The Maharajah's Monkey (24 page)

“Avalanche,” murmured Yongden.

He was riding fast, hooves scudding through snow. I followed, but snowflakes were whirling all around, a devilish vortex in my eyes, ears and nose. A white slab glided in front of my feet, like a magic carpet coming in to land, cutting us off from my friends. Beyond it I saw Rachel's startled eyes.

Aunt Hilda's mouth opened in an agonized yowl at the sight of the avalanche and clumsily, stupidly, she fell off her donkey. Champlon pounded off his own beast and hauled her upright. He half-dragged my aunt on to his mount, kicking it to make it run toward my friends and the veil of snow. Then he raced to Aunt Hilda's panicking donkey and began to hoist himself up. Boom—a shimmering slab of ice juddered into him, obliterating him from view. I shrieked, a scream that wrenched out my guts. It was useless. In an instant Champlon and
donkey were both gone; buried under a huge white cushion.

The ridge of ice shredded; broke up into pieces, pelting hard nuggets in my face. I was sliding on something, under me my beast was braying forlornly. A sooty shadow moved in front of me. Yongden, I believed, as I clutched at hope. Yongden, keep me safe, I prayed.

Where lay earth and where sky, I no longer knew. All I was aware of was eddying light. Glaring, dazzling white that sucked and drowned, obscuring all. Dimly, I was aware that I was sliding, but where and how I couldn't say. My breath came in ragged gasps. I couldn't breathe, the pressure on my chest was suffocating me.

Darkness crashed in on me, as before there had been light. I must have blacked out for I knew no more.

When I opened my eyes all I could see was Yongden's face. He was bending over me, something hairy and ominous rearing behind him. As my eyes focused, it took the form of the nostrils and flank of his piebald stallion.

“What happened?” I rasped.

“You live,” he said sombrely.

“Rachel, Waldo! … and—”

“Your friends safe, they on other side of avalanche.
This was only a—” he made a coughing noise.

“Hiccup?”

“Hiccup. The mountain, she play, not very angry.”

“Play?” I repeated in amazement, remembering the thundering lava of snow, the sensation of being buried alive in ice. “All that ice?”

“Not rock or ice,” he said, correcting me. “Powder snow. A baby avalanches. Your friends they are on other side of avalanche. The Sherpas take them back to India. They not make mistake to come back. They go down mountain. They take care. This land is not for gold hunters. They leave this place which is not for them and go home.”

It was the longest speech I'd ever heard Yongden make. Slowly, I uncoiled my limbs and stood up. Nothing seemed to be broken, though my back ached as if it had been pelted with a thousand small pebbles. Which I suppose it had. Judging from the rosy flush of the sun crawling up on the horizon, I had been unconscious for a long time.

“My donkey?” I asked.

Yongden shook his head and I gathered she was dead. It was a curse to be my mount, I thought bitterly. Two donkeys had died, serving me.

We were in a different land now, the garrison of stocky houses with their stone-freighted roofs had disappeared.
It was a precipice, an icy defile with rocky, impassable peaks rearing to either side. Far, far ahead of us ran a river, speckled with a million dancing lights. Only I wasn't sure if it was a mirage. Increasingly I wasn't certain of what was in my head and what was the world outside. What had I been warned by the young Sherpa, so long ago? “Stay away from Yongden,” he had said. “He plays inside your head.”

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We fell down the mountain.”

Looking up the hundreds of feet it seemed incredible that we were still alive; we should have been smashed, pulverized, nothing but a heap of bones. In my dreams I recalled something feather-like supporting me, a floating bed of snow, and it never occurred to me to disbelieve Yongden. So we must be a long, long way from the others. How would we rejoin them? A cruel thought hit me, whipping me like a lash.

“They'll look for me, Yongden. They'll put themselves into danger.”

He shook his head: “They saw you die.”

“They saw me die?” I asked.

“They saw
us
die—you and me.”

There did not seem to be any answer to this.

“We must go,” Yongden indicated that I should climb on to the back of his mare, behind him.

“Where?”

He turned to me. I saw sorrow in his eyes, but that was only the first level of expression. Underneath were buried layers of meaning, layers of things I couldn't understand.

“Shambala,” he replied.

I mounted the horse. Yongden tapped its flank and in silence we rode off.

It began to snow. The flurry of tiny flakes from above rapidly swelled into a storm that seemed to suck and pull in different directions. The heavens had turned leaden; on all sides of us visibility was reduced to a couple of feet. Our pace had slowed to a crawl, for it was dangerous if our horse put one hoof wrong in this blizzard.

Yongden's back, a few inches in front of me, was painted white by the flakes, but I held on to him, a feeling which was reassuringly solid. Underneath me I could feel the steady lope of his horse, of warm, breathing flesh. Snowflakes were settling on my face in an icy mass, too cold for them to melt. I had to brush them away; lest I turned into a living snowman.

Thus we rode—I have no idea for how long. It might have been minutes or hours. All I knew was that I was living on the edge of my senses, my nerves tingling. The pain in my back, which had felt so raw, had drifted away
in the snow.

“We stop here,” Yongden suddenly announced. I have no idea why. All I could see around me was the same thing, rock and mountain and a dense, white world. The stallion came to a halt, understanding Yongden, so it seemed. Yongden climbed off and delving into the small pack brought out a length of rope, which he made into a kind of simple harness.

“We climb,” Yongden said.

“Where?”

“Up.”

There was obviously no point in asking Yongden questions, he had lapsed into enigmatic mumbles. His face loomed out of the snow for an instant, like a dark moon rising. I read so many different emotions in his eyes. Pity. Compassion. Sadness.

Was he pitying me? Or was pity his normal state? I felt oddly detached from myself, from Kit Salter of the comfortable home in Park Town, Oxford. This new person was traveling through a landscape of ice with a man she barely knew. A man who spoke seldom and gave no hint of his thoughts. I felt an instant of empathy with Yongden, this monk who moved through life with no ties. He was as disconnected from everyday concerns as the shadow of an eagle flitting over a village was from the lives of those it touched. I wouldn't want to be
Yongden. I wanted to be able to love and hate, to feel life. But I admired him. To the monk, all the things that made us so passionately sad or happy were illusions, painted stage sets, while the real action went on somewhere beyond.

It was like traveling with a phantom. I would never
know
Yongden. He wasn't kind, not in the ordinary sense. If anything, he was terrifying.

I held the rope Yongden gave me in my sheepskin gloves. It was tough and fibrous. Made from fronds of a willow-like tree, it felt as though it had been soaked to strengthen it. Yongden showed me how to put on the harness and adjust it using the straps at the sides. It had a big, iron hook at the back which he attached to the rope. He didn't wear a harness himself, just carelessly tied the rope around his waist and looped a coil over his shoulder.

Yongden walked over to the stallion and stroked its muzzle. He was talking to it in a language I didn't understand. He patted it on the back and the horse whickered, nuzzling Yongden's hand. Then it turned round and slowly trotted off.

“You can't do that,” I blurted. “Where is your horse going?”

“He is not my horse. He is his horse. He is going home.”

“How?” I indicated the falling snow, the ice all around us. “How will he find the way?”

“He is a child of the mountains.”

Without further explanation, Yongden threw the loop of rope into the air. It floated high, uncurling itself. I wasn't altogether surprised when it landed around a jutting crag of rock. In fact I wouldn't have been surprised if he had simply walked up the mountain.

I followed him, finding footholds in the icy sides. The first few paces were easy but it rapidly became hard. It was tense, slippery work with the snow blowing in my face and the surface of the mountain sliding under my gloves and boots. The pity of it—I really needed my crampons to take firm hold in the ice, but the guards had removed them at the garrison. Once I slipped and would have fallen if the rope had not pulled tight, holding me by the harness.

“Don't look down,” Yongden warned. “Don't look up. Look straight in front.”

Of course I did exactly the opposite of what he warned. The snow had chosen that moment to clear and I had a dizzying view down the mountain, to the gully far, far below. My stomach heaved, my insides dropping. The trotting figure of the horse was already no bigger than an ant, an ink spot against a gossamer backdrop. My hands loosened against the rope and I had a terrible
sensation of falling, falling.

After that I looked neither up nor down, but concentrated on my gloved hands and the solidity of the rope. At least I hoped it was solid—when I had lurched it had creaked alarmingly. Even though I dared not risk a glance I was conscious in every fiber of my body of the mountain rearing so far above me. Kit Salter was but a tiny speck, a fleck of dust in the immensity of these ancient peaks.

Climbing thus was hard physical work, the rope of the harness cutting into my flesh, even through the layers of sheepskin wadding. My knees felt tremulous. I was aware again of a dull ache in my spine. But above it all my mind was clear, taking flight on the back of this awful adventure. This realm was free of all but birds, the warble of the mynah, the screech of the eagle. Hovering in the background the bald head and cruel beak of the flesh feeders, the vultures waiting for us to fall.

By the grace of Yongden, we didn't fall. Eventually he stopped on a ledge and I climbed up to meet him. It was a slab of rock jutting a few inches out into the air, wide and comfortable enough to sit on. When I did look down I saw that we had climbed far above the other side of the canyon. Over that shining peak I could see that river I had glimpsed before, foaming in the distance.

“We are here,” Yongden murmured.

“Where?” I asked. Even this enigmatic sorcerer could surely not refer to a dizzying perch on the edge of a precipice as “here.” He didn't reply so I asked again, “Where are we?”

“Your way,” he said.

I turned and saw that Yongden was pointing inwards. Behind the ledge, cutting into the face of the mountain was a cave. Too dark to see what was in the cave, but surely this was not the way to the legendary paradise.

“Here I must leave you,” Yongden said. “You will be safe.” He was holding something out to me in his hands. Numbly I took it and saw what it was. My torn half of Father Monserrate's map.

As soon as I saw it a shock jolted through me. I snatched it greedily. “This is mine.”

“Yes.”

I folded my map, and undoing my sheepskin coat with fumbling fingers, placed it in the inside pocket. It felt good, pulsing near my heart. A source of warmth and support, my talisman to protect against danger. Something missing inside me had healed, which gave me the courage to look Yongden square in the eye and say boldly:

“You won't leave me. Not all alone here.”

“I go,” he said calmly, his fingers working away to remove my hook from his rope.

Panic rose in my throat, an acid, lemon tang. My map was only a piece of paper, after all. “What am I meant to do?”

“You will know.”

You can't abandon me, I wanted to wail. You can't leave me on the edge of this cliff to die of hunger and exposure. Strangely no words, no sounds at all, came out of my mouth. The heavens seemed to close in on me, sky and earth rising like another avalanche to cut off the blood coursing in my veins. Abandoned. From far away, I heard rushing wind and, skimming by, a flutter of wingbeats. A hoopoe, the wild, retreating caw of a mountain bird.

Yongden looped the end of the rope round the ledge. “Goodbye,” he murmured. For a heartbeat he placed his hand on my cheek, as if blessing me. Then he stepped off the edge of the mountain.

Horror fluttered in my guts, but I couldn't scream. I was still too paralyzed with shock. I stepped forward to see Yongden floating, almost weightless, down the mountain. Crags jutted out, vicious as ax blades, but he sailed past them. He avoided splattering his head against rock, careening into ice. Too soon, he was gone; a basalt speck far down below.

Momentarily, I thought of following him. But my rope would not have stretched so far. Anyway, I would
have smashed into the rocks with the first lurch. My throat was hollow, butterflies dancing up my spine. I willed them to rest. However frightened, however bewildered, I had no choice. Yongden had left me here. He had told me I was meant to go into the cave. So I did as he bid.

I turned and stumbled into the dark, though my legs had turned to columns of liquid. It was warmer here, out of the wind and the frosted air. I removed my gloves and tucked them into my coat pocket. This nook would have made a cozy home for a snow leopard or a bear. The scattering of feathers, twigs, a dead pelt on the earthen floor suggested that some animal lived here. At the back of the cave was a shadowy area, a patch of velvet blackness against the gloom. A tunnel. Dazedly I went to it and crawled in. It was impossible to stand up in the narrow, musky space, but, carefully making myself as small as possible, I was able to progress.

After a time on my hands and knees, feeling my way through the pitch-black rocks, the passage broadened. I was able to breathe easier and it became possible to stand up. I rose and slowly began to walk, testing the way with my hands, placing one foot carefully in front of the other. There was light coming from somewhere ahead of me, a faint leavening of the darkness. I could see shadowy forms, rocks shaped like large icicles, boulders
sticking out of the walls. Once a bat flitted against my face; and with a flutter of leathery wings flew away. Thus I traveled a long, long way and I felt that I was walking into the heart of the mountain.