Kingdom (37 page)

‘I came to find you,’ she stumbled. ‘I came to find out what happened to you.’

‘Well now you have indeed found me. But it is almost too late.’

Jack interjected, ‘Herzog, where is the terma? Where is the Book of Dzyan? What did it say?’

‘Jack Adams, you are a good man but you are a terribly simple man. You will never understand.’

‘Don’t be so arrogant, Herzog,’ said Jack, taken aback by Herzog’s imperiousness. ‘It is you who don’t understand. You have become drunk on Tibetan superstition and Nazi occultism – and look where it has got you.’

‘Nonsense. You are just a foolish American boy, who believes too many of the lies he has been told about the world. You are too much of a materialist ever to understand the truth.’

‘How dare you patronize me, Herzog?’

Urgently Nancy interrupted.

‘Jack, please. Let him speak, let him say his piece.’ She looked down at the dying man.

Herzog coughed, and then she saw his terrible ravaged face creasing into something – it seemed to be a smile. It looked more like the leer of a death’s head, so wizened and skeletal was the man, and Nancy recoiled again, though she tried to hold his gaze.

‘The boy does not believe me. I do not expect him to. You at least will understand. That is why I summoned you with the bone. You see, I have been working towards this moment all these years, helping you in your career, advising the editor to promote you, and even I did not know why I was doing this, or rather, I thought I was simply doing it because you showed great promise as a journalist. But that is the way of the kings of Shangri-La. We are always the last to know the real motivations for our deeds. I sent the bone to you according to the Oracle’s instructions. The Oracle knew that you would take the bone to Jack Adams. He is the only man in Delhi who could identify it and the only man who could have brought you here, and once Jack Adams saw the bone and realized its significance he was powerless to resist the call of his own vanity. You see, the Oracle knew he would be prepared to do anything to discover where I had found it – the bone was the perfect bait.’

Herzog paused and then his eyes seemed to lose focus, as if he was retreating into memories, literally seeing them rather than the flickering shadows of the cave.

Anton Herzog could see great distances into the past, a stone knight in a great cathedral, his head rested on the pillow, his cold arms folded onto his chest. He would lie here for eternity. But if only now he could tell them something of the things he had seen. He coughed bitterly and his chest ached; he knew his lungs were collapsing and he hadn’t much time. Not so long to think, to remember, to live. To carve his life into the dull stones around him. The opium would carry him for a time, and then its effects would fade and he would spiral into darkness. And the spiral would be endless, unless of course they came for him, came from Shangri-La.

But where to start? How to make them understand what he had discovered and its awful implications? Slowly he began, trying to conjure the past, hoping it would dance on the dark walls around him. He heard his voice, thin, hoarse, whispering to the girl, ‘There was once a man. A thin, ascetic, round-headed man, wearing civilian clothes. He was trying to cross the Bremervörde Bridge. It was May 20th, 1945, it was the end of the war.’

He coughed again, felt the horrible piercing pain in his lungs rise and fall. When it faded enough that he could bear it, enough to let him draw a breath, he resumed:

‘There were some British soldiers guarding the bridge. They challenged him. He was carrying papers in the name of Hitzinger, he had a bandage over his right eye. In the reports that followed, the soldiers all said that there was something strange about the man, something disconcerting. The papers were quite clearly forged and so the soldiers arrested him and took him to the nearest Military Police Station. There he was questioned repeatedly for three days and three nights until finally, exhausted, he removed his bandage and said, “My name is Heinrich Himmler. I am the Reichsführer of the SS. Heil Hitler.” ’

Herzog groaned as the pain stabbed at him again. Jen had extinguished the cigarette lighter, and in the darkness of the Cave the three pilgrims listened as Herzog began once more to speak . . .

‘Of course, at first the police did not believe him. They thought he was mad. They stripped him naked and gave him the choice between a suit of American clothes or a refugee blanket. He chose the blanket. They were about to search him for a suicide pill when he bit down hard and shattered the cyanide capsule that had been implanted in one of his teeth. They buried him in the woods, in an unmarked grave . . .’

Nancy interjected. There was fear in her voice.

‘Why are you telling us this, Herzog? Do you sympathize with this wicked man? Is this why you followed your father’s dream?’

‘My child, sympathy or otherwise is irrelevant. My father Felix Koenig met this wicked man, as you call him. He met him on several occasions. My father told me that this man came from another ethical universe. There was no sense in judging him in conventional terms. He was like an African shaman. He was a warrior monk from another world. He was not a European, governed by the laws of conscience and the ethics of Judaeo-Christian civilization. For in the twelve years since the Nazis had come to power a whole new civilization had been erected on the banks of the Rhine, a whole new ethic had been born, an ethic that was different from anything that had come before . . .’

Now Jack interrupted: ‘That’s a grand way to talk about a bunch of criminals.’

There was a silence, as if Herzog’s trance had been disturbed by this interjection. Then from the darkness his cultured, dispassionate voice came again.

‘To call them criminals shows the frightening poverty of your mind. If you are only capable of using conventional morality to judge the Nazi mystery then you will never understand it. You are like the jury at Nuremberg or at the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem: you are only exposing your own hypocrisy, your own moral vacuum. And we all know that nature abhors a vacuum. All you are doing is preparing the ground for another Holocaust . . .’

‘How dare you talk in that way . . .’

Nancy put her hand on Jack’s arm.

‘Jack – let him talk.’

Once more the rasping cough echoed through the darkness and then Herzog spoke again. ‘It is only natural that the boy is angry. Unpalatable truths always have this effect. He has been taught a materialist version of history in all its inadequate hypocrisy: rampant inflation and unhappiness with the settlement of World War One caused the German people to elect a leader who turned out to be an evil maniac. Conventional history likes to explain the war away in these impoverished terms, but the man arrested on Bremervörde Bridge cannot simply be dismissed as one of a handful of madmen. The Aryan race was being summoned to throw off foreign gods and return to its source. And it was summoned by powers far beyond its control.’

Appalled by what she was hearing, Nancy fumbled for words. ‘But how can you say this – they sent your father to his death – they intended that Stalingrad should be his grave . . .’

Herzog stopped her. ‘My father could see beyond these little men: the Hitlers, the Himmlers, the jack-booted thugs. He did not care about them – he could see all the way to Shangri-La, he understood what was really happening. Why are the Jews allowed their patrimony and history but not the Aryans? Why are the Tibetans allowed theirs, but not the Aryans? My father was loyal to the truth, not to the Nazi regime; he wanted to tell the German people where they had come from and show them their destiny. Once, I asked him to tell me about Stalingrad, about the fighting in the winter, in the streets, in the ruins; the hopeless, insane, pitiless fighting. Did it make him hate the dream that had started the war? I asked. Did it make him wish they had never been made to resurrect the truth of the German past, of the Book of Dzyan and Shangri-La? I wanted him to admit that it was all barbarism and fantasy and that Stalingrad had shown him that – but instead he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said simply, “It was sublime.” Then, I did not understand, but now I do. Now, I do.’

Jack could keep silent no longer. In an urgent voice he said, ‘You are all insane, Herzog. Insane psychopaths, prepared to excuse anything. And you have crossed a moral Rubicon. You have gone too far.’

‘No. I have been to Shangri-La and I have seen the Book of Dzyan.’

Herzog paused for a moment. ‘I will tell, then you too will understand, you too will know the truth.’

They could hear his breathing in the still night air. Then he began again, his voice deeper now, slightly quieter, but stronger, more alive – almost as if someone else was speaking through him.

The night, the cave, the darkness, all were transformed, all else was forgotten as Herzog carried them aloft on his fabulous, wild, fantastic story that led from a small village in Austria, to Argentina, to America and finally to Tibet. Nancy closed her eyes in the darkness and the visions danced before her. She became Anton Herzog; she saw his young father, the diligent professor in Munich all those years ago; she crossed the decades with him and traversed whole continents, all the way until she came through the emerald valley and to the terrible kingdom of Shangri-La and learned with him the truth of the world from the mouth of the King, and of the awful fate that awaited him if he failed to escape.

‘I took my bag from my cell at the heart of the kingdom of Shangri-La and made my way back down to the ground floor.’

His voice echoed in her mind. It was her journey

too.

‘There was no one around as I began to explore the corridors and passageways. I stumbled into a courtyard, at the centre of which was the gompa well. Working quickly, in a deep panic, I drew up some water, crystal-clear and sweet as wine, and filled my water bags. I had a stroke of luck: slumped against the wall of the courtyard was a bag of tsampa. So I emptied all my belongings from my rucksack – toothbrush, bandages, useless maps – and filled it to the brim with tsampa. The bag containing the powder from the metok chulen I had tied around my neck; it was my most valuable possession. Exploring further, I found one room that contained gardening equipment, including several thick woollen winter chubas and a greasy yak’s-wool hat. I tried on the chubas for size, took the biggest, and stuffed the hat into its pocket. Now I was as prepared as I was ever likely to be, and all that remained was for me to find the Book of Dzyan.

‘It did not take long to locate the library; like a ghost haunting a ruined castle, I glided silently through the corridors and rooms until eventually I stumbled into a large book-lined room. In the centre of the room was a golden lectern. I hurried over to it only to discover that there was no book resting on it. I glanced around the room. There must have been thousands and thousands of ancient tomes cramming every inch of the walls, it might take me weeks to search through each one. I had minutes. I sighed in exasperation but then reminded myself that the King’s account of the Book of Dzyan was utter gibberish anyway – a book written on the back of a tortoise, he had said, then transcribed to vellum and parchment. A book that contained the thoughts of the universe – talking to itself. “Madness and black magic,” I reminded myself, speaking out loud. And then I turned on my heel and began to hunt for a way out.

‘I suspected that I was going to have to make my way up onto the rear wall of the gompa and then jump or climb down the other side. I would probably need a rope. But in fact it was much easier than that. I emerged from a passageway into a back courtyard, on the far side of which was a door. I hurried over, not expecting for one minute for it to be unlocked, but tried the handle anyway. The door swung open, revealing the mountainside beyond. I could hardly believe my luck, but then quickly realized that the only reason that the monks could afford to be so casual was that they were utterly convinced that no one would ever try to escape, nor would any unwanted visitor appear from the depths of the inhospitable mountains.

‘The light was fading as I stepped silently through the doorway and shut it noiselessly behind me. Pure undiluted fear tightened every nerve in my body as I set foot on the rocky ground. If they caught me now, I would never get another chance to escape and my horrible fate would be sealed. Then as I adjusted the straps on my backpack, I noticed something glinting on the ground. I bent down. It was the mouthpiece of a bone trumpet, and suddenly I realized that all around the base of the castle wall were bones, bones and more bones; I was standing ankle-deep in ancient bones. I was standing on the burial ground of the kings of Shangri-La. I picked up the bone trumpet and shoved it into my bag; at least I would have some proof, some evidence of my horrendous journey, if I ever managed to make good my escape.

‘Within a few minutes I had put a half-mile between myself and the gompa. I turned around for one last look. The tower was silhouetted against the dusk sky. Was it my imagination or could I just see the abject figure of the King, gazing out at the first stars of the evening, awaiting his awful fate? But perhaps I had now saved him – once they discovered I had gone, there would be no dethronement, and he would live until the next newcomer appeared. He would be able to maintain his gruesome delusions a while longer; he would reign a few more years over the world – or what he thought the world was.

But then there was always the chance they might come after me – and that thought set me scrambling as fast as I could up the slope of the stony hillside, towards what I hoped was a ravine that would lead to a pass. It was a painful process: the thin air contained little oxygen and it felt as if my lungs were flapping emptily as I struggled onwards. An hour later I was still climbing and still panting for breath. The last grey whispers of day were about to disappear, and I decided to stop and get my bearings by the first stars and fix in my mind the various mountain peaks before they were lost to the night. I took the opportunity to mix up a little of the tsampa and metok chulen powder with water so that I could take my first shot of the terton’s magical drug. Then I turned again towards the mountainside and set off at a slower pace into the darkness.