Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘So I set out, journeying south-east, enquiring in the villages I passed for children of unusual learning. But more and more as I considered the matter, and the signs I had been given, I dwelt on the absence of any sign concerning a dwelling place. Therefore, though I had come to the last village for very many miles, I did not turn back, reasoning that I might meet the one I sought far from houses, and that a child begotten in a foreign land might dwell still in that land. And behold, at the very edge of what is now Tibet I met with a child who said he was in danger and who bore in his pocket pictures which were symbols of lower creations, a lily and a horse. Next he spoke of a foreign woman, who might well be his mother – for how else should he be travelling with her in these wild places? And it was to be surmised that the Chinese of whom he spoke was their guide. When the child told me that his name meant Gift of God I felt assured that I was near the end of my search, though the child gave me no new sign.

‘This might have troubled me earlier, but when I encountered the woman I recognized her as being a soul of great spiritual power, untamed and undirected, and I told myself that such a one might well be the mother of a Tulku and took this for a sign. It was then I decided that we must return to Dong Pe and ask the oracle whether I had read the signs correctly.

‘But during our journey I have become increasingly aware, both from outward observation and from inward searching, that the child is not the one I seek. There were many small signs of this. He felt all around him to be strange. I watched him reading from his Christian book and sensed his active dislike of all our ways and thought. I felt no echo of the Tojing Rimpoche I had known for more than thirty years, and last night the Abbot of Daparang confirmed my thought.

‘And yet the signs were so sure. Even now, though I know my reading of them to have been mistaken, I feel assured that these were the signs I was sent to seek. It is as though I had pieced together a torn sheet of paper, but done so in the wrong order, so that the message I read is not that which the scribe wrote; so I must study the scraps again to discern the true order. Reason tells me that the search is not at an end, and that with your help I may yet find the one I seek. It is possible that the woman is the guide of whom the oracle spoke, and that she will recognize the Tulku when she sees him. I do not know. I have sat here in meditation, cleansing my soul of all old thoughts, so that I may look afresh at the signs and question you further.’

‘So that’s it!’ said Mrs Jones with a teasing chuckle. ‘What do you make of that, Theo? I ’spect you’re glad you’re not some kind of incarnation, ain’t you?’

‘Of course I’m not!’ said Theodore in a spitting whisper. ‘It’s . . . it’s rubbish!’

He surprised himself with his own fury. The calm of the Lama’s voice, and Theodore’s tiredness, and the complexity of turning one language into another, had softened and somehow made remote the actual meaning of what was being said. Fear and repugnance shook him now in the silence. And it wasn’t any use saying it was superstition, to be pitied and disregarded, because the Lama Amchi was what he was, neither pitiful nor stupid, but a man of intelligence and authority. You would need an inner power equal to his own to argue with him, and Theodore felt now that you might never reach the limits of that power. How had he known at once that Theodore wasn’t Chinese when in the past many Chinese had been mistaken about that? How had he caused the bandit with the pistol to miss him at point blank range? How did he keep his body so unnaturally warm in the Himalayan night?

Mrs Jones chuckled again.

‘Wonder what he’ll think of now?’ she said. ‘He can’t go back like this, can he? Must of been a disappointment for him when he seen how set you were on your Bible-reading.’

She was interrupted by a movement. In the moonlight Theodore saw the Lama lean forward from the waist and reach out a thin arm to touch her wrist.

‘I sense more lives than our three,’ he said, in that remote and dreamy-seeming voice with which Theodore had first heard him speak. ‘The woman carries a child in her womb. He must be the one I seek.’

Theodore hesitated. Flushing with embarrassment in the dark he stammered the translation. Mrs Jones drew in her breath sharply and let it slowly out.

‘Lord, I hope not,’ she whispered. ‘I been beginning to wonder. How on earth did the old geezer know?’

‘We will go to Dong Pe and ask the oracle,’ said the Lama.

10

AT NOON NEXT day they halted among the snows on the highest pass they had yet tried to cross. Theodore had lost all sense of direction among the intertwining mountains, though the position of the sun seemed to say that three days ago they had been heading south and now they were going north again.

‘We done a detour,’ explained Mrs Jones. ‘He went out of his way south, so as the old holy man at Daparang could have a dekko at you, and now he’s taking a short cut north, save time, instead of going the whole way back and round.’

They had halted not for the noon rest – the thin icy air made stillness seem half way to death – but because a wall of snow had slid down from the peak on the right and was lying, twenty feet high in some places, across the narrows of the pass. Two of the escort were stamping and digging a narrow passage at the lowest part, but they hadn’t gone more than a few feet in when the wall of the passage collapsed on them and they had to be dug out; the hindmost man emerged laughing, as though being buried alive was a splendid joke, but the leader took longer to rescue and therefore longer to see the humour of it.

Meanwhile three of the escort had been expostulating with the Lama, clearly from their gestures saying it would be better to go back. He listened to them without a word, then turned away and moved along the obstacle, wading knee-deep through loose drift. He stopped and stood with slowly nodding head by a place in the wall that looked no better than the first they had tried. The escort, grumbling and unwilling, started to hack and dig and stamp again until they were out of sight. This time they wore ropes round their waists in case of another collapse. Lung was holding Albert’s head while Mrs Jones cleared a ball of snow from his hoof. Sir Nigel, unloaded and swathed in blankets hung his head and gasped at the useless air.

Suddenly there was an excited cry and the escort started to lead the yaks into the gap. Theodore followed in his turn, leading Bessie, and found that at the point which the Lama had chosen, the ground on the far side fell sharply away and most of the thickness of the snow wall had spilt down it. Now the escort were stamping a ledge back along to the path, which dropped precipitously down through snow-fields to another of the lushly forested valleys that threaded among the peaks.

They had not reached the trees when they heard from above and behind them a long, slow grumbling roar; the air quivered with shock-waves below the threshold of hearing, and lesser roars followed as snows loosened by the first vibrations slid and settled. The escort broke into mutters, which seemed centred as much on the Lama as on the noise in the mountains.

‘Avalanche,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I bet his Reverence has managed to make ’em think it come just where we was standing. He’s a sly old geezer, ain’t he?’

‘He was right about where to make the path,’ said Theodore over his shoulder.

‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘But you mustn’t go thinking that proves he’s right about everything else.’

There was a note in her voice which made him look round to where she was leading Albert down the path. Even through the dimness of the veil he saw one large eye wink.