apes were able to travel freely on vines that reached from one bank to the other. Joru led a group of people to the riverbank, where monkeys swung across the river to the far bank. Instead of flinging back the vines, he tied them to a solid rock. That was how his people learned to make a vine bridge, which opened the way for caravans from the east, sent by the emperor of a distant land.
The foreigners used copper to make coins and exquisite urns, and came west to collect the source of lightning, the ore beneath the ground, and the dreamscape of snow lotus herbs. They believed that these ingredients could be mixed with others from the Eastern Sea to make an immortality potion for their emperor.
They wore delicately carved pendants of a fine stone they called jade, and when they landed they waved them at the western barbarians, asking, ‘Have you this stone?’ When they saw the magnificent steeds the barbarians rode, they said, ‘We wish to buy many of your fine horses.’
They needed many things, so more bridges were built, each one wider than the last. Rafts and boats appeared on the broad river. Little by little, Yulung Kulha Sumdo became a centre, bringing lines of caravans from as far as Persia to the west and India to the south. The Indians were uncommunicative, but the Persians, at certain times of day, would dismount and spread out richly coloured rugs on which to pray in the direction whence they came.
Yet they all shared a fear of the north, where the Hor tribe lived. The Hor people were skilled horsemen and archers; the finest bowman among them could simply pluck his bowstring to make a whistling sound, and the terrified merchants would fall off their horses, dead. So, since the merchants were afraid to journey north, the Hor tribe came south. They set up tents at the mountain pass near Yulung Kulha Sumdo, where they robbed the caravans from Persia, India and the Eastern Empire.
Joru knew it was time to open a northern route.
He rode, alone, to the well-guarded Hor camp, where he passed through nine checkpoints and beheaded eighteen guards. The leader of the bandits looked down at him from the watchtower. He was the archer who could kill with only the whistling sound of his bow.
‘I will kill you first,’ Joru called to him.
The man roared with laughter, for Joru had no weapon but the stick on which he rode. More importantly, the archer was a handsome man with an impressive figure, while Joru, though not ugly, was comical, with his misshapen stick, shabby robe and a pair of crooked antlers on his hood.
But the laughing face of the archer froze when he saw Joru point to the sky to call down lightning, which he took in his hand and transformed into a bow. The crackle sent the man tumbling off his tower, dead when he hit the ground. His followers stampeded northward, fleeing for their lives.
The men of the caravans offered rare treasures to Joru, to thank him for saving them. But Joru refused them.
‘We must do something for you,’ they said. Though the merchants spoke different languages, Joru understood.
‘If you wish to help, load rocks onto your pack animals and each of you carry a rock to pile at the bend in the Yellow river.’
‘Dear warrior, you have such powerful magic, what could you need the rocks for?’
‘I wish to build a magnificent fortress.’
‘But you have the power to move an entire mountain – why do you need us?’
‘Your work will be the tax you pay for the profits you have made here.’
The merchants were beside themselves with joy. They had been to many countries, but this was the first time they had been asked to pay taxes by moving a few rocks to the bend in a river. And so strange legends spread about the tiny nation with a very young king who had great powers but acted in unusual ways. Ambitious kings sent messengers and caravans to search for the nation of gold and jade and for potions that conferred immortality.
When Rongtsa Khragan, the old Glingkar steward, heard the tales, he realised that Joru might truly be a son of the deities, using extraordinary means to demonstrate his powers.
‘I feel tremendous guilt when I listen to these stories,’ he confessed to Gyatsa Zhakar.
Gyatsa Zhakar dreamed often of his brother, and in each dream he had spoken to Joru: ‘Gling is your country and the people of Glingkar will one day be your subjects. Do not forsake them because they exiled you.’
*
Soon it was autumn, with its frequent winds and shorter days; snow fell. Gazing at the desolate landscape, Joru’s mother said she missed Glingkar, and her words aroused a strange malady in Joru. He had been told that he came from a celestial kingdom, but could not remember what it looked like; when he longed for his homeland, the sights of Glingkar appeared before him.
In a dream that night his brother seemed troubled.
‘Brother, why are you distressed?’ Joru asked.
‘My aged mother is ill.’
‘Have the doctors given her medicines? Have the warlocks used their magic?’
Gyatsa Zhakar shook his head. ‘Mother yearns for her homeland, but it is ten thousand snowcapped mountains and hundreds of rivers distant.’
‘Is there nothing that can ease her suffering?’
‘Yes, but it has not helped.’
‘What is it?’
‘Metog Lhartse, your mother, knows.’
When Joru awoke the following morning, he told his mother about his dream. Metog Lhartse recalled how, at Senglon’s fortress, a bird no one had seen before flew over one day and landed at the window of Gyatsa Zhakar’s mother’s sickroom. She cried, because she heard the accent of her homeland in the bird’s chirping. The bird left a branch on the windowsill before it flew away. It had many emerald green leaves. The Han doctor told her servant to pick a leaf and cook it in water. Within an hour, the woman had left her bed to stand on the highest point of the fortress to look east, the direction of her homeland. The medicine, the green branch with emerald leaves, which had come from her country, was called ‘cha’.
‘Cha?’ Joru said.
‘Yes.’
‘What a strange sound!’ He laughed.
‘You would consider it pleasing to the ear if you knew how to use it,’ Metog Lhartse said.
‘Oh?’
‘Many sick people recover after steeping it in water, then drinking it. Your brother probably sent you the message in a dream because the Han consort has used all her cha leaves.’
‘I’ll find some cha for the Han consort,’ Joru said, and summoned a peregrine falcon. All the bird brought back was a leafless branch. He showed it to a caravan from the east. ‘Bring me as much of this as you can find.’
‘Tea?’ They used the foreign word.
‘Cha!’ He used the local word.
The leader of the caravan said, ‘News will travel to my country even before I get there. When I am ready to return, the tea leaves will be on their way here. The first shipment will be
