The door leading to the corridor banged open. The four eavesdroppers in the changing room turned around and saw little Fara, four years old, standing wide-eyed in the door.
“Are you playing hide-and-seek?” she asked. Then her face broke into a big smile as she jumped and shouted. “Hide-and-seek! Hide-and-seek!”
Her shouting was so loud that it was certain that the people in the Grand Audience Hall heard.
The children looked at each other.
“I told you this was a bad idea,” said Timu. “The emperor and the empress are going to be furious!” Then his face looked even sadder as he muttered, “Master Ruthi is going to assign a dozen essays for this, and probably double that amount for me, for not stopping you.”
A maid stood in the doorway leading into the corridor, her body quaking with fright. “Lady Soto! I’m sorry! Princess Fara ran away when I went to prepare her snack, and she was too fast for me to catch up.”
Soto waved her away. She was just about to tell the children to run off and she would face the emperor’s wrath by herself when Théra pulled Fara to her and said, calmly, “That’s right. We’re playing hide-and-seek, and we just found you.”
“But I found you!”
“It’s opposites day. Play along with me.” She gestured for Phyro and Timu to leave.
Then Théra pulled the door leading into the Grand Audience Room open, took a deep breath, and shouted. “There you are, Ada-tika! What a nice hiding spot you’ve found! I’m sure I wouldn’t have found you if you hadn’t cried out. Now, where does this door lead to?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE HIKE UP THE MOUNTAIN
What had appeared from the distance as a sheer cliff turned out to have a winding path carved into its face. By pulling on vines and protruding stones, the sure-footed guides, Képulu and Séji, made their way up the mountain.
The two women were sisters, and they kept up a constant stream of chatter as they climbed up the mountain. Though Luan and Zomi couldn’t understand what they said, occasional glimpses of their expressive faces and comically exaggerated gestures as they paused from time to time made the teacher and student chuckle. The sisters were excited to go up the mountain for the first time after a long winter: Springtime was good for collecting herbs, wild greens and shoots, and useful insects with medicinal properties.
The path was simply too steep for Zomi’s leg, and so Luan strapped her to his back as he followed closely behind the guides, copying their steps and holding on to the same handholds. All four were connected to each other by rope for safety. The necessity for her teacher to carry her dampened Zomi’s joy, and bored, she made the mistake of looking down the side of the path once, which made her wrap her arms around Luan’s neck and hang on for dear life.
“If you wanted to go up the mountain, why didn’t we just fly up there in the balloon?”
“The forest up top is too dense for the balloon to land,” said Luan. He tugged on the rope gently to signal to the guides that they needed to stop until Zomi felt calmer. “And it’s impossible to get a close look at the things we came to see if we only survey it from air.”
After a while, Zomi’s breathing returned to normal, and she nodded for the party to keep on climbing.
From time to time, Képulu and Séji paused to collect leaves, berries, lichen, insects, and mushrooms found by the side of the path and store them in the baskets they carried on their backs. Luan would occasionally ask the women to stop and hand him a specimen, which he carefully pressed between the leaves of Gitré Üthu—though if the object in question was too thick, he would try to sketch it in the book with a piece of charcoal.
“Why are you so interested in getting up there?” asked Zomi. She was beginning to enjoy the climb. They were high enough that the mist obscured the long drop down, and riding on Luan’s back made her feel as though she was floating among clouds.
“Treasure.”
“Treasure?” Zomi’s heart sped up. Now this is exciting. “From pirates?”
“Er… not exactly. Though I’ve been here twice before, this year is different. Over the winter there was a volcanic eruption atop the mountain, and I’ve never had a chance to observe how nature repairs itself after such a disturbance. Did you notice how dry things were down in the village? I expect that’s related to the eruption too.” He patted the book in his hand affectionately. “This book may be big, but it is but a pale copy of the book of nature, the greatest treasure of them all.”
“You gave up a life in the palace just to travel all over Dara collecting plants and sketching animals?”
“Some like to hunt trophies; I like to gather knowledge.”
Zomi thought of her own long walks along the beach and the days she spent wandering through the fields and woods of home, noting the patterns of racing clouds and blooming flowers and murmuring winds, hoping to understand the voices of the gods—yes, odd as her teacher was, Luan was a kindred spirit.
She sensed from Luan’s breathing that he was getting tired, and as they were at a relatively flat section of the trail that widened into a small ledge, she pointed to a small bush growing at the side of the path. “What’s that?”
“Hmm… I’m not sure.” Luan pulled on the rope again to ask the guides to stop. “Let me examine it more closely.”
“Put me down first so you can climb up to it,” said Zomi. Luan gently let her down and made sure she lodged her good foot securely between two rocks and grabbed onto secure handholds.
While Luan studied the plant, Képulu and Séji untied themselves from the safety rope—having made sure to secure it first to the cliff for Luan’s protection—and climbed up the dangling vines to reach otherwise inaccessible spots on the cliff face, where they gathered bird eggs, dug out tubers, and sniffed at the succulent leaves of various plants before stuffing handfuls into their baskets. Zomi admired the way they moved about the cliff face as securely as spiders traversing a web. For a moment she was jealous of their perfect, balanced limbs, their powerful muscles and limber sinews—then she pushed the thoughts away. That way lay madness. The choices of the gods could not be questioned.
“This is fascinating,” muttered Luan Zya. He took out a knife and started cutting branches from the small bush.
Zomi couldn’t see what was so fascinating about it at all. It looked just like the common clinging birch that grew on steep slopes back home in Dasu. She had asked the question only in the hope of eliciting some botanical lecture about a plant she was already familiar with so that Luan would get a longer break from having to carry her, but her teacher treated it like some exotic species that had never been seen.
“What is so special about it?”
“Look at how strong and flexible these are.”
Luan now had in his hands a bundle of cut branches, each of which was about a foot long and about the thickness of a finger. He flexed them to gauge their resilience and test for weak spots. Satisfied, he shortened the safety rope and tied it to a rocky outcrop, braced his feet in two depressions in the cliff face, took out some lengths of rope and ox sinew from the sack attached to his waist, and tied the branches together into a framework.
“What are you building?” asked Zomi, curious.