Exiles (26 page)

But Bidur refused to go on. He unslung his rifle, leaned it against the cliff, and turned away from them to piss. Ramesh immediately raised his rifle and fired. Bidur’s brains and blood spattered the rocks behind him, and his body collapsed to the ground.

Peter cried out in terror. He looked at Ramesh, who put his rifle down and turned toward Devi. She came to him and they embraced, as she repeated the word,
daju, daju
. Peter knew this term: older brother. And Ramesh, he had heard that name. It belonged to Sangita’s stolen son.

Devi turned to Peter, tears in her eyes. “This is why I wanted her to come,” she said. “We have planned this from the beginning, when we found each other again.”

“For Christ’s sake, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I tried, but we were never alone! You think Adhiraj would leave us in a crowded place like that without a single spy?”

Peter felt strength begin to pour into him. “We’ve got to go back for her.”

“No,” said Devi. “They will shoot us all for real then. As things are, she will live. We’ll find another way.”

“We can’t just leave her; she’s sick!”

“They need her for propaganda,” Devi said. “They will take care of her.”

Peter tried to clear his head. He could barely believe all of them were still alive.

“I would not suggest this if there were some other way,” Devi said. “But twice now you have misjudged and put her in danger. Let me decide this time.”

Her eyes were calm and firm. She knew this territory, and Peter didn’t. Ramesh stood beside her.

Peter bowed his head. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

Ramesh dragged Bidur’s body across the stream. Peter and Devi followed; they tied a couple of big rocks to the body and let it go. It sank into the eddy, which was opaque with glacial silt, and vanished.

“Where do we go, if we don’t go back?” Peter asked.

“They will miss us soon,” Devi said. “We have to get as far away from here as we can.”

The trail was used mainly by goats and their sure-footed herders, and it snaked its way upward along the sheer face of the canyon wall. Frequently it shrank to a faint path no wider than a foot, with overhanging rock to which they clung with their hands as they traversed along sideways.

By early afternoon they had crossed over the next ridge and started down into the adjoining valley. Peter’s lungs burned, but at least the floating sparks had left his vision. After thirty or forty minutes they stopped by a stream to rest and refill Ramesh’s canteen. They were drinking so much, with the exertion and the altitude, that they emptied it with each ridge crossing. Peter figured they were picking up terrifying organisms from the water, but until now he hadn’t thought they’d live long enough for it to matter.

Ramesh’s English was halting. He’d studied as a boy but had had no occasion to use it since he’d been press-ganged by the guerrillas at sixteen. He and Devi spoke together in Nepali, then Devi translated if it was something she thought Peter should know.

Ramesh wasn’t familiar with this part of the country, though; he usually just went up- or downriver to small villages. They decided
to work their way southeast, across passes and down into valleys, in an effort to get to Pokhara, which was fifty or sixty miles away. Ramesh said that by now the guerrillas would have realized something was wrong and sent pursuers. They were likely to be the sons of local herders; they would know the trails, and they would be well provisioned and move quickly. If they came across a ridge and found the three escapees exposed on the cliff-side trail across the canyon, they would shoot them down.

The skies were clear, and there would be a three-quarter moon. They decided to try to stay awake, and since it would be too dangerous to make a fire even if they had the means, they would keep moving all night.

They followed the goat trail down into the canyon. The river was bigger than the first two they had crossed, a good thirty yards wide, rocky and cold. They scouted upstream and down until they found the safest-looking ford, then cut staffs with Ramesh’s knife and picked their way across. It was waist-deep in the center, and the current was so strong it nearly took Peter’s legs right out from under him.

By the time they reached the other side it was late afternoon, and they were chilled to the bone. Sunset would come early and fast behind the peaks. They figured if they could top the next ridge and make their way by moonlight they’d have a decent enough lead when morning came that they might be able to stop and sleep a couple of hours after the day warmed up. The trail was a little wider here, sometimes two or three feet across, and it seemed like a highway after the terrain they’d just come through. They made the ridge by what Peter figured was eight or nine o’clock. It was a high pass, and they looked back over the day’s route, probably twenty miles by land but only about five as the crow flies. Two ridges back they saw tiny bobbing lights, so distant they appeared to be fireflies.

“Flashlights,” Peter said. “Four of them.”

“Five,” said Ramesh, and Peter saw that he was right.

Ramesh said that there would be at least two guerrillas for
every light, so Adhiraj had probably sent ten or twelve guys after them.

“They’re on the same trail we’re on?” Peter asked, and Ramesh nodded. “How long before they get to where we are now?”

Ramesh figured that if the pursuers kept moving, they’d catch up by sunrise. There had been one particularly tricky stretch that he wasn’t sure they’d be able to do at night, though, even with lights.

“If it stops them, they will have to go back to the river and camp,” Devi said. “It may give us time.”

They pressed on, down and up, across the ridge, down and up again. Fording the rivers was dangerous, partly because the moon was blocked by the ridges and the canyon bottoms were pitch-dark.

By dawn Peter was staggering with exhaustion, and even Devi and Ramesh looked ready to drop, so they found a boulder patch to conceal themselves and lay down in the sun to dry out and sleep.

It was nearly midday when Peter stirred awake. Devi and Ramesh still lay curled in the sun at the base of the boulders, Devi snoring softly. Peter tried to sit up and was immobilized by stabbing pain from his hips and knees. It felt like hot cotton had been glued to the inside of his throat.

He rolled to his side and pushed himself up on one arm, which set off a heartbeat-driven hammer at the base of his skull. Altitude. The air was thin and dry. Everything was too bright. He stretched out a foot and jammed it into the sole of Devi’s boot. She moaned. He did it again, and she flopped an arm. She opened an eye and rolled onto her back, then sat up.

“What time is it?”

She shook Ramesh until he awakened. When he realized how late it was, he swore in Nepali, then started gathering his things. A few minutes later they were walking again.

Peter didn’t remember ever being so hungry. He didn’t walk so much as lurch from one leg to the next, swinging his weight forward like a sack of meat in a kind of staggering dance. Every step
electrified a hot cable of pain that ran from his foot to his knee, then to his hip. The headache grew worse.

They crossed another river and refilled the canteen. After a half hour, walking up the other side of the canyon, they came to a landslide. Peter had seen it as they descended the opposite side but hoped it wouldn’t be too bad.

It was. The trail had been obliterated for a hundred yards, and they faced a sheer wall. Peter looked around, and then he looked up.

“If we’re going to get out of here, we’ve got to go over the top,” he said. He could barely believe he was suggesting this, but he didn’t see any other way.

“How?” Devi asked, incredulous.

“I’ll show you,” he said, bending over to get his breath.

Devi and Ramesh gazed up at the canyon wall, then looked back at Peter as if he were crazy. He had never wanted to climb again, certainly not without a rope, but he figured this was maybe a 5.6 pitch—easy in rock shoes with their sticky rubber soles, tricky but not impossible without them.

“This is going to be hard,” he said, “but they may give up here, or spend a lot of time backtracking to find a way around.”

They wouldn’t be able to climb with the rifles, so Ramesh and Devi heaved them out over the cliff; they turned end over end as they fell, then splashed into the river and disappeared.

Peter scanned the rock face, looking for the easiest routes, even if they were indirect and took longer to climb. He started out and showed them how to do it, keeping their weight on their feet, letting their arms go straight as they gripped with their fingers so they could dead hang—hold their weight with their bones and tendons instead of exhausting their arm muscles.

He started up a fairly easy crack, with good foot placement and large grips—“buckets”—for his hands, and followed it to a small ledge about thirty feet above the trail. They watched how he did it and followed him up. There, they rested briefly in the shade.

“We’re going to have to ration the water,” Peter said, panting. “Take as little as you think you can get by with.” He knew but did
not say that if they got stuck halfway up, trapped by an overhang or a smooth slab beyond their skills, there was no way they’d be able to downclimb without falling or getting shot. It was cool here, but he’d started to sweat, considering the many ways this could go bad. He had failed at everything, and somehow, miraculously, he was still alive; but he knew he absolutely could not afford to fail at this.

The crack disappeared into an open face with big granite nubbins sticking out of it, like a classic gym route. Peter showed the other two how to move up it, climbing the nubbins almost like a ladder, shifting the weight from foot to hand to foot, sort of flowing up the rock. He was trying to hide his anxiety, but he kept reliving that barn-door swing, and he had to measure his breath to stay calm. His palms were sweating, and he wished he had some climber’s chalk to dry them out. He tried to get a little dust on his hands whenever there was a ledge, and told the others to do the same. He kept his eyes on the rock ahead and didn’t look down.

They worked their way up until they got to another crack—a big, capacious crack that went diagonally up the face for forty or fifty feet, past where Peter could see. He could tell that Devi was starting to struggle.

“You’re using your arms too much,” he told her. “Legs, legs, legs.”

“I’m trying,” she said, but she was out of breath with the effort.

He showed her how to slide an open hand sideways into the crack, then make a fist and wedge it in there. “You can lie back into it, let it take your weight, while you move from foothold to foothold,” he said. “Then you relax the fist, pull out your hand, and jam it in a little higher up.”

When they got to the next ledge they rested again. Ramesh was agile and surprisingly strong, but the exertion was taxing him. Devi’s forearms were so pumped she could barely make a fist anymore. For the first time, Peter was glad Alex wasn’t with them; she would have been too weak to climb, and anyway, she probably had a better chance of surviving than they did at this point.

“How much farther?” Devi asked.

“I think we’re about halfway. Maybe another hundred, hundred and fifty feet.”

They were at the foot of a greasy slab cut through with strata of loose, crumbly stone—chossy rock, in climber’s lingo. Peter traversed out to try to find a route. There was nothing to the right; he ran out of footholds after about ten feet and had to go back to the ledge. The other direction was a little better, but he didn’t want to go too far up because he didn’t think he’d be able to downclimb back to the ledge. He wanted water, food, rock shoes, and some easy holds, and he didn’t have any of them. He was responsible for two other lives, they were exposed on a blank face, night was coming, and he was starting to shake from dehydration and hunger and fear.

He climbed back down to the ledge. “We’ll split the last of the water,” he said, his voice hoarse. Devi leaned against the wall, trying futilely to knead some blood through her swollen forearms.