by Jeff Long
The platform bucked. It shook them.
The side tubes buckled. Fabric ripped. Like a wild beast, the abyss fell upon them.
A hole opened. Hugh’s legs were sucked right through the floor. He plunged to his waist and would have kept going if not for the rope hitched to his harness. He almost bellowed his fear, but trapped it all inside.
Blind to the others’ fate, he felt for slings and pulled. But gravity—or hands, he’d swear—snatched at his ankles. That fast, it had him, like talons closing. The awful weight grappled higher, climbing on him, hauling at his legs. The lizard king. This couldn’t be real. It crawled to his thighs. It hung from him.
He wanted to yell and kick. To see and at the same time go on not seeing. It was like the moment before you fall. You know it’s coming. You hold on. You don’t give in.
He groped for higher slings. No one made a sound. For all he knew, they’d dropped through the platform and were being carried off into the night. The slings squeaked. Hugh weighed a ton.
He felt fingers fumbling at his harness. It was untying him from the wall. What in God’s name?
Augustine saved them. “Andie?” he called.
That suddenly the assault ended. The weight vanished from his legs. Hugh felt himself lifted by his harness, and it was Cuba pulling him back onto the platform. They had been her fingers. Hugh thrust his back against the stone.
“Andie?” Augustine said again.
“Quiet,” said Hugh.
“Is she leaving?”
“Let her go.”
“Andie?”
The platform quit swaying. No one moved. Without a light, there was no way to judge the damage. Hugh could feel cool air pouring up through the floor. It was torn, the membrane between their slight rectangle of a world and all that yawned below them. He could have felt with his fingers for the destruction. But there was nothing they could do about it in the darkness, and he didn’t dare put his hands into the abyss. He didn’t want to know what had happened to them, or might yet.
They sat there. Side by side in the pitch-black, they separated into animal solitude. Cuba’s shoulder became no different from the rock against his back. The tent walls ceased to exist in his mind. Except for El Cap, there was only the void.
It seemed the night would never end.
THIRTY-TWO
Hugh dreamed about waterfalls, and then he woke and the water was real. He could hear it outside the tent. He opened his eyes, and the tent wall was luminous and red as cherries. He touched it, doubting, but the nylon was warm. The sun had come.
To his right, Cuba and Augustine sat crumpled against their knees and each other, perhaps drawn close by old memories. While the three of them slept, dawn had crept down the wall and under the roof. The spangles of hoarfrost had melted. His headache was gone. It was as if last night had never occurred.
Slowly he discovered the damage. They were crowded together so tightly, he didn’t see the bent tubing at first. The tent wall had sagged onto their heads. He pushed aside the sleeping bag and opened his knees, and the floor lay ripped from side to side. A half mile of barrens emptied below.
She was gone. Hugh looked twice. His sleeping bag—her shroud—hung vacant. His neat crisscross of ropes was now just a tangle. Andie had fled.
“Wake up,” he said to them.
The water was loud.
Light kept flickering on the tent wall. Colors played on the stone below. With blackened fingernails, Hugh fiddled open the knots. He snatched the tent from his head, and met pure glory. He gasped.
They had been transported to the inside of a rainbow.
Runoff poured from the roof’s outer rim, covering the Eye. It sheeted off in a great, long river that reached to the ground. As the currents thinned and thickened, the rainbow rippled.
Hugh finished stripping the makeshift tent from the guy lines, and the membrane floated down, then was snatched away by the waterfall. Augustine held one hand to his eyes. The colors danced on Cuba’s cheekbones and black hair.
They stared dumbstruck for a minute. Hints of paradise played through the water, a vision of grand pinnacles and forested gullies and the golden sun. The rainbow was slippery. It swam back and forth, up and down. Spray rustled the prayer flags, colors upon colors. Ice thundered on the valley floor.
In a lifetime of exploring, Hugh had always had to seek out the world’s beauty. Never had it come to him like this. He took that back. There had been one other time, a different beauty. Decades ago, one rainy afternoon in Yosemite Lodge, he had looked up from his mapmaking and found Annie standing before him. The rainbow reminded him of that.
“What are we waiting for?” Hugh said.
Beauty did not suffer human contact for very long. No sooner did you embrace it than the illusion withered. One could love too much. He’d learned that. Better by far to walk on.
Augustine peeled away the sleeping bag. Through the gash in the floor, he saw the body missing. “Andie?” he said. He pawed at the chasm.
“She’s gone,” Hugh said.
“That can’t be,” said Augustine. “Her knots were tight. I tied them.”
“She’s gone,” Hugh repeated. He had no idea what had happened last night. It was over, that was the important thing.
“I would have taken her up,” Augustine protested.
“We’ll go faster this way. This is what she wanted.”
“They’ll come for us now,” Augustine said. His feet were dead white. Sacrifices. Pass through the underworld, even stand still among the souls, and you always lost some part of yourself, flesh or spirit. Hugh knew. Walk on.
“They won’t risk it this morning, not with the ice still coming off,” Hugh said. “By the time it stops, we’ll be standing on top.”
To his relief, Cuba agreed. “It’s almost finished.” She looked at peace. No more goblins. Her lips had healed, no more beads of blood. The hollows in her cheeks had filled out. Her eyes were bright. They sparkled at him.
In that moment, Hugh almost loved her. The feeling surged through him, crazy emotions, buried emotions. Here, perhaps, was the woman to take Annie’s place. He could not wait to cut away his gloves of tape and clean off the blood and smoke and sweat, and to see Cuba bathed and whole.
What would she look like in a dress? Did she wear her hair in braids? How tall was she? He’d never stood beside her. He barely knew her. They’d met in shadow, in ruins, at the ends of the earth. What might they be like out under the sun?
She was convinced she had seduced him into joining her, and that was not a bad beginning. He was twice her age, older even. It didn’t have to be forever. Something had started between them up here, a connection. She was wounded. He could heal her.
They could travel to Nanda Devi if she pleased, and to Baffin Island, and the Transantarctic Mountains. Why not? He had the money. He could whisk her away into his world, into the dunes, off to Tibet and Paris and castles along the Croatian coast and Crusader fortresses in Syria, across oceans, under the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. And if it worked. He paused. If it worked, they could make a home somewhere, anywhere. She might even bear him children who would carry his name.
His heart kept on filling up with her. He couldn’t explain it. They’d survived. He’d saved her from death. The sun was out. They belonged together, her hand—with that slave amulet inked from her wrist to her finger—in his hand.
“Can you climb?” he asked her. He didn’t wait for an answer. “You have to make the summit first. Not me. Not Augustine. This belongs to you.”
She watched him with big, inscrutable eyes. Green as olives, they were solemn eyes, and yet radiant with a dot of sun at the center of each. Did she understand? He was giving her El Cap.
Augustine was straining to get his feet into his shoes. Cuba bent to help him. He sat back, shocked by her compassion or forgiveness or whatever this was.
“Let’s not tie the laces too tight,” she said. “You’re damaged enough, and I’m going to ne
ed you up higher.”
Augustine looked ready to weep. He looked cleansed. Reborn.
Freedom. Hugh could admit it now. He’d seen the inhuman at work up here. He’d felt the hunger of souls, and heard the voices in the wind. Things he wouldn’t have believed in a thousand years had unfolded around him. But whatever had been pursuing them, whatever the haunt, it was over. The curse was broken.
They wrapped a stirrup rung around each of Augustine’s unfeeling feet. Hugh got him fixed to the rope leading out through the waterfall and up around the roof.
Augustine gripped Hugh’s shoulder. “You saved our skins.”
Time was wasting. “Give a hard tug when you reach the crack,” Hugh said. “We’ll never be able to hear you through the water.”
Augustine scooted to the edge of the platform. He cinched the jumars tight, and stepped off into outer space. Swinging out beneath the immense overhang, he entered the water in an explosion of colors.
The waterfall batted him from the inside to the outside. It was cold. With a roar, he threw back his head, and scarfed a mouthful of runoff. The breakfast of champions.
Just short of reaching the roof, Augustine dipped his head through the water. “It goes,” he yelled to them. He was excited. “I can see to the top. The crack goes.”
“Go,” Hugh shouted to him.
“What?”
Hugh gestured skyward. Augustine vanished above the roof.
“Did you see his face when you helped with his shoes?” Hugh asked Cuba. “He was like a prisoner getting released.”
“He is released,” she said.
Cuba stood above Hugh with her feet spread for balance, taller than he expected. She draped the rack of climbing hardware across her chest, and for the first time looked like a climber, not a casualty. Her recovery was miraculous.
“You look good,” he said. Let her take it how she wanted.
The rope tugged from above.
“I’ll never forget you,” she said.
Hugh’s smile faded.
She was saying good-bye. He searched her face, and saw the resolution. She was returning to her world, and it didn’t include him. So much for exotic sunsets and far mountains. So much for starting a family to cheer his autumn years. After all his promises not to leave her, she was leaving him. The letdown stung. It embarrassed him. What had he been thinking?
She could have waited for the summit or their return to Camp Four or until he attempted some awkward, candlelit interlude. Instead, alone with him, at the scene of their encounter, before he made more of a fool of himself, she was getting it over with, face-to-face. He respected that.
“Cuba.” He paused. Keep it brief. What to say? “Once more unto the breach.”
She kissed him.
He remembered her other kiss, that grasping, bloody imprint at the height of the storm. This was different, no leathery lips, no desperation. She bent to him. Her scabs had healed. She tasted sweet. It came to him. Like strawberries.
She let the kiss linger, and then her hand released his neck. Straight from the heart, she was letting him go. “I thought you’d never leave me,” she said.
He almost protested. Who was doing the leaving here? But he didn’t try to change her version. This was hard enough. And really, he decided, it was much cleaner. All for the best. One Annie was enough.
He looked away from her unblinking green eyes. “The prayer flags,” he said. “Should we leave them?”
“Take them with you,” she said.
A few ounces of cotton prayers for him, a few pounds of climbing gear for her. That said it all. She was retiring him. The deposed queen was taking back her realm. She meant to lead them to the summit of her climb, and that was how it ought to be. She latched her jumars onto the rope.
“Hugh Glass,” she said.
“Yes?” A change of heart?
She opened her arms and toppled backward from the platform.
She rode the rope’s arc with a secret smile, her eyes still fixed on Hugh. It was a thirty-foot swing, thirty down, thirty out. Back first, she hit the sheet of runoff.
The rainbow burst open. Prism colors sprayed everywhere. A flash of direct sunlight pierced the momentary hole. Then the curtain closed. The rainbow formed again, but now with her blurred silhouette on the far side.
She was like a coiled spring out there, sprinting up the rope. At her pace, they’d make land in a few hours. He couldn’t see the rope’s outline, only the shadow woman—his dancer—soaring through the air. She merged with the sun. For a moment, Hugh couldn’t bear to look at her. Then her shadow darted above the roof.
The rainbow was fading. The day was in motion. Suddenly Hugh felt forsaken in this chamber of stone and water.
The rope tugged. So soon? He clipped his jumars onto the rope. Leaning out, he pulled free the string of prayer flags. The storm had whipped them to cotton rags, and the smoke had stained them. But the wind horses raised his spirits. He was galloping off into the heavens. He crisscrossed the flags over his shoulders and chest.
Then he turned to the wall and started destroying the anchor. Bit by bit, he undid their camp, jerking nuts from the stone, unclipping carabiners, loosening knots.
He had promised himself last night. If he could make it through to daylight and be allowed to leave this place, he would erase their presence from the wall. Lewis would have approved. Besides, it was the law. Leave no trace but your shadow.
Webbing and chunks of line and metal fluttered and rang into the depths. The platform, weighted by aluminum and nylon debris underneath, gave a sudden lurch. He hammered free a piton. The platform lurched again.
One last piton to go. The rope was pulling him above. It took all his strength to hang on to the platform sling. He struck at the hardware, sending sparks with his hammer. The piton tick-tocked back and forth. He struck again.
Everything let go at once. The piton sprang from the rock. The sling, weighted by the wreckage of their camp, pulled from his fist. The ruins plunged with a pig squeal, metal on stone, and clattered away into the waterfall. Hugh swung on the rope.
He hit the water face-first. The rainbow smashed open, and on the far side the sky was blue. The sun was yellow.
He came to rest half in and half out of the waterfall. Water poured down his collar and sleeves. It slashed at his eyes. He almost drowned giving a victory shout.
Sputtering and battered, he reached for his jumars. Here was not the place to dally. The water was freezing, and it shoved at him like a mugger. Higher up, on the heated walls, he could dry out. For now, the race was on, the summit or bust. It was all or nothing. One more night on the wall would kill them for sure.
High-stepping with his stirrups, he shoved against the flow. He caught a momentary glimpse of the summit, a neat white line against the dark blue sky. Then the water cut at his eyes again. He hunched his neck and inched higher.
Near the rim of the roof, he jabbed his head through for a final look at that other world. It was dark inside. The water pounded at his shoulders. The lizard king lurked in there, hungry, always hungry.
Hugh yanked his head back. Leave it. He’d escaped again. The water bullied him. He closed his eyes and bullied it back.
The torrent eased against his shoulders. The thundering water softened to a hiss. When he opened his eyes, Cuba was crouching straight above him, at the rim.
With more than half the rope still left to climb, she’d stopped here for some reason. High beyond her shoulder, Augustine stood perched at the crack, looking up. Was she waiting to welcome Hugh? Or simply making sure he wouldn’t leave her.
“Here I am,” he said.
The water spun him in a circle. He tilted back to smile at her. It was just another few feet before he cleared the overhang and gained solid stone.
The rope kept twisting. Her face revolved. She became the blinding sun, then the water, then a woman again. Her head was cocked. She was studying him almost, making up her mind.
Her hair dra
ped down, and for a moment the black mane lit bright with color, red going on blond. He blinked at the water spray and sunshine. Her hair returned to black, cowling her face from view. He tried to see inside its shadows.
The sun cut at him. The water. Her hair flickered like fire, dark to light. Strawberry blond. Annie? He swiped at his face. “Cuba?”
He spun toward the sun, and it blinded him. He craned back to see overhead, and the water whipped his eyes. He twisted in space, fighting the gyre, clamoring to see.
Why didn’t she answer? She crouched there, quiet as Annie in the end. Just watching him. Waiting with that infinite, mindless patience. Each time he’d looked back, she was watching him, waiting to be led out from the dunes.
The first night he’d circled back to her. The moon had been full, the air chilly. He lay on top of a dune and looked down at her curled in the sand. He didn’t descend. Her hair looked black, her skin silver. She hadn’t moved all day. Their footprints tracked in. They led out. But without him, she was lost.
He left her no water. It was a mercy, of sorts. Why drag out her suffering?
She had no idea he fell asleep on the hill above her. When he woke at dawn, she was standing, facing the sun. Again he left her, and went to his cache of water.
The second night he peered over the dune again, and she had crumpled to the sand. At first, he thought it was over, but she began singing. He lay on his back and watched the moon roll by, and listened to her song. It was not a sad song, whatever it was.
On the third morning, she was silent. He kept walking that day, and the next. He knew the direction. Eventually he would cut the highway. A breeze came up. He watched it bury his tracks. He took off his hat and let the sun burn his face and split his lips. At last, it was time to surface from the desert. He approached the goatherder. He had chosen his savior.
Hugh shook his head. He shucked the past. Water flew. “Cuba?”
She reached down a hand. He thought she meant to pull him up. Her fist was wrapped tight, though, and there was something in it.
He screwed his body around, struggling to see.
It was a black thing, glistening, a sliver of night.
