Tulku (30 page)

‘What’s up, Theo?’ she whispered. ‘I heard a couple of shots this morning, and I knew they must of come from my gun, but no-one won’t tell me what happened. I been looking for you and old Lung all day, and in the end I got it out of someone as you was here. I was going to wait till you come out, but then I got it into my head as how you needed me, so I went and argy-bargied my way in.’

‘They won’t tell me what they’ve done with Lung,’ said Theodore.

‘Why should they of done anything with him?’

‘He tried to shoot the Lama Amchi this morning. I stopped him. On the roof of the temple of
the
oracle. I got knocked out in the fight. They’ve been trying to make me tell them what the oracle said to me this morning, and I’ve been saying I won’t tell them till they let me see Lung. I’m afraid . . .’

The clink of the bell cut him short.

‘Let us do everything in order,’ said the Lama. ‘Child, we must now talk in Tibetan, so that the Mother of the Tulku can answer us.’

Theodore nodded. At a sign from the Lama another stool was brought for Mrs Jones. Everybody sat. The Lama spoke for a short while. Theodore, from what Major Price-Evans had taught him, picked out enough of the words to guess that the Lama was asking Mrs Jones to persuade him to answer the question about his meeting with the oracle. He was preparing himself to refuse when instead of turning to him she replied to the Lama in Tibetan. She started easily enough, but then, to his surprise, stumbled and faltered, searched for a word, got going but almost at once came to a halt once more.

‘This won’t do,’ she said in English. ‘Trouble is, all the Tibetan I’ve learnt is about chants and meditation and such, which ain’t much cop for talking about this kind of thing. I’ll have to do it in English, and you put it into Chinee for them. All right?’

Theodore nodded, remembering his own difficulties with Major Price-Evans. Mrs Jones turned once more to the Lama Amchi.

‘Now see here,’ she said earnestly. ‘Things ain’t been going too bad this far, spite of old Lung trying to take a pot-shot at you this morning – not that he had a hope in heaven of hitting you at that range. But apart from that, I done everything you
wanted
, and more. When I first come here my idea was to scarper, soon as poss, and we set it up and four nights ago we was all ready to go, and you’d never have caught us, neither, with three days’ start. Only who stopped it? I did. I’d changed my mind and decided I was going to stick it out here, and have the baby here whatever happens. And what’s more, I been doing my level best to do it all the way you want, so as your Tulku can have a proper start in his next life, with a Mum what’s really up to the job. I been meditating like nobody’s business. I been learning every blind scrap I can about the sort of thing he’s got to know – all right, I been doing it for my own sake, much as his, but you can’t say as I’ve done one thing what you didn’t want. Now you look like mucking it all up. Lung’s the Father of the Tulku, ain’t he . . .’

She was speaking at a slower pace than her usual rush, and had dropped into the slurred and twanging accent which Theodore had heard only once before, when she had been talking in the cave in the rock pillar about her childhood in the Thames-side slums. It was as though the years of her life between those old days and this had been an almost meaningless interlude. She spoke quietly but with great emphasis, and paused at the end of almost every phrase for Theodore to translate. When he reached this point there was a gasp and a mutter. Clearly most of the Council were not aware that Lung was the father of the unborn child. The Lama Amchi must know – yes, of course, Mrs Jones had told him very early on when they were discussing the signs announced by the oracle – but presumably he hadn’t told the others. They wouldn’t quite so easily accept a
Tulku
of half-Chinese parentage, perhaps.

‘Is he still alive?’ said Mrs Jones.

‘His body lives,’ said the Lama.

‘I want to see him.’

‘It is better not.’

‘Now, look here. This is what I mean when I say you’re beginning to muck things up. For a start, it ain’t right if the Father of the Tulku don’t get proper respect, whatever he might of done in a moment when he was a bit off his rocker. And next, I am very fond of that young man. I ain’t fond of him in quite the same way as what I was four months back, but I want to see as he’s all right. I want that almost as much as I want to see that you get your Tulku born proper. Matter of fact, the one goes with the other. If I start thinking as how Lung got into trouble ’cause of what I did, then I won’t be able to do my meditating and all, will I? That bit of guilt will be like a ruddy great mountain, bang in the middle of my road to enlightenment. I’ll put it stronger. Unless I see as Lung’s all right, and going to stay all right, then I’m going to turn round. I’m going to walk all the way back down the road as I’ve come so far along, and be what I was before I became your
chela
. ’Cause of why? ’Cause you’ll of shown me, by the way you treated my friend Lung, that none of what you been teaching me matters. Perhaps it’s true – fact I still think it is – but it still don’t matter one blind bit if it lets you do that to a fellow like Lung. No, wait. I got something else to say. It’s no use you thinking fair enough. She can go back and be what she was before, and have the baby, and after that it don’t matter what she thinks or feels. It ain’t true. I’m old for child-bearing. What’s more I’ve only had one kid before, and
that
time I wasn’t happy and I near as a toucher died, spite of the best doctors in England, and so did the baby. And I can tell you now it’ll be worse this time. Oh, I can have your Tulku, soft and easy, with hardly a pang, spite of my age, ’cause of what you’ve taught me. But you know as well as I do it’ll only work if I’ve got faith in it. Absolute, stark, unquestioning faith, body and soul. And if you ain’t careful, that’s not going to happen. So, now, let’s have him up here and see what you done to him.’

‘He is a profaner of holy things,’ said the Lama. ‘He cannot come to this place.’

‘No he ain’t,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘He was off his rocker, so it don’t count. And what’s more he’s the Father of the Tulku. So this is where we start. If you say he’s a profaner of holy things and I say he ain’t, that means I’m turning back along the road you shown me. Don’t it?’

‘It is strange when the
chela
begins to teach the
guru
,’ said the Lama, mild as ever.

‘I’m not teaching you. I’m just stating facts. And I’m not threatening you neither. If any of this happens, it won’t be because I want it. I don’t. I want the Tulku to be born, here in Dong Pe, safe and sound. I want to follow on the path you shown me. But it looks like you’re not going to let it happen.’

There was a short silence.

‘Let us ask the Council what it thinks of this matter,’ said the Lama.

Theodore had been aware, during all this exchange, of other voices straining to speak, but held back by the two powerful personalities at the focus of the argument. Now the pent waters burst. One monk started to argue sedately enough, but
almost
at once three others joined in. Angry shouts rose. An old man was on his feet, yelling the same short phrase over and over until his neighbours pulled him down. There was no mistaking the surge of intense hostility and hatred, not for anybody in the room, but for poor Lung, an invisible presence, at whom the monks shook their fists and screamed as if he had been standing there. There was a terrifying note in the tumult, as though the demons whose roles were being enacted outside by the masked dancers had been summoned to this room in their real selves, invisible powers of cruelty and rage and ignorance, occupying the bodies of the Council members in much the same way as the other powers had occupied that of the oracle-priest. Not all those present were shouting for vengeance on Lung. Perhaps almost half of them seemed to be arguing on the other side, but it made no difference – the contorted faces were the same, the gestures of violence, the bellows and screams. They were all possessed, beyond reason, whatever their original impulse.

The Lama Amchi waited with his bell poised, judged his moment and shook it vigorously. The noise was like a whiplash, but the shouting barely faltered. He had to shake the bell twice more before the yelling diminished into a tingling silence. Theodore saw for the first time how thin was the old man’s control, for all his prestige. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps only he could command and save Dong Pe. Perhaps it was not only love of power which had forced him into some of his actions.

‘The Council is divided,’ said the Lama with a smile.

‘So it’s between you and me,’ whispered Mrs Jones.

This time the silence was longer. Mrs Jones and the Lama faced each other, as they had in their first meeting on the mountainside, and energies flowed between them as they had seemed to then, like the lines of force between the poles of a magnet. The other souls in the room were constrained and held in place by the flow of energies until the Lama smiled again, raised his head and gave a longish order in Tibetan. One of the soldier monks at the door left the room.

‘It will take a little time,’ said the Lama. ‘Perhaps now the child will tell us what happened in his encounter with the oracle this morning.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I think you won your point, Theo. You might as well let ’em see you mean to play fair by them.’

‘All right,’ said Theodore in Mandarin. ‘I’ll tell you what I thought happened, though later I wasn’t so sure. It began after breakfast, when Lung told me to leave our room because he wanted to be alone . . .’

He told the story carefully, in the right order, leaving nothing out, not even the fact that he had thought the oracle spoke to him in Father’s words and tone, nor the fact that he had to all intents and purposes accused the Master of Protocol of cheating over the oracle’s messages. They listened closely, but questioned him only about the exact words he had used before the oracle-priest became possessed and the exact words of the reply. These the Master of Protocol wrote down on a slate which he drew from the folds of his robe. As Theodore finished he heard a shuffle and murmur at the door.

‘We will consider these meanings later,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘Let the Chinese be brought in.’

Theodore twisted on his stool in time to see the doors swing open and a shape outlined against the light from the further room. Though the shape was clearly composed of three people standing close together there was something inhuman, something monstrous about it. The shape split as the two men on the outside let go of the central figure and pushed it forward. It came at a slow, dragging walk, which still had that inhuman look, as though the figure were an automaton which would walk like this for ever. Even when it reached the area lit by the lamps in the Council Room Theodore was unable to recognize it as Lung. It was not just that the side of the face was puffy with a huge bruise and that dried blood had dribbled from the corner of the swollen lips. The face was not a man’s face at all. It was expressionless. The eyes stared like an idol’s, round as marbles, unfocused and unblinking. The head was unnaturally stiff on the neck, and the arms, held close to the side of the body, looked as though they were clamped rigid.

As this figure came up the aisle between the benches Mrs Jones rose from her stool, took two paces towards it and clutched it to her side. For a moment its legs tried to continue walking, but then they stilled. Lung, if it was Lung, showed no sign of knowing her.

‘Oh, what have you done to him? What have you done to him?’ she cried.

‘If we hadn’t protected him from the crowd in the courtyard,’ said one of the monks, ‘they would have torn him to fragments as we tear the dough giant.’

‘That ain’t what I meant,’ she snapped. ‘And you know it. What have you done to him?’

‘He was questioned and he would not answer,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘That accounts for his having been beaten a little. Then, while we are considering the proper punishment for a breaker of idols, we locked his soul within him, as you see.’

‘Can you unlock it?’

‘It can sometimes be done. But the Mother of the Tulku must understand that the Chinese is not now, so to speak, a person. He is in abeyance. Once he is himself again, with his soul guiding his body, he becomes again responsible for all that he has done. It is impossible that such a one should remain within the holy valley of Dong Pe, at the height of our great festival. He would be as it were a corruption, infecting all our rituals and ceremonies.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Give him his soul back and he can leave tomorrow morning. First thing. Theo can go with him.’

The Lama seemed about to agree when somebody spoke angrily from among the monks.

‘He cannot go back to China,’ explained the Lama. ‘There are those here who still believe that he is an agent of Pekin.’

‘It’ll have to be Inja then. You can cope with that? They’ll need an escort as far as the border. I’ve got enough money to see them through . . .’

‘We will provide for such needs,’ said the Lama.

‘It won’t be cheap,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Theo’ll need a ticket to England and then to America, and Lung’ll want a bit too . . .’

‘Dong Pe is rich. It will be done. Now let us perform the ritual, for the longer a man’s soul stays thus locked up the harder is his return.’

He gave orders in Tibetan. The monks rose and rearranged themselves. A pair of small drums and a silver incense-lamp were fetched from a curtained niche. The butter-lamps were collected and lined up in a single row at the feet of the Buddha, making the statue seem to float, gold and warm, in the darkness of the rest of the room.

‘Theo,’ whispered Mrs Jones. ‘Come here a tick. I want a word with you.’

She was still standing, clutching Lung to her side as though he would fall without her. Theodore rose achingly and joined her.

‘When this palaver is over,’ she whispered. ‘Come up to my cave. Nobody won’t stop you. We’ll have a bit of a chat, say good-bye, like. And there’s something important I want you to do for me.’