We Are Not Eaten by Yaks (16 page)

They waited, but when nothing burst from the mist to attack them, they continued on their way. Some of the bushes and trees had mysterious ribbons tied to them. Others had what looked like hubcaps hanging from their branches.

“Prayer wheels,” explained Lama Norbu. “Pilgrims journeying from the valley to the sacred mountains above us will leave these wheels and banners along their path to mark their progress and to bless others who pass this way.”

They continued on under the flapping banners and spinning wheels for another hour. The day started to get hotter and stickier. The cold air from the mountains pressed down on the hot air in the valley, coating the forest in a heavy mist that made everything feel like a dream. Shadows moved in the mist and the flapping banners sounded like the whispering of ghosts. This was not a friendly forest. The twins felt like they were being watched.

Suddenly, as they passed through the haze, the path simply ended in front of them. They stood at the edge of a cliff that went straight down to the river at the bottom of the canyon. They could hear the roaring of the Hidden Falls below.

“Where do we go from here?” Celia wondered.

“We must cross the gorge,” Lama Norbu said. “I hope you do not fear heights.”

He pointed to a thin wire that stretched from one side of the gorge to the other high above the rapids. The other side was at least the length of a football field away.

“I wasn't afraid of heights before,” Celia said. “Though I might be now.”

Oliver didn't say anything because he could feel his stomach in his throat. The memory of falling out of the airplane was still fresh. Oliver couldn't help but notice that the wire was about as thick as the kind of wire used to hook up cable television. It looked about as sturdy too.

What would Agent Zero do? Oliver thought to himself, and then he remembered that Corey Brandt, the actor in
Agent Zero
, had a stunt double. Agent Zero would probably hang out in his trailer drinking Fanta while someone else took all the risks. Some unlucky kid like Oliver.

Lama Norbu pulled out a few scraps of cloth from his robes and handed them to the twins.

“Wrap these around your palms so the wire doesn't cut into your hands. Then we'll wrap our legs around it, grab on, and scoot across, like you're crawling upside down.”

“I don't usually crawl upside down hundreds of feet in the air,” said Celia.

Lama Norbu smiled at her and took out his rope. He tied it around each of their waists.

“This way, if one of us falls, the others can catch her,” he said.

“What do you mean by
her
?” objected Celia.

Lama Norbu simply shrugged and grabbed on to the wire, swinging his legs up effortlessly and hanging upside down. He began to inch along, trailing the rope behind him. “Come on!” he called back.

“I don't think we should do this,” Oliver said.

“He's not trying to trick us,” Celia explained. “He went first.”

“It's not that. . . . This wire is going to break.”

“How do you know that?”

“Every show I've ever watched,” he said, “when someone has to cross a gorge or a valley or a canyon . . . the wire or the bridge or whatever always breaks. Always. It's like a law.”

“Well, this isn't television,” Celia said.

“I know.” Oliver sighed. “This is much worse.”

The twins wrapped their palms with the cloth and, one after the other, followed Lama Norbu out onto the wire, hanging upside down and crawling along like inchworms. Oliver went first. As always.

The wind whipped past them and made the wire swing and swoop while they crawled. Oliver made the mistake of looking down. The river churned and the air swirled. He felt his hands slipping. His sister shouted to snap him back to attention.

“Hey! This isn't the time for daydreaming! Keep crawling!”

Halfway across, their arms and legs were aching, and they were getting dizzy from hanging upside down for so long. Lama Norbu was whistling a cheery tune while he crawled, but the twins were straining and grunting with the effort. It was like gym class, only with their lives on the line. If this had been a challenge in school, they never would have made it even this far. Lama Norbu called back to encourage them: “The body is only an illusion, and so your pain is not real. Focus and you can accomplish the impossible! In fact, you must.”

Just as he said those words, the cloth on his hand tore and he slipped. For a moment, he hung upside down and backwards by his legs, looking Oliver and Celia right in the eyes. It was only for an instant, but his face showed a clear expression both kids knew well from gym class: embarrassment and terror.

A split second later, his legs slipped off the wire and he fell. Oliver watched as if in slow motion as the rope that attached him to Lama Norbu unwound and pulled tight. When the rope had run out, it snapped Oliver right off the wire too and he began to fall behind the monk. Last in the line, Celia watched as her brother fell and the rope connecting them began to pull. She screamed and hugged the wire as tightly as she could, with her arms and legs, vowing that she would not let go no matter how much it hurt.

“Pain is an illusion,” she muttered to herself as the full weight of the monk and her brother hung off of her by a gnarly old rope. “An illusion. An illusion. An illusion.”

Her grip on the wire was all that stood between the Navel Twins and certain death. She squeezed her eyes shut and held on for dear life against the strain. The wire continued to sway in the wind and her whole body ached and burned against the weight.

“Oliver,” Lama Norbu called up, “you must climb back up to the wire. Use the rope and climb!”

“Hang on, Sis!” Oliver yelled as he reached one hand over the other and started to climb. Now it really was like gym class.

“Ahhhh!” Celia yelled as the shifting weight yanked her waist. She tried to clear her mind, to think about anything else. She started to list the television networks they'd have once they got cable: ʺABC, BET, CBS, FOX, HBO, NBC, TBS, TNT, USA, Cartoon Network, Soap Network, Reality Network, Reality Two, Reality Three, Food Network, All Sports, All Sports Except Fishing, The Fishing Network . . . Ahhhh!”

Oliver was halfway up to his sister when his arms slipped and he went skidding down the rope, burning his palms. He couldn't give up, though. He began again, one hand over the other.

His arms ached from lifting himself and Lama Norbu below him. Every muscle in his body strained and screamed at him, but he had to speed up. He didn't know how much longer his sister could hang on to the full weight of two people. Overhead, giant vultures had gathered, swirling through the warm air, hoping to catch a meal.

Celia thought of every television show she had ever seen; she imagined what was on right now; she tried to list her favorite actors in alphabetical order; tried to imagine Cory Brandt cheering her on. Anything to distract her from the pain. It wasn't working.

Then she thought of her mother.

Her mother had climbed Mount Everest when she was only eighteen years old. Her mother had trekked alone through the jungles of South America, had swum with great white sharks in South Africa, had told Celia bedtime stories and rubbed her stomach when she was sick, sang ancient songs of healing from the Twa People of Rwanda to her, and blessed her with secret prayers from Kabbalah.

Celia was her mother's daughter. Her mother had always believed in her. And if her mother could believe in her, then she would not fall!

As she imagined her mother's face, watching her, she forgot all about the pain and the danger and the fear. All she knew was that she was loved, and for the first time, she was sure, absolutely sure, that her mother was alive somewhere. She couldn't explain how she knew, she just did. Before she realized any time had passed, there was Oliver, red-faced and soaked in sweat, hanging from the wire next to her.

“Hey, Sis,” Oliver panted. “Coach Busick would never have believed we could do that, huh?” He even managed a smile. Lama Norbu hung from the wire right behind him. Celia noticed that the weight on her arms wasn't so intense anymore. They felt like Jell-O, sure, but they were also relieved; her brother had taken the weight off of her. Celia let out a breath and simply laughed. Even though she was still hanging like laundry hundreds of feet in the air over wild river rapids, she had never felt so relieved in her life.

The moment didn't last.

With a terrible splitting sound and deep vibrating
twaaaang
, the strands of the wire, which had hung across the gorge for almost a hundred years, started to break.

The wire jerked and jolted with every snapping strand.

“Hurry,” yelled Lama Norbu, as they all tried to scurry as fast as they could toward the other side of the gorge.

“Go faster!” Oliver yelled, but it was too late. With one terrible snap, the old wire broke off from the cliff, and they swung down through the air like monkeys on a vine, except they were going way too fast and heading right for a wall of solid rock. Jagged boulders jutted out at them, like the spikes in the Cabinet of Count Vladomir next to their fridge at home. If they held on, they would be impaled.

Celia looked down at the raging river below and saw their only choice. As desperately as she had held on moments before, she let go. Oliver was yanked right off the wire after her, followed by Lama Norbu.

“Ahhhh!” they all screamed as they fell backward toward the frothing river below, tied to each other and flapping their arms like flightless birds.

THE OLD ABBOT OF THE
Monastery of the Demon Fortress of the Oracle King knelt beside the calm pool at the base of the Hidden Falls. He had traveled for weeks, eating only a grain of rice a day. He was tired, but his spirit felt fresh and young. He had reached the goal of his pilgrimage, the place that had appeared to him in a dream. He removed a small butter lamp from his bag and set it on the ground.

“For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too stay to heal the misery of the world,” he chanted. It was his favorite saying from the sacred texts. He bowed his head to the earth and rose again to light the lamp.

The flame flickered in the cool air. Behind him, the Hidden Falls rose hundreds of feet, and, in the mist where the water crashed into a pool at its base, a rainbow blossomed. The abbot smiled.

For months, the monks at his monastery had been afflicted by horrible nightmares. Though his monastery had a terrible-sounding name, it was a place of peace, reflection and learning. There were no demons there, and it looked more like a medieval spa than a fortress. No one actually knew how it had come to have that name, but for centuries the monks had prayed and studied there, hidden from the modern world. Outsiders imagined the place was Shangri-La, as if such a place existed. To the abbot it was simply home.

But all that changed a few months ago. One of their monks, a powerful oracle who channeled the spirit of their protector, Dorjee Drakden, had vanished. Then the nightmares spread like wildfire.

Now, hundreds of sleepless monks were wandering the halls. Everyone was so tired and nervous from the dreams that small arguments turned into ugly fights very quickly. If a monk coughed too loudly or ommed too quietly, all of their nonviolence training went right out the window. Fists would fly. The abbot had never thought he would have to break up fights or treat bloody noses. He felt like a nurse and a referee more than a wise and learned abbot. It was a terrible situation.

The monks' nightmares were all the same, and the abbot suffered from them too. In the dream, Dorjee Drakden, their great protector, was locked in a cage, helpless, as an army of men marched across the land, setting fire to all in their path. The leader of that army carried a giant scroll wrapped in chains, and scholars threw their sacred texts in front of him. He stomped them into the dirt.