Against the Day (150 page)

   
“This
is terrible,” he said. “Look at this. These people have nothing.”

“Which
hasn’t kept the Germans from picking it over,” Prance said. Up until about 800
or 900
a.d
., he went on to
explain, this had been the metropolis of the ancient kingdom of Khocho. Some
scholars, in fact, believed this to be the historical Shambhala. For four
hundred years, Turfan had been the most civilized place in Central Asia, a
convergence of gardens, silks, music— fertile, tolerant, and
compassionate. No one went hungry, all shared in the blessings of an oasis that
would never run dry. Imperial Chinese journeyed thousands of hard miles here to
see what real sophistication looked like. “Then the Mahommedans swept in,” said
Prance, “and next came Genghis Khan, and after him the desert.”

At
Turfan they turned north, away from the Taklamakan, toward Urumchi and the pass
just beyond, which cut through the Tian Shan and led down into the lowlands of
Dzungaria, looking to head north by northwest, skirt the Altai, and, depending
which river by that time was clear of ice, find a steamer to take them down to
pick up the TransSiberian Railway east to Irkutsk.

They
made root soup, shot and barbecued wild sheep, but let the wild pigs go their
way in deference to Hassan, who had moved quite beyond dietary prohibitions but
saw no use in telling the English about it.

Other
foreign parties were out and about, many of them German archaeological
scavengers, though sometimes Prance, held by the gravity of memory, lay peering
attentively through his fieldglasses for what seemed hours before announcing,
“They’re Russian. Notice how low their tents are pitched.”

   
“Should
we—”

“Good
reasons for and against. They’re probably more interested in Germans and Chinese.
With the Entente, the Great Game is supposedly ended out here, but old
suspicions linger, and some of these Russian troopers would as soon shoot as
look at us.”

In
higher country one day, they blundered into a stampede of about fifty
kiangs,
wild red Asian asses, each with a dark stripe down its back, rolling their
eyes and moving fast, likely spooked by the approach of humans. “Holy Toledo,”
said Kit, “that’s sure some wild ass stampede.” They took refuge in a grove of
flowering hemp which they had first begun to smell about midday, long before it
came in sight. The plants were about twelve feet high, the fragrance alone
enough to stun a traveler into waking dream. Hassan for the first time seemed
encouraged, as if this were a message from a realm with which he had done
business. He went about like an Englishman in a rosegarden, carefully inhaling
aromas, peering at and selecting flowering and fruiting heads of ganja, until
he had picked a goodsize bale. For days then

the fragrant tops hung upside down in
the sun, tied to the cargo lashings on the camels, swaying as they stepped
along. Whenever Prance attempted to remove a bud, Hassan appeared from nowhere
and slapped his hand away. “Not cured yet. Not ready to smoke.”

   
“And
when it is . . .”

“I
must reflect. It is not really for English, but perhaps we may strike a
bargain.”

The
wind, which was alive, conscious, and not kindly disposed to travelers, had a
practice of coming up in the middle of the night. The camels smelled it first,
then slowly everyone else in the party began to hear it, its unstoppable
crescendo, giving them too little time to devise shelter, and to which often
the only resort was to submit, pressed against the earth flat as any stalk of
grass, and try not to be taken away into the sky.

Wolves
gathered and watched all night, it was uncertain whether to look after them or
take what was left when the wind was done with them. Prance seemed to live on
little else but a local stomach remedy the Uyghurs called
gul hän,
made
from fermented rose petals, which he carried an enormous canteen of and was
reluctant, indeed surly, about sharing with anybody else. Hassan retaliated by
keeping a wary eye on his supply of ganja, which he was using, it turned out,
as a sort of trade goods, endearing the party to everyone on the route from
Finnish Tatars hunting in the Altai to Cossack icefishers at Lake Zaisan. The
Irtysh by then was still frozen, so they pressed on to Barnaul on the Ob in
time for the great boom and rip of the spring thaw, waking everybody just
before dawn, echoing back up into the mountains, and presently caught a steamer
there, filled with miners, traders, and Tsarist functionaries, and they all
went bouncing like a toboggan 120 miles down to the tiny railroad workers’
settlement of Novosibirsk, to wait beside the widegauge tracks for the train to
Irkutsk.

“
So this is Irkutsk
.”

   
“The
Paris of Siberia.”

More
like Saturday night in the San Juans all over again, as it turned out. All day,
all night. The town was a peculiar combination of riproaring and respectable.
Gold miners drank vodka, played
vint,
argued politics, and shot at each
other in a spirit of fatalistic play. The
kupechestvo
stayed in their
substantial homes over in Glaskovsk, keeping to parts of town relevant to business,
pretending to ignore the lowlife element, which well within living memory had
included themselves.

“Some
pilgrimage,” Kit looking around through a pall of tobacco and

hemp smoke at the spectacle inside
the Club Golomyanka, where he and

Prance had stopped in to celebrate,
or at least commemorate, their arrival.

“Out here pilgrimage is a matter of
kind and wrathful deities. Timing. Guidance.”

   
“What’s
that mean?”

   
“Ask
Hassan.”

   
“Hassan
disappeared the minute we got to the Lake.”

   
“Exactly.”

Their
instructions were to report to a Mr. Swithin Poundstock, a British national
active in the business of importing and exporting, “And it won’t do,” Auberon
Halfcourt had been most emphatic, “to press him for further details.” They
found him down at the port of Irkutsk, in his warehouse going about with an
inkpot and brush stenciling on a number of heavy crates the somehow
unconvincing term naushniki. “Earmuffs,” Prance muttered. “I think not, not in
this life.” Despite the air of general bustle in the great dim space, a number
of employees seemed to be chiefly engaged in observing Kit and Prance with
illdisguised unfriendliness.

“How’s Halfcourt?” the merchant
greeted them. “Barking mad of course, but what else?”

   
“He
sends—” Prance began.

   
“And
listen, what about Hassan?”

Prance frowned in perplexity. “The
native guide? I don’t know, he disappeared.”

“
Before
he disappeared,” with
perhaps a touch of impatience, “did he leave anything for me?”

“Oh.” From a Gladstone bag, Prance
handed over a small package wrapped in oilcloth, through which Kit could detect
the distinctive nasal signature of wild hemp. With an effort he refrained from
comment, which was just as well, for Poundstock was not quite done. He led them
toward the back of the facility, where, slowly growing louder, a rhythmical and
metallic percussion could be heard. They arrived at a steel door, before which
stood two large, thuggish personalities each packing an 1895 model Nagant
revolver. “What,” muttered one of them, “you again?”

Inside,
a large coining press of a certain vintage was stamping out what looked like
British gold sovereigns. Except that they weren’t gold, more a coppery silver,
as Poundstock explained. “Old Chinese coins, basically. What they call ‘cash.’
Silver, bronze, the content varies depending what comes in that day. We melt it
down, cast ingots, roll fillets, cut blanks, strike the design, and
electroplate with a very thin layer of gold. Can’t tell them from the real
thing.”

   
“But
they’re all—”

“Don’t
say it. Thanks to friends at Tower Hill, the dies we use are perfectly genuine.
It really is young Vic here on every one of these. And that’s what matters,
isn’t it.”

   
“I
don’t know. Can they be spent? Legally?”

“Interesting concept, especially out
here. We’ll start you off with a thousand, how’s that? You be the judge. Two?
Not as heavy as you’d think, really.” With a stove shovel, he filled a sturdy
brasstrimmed box with pseudosovereigns. “All yours. One last thing, the
standard sermon, and you can be off to your adventures.” He ushered them into
an adjoining office, dominated by a map of eastern Siberia.

“Here is where you’ll be
operating—the three great river basins east of the Yenisei—Upper
Tunguska, Stony Tunguska, Lower Tunguska. For years the Tungus clans who occupy
each of these river valleys have been at war, in particular the Ilimpiya, who
live along the Lower Tunguska, and the Shanyagir, who occupy the Stony
Tunguska. The key figure in this, perhaps even the one your Doosra reports to,
is a shaman of great regional fame named Magyakan, who has been active on
behalf of the Ilimpiya.”

   
“And
which representatives of the great Powers are we likely to meet?”

   
“You’ve
probably already met,” Poundstock shrugged. “Bon voyage, gents.”

And they were on the move once again,
aboard a river steamer down the Angara, as it was known at this end—its
name would change farther along to Upper Tunguska—past the city, beneath
the great flying bridge, borne by the current flowing out of Lake Baikal, north
into the beating heart of shamanic Asia.

The other passengers were
siberyaki,
prospectors, gamblers, Cossack enterprisers, fugitives from the wide,
welllit streets and whatever these might have required as appropriate behavior.
They passed alder swamps and bamboo groves and pale green reindeer moss. Bears
foraging for cowberries paused to watch them. Baby Siberian cranes learning to
fly rose briefly against the sky.

At
Bratsk there was a deep gorge with pine forests and violent rapids, which
everybody had to get out and go around by land, through a vast swarm of
mosquitoes so thick it darkened the sun, to where another boat waited to
continue the journey.

They
got off a couple of days later at Yeniseisk, and found Kirghiz horses and brush
supplies, and Kit was surprised to hear Prance talking the lingo a mile a
minute. “Tungus, Buriatic, Mongol, question of accent, really, a certain
attitude of the vocal apparatus, embouchure, breathing
. . . .
”

They
picked up their luggage at the dock, including the box full of Poundstock’s
goldplated sovereigns. Prance’s instructions were to hand them out

to any natives likely to be useful,
filling them in when possible on the topic of the Queen whose image appeared on
the obverse. “I tell them she’s alive,” he admitted, with little embarrassment.
“That she is our greatest shaman. She has conquered time. She never ages. Sort
of thing.”

“What about all the Germans out in
these woods telling them otherwise? They’re gonna find out she’s dead, Prance.”

   
“I
tell them she is the ruler of Shambhala.”

   
“They
must know that’s horseshit, too.”

“It worked for Dorzhieff in Tibet. He
told the Dalai Lama that the Tsar was the king of Shambhala—though that
wouldn’t do out here, the Tungus hate any Tsar no matter who it is, just on
principle. We’re supposed to find the local shaman and see if he can’t put in a
good word, anything to help along the old Entente, don’t you know.”

“So,
see if I have this straight, the Tsar is King of Shambhala, Victoria is Queen
of Shambhala, that makes it a ShambhalaShambhala alliance—sort of, I
don’t know, quadratic isn’t it? and aren’t they related somehow?”

“By
marriage,” with a look Kit was used to by now, a mixture of impatience,
disapproval, and fear that there was some joke he wasn’t getting.

Keeping mainly to riverbanks
, they made their way among wildcat coalmining works,
thickets of willow and wild cherry, meadows full of wildflowers that seemed to
Kit enormous, violets as big as your hand, yellow lilies and blue veronica you
could shelter from the rain under, looking for word of the shaman Magyakan, if
not the man in person. Like the taiga, he was everywhere, and
mysterious—a heroic being with unearthly gifts. They heard tales of how
he had been shot once with a rifle, by a Russian soldier, and had calmly
reached into his body and pulled out the bullet, over an inch long, shining and
bloodless. Presented it to the sky. Living witnesses had beheld this. He had
power over the iron creatures of Agdy, Lord of the Thunder, and knew how to
call them down at will, their eyes flashing, their fury inexorable. “You see
what happens out here,” Prance instructed Kit, “you get these conflations,
‘Agdy’ is the Hindu firegod Agni, of course, but almost certainly also Ogdai
Khan, son of Jenghiz Khan, who succeeded to the Mongol Empire and extended his
father’s conquests east and west, from China to Hungary.”