The Step and the Breath

Lena is the word of the canto and not a loan from another game: it sits in the poem’s first simile, and it means the breath of a man just out of the deep with none left. There is one pair of lungs doing two opposite things: lena says how much further you can run, breath says how long you can go without breathing. They live together because they touch, and holding your breath is the fastest way to get your wind back. It starts in the dark wood and holds from there down.

Walking is three metres two a second, running five four and doubles the trace: it is the first hard decision in the game. Full lena is nine seconds of running, forty eight metres, and it comes back walking, faster standing still, twice as fast holding your breath; once spent, you cannot run again until a quarter of it is back. Full breath is seven seconds, set against the narrows of the antehell, where the worst stretch is twenty metres and at walking pace that is six and a half seconds: you get through only by starting full and not hesitating.

The three rules of breath are three and not two, because take one away and it becomes a key you hold down: holding it takes you almost entirely out of the air but does not last, while you hold it you cannot run, and when you let go you gasp. The gasp is worth six, three times a run, and carries twenty metres. Shelters, a hollow trunk or the back of a boulder, let only eighteen per cent of the trace take hold, and turn breath from a question of time into a question of place; but anybody with souls pressed against him loses the shelter, and that is the whole cost of the lost ones, who do no harm and take nothing, they ruin your hiding place. Under water breath stops being a choice: you hold it whether you want to or not, and when it runs out you gasp below the surface.