No one had yet been this high up on the expedition.
After a cold night at Camp VI, George had left with Odell just before dawn. If they kept up a good pace, George wagered it would take them ten hours or so to reach the summit and make it back to camp. Ten hours of straight climbing. He’d had longer days in the Alps, but never at this kind of altitude. And the cold here was unbearable. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to be caught out here, unmoving, at night. Still, their progress had been slower than he would have liked in the pre-dawn glow. Yesterday, on the way up, Odell had challenged him all the way to VI. He liked being pushed and found himself feeling certain they would make it. Him and Odell. He never thought it would be him with Odell, and now, here they were. Teddy was right about leaving yourself open to other possibilities.
But this morning Odell was already waning, slowing before the sun had even crested the peaks to the east. Maybe he’d pushed too hard yesterday, trying to prove himself. He stopped after every step, staring at his feet, inhaling three, four breaths for each step upwards. George was at least making two, even three steps before he had to stop and catch his breath.
“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.
“HOW WAS IT, Somes?”
“Bloody awful.”
Somervell’s voice was a rough scratch, barely audible in the small tent. George handed him a cup of tea and leaned him back into his sleeping bag, propped up against a pack. When Somes was comfortable, George settled back next to Sandy. Sandy’s leg fidgeted against his. “Tell me,” he said.
“I thought we were doing well,” Somes croaked, so it hurt to listen to him. “Made it into the Yellow Band.” Somervell’s hands fluttered close to his throat, touching it under his muffler, stroking it like a pet.
So they had gone higher than he had with Odell. They had done better. If they left now, thought George, he wouldn’t even hold the height record. He’d have nothing.
“I stopped. Coughing. Teddy kept on.” Somervell sipped and winced. “Left there for hours. Only thing kept me awake. My cough. The bloody pain of it. Throat. Ribs. Everywhere.”
Somervell paused for a long time, closed his eyes, his breath evening out and then coming in a gulping gasp. George was going to leave when Somes opened his eyes again and held out his hand. Sandy handed him a lozenge.
“Martha was there. Offered me tea. She wanted me to walk with her. Wanted me to follow her, right off the mountain. Told her, thank you, love, but I’d wait right where I was.”
It was something Somes had said could happen at altitude. “Lack of oxygen makes you hallucinate,” he’d said on the California, at one of his lectures. “It’s your brain shutting down. When that happens, it’s time to descend. Fast.” As George understood it, this was entirely different from his half-remembered conversations with Ruth; Somes had really believed his wife was up there with him. That hadn’t happened to him. Not yet. George imagined those were the only real monsters up there. The ones they took with them.
“Then Teddy was there. Goggles gone. And a glove. He stumbled past me. We didn’t rope up. Should have.” Somervell’s breath was in long, ragged gasps. “The world closed in. Bloody snow. Swirled to a single white pinpoint. Couldn’t see Teddy. I stopped. Don’t know how long. Everything hurt. Ribs. Head. Lungs. My throat. Like someone stabbing me in the throat. Couldn’t breathe. I knew. I was going to die there.”
George couldn’t imagine the horror of that. Of dying alone. Of dying and having no one even know it had happened.
“Tried to breathe. Wished I had a knife to cut my own throat. Emergency. Tracheotomy. Then coughed and coughed. I was being ripped apart. I coughed it up. Blood on the snow. And something fleshy. The whole bloody lining of my throat.”
Somervell slipped a stained cloth from his pocket, unwrapped a lump of flesh like a skinned animal, and poked at it with his surgeon’s fingers. “It was frostbitten,” he said. “You can see. Here, here.”
There was bile at the back of his own throat; he wanted to spit.
“Felt better after.” Somes smiled a little, then folded the flesh back into his pocket.
George wanted to let Somes rest, but first he had to know what had happened. “And Teddy?”
“Couldn’t see this morning. Didn’t tell me. Tried to melt snow first. Almost set his sleeve on fire. Didn’t want me to know. Said he felt stupid.” Somes shook his head. “I roped him up, led him down. Slowly. And here we are.”
“Teddy will need. Few days to rest. Then we’ll go home.”
“I’ll go talk to him.”
“Let him rest, George.”
“You should be resting too. I’ll just check on him, bring him some soup.”
“You go, George,” Sandy said. “I’ll stay with Somes.”
George knelt in front of Teddy and handed him the soup Sandy had made. A weak beef broth with chunks of some dried meat floating in it, flecks of something unnameable in an oily sheen. It made him want to retch, but Teddy couldn’t see it. A damp cloth was tied over his eyes and he moaned softly every so often, seeming to forget that he was not alone. George couldn’t bring himself to look directly at him, even though he knew Teddy couldn’t see him.
What if Teddy said no? Maybe he should. Maybe it was a terrible idea. Teddy might think enough had already been risked for the mountain, enough had been lost. After all, he and Somes had barely made it back to Camp IV alive.
Teddy slurped noisily at his soup before groping for a flat spot near his knee to set it down on. With his other hand he reached out towards George, his fingers landing on his cheek.
“George,” Teddy said, “how’s Somes?”
Teddy’s fingers moved over his features, into his hair, along his jawline, before cupping the back of his head. Teddy would die up here without them now. Leaving him would be a death sentence. He’d starve without food, or could take a false step and tumble down the mountain.
Maybe he shouldn’t be thinking about the summit. Maybe he should stay put here with Teddy, for just a day or two, keep everyone safe. Then they’d go home.
“Fine. He’s fine. Worried about you.”
“Worried that I’m a bloody idiot.” Teddy dropped his hands. His breath heaved out of him in a cough. When he finished he said, “Home, I guess, eh, old man? Once I can see at any rate. She’s beat us fair and square.” There was a long silence. He didn’t know what to say. Teddy went on. “I think I’m done, George. With these mountains. Give me the Lake District and the Alps. That’ll be enough for me. You?” Teddy tilted his head as though he was looking at him.
“No.” He didn’t mean it to sound so abrupt.
“You’ll come back? A fourth time?”
“No, Teddy. I can’t come back here.” He laid it out carefully. “I want to make another push.”
“George, it’s over. We’ve thrown everything we have at her. We’ve tried.”
“We haven’t tried the oxygen.”
“It doesn’t matter. The oxygen isn’t in place.”
“Sandy brought up the oxygen. I want a chance with it.” His voice was speeding on ahead of him. “We can’t move down yet, Teddy. Not with your eyes. We’re stuck here for at least another day, maybe two, until you’re capable of negotiating the Col and the Icefall. We have to use the time we have left. We can’t just sit here while the summit is up there waiting to be claimed.” He could hear the pleading in his voice and tried to lighten his tone. “I’ll be back before you’re ready to descend.”
“Sandy brought the oxygen up? Who ordered him to do that?”
“No one. He was thinking ahead. Showed initiative. There’s enough for a final push.”
“George, it doesn’t matter. About the oxygen. It’s not a good idea. There isn’t time. The weather’s going to close in on us. The monsoon is on its way whether you like it or not.”
“We just need three days. That’s it. The monsoon isn’t a definitive indicator of how much time we have, you know that. The weather is holding. We have the time.”
“Sandy’s too young.” Teddy’s tone was measured. Careful. He leaned his head back and stared blindly. George had heard this tone before. Teddy was weighing the arguments, talking it out. He might be persuaded. “Too inexperienced, we already decided that. You and I.”
“But he’s fresh. Everyone else has already been beaten back.”
“Including you.”
“I can do this.” A beat. “I have to do this.”
“That won’t cut it, George. You want to risk your life? Sandy’s? I need more.”
“Because I can do it.” The words came quickly. “You know that and I know that. Let me do it and we’ll all go home heroes. All of us.”
“Pass me some water?” He handed Teddy his canteen. Listened to him swallow it down. “And you think Sandy can do it?”
“I think Sandy doesn’t know that he can’t. He hasn’t been beaten yet.”
“He’ll follow you anywhere, George. He’ll push himself to keep up with you. To not let you down.” Teddy was waiting for him to say something, but he remained silent, determined to wait him out. “You’ll be responsible for him. He won’t turn back. You’ll have to do it.”
“I know. I will.”
“I’m asking you not to go, George. Just wait it out and we’ll all go home. I’m asking you.”
“But you’re not ordering me.”
“No.”
“If you’re ordering me, I won’t go.” Neither of them wanted to concede. “But if there’s the slightest chance, Teddy, I’m taking it.”
Teddy nodded in the dim tent and removed the cloth from his eyes. He squinted at him and then winced. Teddy’s sharp intake of breath pained him.
He took the bandage from Teddy and replaced it gently. “I have to.”
There was a lull between them. George kept still, not wanting to hurry Teddy. He was considering it. He had to be considering it.
“You and Sandy then,” Teddy eventually said. “One more chance. Take Odell to Five. Someone to carry the gas partway up for you. Then you and Sandy use the oxygen to continue on to Six.” Teddy shook his head again. “Three days, George, and then we go. We are all on our way back to Base Camp. No more delays. Three days.”
Three days. Ascension Day.