by Alex Archer
Lal, his kukri lost, had just buttstroked a guerrilla across his bearded face with the Enfield, dropping him limp to the trail, unconscious or dead. The burst of 9 mm bullets raked the young man’s belly and chest. He crumpled.
His uncle barely caught him in time to keep him from falling over the cliff. Flipping his Khyber knife to his left hand, Pan grabbed the muzzle brake of his M-16 and carried it slung barrel down behind his back. He snapped up the weapon, caught the pistol grip and began to rip short bursts into the guerrillas. The kukri-armed men cried out hoarsely and cringed as needle-slim bullets cut them down.
With a furious howl the storm closed in again. Disregarding the risk of further avalanche Pan backed along, firing in quick, angry spurts. He tucked the knife away in his belt and held the long rifle with both hands.
With his pack still strapped to his back Prasad couldn’t take up his stricken nephew into a fireman’s carry. Instead he scooped Lal up in his arms and began to carry him that way. Annja willed away the sword and threw down her kukri. She offered to help.
He turned her down with a single emphatic head shake. A shiny tear trail ran down each leathery cheek.
Pan’s magazine ran dry. He turned to climb up the trail as he changed magazines. The unarmed Sherpas had fled up the path as best they could. Annja didn’t blame them. Prasad, carrying his moaning nephew, led the way, surefooted as a mountain goat.
Annja unlimbered her own rifle. If the enemy was going to shoot they couldn’t afford to hold fire, avalanches or not. They’d have to take their chances. They weren’t good in any case. She walked backward up the trail.
No more shots came from behind them. They rounded another bend in the trail. It offered momentary shelter from gunfire in case the pursuers opened up again.
Over the wind, or maybe lacing through it, Annja began to hear what sounded like voices. When no more sign of pursuit became evident she turned around. Before her Prasad carried his nephew as if he was an infant.
Within a couple of hundred yards they came upon the porters, huddling against the trail’s inner face and moaning in apparent terror. They were already half-covered with new-fallen snow. Wondering what could possibly have frightened them more than trigger-happy guerrillas, Annja thought she heard a new sound through the wind and illusory blizzard voices.
“What’s that?” she asked Pan.
For a moment he didn’t answer. His head was held high, goggles still pushed up on his forehead despite the heavily falling snow. He seemed to be looking to far vistas despite the big flakes that clogged his lashes and must have been painful as they collided with his eyeballs.
Uh-oh, she thought. He’s wandered off into history again.
He blinked as if rousing from sound sleep. “Sounds like a bird,” he said a bit sheepishly pulling his goggles back in front of his eyes.
“That’s what I thought,” Annja said. “But what could a bird be doing up here in a brutal snowstorm?”
Uncharacteristically angry, Prasad kicked the Sherpas to their feet, speaking in low syllables that stung. Annja recognized one word moaned over and over by the unhappy Sherpas—bonmanche.
Prasad heard her question and turned his face to her. “It is the yeti,” he said.
“They’re afraid of it?” Pan asked.
“Yes,” Prasad said. “It can be very fierce. But it is also a spirit animal. They fear it is a sign of evil coming.”
Annja glanced nervously back down the trail. She could no more see through the falling snow than she could a glass of milk. Below them it seemed twice as dense as ever, although where they stood it fell relatively lightly.
“How’s Lal?” she asked. Prasad only shook his head.
Struggling to his feet, one of the porters suddenly froze. He flung up his arm and screamed something so loud it made Annja cringe for fear it would bring the mountain down on their heads. Then she looked where he pointed.
27
Mist swirled like smoke around a shadowy creature. Then the snow descended again.
The Sherpas began to clamor fearfully. They repeated “bonmanche” over and over. Prasad had never spared an upward look. Holding his nephew’s limp body in his arms, he continued to drive the men to their feet and upward along the narrow cliffside path.
“It was just a bear,” Annja said, shaking her head.
“It seems pretty high up for a bear,” Pan said, as the procession began to file along, bent beneath the storm as if it doubled their loads. One of the Sherpas had quietly added Prasad’s pack to his own. His burden, now doubled, didn’t seem to slow him any.
“We’re still a couple thousand feet under the tree line,” Annja said. “Or it could have been a man in a heavy coat.”
“A very big man,” Pan said half-dreamily.
“What else could it be? Stay with me here, Pan. We’re not out of danger yet!”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Annja. It’s…it’s as if I’ve been awake for days, and find myself drifting off to sleep. But it’s the past.”
“It’s a dream,” she insisted. “A waking dream. I know you’ve snapped back when you needed to. But especially with the air so thin I’m worried you’ll fall so deep in the past you won’t be able to pull yourself out. Even to help us.”
Speaking of thin air, she thought, the fight had winded her and her legs felt like jelly. She found she had to say the words in short bursts. She simply ran out of breath in midsentence and had to inhale before she carried on.
Pan looked at her with a strange light in his dark eyes. “I will never let you down, Annja. No matter what happens, I will stand beside you.”
“Thank you,” she said. She hoped it was true.
The wind swirled and lashed her with hard-driven snow. Pulling her goggles back down she walked up beside Prasad and asked if she could examine Lal. Prasad shook his head.
“We can do nothing,” he said.
She sighed, felt tears start but squeezed her cheeks to keep them from squeezing out and fogging her goggles. It was just so brutal. The burst, completely unaimed and fired from the worst imaginable shooting position, shouldn’t have hit anything—should have spattered across a half acre of mountainside. But somehow at least four and possibly five bullets had hit Lal solidly in the torso. There simply wasn’t anything to do for him on a perilous mountain trail in a horrific blizzard, with human wolves still pressing behind in unseen pursuit.
Shrill screams rang out from somewhere behind. Pan stopped and turned, bringing up his M-16. Despite his vagueness—which Annja thought must be altitude sickness—he did come right back when danger threatened.
But whatever the danger was it didn’t seem to threaten them. The wind’s howling rose to a crescendo. The cries and chilling screams of men in panic and pain remained clearly audible. There were sudden, savage cracks of gunfire.
One voice rose above the rest, shrieking something Annja didn’t understand but knew was in no local tongue. It trailed off into a fading wail as its owner presumably went over the cliff to his doom.
Annja had stopped. She held her rifle pointed back along the trail. She glanced at Pan, who frowned thoughtfully.
“I understand a bit of it,” he said, never taking his eyes off their back trail though the snow completely blocked vision past ten feet. “The eagle’s tongue, as the Albanians call their language.”
“What did he say?” Annja asked.
He shook his head. “I couldn’t make out all of it. But it was something about demons in the snow.”
The volume of gunfire rose. There were several rifles going off, maybe many, the Kalashnikovs playing bass to a counterpoint of higher-pitched submachine guns. Then it stopped.
The clamor continued. Even through the wind’s shrieking Annja could tell the voices were dwindling. Their enemies were fleeing back down the trail, faster than would have been safe even in bright sunlight with bare, dry rock underfoot.
“There’s no such thing as demons,” Annja said firmly. “The altitude
must be affecting them, too, especially Bajraktari’s gang. They got jumbled up in the storm and started fighting each other. That’s all.”
Pan said nothing.
“Hurry, please,” Prasad called back to them. Urgency rang clearly in his voice.
Annja didn’t ask why. She and Pan just turned wordlessly and moved out again. Both still held their rifles. Annja truly didn’t think the pursuit party was going to be catching up to them any time soon. But even the relatively light weight of the weapon reassured her.
Almost at once the cliffside path ended. Prasad led them right, up into a cleft in the rock that might have been made by a cleaver. After a sharp climb of maybe fifty yards they came out between two big rocks to find themselves walking up an easy slope.
Annja didn’t know how much farther they walked. The wind had lost its edge of fury, as if it had spent itself in the squall that caused the guerrillas and bandits to accidentally go for each others’ throats. The snowfall gradually diminished. The surroundings became clear slowly. They were in a valley with big rocks interspersed with stands of hemlocks, so coated in snow they might have been snow sculptures except for the occasional dark branch peeking out.
They crossed a saddle of land. Before them a crevasse thirty yards wide plunged down into the earth as if it wouldn’t stop short of the core. A plank bridge hung from thick, hairy ropes crossed it. On the other side the high stone walls soared and the steeply pitched, sweeping-eaved roofs of a great monastery were visible, perched like a castle on a crag that stood up out of a cloudbank as if floating.
“I AM SO SORRY,” the lama in the red robe said. “There was nothing we could do for your friend. As learned as our healers are, we have limited resources.”
Annja sighed and shook her head. Sorrow for the brave and cheerful young man who had done so much to help her would haunt her for a long time.
As always, Prasad had refused to accompany them to their interview with the head lama. They left him grieving over his nephew’s body. The lamas led the Sherpas to a dormitory to eat and rest.
“I don’t think he could have survived those wounds no matter what treatment he got, nor how quickly,” Pan said. He knelt beside her sipping salty buttered tea.
“Nonetheless, we share your sorrow for the loss of your friend,” the monk said.
For a few moments they sat in silence. Like some of the shrines she had discovered, the room was startlingly colorful. The walls were carved with shapes from Tibetan Buddhist mythology. These were all brightly painted, in crimson and cerulean, forest green, chrome yellow.
Halfway up one high wall ran a balcony. Its thick wooden rails were painted in different colors by one-yard sections—red, green, yellow, blue. Melted-butter lamps on twisted black iron stands sent yellow light dancing over all that color. A bell-shaped iron stove sat in one corner, its rusty sides seemingly on the verge of glowing red-hot. The wind moaned constantly and softly in the background.
Looking like a Buddha, with his clean-shaved head and his cheeks spilling straight onto the crimson shoulders of his robe without any sign of a neck, the lama nodded to indicate the moment of silence was over.
“I am Toshan,” he said, a smile coming back. “I bid you welcome to the Lamasery of the Winds.”
Annja sighed. Business pressed. She felt almost as reluctant to turn to it as to let go of mourning for Lal. There’s always time for grief later, she reminded herself.
“You speak English very well, Toshan,” she said.
“I did not always live on a remote mountaintop, my friends. When I was young I, too, traveled the world. Once, I visited America. I spent time with relatives who lived in a most magical city.”
“Which one?”
He beamed. “Pittsburgh. Also,” he said, “we have a satellite dish.”
For a moment Annja was unable to do anything more than gape at him, dumbfounded.
“I thought this was called the Lost Lamasery?” Pan said.
Toshan laughed. “But it is not lost!” he exclaimed. “We know right where it is. You are here, are you not? No, the proper translation, taking mind of the difference, is Lamasery of the Lost.”
“Wait,” Annja said. “What does that mean, exactly? Lost souls?”
The lama laughed some more. “Perhaps ‘found souls’ would be better. No, not of lost souls. It is a gathering place for those who are lost to this world.”
Annja glanced at Pan. He looked distant again, almost as if in a trance. She halfway hoped he was still altitude sick.
“But I’m not lost to the world,” she said.
“Are you not, Annja Creed? You, who carry the burden you do? Can you truly belong to the world you knew, the material world of ready explanations it pleases you to call ‘scientific’? Or do you merely cling to that which you have already lost beyond recovery?”
She said nothing.
Toshan clapped his hands. Lamas in both saffron and red robes entered bearing beaten-brass trays with colorful covered ceramic bowls on them.
“Now you must sustain your bodies, my friends, that they may adequately house your spirits. That’s very important, you know!”
The lamas set the bowls between the visitors and Toshan. There were a variety of vegetables in various sauces, and white sticky rice. Toshan beckoned his guests to serve themselves. Moving almost like an automaton Pan served Annja and then himself healthy quantities on oblong plates of scarlet ceramic, painted with mythological beings.
Annja began to eat, the sudden awareness of how ravenously hungry she was driving almost everything else from her mind. Beside her Pan ate as wolfishly. She had thought the nausea that had roiled incessantly in her stomach all day, another reaction to higher altitude than her system was prepared to handle, would keep her appetite at a minimum. But it made no difference.
Toshan watched with apparent satisfaction as his guests ate. Then with a nod he graciously permitted red-robed acolytes to heap his own plate high with food.
“You are to be congratulated, my friends,” he said at last. “You have passed through the four previous lamaseries—earth, stone, water, fire, each named for the element which dominates it. To reach each one you have faced trials. At each, you received further guidance on your path. We are, as I have told you, wind. Here you shall receive the final guidance. I warn you, though, that your greatest trials, physical and spiritual, await.”
“You should know, Toshan,” Pan said, pausing between spoonfuls of rice, “we’re being chased by a combination of Maoist guerrillas and bandits from Kosovo.”
Toshan’s laugh boomed off the walls. “Do you think us unaware of this? Ah, my foreign friends, do you think anything passes in this land without our knowing? We have abided here many centuries, while enemies and kingdoms and parties came and went. Do you think isolation alone has served to protect us? Forbidding walls of stone?”
He shook his head. “Those of whom you speak do not threaten us. Only those whom we allow can find this place.”
“What will keep them out?” Pan challenged. “The demons they claimed attacked them in the snow?”
Annja felt a twinge. Is this the real Pan asking the question? She could as easily imagine his fantasy persona of an ancient general speaking those words in just that imperious tone.
“That’s all just suggestibility and altitude sickness,” she found herself saying.
Toshan smiled. “Perhaps. Perhaps indeed. Maybe we did send demons—maybe we sent the storm that shielded you and perplexed your foes. Or maybe those impure ones who follow you summoned up demons from within their souls to torment themselves. Perhaps it is all those things, and none.” He laughed again.
Annja could only shake her head. She decided to eat more.
When she and Pan sat back, their hunger fed at last, Toshan said, “As you see, I know about your quests, my friends.” Annja noted his use of the plural. “General Pantheras came here on a quest, too. He neared his goals. The one he had set out to reach. And the true, greater one.�
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“Will you answer a question for me, Master Toshan?” Annja said.
He laughed yet again. “Please. Just Toshan. Spare me the burden of titles.”
“All right—Toshan. Why have we found all these clues? Every lamasery we’ve stopped at has presented us with scraps of transcriptions of a journal written over two thousand years ago. Hasn’t that been awfully convenient?”
“It is because you were fated to come here,” Toshan said.
Annja thought she showed no reaction. But the monk chuckled.
“Oh, I know that you do not believe in fate, Annja Creed. Any more than you believe in demons. Despite the secret burden you carry. You are simply too polite to tell a fat old man to his face that you believe he is, as you might say, full of it.
“You believe that only you, and those who think as you do, see the true face of reality. I can only shake my head sadly, and hope that someday you might see that this universe of shining gears and ratchets you have constructed to believe in is itself merely a glittering toy, an illusion by which you hide the truth from your eyes.”
She started to say something. Whether to dispute him or make some polite evasion she didn’t know. But he held up a chubby finger.
“No need exists for us to debate. My universe, like your unseeing, unfeeling, uncaring machine, shall carry on regardless of whether either of us believes or disbelieves. I only caution you, for your sake—do not be too hasty to disbelieve in the help that comes to you in your direst need. You can explain it away later. What is vital to your quest, and possibly your survival, is that you not fight it.”
She nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
“Of course you will, child. The clues you speak of were given so that you might be tested. As I say, you have proved worthy. Of course, what you have proved worthy of is nothing more than a final test. Is that not the way of quests?”