Jack Higgins - Year Of The Tiger

There was a fine haze over the land that masked the distances and the wind was as warm as a caress. He reined in on top of the hill and saw a river running through a deep gorge below and Katya standing on the edge of the cliffs.

He cantered down the slope, dismounted andsent his horse to join hers with a smack on the rump. He paused to light a cigarette and as he looked up, she turned and headed his way.

She moved through the dry grass towards him and the sun was behind her and the image blurred at the edges. She looked unreal and ethereal and utterly transitory, as if at any moment she might fly away. But when she spoke, the spell was broken at once.

“Let’s sit down, Paul.”

They flung themselves on the short grass and, after a while, he closed his eyes and relaxed. It was so pleasant, he thought, so wonderfully pleasant to lie in the sun with the right person and do nothing.

He decided there was a lot to be said for beachcombing. Something tickled his nose and he opened his eyes and caught her gently stroking his face with a blade of grass.

“You know, I haven’t done this for years,” he said.

“But you should. After all, life is for living.”

“You’ve got a point there,” he told her. “The trouble is, I never seem to have the time. Some sort of personality flaw, I suppose.”

She chuckled. “I don’t believe you. Were you the same way when you were a little boy?”

He wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes as he tried to somehow measure the limitless depths of the sky. “I can’t really remember. My father was French and my mother was English. He was killed fighting with his regiment at Arras in 1940 when the panzers went through Belgium and France like a knife through butter. My mother and I got out through Dunkirk.”

“What happened after you got to England?”

He found himself opening up in a way he hadn’t done in years, thinking back into the past, half-remembered events suddenly coming to life again.

By the time he had worked his way through to his two years as a lecturer at Cambridge University, almost an hour had gone by.

He stopped talking, and she frowned down at him. “But I don’t understand. You had everything you ever wanted and the prospect of a brilliant academic future, and yet you threw it all away.”

“I changed my ideas about living, that’s all,” he said. “One summer vacation, I helped a friend of mine get a relative out of Czechoslovakia. I found I rather enjoyed the experience.”

She sighed and shook her head despairingly as though he were a small boy she had discovered engaging in some foolishness. “So you decided to take this sort of thing up permanently?”

“Oh, now I’m expert at it,” he said. “They even called me in to help get the Dalai Lama to India last year.”

He was giving away too much of himself, he knew that, but she had a strange effect on him, like that of no other woman he’d known before.

“And what does your mother think about it all?”

Chavasse grinned. “She believes I’m some sort of civil servant, which I am, in a way.”

Katya still looked puzzled. “And you honestly like this sort of life? Constantly putting your head on the block, never knowing when the axe might fall?”

“Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that all the time,” he said. “Working for the Bureau can mean anything from a job like this to making sure nobody shoots Comrade Khrushchev when he visits London. Don’t you approve?”

“It isn’t a question of approving or disapproving. It’s got nothing to do with politics or government or anything like that. It’s just that to me, it seems so wrong to see a fine brain wasted.”

He closed his eyes, remembering that someone else had once said the same thing. Katya’s voice moved on and then it began to rise and fall and then it was the rushing of the river in the gorge and then the quiet trickle of water over stones.

He awakened suddenly. Above him, clouds turned and wheeled across the sky, hinting at a break in the weather. Katya had gone, and he scrambled to his feet and looked about.

There was no sign of her and a slight twinge of panic sent him running to the edge of the cliff. She was standing on a boulder at the water’s edge, throwing stones into the river in an abstracted manner. As his boots crushed across the shingle, she turned towards him.

“You deserted me,” he told her. “I wakened to find you gone, like the enchanted Tartar princess in the fairy tale.”

She jumped down from the boulder and stumbled and he moved forward quickly and caught her in his arms. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, Paul, I wish it were like a fairy tale,” she said. “I wish this were an enchanted day standing still in time and that you and I were together for ever and ever.”

There was a depth and poignancy in her voice that brought a sudden lump to his throat. For a moment he gazed down into her eyes, and then he kissed her gently. She melted into him and the earth moved, but suddenly she broke away and stumbled across the shingle to the path.

When he reached the top of the cliffs, she was already mounted and galloping away, and it took him a moment or so to catch his horse.

As he went over the top of the hill, clouds moved cross the sun and a great belt of shadow spilled darkness across the ground.

He saw Katya moving towards it and he urged his horse into a gallop because, for some incomprehensible reason, he felt a desperate urgency to reach her before the shadow did.

When he was still thirty or forty yards away, it enveloped her and he reined in his horse. The shadow passed over him in turn and he felt suddenly chilled as fear touched his heart with ice-cold fingers.

For a little while he sat there listening to the sound of her horse’s hooves fade into the distance, and when she disappeared, hidden by a fold in the ground, he urged his horse into a walk and followed her.

When he reached the gate of the house, Joro was waiting for him, his face serious. As Chavasse dismounted and handed him the reins, the Tibetan said, “Captain Tsen’s been here asking questions.”

“What about?” Chavasse said.

“He’s making out a report for Lhasa,” Joro told him. “He questioned me for half an hour. I told him we were camped near Rudok when they attacked us. I said they dropped the bodies of the two guards down a hole in the ground.”

“Sounds reasonable enough,” Chavasse said. “Where is he now?”

“Inside. He was about to leave when the Stranoff woman came back. What happened out there? Did you two quarrel?”

Chavasse shook his head. “We decided to have a race on the way home, but my horse was winded.” He took his time in lighting a cigarette and said rapidly, “Everything’s going smoothly so far. The doctor is willing to come with us, and so is the woman.”

Joro frowned. “Are you sure she can be trusted?”

At that moment, the house door opened and Katya and Captain Tsen moved out onto the steps.

“This would seem to be about as good a time as any to find out,” Chavasse said, and walked across the courtyard to meet them.

Katya looked quite calm and completely relaxed and Captain Tsen smiled politely. “I hope you enjoyed your ride, comrade.”

“In such charming company, how could I fail to?” Chavasse bowed slightly to Katya. “I’m sorry I was eliminated so early in the race. I’m afraid my mount wasn’t up to it.”

“We must see if we can find you a better one next time,” she said. “I believe Captain Tsen wanted a word with you.”

Tsen raised a hand. “But there is really no hurry. I simply wish to hear your own account of your unhappy experience, comrade. For my report to Lhasa, you understand. As it happens, the good doctor has invited me to dinner this evening. Perhaps we could talk then?”