Peter Dickinson - Tulku

When they travelled on next morning they found the escort was increased by two men who wore monks’ robes but were built like wrestlers, and indeed turned out to be just that. At their next halt they engaged in a highly formalized fight, accompanied by sharp barks and grunts. Mrs Jones watched the bout with a keen and knowing eye. Apparently they were soldier-monks, employed to escort important men, and even to fight with monks from other monasteries in disputes over territory. They wore their hair combed over one ear in a great curling swag. Mrs Jones was delighted by them, but to Theodore it was just another example of the absurdity of these heathen beliefs, that a religion which claimed to be founded in peace and the rejection of earthly vanities, should train such men.

That night the three of them were sitting on a pile of rugs in the corner of a single upstairs room in a large farm. The Lama had vanished, as he sometimes did. The escort and the farm family were clustered round the stove in the middle of the room. Mrs Jones was trying to tease Lung and Theodore into asking impertinent questions about the family, which seemed to consist – as in the other farms they had stayed at – of one wife, three or four husbands and a few children.

The door on the far side of the room opened, producing a come-and-go of the chill night air as the two soldier-monks entered. They crossed the room and bowed formally to Theodore.

‘Lama say come. Bring woman,’ said one in grunted Mandarin.

‘’Bout time too,’ said Mrs Jones, when Theodore had translated. ‘We got to sort out how far we’re going along of him, and find a proper magistrate or someone what can give us some travel papers, so as we can go off on our own. I wouldn’t mind staying round these parts for a month – there’s hundreds of things to find in some of these valleys.’

She rose, drawing her cloak round her. Theodore reached for his coat. But as Lung got to his feet the soldier-monk who had not spoken made a vehement gesture with his arm, palm forward, as if to push him back onto the rugs.

‘Lama see boy. Lama see woman. Lama not see man,’ said the first monk.

‘I go where the Princess goes,’ snapped Lung.

The monks frowned at him. He gazed hotly back until Mrs Jones laid her hand on his arm.

‘Best do like he says, love,’ she said. ‘Theo and me’ll look after each other, and somebody’d best stay here, stop the beggars going through our baggage.’

Lung shrugged, sighed and returned to the rugs. The silent monk joined the group round the stove. The other one held the door and let Theodore and Mrs Jones climb down the ladder to the farmyard. After the fug and reek of the upper room the night air, crisp with its passing over frosted snows, brought Theodore’s weary nerves to wakefulness; but as they followed the monk up the hill by the light of a half moon, this sense of energies renewed ebbed away. The monk led them not to one of the other houses in the hamlet but straight up a steep meadow into whispering woods. Calves and thighs ached with each step, and the fresh-seeming night air was only a rasp in the throat, with no substance for the lungs. It was very dark under the trees, but Theodore sensed a beetling mass close ahead. The path twisted as if to avoid it and climbed again, more steeply than ever. At last, when Theodore felt he could go no further without a rest, the monk grunted ‘Wait,’ and moved away to the right. For a while Theodore could hear nothing through the sound of his own gasping breath, but then he was aware of voices that seemed to be coming from the middle of the night sky, somewhere out over the valley.

‘Bit of rock buttress there,’ whispered Mrs Jones. ‘They’re out near the end of it.’

The voices ceased and the monk returned. They followed him up to the right and then, as Mrs Jones had guessed, out along a level platform of rock that led them through the tree-tops and into the open air. At the end of the platform was a small shrine, just like the hundreds of others they had seen in the last six days, a square stone box surmounted by a pointed dome, and at the very top the symbol of a crescent moon, a black shape that echoed the silver crescent now riding above the snow-fields. Round the far side of the shrine, sitting cross-legged on the ground, they found the Lama Amchi. Despite the bitter night air he was naked to the waist.

He spoke briefly to their guide who bowed and left without a word.

‘Sit,’ said the Lama.

They settled, fidgeting a little for comfort on the smooth but icy rock. Below them the few lights of the hamlet glimmered in the mass of dark which lay impenetrable, almost as if it were a liquid, all up the valley’s side to where the tree-line ended; above that in lesser blackness rose the rock screes and the cliffs; and above these, brighter-seeming than the moon itself, the glaciers and the glittering wastes of snow. As the body-warmth engendered by the climb faded, the chill of those snows seemed to fill the slow breeze and seep like water through Theodore’s clothes.

‘I am troubled,’ said the Lama at last. ‘I think you are not after all the one I seek.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You tell me you are thirteen years of age.’

‘That’s right.’

‘There is no mistake about this? You count the years in the same manner as we do? A child who has lived for one whole year and is now in his second year, you call him two years of age?’

‘No. We call him one. We only count whole years. I am thirteen years and five months old.’

‘Ah. And this woman is not your mother? It is necessary for me to know, even if you have reason to pretend other than the truth.’

‘No. Honest. My father was a Christian missionary in Kweichow. My mother died when I was four.’

‘Six days you have been in Tibet. You have eaten our food and drunk our drink, travelled our paths. You have slept in a certain house, met a certain man. All this was wholly new to you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘In these six days you have not seen or smelt or heard anything which woke in you a feeling that you already were acquainted with that thing?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

The Lama sighed and fell into silence.

‘What’s he on about?’ whispered Mrs Jones.

‘I don’t know. He’s asking questions about me, and whether I remember seeing things before.’

‘Not much help,’ she muttered. ‘Ask him why he wants to know. Go on, he won’t bite you. That way we might be able to tell him something he didn’t know he was after.’

Before Theodore could frame the question the Lama sighed again.

‘And yet the signs seemed so sure,’ he said. ‘Tell me, child, how you came to the valley, you and this strange woman and the Chinese, pursued by murderers.’

‘It will take a long time,’ said Theodore, reluctantly.

‘You are cold? Take my robe. I do not need it. I am warm. Feel my flesh.’

It was a command. A little embarrassed, Theodore wrapped himself in the harsh cloth and then reached out and touched the naked shoulder. It was warm, not simply with the warmth of health but as if with a fever.

‘He’s hot!’ he exclaimed in English. Almost languidly Mrs Jones peeled off her glove, touched the Lama’s arm and withdrew her hand.

‘Fancy that!’ she said. ‘Mind you, it’s not all that surprising. I can think myself warm sometimes – not that warm, mind you.’

‘What does she say?’ said the Lama, his voice suddenly sharp with interest. He grunted with approval as Theodore explained.

‘Now tell me your tale,’ he said. ‘For six days I have not enquired, nor told you the nature of my search, because I did not wish to plant seeds of thought in your mind until I found whether the thoughts were already there. They are not. Moreover, the Abbot of Daparang, who knew the one I seek in his previous childhood, could find no echo in your soul. And furthermore your age, which I misunderstood at our first meeting, makes it impossible. So we may speak more clearly now, I think.’