’d get a little maple candy on your birthday, or at least dispensation to talk about yourself a little. I don’t mind putting aside what is childish, but it is surprising, and depressing, and maybe restful, to have it unacknowledged.

  I am not popular among the other postulants. They were much better educated than I before we came, and so they are more patient about these first months of toil, in which we are expected only to work in the kitchens, and scrub corrosive chemicals, and polish steel and brass instruments, and pray — to do all the work that the real people of the monastery don’t have time to do, including the shouldering of their burden of prayer. Their work may explore the motion of the world, but we must pray to keep it going round.

  I cannot say that I am surprised. I’ve read enough to know that this is how learning starts, with irrelevancy, and boredom, and exhaustion. But at least at home I could maintain my Secret Heart as I liked, without having anyone push at it. It’s hollow, of course. They always are; I don’t know why anyone needs to test to find out. What matters is what manner of air fills that hollowness — whether it’s buoyant, whether it’s toxic, whether it’s inclined to fly up or down. I am afraid of having my heart pressed out of me by all this work and boredom, and feeling all my delight in knowledge hiss out of the puncture.