Against the Day (148 page)

   
“Some
. . .
Chinese involvement,” prompted
Halfcourt.

“Oh, as if boundarylines mattered
anymore
. . .
if only
. . .
no, we’re well past that—now
we must think of the entire north Eurasian landmass, from Manchuria to
BudaPesth, all, in the eyes of those we must eventually face, territory unredeemed—all
the object of a single merciless dream.”

   
“I
say, Eurasia Irredenta,” Halfcourt beaming through the smoke of his

cigar, as if pleased with the
coinage. “Well.”

   
“They
prefer ‘Turania.
’ ”

   
“Oh,
that!” Waving the cigar, almost one would say dismissively.

   
“Known
to your shop, is it.”

“What,
old PanTurania? Japanese mischief,” as if identifying some item of porcelain.

“Yes.
The usual Turkish and German meddling as well
.
. . .
But for
this
performance, the familiar Powers have been
cast in subordinate roles, removed into the shadows at the margins of the stage
. . .
while up in the glare, poised
between the worlds, stands a visitor—say, a famous touring actor from far
away, who will perform not in English but in a strange tongue unknown to his
audience, yet who for all that keeps each of them transfixed, mesmerized,
unable to remove his gaze even to glance sidewise at his neighbor.”

   
“So
that none of them can
. . .
quite
think straight?”

“So
that by the end of the piece, sir, each, imprisoned in his own fear, is praying
that it all be only theater.”

Halfcourt
was giving him a long appraising stare. Finally, “Has this Asiatic Beerbohm
Tree of yours got a name?”

“Not
yet. . . the general feeling out there is that by the time his name is
revealed, all will be so irreversibly on the move that, for any step we might
conceive, here or in Whitehall, it will be far too late.”

One evening
shortly after his arrival, Kit was sitting out in the courtyard with the
LieutenantColonel. Each had by him a traditional twilight arrackandsoda. Pastry
vendors called from the street. Invisible birds, collecting against the night,
sang boisterously. Across the way came the smell of somebody cooking cabbages
and onions. The evening call to prayer broke over the city like a victim’s cry.

“We are each in some relationship,”
Halfcourt was saying, “largely undiscussed, with the same young woman. I cannot
speak as to another’s feelings, but one’s own are so
. . .
automatically suspect really, that one hesitates to admit
them, even to one’s counterpart in hopelessness.”

   
“Well,
you have my silence,” said Kit, “for what that’s worth.”

“I imagine—how shall I refrain
from imagining?—that she is grown by now quite beautiful.”

   
“She
is a peach, sir.”

They sat among the choiring clepsydras
of the evening garden, time elapsing in a dozen ways, allowing their cigars to
go out, keeping a companionable silence.

   
At
last Kit felt he could venture, “Pretty forlorn lookout for me. I don’t

know that I’d’ve come all the way out
here if she hadn’t set it up, so you can guess how easy I can be made a sap
of.”

   
A
lucifer flared. “At least you’ve a likelihood of seeing her again?”

   
“No
chance you’ll get back there anytime soon?”

“My postings are not of my own
choice, I’m afraid.” He squinted at Kit for a while, as if trying to read a
contractual clause. Then, nodding briefly, “She must have asked you to look
after me
. . . .
”

“No offense, sir
. . .
I can guarantee that Yashmeen has
you very much on her mind, in, in her heart, I’d say
. . . .
” Some articulation of smoke across the twilight advised
him of how little further he could take this.

Auberon Halfcourt was by now too
annoyed to be feeling much pity for this boy. Young Mr. Traverse clearly had no
idea of what to do with himself. Thought he was out on a nature hike. Years
before taking flannel, Halfcourt, his secret commission in a tin box in the
safe of a P&O steamer, sailed out into the preternaturally blue Med, in a
deck chair with his assumed name stenciled onto it, through the Suez Canal,
pausing midway to take a dip in the Great Bitter Lake, proceeding then across
the Red and Arabian seas to Karachi. There at Kiamari he boarded the
Northwestern Railway, which was to carry him by causeway over to the salt delta
of the Indus, on through radiant clouds of ibis and flamingo, mangrove giving
way to acacias and poplars, into the plains of Sind, up along the river
clamoring down from the mountains, toward the frontier, switching to
narrowgauge at Nowshera, on to Durghal station and the Malakand Pass where
raptors soared, into native disguise and eastward through the mountains, shot
at and formally cursed, over the great Karakoram Pass at last, into East
Turkestan and the high road to Kashgar. Nowadays, of course, it might as well
all be on a Cook’s tour.

By
the Edwardian standards of rationallyarrivedat code of values and stable
career, young Traverse here was an obviously drifting wreck without much hope
of ever being straightened out. What on earth sort of family produced wastrels
like this? As long as he was this far from the orbit of an ordinary life, he
might as well be pressed into service for a mission the LieutenantColonel had
had in mind since Prance had brought his news. Without an unambiguous goahead
from home, Halfcourt had decided to resurrect a longshelved plan to project a
mission eastward to establish relations with the Tungus living east of the
Yenisei.

   
“Of
course you’re free to refuse, I’ve no authority, really.”

   
They
went in to the library, and Halfcourt took down some maps.

   
“A
journey from the Taklamakan to Siberia, over fifteen hundred miles as

the
bergut
flies, northeast
across the Tian Shan, across the southern Altai, to

Irkutsk and the Angara, and on into
shamanic Asia. Islam does not flourish there. Few if any Christian explorers
will journey there—they prefer polar wastes, African forest, to this
wilderness without issue or promise. If they must be among the Tungus, say for
reasons of anthropology, then they will approach from the sea, against the
river.”

For
his own part, Kit supposed he was game, imagining that the journey here so far
had been too easy, that
stranniki
do not depend upon railway travel,
that this must be the next stage in a mission beyond Kashgar, that Yashmeen and
Swome had perhaps known nothing of.

He
was to be accompanied on his journey by Lieutenant Prance. They looked over the
maps in Halfcourt’s library. “We must begin here,” Prance pointing. “This great
Archway known as the Tushuk Tash. Which means ‘a rock with a hole in it.
’ ”

“This area all around it, the Kara
Tagh? looks like it hasn’t been mapped very well. Why bother with it, why not
skirt it completely? Be a lot more direct.”

“Because this Arch is the Gateway,”
declared Prance—“unless we enter by way of it, we shall always be on the
wrong journey. Everything between here and the Tunguska country belongs to the
Northern Prophet. We may follow the same route there as ordinary travelers, but
if we do not pass first beneath the Great Arch, we shall arrive somewhere else.
And when we try to return . . .”

“ ‘
We may not be able to,
’ ”
said Kit. “Yes, and some would call
that metaphysical hogwash, Lieutenant.”

“We will be disguised as Buriat
pilgrims, at least as far as Lake Baikal. If you are lucky enough to grow into
your role, perhaps, somewhere on the journey north, all will become clearer to
you.”

Fine one to talk, given his own, one
could say, regionally inappropriate appearance—pale, redheaded, eyes
perhaps a bit too far apart, more reasonablelooking in a top hat and frock
coat, and some setting a bit more urban. His attempts at disguise would not,
Kit feared, suggest the Buriat pilgrim so much as the British idiot.

Early next morning Halfcourt was in
Kit’s room, shaking him awake and puffing cigarsmoke like a steam engine.
“Bright eyes, everyone, heave out and trice up, for you’ve an audience in half
an hour with the Doosra himself.”

   
“Shouldn’t
it be you, you’re the ranking English speaker around here.”

Halfcourt
waved his cigar impatiently. “Far too well known. What’s needed is an unknown
quantity to everybody out here, but marginally less so to me, it being at the
margins, you see, that I do most of my business.”

·
    
·
    
·

The Doosra was younger
than Kit had imagined and lacked gravitas. Plumper than the general run
of desert ascetic, he was packing a new Japanese “38th Year” Arisaka
rifle—basically а .26 саlibеr Mauser whose
eponymous Colonel had improved some on the bolt design—captured in a raid
whose bloodiest details the young visionary had no reluctance to share with
Kit, in fluent English, though his plausibility was not helped by a pronounced
Universitynitwit accent. Kit had arrived on one of the small shaggy local
horses, more like a pony, with his stirrups almost touching the ground, whereas
AlDoosra was mounted on his legendary Marwari, and some horse it was, a horse
of great bravery and endurance, all but deathless, finely quivering with some
huge internal energy, as if poised to ascend and fly at any moment. Many in
fact were the people out here who swore they’d seen the horse, whose name was
Ogdai, soaring against the stars.

“I am only a servant in this matter,”
said the Doosra. “My own master will be found in the north, at his work. If you
wish to seek him for yourself, he will receive you. He will satisfy all your
questions about this world, and the Other. You can then come back and tell the
English and Russian officers in Kashgar all they wish to know. Will you assure
me that you have their trust?”

   
“I
don’t know. How will I find him, the one you prepare the way for?”

“I
will send with you my loyal lieutenant Hassan, who will help you through the
fearful Gates and past those who guard them.”

   
“The
. . .”

“It
isn’t only the difficult terrain, the vipers and sandstorms and raiding
parties. The
journey itself
is
a kind of conscious Being, a living deity who does not wish to
engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you. It
insists on the furthest degree of respect.”

Around midnight
Mushtaq looked in. Halfcourt had been reading Yashmeen’s letter again, the one
the American had brought. His cigar, ordinarily a cheery coal in the dimness of
the room, had in this sorrowful atmosphere gone out.

   
“I
am contaminated beyond hope, Mushtaq.”

“Find her again, sir. Even if you
must ascend the highest tower in the crudest city in the world, do what you
must to find her. At least write back to her.”

“Look at me.” An elderly man in a
shabby uniform. “Look at what I have done with my life. I must never so much as
speak to her again.”

   
That
said, one day he creaked up onto one of the tough, lowset Kirghiz

horses and went riding out alone,
perhaps in search of the Compassionate, perhaps of whatever, by now, had become
of Shambhala. Mushtaq had refused to go with him. Prokladka, convinced that the
Englishman had lost his mind at last, went on with his devious activities in
Kashgar.

Some weeks later
Auberon Halfcourt appeared at a bookdealer’s in Bukhara, clean, trimmed, and
pressed—respectably turned out, in fact, except for the insane light in
his eyes. He was no surprise to Tariq Hashim, who had seen at least a
generation of these searchers pass through—most of them, lately, German.
He led Halfcourt into a back room, poured cups of mint tea from a battered
brass pot, and from a lacquered cabinet inlaid with ivory and motherofpearl
produced, reverently, it seemed to the Englishman, a box containing a loose
stack of long narrow pages, seven lines to the page, printed from wood blocks.
“Early seventeenth century—translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan by the
scholar Taranatha. Included in the part of the Tibetan Canon known as the
Tengyur.”

Since he had left Kashgar, Halfcourt
had been dreaming persistently of Yashmeen, always the same frustrating
narrative—she was trying to get another message to him, he was never
where he should have been to receive it. He tried now to summon the benevolence
of dream.