We told M: We must leave.
Again? she cried.
Again. Bern thinks your location may be somehow known to hostiles.
Do you really think someone could trigger a rockslide as big as that?
Possibly yes. The hutkeepers say the cliff there had an overhang. Could have fallen naturally, but if the overhang got hit by a missile, maybe not even an explosive missile, just an inert mass hitting at speed, the cliff could have come down. That would bury all signs of a missile, and look like an accident. The rockslide could very well have crushed the hut. It just missed. Couldn’t have been sure about it until trying it.
It couldn’t just have been a coincidence?
Cliff falling now, after all the centuries of standing there, right when you are here? On that day, it falls?
It could still be a coincidence, she said. That’s what coincidences are.
Thomas shook his head. They’ve seen something in Bern, he told her. They don’t think it’s a coincidence.
All right, M said, looking more and more disturbed. Where to now?
We told her our plan.
63
They came for her just after midnight, knocking as if to wake her, but she hadn’t slept a wink. The whole hut dark and chill, her guardians hushed and nervous. This is when the climbers always leave, Priska told her reassuringly, to get up high before sunlight starts the rock fall.
Priska and Sibilla took her into one of the washrooms and ran a wand over her body as she stood shivering in her underwear. Then the wand all over the clothes she was to wear, everything she was going to take along, which was hardly anything. They had asked her to leave her phone at the hut; it would be conveyed to her later on. Same with her clothes. They thought she was clear of tracking devices, they said, but it was best to be sure, and leave behind everything not needed for this day.
The hutkeepers outfitted her with warm clothing, with climbing boots and crampons, and an outerwear suit like a pair of overalls but lined with down. A kind of spacesuit, it seemed to her. Also a climber’s helmet, and a harness to wear around her waist and thighs.
I don’t think I like this plan, Mary said.
It will be all right, Priska said. The Fründenjoch is not that hard.
I don’t like the sound of that, Mary said. She knew that not that hard, when talking about the Alps, was Swiss-speak for fucking hard. And she knew that joch meant pass. Meaning probably the low point at the head of their basin, up there above the glacier they had visited the day before. There had been a notch up there in the cliff over the ice, the cliff which was a walled-off section of the crest of the great Berner Oberland. Once you knew to look for it, the notch was visible even from the hut. But the day before, she had seen that the black rock below the notch had looked completely vertical. Not that hard— right!
At 2 AM they went out into the frigid night. There was no moon, but illuminated by stars the basin walls glowed as if with a black interior light of their own. Their headlamps speared the night and illuminated variable circles and ellipses of rough stone ground ahead of them. Mary was roped up between Thomas and Priska, with Sibilla and Jurg on another line beside them. They all had headlamps on their climbing helmets, so no one looked at each other as they spoke.
After a couple hours of walking up the stony slope, Mary huffing and puffing and warming up throughout her body, all except for her nose, ears, toes, and fingertips, they came to the foot of the glacier remnant. After that they scrambled up the left lateral moraine, which was composed of loose boulders held poorly in ice-crusted sand. Then Mary had to focus on getting up onto the ice side of the glacier itself. The slope of white ice they were proposing to ascend was tilted at about forty-five degrees, maybe more; it was therefore crampon work, a hard little climb. She had never done anything like it. They sat her down and helped her strap the crampons onto her boots, and handed her an ice ax, and after that, when she kicked the ice of the glacier, the front points of her crampons bit into it very nicely. With a good kick it became like standing on the step of a ladder, a step which was really just her stiff-bottomed boot, stuck in place. Rather amazing. Up the side of the glacier she went, kick, kick, kick. With the rope extending up from her to Thomas, who was already up on the flatter top of the glacier, it was almost simple.
Then she was walking on the glacier’s top with the rest of them, and feeling her crampon’s downward-pointing points stick into the ice surface with every step. Sometimes she sank a bit and then stuck, piercing a layer of hard snow. That was firn, Priska told her. Good to walk on. In fact it was quite strange. Mary found she preferred the bare ice, where she stuck instantly with each step, remaining almost a full crampon tooth’s height above it. She had to free her feet with little jerks at each step, then step a little high when moving her feet forward, or she would catch a spike and trip. After she stepped and stuck, she couldn’t have slid her foot even if she wanted to. That was reassuring. The boots they had equipped her with were a little too large for her feet, she thought; sliding around inside the boots was the only give in the whole process.
None of this was comfortable for her, it wasn’t her kind of thing. She wondered if the whole adventure was even necessary, but didn’t want to ask about that, as it
