“I will let her friends know she died the way she wanted, doing something someone had never done, making her own rules, at the top of the world.” Yates offered a melancholy grin then rose slowly, bracing himself, then turned and walked back with Shan to the dead woman. He produced a wool cap from his pocket and placed it on her head, then cupped her cold cheek in his hand. “I want her to be more comfortable than this,” he declared. “I want the mother mountain to know she is here.”
They carried her down to a flat slab that faced southeast and rested her back against another rock, her hands in her lap, her legs, stiff from cold, bent under her as best they could. Yates stepped back, returned to straighten her wool cap, and nodded. Megan Ross was facing Everest, meditating, as she often did before a strenuous climb. Shan thought of the strange chain of events that had brought them to the dead woman, of how he had grown close to her after her death. Ama Apte had been right, Shan realized. Ever since the American woman had died, the mother mountain had been using her. The shining light of her death had guided him to the truth he so desperately needed.
Half an hour later, his arms aching from the climb back up to the plateau, Shan knelt in one of the old rock shelters, coaxing a smoldering pile of dried goat dung into flames to boil tea. He looked up to see Yates bend into the shadows of another of the crumbling structures, probing a pile of debris, extracting several scorched sticks. The American carried them back to Shan, studying them, deep in reflection, until he finally dropped them by the smoky fire. They were not sticks, but charred remnants of a wooden crate. On one, still visible after so many decades, was stenciled the words CAUTION! AMMUNITION! in English..
Yates was already away when Shan looked up, walking the perimeter, eyes on the ground for more evidence. As he watched, the American’s head snapped up and he flattened himself against a boulder, warily watching a cleft in the rocks at the far side of the plateau. Shan heard voices as he reached the American’s side, then in quick succession three ringing blows that he recognized as a hammer driving a metal piton into rock.
They edged through the cleft to find four figures working hard to erect a leanto of rock and canvas against the rock face. The smaller clearing where Kypo and three men in red and yellow climbing parkas worked was sheltered on three sides by the rock face and high outcroppings, with a shallow pool that caught meltwater as it trickled from the cliff above. Here had been an inner camp, Shan realized, as he saw the ruins of several more rock shelters, imagining the scene decades earlier when it was the hidden headquarters of the rebels. There were still vestiges of that time, a yak hair rope hanging loose from an iron hook driven into a crack in the rock face, faded paint on a flat boulder in the image of the flag of free Tibet.
Suddenly Kypo stop hammering the pitons being used for support ropes. The Tibetan spun about and advanced on Shan and Yates, the hammer still in his hand. The three men bent low behind one of the old walls, as if hiding. As they did so Shan glimpsed the red robes they wore under their parkas, which bore the logo of Tsipon’s climbing company.
“I want to speak with them,” Shan said.
“No. She says we must stay away from you. Both of you.”
Shan followed Kypo’s uneasy gaze toward the edge of the plateau, where it opened to a view of the Himalayas marching along the border to the east. Tumkot’s astrologer sat near the edge of the plateau, one hand resting on a low mound of stones and earth, on which a few wildflowers bloomed.There was an odd contentment on the face of Ama Apte as she looked up to acknowledge him. “Once this was the most secret place in all of Tibet,” she said. “Now all the world comes here.”
Shan was about to quietly settle beside the fortuneteller when he heard the crunch of gravel under running boots behind him.
“Ever since I arrived you’ve wanted me gone!” came an angry voice. Yates hovered over Ama Apte’s back, his face so fierce Shan braced himself lest the American try to strike the woman.
“You found out about what I was doing from Megan! You knew I was trying to find my father and you destroyed the evidence! You sabotaged my equipment, planted evidence so I would be deported. And now I find you here. It’s as good as a confession! You betrayed me because you betrayed my father!”
“Your father would have been gone from here, would be alive, but for me,” the Tibetan woman agreed in a tight voice, her gaze back on the horizon.
The words seemed to confuse Yates. “Then you admit it,” he said in a quieter, though harsh tone.
“It’s always felt as though I betrayed him,” Ama Apte agreed.
“How can you live with yourself?” Yates snapped.
“I think,” Shan said, fighting an unexpected melancholy, “she has only been trying to protect you, to help you.” He could see the tears now, flooding down Ama Apte’s cheeks. “You came to find your father, didn’t you?”
The American glanced in confusion at Shan. “What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t listened,” Shan said. “The old hermit told us how Ama Apte couldn’t flee across the glacier, that she had to be with family in the village. You told me yourself you couldn’t understand what force it was that kept your father on this side of the border when he could have fled a hundred times, when his own unit was ordering him, begging him to come back.”
Shan turned to Kypo, who now stood with a fearful expression by his mother. “You always wear sunglasses outside, like lots of Tibetans, because the sun in the thin air causes so many cataracts. But inside it’s different. Inside you wear contact lenses, one of the only Tibetans I know to do so, lenses that probably cost half a year’s income to buy.”
“His eyes are too sensitive to the light,” Ama Apte said in a wooden tone. “They need special protection or he will get cataracts, because of all his high climbing. So we found a special doctor in Shigatse.”
“I think you only wear your sunglasses when the lenses aren’t in, Kypo,” Shan said. “Take them off.”
The Tibetan retreated a step, glancing back toward the passage through the rocks, as if thinking of bolting.
Yates looked from Shan to the tall Tibetan in confusion. “You’re not making any sense, Shan,” he groused. “Kypo doesn’t have anything to do with-” His words died away as Ama Apte nodded and the Tibetan lifted his dark glasses. Yates took an uncertain step toward him, looking him in the eyes, unable to speak for a long moment. “Jesus!” Yates gasped at last. “Oh Christ.” He leaned closer to the Tibetan, in disbelief.
Kypo’s eyes were blue.
Ama Apte bent over, racked with a sob. She made an effort to rise, seemed sapped of strength. There were no words from any of them, there seemed to be no words to speak.
“We always felt safe here,” Ama Apte finally said. “For months our band kept telling ourselves we could always safely escape from here across the border if things went badly. Even when the enemy soldiers became better organized, got better equipment and began climbing higher, this ridge was inaccessible to them. They had no helicopters then, and the resistance moved so quickly, hid so easily that this ridge was ruled out as a possible hiding place because everyone was certain it would take ropes and hours of work to move up its face. Only our friends knew of the secret passage.
“In the end there were less than two dozen of us. The Americans were shutting everything down. Samuel said that if he went back they would send him home to America, said it was only his remaining on this side that kept the Americans connected to us.” Ama Apte paused several times to scrub tears from her cheeks. “He would make jokes about how we would build a little house of stone and logs in a valley where no one ever came and invite the yetis for dinner on festival days.” She stopped and abruptly pulled a weed from one of the clumps of heather at her side.
“The solders came as we were finishing breakfast. They killed five of our band before we knew what was happening. Some fled up into the ice field. We killed most of those in the first wave but they kept coming, a full company or more. I shouted at Samuel to run to the ice field and hide, and he grabbed my hand and we began to move up the trail. But I was shot in the leg and fell, hitting my head, knocking me unconscious. When I awoke it was late afternoon, and no one was left but the dead. My face was covered with blood. They had left me for dead. Samuel was there beside me, riddled with bullets. He had thrown away his rifle because the magazine was empty. He had an empty pistol in his hand.”