Ascent

by Roland Smith

  Sixteen

  A Buddhist monk stepped out of the dark forest, his saffron-colored robe glowing in the dim light of the campfire. I nearly jumped out of my boots and dropped my journal into the fire, retrieving it a second before it ignited.

  Zopa laughed.

  Seeing him standing there was as likely as seeing Lwin’s ghost or the tiger.

  “Are your words burnt?”

  I looked down at my journal. It was a little singed, but intact.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Is there rice?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  He pulled a begging bowl and a pair of chopsticks out of his robe. “Good. I am hungry. Tea?”

  There was little use in pushing Zopa for information at this point. He would tell me what he wanted me to know when he wanted me to know it. I put a pot of water on the fire for tea and asked if he wanted his rice warmed. He did. As I set the rice pot over the flames, he sat down in one of Nick’s camp chairs and pointed at our tents. “From the Pamirs?”

  I nodded.

  “Good tents.”

  At the monastery in Kathmandu, he kept his head shaved, but there was a couple weeks of growth now, which meant he hadn’t been at the monastery in a while. Where had he come from? Why was he here? How did he find me?

  I prodded the fire with a stick as the rice warmed. When it was ready, I filled his bowl and handed it to him, then made the tea while he ate. As he sipped his tea, he pointed at the tablet next to my journal.

  “The Japanese?”

  “Yes. On loan. How did you know?”

  “The Japanese always have the best electronics. I heard on my way here that they had a bad climb on Hkakabo Razi.” He picked up the tablet. “Show me how this works.”

  I showed him, but it was clear that he already knew how this worked by the way he expertly flipped through photos and watched the short videos.

  Josh described Zopa as cagey. He said that you never knew what his real motivation was for doing something. Zopa is a mystery, which is why I’m so fond of him. I decided to be mysterious too by not asking him any questions about his shocking appearance. I wanted to see how that felt.

  After he finished flipping through the images, he got up from the chair and stretched. “I am very tired. I will sleep in Ethan’s tent.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t ask him how he knew Ethan wasn’t inside the tent. He’d let me know soon enough. I had pitched the tent in case Ethan came back in the middle of the night. Zopa knew it was Ethan’s tent because he had an identical one. It was part of the Plank gear from the Pamirs. All the support staff had been given yellow gear to distinguish them from the climbers. I wondered what Zopa had done with his expensive yellow gear, but I didn’t ask. He probably sold it in Kathmandu and gave the money to the monastery. When he got to Ethan’s tent, he turned and gave me a little wave and a smile.

  The heat inside my tent woke me. I looked at my watch groggily.

  Crap!

  It was 10:40. I sat up, quickly dressed, and crawled out. Nick and the porters were gone. So were the Japanese. Alessia was sitting on her pack reading a book near the fire. She smiled.

  “Sleepyhead.”

  I attempted to smooth down my sweaty tent hair. “When did Hiro leave?”

  “Hours ago.”

  “I need to give back his—”

  “I gave it back to him,” Alessia said. “You did not even stir when I took it from your tent.”

  I poured myself a cup of tea. “What are you reading?”

  She held the book up. “Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.”

  “So, that’s where you got the name for the village.”

  “Yes, I do love reading science fiction.”

  I did too. Her copy was mildewed and bloated. She was going to have to finish it soon before it disintegrated. I’d have to wait until I got home to read it.

  “What time did Ethan get back?” Alessia asked.

  “He’s back?” I looked around camp.

  “In his tent,” Alessia said. “Snoring.”

  “Ethan doesn’t snore.”

  Zopa wasn’t snoring either. Not anymore anyway. He crawled out of his tent.

  Alessia screamed in delight and surprise.

  Seventeen

  “Ethan was dressed like a shrub,” Zopa said. “I saw him on the other side of the bridge.”

  “He is guarding the bridge so it does not get cut down,” Alessia said.

  I told him about our troubles with Lwin as we climbed the steep trail.

  “So,” he said, “Ethan is a troll guarding a bridge from a rock-throwing ghost.”

  “Ball bearings, and they were real enough,” I said, feeling a twinge of pain in my shoulder.

  “Tell me about the botanist.”

  This explanation lasted all the way to the top of the hill, where we were greeted by a magnificent view of Hkakabo Razi. Nick had sent the porters on ahead and was talking to three men heading south. When the men saw Zopa, they dropped their heavy loads and bowed. Zopa responded by pulling his begging bowl out of his robe. The men quickly filled the bowl with rice and dried fish. Zopa gave them a blessing, and the men left with smiles on their faces.

  “We have food,” Alessia said.

  “Yes,” Zopa agreed. “But giving me food and receiving my blessing gave them confidence and a feeling of good luck, which is worth more than a few grains of rice and dried fish.”

  I wondered if the people in New York dropping coins into my baseball hat felt the same way.

  Zopa turned to Nick. “Dr. Freestone, thank you for looking after my friends.”

  While Nick and Alessia talked to Zopa, I grabbed my binoculars and climbed a tree to get a better look at Hkakabo Razi. The mountain was cloudless. Through my binoculars, it looked like I could reach out and grab a handful of snow from the peak. It would have been a perfect day for a summit attempt, but the things I could reach with my eyes were several days away from my feet. What we needed to do when we got there was to climb fast and hope we didn’t get bogged down by bad weather and route mistakes like Hiro and his team.

  I heard shouting from below. I climbed around to the south side of the tree. Major Thakin and three soldiers with pointed rifles had arrived. Nick and Alessia had their hands in the air. Zopa did not. He was eating his rice from the bowl while the major shouted. I scrambled down the tree.

  “Where is the other one!” the major shouted at me as I walked up.

  “Ethan? He’s up ahead at the next bridge.”

  “Where is Lwin?”

  “I have no idea. You said he was dead.”

  “He is not dead! The finger belongs to another murdered by Lwin.”

  Or murdered by Lwin’s elephant, I thought. I told him about the slingshot attacks and Ethan maybe seeing Lwin at camp.

  “Why would Lwin follow you? Why would he throw rocks?”

  “That’s what Ethan is trying to find out.”

  Major Thakin was not as crisp and clean as he had been during our first encounter. He and his men looked pretty beat-up. Their fatigues were torn, their eyes were bloodshot, and their faces and hands were covered with insect bites and scratches.

  “And your friend is at the next bridge?” the major asked, looking wearily down the trail to the north.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Zopa finished his rice, wiped the bowl clean, and stowed it inside his robe.

  “And who are you?” the major asked.

  Instead of answering, Zopa pulled a large cloth wallet out of his robe and handed it to Major Thakin. What else did he have stowed inside his robe? It appeared to be a bottomless Buddhist crevasse. The major sorted through the papers, checking them carefully. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were bogus. He had gotten Sun-jo into Tibet with forged papers on our way to climb the north side of Everest.

  “These do not say what you are doing here.”

  “Pilgrimage.”

  “
To where?”

  Zopa shrugged.

  “What direction are you heading?”

  Major Thakin was being more deferential to Zopa than he had been to us. Probably because Zopa is a Buddhist monk and nearly ninety percent of Burmans are practicing Buddhists.

  “North.”

  The major pointed at us. “Do you know these people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you meet them?”

  “Here.”

  “I mean before.”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “Dr. Freestone does not have an Afghanistan visa in his passport.”

  “That’s because I have never been to Afghanistan,” Nick said impatiently, putting his arms down. “Interrogating us is not getting you any closer to Lwin Mahn. I want to be on the other side of this valley and across the bridge before nightfall. You can talk to us while we walk.”

  It looked like the major was going to object, but instead he said something to his men, who started down the hill to the north. I put my pack on and started after them. I was worried about Ethan and eager to get to the mountain. Fifteen minutes down the trail, I heard Alessia calling me. I had just passed the soldiers, who didn’t seem to care. One of them had even smiled at me as I squeezed by them on the narrow trail. I felt guilty for ditching Alessia, but if I stopped and waited for her, the soldiers would catch up to me. I compromised by slowing down, which worked. She was able to slip past the soldiers.

  “You are in a rush?” she asked cheerfully.

  “Sorry. I wanted to get moving. There have been too many delays.”

  “You saw the mountain from the tree.”

  I grinned. “Yeah. It looked close. But a nineteen-thousand-foot mountain always looks close from a distance. And I’m worried about Ethan.”

  “And Zopa?”

  Perceptive, kind, cheerful Alessia. I kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was salty.

  “I am worried about Zopa,” I admitted. “I love the guy, and I’m happy to see him, but something is up. It’s not a coincidence, and he’s not on a pilgrimage. I wish he’d tell me why he’s here.”

  “But he will not.”

  “Not yet, anyway.”

  “He is talking now.”

  I looked back. We were way ahead of the soldiers, and beyond them I couldn’t see anyone.

  “He is talking to Major Thakin. When I left them, they were laughing.”

  It was hard to picture the major laughing. “What were they saying?”

  “Their Burmese was too fast for me. Did you know that Zopa spoke Burmese?”

  I shook my head. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Zopa was fluent in Martian. I was tempted to wait for Zopa and the major so Alessia could eavesdrop again, but my concern for Ethan kept me speeding down the trail.

  “What did you learn from Hiro’s photos?” Alessia asked.

  I explained as we walked down the steep trail. At the bottom we found a short footbridge. We filled our water bottles and talked about waiting for the others, but decided to push on. There were more switchbacks, but we were able to skip a few that had narrow shortcuts straight uphill. They were slick with mud and difficult to negotiate, but they saved us a lot of time. We topped the hill drenched in sweat and out of breath. A short walk downhill led us to the final suspension bridge, which was still intact, but there was no sign of Ethan.

  “He would be on the other side, would he not?” Alessia said.

  The bridge was the highest we had encountered, and twice as long as the bridge we had helped to repair. We started across, moving slowly to minimize the sway, Alessia in the lead. Halfway across, Alessia stopped to look down at the raging river. I kept my eyes on the far side of the bridge, expecting Ethan to appear and greet us with his crooked grin. But he didn’t show, and I got one of those Zopa feelings that something wasn’t right.

  I told Alessia that we needed to hurry and squeezed past her.

  “What is wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  I ignored the sway as I rushed up the slippery planks. Ten feet from the end, I heard a rhythmic thumping sound and knew exactly what it was. I’d heard the same sound from the men working in the forest on the downed bridge. I shrugged out of my pack as I ran toward the anchor trees fifty feet up the hill. I had to fight my way through the foliage to reach the massive trunks. Lwin, or someone, had been there hacking away at the ropes. But where was he now? And where was Ethan? One of the ropes was cut almost all the way through, but there were several anchor ropes. The bridge was in no danger of collapsing unless the ropes on the other side had already been cut. I started over to the second tree, then stopped. If it was Lwin who had cut the rope, and I had little doubt it was, he was probably targeting me with his slingshot.

  Or Alessia.

  I ran back the way I had come.

  Alessia was standing near the bridge. Her backpack was on the ground at her feet near my pack. Lwin was behind her, gripping her left arm. With his right hand, he was holding his panga to her neck.

  Eighteen

  “Do not come closer, Peak,” Alessia said, pretty calmly considering that she had a maniac holding a knife to her throat.

  I was standing thirty feet away from them, and I was anything but calm. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. This was all my fault. I shouldn’t have taken the shortcuts. I should have stuck close to the soldiers. They wouldn’t arrive for at least an hour. Maybe longer. I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to slow my heart. It didn’t work.

  Lwin said something into Alessia’s ear.

  “He wants you to cut the bridge down,” she said.

  This was the time for Ethan to show up and save the day like he had done in the Pamirs. He was good at this. But if he was nearby, why hadn’t he stopped Lwin when he started to slice the rope?

  “I’ll need his knife,” I said.

  Alessia actually smiled. A little. “I do not think he will give it to you.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he will really hurt you?”

  “He might try.”

  “I’ll have to cut the bridge.”

  Lwin shouted something and pushed the knife closer to her throat.

  “He does not like our talking.”

  “Tell him that I need to get my hatchet out of my pack.”

  Alessia translated. Lwin backed away from the packs, the knife still at her throat. I walked slowly over, bent down, and unzipped a side pocket. As I pulled the hatchet out, I glanced at Lwin’s tattered longyi. It was no longer bright and gaudy, but the worst thing was his feet. He was wearing Ethan’s boots.

  I stood up, shaken. “Did you see that he’s wear—”

  “Yes,” Alessia said. “Ethan’s hiking boots. I am . . . going to—”

  Lwin started shouting again. I’m not sure what happened next, because it happened so fast. Lwin came flying over the top of Alessia’s head. There was a loud snap, like a dry stick being broken, and then an unconscious Lwin was lying on the ground and Alessia was holding his panga to his neck. His nose and lip were bleeding. His two orange betel-nut-stained front teeth were missing.

  “We will need something to tie him,” Alessia said calmly.

  I pulled some cord out of my pack. We tied his hands behind his back and bound his legs.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Ethan taught me.” She pulled Ethan’s boots off Lwin’s dirty feet. “I would have done it sooner, but we were standing too close to the edge. I did not want him to fall, or pull me over the edge with him. Before you came out of the forest, he told me that he was going to take me away with him.”

  I looked down at Lwin. His hand was twisted at an unnatural angle.

  “I broke his hand. And probably his foot as well.”

  There was a purple bruise on his foot, but it was hard to see through the grime.

  “We must find Ethan.”

  We tied Lwin to a tre
e, then split up and started searching. Ethan was either badly injured or dead. There was no other way Lwin could have gotten his boots. It must have happened just before we got there, otherwise Lwin would have already had the bridge down. How had Lwin gotten the drop on someone like Ethan? I stuck close to the anchor trees, thinking that Ethan would not have risked getting too far away from them. I called out his name over and over again and heard Alessia shouting his name in the distance. An hour passed. I was sick with dread.

  “Hey.”

  I froze.

  “Over here.”

  I followed the sound. Ethan was lying on the ground near a tree. If he hadn’t said something, I would have walked right by. I might have even stepped on him. He blended in perfectly with the ground he was lying on.

  He sat up and vomited. “Wow. Nasty. I must have fallen and hit my head on a tree.”

  “Maybe you should lie back down.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  I’d taken first aid for years. Something Mom had insisted on. Ethan had a concussion, and he had not fallen. There was dried blood on the side of his head and a lump the size of a chicken egg. He hadn’t hit his head on a tree. Lwin had hit him with a projectile. I held his head and laid him back down.

  “Just rest for a while. Take it easy.”

  I called out for Alessia.

  “Alessia’s here?” Ethan asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “She shouldn’t be out here alone. Lwin is around here somewhere.”

  “I know.” I told him what Alessia had done.

  “I told you she could kick your ass. It’s weird. I feel like my feet are bare.”

  “That’s because they are.”

  “I’m going to sit up.”

  “Not yet.” I put my hand on his chest. “Lwin got you with his slingshot. He took your boots.”

  “No way.”

  “Yep. Just lie still.”

  He closed his eyes and appeared to drift off. Alessia came up behind me.

  “He is alive?”

  “Yes. But I don’t like his looks. He’s cold, and what skin I can see through the greasepaint is pale. He might be in shock. You stay with him. I’m going to get my first aid kit and an emergency blanket. Don’t let him sit up.”