We sat on either side of an impressive desk topped by a curved gallery holding lots of compartments containing rolled-up documents. Mr Thivelu put on a dainty pair of glasses and inspected both my passports as though he'd only ever seen one or two such odd documents before.
The last time I'd been here I'd gone through immigration control and customs in the arrivals hall at the airfield. This had consisted of ducking through the cargo door of the crashed Dakota, giving my name to an adolescent sitting behind a tiny rickety desk and shaking his hand. Obviously things had become a lot more formal since then.
Mr Thivelu nodded, searched about the desk for a while, muttered something about a damned stamp, then shrugged and wrote something into my UK passport before handing both back and wishing me a pleasant stay.
As I stepped out of the ministry I looked at what he had written. He'd printed the date and Welcome To Thulahn. Langtuhn held the Roller's door open for me. He was smiling widely. 'You look happy,' I said, as we set off back up the hill.
'Oh, yes, Ms Telman!' Langtuhn said, his face positively radiating happiness from the rear-view mirror. 'His Holiness the Prince will now be returning tomorrow!'
'Yes, unfortunately I'm not sure — what?' I jerked forward in my seat. 'Tomorrow?' I'd thought I'd have at least three more days here before having to worry about Suvinder showing up.
'Yes! Isn't that wonderful news? Now you will get to see him after all! He too will be happy to see you, I'm sure.'
'Yes. Yes, I expect he will.' I watched the Wildness Emporium slide past. One of the Sikh brothers saw me; he smiled and waved enthusiastically. I waved back feebly.
I couldn't even get the plane out; it had been and gone again since I'd arrived and tomorrow's inbound flight bringing the Prince was the next one. The alternative to flying was finding some motorised transport and taking the long road north and west and eventually south and back to India. Days of hair-raising travel and nights in dubious rest-houses, from what I'd heard. Or I could hike straight out, if the passes were open, which was unlikely at this time of year. I'd done some trekking in Nepal in my early twenties so I wasn't totally inexperienced, but I wasn't hill fit either, or that young any more. Anyway, I supposed it would look terribly rude.
'What brings the Prince back so early?' I asked.
'We do not know,' Langtuhn admitted, hauling the ancient car straight as we passed a butcher's and skidded on a patch of what looked like chicken entrails. He laughed. 'Perhaps he has run out of money in the Paris casino.'
'Ha ha,' I said. I sat back. Suvinder. Oh, well.
Maybe having the Prince here wouldn't be so terrible. He wasn't that difficult a guy to deal with and he would, I assumed, make it even easier for me to travel round the country and gain access to, well, whatever I needed to gain access to. So, not such a bad thing after all.
Look on the bright side, I told myself.
The Prince arrived back the following morning. What seemed like most of Thuhn turned out to watch the plane land. It was another clear but bitingly cold day, though the wind was barely more than a breeze. Langtuhn Hemblu, wearing a slightly threadbare chauffeur's outfit, which was a size or two too big for him and which included tall boots, jodhpurs and a peaked grey cap, drove me down to the airfield in the Rolls-Royce but explained apologetically that I would have to make my own way back to the palace, as the car would be required by the Prince and his entourage. I told him this was fine by me and joined the crowd on the banking above the football pitch/airfield like everybody else. They'd removed the far set of goalposts, I noticed.
Some of my little pillow friends appeared — Dulsung, Graumo and Pokuhm, if I'd got their names right — and we stood together, though they couldn't see very well over all the adults in front. Dulsung was the smallest, so I lifted her on to my shoulders. She giggled and slapped a pair of sticky hands on to my forehead, below my black fur hat. The two boys looked up enviously at her, put their pointy-hatted heads together and conferred for a moment, then each tugged at the nearest pair of quilted trousers, pointed meaningfully up at Dulsung, and after some teasing were duly hoisted on to neighbouring sets of shoulders.
Everybody else seemed to see the plane before me. People started pointing and a few cheers rang out. Then I saw the tiny scrap of metal against the grey-black rocks of the mountains high above and away to one side, its dark shadow flickering over ridges and gullies as it tipped and fell towards us. It looked about the size of a small bird of prey. The sound of its engines was still lost in the spaces between the mountains.
I looked up towards Dulsung, pointed at the aircraft and said, 'Aeroplane.'
''Roplane.'
The plane raced down, wheeling and stooping through the winds, no longer making straight for us but heading diagonally across the sky above the ice-choked gorge. It curved out to one side of the city, turned sharply over the gravel beds in the valley downstream and came flying back straight towards us. The wind, I realised, must be in the opposite direction from when I'd landed. The square-sectioned, hunched-looking craft seemed almost static in the air, the drone of its engines audible now.
The plane jiggled, riding waves of wind and shaking its wings as though it was shrugging. It seemed to be about to overshoot and go round again, then it dipped suddenly and flared, wheels smacking the far end of the field in a cloud of dust and gravel with a thud, just about where the goalposts would have been. Everybody seemed to take this as a cue to start clapping; even Dulsung removed her hands from my forehead to slap them together a few times. Over this racket, the plane's engine note had changed and swelled and the machine seemed to bow, compressing the nose wheel's landing gear as it rushed towards us with a swirling grey-brown cloud rising behind it.
I could see the two pilots in their seats. I got ready to run. The engines screamed, the whole plane shuddered and slowed, and then it turned, tipping slightly and skidding to a halt, still not quite into the nearer penalty box and a good fifty metres away from where I stood.
I joined enthusiastically in the applause while the cockpit window slid open and a Thulahnese flag on a stick was jammed into its hole. A small line of welcoming officials formed up on the gravel and Langtuhn Hemblu manoeuvred the Roller on to the touchline near a couple of four-wheel-drives and then got out and stood, cap under arm, by the rear door.
The Prince was first out of the plane, waving from the doorway, dressed in what looked like a niftily tailored dark blue version of the traditional quilted trousers and jacket. People waved back. Some were drifting away already; presumably those who came only to watch the plane, or hard-line republicans disappointed to have witnessed another safe royal landing. More people spilled out of the aircraft behind the Prince.
I glanced up at Dulsung. Her muddy boots were leaving marks on my quilted red jacket. I pointed. 'The Prince,' I said.
'Thirp Rinse.'
Suvinder looked around, seemingly distracted, as he progressed down the line of bowing officials. He motioned Langtuhn Hemblu over while everybody else was getting themselves and their luggage organised. Langtuhn and the Prince talked briefly then Langtuhn pointed at our bit of the crowd and they both shielded their eyes and stared in our direction. They weren't looking for me, were they?
Then Langtuhn looked right at me, waved and called out. He touched the Prince's sleeve and gestured in my direction. In front of me, heads were starting to turn. The Prince caught my gaze, smiled broadly and waved, shouting something.
'Shit,' I breathed.
'Shit,' said a little voice quite clearly above me.
'It is so good to see you again!' the Prince enthused, clapping his hands and smiling like a schoolboy. He wasn't wearing any rings, I noticed. There were seven of us squeezed into the back of the Roller, bouncing uphill to the palace. I was thigh-to-thigh with Suvinder, who was relatively comfortable in the middle of the rear seat with B. K. Bousande, his private secretary, on the other side. Hisa Gidhaur, the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary whom I'd last seen at Blysecrag, sat directly across from me. Hokla Niniphe, the Home Secretary, was sitting sweating next to the cabin's stove, while Jungeatai Rhumde, the Prime Minister, and Srikkuhm Pih, commander of the militia, had been the last two to get in and so had to squat each with their backs to a door. I'd have assumed they'd be better off in one of the two four-wheel-drives following us up the hill, but apparently there was some big protocol thing about travelling with the Prince.