Philip Kerr - Esau

The next second she saw two human feet, naked like her own. She heard a thin reedy voice, and then a bearded man was kneeling down at the tunnel’s entrance.

‘Everything is all right,’ he said quietly. ‘You can come out now. It is quite safe.’

It was the sadhu. The man she and Jameson had mistakenly tracked when they had first arrived in the Sanctuary.

Swift felt her face smile with relief.

‘Swami Chandare,’ she panted.

‘Are you training to become a sadhu?’ he laughed. ‘Why are you naked?’

Swift shook her head, too cold now to say anything. She felt the swami crawling into the tunnel beside her, turning her over, his hands upon her bare stomach. He wanted her too. Feebly she struck at him with her fist.

‘Calm yourself. I must bring you heat. Listen to me. You must relax. Breathe calmly and listen to me. You must breathe gently and feel nothing but my hands. And hear nothing but my voice. Feel the heat in my hands. Heat coming into your body. Breathe deep and listen to my voice...’

For a moment, she felt quite light-headed, as if she were floating somewhere. Was he hypnotizing her? If he was, she felt no fear. She let herself be stroked by the honied tones of his voice. And by the healing warmth in his hands. The power in his hands seemed to come from some great underground hot spring, so potent it might have been the force of life itself. It was like the anaesthesia offered by the drugs in one of Jameson’s darts, only much, much warmer than anything that might be offered at the point of a needle. She closed her eyes, feeling more relaxed now. Somehow the cold no longer mattered, and for a second she felt fear, thinking that this might be death, but then there was his voice again, calming her, telling her that it was not cold, assuring her that the heat she could feel in her stomach was coming from his hands.

‘...heat coming from my hands. There is no cold. There is only heat from my hands...’

There was heat. A deep, profound heat that seemed to flow out of him like a stream of hot water, warming her belly, her chest, and her arms. An inexorable tingling painless heat spreading through her limbs as if he had simply plugged her into an electric current. Feeling returned to her hands and to her feet. There was not even any pain as sluggish, half-frozen blood began to move in her bluish toes and her fingers. Just a wonderful feeling of well-being that seemed never ending.

‘...listen to me. Awake.’

Swift opened her eyes and stared into the swami’s bearded face. He smiled. His hands were still on her naked body, but she felt no sense of her own nakedness. She felt only warmth. Incredible warmth. The last time she had felt so warm she had been lying on a beach in Santa Monica. Her breath was there in front of her mouth, only without the accompaniment of teeth chattering together. It was freezing cold. And yet she was as warm as if she had still been wearing her SCE suit. The snow under her bare behind actually felt like the softest and warmest sand.

Sleepily she smiled back at him and shifted comfortably.

‘I must be dreaming,’ she said.

‘Trust your dreams,’ said the swami. ‘In them you will see the way to eternity. But now we must go find your clothes.’

He helped her out of the tunnel of undergrowth, took off his threadbare robe, and wrapped it around her for the sake of modesty.

Swift glanced anxiously at the big silverback yeti now sitting calmly beside Boyd’s broken body and pressed herself close to the swami’s back.

‘My brother will not harm you while I am here.’ The swami glanced sadly at Boyd’s body. ‘Nevertheless, your friend... I am very sorry.’

‘He was no friend of mine.’

‘A leaf does not turn brown and die without the whole tree knowing.’

The swami led her through the trees and across the clearing to where the satellite lay. The yeti followed meekly, at a short distance, like some sort of bodyguard.

‘Ever since it landed here, I have been expecting someone to come,’ said the swami. ‘Such is the way of the world. I must confess, I have been dreading this moment.’

‘That was Boyd. The dead man. Not me. He came for the satellite. I came to find out about the yeti.’

‘And they led you to the same place.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I meant no harm. I only wanted to know about the yeti.’

Swift collected her protective underwear and unhurriedly put it on, for she still felt as warm as if she had come straight out of a sauna bath.

‘As an object of intellectual interest, I think my brother is not much more than an abstraction to you. But to my soul, he is an object of joy. To the enlightened man he is a thing of truth and beauty, a window through which one may gaze in wonder at the universe.’

The yeti sat down at the swami’s feet and allowed the holy man to stroke him with careless affection.

‘You keep calling him your brother,’ remarked Swift, climbing back into her SCE suit. For all the many facts about the yeti’s blood chemistry that Lincoln Warner had told her, she still felt that she understood very little about this extraordinary creature. She remembered something the swami had said the first time. How he had warned her about looking for ancestors and family trees. ‘Fruit may fall into your lap,’ he had said. ‘You may be nourished by it. But do not be surprised if the branch breaks off in your hand.’ Clearly the swami knew more about the yeti than he had said. Perhaps he even knew all there was to know.

‘We are like the pillars of a temple. We stand close together, but not too close together, otherwise the temple would collapse.’

‘Just how close are we? The DNA says he’s very close.’

‘The world is not atoms,’ said the swami. ‘The way to understand this world and its creation cannot be achieved by studying it from the point of view of destruction. The atoms are not important. Only in the One and in the Whole is there love. This is the greatest truth of all and the first seed of the soul.’

Swift handed him back his robe. He drew it about his scrawny shoulders with an apparent indifference to the cold that Swift could now understand, for she had felt it herself. He helped her fasten her backpack life-support system as if he had done it many times before.

‘But what is the truth about the yeti? How did he come to be here? Why—’

‘Who knows the truth?’ He giggled in a way that reminded her of a newsreel she had once seen about the Maharishi. ‘Who can tell how and when this world and ourselves came into being? But what is certain is that the gods are later than the beginning. So who knows where any of us comes from? Only the God in the highest heaven perhaps. Or perhaps not.’

‘I don’t believe in God,’ said Swift.

‘You cannot know God by solving puzzles.’

‘Then will you tell me what you know about the yeti, not about God?’

‘They are the same thing. Life itself is a temple and a religion. What I do know and what I can tell you is born of the knowledge that if one only sees the diversity of things, with all their distinctions and divisions, then one has imperfect knowledge. Great are the questions you ask of the world. But since you only know a little, I will tell you more.

‘The yeti is more man than animal, but the animal is his innocence. The innocence that man has lost.

‘According to one of my predecessors, his own grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather many times over told him, whoever he was, that yetis were once abundant in these mountains. Indeed there were as many yetis as there were men. But as the men grew clever they became resentful of the yeti, for while they toiled, the yeti did nothing. What was more, the yeti were forever stealing tsampa , which is barley mixed with water and spices, and still the staple diet in this part of the world. Sometimes this was the only food people could get. Worse, they sometimes took meat, which is even scarcer than barley in these mountains.