Above All Things (32 page)

“You should wait here,” he finally told Odell.

“I’m. Fine.” Odell’s voice stuttered. Slow, but vicious, as if he couldn’t believe that he would be left behind. But Odell was an anchor. As long as they were tied together, George couldn’t gain any ground. Odell had to see that. This wasn’t about either one of them. Not anymore. They had to go all out if they were going to succeed.
He
had to.

At this rate, the summit and back would take more than the ten hours he’d estimated, much more. “You’re slowing me down. We need to move faster. I can move faster on my own.”

Odell looked up through the gloom at the glowing snow cone of the summit and slumped to the ground. He tried for a moment to haul himself back up before fumbling with the rope knotted at his waist. “Go,” Odell nodded. “But I’m not turning back.”

“Fine. But be careful. Go down. If you need to. I’ll meet you back there at the end.” He pointed down towards the smudge of their tent.

That was forever ago. He’d left Odell just after dawn and pushed on alone. As noon rolled over him, the summit was still so far away. He couldn’t even see it past the mountain’s nearer shoulder. Couldn’t tell anymore how long he’d been climbing, how much farther it was. The guilt of leaving Odell behind buzzed in his head. If Odell got disoriented he might walk right off the mountain, and if he wasn’t moving he would grow colder and colder. He could freeze to death. George imagined climbing back down and finding Odell dead beside the route, frozen solid. He shook the image from his head.

He groped for his watch, the cold burning the exposed flesh of his wrist. The summit was there. Maybe just over the next rise. He could reach it this time. He trudged towards it. And towards it.

It was hard to measure the distance. He set markers – an outcropping, a strange dog-shaped rock formation nearer to him – to count it off. Pressed himself to reach it and then allowed himself a quick break, a gulp of water, when he did. Picked another marker and pressed forward again.

He stepped forward, and again, and again – a dragging rhythm like a slowing Victrola. One step. Followed by another. And then another. Then a sickening lurch in his stomach and he was falling. And the wrenching stop, his right arm over his head, a tearing at his shoulder. He screamed in pain. Above him, his ice axe was caught widthwise across the top of a crevasse. The loop of leather cut into his wrist. He couldn’t breathe against the pain that thudded in his arm. Below him a gape of emptiness.

He was being held together by his skin, his windproofs. He imagined them ripping, his flesh tearing, and dropping him a mile into the Earth.

Light came in from the crack above him and to his right. He’d stepped through a cornice of snow masking a fracture in the mountain. He tried not to think. He was hanging between sheer walls of ice and snow that grew deeper, more violet and indigo as they sank down towards the bowels of the mountain, away from the wind and cold and light. If there was a monster on the mountain, it lived down there. His fingers were growing numb with his weight on them. With the cold.

This was how it could end then, this easily. He wasn’t tied to anything. Not the mountain. Not Odell.

Odell. He was too far away to help him, even if he could have gathered enough breath to get Odell’s name out through the searing pain in his lungs, his shoulder. He closed his eyes. Breathe. Slow. Steady. Don’t panic. His breath came in ragged gasps, squeezed out by his position. There was nothing but ice and rock around him. Nothing. He dangled over
the empty darkness of the mountain and imagined letting go.

“Hold on,” Ruth said.

He was hanging from the loggia at the Holt. He’d climbed up to where she was reading in the back garden. “If you don’t kiss me,” he warned, “I’m letting go.”

“No!” And she giggled. “Please hold on.” Then she leaned over and kissed him.

He opened his eyes and tightened his grip on the axe.

He was still clinging to the overhang. He couldn’t find the hold, couldn’t make the leap. “Go for it, George,” Geoffrey was saying. “Or drop down to rest. You can’t stay there.”

There was a ledge just in front of him. A hold. Big enough for his foot. He kicked his crampons into the ice, putting his weight on the metal spikes. It held. Frozen for a millennium, the ice was solid, didn’t splinter or flake. He fought to dislodge his axe and then threw himself against the wall of ice, its coolness washing over him. He was sweating, though, in the cold, the false warmth of it a relief. After catching his breath some, he swung the axe and dug into the ice, which rained down on him, lifted his right foot to kick in again.

Hours passed, and the sun crept slowly over the opening of the crevasse, its shaft of light moving faster than he was as he fought to climb free. Ignoring the burning in his muscles, he inched up the ice wall until he surfaced and hauled himself out of the crevasse and back onto the mountain. Exhausted. Terrified.

The peak was there, its spindrift raced across the sky. He closed his eyes. The dull pulse in his shoulder was warming somehow and his lungs heaved as he swallowed down frigid air that dried his mouth and throat until he was coughing, his body racked with muscle spasms.

“You can’t stand by, stay here, and just let someone else climb her,” Geoffrey said.

“What if she just can’t be climbed?”

Geoffrey didn’t say anything. George huddled himself in a ball. He had to move. One way or the other. It could be done. She could be made to yield.

He fell back onto the mountain again and cursed upwards into the screaming wind. He couldn’t even hear his own voice. Couldn’t hear Geoffrey.

But it couldn’t be done now. He was exhausted from freeing himself from the crevasse, and even if he wasn’t he’d lost too much time. If he pressed up, he’d be caught out by nightfall for sure. Even if he made the summit before dark he’d never make it back to camp before the temperature plummeted. The image of Odell’s frozen body came back to him. No, he had to turn back.

Finally he hauled himself to his feet, swaying before he steadied himself on his ice axe. Then he trudged down the ridge, poking the snow in front of him. Moving down towards Odell, towards the camp.

He would have to watch someone else try to take her. It would be up to Teddy and Somes now. He turned back to give the assault to the second team, tried not to hope for their failure.

“IF THEY MAKE
it, I’ll be a footnote. After all this. A footnote.” George was slumped over the cup of tea Sandy had brought him, though he still hadn’t taken a sip.

“Don’t be ridiculous, George. Everyone knows what you’ve done on this mountain.”

“Right. How many men I’ve killed, you mean.”

George had never spoken to him about the avalanche before. Sandy wasn’t sure what to say to that. George certainly wasn’t
responsible for Lapkha’s death. That much was obvious. He was. “There’s enough guilt to go around, it seems.”

“You don’t realize it now, Sandy, but you’ve got everything in front of you. Everything. This isn’t the end for you.”

“I don’t think this is the end for you, either.”

“It is. Either Teddy and Somes will claim the summit and it will be over or we’ll go home and it will be over. And by the time the Committee is ready to make another go of it, I’ll be too old. I’ll have failed too much. It’ll be your turn. You and yours.”

“You wouldn’t go again?”

“No. Not like this.”

George put down his tea and they sat in silence in the tent. It was growing dark. They’d know tomorrow. Sandy couldn’t decide anymore what it was that he wanted. If Norton and Somervell reached the summit, maybe he would just be a footnote, but at least it would be a footnote to success. That had to be better than being a footnote to failure. And there wasn’t any guarantee that he would get the chance to come back, despite what George said. Hinks dismissed climbers all the time. And so far he hadn’t done anything to set himself apart.

“What would you do differently?” he asked after a while.

They were both blue shadows in the tent, their skin the pale blue of clean water, their clothes darker, like the depths.

“Everything.”

“No. Really, George. What?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I should have just stayed home. Maybe nothing would have made a difference. Maybe setting out earlier or using the oxygen would have.”

The oxygen
. What if it came down to the oxygen?

“I wanted an attempt with the oxygen. I told Teddy that. But he thought if we just had the one chance it was better to reach the summit without it. That way no one could dispute
it. And it would be a greater glory. Of course, no one would call us unsporting. But to hell with
sporting
. What if it’s the only way?”

“There’s oxygen here, George.” He hadn’t meant to tell anyone that, certainly not George.

“What?” George peered at him. Even in the dim of the tent it was clear something had shifted, a switch had been thrown. The air between them sharpened.

“I brought it up.”

“Why? You weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t in the plan.”

Sandy could feel the flicker of irritation from George, all because he’d done something he hadn’t been told to do. He’d followed orders up to now, and look where it had got him – left behind, nannying the porters and watching one of them die. How could George be so bloody clueless?

“Dammit, I brought the oxygen up just in case. If it had been up here all along maybe Lapkha wouldn’t have died.” His voice was harsh and there was a sharp pain in his throat, but the anger felt good. To hell with it. It was over anyway. “All any of you ever talk about is how hard it is up here. How the altitude gets to us, is slowing us, killing us. So I brought the oxygen in case it would keep someone bloody well alive.”

He panted, short of breath after his outburst. There were small explosions of light in his head.

George didn’t respond.

“Forget it,” Sandy finally said, and moved for the flap of the tent. He didn’t know where he was going to go, but he didn’t want to sit there with George anymore.

“No, wait.” George’s hand was on his arm, insistent. “How much?”

“What?”

“How much did you bring?”

“Six bottles. Two rigs.”

“You’re a genius, Sandy. If Teddy and Somes don’t make it, if the weather holds, then you and I will get one more shot.” George clapped both his hands on his shoulders, leaned forward and kissed him, hard and fast. His chapped lips swelled and then they split as Sandy smiled.

“Sahib! Sahib!”

At the end of the following day there was shouting, and Sandy was out of his tent. George was beside him, a smile fixed to his face. This was it, thought Sandy. If they’d done it, it was all over. If not, then he’d finally get a crack at the summit. But they were back, and they were alive, and that was something. His own smile spread across his face in a ripple of pain.

George hurried on ahead while he grabbed a Thermos of tea and some cups. Were they celebrating? Disappointed? They were huddled close together: Norton, Somervell, and now Odell and George, hugging. They had to be congratulating each other. He raised his hand in greeting as he moved up the slope; there was no response.

Then he realized Norton wasn’t walking on his own. George and Odell weren’t hugging or celebrating, they were holding him up, with Somervell collapsed behind them. The three of them lurched into camp like a dying creature.

He hurried towards them. They didn’t look good. His heart throbbed. Norton and George stumbled past him, Norton’s eyes covered with a piece of cloth torn from his puttees. Snow-blindness. It could have been so much worse.

But the snowblindness might have happened on the way down. After the summit.

He went to Somervell, hauled him to his feet, took some of his weight on his shoulder. When Somervell met his glance, he shook his head. There was a smear of blood near his mouth. Failure was written all over him.

The possibility was physical, a rush of adrenaline in his stomach so that his limbs tingled, and he tasted blood. He stumbled and Somervell grunted in pain.

He and George would have their chance.