by Mike Bond
“What good would come of that?”
“Even those like you who are favored by fortune are blind in both eyes. Only with the third eye can we see the world which does not pass away.”
The pain screamed inside him. “Do not say, father, that I am favored.”
The old man scanned Cohen's face in the near-darkness. “To be favored by fortune is a great impediment to wisdom.” He opened the door and dragged a frame of loaded kerosene tins onto the trail, squatted and adjusted the tumpline round his brow, leaned forward, feet splayed, and stood, the frame groaning. “When I was young, I thought I understood this world, but did not. Now I am old I see I don't understand and that it doesn't matter. Is this not wisdom?”
THE BUTTHI MAN rose, coughing and spitting, and fried Cohen duita phul, two eggs in yak butter, while the porters, rubbing spidery hands before the dim stove, waited to warm their morning palmfuls of rice.
The eastern sky flamed coral as he paid the butthi man five rupees and asked the direction to Tatopani and the Kali Gandaki. The man pointed out the wire line against the tan, eroded hills.
Once beyond the man's gaze Cohen dropped from the trail down a path between fields of new rice and recrossed below the village to pick up the Pokhara trail. From a ridge he glanced back through the ascending haze of morning fires but saw no horses, the land quiescent.
By noon he had walked and run another thirty miles yet felt no exhaustion. The trail was busy with barefoot porters bent under their tumplines, with women in red saris who stared at him openly. He stopped at a trail shrine to drink thirstily from the grinning face of a stone waterspout, a stump-nosed leper watching him vacantly from the twined shadows of a banyan and pipal tree.
In the valley after the shrine, pai dogs ran at him barking where seven huts clustered by a sparkle of water; beyond them a man followed a wooden plow and a water buffalo round a tiny rice plot. The trail snaked out of the valley to a cobbled, brushy ridge.
Atop this ridge he glanced back as a horseman crested the valley's western edge and leaned forward in his saddle to speak with the leper at the shrine. Cohen dove into the thornbrush, crawled fifty feet from the trail and squeezed on his back beneath a butterfly bush. The pai dogs began barking when the horseman reached the huts. Soon a clink of shoe on stone sounded over the twitting and scuttling of sparrows in the bushes. The water buffalo bellowed, a clear, lonely sound. “Twik-twik,” called another bird, deep in the scrub.
A stripe of sunlight shifted on the branch above his face. He tried to look up but it lay on the periphery of his vision. Gently he turned his head. The sunlight slid toward him along the branch, iridescent jade, hand-to-elbow long, diamondheaded. The yellow eye with its black slit pupil blinked, the translucent sheath slipping down and away. It swayed above his forehead, one loop over the branch, split tongue flickering.
He did not breathe. Bony scrub encased his legs and ribs. The snake's swollen mouth was framed by globular white lips tufted with glossy scales. The topaz eye with its black slit winked. The head descended.
Sweat stung his eyes. He fought the urge to blink. Pulse fluttered in the snake's neck. The horse whinnied. Gravel crunched as the rider dismounted. The snake's coldness brushed his forehead. He twisted from a sudden pain above his eyes.
Time for two steps before I die. Don't move, slow the circulation. Falling into a core of light. A gaunt, bearded face before me, eyes that drink me in. I feel no fear. I love You and my heart is at peace with You. I may have been apart from You but never have I ceased loving You. A warm calm sea was inside and all around him. Thoughts passed away.
A small chittering went on near his ear – a child, crying from afar, over a broken music box. It grew closer, clearer:
Connection,
I just can't make no connection,
and all I want to do
is to get back to you.
The strangeness of this dying overwhelmed him. He was in a warm winter's apartment in Paris, surrounded by music, a woman near. Sylvie, it's a dream. Sadly she shook her head. “To be favored by fortune,” she said soundlessly, “is an impediment to wisdom.” He opened his eyes.
A cobalt sky loomed over bright leaves. A gold spider twirled from a twig. The music wavered, distanced. He reached a tentative hand to the trace of pain above his eye. Blood mixed with sweat came away on his finger. The chittering subsided.
A small yellow bird lay shivering on its back, vermilion underwings fanned out on the dead leaves. The two-step snake lay atop one wing, its slimness undulating over the bird's body as a man over a woman in the aftermath of love.
Cohen rubbed the scratch in his forehead where the bird in its terror had clawed him. He slid quietly from under the butterfly bush and inched upward till he could see through an aperture in the leaves. The horseman was a portly Newari boy clutching a black plastic tape deck to his high-fronted saddle. Cohen shivered and turned back to the snake.
It had unhinged its jaws around the bird's head. He dug a stone from the soilless earth. He raised it, then remembered his own sure death moments earlier. The feeling of unity returned, and with it reverence for life. On his sleeve lay a yellow feather, down-tufted at its stem. He pocketed the feather and cast the stone away.
HE THREADED through the brush to the trail, inspecting each branch for snakes. At the trail's edge he knelt to sip from a slender runnel. Beyond his tanned and unshaven reflection, two butterflies linked and spiraled skyward, toward the blue apex in the pebble-bottomed mirror of a palm-sized pool.
Beyond the next valley the trail switchbacked up a southwest ridge, then descended into a purple-shadowed forest ringing with birdsong and the chattering of monkeys. Travelers were fewer and he made good time on the downgrade, stopping once for a glass of chai.
AT DUSK the forest opened on a valley where horses grazed knee-deep, their tails painted red by the setting sun. Stone houses rimmed a paved yard cut by a stream whose susurration merged with the arrhythmic tinkling of horse bells and the failing wind's whisper in the rhododendrons.
A bent woman in a black sari watched him from a garden. “Namasté, grandmother,” he called. “This is the Pokhara trail?”
“Ho.”
“How many days?”
She raised three crooked fingers, holding in her other hand a plank she had removed from the stream bank to divert water into the garden. “If there are no landslides.” Wrinkles jammed the corners of her mouth. “Now the dark comes. You may stay tonight in the house of my brother.”
“I must go tonight to Pokhara.”
“It is impossible. Three days.”
Cohen turned toward the fields behind him. “They are fine horses.”
“My brother's.”
“I seek such a horse to go to Pokhara.”
“These do not leave the mountains.” She replaced the plank. Water sank from view into the dirt, pebbles glistening.
Raising her sari hem she crossed the stream and led him to a two-story stone house, the first floor open facing the yard. Herbs and bulbs hung from the beams. To one side a man crouched on his heels among naked children, a stemless pipe cupped in his hand. A girl with onyx eyes and mahogany skin sat beside him, one hand on his knee. He detached himself, grasped a cane, and stepped into the yard.
“You travel to Pokhara?”
“Ho.”
“The river eats the trail.” In place of one eye was a half-closed pit. “In the morning I will tell you the old way to Pokhara.”
“I must go tonight. I would pay well for a horse.”
“Sit down. Have chai.” As the man spoke the children scampered from the fireplace. “Even the porters do not travel it, since India fixed the trail.”
“Why?”
“Two days ago, four fell into the river. Now, their families will starve.”
“I have no family.”
The old man smiled. He lit and proffered the pipe. “What is your name?”
“Cohen. And yours?”
“Hem, thoug
h I tire of it. Perhaps I will give myself a new one.”
Cohen exhaled the smoke slowly, tasting it. “I would change more than my name, Hem. But first, I would talk with you of horses.”
“They cannot be sold.” Hem jostled the fire with a hardened stick. “In the morning we can talk Pokhara. Tonight my daughter will kill a chicken for curry, and you may sleep in the tallest part of the house.” He grinned. “It's where the bedbugs are fewest.”
Cohen watched the dark slink of water across the stone yard. Its sound was like many tiny bells. He glanced past the woven leaves of the porch to the trail breaking the tapestry of darkness at the forest edge. “I must ride the metal bird at Pokhara tomorrow noon.”
“The trail is very dangerous in day. At night, impossible.”
“And the old way?”
“Is longer.” Hem shook ashes into the fire. “There are some who seek you, Koan?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You look often at your back trail. And why else would you wish to travel at night, in the mountains?”
Cohen stood, stunned by a photograph on the wall. “From where comes this picture?”
“He was a young king of a far land. Years ago one like you gave me his image. Even in these mountains we knew him, for he was fair, and loved all children of God. Soon after, he was murdered. His death is not yet avenged. Perhaps you know of him?”
“His name was Kennedy; he was the leader of my country. After his death my country suffered a long and painful war. It suffers still.”
“War is the punishment of nations, as sickness and pain are the punishment of men.” Hem gestured to the onyx-eyed girl, crossed the stream to the pasture, and whistled. The nearest horse raised her head, a tuft of grass in her mouth. Cohen followed him to a stone shed where Hem took two blankets from a stall.
“I must not stay.”
“These are for the horses. Or do you wish to ride without a blanket?”
“You will go also?”
“You would not find it alone.”
The horses approached, heads nodding. Hem looped raw-hide bridles over the ears of a spotted gray and a bay roan and strapped a blanket on each with a leather girth. Their unshod hooves clattered on the stones as he led them to the stream. Over the sucking of the horses Cohen could hear children laughing behind the huts; from faraway downwind came the steady thunk of a rice mill. “There are others in this valley?”
“Where the river meets the trees.” Hem handed him a woolen cloak and a topi. “In the darkness, your face hooded, you are Chetri.”
They washed down a quick meal of dhal bhat with chai and rode into the shadowed valley. At its far end Hem turned the gray along an irrigation ditch. To their left passed the blunt outlines of huts, here and there a trace of lamplight.
For several hours they descended the canyon of the Modi Khola, fording finally at a gravel bar where stones rumbled on the riverbed, then turned eastward along diked fields where star reflections darted like minnows among stems of young rice. Hem reined in to point out a faint cluster of huts, “The butthi of the first day.”
They climbed through cedars and junipers, then wind-torn scrub, then higher through ice-fractured rock, the wind stealing their voices, lashing skin from their faces, sucking air from their lungs, numbing their fingers round stiffened reins, freezing the horses’ lips to their iron bits. Petrified buttresses of jagged stone spired over them into the wind-tortured darkness, the stars shimmered fiercely against the higher black-ribbed peaks, the gasping shivering horses broke belly deep through hardened snow that the wind snatched westward in tinkling fragments, the moon a razor creeping from the wind-sharp eastern crests.
Down the far side the trail was a frozen streambed that became a rushing creek, then a torrent, the horses slipping and hoof-slapping back and forth through it. They dismounted, their feet soon numb in the near-frozen water, their clothes hardening against them. Cohen felt Hem's hand on his shoulder, could barely hear his yell above the crashing water, “It is here India fixed the trail.”
Soon the canyon brightened. The stream cascaded over a ledge, shattering luminously and soundlessly on the cliff far below. They followed the cliff top westward to the old trail, coming out in a wedge of wind-stunted pines overlooking a dark valley.
“Here the danger begins.” Hem grasped Cohen's shoulder and pointed to a filigree of moonlit ledge against the black cliff. “The trail is narrow there; the fall is long. In the valley below are leopards, which scare the horses. They smell them now.”
Hem descended first, leading his horse. The ledge immediately narrowed to body width, the horses rubbing shoulders against the cliff. It narrowed again, and then more. The horses hesitated, huffing nervously. Cohen bumped a rock from the cliff with his elbow. Ten heartbeats later it clicked distantly against the cliff, then clicked again.
He inhaled, relaxed. The roan made a shivering murmur behind him. From far below rose a clatter as the rock reached the valley floor. Hem was invisible. Cohen urged the roan forward, trying not to lose his balance by pulling too hard on the rein. They stepped over a depression cut by a seep across the trail, the footing even more narrow and slippery.
After an hour the tops of the valley trees reached up to them. At the first widening of the trail Hem whispered, “Now we will go quickly, Koan, through this valley of dangers. We will not stop, or talk, but run, as the horses wish.”
The trail disappeared under the black canopy. Twigs tore at their faces, louder than the horse hooves on the sod. The forest was redolent with rotten, leaf-damp, mushroom odors overlain by the sweat and manure smell of the horses. Cohen squeezed his shoulder blades against the empty feeling between them.
4
MOONLIGHT SLID DOWN HEM'S back and across his horse's rump. Then Cohen saw his own horse's head illumined, her ears bent forward, her head casting steadily from side to side, before the moonlight slipped across his hands and face and he too reentered the darkness. Hem flitted through another moonlit patch, his silvery image etched in Cohen's mind when he again had vanished. It seemed a very odd and old feeling, horsemen riding through the mountains in the darkness; it made him think of war. Now I too am at war. Where and who is my enemy?
Soon the forest thinned; ahead light gleamed among the trees. Hem rode unconcernedly on; Cohen urged the roan forward to warn him but saw that the gleam was a clearing into which moonlight poured. Hem halted. “The butthi of the second day.”
“The leopards?”
“Behind us.” Hem leaned forward to caress the gray's neck. “Before noon you will be in Pokhara.” They left the trail and circled the clearing through forest whose resinous branches hissed against the horses’ flanks.
As the first birds began to call they broke out on a tapering burnt ridge, below which a pocket-mirror lake gathered in the fading stars. The moon had set. They descended the ridge as dawn spilled red over eastern peaks, toward a long valley of villages and farms, toward the crowing of a cock and the wavering, unanswered bray of a buffalo.
THE RUSTY CLOCK inside the Pokhara terminal shed said 11:35. “The Katmandu-going plane comes at noon?” Cohen asked a Gurkha who sat splay-legged on a crate polishing the sheen of his crescent kukri against a khaki trouser cuff.
“Possibly,” the soldier yawned, eyeing him down the blade edge.
Cohen stepped past a cyclone fence to Hem and the horses. “Soon.”
“I do not see it, the bird.”
“It comes now, from Bhutwal.”
“The soldier said?”
“It does each day.”
Hem shook his head. “Do not so depend on things, Koan.”
Cohen scanned the field. “I must pay you for the horses. And for your help.”
Hem grinned, empty eye socket crinkling. “I have watched as you spoke with the soldier. No one here hunts you.”
“Because you brought me swiftly.”
“They give up, Koan?”
“No.”
“Then cease to
be the one they hunt. Was it so good, your life? Before they came to hunt you?”
He watched wind devils twist across the field. “No.”
“Our lives derive from what we are. There are no accidents.”
Cohen turned his head to a distant whisper. “The bird comes.” He took a wad of notes from his pocket. “We haven't discussed the money.”
“Perhaps the young king on my wall was killed by those who hunt you?”
“Huena. Not the same ones.”
“But the same kind?” Hem shortened the reins. “Some day you will be with a wife and children. Bring them across the water to my home. The sun is warm. Your children will play with my grandchildren. Your wife will sit with my sister by the stream. You and I will talk.” He mounted the gray. “Namasté!”
“The horses, Hem. I must pay you.”
“When you return!” Tugging the roan behind, Hem trotted through the outskirts of Pokhara toward the hills, his stiff right leg jutting from the gray's side.
OVER THE RUMBLE of the descending plane Cohen noted for the first time the noises of Pokhara: chugging rice mills, the complaining dusty wind, the gnashing wail of a sawmill, the babble of schoolchildren as they ran past him barefoot, clutching thin books bound with red string.
Nothing moved along the edges of the field but a hungry dog; no one approached from the town. He took a breath, shoulders slumped by fatigue that ached down his legs and into his ankles, his eyes gritty with exhaustion and wind-borne dust. How long since I slept? How can I change, when I don't know who I was? When the one I was is dead?
He returned to the galvanized shed as the plane bounced down. His fellow passengers seemed unlikely foes: three overweight Newaris in red topis, a hill man with four goats, two old women in saris whispering and nodding, a teenager slipping back the sleeve of his cotton shirt to glance at a chrome digital watch with a black plastic wristband.
In the plane they sat on benches on both sides of the fuselage, held in by a rope running from front to back, goats and baggage in the middle between them. Lulled by the vibration of the propellers he nodded into watchful sleep till they turned south under the soaring Everest wall and drifted nose-high up over the edge of the Katmandu valley, over a dusty farmer and his buffalo cart, the tan and blue silhouette of the city wide on the plain before them.