Part 59 (2/2)
Basil said: Risky.
Nirupam said: You boss. But Chazz running on ballpower small disaster you shrugged off back at creva.s.se got to him maybe delayed shock on top sore face & nearly blind.
Basil said: Chazz oldman we're going to move you to Number 3 on rope. It be safer for all incase I come cropper leading.
Chazz said: Sorry to be the crock of the flock guys.
Derek said: Spare us bouillabaisse goodbuddy. Just switch with me. Snap on safety lines? Okay. Easy! You stomp me with tackety boots they hear my screech in basecamp!
Basil said: Please be very quiet all of you ... even if stepped on. The consequences of sudden noise this point could be lamentable.
Chazz said: He means avalanche could be set off by your bigmouth Derek.
Derek said: Or your clumsy feet.
Basil was looking down on the pair, who had unsnapped their harnesses from the main rope. Both were manoeuvring carefully on the tiny ledge of compacted snow, Chazz linked to Derek by a light safety line and Derek ready to refasten them to the rope as soon as the position switch had been accomplished.
Nirupam, the low man, was keeping a sharp eye on the two amateurs, offering advice and encouragement. And then there was a distant crackling sound. Nirupam caught sight of a small wisp of white blurring the dazzle of the upper icefield. A jagged blue line spread across the high face of the chute and opened like a fanged mouth before disappearing behind a foaming cloud of snow.
”She's coming down!” Nirupam yelled. ”Hold! Hold!”
His cries were smothered in a musical rumble, as if someone had trod upon the pedals of a great organ. A cascade of broken thin crust came jangling and hissing ahead of the snowslide. The climbers cringed, hugging the slope and drawing their heads down between their shoulders. Basil whipped his tube-pointed hammer from its holster and sank the second tool into the ice with his left hand, clinging to axe and hammer with all his strength as the avalanche rolled over them.
He said: Hold on boys hold!
Chazz's mind spoke first, incredulous, refusing to admit that he was cartwheeling through opaque white air instead of clinging to a slope by the tips of his toes and an insecurely anch.o.r.ed axe. Derek was torn screaming from his place by a forty-kilo slab of snow that slammed into him like a skating chunk of sidewalk. He flailed out with his axe in a futile attempt at selfarrest and cut the rope linking Nirupam to Basil. The Indian mountaineer, struck by Derek's body, tumbled helplessly as the strap of his dropped ice-axe banged about his ankles. The tool was still tethered to his harness, but he could not haul it up because his neck was broken and the motor nerves of his arms refused to function.
The rus.h.i.+ng snow pa.s.sed Basil by. He dared to lift his head and look down, in time to see the avalanche reach the base of the couloir and make glittering puffb.a.l.l.s as it buried the bergschrund. Chazz spoke a last telepathic curse and Derek simply said: Goodbye. Nirupam was serenely reciting a Buddhist prayer as he expired from a severed spinal cord. Basil called the names of all three men telepathically and out loud, and then he hung there facing the ice and let tears course down his weathered cheeks. It was sunny and very quiet.
After a while he summoned the long-range faculty of his farspeech and bespoke Bleyn the Champion in Camp Bettaforca. No, he said, he would not turn back. Since he still carried the winch and cable, he would complete the climb up the now avalanche-free slope and see to the installation of the apparatus, so that Camp 2 might be set up easily by the next support team. It would be a simple matter for him to return to Camp 1 by nightfall by winching down and then following the marked route across Tine Glacier.
Reluctantly, Bleyn agreed to this. And for some time he watched the dogged human creep upward, and heard with his mind's ear the tag that spun endlessly through Basil's mind, to be broadcast inadvertently into the aether: I, demens, et saevas curre per Alpes, ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.
The Tanu knew that Basil was quoting from a human poet again, as he had done when delivering his orientation speech at the start of the climb. The verse from Kipling had appealed to Bleyn's native bravura; but this one, oddly enough, seemed to come from Basil's own unconscious: Go, madman, and hurry over the cruel Alps, that you may delight small boys and inspire f.e.c.kless adulation.
Humans, thought Bleyn the Champion, were a paradoxical lot.
CHAPTER.
NINE Aiken was alone on his balcony in the Castle of Gla.s.s, watching Kyllikki with his fa.r.s.ense. Although it was night in Goriah the sun had just set in the region of the Atlantic just north of the Azores where the great schooner ploughed along in a fair breeze. Her solar-collector sails gleamed like bronze in the warm light. She sailed on a flaming sea with the evening star over her shoulder and deep night her destination.
Aiken called: Elizabeth.
Yes. How are you dear?
Cultivating lionheartedness. I've been watching Kyllikki and drinking Laphroaig and stuffing myself with Scotch eggs. There are three portable sigmas all charged and ready to hang around my royal neck when I decide to go to sleep and I can't help thinking how a beam from an X-zapper could slice through those s.h.i.+elds like a sgian dhu through a G.o.ddam clootie dumpling ... I don't suppose you know where Marc is?
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