If Nadia and Alexander had not been prepared for tall columns of steam, warm mists and pools of sulfurous waters, fleshy purple flowers and herds of chegnos grazing the dry valley’s pastures, they were even less prepared for the Yetis when they appeared.
At a turn in the path, a horde of males armed with clubs blocked their way, yelling as if possessed by devils. Dil Bahadur took his bow in hand; he realized that since he was dressed in one of the bandit’s clothing, the Yetis had no way of recognizing him. Instinctively, Nadia and Alexander, who had never imagined the Yetis would be so horrible-looking, stepped behind Tensing. He, in contrast, walked forward confidently and, placing his hands together before his face, bowed and greeted them with mental energy and with the few words he knew in their language.
Two or three eternal minutes passed before the Yetis’ primitive brains recalled the lama’s visit several months before. They were not actually friendly when they remembered, but at least they stopped waving their clubs a few inches from the visitors’ heads.
“Where is Grr-ympr?” Tensing inquired.
Still growling, and never taking their eyes off them, the Yetis led the party to the village. Pleased, the lama noticed that things had changed; the warriors were filled with energy, and in the village he saw females and children who appeared to be healthy. He noticed that none had a purple tongue, and that the whitish hair that covered them from neck to foot was no longer matted with filth. Some females not only were more or less clean, but seemed in addition to have smoothed their coat, which intrigued him immeasurably, since he knew nothing of feminine wiles.
The village itself hadn’t changed; it was still a warren of dens and underground caves beneath the crust of petrified lava that was the prevailing feature of the topography. A thin layer of soil lay on top of that crust, which, thanks to the warmth and moisture in the valley, was reasonably fertile and produced some food for the Yetis and their only domesticated animals, the chegnos. Once there, the Yetis led them straight to Grr-ympr.
The sorceress had aged visibly. When they had met her, she was already ancient, but now she seemed a thousand years old. If the other Yetis looked healthier and cleaner than before, she, in contrast, had become a bundle of rickety bones covered with a greasy hide; foul secretions trickled from her nose, eyes, and ears. The smell of filth and decay she emitted was so repugnant that not even Tensing, with his extensive medical training, could ignore it. The two communicated telepathically, occasionally throwing in the few words they shared.
“I see that your people are healthy, honorable Grr-ympr.”
“Lavender-colored water: forbidden. He who drinks: beatings,” she replied summarily.
“The remedy seems worse than the illness,” Tensing said with a smile.
“Illness: no more,” the aged woman confirmed, missing the monk’s irony.
“I am happy. Have children been born?”
She indicated two on her fingers, and added in her language that they were healthy. Tensing had no difficulty understanding the images that formed in his mind.
“With you: who are they?” she grunted.
“You know this one; he is Dil Bahadur, the monk who discovered the poison in the lavender water of the spring. The others are also friends, and they come from very far, from another world.”
“For what?”
“With all respect, honorable Grr-ympr, we came to ask your help. We need your warriors to rescue our king, who has been kidnapped by bandits. We are only three men and a girl, but with your warriors perhaps we can overcome them.”
The ancient woman understood less than half of that speech, but she knew that the monk had come to collect the favor she owed him. He wanted her warriors. There would be a battle. She did not like the idea, primarily because for decades she had been trying to keep the tremendous aggressiveness of the Yetis under control.
“Warriors fight; warriors die. Village without warriors; village die, too,” she summarized.
“You are right. What I ask is a very great favor, honorable Grr-ympr. Possibly there will be a dangerous battle. I cannot guarantee the safety of your warriors.”
“Grr-ympr, dying,” the woman muttered, striking her chest.
“I know that, Grr-ympr,” said Tensing.
“Grr-ympr dead: many problems. You cure Grr-ympr: you take warriors,” she offered.
“I cannot cure old age, honorable Grr-ympr. Your time in this world has come to an end; your body is tired and your spirit wants to go. There is nothing bad in that,” the monk explained.
“Then no warriors,” she decided.
“Why are you afraid to die, honorable elder?”
“Grr-ympr: needed. Grr-ympr commands: Yetis obey. Grr-ympr dead: Yetis fight. Yetis kill, Yetis die: end,” she concluded.
“I understand. You cannot leave this world because you fear that your people will suffer. Is there no one to take your place?”
Sadly, she shook her head. Tensing realized that the sorceress was afraid that at her death the Yetis, who now were healthy and energetic, would go back to killing one another as they had before, until they disappeared forever from the face of the earth. Those semi-human creatures had depended on the strength and wisdom of their leader for several generations; she was a severe, just, and wise mother. They obeyed her blindly, because they believed she was gifted with supernatural powers; without her, the tribe would be set adrift. The lama closed his eyes and for several minutes both of them sat with their minds blank. When Tensing opened his eyes again, he announced his plan aloud, so that Nadia and Alexander would understand it.
“If you lend me some of your warriors, I promise that I will come back to the Valley of the Yetis and stay here for six years. Very humbly, I offer to take your place, honorable Grr-ympr, so that you may go to the world of the spirits in peace. I will look after your people; I will teach them to live as well as possible, not to kill one another, and to use the resources of the valley. I will train the most capable one among them so that at the end of six years you will have a chieftain or chieftainess of the tribe. This is what I offer you.”
When he heard those words, Dil Bahadur jumped to his feet and stood before his master, pale with horror, but the lama stopped him with a gesture; he could not lose mental communication with the ancient woman. It was several minutes before Grr-ympr absorbed what the monk was saying.
“Yes,” she accepted with a deep sigh of relief; at last she was free to die.
As soon as they had a moment of privacy, Dil Bahadur, his eyes filled with tears, asked his beloved master for an explanation. How could he have offered such a thing to the sorceress? he wailed. The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon needed him much more than the Yetis did; his own education was not complete, and the master should not abandon him in that manner.
“Possibly you will be king before it was planned, Dil Bahadur. Six years go by quickly. In that amount of time perhaps I will be able to help the Yetis.”
“And me?” cried the youth, unable to imagine his life without his mentor.
“Possibly you are stronger and better prepared than you believe. After six years I plan to leave the Valley of the Yetis to begin the education of your child, the future ruler of the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon.”
“What child, master? I have no child.”
“The child you will have with Pema,” Tensing replied calmly, as the prince blushed to the tips of his ears.
Nadia and Alexander followed the discussion with some difficulty but they captured the sense of it, and neither of them showed any surprise regarding Tensing’s prophecy about Pema and Dil Bahadur, or about his plan to become the Yetis’ mentor. Alexander was amused to think how a year ago he would have qualified everything that was happening as madness, but now he knew how mysterious the world is.
Through telepathy, the few words he had learned of the tongue of the Forbidden Kingdom, the words Dil Bahadur had acquired in English, and Nadia’s incredible gift for languages, Alexander managed to communicate to hi
s friends that his grandmother had once written an article for International Geographic on a kind of puma in Florida that was destined for extinction. It was confined to a small, inaccessible area, and because when it bred it had always reproduced within the same family group, it had grown weak and unsocial. The best guarantee for any species is diversity. He explained that if, for example, there was only one strain of corn, soon pests and changes in climate would destroy it, but when there are hundreds of varieties, if one dies, others live. Diversity guarantees survival.
“What happened to the puma?” Nadia asked.
“They brought experts to Florida who introduced similar cats into their habitat. They interbred and in less than ten years the species was renewed.”
“Do you think that’s what’s happening with the Yetis?” Dil Bahadur asked.
“Yes. They’ve lived for so long in isolation; there are very few of them, they breed among themselves, and that’s why they’re still weak.”
Tensing sat thinking about what the foreign youth had said. Whatever happened, even though the Yetis left the valley, they would not find anyone to interbreed with; there were no others of their species in the world, and no human would be willing to mate with them. Sooner or later, however, they would have to be exposed to the outside world, it was inevitable, and it would have to be done with great care, otherwise the encounter with humans could be fatal to both. Only in the protected surroundings of the Forbidden Kingdom might that be accomplished.
During the next few hours the party ate and rested briefly to nourish their depleted bodies. When they heard that there would be a battle, all the Yetis wanted to go, but Grr-ympr would not allow that, she did not want to leave the village unprotected. Tensing warned them that they might die, because they were going to meet some evil humans called Blue Warriors, who were very strong and who had daggers and firearms. The Yetis did not know what those things were, and Tensing explained using the most extreme terms he could, describing the kind of wound the weapons produced, the streams of blood, and other gruesome details to excite the Yetis. That doubled the frustration of those who were going to stay in the valley; none of them wanted to miss the opportunity to have fun fighting against humans. One by one they passed before the lama, leaping and uttering harrowing yells and showing off their teeth and muscles to impress him. From them, Tensing chose the ten who had the worst characters and reddest auras.
The lama personally checked the Yetis’ leather shields, which might deflect the thrust of a dagger but would be ineffective against a bullet. Those ten creatures, only slightly more intelligent than a chimpanzee, would not be able to outfight the men of the scorpion sect, no matter how fierce they were, but the lama was counting on the element of surprise. The Blue Warriors were superstitious, and although they had heard of the Abominable Snowman, they had never seen one.
That afternoon, by Grr-ympr’s orders, a pair of chegnos had been slaughtered in honor of the visitors. With great repugnance, because they could not conceive of sacrificing any living creature, Dil Bahadur and Tensing collected the animals’ blood and smeared the hairy coats of the chosen warriors with it. Using the horns, the longest bones, and strips of the hide, they constructed terrifying, blood-covered helmets, which the Yetis donned with shrieks of pleasure while females and children leaped about with admiration. The master and his disciple concluded with satisfaction that the Yetis looked frightening enough to intimidate the bravest opponent.
Alexander did not want to expose Nadia to the dangers that awaited them; the other men agreed, so they planned to have Nadia stay in the Yetis’ village. It was pointless to try to convince her of that, however, and finally they had to agree to let her come with them.
“We may none of us come out alive, Eagle,” he argued.
“In that case, I would have to spend the rest of my life in this valley, with no companions but the Yetis. No, thanks. I’ll go with the rest of you, Jaguar,” she replied.
“At least here you would be relatively safe. I don’t know what we’re going to find in that abandoned monastery, but I’m sure it won’t be pleasant.”
“Don’t treat me like a child. I know how to take care of myself, I’ve done it for thirteen years. Besides, I think I can help.”
“All right,” Alex conceded, “but I want you to do exactly what I say.”
“Not a chance. I’ll help any way I can,” Nadia replied. “You aren’t an expert; you know as little about fighting as I do.” Alex had to admit that she wasn’t far off the mark.
“Perhaps it will be best to leave by night; that way we will reach the other end of the tunnel at dawn, and can use the morning hours to get to Chenthan Dzong,” Dil Bahadur proposed, and Tensing agreed with his plan.
After filling their bellies with a generous meal, the Yetis all lay down and started to snore—without removing the new helmets they had adopted as a symbol of bravery. Nadia and Alexander were so hungry that they wolfed down their ration of roasted chegno despite the bitter taste and bits of singed hair. Tensing and Dil Bahadur prepared their tsampa and tea, then sat to meditate facing the enormity of the firmament, whose stars they could not see, because by night, when the temperature fell in the mountains, the mists from the fumaroles turned into a thick fog that covered the valley like a cottony mantle. The Yetis had never seen stars, and for them the moon was an inexplicable halo of blue light that sometimes shone through the mists.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Fortified Monastery
TEX ARMADILLO PREFERRED THE original plan for getting out of Tunkhala with the king and the Golden Dragon: a helicopter outfitted with a machine gun, which would land in the palace gardens at a specified moment. No one would have been able to stop them. The air force of that country consisted of four antiquated planes acquired from Germany more than twenty years before and flown only on New Year’s Day to drop paper birds over the capital, to the delight of the children. It would have taken several hours to get them ready to give chase, and by then the helicopter would have had more than enough time to reach safe haven. The Specialist, however, had changed the plan at the last moment, without explanation. The message had said that it was not in their best interests to attract attention, and even less to machine-gun the peaceful inhabitants of the Forbidden Kingdom; that would provoke an international scandal. Their client, the Collector, demanded discretion.
Armadillo had no choice but to accept the second plan, which was, in his opinion, much riskier than the first. As soon as he captured the king in the Sacred Chamber, Armadillo had taped his mouth and given him an injection that anaesthetized him within five seconds. The instructions were not to harm him; the monarch had to be alive and uninjured when he reached the monastery so they could extract the information they needed if they were to decipher the statue’s messages.
“Be cautious. The king is trained in martial arts, he can defend himself. I warn you, though, that if you hurt him you will pay for it dearly,” the Specialist had said.
Tex Armadillo was beginning to lose patience with his boss but he didn’t have time to state his misgivings.
The four bandits were frightened and impatient, though that didn’t stop them from stealing some of the gold candelabra and incense burners. They were starting to pry the precious metal from the walls with their daggers when the American barked his orders.
Two of them took the inert king by the shoulders and ankles, while the others lifted the heavy gold statue from the pedestal of black stone where it had stood for eighteen centuries. The reverberation of the dragon’s chants and bizarre noises still echoed in the room. Tex Armadillo did not pause to examine the statue, but he assumed that it functioned as some kind of musical instrument. He didn’t believe it could predict the future; that was a myth concocted for the ignorant, but it didn’t really matter: the intrinsic value of the object could not be measured. How much would the Specialist make from this mission? Many millions, he was sure. And what would his share be? Barely a tip by comparison.
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nbsp; Two of the Blue Warriors strapped some cinches from their horses under the statue. As they struggled to lift it, Armadillo realized why the Specialist had told him to bring six men. Now he badly needed the two he had lost in traps in the palace.
Even knowing the way and how to skirt the obstacles did not make their return easier; the king and the statue slowed them down greatly. They soon realized, however, that, taken in reverse order, the traps were not being activated. That afforded them some relief, but they didn’t linger or lower their guard; they feared that this palace held further disagreeable surprises. They reached the Magnificent Door without incident. There they saw the bodies of the two guards they had attacked, just as they had left them. No one noticed that one of the young soldiers was still breathing.
Using the GPS, the robbers made their way through the labyrinth of rooms and doors and finally emerged into the dark garden of the palace. The rest of the band was waiting, along with Judit Kinski, whom they held prisoner. They had followed orders and did not drug or mistreat her. The bandits, who had never seen the woman before, did not understand the purpose of taking her with them, and Armadillo did not offer any explanation.
The men had commandeered a truck from the palace, which was parked outside, beside the Blue Warriors’ horses. Tex Armadillo avoided looking Judit in the eye. She was quite calm, given the circumstances; he motioned to his men to put her in the truck bed along with the king and the statue, and cover them all with a tarp. He got behind the wheel—no one else here knew how to drive—and the leader of the Blue Warriors and one of his men joined him in the cab. As the truck headed toward the narrow mountain road, the remaining men scattered. They would meet later at a spot in the Forest of the Tigers, again following the orders of the Specialist, and from there they would begin the trek toward Chenthan Dzong.
As they expected, the truck was stopped as they left Tunkhala, where General Myar Kunglung had posted sentries to control the road. It was child’s play for Tex Armadillo and the bandits to overpower the three men who were standing guard, and to take their uniforms. The trunk was painted with the emblems of the royal house, and in the sentries’ garb they passed the remaining road blocks without being stopped, heading toward the Forest of the Tigers.
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