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.
Outer space
Even in the current situation - after four days of difficult climbing, surrounded by miles and miles of wasteland, near the upper limit of troposphere, alone as few people could ever be on our planet, their heads rattling with traces of cerebral oedema, Ryouga couldn't avoid noticing how Ukyou's features seemed more and more incorporeal, part of the ice and rocks, the malevolent presence of the suspended glaciers looming of the west ridge making a fit background for her uneasy, statuary presence. He remembered the first afternoon spent at their small base camp in the Savoia basin, well content to find, as foretold, that no expedition was already in the area for the annual combined assault to the flanks of world's second highest mountain. Ukyou sunbathed on an platform made with tent covers and rucksacks, seemingly careless of the dangerous effects that UVA have at 17000 feet. Ryouga had spent hours following with his eyes the contour of Ukyou's naked body against the sweet, snowy waves of the glacier surface, the blinding white contrasting with the black gashes of crevasses. The silence, broken only by the rumble of the heat-induced avalanches far over the American Towers, slowly became palpable, part of the landscape as the glacier, the chrome coloured sky and Ukyou. Before them towered the rectilinear shape of K2 West Face, enclosed between the fantastic staircase of the ridge and the SW spur. The wall itself seemed to recede inside the mountain - its most striking feature, the so called Shield, overhung near the top. Its multiple gneiss strata limited to the right a curvilinear ice couloir, shaped as a giant scimitar slash. Seen from their position, the whole composition reminded Ryouga the funereal mask of a dead god, like those he had seen in many derelict Chinese villages on his way to Jusenkyoo's springs, long time before, in what now seemed another life.
The citadel
The climb itself started few days later. They had attacked at midnight the lower 45░ tilted icefield, as aggressively as altitude (and energy) allowed. Ukyou, the ice specialist, lead the first part in few hours under the residual light of the moon. When the sun finally rose, they had already entered the rock bands above. The climbing had turned into a brutal affair, requiring all their stamina and skill. They were alternatively leading every pitch, even if Ryouga's self-esteem could have, in a different situation, exacted a stable leader role on rock. They had climbed slowly but regularly, baked from the intolerable heat reflected by the Savoia basin cauldron. When the evening came, they had ascended nearly 2000 feet over the wall base, and had finally reached a diagonal ramp that could have, according to Ukyou's calculations made over an old Polish telephoto, got them to the left of the overhanging area, near the border of the Shield.
Ryouga could not make any plan out of this. He was, already, irremediably lost. He only knew that there was something up, something down, rock before them and an increasing chasm behind their backs. He didn't care - Ukyou was his guide, and he ever relished on his sensation to be completely out of touch with their tridimensional position in space. He used to think of himself as an impaired, defective piece of the human race's gene pool, but Ukyou had taught him that you can't find nothing of value if you don't lose yourself. The important things is to learn how to find your way back.
Topography
"If you look at Karakoram on a conveniently scaled map" said Cologne during one of the preparatory meetings held on Ucchan's back "you'll see that its major sub-ranges seem to run parallel, but they tend to converge toward the Upper Baltoro basin." She inhaled another puff from her pipe. "Usually, it is the Pamir that is referred to as the Roof Of The World, because from its central position it seems to be the originating point of the Greater Ranges of the Earth. However, any practitioner of serious map reading - an overlooked but interesting art - will immediately observe how it is Northern Karakoram that has the honour to be the Mother Of All Mountain Ranges. It is the greatest ice expanse of the world outside the Poles - and its average altitude is higher than Himalayas. Not only that - it's located far north than the Abode Of The Snow, so its climate is arid and cold."
"Have you been there, great-great-mother?" asked Shampoo, who was following Cologne's description with wide-opened eyes.
"I've been learning and teaching in the Hunza's area for some time, where people are said to be healthy and strong even at a venerable age , but I've more or less explored much of the whole range. The peoples inhabiting these places are rugged as their land - and they know many forgotten things. There, I've made many friends and some enemies, not all of the human variety. An interesting place for sure."
The Old Ghoul
She had been, alternatively, the foreigner ensnaring Ranma in his plots, the fierce warrior training Ryouga over the mountains, the old woman eternally smoking a pipe loaded with God-knows-what and managing the Nekohanten with ruthless ability - or the learned explorer of things old and mysterious. Through all his life, Ryouga had always been attracted by Cologne's vague past, by her rigorously locked armoires and closets - that Shampoo assured him to be full of nameless wonders - by her books written in many languages and many alphabets (that she seemed to know perfectly), by the confidence that she put on everything she did. The failure to marry Shampoo, thus providing new and strong blood to her family, was generally regarded as her greatest defeat - but once Akane and Ranma had wed and Shampoo clearly stated she wasn't going back to Jusenkyoo (Mousse hadn't agreed, and had returned to China in a bodycast), she had lost interest in the matter, and turned her attention to Ukyou. Her reliance seemed to come from the perception she had the entire eternity to reach her goals.
Decline and fall
Ryouga suspected that much of Shampoo's new found friendship for Ukyou had to do with her sense of guilt - after all, it was Shampoo who had organised the failed bomb-plot that had disrupted Ranma's first wedding, and Ukyou had been the only one to pay for the consequences. Cologne had manoeuvred much to insure that authorities wouldn't proceed against Shampoo, but Ucchan didn't had her connections. She had seen her license revoked, and had been charged for attempted manslaughter. Being underage, she would have probably got out with a reprimand, but Ranma had insisted for a full scale legal action against his ex childhood friend. Ryouga had tried in vain to turn Ranma to a more lenient attitude. "I'm sorry, Ryouga - Ukyou could have killed Akane. She'll not get away with it." The evidence that the bomb probably wouldn't have killed anyone, the circumstances, even an appeal for indulgence by Kasumi, nothing had moved Ranma (and Akane) to forgive and forget. Through he could understand some of Ranma's motivations, Ryouga had been infuriated. "One year ago they weren't even admitting they loved each other and now that blockhead plays the poor man's Valentino!" he had later told Shampoo. Ukyou had ended up under probation for three years, but only the Saotomes final departure from Japan had effectively ended her tribulations. She had got her license back and opened, with Cologne's help, another restaurant. Ryouga had found more and more difficult the idea to deal with Ranma after all that, and he had politely turned down a free trip to the States for their second child birth. Not only because of Ukyou - he had never really come to terms with Akane's definitive loss. Ryouga had now lost most of his old friends.
To Red Tower, Black Tower, Grey Slabs, part 2
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