Tulku

7

FROM THE VERY first day in the valley a routine seemed to spring into being, ready made. Mrs Jones’s mornings were for Theodore, her afternoons for Lung, and the evenings for the three of them to eat a slow supper and then sit round and talk a little, and listen to Mrs Jones’s songs, and watch the stars moving behind the mountain-tops or the big pale moths that came from nowhere and floated among the lily-banks, settling to drink their nectar or floating soundlessly from flower to flower. As the dusk came on the lilies began to produce a pungent, peppery scent and it was that, Mrs Jones said, which attracted the moths.

On the first morning, after they had groomed and tethered the horses and had breakfast, Mrs Jones sent Lung down to the lake and told him to see if he could catch some fish.

‘You’re always on about old fishermen in them poems of yours,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if you can do anything more than talk about it. Now come along here, young man. I got to start painting my lilies before they goes over, but you’ll find that a bit dull. What’d you like to have a go at?’

‘The mountain,’ said Theodore immediately.

She shook her head.

‘Bit of a mouthful,’ she said. ‘Surprising how tricky that sort of subject is. No, supposing you settle up there and have a go at that bit of the hollow. You got the tents there, give it a bit of shape, and Albert. Not that horses is easy, but they’re easier than mountains . . . Don’t waste more paper than you can help . . .’

She gave him two pencils, a piece of charcoal and a brand-new notebook, and he settled down to do as he was told. He drew a tent and decided it looked quite like, so he put the other one into the same picture. He started to draw the bottoms of the tree-trunks beyond but found that they seemed to be floating in mid-air, so he experimented with grass-tussocks to try and suggest the bank of the coomb, but they floated too. He was beginning on Albert when Mrs Jones came over and sat beside him.

‘Why, that’s not so dusty,’ she said. ‘Who’s been teaching you?’

‘Nobody. Mother was an artist, but she died when I was four.’

‘Then you got it in you. I see we’re going to have to take this serious. Look, I’ll show you a trick for doing shadows. Lend me that pencil. Ta . . . like this, see. It ain’t the only way, course, but it’s the easiest. And this bit here . . . you don’t want to draw quite so careful as I do, mind you. It’s the only way I know how, but except for flowers it’s a bit . . . oh, I don’t know. Remember how Mr What’s-is-name drew? That’s the thing to aim for.’

Theodore could see what she meant. She had added several touches to his picture which had anchored the trees to the top of a definite slope, but there was something vaguely niggling about them. It was as though the richness of her personality stopped at her finger-tips and could find no way out through her pencil. When she left him he practised shadows for a while and then went back to Albert, achieving a shoulder and a haunch that were quite horse-like but a head that was far too small and looked more like a dragon’s or even a sheep’s. Not that Albert’s head was really a model for all horses . . .

He was surprised to find how high the sun was above the mountain by the time of the next interruption. At a low whistle from the bottom of the coomb he glanced up and there was Lung, looking both shy and triumphant and carrying something hidden behind his back. He marched up to Mrs Jones, still hiding his booty.

‘I catch fish,’ he said, grinning.

‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Mrs Jones.

‘Flying fish?’

‘Garn!’

She grabbed at him and he dodged away, slipping on the slope and almost falling. He flung out his hidden hand to steady himself, revealing the body of a dark brown duck.

‘Ho! Mighty hunter!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘How did you manage that? Make yourself a bow and arrow?’

‘I make trap,’ said Lung, producing a length of cord with a noose on the end. ‘Tomorrow I make better trap, with basket. Plenty reed for basket.’

‘Good for you. Let me have it. H’m, bit of meat there. I better pluck it while it’s still warm. Now, you two, you can go up to the path, back along the way we come, try and wipe out any marks we might of made . . .’

Theodore and Lung spent the rest of the morning doing that, smoothing out hoof-prints and foot-prints and sprinkling pine-needles over them. After lunch Lung showed no inclination to leave the coomb, so Theodore climbed up through the wood and continued to work alone, doggedly smoothing and scattering till he reached the beginning of the trees and found that the sun was almost down behind the mountain ranges to the west. He had to pick his way down in near dark, trying not to spoil his work by leaving yet more foot-prints, and met Lung coming up the path to look for him. They smelt the roasting meat before they reached the clearing.

The duck was oily and incredibly tough, but they chewed up every scrap and threw the bones on the fire. After the chill nights on the plateau it was strange to be sitting out under the stars without having to creep at once into a blanket-roll; they talked, and tried to prevent the big moths from flying into the fire, and listened to the steady tearing rasp of the grazing horses. Mrs Jones began to tease Lung into translating his poem about her and he made up uncomplimentary lines and pretended they were parts of it, but when he quoted in Mandarin it was clearly the real thing. Mrs Jones answered him with flowery speeches from old pantomimes, and even once a bit of Shakespeare. Then she started to sing.

‘The boy I love sits up in the gallery,

The boy I love is looking down at me . . .

‘Not that I’m the right type to sing that one,’ she broke off. ‘What you want is a neat little ingenue, all pink and white and countrified, rolling her big blue eyes up at the clerks and ’prentices in the top of the house. Never mind. You’ll have to make do with what you got . . .

‘There he is, can’t you see, waving of his handkerchief . . .’

It was a sign which Theodore understood perfectly well. She wanted to be alone with her lover. He rose, muttered a goodnight and walked up the dell to his tent, where he slid between his blankets and started to say his prayers. The singing stopped, replaced by whispers. A low laugh reminded him that he ought to pray for the other two, that they should recognize their sinfulness and be forgiven, but he had hardly begun when he stopped, feeling that it wasn’t right. The peppery wild scent of the lilies drifted through the night. He felt the stillness and the isolation of the valley all around with the three humans at the centre of it, as though they were cradled in the palm of the mountains. Things that happened here seemed to him to have no weight, no effect on the rest of the world. Any act was simply itself, neither good nor evil. It existed, and that was all, like one of the lilies.

So day followed day, restful and quiet. The only serious effort anyone made came on the third day when Lung, irritated perhaps by Mrs Jones’s obsession with her lilies, announced that he was going to explore the path to the bridge marked on P’iu-Chun’s map. Theodore went with him.

They followed the track through the wood and came quite soon to a place by the water’s edge which was clearly used as a camp-site by other travellers. There were remains of cooking-fires, and scatterings of yak-dung. After that the path climbed for a couple of miles through the wood and came out on a vast slope of sour-looking earth, above which the rock face rose precipitously to the snow-fields. The path continued to climb, but far less steeply than it would have needed to if it had been aiming to leave the valley at the skyline. Instead it led towards a point where the mountain cliffs seemed to come down and close the valley off. Steadily, as Lung and Theodore climbed, the tilt of the slope became steeper, until it was a slope no more, and the path was a mountain ledge running with vertical cliffs above and below, and the cliffs of the opposite mountain now incredibly near. They were, in fact, now walking along the wall of a vast ravine, with a river growling towards the lake a thousand feet below. An unsteady wind whipped through these narrows, with sudden little lulls, as though it was trying to trick the traveller into unwariness and then hurl him over the edge with its next gust.

After a couple of hundred yards the ravine began to open out as the opposite cliff tilted away, but before that happened, at the narrowest place of all, the path ended and there hung the bridge.

It was a single strand of rope, sagging hideously over the drop, and that was all. At either end was a fair-sized platform, with the rope running a few feet above it; on the further side the rope seemed to start from a timber structure, but here it was anchored into a big iron ring set into the cliff. Theodore stared at the curving rope, which swung slowly from left to right as the wind gusted down the gorge. His palms began to prickle with the idea of height. Yes, he could imagine hooking his legs over the rope and hauling himself across, hand over hand, though when he reached the far side his weight would drag it down to such a steepness that perhaps he wouldn’t be strong enough to pull himself up those last few feet. He could see on the far side where the path led across another barren slope and vanished into a steep wood of larches. Perhaps he could reach there, and Lung, and even Mrs Jones – she could do anything – but the horses? The baggage?

‘This is a place of devils,’ said Lung. He usually spoke Mandarin to Theodore, though his English was steadily improving.

‘People get yaks across here, I think,’ said Theodore.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps there is another path, though none is marked on the map. I think we will return and tell the Princess that we can go no further.’

He turned decisively away and began to walk back along the ledge. Theodore understood very well – if it was impossible to go on and dangerous to go back, then they must stay where they were, and the idyll could be prolonged. He smiled and shook his head in sympathy, but from that moment there started to grow inside him a conviction that the idyll was not free. It would have to be paid for in the end.

Mrs Jones took the news very calmly, saying that the valley was as good a place to be as any while the weather lasted, and there were enough plants around to last her another couple of weeks, at least, and after that they’d start thinking what was the best thing to do next.

In fact it was an extraordinary relief to settle back into the coomb of the lilies, and to know that they would be staying here for another day, and another after that. Theodore hadn’t realized how weary he was with travel, not simply weary in nerves and muscles, but soul-weary with ceaseless change. Time on the journey had been like a muddy spate, full of whirling and uprooted objects, but here it settled to a clear, still stream, with even the eddies in it returning again and again to the same pattern.

Mrs Jones botanized and sketched her finds, including a small dark-red clematis which she thought was new. There were delicate little plants too in the barren-looking slopes above the tree-line, which Theodore helped her press. But the lily remained her chief delight. It grew in drifts in several places along the lake shore, often mixed with a shorter, dark-orange lily which Mrs Jones said was quite common. The yellow one stood up to four feet high and carried as many as a dozen trumpets at the top of its scrawny and metallic-looking stem; the flowers were about five inches long and less than three across at the tips of the outcurved petals; from a distance they seemed to be all of a uniform intense yellow, but in fact each petal had a streak of green along its outside, and inside the bell the colour slowly darkened from the rim and was flecked with a pattern of small orange spots; at the mouth of the trumpet poised the six large anthers on their curving stalks, the colour of plain chocolate.

‘I seen bigger lilies, of course,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I mean, there’s Lilium auratum – I seen that a foot across, and with twenty flowers on a stalk – dead vulgar if you ask me – not a patch on this little beauty. How are you getting on, young man?’

Theodore had become obsessed with a desire to produce a drawing of Sir Nigel that would do justice to that animal’s look of utter nobility, a problem, he found, far subtler and more difficult than rendering Albert’s coarse-grained ill-will. He was developing his own style of drawing, neither like Mrs Jones’s nor P’iu-Chun’s, but chunky and stolid, as though he was as much interested in the weight of things as their shape and texture. He was unaware of this – or rather he was only aware that he liked certain effects when he got them right – until Mrs Jones pointed it out.

‘That’s not at all dusty,’ she said, looking at a picture he had made of a tree overhanging the lake shore. ‘You got it in you, more than what I have. You draw like you are.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I dunno. Someone as didn’t know you, suppose I showed him this, he might make a guess what kind of person you are, and that’s good. It ain’t true of my pictures.’

‘If it was you’d keep running off at the edge of the paper,’ said Theodore.

She laughed and went back to her fiftieth attempt to render the spirit of her lily.

In the afternoon Theodore explored. They did not have the valley to themselves. The wood was full of birds, which sometimes called until the cliffs echoed and at other times for an hour on end failed to break the intense silence of the place. There were porcupines, and a lot of other small animals too briefly glimpsed to be sure of. There was something larger, perhaps a bear, which raided the camp one night, frightened the horses and upset one of the baggage baskets – Theodore slept through this episode, but Mrs Jones and Lung woke and drove it off. Next day they moved camp to another lake-side clearing Theodore had found, an even more secret place, further from the path because of a curve of the shore and screened by thicker undergrowth. It too had its drift of lilies, but no stream.

They would have had to make a move in any case, because the horses by now had eaten almost all the thin grass of the clearing, but the episode with the bear decided them. In the new camp Lung devised an ingenious arrangement of ropes that allowed him to haul all the baggage out of reach of bears, up among the branches. He astonished Theodore by his knack of doing this sort of thing, and the neatness of the fish-traps he wove, and his general practicality, though he pretended to despise the work.

‘A scholar does not do these things,’ he said, weaving a length of split reed between the ribs of his latest trap.

‘My father said we must worship God with our hands as well as our minds,’ said Theodore. ‘You ought to have seen the bridge he made.’

‘Good,’ said Lung. ‘Then I am worshipping the Princess with my hands.’

He tied the reed’s end in with mocking precision, as though he were making a true-love knot.

Theodore laughed aloud, though a month ago the joke would have appalled him. But now all that part of him seemed dead. Of course he said his prayers morning and evening and read a little from his Bible each day, as he had always done; but this was mere habit and he knew it needed only one more violent event to break it. It was as though deep inside him was a chapel which had once been lit and gleaming, loud with hymns or full of silent prayer; now it was shut, its air never changed, its ornaments gathered dust and mildew.

* * *

A few mornings later Theodore was lying on his stomach, drawing Sir Nigel once more. It had started as a practice study on the blank part of one of Mrs Jones’s rejected lily-drawings; but of course, being only practice, it was going particularly well, with eye and mind and hand and pencil forming a smooth-linked system so that what appeared on the paper was not only a real horse, living and solid, but was this particular horse, with its own striking combination of dash and dignity.

‘Hullo,’ said Mrs Jones, ‘here comes my admirer. What’s brought him back so soon?’

Theodore looked up and saw Lung walking towards them, carrying something slung on a stick over his shoulder. He smiled, lifted down his burden and laid it at her feet like an offering. It was a fish, more than twice the size of any he had so far trapped, blue-black above and brown below.

‘My, that’s a beauty!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Three good meals on there – at this rate we could stay here all summer, and I wouldn’t mind hanging around till my lilies have seeded.’

Lung settled on to the grass and watched her manipulating her flower-press. For a while Theodore went on drawing, but gradually became aware of a change in the atmosphere, a sense of stifled energies beginning to fill the glade. He looked carefully up and saw that Lung was watching Mrs Jones out of the corner of his eyes while his hand stroked the sleek side of his fish, and she was merely twiddling and then untwiddling the brass butterfly-nut at the corner of her press. It had happened sometimes before, but they had always been extremely strict with themselves; perhaps, without telling him, they had agreed rules, but if so it had been for his sake. He had seldom seen them even touch, and when talking to each other in his presence they maintained a slightly teasing relationship, as though their love was not really serious and he needn’t worry about it. But he was often aware of it, a deep, intense, unspoken shared emotion, more like hunger than anything he could understand as love. Being with them in this mood was like living too near some source of power – a furnace, perhaps, the by-product of whose energies is enough to make one want to move to somewhere cooler.

‘Shall I go and look at the old traps,’ he said. ‘If that one’s going to last three meals we don’t want to catch anything we can’t eat.’

‘I think that would be a very good idea,’ said Mrs Jones in her drawing-room voice.

Theodore folded his picture and tucked it into the breast-pocket of his jacket. He rose and walked away without looking back.

Normally it took about ten minutes to walk to the coomb where they had first camped, but Mrs Jones had made a rule that for regular journeys like this they must always try to use a different path, so Theodore decided this time he would stay right down by the lake shore, which would delay him because the undergrowth was thicker here. He slowed himself still further by walking with a hunter’s silence. There was no real difference between deliberately going a slow way and going a quick way and then hanging around for a while, but there seemed to be. He was angry about the interruption of his drawing when it was going well, and the stealing of his share of the day, and he was ashamed of himself for being angry.

About a hundred yards short of the coomb he ducked below a branch that hung right out over the lake and saw that something was disturbing the water near where the little stream ran out – close by Lung’s fish-traps, he thought. He couldn’t actually see the shore at that point, but after watching for a moment he became almost certain that something was actually meddling with one of the traps. The bear, perhaps. He wasn’t at all anxious to meet the creature at close quarters, but he would be glad to see it at a distance, so now he struck up away from the shore, aiming for a point about half way up the coomb; the lakeside undergrowth thinned, and he was able to move quite quickly between the trees until he came out behind one of the ranked drifts of lilies and could gaze down from tree-shadow into the bright-lit arena beyond.

Down by the stream, a few yards up from the shore, a man was making urgent gestures. Near the head of the coomb another man was kneeling by a rectangle of paler grass where Mrs Jones’s tent had been pitched. This second man looked up, saw the gestures and came hurrying down to meet his comrade. Together they went to the lakeside and pulled out one of the fish-traps. Even from where he watched Theodore could see the sudden agonized writhings of a fish brought into the air. The men looked at it for a moment, then slid the trap back into the water and backed away, stooping as they did so to erase their foot-prints in the water-logged earth.

They came slowly up the coomb, pointing at things that caught their attention – the interlocking rings of shorter grass where the tethered horses had grazed, a pile of old horse-droppings, the patch by the stream where Lung had usually washed the dishes. They darted eagerly up the far slope and stared at a point among the lilies, inexplicably as far as Theodore could see, until one of them fell to his knees and began to dig with his bare hands; then he remembered that Mrs Jones had dug one of her precious lily-bulbs from there. What were they after? Treasure?

The standing man began to argue. He snatched at his companion’s shoulder, dragging him to his feet. They came back down to the stream, still arguing in low voices. They were small men, wearing what looked like rags which were held in place by a tracery of criss-crossing thongs; plaits of coarse black hair stuck out all round their heads under small grey fur caps with tight-rolled brims. They were Lolo, that was certain. Then one of the men in the frenzy of argument pushed his face to within an inch of the other man’s nose. He held his head poking forward on his neck and cocked a little to one side – an extraordinary posture which made it look as though his spine were double jointed. Theodore had seen a man do that only once before, in an argument over who should carry which burden when the porters were loading up in the Lolo village before the ambush. This was that man.

Theodore stayed perfectly still, his muscles locked by the ancient instinct of the hunted, while the men finished their argument and peered hither and thither, eager but scared, into the lily-glowing darkness beneath the trees. He began to feel that at any moment the wide, snub noses would pick up his scent, but at last the men started back up the coomb and disappeared under the trees. He felt certain that they were going to find their comrades and report what they had seen.

It seemed important to him to know whether the enemy were behind or in front, so, using known tracks, he followed the men up through the wood, keeping them right at the limit of his vision. They never looked round but the moment they reached the track they started eastwards up it at a quick, effortless jog. He held his breath until they disappeared and then, still careful to leave no traces, made his way down to the camp.

Normally when he came unexpectedly into the glade he would have coughed, or hummed a few lines of one of Mrs Jones’s songs. It was like knocking at a door. But this time he didn’t dare make even that amount of human noise, so he caught the lovers unprepared. Lung was lying on his back with his head in Mrs Jones’s lap. She had let her hair down and was bending over him, gently stroking his head with one hand. He held the other clasped against his chest.

Theodore paused in his approach. Despite the urgency and fear he found it hard to break the weightless bubble of their happiness. He saw for the first time how streaked with grey was Mrs Jones’s hair.

‘Pardon me,’ he whispered.

They looked up. Mrs Jones stared for a moment through the curtain of her hair, then tossed it back.

‘What’s up, Theo?’ she said in a low voice.

He crouched in front of her and in a straining whisper told what he had seen. She nodded, accepting without question that he was sure that he recognized one of the men.

‘That’s rough,’ she said. ‘The others can’t be far off, neither, or they’d have spent more time scouting. First thing, we got to get out into the open – up by this bridge of yours might be favourite, then if things go sour we can try and cross it and cut the rope behind us. Before it comes to that we’ll try and parley with them, buy them off for a blood-price. But we haven’t a hope if they catch us down among the trees . . . oh, it’s all my fault for saying we could hang on here for ever! Lung, my love, you better get up. I’m afraid our prettytimes are over.’