Imperial Fire

XXXI

Morning broke clear, giving Wayland his first sight of the pass. It was just a blue nick between two peaks washed yellow by the rising sun. He had to tilt his head back to view it. His gaze travelled back down over icefalls and glaciers and immense scalloped walls overhung by cornices.

The Khampas looked on as he and Zuleyka packed their supplies on one of the yaks, a cinnamon-and-cream beast with a placid disposition and tragic gaze. Its name was Waludong. Wayland took Freya from her perch and approached Osher.

‘This is where we part.’

‘Give me the eagle.’

‘She won’t fly for you.’

‘Give it to me.’

‘If you want her, you’ll have to kill me.’

Osher appeared to give serious consideration to the proposition, one hand stroking the hilt of his sword. He broke the tension with his tombstone grin and hugged Wayland.

‘Go slowly, my friend. Return soon.’

‘Go slowly yourself,’ Wayland said. He smacked the yak’s rump with a switch to sting it into motion. The Khampas watched him and Zuleyka leave. They were still watching when a spur hid them from sight.

Wayland led the way through cold shadows until he reached a sunlit step. Down below he could see the amphitheatre where Freya had killed the wolf. Before unhooding her, he cut off her jesses. He’d let her gorge last night and her crop still bulged. She sat on his fist, taking in the landscape, a breeze ruffling her flank feathers. She spread her wings and held them at full stretch, her weight transferring from Wayland to the air until he could hold her aloft with his hand at full reach. Light as thistledown she left him, setting her wings in a swift glide. Wayland watched her go until she passed out of sight.

‘Are you sorry she’s gone?’ Zuleyka said.

‘I’m not losing her. I’m returning her.’

The monks had told him they had to make the crossing in one stage or risk being benighted at the top, with no shelter from the elements. The other side was as steep as the approach, they said, plunging thousands of feet down to the temple and its village.

At first Wayland thought they would reach the pass with time to spare, but by midday the notch in the mountain wall seemed scarcely any closer. Zuleyka made chai and Wayland noticed that the boiling water was cool enough to drink straight from the pot. He’d been travelling for months across a plateau where the lowest valleys were higher than most mountains in other lands and had thought he was acclimatised to altitude. Now, though, his breath grew short and his temples throbbed.

On they climbed, the yak ploughing a path through snow up to its knees. Wayland looked back to see the Tibetan plateau spreading away to the curve of the world. Sweat chilled on him as he rested.

The sun was dipping towards the summits when he emerged from an ice corridor and saw the pass directly above. The final approach was up a steep and tilted snowfield where a slip would have sent them spinning a thousand feet onto a glacier. The yak forged ahead, snorting steam from its nostrils and throwing up powder snow as fine as diamond dust. The pain in Wayland’s head had intensified and it felt like an iron band was tightening around his skull. He had to stop every fifty yards or so, hands on knees, dragging in lungfuls of parched air. Zuleyka was suffering too but made no complaint.

Distances were deceptive in the rarefied air. The col seemed to recede as fast as he advanced. Looking back, he had a god’s eye view of ranges aligned in no particular direction, saw-toothed ridges shooting up from bowls of ice and glaciers striped with rock debris. Looking up he felt the first prickle of anxiety. The sky behind the pass was beginning to dull over and a wind from the south drove licks of snow from the gap.

He dragged himself on, pushing through the limits of pain. Heart bursting, head pounding, he felt the slope begin to relent. Another few hundred feet and he reached the pass. At the moment of triumph clouds streamed up ahead like grey phantoms and the headwind strengthened, blowing spindrift into his face. Soon it would be dark and they still had to make the descent.

They stumbled across the col and it was dusk when they reached a cairn marking the highest point of the ascent. A little way further on the ground fell away at their feet. They were standing on the rim of an immense corrie, looking down thousands of feet into a horseshoe-shaped cockpit that flattened and narrowed at the far end. That was where they had to make for, but Wayland couldn’t work out how to reach it. The direct route led down a snowfield pitched at an acute angle. To his left the snow was broken by crevasses. To his right a gap opened between a massive outcrop and a wall of cliffs.

‘How do we get down?’ Zuleyka said.

‘It must be this way,’ he said, traversing right. He moved fast, aware that time was running out. The wind whipped up a ground blizzard, blowing with a force that cut through his clothes. They would never survive a night up here.

For a while it seemed that he had guessed correctly, a ramshackle staircase of rock and ice descending between the cliffs. It was nearly dark. His foot pawed air and he stopped, one step from falling into space. Below him the stairway dropped into a couloir, a slipway of ice jammed in a gulley.

‘This can’t be the right way,’ Zuleyka called.

Wayland climbed up to her, blew on his frozen fingers and unlooped a rope. He tied it to the yak’s pack saddle.

‘Hold Waludong,’ he told Zuleyka.

He tossed the free end of the rope into the gulley and lowered himself down it hand by hand. He was wearing Tibetan boots soled with yak hide that gave little grip and he was only halfway down the chute when he slipped. He clung to the rope but it didn’t arrest his slide. Feet first, he shot down the gulley. He knew he was going to die, yet he felt no fear and didn’t panic. He even had time to loop the rope around his right wrist before his descent was arrested with a jar that almost wrenched his shoulder out of its socket.

He hung with his feet dangling in space. He opened his eyes, not daring to move. The rope went slack again and he slipped another couple of feet before another violent braking brought him up short halfway over the lip. Clinging to the rope, he looked back over his shoulder to see nothing but darkness below.

Zuleyka was shouting, her voice almost blown away by the wind. ‘You nearly pulled Waludong over. I can’t hold him much longer.’

Wayland raised his head. ‘I’m coming back up.’

He strained against the rope, half-expecting it to give. It held and he hauled himself to safety. When he reached Zuleyka, he saw that the margin had been very small indeed. The yak was inches from losing its footing, Zuleyka braced back on her heels to hold it. If he’d fallen another foot, all three of them would have toppled to their deaths.

‘I thought you were gone,’ Zuleyka cried. ‘Oh, Wayland, what are we going to do?’

Wayland’s lips were so frozen he could hardly articulate. ‘We have to return to the cairn.’

It was night now. If the wind hadn’t eased and if a few stars hadn’t appeared, they might not have found their way back. The way down was no clearer than before.

Zuleyka’s teeth chattered. ‘I’m freezing.’

So was Wayland — not just his face and hands. His blood was thickening, beginning to congeal around the functioning part of his brain.

Below him a robed figure appeared, floating above the snow.

Wayland leaned towards it. ‘Yonden?’ he said in a slurred voice.

The apparition faded.

‘We have to go straight down,’ Wayland said. ‘We’ll die if we wait any longer.’

He’d taken only a few steps when the cornice hidden from above collapsed under his weight and he fell. He clawed his hands into the snow in a forlorn attempt to slow his descent. He tobogganed down on his back at breakneck speed and his only thought was that if he went over a precipice or hit a boulder, the impact would kill him outright.

He hurtled into a drift, almost burying himself. He lay gasping and coughing before dragging himself out. He must have slid a thousand feet and he couldn’t see Zuleyka and the yak. Then he spotted the dog bounding down the snowface. It flung itself against him, licking his face.

He cupped his numb hands around his mouth. ‘Zuleyka, follow my path.’

She couldn’t have heard him. A terrible decision had to be made. Use the last of his strength to climb back to her, or abandon her and try to save himself.

He’d dragged himself only a short way up the snowfield when he heard a faint cry and saw two dark dots inching down. With her dancer’s balance, Zuleyka managed to reach him without losing her footing, the yak following in a manner part-comic, part-majestic, sitting back on its haunches.

From here the way was visible, but they were a long way from safety. Wayland’s boots were full of snow and a poultice of ice chilled his back. If he didn’t reach shelter soon, he would lose fingers and toes to frostbite.

‘How are your hands and feet?’ he asked Zuleyka.

Her reply was apathetic. ‘I can’t feel them.’

They tottered down the trail, each wrapped in a private world of pain. It began to snow again — big soft flakes that stuck to the face. They followed the yak, Wayland encouraging it with cries copied from Tibetan nomads. ‘Ka, ka, ka. Bri, bri, bri. Get on.’

The beast maintained its plodding pace.

‘Look out for a cave or sheltered ledge,’ Wayland stuttered. ‘Somewhere we can light a fire.’

No haven appeared and the snow was falling more heavily, obliterating the view ahead. Zuleyka stumbled and fell.

‘I can’t go on,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Wayland pulled her upright. ‘It can’t be far now.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Wayland took her weight with one hand and gripped the dog by its scruff. ‘Find shelter. Go on, find it.’

It bounded away. Wayland followed, supporting Zuleyka, his feet like clods of ice. His mind was so deranged by cold that at first he thought he was dreaming when he heard the dog giving tongue in the distance.

He stood swaying. ‘Hear that? Come on.’

Dragging Zuleyka beside him, he increased pace, barging into rocks, tripping over. He stopped and rubbed his eyes. Out of the darkness and flowing snow emerged a building, looking as if it lay in a white cave or at the far end of a tunnel. He staggered forward, unable to believe the building was real until his hands contacted stone.

It was a two-storey house, the entrance to the byre on the ground floor drifted over. Wayland found a notched log ladder leading up to the flat roof. He unloaded the yak, then pushed Zuleyka up the ladder and dragged the dog after. One side of the roof was occupied by a lean-to stacked with firewood. The shed had acted as a weathershield and Wayland made out a square impression on the roof. He scraped the snow away to reveal a trapdoor. He hacked at the ice sealing its edges and heaved it open. A ladder descended into darkness.

‘Anyone there?’ he called.

He dropped two bundles of firewood through the trap and climbed down. Cursing his useless hands, he managed after many attempts to light a lamp. Its flame threw shadows across a chamber about twenty feet long and ten wide. A fireplace was sunk into the floor at one end and at the other stood an altar bearing offerings to the gods. Stalactites of soot and ice hung from the beams.

He lit kindling with the lamp and heaped branches on the fire until the flames leaped halfway to the roof. Zuleyka sat slumped on the floor. He fumbled off her boots and felt her feet. Stiff as wood. His own feet were in the same state. He stretched them out to the blaze and waited for the pain to start. It began as a tingle that turned into an itch and swelled to a bloated throb. The pain came in colours, pulsing black and red. His fingers felt as if they were filled with splinters and were being squeezed in a vice. They felt swollen to twice their normal size, ready to split like rotten fruit, but when he inspected them they were merely puffy and mottled. Zuleyka sobbed to herself on the other side of the fire. The dog lay rasping at its pads.

Eventually the pain ate itself up, leaving Wayland sick and lightheaded. A raging thirst consumed him. He made chai from melted snow and they drank four bowls apiece before stretching out by the fire and falling into a chasm of sleep.

The room was oppressively warm when he woke. Meltwater from the icicles dropped hissing on the ashes. Zuleyka slept on. He opened the trapdoor and climbed out into a day of ineffable brilliance, the mountains on all sides soaring like vast monuments of chiselled white marble. He’d slept past noon and the sun beat hot on his face. The dwelling was one of five scattered over the flat floor of a bowl walled by vertical precipices. A few thorny bushes stippled the snow. To the south the path divided around a chorten so that Buddhist travellers coming both ways could keep it on their right.

Wayland stuck his head through the trap. ‘Wake up. We’re nearly there.’

Zuleyka joined him on the roof, blinking and yawning. ‘What’s this place, then? Why isn’t anyone here?’

‘It must be a summer settlement.’

Wayland blew the fire back into life and made breakfast. They stuffed themselves on buckwheat pancakes cooked in butter. Wayland’s fingers and toes were still sore to the lightest touch, several of the pads grey and dead-looking. He rubbed butter into them,

‘My nose feels funny,’ Zuleyka said,

Frost had nipped the tip. Wayland kissed it. ‘It’s not going to fall off.’

They rested another night and left in mid-morning, following a path beside a half-frozen stream. By the time they passed through a gateway marking the territory around the main settlement, the river had vanished into a deep gorge to their right. Down the valley Wayland spotted a few straight lines among the chaos of rocks.

‘Fields. The village must be close.’

To reach it they had to pick their way along a track only a footprint wide scribed into a scree slope. Wayland negotiated a tight bend under a shattered cliff and held out his hand to Zuleyka.

‘We’re here.’

Set inside the entrance to a valley on the other side of the gorge, the village resembled a fortress-citadel built on a plug of rock a hundred feet high, the two- and three-storey houses clinging like swallow’s nests to the summit. Many of the houses were caved in or lay in piles of rubble at the base of the outcrop. A gulley with terraced fields climbed around the back of the settlement.

‘It’s empty,’ Wayland said.

‘The earthquake that blocked the river must have destroyed it.’

‘It’s been deserted for longer than that. The monks told me it’s been years since the villagers crossed the pass. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t rebuild it.’ Wayland pointed towards the other side of the gulley. ‘That must be Oussu’s temple.’

It stood in lofty isolation on a bluff under a cliff eroded into fluted columns and honeycombed with caves. From this distance it appeared intact. Tattered prayer flags on its roof fluttered defiance to demons at the four corners of the world.

‘You’ll never reach it,’ Zuleyka said.

Where the lips of the gorge almost met, a bridge had once stood, its ends marked by stone pillars erected on a foundation of slabs and timber. The span was less than thirty feet and, so far as Wayland could tell, the bridge had been the only connection between the villagers and the rest of the world. He advanced to the edge and looked over. The view into the abyss made his head spin. Working over aeons, the river had cut down through the rocks at different angles and was now invisible below the crooks. Wayland couldn’t even hear it.

He made his way back to Zuleyka. ‘We’ll camp here tonight. Tomorrow we should be below the treeline.’

In the evening he sat watching the temple recede into shadows. A flock of wild sheep inched down a cliff behind the village.

‘Supper’s ready,’ Zuleyka called.

‘In a moment,’ Wayland said.

He tasted bitter dregs of disappointment at being balked so close to reaching the temple. Less than thirty feet, damn it.

‘Wayland!’

Stars formed a mesh of quicksilver. The moon had risen. Wayland slapped his knees and rose. ‘Coming.’