Tulku (6 page)

Mrs Jones was dressed in much the same style as the women in the pictures, with her hair piled up into a bun, stuck through with great wooden pins, and her face painted white and scarlet like a doll’s. Her small hands fluttered inside the huge sleeves as she spoke.

‘Isn’t it perfectly marvellous needlework?’ she fluted in her upper-crust accent. ‘I can’t help wondering what they’re up to. What do you imagine the story is, Theo?’

‘There’s got to be a story?’

‘Oh, yes, please. I wouldn’t trust this gentleman here one inch. Why’s he giving her that lily –
lilium tigrinum
, I’d say? He’s just the type to deceive an innocent girl. Would you say she looked innocent?’

‘The rain has spoilt them.’

‘I don’t know,’ she cooed. ‘These vegetable dyes don’t run and wool stands a lot of wetting . . . Now is this the same lady? Ooh, fancy, she’s got a knife! Is it for herself or for him? It’s a different gentleman, I think . . .’

Theodore knew quite well what she was doing, deliberately steering the conversation as close as she could to the frontiers of indecency, to see how he would take it. At first she had been amused simply to play the mourning widow, a figure of mystery behind her curtains – to peep out at the fabulous Yangtze and the busy ferry-towns, or to wait with her gun cocked beneath the litter-rugs while Lung bargained with porters or officials. She had positively enjoyed the danger, and the triumph of using that danger to force both Lung and Theodore in the direction she wanted to go, towards the forbidden mountains. But now she was bored – bored with the slow job of the porters, and with her role as a female, mere baggage, not allowed to ride her own horse, let alone to halt the procession and botanize in the teeming woods. She had spent twenty minutes swearing at Albert, pitching her voice just below the level at which Theodore could pick out definite blasphemies, and now she was bored of that too and had found a subtler way of teasing him. He looked at the embroidered picture, and smiled.

‘I guess she’s going to cook him dinner,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that a turnip?’

‘Oh! Men!’ she said. ‘You ain’t got no souls, none of you!’

Theodore smiled again. Even the careless phrase gave him barely a twinge. Since the decision to travel west, the break with Father’s last definite order, he had felt an odd sense of freedom from anything in his old life. The inner numbness was still there. He prayed morning and evening, but not as if anyone was listening to his prayers. He was cast out from the Congregation. But for most of the time he hardly thought about any of this,
and
was happy to play his part in the journey and let Mrs Jones tease him if she wished.

Before she could start again he had to trot forward and lead Bessie down a sudden slope. In front of him the porters used the incline to swing into a faster trot which opened a gap between them and the litter ponies. They were wizened little men, dressed in layer on layer of rags all bound to their limbs with leather thongs. They were the first Chinese Theodore had seen who didn’t wear the pigtail, but whose hair stood out in shaggy plaits beneath little grey fur caps with tight-rolled brims.

The path swung right between close-packed trunks and emerged into a clearing of lush, fine grass patched with pink flowers. The morning’s rain twinkled off the grass-blades and dripped all round from forest leaves. The earth seemed to whisper to itself as it sucked the moisture in.

‘Might be a plant or two worth looking at here,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Time for a halt anyway. Give Lung a yell, Theo.’

Theodore put a hand to his mouth and shouted. Lung, almost at the far trees now, reined and swung Sir Nigel up the slope to circle back towards the litter.

‘Hey! Look out!’ shouted Mrs Jones, grabbing suddenly beneath her litter-rug.

Her voice was answered by yells from the wood, and a shot. From the trees ahead, a little above the path, sprang a group of men as wild as animals, brandishing short curved swords or rough clubs. The porters dropped their loads and stampeded down the slope into the trees. Bewildered, Theodore looked to see what their guard, Uncle Sam, was doing. The old man had
drawn
his pistol and was pointing it roughly level with the tree-tops; with his head turned well away he pressed the trigger; there was a far louder explosion than any normal shot, and a lot of black smoke. The last coherent thing Theodore saw for a while was Uncle Sam running for the trees, screaming and nursing his arm.

By this time Albert was rearing and twisting sideways between the shafts and Bessie was trying to bolt down the path. The litter was empty. Theodore wrestled with the bridle, dragging Bessie’s head down. Under her neck he glimpsed Lung toppling from his saddle and still beating down with his umbrella at a wild man swinging a sword. Three sharp bangs. The shriek of a bamboo litter-pole twisting into shredded splinters, but still not breaking. A scream of pain from Albert, and a lunge that rushed Bessie forward, with Theodore tumbling under hooves, and then somehow up, still holding the bridle, with a bandit rushing down at him, club swung high two-handed. A fresh lunge from Bessie, dragging him off his feet, letting him slither somehow round to her far side. He struggled up, still gripping the plunging halter and twisting to face the attacker, but as he rose he saw the bandit topple, all of a piece like a falling tree, with his mouth wide open. He remembered hearing the shot as another banged out, and another, close by. Mrs Jones was kneeling in her Chinese clothes, with her doll-face cradled to the stock of her rifle and her left elbow steadied on a fallen basket. Her finger tightened on the trigger, and before the snap of the shot ended she was working the bolt again. The triple click of metal seemed to create new silence. Even Albert stopped rearing and stood between the
broken
shafts, twitching and foamy with sweat. Mrs Jones got to her feet. Theodore could hear that she was swearing to herself. She turned to him biting her scarlet lip.

‘Give me that horse,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘Go and see what’s happened with Lung. Don’t get near any of them others.’

On his way up the clearing Theodore found that his left upper arm and the ribs beside it seemed very sore and guessed that a hoof had caught them. He passed Sir Nigel, who was nervously edging down towards his mistress, head high and alert, tail swishing. A little above the path a bandit lay face down, arms spread wide. All the porters had vanished, but a heavy erratic rustling came from the trees below the clearing.

Two bodies lay close to each other in the grass. One was a bandit, huddled sideways, the rags round his chest stained with blood. The other, lying on his back, was Lung. A sword lay between them, its hilt hidden in one of the patches of pink flowers.

‘Lung?’ whispered Theodore.

The young man groaned and sat slowly up. His right hand felt the back of his head and then patted around among the grass until it touched his little cap. He put it on and stood up.

‘The Princess is not hurt?’ he said, staring down the glade to where Mrs Jones, bridle in one hand and gun in the other, had moved up the slope to look at a third body.

‘She shot them,’ said Theodore.

‘She is a soldier,’ exclaimed Lung.

He prodded the dead bandit with his foot, then stooped and picked up the sword. They went slowly back down the twinkling turf, glancing
from
side to side among the trees but seeing no movement. Mrs Jones turned towards them as they came and Theodore saw that her make-up was runnelled with tears which still flowed helplessly down.

‘Never thought as how I’d have to do that,’ she whispered. ‘Always thought just pointing a gun would be enough . . . Theo, see if you can catch that Rollo – he’s got the shot-gun in his left-hand basket. Then Lung can hold that and look dangerous while I re-load this one – I’ll have to get the fresh rounds out of my saddle-bags, and Rollo’s got that too. I don’t want the bastards rushing us while I’m mucking around.’

‘Not many live,’ said Lung. ‘Missy shoot three.’

‘Them porters is in it too,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘They knew as it was coming – look how quick they scarpered.’

‘The old man shot at the top of the trees,’ said Theodore. ‘His pistol blew up. He wasn’t aiming anywhere near them.’

‘That shows,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Fair enough, we’ll get along like we was before we reached Mr What’s-is-name’s. If we don’t have the litter there’ll be two horses spare . . .’

It must have been more than an hour before they were ready to move again. Mrs Jones was unusually sharp and bossy about the details of packing. All round them the rotting woods seemed to watch them move, and Theodore’s nape prickled at every crackle and whisper from the shadows, but even while Lung and Theodore held the guns so that Mrs Jones could change into her riding-habit, no sign of attack came. The ponies grazed. Sir Nigel champed at his feed-bag. Lung and Mrs Jones mimed an elaborate argument
about
whether to go on up the track or back to the porter’s village and pretended to settle on the latter. At last, shivery with nerves, they were ready.

‘Now Missy foreign woman again,’ said Lung, with a touch of sadness in his voice which rang strangely in this scene of danger and urgency. Theodore guessed he felt that somehow he had been demoted – there was a difference between leading a ritual procession for an important Chinese woman and being guide and factotum for a foreign plant-hunter.

‘Looks like you’re as foreign as I am round these parts,’ snapped Mrs Jones. ‘Tuck that sword you found away and take the shot-gun. Ride with your thumb on the safety-catch, too, and keep your eyes skinned. With a bit of luck they’ve guessed we’re going back, but then again they might of split up, ready to have a go at us either way, once we’re in among the trees. You first, Lung. Theo, you’ll have to ride Bessie and lead Albert – don’t stand no nonsense from him. I’ll be rear-guard. Off we go.’

Lung started towards the dark chasm between the trees. Theodore coaxed Bessie into movement and Albert followed, nervous but subdued. As they reached the trees a voice called in the wood below, but some way back.

‘Don’t hang about, Lung,’ shouted Mrs Jones. ‘We got to get well ahead.’

Lung slapped his pony into a bouncy trot, and Bessie followed the example. One more alarm, Theodore guessed, and she’d try to bolt again. He was tense with readiness when, just before he reached the first bend in the track, a weird wailing rose behind him, shrill and throbbing, like a dog
baying
. He glanced back and saw that Mrs Jones did the same. Beyond her, framed in the arch of light where the path opened into the glade, Uncle Sam was kneeling by one of the bodies. He looked up to the sky and raised his arms, one swathed in blood-soaked rags. Still wailing, he bowed over the body and covered his face with his hands. His fingers tore at his tangled grey hair.

‘Move along,’ called Mrs Jones. ‘I can’t stomach no more of this. Looks like it might of been his son.’

5

IN THE REST
of that day, though the track became steadily narrower and steeper, they travelled further than they had done in any two previous days. They heard and saw no sign of pursuit, but Mrs Jones would rest no more than the horses needed. She was unusually silent, riding close behind Albert so that at the slightest sign of jibbing she could flick him across the haunches with a long withy she had cut – but indeed she seemed to drive them all on, horses and humans, as though she had funnelled her swirling energies into a single blast before which they were nothing but wind-borne seed, blown steadily up the track. It wasn’t that she was scared, Theodore guessed. It was something else.

The map which P’iu-Chun had given them looked like an illustration to a fairy-tale, with a curly dragon blowing the prevailing wind from the south-east corner and delicate drawings crowding the blank spaces; but it was surprisingly accurate, marking every fork in the track, and at last the endless series of zigzags which brought them up into the Plain of Shrines. For more than an hour they had climbed this last section, with the tree-tops below the path not reaching high enough to obscure the view across to the opposite side of the valley, just as steep and now astonishingly near. And then they were in the open.

The trees ended as though a line had been shaved along the rim of the valley and they came out wearily on to a vast, undulating, grassy plateau which seemed to reach right to where the wall of the true mountains shot towards the sky. Scattered all across this plain were strange rock outcrops, carved by wind and water into pinnacles and pillars and shapes like fortresses, and pocked with caves. Sometimes a fuzz of twisted trees crowned these outcrops, and nearly always there was a shrine or tomb, mostly in ruins but once or twice looking almost new.

To Theodore’s eye the path vanished – you could roam where you wished over the measureless grassland – but Mrs Jones seemed to see where it lay. The grass itself was deceptive, shimmering green in the distance but underfoot only tufts and sparse blades protruding through shaly soil. The air was almost painfully sharp and clear after the muggy heat of the valley. At first their path took them back to the line of the river, which now ran a thousand feet below them, cutting its way through a gorge which made the ravine at the Settlement seem no more than a trivial crack. Even from this height, though, they could hear the mutter of rock-torn water. Then the river curled away south and for three hours they rode through the weird plateau, with no landmarks except the rock formations, which often looked completely different from different angles. It became steadily colder, and Theodore was grateful for another of P’iu-Chun’s ‘gifts’, a hip-length jacket of coarse-woven wool, with a breast-pocket he could fill with bread to munch as he rode.

Towards dusk they came to a pillar crowned by a shrine and a single, leaning birch-tree. A flight
of
steps had been cut in the sheer side. Mrs Jones reined and looked at it.

‘This’ll do,’ she said. ‘You two give the horses a feed, and I’ll nip up with the glasses and see if I can spot if we’re being followed. If we ain’t, then we’ll camp here – if we are, then we’ll have to plug on.’