Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘No,’ said Theodore slowly. ‘I guess I’ve known for a long time that you weren’t coming. I guess Lung’s known too . . . Oh, Mrs Jones, won’t you come and tell him yourself? I can’t! I just can’t!’

She nodded briskly.

‘Quite right. ‘Course it’s up to me. I s’pose I wasn’t proper come to after my vision, trying to put it on you . . .’

She had learnt the Lama’s trick of rising so that she seemed to float to her feet.

‘Sumpa gave me a monk’s robe,’ said Theodore. ‘In case anyone tries to stop you.’

‘They won’t . . . it’ll be funny going out without my escort. Wonder where they got to. Probably they come to take me to the temple and found me having my vision, and they understood what was up and cut along without me. You go first, young fellow. Heavens, hark at that thunder!’

The storm had drifted closer now and was rubbing against the lower slopes of the mountain, the glare of its flashes making the landscape jump into being, sharp as cut paper, and then float dazingly on the retina when all was darkness again. The wind threshed among the many-faceted roofs below and thudded against the rock-face. If the monks were still singing in the temple, their voices were drowned by the voice of the storm. Clutching the hand-smoothed rope Theodore started down the first slant of steps, feeling for each foothold in the dark.

‘You ain’t scared?’ called Mrs Jones. ‘Want me to go first?’

‘No. It’s all right,’ called Theodore.

He had in fact hesitated at the first step, full of a sudden horror of falling, but then he remembered the assurance of safety that had surrounded him as he had come up this way, and he went down confidently, flight after flight, until he reached the platform where the Lama Amchi’s house stood beside the one that had belonged to Tojing Rimpoche. He was only half surprised to find that Mrs Jones had followed close on his heels, as if there were neither night nor storm.

‘That’s where he’ll get born,’ she said, flicking a thumb towards the empty house. There was something not exactly false about the gesture, but still not quite right. Indeed, since she had first spoken her manner had jarred. If he hadn’t come to know her so well in the past months he would never have noticed, but now he realized that she was play-acting. The role of Mrs Jones – the exuberant, warm, resourceful, crude-spoken horsewoman, who had worn her make-up so thick and her clothes with such an air – no longer quite fitted her. She had changed. She was somebody new and different, trying to fit herself back into the old role for the moment and getting it subtly wrong, too boisterous, too coarse-grained. He shook his head, unhappy at the distances that had stretched between them, and led the way down to the main courtyard.

As they reached the paving there came another change in her. She put her arm round his shoulders and held him close against her side, so that the folds of her robe flapped around him as they walked. Warmth seemed to flow out of her, and not simply warmth but a deep, quiet contentment.

‘Mind you, that was some vision I had,’ she said, speaking in a quite new voice, very soft and even. ‘I wonder if it’ll ever happen again. I hope so. Or perhaps once is enough.’

Still holding him she started to make the humming noise which the Lama had produced the night he had first told them about his search for the Tulku, a noise like the purr of a great cat, dreaming. She let go of him as they climbed the stairs, but was still humming as they moved through the network of galleries towards the little door. An old monk, tottering along with a lamp, met them, peered astonished through the dimness and stood reverently aside. Mrs Jones said a few words to him in Tibetan, perhaps a blessing, but didn’t pause in her stride. Theodore noticed that she was actually walking in a different manner, as though she was conscious every instant of the treasure she now carried.

‘Do you believe everything the Lama Amchi says?’ he asked. ‘You used to say he was sly.’

‘Oh, he’s that all right, sly as a coach-load of politicians. Everything we said about him at the start, wanting to keep his hands on Dong Pe and all that, it’s true. But it don’t make no difference to him being holier than all the saints in the calendar and wiser than the Three Wise Men. But I ain’t doing what I’m doing for him, you know. I ain’t even doing it for the Tulku. I’m doing it for me.’

They met no-one else as they crossed the final galleries, crept down the narrow stair in the outer wall and through it into the night. Theodore wedged the stone back into the jamb and lashed the door tight with the thong, then started along the path. The valley was like a cauldron now, boiling with thunder. The cloud-layer hid the lightning-flashes, but the glare of them filled its surface with sudden luminosities, so that a cloud-tower would glow white for a moment, seeming to float by itself in the dark, and somehow to belong for that moment to the same order of creation as the monastery, with its towers and spires and ramparts. Though it felt as if huge rain-drops should have been clattering down, the air was desert-dry, whipping to and fro in fierce gusts. Theodore discovered that he was still carrying the monk’s robe, slung over his shoulder, and the wind flogged it against his ribs as though it held a wiry but boneless body. The thunder drowned any noise the wind might make, so that its violent movements came unheralded, like willed onslaughts.

Theodore led the way along the path until they reached the area of shrines. At the third one – he saw its spire, topped with a crescent, outlined against the higher clouds which flickered continuously with reflected light from the storm – he turned and began to climb the slope in paces only a few inches long. Mrs Jones came effortlessly behind him. Now a different light showed, faint but yellow and steady – a lantern. Theodore climbed panting over the rim of the platform and saw in the dimness men and horses and loaded yaks, but before he could advance a pace Mrs Jones seized his elbow.

‘Why’d you bring me here ?’ she gasped.

‘It’s where Sumpa told us to . . .’

‘But he must of known! This is the place where they’re going to build his shrine – Tojing Rimpoche’s, when his body comes home!’

Before Theodore could answer Lung rushed out of the group of men, no doubt having heard her voice.

‘You come, Missy!’ he said. ‘I think all these long days . . .’

‘No, sweetie, I ain’t coming,’ she answered. ‘Listen . . .’

The rest of the sentence was drowned in thunder. She led Lung aside, and in the next glare Theodore saw the pair of them outlined right at the edge of the levelled ground, Lung with his head bowed and Mrs Jones facing him, holding both his hands in hers and looking up into his eyes. Lightning came and went and came again, and each time they were still in the same pose. A man grunted close at Theodore’s side.

‘When we go?’ he said in harshly twanging Mandarin. ‘This most bad night. Go soon.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. ‘Wait. The woman is not going.’

‘Ho! Monk Sumpa say woman must go! Say if woman no want to go, then we bind woman and carry!’

‘No . . .’ began Theodore, but the man – presumably he was the one called Tefu – turned and called to his companions. One of them was holding the lantern, so Theodore could see their surge across the levelled space towards where Lung and Mrs Jones stood. He called a warning, probably inaudible against a great bellow of thunder, but Mrs Jones turned and as the rumbles died started to speak in Tibetan. The men stopped in their tracks.

That last thunderclap was like a signal for the storm to end. Though it still muttered a little at its further fringes, and though the wind still hooted and flapped among the shrines, her voice rang clear. Theodore heard the word ‘Tulku’ repeated several times. A man, perhaps Tefu, made a lunge towards her but the others caught him and dragged him back. One actually whimpered out loud. Mrs Jones didn’t shout or rage, or even raise her voice more than was necessary to pierce the wind, but from her tone it was clear that she was telling them what penalties would be inflicted, by god and man and demon, on any who dared to touch the Mother of the Tulku. She faced them as confidently as she had faced her rebellious porters on the day Theodore had first seen her, though armed with other weapons. In some ways she had changed less than he had thought.