by Jane Johnson
*
From that day Amastan returned to the tribe, though he largely kept to himself and exchanged few words with the other men. To begin with people tended to avoid him, casting askance glances at him when they thought he was not watching. His mother treated him like a recovering invalid, bringing him special foods and saving her meat for him. She was very pleased with Mariata, to whom she ascribed Amastan’s miraculous return to his true self. At first Mariata did not know how to respond; she could not tell Rahma what the enad had done, for she did not really understand what that was. Tana had employed some sort of strange magic; the spirits had left of their own accord; removing the amulet had indeed enabled Amastan to regain his sanity; or he had simply decided for some reason known only to himself to give up his long and perturbing period of desolation – any of these could have been true. And so she decided to smile and say how glad she was that Amastan was well again and that she had been able to help.
‘You must stay with us as long as you would like,’ Rahma told her, as if she had other choices. ‘I regard you as I would a daughter.’
‘That is very kind of you,’ Mariata returned, acknowledging the formal invitation, but she could not look the older woman in the eye: for she knew she had no wish to be seen as a sister to Amastan. She wore his amulet, washed clean of blood, beneath her robe, against her heart.
12
The nightmarish images that had plagued my sleep that first night in Tafraout remained with me in uncomfortable flickers as we made the hard two-hour walk-in up through spectacular rocky terrain to reach the foot of the Lion’s Head. For the next four hours, as we made our way by increments in two teams of two – Miles and me, followed by Jez and Eve – up the three hundred metres of the route, I moved from pitch to pitch with greater caution than was my usual style, feeling those unsettling dreams nagging at me. I placed my feet with exaggerated precision, consciously checked each hold before putting my weight on it, backed up every belay in textbook fashion, and checked knots and harness buckles with such neurotic care that I knew I was driving Miles mad with impatience. As it was, it was clear he would rather have been climbing with Jez alone, swift and Alpine-style. He was lucky: at least I pulled my weight, alternating leads with him and carrying out my duties with some degree of efficiency. Eve, being the slowest and least experienced climber of the four of us, led no part of the route, meaning that Jez had to lead each pitch, which necessitated a slow and tedious pulling-through of ropes at every belay, and inevitable tangles and further delays.
Miles had been tutting and swearing under his breath for the past two pitches, even though the sun was glorious, and the climbing sound, for the most part, and elegant. But when we reached the crux traverse beneath a vast, unclimbable roof, a long sideways expanse of unstable rock whose upper layers were exfoliating in thin skins due to their long exposure to heat and cold, he skittered sideways across it impatiently, not stopping to place any gear to protect me when I seconded the pitch. I paid the ropes out angrily. Long traverses like this were as dangerous for the second as for the leader. Take a fall on a vertical pitch and the rope is always above you, so that you fall only a metre or two at worst; but take a fall seconding a traverse and you’ll swing all the way from the point of the fall to beneath the point where the leader has taken his belay; and from where I stood that was a good twenty metres away. Unable to stop myself, I looked down, something I could usually do without feeling any great terror, and realized that the traverse was deeply undercut and that when I started out over it there would be a yawning void below me, a sheer drop of more than fifty metres. Or so I reckoned: the scale was simply impossible to calculate. All I could see down there were the tiny dots of trees green against the ambient orangey-pink of the rocky ground, and below those some tiny black dots like ants but which were probably goats.
I looked back, but Miles was out of sight now, having climbed over the lip above, and the rope had gone still. I looked to my left. Far below I could see Jez’s blue bandana bobbing as he made his way up the pitch. Of Eve there was no sign because of the curvature of the cliff. I was on my own. The temptation to wait until Jez made it to the belay ledge became immense; I found it cold and dark and lonely in the shadow of the overhanging roof, a nerve-racking place at the best of times, and all the more so when faced with the prospect ahead. But after a couple more minutes the ropes jerked three times: the signal that Miles had reached a safe place and made his anchor point. I detached the lead ropes from the belay device and watched them snake away across the rock till they went tight on my harness. Jerk, jerk, jerk. The next signal: that he had me on belay, and pretty much what I thought of him too. With shaking hands I removed the gear with which I had protected our belay and tugged the rope in turn. Ready to climb. I touched my amulet, which I had hung for luck on the back of my harness, out of harm’s way, and started the traverse. I teetered across the first two moves feeling acutely exposed. I was at the furthest extent of the rope now: one false move and I’d pendulum across the rock face, taking a leader fall that at best would rip the skin from my hands and face, at worst would put such force on the belay that it would see us both plunge down the mountain. The tremor in my hands transferred itself into the muscles of my forearms, then into my thighs and knees. I was balanced on five centimetres of flaky rock, without a handhold, both palms pressed against the quartzite: precarious, to say the least. Get a grip, Izzy, I told myself fiercely. Just bloody well get a grip. You’re on a rope and you’re not going to die.
But I might …
I made another sideways move, leaning into the rock. Still no decent holds. Another move; toe in a crack. A tiny piece of rubble detached itself at the pressure of my foot and went bouncing away down the rock. I heard it go, click, click, click; then there was no sound at all as it peeled off into the void. The tremor became a shake.
Get a fucking grip, Izzy: it’s only 5a.
I looked down, seated my left foot as well as I could in order to move on again with my right, and reached across. Nothing, well nothing much. Nothing much would have to do. My whole body made a tremor of intent as I prepared to transfer my weight; then I saw the ropes. A great loop of them now hung between me and my invisible belayer: Miles, bored and annoyed, was not taking in as quickly as he should have been. I shouted up to him – ‘Tight!’– but the word fell like the stone into the empty air. A tight rope would pull me off-balance anyway, I reminded myself. Hell. I took a deep breath to steady myself and transferred my weight to the right …
A chunk of quartzite the size of a house brick came away beneath my leading foot and down I went, tumbling over and over against the rock, too fast even to yelp or fully register the pain as I knocked, hard, an ankle here, my cheek there, nose, hip, knee, forehead … There was a disembodied cry, sharp and hallucinatory: from far below me, or was it inside my head? I had no way of telling. I waited for the plunge into space as the rock ran out beneath me, but then, with a jolt that nearly dislocated my hip, the fall was halted. I was hanging sideways, looking down the mountain. How bizarre. Surely if the ropes had caught me, I’d be facing in, or out, not sideways at this odd angle. I looked up. The ropes, two garish pink and blue snaking things, lay flaccidly along the rock high up against the deep red of the quartzite, unconcerned by my fate. I hung where I was, afraid to move, hardly daring to breathe. So it wasn’t the rope that had held me but my harness. Probably one of the gear loops had snagged a spike of rock. Panic flared up again: gear loops weren’t made to resist a shockload; any moment now whatever held me would snap and I’d be hurled down off the cliff, and that would be that.
Slowly, I moved my head to examine what had stopped me. My vision was blurred; my head rang from the knocks it had taken. For several woozy moments I couldn’t trust my eyes. Impossibly, it looked as if the amulet had wedged itself inside a crack and that I was hanging from its narrow leather thong, clipped with a mini-karabiner on to a gear loop. I stared at this unlikely combination of cause, effect and sheer unc
anny luck, unbelieving. Then, compulsively, I twisted to get my feet and hands back on to the rock and take my weight off that fragile point of contact. A decent foot-ledge; a handhold. Thank God. And just as I breathed out, the leather thong holding the amulet snapped. I pressed my face against the rock, my heart beating so hard it felt as though its hammering might propel me off my precarious hold on the mountain.
Danger soon steadied my swimming head. Swiftly, I fiddled a piece of gear into a crack, ran a sling through my harness loop and back again and clipped it; did up the karabiner’s gate. That gave me the courage to stare at the amulet again. There it was, wedged across its broadest point, the sun winking off the silver. It looked positively smug, as if it had been designed for this very moment in time. But the force of the fall had deformed it: I could see how it was bent and awkward-looking. It was probably never going to be shifted. I would have to leave it behind as a sacrifice, a thank you to the Lion’s Head, which had once again extended its legendary protection to a woman. I reached out to it, brushed my fingers over its outside edge as if in farewell; and it fell into my hand.
Shaking, I slipped it into a pocket in my climbing pants and zipped the pocket closed over it. Then, fiercely pushing away my fear, I removed the gear and climbed towards Miles with my heart thudding like a trapped bird’s. Going up was a whole lot easier than going sideways. When I appeared over the lip of rock where he had made the belay he was still taking in rope at speed. ‘Slow down,’ he said. ‘I can hardly keep up with you.’ He huffed and puffed as he clipped me into the belay, then looked at me properly for the first time.
‘Christ, look at you, what happened?’
I put my hand to my face and it came away covered in blood. I realized suddenly that various bits of me were hurting, quite badly.
‘Ah …’ The words would not come. I looked down, my head throbbing with the effort. Blood was seeping through the knee of my climbing pants, but, though the kneecap smarted, I knew instinctively that I had a worse injury. Now that the adrenalin of the fall and the desperate need to reach the safety of the belay had worn off, I could feel a dull, foreboding pain in my left ankle. Gingerly, I pulled up my trouser leg to examine the damage. The ankle was swollen, flesh spilling grotesquely over the top of my climbing shoe. Abruptly, I found it would not take my weight. I thought I might vomit.
Now Miles looked horrified. ‘Jesus, what have you done? How the hell did you climb that pitch like that? Can you move it?’ He stared at the ruined joint but made no attempt to examine it more closely. Instead, I saw his gaze slide away down the rock towards the long, rugged expanse of mountain beneath us, and I knew he was already anticipating the difficulties of the descent while hampered by an injured woman. He ran a hand over his face, a gesture that said quite articulately, This was not what I signed up for.
‘I’ll strap it up,’ I said briskly, angry at myself for allowing this ridiculous situation to have occurred at all, angry to have put myself at the mercy of a stranger. ‘I’ll bind it and put my walking boot on to support it.’
Miles pulled at his lip. ‘I’m not sure about that.’ He looked at a complete loss. Then he readjusted his belay and picked his way across the shield of rock to where he would have a view of the progress of the other team. Where he should have taken the belay in the first place, I thought savagely, so that he could keep a proper eye on his second. But there was no point in apportioning blame: it was my own fault for falling. I hadn’t checked the crucial foothold before trusting my weight to it, despite all the caution I’d employed right up to that fateful moment. In climbing you soon learn to take responsibility for your own mistakes and live with the consequences. It was one of the things I most liked about the sport: cause and effect was clear-cut, the way life should be but rarely was.
Miles returned to the belay looking relieved. ‘Jez’ll be up in a few minutes.’ Then he sat down and mutely fiddled with his gear, rearranging it on his rack, head bent to avoid eye contact, and not another word passed between us.
Time ticked leadenly by. About fifteen minutes later Jez’s blue-bandanaed head appeared over the lip of the ridge. He was grinning from ear to ear, clearly loving the sensation of the Moroccan sun on his back, the warm rock under his fingers, the gulf of air beneath his feet, the delicacy of the moves. When he saw the state of me, though, the grin faded. ‘Fucking hell, Izzy, what have you done?’
I waited until he’d made himself safe on the belay and gave him a carefully edited version of events. No point in mentioning Miles’s failure to protect his second; or his lack of patience or communication. Jez whipped off the bandana, wet it with some water from his pack and made to clean my face. I pushed his hand away, took the cloth from him and dabbed at my nose.
‘Not broken?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s her ankle,’ Miles said flatly, staring out across the landscape. If we were on Everest, I thought, he’d be consigning me to my fate, leaving me behind in the death zone, every man for himself. But Jez came from different stock. He ran a practised hand over the mass of bruised and fluid-filled flesh, and I tried unsuccessfully not to wince. ‘Can you move it?’ I couldn’t, and the attempt elicited a moan. ‘Bloody hell, Izzy, I think it’s fucked.’ Even as my mouth opened in shock, he took the edge off this by winking. ‘That were a technical term. You just sit back and leave it to the doctor.’ With a swift gesture he ripped the bandana in half, spliced the ends together and soon had the ankle expertly immobilized.
‘I was going to put my walking boot back on to stabilize it a bit more.’
Jez looked dubious. ‘I worry you won’t be able to get it off again. Let’s have a look.’ A couple of minutes later he had removed my 5.10, clipped it to the back of my harness by its pull-on loop, modified the lacing on my Salomon mountain boot so that it would fit over the ruin of my ankle, then laced it up as hard as he could without my fainting. When he saw my colour, he patted me kindly on the shoulder. ‘We’ll get you off, don’t mither yourself.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, though the apology came hard. ‘Not the best start to your climbing holiday. Hope you don’t believe in omens.’
Miles said nothing. Jez shrugged. ‘Accidents happen in climbing. That’s why we love it, eh?’ He paid out a loop of rope, twisted a figure-eight knot into it and secured it to his harness, then downclimbed to where he could belay with Eve in sight. I watched him give her a thumbs-up and wondered how she would cope with the traverse, but when she eventually appeared over the top, her eyes huge with concentration and panic, I saw that her gear loops were festooned with runners: Jez had clearly protected the pitch all the way for her. The two of them shared a swift, quiet conversation that I couldn’t quite catch and then Eve came padding up to the belay ledge and clipped herself in.
‘God, Iz, I’m so sorry. Jez says he thinks it’s broken.’
That was not what I’d wanted to hear. Shit. Now I was really in trouble. I forced a grin. ‘Maybe. Ah, well, an excellent chance for us to practise our rescue techniques, huh?’
Miles put Jez on lead and off he went out towards the arête, armed with gear and slings and a ferociously purposeful expression. Some while later he headed back again, crabwise, across the slab. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ll get you across this section and from the edge I reckon we’ve got enough rope to lower you into the upper reaches of the gully. Then Eve can abseil down to be with you while Miles and I clear the gear and finish the top pitch, and we’ll make it down the col to you, OK?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said firmly. ‘If you can get me into the gully, I can get down to the car, even if it takes me a week on my bum. Finish the climb, Eve: get it ticked. Don’t worry about me.’
She looked appalled. ‘I can’t do that. I won’t leave you.’
‘Honestly, I’d rather deal with it on my own; no need to ruin everyone’s day, eh?’ I said, sounding a lot braver than I felt.
The setting up of the abseil ropes seemed to take an age. No one would
let me do anything: at a stroke I’d gone from experienced climber to invalid, a burden to be lowered off over the edge of the route. I seethed inwardly and tried not to think about what lay ahead: the descent; the seeking of medical attention; and, if it really was broken, spending the rest of the holiday as useless, and deeply bored, baggage.
With a mixture of hops and slithers I made it to the stance and looked over the edge. It was a long way down. I hoped the sixty-metre ropes would reach the ground, but it would be impossible to see precisely where they landed from here, since the line of the cliff bowed out and away before cutting back in again. The only way to find out would be to make the ab. I leant against the hot rock, sweating as I watched Jez make knots in the ends (it seemed he was thinking the same thing), then coil them expertly and hurl them out into space. We both held our breath, listening for the sound as they hit the ground, but at the crucial moment all we heard was the cry of a goat. Jez grinned at me. ‘Ey up, sounds like I just killed our supper!’ He handed me the loops from the belay. ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘is how come you didn’t fall all the way. I saw Miles hadn’t protected the traverse.’
