Tulku

6

FLIGHT, BUT A strange exhilaration, like the flight of a wild bird freed from the hand. They breakfasted on horseback and rode all morning, stopping only to water and feed the horses at two of the strange little circular ponds that pocked the plateau almost as dramatically as the rock pillars, impenetrably deep below the mirror surface. At their midday halt by another of these ponds Mrs Jones made them fake a struggle. Lung and Theodore wrestled vigorously on a patch of softer ground, laughing between the grunts of effort. When they rose, still laughing, Theodore found he was filled with a sudden rush of affection and comradeship, something which he had never known in the God-centred community of the Settlement. It was as though the three of them were the only people in the world. They left a couple of empty cartridge-cases by the pool and one of Mrs Jones’s scarves, bloodied with Lung’s blood, half-hidden at its edge. They loosened two boulders and threw them in, hoping that their pursuers would see the fresh sockets and guess that the boulders had been used to weight something down. Then they rode on towards a hamlet marked on the map, the only real houses for fifty miles.

Well short of this place Theodore and Mrs Jones dismounted and walked south, choosing hard ground where they would leave no footprints, while Lung rode on into the hamlet with instructions to make a parade of guilt and haste, buy what provisions he could – feed for the horses was the most urgent – and leave the place heading north.

It was almost dusk when Lung came over the horizon. The sun, low over the mountains, threw stilted shadows from the weary horses. Mrs Jones put four fingers into her mouth and produced a screeching whistle. He waved a triumphant arm and headed towards them.

‘All fine,’ he called, almost before he was in ear-shot. ‘I find Chinese trader-man. He think I rob you, kill you. I tell him going north. Find old river – no water, all rock. Ride long way. Then come round. Trader say men in village Red Lolo, men in forest Black Lolo. Black Lolo enemies with Red Lolo.’

‘Sounds promising,’ said Mrs Jones, spreading out P’iu-Chun’s map on a jut of the rock pillar they had chosen for a rendezvous. ‘Now see here. The track we been following gets up into the mountains through this pass here, but down south here, by the river – looks like it runs through a gorge all the way – there’s this other little path he marked . . .’

‘Very poor road,’ said Lung, reading the exquisite characters at the edge of the map. ‘Bad bridge. Very difficult mountains.’

‘The worse the better, far as we’re concerned, ’cause them brigands won’t imagine us trying it. Bit of luck they’ll think you done me in and shoved me in that pool, and then they’ll pack it in, ’cause it was me they was after.’

‘This path go into Tibet,’ said Lung.

‘Now ain’t that a rum do! Just what I been wanting all along. I hope you don’t mind, gentlemen both.’

‘You go. I go,’ said Lung.

‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones, smug as a well-fed cat. ‘Now we’ll give the horses a bite and a rest and get on as far south as we can. If there’s a moon like what there was last night, it’ll be good as daylight.’

That night’s march was the first part of a stage which lasted another five days. On the first afternoon it took them several hours to find a way across a dry ravine, but after that they rode south until on the second morning they reached the colossal gorge which they had last seen soon after they had left the forest. Here they turned west once more. All this time they saw no travellers, and only once, through the binoculars, a group of nomads herding a vast flock of browny-orange sheep.

Now, visibly, march after march, the mountains came nearer and at the same time looked ever more impassable. From a distance it had been easy to imagine clefts in the wall beneath the glittering rim, but at closer range the rock face showed no gap. It reached out of sight to north and south and at its nearest was still purple-blue with distance; to Theodore it seemed an impossible barrier, but Mrs Jones was not at all daunted. Indeed her spirits increased as the mountains neared and she sang and talked all day long, to Theodore, to Lung, to Sir Nigel if she felt like that. It was as if in her eyes the journey west was more than a haphazard line of escape, a running away. She was moving towards. Beyond the mountain rampart something marvellous was waiting for her, calling to her, drawing her on; and everything else that had happened – the Boxers, P’iu-Chun, even the ambush in the forest – was part of this pattern. The light persistent wind plucked at the folds of her riding-cloak as if trying to hurry her on.

On the fourth afternoon Theodore was riding alone, thinking about Father. He had deliberately let himself fall behind, because Mrs Jones was behaving in a manner which made her company uncomfortable. She was, to put it bluntly, flirting with Lung. Her excuse was a song she had chosen to sing:

‘The boy I love sits up in the gallery,

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

She had thrown back her veil and was continually glancing sideways at Lung from under her enormous lashes, and the poor young man was taking her behaviour at least half-seriously, laughing, but always with a certain embarrassment. Theodore had come to like Lung considerably; there was an inner dignity and pride in him, hidden at first under shyness and uncertainty but becoming steadily more noticeable as they rode across the grasslands. It was unfair of Mrs Jones to tease him like this in Theodore’s presence, so Theodore dropped back out of earshot.

As he watched the pair riding ahead, he wondered how Father would have reacted in his place. Of course Mrs Jones wouldn’t have behaved the same way with Father there – or would she? Father would certainly have reproved her, bluntly but without arrogance. He would have disliked her treatment of Lung quite as much as her general impropriety and would have said so. Ought Theodore to have done the same? No – he wasn’t Father. Father was . . .

It was strange to be thinking of Father like this, as it were from the outside. Father had been a wonderful man, good and clever and kind, but his personality had been so strong that it filled the Settlement. You breathed and ate and drank Father. Sometimes he was a cliff towering above you; at other times you swam in the lake of his love. But all the time you were somehow inside him, as the unhatched bird is in its shell; and now Theodore was outside, looking back down the vista of travelled days to where Father was dwindling, just as the limestone pillars of the plateau had dwindled with the miles.

Theodore was only very vaguely aware that this sense of dwindling and distancing was a symptom of the wound in his life beginning to heal; in fact his main reaction was one of guilt at the sense of ease and freedom he had been feeling for the last few days, and for a while he actually tried to open the wound up, to bring Father nearer by working himself back into a state of shock and agony at the destruction of the Settlement and his own casting-out. But at the same time he knew in his heart that this wouldn’t do. It was a lie, and Father had always taught him that unless you were truthful with yourself you couldn’t be truthful with anyone else.

He was distracted from this train of thought by an absurd piece of behaviour by the pair ahead. For a moment he thought that Lung had been stung by some insect, from the way he was wriggling about; but then it became clear that the Chinese was attempting to kneel on Rollo’s haunches, and having achieved that, to rise to his feet. He actually made it, and stood for two or three seconds, arms outstretched like a circus performer, while Mrs Jones applauded. Then he lost his balance and half-slid, half-jumped to the ground. Theodore would have thought that the pair of them were drunk if he hadn’t heard Mrs Jones complaining the night before that Lung had forgotten to buy any wine in the village in the hollow. He smiled at their childish antics, and decided that it was not his business to judge them.

This decision, though sensible, turned out harder to stick to than he would have guessed. The nights on the plateau were very sharp. If the air was still they would wake in the morning to find the miles of grass all white with frozen dew; and any wind that swept down from the mountains was like the breath of an ice-giant that can turn all living things to stone. They would halt near dusk, pitch the two little tents, feed and water the horses, then cook a meal on the portable stove and go to bed. Despite the cold Lung had taken to sleeping in the open, saying that he slept better that way. The tethered horses were their sentries.

However hard the ground, Theodore normally slept till dawn, and if he dreamed the images were lost beneath many layers of slumber. That night, though, he chose his sleeping-place carelessly and woke at an unguessable hour with his left leg completely numb where a lump of stone had pressed into a nerve. As he turned to ease it he groaned, still half asleep, and then he was wide awake, conscious that something had responded to his groan. There had been a noise and it had stopped. There was no wind. He listened till he heard a horse fidget, and knew at once that it had not been that. Now he was tense. Wild animal? Wolf? Bear? The men from the forest? No – the horses would be making more noise. Slowly he relaxed, and as he edged towards sleep once more his mind recreated the sound he had heard. It had been a laugh, very quiet, ending in whispered words. Not one voice, but two.

He was asleep before he worked out what it meant, and in the morning had forgotten the incident until they were loading the horses and Lung said something to Mrs Jones, out of Theodore’s earshot, and she laughed.

Even so, they had been travelling for some hours before he decided that he knew for certain that Lung and Mrs Jones were lovers. (Adulterers was the word he used in his mind.) After the first chill little shock – more unease than shock – at the memory of the laugh in the night, he had told himself that he must be mistaken. He was, in fact, instantly ashamed of his own nasty-mindedness. But then, as he noticed the behaviour of the other two to each other he became amazed at himself for not having noticed it earlier. It was as though they were talking, in glance and tone and gesture, a secret language to which he had hitherto been deaf; now he could hear it, though he still couldn’t understand the words. He remembered a sentence of Mrs Jones’s, bitten short, just after she had first seen their pursuers. He remembered their clowning the previous day, almost puppy-like in its spontaneous happiness. He remembered that first night on the plateau when he had fallen asleep in the cave and had been carried down those difficult steps to the tent . . . that was when it had started, he was vividly sure.

He came to these conclusions erratically, with many moments when he had almost persuaded himself that the opposite was true, or that he had not seen things which he knew he had seen, or that he had never heard Mrs Jones laugh to her lover in the dark – that it had all been a dream. He even wondered whether he was going mad. His own reactions to the knowledge troubled him almost as much as the knowledge itself. Here was an outright breaking of one of the Commandments, and he knew that what he ought to have felt was a mixture of pity and horror – pity for the sinners, horror for the deed. These emotions were there, but if he was honest with himself they were not his main emotions. He could summon them up if he concentrated, but as soon as he relaxed his will they disappeared in a storm of other emotions – a sense of betrayal, a curious jealousy at being left out of the secret, a slightly squeamish but inquisitive surprise that it was possible for two people so far apart in age to feel like that about each other, shame at his own cowardice in not denouncing them, in continuing to travel with them, in (to be honest) still wanting their company and their liking. What they were doing was wrong – wicked – but it did not feel like that. They were so happy, and Mrs Jones at least seemed to want Theodore to share in their happiness. In fact, when she tried to make him join in one of her songs and he rebuffed her, smiling thinly and shaking his head, he felt as if it was he who was doing wrong. It was like uprooting some cheerful little flower because it happens to be a weed.

By this time the nature of the terrain had altered. All morning the line of mountain below the snow-peaks had been losing its blue-purple vagueness and acquiring shape, ceasing to be a wall and becoming a series of steep spurs and screens, like the beginnings of roots round the bole of an enormous tree. Soon the real climbing would begin, though it was many miles still to the peaks. There was no track that Theodore could see, but the path on P’iu-Chun’s map followed the line of the enormous gorge for a while, then swung away, doubled back and reached it again at a lake, right up among the mountains.

‘Here’s where Mr What’s-is-name’s poor road begins,’ said Mrs Jones, almost eagerly, as if welcoming the challenge.

‘No way through,’ said Lung, shading his eyes like a hunter and scanning the whole line of mountains.

‘Hark to old eagle-eye!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Now look here. See where that shoulder sticks out? The gorge runs in south of that, and I ’spect it is where it is ’cause it comes out through a crack in the mountains and there’s no way through that side, so we got to get up behind the shoulder from the other side, and from the way he’s drawn it it ain’t no use heading straight up, we got to start out along that next spur there, and even that’s not going to be much of a party.’

She was right. After the days of easy travelling the journey slowed to an endless-seeming trudge across slant shale and scree, resting every hour and lucky to do two miles between rests, leading the horses almost all the way, seldom daring to look up from the ground for fear that a careless step would begin a hundred-foot slither, perhaps to a sheer cliff edge. The wind whipped savagely off the mountains, relaxed, and came again in buffeting gusts from unpredictable directions.

They camped that night on a slant platform of coarse grass, and almost had their tents washed away when a thunderstorm boiled up all round them in the small hours. Rollo cut a knee, wrestling with his tether in the panic, so they had to redistribute the loads, treating poor Sir Nigel as a common pack-horse. Next day they barely made ten miles, but reached at last the point where the spur they had been climbing rooted into the main mass of the rampart, and up this mass they crawled slantwise for the next two days. Around the middle of the second day they met three men – copper-skinned, fur-booted, smiling – leading a train of loaded yaks down the barely visible path and gossiped with them for a while in shreds of Mandarin. Yes, this was the road to the lake. No, no-one would stop them. So few people used this path that there was no real border. But yes, somewhere beyond lay Tibet.

Next morning they climbed the last few miles to the saddle and crossed the invisible border. It was icy cold. Patches of stale snow lay all along the level, and barely a blade of grass or other vegetation showed among the loose-lying rubble and gravel between. On either side the slopes curved up, harsh rock and loose boulders merging into the true snow-fields, never melting even in the height of summer. Mrs Jones made sure, despite the cold, that where the gentle-seeming sun beat down on them their skin was covered all the time. ‘Surprising how it can burn you at this height,’ she said. ‘All blisters I was once, up in the Andes. And don’t you go staring at them snow-fields or you’ll have a headache you’ll never forget.’

So, muffled against scorching as much as freezing, they trudged across the pass, with the horses gasping all the time at the poor, thin air. At last, after weary hours, they halted and stood gazing down at a long gash of a valley slanting into the tumbled mountains. The crack that had opened and let the river through was here more than a gorge. On its far side the cliffs rose almost perpendicular, but on this side it was as though half the mountain had been scooped away to create this valley. At their feet the path wriggled down a plunging bare slope until, thousands of feet below them, it came to the trees. Even from this height Theodore could see that it was nothing like the clogged and rotting forest where they had met the Black Lolo, but a pure stand of flat-topped pines with almost blue needles and a pinkish glimmer of trunks beneath. And thousands more feet below the trees lay the lake, so dark blue it was almost black, reflecting the tremendous cliff beyond.

‘This sacred place,’ said Lung in English.

‘You been here before, then?’ said Mrs Jones, mockingly.

‘I feel excellent ghosts.’

‘Let’s hope not. Now we’ll get a move on, so we can camp down among them trees, with a bit of luck find a clearing where the horses can forage, poor things, or they won’t be no use to us, not after what we been through these last few days.’

She hitched up her skirt and coaxed Albert, too tired and starved now to make trouble, down the first stretch of path.

It took them half the afternoon to reach the tree-line, but all the time the air became warmer and stronger, and sweeter too as the faint smell of the pines drifted towards them. And then, with their calves aching from the downward slope, they were among the trees, walking on pine-needles instead of rock and seeing on either side the pillars of the trees rising to the blue-green roof. There was some undergrowth – rhododendrons and trails of yellow-flowered clematis, but the whole impression was of almost ordered space, of mottled shadow and deep silence.

Still the slope plunged down, with the path twisting back and forth between the trees but heading generally west along the valley. They were beginning to look for a place to camp when Mrs Jones halted and handed her reins to Theodore before darting upwards into the wood. About twenty yards from the path she dropped to her knees in a nook between two glossy green mounds of rhododendron. She stayed quite still for more than a minute, just as if absorbed in sudden prayer, but her body hid whatever she was looking at until she rose and backed slowly away, still staring, still unmistakably worshipping. What she had found was a single lily-plant, a stem about three feet high fringed along its length with insignificant down-curled leaves, and at the top five trumpets of intense pale yellow, amid the shadowy browns and greens and blues of the wood a colour as sharp as the call of a bird.

She came back to the path shaking her head slowly from side to side. There was a shiver in her voice which Theodore hadn’t heard before.

‘That’s new,’ she said. ‘That’s me name in all the books. I’ll lay my best bib and tucker no-one’s never seen that before. Ain’t it a beauty! Where did I pack my trowel, Lung?’

‘Not time for digging,’ said Lung, a little sourly. ‘Must find grass for horses, place for camp.’

He was jealous. Even Theodore could hear that he resented her passion for this flower. She must have thought so too, to judge by her laugh.

‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘Fair enough, I’ll come along of you for a bit. We must be getting down near that there lake by now, and there ought to be somewhere along there. But I warn you, if we don’t fetch up somewhere good in half an hour I’m coining back, even if it means riding half the night to catch you up again.’

‘Maybe we find more flower,’ said Lung mildly.

‘That’s right. There can’t be just the one.’

They walked on. The slope, easing now, took the path down slantwise another mile or so into an area where the pines gave way to oak and the undergrowth was much more varied and profuse. Here Mrs Jones halted again and studied the tree-tops to their left.

‘Looks a bit more light down there, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘But it ain’t worth taking the horses down, case it’s no good. Nip off, Theo, and see, would you?’

‘I go, Missy,’ said Lung, eagerly, and before Theodore could move he had dropped his reins and was darting down between the bushes, leaping like a deer to clear the lower ones. He vanished from sight, but still they could hear the crack and rattle of his progress, loud in the forest quiet.

‘Changed, hasn’t he?’ said Mrs Jones. ‘He wouldn’t of been dashing about like that a fortnight ago, would he? You’ve spotted there’s something on between us, young man?’

Theodore wasn’t ready for the question.

‘I guess so,’ he muttered.

She lifted her veil and looked at him, smiling gently. Beneath her make-up he could see the lines of exhaustion creasing her face.

‘And what do you say to that?’ she whispered. ‘No, it ain’t fair to ask. You can’t go telling me to my face what sort of woman I am, can you? But let me tell you this – I ain’t ashamed of myself. He’s a duck, ain’t he? You ever seen a young fellow so happy? You’ll be lucky if you feel like that yourself one day. I tell you, it was seeing I could still do that to a bloke as begun it in me, and now I don’t know as I’m not a bit head-over-heels myself . . . disgusting, ain’t it, in an old baggage like me?’

Theodore shook his head. It was sinful, but it was not disgusting.

‘Glad you think so, ’cause I see it’s rough luck on you. It ain’t easy living along of a pair of love-birds, and never mind your principles. But you ain’t going to go all haughty on us, are you? You’ll put up with our doings? Not that you got much choice.’

He nodded, dumbly. Certainly he had no choice, not just because he was forced into their company, but because it was impossible to resist her pleading.

‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘I’ll teach you drawing. That’ll be something, to make up like. Here comes young Galahad – he better not see me holding your hand, or he might hit you.’

As Lung came crunching up through the wood Theodore discovered that her small fingers had been gripping his wrist like a steel bracelet. He rubbed the place, feeling dazed and uncertain.

‘Number one fine place,’ panted Lung. ‘Plenty grass, plenty water.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘You two take the horses down, set up camp, while I nip back for my Lilium Jonesii. How’s that strike you, Theo? Lilium . . .’

‘Missy come along this way,’ interrupted Lung. ‘All day walk too far. I fetch this flower.’

‘So who’s being masterful?’ said Mrs Jones, only half-mockingly. ‘All right if you say so – I’m fair tucked-up, to be honest, and I’m surprised you ain’t too. You got to promise to do the job proper, like you seen me doing it. I want every hair off every root. First off you got to dig . . .’

‘I know. I dig very well,’ said Lung, seizing Mrs Jones’s wrist in his impatience and trying to drag her from the path. She shook him off, laughing.

‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘Here’s the trowel. You cut along up the path or it’ll be too dark to see where you’re digging. Come on, Theo.’

For a moment Lung seemed reluctant to obey, but then he made up his mind and started back along the path.

‘See any hoof-prints, try and wipe them out,’ called Mrs Jones as she led Albert down between the bushes. ‘We’ll have to make a proper job of that tomorrow, if we’re going to have a bit of a rest here.’

Theodore saw that she was already picking her way with extra care, choosing patches of fallen leafage that left no trace of their passage, and making wide circuits to avoid breaking through undergrowth.

‘Do you really think they’ve followed us this far?’ said Theodore, after a while.

‘You can’t never tell with blood feuds. Besides, they ain’t the only ones we got to look out for – there’s other people use that path, and some of them might think as we was easy pickings like that first lot did. Nearly there. Hi! What’s this? Ooh, the yellow monkey! I thought as he was up to something!’

The spate of exclamations had begun with a squeak and ended in a whisper. Theodore, his eyes on the ground to choose the least betraying path, looked up to see what had caused that note of hushed excitement, almost of awe. At first all he noticed was that she was standing beside Albert on the edge of open ground; a mile beyond her a wall of dark cliff reared up, but in the middle distance was only the pale and mist-tinged luminosity of evening. He led Rollo up to her side and found that he was looking down a green coomb that reached right to the lake shore. The green was grass and looked good for grazing. A thin stream threaded through it.

Slowly his eyes were drawn away from these practicalities by the mountain opposite, the enormous wall of granite rising from the water, and above it the glittering ice-peak, pink and gold with sunset. The lake surface mingled the colours of the dark cliff and the pearly sky into a silky shimmer. The mountain was a huge presence, imposing awe and quiet.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he whispered to himself.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed ’em!’ said Mrs Jones, flinging out an arm. Theodore followed the direction of her gesture.

The flanks of the coomb were not as steep as its head, where they were standing. The trees reached the rim and stopped, leaving caves of shadow beneath their lower branches. In this shadow the lilies glowed.

‘Did you ever see anything like it?’ said Mrs Jones. ‘In your wildest dreams, even? Ooh, Where’s that fancy-dan of a poet? I could of told he was being artful!’

‘Here, Missy,’ said Lung with a chuckle in his voice, coming quietly up behind the horses. ‘You find plenty flowers?’

‘Oh! You!’ cried Mrs Jones, spinning round to seize and hug him. ‘I’d kiss you, too, young man, only I’m scared what he might do to us.’

‘Missy go see flowers,’ said Lung, disengaging himself. ‘I make tent.’

There was a note in his voice as though he had created the coomb for her sake and was now presenting it to her, like an emperor giving his beloved a kingdom. But Mrs Jones stayed where she was.

‘Funny thing,’ she whispered. ‘Ever since we crossed the Yangtze I’ve had a feeling something was sending for me, calling me westward. Perhaps this might of been it.’