Left Turn at Paradise

by Thomas Shawver

  I briefly passed out. When I awoke, my legs were moving as if there was something under them other than 1,500 feet of air. It didn’t take long to realize the situation had changed. One second I was falling to my death, the next I was assaulted by sickening waves of pain while twisting on a half-inch-thick cord.

  A forty-pound pack is not the kind of anchor you’d want with a harness squeezing the base of your rib cage. I was no stranger to torn cartilage from my rugby days, but this was different. At least two ribs were broken. There was a real chance of internal bleeding and suffocation. With every desperate exhalation of breath, I moaned like a bankrupt banker.

  Even worse than the pain was the feeling that the jagged ends of bones were edging closer to my left lung. Every swerve of my body on that nylon rope brought me an eighth of an inch closer to dying. Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to disregard the injuries, real or imagined. Instead, I focused on countering the centrifugal force of the spin.

  I accomplished this by spreading out my arms, which left me dangling like a field-dressed deer a dozen feet from the side of the mountain. The rushing wind had passed, so I could hear voices shouting above me. Stretching my neck as far back as the pack would allow, I saw I’d fallen about forty feet. The line had snagged on an outcrop of rock, catching my fall in time to save my life.

  For the time being, anyway.

  It doesn’t matter if you’re Edmund Hillary or Reinhold Messner: Nobody lasts long hanging at the end of a rope.

  I spotted Craddock and Hart sitting on a thin ledge not far above the overhang. Their backs were braced against the slope and their arms extended in front of them as if in a tug-of-war contest. Their gloved hands clung fiercely to the line.

  Twenty feet below the outcrop, and an equal distance above me, Pillow hung like a broken doll. Her head was slumped forward, her arms straight and motionless. The harness had slipped high under her right armpit, causing her shoulder to appear horribly out of place.

  The two of us had fallen on opposite sides of the outcrop so that our lines straddled the rock, running parallel to each other. With each sway in the wind, the rope threatened to snap under our combined weight. Craddock shouted a warning that he and Hart couldn’t maintain the belay much longer.

  Ignoring the pain in my chest, I reached over my backpack and pulled the ice ax from the strap holding it. Then I began to swing back and forth as if on a pendulum, each time coming closer to the edge of the wall. With the fourth try I managed to slam the ax into the rock, gaining a tenuous hold. Quickly, I swung my left foot onto the slope, adjusted my shoulders to shift the weight of the pack, and let gravity pull the rest of me onto hard ground. The pressure on my ribs lessened considerably. I was still in agony, but I could breathe freely again.

  I shook off the pack and evaluated Pillow’s situation. Even if Craddock and Hart had the strength to pull her up, the fulcrum of the rock and the condition of the frayed rope wouldn’t allow it. It was up to me to get close enough to pull her onto the slope.

  Because the surface was mostly rock, I removed my crampons and clawed upward, inch by inch, gasping with each painful breath. It took ten minutes to get to where I was directly across from Pillow. My platform was a ledge about two meters wide.

  Using my ice ax to anchor me to the rock wall, I stretched over the void, keeping my left leg on the slope and my right suspended in the air. Pillow hung tantalizingly just out of my reach.

  I brought my right leg back to the slope to replant the ax in the rock a few inches closer to the edge. Then I stretched out again.

  It was enough to snag a loose strap of her backpack that was fluttering in the wind. When I turned her toward me, I was shocked to find her face covered by a thin carapace of ice. It looked like a death mask.

  I tugged on the strap. It brought her closer. I pulled harder, risking that the strap would come loose. And again, until I was able to secure both of my feet on the mountain while still tenuously connected to her.

  I yelled for the men to slacken the rope on my count of three. Then, bracing my feet and with my left hand still clinging to the ice ax, my right hand released its grip on the strap. I grasped the front of her anorak.

  At my command the rope slackened. I heaved her across my body onto the ledge.

  There was no time to catch my breath. I slipped the carabiner from her harness and gently turned her over. Her right shoulder hung like a puppet’s whose arm had been caught in a hopelessly snagged string. I loosened her collar to get to the carotid artery. Although the pulse was feeble, she was alive.

  Craddock was at my side within seconds. One look at Pillow and the hard lump of muscles of his neck tightened. He took over, pressing his thumbs in the small hollow space behind her ears.

  Her eyes popped open as if she’d been shocked by a cattle prod. She gazed furtively into our faces as if confused as to time and place. When she shifted her weight to get up, the unexpected explosion of pain caused by the movement caused her to scream.

  Hart appeared with the frayed rope looped in circles over his shoulder. As was the case with Craddock, blood from his fingers had seeped through his mittens.

  “Her shoulder’s dislocated,” he said. “It has to be put back into the socket.”

  Craddock and I nodded in agreement. If the muscles and ligaments were torn, tugging on the arm might cripple it. But given her unbearable pain, we had no choice.

  Pillow’s shrieks had subsided to pitiful groans by the time we got her to lie flat on her back.

  While I held down her legs and Craddock cradled her torso, Hart kneeled by her right side. Grabbing her wrist, he placed his left foot under her armpit for leverage, then began a slow, steady pull on her arm directly away from her body. Her howls were unnerving, but after a few long minutes the joint slid into place. The pain seemed to magically vanish.

  We sat her up to remove her anorak and get her arm stabilized. From my backpack, I pulled a thin foam pad—great for keeping backsides dry on wet ground, by the way—and slipped it between her right arm and chest. Using a pair of nylon crampon strips for a sling, we slipped the anorak over her and let her rest.

  * * *

  If any of us had any doubts as to Pillow’s toughness, they were soon dispelled when we resumed the climb an hour later.

  We reached the Matukituki Saddle without further incident, Pillow stoically matching our every step without complaint. I, on the other hand, muttered an occasional whimper whenever something brushed against my ribs.

  On the downward slope we made good time glissading on our butts down the hard-packed surface of a snow gulley. After a quarter of a mile the snow petered out and we had to clamber over a boulder-littered moraine. This was particularly painful for Pillow and me, but we soon reached a beech forest devoid of rocks and with eye-popping views of Mount Aspiring.

  * * *

  After our rest, we scrambled down a barely visible deer path to the crescent-shaped lake with no name. The sand flies and sharp tips of sword grass soon drew blood from everyone, but the flat ground was kind to our aching muscles.

  Sitting around a campfire next to the rapids of the Waipara that night, Craddock informed us that in the morning we’d hike up the gorge to where the Cat O’Nine Tails cascade met the river.

  “After that, I’m pretty sure Ivo’s scouts will find us. Do as they say and it will be all right. We’ll pass among topuni, sacred sites of the Kāti Māmoe iwi, so watch where you spit. And, for God’s sake, if you need to relieve yourself, ask to make sure it’s not on ground that’s tapu.”

  I felt like a sodbuster listening to Kit Carson warn the wagon train before it entered Apache country.

  * * *

  Sometime before midnight, three of us still remained by the dying fire. Craddock had crawled into his sleeping bag an hour earlier.

  Pillow, cradling her damaged arm, gave a mighty yawn and got to her feet.

  “I need to hit the loo,” she explained, before wandering toward the river.

 
I figured it was as good a time as any to again stir the ashes with Hart. I began nicely.

  “You were impressive on that belay.”

  He swiveled his head toward me. His eyes had a red glare. “Have you a question for me, Bevan? You’ve seemed full of them since we left Queenstown.”

  Looking back on it, maybe I should have just come out and told him I knew he killed Bartow. We would have settled things one way or the other right there. But there remained too many unknowns—one of them concerning Pillow’s involvement.

  And, truth be told, after surviving one harrowing incident with cracked ribs, I didn’t fancy tangling in the wilderness with a former SBS man. Hart may have been what romance novelists call a popinjay, but he was no pansy.

  Rather, I said, “You knew Ivo Mackin had the third journal a long time ago. Why didn’t you tell Pillow? She’s your business partner, after all.”

  “I didn’t want to involve her at the time.”

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure Pillow hadn’t started back. “She was involved in certain, shall we say…difficulties.”

  “Such as?”

  Hart didn’t answer at first. Instead, he remarked, edging closer to me, “She’s an interesting woman, don’t you think? Smart, strong, attractive.”

  “Yes. So what?”

  “Fancy her?”

  “None of your business.”

  “She was married, you know.”

  “So I heard.”

  “He’s dead now.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Don’t you think it odd she never mentioned it to you?”

  I didn’t answer. But I thought it just as strange that her mother and Cattley Middleditch hadn’t, either.

  “And the Russian?”

  “Esme told me. Having to testify at the bastard’s trial must have been traumatic for Pillow.”

  Hart grinned at my naïveté.

  “There was no need for the Crown to file charges. Another form of justice intervened. The girl may be only one eighth Maori, but Utu—the hereditary will to avenge—courses through her blood.”

  “What are you saying, Hart?”

  He drew uncomfortably close to my face. Light years from the nearest Macy’s, the guy stunk of cologne. Lavender, I think it was.

  “Only what I read in the London Observer. Goshenkin was a collector of books on big-game hunting and erotica. One day he received a letter from a dealer on Cecil Court asking if he might be interested in a privately printed edition of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, ou l’École du libertinage by the Marquis de Sade.

  “The next day he showed up to inspect it and was never seen again.”

  Hart got up to throw another log on the fire.

  Returning to my side, he whispered, “Who would have thought that lily of the valley steeped in warm water and added to a cup of tea could have such devastating effects?”

  “Where were you during this time?”

  “At the Boston Antiquarian Fair, all by myself.”

  “And her husband? How did he die?”

  “Lost at sea shortly thereafter. Mysteriously fell from his yacht one night while sailing off the Côte d’Azur. The presumed suicide made all the papers.”

  “I don’t suppose you were on that boat?”

  “My dear boy, I was in London setting up our booth at the Olympia Book Fair.”

  “And Pillow?’

  “In Cassis.”

  “Cassis?”

  “Oh, yes, a lovely place down the coast from Marseilles. Pillow has oh so many friends in the yachting community there. Some are rather notorious.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because,” he said, getting to his feet upon hearing Pillow’s return, “you should know more about your gal pal before leaping to conclusions about me.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Low-flying clouds off Mount Aspiring brought flurries of snow mixed with sleet the next morning. It was the kind of dreary weather that made you want to pull up the covers and dream of Barbados. But Craddock had us on the trail by seven with only oatmeal and raisins in our bellies.

  After tramping through a long, narrow ravine gouged by the river, we reached the Cat O’Nine Tails cascade at mid-morning where we encountered a most extraordinary-looking young man.

  He wore a kiltlike garment between his waist and knees and a flax cloak over his upper body. Traditional cold-weather Maori gear, I reckoned, except for the Nike hiking boots and woolen socks.

  He was a handsome, well-built kid whose long plaited hair was tied at the top in a knob adorned with white-tipped feathers. But it was the head of a live juvenile kea squeezed through a hole in his ear that caused me to do an Oliver Hardy double take. The parrot must have been accustomed to the treatment, because the brilliant olive wings and gray legs hung listlessly down the left side of its master’s neck. Only the yellow-ringed eyes seemed alive. Nervously, they followed our every move.

  In addition to the bird, our greeter carried a flat quarter staff five feet in length. The weapon looked from a distance to be made of hard wood and seemed remarkably light. He began to twirl it like a baton, increasingly fast, alternating it in his right hand and his left, spinning it horizontally over his head, then in front of him and vertically on either side of his body. With his hands and arms thus engaged, he hopped from one foot to the other, his body twisting, head jerking from side to side, tongue extended, and eyes bulging like a drum major stoked on Ecstasy.

  He hopscotched that way before careening to a stop five yards in front of us, standing stock-still, right foot in front of left, the weapon held over his head primed to thrust.

  Craddock cautioned us to not move.

  After a few tense moments, the youth cocked his head sideways, twisted his spear horizontally so that the tip pointed away from us. Slowly, he removed a bone knife from the woven belt around his waist, took four cautious steps forward, and laid it on the ground.

  Craddock waited for him to retreat four steps back to his original position. Then, cautiously, he moved toward the object, shouted something in Maori, and stooped to pick up the knife by the blade. He was so deliberate in grasping it by the sharp edge that I got the uneasy feeling our subsequent relations might not have been so amicable had Craddock reached for the handle instead.

  Whatever, it did the trick. The boy relaxed noticeably. He performed some kind of waving motion with the hand that did not hold the spear, and addressed Craddock, mostly in English.

  “Haere,*1 Tane Craddock! What brings you here without supplies?”

  “Kia ora, Ngati! I’m taking these people to see Watere Mackin.”

  The boy he called Ngati looked perplexed.

  “The Ariki has made no mention of this. You must go back.”

  Craddock’s amiable attitude suddenly changed. He thrust one foot forward, forcefully crossed his arms and jutted his face forward. His eyes bulged comically and his tongue shot from his mouth to an extraordinary length until it reached below the cleft of his lantern jaw.

  Snapping his tongue back, but maintaining his fierce stance and glare, Craddock spoke Maori in a deep guttural voice that was totally alien to his previously amiable nature.

  “E moe! E moe!” he snarled. “Ko te po nui, ko te po roa, ko te pi i whaka—aua ai to moe, e moe! Mackin tamahine, Te Rangihaeta!”

  The boy shot a startled look at Pillow, who met it with a haughty stare. He assumed a defensive posture with the spear drawn over his right shoulder while Craddock harangued him for several more minutes.

  When the verbal barrage finally ended, Ngati assumed a respectful, almost sleepy, attitude, then motioned for us to follow him.

  “What in the world did you say?” I asked Craddock.

  “I recited my ancestry, threw in a bit of hocus-pocus, and, by my command of the high Maori language, let him know I was not to be messed with at the risk of offending certain spirits. This wouldn’t have worked in the city, but these lads are differ
ent. You’ll see. It’s good that I didn’t have to threaten to take the hau of the boy.”

  “The hau?”

  “When a person’s hau is affected, his body perishes because his intellectual and spiritual forces desert him. It would have been overkill in this situation.”

  * * *

  We followed Ngati at a respectful distance, gaining altitude until we crested a minor peak and descended to a grove of fir trees where five Maori women squatted in the snow. Covered head to toe in brown and gray cloaks, all five peered between the folds with disinterested eyes, humming strange incantations that unsettled Craddock. He motioned for us to steer clear of them.

  “Who—what—are they?” Hart asked, once we had passed through the trees onto an open field.

  “Memgas. Witches,” Pillow answered matter-of-factly, as if she’d known of them all her life. Unlike Craddock, she didn’t seem worried by them.

  Since the encounter with Ngati, she no longer used the sling. It made for a subtle difference in her bearing, one that exuded a cool, aristocratic poise, as impersonal as a queen. It was as if she was returning to her people, to a past that had meaning for her.

  “I haven’t seen their kind in many years,” Craddock said, of the crones. “My magic is not as strong as theirs. It’s good the boy led the way for us.”

  No sooner had he said this than Ngati reappeared, accompanied by four fearsome-looking men dressed in traditional Maori mountain capes made of bird feathers and dog hides. Like Ngati, they wore their long hair pulled back and tied at the top of the head in a knot. One of them had stuck a feather through the septum of his nose so that it spread horizontally from cheek to cheek like a mustache. Two were heavily tattooed from forehead to chin.

  With a nod from Craddock, we followed them over a hill and eventually into a fourteenth-century Maori version of Brigadoon.

  * * *

  Another circle of women, less ominous than the witches, sat under a spare four-post shelter. They fed strands of flax fiber between their toes to their fingers and onto looms, nimbly creating new capes. Another group, similarly clothed in long black cloaks and so intent upon their work that they scarcely noticed us, plaited floor mats from reeds of saw grass.