Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

The verb “walk” is wholly inadequate to what followed. No single word will suffice: we walked, crept, climbed, slid, dragged, laboured, and occasionally fell our way across the intervening terrain. And all this effort was made worse by the awareness that, if we descended just a little way, we would find ourselves on much more hospitable ground, below the worst of the ridges which made a washboard of the area we traversed. But the farther down we went, the more attention we would attract. None of us had any illusions that our presence had not been noticed, of course; Thu had gone into the village, and we had undoubtedly been spotted a dozen times by distant herdsmen and traders. Habitation here might be sparse, but that did not mean it was absent. But the more inconspicuous we remained, the easier it was for the Tser-zhag to shrug and let us pass.

Before we ever embarked upon this journey, Tom, Suhail, and I had discussed what to do if our most experienced climbers, Chendley and Thu, disagreed on routes or techniques. Ultimately we chose to trust in Thu’s experience of that region, even if it meant frustrating our lieutenant. Which it most certainly did—but in one respect that journey to the village of Hlamtse Rong was beneficial to us all, for it gave Thu ample time to prove his competence in the face of Chendley’s distrust. When we roped ourselves together, we did so in two groups: myself following Chendley, and Tom and Suhail behind Thu, because Chendley considered it his sacred duty to keep me alive, and would not let me dangle from a rope tethered to our Yelangese companion. But by the time we reached Hlamtse Rong, he had seen enough of Thu’s skill and courage to accord the man his grudging respect. After all, it is difficult to question someone’s integrity when you have seen him fling his full weight upon his alpenstock to arrest the headlong plunge of his companions into the river below, then hold them both while another man unropes from a horrified baroness and joins him to set up a rescuing belay.

(When Suhail and Tom were upon solid ground once more, I discarded our usual public reserve and clung quite tightly to my husband for some time. “Please tell me,” I said, my nerves expressing themselves via unsteady humour, “that you did not engineer that incident merely to prove to Chendley that Thu is a good sort.” Suhail’s answering laugh was so shaky as to barely qualify, but it became a joke afterward among the five of us, that any setback or difficulty was a cunning ploy to create trust.)

I fretted at the slowness of our pace. How could I not? Every day we spent trying to reach Hlamtse Rong brought us one day closer to the onset of the monsoon. We moved at a crawl, for we could not carry every piece of our gear on our backs, and had to spend half our time raising it or lowering it over the same obstacles our bodies had to surmount—and raising and lowering our ponies, too. We were exhausted, gasping for breath, our hearts pounding at the smallest exertion. Our journey up to Parshe in the highlands had given us some time to acclimate to the increasing altitude, but from there to here we had leapt over a rise of more than a thousand meters, and every one of us felt the difference in our bones. Suhail suffered particularly, his hands and feet swelling, fatigue and dizziness threatening his balance as he moved. I fretted at not being roped to him, even though I knew he was safer with Tom and Thu, and examined him for fever or fluid in the lungs every time we paused to rest. It was a great relief when, after a few days, his symptoms began to subside.

But if I claimed I had no energy with which to conduct research during that time, you would know I had been replaced by an imposter.

I mentioned before the cat-like dragons supposedly kept as pets by the local people. One night, as I climbed out of the tent I shared with Suhail to deal with a certain necessity, I startled several creatures who were investigating our food stores. They froze—I took a step toward them—and they shot skyward in a burst of wings.

“Dragons!” I exclaimed, instantly awake with delight. I fear my voice was too loud; it disturbed Suhail, who (having not heard me properly) thought I was in some kind of distress, and his half-awake attempt to leap out of the tent ended badly enough that it roused Tom and Chendley both. With the two of them up and moving, of course, Thu could not long stay asleep.

“Oh,” Thu said when he heard my tale. He did not sound impressed. “Yes. We should be more careful in storing our food, or they will eat it all. They adore fat.”

At that altitude, it was not surprising. We had packed a large amount of pemmican (a mixture of powdered meat, fat, and berries), knowing that the cold and thin air would cause us to crave the fattiest, most filling food we could put down our gullets. I was fascinated to see it act as bait for dragons, though. “Are these the beasts you told us about? The mews?”

“Mew,” of course, is not any kind of official name. The locals have a variety of terms for them: drukshi, udrakor (“noisy trickster”), and others less polite. But Thu and his companions had dubbed them the Yelangese equivalent of “mews,” because of their call, which resembled that of a cat.

The Tser-zhag did not, as travellers’ rumours had it, keep them as pets. Quite the contrary, in fact, as mews are scavengers who will paw through garbage, steal shiny objects, and even (in large enough groups) dive at yaks. The locals say this is an attempt to burrow through their dense wool and chew at the fat beneath, but I never saw one succeed; I think a yak would have to be very far gone indeed to let that pass without retort. But their failures notwithstanding, they are far from popular with the human inhabitants of the region. Suhail and Chendley soon came to detest them as passionately as Thu did, after they perpetually broke into our stores and played havoc with our gear.

But for Tom and myself, they were very nearly as interesting as the frozen specimen we hoped to find. They could not be counted as true dragons, for they had nothing resembling extraordinary breath, but we relished the chance to dispel a misconception among our peers—not to mention answer new questions. I was especially eager to know how the mews avoided losing too much heat through the thin membrane of their wings.

Our curiosity was not sufficient to make us delay our forward progress, of course. A bird in the hand might be worth two in the bush, but a dragon in the ice was worth half a dozen of its diminutive cousins digging through our supplies. The latter would still be there next year; the former might not be. Nonetheless, we made what observations we could as we trudged to Hlamtse Rong, leaving out bait at night, studying their tracks, and keeping watch for them during our hikes.

Of the mews I will say more later—but first, the village.

Hlamtse Rong is named for the valley it sits in, which points toward the nearby peak of Hlamtse as if laid out by a landscape architect. In those days it was a flyspeck too small to even appear on Tser-zhag maps, let alone those made by foreigners, and it is not much larger now. Were it not for Thu, we should never have found the place, nor had any reason to go looking for it to begin with. Its population numbered less than one hundred, eking out their living through a combination of yak-herding and growing crops on what narrow terraces they could carve out of the slopes. The only reason anyone had built a house there at all was because it was unclaimed land: the people of the village belong to the tiny Nying minority, whose members had been evicted from more favourable regions by the dominant Tser-zhag.

Living where they do, on the extreme edge of a country in which they do not enjoy power, the people of Hlamtse Rong take a very cautious approach to strangers. When we entered the village, we might have thought the entire place deserted: there was no one at all in the narrow dirt track that served as a main street, no one in front of the houses or visible through windows. But here and there we saw eyes peering over a low wall, or caught the movement as a shutter swung hastily closed, and we knew we were being watched.