Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel

by Mark Sullivan

  Before they could start up the ridge, the young boy made a whining noise and began bickering at his sister.

  “Stop,” Pino whispered harshly.

  “No one can hear us up here,” Anthony said.

  “The mountain can hear us,” Pino said firmly. “And if you’re too loud, it will wake up and shift under its blanket and send avalanches that will bury us all.”

  “Is the mountain a monster?” Anthony asked.

  “Like a dragon,” Pino said. “So we have to be careful and quiet, because we’re climbing up his scaly back.”

  “Where’s his head?” Judith asked.

  “Above us,” Mimo said. “In the clouds.”

  That seemed to satisfy the children, and the group set out once more. What had taken him less than an hour the last time he’d climbed the hard route took them almost two. It was four thirty in the morning when they reached the chimney. Pino could make out the gouge in the nearly vertical mountain face, but he needed more light than the moon’s if they were to climb it.

  He poured water into the carbide lamp and screwed the lid tight to seal the vapors that were rapidly filling the reservoir. After waiting a minute, he loosened the gas valve and hit the striker. On the second try, a thin blue flame burned against a reflecting pan, throwing enough light up the chimney that they could all see the challenge ahead.

  “Oh my God,” Mrs. Napolitano groaned. “Oh my God.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “It’s worse than it looks.”

  “No, it’s not. Back in September, when the rock was bare, it was worse, but see the ice on both sides? The ice has narrowed the chimney, made it more climbable.”

  Pino looked to his brother. “This may take a little time, but I’m going to cut steps. Keep them moving and warm until you hear me whistle that I’m sending down the axes. Then rope up and send Mr. D’Angelo. I’m going to need his strength up there. You’ll come up last.”

  For once, Mimo didn’t argue about being last. Pino freed himself from the group rope, dropped his pack, and put on crampons. With Mimo’s rope coil slung like a bandolier, he picked up his ice ax and Mimo’s and said a prayer before he began to climb. His back to the mountain, Pino reminded himself not to look down before he kicked in the blades of his crampons for support, reached overhead, and jabbed the pick points of the axes into the ice floe.

  With every half meter gained, Pino stopped and carefully chopped out flat spots for the others. It was maddeningly slow work, and the higher he got, the more he was aware of lights coming on, one by one, down in Campodolcino. He knew that with binoculars someone might see the miner’s lamp lighting up the inside of the ice chimney, but he felt he had no choice.

  Forty minutes later, drenched with sweat, Pino reached the balcony. He kept the lamp on long enough to attach a carabiner to a piton he’d driven into the rock the last time he’d climbed this way, and to pass one end of the rope through the carabiner before testing it with his weight. The anchor held.

  Pino tied the ice axes and his crampons to the rope, whistled, and then lowered them down the chimney. Several minutes later, he heard his brother whistle, and he took the slack out of the rope. Mr. D’Angelo came up onto the balcony fifteen minutes later. Together they pulled his son, daughter, and wife up quickly.

  Pino could hear Mrs. Napolitano moaning with fear even before she entered the icy slot. He lowered the mining lamp down for her to use. The additional light only seemed to deepen the pregnant violinist’s terror. Shaking head to toe, she took the ice axes and in crampons clomped into the chimney.

  “Right hand first,” Mimo said. “Just give it a good whack in there where Pino’s leveled things off.”

  Mrs. Napolitano did so, but halfheartedly, and the ax came free before she could get her full weight on it.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”

  Mimo said, “Just climb the stairs Pino made, stabbing the axes and the crampons’ blades in tight, back and forth all the way up.”

  “But I could slip.”

  Pino called down the chute, “Not with us holding the rope, and definitely not if you kick those crampons and swing those axes like you mean it . . . like your violin bow when you play con smania.”

  That last bit, referring to playing with passion, seemed to get through to her, because Mrs. Napolitano slashed up and out with her right ax. From above, Pino heard the pick end drive solidly into the ice. He backed up to join Mr. D’Angelo on the rope, and he had his wife lie on her belly, looking over the edge and down the chute to tell them each time the pregnant violinist was going to shift her weight and climb higher. Whereas the others had come up half meter by half meter, her ascent was measured in centimeters.

  Almost four meters off the ground, Mrs. Napolitano somehow lost her footing, shrieked, and fell. They caught her, and she dangled there, moaning and blubbering until they could coax her into trying again. Thirty-five nail-biting minutes later, they hauled her up and over onto the balcony. In the wavering light of the miner’s lamp, frost coated her clothes and icy snot clung to her face, making her look like she’d been through a frozen hell and back.

  “I hated that,” she said, collapsing. “Every second of it I hated.”

  “But you’re here,” Pino said, grinning. “Not many people could have done that, and you did. For your baby.”

  The violinist placed her mittens over her overcoat and belly, and closed her eyes. It took another twenty minutes until they could hoist up the packs, tasks made difficult by the poles and skis strapped to the sides, and another fifteen minutes for Mimo to come up the chimney.

  “That wasn’t too bad,” Mimo said.

  “You must have been tortured as a child,” Mrs. Napolitano said.

  By Pino’s watch it was almost six o’clock. Dawn would come soon. He wanted them off the face of the Groppera before that. He tied them all back into the rope line, and they started higher.

  At six thirty, when they should have been seeing the first paling in the eastern sky, it was suddenly darker than it had been during the entire ordeal. The moon had vanished. Pino felt the wind shift, too, out of the north now, and stronger.

  “We have to move faster,” he said. “We have a storm coming.”

  “What?” Mrs. Napolitano cried. “Up here?”

  “This is where storms happen,” Mimo said. “But don’t worry. My brother knows the way.”

  Pino did know the way, and for the next hour as daylight came amid flurrying snow, they made steady progress. The snowfall was good, Pino decided. It would help hide them from all prying eyes.

  Around seven thirty the storm intensified, and Pino dug out a pair of glacier glasses his father had given him for Christmas, with leather side blinders to keep out the snow. Dark clouds enveloped the Groppera. Supercooled by the frozen crag above them, the clouds began to pour snow down on them. Pino fought the urge to panic as he used his ski poles to probe his way forward, intensely aware that the higher they got, the greater the likelihood of a false step. The wind began to swirl, causing whiteouts. The visibility was so low he was almost climbing blind, and it rattled him. Pino was trying to keep faith, but he felt doubt and growing alarm creep into his mind. What if he took the wrong angle on the route? Or made a misstep at a crucial time and fell? With his weight, they’d all be going for a neck-breaking ride. He felt the rope tug him to a halt.

  “I can’t see,” Judith cried.

  “Neither can I,” her mother said.

  “We’ll wait, then,” Pino said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Turn your backs to the wind.”

  The snow kept falling. Had the wind stayed a steady gale, they never would have made the catwalk. Instead, it gusted and died to almost nothing every few minutes. During those gaps where Pino could make out the route, they fought their way upward until he felt the ridgeline level out and narrow. Ahead fifteen meters, he could make out the catwalk and the snowy, concave mouths of the avalanc
he chutes on either side.

  “We go one by one here,” he said. “See the white little bowls of snow next to the spine? Don’t step there. Just put your feet exactly where I do, and you’ll be fine.”

  “What’s under that snow?” Mrs. Napolitano asked.

  Pino didn’t want to tell her. Mimo said, “Air. Lots of it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Ohhh.”

  Pino wanted to smack his brother.

  “C’mon now, Mrs. N,” Pino said, trying to sound encouraging. “You’ve come this far, and done worse. And I’ll have the other end of the rope.”

  The violinist made a puffing noise, hesitated, and then nodded weakly. Pino untied the group line and knotted it to Mimo’s to create one long line. While he worked, he whispered to his brother. “From now on, keep your mouth shut.”

  “What?” Mimo said. “Why?”

  “Sometimes the less you know, the better.”

  “Where I come from, the more you know, the better.”

  Seeing it was fruitless to argue, Pino tied the rope around his waist. He imagined himself a tightrope walker and held the ski poles horizontally to help him balance.

  Each step was dreadful. He’d test first with the toe of his crampon, kicking gently until he heard rock or ice, and then press his heel directly onto that spot. Twice he felt his balance teeter, but managed both times to right himself before reaching the narrow ledge beyond. He paused, his forehead resting against the rock until he felt composed enough to drive a piton into the face.

  He got the rope rigged through it. Mimo pulled back the slack, and the rope was taut, like a banister. The wind gusted. The whiteout returned. They were visually separated for more than a minute. When it calmed and he was able to make out the others back on the other side of the catwalk, they looked ghostly.

  Pino swallowed hard. “Send Anthony first.”

  Anthony held on to the taut rope with his right hand and put his boots exactly in Pino’s prints. He was across in a minute. Judith followed her brother, holding on to the rope and putting her boots in Pino’s prints. They accomplished the task with relative ease.

  Mrs. D’Angelo came next. She froze between the avalanche chutes, looking hypnotized.

  Then her young son called out, “C’mon, Mama. You can do it.”

  She pushed on, and when she reached the ledge she wrapped her arms around her children and cried. Mr. D’Angelo came next and accomplished the feat in seconds. He explained that he’d done gymnastics as a boy.

  The wind gusted before Mrs. Napolitano could begin the journey. Pino cursed to himself. He knew that the mental trick to crossing something like the catwalk was not to think about it until you were actually in motion. But she couldn’t help thinking about it now.

  Her ascent of the chimney, however, seemed to have emboldened Mrs. Napolitano, because when the wind ebbed and the visibility returned, she started across without Pino’s prompting. When she was three-quarters of the way across the catwalk, the wind picked up again, and she vanished in swirling white.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” Pino shouted into the void. “Wait it out!”

  Mrs. Napolitano did not reply. He kept testing the line gently, feeling the weight of her out there until, at last, the wind dropped, and she was standing there coated in snow, as still as a statue.

  When she reached the ledge, she held on to Pino tightly for several moments and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared in my life. I know I haven’t prayed that hard in my life.”

  “Your prayers were answered,” he said, patting her on the back, and then whistling for his brother.

  With one end of the long rope tightly knotted around his brother’s waist, and Pino ready to take in slack, he said, “Ready?”

  “I was born ready,” Mimo replied, and set off quick and sure.

  “Slow down,” Pino said, trying to pull the slack rope through the piton and carabiner as fast as possible.

  Mimo was already almost between the two avalanche chutes. “Why?” he said. “Father Re says I’m part mountain goat.”

  Those words had no sooner left Mimo’s mouth than he stumbled slightly. His right foot shot out too far, and broke through. There was a sound like someone plumping a pillow. Then the snow in the chute swirled and slid like water cycling down a drain, and to Pino’s horror, his little brother went with it, vanishing into a whirlpool of white.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Mimo!” Pino yelled, and heaved back on the rope. His brother’s weight jerked in the void and almost pulled Pino off his feet.

  “Help!” Pino cried to Mr. D’Angelo.

  Mrs. Napolitano got there first, grabbed hold of the line behind Pino with her mittens, and threw her weight backward. The rope held. The load held.

  “Mimo!” Pino shouted. “Mimo!”

  No answer. The wind gusted, and with it the world above the avalanche chute whited out once more.

  “Mimo!” he screamed.

  Silence for a moment, and then came a weak, shaken voice. “I’m here. Jesus, get me up. There’s nothing but a lot of air below me. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Pino hauled against the rope, but it gave no ground.

  “My pack’s caught on something,” Mimo said. “Lower me a little.”

  Mr. D’Angelo had taken Mrs. Napolitano’s place by then, and though he hated to give up any ground in a situation like this, Pino reluctantly let the rope slide through his leather gloves.

  “Got it,” Mimo said.

  They heaved and pulled and brought Mimo to the lip. Pino tied off the rope and had Mr. D’Angelo pin his legs down so he could reach over to grab his brother’s rucksack. Seeing Mimo’s hat was gone, seeing him bleeding from a nasty head cut, and seeing how the chute fell away below him, Pino surged with adrenaline and hoisted his brother onto the ledge.

  The two brothers sat against the rock face, chests heaving.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Pino said at last. “Mama and Papa would never forgive me. I’d never forgive me.”

  Mimo gasped, “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Pino threw his arm around his brother’s neck and hugged him once and hard.

  “Okay, okay,” Mimo protested. “Thanks for saving my life.”

  “You’d do the same.”

  “Of course, Pino. We’re brothers. Always.”

  Pino nodded, feeling like he’d never loved his brother as much as he did right then.

  Mrs. D’Angelo knew some first aid. She used snow to clean out the scalp wound and stanch the blood flow. They tore pieces of a scarf for bandages, and then wrapped the rest around Mimo’s head for an improvised hat that the children said made him look like a fortune-teller.

  The gusts slowed, but the snow fell harder as Pino led them up to that ledge along the low neck of the crag.

  “We can’t climb that,” Mr. D’Angelo said, craning his head up at the peak, which was like an icy spearhead above them.

  “We’re going around it,” Pino said. He pressed his stomach to the wall and started to step sideways.

  Just before he rounded the corner where the ledge dropped nineteen or twenty centimeters in width, he looked back at Mrs. Napolitano and the others.

  “There’s a cable here. It’s iced up, but you’ll be able to grip it. I want you to hold it, right-hand knuckles up, left-hand knuckles down, above and below, right? Do not under any circumstances release your grip until you reach the other side.”

  “Other side of what?” Mrs. Napolitano asked.

  Pino glanced toward the wall and down, saw that snow blocked any real view of what was a very, very long fall—an unlivable fall.

  “The rock wall will be right in front of your nose,” Pino said. “Look in front of you and sideways, but not behind you or down.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” the violinist asked.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t like the first night you played at La Scala, but you did it, and you can
do this.”

  Despite the frost on her face, she licked her lips, shuddered, and then nodded.

  After everything they’d been through, crossing the face via the cable and ledge proved easier than Pino expected. But that side of the peak was southeast facing and leeward to the storm. All five refugees and Mimo came across without further incident.

  Pino collapsed in the snow, thanking God for watching over them, and praying that they’d seen the worst. But the winds picked up again, not in gusts but with steady force that drove the snowflakes into their faces like icy needles. The farther northeast they trudged, the worse the storm got, until Pino wasn’t exactly sure where he was. Of all the obstacles they’d faced since leaving Casa Alpina that morning, moving blind in a snowstorm across an open ridge was the most dangerous, at least where Pino was concerned. Pizzo Groppera was pocked with crevasses at that time of year. They could fall six meters or more into one of them and not be found until spring. Even if he could avoid the mountain’s physical dangers, with the cold and wet came the threat of hypothermia and death.

  “I can’t see!” Mrs. Napolitano said.

  The D’Angelo children began to cry. Judith couldn’t feel her feet or hands. Pino was on the verge of panic when ahead, out of the storm, a cairn appeared. The stack of rocks immediately oriented Pino. Ahead of them lay Val di Lei, but the forest was still a solid four, maybe five kilometers away. Then he remembered that along the trail that climbed north from the cairn there was another shepherd’s hut with a stove.

  “We can’t go on until the storm lets up!” Pino shouted to them. “But I know a place we can take shelter, get warm, and ride it out!”

  The refugees all nodded with relief. Thirty minutes later, Pino and Mimo were on their hands and knees, burrowing into the snow to open the door to the hut. Pino ducked inside first and turned on the miner’s lamp. Mimo made sure the stove was not booby-trapped, and built a fire. Before they lit it, Pino went out into the snow once more and invited them inside before climbing onto the roof to make sure the chimney was clear.