The Wall (22 page)

Hugh coughed rainwater. He closed his mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes from it.

Cuba emerged from the tent. The tranquilizer had worn off, or the thunder had awakened her. Her strength was back. She stood on the edge of the platform, unroped. The platform shuddered.

Augustine said something to do with witches.

The ghostly fire sank along the wall. With one touch, her whole anchor of ropes and slings lit cold blue. Like a child, she reached for it.

There was no time to warn her. The spellbinder was spellbound. Rapt. Hugh watched, dreading what came next. She would burst into flame. She would explode or be hurled into the pit.

The cold light climbed her arm, and she held it out like a torch over the abyss, Prometheus in a sports bra.

Maybe it burned. Her mouth opened with a scream. Hugh couldn’t hear for the screaming sky. Augustine wasn’t lying. The wind was filled with voices. Furies. Dead spirits. She was joining her voice to theirs.

Hugh started up the rope for her. They had come too far to lose her. She was their muse.

The blue fire ebbed. She collapsed against the makeshift tent. In a minute, she would go sliding into the depths.

Hugh threw himself upward, past Augustine standing frozen. Water sprayed from his jumars.

Her arm dangled from one edge. The platform beat up and down, ridding itself of her a few pounds at a time. Her head appeared, hair lashing.

He cast himself across her body. Or was cast. A clap of thunder detonated against his back. His bones seemed to melt. The shock wave doubled him over the platform.

The wind quit. It hadn’t quit. He was deaf. Numb. He opened his eyes, remembering, and looked.

Lewis was out there beyond the riot of prayer flags.

The volts were still convulsing him. Head back, teeth bared, he was gripping the metal litter with all his might. His muscles bulged. He made the world seem still for a moment.

Then the night sucked him from view. A minute later, it returned him in a lazy arc.

What had been a man was now a limp puppet. Whoever held his strings above had fled. His limbs flopped. His back arched. A bobble head. As he spun in a circle, the parts of him sprawled stupidly, as if he had never shown grace on the stone or recited poetry or chased the sun.

“Lewis,” Hugh pleaded. It wasn’t possible. A man was dead. A noble fool. His dearest friend.

Cuba stirred. He lay folded across her. She spoke. He became aware of that. His ears were ringing. “What?” He pried loose of her.

“Don’t leave me, Hugh.”

“What have we done?” Maybe he shouted at her. He was having trouble thinking.

She opened her arms to him. “Don’t cry,” she said in his ear. “You’re with me now.”

After witnessing
Lewis’s death, the rangers turned off their big spotlight in the meadow. The summit team ran for their lives. Once again, night fell on El Cap.

Light-headed with shock, Hugh followed Cuba into the tent. In her hunger or drugged confusion, she had emptied his stuff sack onto the floor. Chaos, he thought, chaos everywhere.

The edge of his makeshift tent wall snapped like gunshots in the wind. The laces were coming untied on all sides. Their covering was tearing away.

Thunder filled the deep canyon. The stone vibrated with it. Seal out the storm, he thought. Make order from darkness. Begin again. Before drawing the tent shut, he pushed out partway with his headlamp in hand.

“Come up,” he shouted to Augustine. The platform was barely large enough for two, but they could make do. “Leave her.”

But Augustine had already sewn himself into the ropes beside Andie. With his legs tucked into the haul bag and his hood pulled tight, and those two red hammocks billowing and straining in the wind at his feet, he was once more navigating the underworld.

Hugh gave up on him. Augustine had made his decision. If his lover would not join him, he would join her. By dawn, they would be married.

Hugh searched the night for his old friend. They’d left him hanging with the litter. At the farthest reaches of Hugh’s light, armored in his helmet and jacket and plastic white skin, Lewis glittered in the rain.

“Christ,” said Hugh, trying to think it through. Rachel had probably been among the rangers manning the spotlight in the meadow, the wife of the daring volunteer. They would have given her binoculars to watch, and maybe a big, yellow SAR jacket for the rain, and a cup of thermos coffee. They would have made her one of them. She would have seen the lightning strike.

Walk on.
But she had already walked on once. She had emptied her heart of Lewis and left him on his walls. For whatever reason, maybe drawn by the fire or inspired by steadfast Augustine, she’d circled back and found her husband. And sent him up into the teeth of a storm, in memory of a woman who had lost all memory of herself. Love ruled, that was their notion. Hugh felt sick. After this, guilt would consume her. Her great beauty would wither. Better by far if she had never looked back.

Lewis arced from sight, batted by the wind. Snowflakes appeared in Hugh’s light. The last thing he saw outside were the furious prayer flags. Hysteria on a string. He finished stitching shut the tent wall.

Cuba had changed yet again. She sat by the wall, clutching the anchor slings. The priestess, or mad fury, whoever had seized the St. Elmo’s fire in her hand, was now in a terror. One moment she was the queen of the dead, the next a frightened survivor.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

“We’re going to beat it,” Hugh said.

“She knows we’re in here. Listen.”

“That’s thunder.” Every storm feels personal when you get caught out like this. But to Hugh, this one seemed especially point-blank. The wind scoured the Eye so fiercely that he could hear rocks tumbling, like on a river bottom. Loose rope bull-whipped against their tent and the stone. It cracked in the air. The platform’s outer edge bucked. If not for the pitons he’d nailed at the corners, they would have been smashed against the roof.

“Don’t leave me alone. She’s like this animal. Hungry.” Andie’s ghost again. He didn’t know how to fight it.

“You’re not alone, Cuba. I’m here. All this will pass.”

“Keep her out. Please.”

She was on the edge of completely losing it. Haldol, thought Hugh. Or morphine. Whatever it took to put her down. They couldn’t take another of her tantrums, their fragile shelter would rip to pieces. But the med kit lay scattered in his lamp beam, and the bundle of syringes was nowhere to be found.

As he pawed through the shadowy mess and tossed things into the stuff sack, Hugh found empty wrappers and jugs. Cuba had been ravenous when she woke up. She was the hungry animal. All that remained of their supplies was a gallon of water and two protein bars. They were meager pickings, but rationed carefully could last them three days, or four.

There were other things missing, too, though in his daze Hugh could not remember what they were. His bible of maps was gone. He searched for it. All those decades, all those journeys, gone. For a moment, its loss went beyond the loss of Lewis, and that was a selfish thing, he knew. But in a real sense, that little journal had been the heart of him.

His T-shirt lay stuffed in the far corner, the last of his dry clothing. Cuba was sopped and shivering. Her skin was all goose bumps. “Put this on.” The floor whanged against the stone.

Cuba ignored the offering. She stared at Hugh with frightened eyes.

He laid the sleeping bag open for her. It wasn’t quite a straitjacket, but if he could just get her zipped inside, they were half safe. He patted the bag.

“It’s snowing, Cuba.” Even as he spoke, the storm’s pitch changed. Hail rattled on the tent wall like buckshot.

“Lie down. Get warm.” He touched her bare shoulder, and despite her trembling, she was hard as a rock. The cords of her forearms stood in ridges. That curious slave tattoo looked like something etched on bone.

“If you leave me, I’ll die. She’ll kill me like the others,” she said. “Don’t leave me.”

In Saudi Arabia, he and Annie had adopted a jet black Saluki pup they’d found wild in the desert. Back in the compound, five times a day, it wailed when prayers were called from the minarets, which amused all the expats. Diesel, as they named it, had bonded to Annie like glue. Every slight motion she made, that dog was watching. Diesel slept in their room on Annie’s side of the bed. Whenever they left the house, the dog had to be chained outside, where it dug deep holes to cower in until their return. Even after Annie quit recognizing him, Diesel stayed by her side. The same day Annie disappeared in the desert, while Hugh was still traipsing through the dunes, Diesel broke his chain and escaped from their neighbors. Hugh never saw him again.

That was what Cuba reminded him of. She needed Hugh in her sight every minute. After this nightmare, her separation anxiety would probably never quit, she would just transfer it to the next person, and the next. And who could blame her, the way the Captain had brutalized her?

“Cuba,” he said.

“Promise.”

“We’ll see this through. We’re together to the end, you and me, kid.”

“Oh, Hugh.” She breathed at him with her witch’s voice, husky and low. “I’ve heard that before.”

Her eyes glittered in his headlamp beam. They seemed to ignite, as if pure oxygen had hit a flame. Hugh tipped his headlamp, thinking the battery had surged or the bulb was flaring. She still crouched by the wall. Her iron grip held to the slings. But her vulnerability was gone. It was as if she had changed skins.

“I’m with you, Cuba, right here beside you.”

“You say that to all the girls,” she said. It jarred him. She was playing? In this storm? After what had just happened?

“Get in the bag,” he said.

“I’m cold, Hugh.”

“I’ll zip you shut. You’ll warm up.”

“Lie with me.” She cut a glance at him.

Why these games? The floor shuddered. Lewis was swinging by a rope out there. Any moment, they might be torn from the wall. “I’m soaked,” he said. “You’ll be warmer alone.”

She let go of the slings.

The tent flashed red. It seared his eyes. Thunder slapped the stone. Night fell again. His ears buzzed.

When he could see again, she was kneeling in his tunnel of light, feral, watchful. Half naked. She had stripped off her sports bra. Ripped on the abyss.

He didn’t mean to stare. Where the dark tan line stopped, her breasts were honey gold. They were large for an athlete, with a shadow between. She gave him the spectacle of her nipples and flesh. The wind rocked them. She watched him working to break free of the sight.

She smiled, feeding off the storm. Blood beaded on her lips. She took the shirt from his hands, and balled it to her nose. “Hugh Glass,” she said, as if recalling his scent. She pulled it on.

He didn’t touch her. But they were inches apart, and he could smell her black hair. The rain had cleaned out the smoke and sweat and death stink. She was fresh and clean, at least for a big wall.

“Lie down,” he repeated.

She stretched out on the sleeping bag.

“They’ll come for us again,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

He started to close the bag over her. She caught at his neck and pulled. She kissed him.

The force of it—the starvation in it—startled him. He tasted the blood on her split lips. He pulled his head away.

“I thought you loved me, Hugh.”

He wanted her to be sane. Or wild, but in controlled doses. But there was no way around it. She was crazy.

“Be still.”

“Hugh.” Like a broken record.

He considered. By embracing her, he would have his greatest safety. He could rest. If she moved, he’d know it. If she struggled, he could hold her still. And they could keep each other warm.

“We need to sleep,” he said. He shed the wet parka and shoes. He lay behind her and wrapped the bag over them.

She did not so much nestle as burrow into him, taking his arm for her pillow. He turned off the light. “To save the battery,” he said.

“You’re not going to leave me, Hugh.” A statement of fact.

“Go to sleep,” he said.

She fidgeted. Her rump foraged at his loins.

He thought about Lewis rocking in the wind. “Listen to the storm, Cuba.” The tent wall hummed with the wind’s vibrato.

The ferocity calmed her. She settled in his arms. He started to get warm.

The rattle of hail turned to hissing sleet. Sleet gave way to silence: snow. Those were the sounds Hugh listened for, glimmers of what was going on out there. The wind was full of other sounds, too, but the shrieking and howls were nothing to him, just points of contact between the earth and sky.

Hugh closed Lewis from his mind. The platform bucked less violently. He held on to Cuba, still as a mouse now, and let the delirium take over.

At very high altitude, above eight thousand meters, it could get this way, with the violence and elements, but especially with the loss of jurisdiction. The world turned slippery. From minute to minute, you forgot and remembered and forgot again. Hallucinations took away the pain.

Hugh found himself in the desert, raging at the sun. The dunes had come alive. Great sea waves rose and fell. He saw himself digging in the sand for one of his water bottles. His hand came out with a pear, a shriveled black mummy of a pear.

Annie—mindless Annie—was stalking him through the sand. She’d never done that before. He ran from her. She sprang out and clutched his arm.

“Hugh?” It was Cuba. She was gripping his arm, waking him.

“It was a bad dream. I’m sorry. We’re okay.”

“I’m cold.”

“Stay close.”

It went on like that for hours. They shared the storm like fever victims, taking turns singing and groaning and reassuring each other. At one point, Hugh could not be sure she was even alive. He felt for a pulse, but the whole world was pulsing. He listened for her breathing, but the wind was howling. Finally he shook her, and she whimpered. On a night like this, that was all the proof he needed.