I would dearly have liked to try breeding mews, or at least conduct experiments with their eggs. After my conversation with Suhail in Falchester, a part of my mind was constantly examining my research, asking at every turn, And what else? It was a peculiar feeling. On the one hand, I lamented the loss of my girlish glee, the sense that it was enough simply to see a new thing and record it for other people to learn. On the other hand, it was also exhilarating, for I was challenging myself to look further, to think harder, to fit what I saw into a larger picture and then tease out its implications.
Unfortunately for our mew-related aspirations, we were again there in the wrong season. Unlike honeyseekers, who will mate at any time of year, mews did so only toward the tail end of winter, with their eggs hatching in mid-spring—“And if we are still here then, something will have gone terribly wrong,” Tom said.
“Can’t you trap a pair and try to carry them out?” Chendley said, when he heard this.
It was a mark of how restless our lieutenant had become that he showed any enthusiasm for the prospect. Even granting that we would carry a smaller quantity of supplies out of the mountains than we had carried in, adding a pair of caged mews to the pile would not make things any easier. But it was a moot point regardless. “If they’re anything like yaks,” Tom said with a wry grin, “they’ll go toes-up from heat exhaustion at the searing temperature of fifteen degrees. But who knows. If all else fails, I’ll have a shot at it.”
One thing Tom and I did not attempt: bone preservation. We had not brought any of the necessary chemicals with us, as Thu’s report had made it clear that we should not expect any bones to survive in one of his mystery specimens. Besides, the process had gone from a matter of great industrial import to a minor curiosity, of interest as a footnote in the history of dragonbone synthesis, but otherwise of use only to individuals like ourselves, who wished to study the skeletons of dragons at leisure. We did dissect several mews, working from carcasses provided by the spinsters who hunted them, and confirmed that their bones disintegrated according to the common habit of their kind; but for records we were dependent upon my drawings.
One other activity kept us occupied during the monsoon, and that was mountain climbing. Once Suhail had enough fluency in Tser-zhag to handle minor daily matters, Chendley went out on a regular basis with either him or Thu to hone their skills on the nearby ridges and peaks. Tom and I went less frequently, but the weeks we spent with the herdsmen involved a great deal of clambering around by routes that made the Nying laugh at us. It was preparation for what was to come: the snows would have made our route much more treacherous, and the five of us could not afford the suspicion and lack of coordination that had weakened us on the journey to Hlamtse Rong. By the time the monsoon ended, we were in the best fighting trim of our lives, and ready—we thought—for anything.
EIGHT
Leaving Hlamtse Rong—Across the glacier—Gyaptse and Cheja—Speculations—Clear weather—Climbing—Buried in the snow
Although the Nying had been willing to accept us as guests, the strain upon their resources meant they were pleased to see us go—though not in the direction we chose.
I mentioned before that the nearby peak, Gyaptse, is named for its supposedly cursed nature. There are meadows below it which might be profitable for the grazing of yaks, but the locals never used them; they were certain that anyone who went there would die. They held to this certainty even though, upon questioning, none of them could name a single person who had done so within living memory—for this is how folklore works.
What caused this belief? Elsewhere in the world (that is to say, in Vystrana and Keonga), it had been the presence of Draconean ruins which inspired such dread; but as I have mentioned, it was deeply unlikely that any such things should be at so high an elevation, and Thu had seen nothing of the kind during his own exploration there. No, the fear had a more fleshly source … or so I suspected.
Elsewhere in the Mrtyahaima, there are stories of monstrous snow-apes, variously called yeti, mi-go, and an assortment of other names. But in Tser-nga, the stories tell instead of ice demons. Could these, I wondered, be derived from the creature Thu had found?
We had seen no sign of any such creature during our time in Hlamtse Rong, despite locals who swore up and down that they had seen them with their own eyes. Again, this is customary with folklore; Scirling farmers will swear equally blind that they have seen giants and fairy hounds on the country roads at night. But this did not mean that, once upon a time, something had not existed and roamed the mountains. Even if they were all gone now, their memory might survive.
Thu and Suhail managed, through weeks of effort, to persuade three youths from the village to help ferry our supplies to a spot at the foot of Gyaptse’s neighbour Cheja, which we could then use as a depot while we explored the area. In addition to this we had our two ponies—which was still not enough to carry everything, but one of the virtues of our long delay was that we had learned which items we could, upon reflection, do without. Eight humans and two equines sufficed to convey the remainder, though we could not have hoped to do so were the ponies and Nying youths a whit less sturdy and tireless.
In theory it should have taken us four or five days to reach the valley below the col, where Thu had found his specimen. But he had been travelling in the spring; now it was autumn, and the snow lay deep on the higher slopes over which we must toil.
And toil we did. In the first day we climbed at least five hundred meters, counting ourselves fortunate that our monsoon-imposed delay had put us into so fit a state. That night it snowed, for while the season arrives quite abruptly, it does not depart in the same fashion; and by then we were at a high enough elevation for precipitation to come in solid form. But the snow was not so bad as the wind. This howled about our tents and proved to us that we had not pitched one of them securely enough; I think the only thing that prevented it from blowing away was its burden. (We were sleeping four to a tent in structures designed to hold three, so that our porters would not be left exposed. I was glad my nose had become entirely stuffed up, as it protected me from the aroma of so many unwashed bodies in such proximity—my own not excluded.)
But all of that was nothing compared to the obstacle that lay ahead, which was the Cheja Glacier.