Asha of the Air by John Huddles

Author:John Huddles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Notable Kids Publishing
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Sometimes stationary yaatras, especially ones as extreme as Omala’s, can exceed by sheer internal magnitude the overall dimensions even of their counterparts in motion. Not this time. Omala’s journey would at best save a life; Asha’s might make one.

She left the western woods with Ilarô’s few belongings: his sleeping mat, his thermal pants and sweater, his gloves which still carried the scent of his skin, his collapsible drinking cup and his simple cooking tools. She would have taken his horse too, but it had fled in the hour of his death. Her own mare was inclined to disobey, and though Asha admired the creature’s vitality, horse and rider had never been an ideal fit. Nevertheless, for the long journey ahead of them, Tapti would be Asha’s sole companion and Asha Tapti’s only hope. Both went out of their way to make the arrangement work.

For three days they moved easily through the forests Asha knew, passing stands of cedar, sleeping in groves of fir and on carpets of yellow moss. When they came to foothills studded with hyacinths, they began to climb. They rose ten thousand feet to the timberline, and for short stretches above it, into a land of alpine tundra, a delicate world of short grasses which themselves came to a halt at fourteen thousand feet, where only lichen grew, clinging to granite cliffs as if in a dried-up sea at the top of the world.

Sloping down again a day later, they spent half a week in the stark terrain left by the retreat of prehistoric glaciers. They skirted a chain of high-altitude lakes and stepped carefully up one side of a mountain of loose rock and even more carefully back down the other. Asha had been here once before, as a girl, on an expedition with her father to sketch pictures of all this jagged beauty. They had come then with a team of fifty: guides, porters, cooks, men to build and un-build tents, even a geetakaar to sing them to sleep. A different time.

Nine days out from the dell of the temple, Asha’s familiarity with her surroundings came to an end. Now she and Tapti were in the wild. The glacial peaks and airy pines of their original region were replaced by silver-white forests reflecting light so glaringly that, without her riding goggles, Asha was reduced to tearing a strip of gauze from her under-sari and tying it around her eyes as a protective filter, letting Tapti guide them for long stretches. Still, the lack of eyewear was distressing, though with plenty of time both to contemplate her own mind and to let her mind drift, it eventually occurred to Asha that if she kept wishing for every accoutrement she was used to, gloss for her lips and cream for her knees, a pair of goggles to counter the glare and a pair of field glasses to see long distances, her heliotrope perfume to make her feel distinctive and her diamond-dust shampoo to make her feel beautiful

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