Peter Dickinson - Tulku

The horns were still booming when the nearest monks broke from their ranks and rushed toward him. Theodore was dragged aside and almost fell among the crush of bodies. He heard Lung shouting angrily, some yards away. He stumbled backwards against something hard, the lowest of the temple steps, and scrambled up clear of the crowd. Once there he turned and looked out over the heads of the struggling mob.

Below him the monks were crowding to a focus like bees at swarm-time clustering round their queen. At the thickest centre of the mass a slow eruption began, an upwelling of arms with a dark object half-hidden among them. Jerkily it took shape as it separated itself from the jostle of russet robes and became a black, high-backed chair with carrying-poles at either side. The monks, a dozen to each pole, were holding it not shoulder-high but at arm’s length above their heads. At first its back was towards Theodore, but then it swung sideways like a boat at tide-change as the monks began to carry it through the press, and he could see Mrs Jones sitting up there, smoothing her skirt down with one hand and with the other tucking a loose whorl of hair back into place under the silly little hat. A low, baying hum rose all round the courtyard.

The crowd was too thick-packed for the monks to carry her through, so they passed her from hand to hand above their heads. The arms rose round her chair like waving wheat to take the load, or to touch chair or skirt, or simply to stretch towards her. Her face was stiff and calm, her back straight as a soldier’s. She came quite close to Theodore at the beginning of the wide sweep she was to move in, and even through her veil he imagined he could see the electric energies flashing from those huge eyes. The hand on her lap moved as if to begin a gesture, then stilled, so he guessed she had seen him, but she didn’t smile. They had that chair ready, he thought. They knew it was going to happen. They knew what the oracle would say.

As the crowd jostled to follow her the crush below the steps eased and Lung came panting up to stand beside Theodore. He looked pale, drained, furious. For a while he stared at the retreating chair where it bobbed and wallowed above the threshing arms, then he sighed and struck his fist into his palm.

‘She thinks there is nothing in the world that can out-face her,’ he muttered. ‘She does not understand what she has met today.’

13

AT ONCE THE routine of days changed.

Theodore had intended to visit Major Price-Evans immediately after the ceremony, to find out what it all meant and how it affected him and his friends; but he was too shaken to resist Lung’s demand that they should return to the guest-house, so now he was kneeling on the floor and pumping the primus stove, while Lung sat withdrawn and brooding on his cot. In theory Theodore was getting ready to welcome Mrs Jones after her adventure, but really he was trying to restore his own centre of balance by contact with things he knew, by handling a western gadget and making tea the way Mrs Jones liked it. He had just got the flame to roar and steady when Tomdzay came striding through the door with no warning at all. He beckoned to Theodore.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘You are needed.’

‘Where is Mrs Jones?’ said Lung and Theodore together.

‘The Mother of the Tulku is in the house of the Lama Amchi Geshe Rimpoche. It is there that we go.’

As Lung took a pace towards the door Tomdzay barred his way.

‘Only the Guide is needed,’ he said. ‘The much-honoured Father of the Tulku may stay here.’

He made a slight movement, not enough to let Lung pass but enough to make sure he could see the three soldier-monks waiting beyond the door. Lung took a half-pace towards them, hesitated and turned.

‘Not permit Missy think she strongest,’ he muttered in English.

Theodore smiled bleakly at him and followed Tomdzay out of the door.

This time they entered through the main gate of the monastery. The crowd was still streaming out, but whatever the crush they jostled aside to let Tomdzay pass; it took Theodore a little while to realize that their eyes were turned not on Tomdzay but on him. He was used to being stared at on his wanderings through the monastery, by eyes inquisitive but wary, but these stares were different, open and respectful – they might have stared at one of their idols in much the same way.

When the little procession he was now part of reached the main courtyard there were still plenty of people about, who behaved as though they had been waiting to see him, not pushing close as they had round Mrs Jones but forming a wide clear path between two packed lines of watchers. Tomdzay led the way down the centre of this space to the flights of stairs that zigzagged up the rock towards the two houses that stood there. One of these, Major Price-Evans had said, belonged to the Lama Amchi and the other was kept in permanent readiness for the return of the Lama Tojing or the arrival of his successor.

The escorting monks stopped at the bottom of the stair, but Tomdzay led the way up to the door of the left-hand house where he paused and whispered a brief prayer or incantation, then held the door open for Theodore.

‘Enter,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Be reverent.’

Automatically Theodore returned his solemn bow and crossed the threshold. As the door closed behind him his immediate impression was of yet another temple, not of stone but of wood, all polished to gleam in the near dark, and cluttered with jewelled idols and ornaments, and hung with garish cloths. Butter lamps glowed in front of some of the idols and the still air prickled with incense, but not so heavily as it did in the temple – the smell was thinner, or perhaps finer.

‘Coo-ee, Theo,’ called Mrs Jones’s voice. ‘We’re up here. Come and look. I never seen such a view.’

Theodore followed the sound up a flight of stairs, polished till they were as slippery as an ice-fall. At the top was a little vestibule, beyond which he found a large airy room which ran all across the front of the house with its windows looking out over the monastery roofs to the tremendous range beyond. This room too glistened with polish and twinkled with knick-knacks and idols.

In the many hours he was to spend there with Mrs Jones and the Lama Amchi, Theodore never became used to the nudging presences of the idols, whispering in his mind, You have felt us. You have known our power . We are real . He could look at a particular statue and perceive that it was mere stone, lacquered and gilded; its staring eyes had no mind behind them, its expression was whatever the sculptor had thought proper to carve there; that was all it consisted of. But out of his direct line of vision the idols were never quite empty; behind each half-seen mask a power brooded. Most of the Lama Amchi’s statues were of the Buddha, and so were the innumerable pictures in the hangings and paintings. All these seemed to express a strange multiple being; it was as though Theodore was being watched by an eye, many-faceted like an insect’s, but turned not outward but inward, inspecting through all those facets the object – Theodore – at its centre. Furthermore the silver or brass bowls and the butter lamps and the bright-patterned rugs and cushions and the hundreds of other garish or glittering objects, each with its own meaning and use and all bright with jewels and gold, served to increase the feeling of light refracted and splintered so that the eye could watch not only from all possible angles but in all possible hues. Sometimes Theodore could close a facet off, as if drawing a blind across a window. He might learn, for instance, the symbolism of an object or the myth behind a particular pose of the Buddha, and by refusing to accept them he could rob a presence of some of its power; but it would still be there, and much as he longed to he was never able to deny the whole vast system of beliefs and myths and symbols. Even if he had had the knowledge and intelligence to understand it all – and there was so much of it, so sharp and intricate in detail, so vague and ungraspable in outline – Theodore knew he would not have been able to argue it out of existence. You needed more than understanding for that. You needed a sort of spiritual energy, a soul-force, such as Father had possessed. The Lama Amchi possessed it too, and so did Mrs Jones, but not Theodore.