Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (27 page)

“I believe that Pema and the other girls are safe by now. That means that soon General Myar Kunglung will know that the king is in the monastery,” said Tensing.

“How do you know that, honorable master?” asked Alexander.

“Pema's mind is transmitting less anxiety. Her energy is different.”

“I've heard of telepathy, master, but I never imagined it could function like a cell phone.”

The lama smiled amiably. He didn't know what a cell phone was.

The young people tried to make themselves comfortable among the boulders while Tensing rested his body and mind; however, since these peaks were the land of the great white snow leopards, he kept watch with a sixth sense. That night seemed very long and very cold.

The next day the party reached the entrance of the long natural tunnel that led to the secret Valley of the Yetis. By then Nadia and Alexander were totally fatigued; their skin was burned by the sun reflecting off the snow, and their lips were dry and cracked. The tunnel was so narrow and the smell of sulfur so strong that Nadia thought they would suffocate, but for Alexander, who had wormed through the depths of the earth in the City of the Beasts, this was a walk in the park. Tensing, who was almost seven feet tall, could barely squeeze through some parts of the tunnel, but since he had come this way once before, he kept moving forward with assurance.

Nadia and Alexander were amazed when finally they emerged into the Valley of the Yetis. They had not been prepared to find a place bathed in warm mists buried deep within the frozen peaks of the Himalayas, a land where they saw vegetation unknown anywhere else in the world. Within a few minutes their bodies recovered the warmth they hadn't felt in days, and they were able to take off their parkas. Borobá, who had made the journey beneath Nadia's jacket, clinging tight to her and numb with cold, poked out his head; when he felt the warm air he recovered his habitual good humor: at last he was in his element.

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 his 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.