‘What do you think of that cloud?’ he asked, breathing still laboured. ‘The forecasts said it was going to get worse tomorrow.’
Luca paused, a shovelful of snow sliding to the ground. He lifted his goggles off his face and wiped the sweat out of his eyes.
‘It’ll pass,’ he said, and carried on digging.
Bill nodded. He had climbed with Luca long enough to know not to question him about the weather. Whatever the forecast said, somehow Luca always seemed to get it right. It had become a standard joke between them. Whenever Luca lay down, everyone thought it was going to rain.
Unstrapping his own shovel, Bill started digging alongside him. In thirty minutes they had completed the snow hole and soon both of them were lying exhausted in their sleeping bags inside it, the soft roar of the MSR stove blocking out the noise of the outside world.
As soon as day broke, Luca punched through the thin wall of snow by his sleeping bag, letting the fierce morning light flood in. Cold air rushed through the gap, dispelling the stale air from the previous night. It had been a long, fitful night, neither man sleeping properly from the altitude.
Bill unzipped his sleeping bag and sat up, groaning as a headache split along the back of his skull. He stayed still, waiting for the pain to pass, while Luca shuffled forward, keeping his head bent under the low ceiling of ice. Reaching into the top of his rucksack, he handed across one of the granola bars and the tube of condensed milk. Sugar was the only way to get a climber’s body moving again in the morning.
‘Pass the water will you?’ Bill muttered, gesturing to the plastic bottle by the stove. ‘Must have got dehydrated during the night.’
‘Headache?’
‘Bitch of a one.’
After a few mouthfuls of water, Bill turned to look through the open hole in the snow, inspecting the sky outside.
‘You were right about one thing at least.’
‘The weather’s not the problem,’ Luca replied, stuffing his gear into his rucksack. ‘It’s the ice field. Did you hear the rocks coming down during the night?’
Bill nodded. Every few hours throughout the night, they had heard rocks ricocheting down the face and smacking into the hard ice of the glacier below. Both had woken with a start each time it had happened, but there was nothing to be said. They knew it was the most dangerous part of climbing Makalu’s western pillar.
They packed up in silence, methodically going through the process of striking camp, their minds on the climb ahead. They were over six and a half thousand metres up already and the ice wall was going to require some serious technical climbing. No more easy snow ridges or easy retreats.
‘You’ve planned the route,’ Bill remarked. ‘Why don’t you lead today?’
Luca didn’t look up from clipping the straps on his rucksack. ‘Sure,’ he said, hoping the nonchalance in his voice didn’t sound forced. ‘No worries.’
Twenty minutes later they stood out on the ridge, feeling the warmth of the morning sun. Luca had uncoiled the ropes and passed two of the ends over to Bill. He, in turn, swung a heavy sling filled with friends, ice screws and nuts off his shoulder and handed it over to Luca, who begun clipping them into his harness in a well-practised and deliberate order.
‘Never met anyone so anal about where they clip their hardware,’ Bill noted.
‘You know how it is — the higher up we get, the more stupid we become. At least this way, I know where everything is.’
Despite the dull ache in his head, Bill smiled. Back home, Luca’s flat was one of the most disorganised places he had ever set foot in, surfaces covered with unopened mail and abandoned clothes. Yet out here in the mountains he seemed to undergo a complete character transformation: exact, thoughtful, with no cut corners or laziness.
‘I’ll belay you up there,’ Luca said, pointing forty feet above their heads to a black outcrop of rock, clinging to the vertical ice. Then, with a quick nod to check Bill was ready, he moved forward along the ridge, adjusting the length of the leaches on his ice axes.
Moving up on to the wall so that his hips were almost pressing against it, Luca kicked in his crampons, sending tiny shards of ice tumbling below. With fluid, rhythmic movements, he hammered in his ice axes, working his way higher with each step and taking care to keep his front points balanced on the natural shape of the ice, rather than always kicking new steps. He didn’t look up, minutely absorbed in what was in front of him.
He knew he had to compartmentalise the climb. Had to focus on the first pitch, then the second. Nothing more. Thinking ahead to the summit ridge was just too far away. Above him, the cliff continued vertically for another thousand metres.
Hours passed — the same movements, the same rhythm. The sun slowly travelled across the sky, switching their shadows from right to left as they reflected off the polished ice. Both men moved silently upwards, just a few words exchanged as they handed over the hardware at the end of each pitch.
Luca dug his axes in and spread his legs wider, adjusting his balance. He unhooked an ice screw from his belt and wound it into a smooth patch of ice just by his shoulder. Clipping the rope through the carabineer, he leaned back against it, dropping his weight into the seat of his harness and relieving the intense pressure on his calves. Then he wound in a second screw, clipped in and peered down between his legs.
Following the line of the ropes, he could see Bill fighting his way up. That was the way he climbed when he got tired, always fighting. He would hammer his axes in, spraying ice everywhere, using strength not skill to move himself higher.
Somewhere off to the right, Luca heard a noise and a small collection of rocks, some the size of a man’s head, came clattering down the cliff-face. They were far enough away not to be any danger, but the sight of them bouncing off the granite wall in puffs of dust was unnerving. Even rocks that size would splinter straight through their helmets.
Luca saw Bill tilt his head up to watch the rock-fall and for a moment their gazes met. Neither said a word. Playing these kinds of odds was a choice they never spoke about.
Sending a cloud of frosted breath out into the air before him, Luca looked up, allowing himself a rare moment to check their progress. They had been climbing fast and were nearly two-thirds of the way up the face. A few more hours and they would be under the summit ridge.
As the afternoon dragged on, he felt the pace starting to slow even further. He could hear himself grunt each time he pulled his body upwards and his forearms felt swollen and numb. There was a strange, cramping spasm in his right leg that he knew wasn’t from the cold. He wondered, almost clinically, how much longer his body could bear it.
Longer, he knew, than Bill’s could. Over the course of the last few hours, as Luca had tried to move forward, the ropes would often snap taut at his waist, jerking him to a standstill. He would wait for a minute, allowing Bill to catch his breath, but when he tried to press on, they still wouldn’t budge.
Fifty feet below, Bill could feel sweat mingling with the thin veil of ice across his face before running down into his eyes. Beneath his jacket, his chest rose up and down in ragged bursts and, whenever he stopped to try and steady his breathing, he was hit by a protracted bout of coughing which left him feeling even shakier. He tried to kick in his crampons and get a better grip, but his legs felt wooden and unresponsive, his front points just scraping over the smooth ice. In each hand, the axes felt unbearably heavy, and as he swung against the wall he knew his movements were becoming increasingly desperate.
He stopped again, bracing himself for another fit of coughing. Looking up through his fogged goggles, he could see the outline of Luca waiting above.
‘You all right?’
As the words floated down to him, Bill went to respond, but another bout of coughing tore through him. When it had finished he tilted his head back and, clenching his jaw in anticipation of the pain, yelled out a single word.
‘Rest.’
Even from the distance, Luca could hear the strain in
Bill’s voice — you didn’t climb for seven years with someone without being able to instantly gauge their level of discomfort. Judging by the jerky rhythm of the last hour or so, Luca guessed that Bill was now running on empty.
About twenty feet above his head, Luca had spied an outcrop of rock that might be big enough for the two of them to sit on. He had been working his way towards it for the last half-hour. Waiting for enough slack in the rope, he climbed the last few feet and, with trembling arms, hauled himself over the lip. With his back wedged against the ice and his legs dangling over the edge, he heaved back on the rope to take some strain off Bill.
‘Fifty feet more,’ he yelled down. ‘We’ve got our own private balcony up here.’
For hours Luca had had his nose pressed against the mirror of ice, totally absorbed in the climb. Now he sat back in the sunshine, blinking at the world that was spread out beneath him.
Every view was different and no matter how much he climbed, the experience of having a new perspective was always breathtaking. As the sheer scale of the surroundings came into focus, his personal struggle with the mountain seemed to fade, shrinking him to what he was: a tiny human, clinging to a giant aberration of land.
Except that this time the aberration had a strange sense of order to it.
Luca squinted in the bright light, trying to take it all in. To his right stood a ring of snow-capped mountains, flawlessly aligned. His eyes followed the peaks as they curved round in a perfect circle. It was the symmetry that was so extraordinary, as if they had been positioned with a pair of compasses. At the centre lay a blanket of cloud, impenetrably thick.
As he watched, the cloud started to shift. It began to part slowly, changing and reforming, before something began to take shape at its centre. Luca felt his grip slacken slightly on the rope as he leaned forward involuntarily.
Light poured in through the gash in the clouds, illuminating one side, then the next. As the shape beneath finally broke free of its swirling cover, Luca realised that he was staring at a pyramid so perfectly proportioned it had to be man-made.
Except that it couldn’t be. Surely. What else could be in the middle of the Himalayas except a mountain? Looking out across the horizon, he realised it was smaller than the surrounding peaks, but only fractionally. That would make it nearly seven thousand metres high. Absurd to think that humans could build anything so big.
A trembling hand appeared over the ledge beside him.
For a split second Luca just stared at it, his thoughts still on the pyramid mountain. Then, shaking himself awake, he lunged forward to grab Bill’s wrist. He pulled as hard as he could while Bill struggled to gain purchase, his crampons clawing over the dark rock. Long seconds passed before he managed to worm his way far enough on to the ledge. Then he collapsed, flat on his back, the only sound the heaving of his chest.
‘Mate, are you OK?’
Even behind his goggles, Luca could see the sick exhaustion in Bill’s eyes. He looked pale and utterly spent, as if each hour’s climb had gradually leached a little more colour from his blood.
‘You OK?’ Luca repeated, automatically gathering up the last few coils of rope. Already he felt his gaze being drawn back to the pyramid. ‘You’ve got to check out this mountain, Bill. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Bill opened his mouth to answer, but was suddenly hit by a bout of hacking coughs. Luca turned back in time to see his head loll to one side, a string of bloody spittle stretching from his lips. The lack of oxygen in his blood had started to turn his lips mauve.
‘Shit,’ said Luca softly, and then as he saw Bill slowly close his eyes, he raised his voice.
‘Bill… you have to stay awake.’
Bill remained motionless, his eyes shut tight.
The throbbing in his head was unbearable, even the smallest movement threatened to split his temples, paralysing him with pain. For hours he had tried to fight it, but now even his vision was starting to blur.
‘Head is killing me,’ he managed. ‘The altitude… we’re climbing too fast.’
‘How bad is it?’
It took Bill a few seconds to muster the energy to speak. When he did it came out as little more than a murmur.
‘I can’t see so well.’
Luca swore before turning and looking up the sheer wall of ice.
The summit ridge was no more than half an hour’s climb above them. The weather was absolutely perfect — low winds, good visibility. This expedition had been months in the planning, and now here they were in the perfect position — the mountain was offering itself on a plate.
‘Bill, listen. I’m going to tie you to the ledge just here, only for an hour or so, and go for the summit. You’ll be all right, I promise.’
Somewhere in his exhausted brain, Bill processed these words. He raised his head to speak then another bout of coughing convulsed through him, his chest rising and falling like a fish thrown on to dry land.
After a moment his body went limp and he slowly turned his head aside to spit a thick globule of phlegm on to the nearby rock.
‘You… can’t leave,’ he hissed.
He opened his eyes, squinting through the pain.
‘Don’t… fucking… leave,’ he repeated.
Bill tried to focus through the fog of his thoughts. He had to stay awake, had to fight the crippling lethargy. The seconds stretched. He felt his consciousness dip and the darkness drag at him. For the longest time, nothing happened. All he could hear was the noise of his own chest, heaving up and down. There was nothing except the blackness clouding the edges of his vision, slowly sinking in on him.
‘Luca… please.’
Bill’s voice was nothing more than a pathetic murmur, his last thoughts fading on his swollen lips. Then, somewhere through the haze, he saw Luca’s silhouette move closer until he was standing directly overhead. Bill felt a hand on the front of his climbing harness and his body being hoisted forward towards the edge of the cliff.
He reached up, trying to grab on to Luca’s arm. He was balanced right over the long drop of the cliff beneath.
When Luca finally spoke, frustration thickened his voice.
‘Come on then. Let’s get the hell out of here.’
Chapter 3
There was no natural light, only a collection of squat candles connected by long rivulets of syrupy wax. From their flames came a low aureole of light, illuminating the outline of five seats carved directly into the stone walls.
The seats were arranged in a semi-circle, following the natural shape of the chamber. All but the middle one was occupied by a cross-legged figure dressed in highly ornate robes. The fabrics were all dyed in rich contrasting colours and wrapped in complex folds so that only the right arm of the figure remained bare.
On the other side of the circular chamber, a small collection of personal effects had been laid out neatly on the stone floor. There were five of each item, prayer wheels, beads and miniature golden bells, stretching away from the candlelight.
One of the figures leaned back, pulling aside the yellow cowl that covered his face.
‘The divinations were correct,’ he said in a voice cracked by age. ‘The boy has been found.’
The others turned to look at him, their elderly faces creased in surprise.
‘You are certain of this?’
‘I am.’
Another of the monks leaned forward in his seat, arranging his red robes around him.
‘How did you find him so soon after His Holiness passed away?’
The monk in the yellow robe smiled. ‘It was indeed a marvellous thing. The smoke from the cremation blew south-west, confirming exactly what the Tshangpa oracle said. After only a month of searching, we found the boy in a small village called Tingkye.’
‘A month?’ another monk interrupted dubiously. ‘How can he be found in only a month?’
‘If the divinations are correct, you should do nothing but rejoice that we have found him so fast.’
‘And the boy — what is he like?’ asked another, slightly younger monk, his green robes glinting in the candlelight as he leaned forward eagerly to address the others.
‘He is only nine years old, a peasant with no learning or education. Yet as soon as I cast eyes on him, I saw he possessed a spirit that was identical to his predecessor’s. When I showed him the personal effects, he did not hesitate for a moment. He chose His Holiness’s personal prayer wheel, then the golden bell that he only used in his private chamber. Presented with five different prayer beads, he cast his hands over each before settling on the one that can only be used by His Holiness — the beads made of jade and silver that are the mark of Shigatse. They boy took them into his pocket and then looked at me curiously, saying, “These are mine. Where did you find them?”’
As the old monk finished speaking the other three bowed their heads in awe. The search could take years, even decades, and yet in only a few weeks the boy had been found.
Eventually one of them raised his head.
‘And what of the golden urn?’
‘He was chosen. With each trial, it soon became clear to me that he did not even know he was being tested. The movements came to him naturally, as if he were following a dream he had already experienced. Such things could not have been taught.’
There was another long pause as each monk considered the significance of what they had been told. Then the younger one in the green robes glanced round the semi-circle, his eyes bright.
‘We must inform Shigatse that their new leader has been found.’
The monk in the red robes shook his head abruptly, sending shadows flickering across the chamber’s walls.
‘No. We must tell no one. The boy’s identity must be concealed at all costs. If such news were ever to leave this room, there are many more powerful than us who would seek to control him. We must act quickly, brothers, or suffer a terrible fate.’
He turned his head slowly so that his gaze fell on each of them in turn.
The Cloud Maker Page 2
