by Garry Ocean
“I can see that you are a very smart lad. So listen to what I’ll tell you,” he then looked at Cleo. “You as well, the Greatest-Born One. Even though I did teach you this at the time, but as my mother used to love to say, repetition is the mother of learning!”
Cleo quietly mumbled something like “Here we go again!” to herself, but still sat down more comfortably and prepared to listen.
“When it starts dawning, we will start climbing to the very top of this ridge. That way we will be able to avoid any rock falls. And the beasts will not be able to get to us up there. Now let’s talk about the ascension. When we advance up the rocks, we need to do it extremely carefully, without sharp and sudden movements. You will need to look for various uneven surfaces, ledges, nooks and crevices. Before grabbing onto a ledge or putting your leg or arm into a crevice, you need to feel them out first, if they are steady and reliable,” Gunn-Terr gave Cleo a quick look. “Do you remember the rule of thee points of contact?”
The girl frowned, as if remembering something, but then responded quickly, “When you stand firmly with your feet on a foothold, you hold with one hand on a ledge and move the other hand, or, while holding on with two hands and one foot, move the second foot. The idea is you advance by moving only one hand or foot at a time. That way, if one of your three points of contact slips, you will not fall.”
“That is correct,” the Alvar said, satisfied. “In other words, before moving further, you need to make sure that three of your four limbs are firmly anchored in safe hand- and footholds. And one more thing,” he now looked at Sith, “to preserve your strength during the climb, do not cling desperately to the rocks like a baby animal sucks on its mother’s tits blindly and desperately. You should be mostly grounded with your feet! Work your legs, not arms. You need arms to keep your balance and to anchor yourself when you step from one foothold to another.”
Nick was lying with his eyes closed and thought about how much Gunn-Terr reminded him of Dato Gzirishvili at that moment. Even the tone of his voice was similar, just like Dato’s when he was instructing them on mountain climbing before they ascended the challenging Kungei-Alatau Mountain.
The exhaustion, the warmth and the peaceful flickering of the fire were working on Nick. He thought a little and decided that since Gunn-Terr and Sith were not yet sleeping any way, he could take a quick nap without feeling guilty. “They can wake me up when my turn to stand guard comes,” he thought, drifting into deep sleep.
*****
Nick was climbing with Kostik Shalygin as a partner. To earn the mountaineering qualification, they first needed to complete training, “schooling” as it was called, in front of the judges’ eyes and receive a passing grade. And then the judges would decide if they could proceed to the actual Ultra-C route or needed to train some more. For the “schooling” they selected a very difficult wall of about nine hundred feet. It was in fact the tip of a “glacier’s tongue” that reached that part of the mountain about half a million years before.
The lower base, as the cadets called the training base #17 in Tien Shan mountain reserve, welcomed them with a vigorous snowfall. The pilot of the glider with thirty cadets on board must have landed the glider about a hundred yards away from the camp on purpose. Nick and his classmates spent at least an hour on hauling the training equipment they had been provided with, in a twenty-degree cold and gusting wind. Those who were a little smarter had put their climate suits on beforehand. But most cadets, including Nick, worked in shorts and t-shirts. The team leader warned the cadets in advance that they would be re-located to the Tien Shan foothills. But who in their right mind, after serving for six months in the Caribbean, would ever think about putting on a Category 3 climate suit?
The old-timers, guys whom they came to replace, welcomed them warmly. As a thing of first order, they had a grand ceremony of transferring to the rookies a huge, obviously overfed, and very furry male cat named Barsik. He was given from one shift to another as a trophy. Rumor had it that Barsik was capable of predicting avalanches that happened quite often in these mountains much better than any meteorologists with their ultramodern and sophisticated equipment.
When they set out to climb, the weather could not be better: plus five degrees by Celsius, bright and sunny. They climbed using crampons10 and ice-fifies.11
They took turns in leading. Kostik led on one rope length, and Nick – another one. The climb was timed. By all indicators, they had a good time to spare, about twenty minutes ahead of all other pairs. But they couldn’t get too relaxed. In a bivouac12 set up not too far from the rock’s foothill, their main competitors – the Johnson brothers – were on standby. The brothers were superb climbers. The list of the mountains they ascended included such monoliths as Ben Amera in Mauritania, El Capitan in California, not to mention the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.
No one had any chance of beating the brothers on a dry mountain. But on a glacier they could give them a fight, especially because the friends had conceived a good plan. The day before, when they were studying routes, they noticed a slightly overhanging ice traverse. If they took it they could cut the distance and beat the competitors by at least ten to fifteen minutes. The Johnsons would most likely not risk taking that route.
Kostik was the first one to turn to the traverse. As he was supposed to, he started to drive the bolt hooks into the ice, to prepare the belay. Everything was going great, just as they planned in advance. Nick was smiling imagining the Johnsons watching them on edge, trying to figure out their unexpected move. Not rushing, he climbed to a narrow rock shelf that was sticking out on the ice wall. Keeping his balance with difficulty, he straightened out clumsily, and at that moment the belay flew up with a swish. Nick croaked quietly in disappointment. In a rush or due to forgetfulness, he must have not turned the locking carabineer’s screw sleeve all the way in.
Nick looked around. Kostik was to his right and higher. Now he was behind a large ice sheet, out of Nick’s sight. He could hear the loud sounds of a hammer driving the bolt hooks into the monolith rock. His partner was always very serious about safety while climbing. Nick smirked. At that point, he could not find any humor in that situation. He only remembered Dato’s favorite joke. He used to love shouting during the morning drill, “Cadets! What did three attentive mountain climbers find at the foothill one early morning?” And the cadets answered in unison, “An inattentive one!”
Nick seemed to have found himself in a stalemate. To ascend, without a belay, an almost vertical ice wall was equal to suicide. According to the rules of “schooling,” everything had to be real. This is why the graviresks13 were not provided as a part of the harness14 for this training. And if Nick just stayed on the shelf it would mean a defeat. Nick was getting angry with himself: He was just one step away from the victory and committed such a stupid, childish blunder!
The hammering sounds on top of him stopped. Kostik either finished working on the belay or, more likely, was getting worried. Nick had a crazy idea. He carefully shook off pieces of ice stuck on his gloves, gripped his ice-fifes, and, afraid of changing his mind, jumped from the shelf to the right in one strong push with both legs. He had remembered that right behind the shelf, a little bit below, there was a narrow couloir.15 The glacier top melted a little under the sunrays during the day and the water streamed down, forming a narrow and gentle slope.
From below, everything seemed different than it is in reality. Already in free fall Nick noticed that the gully was not as gentle as he had thought and that he needed to fly at least thirty feet to it, not less. So he flopped into the narrow passage’s ice with his entire body. His helmet partly absorbed the shock, but the knees and elbows received a hard painful blow. Feeling that the force was taking him down, he pulled his strength and drove both of his ice tools into the ice.
Nick was lying flat on his entire body, at the slope of the glacier with an angle of at least sixty degrees. His heart was racing, he was gasping for air. He felt as if the force of the blow on lan
ding knocked all the air out of his lungs. Without moving his head, Nick looked through the tears of pain in his eyes first to the left then to the right. He was short of getting into the gully only by a couple of yards. But perhaps that’s where he was lucky, because otherwise he could have died on impact. Here the landing was softer because even though it was not soft, the rock was covered with snow, not ice. Wet snow. To the right, Nick heard the stream of water.
Overcoming unbearable pain in his knees, Nick carefully pulled his legs up and stuck the front spikes of the crampons into the slope. He immediately felt a little more confident and was able to lift his head up. At about twenty yards above him, slightly to the left, Kostik was hanging upside down. His partner bent over on his belay ropes, looking at Nick with his eyes wide open. His face in turns expressed first surprise, then alarm, and then understanding and disappointment. Nick tried to smile to somehow encourage his partner, but the smile was tortured and looked more like a grin.
Kostik’s eyes widened even more, and it took Nick a second to realize that he was not looking at him anymore. Nick heard a dull crackle, as if someone broke off a dry tree branch above his ear. Nick followed Kostik’s gaze and his body felt even colder with fear. Just a little bit above him, several yards away, a crack started to run like a thin dark snake. The melted ice underneath him suddenly shook and sank. Nick’s heart gave one loud beat in his temples and got stuck somewhere in his throat. Time stopped.
Nick quickly assessed the situation. The thin streams of water coming from the top of the glacier undermined the foundation of the snow layer into which Nick now was pressing with his whole body, holding on only thanks to the ice tools and crampons. Add his heavy landing from a height to that. Nick was quite surprised to note that his mind was working as if it were separate from his body, assessing the situation as if from the outside. His body suddenly acquired weird lightness and his head – surprising calmness. All of this was happening close to the top, which meant there was at least two hundred yards of almost a vertical mountain underneath him. That was a lot, too much even.
His peripheral vision noted that Kostik, hanging on the belays like a spider, was hectically trying to feed him the Dulpeter rope, but obviously was not making it on time. The cracks were becoming wider. The thick ice sheet underneath him started to float slowly, crackling, taking him with it on his last flight.
Nick was turning his head right and left, desperately looking for a way out. Suddenly, he saw an old rusty hook. Where did it come from? The sliding mass of ice and snow must have exposed the rock underneath. Nick saw the branding almost immediately, “Austria 1936.” Without hesitation, Nick pulled himself up on his ice tools and at the very last moment fastened the belay’s carabineer on the hook. “How long has it been here?” Nick thought quickly as he was in free fall.
The hook, beaten by the water and cold, left behind here for some reason centuries ago by an unknown climber, held his weight. Nick painfully smashed into the wall several times while he was swaying like a pendulum on the belay from one side to another. The ice sheet that fell into the canyon underneath claimed his ice tools with it, so it took him some time to stop swaying and stabilize himself.
They did finish ascending then. After a long discussion, the judges cut off some points for time, but gave them the certificate of qualification. Nick was grateful for that. When bidding his good-bye to the group, Dato Gzirishvili came up to Nick and asked with a smile, “Do you know what three attentive climbers found at the foothill one morning?” Despite his joking tone, Nick thought he saw approval in the depth of Dato’s eyes, as blue as a clean ocean lagoon. Or perhaps it was just joy that the troublesome student was finally leaving.
*****
The ascension to the top of the Bony Ridge was not bad on the whole. Gunn-Terr woke everyone up before dawn. The Alvar was energized and full of strength, something that couldn’t be said about the others. Sith was rubbing his eyes. Cleo was looking around the cave, puzzled and confused. She looked like someone who just woke up from an unpleasant dream. As if she was already awake but the bad dream still lingered with her.
Nick felt out the space around him. Gray was nowhere to be found. The animal recently took it as a new habit to disappear on a whim. And then he’d reappear again, out of nowhere as well. Nick got up and stretched with great pleasure. He then rubbed his neck that went numb during the night. Nick nodded at Whisperer sitting at the fire. The old man did not pay attention to anyone, conjuring over the boiling pot. Croaking from time to time, he would pull out of his bag one by one some herbs and roots only he knew, rub them in his palms mixing in proportions known only to him, and carefully put them into the boiling water in small pinches. He was also mumbling something while doing that, perhaps pronouncing some of the ritual words necessary for those to work. In general, now he looked like a regular shaman from some Altai village. Nick smirked at himself and left the cave to breathe some fresh air.
The Dominia was disappearing behind the horizon. The Orphius was not in a rush to take the shift. Its rays were just starting to touch the tops of the Bony Ridge. The night sky was black, homogenous, and empty. Nick shivered. Now he could almost physically feel the presence of the cocoon that covered the planet like a dome. “If only it were just a dome,” Nick smirked bitterly. Like no one else living here, he could really imagine the scale of the cataclysm that had cut off this unique planetary system from the rest of the Space with a dense veil of darkness. “I wonder what the locals feel?” Nick noticed that he was trying to avoid even in his mind the word “aborigines” in relation to the planet residents.
He suddenly remembered his first meeting with Niya. He saw the girl’s begging eyes again, remembering the moment when she asked him humbly to show her the stars. Nick suddenly felt bad. He could have been a lot more sensitive to her request then and not played a condescending adult who said something like, “What? Have you really never seen any stars?”
This was so wrong. Whoever did this, to take away from the people an opportunity to see the stars was like killing a dream. Killing the natural human desire to know the unknown, to discover other worlds. What would have happened if something like this had been done in the past to the Earth? Nick looked at the dark emptiness with hatred and remembered a verse that he came across a long time ago, in his childhood:
To kill a dream is like to shut a star,
The lonely star that twinkles in the sky…
The world will plummet into darkness then
And humans will befall a prey to vice.16
Nick suddenly realized that to destroy or to break the cocoon from now on was his personal goal. He again shivered because he realized the burden of responsibility on his shoulders. Now it’s not only his war. It’s a battle for this entire world. Nick smirked and frowned at himself, because it really sounded pretentious. But he couldn’t simply dismiss the thought.
“Just who do you think you are, lad?” he thought about himself. “A cutting-edge research base is working on this problem. For sure, huge resources and skills of the human civilization have been allocated to resolve it, with the best human minds involved. And here you are, barefoot, wearing a fig leaf cover and carrying a spear in your hand.”
Nick smiled at the picture his own mind drew for him. “Well, not really barefoot and wearing some clothes. But the most important thing is that I am here, inside this cocoon. So, as my friend Paul loved to say, this is my game round!”
“And why do you keep staring at the sky?” Sith interrupted Nick’s internal monologue. “Are you on the lookout for your Departed? You’d better go to the fire; Whisperer has already finished cooking his concoction. It will jolt you back to reality!” the boy gave a short merry laugh.
Nick gave another look at the sky and then hugged Sith by his shoulders, “Don’t worry, Sith, everything will be just fine!” He patted Sith on the back and went back into the cave.
Sith stood there for some time, looking at Nick’s back, then shrugged his shoulder
s, scratched his head and followed Nick into the cave. At the very entrance he stopped, turned his head up and studied the dark sky for some time. Then he shrugged again, waved something off and ducked into the dark cave entrance.
*****
“You couldn’t have thought of something better!” Whisperer was angry and fuming. “When I die, you will carry me on your hunchback! And don’t look at me like at a rotten ripe-too-soon. I am not a sack for you to tie me on your back!”
“What did I say?” Nick looked at his companions in search of support. Sith, the little fox that he was, pretended to be searching for something in his back bag, as if he were not there. Cleo buried her face in her palms trying not to break into laughter. Her shoulders were shaking, and judging by her effort to contain the outburst she was about to lose it. Even Gunn-Terr, who was looking at the Bony Ridge passages for the hundredth time with a fully concentrated attention, turned away. Nick could swear that a quick smile ran through his face.
They were standing before the last climb. Before that, they ascended in links, earlier have agreed that the Alvar will be leading the first chain. Sith was linked to the Alvar in the middle, and Cleo was the last one. The second pair was Nick and Whisperer. They didn’t have big challenges with the ascension. Gunn-Terr’s intuition helped him choose the safest and easiest path for climbing. Nick gave him his due and even admired him. The Alvar did not rush, and sometimes they had to take a hook to pass dangerous areas. Only once they had to jump over a wide crevice and another time – to move along a very narrow shelf, pinning themselves to the rock with their entire bodies, for about twenty steps.
When they were moving along difficult areas, Nick tried to keep the rope tight, to make the climb as easy as possible for Whisperer. Just like now, when they were facing a vertical wall. There was no other way. The trail they were following on their last stretch planning to climb over the ridge in one climb suddenly narrowed and broke in a cliff. The only way was up.