Luca Signorelli (SignorelliL@alma.it)
--- RED TOWER, BLACK TOWER, GREY SLABS ---
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PART 1 OF 4
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As she fell asleep on the outward lip of the granite buttress, Ukyou
Kuonji heard the noise of the jetstream winds blasting through the
West Ridge pinnacles, leaving only the broken clouds behind it like an
unknown alien spaceship's exhaust suspended over the sky of Northern
Karakoram. This memory of the TV shows she used to watch as a young
girl had filled her oxygen-deprived nights since their arrival on the
Savoia basin. Later, as weariness had finally overcame her, she dreamt
of the great Kobe port and coastline, interminable rows of cargoes and
oil tankers, prowling like titanic sphinxes of steel. And she dreamt
of her father calling the customers near their okonomiyaki cart, while
she played with the paper tissues with the "Ucchan" logo on it.
Regularly, these dreams would wake her up, and she would wearily check
the wristwatch to see how many hours it was from sunrise. Again she
turned on one side, trying to disentangle herself from the endless
straps and loops of their shelter, and observed Ryouga sleep. She
recognised the familiar pattern of Cheyne-Stokes respiration - long,
deep breaths more and more irregulars, followed by nothing at all for
what seemed an eternity, and finally a rapid reprise of lung activity.
At their current altitude, this meant his brain was starting to lose
its battle to survive on a lower oxygen intake.
Ukyou stood still for a bit, fixing her eyes on the zenith, and tried
to observe any sign of sky colour's change. They were in full
north-western exposure, so they couldn't see the sunrise on the
opposite side of the mountain - the sun extending its light over the
tops of Central Asia's heartland. Again, she looked at the great
diadem of stars high above their bivouac spot - the Summer Triangle
inverted, with dim Altair at the zenith, bright Vega on the lower left
and remote, savage Deneb on the left, the most luminous object in a
4000 cubic light years area around Sun. Ukyou dreamt of Furinkan
astronomy lessons, and Mr. Ohtani, their science teacher, explaining
that if Altair would be at arm's length, on the same scale Deneb would
have been one mile away. Even at this distance, its unimaginable
luminosity made Deneb brighter than Altair. And she would slowly
juggle Altair and Vega, the shepherd and the princess of the Chinese
legend, and all the "Ucchan"'s patrons and Ranma and Akane with them
would laugh and cheer and Ranma would ask politely to Ukyou if she
wanted to dance. She felt happy.
-- Reawakening --
Ukyou woke up fully, and started the long early morning routine. They
had only three gas cartridges left so she would take extra attention
not to spill the snow content of a small aluminium pan. At 21.000
feet, melting the snow in two cups of lukewarm liquid is a process
taking hours, so Ukyou would eventually do another unfruitful check of
the climbing material left - the Polish-made titanium ice screws, the
green and yellow runners, the set of hexentrics and nuts and tri-cams,
the Grivel 14-points crampons and the short shafted, curved ice axes,
with the Grivel mark on the inner part of the blade. Their two
surviving climbing ropes were carefully coiled behind them, attached
with a long chain of karabiniers to their belay point.
Ukyou made a conscious effort to put her altitude boots on - but
exhaustion forced her to stand back, breathless, trying to regain the
nervous strength necessary to accomplish this task. She would
concentrate, as she used to when training those ten years of anger so
long ago, on the simple details - the number of passages the string
would make into the boot, the "SCARPA" huge sign on the left, the
marks left by countless rocky edges on the sole.
-- Caresse --
"Ranma and I went out
right at the school
in the snow"
As the sun's glare turned Karakoram's night into huge varieties of
blues and whites - deep or delicate shades of blue for ice, blinding
white and grey for snow - Ukyou remembered when once, many years
before, in a January afternoon, Ranma had asked her to come in the
large open field of the Furinkan's back for a walk in the snow. Akane
was nowhere near, and they had played, throwing snowballs and
stumbling breathless, laughing. Back then, she had felt so glad that
this memory had frozen solid, as the masses suspended 3000 feet above
them, on the top of the mountain. This snow is the same snow of that
afternoon, long time ago, the sky is the same sky, and I'm Ukyou - she
thought. The sweetness of that afternoon could loom in the distance,
as the Mustang Tower profile, just 10 miles in front of her, but still
unreachable as Deneb or Nerima. "Time and my direction are
unalterable, my movement is another one", Ukyou thought, and looked
again up, in the direction of the invisible summit of K2.
-- Sky --
Two tiny figures moved upward, on the left limit of a stone spur,
right on the upper edge of the Shield, the immense, overhanging stone
slab topping the West Wall. The upper shape carefully advanced on the
mixed, difficult terrain, while the lower uncoiled the rope.. At
10.000 miles from Tokyo, at 21000 feet above the sea level, a young
Japanese girl, her face covered by layers of tissue and protective
glasses against the UVA devastating effect, continued her slow,
hopeless upward progression toward Earth's second summit. Her face is
withered, aged of years, her lips broken, her breath irregular. One
step, another hit with the ice-axe. The young girl knew that, there,
everyone is alone. She felt comfortable with it - she wanted
desperately to reach the top and, in some way, she's always been
alone.
-- The Avenue of the Dead --
When it came Ryouga's turn to climb, he tried to forget his weariness,
focusing on this momentary task. His lack of direction's sense had
been made more acute by altitude, but the holds were tracing a route
even he couldn't lose. That was the reason he had started to climb -
apart from the desire to stay with Ukyou, the only person that could
really understand his misery. Valleys are routes you cannot fail,
mountains are unmistakable signposts. Akane's delicate features were
still solidified on everything he saw, but the same nature of the
monoliths bordering the icy highway of the Baltoro glacier helped him
to force this memory back. Ryouga could remember every mountain name,
and repeated them as a mantra while forcing his body up. "Pajiu,
Trango, Liligo, Urdokas, Uli Biaho, Biale, Urga, Doksam" and finally
the immense Concordia junction - that Ryouga knew he would see again
once they had been higher that the West Ridge at their right. He could
barely remember Concordia, but this gigantic ice plaza merged, in
Ryouga's memory, with the four lane highway junctions outside Tokyo he
hated so passionately because of his direction's sense.
-- Spider gods have lost control --
"See now - Ursa Major
Mallory and Irvine disappearing into a cloud
See now - smoking mirror
Texcatlipoca will teach me how"
Ryouga had received a postcard shortly after Akane's wedding. It had
been sent by the two newlyweds during their honeymoon trip in Mexico
and the scene displayed was the Avenue of the Dead, the sacred street
among grim Aztec temple-pyramids of Teotihuacan. Then, Ryouga had felt
insulted - he suspected some hint of Ranma's insensitivity lurking
behind that present. But once on his way to K2, he had realised how
that postcard was just foreboding the place he and Ukyou had walked
into, a colossal sacred road no Aztec or Mayan architect could ever
have conceived. Ukyou and he had recently only few occasions of
physical intimacy, but in a sense this was their honeymoon, of an
intensity Ranma and Akane wouldn't ever dream of.
-- The model --
On the belay stance, Ryouga looked again at Ukyou, her lean body
wrapped in the black altitude jacket and gore-tex trousers. She's my
invisible presence in this painful climb, Ryouga thought. Ukyou's
intense, secret beauty, still somehow sensible through the multiple
strata of her climbing outfit, seemed to provide a solitary source of
sanity in the vertical desert that surrounded them.
"Don't you understand, Ryouga?" - she had told him once, after one of
the training climb they had done together in the Japanese Alps -
"don't you understand how close to the abyss we've both been? All
those years - while you were losing all your self-respect after Akane
and I lost mine chasing Ranma... Ryouga, they say love is the best
part of youth. Those bloody fools at Furinkan could see that you were
the right person for young Mrs. Tendo. I mean, you loved her, that's
more of what anyone of us could say about Ranma. You were the knight
in shining armour, Ryouga, compassionate, chivalrous, always ready to
step back in darkness as the situation required. And circumstances
have denied you even a small chance to play equally with Ranma - I
suspect that, even after all these years, Akane still doesn't realise
how much you loved her. We've spent the best days of our lives after
an obstinate brat and a frigid young woman that couldn't see past her
nose. A lot of people, after I tried to snuff Mrs. Tendo, thought I
just showed my real face to the world. All Akane's girlfriends, you
know, all those chicks who couldn't ever conceive life without a man
around, said that I deserved what happened later. We were nearly on
friendly terms, me and Akane. I suspect that I did it just out of
desperation. I've always hated the idea of losing and I've lost
everything, as you did, poor Hibiki. We've lost our youth, our hope,
whatever any spoiled middle class kiddo in bloody Furinkan considered
his sacred right. Be young, be careless. We've never been part of
their clique. I'm happy all this is behind us."
-- Progressive shift --
Later, when they became lovers, much of Ukyou's bitterness seemed to
evaporate - or maybe, her wounds had been healed. In contrast, Ryouga
had discovered how his coyness and angst had been changed into a vague
sense of inadequacy when other people he didn't knew well were around
- he had often those recurring dreams of anxiety, like being unable to
provide urgent answers in front of a huge crowd. To Ukyou's amusement,
he still bled profusely from the nose, especially the first time he
had seen her in the raw. Only the old difficulties with his sense of
direction really troubled him - but Ukyou, always the strong one, had
been his cure. He had found all the pleasure and terrors to be lost
inside Ukyou's maze of flesh. The discovery of her (and his) body had
been a definitive watershed, a point of no return. The movement of her
mouth, the angularity and at the same time the composure of her facial
bones, the enigmatic longing of her eyes, the warm excitement of their
skin surfaces making contact, the outline of her pectoral girdle
against his mouth, the serpentine touch of her legs around his body,
the persistence and depth of her breath during the climax, all this
composed a territory Ryouga had many times tried to explore. There,
their identities ceased to make sense.
-- I go, but you shall wait until I return --
They had arrived the western side of the mountain after a twelve day
trek from Askole up the Braldu valley and the Baltoro glacier. They
had only a trekking permit, but they had avoided any trouble from the
omnipresent military teams patrolling all the Karakoram border of
Pakistan - a presence enforced since the Siachen War with India back
in 1985. Their apparent invisibility had been taken by Ryouga as a
sign that destiny favoured their project - an alpine style, early
season attempt at the unclimbed west face of K2. They had avoided
asking for a climbing permit - by the way, they couldn't afford it.
Shampoo, one of the few still left from the Furinkan years, suggested
openly that they had both gone mad - but had given also her support to
collect equipment. Ryouga's writing career was just now paying off,
and Ukyou's business, now flourishing again after having been forced
out of Nerima in result of the Wedding Fiasco, still could not pay the
high costs of the expedition. Ryouga had consumed all his inheritance
plus the money made selling his parents' house for the material - it
was clear they were going to live on peanuts for months. Shampoo had
shaken her head, and said she didn't hope to see them back.
-- Something lost in Karakoram --
Only Cologne, who had kept a watchful eye over Ukyou since Ranma's
wedding, seemed to understand and approve the secret urgings behind
their plan. "You're not the first, neither the last to look for
something lost in Karakoram", she said while browsing with the tip of
her staff over Ukyou's large and utterly unusual library. It was
located in Ukyou's bedroom over the "Ucchan", and included titles
equally divided between cuisine books, books on the Great Patriotic
War (the way Russians call the Eastern Campaign on WWII), books on
mountain lore and books on a divinatory ability called geomancy -
something that Cologne itself had suggested Ukyou to study. "The
hazards and allures of such a destination need not be stressed" the
old matriarch added pensively "but I sense that you have some reasons
to go there. Because, as they say, it is always a matter of
motivations, isn't it?"
She then gave them a presentation letter for an old acquaintance of
hers, that still lived in Askole.
-- Slowly and mechanically in darkness --
Their training, by all standards, was superb. In their late twenties,
they hadn't lost anything of their old physical qualities. Ryouga was
very strong, as Ukyou was incredibly agile. She had done a string of
solo climbs in the Alps, including the fearsome McIntyre couloir at
the Grand Jorasses North Face in five hours, and the South Face Direct
of the same mountain in ten - both in winter conditions. Ryouga had
several difficult routes on the Yosemite and Zion parks in USA under
his belt, plus an entire season of ice climbing in the Canadian
Rockies, and three routes in the Denali area in Alaska. What they
lacked in high altitude experience they hoped to get through skill and
strength, but K2, possibly the most difficult mountain on Earth, was
entirely another affair.
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END OF PART 1 - CONTINUE
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