Tulku Read online

  The men were strangely silent, not at all like workmen chatting over a routine task, but almost more like worshippers engaged in a ritual. The rhythmic movement of paying out the cord ceased, and there was a long pause, but their bodies blocked his view of the far platform, preventing him from watching whether there was any special trick of attaching bundles to the traveller. At last a yodelled shout floated across the gap and the men went to their positions and began to pull the cord in, using no force yet because the load was still sliding down the further curve. Before it dipped from sight below the rim of the platform Theodore saw that this was not a bundle but a man sitting bolt upright in a chair.

  Now the men began to heave, working against steadily increasing gravity and friction. Where was Lung – he should be here by now, surely? – he might know a few words of Tibetan. Or Mrs Jones might use her strength of character, to make the men understand the urgency . . . there was no sound along the path, no sign of either. Now the chair came into sight and Theodore could see that the man sitting in it was different from the others, elderly, with a many-wrinkled face of a yellower tinge than the bronze of the men working the ropes. He wore a pointed dark red cap with flaps to cover his ears, and a heavy robe of reddish brown, which flapped around his feet in the gusting wind. His eyes were closed, but obviously not from fear of the drop. In fact he looked as if he were asleep, sitting still as an idol in the swaying chair.

  Again two men took the strain while the other two unfastened the chair and lowered it on to the platform. The newcomer rose, opened his eyes and intoned a few words. The men looked pleased. He was nearly a head taller than they were.

  ‘Honoured sir,’ called Theodore in Mandarin. ‘Can you help us? We are being attacked by bandits and must cross the river.’

  The men who had pulled the rope glanced angrily at him and made shushing gestures, but the newcomer turned and gazed at Theodore with strange, vague eyes, as though he were seeing him through layers of mist.

  ‘I am on a holy search,’ he said. ‘Let none distract me from my path.’

  His voice was clear and deep and he spoke good Mandarin, apart from a metallic twang at the end of many syllables.

  ‘But, honoured sir,’ pleaded Theodore, ‘could your men show us how to cross the river? Many men are attacking us, and we are only three.’

  ‘Three?’

  The newcomer spoke as though the number were much more interesting than the idea of bandits. His gaze sharpened, and he moved towards Theodore with gliding paces that made it seem as though he were floating above the rock surface. A hand drifted from his robes and plucked at something in Theodore’s breast pocket, then drifted away again, holding the folded piece of paper on which Theodore had been drawing that morning. Another hand – they seemed to be moving of their own will, almost unconnected with the mind behind the quiet, distant gaze – helped unfold the paper. The eyes studied it. The hands refolded it and put it back in Theodore’s pocket.

  ‘What is your age?’

  ‘Thirteen, honoured sir.’

  ‘And your companions?’

  ‘Mrs Jones is about forty. Lung is over twenty.’

  ‘A Chinese?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wear Chinese dress and hair, but you are not Chinese.’

  ‘I am American, sir.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Theodore. It means Gift of God.’

  Theodore had no idea why, at this moment of desperation, he should feel compelled to utter these unnecessary syllables, but the old man’s gaze which for a while seemed to have been dying back into distance now steadied and returned. He muttered to himself in Tibetan and then, suddenly as sunburst through clouds, smiled and became an ordinary person. It was as though his soul had swooped down from heights where it had been hovering and now stood in his body beside Theodore on the rock platform.

  ‘I am confused,’ he said. ‘My name is the Lama Amchi. I follow certain signs, some of which you bear but not others. I must enquire further.’

  ‘Honoured sir, there is no time. We are being attacked by bandits. If you help us across the gorge . . .’

  ‘I must not go back till I am sure. But I travel well protected, so that I may have a suitable retinue for the one I seek.’

  He turned and spoke in Tibetan to his followers, one of whom shouted across the gorge and made urgent signs; the others opened one of the bundles on the platform and brought out a number of savage-looking daggers and a couple of elderly rifles. The men on the far side began to cross the bridge, but Theodore was only aware that they were doing so when the first dropped grinning on to the platform. He moved to where he could see the traveller being rapidly twitched back over the gap. As soon as it was within reach another man leaped for it, twisted and swung his legs up over the rope. With nothing else to hold him but his hands gripping the traveller on either side he walked himself across, monkey-fashion. Theodore felt cold in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Tie your horses,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘We will go and investigate your predicament a little further. The thought comes to me that in itself it is perhaps a sign.’

  He spoke softly and kindly, as though a confrontation with the savage tribesmen from the forest were a problem such as a scholar might meet in his books.

  They found Lung waiting with his back towards them at the point where the cliff began to tilt from the vertical and became an immensely steep slope. Rollo had lost his baskets, and was standing on the path with his head bowed, snorting at the thin air for breath. Lung seemed to hear or sense the newcomers and swung round with the shot-gun rising to his shoulder. Theodore, half-hidden from Lung by the Lama Amchi, scrambled a little up the slope.

  ‘These are friends,’ he called in Mandarin. ‘They have come to help us.’

  Lung lowered his gun, stared in astonishment at the Lama Amchi, and bowed deeply.

  ‘Revered and honoured Sir,’ he said in Mandarin. ‘We are peaceful travellers but we are attacked by violent men. Pray condescend to make room for us under the umbrella of your benign protection.’

  The Lama Amchi didn’t answer, but strode past him and Rollo and on down the path. A shot snapped through the whistling air.

  ‘Who is this? What does he want?’ whispered Lung as Theodore reached him.

  ‘I don’t know. Something about a search, and signs, but I think he’ll help us cross the bridge.’

  With the jostling escort they followed the Lama Amchi down until he halted where a small ridge made a level and they could all crowd round to watch the scene below. About two hundred yards down the slope Mrs Jones was sitting on Sir Nigel’s back, facing the woods with her gun half raised. For a moment the rest of the drear expanse seemed empty, and then, a hundred yards beyond her, Theodore noticed a movement, and another further to the left, and another beyond that. The attackers had spread themselves into a wide curve and were creeping up the hill towards her, using what cover they could from tussock and outcrop.

  Lung put his hand to his mouth and gave a shrill yell. Mrs Jones twisted in the saddle, stared for a moment, then waved an arm, nudged Sir Nigel round and came cantering up the path. The horse’s huge lungs laboured and his ears were flat on his head. Twice he almost fell, but Mrs Jones somehow hauled him up and kept him going. Behind her the attackers rose to their feet and came trotting up the hill, some of them waving weapons. Theodore hadn’t realized there were so many of them – more than twenty, he thought.

  ‘These are not here for vengeance,’ muttered Lung. ‘Some are from other tribes. Look at their dress. They are here for loot, mere bandits, brought by chatter of gold.’

  Mrs Jones at last let Sir Nigel slow to an exhausted walk.

  ‘What’s up?’ she called.

  ‘Holy Lama on search,’ called Lung in English. ‘Maybe help. Missy cover face, please.’

  She had been riding with her veil thrown back, no doubt for better shooting. Obediently she twitched it into place as she brought Sir Nigel round once more so that
she could face down the slope. The attackers came on steadily, but as the slope tilted they bunched towards the path, so that by the time they were fifty yards away they were trotting up in a ragged file, silent, panting, but still tireless.

  ‘That’s close enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I’ll stop ’em there.’

  She was raising her rifle as she spoke. The men on the path jostled to a halt.

  ‘Do no violence,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘I will speak with these foolish people.’

  ‘Missy, holy Lama say no shoot,’ called Lung.

  ‘I might have to,’ she said. ‘I been aiming to miss so far, but . . . Hey! Stop him, somebody. Oh, why didn’t one of you stop the old goat?’

  It was too late. The Lama Amchi was striding down the path with the confident long pace of a man used to steep places. His followers whispered uneasily but stayed where they were. A bolt clicked.

  The attackers closed to a tight cluster and waited to meet the old man. He halted a few feet away from them and spoke, too far off now for Theodore to hear words, or even language.

  ‘I can’t pick the beggar out,’ cried Mrs Jones. ‘Shout to him to watch out, Lung.’

  Even as she was speaking Theodore saw metal glimmer, shoulder high, somewhere near the middle of the bunch, a pistol barrel. He couldn’t tell whose hand was holding it, but in the thin air and slowed time of helpless watching he saw the clumsy flintlock hover over the pan. The Lama’s robe flapped violently in a sudden gust, so that for a moment the old man seemed to waver, to separate into two images at the instant when the shot cracked and the dark smoke puffed among the faces. On the ridge there was one quick gasp of horror, followed by a wild yell as the Lama’s escort broke into a charging rush down the hill, waving their weapons and leaping from tussock to tussock, screaming like animals. The Lama stood still, apparently unharmed, but in front of him the bunch of bandits broke and ran streaming down the path, jostling and stumbling, though they must have outnumbered the attackers two to one.

  ‘Missed at that range!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Thank Heavens!’

  ‘Lama make himself two men,’ whispered Lung. ‘Missy no see?’

  ‘I saw a bit of rotten awful shooting,’ snapped Mrs Jones. ‘Now I suppose we better try and make a good impression on His Reverence.’

  The Lama Amchi had stood unmoving while his escort charged past him, then turned and come striding up the hill. He looked neither sad nor exhilarated as he approached. Beyond him the escort had caught up with the hindmost bandits and were hewing at them as they ran. The bandits made no attempt to turn and protect themselves. Already two bodies lay on the hillside.

  Mrs Jones slid gracefully from the saddle and gave a little curtsey, but the Lama turned to Theodore.

  ‘These are your companions, child?’ he said in his twanging Mandarin.

  Theodore made formal introductions.

  The priest gazed for a while at Lung, who faced him uneasily and seemed relieved when the old man turned away. Mrs Jones stood her ground until the creased, blue-veined hand rose as if to pluck her veil; then she backed politely away, raising the veil as she did so, and stood answering his gaze with her own. The sounds of the valley – the hiss of the wind, the growl of the river in its gorge, the cries of fighting men down across the slope – all dimmed, became almost part of some other scene as the world closed in to make a sphere of calm around the group by the path. Intangible energies flowed, as if round the twin poles of a magnet, creating and maintaining this sphere until, like duellists or dancers at the end of an encounter, Mrs Jones and the Lama bowed their heads to each other and turned away.

  ‘Now we will return to the bridge and prepare to cross,’ said the Lama.

  9

  TIBET. THE YAK-DRIVERS they had met on their way to the valley had said that there was no real border. The Lama waved a vague hand eastward and explained that two whole provinces had been stolen by China a hundred years before, so Theodore’s party had really been travelling through Tibet for many days. But for Theodore the border lay, sharp as a shore-line, at the bridge. From then on the grammar of all things, large and small, changed. There was the change from stillness to travel, from the simple triangular relationship with Mrs Jones and Lung to the far more complex pressures of the Lama and his half-hostile escort. There were the yaks, brooding, slow-paced, utterly alien; even their drivers, who drank their milk, ate their butter, wove their hair and wore their hides, seemed to have no feeling for them.

  There was Tibetan tea. The only time Theodore attempted to drink this on the journey his mouth spat it back into the cup before he could will himself to swallow. The first taste was of half-rancid grease, disgusting but manageable; then, inside that – wrapped in it, so to speak – his tongue met scouring soap and sharp salt and a thick woody flavour like the bark of a tree. He looked up, flushing with shame, and saw the Lama watching him with an intense but unreadable stare.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘It is a strong taste,’ said the old man. ‘You do not remember it, child?’

  ‘Tibetan tea notorious,’ said Lung in English. ‘Boil leaf long time. Put in salt, soda, sour butter.’

  ‘It is as well to acquire the taste,’ said the Lama mildly. ‘The drink is full of strength for those who travel in the mountains.’

  He didn’t seem at all put out by Theodore’s ill manners, but oddly interested. Then he and Mrs Jones and Lung fell into bilingual small-talk about the tea ceremonies of different countries.

  Yaks and tea were trivialities. There was a more important change, which Theodore sensed at once – had in fact sensed in the escort’s behaviour as they had prepared to haul the Lama across the ravine, the very first time he had seen the old man. Tibet was a priest-ruled country. Father had in a sense ruled the Settlement, but had done so as its first citizen, with the consent of his converts. He had been respected, and loved. But in Theodore’s eyes the escort, as well as the inhabitants of the flea-swarming farms where they billeted themselves each night, treated the old man as if he were in some way God. And this strong uncomfortable awe applied not only to the Lama but to everything. Wherever a stream ran near a village it drove at least one prayer-wheel, a tinkling device which at each turn was supposed to repeat the same meaningless syllables of devotion, inscribed on its rim. Prayer-flags – mere rags on sticks, like wash-day in the slums, Mrs Jones said – fluttered from the roofs of houses or in groves along hillsides, to perform the same function. Shrines – little box-like stone buildings, each with a fantastic bobbly spire ending in a crescent moon – dotted every slope. Monks stalked the roads.

  Father had always pitied heathens, never hated them, even at their most superstitious. His anger and his hatred had been reserved for those Christians who had, in his eyes, been shown the truth and refused it. But despite himself Theodore couldn’t help a distrust and dislike which was almost hatred. The wheels and flags offended him most. Prayer was not like that. It was a thing which needed to be done each time afresh, with intense personal effort. And yet . . . and yet how different, really, were these meaningless devices, repeating their formulae without a mind behind them, from Theodore’s own useless attempts to pray?

  Strangely, this very revulsion made him pray with greater earnestness, as well as with a new sense of frustration. In the valley of the lilies he had felt it would need only one more violent event to break the habit of prayer, but now that event had come and the habit was strengthened.

  Perhaps it was the mountains which caused this change. They were, in themselves, the biggest change of all. The peak that had faced across the valley of the lilies had seemed colossal, but soon the party was moving through country where the outcrops and buttresses of the main mountains were larger than that; and the saddle they had crossed into the valley seemed low and easy now, compared with some of the passes they traversed. The ranges were split by immensely steep, thick-forested valleys, each with its rushing river at the bottom, and here and there
a huddle of flat-roofed stone houses in a patch of tiny fields. In the valleys the tracks were often tolerable, sometimes even surfaced with logs laid side by side. But then the route would zigzag up to the bare slopes above the tree-line, higher and higher, until they were trailing among wastes where snow lay in crackling drifts between the wind-eroded boulders. Here the paths were usually invisible, except to their guides. Even Mrs Jones would look at some barrier – a cliff carved by frost and blizzard into vertical pleats and pillars, and lined with horizontal layers by the rock-strata – and shake her head, but the Tibetans would find a series of cracks and gullies and yard-wide ledges where only a few worn foot-holds showed that anyone had ever passed this way before. Theodore learnt to walk at these heights with a short-paced shuffle, drearily slow but not using one breath more than was needed of the sparse oxygen, one extra pump of his straining heart. He learnt that it was possible to sit at the midday rest with one’s head in the sun and one’s feet in shadow and suffer sunburn and frostbite at the same time. He learnt to trudge for hours with his eyes half-closed against the brilliant light, though the temptation was to gaze and gaze at the enormous, sharp-seen distances and the piercing colours.

  But all these discomforts were overwhelmed by the sense of awe which the mountains imposed. It was no wonder that such a country had come to be ruled by priests who were almost gods. Even Mrs Jones, despite her restlessness at the slow pace of travel, and the feeling that the Lama, by pressing steadily on at that pace, was preventing her from exploring the valleys properly for plants – even she seemed to feel the solemnity of the mountains. They changed her, as they changed everything. Her personality, which in earlier days had been so elusive and at the same so enveloping, withdrew into itself a little. There was no less of it – supposing you could measure such things – but it seemed somehow more concentrated, and more coherent.