The Business

Most of the buildings in Thuhn were constructed, for the first one or two storeys at least, from large, dark blocks of rough stone.  The walls were almost vertical but not quite, spreading out at the base as though they'd started to melt at some point in the past.

They generally looked worn but tended, and most had fresh-looking two-tone paint jobs, though a few sported patches and friezes of brightly painted plaster depicting scenes from the Thulahnese version of Hinduism's idea of the spirit world, which — from the gleeful illustrations of people being impaled on giant stakes, eaten by demons, torn to pieces by giant birds, sodomised by leering, prodigiously endowed yak-minotaurs and ski

The top storeys were made of wood, pierced by small windows, painted in bright primary colours and strewn with long prayer flags twisting sinuously in the wind.

We skidded round a corner and the Wraith's engine laboured to propel us up the steep slope.  People ambled or jumped out of the way — depending on how soon they heard us coming — as we rumbled and bounced across the uneven flagstones.

'Oh, I have your book!' Langtuhn said. 'Please.  Here.'

'What book?' I reached out to the opening in the glass partition and accepted a small dog-eared paperback with a two-colour cover.

'The book you left on your last visit.'

'Oh, yes.' A Guide To Thulahn, the cover said.  I'd picked it up in Dacca airport four years earlier and vaguely recalled leaving it in my room in the Grand Imperial Tea Room and Resting House — a sort of de-glorified youth hostel — which had been my base the last time I'd been here.  I remembered thinking at the time that I had never encountered a book with so many misprints, mistakes and misspellings.  As quickly as I could without taking my gloves off I flicked to the work's notoriously unreliable 'Top Tips and Handey Phrases' section and looked up the Thulahnese for Thank you. 'Khumtal,' I said.

'Gumpo,' Langtuhn said with a big smile.  I had the worrying feeling that this was the sixth Marx Brother, but it turned out to mean 'You're welcome'.

We cleared the city; the road stopped twisting wildly at random and started twisting wildly at regular intervals, zigzagging steeply up the boulder-littered side of the mountain.  Dotted along the roadside amongst the houses were more tall masts, prayer flags, squat stone bell-shaped stupas and thin wooden prayer windmills, their sails painted with dense passages of holy script.  The houses themselves were sporadically spaced, turf-roofed and, from a distance, easily mistaken for piles of stones.  People walking downhill under dripping, small but heavy-looking packs, or trudging uphill under huge and heavy-looking bundles of wood or dung, stopped and waved at us.  I waved back cheerfully.

'Do you yet know how long you will be staying with us, Ms Telman?' Langtuhn shouted back.

'I'm still not sure.  Probably just a few days.'

'Only a few days?'

'Yes.'

'Oh dear!  But then you might not meet the Prince.'

'Really?  Oh, what a shame.  Why?  When is he due back?'

'Not for a week or thereabouts, I am told.'

'Oh, well, not to worry, eh?'

'He will be most disappointed, I'm sure.'

'Really.'

'You ca

'I doubt it.'

'That is a shame.  I suspect he ca

'Has he, now?'

'Yes.  I understand he has said that soon we may all start to benefit from greater outside investment.  That will be good, will it not?'

'I dare say.'

'Though of course, he is in Paris, or some such French place.  We must hope he does not gamble it all away!'

'Is the Prince a gambler?' I asked.  I'd watched him at the blackjack table in Blysecrag; if he was a gambler he wasn't a very good one.

'Oh, no,' Langtuhn said, and took both hands off the steering wheel to wave them as he looked back at me. 'I was making a joke.  Our Prince enjoys himself, but he is most responsible.'

'Yes.  Good.'

I sat back in my seat.  Well, not a despot, then.

The road grew tired with making wild zigzags up an increasingly steep slope and struck out ambitiously along a notch cut in a vertical cliff.  A hundred metres below, the river lay frozen in the bottom of the gorge like a giant icicle fallen and shattered amongst the sharp black rocks.

Langtuhn didn't seem to have noticed the transition from a steep-but-ordinary road to a slot-in-a-cliff.  He kept trying to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. 'We have been hoping that one day the Prince would come back from Paris with a lady who might become his new wife,' he told me.

'No luck yet?' I looked away, hoping this might encourage him to return his attention to the business of keeping the car on the narrow road.  The view down into the chasm was not an encouraging one.

'None whatsoever.  There was a princess from Bhutan he seemed most sweet upon a few years ago, they say, but she married a tax-consulting gentleman from Los Angeles, USA.'

'Smart girl.'

'Oh, I do not think so.  She could have been a queen.'

'Hmm.' I rubbed the red tip of my nose with one gloved hand. and looked in my guidebook for the word for frostbite.

The old palace canted out over a deep, ice-choked gorge a mile down from the glacier foot, its haphazard jumble of off-white, black-windowed buildings supported from beneath by a half-dozen enormous charcoal-dark timbers, each the size of a giant redwood.  Together they splayed out from a single jagged spur of rock far below, so that the whole ramshackle edifice looked like a pile of ivory dice clutched in a gigantic ebony hand.

This was where the dowager Queen lived, the Prince's mother.  Even higher up the mountainside, at the head of tumultuously zigzag paths, monasteries lay straggled across the precipitous slopes in long, encrusted lines of brightly painted buildings.  We passed a few groups of saffron-robed monks on the road; they stopped and looked at the car.  Some bowed, and I bowed back.

Langtuhn parked the car in a dusty courtyard; a couple of small Thulahnese ladies-in-waiting in dramatic carmine robes met us at the doors and led us into the dark spaces of the palace, through clouds of incense, to the old throne room.

'You will remember to address the Queen as ma'am, or Your Royal Highness, won't you?' Langtuhn whispered to me, as we approached.

'Don't worry.'

Guarding the doors was a massively rotund Chinese man, who wore camouflaged black/grey/white army fatigues and a jacket made of what looked like yak fur.  He was sitting in a chair reading a manga comic when we approached.  He looked up and rose carefully, taking a pair of minuscule glasses off his nose and leaving the comic open on his seat.

'This is Mihu,' Langtuhn whispered to me, 'the Queen's manservant.  Chinese.  Very devoted.'

Mihu moved in front of the double doors, barring the way to the Queen's chamber.  The two ladies-in-waiting bowed and spoke to him in slower-than-normal Thulahnese while gesturing at me.  He nodded and opened the doors.

Langtuhn had to stay in the antechamber with the two ladies.  Mihu came into the room with me and stood with his back to the door.  I looked around.

I hadn't really believed that the dowager Queen had stayed in bed for the last two and a half decades, since the death of her husband but, then, I hadn't seen the bed.

The ceiling of the huge state room was painted like the night sky.  Its two longer walls were lined by bizarrely proportioned sculptures of snarling warriors, two storeys tall.  These were covered in gold leaf, which had started to peel so that the soot-black wood underneath showed through like dense sable skin under flimsy gold armour.  Tissue-light, the strips and tatters of glittering leaf waved in the faint draughts that swirled through the vast room, setting up a strange, half-heard rustling, as though hidden legions of mice were all crumpling Lilliputian sweet-wrappers at once.  Snow-white daylight spilled in from the wall of windows, which looked across a terrace to the valley; its glare glittered back from the rustling scraps of gold like ten thousand cold and tiny flames spread out across the walls.