"There was a time," the old monk said above the howling of the late afternoon wind, "when this kingdom controlled all trade throughout the Himalayas. It was the top of the roof of the world."
Gunter Schmidt thought, I will not kill my travel agent. That is far too merciful. I will sue him until he bleeds from the eyes.
"Of course," the old man said with magnificent redundance, "all that was long ago." He underlined the unnecessary words with a sweeping and equally superfluous gesture. Every square inch of the immense fortress-cum-temple within which they stood shouted that the structure had already been a long-abandoned ruin on the day Johann Sebastian Bach died.
From their vantage point on one of its flat rooftops, they could see Lo itself laid out below them in the merciless sunlight of a cloudless December afternoon, a collection of flat-roofed, log-laddered earthen dwellings at the base of the hill on which this crumbling castle of Kechar Dzong stood. Even by Fourth World standards, the Kingdom of Lo was unimpressive. The land was parched, supporting nothing higher than thornbushes; a few carefully nurtured stands of poplar and willow saplings were to be found in the village itself, but wood had been too precious to burn here for centuries. The brief growing season was over, and even the Himalayan vista in the distance could not overcome the bleakness and desolation of the landscape. The kingdom was permitted to exist, semiautonomously with its own king and queen, within the larger kingdom of Nepal—largely because there was nothing here worth arguing over.
"What happened?" Gunter asked, not because he wanted to know, but because he wanted to hear the old monk say something he didn't know already.
"Calamity. The Kali Gandaki moved."
"I hate when that happens."
The old man actually seemed to catch the sarcasm. "The Kali Gandaki was the river from which the strength of Kechar Dzong flowed. It once passed by right there—" He indicated a vague gully meandering through a section of rocky outcroppings no more or less desolate than any other, a few hundred meters downslope. "But when it changed its location at the end of the sixteenth century . . ."
Gunter understood now, and his anger deepened. "And ever since, you have been praying for its return—"
"—in the Tiji ceremony, the elaborate and beautiful ritual I told you of earlier, yes," the old monk agreed happily. "Dorje Jono, the son of the demon who moved the river, repels his father with the power of his magical dancing, and brings water back to the land. The Tiji ceremony takes three full days, and involves every member of the kingdom who is well enough to travel. We summon them with the two mountain horns I showed you downstairs, each of them four meters long. For three days Lo becomes the most magical place in the Himalayas, with damyin music and feasting and dancing and singing and beautiful costumes and pageantry and—"
"In May," Gunter said through his teeth.
His rhapsody interrupted, the old man blinked at the venom in Gunter's tone. "Well, yes, as I said, that is when foreigners usually visit us. We seldom see a European this late in the year."
"Really?" Gunter said, pulling his parka tighter at his throat against the sharp and icy wind. He mentally replayed the conversation with his travel agent, realizing in hindsight that while the man had waxed eloquent about the Tiji festival, he had never specifically said when it was held. He had only seemed to suggest, somehow, that Gunter barely had time to book his passage if he wanted to be there in time. The trip here had been quite arduous. The last fifty kilometers had been accomplished on horseback, following a guide with whom Gunter had no languages in common. So I can't sue the bastard, and killing him is too good for him. Ah, but what about torture?
From somewhere in the far distance to the north came the half-mournful, half-comic sound of a Tibetan mountain horn like the two Gunter had been shown downstairs, a sustained baritone bleat that made him think of a brontosaur dying in agony. It made the mountains ring with echoes. "What's that?" he asked idly. "Call to prayer? Some sort of religious ceremony in another temple?" Perhaps this trip need not be a total loss. Exotic religions were a hobby of Gunter's; having had his mouth set for a grand festive colorful Buddhist ceremony, he was now prepared to settle for the local equivalent of Vespers, rather than go home empty-handed.
But the old man was shaking his head. "I have no idea."
For some reason, this irritated Gunter. "Well, who lives up that way, then?"
The old man looked sore puzzled. "Hardly anyone. There is an old hermit who lives in that general direction . . . and I know he has such a horn, because I have seen it outside his home. But I have never heard him blow it—if indeed that is his horn."
Gunter lost his manners. He had wasted a week and a fortune to see something exotic, and now he was freezing his buns off in a crumbled ruin—an empty crumbled ruin—that would be deserted for the next six months, with a canny native guide—clearly one of the oldest inhabitants of the area—who could not even tell him the significance of a simple mountain horn signal. "Perhaps it is Charlie Parker," he snarled, "practicing in secret until the day when Kansas City needs him again!"
He did not expect the monk to get the reference, of course—but the gesture the old man made indicated that he had not even heard the remark. The wind had redoubled in fierceness and volume. "Never mind!" he said, louder, and could not even hear himself this time. Again the monk pantomimed, Excuse me? Gunter's temper boiled over; he waved his arms angrily, gave a wordless shout of exasperation, and set off toward Lo, below. He deliberately left the ancient ruin by a different exit than the one by which he and the monk had entered, one which was more difficult to negotiate, and once he had reached the ground he continued at a pace which he knew the old man would be unable to match. He had forgotten how difficult the climb up had been.
Within a few hundred meters, he was breathing hard. It occurred to him suddenly, as he was negotiating a two-meter drop-off, that in his irritation he was about to leave here completely empty-handed. He stopped and took his camera from his shirt pocket. At least he could get some good shots of the ruined temple itself. He had purchased enough memory for five straight days of shooting; might as well get a few minutes. He turned and grunted with satisfaction: the decaying temple really did look striking against the sky. It somehow gave Gunter the impression of a fortress built to defend men against the gods. Unsuccessfully. He backed off a few steps for a better angle, and checked the camera's charge. To avoid wasting power, he disabled the audio pickup. The wind was really roaring now, and he could overdub the audio later, with something suitably timeless and melancholy.
He peered through the viewfinder and panned across the face of the ruin, left to right and then back again. He did not see the old monk anywhere, and wondered if he were still within the walls, paralyzed by Gunter's rudeness. Then he did see him—and sure enough, he was standing in the same window they had both been looking out from, minutes earlier. He appeared to be doing jumping jacks.
Gunter grunted in surprise, and zoomed in. No, the old man was hopping up and down and flapping his arms, but not in any organized fashion. He seemed to be waving at Gunter. Gunter zoomed in farther, and became even more puzzled. The old man appeared to be laughing like a loon. And he was pointing now, pointing to the north. Was he trying to say something about that silly horn blast? In sign language, at this distance? Gunter waved back with his free hand, signing, forget it. This seemed to convulse the aged monk; he held his ribs and roared with silent laughter.
Gunter had heard of this: Himalayans were known to go into spontaneous laughing jags, due to the low oxygen content at this height. He found it annoying: here he was trying to get an imposing shot of this ancient temple, and its caretaker was capering like an ape in the foreground. Go away, he gestured. Get out of the window!
The monk nodded at once, still laughing merrily, and vanished from the window. Gunter kept shooting. Now the wind began to devil him, increasing its force until it was tugging at his clothes, pressing at him like a Tokyo commuter, hammering at his eardrums. The camera was just big enough to present sail-area to it; the wind kept trying to force it to the right. Gunter had image-stabilization circuitry, but knew that this much wavering was taxing it. He twisted slightly to his right to put his back toward the wind, shielding the camera with his hunched left shoulder. The wind pressed especially hard at his ankles, for some reason, and his feet began to feel chilly. Oh fine, he thought, defective boots on top of everything else. I am definitely going to sue somebody when I get home!
But almost as he finished the thought, he realized that his feet were actually cold, colder than they should have been even if the boots' heating systems had both failed completely. He glanced down, and discovered that he was standing ankle deep in crystal clear water. It rose as he watched, climbing his shins.
He looked to the north, and saw the Kali Gandaki river returning, after five centuries, dividing around his feet. Now his ear could distinguish between the sound of its passage and the similar sound of the wind. For no reason at all he remembered the damned travel agent saying that the Tiji festival was also known as the Festival of Impermanence.
From above him, in the temple, came the continuous BBBRRRRRAATTTTTTTT! of a mountain horn, cutting cleanly through the wind and water noise to alert the village below, and this horn sounded to Gunter more like a brontosaur laughing. . . .