The Breath of the Sun Read online

  But Disaine? She’d tell me, with her beaming big-nosed face that seemed always highlighted with gray, that today we must join five segments as thick as the rind of an orange, and that they must be attached almost as precisely — and then she would go outside, and I’d see her tracking something with a telescope or talking to passersby, waving her sharp elbows with their flapping sleeves. Then she would come back in and stitch through her half of the work, unseriously, as if it were vapor.

  We launched them by night and watched their little candles go out, pattering against the mountain until the furthest-flying was lost to sight. And then we were ready.

  Chapter 4

  Asam climbed the mountain so that he could not see the mountain. His whole life it had burned in his brain like a tumor. He climbed it so that he could look about him, at the world, from the only spot on the continent where it could not be seen. But when he reached the peak and stood panting on the pitted stone, he was aware only of absence close about him, as if the world were the matte black paint of a stage and, beyond the footlights, the deeper darkness of the audience.

  Asam said, “What is this place?”

  And God said, “We are outside of the world, where I am not.”

  God’s voice was flowing as water, and his breath was fresh cold air. Asam said, “Forgive me, because I needed to know you.” God said, “Why should you hate yourself, for doing as I told you?”

  —The Gospel of the Waters

  The mountain assaulted us the first day of the climb — the white-hot slopes, the snapping, blinding sun. It was only toward evening, when we passed the monastery, that lavender shadows gathered in the snow and we were able to feel the reality of what we were doing.

  Evening prayers floated to us across the white. All of Asam’s various sects pray at sundown, but there is a good deal of debate at the monastery as to what that should mean. Different groups choose different ticks of the clock or redefine the sunset: it’s the time when the sun disappears; it’s the time when the light is gone; no, it’s the moment when the horizon begins to press against the sun and deform it. People go and stand on the wall in order to shout down the status of the sun. We could see a few of them, black sticks against the light, and hear the soft cacophony of their competing offers to Asam and to his god.

  Far above, we could see the observatory, a bubble of iron on a little plateau. And beyond that there was nothing and no one.

  At night the lights in the sky and the lights of the cities seemed to differ only in the ways they were organized, liquid light above, solid below. We slept, and the next day we cleared the observatory and broke into the free snow. From here on, there was only cold blinding light and continuous wind, a space that at an amateur’s glance might look abstract.

  The suits were coiled in our packs. We were identically clad in heavy fur parkas and trousers, hoods drawn up around our faces, their fur edges ghosting our skin. Layered wool and silk covered our faces to the eyes, and dark goggles of heavy glass rubbed against our cheeks. The wool abraded Disaine’s cheekbones just a little through the silk. I know this because I remember it, not because I felt it myself. That part of my face is all scar tissue, and I was glad not to have lost more of my nose; there was still enough for the goggles to rest on. I have known old climbers who have had to resort to straps over the head.

  The first days were easy. Asam’s Step was still ahead, and the mountain’s angles were shallow. We did not need ropes, but only went along using our axes as walking sticks, probing, testing. The broken page of the snow stretched out before me like this one, full of half-sentences: rough there, buckled here, like a tooth, is there more depth here, Disaine will like this. She was as interested as I in the variations of the snow and ice, and already knew their names.

  Still, the first climb was wearing and monotonous, sloping fields and ridges with no variation and no obvious end. Ahead, it was just possible to see glaciers, and the beginnings of the Step, all seamed granite and ice. For now it was just land, sweat-white and covered in smashed and clotted snow, to be got over.

  We weren’t using oxygen yet, and I could hear Disaine struggling, despite the acclimatization she’d done lower down. While actively climbing, you have few words to spend, and I spent several that afternoon telling Disaine, “Rest step,” or just, “Rest.”

  On one of our rests, sitting on our packs on the slope and looking down between our feet at the stripe of green that was the horizon, she complained of the pace again, and I said rather sharply, “We must try to be like God. Infinite patience.”

  “Easy to say that, but all right.” She huffed at me, though for breath rather than from emotion. “All the same, it’s getting better.”

  “That’s good. It’ll continue to do that. You’ll get stronger, and so will They, only just a little bit faster than you.”

  We sat in silence and ate some hard biscuit. Then she said, “I could go.”

  “With care,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  She kept talking as we made our slow, humped way up the plane of white. “Lamat — can we put the suits on tomorrow?”

  “Above Asam’s Step,” I said. “Have you done glaciers in them? I think it’d be impossible.”

  “Oh — I guess you’re right. And to put them on, then take them off —”

  “Once we’re committed, we don’t go back. We’ll lose all our acclimatization.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will we have full oxygen from the supply balloons, or will we have to economize?” I hadn’t packed the balloons; Disaine had taken that project in hand.

  “The mask doesn’t just give you oxy from the bottle. It filters it out of the air around you and supplements what you’re carrying. All based on a theory of mine.”

  “Another one that someone else got credit for?”

  “I got credit for this one. ‘The Disaine attractor.’ Look it up.”3

  * * *

  3 She must have waited on purpose for you to get out of looking-up range, because the Disaine attractor was a big scientific scandal. Even I heard about it, and I am a doctor, not a scientist. You were supposed to use it to modify air, to pull things out or put things in — it could be made denser, it could be filtered of toxins — you could even mine the air, in a way, since there are minute bits of everything in everything, so you could get metals out of it, gasses. But then nobody could replicate the device, and when they went to test the original, it didn’t work for anyone but her. And then it stopped working for her.

  * * *

  “But you said there was magic in them.”

  “There is. But the idea came from the attractor.” She paused to pick her way around a fallen boulder with a thick, slippery scrim of snow piled up by the wind. “I wish I could tell you how it all works, but magic doesn’t work as well — if it’s understood.”

  “How so?”

  “Well — magic is the animating force inside us all. But we don’t know how or where it is. It’s a black box, as they say — or something under a round glass, like the helmets of our suits.” She opened her scarf and let her pink mouth out, the better to take a gasp of air. It made her look a touch oracular. “Even the heart — is moved by minute magical impulses. And the lightning is made of raw magic.”

  “Really.”

  “It seeks a focus. It floats around until it finds something that’s ready to be destroyed.” Another gasp of air. “And it hits it.”

  “How does it know what needs to be destroyed?”

  “It likes metal best,” she said, “and flesh, and wood.”

  “That’s not very specific.”

  “Black box. Glass helmet.”

  “Does it come from God?”

  “There’s a school of thought,” she said, and gulped air, “that God is dead and the magic is only what’s left of His body. The forces of His decay.”

  “Fucking bleak, Disaine. Rest step.”

  She leaned back on her leg. “I don’t think so, though. I do thin
k it comes from Him, and when we imbue something with magic, it’s like praying.”

  “Bit more direct than praying.”

  “The sense is that God is generous. God wants us to learn.”

  “That’s very Arit of you.”

  “I am an Arit, Lamat. Still.”

  “You can take a step now.”

  She did.

  “And how do you know,” I asked, “that God is generous?”

  “Lamat, I’m not a theologian.”

  “You were doing a pretty good impression of one.”

  “So you haven’t talked to many theologians,” she said, and pulled the wool thick over her mouth again.

  “I’ve talked to a bunch, actually.”

  “I don’t know, then. Certainly I’ve never felt like he’s generous to me. Because the gifts he showers on me are always practical ones.” She laughed, quick and cutting. “Socks and lenses. And others, harder to identify. And some of them fall quite hard.” She dug her axe into the ragged snow and took another step.

  We came upon our first supply drop two days later. Disaine had been climbing well, but when she saw the red of the collapsed balloon I had to stop her from running.

  “Look at it all!” she said — I couldn’t see her expression through the thick layer of wool, but I could hear it in her voice. “The nuts, the biscuit, the new gloves!”

  I bent to go through the cache myself. This balloon had landed too soon. We hardly had to replenish our supplies, and I would have been happy to travel for another few days with a lighter pack. Disaine had snuck in a lot of nonsense, too. I found a red scarf, a little pale bottle of vodka with a bubble dancing in it, stove fuel for a stove we had barely lit, a book with a tooled leather cover, a collapsible telescope — absurd.

  I don’t know what it was about the cache that made me feel so suddenly depressed. I think it was because these things felt like toys. They were sweet and jolly. They lay on the tarp in rows. Sometimes I think there is nothing sadder than a toy. They usually have faces, but they have no use. Does that make any sense to you?

  Anyway, we lost an hour to that. That night, we slept in a fresh tent, with a cache of food and most of the toys. I told Disaine that it would be foolish to stagger up with all of these things on our backs. She insisted on keeping the telescope, and then gathered up all the things anyway, while she thought I wasn’t looking. She was guilty as a dog about it, but I think people like Disaine have trouble letting little things go. They love them and worry about them, being left in the snow to rot.4

  I am crying now, thinking of this. I need to rest from writing.5

  * * *

  4 Shit, I am exactly like that.

  5 I’d say, “You can talk to me,” but I don’t know if this is just how you do that. But, look, you can always talk to me. I wish you’d woken me up, if I was sleeping.

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  Asam said, “Your bodies are the compaction of stars and your minds are the compaction of history. Be decent to each other; pity each other, for it is not an easy state to be made of so much and live for so little a time. Unspool, unwind, unpack each other, and find each other out, for in each of us is the material of humanity, and what is left over is God’s love.”

  —The Gospel of the Arit

  I had my monthly blood in the tent at twenty thousand feet. At that height, most people’s bodies shut down — food rots in their stomachs before it reaches their bowels; their blood churns and thrums instead of pumping — but life finds a way, I guess. And so I found myself wriggling out of my leggings in a glowing tent whose inside was just above freezing, as Disaine companionably leaned on her elbow and looked the other way, at the tent’s flapping side.

  “I thought I was done with this,” I said. “I don’t have them anymore, I thought. Fuck.”

  “That’s only the sixth time I’ve heard you curse,” observed Disaine, languidly enough — she was good at translating exhaustion into languor. “For all your people’s reputation for it.”

  “I’m sure you keep track of these things.”

  “I keep track of everything. I’m a scientist.”

  “All that shit in the drop, and we didn’t think of rags.”

  “Well, you said it yourself: you thought you were done.” Disaine’s hand lifted, pointed at her pack. “I have cloths in my bag. In the second pocket, behind the instruments.”

  I had expected — what? Handkerchiefs or napkins, because I had thought of Disaine as someone who would climb a mountain with napkins, but they were proper things of cloth with tapes that stuck together. I said, “Why do you have these?”

  “Because I still get them sometimes.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not joking. I really, really do.” She turned the page of her book, which lay flat in front of her. “It’s as if my body really doesn’t understand that I don’t intend to use it for certain things and continues to offer because I have never said an explicit no.”

  “Well, I’ve said an explicit no. And they come anyway.” I folded the thing into my underwear and quickly inserted myself into my sleeping bag, pushing off my wet outer parka as I did so.

  “You’ve got rid of one?”

  “I meant the divorce. I lost one once.”

  She touched my back, and I was so fiercely reminded of Courer that I shut my eyes against a slick of tears. “Are you in pain?”

  “Ghost pain. Ghost babies. You know?” It was supposed to be humor — the sort of humor where the phrases are shrieked at other women, at moments when it’s hard to tell whether your grimace is from amusement or exhaustion — but I was too tired.

  “Yes,” she said, and rolled over to face me and turn out the lamp. “It is a ghostly sort of pain. You can’t locate it, quite.”

  We were silent for a long time, though our minds were still busy and we could not rest. There was a sick pain traveling up my spine. It pooled, this pain, in the places where a kind person’s body might press to your back. I always thought of Courer at times like this, and that meant I thought of Daila. I wish I could separate them in my mind; certainly in life they were hardly together, but in her death they were married.

  Daila was my height, a small man. His eye wandered just a touch, so that he always looked a little vague — with effort he could focus, but mostly he used his efforts elsewhere. His family had for generations owned the bar that now is mine, and they were not really climbers, but he was a climber, a man whose muscles moved beneath his skin with grasping grace. He was the finest of his generation. He spoke the language of the mountain, whose letters are in the writhing of bodies up sheer icefalls and their smashed shapes at the bottoms of cliffs. Two languages, black and red.

  We slept the light sleep of the mountains, in which there are always intrusions or occlusions of light and cloud and snow, and woke when the tent glowed from the outside instead of the inside. Packing up camp, I was preoccupied by all this, and by the smudges of pain that pressed at me from within, and a little simple tiredness — it was strange to be so high on the mountain for the first time since youth, up in the sweet, soft snow that had never been touched, and yet to feel so weary all at once. If I closed my eyes, this place was still so familiar — the vaporous thinness of the air seeming merely cool to me, and natural — that I could practically feel the touch of Daila’s hand against the back of mine. I could imagine Courer alive, and my mouth, drawn into a tight smile of tension, would relax into a frown of rest.

  That night we arrived at the foot of Asam’s Step. The sun had set, and in the cool thin light still remaining, the gray ice that covered its surface looked ethereal — the bits of black stone trapped in it looked like its only real part. We set up our tent and stove a good distance from the wall, so that no ice would melt and smash us, and I instructed Disaine to sleep as long and well as she could, and to eat an extra ration of dried meat and drink an extra cup of water.

  “You’re just making sure that I won’t sleep,” she complained.
/>
  “Fine, then. Eat nothing, stay weak, sit up all night looking at the stars.”

  She did sit up for some of the night, sketching the Step; I could hear the flapping of her sketchbook out in the air, and the noise of her mouthing some biscuit which she’d kept in the pocket of her parka. Long snorts of breath and exhalations of wonder. The cliffs are, I will grant, very fine acts of nature, generous if not kind, running the mountain round. To sketch them by moonlight is an act worth doing. Nonetheless, before too much time had passed, I slapped the back of her ankle through the tent, and she obediently crawled back in and fell asleep.

  In the morning we boiled tea and sugar and ate more dried meat — chicken it was, on that trip, crudely chopped with stiff fuzzy edges. A few pieces of dried apricot.

  She had southerners’ crampons, the hinged kind, of which I didn’t entirely approve, but they were well used, freshly sharpened, abraded to a high polish with a stiff scarf. For all the sloppiness of her dress, Disaine took exquisite care of her gear. Really, it was only on the outside that she was such a mess. Inside she was like one of those fine-tongued delicate machines that she used in the suits and on the balloon, each one a system in miniature, all sounds condensed into a hum. They were so finely calibrated that one hard whack could break them, but she understood them so well that they could always be fixed.

  She was playing me more than I realized, too. God, I didn’t understand then that she was manipulative. I was married to Daila, who was openly and almost joyously manipulative, and so I thought I knew the difference between someone who’s inspiring — who gives you the new air of genius — and someone who’s just giving you a perpetual sort of rescue breathing that you can’t break away from. But Disaine was outside of this dichotomy, Otile. She could manipulate you the way you can operate on a person’s lung. It will hurt you; it may cure you, and you submit to it only as a last resort.