The Golden Tiger Mountain, page 5
Suddenly Pala Dawa could take no more of the cold. As he neared a large, flat rock, he dizzily clambered on top of it, and just lay there, slumped.
Rinzing opened the bundle of clothing and wrapped him in the thick yak wool blanket. She began rubbing and slapping him all over his body to try and get his blood circulation going again.
‘Get up, Pala, get up! The island in the middle of the golden tiger is not so far away. Get up, Pala!’
She spread the blanket in the sun and let it warm up. Then she wrapped him in it.
In desperation, she slapped his face a few times, weeping: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Pala . . . you have to wake up. You can’t go to sleep here. This cold is like death. We have to go on to the magic tree. Then you will be well . . . Get up, Pala . . . ’
The heat of the sun that the blanket trapped seeped into Pala Dawa and warmed him. As Rinzing’s little hands slapped him, Pala Dawa opened his eyes and smiled weakly at her.
‘You hit so hard for such a tiny girl,’ Pala said. ‘When you grow up and get married, don’t hit your husband so hard. He will cry!’
‘Oh, Pala! You’re fine. Now get up. We have to get to the island quickly,’ urged Rinzing. She pointed to the island in the middle of the lake, on which the low hill stood, and it was really not too far away.
‘I think we could get there in another . . . half hour . . . or so . . .’ whispered Pala to her.
‘Another half hour in that freezing water! Are you sure you can manage it?’ asked Rinzing, her fear now eclipsing her bravado.
‘When we have come so far, it is best to just move forward. If we stop now, we will regret all our lives that we gave up right at the end. All we would think would be, “What if we had just tried a little harder?”’ said Pala Dawa, finally voicing the awful regret that had haunted him all his life. With a shiver, he added, ‘It will take longer to try and get back. So we might as well go forward.’
So Rinzing tied Pala Dawa’s clothing into the bundle and climbed back on his shoulders. He stepped into the ice-cold water, and Rinzing began steering him clear of the rocks again.
They made steady progress through the freezing water. Eddies of reflected golden morning sunlight swirled all around Pala Dawa as he walked. And beneath the surface of the frigid water, the huge creatures still swam around menacingly.
Rinzing had both her hands inside her bakhu to keep them warm. She felt around and found the blue and yellow flowers that she had stored in the folds.
Four of the creatures, mouths wide open, their pink teeth bared, suddenly stuck their heads up beside Rinzing, and she almost screamed out in fear. She instinctively threw some of the flowers she held in her hand at them.
The creatures stopped right where they were and nosed at the flowers. More and more of them surfaced around the flowers, as if they all wanted to have a look. ‘Pala, be careful, to your left. That rock juts out a lot,’ said Rinzing as she looked, aghast, at the giant creatures playing around those few flowers.
And then Pala Dawa walked straight into a sharp protruding rock that Rinzing hadn’t seen while she was watching the terrifying creatures playing with the flowers.
The rock had struck his bad knee – the one that he had broken when he was younger. Pala Dawa just stood in agony, dizzy with pain. Knowing he could not afford to stay in the water very much longer, he began to hobble forward, moaning with each step. He was in serious pain, but there was nothing he could do but limp forward.
As his knee bled from the cut, the giant creatures began to converge around the bloody water. Rinzing felt sure this was when they would all go berserk and attack.
And then, the water began to get shallower. Soon it was at Pala Dawa’s waist, then his knees, then his shins and ankles.
At last, they were standing on the island of the golden tree with the magic fruit. The low hill loomed ahead.
Shivering horribly, Pala Dawa staggered onto the pebbled shore and collapsed. He sat there for some time, holding his swelling, bleeding knee, groaning occasionally.
He asked Rinzing for his long overshirt. Tearing off some of the fabric from the lower part of the shirt, he fashioned a rough bandage, which he wrapped around his knee tightly.
As he knotted the bandage, he turned to Rinzing and said fiercely through chattering teeth, ‘WE CONQUERED THE GOLDEN TIGER! We really did!’
For the first time since they landed on the shore of the lake, Rinzing smiled. ‘Oh, Pala! You were so brave!’ she cried in relief and joy.
‘I was so scared when the cold became too much for you. And when you hurt your knee. I’m so sorry I didn’t see that rock. And yes, now you are the only man who has defeated the tiger!’
‘I’m a man. But because of my little girl, I CAN!’ said Pala Dawa, smiling.
Rinzing giggled as she unpacked the bundle and helped Pala Dawa get dry and warm. His knee had swollen to almost twice its normal size. The cut was bleeding through the improvised bandage, but Pala Dawa managed to pull on his trousers.
‘It will stop bleeding on its own, don’t worry,’ he said.
When he had on all his clothes, he walked around falteringly, trying to put weight on the injured knee. When he stopped shivering, he looked at Rinzing and said, ‘Now, on to the golden tree. Let’s move as best we can.’
Just ahead of them on the island was the little hill. It didn’t look too high, maybe half an hour’s easy climb. The top of the hill glowed with golden light, bright even in daylight.
Pala Dawa mixed some tsampa with the water from the Golden Tiger Lake. They both ate a little bit, and Pala Dawa put the rest away in the little box in his bag before they began climbing up the little hill.
As they walked up slowly, Rinzing looked back at the lake and thought, ‘Why didn’t anyone ever build some kind of boat to cross the Golden Tiger Lake? It would have made things so much easier . . . ’
Leaning heavily on his stick, Pala Dawa walked behind Rinzing. If it had not been for his knee, it would have been quite an easy climb. As they neared the top, the air all around them took on a golden glow. ‘We must be quite close to the golden tree,’ said Pala Dawa. As they climbed, the golden light grew brighter and brighter.
THE GOLDEN TREE
Soon, they were at the very top. Clambering over the edge of the incline, they landed on a grassy plain that rose very slightly towards the middle. It was a scene almost out of a picture book.
‘We’re on a plain, on a hill, on an island, in a lake, in a basin on top of a mountain,’ recited Rinzing, giggling again.
‘Be quiet. We do not know what power lives here. It may not like being laughed at,’ warned Pala Dawa.
Down below the hill, the lake looked like a giant tiger – all ready to pounce. But one thing was different now. From where they stood, the water no longer reflected the dawn’s golden rays, so the lake now looked like a dark grey tiger.
Looking forward, they could see at the top of the rising plain, slightly to one side, a large orange tree. Its branches were laden with plump oranges, and it looked as if it was made of pure gold. The entire tree shimmered and emitted a golden light – so bright that Pala Dawa and Rinzing turned their eyes away for an instant. They were only able to look at the tree through squinted eyes.
‘No man has ever seen this. I don’t think even the most powerful lamas of the monastery. Not even the Chogyal, when he was alive,’ said Pala Dawa, breathing heavily.
‘It’s so beautiful. It’s all golden, Pala,’ whispered Rinzing. ‘Just like you said it would be. Is the tree made of real gold?’
Then something struck her. ‘If the tree is really made of gold, then how will you eat the fruit and get well? No one can eat solid gold fruit. It is completely useless. How will you get well?’ she said, a tremor in her voice betraying her dismay.
‘Don’t be so disheartened. Let’s go closer and see,’ said Pala Dawa in a hushed voice. And they slowly began to walk towards the tree.
As they walked closer, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every leaf, every fruit, every bud and every branch, the entire trunk of the tree right down to the ground, was covered with millions and millions of tiny golden butterflies! A little gold butterfly sat and fluttered on every millimetre of space upon the tree. The butterflies’ constantly fluttering wings made the tree appear all gleaming, burnished gold. Rinzing held out her little hand to a low-hanging orange to touch one of the butterflies.
Suddenly, every one of those millions and millions of little butterflies took flight. They flew around and over the tree, and spun crazy patterns in the air, while Rinzing clapped her hands in delight.
Then she looked at the tree and wailed: ‘Palaaaa, the tree is not golden any longer. It’s just an orange tree. We fought the golden tiger, climbed a mountain and a hill, and now we have a real orange tree. IT’S JUST AN ORDINARY ORANGE TREE. Can an ordinary orange tree be magic?’
Pala Dawa looked at the tree and gulped. The golden tree was gone. It really was an ordinary orange tree. A big tree, with really big, delicious-looking oranges, and beautiful shiny green leaves . . . but it WAS just an orange tree – an orange tree with millions of butterflies now hovering around it, giving it a golden halo.
But now the tree seemed to just stand there, stripped of all its golden magic.
‘Shh! Don’t mock the tree,’ said Pala Dawa. ‘So what if the gold is just butterflies. So what if it looks like an orange tree! The fruit of the golden tree is said to be magic. All the old legends cannot be wrong. The story of the magic golden tree is almost as old as the myth of Itbumoo, the creator, who made Fadaongthing, the first man, out of a ball of snow from Khangchendzonga with her right hand, and Nuzaognyu, the first woman, out of a second ball of snow with her left hand.’
‘And remember,’ he continued in a low, fierce voice, ‘we are the first people who have EVER seen this tree. So let us ask for the tree’s magic instead of deriding it.’
‘Well, now that we know it’s a real orange tree, with real oranges, at least you can eat the fruit. If it was a golden tree, you wouldn’t have been able to eat fruit made of gold. Maybe . . . it might have some magic that will make you well, Pala,’ reasoned Rinzing.
As the butterflies made golden waves in the air around them, Rinzing reached for an orange and plucked it off the tree. Holding the orange in her hands, she breathed in the intense scent.
Then she broke open the orange, pulled out a segment and held it to Pala Dawa. ‘Eat, Pala,’ she whispered in an awestruck little voice.
Pala Dawa took the segment and put it in his mouth. As he bit down on it, he closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side.
‘What happened, Pala? What happened?’ asked Rinzing, alarmed.
‘This is the best-tasting orange I have ever eaten,’ declared Pala Dawa, his voice hushed and solemn. ‘The sweetest, the most flavourful . . . unique! Never such an orange EVER before, in all my years . . . NEVER, NEVER!’ cried Pala Dawa.
Rinzing separated another segment and bit into it. She tasted the wondrous sweet and sour and drowned in the maddening flavour of the orange. The never-before-tasted citrus intensity forced her to close her eyes and breathe in the fragrance. As the juice flooded her mouth, throat and mind, the taste made her think all kinds of thoughts that she had never considered before. Huge thoughts about everything that she couldn’t even express because they swam around in her head so fast.
‘This tastes wonderful . . . almost like magic,’ said Rinzing. ‘But I still feel tired from all the climbing. And just as cold from crossing the Golden Tiger Lake. No magic so far. I don’t know if there is any magic . . . Can you feel any?! We came all this way . . . for oranges . . . even though they do taste really wonderful, Pala.
‘We could have stayed at home and eaten oranges. But since we are here, let us at least eat lots and lots and lots of them!’
Pala Dawa just looked down and smiled a tired smile.
Both of them stood there, breaking off and eating segments of those wondrous oranges. The sourness of the fruit made Pala Dawa cough every now and again, and he too grew more and more thoughtful: ‘Here I am, eating these supposedly magic oranges, but I can feel no magic at all. My knee still hurts as bad as when I injured it so many years ago. I can barely walk on it at all. It’s probably still bleeding through the bandage. My cough has not gone. I feel completely drained and exhausted from the illness of summer, this absolutely awful climb and that miserable, deathly cold lake. Whatever there is here, there is no magic – no matter how delicious these oranges may be.’
As Rinzing offered him another half orange, he grew sadder and more disheartened and his mind moved round and round in circles.
‘I came here pursuing the magic tree as a young man and failed,’ he thought. ‘All my life, I thought of myself as a failure because I nearly died of cold at the lake and never reached the magic tree. A whole lifetime of secretly believing I was less than others. And now that I’m finally here after fighting the golden tiger, this is just an orange tree with no magic. I have risked my life, and the life of my precious grandchild, for this? This stupid orange tree?’ Then another thought struck him, and he felt as if his heart and guts had turned to ice. He broke into a cold sweat as he stared up at the orange tree, thinking: ‘Now that it is clear that there is no magic to heal me, how will I get Rinzing and myself back down the mountain? My knee is hurt so badly, I can barely walk. I am absolutely weakened. I don’t think I can descend the mountain. And I have to cross that freezing Golden Tiger Lake all over again if we are to get out of here. And I just cannot manage that crossing again. It’s completely beyond me.’
His mind began to whirl with the impossibilities of returning – the freezing, killer lake, the murderous climb up and all the way down the mountain – and his heart began to grow cold and sink.
‘We are never getting out of here alive,’ he thought. ‘I have come all this way for a fantasy. I have foolishly believed a children’s story. These legends have been a sham. I have damned myself. Worse than that, I have doomed this child who is more precious to me than anything else in the world. I have condemned both of us to death with my stupidity. I am just not capable of returning home. We will either be killed in that lake. Or on those cliffs on the way down. Or by the demons or the snake or those murderous lightning clouds. Is there any point in trying to move from here at all?’
His breath was coming in sobs now, but he stopped himself from crying. In absolute hopelessness, he said to himself, ‘We really have no way out of here.’
Meanwhile, Rinzing had been walking all across the little plain on the hilltop. While Pala had been thinking, she had plucked a large number of oranges. She laid them down on the grass below the tree and asked Pala Dawa to join her. Sighing to himself, he painfully shuffled over to where she was sitting, a huge grin on her face.
‘Come, eat!’ she said. ‘Enjoy these fabulous oranges. And this lovely warm sunshine.’
They ate those incredible oranges slowly till they were full to bursting. Then they both lay on the grass and soaked in the sunshine, letting the warmth seep into their skin as they recovered from the fatigue of their journey. It was just like lying on their favourite flat rock by the river in their village.
As they lay there quietly, the tiny golden butterflies danced in swooping golden patterns in the air around them. In the late afternoon sun, they returned to cover the tree in shimmering gold again, till it looked like the golden tree of legend once more.
‘Do you think the golden butterflies have always been here? The same ones?’ wondered Rinzing out loud. And Pala just smiled.
They couldn’t stop eating the oranges even though they were full to bursting. Rinzing chattered on: ‘We are so far away from home. But here I feel so happy. Like I’ve always lived here, never been anywhere else. This grass feels softer than Ama’s softest mattress. I’ve never been so perfectly warm, or perfectly happy, in my life. Even though Ama and Apa are in the village, it feels like they’re right here. I almost feel like I never want to leave this tree and this sunshine. And even if there is no magic in them, these oranges are the most marvellous I have ever eaten. The best . . . the best!’ And Pala just smiled.
As the sunlight began to soften, Rinzing asked in her little bird voice: ‘Should we begin climbing down now, Pala? It will be evening soon. And then night. We can’t climb all the way down the mountain to the valley today. So should we sleep here on this plain on this hill? Or go down to the shore of the Golden Tiger Lake and sleep there for the night?’
‘Maybe we could sleep the night here and start our journey in the morning,’ replied Pala Dawa, smiling at her. ‘Let us enjoy the golden tree and this beautiful view. Who knows if we’ll ever see all this again.’
They sat on the grass and ate a few more of those delicious oranges, talking about Ama and Apa and all the people of the village and what they might be doing at that time. Everything felt warm and golden.
THE END OF THE DAY
As Pala Dawa sat thinking in the fading light, Rinzing was running around the tree, all across the little plain, waving her arms up and down. ‘I’m one of the golden butterflies,’ she shouted as she ran past. Pala Dawa smiled and called back, ‘Of course you are! You look just like a little butterfly.’
After an hour or so, the golden butterflies on the tree began to go to sleep, and the tree’s golden glow grew dimmer and dimmer.
Then suddenly, it turned into a dark shadow against the dwindling light. Pala looked back at the last rays of the dying sun on the other side of the valley.
The mountain ridges cast colossal, pitch-black shadows that looked like a tiger attacking in the semi-darkness; a huge, black tiger stretched across the whole mountain range – black as imminent death.
