Tulku

15

THE FESTIVAL WAS due to last for several days, during which the monks performed a series of dances, or plays – Theodore found it hard to tell which – acting out different bits of their faith. As usual it was difficult to get a coherent account from Major Price-Evans, because his enthusiasm kept reminding him of extra details, or of other parts of other ceremonies which could be compared with what he was describing. For instance he was trying to explain a dance in which somebody wearing the mask of a three-eyed bull and carrying a sword and a bowl of blood attacked an image made of coloured dough and cut it to bits, which were then scattered among the spectators, who ate them.

‘He’s the Lord of Death, of course,’ explained the Major. ‘Used to be a real human sacrifice, I shouldn’t wonder – lot of that sort of thing in Tibet before the Buddhists took over. Never seen a human sacrifice meself, though I’ve seen some rum things in my time. Suppose I would have had to try to stop it, in any case – British officer can’t just sit through a thing like that. All a bit like Communion Service, hey?’

He had sounded so far off and wistful, discussing the proper behaviour for a British officer who found himself in the audience at a human sacrifice, that it took Theodore a moment or two to grasp the meaning of the last sentence, especially as the Congregation’s name for the central Christian ritual was ‘The Lord’s Table’.

‘No!’ said Theodore explosively, ‘it’s nothing like.’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . . but I didn’t mean to put you out, me boy. My fault for describing it badly, hey? Wish I could tell you how stirring it all is, with the music, and the colour, and the masks and all that. No set places for the audience – not like a theatre, hey – happens right in among you, and suddenly you find it’s happening inside you – see what I mean?’

‘No. Don’t the people watching get in the way?’

‘Not at all. Fact I’ve seen ’em join in once or twice, become part of the show. Seen a scrawny little chappie stalk into the middle of a dance with a dagger stuck through both cheeks – no blood, of course – and tell them he was some demon they’d affronted, somehow. Not invited, I dare say, like the witch in Sleeping Beauty. All they did was put a bit into the dance apologizing to the demon, and the demon would leave the chappie, who’d take the daggers out of his cheeks and go and sit down and watch the rest of the dance as though nothing had happened. You can’t get away from it. The Gods are very close to us up here. Don’t you feel that, hey?’

‘Yes,’ said Theodore.

The energy of his own assent shocked him like a blow. The single syllable had exploded out of him with even more force than his rejection a minute or two ago of the Major’s idea that sacrifice of the dough giant had anything to do with the Lord’s Table. He startled the Major, who tried to peer at him, blind-eyed, then nodded thoughtfully in silence before he broke once more into rambling talk.

Theodore barely heard. He was thinking God is very close. He does not answer me, but he is very close. He felt a strange sense of movement towards a crisis, like the silky tension in a river’s surface as it flows into the last still reach above a fall.

During the next few days the memory of this almost violent moment of assurance came and went, but the sense of coming crisis endured, fed not only by the approaching flight but by the feeling of excitement that filled the valley, like a liquid brimming up to the jagged rims. The preparations for the festival produced a tauter rhythm in daily life, full of sudden little turbulences. The very day of his talk with the Major, Theodore came into one of the minor courtyards to find a team of monks there, prancing like frogs to the beat of a small drum. Evidently the Major was mistaken when he said the dances were performed without rehearsal.

Later still Theodore was passing along one of the balconies when he looked over the rail and saw that the paving of the small courtyard below was covered with monstrous faces, fresh-painted and laid out to dry, snarling or grinning, staring at the sky with huge, round, unwinking eyeballs. Most of them were much more than masks, structures like the shell of a lobster, made to cover the performer almost to the ground; eye-slits cut in their chests showed that when they were worn they must stand nine or ten feet high. Largest of all was a three-eyed monster, dark blue, crowned with a ring of little white skulls. Its mouth was made to move, and now it hung open at its widest, displaying clashing white teeth and a scarlet gullet. Theodore could just make out that it was supposed to represent a bull, presumably the one who would cut the dough-giant to pieces in the dance the Major had described. He told himself it was only a mask, stupid and ugly, but all the same he shivered. As he turned, a monk came and leaned on the railing beside him as if to see what he had been looking at, then grabbed his arm and drew him away from the railing. It was Lung’s friend, Sumpa.

‘You must not look at that one without due preparation,’ he muttered.

‘What is it? Why?’

‘Yidam Yamantaka. Death and slayer of death. That he should encounter one at the start of an enterprise . . . walk with me, and if we meet anyone I shall be expounding to you the meanings of Yama and Yamantaka . . . in two nights you must leave.’

‘I know. Lung told me. I don’t know if Mrs Jones knows. I only see her now when we’re at the Lama Amchi’s house. I don’t even know which is her cell . . .’

‘I will show you. But you are fully ready?’

‘Some other people have moved into our guest-house, so we’ve had an excuse to pack most of our things away.’

‘Good. Now listen. At dusk the day after tomorrow the Steward of the Guest-houses will send fresh guests to your house. The honoured Lung will protest that there is no room, and the steward will say that there is nowhere else available. I will then come and suggest that you and the honoured Lung move to a cell in the monastery, and you will accept this. Thus your disappearance from the guest-house will be accounted for. You must tell some story to your friend Achugla.’

‘Major Price-Evans? All right,’ said Theodore reluctantly. Deceiving the old man would be unpleasant.

‘What about the horses?’ he asked.

‘It is arranged. Your guide, whose name is Tefu, will take a paper to the groom who has looked after them, authorizing him to buy them. He will give the groom, who cannot in any case read, some money for himself. All that is not important, or if it is I shall have taken care of it. There is no time to discuss it now. Lean on the rail here and listen.’

They had reached by this time the gallery on the south side of the courtyard, and a little way along it Sumpa halted and leant his elbows on the rail. Theodore fell in beside him, as casually as he could.

‘You see the hermit-caves?’ said Sumpa.

‘Yes.’

Major Price-Evans had told Theodore about the hermit-caves. In each of them lived a monk who had vowed to endure total isolation while he performed spiritual exercises. Most of them were walled in, with only a slit left open through which food could be passed. At the end of his time the monk would emerge purified, and gifted with strange powers. Apparently the Lama Amchi had achieved this, living alone, Walled into one of the caves, for seven years. It was to this he owed his spiritual authority. Seven years!

‘Follow the left-hand stair up, then,’ Sumpa muttered, ‘and you will see a ledge branching off to left and right. Three caves on the right-hand branch and one on the left. The woman is in that single cave on the left.’

‘Walled in?’ whispered Theodore.

‘Of course not. There is a token stone at the entrance. Now, immediately we have left the guest-house I will take you to a side-door to the monastery – the one you used when you came to the ceremony of the oracle. Go there on the night and behind the door you will find a monk’s robe, folded. Take that with you and go to the cave. You will meet no-one of importance. All the senior monks will be in the temple for the ritual that starts the days of meditation before the festival. The woman will be there also for a while, but at a certain point in the ceremony she will leave and return to her cave. She will find you there and not be alarmed. You will explain what is happening. She must dress in the robe you carry and raise its cowl, so that in the dark she may pass for a monk. You will lead her back by way of the door through which you entered the monastery, and turn west, along beneath the wall, until you come to the place where there are many shrines on either side of the path, above and below. You know it?’

‘Yes.’

‘At the third shrine turn left and climb straight up the hill. In thirty paces you will come to a platform which was made for a shrine not yet built. Tefu will be waiting there, with the honoured Lung, and your horses. He will have yaks and men. If you leave at once, travelling in the dark, you will be able to camp by the edge of the Stone Lake and cross it next day at dawn. You can do all this? It must be you, because you speak the woman’s language, and moreover you are the Guide, so no-one will question or stop you.’

‘I think I can do it. I don’t see why not. I’ll make sure I know my way through the monastery so that I can find it in the dark. I’m much more worried about the journey.’

‘No difficulty there, provided you leave unnoticed. You will have three days’ start, and before the end of that time you will be among friends. I am only the furthest finger-tip of the strong hand that will take you to safety.’

A monk came pacing along the gallery. Sumpa started telling Theodore the names of the demons who inhabited the mountain peak, but as soon as the monk was out of earshot, led him away to show him where he would hide the robe Mrs Jones was to wear. Theodore by now knew the monastery well enough to notice that they were making a longish detour to avoid the courtyard where Yidam Yamantaka – Death and Slayer of Death – stared at the sky.

There was one more meeting at the Lama Amchi’s, and Theodore, despite his new nervousness, could not see that it differed at all from any of the other recent meetings. The pattern had changed from that of earlier days. Nowadays Mrs Jones wore her nun’s robe and barely seemed to notice Theodore, speaking directly to the Lama in Tibetan, stumbling but happier to communicate like this. The Lama answered her questions in short, repetitive sentences, and only called on Theodore to amplify some idea that could not be treated in simple terms. So Theodore spent most of his time at the window, reading or drawing; and even when he was taking part in the lessons, the ideas he was asked to translate were so strange and rarified that there was no need for him to shut his mind to them – he could not have begun to grasp them, however hard he had tried.

This made the lessons less tiring, but he was distressed by the increasing gulf that had opened between Mrs Jones and himself. It was she, now, who treated him as a mechanical device, while the Lama became increasingly polite and kindly. At the end of one meeting he had said, ‘Theodore, a guide exists by virtue of the path he has to show. Once the journey is made and the path known, he is a guide no more. A bowl of life-giving food does not itself give life. Once the food is eaten, the bowl is only a bowl.’

‘Yes, I know. I didn’t want to be anyone’s bowl.’

‘But you have served honestly, my child. I think well of you, for what my poor thoughts are worth.’

‘Thank you.’

An odd little part of Theodore’s nerves rose from the prospect of resuming the old life with Mrs Jones, the songs and the teasing and the rush of energy flowing out of her which was now all turned inward. Would it be like that again? He didn’t dare wonder. Luckily at that last lesson he was hardly called on to take part at all. It consisted largely of silences, repetitions of sacred formulae, hummings in the throat or single syllables exploding, while Theodore stood at the window and neither read nor drew, but stared at the majestic skyline he hoped he would not see again.

The scene at the guest-house went like a well-rehearsed play. For some days the over-decorated little room had become increasingly crowded and smelly and noisy as visitors began to gather for the festival. Tibetans seemed to have no sense of privacy at all, so wherever there was a spare patch of floor they thought it natural to spread out their flea-ridden blankets and bed down. Lung, now triply fastidious in his loneliness, fought against these invasions, using a screen and a barrier of baggage to mark out the area which belonged to him and Theodore, but even these frontiers of civilization contracted daily under pressure from the alien horde. On the evening marked for the escape there were already eight Tibetans – two of them boisterous small girls – using the guest-house when the door heaved on its frame, the latch gave, and a squat woman backed in, dragging a loose pile of baggage. Two thin little men, so alike that they were certainly brothers and therefore probably her husbands, followed laden with pots and food. Several children seemed to be hovering in the dusk beyond the door-frame.

The woman, bewildered but cheerful, stared round the room, spotted the last empty space between Lung’s cot and Theodore’s, and marched towards it. Lung rose to fend her off, but her technique for getting through the gap between the screen and the baggage was the same as the one she had used at the doorway – she reversed, pulling her belongings behind her, moving with enough momentum to knock Lung on to his cot when she collided with him. By the time he was on his feet the children – there were only two of them after all – were climbing across the baggage pile, the men were halted in the gap, and three of the other inhabitants of the guest-house were crowding behind them to watch the upheaval and explain to the woman that the space between the foreigners’ cots was sacred ground, or something of the sort. At the same time the two little girls came shrilling across to tell the new children about the wickedness of climbing on foreigners’ baggage, a lesson they themselves had only learnt two days ago. In the end Lung had to move the screen to reach the door where the Steward of the Guest-houses, a middle-aged monk, stood gap-toothed and blinking.

Lung began to argue. The Steward, who had acquired a smattering of Mandarin in the course of his duties, answered mostly with gestures, designed to show that the other guest-houses were even more crowded. Angrily Lung took him by the elbow and pulled him out of the door, so that it seemed perfectly natural for Theodore to wriggle through the crush and join the discussion outside. He reached them in time to see Sumpa come strolling down the path from the monastery. Lung turned to him in despair and fury.

Perhaps it was all a little too pat, but it seemed to Theodore quite convincing. Sumpa and the Steward argued for a little in Tibetan – perhaps for the benefit of the visitors now crowding the doorway, or perhaps because Sumpa had somehow engineered it that the Steward should bring the newcomers down, without letting him know the reason. But after a minute Sumpa turned to Theodore.

‘If the honoured Guide will come with me,’ he said, ‘I will show him an empty cell in the monastery which he can share with the honoured Lung. Meanwhile the honoured Lung can supervise the packing of your belongings. These peasants will bring them up to the path below the monastery wall and I will arrange for their collection from there.’

He spoke a couple of sentences in Tibetan and turned away, striding up the path with brisk small steps. Theodore caught him up.

‘I went out to the shrine this morning,’ he muttered. ‘There was a camp among them, three tents and some yaks.’

‘That is Tefu and his friends,’ said Sumpa. ‘I will go there now and send them to fetch the baggage. You go to the small door. The robe is where I showed you.’

When they reached the monastery wall he gave a formal little nod and hurried away, vanishing almost at once in the near-dark. Theodore followed the blank line of the wall in the other direction, noticing for the first time how noisy the evening was, with laughter and shouts from the guest-houses and the more distant throb and pulse of temple music. Below him, at the heart of the valley, a thunderstorm had brewed, and the continual flicker of its veiled lightning picked out the tree-tops and the spiky pinnacles of shrines below the path. When he came to the small side-door he found it wedged slightly open with a stone, and tied with a leather thong to prevent it from swinging in the wind. He slipped the knot by touch and slid through, kicking the stone away and latching the door from the inside. The robe was there; folded along the wall. He slung it across his shoulder and felt his way up the stair to the maze of galleries above.

This section of the monastery consisted mostly of the quarters of senior monks. Now there was no-one about, and few lamps burnt in any cells; but from the direction of the main temple came the murmur and throb of horns and drums and the ocean-like rumble of the monks’ responses, all echoed from the valley by the growing mutter of the storm. The building was like a vast creature, the rhythm of whose life at times draws all its living cells to the centre of its system, leaving its outer parts mere lifeless shell, untenanted. Through these veins and chambers Theodore stole like an infection. He felt totally safe.

‘I am armoured in faith,’ he whispered several times.

Whatever happened God would not let him be harmed, but moved beside him now so that all the demons of the mountain could not touch him. This exaltation of certainty lasted while he walked silently above the courtyards, round behind the temple of the oracle, down a stair and out into the main courtyard through the arch from which he had first seen it.

It was full night now, with many stars, though they were smudged out to the north where the thunderstorm was rising and nearing. He picked his way along beneath the slope of natural rock to the stairs he had climbed so often, going to lessons at the Lama Amchi’s house. Almost nonchalantly he started up them, reached the ledge where the two houses stood side by side, crossed it diagonally and began to climb the steeper, more irregular stairs to the caves. Stirred by the fringes of the storm, the night wind, icy cold, slashed and whipped at the mountain, snatching his panted breath from his lips and tugging at his clothes. He slowed his pace, taking care over each step, husbanding his energy as if he had the whole mountain to climb. When he looked over his shoulder he was astonished by how far he had come; the rock-face plunged down, seeming far steeper from above than from below, and the whole monastery was mapped out beneath him. The thought struck him that he should have come up here before and looked at the whole valley from this height. But mostly he kept his eyes on the individual steps, which were often no more than scooped footholds in the rock, no larger than a dinner-plate. At the steepest places a coarse rope, greasy with use, ran beside them.

At last came a change, a step that was wider than the others, and broader too, a place to rest and recover breath without feeling that the wind would scour him off the mountain. But it was too cold to stand still for long, and Theodore was about to climb on when his eye was caught by a dim yellow light to his left and he realized with a shock that he had reached the first line of caves. His eye was now trapped by that light and could see nothing else, so he had to feel his way, trembling suddenly with the knowledge of the sweep of rock below him, till he reached the cave mouth. Heavy curtain was stretched across it just inside. Eagerly he slipped through.

‘Hullo, Theo,’ said Mrs Jones.

She was sitting cross-legged on a prayer-mat on the floor, opposite a place where the cave wall had been roughly plastered and then whitewashed. Elsewhere it was naked rock, but hung with the usual banner-like pictures and patterns that decorated all the monks’ cells. The butter-lamp on the stool beside her cast slant shadows upward across her face. Her eyes were open but they looked heavy with sleep, and she was smiling dreamily, a smile that reminded Theo of the remote sweet smile of the Buddha in the temple.

‘I thought you’d still be in the temple,’ he said.

‘Gracious me! I’ve missed it! I was having a vision – ’salright, you didn’t interrupt nothing. I think it was finished.’

‘It’s time to go. They’ve sent me to fetch you. Everything’s ready. We couldn’t get a message to you earlier, but . . .’

‘I know, ducks. Listen, I’m afraid you’ll have to go back and tell them I ain’t coming.’

‘Not . . . But the baby! Proper doctors! India!’

‘It wasn’t never going to be India, love, not if that Sumpa had anything to do with it. He wanted the Tulku born where the Chinese could get their hands on him. But it’s no odds either way, ’cause I’m staying here. We’ll be all right, me and him – that’s one of the things I seen in my vision.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No more do I. I was just sitting here, humming one of me hums, when all of a sudden that wall there started a-glowing, all kinds of colours and shapes, real beautiful, like nothing I never seen, and I sat where I was with my eyes on stalks, and somehow the patterns became a lotus, and it opened and opened, and there he was at the heart of it.’

‘Who?’

‘Tojing Rimpoche, the Siddha Asara.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t that sort of seeing. The lotus was, but I seen him somehow different, in a way as won’t go into words. But he was there, right enough.’

‘I thought he was supposed to be . . .’

She chuckled like her old self and slapped her belly.

‘In here. Not really. It ain’t like that, far as I can make out. Matter of fact, I don’t think any of them’s proper clear how it all works – you see they don’t usually find a Tulku till he’s four years old, about, when he can talk and tell ’em things about his old life, so as they can be sure they’ve got hold of the right kid . . . Do you know, couple of nights back he gave me a great kick from inside – funny how they do that – but it’s early, innit? Shows the little beggar’s going to be strong . . . bit of a shock for you, young fellow, climbing all the way up here and finding I’m going to cry off.’

‘No,’ said Theodore slowly. ‘I guess I’ve known for a long time that you weren’t coming. I guess Lung’s known too . . . Oh, Mrs Jones, won’t you come and tell him yourself? I can’t! I just can’t!’

She nodded briskly.

‘Quite right. ‘Course it’s up to me. I s’pose I wasn’t proper come to after my vision, trying to put it on you . . .’

She had learnt the Lama’s trick of rising so that she seemed to float to her feet.

‘Sumpa gave me a monk’s robe,’ said Theodore. ‘In case anyone tries to stop you.’

‘They won’t . . . it’ll be funny going out without my escort. Wonder where they got to. Probably they come to take me to the temple and found me having my vision, and they understood what was up and cut along without me. You go first, young fellow. Heavens, hark at that thunder!’

The storm had drifted closer now and was rubbing against the lower slopes of the mountain, the glare of its flashes making the landscape jump into being, sharp as cut paper, and then float dazingly on the retina when all was darkness again. The wind threshed among the many-faceted roofs below and thudded against the rock-face. If the monks were still singing in the temple, their voices were drowned by the voice of the storm. Clutching the hand-smoothed rope Theodore started down the first slant of steps, feeling for each foothold in the dark.

‘You ain’t scared?’ called Mrs Jones. ‘Want me to go first?’

‘No. It’s all right,’ called Theodore.

He had in fact hesitated at the first step, full of a sudden horror of falling, but then he remembered the assurance of safety that had surrounded him as he had come up this way, and he went down confidently, flight after flight, until he reached the platform where the Lama Amchi’s house stood beside the one that had belonged to Tojing Rimpoche. He was only half surprised to find that Mrs Jones had followed close on his heels, as if there were neither night nor storm.

‘That’s where he’ll get born,’ she said, flicking a thumb towards the empty house. There was something not exactly false about the gesture, but still not quite right. Indeed, since she had first spoken her manner had jarred. If he hadn’t come to know her so well in the past months he would never have noticed, but now he realized that she was play-acting. The role of Mrs Jones – the exuberant, warm, resourceful, crude-spoken horsewoman, who had worn her make-up so thick and her clothes with such an air – no longer quite fitted her. She had changed. She was somebody new and different, trying to fit herself back into the old role for the moment and getting it subtly wrong, too boisterous, too coarse-grained. He shook his head, unhappy at the distances that had stretched between them, and led the way down to the main courtyard.

As they reached the paving there came another change in her. She put her arm round his shoulders and held him close against her side, so that the folds of her robe flapped around him as they walked. Warmth seemed to flow out of her, and not simply warmth but a deep, quiet contentment.

‘Mind you, that was some vision I had,’ she said, speaking in a quite new voice, very soft and even. ‘I wonder if it’ll ever happen again. I hope so. Or perhaps once is enough.’

Still holding him she started to make the humming noise which the Lama had produced the night he had first told them about his search for the Tulku, a noise like the purr of a great cat, dreaming. She let go of him as they climbed the stairs, but was still humming as they moved through the network of galleries towards the little door. An old monk, tottering along with a lamp, met them, peered astonished through the dimness and stood reverently aside. Mrs Jones said a few words to him in Tibetan, perhaps a blessing, but didn’t pause in her stride. Theodore noticed that she was actually walking in a different manner, as though she was conscious every instant of the treasure she now carried.

‘Do you believe everything the Lama Amchi says?’ he asked. ‘You used to say he was sly.’

‘Oh, he’s that all right, sly as a coach-load of politicians. Everything we said about him at the start, wanting to keep his hands on Dong Pe and all that, it’s true. But it don’t make no difference to him being holier than all the saints in the calendar and wiser than the Three Wise Men. But I ain’t doing what I’m doing for him, you know. I ain’t even doing it for the Tulku. I’m doing it for me.’

They met no-one else as they crossed the final galleries, crept down the narrow stair in the outer wall and through it into the night. Theodore wedged the stone back into the jamb and lashed the door tight with the thong, then started along the path. The valley was like a cauldron now, boiling with thunder. The cloud-layer hid the lightning-flashes, but the glare of them filled its surface with sudden luminosities, so that a cloud-tower would glow white for a moment, seeming to float by itself in the dark, and somehow to belong for that moment to the same order of creation as the monastery, with its towers and spires and ramparts. Though it felt as if huge rain-drops should have been clattering down, the air was desert-dry, whipping to and fro in fierce gusts. Theodore discovered that he was still carrying the monk’s robe, slung over his shoulder, and the wind flogged it against his ribs as though it held a wiry but boneless body. The thunder drowned any noise the wind might make, so that its violent movements came unheralded, like willed onslaughts.

Theodore led the way along the path until they reached the area of shrines. At the third one – he saw its spire, topped with a crescent, outlined against the higher clouds which flickered continuously with reflected light from the storm – he turned and began to climb the slope in paces only a few inches long. Mrs Jones came effortlessly behind him. Now a different light showed, faint but yellow and steady – a lantern. Theodore climbed panting over the rim of the platform and saw in the dimness men and horses and loaded yaks, but before he could advance a pace Mrs Jones seized his elbow.

‘Why’d you bring me here?’ she gasped.

‘It’s where Sumpa told us to . . .’

‘But he must of known! This is the place where they’re going to build his shrine – Tojing Rimpoche’s, when his body comes home!’

Before Theodore could answer Lung rushed out of the group of men, no doubt having heard her voice.

‘You come, Missy!’ he said. ‘I think all these long days . . .’

‘No, sweetie, I ain’t coming,’ she answered. ‘Listen . . .’

The rest of the sentence was drowned in thunder. She led Lung aside, and in the next glare Theodore saw the pair of them outlined right at the edge of the levelled ground, Lung with his head bowed and Mrs Jones facing him, holding both his hands in hers and looking up into his eyes. Lightning came and went and came again, and each time they were still in the same pose. A man grunted close at Theodore’s side.

‘When we go?’ he said in harshly twanging Mandarin. ‘This most bad night. Go soon.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. ‘Wait. The woman is not going.’

‘Ho! Monk Sumpa say woman must go! Say if woman no want to go, then we bind woman and carry!’

‘No . . .’ began Theodore, but the man – presumably he was the one called Tefu – turned and called to his companions. One of them was holding the lantern, so Theodore could see their surge across the levelled space towards where Lung and Mrs Jones stood. He called a warning, probably inaudible against a great bellow of thunder, but Mrs Jones turned and as the rumbles died started to speak in Tibetan. The men stopped in their tracks.

That last thunderclap was like a signal for the storm to end. Though it still muttered a little at its further fringes, and though the wind still hooted and flapped among the shrines, her voice rang clear. Theodore heard the word ‘Tulku’ repeated several times. A man, perhaps Tefu, made a lunge towards her but the others caught him and dragged him back. One actually whimpered out loud. Mrs Jones didn’t shout or rage, or even raise her voice more than was necessary to pierce the wind, but from her tone it was clear that she was telling them what penalties would be inflicted, by god and man and demon, on any who dared to touch the Mother of the Tulku. She faced them as confidently as she had faced her rebellious porters on the day Theodore had first seen her, though armed with other weapons. In some ways she had changed less than he had thought.

‘Fair enough,’ she said, switching suddenly back to English. ‘I’ve told ’em to bring our clobber back down to the monastery gate, and we’ll all go home and have a good night’s sleep. I’ll see as nobody gets into hot water over any of this.’

Theodore never clearly remembered walking back along the path to the monastery. He retained a dream-like image of several monks, including Tomdzay, at the gate, courteous and unsurprised, and then at last he was sitting exhausted on a cot in a fair-sized upper room in the monastery and watching some junior monks carry in the baggage and stow it against a wall. And then Lung stood framed in the doorway, wild and unfamiliar in Tibetan clothes, with the bandit’s sword stuck through his belt. He stared at Theodore, opening and closing his mouth as if trying to speak, but no words came. Instead Lung rushed suddenly forwards. Theodore tried to rise and dodge the attack, but had hardly moved before Lung’s arm was swinging at him, snatching at the robe he still carried slung across his shoulder, dragging it free so violently that he pulled Theodore to his feet. Theodore began to edge towards the door but Lung glared round the room, moving his head in savage jerks, until his eye was caught by the beam running up the far wall. He strode towards it, holding the robe at arm’s length in his left hand, while with his right he drew his sword and swung it back. The moment the robe touched the beam he struck, crying like a demon.

He stood back, panting. The russet cloth was pinned to the beam and hung limp from the blade, but the hilt still quivered from the force of the blow. Lung gazed at it, uttered a sobbing groan, flung his arms wide and collapsed face down on his cot.