The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One

by James A. Owen

  Trembling with frustrated anger, Galen was about to say something rude and storm out of the apartment—then his eyes fell on the open leaves of the book in front of them, and the faint, spidery handwriting in High German which lined its margins. He would bet his life that the writing was Wagner’s; he would, because he had made the study of the legendary composer a major part of his life’s efforts, and the writing would have to be authentic, or the greatest forgery he’d ever seen. He also felt a strange affinity for the lanky historian who was looking at him with such a controlled steadiness. They both had reasons to want to believe in the reality of the manuscript—enough to believe past all rationality, which was the position Jude’s wild story had put them in. But, if Michael was willing to see it through to the end, then he could do no less—especially if there was still a possibility that the book was indeed all it seemed to be.

  Galen’s shoulders relaxed, and he turned and sat down. “All right,” he said, his voice carrying the steely reserve of an authority figure—which, in fact he was, as Vice-Rector; Jude and Michael were both mere professors—“I want the rest of the story. All of it. Or this ends right now.”

  “My dear Professor Galen,” Jude said sitting up and leaning his chin on the pyramid of his fingers, “it was never my intention to do otherwise. And in all fairness,” he added, eyes glittering, “I did warn you beforehand that the story was a remarkable one.”

  “That’s the understatement of the year,” remarked Michael. “There is one thing I’d like to clarify, before you continue—whatever the information in the books, there is no possible way that they could be of the age you’re speculating them to be. Even Tibetan paper under pristine conditions won’t last more than five or six thousand years, so your estimates that the latter books were seventy times that is—no offense—erroneous.”

  “No offense taken,” said Jude, “and I hope you’ll not be offended when I tell you that I think you may be wrong. I have a working theory, but no proof as to how it might work, so I’ll defer to your judgement—for now.”

  “All right,” said Michael. “Then from what you’ve said, let’s assume we know the following: somewhere in Tibet is a monastery where you estimate are two hundred thousand volumes similar to this one. At least seventeen to twenty were of a nature that you could translate them to a degree, and as this book which we are examining is from that grouping, and I can assert that it is at least a thousand years old, we can assume that the others were of like vintage.”

  “That’s as good a baseline as any.”

  “Were the other books you examined printed in the same way as this one?”

  “Yes. Identically.”

  “So your estimation of the books’ relative age was based entirely on the translated content?” asked Galen.

  “Not entirely,” said Jude, “as I’d said, I have my own theories, but I cannot substantiate those claims at the moment, so I will defer to the judgement of the room.”

  “Well there you go,” said Michael triumphantly. “The books are obviously a mythological trove, gathered by the founders of the monastery a millennium ago. The materials were apocryphal in nature—perhaps tales set down by travelers who encountered the monks, or gleaned during travels of their own.”

  “If that were true,” offered Jude, “then how would the block-makers have been aware of the distinct cuneiforms of Sumerian? Or the Mayan?”

  “Samples accumulated over the years, as I just described. Actually, that’s a good rationale for why the languages were mixed in places, and why you’d be reading a document in Mayan describing the founding of a Roman village.”

  Galen laughed. “Of course. What were we thinking, considering a half-million year old book? I let my temper get the best of me—inexcusable, to express anger at the judgements of someone working outside his field. Please, forgive our rashness,” he said in apology for himself and Michael.

  Jude hesitated a moment before the familiar smile creased his face, and he leaned back into the couch. “Of course—why else would I bring such a manuscript to you, except to authenticate what my meager estimations suspected?”

  “There’s still another thing I don’t understand,” said Michael, his nose about an inch from the single sheet which he’d placed alongside the book. “If we take all that as our baseline, then how did Wagner and Liszt’s handwritten annotations come to be here? I have no recollection of either of them ever making a pilgrimage to Tibet.”

  “Yes,” said Galen. “Let’s bring the discussion full circle—where did you get this book, Jude? You mentioned a monastery, Shangri-La?”

  “Yes I did,” said Jude, “but from here I suppose I ought to call it the name by which we came to know it—Meru.”

  ***

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Mystery School

  “What were you doing in Tibet?” asked Michael.

  “Have you ever been to a place that was utterly alien, atmospherically inhospitable, totally challenging, and in every way a place which all of your previous experience left you ill-equipped to explore?” Jude said, folding his hands into a pyramid and resting his chin on them.

  “Well,” mused Michael, “Yes. In Libya, actually. They shot at me, it was never less than a hundred degrees in the shade, and I got a rampant case of the trots. Not a nice place at all.”

  “Were you on a dig? A research trip? A cultural exchange?”

  “No, none of those.”

  “Then why did you go?”

  Michael shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Do you regret the experience?”

  “No, not at all. I don’t think I would go again without a good reason, but at the time, I thought I might never have the opportunity again, so off I went.”

  “Exactly. Such was my thinking as I traveled across the continent and found myself at the borders of Nepal and Tibet.”

  “When was this?” Galen asked.

  “About two years ago, just after I graduated from Cambridge,” said Jude. “I decided a little more travel was in order before I settled down to a more sedentary life of teaching and research.”

  “That was a good choice,” said Michael. “I’ve never been to the Himalayas myself, but I imagine it’s quite a marvelous place.”

  “Vulgar would be a better word,” said Jude with a trace of regret. “Tibet is not the place it was before Mao: revolutionary graffiti has obscured the frescoes, Chinese and Hindi pop songs obscure the chanting of monks, and brothels and casinos have obscured the palaces. Twentieth-century modernization has come to Tibet, and it’s dressed in Han Chinese uniforms. I thought I’d go take a look before obscurity became oblivion.

  “I had been in Tibet for almost a week when I happened to find myself eating a meal in the company of an American journalist who had been there for almost a month longer than I. He was at the moment a bit of a local scandal, having only recently graduated from the rank of local crackpot. It seems he was in Tibet looking for a creature called a Rakshasha….”

  “The Abominable Snowman,” put in Michael. “Interesting.”

  “I see,” said Galen skeptically.

  “… Which he found about five weeks into the expedition.”

  “You don’t mean to tell us he actually found such a beast?” Galen said incredulously. “Not really?”

  “Yes, really—insofar as what he found was actually an heretofore undiscovered branch of the polar bear family. The huge, long-haired animals lived in an isolated area at an elevation ill-suited to men, and so were only sighted when they came down the mountain in search of goats or cattle to feed on. My companion, for all his eccentricities, had a willingness to go the extra mile that demanded respect.”

  “What kind of eccentricities?” asked Michael.

  “Among other things, the fact that he referred to himself by a single letter —’H’,” said Jude. “Beyond, that, I suppose it was his capacity for lateral thinking—a trait the mathematician in me admired—and his unusual dri
ve.

  “After almost a month of fruitless exploring, he sent his porters back to the village and hiked alone up a glacier. There, H stitched a goatskin to his clothes and spent eleven days milling around with a wild herd of goats until the bears showed up for a grocery run. He barely escaped with the skins on his back and I believe he lost a toe to frostbite, but I’ll give him this—he got his story.”

  “Mmm,” said Michael. “If that was what he was after, then why was he still there when you arrived?”

  “I asked him that, too,” said Jude. “He told me that the bears—there were five of them—were the monsters the villagers had seen stealing their animals, and the discovery satisfied all of the main journalistic, scientific, and sensationalistic aspects of his story. But, he discovered something else that he couldn’t explain, and couldn’t stand to leave unresolved—up near one of the summits, where their habitats had been carved out in a system of caves, he found the carcasses of two more bears and the remains of many more, some decades old. Something had been feeding on them.”

  “Why is that strange?” asked Michael.

  “Think on it,” said Galen, turning to him. “At that altitude, where very little can survive, and even the bears had to descend the mountains to feed, what could possibly be vicious enough, strong enough, to attack and eat a three-ton polar bear?”

  “Exactly. Unfortunately, he had caused enough of a problem with the announcement of the polar bear discovery that the locals were on the verge of tying him up and running him out of the Himalayas on a rail.”

  “Why is that?” asked Michael.

  “Because,” said Jude, “although the Rakshasha have never actually been captured, and seldom even seen, the various molds of discovered footprints and a supposed skull fragment, not to mention the occasional interest of luminaries such as Sir Edmund Hilary have made the beast, or ‘Yeti’ the single most important tourist attraction in the Himalayas. The lack of evidence did not keep the Nepalese government from officially declaring in 1961 that the Yeti did indeed exist, and shortly thereafter it became their national symbol.”

  “They even made it into a stamp,” Michael offered helpfully.

  “Correct,” said Jude, “and given all that, how interested do you think they were to have a journalist actually discover that their national symbol was nothing but an extremely shaggy bear?”

  “I’m surprised he made it to your dinner,” Galen said drolly.

  “He nearly didn’t,” said Jude. “The only reason H hadn’t been lynched was that he happened to be there with the support of the Tibetan government, and as the spot where he discovered the bears was at the Melung Glacier, which borders both Tibet and Nepal, no one could settle on the proper jurisdiction in which to deal with him. It was finally decided that he should simply leave the region while there was still some degree of ambivalence, and so two days after we met, a cargo plane arrived which could transport us to China.”

  “So, you chose to tag along?” Michael asked.

  “It seemed the prudent thing to do,” said Jude, “considering my camaraderie with H had made me kith and kin to the Yeti-slayer—at least as far as the Nepalese were concerned.”

  “Let me guess,” said Galen, “you left in the plane amidst a hail of hurled bottles and stones from your recent hosts, and once in the air, your intrepid friend convinced the pilot to alter his course to search for the real Yeti.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know that?” exclaimed Michael.

  “It’s also a close parallel to Lost Horizon,” said Galen darkly, “and I’m starting to feel quite the fool.”

  “You shouldn’t,” replied Jude. “Sometimes, life does indeed imitate art, and in this case, it’s almost a stereotype. Just about every flight out of the Himalayas is sent off in such a fashion. I actually think my friend would’ve been disappointed if we hadn’t been.

  “We flew north, to access a line of ridges shaping naturally-formed air passages, which would lead us west and over the top of the glacier, when …”

  “A storm hit,” Galen suggested dryly.

  “Actually, no,” said Jude. “H and the pilot, who happened to be Afghani, fell to arguing about whether China’s annexation of Tibet mirrored Afghanistan’s struggles with the Soviets, and both got so involved in the discussion that neither one noticed we had drifted off course until we smacked into the mountain.”

  “You actually hit?” said Michael, pouring then spilling a fresh cup of coffee. “Ow! Curse it… A mess, sorry,” he said apologetically. “The plane didn’t have a proximity alarm, or an auto-pilot?”

  “In the Himalayas, planes are lucky to have propellers,” said Jude. “We didn’t strike it dead on, or I wouldn’t be here. We struck a glancing blow on the right, shearing off the wing; a few seconds later, the left was sheared off as well, which left us a hurtling cylinder rocketing across the snow. Mercifully, we managed to miss the various outcroppings, though it was by luck rather than design. After almost a full minute of blinding speed, we reached the edge of the plateau and shot out into open space. The journalist and I were almost apoplectic with indecision and shock, but the pilot kept his head, and once we were past the lip of the mountain and going into a free fall, he grabbed us both, snatched up the sole parachute which he had stashed behind his seat, and shoved all of us out the door.”

  “You jumped?” Michael said incredulously. “Out of the plane? With only one chute?”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” said Jude. “I’d’ve stood in the plane till it flattened on the valley floor. But his quick action saved all of our lives, at least for the moment. We hit, roughly, and then became entangled in the parachute, rolling several hundred feet down the mountain, all a jumble of canvas and arms and legs. Amazingly, none of us seemed to be seriously injured. The plane was lost to us, but we had a rough idea of our bearings, and so I took charge of our little expedition and we began to make our way in the direction that would best lead us to some sort of settlement.”

  “Did you just expect that there are villages and monasteries dotting the mountains, just waiting to be discovered by unfortunate wayfarers?” asked Galen, a skeptical tone in his voice.

  “Yes, I did,” said Jude flatly. “There have been peoples in the Himalayas since time began, and it stood to reason that they’d have built wherever they found the space to do it. Of all of us, I was the one who was best suited to judge where such places might be, given my expertise in mountains.”

  Galen blinked. “You’re kidding, surely. What kind of imbecile would actually believe they could walk away from a plane wreck in the Himalayas directly to an inhabited settlement?”

  “The kind who believes there are only two varieties of Himalayan-plane-wreck-survivors: those that walk directly to an inhabited settlement, and those that don’t. I’m one of the former, and faced with the alternative, my companions chose the same mode of thinking. And don’t call me Shirley.”

  “Wait a minute,” Michael put in, frowning. “I thought your specialty was mathematics.”

  “My first doctorate was in Mathematics,” said Jude. “My second was in Orology. As you probably know,” he said, tipping his head to Galen, “my teaching credentials came from Cambridge, but I like to think that my travels had better prepared me for the position I was in than three years of lessons and a sheepskin.”

  “Three years?” said Michael. “For two doctorates?”

  “Four, actually—in Mathematics, Orology, Applied Cosmology, and Public Relations.”

  “No kidding,” said Michael.

  “Orology?” asked Galen.

  “The study of mountains.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Michael. “I never knew someone could earn even just two doctorates in three years.”

  “I did it in one,” said Galen.

  Michael’s jaw dropped to his chest, and Jude leaned forward, amused. “More coffee, professor?”

  “No thanks,” Michael said, waving of
f the pot. “I think it’s time for the absinthe,” he finished, bolting for the kitchen.

  Jude turned to Galen. “You got both of your doctorates in two years?”

  “Actually, the first one was handed to me, and the second took five years—but I wanted to see the look on his face.”

  “Here are some glasses for … hey, what’s so funny?” Michael asked, sitting down in the wingback. “Don’t tell me you guys are plotting against me.”

  “Not yet,” said Jude.

  * * *

  “So,” said Galen, a glass of absinthe resting in his hands, “how long did it take you to reach a settlement?”

  “Almost nine days,” said Jude, sipping from his own glass of the potent greenish liquid. “The second day we actually spotted some goats and hoped to kill one for food, but there was no way to match their nimbleness on the steep crags. H made an attempt, but only succeeded in breaking his ankle. We managed to subsist on a few scrounged plants,—lichen, mostly—and melted snow. It was also luck that no storms of any import swept through our path, or we’d easily have perished.”

  “How did you make any progress at all, if the journalist had a broken ankle?” asked Galen.

  “As I’d said, H had a remarkable resolve. We tied up his foot with strips of cloth torn from our clothes, and the fool walked. As a matter of fact, it was because of him—not me—that we found Meru.

  “We had been walking across a broad grassed plateau, and had actually begun descending to a respectably low elevation when we came across a stone cairn about fifteen feet high. There was a pole of sorts with strips of cloth wrapped around it sticking out of the top; it was obviously some sort of religious shrine. I walked right past it, hardly giving it a first, much less a second glance—but H and our pilot, who I had learned was called Hammurabi, stopped several paces back.