Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Alistair nodded, eyeing the mountain grimly. He tied his handkerchief over his mouth, and they set off, one thought echoing with each footstep. Hold on, Ismay. I am coming.
It was an irrational thought. Ismay was not in any known danger, just the possibility of it.
And she was not waiting for him, anticipating his arrival in any way.
But the thought added urgency to his steps—as if he needed any more reminders to make haste with a looming ash cloud and a rumbling mountain.
At the halfway inn, all that waited for him was proof that she’d been there and who she was with.
Her name—Ismay Elizabeth Rose, was in the ledger alongside Johan Christian Dahl and Caspar David Friedrich, both of whom listed themselves as friends of the prince of Norway and had also used their second names.
All three of them had been very formal in signing, their print painfully legible.
His mind whispered the morbid reason for it.
To make it easy to identify them, to know who to contact if the worst happened.
He had to stop. He was fear-mongering now.
Other guests coming down the mountain confirmed they’d seen her trio going up.
‘We tried to talk them into joining us and coming down,’ a man told him.
‘We should not have gone up. If I had known what it would be like, I would not have gone. There is lava flow at the northwest fractures. It’s not just fireworks.
’ He coughed. ‘Hard to breathe, too. Once you get there, you can’t stay overlong.
Too much heat, too much gas. We warned them, but the artist is intent on sketching the crater in eruption up close.
’ The man held out his hawthorn walking stick. ‘Take it. You’ll need it.’
He had to hurry, then, if hurrying was even possible.
Alistair recalled the slippery footing, the corrosive gravel and the ash that marked the second half of the ascent.
It would be even more difficult today with fresh ash to contend with.
He took off his handkerchief and wet it in the inn yard pump.
The cloth was already grey. He refilled his canteen and said goodbye to his guide.
It was an ominous climb, something out of a hellscape, the land grey and black and barren—he’d not been able to see just how desolate it was in the dark the first time. Lower on the slopes, there were rich forests, crops, orchards, but up here, all of that fell away.
Alistair bent to scoop some soil and let it sift through his fingers.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There was no better place to remind oneself of that than on the slope of an active volcano, something the mountain was determined not to let him forget with its groans and rumbles, fiery bursts and explosions.
The sounds probably had names. Ismay would know them.
He pulled off his cravat and wiped his brow with it.
It was Hades-hot up here. He thought of the first day he’d been in Naples, of sweating beneath the sycamore tree, of watching Ismay come up over the rise of the Petraio.
A lot had happened since that day. He’d found purpose, he’d found love.
He was on the verge of marriage because Ismay had given him hope.
Perhaps he had given her the same. Now he needed to find her, wanted to tell her.
What he would give to turn a corner and see her in the distance, but each curve proved a disappointment. He pushed on to the next and the next, hope rising and ebbing like waves on the shore with each turn that this time she’d be there.
He rounded another turn, wishing he’d thought to bring his binoculars.
His eyes were burning from the ash. He must be close to the summit now.
The rumblings were loud enough, long enough now to drown out any chance for conversation—not that he had anyone to talk to except himself.
He shielded his eyes and scanned the distance.
Yes, the last scramble up piles of ash and gravel was near.
He was almost there. He squinted, spying something white near the foot of the crater.
A shirt? Her? His heart told him it must be.
He quickened his pace as best he could, thankful for the hawthorn stick, more convinced with each step that it was her.
Ahead of her, two men struggled up to the crater.
Why wasn’t she with them? Why wasn’t she going up?
He was nearly there when he sensed it. Something was wrong.
He’d more than thought it when the mountain shook, and he watched Ismay collapse, a pile of ash slipping towards her, loosened by her colleagues’ scrambling efforts to reach the summit.
A person could drown in that ash, choke on it, be buried beneath it like an avalanche.
Alistair marked the space with his eyes, struggling to reach her, the logic of his mind telling him he wouldn’t be in time. He wasn’t going to make it.
* * *
She wasn’t going to make it off the mountain.
Not this time. Ismay knew this truth in her bones as surely as she knew she needed air to breathe, and there was damnably little of it up here fit for breathing, loaded as it was with gas and ash from the eruption.
Ismay sank to her knees. She was going to be sick again.
She’d been sick all morning, a continuation of the night before.
She was starting to think it was more than bad fish, that she had worked herself into this state with her feelings for Alistair, had made herself literally sick with love.
Ismay gagged, light-headed with the effort to breathe.
The gas and ash weren’t helping. She couldn’t rise, didn’t want to rise.
She wanted to lie down, to sleep. She wanted her stomach to stop roiling.
She should not have come. She ought to try to stand anyway, but her strength had deserted her.
How would she ever get down the mountain?
Oh, of course. She remembered now. She wasn’t getting down the mountain.
She closed her eyes and tried to focus on breathing as best she could.
Soon she would asphyxiate. With all of her retching, she’d inhaled too much gas.
It was making the earth swim, or was that the earthquakes?
She thought she’d been right about those, they were signs, if one knew how to read them.
In time, she might have figured out their language.
It would have been nice to have seen Alistair again.
She would think of him now, here at the last as she wandered towards unconsciousness.
‘Ismay!’ Someone called her name from far away. Alistair? It sounded like him, but she couldn’t answer back. She hadn’t the voice, the energy or the air for it.
‘Ismay, damn it, help me, fight with me!’ It was Alistair, and as usual, he was being demanding and rude, pulling her, dragging her, making her stomach lurch just when she’d found some peace.
She was so tired. She just wanted to sleep, but her body had other ideas.
She coughed, and the last of her stomach came up.
Then Alistair was kneeling beside her, his arm about her, supporting her.
‘Thank God, Ismay, you’re alive.’ He was sobbing, choking as he held her, pushing her hair back from her face. ‘I saw you fall, I saw the pile of ash start to slide,’ he gasped. ‘I didn’t think I’d reach you in time.’