and when his friend glances back he catches a thoughtful expression on Patrick’s face. “Don’t poke fun at her. That’s a seriously nice girl, and I’m damned if I know what to do about her.”
The shorter man shrugs. “Have her, make her breakfast, and begin your next sentence with the words, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’…”
Patrick arches a disapproving eyebrow. “Nicky, I have never in my life dumped a girl like that, and I’m not starting with her. What’s more, I don’t think you would either. You’re full of it, you know that? You talk like Jack the lad, but if it came right down to it—if first of all you could find someone who wanted to be your girlfriend, and then she wanted to stick with you after you wanted to move on—I think you’d emigrate and send her a postcard from Brisbane. Wouldn’t you? I’ve seen you talking to women, remember. If they don’t know a piton from a crampon, you have no bloody idea what to say to them.”
Which is true. It’s something else Nicky rather regrets. He just thinks there’ll be time to worry about it later. After he’s climbed all the mountains he wants to. “All right then, marry her. Have kids and a Volvo estate with her.”
“I can’t do that either. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“It’s what she wants. Anyone who’s seen her looking at you knows that.”
“I know it too. Nicky, none of this is news to me. But it wouldn’t be right. I like her. I like her a lot. I don’t like her enough. And she doesn’t need to be my second choice, or anybody else’s. She deserves better than that.”
“Hold on.” Nicky stops and looks his friend squarely in the face. “Is this your way of telling me there’s someone else? Someone you do like enough?”
Even elegant, well-bred Patrick looks discomfited. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, who is she?”
But Patrick knows better than to answer. “And have it the subject of common gossip in every bothy from the Pamirs to the Rockies? I don’t think so!”
Nicky shrugs, untroubled. “So don’t tell me. But if that’s the problem, maybe you should tell”—he still can’t remember her name—“her with the pigtails.”
Patrick looks serious again. “I know. I’m just wondering how. I don’t want to hurt her.”
“You’re going to hurt her,” says Nicky, relationship expert. “And sooner is better than later.”
“I know,” says Patrick sadly.
After they’ve crossed the Little Horse River and they’re standing at the foot of the glacier, looking up, they still can’t see the summit of the mountain, only its heaving shoulders. But they can see the thin blade of the ridge, and the snow whipped off it by the rising wind making arabesques against the impossibly blue sky. They stand still for a long time, their kit at their feet, just looking.
Finally Patrick says, “And we’re going up there, are we?”
Nicky grins his youthful, overconfident grin and nods. “Oh yeah.”
“All the way?”
“You’d better believe it.”
But there’s a word for people who put their trust in mountains. You see it sometimes inscribed on memorials. Not even tombstones: you make that big a mistake, it’s unlikely they’ll find enough of you to bury.
The mountain waits. The weather closes in. The blue sky vanishes under the swirling gray cloak of a spring storm. Snow falls, and also rises as the wind tears it off the mountain’s sides. There are no observers, but if there were there would be nothing to observe. In a whiteout, you can die of exposure scant meters from the shelter that you cannot find. If there had been any observers, they would not have believed it possible that anyone could survive, let alone climb, in that.
But there is only the mountain. And when eventually the whiteout subsides and the sky turns blue again, and the expedition trudges exhaustedly down from the Death Zone and out onto the last treacherous traverse across the glacier, Little Horse doesn’t even notice that the climbing party is smaller coming down than it was when it went up.
CHAPTER 1
HE’D GOT IN THE WAY of returning home at different times and by different routes. The first thing he did when he moved to a new town was rehearse the alternatives, driving and on foot, and make a note of where it was normal to see parked cars and men standing on street corners and where it wasn’t. After four years it was second nature to him.
After four years the whole business had become second nature. Finding