9
WE SEE A SHUSHING
ON AN ICY PEAK high in the mountains of Tibet, a group of men sat in a circle of thrones beneath a giant statue of a ferocious creature with a dozen arms and a dozen snarling heads. Some of the men wore the yellow and maroon robes of Buddhist monks, others were in the black robes of priests and some wore business suits. There was even a man in blue jeans and a T-shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his face. Candles flickered in front of the giant statue, casting strange shadows on the walls.
The men watched the floor in the center of their circle, where a man stood in a trance. He wore the sparkling robes and giant banners of the protector-spirit, the warrior-god, Dorjee Drakden. When the spirit entered the man’s body, he rose taller in his shoes, his chest puffed and his voice grew loud and deep.
“Who calls me?” he bellowed. Bells at the top of his helmet jingled. He held a shining sword, and his eyes, wide and full of fury, darted around the circle of men. He saw the powerful monks of the Yellow Hat sect sitting on the floor behind him, each frozen in meditation, yet alert to his every move. He saw the priests and the men in suits and the shadows dancing on the walls. The spirit searched for the only being to whom he would bow, the highest lama in Tibetan religion, His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Dorjee Drakden swung his arms and swept around the circle. He did not see the Dalai Lama; he did not see anyone he considered worthy of his friendship. He arrived at the center of the circle, face to face with a little man on the largest throne, a little man whose feet did not even touch the floor.
“Greetings,” Sir Edmund said as the god hissed and snarled in his face. Dorjee Drakden’s helmet rose several feet above Sir Edmund and his sword could have easily sliced the little man in two, but Sir Edmund was not alarmed. He snapped his fingers, and immediately, two young monks appeared at his side and gave him a long white scarf, which he presented to the spirit. “I bring the respect of the Council, and gratitude for your service to us.”
“I serve the ancient ways, beyond time and form, beyond good and evil.” As the warrior-god spoke, a secretary scribbled every word he said onto a scroll. “I obey no master, but see and hear the crumbling of the universe. I protect the dharma and guide those who stray beyond the hope of kindness. I am fire, light and air. I bow to none but the—”
“Yes, thank you,” Sir Edmund interrupted. “That’s lovely and we are very glad for you. We’ve called you here to tell us what we need to know.”
“Insolent little man! You dare to speak to me in this way! I spin the Wheel of Protection and bring demons to despair!”
Sir Edmund stood on his throne so that his face was a little above the protector-spirit’s.
“In the name of the Council, I demand you answer me, Drakden. You may be immortal, but that little monk who you’re living in isn’t. He’s our prisoner. So tell me: Where is the Navel family? Where have they gone? They were supposed to land in Beijing. Why aren’t they on the plane anymore?”
Dorjee Drakden drew back from Sir Edmund and swayed and swooped around the room, hissing and growling, nearly falling under the weight of armor and robes, before stopping in the middle of the circle of men.
“They are out of your control. They fall toward the gorge and the Hidden Falls. Great power is with them, though they know it not. Great evil too!”
“They should have landed in Beijing,” Sir Edmund muttered to himself. “This was not the plan. How will our agents intercept them?”
“If someone else finds them,” said the man in the baseball cap, while texting on a tiny cell phone, “then your whole plot is in danger of falling apart, Ed.”
“My plot is perfect!” Sir Edmund objected. “This is just a wrinkle. My people will come through.”
“But if the Navels should find—”
“Relax,” said Sir Edmund. “I always have a backup plan. They are headed into the realm of the Poison Witches.”
“Heresy! Damnation!” shouted Dorjee Drakden as he rushed at Sir Edmund, waving his sword and shouting. “These witches do not respect my authority. They are unholy creatures, whose souls are black and screeching owls. Murderers! They will not bow to me!”
“Oh, hush,” Sir Edmund snapped. “Get over yourself. Do you want Shangri-La to be found? Turned into a tourist attraction? An amusement park?”
“I do not,” said Dorjee Drakden with a swipe of his sword through the air, trying to regain his impressive composure. “I have protected it since before it existed.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sir Edmund said. “Now stop being cryptic. I need to make sure they find their way to this place.”
Sir Edmund pointed to a map on the wall that was unlike any other map in the world. It was old and faded, and would not have been so useful for getting from place to place. It showed the deep valleys and high mountains of Tibet, but it also showed other dimensions, realms of gods and devils, ghosts and saints. There was no north or south or east or west. It was a map of the unseen and the unseeable.
Sir Edmund was pointing to an area that showed a hill with a collection of small round huts. In the center of the huts burned a fire. Wide-eyed ghosts with many heads and many clawing arms scrambled from the flames, tiny versions of the giant statue behind the monks.
Dorjee Drakden looked at the strange map, then yelled and hissed, and with a roar, he tossed his sword at Sir Edmund. The blade spun through the air end over end. Sir Edmund did not move. The blade missed him by centimeters and slammed into the map.
“Their path will lead them to this place, but I will do no more!” he declared.
“Good,” Sir Edmund said.
“Except for this,” the spirit continued. Sir Edmund rolled his eyes. “I am the Great Oracle and this I prophesy: The greatest explorers shall be the least. The old ways shall come to nothing, while new visions reveal everything. All that is known will be unknown and what was lost will be found.ʺ
He finished with a long hiss into Sir Edmund’s face, and, with the sound of a gong, the spirit left the monk’s body, and he collapsed to the floor. Young monks rushed to him, untying the armor and the helmet, which weighed enough to crush the little monk now that the god no longer filled his body. The monk would be exhausted for days and sleep the soundest sleep of his life, with no memory of the things he said or the dark predictions he made. He would wake up in a prison cell.
The scrolls on which the spirit’s words had been written were quickly tied closed and rushed from the room to be copied and hidden in the depths of the monastery, where thousands of years of prophecies were stored.
“We will deal with the Navels first,” Sir Edmund said. “This oracle has given me great cause for hope. ‘What was lost will be found.’ Most excellent for us. The foolish explorer and his dull children have no idea what they’re in for. I knew they would do exactly what we wanted. We just have to find them again.” He smiled and hopped down from the throne. The other monks looked at each other with worry in their eyes.
“Stop being such cowards,” said Sir Edmund. “Dorjee Drakden will do as we ask. What choice does the old god have? He’s our prisoner, after all. The Poison Witches will take care of the rest. Trust me. The Lost Library is as good as mine.”
“You mean ours, don’t you?” an old monk asked.
“Yes, ours. Whatever,” sneered Sir Edmund.
10
WE AREN’T EVEN AT THE WORST PART
THERE WAS A ROAR, a sickening spinning feeling, and a blinding light. For a moment, it felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the children’s lungs by a cruel vacuum cleaner. The air was thin that high up, but luckily, they were falling fast toward better air. Unluckily, they were falling fast toward the ground too. From thirty-eight thousand feet even falling into water was like landing on cement. And they were falling toward an icy mountain.
Oliver prayed their do-it-yourself parachute would work. If he and his sister died, he would never get to see what happened in the final season of Agent
Zero, which was about a teenage superspy living a complicated double life. Who would turn out to be Agent Zero’s real father? Who had planted the bomb in his algebra textbook? Why was Principal Drake talking to the president?
“I need to know the answers if I’m going to have any peace in the afterlife,” he thought.
After a moment of screaming and spinning and thinking about missing Agent Zero, it didn’t feel like they were falling at all. It felt more like they were being pushed up from below, though they were still spinning. They had to hold on tightly to the raft and to their father, and their arms were tiring. Oliver couldn’t handle it anymore. He lifted himself off the parachute, letting it fly out from under him. It snapped and twisted in the air. Two or three of the plastic bags broke away and twirled off into the sky. Oliver feared the whole chute would tear to pieces. The knots connecting it to the raft strained, but held. The canvas ponchos stayed tied and the chute filled with air.
“Well, those were worth more than twenty-three ninety-five,” Oliver said.
Celia’s stomach churned as their fall slowed. They felt themselves jerked upward and then, suddenly, they were drifting. The parachute was working. They weren’t falling anymore, at least not deathly fast. They were floating slowly toward the clouds below them.
“I can’t believe that worked!” Celia shouted.
“Me neither,” yelled Oliver. They both still held tightly to the raft, though they could now let go of their father, who was still out cold.
As they drifted through the sky, the view was amazing. Mountain peaks jutted like teeth through the clouds. Mount Everest rose in the distance, towering above the others. Wind whipped snow off the mountaintops.
When they dropped through the clouds, they saw birds swimming gracefully through the air over rocky plains where herds of yak grazed on grassy patches. Sunlight shimmered off the golden roofs of Buddhist shrines scattered like crumbs over the scenery. A canyon snaked through the mountains, like the earth’s deep veins. Neither of the twins would admit it, but it was a beautiful sight.
“This is just like the second season of Million Dollar Mountain Challenge,ʺ Celia said.
“They had to eat bugs,” Oliver added.
Celia groaned. “We better not have to eat bugs.”
“Like the Thanksgiving before Mom left.” Oliver remembered that night. They had a turkey, like a normal family, but his mother made her favorite recipe from Thailand: roasted centipede and cornbread stuffing with a spicy peanut curry sauce. His stomach, already weary from the airplane food and the fall out of the airplane, felt like it did a backflip. He thought he might yak himself.
That Thanksgiving had been a lot of fun. They had played a geography quiz game, naming all the most extreme points on earth (Mount Everest, in front of them, was the highest mountain, and the Tsangpo Gorge, right below them, was the steepest canyon). After the game, they curled up on the couch and watched a movie. They had to watch it on an old film projector. Their mother loved those old projectors. She loved the sounds they made and the antiqueness of it all. She loved how real they were. She refused to have their home movies transferred to DVD. She even refused to own a DVD player.
She always said that one day the film reels and the old projectors would be civilization’s artifacts for future explorers to discover. They would think it was a kind of ancient magic, how people put little images on film and moved them in front of a light to make them tell stories.
“They are like our shamans,” she would say. “They are our mystic storytellers, conjuring visions and images from light and air. How is a projector anything other than magic?” Their mother made watching a movie seem like an important thing to do.
Oliver couldn’t remember what the movie was that they watched that night, but his mother laughed the whole way through it, while she snuggled with his father, and they popped fried beetles into each other’s mouths (instead of popcorn). Professor Rasmali-Greenberg had come by with some old nautical charts to review, forgetting that it was an American holiday. He ended up watching the movie with the family, and laughing at jokes none of the Navels thought were funny. It was a great night. Too bad his mother had to ruin it all by running off on her adventure just after the New Year. Oliver wiped a tear from his eye.
“Are you okay?” his sister asked.
“Yeah, just that the wind is making my eyes water,” he said.
“Yeah . . . me too,” she said, and Oliver noticed that her eyes were red and teary also. “I wonder where we’ll land,” she added. “They took all of Dad’s maps and books.”
“At least we still have this,” Oliver said, and pulled the scrap of paper with their mother’s note and sketches and the ancient Greek writing from their father’s pocket. It flapped in the wind. “Let’s put it in the backpack. So it doesn’t get lost.”
“I think that air marshal and that stewardess were working for Sir Edmund,” Celia said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, they seemed to know each other and the man next to me who started it all. He was definitely a spy. And they both had matching rings on, rings that made me think of Sir Edmund’s emblem. They were different, but they reminded me of it. They were these jeweled keys.”
“Would Sir Edmund really want us killed?”
“What do you think?”
Oliver remembered what Sir Edmund had said about their father, and he knew that Sir Edmund would do anything to get what he wanted. That’s how he got rich. Their parents always said that discovery was its own reward. Sir Edmund thought reward was its own reward.
“If we don’t find these tablets, then he’ll win the bet with Dad . . .ʺ
“I don’t even want to think about it. If he’s willing to throw us out of an airplane to get what he wants, imagine what he’d do if we were his slaves!”
Oliver shuddered at the thought. Celia looked glum.
While adventures that took them away from the television were bad, forced labor for Sir Edmund every vacation until they turned eighteen would be even worse. The bet their father had made for their freedom was totally unfair. And Celia couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d fallen right into Sir Edmund’s plans. In the library, he had said something about a Council, about his plans for the Navel family. She couldn’t make sense of it at all. It was more complicated than trying to pick up a TV show in the middle of the season.
“So.” Celia decided to change the subject. Secret Councils and ancient documents were her father’s concern, not hers. She was just trying to make sure they got back home alive. “Can we steer this thing?”
Oliver reached up and pulled on one of the cords attached to the parachute. The raft swung hard to the left and tilted, nearly dumping all three of them over the edge.
“Not without killing ourselves in the process,” Oliver said.
“Let’s not do that again,” Celia said.
“I agree,” said her brother, looking toward the ground far below. “I hope landing doesn’t kill us anyway.”
11
WE DISCUSS THE LOCAL NEWS
AFTER ABOUT FIVE MORE minutes drifting through the sky, the bottom of the raft started to skim the snowy boulders and jagged trees on the edge of a mountain.
“We’re almost down,” Oliver said. “I hope we don’t get stuck in a—ouch!”
“Are you all right?”
“A tree branch just poked me in the butt,” he said as he shifted uncomfortably. They saw their father’s limp body jolt. For a second, they thought he was awake, but it was just another branch whacking him from underneath. “Dad’s going to have some bruises.”
“I hope he’s not mad,” Celia said.
“He’d be dead if not for us,” Oliver said. “And we nearly died because of him . . . as usual. If anyone gets to be mad, it should be us.”
Suddenly, with a terrible crunching, cracking, breaking noise, the raft smashed through a sheet of snow, scraped off a boulder and, suddenly rolling and spinning, became like a sled, screaming down t
he side of the Roof of the World. Colorful birds took flight all around them. A small red panda cocked its head curiously as the bright yellow raft streaked past, trailing its strange parachute like a tail.
“Ahhhh!” both children screamed together. They raced along, the world a blur of white and blue and green. Rocks and bushes smashed into them, knocking their raft around like a pinball.
“Oh, no!” Celia shouted.
“What is it?” Oliver screamed back to her, because his eyes were closed.
“A cliff!”
Oliver opened his eyes and saw that they were about to go over the edge. Their parachute was shredded. All he could think to do as they took to the sky again was grab his father’s ankle and scream.
“Ahhhh!” both children yelled as they were yanked brutally backwards.
They stopped.
Their parachute had tangled and snagged on a boulder, and the life raft swung to a stop several thousand feet above a raging river in the gorge below. The children were dumped into each other, with their father lying on top of them. The raft made a creaking noise as it settled and swung in the breeze. A bright red bird perched for a moment on their father’s foot, screeched and flew off again.
“Are we alive?” Celia wondered, her father’s foot smashing into her face.
“I think so,” Oliver answered, his face dug into his father’s armpit. “It smells like we are.”
“Hmmm,” Celia added. At this point, the raft was more like a hammock. They were piled on top of each other in a jumble of legs and arms. Celia was looking down toward the forest and the river, while Oliver was twisted upward, looking at the sky and the icy walls on top of the cliff. They hung for a while with the high mountain wind howling against their yellow raft.
“Hey,” Oliver asked, forming an idea. “What’s below us?”
“A river,” Celia said.
“The riverbank could be pretty soft,” Oliver said, remembering Choden Thordup’s story about jumping from the window of the monastery.
We Are Not Eaten by Yaks Page 6
