many times before. It took just minutes before the woman's leg bones were bare
white sticks. Losing his revulsion, Abe marveled at how quickly a body could be
undressed of its flesh.
'They throw their poor and their dead children into the rivers,' said Li. He spoke
aloud with a tour guide's voice. 'Their monks are cremated or else buried in big hollow
tree trunks. But for many, many centuries, this is how the common Tibetans have
been. Cutting up their loved ones like chickens. Feeding each other to the animals.'
Gigantic blue-and-white vultures that had been wheeling in the abyss came closer
now and roosted, first one, then others, landing with ungainly hops.
Like a pack of grotesque schoolchildren, the birds gathered into a semicircle at one
corner of the ledge. While they waited with eerie pique, they nipped and nudged each
other and flexed their six-foot wings.
The birds began to unsettle Abe in a way that the butchers had not. The vultures
looked like a parody of their little band lined against the
Yet even as Abe and the other climbers sorted through their guilt feelings, they kept
on snapping photos. Robby was firing away with a little black Samurai. Its
motor-driven telephoto lens pumped in and out with electronic frenzy. Abe's own
camera was bulky and old, which kept his picture taking slow. It made him seem
studied, even reluctant.
'Go closer,' Li encouraged him. But Abe didn't.
One man finished stripping the woman's arm bones clean. The other two began
working on the flesh already cut away. They sliced it into pieces and threw it to the
vultures. As the birds shoved about for bits of meat, their big dry feathers rattled.
Li was grimly jubilant.
'Now you see,' he said, 'we have come to the edge of the world. And they are
barbarians.'
8
It was nearly June and summer was loosening the countryside. The moraine thawed a
little more every morning, and their separate islands of tundra grass turned spongy.
Abe found mud on his shoes. It was a sign. The earth itself was compromising. The
separate elements – the mountain, the wind, the cold, the ice, the sunlight – were
reaching a sort of peace, mixing together, melding. It was a season for changes and for
the Ultimate Summit the changes came swiftly.
First, Gus brought the word down to Base, catching them at noon in the olive-green
mess tent. They were all there, a few hard at work rewiring the stubborn
walkie-talkie sets, most just swapping lies and snacking on popcorn and generally
taking it easy. From out of nowhere, Gus burst in upon them with her pack on, the
waistband still clipped.
They barely had time to recognize the windblown creature before she had delivered
her message. 'He's done it,' she rasped. Corroded with bronchitis and strep, her voice
cracked through them like distant thunder. The words came out more animal than
human and Abe wasn't sure he'd understood her.
A length of parachute cord bound her red hair and she had a filthy cap over that.
The smear of zinc oxide across her cheeks and nose was flecked with old food and
older scabs. What made Gus most alien, though, was not the filth but her wildness.
Something close to dementia burned in her green eyes – Abe recognized it as his own
– and she looked menacing, a berserker fresh from the glory fields.
Robby was the first to recover from her entrance. 'Sit down, Gus,' he said.
Kelly was next. 'Gus? Are you okay?'
Gus continued standing there with her craziness, weaving in place, drunk on the rich
oxygen. She stared at them.
'Where's Daniel at?' Stump asked with a most casual interest. He had a Phillips-head
in one hand and a welding gun in the other and amateur electronics on his mind.
Having found the glitch, he had sworn to get their walkie-talkies up and running by
tomorrow morning.
Gus stared at them, mute.
It suddenly hit Abe that Daniel might have fallen. Had he done it, then, sailed a day
too far? But Abe was just guessing, and no one else seemed concerned.
'How about some herbal spice tea?' Kelly asked her. 'It's great, sweet without sugar.
Real cinnamony.'
Abe goggled at Kelly's banality. Here was this ferocious woman with ropes of snot
splayed across her face like a horse whipped too far. Then he realized the banality was
Kelly's very point. Down here at Base, the status quo had its own rhythm and
coziness, and before things got too incendiary, they were banking Gus's fire, and their
own, too.
Gus would have none of their pacifism, though. She stood at the head of their table.
'Daniel broke through.'
'I knew it.' Heads turned. It was Thomas, the blood drained out from his cheeks.
'Are you saying Corder topped out?'
Gus heard his hostility, and chose to let him dangle. 'I'm saying he found a way out
of the Shoot. He placed Five. We're home free.'
'Gus, would you take a chair, please,' Robby said. 'Sit down before you fall down and
tell it in plain English.'
She sat. She told them. While she stayed in the cave, Daniel had soloed out of the
Shoot's lethal tube of rock-fall. He had discovered a sprawling snow plateau at the
base of the so-called Yellow Band – a thick sandwich of sulphur-colored limestone that
girdled the mountain at 27,500 feet. Blazing his path with nine-mil rope, he'd spent an
extra day humping a load of Kiwi gear up to the plateau and pitched their next camp.
Then he had descended to ABC. A dozen questions swarmed to Abe's mind. Before he
could ask even one, the others started interrogating Gus.
'So?' Thomas demanded. 'Did he solo to the top?'
Gus ignored him.
'Five's not much,' Gus said through the steam of her tea, 'but we don't need much.
There's wind up there, but no more rockfall. Daniel told me to tell you, from Five to
the top it's a cruise.'
'A cruise?' snorted Thomas. J.J. scowled at him. Thomas scowled back. On this
north side, the hard yellow rock lay in tiles canted downward at a 30-degree pitch,
with successive layers overlapping one another. The Yellow Band wasn't particularly
dangerous or technical, but neither was it going to be a cruise. Thomas was probably
right. The climb wasn't over yet.
Gus rolled right over Thomas's fatalism. For one thing he hadn't earned it; and for
another his cynical tone cloyed. 'Daniel says, Five's close enough, you can see the top.'
'Yeah? Well I can go outside and see the top from down here too,' Thomas said.
'That doesn't mean we're close.'
Gus had the punchline ready. 'Yeah, but you can't see the tripod. Not from down
here.'
It took them a minute to gather the significance of that. Then a light went on in
Robby's eyes. 'Daniel saw the tripod?' he breathed.
