“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.”

“It isn’t possible,” Yates murmured, his voice still full of disbelief.

Ama Apte slowly unbuttoned the neck of her shirt and pulled out her gau. “In all these years,” she said, “only Kypo has seen what my gau has held.” But she opened it now, in front of Shan and Yates, cradling it against the wind. There were several rolled up papers, traditional prayers. But on top of them were two yellowed photos. The first was of a young Dalai Lama. The second, tattered from much handling, was of a smiling Samuel Yates, holding a young, beautiful Ama Apte, Mount Everest peering over their shoulders.

Chapter Sixteen

Shan looked up at Chomolungma and saw a huge slab of snow and ice careen down the side of the mountain. Tectonic plates were crashing together below their feet. This was the place where worlds were shaken.

“It was never supposed to end that way,” Ama Apte said, looking up at Yates with wet eyes. “It was my fault that he died.”

“I think,” Kypo interjected, “it was my fault.” He understood that her pregnancy had slowed her down, had made it impossible for her to flee with Samuel Yates.

His mother reached and grabbed his hand. “Never! You were the one good thing that rose out of it.”

“My uncle,” Yates said, scrubbing at his own eyes now, “told me there was an unusual joy in my father’s letters at the end.” He turned and embraced Kypo. The Tibetan, embarrassed at first, awkwardly returned the embrace. Yates looked back at Ama Apte. “But where is he?”

“Two others came back from hiding in the ice field,” the Tibetan woman explained. “I told them it wouldn’t be the way of Samuel’s people, to be disposed of like the others. They helped me to scrape a hollow, bring gravel and some soil from the foot of the glacier. I brought heather, though it has always struggled to grow.”

Yates acted as if he had just seen the rock-covered mound at his feet for the first time. He sank to his knees, extended his hand to one of the spindly flowers that grew out of it. “He’s here?” he said, his voice twisted in confusion. He ran his hands over the grave. “He’s here. You knew him,” he murmured to the woman. “You knew him better than anyone. But you tried to have me thrown out of Tibet,” he added in a confused tone.

“Megan didn’t tell me everything, only that you were looking for evidence of the old resistance,” the astrologer replied. “I thought you were one of those reporters who came through from time to time to stir things up about the past, write something that just rekindles the anguish. I wanted you away. But then I saw your face at the camp, up close for the first time, and I thought I was looking at your father. Then it became even more important that you go because if you were anything like your father you wouldn’t stop until you were confronting the people from the past, and you would never know how dangerous they were until it was too late.”

“You put his cross on that altar,” Yates said.

Ama Apte nodded. “He and I would go there sometimes on the seventh day, on his Sundays. I would pray my way, and he would pray his.”

The American placed his hands, palm down, on the mound. “I never expected it to be like this.”

“What did you expect, Na-than?” Ama Apte asked in a tentative voice. She pronounced the name tentatively, with a gap between the two syllables, as if trying it on for size.

Yates shrugged. “I don’t know. I wanted to say goodbye, to be able to say I understood him. He was always behind me, looming like a ghost, as if we had unfinished business.”

“He took you to the unfinished business,” Shan said, gesturing to the two Tibetans.