I must have fallen into sleep, despite the icicles settling in my veins and in my heart. Sometime in those despairing hours I was woken by a clatter of feet, the crash of a cell door against the wall. A burly figure in a sheepskin coat stood in the darkness without. He held a butter lamp, which lit his face from below. The flickering light turned an ordinary man into monster, with dark puddles for eyes and slanting cheekbones as cruel as knife slashes.
Through our tiny cell window I could see dark sky. Deep, black, star-speckled night in the center of which cruised a gibbous moon, wrapped in scarlet clouds. A time for sleep, but already our executioner had arrived.
His entrance awakened the others. Rachel’s face like a crumpled rose, Aunt Hilda repressing a gasp. Silently we all watched the man as he stood on the threshold and raised the butter lamp to light his way.
“Yongden?” I gasped.
“Is time,” he replied.
I had been sure we would never see the monk again, yet here he was. I did not wonder where a man who we had last seen walking barefoot into the snow, had acquired a sheepskin coat, stout boots and a butter lamp. How had he suddenly appeared in our cell? With Yongden it did not do to ask too many questions. Instead we meekly did as he bid, walking past a snoring guard in a chair, down the corridor and turning right, where there was another pine door.
“Wait,” he commanded and turned the door handle. It swung open, revealing a sleeping Champlon and Isaac. Waldo was standing up, staring at the door with huge, lunatic eyes.
“I’ll die before you take me,” he muttered, clenching his fists into a ball. “I’ll kill you. Savages.”
“Shush, Waldo,” I hissed. “It’s us.”
“Kit?” His blue eyes were bleary, and he stared at me as if fearful I was an apparition.
The others had woken as Yongden stepped into their cell. Such was his mastery of us all that he didn’t need to speak, just beckoned with a crooked finger. Hardly trusting myself, not knowing whether he was a phantom borne of our need for a savior, I was the first to follow him. Aunt Hilda, Waldo and then the others falling into step behind us. We went past half a dozen soldiers, all fast asleep. Waldo removed their guns, our own Martini-Henry rifles, and they didn’t stir. As we sped by on feet of air, Waldo passed the weapons out to the others. Never had I felt so fleet, so made of spirit and light. We seemed as insubstantial as wraiths to our jailers, our passage disturbing no more than the air around them. In a flash we were outside in the cobbled courtyard where our donkeys were stamping their feet, and our Sherpas waiting for us in a mute huddle.
My breath created shimmering mushrooms of vapor in the air. It was freezing out here, with Tibet at our feet. We were ants against the majestic mountain, that jutting dazzle of ice silhouetted against the raven sky. Above it all hung the same blood-drenched moon I had glimpsed from my cell. Vultures circled above us, their harsh caws rising and falling in the wind. A dark omen? No matter. I have never been happier to feel the air on my face, to taste freedom in my mouth.
“Go,” Yongden addressed my aunt and Champlon.
“We must make haste,” Aunt Hilda agreed. “Press onwards.”
“No.”
“What … c-can … you … m-m-mean?” Aunt Hilda stuttered.
“Go home. It is time.”
Aunt Hilda blinked, for a moment I thought she was going to argue, but she merely hung her head. It was Champlon, his face naked and furious, who protested, refusing to mount his donkey and waving his gun. A bullet cut him off, cracking past his face, fizzling out in the snow. A clamor from inside the building told us the strange spell that blanketed the garrison had been lifted.
More bullets careened past us; a donkey brayed in sudden sharp pain. Ebony figures were flitting in the snow darkness; crouching, running toward us.
“Go!” urged Yongden.
There was a stampede of donkeys’ hooves, of braying and thumping of Sherpas cursing and running. More and more guards had emerged from the house, inky shadows against the overwhelming darkness. Arrows, silent and deadly, mingled with bullets. Champlon, wheeling away on his steed, was taking aim, picking off the soldiers with unerring accuracy. Waldo, I saw with a pang, was raising a quavering left hand, trying to shoot.
An arrow pelted toward me. A streak of eagle feathers, a deadly tip. I ducked. Behind me someone shrieked.
Yongden, trotting by me on a fine piebald stallion, laid his hands on the flank of my donkey, calming my panicking beast. He gestured to me to follow him. Miraculously we seemed to cut a path through the mayhem; the hiss, the cries, the bullets exploding in bursts of white light.
We were among the last to escape, bringing up the rear behind Rachel, my aunt and the mass of Sherpas. Finally came Champlon, his face set and desperate, but his pistol steady. He was holding off our attackers, cutting off their advance with deadly gunfire. On the edges of my senses I was aware of another sound, underpinning the hiss and whine of fighting. A deep ominous sledgehammer under our feet and in our ears. A rumble that froze all battle and instantaneously scattered our attackers in panic.
“Avalanche,” murmured Yongden.
He was riding fast, hooves scudding through snow. I followed, but snowflakes were whirling all around, a devilish vortex in my eyes, ears and nose. A white slab glided in front of my feet, like a magic carpet coming in to land, cutting us off from my friends. Beyond it I saw Rachel’s startled eyes.
Aunt Hilda’s mouth opened in an agonized yowl at the sight of the avalanche and clumsily, stupidly, she fell off her donkey. Champlon pounded off his own beast and hauled her upright. He half-dragged my aunt on to his mount, kicking it to make it run toward my friends and the veil of snow. Then he raced to Aunt Hilda’s panicking donkey and began to hoist himself up. Boom—a shimmering slab of ice juddered into him, obliterating him from view. I shrieked, a scream that wrenched out my guts. It was useless. In an instant Champlon and donkey were both gone; buried under a huge white cushion.
The ridge of ice shredded; broke up into pieces, pelting hard nuggets in my face. I was sliding on something, under me my beast was braying forlornly. A sooty shadow moved in front of me. Yongden, I believed, as I clutched at hope. Yongden, keep me safe, I prayed.
Where lay earth and where sky, I no longer knew. All I was aware of was eddying light. Glaring, dazzling white that sucked and drowned, obscuring all. Dimly, I was aware that I was sliding, but where and how I couldn’t say. My breath came in ragged gasps. I couldn’t breathe, the pressure on my chest was suffocating me.
Darkness crashed in on me, as before there had been light. I must have blacked out for I knew no more.
When I opened my eyes all I could see was Yongden’s face. He was bending over me, something hairy and ominous rearing behind him. As my eyes focused, it took the form of the nostrils and flank of his piebald stallion.
“What happened?” I rasped.
“You live,” he said sombrely.
“Rachel, Waldo! … and—”
“Your friends safe, they on other side of avalanche. This was only a—” he made a coughing noise.
“Hiccup?”
“Hiccup. The mountain, she play, not very angry.”
“Play?” I repeated in amazement, remembering the thundering lava of snow, the sensation of being buried alive in ice. “All that ice?”
“Not rock or ice,” he said, correcting me. “Powder snow. A baby avalanches. Your friends they are on other side of avalanche. The Sherpas take them back to India. They not make mistake to come back. They go down mountain. They take care. This land is not for gold hunters. They leave this place which is not for them and go home.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever heard Yongden make. Slowly, I uncoiled my limbs and stood up. Nothing seemed to be broken, though my back ached as if it had been pelted with a thousand small pebbles. Which I suppose it had. Judging from the rosy flush of the sun crawling up on the horizon, I had been unconscious for a long time.
“My donkey?” I asked.
Yongden shook his head and I gathered she was dead. It was a curse to be my mount, I thought bitterly. Two donkeys had died, serving me.
We were in a different land now, the garrison of stocky houses with their stone-freighted roofs had disappeared. It was a precipice, an icy defile with rocky, impassable peaks rearing to either side. Far, far ahead of us ran a river, speckled with a million dancing lights. Only I wasn’t sure if it was a mirage. Increasingly I wasn’t certain of what was in my head and what was the world outside. What had I been warned by the young Sherpa, so long ago? “Stay away from Yongden,” he had said. “He plays inside your head.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We fell down the mountain.”
Looking up the hundreds of feet it seemed incredible that we were still alive; we should have been smashed, pulverized, nothing but a heap of bones. In my dreams I recalled something feather-like supporting me, a floating bed of snow, and it never occurred to me to disbelieve Yongden. So we must be a long, long way from the others. How would we rejoin them? A cruel thought hit me, whipping me like a lash.
“They’ll look for me, Yongden. They’ll put themselves into danger.”
He shook his head: “They saw you die.”
“They saw me die?” I asked.
“They saw us die—you and me.”
There did not seem to be any answer to this.
“We must go,” Yongden indicated that I should climb on to the back of his mare, behind him.
He turned to me. I saw sorrow in his eyes, but that was only the first level of expression. Underneath were buried layers of meaning, layers of things I couldn’t understand.
“Shambala,” he replied.
I mounted the horse. Yongden tapped its flank and in silence we rode off.