*
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.
This, as much as the mountaineering, was why we had brought Thu. He called out in Tser-zhag, which is not the native tongue of the Nying, but they speak it quite well. Under his breath, Chendley muttered, “How do we know what he’s saying is friendly?”—but his heart was not in the suspicion; he said it more out of habit.
I could not deny that we were as much in Thu’s hands right now as Tom and Suhail had been when they went over that cliff above the river. Whatever he said caused a man to emerge from one of the houses: a small fellow, with the broad face typical of his people. This man peered at Thu, who spoke to him in what even I could recognize as very halting sentences. I alternated between watching the two of them and watching Suhail, who had the abstracted look that meant he was bending all his concentration to the task of parsing their conversation. I envied him his facility with such things.
Finally the local man nodded, and Thu sighed in relief. “He remembers me,” he said to us. “And no one has given them difficulty because we were here before.”
Apart from the weather and the mountains themselves, this was the biggest danger we faced. The Nying of Hlamtse Rong were so separated from their Tser-zhag countrymen in the “lowlands” (by which they meant those living a mere three thousand meters above sea level) that they hardly cared that the government in Thokha had closed the borders. But they might have gossiped about the Yelangese explorers to someone in another village, and so on down the chain until it reached the ears of some official who did care. If such a man had taken action against this village, our welcome might have been even colder than the environment itself.
With that hurdle cleared, we laid out our gifts, like foreign diplomats at the feet of a very ragged potentate. We had brought things useful to the Nying: copper pots, good steel knives, waterproofed silk. The sight of these items lured the other villagers out of their wary hiding, and soon we had everyone from old grannies to toddlers barely old enough to walk poking at our gifts—and at the five of us, too. Thu they had seen before, and his features and coloration were not too dissimilar to their own, but Suhail’s Akhian nose and cheekbones drew comment, and my pale skin and lighter hair even more. But they were the most fascinated by Tom, who was, as usual for him, already red and peeling from the sun, which is even more intense at high elevations than it is in the desert or at sea.
In exchange for these things (and the entertainment we brought), we were given leave to use the village as our base of operations while we attempted to search for another frozen specimen. “Have you asked them whether they’ve seen any other carcasses themselves?” I asked Thu, as we lugged our equipment to the house where we would be staying.
He shook his head. “Do not say anything of it to them yet.”
“I hardly could,” I said wryly, dropping my pack inside the courtyard wall. “Remember, I have not mastered above a dozen words of their tongue.”
Thu apologized for his error, then went on. “They consider Gyaptse, the nearby mountain, very ill-omened—its name means it is cursed. They did not like us going up there the first time, but it is the lowest col in the vicinity—the only one we had any hope of using as a pass.”
I thought of the Draconean site outside Drustanev, and the island of Rahuahane. “You did not see any ruins near there, did you?”
His answering look suggested I was mad. With justification, I suppose; no one builds structures of that kind at such an altitude. Even the monasteries of Tser-nga are never above five thousand meters. Once I explained my reason for asking, he said, “No. It is cursed only because those who wander too much around the area have died.”
And yet we proposed to go there ourselves. Well, it was not the first reckless thing I had done.
The houses in the village were all of a type common to the high regions: round and multi-storied, with livestock on the ground floor and the family above, and the attic space used for storage (which helps to insulate the people below). Shuwa, the woman to whom the house belonged, had been in the street for our arrival, and had raced ahead to make all ready for us—which, given that there was no guest room to prepare, largely consisted of brewing tea. When we climbed up the steep ladder into the living quarters, a tray was already set out, with five steaming cups on it.
It is natural that when we read a word like “tea,” our minds supply the most obvious interpretation, as shaped by our own experiences. For a Scirling, this means black tea, sweetened with sugar and milk. For a Yelangese, it might be green tea. But we were in Tser-nga, and that meant those five cups contained butter tea.