The Breath of the Sun Read online

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  8 You already understood the most important lesson in medicine, even then.

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  They can begin just like that. They are like the lighting of a white flame. The competent climber will always have a sheltering spot in mind, above twenty thousand feet on the Sublime Mount (or the Indescribable Mountain or the Mountain of Transcendence; many translations have been tried, and all of them only render the mountain in souvenir crystal. Maybe you could do better, Otile. You mainly name things after people, organs and the like, and maybe that is all I would like to do, to name the mountain after Courer).

  The snow did not obliterate everything. I could still see the black rocks before me and the red of the tent ahead, seeming to gape and smoke. I saw the bit of hempen rope with which I had been belaying Disaine, and below I saw Disaine, her face glowing with effort inside the space that the helmet afforded within the snow. My own helmet was cold and very visible to me, smeared as it was with frost and ice and fingerprints, and in an abstracted way I let go the belay with one hand and pressed at the glass with my glove.

  Disaine shouted something, and I came back to myself. The noise of the snow was already all the noise there was in the world. I was surprised that anything of her voice had found me through all that water and glass, but Disaine had a voice made for preaching and could make a tremendous noise when she wanted it. I clutched the belay, she gained the ledge I was on, and together we tunneled through the blowing snow up toward the tent. We made for it blindly, by unspoken consent, recognizing that the cave was far better shelter than anything on this rocky scree, down which we might slide five or ten feet without really noticing anything except for the pain. The visibility was that bad.

  But we had strength, she and I, and we made it to the tent in the end. I almost fell to my knees when we came to it and I saw, leering out of the snowstorm a few feet away from me, Courer’s body — Courer’s body, frozen to the ground, sitting against the wall of the tent, exactly where she had died. I had not waited for her, but she had waited for me — cross-legged and looking at the view.

  The sight of her seated there was so familiar, so native to my memory, that the alteration was after all monstrous. Daila had done what Daila did, and she had crawled out to sit in the storm while I screamed at him and tried to strangle him inside the tent, and in the morning, the storm was gone and so was she. And we had descended through the clouds, leaving her there with the moisture of her eyes frozen, looking bad, looking drawn, her skin already tight over her bones.

  Disaine yelled to me to come inside, never mind it, and I fell to my knees and crawled into the tent, Daila’s tent. Inside it was bone-cold and half-rotted, its waxed canvas surface streaked with ice. Nothing was left inside except one crumpled yellow blanket, frozen stiff, crushed into shape by the body of Courer or Daila or me — it was just the three of us curled up together in the tent, me between my two loves, certain that we would die there. At first my face was pressed to Daila’s back, but then we all began to argue.

  Now Disaine and I clutched each other in the cold, the tent blurry and blowing around us in the terrific wind. We took off our packs, tried to breathe in the foul air — the suits did not seem to be working as well, even, as they had on the scree, and the helmet was not helping me to distance myself, now that I knew Courer was out there. I took a long seeping breath and rested my head on my pack, trying to banish the story of her death. How could I, though, when it was all around me like a display in a museum, every wrinkle preserved?

  Life is supposed to let us forget the worst things, but I remember that long night with Disaine better than I should. I recall its whole rough snow-edged layout, the grid and grit of the hours, Disaine’s arms around my chest, the titanic wind, and the impact as Courer’s body was broken free by the wind and began to knock against the tent. It was not as dramatic as you’re picturing, maybe, but it was bad enough. A dent in the canvas, horribly small and bearing the clear shapes of ribs. And then again and again, and the ancient cloth began to tear, and then a hard blast of wind blew her so hard against us that I saw a piece of her parka and the bone of her neck in the gap where the tent tied shut.

  It was all so small, if that makes sense. You expect tragedy to have an aura of unreality around it, that fuzzes its borders and makes it comfortingly big, but this was only the wreck of a tent and a dead woman whose body was starting to damage it, and a good deal of snow, and my memories of a time when this woman was alive, when she had held me in her arms as Disaine was doing now, and told me that soon this would be over, and we would break through to a blanket of snow, a land of warm snow that we would reach any day now, any hour, any moment, perhaps without even trying. I had felt her cold dry lips against my ear. And Daila had made a noise of irritation — not rage, not envious fire, but irritation. And now all of that was gone, and what was left of that woman was trying to make her way back into the tent.

  Suddenly Disaine let go of my hands and went to the tent entrance, as if to push Courer away down the side of the mountain. I said, “Wait!” but she went anyway, and began to untie the thongs that held the tent closed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to get her away from there.”

  “You’ll let her blow in!”

  “I won’t,” she said, and then the cacophony was inside the tent, burying all the wet trash beneath clean snow, and I was diving to tie the knots again, and I saw Disaine vanishing with Courer’s body gently in her arms. I knew that was the last I would see of either of them, and I spent the whole rest of the night huddled on the floor, the place now scrubbed of ghosts. I was numb to the idea that Disaine had gone, with her brave erect body and her air of an orderly, Courer only a patient. And eventually I passed out, but from lack of oxygen, not anything else.

  When I awoke my head was being bashed against the floor of the tent — slam and crack again, against thin canvas and rough stone. I tried to call out, but there was no breath in my body — I could not breathe at all. My lungs seemed to have forgotten their function. I moved the muscle about my ribs, but no air came in. Another hard impact with the floor. Disaine was sitting on my back, holding me down. On the third impact, the helmet shattered, and I was huffing in a deep hard breath among the broken glass and automatic blood, Disaine shouting and flailing at me.

  “We have to descend! The suits are fucked!”

  “Why did you have to break it?”

  “I can’t move my fucking fingers!”

  I threw her off of me and took stock. The storm outside had abated; it was no longer whiteout, though snow was streaming down the slope in the gray dark. I could feel the deoxygenation hitting me, a sharp headache, a wild-headed feeling, brain of black wool, and I knew she was right: we were in the death zone, without any means of gathering the scattered breath from the air around us, and we would die if we did not get down soon.

  Chapter 6

  The Arit say Asam went up the mountain from curiosity; the cultists of Tion say that it was from hubris, and the good men of the Gospel of the Worms say he did it because he could no longer bear, a man who saw himself as holy soil, to be apart from the sky from which the perfumes and spices of his flesh had come. But the last to see him were Holoh, the rites said at his funeral were Holoh:

  the man standing at the edge of the flames, and

  the straightness of his spine, and

  the stillness and solidity of his closed eyes, and

  the fire in the pit

  and he said nothing of his desires then, and

  he left in the night.

  —The Holoh Litany

  Of everything we did on that first trip, I am proudest of the descent. It was the only part of the trip that involved real mountaineering, which is to say a violent and unpredictable journey, during which the very landscape revises itself, everything is swift and uncontrolled, and as you try to sleep, much later, you are kept awake by the keen whine of wind still in your ears. We glissaded, we rappel
led, we scrambled down hills of moving scree in which everything — the wind, the stones, the snow — was blown down together. We held hands. I screamed advice at Disaine until I realized that she could not hear my voice any more than she could feel my fingers. She must have been dying, that old woman, as we skidded down with our brains clogged with blood. She must have been closer to death than anyone knew. But she always came back.

  How strange to meet a woman whose name is like a man’s. Men are especially sacred to the mountain, and so each Holoh man’s name is appended with a vowel, a vowel always enunciated, like an extra comma, like an extra sigh. The e in Disaine was silent, but always somehow present. I could never forget it, not when we were talking and not when we were climbing. That little e, that curled mark, made her name so impossibly remote.

  For some reason, your name is different. I think it’s because it begins with a vowel, too, Otile, a little name that slips in and out.

  We climbed for hours. We shed most of our gear as we went, flopping our arms from straps as an infant wriggles free of swaddling. With the springing of our helmets, we had loosed something new — the tick-rise, tick-set quickness of time in the death zone — and I have no real way of knowing how many hours passed in the fog. I think it was the rest of the night and most of the day, because when we finally reached a safe altitude — when the air felt rich and thick again, though the observatory was still not yet imaginable — and I was able to treat Disaine’s frostbite, her fingers were not dead. She lost no more of them that day, though the left-hand forefinger looked bad before it looked better.

  We were huddled over a stove on the open mountain, behind a snow wall that I’d dug to keep out the worst of the wind. We had removed our goggles and scarves to get the better benefit of the heat. It was much colder than it had been climbing up, and the air froze in our noses and made our thoughts hot and muddled and dark. I rubbed her hands and applied lukewarm water, and at length the real pain arrived, which meant that her flesh had loosened around the bone.

  “Are yours okay?” she asked me. I looked up at her, uncertain of what she meant — I was hard-and-soft with exhaustion, my eyelids so swollen that I could hardly see.

  “My what?”

  “Fingers.”

  “Mine are fine.”

  “I buried her, you know.”

  I blinked, and my eyes, just for a moment, froze shut. I had to place my palms over them to warm them, and then I put my goggles back on. “In the snow?”

  “Built a cairn.”

  “How? In the storm —”

  “I went to the back of the cave,” she said, raising her voice above mine.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine. But I try to live my life as if I’m crazy. It’s the only thing that gives it any feeling at all.”

  “Okay.”

  “You aren’t angry?”

  “For why? For leaving me alone?”

  “For burying her. It wasn’t as if we were going to be able to cremate her.”

  “Oh — no.” I touched the muffler over my mouth.

  “It’s just that you seem angry.”

  “I’m just very tired, Disaine. And — it’s a second loss.”

  “For her to be buried?”

  “I think of her loneliness,” I burst out. “And being hemmed in. When she used to be able to see the view. I can’t help it.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it,” she said quietly.

  “No, you were right to. It was right. But you could have died. I don’t understand how you didn’t die.”

  “I am very sorry,” she said, and she did look contrite, sunk on her knees beside the stove, more collapsed than resting.

  “Or lose the rest of your hands.”

  “I can summit without hands. I’ve built us lungs. Why not fingers?”

  “You’re going to fix the suits?”

  “I’m going to have to. They’re sad, overcomplicated things — pieces of shit, really.”

  “They kept us going for a long time. You have no idea how much it took out of us, me and Daila and Saon and Courer, to climb that far without them. We’ll try again.”

  “Always trying again,” she mumbled, and got up.

  We limped and slid down to the observatory over the next day. There Disaine was greeted with shocking reverence. These people were a ragged band, some of them priests with the same scent of bile about their robes as Disaine, most of them secular scientists. I never figured out how they had originally got the money to build this astonishing structure, the highest and the poorest house in the world.

  We sat at their noisy table, among the furs and shouting skins, and they asked Disaine for her observations, for her opinions, for any scrap of the stars that they had missed, even for mountaineering advice. The tide of sound went from one end of the group to the other and then sloshed back. I excused myself when I was done and went up to my room, where there was a narrow fire in a tubular flue, and I let it flood my bones.

  It is peculiar, the way southerners, and particularly the southern faithful, see the Holoh. Well, that’s a great understatement, isn’t it? Everyone weights us with their own ideas, ornaments us with their own lumps of stone and crystal, because that’s what people do with anyone who has to live differently. But I mean to talk about the priests. They know what the Holoh mean: doubt, and moral failure.

  Because we accompanied Asam up the mountain, part way, briefly. We listened to his last preachings, whatever they were — we have as many stories about that as anyone. It’s said, mainly, that he talked in a forced way about poverty, all his standard points: “Know that anyone can be close to God, but that it is easier for the poor, because they have less to fetter them.” That’s how it is in the Waters gospel, isn’t it? I feel like I have the whole thing memorized, it’s referenced so many times in Southern novels. And I think it’s a fallacy of sorts, or anyway it made more sense back then. I have been poor and I have been rich, by my people’s standards. And I had just as much to fetter me, either way.

  But it is not such a bad idea, not to hold on to money. To let the world slide by you as if you were lying in a shallow river. And if the queen and her family have not always made it easy for themselves to approach God, they do seem to have a sense that they suffer for it. Strange: I think I like Asam better than some of his believers do.

  Anyway, what my family always told me — and I imbibed this like porridge, believe me, they told me so little with tenderness — was that Asam left off preaching in the end. He could do it no longer, he explained to the Holoh. “I am finished, I am compelled. I wish it did not need to be this way.” I used to wonder at night why he couldn’t change his mind. What it might mean to be compelled.

  Back in Asam’s day, everyone believed in the God of the mountain. The Holoh were only God’s priests. And so, clumsily, because they felt great sorrow at losing this extraordinary man to such an ordinary need, they kissed him on his cheeks and forehead, touching their cold noses to the heat of him, as the Holoh do while climbing, to keep blessed and to keep warm. And they gave him a funeral.

  This is what we must do, in order to excommunicate someone. Asam didn’t argue. He had already denied God, had decided that God was something he needed to find atop the mountain, rather than a living mass beneath his very feet. So what did it matter to him, what some kind priests felt they needed to do to keep him safe? One of his great tenets was to allow others their mistakes if they did no one any harm, if they were kindly meant, although for me sometimes it is so difficult to tell. So he let them make his effigy from climbing gear and whatever wood they could find at that height, and burn it and say the words about perfuming the body of God, disappearing from God’s flesh, the same words I had said for Saon. And then he had left, but he left as if we might chase him. Left, and shot up the mountainside, lighting it all up in a brief flash, then gone.

  But when the story’s told by Southerners it becomes a story of cowardice. The Holoh priests did
n’t climb on with him because we were afraid, because we thought too simply, because we acted in a group. And that reputation clings to us, among readers of the Gospels, clings to us like water on the skin, which on the mountain is so dangerous — it will chill you during the day, freeze you in the night. I think that to many believers, it is strange to meet a live one of us at all.

  And besides that, we understand the mountain too well. This alarms people. They feel that our knowledge must be supernatural — although we would never think the same of their understanding of cities, which is as much a skill as climbing. More, really, for I could teach you the rules of climbing in a week, while even after months in the city, I still cannot remember what streets are unsafe at night, or how to find the coffee house that opens early. But to the Southern faithful, our fierce skill makes us as untouchable as ghosts, and it is very easy to disbelieve in ghosts. I do it myself.

  Chapter 7

  When Asam came awake atop the mountain, he knew he was in God’s presence, although he could not see him. Asam said, “Father, how is it that I can be with you and yet live?”

  And God said to Asam, “It is the way of my angels that, while you may breathe in good air and breathe out poison, they breathe in poison and breathe out good air. The breath from their mouths sustains you.” And Asam thought, there is no mystery that fails to reveal another underneath; this is why it is worth solving one.

  — The Gospel of the Arit

  The next day we climbed down to the monastery. Disaine had so badly wanted to avoid both it and the observatory, but having been greeted with such surprising love at the latter, she allowed herself to break up the long climb back to the village by a visit to the former. She kept to herself, though, and disappeared almost immediately into the room provided for us.