Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘Of course. But there are times when I’d be glad to be somewhere else. I hear you were attacked in the valley of the Jade River. There are notorious bandits all along that way – Lolo, very unreliable. We never travelled through there in groups of less than ten, all armed. But that track leads up to Starve-all Pass and through the ranges well north of here. How did you come to be right down on the Jade River gorge again?’

Theodore explained. The priest nodded and asked more questions. He spoke Mandarin in a quite different way from the Lama Amchi, with a better accent but much more erratic grammar. The Lama Amchi spoke as though he had learnt the language systematically, from books, whereas this man had evidently picked it up in a series of smatterings. Once or twice he used earthy idioms, or words that didn’t belong to Mandarin at all but to Miao or languages Theodore didn’t know. He was very friendly and easy to talk to.

‘How do you know the country so well?’ asked Theodore. ‘Were you born there?’

‘No indeed. From the monastery wall I could show you the house where I was born, on the far side of the valley. But my father kept a team of yaks and used to trade into China, and he brought me up to that life. I would be at it still if I hadn’t been chosen to become the oracle.’

‘The oracle?’

Theodore had guessed that he was talking to the oracle-priest, but had assumed that his function was to perform some special sort of mumbo-jumbo with an idol. There was something shocking about this bluff, earthy man’s casual announcement that he himself was that idol.

‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘That’s me. You wouldn’t think at it to look at me, would you? And I’ll tell you another thing that might surprise you – it’s a lot harder work than driving yaks.’

Mrs Jones was in a bad temper that evening, and took it out on Lung. Theodore had heard a little thunderstorm grumbling away below the monastery during the afternoon, but hadn’t realized that Mrs Jones had been lower down still. Her escort, none of whom spoke any language she knew, had insisted on keeping to well-worn paths and on coming home the moment the first drops fell.

Lung endured her malice very well and teased her gravely in return. They were both very interested in Theodore’s meeting with Major Price-Evans.

‘He might give us a hand,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘It ain’t as surprising as you might think, finding him here. Lot of sappers go bats in the belfry. Ask him to tea, Theo, and I’ll see if I can’t wheedle him.’

Lung refused to say anything about his own adventures during the day. He looked smug and knowing, but Theodore guessed that this was only a way of teasing Mrs Jones and concealing the fact that he had achieved nothing at all.

12

THE VISIT FROM Major Price-Evans was not a success. He came eagerly enough; Theodore met him at the door of the temple of the oracle and led him down to the guest-house. As they passed through the main gate of the monastery he said, ‘Last time I set foot outside Dong Pe, why, it must have been sixteen years ago.’ He sounded like a child being taken on a long-promised outing, but as soon as he was introduced to Mrs Jones his manner began to change. Though Theodore had told her the Major was blind she had made herself up with extra care and was wearing the lacy pink blouse and red skirt she had used to impress P’iu-Chun. Her manner was more formal than usual, and she spoke all the time in what she called her drawing-room voice, level and grave and a little throaty. Theodore was amazed. He had heard her acting this part for a sentence or two, but he had no idea that she would be able to corset her extravagant personality so easily into this constrained and tasteful style. The thought struck him that supposing her story had taken a different path and she had married the man she called Monty, this would have been her normal appearance, and the woman he knew as Mrs Jones would only have been allowed to erupt at odd and secret moments.

Her conversation was exactly right too, Theodore thought. She seemed to know India quite well, and claimed to have travelled along several of the roads the Major had helped to build; and she had been to Ceylon and most of the other countries he had visited on his pilgrimages. She talked about these, asked questions, very gently tried to draw him out. But for all her care he seemed to retreat further and further into his shell, and to shrink his slight body into the folds of his russet robe. His answers, which had begun as the rambling untroubled flow that Theodore had heard on their first meeting, became shorter but even less coherent, and he began to have trouble with his breathing, wheezing heavily in the silences until it seemed an agony to draw each breath.

This gasping eased quickly as Theodore led him back up the hill, and he was perfectly happy and cheerful by the time he reached his cell.

‘Well, that weren’t much cop,’ said Mrs Jones when Theodore got back to the guest-house. ‘Shy as a schoolboy, poor feller. You’ll have to try and handle him, Theo – but don’t ask him for help till he’s got over the shock of meeting me.’

Next day the Major never mentioned Mrs Jones and seemed to have forgotten the incident. Theodore had already evolved a routine for his visits: the Major would be waiting for him at the wicket – on the third day even in one of the rare thunderstorms which rose high enough along the mountain wall to drench the monastery; then they would have tea and talk; then clean the Temple; when the oracle-priest came Theodore would gossip briefly with him; and when he left they would retire to the Major’s cell for a lesson in Tibetan.

Provided the Major was there Theodore enjoyed the cleaning and found it helped him master his horror of the convoluted heathen mysteries which the idol symbolized for him. It was a thoroughly mundane process, picking loose fluff out of a demon’s snarl; the grimace lost all its meaning and became only an awkward pattern of crannies which let Theodore think more about the sculptor’s stupidity in producing such a shape than about the myth he had tried to embody. In a quite different way the Major helped make the monsters ordinary. The old man accepted them, as he accepted everything, with the same innocent delight. He accepted the meaning behind the grimace, but seemed to drain the nightmare into himself and remove its terrors in the process, so much so that Theodore found himself beginning to think that anything the Major believed in or approved of must have something to be said for it. He knew this was a dangerous idea, but he couldn’t help it.

Only once did something happen which broke this pattern. Theodore had his ladder up against the idol of the Buddha and was using a soft brush to dust among the crannies of an intricate jewelled shoulder-piece when it struck him what a contrast this was with the almost appalling smoothness of the face. He paused and looked up. This particular statue had the eyes closed in contemplation, but from where he was standing on the ladder Theodore could see that the lids were not completely shut, and that through the slit between them and the gold underlid Someone might be watching him.

As if to prove that the face was nothing but gold and stone, Theodore climbed the last two rungs and deliberately scuffed the dust from its smile. He had been going to rootle with his brush into the inch-wide nostrils, but suddenly he felt ashamed and returned to the jewelled shoulder-piece. The gesture seemed to have worked, and the idol was inanimate once more.

Conversation with the oracle-priest was untroubled.

‘Don’t tell him nothing,’ Mrs Jones had said. ‘He only wants to use it for his oracling. My Auntie Rosa, she was a fortune-teller at all the fairgrounds, so I know the tricks. She said that all you got to tell a feller is one true thing about him which he doesn’t think you could of known, and he’ll believe everything else, no matter what.’