The Ascent

by Jeff Long

  broad forehead. Their archaeology had come to life.

  Then the wind shifted, and there was that smell of cedar again.

  This time the white smoke engulfed them, turning the ruins into a cupful of flags and

  wood fog.

  Then Abe smelled something else, too. An unpleasant, saccharine odor. It took him a

  minute to place the smell. And then it came to him. Something had died.

  Voices drifted in with the smoke. They came muffled, from a distant part of the

  ruins.

  'This way,' Li said with waning confidence. 'But we must stay together. We must

  take care. There are dangers. There are bad stories.'

  Abe wended his way through the smoke. The summit structure was not very large,

  but they had to pick their way through so many clusters of prayer flags and mani

  stones that it seemed enormous and mazelike. Abe passed another horned animal

  skull embellished with paint and carved lettering, then another. The voices grew

  louder.

  At the rear of the old structure, a collapsed doorway opened out onto a wide flat

  ledge on the outside. On every side of the ledge, the mountain dropped away, a

  thousand feet deep. Far in the distance, Everest was blowing her afternoon plume.

  Abe stepped through the doorway. Then he stopped, frozen, for they had emerged

  into the middle of a funeral. At first Abe wasn't even sure of that. He had no idea at all

  what they were doing.

  Three Tibetan men had stripped naked a dead woman.

  One of the men was holding a knife.

  The woman's clothing lay in a heap.

  The scene struck directly at Abe's mind, unbuffered by language or thought. A big

  hand grasped his shoulder from behind, someone trying to come through the

  doorway, and Abe heard the person gasp sharply.

  A cedar fire was smoking away on one end of the ledge. Back against the dzong wall,

  to Abe's left, sat what he took to be the woman's family, maybe eight people of

  different ages. For a moment, deceived by the thick white smoke, Abe thought he saw

  his monk seated on skins, droning his monotone into the empty blue. The smoke

  shifted. His monk disappeared.

  For a moment, some of the family members didn't see the climbers and kept on

  muttering prayers. Then all was silence. They froze, as if ambushed.

  The climbers stood paralyzed, too. The Tibetans considered them for another

  minute or so. They were not welcome, that was clear. But Abe and the others were

  too stupefied to be moved by the hostile glares.

  'What's the traffic jam,' Thomas groused, squeezing through the doorway. Then he

  saw the body and went still, too.

  'Trespass.' Carlos said it firmly. 'This is trespass. We don't belong here.'

  But before they could retreat, Li squeezed through the bunched climbers.

  'Trespass?' he scoffed, and the fear was gone from his voice. He seemed oddly

  triumphant, pleased by the climber's shock at this raw, strange sight.

  'We are within the law,' Li said with growing confidence. 'We are not trespassing.

  You can take photographs. Yes, it is within the law.'

  The Tibetans didn't speak to one another. Each of them scrutinized the climbers and

  especially their Chinese guide. Then as suddenly as they had stopped, the Tibetans

  started again. They began droning mantras without syncopation, almost without

  breath. The cedar smoke changed direction and fell into the valley.

  'Come.' With great firmness, almost as if he were disciplining them, Li ushered the

  climbers to one side. 'Please, sit,' he said, indicating the ground by the wall.

  Abe was dumbly obedient.

  'What is this?' Kelly asked, hunkering by the wall.

  Stump spoke in a whisper. 'I don't know.'

  Abe felt their fear and helplessness, too. That bare knife, the corpse, the wind and

  prayers: He wondered what they meant to do.

  'I've heard of this,' Carlos said, keeping his voice low. 'Daniel told me about it. He has

  pictures. They call it sky burial.'

  Robby squirmed, horrified. 'They push her off the edge, or what, man? What is this?

  What am I doing here?'

  Before Carlos could answer, before Robby could leave, the man with the knife bent

  down and made a long cut. From just right of her lightly haired pubis down to the

  inside of the knee joint, the butcher drew his blade fast and hard.

  Kelly groaned aloud.

  Abe squinted in the cedar smoke. He tried not to flinch, though, telling himself this

  was the stuff of gross anatomy, nothing more. And they were travelers and this was

  culture. He took out his camera. Somehow, looking through the viewfinder made it

  easier to watch.

  Quickly now, because they had begun, the corpse was tilted up on one hip. From the

  pelvic saddle down, the butcher sliced again and the quadriceps flopped loose onto the

  cold stone.

  The knives were sharp and these men had obviously done this with human beings

  many times before. It took just minutes before the woman's leg bones were bare

  white sticks. Losing his revulsion, Abe marveled at how quickly a body could be

  undressed of its flesh.

  'They throw their poor and their dead children into the rivers,' said Li. He spoke

  aloud with a tour guide's voice. 'Their monks are cremated or else buried in big hollow

  tree trunks. But for many, many centuries, this is how the common Tibetans have

  been. Cutting up their loved ones like chickens. Feeding each other to the animals.'

  Gigantic blue-and-white vultures that had been wheeling in the abyss came closer

  now and roosted, first one, then others, landing with ungainly hops.

  Like a pack of grotesque schoolchildren, the birds gathered into a semicircle at one

  corner of the ledge. While they waited with eerie pique, they nipped and nudged each

  other and flexed their six-foot wings.

  The birds began to unsettle Abe in a way that the butchers had not. The vultures

  looked like a parody of their little band lined against the dzong wall.

  Yet even as Abe and the other climbers sorted through their guilt feelings, they kept

  on snapping photos. Robby was firing away with a little black Samurai. Its

  motor-driven telephoto lens pumped in and out with electronic frenzy. Abe's own

  camera was bulky and old, which kept his picture taking slow. It made him seem

  studied, even reluctant.

  'Go closer,' Li encouraged him. But Abe didn't.

  One man finished stripping the woman's arm bones clean. The other two began

  working on the flesh already cut away. They sliced it into pieces and threw it to the

  vultures. As the birds shoved about for bits of meat, their big dry feathers rattled.

  Li was grimly jubilant.

  'Now you see,' he said, 'we have come to the edge of the world. And they are

  barbarians.'

  8

  It was nearly June and summer was loosening the countryside. The moraine thawed a

  little more every morning, and their separate islands of tundra grass turned spongy.

  Abe found mud on his shoes. It was a sign. The earth itself was compromising. The

  separate elements – the mountain, the wind, the cold, the ice, the sunlight – were

  reaching a sort of peace, mixing together, melding. It was a season for changes and for

  the Ultimate Summit the changes came swiftly.

  First, Gus brought the word down to Base, catchin
g them at noon in the olive-green

  mess tent. They were all there, a few hard at work rewiring the stubborn

  walkie-talkie sets, most just swapping lies and snacking on popcorn and generally

  taking it easy. From out of nowhere, Gus burst in upon them with her pack on, the

  waistband still clipped.

  They barely had time to recognize the windblown creature before she had delivered

  her message. 'He's done it,' she rasped. Corroded with bronchitis and strep, her voice

  cracked through them like distant thunder. The words came out more animal than

  human and Abe wasn't sure he'd understood her.

  A length of parachute cord bound her red hair and she had a filthy cap over that.

  The smear of zinc oxide across her cheeks and nose was flecked with old food and

  older scabs. What made Gus most alien, though, was not the filth but her wildness.

  Something close to dementia burned in her green eyes – Abe recognized it as his own

  – and she looked menacing, a berserker fresh from the glory fields.

  Robby was the first to recover from her entrance. 'Sit down, Gus,' he said.

  Kelly was next. 'Gus? Are you okay?'

  Gus continued standing there with her craziness, weaving in place, drunk on the rich

  oxygen. She stared at them.

  'Where's Daniel at?' Stump asked with a most casual interest. He had a Phillips-head

  in one hand and a welding gun in the other and amateur electronics on his mind.

  Having found the glitch, he had sworn to get their walkie-talkies up and running by

  tomorrow morning.

  Gus stared at them, mute.

  It suddenly hit Abe that Daniel might have fallen. Had he done it, then, sailed a day

  too far? But Abe was just guessing, and no one else seemed concerned.

  'How about some herbal spice tea?' Kelly asked her. 'It's great, sweet without sugar.

  Real cinnamony.'

  Abe goggled at Kelly's banality. Here was this ferocious woman with ropes of snot

  splayed across her face like a horse whipped too far. Then he realized the banality was

  Kelly's very point. Down here at Base, the status quo had its own rhythm and

  coziness, and before things got too incendiary, they were banking Gus's fire, and their

  own, too.

  Gus would have none of their pacifism, though. She stood at the head of their table.

  'Daniel broke through.'

  'I knew it.' Heads turned. It was Thomas, the blood drained out from his cheeks.

  'Are you saying Corder topped out?'

  Gus heard his hostility, and chose to let him dangle. 'I'm saying he found a way out

  of the Shoot. He placed Five. We're home free.'

  'Gus, would you take a chair, please,' Robby said. 'Sit down before you fall down and

  tell it in plain English.'

  She sat. She told them. While she stayed in the cave, Daniel had soloed out of the

  Shoot's lethal tube of rock-fall. He had discovered a sprawling snow plateau at the

  base of the so-called Yellow Band – a thick sandwich of sulphur-colored limestone that

  girdled the mountain at 27,500 feet. Blazing his path with nine-mil rope, he'd spent an

  extra day humping a load of Kiwi gear up to the plateau and pitched their next camp.

  Then he had descended to ABC. A dozen questions swarmed to Abe's mind. Before he

  could ask even one, the others started interrogating Gus.

  'So?' Thomas demanded. 'Did he solo to the top?'

  Gus ignored him.

  'Five's not much,' Gus said through the steam of her tea, 'but we don't need much.

  There's wind up there, but no more rockfall. Daniel told me to tell you, from Five to

  the top it's a cruise.'

  'A cruise?' snorted Thomas. J.J. scowled at him. Thomas scowled back. On this

  north side, the hard yellow rock lay in tiles canted downward at a 30-degree pitch,

  with successive layers overlapping one another. The Yellow Band wasn't particularly

  dangerous or technical, but neither was it going to be a cruise. Thomas was probably

  right. The climb wasn't over yet.

  Gus rolled right over Thomas's fatalism. For one thing he hadn't earned it; and for

  another his cynical tone cloyed. 'Daniel says, Five's close enough, you can see the top.'

  'Yeah? Well I can go outside and see the top from down here too,' Thomas said.

  'That doesn't mean we're close.'

  Gus had the punchline ready. 'Yeah, but you can't see the tripod. Not from down

  here.'

  It took them a minute to gather the significance of that. Then a light went on in

  Robby's eyes. 'Daniel saw the tripod?' he breathed.

  'Fantastic,' Stump said.

  Thomas looked slapped silly. Speechless, he blinked rapidly.

  The news galvanized them like a shot of crude voltage. In 1972 a Chinese expedition

  had climbed via the easier North Col route and erected a five-foot-high metal survey

  tripod on the very summit. Ever since, it had become a feature as natural as the

  fossils and space shuttle vistas that awaited summiteers.

  'I've never seen him so certain,' Gus added. And that in itself – Daniel's confidence –

  spurred them even more than the other news, the camp, the Yellow Band, the tripod.

  They were close all right.

  'And Corder? Is he coming soon?' Jorgens guessed. His beard was more salt and

  pepper now, his motions slower. He looked older and used up. But with this news, he

  perked up. This was good news, very good, tantamount to victory.

  'I parked his butt at ABC,' Gus said. 'He's in no shape for a bunch of round-trips to

  Base.' They understood. Everyone had seen the way Daniel limped around on the

  flats, and had heard the crepitation of bone on bone. It was harder on him to descend

  an easy trail than to climb a sheer face. Climbing, he could at least compensate with

  his arms for the kneecaps and cartilage of host of orthopods had cut out.

  'One thing else,' Gus related. They fell silent. 'He made a promise. He said he'll wait

  for us.'

  She said it to remind them. Daniel could just as easily have continued on the last

  thousand feet to the tripod alone. Instead he had roped down to join hands with his

  teammates and take the Kore in a classic finish. Abe knew it was a gamble, Daniel

  turning his back on a solo flash that must have seemed a sure thing. But apparently it

  wasn't as much a gamble as lone wolfing through the rest of his life. Even now, several

  days later, Gus looked relieved by his decision. She really thought she could save him,

  Abe thought. Bravo, Gus.

  The elated climbers bubbled out of the mess tent and into the sunshine, leaving Gus

  in the dark with her mug of tea. Abe lagged behind. Unfinished business.

  'How's he doing?' Abe asked her. She was changed. At least she would look him in

  the eye now.

  'He's whipped,' she said. 'He's in pain. His hands are like meat. His ribs are bad,

  busted I think. And he stayed high too long. You know, the thousand-mile stare, all

  that.' A sternness flickered across her face. 'But the nightmare's almost over. We're

  going to nail this bastard. And then he's free.' She spoke it like a credo. She nodded to

  herself and Abe nodded, too. To control the mountain was to control the entire

  pyramid of obsessions that had led to it. None of them yearned for that power more

  than Daniel.

  'Is he taking care of his hands?' Doctors were supposed to ask questions like that.

  'Of course.'

  'Ho
w about you, how are the lungs holding up?' She had once developed double

  pneumonia deep in the Karakoram range in Pakistan, and it was again a doctor's kind

  of question. In truth, he was stalling. He wanted to know if there was any room to

  negotiate on her dislike for him.

  She was staring at him, deciding something. 'Daniel wanted me to tell you

  something,' she said.

  Abe braced himself.

  'He wants to summit with you, Abe.'

  Abe was dumbfounded. Then it occurred to him that Gus had gotten injured and

  couldn't climb anymore. It would be like her to hide an injury. That would explain

  Daniel's need for a new partner.

  'Are you hurt?' Abe asked.

  Gus reacted with scorn. 'Hurt?' she said. 'What the hell do you think?'

  Now Abe saw his error. She was whole, but she was indeed hurt. 'No,' he said. 'I

  meant injured.'

  Gus waved aside his clarification.

  'Then what is this?' He knew better than to feel sorry for this woman, and yet Daniel

  had betrayed her. Alone and weary, she'd had to carry the news of it down ten miles

  and then deliver it to the man chosen to replace her.

  'He wants you with him when he hits top,' she said. 'Same day. Same rope.'

  Abe was flattered. He hadn't expected anything like this, to reach the summit, to lay

  the past to rest once and for all. But could they? Forgiveness was something granted,

  not attained. It was not the same as reaching a mere mountaintop. Like that, Abe

  made his mind up.

  'I'll tell him my answer when I see him,' Abe said.

  'Tell me,' Gus demanded. She had a right.

  'I already have a partner.'

  Now was Gus's turn to be surprised. She stared at him as if he'd stayed too high for

  too long as well. 'Kelly?' she said. But her real contempt was for Abe. 'You're not telling

  me you'd hang yourself up with her. Daniel's your one sure shot.'

  Abe shrugged. 'It's me and Kelly.'

  Gus frowned, trying to turn with this latest about-face. Odd, Abe thought. He hadn't

  noticed until now that her red hair had turned nearly gold. The great stone crucible

  was changing them. To see her from behind, you might almost mistake Gus for Kelly.

  'You're making a mistake,' Gus said. But she wasn't really arguing. For all her

  muscular gruffness, she had a wonderful transparency, Abe realized. There was no