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 saw 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.