Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘The old man shot at the top of the trees,’ said Theodore. ‘His pistol blew up. He wasn’t aiming anywhere near them.’

‘That shows,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Fair enough, we’ll get along like we was before we reached Mr What’s-is-name’s. If we don’t have the litter there’ll be two horses spare . . .’

It must have been more than an hour before they were ready to move again. Mrs Jones was unusually sharp and bossy about the details of packing. All round them the rotting woods seemed to watch them move, and Theodore’s nape prickled at every crackle and whisper from the shadows, but even while Lung and Theodore held the guns so that Mrs Jones could change into her riding-habit, no sign of attack came. The ponies grazed. Sir Nigel champed at his feed-bag. Lung and Mrs Jones mimed an elaborate argument about whether to go on up the track or back to the porter’s village and pretended to settle on the latter. At last, shivery with nerves, they were ready.

‘Now Missy foreign woman again,’ said Lung, with a touch of sadness in his voice which rang strangely in this scene of danger and urgency. Theodore guessed he felt that somehow he had been demoted – there was a difference between leading a ritual procession for an important Chinese woman and being guide and factotum for a foreign plant-hunter.

‘Looks like you’re as foreign as I am round these parts,’ snapped Mrs Jones. ‘Tuck that sword you found away and take the shot-gun. Ride with your thumb on the safety-catch, too, and keep your eyes skinned. With a bit of luck they’ve guessed we’re going back, but then again they might of split up, ready to have a go at us either way, once we’re in among the trees. You first, Lung. Theo, you’ll have to ride Bessie and lead Albert – don’t stand no nonsense from him. I’ll be rear-guard. Off we go.’

Lung started towards the dark chasm between the trees. Theodore coaxed Bessie into movement and Albert followed, nervous but subdued. As they reached the trees a voice called in the wood below, but some way back.

‘Don’t hang about, Lung,’ shouted Mrs Jones. ‘We got to get well ahead.’

Lung slapped his pony into a bouncy trot, and Bessie followed the example. One more alarm, Theodore guessed, and she’d try to bolt again. He was tense with readiness when, just before he reached the first bend in the track, a weird wailing rose behind him, shrill and throbbing, like a dog baying. He glanced back and saw that Mrs Jones did the same. Beyond her, framed in the arch of light where the path opened into the glade, Uncle Sam was kneeling by one of the bodies. He looked up to the sky and raised his arms, one swathed in blood-soaked rags. Still wailing, he bowed over the body and covered his face with his hands. His fingers tore at his tangled grey hair.

‘Move along,’ called Mrs Jones. ‘I can’t stomach no more of this. Looks like it might of been his son.’

5

IN THE REST of that day, though the track became steadily narrower and steeper, they travelled further than they had done in any two previous days. They heard and saw no sign of pursuit, but Mrs Jones would rest no more than the horses needed. She was unusually silent, riding close behind Albert so that at the slightest sign of jibbing she could flick him across the haunches with a long withy she had cut – but indeed she seemed to drive them all on, horses and humans, as though she had funnelled her swirling energies into a single blast before which they were nothing but wind-borne seed, blown steadily up the track. It wasn’t that she was scared, Theodore guessed. It was something else.

The map which P’iu-Chun had given them looked like an illustration to a fairy-tale, with a curly dragon blowing the prevailing wind from the south-east corner and delicate drawings crowding the blank spaces; but it was surprisingly accurate, marking every fork in the track, and at last the endless series of zigzags which brought them up into the Plain of Shrines. For more than an hour they had climbed this last section, with the tree-tops below the path not reaching high enough to obscure the view across to the opposite side of the valley, just as steep and now astonishingly near. And then they were in the open.

The trees ended as though a line had been shaved along the rim of the valley and they came out wearily on to a vast, undulating, grassy plateau which seemed to reach right to where the wall of the true mountains shot towards the sky. Scattered all across this plain were strange rock outcrops, carved by wind and water into pinnacles and pillars and shapes like fortresses, and pocked with caves. Sometimes a fuzz of twisted trees crowned these outcrops, and nearly always there was a shrine or tomb, mostly in ruins but once or twice looking almost new.

To Theodore’s eye the path vanished – you could roam where you wished over the measureless grassland – but Mrs Jones seemed to see where it lay. The grass itself was deceptive, shimmering green in the distance but underfoot only tufts and sparse blades protruding through shaly soil. The air was almost painfully sharp and clear after the muggy heat of the valley. At first their path took them back to the line of the river, which now ran a thousand feet below them, cutting its way through a gorge which made the ravine at the Settlement seem no more than a trivial crack. Even from this height, though, they could hear the mutter of rock-torn water. Then the river curled away south and for three hours they rode through the weird plateau, with no landmarks except the rock formations, which often looked completely different from different angles. It became steadily colder, and Theodore was grateful for another of P’iu-Chun’s ‘gifts’, a hip-length jacket of coarse-woven wool, with a breast-pocket he could fill with bread to munch as he rode.

Towards dusk they came to a pillar crowned by a shrine and a single, leaning birch-tree. A flight of steps had been cut in the sheer side. Mrs Jones reined and looked at it.

‘This’ll do,’ she said. ‘You two give the horses a feed, and I’ll nip up with the glasses and see if I can spot if we’re being followed. If we ain’t, then we’ll camp here – if we are, then we’ll have to plug on.’

She dismounted, took a pair of binoculars from her saddle-bag and started to climb the steps. Lung seemed even more absent-minded than usual, so Theodore saw to the horses single-handed. When he had finished he found Lung staring up at the rock-pillar and followed his gaze. Mrs Jones was there, standing on a slant of rock stair forty feet up, her back braced against the cliff and the binoculars to her eyes.

‘She has a great head for heights,’ said Theodore.

‘She is the osprey on the crag,’ said Lung. ‘She is the song men sing when they march under banners. Her heart beats with the blood of dragons.’

‘Yes, she doesn’t seemed scared of anything.’

‘But she is the duck on the nest. She is flute music heard under willows in the evening. Her eyes shine with lamplight from old gardens.’

‘Is that your own poem?’

‘A beginning. You have fed the horses?’

‘Yes. Do you . . .’

‘Look, she has seen us.’

Mrs Jones’s voice floated down through the evening stillness. ‘Cooee! I can’t see nothing, and that’s right to the forest. We’ll camp here. And I’ve found a nice cave a little up the cliff.’

* * *

The cave was dry and surprisingly clean. Lung said it had probably been used by a hermit. They made no fire, but cooked hot stew from a can using Mrs Jones’s patent stove, whose white tablets of solid fuel reeked vilely in the clean air. They ate their food in the dark, by feel and smell, and watched a storm build itself against the mountain wall far to the north. Lightning whipped and blinked, too distant for them to hear the thunder, but overhead the sky was full of stars.