Within the Sanctuary of Wings by Marie Brennan

Author:Marie Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

TWELVE

A fire in the yak barn—Into the Sanctuary—Herding with mews—The perennial question—In search of yaks—Up the path

In the history of scientific discovery, it is my opinion that insufficient credit has been given to the behaviour of the humble yak.

Oh, I could say that what happened next was due to a fire in the yak barn. This would be true as far as it goes; without the fire, the beasts would not have panicked, and nothing of interest would have occurred. But had it been a fire only, with no ensuing complications from the yaks, I believe I would have remained in that village for the whole winter, and what ensued thereafter would have proceeded entirely according to the plans of my hostesses. Instead I departed from Imsali, learned things the sisters did not intend, and made a great deal of progress I had not anticipated in the least.

The carelessness which began the fire was not my own. The interior of the barn was exceedingly dim, even with the doors thrown wide; we often set butter lamps in strategic locations, the better to see what we were doing. Ordinarily we exercised some caution in where we placed the lamps, but errors happened—and on that transformative day, Kahhe made a mistake.

One of the yaks, wandering about its enclosure, jostled the beam on which the lamp lay.

Had either of us been right there, we would have seen the lamp fall, and could likely have extinguished the fire before it grew too large. But I was outside the barn when the trouble began, and Kahhe had gone to fetch a new basket in which to carry away the yak manure; the first one she found was torn, and by the time she replaced it with a usable one, the fire had well and truly taken hold.

Ruzt and Zam were out with portions of the village herd for grazing, which left the two of us to fight the blaze on our own. We first attempted to suffocate the fire with the best material we had to immediate hand—which is to say, yak manure. (Dried, their droppings are often used for fuel. But these were not yet dry.) Had the yaks remained calm, we might have succeeded. Alas for Kahhe and myself, they did not.

The group nearest the fire stampeded first, with their neighbours hard on their heels. The enclosures were not meant to withstand a concerted attempt to break out; the railings splintered and fell. Kahhe bent her knees and sprang upward, snapping her wings out in a desperate attempt to gain altitude; it lifted her high enough to seize one of the overhanging rafters. For my own part, I could only run—sideways to begin with, out of the stream of yak flesh, as if they were an avalanche like the one that had brought me to Imsali; but then onward and out of the barn entirely, for the spreading fire and the stampede soon had the entire place in an uproar.

Kahhe, it must be said, kept her wits rather well.

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