The Ninth Buddha (62 page)

‘For God’s sake, Chindamani!”
 
shouted Christopher.

“Get out of here!
 
Take Samdup and run!”

“I can’t go Ka-ris To-feh, not without you.
 
Don’t ask me to leave you.”
 
She had the boy and she knew she ought to make a run for it. His life was at stake: it was her duty to save him.
 
But she could not move.
 
With William dead, Christopher needed her more than ever.
 
Her love for him tore at her love for the boy, like a trapped beast with its claws.

Zamyatin lifted his pistol and pointed it at Samdup.

“You!”
 
he shouted in Tibetan.

“Come over here and bring the boy with you!”
 
He knew Ungern would need the boy now, if he intended to execute the Khutukhtu.
 
Ungern would not let Sepailov fire as long as he was aiming at the boy.

“Ka-ris To-feh!”
 
cried Chindamani.

“Tell him to put his gun down or I’ll have to kill him.
 
Please tell him!”

At the main door, Ungern and Sepailov hesitated.
 
Zamyatin had realized they needed the boy.
 
But why didn’t the woman take the child and run?
 
And what did she mean, that she would kill him?

“There’s no point, Zamyatin,” Ungern said.

“You’re finished.

Sukebator has retreated.
 
The members of your cell in Urga are either dead or in prison awaiting my orders.
 
If you kill the boy, the Khutukhtu lives.
 
If you kill the Khutukhtu, the boy will serve me as he has been serving you.
 
And in either case, Sepailov will kill you.
 
Better just to drop your gun and make the best of it.”

Zamyatin’s hand was shaking.
 
He could scarcely control the gun.
 
He turned from the boy to the Khutukhtu and back again.

Sepailov took a step forward.
 
Zamyatin raised the gun and pointed it at Samdup.

Ungern nodded.
 
Sepailov took aim and fired, hitting Zamyatin in the left shoulder.
 
Zamyatin’s hand jerked, firing his pistol, then he dropped it.
 
It fell like a stone to the heavily carpeted floor.

Sepailov motioned with the gun, directing Zamyatin to join

Christopher, and the Khutukhtu.
 
Clutching his bleeding shoulder, the Buriat complied.

At first, no-one noticed what had happened at the rear of the room. But when Zamyatin moved, Christopher saw Chindamani bending over Samdup, who was lying on the floor.
 
Her long black hair fell over the boy like a curtain, concealing his face.
 
But from the edge of the curtain, like the petals of a tiny flower pushing themselves out above the black soil, fine drops of blood appeared, spread, and combined into a gently moving pool.

No-one spoke.
 
Sepailov continued to cover Zamyatin with his pistol.

Ungern turned his attention to the woman and the boy.

When she raised her face at last, it was smeared with blood, and blood clung in fantastic drops to her hair.
 
She said nothing.
 
All her eloquence was in her face, in the blood that had fastened to her cheeks and lips, in her eyes, staring past her matted hair into the still room.

Christopher rose from his seat.
 
He felt a great numbness come over him, striking his limbs into immobility.
 
He remembered Chindamani’s words, speaking of the prophecy: he will have to die in order to be reborn yet again.
 
Her blood-streaked face chilled him.
 
He knew that some terrible doom had taken hold of them and was harrying them towards an end of sorts.
 
Or a beginning: it was all the same now.

“Let me go to her,” he said in English, addressing Sepailov.
 
The Russian did not move.
 
He held his pistol pointed at Zamyatin, ready to fire again.
 
Christopher stepped towards him, but Sepailov did not alter his position.
 
He let Christopher pass.

Ungern watched as though fascinated as Christopher walked up to Chindamani and raised her.
 
Samdup’s head had been shattered by the bullet: there was no question of saving him.
 
He held her against his chest, feeling the futility of everything.

They stood like figures of wax, separate, immobile, dreaming individual dreams.
 
There were no prayers to take away the blood or the spiders, no gestures to bring life back to the dead.
 
No-one saw Chindamani move, or if they did, they ignored her.

From the folds of her jacket, she took out a gun, a small Remington she had somehow managed to palm and hide during the tour of the Khutukhtu’s treasures.
 
She had no certain idea how it worked, or whether it was loaded, or whether it worked at all.

She had picked it up without my notion of what she intended to do with it.
 
Now she knew.

The first shot found Sepailov’s back.
 
He dropped without a murmur, dead or paralysed.
 
Zamyatin saw his chance.
 
He ran forward, fingers clutching for the gun that had fallen from Sepailov’s hand.
 
As he picked it up, she fired again.
 
And twice more.

Zamyatin clutched the air.
 
He tried to breathe and swallowed blood. He tried harder and blood came gushing out of his mouth and throat.
 
Suddenly, his legs felt like lead and his head was spinning through space, divorced from his surroundings.
 
He heard himself coughing, choking, drowning in his own blood.
 
The red flag fluttered in front of his eyes against a velvet sky.
 
Then it was blood, smothering the world.
 
And at last he was one with History and the sky was empty and as black as night.

Chindamani dropped the gun.
 
With a moan, she bent forward, burying her face in her hands, sobbing without control.
 
With Samdup, the last vestige of her world had vanished.
 
Her love for Christopher had destroyed the boy and the world he had symbolized.

Christopher picked up the gun.
 
He had guessed who the baron was, guessed what he had to do if they were to get out of here alive.

Von Ungern Sternberg carried a pistol in a leather holster strapped to the belt around his waist, but still he had not drawn it.
 
He had watched everything without emotion, a spectator rather than a participant.
 
Now, he looked at Christopher and the gun in his hand as if it were a flower he held out to him.

The precision of death, its absoluteness, its finality these had been the things that had commended it to him and made him linger over it in the long days and nights at Urga.
 
How simple it was, he thought, how plain, how lacking in affectation.
 
It was all that he admired, the ultimate statement of man’s innate simplicity.

There was a perfection in it such that he had never found in anything else, and he loved to see that perfection renewed, that bold simplicity restated time after time in his presence.

And now his own death.
 
It had come sooner than expected, but it was welcome all the same.
 
It seemed like a good enough time to die.

Christopher raised the pistol.
 
There were still a few bullets left,

but he would need only one.
 
He stepped up close to the baron,

it looking him directly in the eye.
 
Yes, he could understand the stories he had heard.
 
It would be better for everyone if von Ungern Sternberg were removed.
 
He put the pistol to the baron’s head and felt the trigger start to give to the pressure of his finger.
 
The baron did not move or flinch.
 
He stared into Christopher’s eyes patiently, without reproach.

It was no good.
 
Christopher could not be an executioner.
 
Not even of this man.
 
He lowered the gun and threw it away from him, into a corner.

There was a sound of running feet outside.

“Why didn’t you shoot?”
 
Ungern asked.

“You would never understand,” Christopher replied, turning away and putting his arm round Chindamani.
 
She was trembling.

The door opened and a group of armed men ran into the room.

They stopped dead, slowly taking in the scene before them.
 
Two of them stepped past Ungern and took hold of Christopher and Chindamani, dragging them apart.

“Let them go.”
 
Ungern’s voice was sharp.

The soldiers looked puzzled, but the baron’s tone had been unmistakable.
 
Their hands dropped, leaving Christopher and Chindamani free.
 
Christopher bent down and picked up Samdup’s body.
 
He was still warm.
 
Blood ran unimpeded over Christopher’s hands.
 
He cradled the small body against his own for a moment, then passed him tcxCIhindamani.
 
Ungern watched as Christopher crossed the roorrr to where his own son lay and picked him up carefully.

They said nothing as they left.
 
Ungern sent a man with them, to see that they got through.
 
They left the Khutukhtu behind, sitting on a heap of cushions, kneading his soft robes with nervous fingers.

His hands still held traces of scent from the boy’s skin.
 
By dawn, even that faint perfume would have faded forever.
 
He closed his eyes as though something had crept into his darkness, and he dreamed of freedom.

They carried the bodies to the Maidari Temple and left them there, at the foot of the giant statue of the Maidari Buddha.
 
There was no resemblance between the statue and Samdup, except that neither lived nor breathed.
 
Chindamani tidied Samdup’s clothes and hair, but otherwise did nothing to disguise the fact that he was dead.
 
Christopher took the small teddy-bear and put it in William’s hands as he had done in England when he was asleep.
 
There were no words.

It was dawn when they left the temple.
 
The first rays of the sun were striking its towers, and everywhere pilgrims were rising to pray the first prayers of the Festival.
 
They prayed for paradise and an easy death to take them there, for the removal of the weight of their sins and enough food for the journey home.
 
Today, nothing would be refused them.

Christopher and Chindamani walked out of the city without any very clear idea of where they were headed.
 
Their clothes and hair were covered with blood, but they walked on without stopping to wash or refresh themselves.

It was well after noon before they halted.
 
They had long since lost anything that looked like a road or a track, but had gone on as though they had found a path of their own to follow.
 
They went north into the Chingiltu Ula mountains, making their way by guesswork.
 
The sides of the steep hills through which they passed were heavily forested with dark conifers.
 
They passed no-one.
 
They could hear birdsong, but saw no birds or any other form of wildlife.

The place they stopped in was a small temple, abandoned and partly ruined.
 
They spent that night there, huddled against one another for warmth.
 
The following morning, Christopher went into the forest to find food.
 
There were berries on low bushes and small mushrooms that he gathered in his shirt.
 
He found a small stream close to the temple and carried water back in an abandoned bowl he discovered in an inner room.

They spent the rest of that day in the temple, resting, and decided to spend the next night there too, lighting a fire with wood Christopher collected from the forest floor.
 
By now, they could talk about what had happened.

There was no point at which they decided to stay in the temple.

But gradually, they made themselves more comfortable there, and soon they regarded it as home.
 
No-one came there.
 
Nothing disturbed them.
 
Christopher found abundant game deeper in the forest and made small traps for deer and rabbits; but Chindamani would eat no flesh and subsisted on what they could gather from the trees and bushes.

She suffered badly from a sense of guilt.
 
She was convinced that her illicit passion for Christopher had in some way been responsible for Samdup’s death.
 
Her hesitation at the entrance to the tunnel had, she was certain, cost Samdup his life.
 
No amount of reasoning could convince her otherwise.

She was a trulku, she said, a vehicle for the Lady Tara.
 
She had not been born to love or marry or have children.
 
That was for mortals; but the’gbddess in her was not mortal.
 
He used the arguments that she had used with him before, that she herself was a woman, that she was not a goddess, that their love was its own justification; but she would not listen, or if she did, she chose not to accept his reasoning.

For the first two months, she would not sleep with him.
 
He, for his part, neither pressed her nor made her feel unwelcome.
 
But when they walked in the forest together, she would sometimes hold his hand, and at those times he would feel she still loved him in spite of herself.
 
And one day towards the end of June he kept a rough calendar on the trunk of a tree outside the temple she came to his bed as she had done the first time, without explanation.