Tulku Page 13

  ‘We’ve only got three horses now.’

  ‘The Chinese can follow with the yaks.’

  Lung did not like this arrangement at all, but in the end he accepted it, scowling. Theodore perceived suddenly that Lung was aware that something was being hidden from him, something which Mrs Jones and the Lama and Theodore knew. This would have been wounding enough if they had merely been companions, but for poor Lung, already half-sick with the ending of his idyll, it must have seemed a sign like the ending of love itself.

  While they were redistributing the horse-loads among the yaks, Theodore saw Mrs Jones, standing alone a little to one side, holding Sir Nigel’s head. Her veil as usual hid her face, but again he noticed how her stance had changed, an imperceptible slackening in the line of her spine and shoulders that showed deep inward thought, and, he guessed, an echo of Lung’s unhappiness. He could almost feel her fear and uncertainty. This was so unlike her that without thought he led Bessie across towards her. She turned her head to look at him, stiffening her stance as she did so.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ he muttered.

  She reached out an arm, took him by the shoulder and drew him close against her side, holding him there while the wind flapped her cloak round him in swirling folds.

  ‘Let’s hope,’ she whispered.

  Beyond the stone lake the track was better than any they had travelled for many days, sometimes steep but always reasonably smooth, twisting its way around rock outcrops that covered all the long slope between the two pincer-like ranges that ringed the stone lake. The Lama rode Albert, sitting sideways across his haunches like a peasant and seeming to control him as easily as Mrs Jones controlled Sir Nigel, without visible signal or command. He hurried them on, apparently impatient for the first time in the whole journey, though the horses gasped and stumbled with the steadily increasing height until Mrs Jones insisted on dismounting and leading Sir Nigel up the steeper stretches. Once or twice, looking over his shoulder, Theodore caught a glimpse of the yak-train, already ant-like with distance, and beyond that the stone lake, which from this height seemed to glimmer and shift as if it were indeed a lake of water.

  At last the ground levelled and the track swung east, dipped, and began to sidle steeply down along the far side of the right-hand range. Now below them opened another precipitous valley, wider than most they had seen and splitting into several side-valleys. Beyond it stood a single massive peak, not rising to any dramatic points but topped by a long smooth snow-ridge which made the whole slab seem solemn and tremendous.

  ‘Now that’s something,’ said Mrs Jones in an awed voice.

  ‘In our language it is called the Dome of Purest Light,’ said the Lama. ‘Its contemplation brings self-knowledge. Tell the Mother of the Tulku that henceforth she shall gaze on it every day.’

  ‘I wish he wouldn’t keep calling me that,’ grumbled Mrs Jones, who had learnt by now to recognize those particular syllables. ‘Counting chickens, that is.’

  They rode on down the twisting track. All along its length the little shrines sprouted on every small level, like a field of weird stone fungi. Slowly the snows of the great mountain changed their colour and the shadows on it, which had been a brighter blue than the sky, darkened and grew as the sun westered. There were pinks and golds among the glittering white, and the depths below were already heavy with dusk, when the track reached a point where it seemed about to lance out over empty space. The Lama rode unhesitatingly to this dead end and swung out of sight round a pillar of sheer rock. Theodore followed Mrs Jones round the bend and reined to a halt beside her. All three sat perfectly still, as if transfixed by the shock of vision. Then the Lama flung out his arm in a wide gesture.

  ‘Dong Pe,’ he said.

  Mrs Jones and Theodore sat and stared.

  The buttress they had just rounded had concealed the way in which the dark cleft of the valley widened suddenly to an enormous bowl ringed by the towering ice ramparts, flanked with steep forests and floored with little meadows. The Lama was not pointing at any of that, but at the mountainside ahead. There, clinging like the hive of wild bees to what seemed almost vertical cliff, was the monastery. Its walls were white. Many of the roofs were flat; others were shallow curves of hummocky tiles, ending in wide-spreading eaves. In several places the roof-line erupted into pyramids topped with spiky onion-domes, and the largest of these, near the middle, seemed to be covered with a dull yellow metal. The monastery spread apparently endlessly along the cliff, as if it had grown there, section by section, wherever a ledge or cranny gave the builders foot-hold. The flat roofs and the sharp lines of buttresses and the heavy-lintelled deep-set windows along the upper storeys made this growth seem more like that of a crystal, which increases by angles and facets, than that of a plant.

  Above the main buildings the cliff was pocked with the mouths of caves, and below lay a huddle of small squat huts and exotic shrines. The whole site faced east and was already deep in the shade of the mountain behind it, so the faint glow of lights at many of the windows added to the sense of a huge, mysterious life born out of the very mountain.

  ‘I have been to Lhasa and seen the great Potala,’ intoned the Lama in his clanging Mandarin. ‘I have travelled in India and seen the mighty shrines of that land. I have seen even the sea. But in all this world of illusion I have seen no illusion that can compare with Dong Pe.’

  11

  FOR ONLY THE second time since the destruction of the Settlement Theodore was suddenly convinced that his prayers were being listened to. Once, at the top of that far-away rock pillar, when he had tried to pray for Mrs Jones; and now, here, in the guest-house below the gates of Dong Pe monastery, with the bitter mountain air fingering his shoulder-blades as he knelt on the rug beside his cot, while his lips moved as usual through the automatic phrases and his mind roamed helplessly.

  He had been thinking, as it happened, about Lung. Two images had floated side by side into his head – that last morning in the valley, Lung lying with his head in Mrs Jones’s lap, drifting in love; and his arrival at the guest-house last night, snarling with sulky suspicion. Theodore liked Lung; at the start of the journey he had seemed at least half-absurd, but slowly Theodore had discovered some of what Mrs Jones had seen in him: humour and intelligence, and a kind of exulting innocence which he occasionally let gleam from behind the fastidious façade. But Theodore, despite that liking, had not been able to grasp the depth and strength of Lung’s love for Mrs Jones, and so had found it hard to bear the apparently childish fits of sulks that had followed its ending. Now, in his half-dreamy state, self-hypnotized by the empty repetition of words, he found himself laying the two images side by side, the exultation and the misery, as if they were two pieces of cloth he was comparing. He was swept with a wave of sympathy for poor Lung, as sudden and powerful as the scent of honeysuckle come upon at dusk.

  As the wave ebbed he knew he was being listened to – not the movement of his lips, but his thought. It was as though, wandering round the deserted chapel of his soul, he had found a footprint in the dust that was not his own. He stopped praying, opened his eyes and stared around. Opposite him hung a shimmery cloth woven with a picture of the Buddha cross-legged on his throne and surrounded by grimacing warriors and monsters and calm, bare-breasted women. The guest-house was a gaudy tunnel, sharp-lit by the morning light through small square windows. Lung lay curled on his cot. From behind a partition of blue and scarlet hangings came Mrs Jones’s light snore, contented as the purr of a cat. Neither of them had been the listener. The Buddha was only a picture, smiling that sweet inane smile. And the listener was fading now, fading, gone – frightened, as it were, by the sudden concentration of Theodore’s thought. That first morning he rose, smiling self mockingly at the sudden whimsy that his visitor might have been the Siddha Asara; he could not then know how many times, morning and evening, he would find the same nameless presence waiting to pray beside him.

  As they breakfasted he became aware that the relat
ionship between Mrs Jones and Lung had changed again. She had spent a full hour last night, coaxing the poor young man out of his sulks, and when Theodore had dozed into sleep they had still been sitting side by side by the stove, talking in low voices. She must have told him about the child she might be carrying, his child. He seemed very uncertain how to react – shy, puppyish and strangely clumsy. It was as though the idea that the love-affair might ever result in offspring had not crossed his mind before. Mrs Jones found his behaviour irritating and was sharp with him, but instead of lapsing back into sulks he tried to turn his clumsiness into a joke, which only made her crosser still. She was at a high pitch of irritation when they heard a soft knock at the door.

  ‘Visitors I can do without this morning,’ she snapped. ‘Go on, one of you! Ain’t you going to let them in?’

  Lung scrambled to the door, almost colliding with the Lama Amchi who had chosen that moment to open it and enter. He was followed by a tall young monk, very thin, with a round smooth head too small for his body. Everybody bowed like dolls. Unasked the two monks settled cross-legged on the floor, completing a circle round Mrs Jones’s stove. Mrs Jones produced two more of the steel mugs from her hamper and filled them from the tea-pot. They all sat in silence for a while, as if the stove were an object set there for them to contemplate. The steam drifted up from the mugs. Theodore wanted to fidget, but stayed still.

  ‘I introduce to you the Monk Tomdzay,’ said the Lama Amchi suddenly. ‘He will come here each morning, so that if you have any wishes or needs you may tell him and he will see that they are met.’

  ‘I am honoured to be of service,’ said the young monk in very good Mandarin with barely a trace of the Tibetan twang.

  ‘Delighted to meet his excellency,’ said Mrs Jones in her drawing-room voice.

  There was another long silence, broken only by the smack and suck of the holy men gulping at the scalding tea.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said Mrs Jones at last. ‘Ain’t one of you going to ask what happens next? Is there any harm in me going botanizing? When are they going to consult this here oracle they’re on about? Lung, my love, you’ll have to tell him I told you what’s up.’

  Lung’s embarrassment took the form of language so flowery and contorted that Mrs Jones became more and more impatient, and eventually cut Lung’s translation short with an unmistakable gesture.

  ‘What a bunch of idiots! You have a go, Theo, get it into their heads I got to know what’s up.’

  But the Lama Amchi seemed to have understood both the gesture and the motive behind it.

  ‘The time is not propitious to consult the oracle,’ he said smiling. ‘In some days, however, the astrological signs will change and then we will hold the ceremony. Meanwhile, go where you will. If you wish to journey in the valley, Tomdzay will arrange for an escort. In most parts of the monastery too you may come and go as you like – we are not a sect that forbids the presence of women. Indeed, many of our monks are married. You will not see me again until the ceremony of the oracle, as the time has come for me to retire and engage in meditation, but as I say Tomdzay will attend to all your wants.’

  While Theodore repeated the explanation to Mrs Jones, the Lama Amchi returned to his tea. Perhaps he was already half-withdrawn into his meditation, but his noddings and suckings made him seem much older and less commanding than he had been during the journey, like a gaffer mumbling by the hearth. Suddenly he rose to his feet with a single effortless movement that was almost as though he had floated himself upright. Tomdzay copied him. They bowed. The Lama Amchi intoned a few words in Tibetan and they were gone.

  ‘What a pair of beauties!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Each one as sly as the other. Now listen, I been thinking. First off, this oracle’s going to say whatever old Amchi tells it. His idea is get the baby born and then tell everyone it’s this Tulku they’ve been waiting for . . .’

  ‘What when child is maybe girl?’ interrupted Lung.

  ‘They’ll have a baby boy ready somewhere, mark my words. You see, it ain’t only finding their Tulku and dishing the Chinese as appeals to Amchi – it’s having the kid so young. F’rinstance, even if he’d managed to convince himself it was Theo here, like he tried to first off, that wouldn’t of been half as good, ’cause of Theo being getting on for grown up. But if he starts with a kid aged nothing, that’s another twenty years Amchi’s got of running this here monastery before the kid takes over.’

  ‘But you said you weren’t going to have the baby here,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Course I ain’t – I was just giving you a f’rinstance of how sly old Amchi is. And we got to seem to go along with him, what’s more. One sign we’re trying to scarper and he’ll watch us like a cat at a mousehole. But we’re going to, and we got to start thinking out how straight off, ’cause if we leave it too long all them passes will be blocked with snow, and besides I’m not going swinging across any of them bridges when I’m eight months gone.

  ‘Now, listen, there’s a lot of things we can try. First off do I tell old Amchi I’m not carrying, after all? I ain’t so sure that’ll work, ’cause I ’spect it ain’t true and he’s got a way of guessing – and once he gets it into his head we ain’t on his side then he’ll keep a tight hold on us – lock us up, I shouldn’t wonder. So I think I won’t say nothing about that for a bit.

  ‘So, next, we start looking for a different way out. I can do that while I’m off botanizing. I know he told you as the way we come was the only way into this here valley, but he’s quite up to pulling a fast one over something like that, make us think we hadn’t a hope of getting out. Next, you remember what he said about this Tojing bloke being scuppered by traitor monks? I’ll bet there’s one or two of them still about. You don’t get a place like this run all of a piece. There’s all sorts of splits and gangs under the holy surface. I reckon that’s one for you, Lung – you hang around, keep your eyes open, see if anyone seems a bit extra friendly, keep your wits about you. You’ll know him when you meet him, some bloke as asks a lot of little questions and then keeps shying away from the subject . . .’

  ‘Why will this man help us?’ asked Lung dubiously.

  ‘Dish old Amchi, of course. There must be a gang here as don’t want him to come up with the new Tulku, go on running things another twenty years. Now look, you won’t have to go hunting around for this bloke, ’cause if he’s there he’ll come to you. All you got to do is be where he can find you. There’s got to be a library, place like this, so why don’t you go scholaring – you’ll like that. Lot of ’em will be shy of you, ’cause of you being Chinese, so I think you’ll know the right bloke when he comes along. Take your time. Act shy. Don’t rush it . . . Now, young Theo, you’ve got to see if you can’t pick up a bit of the lingo. That’s important.’

  ‘Learn Tibetan? Me? Why?’

  ‘Because we’re going to need it whatever happens. I’m not laying much odds on me finding a way out of here what we can manage by ourselves. Lung’s got a bit better chance, finding a bloke what’ll help us. But my bet is in the end we’re going to have to buy our way out – find a gang of yak-drivers or blokes like that what’s prepared to risk it, or even some of these escort wallahs that’s supposed to keep an eye on us – that’d be favourite, ’cause they could pretend to take us off botanizing and we might get a whole day’s start – two days, if we make out we’re going right over the far side of the valley so we’ve got to camp out . . . but anyway, Theo, if we’re going to do that we got to be able to talk the lingo. There’s not many peasants as know Chinee, I bet. And even suppose we get out one of the other ways, we’ll still have to do a bit of chit-chat, time to time. Now, I ain’t no good at languages, never have been; and Lung here, well, he’s had plenty practice in English but the way he’s got on don’t give me that much confidence. So it’s up to you . . .’

  Her ill temper had gone. It was as though a sulky, dank dawn had been cleared by a driving north wind, lifting doubt and low spirits like dead leaves and making
the blood sing. The lines on Lung’s face had hardened and his eyes were sparkling – after the days of dejection this was his soldier-woman come back again. Theodore wanted to laugh, not with mockery but with the same sudden exhilaration.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll learn Tibetan.’

  The mood lasted while they groomed the horses. They found an old man there who had brought some coarse feed and was now spreading dried fern over the floor of the shed they had been given for a stable. He treated Mrs Jones with awe and tried to prevent her grooming Sir Nigel, but she quickly bent him to her will and made him watch while she showed him exactly how she wanted everything done.

  ‘Every comfort, you see,’ she said to Theodore. ‘Grooms, stable-boys – if we wanted footmen with white knee-breeches I bet they’d lay them on somehow. I won’t be taking the horses, couple of days at least. They’re fagged out, and it’ll look lots more natural if I start my botanizing close at hand, get the monks used to the idea that’s how I spend my time, before I start off on proper expeditions . . . Ta very much, Theo. Jorrocks here and me can finish off. You go and find some nice monk what wants to teach a kid his own language . . .’

  Theodore was hesitating just inside the main gate of the monastery when an old monk came shuffling along the inner wall, automatically twitching a line of little copper cylinders – another sort of prayer-wheel, Theodore guessed – into motion as he passed. They revolved with an erratic thin clinking. He ignored Theodore’s Mandarin greeting, took him by the shoulder, and made gestures towards the southern end of the maze of buildings. Then he himself went shuffling out of the gate. Theodore shrugged, but obediently turned left and began his exploration. (Weeks later he found that the old man had been telling him that one is supposed to move around sacred ground in a clockwise direction – had he realized that at the time, Theodore might well have gone the other way.)