Peter Dickinson - Tulku

‘Fair enough,’ she said, switching suddenly back to English. ‘I’ve told ’em to bring our clobber back down to the monastery gate, and we’ll all go home and have a good night’s sleep. I’ll see as nobody gets into hot water over any of this.’

Theodore never clearly remembered walking back along the path to the monastery. He retained a dream-like image of several monks, including Tomdzay, at the gate, courteous and unsurprised, and then at last he was sitting exhausted on a cot in a fair-sized upper room in the monastery and watching some junior monks carry in the baggage and stow it against a wall. And then Lung stood framed in the doorway, wild and unfamiliar in Tibetan clothes, with the bandit’s sword stuck through his belt. He stared at Theodore, opening and closing his mouth as if trying to speak, but no words came. Instead Lung rushed suddenly forwards. Theodore tried to rise and dodge the attack, but had hardly moved before Lung’s arm was swinging at him, snatching at the robe he still carried slung across his shoulder, dragging it free so violently that he pulled Theodore to his feet. Theodore began to edge towards the door but Lung glared round the room, moving his head in savage jerks, until his eye was caught by the beam running up the far wall. He strode towards it, holding the robe at arm’s length in his left hand, while with his right he drew his sword and swung it back. The moment the robe touched the beam he struck, crying like a demon.

He stood back, panting. The russet cloth was pinned to the beam and hung limp from the blade, but the hilt still quivered from the force of the blow. Lung gazed at it, uttered a sobbing groan, flung his arms wide and collapsed face down on his cot.

16

WHO KNEW ABOUT the failed escape? Everybody? Nobody? It was impossible to tell. Sumpa had vanished – but had he run away? Was he hiding? Was he prisoned in one of the hermit-caves? Was he dead? Again there was no clue. Tomdzay came to their room next morning to ask if they were comfortable and apologize for their treatment at the guest-house. Then, still speaking as though it were an ordinary matter, he said that as soon as the festival was over Lung and Theodore would be given money for their journey and escorted to either India or China, whichever they might choose. Lung lay face down on his cot throughout the interview and gave no sign that he had heard a word, but Tomdzay didn’t seem at all put out, though Theodore noticed that his eye was caught by the monk’s robe, still pinned to the beam by the sword. An unreadable expression flickered across his face but his voice didn’t falter. When he had left Lung groaned, raised his head and let it fall back again on to his pillow. His misery so filled the room that Theodore could not bear it for long, and left to wander round the monastery.

The whole great maze was humming with preparations. In the main courtyard the steps of the great temple were being extended to left and right with wooden staging at various levels; new banners and hangings fluttered from archways or dangled in gaudy streams down the fronts of buildings. It was all very well for Major Price-Evans to claim that the dances were unrehearsed, but now there was hardly an open space that didn’t swirl with troupes of performers or echo with strange music; passing one of the kitchens Theodore saw through an open door a rickety scaffolding at whose centre was a weird grey bulbous mass, over ten feet high. Two men were perched on the scaffolding painting the object, which seemed to Theodore wholly out of place in a kitchen until, some time after he’d walked on, he realized that what he’d seen had been an early stage in the creation of the dough-giant which in a few days’ time Yamantaka, Death and Slayer of Death, would hack to pieces and fling to the attendant worshippers to eat. An echo of human sacrifice, Major Price-Evans had said, and also an echo of the Lord’s Table. Theodore shuddered, not at the blasphemy but at the dough giant itself, cretinous, cold, grotesque, a parody of flesh. He decided to go early for his call on Major Price-Evans.

Usually Theodore didn’t argue with the Major about Buddhism – it didn’t seem polite, for one thing; for another, as Lung had found, there was no way of winning such arguments; and for a third, till now Theodore had felt ashamed to pretend he held his beliefs with the through-and-through simplicity of the Major’s faith. There was always that numbness and emptiness at the centre, which had been there since the Settlement had been destroyed and Father had died. He was not in his heart sure that he had been doing any more than acting his belief, in the way Mrs Jones had said she was acting hers, or that his prayers and Bible-reading had been anything other than habits. But in the last week, since that spurt of faith when he had answered ‘Yes’ to the Major’s question about the gods, he had changed. He felt he was moving, just as the whole life of the monastery was moving, towards a turning-point. Of course until last night this turning-point had seemed to be the escape from Dong Pe, but though that had come to nothing the sense of movement was still there. Perhaps it was this which made him tell the old man not simply that he had seen the dough giant but what he had felt about it.

‘See what you mean, me boy,’ said the Major affably. ‘You’ve got to remember that flesh is illusion, so old Yidam’s only an illusion of illusion. Perhaps that’s what you really felt.’

‘No it isn’t. And anyway flesh isn’t an illusion. My Father said that everything God made is holy, so how can it be illusion?’

‘Ah, well, perhaps that’s true too – only another way of looking at it.’

‘Something’s either an illusion or it isn’t. To say anything else is nonsense – the words don’t mean anything.’

‘Now that’s where we differ. I don’t like saying anything’s nonsense, because when you think about it a bit more it often turns out to be sense. A lot of what you’re saying is just what I used to think, but then I found I was wrong about one thing, and then another thing, and so on, and now I’ve given up judging. Judge not that you be not judged, don’t you know.’

(The Major was a great quoter from the Bible, which he knew just as well as Theodore. But he also knew the Koran, and the Talmud, and a lot of other sacred books.)

‘Jesus was talking about judging people,’ said Theodore.

‘Quite right, me boy, but all these things mean more than just one thing, you know.’

‘Look, if you’re not allowed to say something’s nonsense – not allowed to think it even – it means you can believe anything you want to. The Earth’s flat! The moon is green cheese! Pigs fly!’

‘I heard about a lady the other side of Tibet who could turn herself into a pig. Abbess of one of the great nunneries. I don’t know whether she could fly, but some of them can levitate, you know.’

‘Oh, sure!’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘In any case, supposing it’s true, what’s it all for? These tricks they say they do are all so useless. Floating about in the air, or sitting by a frozen lake drying out towels with your body, just to prove you can do it!’

‘Jesus walked on the water.’

‘He had to. His disciples were scared. They thought the boat was sinking. He didn’t like doing miracles, and he didn’t do them to show off. They were useful. He fed people. He healed people.’

‘Lot of Lamas do healing, you know. But it’s interesting, isn’t it – shows a difference in attitude. Wheels, now. In the west we talk about the invention of the wheel as a great thing because it’s so useful. Here you aren’t allowed to use it at all. Same with miracles – I don’t think the Lamas would want to do them if they were useful. They are spiritual exercises, you know. They prove the Lama’s mastery over illusion. That’s one of the reasons we know we can believe what the Lamas tell us.’