31. Anecdotes from the Valley (above)
The caravan had been travelling along this winding and difficult mountain road, and I could feel the terrain around me increasing in height. I didn't dare look at the already bottomless mountain stream by the side of the mountain, it was so high that one would feel a sense of suffocating panic. But I could look effortlessly flat across the valley to the summit of the Chilterns on the other side. These gentle slopes, which are close to flat, can really wear out anyone's patience. It was a long journey, always the same road with no end in sight, no switchbacks and no people in sight. The hills around us are finally beginning to bare. Even the moss-like weeds that grow on the surface of the rocks are becoming scarce, and the wild goats that were still visible are also extinct here.
It has been nine days since our group entered the northern foothills of the Pai plateau, and for me, not knowing where we would end up, it was not a pleasant experience, because the more I hoped and hoped, the more painful the wait became. For the men in the caravan, this was life on the back of a thunder rhinoceros, and for me, it was my life too.
Every day I would lie bored on the back of the thunder rhinoceros, clutching a roll of parchment and reading, which was the best way to pass the time. Sometimes when I came across a travelogue, I would share some of the best passages with Kurtz in orcish, the boy was not a big reader, but he was still very interested in adventure diaries and the like.
The adults would walk to the edge of the cliff, stand still and unbuckle their trousers and pee into the mountain stream, they could even do this easily and comfortably whistling, but I didn't dare, my legs would get weak as noodles just standing on the edge of the cliff. I had to find an earthenware jar with a crack in it that was going to be discarded and secretly hide behind the thunder rhinoceros to solve my personal problems, which was not necessary for a small child, but I was trying my best to maintain my ridiculous dignity.
I was sixty-seven thunder rhinoceroses away from my sister Gogo, a distance that neither of us could cross. For a distance of a kilometre or so, we sometimes had to stand on the higher ground and wave to each other to be safe. I heard Uncle Fred say that all the members of the group were divided into groups and took turns to go ahead and scout the trail.
Uncle Fred said it was a kind of psychological dependency that orphans crave, and it was something that the old kuru could not give me. It was more my lack of motherly love than my sister's, and this old six-hair mocked me for not having been breastfed as a child, which was why I was so shamelessly clinging to someone's lap and crying out. I stood up angrily and glared at him hysterically, saying, "Tomorrow I'll tell Singh not to fall back on you, a half-old man who is almost buried to his chest in yellow dirt. Kurtz jumped to my side and clenched his fist and stared hard at Fred, his fierce face showing his murderous aura and his wolf's teeth coming out like a silent warning.
Every spat like this was the spice of the trip, and I knew Uncle Fred wouldn't have hit me even if Cuz hadn't stopped him, but every man has his own dignity, like his own scales, and if he touches them, he's angry. Walking along the paths of this desperately cold and silent rocky valley, with the mountain stream at the bottom of the valley always visible from time to time, can inevitably bring out a myriad of fears, irritations, anxieties, tensions, frustrations and other emotions that, if kept bottled up in the bottom of one's heart, can collapse the last line of defence once they have accumulated for a long time.
I finally found out the girl's name, or rather the name I gave her, on the third day after the encounter at the smoked rabbit's head, because I thought she was very thin. But then I realised that her white, lotus-root arms were white and round, and still very fleshy. Even when I stood on my tiptoes, the top of my head was only level with her slightly raised breasts, and her slender figure was a little too tall for her age, which made me think she was thin. She rarely spoke, sometimes more like a quiet cat, crouching in the most inconspicuous corners when people were around, which was one of the most surprising things to me, as if everyone was deliberately ignoring her, treating her as if she were air, and no one ever sensed her presence. She was also a gluttonous cat who only appeared silently the next morning when Kurtz was hunting for mountain treasures, her overly sultry-looking eyes fixed on the food, and sometimes she would stick out her red tongue to lick the dripping grease.
Then I finally realised that she really was a glutton, and not because she was starving to run out and steal food. Because it wasn't every morning that we had something tasty to eat, and as we got deeper and deeper into this gorge, it became harder and harder to hunt for edible animals, and little Chai Nui came over less and less often.
The other day I had complained to her about how the caravan never gave us white bread and wheat cakes, and then talked about how delicious the wheat baked pasta was. Every morning after that, I suddenly found two more baked, browned wheat cakes by my pillow, and sometimes maybe two bowl-sized loaves of white bread, one for me and the other for Kurtz's hush money. There were no secrets between me and Kuz, he was my brother, and I sliced the white bread into thin slices and spread date sauce and bacon and tomato slices on it to make a delicious sandwich that actually tasted good, the first time Kuz had eaten vegetable-based food with such relish. The people in the caravan weren't surprised that the two of us were getting all sorts of tasty food, because privately, people still traded their treasures to Kurtz the Orc for some secret orc dish that they thought would taste better.
Kuze never seemed to show up when Kulu was around, always deliberately avoiding him, even when I had tempting food on my side. Only a few moments after he left, she would suddenly appear and take her share of the bacon and tomato sandwich, and I was thinking that a little cheese would have been nice.
I always thought she was one of the girls' maids or slaves in the troupe, so I always did my best to cover up for her, fearing that she would be whipped if she was found out. Kurtz, on the other hand, thought I was just like Uncle Fred, who had found a match in the troupe, and he despised it. Squatting down beside me and hooking my shoulder, he grumbled to me, "You humans are so emotional, Ja, you know how to keep a woman at such a young age?"
I leaned back into the leather seat on Thunder Rhino's hindquarters, and after tossing the last bite of my sandwich into my mouth, I smiled and said nothing. What I actually wanted to say was that I merely felt close when I found someone who was in the same category as me, and wanted to help each other as much as I could so I wouldn't be alone.
In the end I was afraid of being alone, like knowing that we were going to be separated from Kuz when we arrived at the Gurudin tribe, and that's when I felt like an outcast, and I wanted to cower in a corner and hide when I thought I was going to drift like a rootless duck again. There would be an overwhelming dependence on a female magician, Gogo, who would take me in. So too would a feeling of empathy for the little faggot girl, who could be a little maid struggling to survive in a dance troupe, and me a wanderer with no status in this merchant caravan. Thankfully she doesn't seem to be doing too badly, at least she gets to eat sizzling white bread every day, and I'm doing well, I'm surrounded by people who are willing to look after me and my brother Kuz.
The rhinoceros was not fed with grain, but with black beans and hay, and if this continued, the rhinoceros would lose weight, so to prevent the rhinoceros from losing weight, Kurtz, Uncle Fred and I would scrape the moss from the rocks on the side of the cliffs in the evening before it got dark. Sometimes two groups would argue over a rocky crevice in a mossy area.
Water was also very scarce, so we didn't have to wash our faces every day, but even the water we drank was collected in the morning from the snow and ice on the rocks and put into iron buckets to melt away slowly. We all put such water into kettles and leave it for a day and a night, then filter it through cotton cloth and boil it before drinking it, it tastes bitter and astringent, there is no way around it! The water we carried up from the West Lake grasslands was long gone, and this water was not even openly available!
The temperature difference between day and night is so great that you can't even walk with Thunder Rhino in a single coat during the day without sweating, and you can't sleep in a leather jacket at night without getting warm.
Old Kulu was counting every day how long it would take to reach the staging post ahead, but the thunder rhinoceroses could barely walk a hundred miles a day before they refused to move a single step, and recently he had been asked by Steward Leipas to go ahead of the caravan more and more often to observe the terrain and stay longer and longer. The two dry addiction even though, he rested on the back of the thunder rhinoceros, I saw his hunched back to me still sigh: too ruthlessly loaded, hey!
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