I felt suddenly overwhelmed by all that was being asked of me, not only by Vita, but by the entire Montebianco family, that chain of men and women stretching back hundreds of years. “How can I know, when even you couldn’t find anything?”
“It is very simple, Alberta,” Vita whispered, her strength gone. “Look carefully at the tribe. If a descendant of Leopold has survived, certain kinds of physical traits will be present. There may be pigmentation to the skin or hair—this would be a sure sign. Our kind is smaller. Our skulls are shaped differently. I looked for such traits years ago, when I went to the village. I found nothing then. But, as you know, inheritance is a trickster. One generation may hide its genetic treasures, while the next will put them fully on display.”
Twenty-Eight
From the start, I struggled to climb the mountain. My leg was weak, still tender from the gunshot wound, my vitality swept away by months of lying in bed. My muscles had withered, taking with them the strength I’d had just months before, when I’d scaled the mountainside in Nevenero. I had felt then that I could climb to the top of the world. Now, after five minutes on the path up the mountain, I was on the verge of collapse.
Yet, I wasn’t about to go back. I had the leather sack with the medical supplies Aki needed, and Vita’s voice at the back of my mind urged me forward. Promise me, she had said, squeezing my hand as I stood to leave her. Promise you will look for the descendants of Leopold. If you find one, bring him here.
I climbed onward, pushing myself up the rocky trail. It wound higher and higher, switchbacking up rocky promontories, around deep, bottomless crevices, through thick groves of trees. The cold spring air tingled in my lungs. The scent of pine needles and limestone and wet earth hung heavily around me. I imagined the generations of men and women whose feet had worn down this rock, so many centuries of movement that had left the stone smooth and slippery.
Exhausted, my leg aching, I paused to catch my breath at the base of a waterfall. I dropped the leather pack. I took out a bottle of water, drinking it quickly and then filling it in a pool below the waterfall. Spring had melted the snow, sending water gushing down the mountain. It burst from a crack in the rocks, falling over a clutch of stones below, sending up swirls of mist. Sunlight churned in the air, splintered into a rainbow of colors that lifted, held form, and dissolved back into the mist again. In the winter, this free fall of water would freeze, coating the granite in clear, glistening ice. But for now, it gushed down to the valley below, soaking the earth.
By then, I had come to see that the true mysteries of the Alps had nothing to do with the legends of dragons and cretins and beasts, or any of the other stories passed down over the generations, but with the mountains themselves. The desolation of the peaks, the murderous indifference of black granite, the calamity of ice and snow—this was nature in its most indomitable and glorious expression. The feeling of vertigo as I stood before the waterfall was not so very different from what I had felt that first day at the castle, when I had gazed out the window over the peak of Mont Blanc: awe and wonder at the power of nature. An acute awareness that the mystery of creation and destruction existed here, in these mountains. Time, millions and millions of years of it, more than I could even imagine, had passed through these gorges, moving fast and treacherous as snow melt. The mountains had stood against it, strong and indifferent. The fierce beauty of it all made me tremble with humility and terror. What was I—what were any of us—compared to this?
I hoisted the pack on my back and pushed myself onward. I climbed for some time before I heard a noise ahead, a branch snapping, the scrape of feet over rock. I stopped, listening.
“Hello?” I called into the shadowy nothingness above me.
I reached into the pack and pulled out the knife I had taken from the kitchen. How well I could defend myself against a wild animal wasn’t something I had considered. I steeled myself and continued on the path when, above, on a ledge of granite, I saw Aki.
For a long, tense moment, he stared at me, a look of surprise in his eyes. He seemed to be struggling with my presence there, and I realized that while he had asked me to come to him in the mountains, and had showed me the path to take, he hadn’t ever really believed I would do it.
Aki climbed down the promontory of rock until he stood before me. I showed him the leather pack. He glanced at my offering and thanked me.
“Come,” he said, motioning up the mountain. “The village isn’t far.”
My leg was aching, and I had no idea how I would climb another step, but I was determined to see the village. I braced myself and followed. Aki slipped behind a boulder and back onto the steep path. His pace was quick. I couldn’t keep up.
Finally, he turned around, annoyed. I had fallen far behind.
“You must go faster,” he said.
“I’ll try. It’s just that—”
He must have realized that I was in pain, because he asked, “You are hurt?”
I explained the gunshot wound, the botched surgery, my slow and incomplete recovery.
“But why?” he asked, confused.
“I was running away,” I said. “Sal wanted to stop me.”
This answer didn’t make sense to Aki. He thought it over, his brow furrowed. “But this weapon,” he said. “I have seen men use it to kill animals. Do you kill your own people with this weapon, too?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes we do.”
“We do not,” he said, looking at me. “Never. There are not enough of us for that.” He walked back to me. “Show me,” he said.
I slipped my jeans over my hips, easing them down past the gunshot wound, revealing the pink scar on my thigh. Aki bent close to look at my leg, his gaze settling on my bare skin. He touched the scar, his thumb tracing the damaged skin, and a shiver went through me. When our eyes met, I could not look away, and for a moment, I thought something had passed between us, a moment of attraction and complicity.
It was a long way up and I wasn’t going to make it without help. Sensing this, Aki squatted down and told me to climb on his back. I wrapped my arms around his neck and hoisted myself up. He glanced over his shoulder, asked if I was ready, and, with that, began to climb up the mountain.
Aki was strong and quick and adept. I held tight to him as he launched from rock to rock, his fingers pushing into cracks and crevices, his legs propelling us up. He moved with the energy and power of someone inured to the terrain, without hesitation, without reflection, pushing through banks of trees, scaling slopes, traversing the solid rise of each new plateau. I was so caught up in the sensation of weightlessness, the pure terror of clinging to him, I could hardly breathe. I buried my head in his neck, afraid to look, but when I got the courage to lift my eyes, I saw the mountain as I had never seen it before. The mineral-stained, striated surfaces, so close that I could have skimmed my nails against them as we passed. Fat rock crystal formations hung like opalescent beehives. Above, the mountain peaks rose like giants, their long, spiked ridges stretching as far as I could see. Snow glinted in the sun, too bright, too brilliant to look at without blinking. At the highest reach of my vision, a misty powder swirled in a solution of air, thick as yeast in beer. And below—pure vertigo. The earth fell away, dropping into a sheer, chiseled chasm of bottomless, formless space. This, I realized, was how a bird must feel riding the air to the top of the world.
At last, we reached a plateau. Aki dropped me to the ground and I fell onto a flat of granite. Although Aki had done all the work, I was out of breath, hot and trembling from fatigue. My leg burned from the effort of clinging to his body, the dull throb of pain pounding through my thigh. At that altitude, the air was cool and thin. I had lost all sense of equilibrium. I leaned against a boulder to get my balance and looked around.
There it was, the arcade of caves Justine had described, the very one she had discovered tracking footprints in the snow. Long and dark and crusted with ice, the passage had the appearance of a tunnel to another world. I hardly s
aw a thing as I walked inside. What light filtered down left only a weak, green haze that pooled over my feet like dirty water. The image of Joseph, Greta’s son, being pulled through the crack in the mountain appeared in my mind, flickering as if projected on a screen. A child’s desperate cry echoed in my ears. I shivered, and pulled my jacket close.
Aki walked off ahead. I steadied myself and hobbled after him, fear rising in my chest as he slipped through the narrow crack at the end of the arcade and disappeared. What lay beyond exhilarated and terrified me. I stood before this fissure, feeling my life collect into two parts, the life I had led before, and the life I would lead after I entered the village of the Icemen.
Twenty-Nine
I emerged into a tongue of land cut deep into a crevice of the mountain. Leopold had described the village as a seed pressed into a rocky furrow, and it seemed exactly that: a furtive garden in a fold of stone. The mountains angled up on all sides, shielding the village, protecting it. I understood then how the Icemen had survived. The only way in or out of the village was the narrow arcade of caves, that single crack in the wall. They were surrounded by a fortress of rock.
As Vita had told me, the village had grown since Leopold had described it in his field notes. Where once there were only caves, now there were stone huts. They were primitive shelters, cut from the mountain, the walls constructed of rough stone that appeared to be nothing more than the natural outcroppings of granite, the stone rooftops speckled with moss. This explained why the village hadn’t been discovered from above—not by helicopter or airplane or satellite. Even if a helicopter had flown overhead, the curve of the mountains hid the Icemen so completely that it would be difficult to discern life below. The mountains enfolded the valley so that everything—the stone huts, the cultivated plants, the population of archaic humans who came to greet me—remained invisible to the outside world.
I walked over an expanse of moss-covered rock toward Aki’s tribe.
I have never taken it lightly, that moment of contact with the Icemen. I knew that they were vulnerable to the modern world. Vulnerable to me. They had persevered through the millennia without contact with the rest of humankind. Only pure, inviolate isolation had protected them.
Through the vicissitudes of time and geography, through the cruel workings of evolution, through all the hazards of climate, of migrations, food shortages, sickness, invasion: we stood face to face there, then, together. It was a miracle. By all measures, they should have been extinct. Like their direct ancestors, Neanderthals, or their more distant relations, Cro-Magnon, or any of the other dozens of archaic hominids that had evolved and perished—they should have been crushed by disease and competition. If the Icemen were a rare treasure of biology, I was the most privileged person on the planet: their witness. What I did not anticipate, and what has remained a source of wonder through all the years since that day, is how our meeting would transform me.
“My name is Alberta,” I said to the gathering crowd. “Granddaughter of Vittoria Montebianco.”
At the sound of my voice, more Icemen emerged from the stone huts, men and women and a few children. They looked at me, staring at me in wonder. I couldn’t help but imagine Leopold Montebianco there, standing at my side, his jet-black hair and flamboyant cravat, surveying these pale men and women as they crowded around. I imagined the thrill of discovery he must have felt upon realizing what he had found. I felt it, too, a buzzing in the chest, the rare privilege of seeing something only a handful of people had ever seen before.
The Icemen gathered around. There were fifty of them, perhaps fewer. I scanned their faces, looking for aberrant traits, but they were all eerily similar to Aki in appearance. The defining features of their kind—the lack of pigmentation of skin and hair, the enormous blue eyes, the rough-hewn brow, the high cheekbones and long limbs—showed little variation. The full lips and the flatness of the nose, the pointed ears, the particular mold of the chin—these features were uniform. There was nothing of Leopold in any of these people. Nothing of me.
There was no variety in their clothing either. The women wore white woven tunics over loose pants, while the men wore cargo pants and leather vests that revealed their hair-covered arms. I remembered the picture of the Yeti in Justine’s article, thick white hair covering its body, and while the Icemen might be mistaken for such a creature from a distance, up close they were far more human than anything that might resemble a beast. They were all as beautiful as Aki.
It surprised me to find them so different from Leopold’s descriptions. While Vita had told me of the community’s progress, I had imagined a struggling and ragged community on the brink of extinction. I had imagined the Icemen to be primitive, without resources, suffering the elements like animals in a cave. But that was not at all how I found them. Theirs was a human civilization, one with all the elements we would recognize as such: cultivated plants, shelters, clothes, and tools. Their technologies were simple, but simple in the way materials of the medieval period would seem simple to the modern eye. They raised goats and stored the milk. They wove very simple rough fabrics on a loom. Although they needed Vita’s assistance, they had developed all the basic skills that could lead, one day, to survival.
Jabi, the man I had met with Aki on the east lawn with Vita, stepped from the crowd and turned to the others. From the way he pointed at me, and the sharpness of his voice, I knew he was angry that Aki had brought me there.
One of the children started to cry. She hid her face in her hands to block me from view.
“Jabi is telling them to be afraid of you,” Aki whispered.
“They have no reason to be afraid,” I said.
“He is telling them that you are dirty. He says you will bring disease. That you will kill with metal weapons.”
“I’m healthy,” I said. “And I have no weapons.” I remembered the knife in the leather sack. No weapons that I intended to use.
Aki listened to Jabi, his expression dark.
“I thought Vita has helped the village,” I said.
“She has not been here for two generations,” he said. “The oldest remember her. But most do not.”
As Jabi spoke, the others turned their eyes to me, watching, assessing. I could feel them turning against me. I glanced back, to the opening in the mountain, aware of my precarious position. I wouldn’t be able to protect myself if they attacked me. The narrow passage was the only way in or out of the village. If they blocked the passage, I would be trapped.
Just as I was assessing my chances of escaping, Aki came to my side, his arm brushing against mine.
He lifted an arm into the air, to announce that he would speak. The others quieted and listened. He opened the leather sack, showing them that I had brought gifts. The energy of the crowd shifted, and they came to me, touching me, greeting me in their strange, guttural language. They said the word “Simi,” the word Joseph had written on his drawings of the blue men, a word I would come to learn meant “fellowship.” It would be months before I would understand even the rudiments of their speech, but I saw from Aki’s gestures—and the way his voice softened when he looked at me—that he had convinced them of my intentions.
“Now,” Aki said, “give them the gifts.”
I distributed jars of preserved fruit, a few rings of dried sausages, a container of goat cheese from the mews. I pulled out medicine and bandages, a sharp kitchen knife. Jars of aspirin and tubes of antibacterial disinfectant. Small things to us that could prove invaluable to them.
I removed a box of plastic freezer bags I’d found in the pantry, opened one up, and demonstrated how it worked. The bags interested them the most. They pulled the bags out of the box and passed them around, dropping in sausage and goat cheese, opening and closing them.
Aki gestured to a woman, who stepped close to meet me. It was Uma, the woman Vita had taught at the castle. She took the leather sack with its jars of painkillers and tubes of antibacterial ointment. The rolls of bandages and packs of antibio
tics. A big bottle of rubbing alcohol and cotton. She threw the sack over her shoulder and smiled at me. “Welcome,” she said.
I may have mollified the others with my gifts, but Jabi watched me, his expression filled with animosity and accusation. I didn’t understand why he hated me so intensely, but it was clear that he wanted me to leave. He said something to me, and when I didn’t respond, he moved closer, then closer still, until he stood inches from me, his blue eyes piercing, his smell overwhelming. I stepped back, alarmed by his proximity, ready to turn and walk away, when he struck me.
I understand now that this attack was much bigger than Jabi and me, or even the Montebianco family and the Icemen. This was a moment of reckoning, an evolutionary clash, a confrontation between past and the present. We were part of a war begun some forty thousand years before, when Homo sapiens surpassed other humans to become the dominant life-form on the planet. My people had survived through strength and intelligence, by taking over shared resources, by gradually pushing out the less adept hominids. We survived by creating communities to protect us. We ate well, formulated medicines, reproduced more often, lived longer. We developed speech and advanced tools, grew crops and built shelters. We created language, religion, writing. We became masters of our reproduction, our habitat, our environment. Our technologies allowed us to exist apart from nature and to regard it as something other than ourselves. From this position of dominance, I watched Jabi, knowing that he could easily kill me, but it wouldn’t change a thing. His kind would die. Mine would survive.
Jabi pushed me to the ground. I fell, pain slicing through me. I pulled myself up and tried to stand, but a second blow knocked me flat onto my stomach, socking the wind from my lungs. I gasped, trying to breathe, as Jabi stood above me, growling, his long yellow teeth bared. There was a rock in his hand. A sickening, triumphant smile grew on his face as he brought it down on my head.
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