Peter Dickinson - Tulku

The rain had stopped and the cloud-layer was rising and thinning. Soon it would vanish and the day would half-clear to the steamy brilliance usual at this season. The smoke from the huts, which had dwindled to nothing under the steady rain, revived and slanted up in wispy parallels. Mrs Jones rode very straight-backed, glancing from side to side like a sightseer, but with a shot-gun ready across her knees. She moved at a steady pace between the huts, pausing only by the wreck of the church, where she reined to a standstill and gazed for some time before starting back up the slope.

‘Well, that’s not much cop,’ she said in a sombre voice, then gave a deep sigh and swung herself to the ground. She turned away from Theodore and set about giving her horse its feed, but continued to speak while she was working. Theodore got the impression that she was using the process as a way of not looking at him directly.

‘No, ’elp there,’ she said. ‘Jesus! You’d of thought they’d . . .’

‘Who these men?’ lisped Theodore, wary once more. ‘Why they burn Settlement?’

‘Must have been Boxers, I bet,’ said Mrs Jones.

‘Boxers? Please?’

‘Jesus! Don’t you know? Ah, I ’spect your missionary fellow kept quiet about it – didn’t want all his converts scarpering off . . . there’s bands of young thugs wandering all over China, trying to kick the foreigners out, burning and murdering. They call themselves Boxers. The Empress don’t do anything to stop them – ask me, she’s pleased they’re at it . . . Anyway, you’re going to have to stick with us, young man. There’s nothing for you down there. Not any more.’

‘Stick with you? Please?’

‘What else can you do? I’m not having you going down there, seeing what I seen. It’s all over and done with, see?’

‘Then I must go to mission of Doctor Goertler.’

‘Where might that be?’

‘About hundled miles,’ said Theodore, pointing north-east.

‘Then we’ll come along of you, and let’s bleeding well hope the same’s not happened there.’

Theodore drew a deep breath.

‘Solly,’ he muttered. ‘I cannot come along by you.’

‘Why in hell not?’ she said, turning and straightening. He shook his head.

‘Ah, come off it. Theo. We’re much best off, all together. There’s more to our friend Lung than meets the eye, but he only speaks pukka Chinee. You know the lingo in these parts, and you know where we’re going, and I can manage the horses and the rifle. What’s biting you?’

Theodore found himself unable to speak. He stood dumb while she stared at him, her expression invisible behind the thick veil, until she took a pace towards him, lifting her arms in a gesture of appeal.

‘What’s up, Theo?’ she said in the gentlest of voices. ‘Is it something I done? Spit it out, then. I got to know, ain’t I, or how can I do anything about it?’

It would have been easier if she’d stayed in the saddle and cursed him as she did Lung and the horses. He could have borne that in silence. Now, he didn’t know how, she forced him to speak.

‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ he said in a toneless mutter.

‘Je . . .’ she began and bit the word short. ‘Is that it?’

She stood for a moment in silence, then slowly raised both hands and unpinned the large green brooch that held the veil in place beneath her chin, continuing the movement to lift the filmy stuff aside and settle it behind her shoulders.

Her eyes were large, round, blue – not sky-blue, but the colour of still water on a cloudless noon. Strong black eyebrows made them seem bluer still. The skin of her plump cheeks was white and flaky, so that for a moment Theodore thought she wore the veil to hide a disfiguring skin-disease, but then he saw that the flakes were a mixture of powder and sweat, concealing innumerable tiny wrinkles. Her wide mouth was painted poppy-red, and its emphasis made her chin seem absurdly small, just the first of a series of receding folds that eventually became her neck. Her nose was small and snub, like an afterthought.

‘I bet I don’t half look a picture,’ she said, turning her head slightly and watching him a little sideways, as if suddenly shy. ‘Now, listen here, duck. You can’t stay in these here parts – it’s dangerous, and there ain’t nothing to eat, and I’m not having you go down in the village, not if I have to tie you up and carry you along of me. Lung and me could do that easy – he’s ever so handy with knots. But I want you to come willing, so let’s start all over again, shall we? I’ll mind my lip and you’ll forget as you ever heard me cussing. It won’t half do me good – I been letting myself get out of hand in these heathen parts. So is it a deal, young man?’

Theodore hesitated. Whether she cursed or not she was certainly a wicked woman – the paint on her face only confirmed that. But the eyes in the painted face were earnest and pleading, and her voice, though still faintly mocking, seemed to be mocking only herself and was as gentle as the contented chucking of a mother hen.

‘Oh, I can do it,’ she said suddenly in a quite different accent. ‘I’ve had to mind my tongue before. I’ve passed myself off in swell houses, taking tea with Lady This and the Duchess of That, and not one of them spotted I didn’t belong.’

She giggled and dropped back to her normal voice.

‘You’ll come along of us, won’t you, Theo? Didn’t Jesus himself go along of harlots and sinners?’

She was still looking at him with her head tilted a little away, and now her eyes were half-closed. He noticed that her eyelashes were enormously long and paler than her eyebrows, glinting here and there with gold. His lips seemed to make up his mind for him.

‘I guess I’ll go along with you,’ he said. ‘Are they all dead in the Settlement?’

‘I didn’t see anyone as wasn’t,’ she said, beginning to refasten her veil. ‘Looks like they herded them into that big building and . . .’

‘The church. Did you . . . did you see the missionary?’

‘Big feller in a night-shirt? ‘Fraid so. What was his name?’

‘The Reverend Simeon Tewker.’

She nodded, turning towards the horses, then slowly swinging back.

‘’Scuse my asking,’ she said, ‘but you’re speaking English pretty nice all of a sudden. American, I should say. Been faking it, have you?’

The danger and action of the morning, the vigour and warmth of her company, had faded in the instant that she told him for certain that Father was dead, and now he was settling again into the numbness of shock. The question barely broke through his consciousness but once more his lips answered for him.

‘He was my father.’

3

THEY TRAVELLED NORTH along the forested foothills, taking the old track that had barely been used since Father had built the bridge. It would have been easier to go east, but that would have taken them to Shiacheng, where the men who had attacked the Settlement must have come from; so the best chance was to make a detour and hope to strike another road to Taho. All the first day Theodore rode, sitting sideways, peasant-fashion, across the rump of his pony, slumped into the trance of shock. He barely noticed where they went, what they ate or how they camped. They met no-one. The woods, the whole of China, the world – they were as empty as his soul.

In the middle of next morning Mrs Jones dragged him out of his stupor to talk to a couple of hunters who spoke a rough version of Miao which he could just understand. They insisted that the best way to Taho was back, through Shiacheng, but agreed that it was possible to travel on north. They seemed to know nothing of any Boxer uprisings, or anything that happened beyond the valleys they hunted. As soon as the talk was over Theodore slid back into numbness. The usual morning rain drizzled on. It took an age to climb each rise and to plod down into the next valley, where the usual stream, steeper and angrier each time, had to be somehow forded.