Brandon Cook Writer

Inspired by a trip to Yunnan back in October. Not very satisfied with, but it was fun to write.

Storm is the language of ghosts and gods, thinks the man in the red coat on the roof of the world, hammering an iron ring into the cliffside. Or so his people believed. And who that’d braved the mountain and heard its whispers, too monstrous to be human, and too human to be alien, not thought the same?

“Khroom, khroom,” went the winds. “Kwhool, kwhool.”

The man in the red coat threaded the rope through the ring and gave a thumbs up to his partner, Sagar. This man wore a yellow coat and thick gloves which covered the half-frozen fingers clutching the fixed line. His mustache was licked with frost, like the petals of an alpine flower. It reminded the man in the red coat of the valley where they would soon lead their herds. In a matter of days, they would have all the fixed lines secured, and then they could lay the ladders and bridges to allow the herds to safely cross the treacherous mountain passes, threading the pass into the green valley. He thought of his family, his teenage son and his herd of fifty-two yak, and the valley on the other side of Karangara, where there were no sudden winter squalls, no towering crevasses, no otherworldly moans of frozen terror.

But now Sagar was there, ready to push on. He looped the end of his rope into the newly-hammered ring, then shouldered the rope and began walking the narrow cliffside, pausing at intervals to hammer more rings in place.

Bend. Hammer. Rope. Walk. Bend. Hammer. Rope. Walk.

“Khroom, khroom….”

The man in red shivered and involuntarily looked down, at the decline to his right. Let the line go, there was nothing to stop you from plummeting down the steep decline and into the crevasses, from which nothing emerged save the mountain moans.

“Kwhool…

…

“Whool!”

The burst of wind nearly tossed the man in red from the cliffside. His legs gave out, and the sudden weight yanked the hook free from the cliffside, so that he clutched the line with dear life and swung with the wind hard against the rock face. The rope twanged and snapped, and he was driven violently towards the crevasse. He scrambled his deadly-tired legs, dug his heels into the shale, mashed his arms, anything to break the momentum of the fall, but he was pulled, ineluctably, towards the black, until finally his half-frozen hand remembered the ice hammer in the knot in his belt and rammed it into the ice. With a sickening lurch and a snap of his arm, he hjolted in place.

With his good hand, he took off his broken goggles. Ice crystals bladed his eyes. He sat on his haunches, all but blind, and called out for Sagar.

Nothing.

He called again.

“Khroom, khroom…,” mocked the wind, and died.

On this side of Karangara, he was completely alone.

When Niko found Grandmother, the goat was trussed up beneath her knees, and she held the obsidian knife to its throat, its blood, rich as night, cupped in Grandmother’s brown-leather palm. After bleeding the dying animal, she smeared the palm across the sacred stone, her touch knowing and gentle. Her hut was on the edge of town next to the shrine, where she performed the appointed sacrifices, and where the villagers would not have to hear the screams of the dying animal.

“I have had a dream,” Niko reported. “I saw them last night.”

“Hush,” Grandmother instructed, locking her hands around the dying goat’s thrashing limbs. Niko was unfazed; it was a ceremony he had witnessed countless times. Grandmother and Father insisted on it, for when they were gone, there would be no one else who remembered the old ceremonies used to appease Karangara’s anger, and what would become of the village if the people forgot the old ways? Without sacrifices, Karangara’s shrine would fall into desuetude, and then it would be by curses and thunder that the mountain goddess made known her will, rather than in the blessings of plenty and green valley summers.

“Father is in trouble.”

“I have prayed for his return, but I fear the winds.”

“He is near the crevasses, and Sagar has fallen down the mountain. He was wearing a yellow coat.”

“Hush now.” Grandmother’s face a wrinkled summer tomato, her eyes white with cataracts, her voice a husk. When Karangara spoke to her, the face took on something of the mountain’s harshness, its lonely splendor, and the danger of its freighted silences.

The goat ceased its thrashing. A grey mist enshrouded its eyes while at the same time, Grandmother’s eyes became clear again. The sacrifice performed, they waited for the mountain to respond. Grandmother wiped her hands on a rag. She was weary, and her gray face stricken and hopeless. She put no stock in the sacrifice; it was compulsion guiding her knife, not faith. The mountain had stopped listening to her prayers years ago, when it’d taken her other sons and she’d implored nightly amidst the entrails of beasts for their return. Did she still remember them? Or like the rest, did she care only for the days of the green valley, when the pastors lay in the fields and felt the sun on their faces, and there was no wind, and all else could be forgotten?

The wind. It was said that the storms were birthed from it. That the cry of the mountain came from deep within the serried crevasses, and that one blast was enough to shatter the marbled blue sky and twist it into a black rag of storm and shudder which would scatter climbers across the mountain face like blood from the neck of a goat. The crevasses were well-known to Niko’s forebears, those distant men, stoic and tragic, who’d lost whole herds in the icefalls. Lost, though not gone. No creature that Karangara devoured ever perished, but rather added its dying wail to the cacophony of winds that only grew stronger with time. It was for this reason the women said the mountain was a demon. Grandmother disagreed. Karangara was a mother of perished children, and the storms were her wailings, and to appease her grief in ancient times, the forebears had offered her their own children, and when the people had forgotten their duty, the mountain itself came to the village and lead her sacrifices away, though nobody spoke about these things much.

Staring at the mountain now, his mind alive with the memories of his dream, the stories came back to Niko, and he asked with a kind of hopelessness whether Grandmother believed Father was even alive.

“If they are, it is only by the grace of Karangara.”

“But can a man live so long?”

“If so—”

She stopped speaking. Her hands had begun to tremble. Niko took her arm to support her, though she shook free from his grasp and pointed to the corpse of the goat, now standing on all fours, staggering, but steady. The goat wobbled out of the doorway, the tatters of its opened throat jiggling like two full lips and vanished over a rise in the land. The winds arose with a hiss.

“Karangara has ignored our sacrifice,” Grandmother said. “We must tell the village.”

“The people will not give up their herds.”

“We will call them,” said Grandmother again, though there was no emotion in her voice, as desolate and hard as the naked rock.

No more than a hundred villagers gathered underneath the colored prayer flags in the center of the village when Niko summoned them, and he knew immediately they would not listen. Not to his dream. Not to Grandmother’s imprecations. Not even to the sign of the goat.

Still, when Grandmother emerged wiping the blood from her fingers, her eyes cloudy, and with lips dry and broken spoke to the village about the mountain’s rejection of their sacrifice and the need of a yak, or more, to placate the mountain’s anger, there was a stir amongst those faces, and a turning of heads, and a general murmur.

“Was there no man to make the sacrifice?” Grandmother called. “Was there nobody who remembered their duty?”

One by one, the murmurs died. Heads turned away.

“Was there no man to supplicate Karangara for the return of their Chief, he who had braved so many winters with his people? Who had offered so much of himself? Could no beast be spared for his return?”

Grandmother had not spoken so much in years. Her voice was bleached, dry, and cracked as bone. “The best of you lies a prisoner, and there is nobody to offer sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice will only bring more sacrifice. The mountain will not return freely what it has claimed.”

 “You would steal from the mountain?” Grandmother rounded on the speaker, gratified to have an audience for her railings. “Have you seen more winters than Karangara? Do you have more strength than she, she with all her squalls and tempests?”

“The mountain gives nothing but devastation and wind. What we want we must take.”

“The mountain gives us the green valley. The mountain gives us the good months.”

“We starve half the year and live our lives in bitterness and terror of her chill. We owe nothing to the mountain.”

Grandmother spat towards the speaker and threw up her hands and slapped her thighs. The man stood firm, heady and determined. Niko had recognized his voice at once.

Toler commanded a herd of thirty heads and had taken them through the mountain pass three times. His father had once been the richest, most powerful man in the village, but that was before Karangara had swallowed him and his herds.

“I will go to bring the chief back,” he declared to the congregation. “I will not offer sacrifice.”

“You will displease the mountain,” Grandmother said. “You do not know the old days. There are things worse than imprisonment. Karangara took skins and walked among us in the form of the living. She spoke to us in the voices of the mountain and led the young and the foolhardy into her passes. The men, wives, children, goats, and yak. She swallowed them all up. She will do the same to us.” She stopped to catch her breath.

“I will go,” Toler said, firmly. “Is there nobody else to go with me?”

Grandmother turned away in bitterness. The others watched her and followed suit, although they did not believe in the mountain’s curse like she did, like Niko did, who had turned to follow Grandmother back to the shrine when Koldo of the upper valley stepped forward and announced he would go.

He was old, and he lived well away from the village, where the winds blew stronger and where he had more room for his herds. Reckless but lucky, there was no man more acquainted with the wild. He wore wolf pelts and brewed strong rice liquor, and he cultivated friendship with the herders and their children, who often gathered around his fire for his stories of wolf spirits in the skins of women, and about how the dead communed with him in the night. Niko himself had heard these stories, and did not doubt when he saw the belief in Koldo’s eyes, but it was well-known that Toler hated the old man, and now the solitary adventurer turned away in disgust and told Koldo to return to his wine and his wolf women: he was not welcome.

Koldo remained firm. “Who knows the wild better than I? Who owes more to any man than I? Is it for you and I to accomplish this thing.”

“You are drunk. Go back.

“And we will take the boy, the Chief’s son.”

“He is too young.”

“Karangara has spoken to him. The mountain wants to see him.”

Toler looked again at the surrounding men, but they gave back stony, imperturbable faces, and he bit his lip and said nothing. Nobody else would accompany him save the gray old man in filthy skins and a skinny boy, and he nodded only.

The party loaded itself with supplies for three days and left the village within the hour. Nobody saw them off. The villagers scurried into their fields or into their homes away from the wind. Grandmother returned to the shrine and lit candles and whispered prayers, though the winds were soon upon her, for it was foolish to placate the mountain that had so clearly set its will against them.  

The land beyond the village was gray, though patched with verdant plots of yellow, globed alpine flowers and gorse, and when they passed through, the three men forgot their burdensome task, yet before long the sun had fled and the land was shale with pockets of ice, and they pitched their camp and started a fire which they guarded closely against the breath of the wind.

“If the mountain is a spirit, how can one spirit possess so much breath?” Niko asked.

“Karangara is eternal, before time and after. Her breath is infinite and gives life,” Toler explained.

“No. These are the breaths of the children sacrificed to the mountain in the old days,” said Koldo. “They still seek vessels to inhabit. When they find one, they slip inside and then wring it out like a wolf a dead hare.”

“They say that Karangara is the mother of the valley. The people have never given her their children.”

The men argued until supper, though no man could out-talk Koldo. Talk had kept him alive, he said. A man might have the strength of an ox, but talk was the only thing that could overpower the wind.

“If they are children, why do the winds not return home?” Niko asked.

Koldo spoke of the mountain dead whose souls could find no grass or trees to inhabit and so skipped over the denuded rock, looking for bodies to spirit away. He spoke of Toler’s father, who had once saved his life. He spoke of days when the valley was lush and green as an emerald, in days when the men were stronger and more hardy than now.

“Why did you volunteer to go?”

“It is a man’s duty,” Toler said.

“I have been given more than I can give back,” Koldo said. “And I must pay it back.”

Niko was visited by his second dream that night.

The dark was a worm that slithered into his body.

The cold was a winding sheet.

He was in a cave. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there. Not how he was still alive. But he was safe. Even though…

He reached his hands out but he could see nothing. Blind. He knew the stories of men who’d gone blind. Ice froze the retinas. If he could warm them up, he might be able to see enough to get out. He put his hands to his eyes and rubbed. No use. He had rubbed them raw already. He could feel the sting of cold on the flayed skin and feel the frozen blood.

He sat in the darkness and the stillness. He tried not to imagine the black pools surrounding him, black as a sky drained of all gods and all life.

From the icefalls came the wind that was the cry of a thousand dead men.

Mouths that ate the living and returned dry, homeless, scudding spirits.

He rubbed his eyes fiercer, willing the return of his sight.

“Khroom, khroom,” said the winds. “Kwhool, kwhool.”

Blind eyes streaming with blood, he raised his head and caught a flicker of white. Karangara’s face, lucent and beautiful and terrible like some dim memory of the times when the village threw their children into the crevasses to appease the gods of thunder, for all things in those dim days were filled with gods, their ways magnificent and inscrutable and made holy by blood.

Closer inside, like the beat of his own pulse, he heard it. “Kwhool…kwhool…khroom…”

He shook his head. He would not let them in. No matter how they cried. He only had to outlast. Just hold on. For all he knew, others were out there, looking for him.

Koldo was already up when Niko awoke. His body was oriented towards Karangara, and he was on his knees, alone.  

“Where is Toler?”

“He will not offer prayers with a murderer. Come and sit. Why are you awake so early?”

 “He was in my dream. In a cave by the icefalls. It was dark.” Niko did not say how he feared that dark, and Koldo did not ask him about it. Instead, he said it was a good thing his father had found shelter. If there was any place a man might still be alive, it was the cave by the crevasses.

“Do you know this place? When will we reach him?”

“Late afternoon, if the winds—well.” Koldo stretched his legs. “They are angry. The mountain will be with us tonight. Perhaps you heard them, in your dream.”

“Have you heard it?”

“When I was young and lost on the pass. Karangara was inside my head, day after day. I couldn’t think anything else, couldn’t see anything or smell anything but the mountain. Don’t know how, but Toler’s father eventually found me and brought me back. He owned all the herds then and served as chief. I was half-crazed, but part of me was still there and that was enough to keep me sane.”

Niko wondered at the accuracy of that statement—it was widely believed that Koldo shared more with the beasts of the valley than the men of the village. Nobody knew how he survived the long winters outside the village.

“What happened to Toler’s father?”

Koldo drew a stalk of yarrow grass and munched it thoughtfully. “After they led me back into the village, they took their yak up the pass but the storm that got me shook them off like a cloud of horseflies. Three men, fifty cattle. Toler grew up fatherless, and your father became Chief. He had fifty head, the most in the village.”

“Why does Toler think you are a murderer?”

Koldo removed the yarrow stalk, spat into the rocks, and stood. The sun had slipped through the rocks of the mountain, and the wind was speaking again.

“I’m not pretending to know Toler’s reasons. He is bitter. Towards me. Towards the mountain, towards the Chief.”  

“He’s always served my father well.”

Koldo tossed his stalk away. “As I said, I don’t pretend to know a man’s reasons for what he does.”

They marched uphill most of the morning, and before noon found Sagar still in his yellow coat, the body splayed in marbled white like a sundried starfish. The that showed under his sleeve was already brittle as beach sand. “The wind strips the flesh away like this,” Koldo explained. “Three days exposed to this wind and you’re wrung brittle as paper.”

“I saw him in my dream the first night,” Niko said.

“He must have fallen,” said Toler.

“The mountain threw him off,” retorted Koldo.

They covered the man, and before long they were moving again into the unforgiving terrain, skirting the narrow cliffside passages, tramping the islands of snow. The ice blew into their faces like angry bugs, and the wind roared, stranger now, deeper, more of a moan than a hiss.

“What is that?”

“Crevasses,” Koldo answered. “Pockets where Karangara breathes.”

There were cracks and collapsed walls of rock, and when they edged closer, they came to a lip of a ridge and beheld a wide glacier slitted with black cuts.   

They skirted the defile and soon came to the riggings and ladders leftover by the Chief and Sagar. Some had been crushed by the shifting ice and stuck out, their crumpled edges an explosion of crazed angles, the steel spiked and tearing with cruel teeth that gnawed boots and gloves.

Bridging the gaps was a span of crumpled ladders that led deeper into the mountain, and beside this was the wall where the men in Niko’s dream had hooked their ropes. Just one plunge over the darkness, Niko told himself, and they would reach the caves. Just one.

Koldo tested the weight of the first ladder, and bidding Toler kneel and stabilize his end, he rabbited across, dismounted promptly and bid Toler over. The man proceeded step by step over the rickety hold, and the void below through which the whispers echoed went suddenly, strangely silent, holding its breath. But it wasn’t long before Niko heard it, quietly at first: “kwhool…kwhool…kwhool…” and a sudden fear gripped him by the heart, and he heard voices in the winds, and he knew then it was true: the stories told over smoking fires, of children abandoned to the endragoned mouth of the gasping mountain—all true. Niko knew then with the insight of certainty that each forsaken child was an indictment against their village, for which the mountain would claim its restitution, for she too had been a mother of perished children, Grandmother had said, and she would exact blood for blood. “KHROOM KHROOM KHROOM” rose now a shout like the beats of a hideous drum, driving him into death—SEE! It seemed to cry—SEE WHAT YOUR PEOPLE HAVE DONE— and Niko fell to his knees, clutching the edges of the ladder, and shook his head and closed his eyes to drown that darkness, and would go no further, not even when Toler kicked him in the head and ordered him forward.

            “Then I will take you back myself,” he shouted.

“What about Koldo? How far to go?”

“Hours.”

“I will wait.”

“The wind this high up will drive you insane. I will take you back. Koldo will find Chief alone. He’s lived alone all these years, hasn’t he? If anyone can survive the mountain it’s he.”

Day died to dark, and the wind ground on, an engine, running them mercilessly downslope. Several times in their descent, Niko was sure they passed the place where Sagar ought to have been. Nothing was there now. Was it the same place? Was the mountain turning him around, an endless spiral, filled with the primal screams of the winds?

“No, not winds. Mountain spirits,” Niko said out loud, remembering his conversation with Koldo.

“There are no mountain voices,” Toler said.

“Koldo said they’d be with us tonight.”

Toler plopped himself down weightily. The winds had shaken even him up. “You want the truth? Koldo got drunk in the wild, and by the time my father found him, he was so crazy he shook off the men who were holding him down and stabbed an axe into my father’s leg. Koldo’s lived outside the village in disgrace.”

“He speaks to the spirits.”

“He deserves to die.”

“My father outlawed killings in our village.”

“Your father only became chief because mine died, and all his herds with him. I say leave them both to the mountain. Let Karangara decide.”

Stooped over the water he boiled for tea, Toler’s face was that of a ghost.

“You don’t believe in her spirits,” Niko said. “You believe in yourself.”

The wind howled.

They both looked up, expecting a ghost.

“It’s not for me to say,” Toler said evenly. “The mountain takes, and the mountain spares. But if there is anything on this mountain, it’s tonight we’d see it.”

Niko caught the glint of the man’s ice axe.

And tucked a knife under his pillow before bedding down.

It wouldn’t be longer now.

“Khroom…khroom…”

There came a man’s footsteps: crunch, crunch, crunch. Impossible he should hear, and yet there they were.

Chief, you are…

Here.

Hello.

Of course he saw nothing within the perfect blackness of his world. He heard words. Picked them out like shafts of light, illuminating stabs of meaning.

But Chief…your eyes…?

A hand touched his shoulder, and vision burst into his eyes.

A dark being appeared.

He reached out his hand. And saw its glimmer of light. A perfectly, paper-white, bone-dry skeleton hand, flesh picked clean by the wind.

He stumbled, but he had the man, and now they were grappling one another, the dancer dancing with the freeze that would not let go, and around them danced the wind and the storm as they stumble from the cave, and towards the drop. Against the white serac, a drop of darkness as black as the totality of the world: a night without beginning, an end which only was, forever.

And then he cried, for something had bit him in the head and his hands were slipping of their own accord, unsticking from his opponent. Curious and light-headed, he felt no cold, nothing of the darkness and loneliness of the last few days.

Only a warm, black blanket, hovering beyond his grasp.

Forward he moved, into the blanket, and his feet caught, and then he was falling, and the blanket gave way to perfect emptiness—the same that he had poured his tormented spirit out, countless ages ago, and then like now the plunge tore a whistling cry from his tortured throat, a cry so dense and piercing it flung itself out of the blackness and back up the mountain, and through the wild and the desert, grappling, clawing, searching for a form in that wind-damned wasteland…

Niko felt the nearness of the mountain closing in, even from inside the tent. It had crept up on him when he slept, some primeval beast composed of darkness and teeth, and now he could feel it looming, its mouth opened and ready to snap. He ran outside, but there was only blackness and wind, and Toler sitting still as a skeleton, pale in the dusty moonlight, keeping watch. He had been awake the whole time.

“They have been up tonight,” he said, gripping the haft of his ice axe. “Koldo was right.” Calm, milky white flooded his eyes. Like the mountain in a snowstorm. Like Grandmother before she slaughtered the goat.

“My father is free. He is coming,” Niko said, knowing then it was a lie, that even now the mountain had claimed its newest victim. “They’re returning now, just like your father.”

“My father…” Toler said, picking at of his axe. “He never returned. Something did, wearing his skin, days after Koldo, but it wasn’t my father. Whittled down to a skeleton and the ice axe in his back. What they said about the thing wearing your skin, and all the old sacrifices, that’s all true. We took the thing out back to the mountain and hacked it into pieces and tossed them into the crevasse. Maybe we thought it’d stop the winds. Maybe it worked once, in the days when mothers threw their children into the crevasses, but I think we only made the mountain more powerful. And I’ll tell you something else, I’ll never lay eyes on another being like my father. Whatever comes back from the mountain, I will put this axe into it before I let it into our village.”

“But my father is coming,” Niko said, his breath no more than a whisper, and so desperately that even he believed he was telling the truth. “The mountain doesn’t have him, or me, or Koldo. We’re all coming back.”

With a sigh, Toler rose. “Then it must be this way. I will not let the mountain take another.”

Niko dashed inside the tent, groping for a weapon, but Toler grabbed him by the legs and yanked him back out and threw him to the ground. One blow of the axe. The man wouldn’t hesitate. He didn’t have it in him. Niko waited, but all that came was a streak of wind, and then Toler was thrown off balance, and the axe thrown to the ground. Toler lunged. From his crouch, Niko watched as the man was whipped away, like a puppet on a line, and with a sickening plunge Toler collapsed face-first, into the wedge of the axe blade lying prone.

It wasn’t until he stopped thrashing that Niko dared rise from his crouch. He saw the still body, the haft of the axe. Something yellow flickered on the edge of vision before vanishing: a coat, or the wink of a star.

Niko did not wait. He gathered his pack and walked away from the place of death. He walked until the darkness melted into blue, and the blue to red that was like the red of an alpine flower, and then gushing gold and phosphoresce came the dawn. It might have been the first dawn that ever broke over the mountain, but Niko did notice. Well before the sky split and Niko clawed down the mountain, he had felt the eyes watching over him. Watchful and hiding, the gaze protective and jealous.

Though he would not see the figure until well into the day, when he stumbled, almost by accident, back into sight of the village smoke, and he turned, and there was the black figure, no more than a smudge on the mountainside, gradually resolving into Koldo. Niko smiled his joy but his cheer soon dimmed, for there was something in the silence and the hunted urgency with which the man declined the mountain that filled Niko with quiet dread, and he found himself longing for the man to be within range of hailing, just to hear a human voice, for he remembered a man might stave off madness if only he could talk, and yet as he neared, it was no human voice he heard through those broken lips but only the dry sibilant hiss of wind pouring off the mountain.