Out of the corner of his eye there was a flicker of green, the same colour as Marjory’s dressing gown. But when he turned his head there was nothing, just the vertical drop of the rock face. Nothing green. Not anywhere.
WHEN HE MADE the ridge, George could see in all directions – for the first time he looked down the south side of the mountain, tried to see what the route would have been like from there. Ahead of him the thin line of the ridge stretched out to the first of the three stone steps.
“It’s practically … ten o’clock, George,” Sandy said. His mask dangled from one side of his fur-lined cap as he drank from his canteen. They’d been climbing for more than four hours. “You said … we should … be here by eight.”
“Got off late. Making up time. We’re fine. Still fine.” It was much too soon to give in. They’d barely even started. From here it would be easy to follow the clean line of the ridge to the summit. There was no finding the route from here. There was only the Second Step ahead. “We’ll make it,” he said.
George stood and climbed from where they had been resting, almost hidden from the wind. At a height of more than 28,000 feet, the ridge was a knife blade that plunged away on either side of him. Out ahead were the snow cornices, whipped and moulded by the wind that swept along the ridge. It was impossible to tell where the mountain ended, where the sky began. Sandy followed. George was confident he had made the right choice. Sandy had been moving well to here. If he kept him moving, he’d be fine.
He started up; Sandy would follow.
“Well done, Georgie-boy. I was never able to get up this high.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Traf.”
It had been his brother’s great joke, how George had to climb to get to these heights. Trafford just hopped into a plane.
“I mean, if you want to take the hard road …” Trafford had said the last time he saw him. They’d been talking of the Alps, the Pyrenees. Trafford wondered what it would be like to fly low over them. Joked he would meet him at the top of Mont Blanc someday, much less winded than George would be.
George reached out to touch the wings pinned on the khaki wool of Trafford’s lapels. “Yes, well, any old fool can take the easy way up.”
“Easy?” Trafford laughed. God, how he missed his laugh. “George, you would lose your lunch before we’d been up a quarter-hour. Easy!”
“Is that so? Shall we make it interesting?”
“A wager? Yes. I’ll take you and your mechanically narrow little brain up, and I’ll let you take me climbing. See who takes to what better, shall we?”
“I’m not sure we can get your lazy buttocks up that high without an airplane.”
“So you won’t take the wager? See who can get higher? See who’s better?” It was an old competition, one they’d fought regularly.
“No. It’s a deal. After the war.”
“After the war.”
They shook hands.
And then Trafford was killed during the war. “You would have been a terrible flyer,” Trafford told him now. “But you are good at this.” There was a pause. “Of course you would be. All the time you spent off on your adventures. You always did whatever you wanted.”
“That’s not fair, Traf. You had your own adventures.”
“But none of mine resulted in my getting sent home from the battlefield, did they? You didn’t even have to shoot yourself in the foot. You just tumbled from a sandstone wall that you shouldn’t have been climbing in the first place. No, you left the real fighting, the dying, to the rest of us. To me.”
George stopped on the ridge. His blood itched, cold in his veins, in his throat and lungs. All around him were lower peaks, their white caps spreading out to the horizon in every direction. As he climbed, he belayed the rope around rock outcroppings, looping over boulders and stones in the hope that it would stop a fall. Behind him, Sandy untangled it and followed him. They negotiated the space between them, the ridge at their feet. Small cascades of rock and ice rained down with each footstep.
When he looked around, he was struck by the high contrast of the peaks around him against the deep blue of the sky, everything cast in sharp relief. No one had seen this before. No one had ever been this high. Only him. And Sandy. He had to take a photograph. The entire world was below him, bright and sharp.
As he dug into his windproofs for the camera, his body was pulled down against the ridge, landing badly, his left arm caught under him. He scrambled to hold the rope against gravity and the angle of the mountain. Thirty feet down, Sandy had slipped, was scrambling for his feet on snow. George could see that he wasn’t in any immediate danger, but his movements were panicked.
Finally Sandy righted himself and George collapsed back onto the ridge. His wrist throbbed where he’d landed on it. His watch was broken, the glass covering on its face shattered and pressed into his skin. He took it off, slipped it into his pocket. On his exposed skin, the blood was a dark sludge, almost black. It moved slowly, oozed.
He watched it clot in the thin air.
HE COULD HAVE died.
He could have bloody died. Sandy stared down the mountain but couldn’t see past his mask, past his goggles. It looked as though he were standing on nothing.
He tugged at the rope and after a beat there was a reassuring tug back. He turned carefully, to see George slumped on the ridge ahead of him, maybe thirty feet away. That was it. That was all that held him to the mountain. George and their gentleman’s belay. His heart pounded at his temples. He cursed into his mask.
“Just don’t take a tumble off that mountain,” Marjory had said with a wink. “What would I ever do, if you didn’t come back?”
It had all seemed such a lark then. Such an impossibility. How could he just go back to his regular life, to the way things had been? I’ve seen a man die, he’d written to Dick after Lapkha’s death. He’d meant to send it, but it sounded so melodramatic. Dick wouldn’t understand. How could he? And now he’d almost died himself. He tried to move but couldn’t. His skin buzzed all over him. He wanted to vomit.
“You’ll have to make your own decision, Sandy.” Somervell’s voice was in his head. “What it’s worth to you.”
He moved his feet upward, each step an effort. One, then the other.
He tried to keep his eye on George, who was standing now, stamping his feet, his arms hugged to his chest. But just past him on the snow slope there was someone else. A woman, tangled in the snow as if in bed linens. He tried to point to her, but his arms felt as heavy as his legs. She rolled away from him, her white shoulders disappearing into snow.
George pulled off his mask as he neared. “You’re all right,” he said. It was an instruction. An order. For the first time Sandy imagined George in his officer’s uniform, cajoling frightened soldiers, bullying them up over the top. He must have done that. Sandy nodded.
“No one’s ever made it this high, Sandy. No one. We’re the first.”
Around him the world seemed to move, the peaks and clouds drifting on some kind of current. He was at sea. He turned back to George, who stepped backwards, surefooted, took a photograph of him, then folded the camera away. He was favouring his left hand. “Are you all right?” There was blood on George’s cuff.
“No. I’m fine. The cold’s good for it.”
Sandy checked his watch. “I think it’s time, George.”
“No.” George sounded genuinely surprised. “We can still make it.”
“Of course. But the gas.” Sandy said, gesturing over his shoulder. “The canister will be almost empty. Time to switch them.”
George checked his own, empty wrist. It was bruising slightly. “Right. Right.”
They stood looking at each other until George turned him around by the shoulders. Sandy tried to focus on his feet, on the ridge of snow and ice, through the long beat of suffocation, his lungs gulping for air. Then a release on his shoulders before the gas flowed again. His vision cleared and he inhaled long and deep. George dropped the tank beside
him. The tank slid; slowly at first, and then picked up speed as it plunged down the south side of the mountain, into Nepal. They weren’t supposed to go there.
The border seemed so arbitrary now. What could it possibly matter which side of the ridge they stood on? No, this place was theirs. His and George’s. They could claim it. Like a new continent. He turned back around. George already stood with his back to him, waiting for Sandy to remove his oxygen tank. He unhooked the canister, placed it carefully on the ridge.
They were lighter now, but still the mountain dragged at him.
AHEAD OF GEORGE the Second Step loomed, a rock outcropping some one hundred feet high, like the corner of a great cathedral.
“I can turn that,” he said, and passed the spyglass back to Geoffrey.
“I don’t know, George. You might be best to skirt it, find a way around it.”
“There isn’t another way. We’d have to double back. We’d have to drop down, take Teddy’s route. It would take us hours.”
“He can’t do it. The boy. He can’t climb that.”
“You don’t know that. I have faith in him. You used to have it in me.”
“Yes, well,” Geoffrey continued, “you were the one who left me behind. I should be the one climbing Everest.”
Geoffrey was right, of course. It should have been him. And it probably would have been him, if not for the war. He was a better climber than any of the rest of them – Teddy, Somes, Odell. The two of them on the rope together would have been unbeatable. “If you hadn’t lost your leg.” It was the first time he’d ever said it aloud.
“Lost. Ha.” Geoffrey laughed mirthlessly.
He’d never asked Geoffrey if they’d found his leg.
“Why not? Why didn’t you ask?”
“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”
“Bullshit, George. You didn’t want to talk about it. You didn’t want to know. You wanted to keep climbing as if nothing had changed.”
“That’s not true.”
“Sure it is, George. As long as everything works out in your favour, as long as you can continue to go along on your merry way, it doesn’t much matter what happens to anyone else. As long as we’re still there to play the audience to your adventures.”
He started to say he was sorry, but Geoffrey wasn’t there. There was just him and Sandy on the ridge. He couldn’t drift off like that. Had to stay focused.
He looked down below the Step, deep into the couloir.
Geoffrey was wrong. There was no way to skirt the Step, not without downclimbing at a mad angle that would send them sliding down the face. Still, the Step appeared immovable and already he felt exhausted. With every step his head throbbed and the pain rocketed down his spine, into his joints and the small of his back, where the oxygen tank had rubbed his skin raw. But it was the last obstacle. He’d pointed it out to Sandy all those weeks ago: the Second Step – it’s the only one that counts. After that it’s a clear run to the base of the pyramid.
There was someone there, below them. He could see him. He raised his arm again, to wave, to point him out to Sandy. A man, there, curled on his side. Knees drawn up. He shouldn’t be there.
Wilson maybe? No. Couldn’t be. Wilson was waiting for them below the North Col. Sandy then? He focused his eyes on the shape. But Sandy was behind him on the rope. He glanced back to check on Sandy, plodding up the ridge. Slowly, painfully slow – step and stop, step and stop.
Then who was on the mountain with them?
“Higher up, on her shoulders,” he heard Virgil saying, “the demons wait.” When he tried to spot the man again, the shape was gone. Resolved into grey stone.
He leaned back against the wall of the Second Step and watched Sandy climbing towards him, slowing with each long minute that ticked by. He should move, at least into the patch of sun on the snow slope, out of the shadow cast by the overhang of the cliff. Instead George closed his eyes against the bright sky, blanched to almost white at the horizon.
The stone behind him leached the heat from his body. He was shivering, his teeth chattering in the stale smell of his mask. He tried to still his body, would give anything to be warm. How long had he been climbing? Time stretched and compressed. His watch wasn’t at his wrist, just smears of blood. And slivers of glass burrowing into him, drawing the cold into his veins.
He closed his eyes and there was the dry, earth scent of tea. He reached to take the cup from Ruth, but his hands were shaking. He drew them back, tucked them into his armpits and inhaled slowly before he reached out again, trying to force them steady.
“You don’t look well,” she said.
“Better now.”
“For the tea.”
“For you being here.”
“Nonsense. You like your adventures. Set off every chance you get. Tuck me away at the back of the cupboard and then pick me up and dust me off when you see fit.”
“No.” He set down the tea, drew her to him. He could feel her warmth dissipating. She’d be cold. “No. You’re perfect. I shouldn’t have left. I won’t leave again. You’re where I want to be.”
“But you have to climb her first.” He couldn’t tell if it was a demand or resignation. But she was right. He did have to climb her first.
And then Sandy was beside him, slumped against his shoulder. “What time is it?”
Slowly Sandy peeled back his glove, his sleeve, found his watch. “Quarter to two?” A long pause. “We should turn back. You said we should be here by noon.”
“How do you feel?”
“Tired. Good. Cold. I can make it.” Sandy pushed himself to his feet.
“Good.” He stood too, held his hand up to Sandy, rotated it and waited as Sandy turned his back to him. His hands were on Sandy’s shoulders. The slightest pressure and Sandy would plummet down the mountain to the glacier far below.
He unclipped the tank, slid the straps from Sandy’s shoulders. He watched as Sandy’s shoulders straightened a little without the weight, only to slouch again as the gas wore off.
He would have liked to hurl the canister, to make a show of throwing it in the mountain’s face, but he couldn’t. He let it slip from his fingers, heard the metallic clang of it, once, as it cartwheeled into space, and then disappeared below them. He turned his back to Sandy and waited for the same release. It came, but only as a brief reprieve. Without the forced oxygen his breath came harder, slower. He struggled to send oxygen to his lungs, to his limbs on his own. What little warmth he had curled back into his chest, his guts, retreating from his limbs.
He had hoped they would have enough gas to at least make the summit, or even part of the way back. A miscalculation. They were moving too slowly.
The stone was cold. He’d pulled off his outer mittens, had on only the thin wool gloves. He had to feel the stone, would have preferred his skin on the flesh of the mountain – stone that had never been touched, virgin behind its veil – but the tips of his fingers were numbing already, frostbite settling in. The blood in them would expand as it froze, exploding his cells, destroying them.
One hold, then another.
There was someone beside him as he climbed. Another climber, making every move he did. A reflection just off to his side. Maybe he had the better route. George reached out to him and the man beside him reached away. He had to beat him.
His lungs filled with empty air as he lifted his right foot to a hold, a tiny indentation in the face. The muscles in his legs, his back and arms burned, the lactic acid bubbling in them. A long pause and then the pull up. An inch. Two. Just the rock in front of him. And the wind – an inaudible roar, so constant it fell silent, just a pressure on his ears, his body. And the man beside him.
At the top of the Step, George looped the rope around a stable rock, wrapped it around his waist and felt Sandy’s weight on it, stuttering and stopping. His wrist ached with the jolts. The clouds had begun to rise up around them, swelling from below, slowly swallowing the ridge in white, cutting them off
from the mountain. The way to the summit was still clear, even though it was hidden coyly, behind the shoulder of the mountain.
Where did he go, the other climber? The one who had been on the Step. He cast about for him. Were those footprints in the snow ahead of him? Or just the shape of the wind?
He leaned against the counterweight of the rope.
His muscles quivered against his joints and bones. He closed his eyes. Small paws crawled all over him, digging in with their claws, sending sharp currents through his limbs. Laughter. The other climber had sent them down – these creatures all over him – so he would get to the summit first. A razored talon drew a line around his scalp, then peeled back the skin. The white of his skull reflected the sunlight. Another plucked the tendon in his ankle like a bowstring. He kicked, jerked his foot away, and his hobnails caught his other leg. He barely felt it through the layers of cloth.
He jolted himself awake. What if it was on the rope? Virgil’s demon. Climbing towards him.
Maybe he should cut the rope. That would be the only way to be sure that the demon didn’t reach him, didn’t tear him from the mountain.
“Don’t be so rash, George.” Will’s hands were over his, helping him hold the belay. “You’re always so damned rash.”
“I’m not.” He squeezed the words out through clenched teeth.
“That would be a first, then, no?” Will’s hands were steadying. Warming.
“Maybe. But that’s why we have you, Ruth and I. Someone to take care of us both.”
“I have taken care of her, George. And a damn sight better than you. She would have been happier with me. You know that, don’t you? She is happier with me.”
The wind hollowed him out, scraped him clean, stole away what he needed to say to Will. He could see the words, scattered like bits of ribbon, blowing out over Tibet.
Above All Things Page 30