Chapter 4: Yangchen’s Festival

Three years before the Great Comet. The coast.

Dolma flew low over the water for the last hour of the crossing. She liked doing that, dropping until her belly was close enough to the surface that spray caught the underside of the saddle and left salt on the leather. I’d given up trying to correct her altitude months ago. She was faster near the water, riding the cushion of air between her body and the sea the way a good airbender rides a natural current. I let her fly and watched the coastline come together ahead of us.

We’d left at dawn with the rest of the Southern Temple’s column. Twenty-three bison flew in loose formation with kids in every saddle and monks riding point and tail. Gyatso’s bison was at the front, a bull so old and so large that the other animals kept their distance. Dorje was four bison back on a borrowed mount because his own bison had been sick for the past week and the handlers wouldn’t clear her for the trip. He’d been holding up six fingers from his saddle for the past twenty minutes, which meant either he was counting something or he was telling me how many fruit pies he’d eaten before departure. Given that it was Dorje, both were plausible.

The meadow showed itself first, a wide stretch of green that ran from the tree line down to a cliff edge above the water. I could see the statue on the headland from the air. Then I saw the people. There were hundreds already on the grass and more were arriving from every direction. Bison were landing on the meadow’s upper edge in a steady stream. The Eastern Temple contingent was already set up on the east side, their camp organized in neat rows of ground cloths and cooking fires. The Western Temple had claimed the far end near the trees. Bison from both groups grazed in loose clusters, mixing together without any concern for which temple they’d come from.

I’d been to Yangchen’s Festival every year since I was old enough to ride in a saddle. This year I had a job to do.

We landed near a stand of trees because Gyatso’s bison wanted shade. I unbuckled the riding harness, swung my legs over the saddle lip, and slid down Dolma’s flank. She turned her head and breathed on me, slow and warm. I put my hand on her nose. She held still for a three-count, then shoved my arm sideways hard enough to stagger me and walked off toward the Eastern Temple’s grazing area.

The horns started before I reached the crowd. The sound was lower than a voice and it hit my chest before my ears, a vibration that sat behind my sternum like a second pulse. I’d heard them at previous festivals, but with the cliff behind me and the sea below, they sounded bigger than I remembered. Hand drums picked up between the long notes, quick patterns that changed depending on which direction you were facing. The drummers were children, some of them younger than me.

We walked toward the headland with the crowd. The woman at the front of the column was a nun from the Western Temple who looked ninety at best and walked like she had exactly nowhere else to be.

Lady Tienhai’s statue stood at the cliff’s edge with her hands open and her face turned toward the sea. The stone had gone gray with salt spray. Wind and weather had smoothed her features until her expression could have been anything.

The bowing ritual was four bows, one for each direction. A single note held until the last bow was done. I bowed with them and my knees touched the grass.

From the headland, the procession moved down to the meadow. The horns led and the drummers followed. Elders from all four temples came in pairs, their robes the only color-coordinated thing in the whole event. The rest of us filled in with no particular order. I ended up between a group of Northern Temple boys arguing about bison polo and a family whose youngest was riding her mother’s shoulders and pulling her father’s ear.

The ceremonial meal took up the meadow’s center. Low tables were arranged in concentric rings on the grass, with the outermost ring close to the tree line. Every seat was the same and food came from every direction, passed hand to hand around the rings until nobody could tell you where their plate had started. I had bread with seeds baked into the crust, a lentil stew with a spice that burned going down, and a cold soup made from something green that I didn’t recognize. The kid next to me was eating it without complaint and that seemed like endorsement enough.

Dorje dropped into the space across from me with his bowl of stew already half gone and his bread in his other hand. He had grass stains on both knees.

“I counted the bison on the way in,” he said.

“How many?”

“I lost count around two hundred. Some of them were moving.”

“They tend to do that.”

He grinned. There was a lentil on his chin. “The Northern Temple has the biggest ones. One of them has a scar across its whole face. I’m going to find out what happened.”

“Well, just go ask them.”

“I will.” He tore his bread in half and held one piece across the table. I took it. The seeds crunched between my teeth and the bread was still warm, probably from the Eastern Temple’s traveling ovens because nobody else would haul clay ovens across a sea crossing.

The woman next to me passed a fruit pie to the man on her other side. He broke it in half and gave the bigger piece to a girl behind him who looked about four. She held the pie with both hands and took a bite so large that filling went up her nose. The man wiped her face with his sleeve and she laughed and bit down again.

“Is that Gyatso’s recipe?” someone behind me asked. “The crust is different.”

“I think it’s a Western Temple recipe. They use honey instead of sugar. Gyatso would be offended.”

“I watched him eat four of them before the procession. He’s in no position to judge.”

I let the meal go long and ate what came to me. The conversations moving around the rings had their own rhythm. Monks and nuns from different temples hadn’t seen each other since the last festival and were catching up like people do when a year has passed, talking over each other, finishing stories that had been started twelve months ago, and arguing about things that clearly predated the children sitting between them.

After the meal the crowd spread out across the meadow. The elders gathered near the statue. The kids scattered. An airball game started on the south end using a ball someone had brought from the Northern Temple, and within five minutes it had drawn players from every temple and the rules had been abandoned in favor of whatever was happening, which looked from a distance like organized chaos with occasional gusts of wind.

Aang was in the middle of it. He was easy to spot because he moved differently from everyone around him, cutting through the other players with a looseness that made them look like they were moving through water while he ran on dry ground. A boy from the Northern Temple threw the ball wide and Aang redirected it with a flick of his wrist that nobody else in the game could have managed, then passed it to a girl who fumbled it, and he laughed harder.

I watched for about ten seconds and walked away.

Gyatso’s ceremony happened in the late afternoon. The crowd gathered in a loose semicircle near the statue with the sea behind them and the sun coming in low from the west, lighting one side of every face and leaving the other half dark. Gyatso stood at the front with his hands together.

“I see some young ones here who have not heard this before, so let me tell you why we come to this place every year.” He found the little kids in the front. “A long time ago there was a city right here on this coast. It was called Tienhaishi. And there was a spirit, a very old spirit named General Old Iron, who had a friend he loved very much. Her name was Lady Tienhai. When she died, Old Iron thought the people of that city had hurt her. That was not true, but he did not know that, and he was in a lot of pain. So he put on his armor and he came here to knock the whole city down.”

He looked across the semicircle. Some of the younger kids had their mouths open.

“Avatar Yangchen went to stop him. She had just finished her training and was about as ready as any of you would be.” A few of the older monks smiled at that. “She fought Old Iron all through the night. By morning the city was not standing anymore. But every person who lived there was safe, because Avatar Yangchen had put herself between Old Iron and the people. All night long, she would not let him through.”

He let that sit for a moment.

“When it was done, she sat with him. He was hurt and he was tired. He had been wrong about a great many things. But Avatar Yangchen did not say any of that. She sat with him until he was ready to talk. And when he was, she told him she would build something here for Lady Tienhai. She would bring her people to this place every year to look after it. And he would put his armor away.”

He opened his hands toward the statue.

“That is Lady Tienhai. The kites tonight are cranefish because that is what she became. And we are here because Avatar Yangchen gave her word, and we have kept it.”

Then his eyes moved across the semicircle. For about two seconds his gaze passed over where I was standing. The smile stayed, but his eyes went quiet behind it, the way they did when he was watching Aang and didn’t know anyone was looking. He looked like a man watching something he loved.

His eyes moved on. He introduced the next speaker and the ceremony continued.

I left before it ended and walked toward the Eastern Temple’s section of the meadow looking for contacts. The nuns kept their space more organized than the monks, ground cloths in rows, cooking fires banked and covered against the sea wind. I walked through their camp the same way I’d been walking through the whole festival, watching for anyone who might be useful, listening to conversations.

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Most of what I heard was what you’d expect. Nuns were catching up with each other, girls were talking about the airball game, and a pair of older novices were comparing notes on a meditation technique.

Then I passed a ground cloth where a girl about eleven was arguing with a younger nun about the ceremony.

“It’s not the same as last year, though,” the girl was saying. She had a chunk of bread on her knee that she was tearing into pieces without eating any of it. “Last year Monk Pasang opened with the four bows and then the horns came right in after. This year everybody just stood around for a while before the horns started. Somebody moved things around and when I asked Sister Dolkar about it she said it’s always been that way, which is just not true.”

“Does it matter?” the younger nun said. “It’s a ceremony, Yeshi. It’s not a puzzle.”

“Well how am I supposed to know if it matters if nobody will even tell me why they changed it?”

The younger nun rolled her eyes and walked off toward a cooking fire. Yeshi tore another piece of bread and didn’t seem bothered by being left alone.

I sat down on the edge of her ground cloth. She glanced at my robes and looked away.

“You’re right, by the way,” I said. “About the horns being different this year. I’ve been coming to this festival for a while and they always came in right after the last bow.”

She looked at me again, longer this time. “Yeah, well, at least somebody else noticed. How old are you?”

“Nine.”

“And you remember what order things went in from previous years?”

“I just notice stuff like that.”

“Apparently.” She studied me for a second. “I’m Yeshi. I’m from the Eastern Temple.”

“Sonam. I’m from the Southern Temple.”

“I figured, from the robes.” She pulled her knees up. “So is your whole temple like you? Because the nuns at ours don’t notice anything unless you put it right in front of them.”

“No, most of them are the same as yours.”

“But I’ve heard your monks let you visit other nations. Is that true? Ours won’t let us go anywhere. I wanted to visit the university at Ba Sing Se or Ember Island in the Fire Nation and Sister Dolkar wouldn’t consider either.”

“Well, we’re allowed to travel, but I haven’t yet. I wouldn’t go to Ba Sing Se, though. They separate people into walled rings based on how much money they have. Their poorest citizens are packed into slums in the Lower Ring.”