Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (15 page)

“I haven't seen them,” Kate replied.

“They went to the hotel because Nadia wanted to get a jacket, but they should have been back by now. Maybe I'd better go look for them,” Alex decided.

“They'll be coming along, there's nowhere for them to get lost here,” his grandmother said.

Alexander did not find the girls at the hotel. Two hours later, everyone was worried because no one had seen them in the swirling crowds for a long time. Their guide, Wandgi, borrowed a bicycle and went back to his house, thinking that Pema might have taken Nadia there, but he soon returned, in a panic.

“They've disappeared!” he shouted.

“Nothing could have happened to them. You told us that this is the safest country in the world!” Kate exclaimed.

By then very few people were in the streets. Only a few stragglers and the women who were clearing trash and remnants of food from the tables lingered. The scent of flowers and gunpowder floated on the air.

“They might have gone somewhere with students from the university,” Timothy Bruce suggested.

That was not possible, Wandgi assured them. Pema would never do that. No respectable girl went out alone at night and without her parents' permission, he said. They decided to go to the police station, where they were courteously received by two exhausted officers who had been working since dawn and did not seem disposed to go out looking for two girls who surely were with friends or relatives. Kate planted herself before them, flourishing her passport and journalist's credentials, and loudly scolded them in her best voice of command, but nothing could shake them.

“These people received a special invitation
from our beloved king,” said Wandgi, and that got the police officers' attention.

The rest of the night was spent looking for Pema and Nadia. By dawn the entire police force—nineteen officers—was on a state of alert, because four other young girls had been reported missing in Tunkhala.

Alexander told his grandmother about his suspicions that Blue Warriors had mixed in among the crowd, and added that he had seen Tex Armadillo disguised as a Tibetan shepherd. He had tried to follow him, but Armadillo must have realized he had been recognized and had slipped away. Kate informed the police, who advised them that it was counterproductive to sow panic when they had no proof.

During the first hours of the day, the chilling news spread that several girls had been kidnapped. Nearly all the shops remained closed and the doors of houses open, as citizens of a peaceful capital poured out into the streets to discuss the disappearance of the girls. Crews of volunteers went out to scour the countryside, but it was a disheartening job because the rough terrain covered with impenetrable vegetation greatly complicated the search. Soon a rumor began to circulate. It grew until it was an uncontainable river of panic sweeping across the city: The Scorpions! The Scorpions!

Two peasants who had not attended the festival reported having seen several horsemen gallop toward the mountains. The hooves of their horses struck sparks from the stone and their black capes flapped in the wind. In the ghostly light of the fireworks they looked like devils, the terrified peasants said. A little later, a family returning home to their village found a worn canteen filled with liquor on the path, and took it to the police. A scorpion was burned into its
leather case.

Wandgi was beside himself. He was kneeling on the floor of his house, moaning, with his face in his hands, while his wife sat silent and tearless, completely stupefied.

“Are they referring to the Sect of the Scorpion—the one in India?” Alexander asked.

“The Blue Warriors! I will never see my Pema again,” the guide wept.

Little by little, the group from
International Geographic
gathered details. This group of bloodthirsty nomads roamed the north of India, where they often attacked defenseless villages to kidnap girls and convert them into slaves. To them, a woman was less valuable than a knife; they treated the frightened girls worse than they did their animals, and kept them hidden in caves.

The members of this sect immediately killed any girl child born to them, but they kept the infant boys, whom they took from their mothers at the age of three and trained to fight. To harden them against venom, they exposed the boys to scorpion bites so that by the time they were adolescents they could survive snake and insect poisons that would be fatal to anyone else.

Within a very short time, the young slave girls died of illness or mistreatment, or were simply murdered, and the few who lived to the age of twenty were considered useless and were abandoned, to be replaced by the next group of kidnapped girls. And so the cycle was repeated. Along the rural roads of India one would see the sorrowful figures, these mad women, in rags and begging for food. No one came near them for fear of the Sect of the Scorpion.

“And the police do nothing?” Alexander asked, horrified.

“It all happens in very isolated regions, in miserable little villages with no defenses. No one dares confront the bandits. They live in fear of
them; they think they have diabolical powers and that they can send a plague of scorpions to wipe out an entire village. There is no worse fate for a girl than to fall into the hands of the Blue Warriors. For a few years she will live the life of an animal, see her newborn daughters put to death, have her sons taken from her, and, if she doesn't die, end up as a beggar,” the guide explained to them. He added that the Sect of the Scorpion were thieves and murderers who knew all the mountain passes in the Himalayas, crossed borders at will, and always attacked by night. They were as silent as shadows.

“Have they been seen in the Forbidden Kingdom before?” asked Alexander, with a terrible suspicion growing in his mind.

“Not until now. They have been active only in India and Nepal,” the guide replied.

“Why did they come all this way? It's very strange that they would dare come to a city like Tunkhala. And strangest of all is that they decided to come in the middle of a festival, when the entire town was out celebrating and the police were on guard,” Alexander noted.

“We must go immediately and speak with the king. He must mobilize every possible resource,” Kate said decisively.

Her grandson was thinking about Tex Armadillo and the alarming men he'd seen in the cellars of the Red Fort. What role was that man playing in all this? What was the significance of the map he and the men had been studying?

Alexander didn't know where to begin to search for Eagle but he was prepared to travel the Himalayas from end to end to find her. He had no doubts about the danger his friend might be in at this very moment. Every minute was precious: he must find her before it was too late. More than ever he needed a jaguar's hunting instinct, but he was so upset that he couldn't
concentrate hard enough to invoke it. Sweat was running down his brow and his back, soaking his shirt.

Nadia and Pema never saw their attackers. Two dark cloaks fell over them, enveloping them; then they were tied with cord, like packages, and lifted off the ground. Nadia screamed and kicked and tried to defend herself, but one sharp blow to her head stunned her. Pema, in contrast, gave herself to her fate, sensing that it was useless to fight at that moment, and that she should conserve her energy for later. Two of the kidnappers slung the tied-up girls over the horses they were riding and mounted behind them, holding them with iron grips. Folded blankets were the men's only saddles, and they guided their horses with the pressure of their knees. They were formidable horsemen.

Within a few moments Nadia had recovered consciousness, and as soon as her mind began to clear she took inventory of her situation. She recognized immediately that she was on a galloping horse, even though she had never ridden one. With each stride her stomach and chest pounded hard against the animal; she could barely breathe beneath the blanket, and on her back she felt the pressure of a large, powerful hand clamping down on her like a claw.

The penetrating odor of the sweating horse and the man's clothing was precisely what cleared her mind and allowed her to think. Accustomed to living in contact with nature and animals, she had a sharp sensitivity to odors. Her kidnapper did not smell anything like the people she had met in the Forbidden Kingdom, in which everything was scrupulously clean. There the natural aromas of silk, cotton, and wool blended with those of the spices its citizens used for cooking and the almond oil that everyone used to
add luster to their hair. Nadia could recognize a person from the Forbidden Kingdom with her eyes closed. The man who had her in his grasp smelled as if his clothes had never been washed, and his skin exuded a bitter scent of garlic, charcoal, and dust. She had no doubt that he was a stranger to this land.

Nadia listened carefully and calculated that besides the two horses Pema and she were being carried on, there were at least four more, maybe five. And she could tell that they were riding uphill. When the pace of the horses changed, she realized that they were no longer on a path, but cutting across open country. She could hear the sound of hooves against stone and feel the horse straining to climb. Sometimes it slipped, whinnying, and the voice of the horseman would urge it forward in an unknown tongue.

Nadia's bones felt as if they were being ground to powder by the thumping, but she couldn't get more comfortable because she was immobilized by the rope. The pressure on her chest was so strong that she was afraid her ribs would break. How could she leave some sign, so they could find her? She was sure that Jaguar would try, but these mountains were a labyrinth of peaks and precipices. If she could only drop a shoe, she thought, but that was impossible since she was wearing laced boots.

Shortly afterward, when both girls were badly bruised and half-unconscious, the horses stopped. Nadia tried very hard to listen and concentrate. The horsemen dismounted, and again she felt herself being lifted, then tugged like a sack to the ground. She fell onto stones. She heard Pema moan, and then hands untied the rope and removed the blanket. She gulped fresh air and opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was the moon and the
dark dome of the sky; then two black, bearded faces bending over her. A stinking gust of garlic, liquor, and something like tobacco struck her like a knife. The men's dark eyes shone from sunken sockets and they laughed mockingly; many had missing teeth, and the few they had were nearly black. Nadia had seen people in India with teeth like that, and Kate had explained that the color came from chewing betel nut. Even though it was dark, she recognized the faces of the men she'd seen in the Red Fort, the fearsome warriors of the scorpion sect.

With one jerk, her captors pulled her to her feet, but her knees buckled, and they had to hold her up. Nadia saw Pema a few steps away, doubled over with pain. Pointing and pushing, the kidnappers indicated the way the girls should go. One of the men stayed with the horses and the others climbed the hill, leading the prisoners. Nadia had calculated well: there were five horsemen, plus the two that had carried Pema and her.

After walking for about fifteen minutes, Nadia saw a cluster of men, all wearing the same type of clothing, all dark, bearded, and armed with knives. Nadia tried to conquer her fear and listen with her heart, trying to understand what they were saying, but she was too battered. As the men talked, she closed her eyes and imagined that she was an eagle, the queen of the heights, the imperial bird, her totemic animal. For a few seconds she had the sensation that she was soaring up like that splendid bird, and could see beneath her the chain of the Himalayan mountains and, very far in the distance, the valley of the city of Tunkhala. A shove brought her back to earth.

The Blue Warriors lighted torches made of burlap scraps tied to a stick and soaked in yak
butter. In this wavering light, they led the girls down a natural, narrow ravine through the rock. They clung close to the side of the mountain, stepping with great care, because a deep precipice yawned at their feet. An icy wind sliced their skin. There were patches of snow and ice among the rocks, even though it was summer.

Nadia thought that if it was this cold in summer, winter in this region must be frightful. Pema was wearing only her silk sarong and sandals. Nadia tried to hand her jacket to her friend, but the minute she started to take it off one of the men slapped her and forced her to keep walking. Pema was at the end of the file and Nadia couldn't see her from her place in line, but she imagined that her friend was in worse condition than she was. Fortunately they did not have to climb much farther but stopped before some thorny bushes the men parted and held aside. Their torches illuminated the entrance to a natural cave, well hidden in the rough terrain. Nadia felt her hope fade; any possibility that Jaguar would find her was dwindling.

The large cave was composed of several smaller grottos or rooms. The girls saw bundles, weapons, tack for horses, blankets, sacks of rice, lentils, dried vegetables, nuts, and long strings of garlic. To judge by the look of the camp and the quantity of food, it was obvious that their captors intended to stay for a while.

A spine-chilling altar had been set up in a central location. A statue of the fearsome goddess Kali sat atop a pile of bones, surrounded by human skulls, dried rats, snakes, and other reptiles, vessels containing a dark bloodlike liquid, and jars holding live black scorpions. As the warriors walked in, they knelt before the altar, stuck their fingers in the vessels, and then placed them in their mouths. Nadia noticed that each of the men wore an assortment of daggers of
different shapes and sizes tucked into the sashes circling their waists.

The two girls were pushed toward the back of the cavern, where they were given to the care of an old woman. Over her rags she wore a mantle made from the hides of dogs, which gave her the look of a hyena. Her skin was stained the same blue tone as the warriors'; a horrible scar furrowed her right cheek from eye to chin, as if she had been slashed by a knife, and the figure of a scorpion branded her forehead. She carried a short whip.