Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘Are you sure?’ he cried.

‘Course I ain’t,’ she snapped, suddenly angry. ‘And watch where you’re walking. And keep your voice down.’

Theodore turned his head and trudged on, confused. The night before, on their way down from their interview with the Lama, she had suddenly said, ‘I’m not telling old Lung till I know for certain, one way or the other. I don’t want him puppying round, all anxious, right? And that means you’ll have to ask His Reverence not to mention it in front of him – don’t tell him why – perhaps he won’t fancy the kid having a Chinese Daddy. Just let him think I don’t want Lung to know ’cause I’m a bit ashamed, like.’ No doubt that accounted for her asking Theodore to keep his voice down now, but not for the violent shift of tone. She had sung most of the time on their way up to the pass, until the air became too thin for wasted breath, but between whiles Theodore had noticed her riding or walking with an unaccustomed slouch, as if deep in thought.

He was confused at a deeper level too. Obviously it would be best if there were no child – an infant conceived in sin, born out of wedlock and doomed to be reared in an idolatrous creed . . . but Theodore had slept uneasily, and in the timeless slithering intervals when he was neither awake nor asleep he had been conscious that somebody or something was standing at the top of the ladder outside the upper room in the farm, waiting to be let in. Sometimes he thought it was the Lama Amchi, come down from the hillside; once he had been certain that it was Father, alive and safe; but several times it had been a vaguer being, a bodiless cloud, the soul of the unborn Tulku. Theodore had even dreamed that he had slid out of his cot and opened the door and found nothing there but the starlit mountains – and then he would be awake in his blankets, raging with fleas and knowing he had never opened the door at all. Of course it was only dreams, but the memory was still strong as he picked his way down the tilt of the track towards the cedar-scented woods.

They slept that night in a village in the valley, where the villagers held an impromptu festival to celebrate the Lama’s presence. It seemed that the expedition was now returning to territory where he was well known and revered. Next day they climbed a good broad track up the far side of the valley and came to a wide plateau, ringed with ridged peaks, quite barren and without even snow to vary the deadness. For two hours the track wound north across this desert and all the time the peaks funnelled in until, about the middle of the afternoon, they crossed a slight ridge and looked down on an extraordinary bowl or plain. It was four or five miles across, almost circular, reaching on this side to the foot of the ridge where they stood, rimmed to left and right with cliffs which were really the beginnings of the peaks, and on the far side apparently ending with a steepish slope of bare ground which rose to a horizon between the flanking mountains. The floor of the plain was made entirely of close-packed rounded boulders, some as small as a clenched fist and others large as a hay-bale, but all lying so level that from the distance they looked like dark grey water, made opaque by the ruffling of a breeze.

Here, to Theodore’s surprise, the escort started to make camp by unloading the yaks and building a larger-than-usual fire of dried dung. Anywhere would have been a more appealing place than this, he thought. Surely they could have crossed the plain – it was still three hours till nightfall – and found somewhere better beyond it. The wind, which was full of fine, abrasive grit, slashed at them from erratic directions and set up vague hootings among the stones. They ate their meal early and then simply sat and waited for nightfall, but when Mrs Jones set out for a stroll towards the nearer cliffs the Lama immediately sent two of the escort to fetch her back.

‘There are fourteen devils in this place,’ he explained solemnly. ‘Within my protection you are safe, but beyond it they will cast you down and break your limbs, howling.’

Indeed at dusk he performed a ritual, circling round the camp with a weird, gliding step and stopping at four points to make an invocation which sounded like no language at all, but a mixture of whooping cries and sharp barks and a booming hum with bits of gabble threaded through. The escorts turned inwards towards the fire, shutting their eyes and stopping their ears while he performed, and as soon as he had finished rolled themselves in their blankets and lay still. Lung and Theodore copied them and Mrs Jones went to her tent, but Theodore spent longer than usual saying his prayers. Though he was praying to the emptiness which was all he had found for many days, it crossed his mind to ask that Mrs Jones should turn out not to be pregnant after all; but before the thought had formed itself into words he tried to erase it – there was something appalling about the idea of praying that a life should not exist.

Again he slept badly, and whenever he woke he saw the Lama sitting a little further up the hill, bolt upright, staring out across the mysterious plain, cross-legged and motionless, sentinel against the princes of the powers of the air and spiritual wickedness in high places. St Paul’s strange phrase repeated and repeated itself in Theodore’s muddled brain. He kept telling himself that these fourteen silly devils didn’t exist, and suppose they did, there was nothing a heathen priest could do to control them; but at the same time he knew quite well that he was scared, and that if the Lama hadn’t been there he would have been more scared still.

Early next morning they set about crossing the plain, and Theodore at once discovered why they hadn’t tried the previous afternoon. Night would certainly have caught them somewhere out in the middle. Each stone, though apparently just like all the others except in size – a flattish dark blue-grey oval, very smooth and veined with paler lines – seemed to have a life of its own. In places they lay loosely on beds of the sharp grit and it was possible to pick a way between them, but mostly they were many layers deep and one had to pace across them as if they were stepping-stones, never knowing whether they would stay firm or shift with one’s weight. All the while the stinging, buffeting wind came and went, seeming to strike at the exact moment when one was balancing for the next pace.

‘Don’t need no devils to cast us down round here,’ grumbled Mrs Jones. ‘This wind! We’ll be lucky if we get the horses across in one piece.’

Certainly, though the stones were trying enough for the humans, for the animals they were almost impossible. The yaks managed a little better than the horses, being more sure-footed, lower-slung, and readier to take a stumble, but even they had to be coaxed or prodded almost every yard. In the worst places the escort gathered all the bedding and laid it out, several layers thick, to make a pair of rafts. An animal could be led onto one of these, then the other one laid in front and when it was standing on that the first one could be taken round to make another short stretch of tolerable footing. Elsewhere the escort piled the larger stones together to make a rough causeway. There were stretches where the remains of previous causeways showed clearly, the results of earlier crossings by other travellers, and they used these where they could. But frequent repairs were necessary, as though something had come since they were made and started to tumble the stones into their normal loose ruin.

Lung was leading Rollo along one of these stretches of old causeway when a stone, apparently as stable as any other, tilted sideways under Rollo’s hoof. The movement was so sudden that to Theodore, following next behind, it looked as though the other end of the stone had been violently flipped up from below. The pony’s leg shot down as if into soft bog and through the beginnings of its squeal Theodore heard the bone snap. The Tibetans left their yaks and came crowding round, gabbling at each other as they tried to drag the struggling animal free. It squealed with fresh pain. Mrs Jones strode past Theodore with her gun under her arm, her face invisible beneath the veil. The click of the bolt stood out sharply through the clatter and scrape of hooves on stone. Theodore looked away. The shot rang out, clapped against the nearing cliffs and came back in echoes that sounded like laughter from stone lungs.