THE BRIDGE JOLTED AND LURCHED as Will stepped onto it. He started cautiously forward. The narrow footway rocked and swayed with his slightest movement.
Sophie watched him feel his way barefooted along the slippery bamboo, his hands gripping the cables. I mustn’t look, she thought, till he’s safely over — but it was impossible to turn away. She wondered if Will was as fearful of heights as she was.
As he neared the centre of the bridge, she saw it sag alarmingly, the footway canting up under his weight in front and behind him. He stopped for the space of a few breaths, then went on, more slowly. Against all likelihood, the bridge held. Jeannie let out a long shuddering breath as Will reached the other side. He stepped off onto the cliff, turned and waved to them once, then disappeared into the shadows of the trees.
Darius followed, his Lee Enfield rifle strapped across his back. Twice he paused to crouch down, and Sophie guessed that he was fastening some ties that had come undone while Will was crossing.
Sophie was impatient for her turn to come, for the waiting to be over. She could not bear the awful tightness in her chest, the painful thudding of her heart against her ribs. But when the time came, as it soon would, could she summon the courage and the will to step out over the abyss? She would be of no use to Alex if her nerves and her strength failed her, if she grew faint and giddy, as she had done in Kali’s temple, in the Park Street cemetery, in the palace at Gangtok.
In the hands of the kidnappers, Alex would be frightened — but she would also be outraged, and obstinate, and argumentative. Suppose she’d been drugged, or hurt to make her obey, and was unable to walk, and Sophie had to carry her across the bridge? Or worst of all, suppose Sophie had been wrong? Suppose Alex was not there at all?
But now both Will and Darius were standing on the far cliff. Her turn had come. “Go, my brave girl,” she heard Jeannie whisper.
And then she was on the bridge, the whole flimsy structure writhing and pitching and rolling with every step, and there was no turning back. As she clung one-handed to a cable and shone the torch downward to find her footing, she could see the black torrent rushing far beneath her and spume, silvered by moonlight, boiling over the rocks. Breathe in, breathe out. But fear was squeezing her chest like a tight band, making it hard to breathe at all.
For the first part of the way, she inched downward with the slope of the bridge, terrified of losing her footing on the slimy bamboo. But then as she approached the centre, the sagging footway rose steeply in front of her. An image flashed through her mind of passengers clinging in helpless panic to a ship’s slanting deck as the stern thrust skyward. She forced that thought away, then sucked in her breath as a loose strip of bamboo tilted under her tread and one bare foot skidded sideways. The bridge gave a sudden jerk and shuddered beneath her. Nausea welled up in her throat.
Only a few more feet now. Breathe in. Breathe out. Now Will was grasping her outstretched hand and she was stepping onto the solid ground of the cliff top. “Bravo, Miss Pritchard,” Will said. “Most admirably done!”
Teeth chattering from tension, she managed a shaky smile. And heard, from somewhere overhead, a frantic voice calling out her name.
She looked up. A bank of mist had briefly cleared, revealing the monastery gates on their rocky ledge — revealing as well a small figure scrambling down the steep slope below its walls.
A moment later, Alex flung herself into Sophie’s arms, clutching her as though she never meant to let go. The terrible constriction in Sophie’s chest loosened. But there was no time to ask questions, no time to comfort the child, no time to feel joy or simple relief. “Sophie, go now,” Will was saying in an urgent whisper. “Take her back across the bridge while Darius and I stand guard.”
“Alex,” she said, “We have to cross the bridge. You have to stay close to me, and trust me, and not look down. Can you do that?”
From the face pressed hard against Sophie’s shoulder came a muffled “Yes.”
Alex walked just in front of Sophie, a hand on each cable, step by careful step. She did not try to look down into the gorge, as Sophie had done. But part way across, she turned her head to say, “I knew you were coming, Sophie.”
“Alex, don’t talk just now. You mustn’t look round at me, just mind where you are setting your feet. Soon we’ll be safely across, then you can tell us.” The bridge seemed longer, the gorge more terrifying now that Alex’s life lay entirely in Sophie’s hands. Even now a careless misstep, a gust of wind, could plunge them into the dark water that seethed below.
But Alex was moving calmly, purposefully along their narrow pathway, and at last they were safely across, and Jeannie was at the cliff’s edge holding out her arms. Alex said, “I knew you would come for me soon, Mummy. And Sophie too. And I thought if I could just reach you, if I could get away, so I waited till she was asleep.”
“She?” said Jeannie.
“The woman they left to guard me. There was a man too, but he went away and left me alone with her. She wasn’t unkind; she gave me a warm blanket and cooked rice over the fire, and gave me chai to drink, but I knew I had to get away. And I thought, what would Kim have done? So when she went outside for a minute I looked in her pouch and I found a little bottle of some strong-smelling stuff, and I thought that must be what she put on the cloth that she put over my face in the market so that I didn’t remember anything until I woke up in the monastery, and I felt really sick and had to throw up.”
“Ether,” said Jeannie, looking murderous.
“And so I waited tonight till she was asleep , and I poured some on my handkerchief and put it over her face, and I found some rope and I tied her hands and feet together so she couldn’t run after me.” She finished, all in one breath — “I knew I had to hurry because the man who had gone away might come back, and Sophie, I knew you were close by.”
“But how did you know?” Jeannie asked softly, stroking her daughter’s tangled hair.
“Mummy, I just did. It was as though I could hear Sophie talking in my head, and I knew she couldn’t be far away.”
Sophie saw, and wondered at, the look that for a moment flickered across Jeannie’s face.
Now Darius had safely arrived, and soon after that, Will reached the halfway point on the bridge. Even by moonlight, at this distance, Sophie could see his smile, and knew he must share her joy and her giddy sense of relief.
High up on the rocks above the monastery a dark-clad figure suddenly appeared. The man — if it was a man — stood poised there for an instant, seeming to stare down at the bridge, and beyond to the far edge of the gorge where they all stood waiting for Will. Moments later, he had scrambled down the scarp to the cliff’s edge. With one hand he gripped a bridge cable. In the other hand he held a large-bladed knife. As Sophie shouted out a warning, Darius unstrapped his rifle, raised it and fired across the gorge. They saw the man glance up as the bullet whined past his head.
At Sophie’s cry and the crack of Darius’s rifle, Will had looked back. Letting go of one of the cables, he drew his Webley from its holster; but on that swaying footway he had little chance of striking his target.
Darius fired again; again the shot missed. The man with the knife bent to his task.
From the rock-strewn slope above the monastery there came a grinding, grating noise as though some ponderous weight was tearing itself loose from the earth. High up, a huge boulder was shuddering and rocking on its base. Warned, Sophie supposed, by its ominous rumbling, the man with the knife stepped back, but he was too late. The boulder, carrying with it a great mass of gravel and dust and scree, was already thundering down the scarp towards the cliff’s edge.