“Your harness is set. You need to get into it. We have to go.”
“Two seconds.” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then squeezed the trigger.
One of the men went down. I think it was Géant. Émile went flat and returned fire. He started to get back up. Mom fired again. She didn’t hit him, but the shot ricocheted on a rock near his right leg. He hit the ground again.
“Time to go,” Mom said.
We backed our way to the gorge and dropped over the edge.
The Gorge
I rope down about forty feet and stop. There’s a toehold just big enough for me to catch while I pull the rope and reset. Zopa and Alessia are about fifty feet below me to my right, setting up for their second pitch. Mom stops ten feet above me, a little to my left. We both have more rope, but it’s best to rerig when you can, not where the rope ends. And then there’s Émile. If he gets to our anchors before we pull our ropes, he’ll cut us loose—
“ROCK!” MOM SHOUTED.
I hugged the wall and covered my head. I’d left my helmet on the hillside with the camel. It wasn’t a rock. It was her pistol. It hit me in the shoulder, painfully. I made a grab for it, but missed.
“Drop something?” A man’s voice shouted from above.
Émile. He was on his stomach, hanging out over the edge, pointing his rifle at us. “If any of you descends one more inch, I will shoot all of you.”
I doubted he would shoot Alessia, but I had no doubt that he’d shoot me and the others. He didn’t even have to waste a bullet on Mom and me. All he had to do was reach out with a knife and cut our ropes. It was probably lucky Mom had dropped the pistol. If she hadn’t, she would be falling right now. Climbing back up to Émile was not going to be easy, but that wasn’t what he had in mind.
He called down to Mom. “Retrieve your rope, or I’ll cut your son’s rope.”
Mom hooked on to the wall and pulled her rope.
“You next,” he said, pointing his rifle at me.
I retrieved my rope.
“I am coming down. We will descend together. Slowly. If I tell you to stop. You will stop. If you do not. I will shoot you. Do you understand?”
I nodded, and I’m sure the others did too. The wall was as flat as the side of a glass building. There was no place to hide.
“I am going to attach my rope now. When I look back over the edge, if any of you have moved, I will shoot you.”
He didn’t ask us if we understood this time; he just disappeared. We stayed exactly where we were. There was nothing we could do. There was obviously a second boat, and he wanted to get to it. A couple minutes later, a rope flew over the edge. A few seconds after that, Émile roped down with his rifle slung over his shoulder, stopping about ten feet above Mom. He may not have been climbing recently. Soft hands. But judging by the way he had rigged his harness and descended, he knew what he was doing. There was no sign of Géant. Mom had either killed him or wounded him so badly, he couldn’t join us. I wished she had shot Émile instead.
“Small increments all the way to the river,” Émile said. “You will wait for me to retrieve my rope, then reset. No one descends until I tell you to. When I say stop, everyone stops or everyone gets shot. Go.”
Of course, Émile stopped when he had something to grab on to or a toehold. We stopped when he told us to, which meant that most of the time we had nothing to hang on to but our ropes. To avoid this problem, I picked a spot below that looked like it had something I could latch on to, then slowed down or sped up my descent, trying to time it for when Émile shouted for us to stop. This took my mind off the fact there was a French maniac rappelling down behind me with a gun pointed at my head. The only hope we had was that he would screw up and fall to his death. I nearly got my wish halfway down the cliff when his rope got jammed.
“Stop!”
At first I didn’t know what was going on. He’d only descended about fifteen feet from his anchor and was dangling in a terrible spot. From where I was, I couldn’t see anything for him to grab on to.
“He’s stuck,” Mom said. She was the closest to him.
So what? I wanted to say. Let him dangle. It was scary, but relatively safe if your anchor held, which I hoped his didn’t. The way out of it was to climb back up the rope to the anchor and reset your rope. Of course Émile’s problem was a little more complex than that, because when you’re climbing up, you have to look up. Hard to do when you’re trying to point a rifle down at your climbing partners or, in our case, his climbing targets.
“Old man! Get up here and help me!” There wasn’t any panic in his voice. Just extreme irritation.
Zopa was the farthest away from him.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’m closer, and I have a good route up to you.”
It wasn’t a great route, but it was better than Zopa’s or Mom’s, although she was even closer to him than I was.
“Yes,” Émile said. “You do it.”
As I climbed up, I wondered if I would have the courage to drop him if I got the chance. I stopped to rest and glanced down at the others. Everyone was looking up at me, but none more intently than Zopa. His dark eyes were locked on to me like lasers. He shook his head as if he knew what I was thinking and wanted me to stop thinking it. Was my thinking a want or a need? Clearly Zopa felt it was a want. But I wasn’t so sure. Weren’t there times when a want and a need were the same thing?
“Get up here,” Émile growled.
“I’m coming,” I said.
But I hadn’t decided if I was going to kill him or not. I climbed up next to him. He was dangling like a spider on the end of a thread about six feet out from the wall. His rope had fallen over an outcrop, which was why he was hanging so far from the wall when he got jammed. It was an amateurish mistake. Maybe Émile wasn’t the climber I had thought he was. If I’d had a knife, all I’d have had to do was touch the rope with the blade and he’d have been gone. I didn’t have a knife. Or the will. But I was working on that. I glanced back down at Zopa. He was still zeroed in on me.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you, cagey monk.
I peered up at Émile’s anchor. It looked like the rope had doubled over and knotted as it slipped through the carabiner. I’d need slack to get it loose.
Émile had unslung his rifle and was pointing it down in the general direction of Mom, with his finger on the trigger. He was smiling, trying to act like dangling a thousand feet above a river was no big deal, but I could tell he was nervous about it.
“What will you do?”
“Pull you to the wall, anchor you, climb up and untangle your rope, and drop it down to you.”
“Do it,” he said.
It was easier to explain it than it was to do it, but I managed. After getting him hooked to the wall on a new anchor, I climbed to the top of the outcrop and paused to catch my breath. He’d insisted on keeping his original rope tied to his harness, saying he wanted it there for safety. I think he wanted it tied to the harness in case he butterfingered the rope when I dropped it down to him. I glanced down at his rope and realized that if I grabbed it, I might be able to make him dance like a marionette, maybe even hard enough to make him drop the rifle. I might even be able to dislodge the anchor holding him and drop him into the river. I looked down at Zopa. Mistake. He was still locked on to me. He gave me another head shake. I didn’t believe he was reading my mind. I thought he was putting himself in my place, knowing that he’d be tempted to rope-a-dope Émile too. The dope with the gun was moving his weapon from head to head. I didn’t think he’d be able to hit anyone intentionally as I was shaking him, but if he managed to hang on to the rifle and hold the trigger down, he might hit someone accidentally. It was a risk, but a risk that might be worth taking.
“What’s taking so long?” Émile shouted.
“Just looking for a handhold,” I said.
Debating whether I should try to kill you, I thought.
Zopa had stopped shaking his head. For a second I thought he
was giving me the go-ahead—not that I needed his permission—but no such luck. It looked like he was nodding at something to his right. I scanned the cliff face. There was nothing I could—
The shen was back, not thirty feet away from me. The ledge it was standing on was no wider than my boot. It actually looked like it was floating in thin air. I quickly turned my head. I didn’t want Émile to see it. For all I knew, Émile had shot the other snow leopard. Our guesses about how they got here were pure speculation. Émile had made some dumb mistakes during this climb, but he wasn’t without skill. He could have come up this way originally with the help of someone who knew what he was doing. I scrambled up to his anchor.
“I need some slack!” I yelled.
Émile sent some my way, and I had him untangled in an instant. I dropped the rope down to him, hooked on to the anchor, and lowered myself with regret.
The Darkening
I’m convinced that we are no longer hostages. That Émile has no intention of releasing us, whether the ransom is paid or not. He is using us to get down the cliff. This is the only reason we are alive. He gets tangled two more times. Zopa frees him, then Mom frees him. And each time, I’m disappointed. Émile lives. If he gets tangled again, I’m going to volunteer to free him. I’m going to . . . I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I want another chance to decide.
“Stop!” Émile shouts.
We stop, dangle, wait for him to catch up. A sliver of light from the cliffs illuminates the gorge, but it’s getting darker with every pitch.
The shen is still stalking us, pausing when we stop, moving when we drop, nearly invisible, always about thirty feet above, alighting like a gray moth on bits of rock and ledges I can’t see. The only real climber among us is the shen . . .
I COULD HEAR the roar of the rapids two hundred feet below and see the black inflatable boat pulled up on a shelf cut into rock by the fast water. Alessia had been inching her way closer to me the last several pitches and was now only ten feet away. Her face was streaked with dirt and sweat, her black hair powdered with rock dust, her pale blue eyes bloodshot, her lips swollen and chapped. We’d finished the last of our water a thousand feet ago.
“Zopa says that we will be fine,” she said.
I shrugged. I seriously doubted it, but I didn’t want to tell her that.
“He told me that we would be saved from above,” she said.
I glanced up. Émile was making his way down and had just about reached the end of his rope. Above him the shen was carefully picking its way down the wall. As terrible as our circumstances were and as exhausted as I was, I couldn’t help but be amazed and awed by the cat’s ability to balance on what looked like nothing.
“Do you think he meant God?” Alessia asked.
The question threw me. I didn’t know what she was talking about, which must have shown on my face, because she gave me a gentle smile.
“Zopa,” she said. “Do you think that by above, he meant that God would save us?”
“I don’t know. It’s sometimes hard to know what Zopa means. His idea of what saved means might be different from ours.”
It was Alessia’s turn to look confused. I gave her a cracked-lip smile. “I’m just saying that he doesn’t think like you and I. He doesn’t see things the same way. He’s comfortable with mysteries like the shen.”
“Shen?”
“Snow leopard. It’s been following us all the way down the face.”
“I didn’t see a—” She started to look up.
“Don’t look! I don’t want Émile to see it.”
Émile had reached the end of his pitch and was hammering in his next anchor.
“Go!” he shouted down at us.
Alessia and I started down side by side. The lower wall of the gorge was rougher than the upper part, with more hand- and footholds. We were able to rappel all the way to the ends of our ropes. Two more pitches, and we’d reach the river and find out if we’d be saved by something from above. I just hoped I’d be able to get a drink of water before we were murdered.
Once again, Alessia stopped right next to me, and Zopa stopped right next to her. Mom was about thirty feet to my left. Émile was coming down slowly above us.
“I still do not see the snow leopard,” Alessia said.
“Thirty, maybe forty feet above Émile, to his left. Just make sure you look away when Émile stops.”
“Oh, yes! I see it. It is magnifique!”
The shen was nearly sprinting down the face now. I was afraid Émile was going to see it, but once again, it stopped the instant Émile stopped, as if it knew who its enemy was.
“I’m out of anchors!” Émile shouted. “Bring me one.”
He hadn’t directed this to anyone in particular, but Mom was closest to him.
“Hang on,” she said.
She started free climbing up to him. I guess he didn’t realize that he could free climb too—we all could.
“There are enough holds to get down the last hundred feet to the river blindfolded,” I said.
“Not if you want to use a rifle,” Zopa said. “And not if you are an unskilled climber.”
Both good points. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Zopa since he had warned me off trying to murder Émile, which I still thought was a mistake.
“He’s just using us to get to the river,” I said.
“No doubt,” Zopa agreed.
“So what happens when he gets to the river?”
“He will try to kill us.”
“Then why didn’t you let me—”
“I said he would try,” Zopa interrupted. “He will not succeed.”
“You think the shen is going to attack him?” I asked sarcastically.
Sarcasm was about as effective on Zopa as it was on Alessia.
He looked confused, then said, “The shen is not here to save us. That is not the cat’s role. Shens are not violent creatures unless you are a deer or small mammal or a bird.”
“Yeah, I get that, but you told Alessia that we would be saved from above.”
“And I believe we will be. Do you remember the eagles?”
The eagle attack seemed like it had happened a hundred years earlier.
“I remember.”
I also remembered that Zopa seemed to understand what the birds were going to do before the birds knew they were going to do it, like some kind of raptor whisperer.
“The eagles are going to help us?”
Zopa shook his head. “Very doubtful. Eagles are territorial. I don’t think they use this gorge.”
“Then what—”
“You have been so focused on Émile and the shen, you have missed something. You have lost your focus. It happens. You will see what you missed when we reach the river.”
I heard a familiar ping above. Émile was hammering in an anchor. Mom was nearly back to where she had started from. She was climbing easily and seemed pretty relaxed. I wondered if she had seen what Zopa said I had missed.
“Go!” Émile shouted.
Two more pitches, and we were on the ground, standing on shaky legs with the cliff in front of us, the river roaring behind. Émile hung twenty feet above, pointing his rifle down at us.
“You can unhook and drink,” he said.
Which I think meant he wanted to get to the ground and unhook while we were a safe distance away, not that we were stupid enough to rush him. If we’d wanted to take him out, we would have done it on the face. I was still mad about that as I dropped my harness and walked over to the river to get a drink.
I put my head completely underwater. When I came up for air, I found I was sandwiched by Mom and Alessia, both shaking out their long wet hair. I scooped several handfuls of water into my parched mouth.
“What do you think Émile will do?” Alessia asked.
I thought he was going to shoot Mom, me, and Zopa in the back, tie Alessia up, and take her downriver. But I didn’t tell her this. I shrugged.
Zopa had already slaked his thi
rst and was back on his feet facing the cliff. We got up and turned around. Émile was on the ground, unhooked, thirty feet away, pointing his rifle at us.
“The boat is not big enough for all of us,” he said.
The boat was plenty big enough for all of us if one of us hadn’t been a kidnapper worried that we would jump him in the confined space.
I looked at the cliff face. The shen was twenty feet above him, moving to his right, slowly descending. I wanted to shout and warn it off, but that would draw attention to the cat.
Émile put his rifle to his shoulder. I looked at Mom. Tears rolled down her cheeks. A sad smile on her face. She put her arms around me.
“Don’t,” Alessia pleaded.
“I am not going to shoot you,” Émile said. “Step away from them.”
“No!” Alessia grabbed Zopa and pulled him in to us.
It was a delaying tactic that wasn’t going to work for very long, but it was worth it to see Émile’s rage. I thought he was going to shoot Alessia too, but he didn’t. He just stood there glaring.
“We could fall back into the river,” I said quietly. “Take our chances.”
“A cork couldn’t survive in this water,” Mom said.
“We will be fine,” Zopa said. “Just stay where you are. Watch the shen.”
The shen jumped from the wall to the shelf and started moving toward the inflatable boat. Émile swung his rifle toward it.
“No!” I shouted, breaking away from the group—
The shen freezes in place and looks up at the sky. Émile points his rifle at me and grins. The gorge somehow gets darker, like a cloud is passing overhead, which is impossible. The gorge is too deep and narrow for sunlight to reach the river unless the sun is directly overhead. I wonder if this unnatural darkening is something that happens just before you die. I look back at Mom. She is moving toward me with her arms out, screaming. I hear a gunshot, then another, and another. I’m surprised it doesn’t hurt. I look back at Émile . . .
He was on the ground covered in blood.
From Above