Coromandel! (41 page)

The leader opened the leather case and lifted out a jade cup. It was very small, and there were black veins in the stone, which was so thin that the lamplight shone through from underneath it. He poured spirit into it from the small goatskin and gave it to Jason.

Jason took the cup in his left hand. His right hand slipped back to rest on the rough, comforting handle of his knife--just in case. But violence was not for him. He let go of the knife and drank.

The strangers sighed. The spirit burned in Jason’s throat and chest. After a time he said, ‘It’s not poisoned. Don’t forget you have the spirit from the other goatskin, the first one. Throw it away.’

But the leader seemed to have forgotten that Catherine and Ishmael existed. He stared only at Jason, his dark old eyes full of amazement.

Jason banded back the little cup and said, ‘Thank you. Now tell him we’re going.’

Ishmael spoke. Simultaneously the old leader began to speak rapidly. He beat his hands together in anguish. He conferred with another, larger man, almost as old as himself. He kept staring at Jason.

Ishmael said, ‘He wants to know where you were born, what your house looked like.’--Jason said, ‘God’s blood!’ He forced himself back into his new-loved calm. If he was patient all this excitement would pass away. He described the farmhouse under the Plain.

Catherine said, ‘The horses are ready.’

Ishmael translated, even more slowly than before, for the idea of an English farmhouse under the Plain could not be easy to explain.

The leader began to speak. Ishmael said, ‘Jason, they’re not bandits! They are monks. The leader is called Tendong, and he is the chief abbot of Tsaparang Monastery. He doesn’t want you to go. He must give you another--I think the word means “examination!” ‘

Jason looked at the old leader with new interest. Tendong, an abbot of a monastery! There was a monastery down the vale, four or five miles from Pennel--a big ruin with no roof and stinging nettles in the forecourt. A monastery used to be something like a temple. He’d like to go and see this Tsaparang. Probably it would still have a roof on it, if all these men lived there.

With his own hands Tendong unrolled a carefully tied bundle. He spread it out beside the lamp and stood back. On a large sheet of yellow silk lay three brass cylinders, three squares of yellowed paper, three silver handbells.

Ishmael said, ‘You know what those cylinders are? Prayer wheels. And the papers have the Wheel of Life painted on them. Beautiful!’ He hurried forward, adjusting his spectacles and murmuring apologies to the abbot. Tendong gravely held him back and spoke a few words.

Ishmael said, ‘Jason, he wants you to touch one of each--one prayer wheel, one painting, one bell.’

‘Why?’ Jason said.

‘He won’t tell me.’

Jason bent down and touched his finger to the prayer wheel on the right, the painting in the centre, the bell on the left. He waited tensely. This was a queer, exciting examination.

The Abbot Tendong stood up and seemed to grow larger. The light glowed in his bronze-red face, his men fell away from him so that he stood alone, and his voice rang like a trumpet.

He spoke a long time, using small gestures powerfully controlled. He pointed to the east, the direction whence he had come with his followers. He pointed to the west. He pointed at Jason.

Ishmael kept looking at Jason with a more and more startled expression. By the time the Abbot finished, Ishmael had turned pale and begun to tremble. Catherine left the horses to wander at their will, and came to Jason’s side.

Ishmael said huskily, ‘My daughter, our talk this morning was so much wasted breath. Jason may be the reborn Lama of Tsaparang, for whom the abbot is searching.’

Catherine said, ‘He’s no such thing!’

Jason stood away from them. He found it difficult to breathe, though the night air was like ice in his lungs. Something large, larger than he had ever imagined, something like an enormous red bird, hung over him with slowly beating wings. He looked at Catherine and noticed that her eyes were wet. He said, ‘Let the abbot explain further.’

Ishmael said, ‘Tsaparang is a big monastery with two thousand monks. Some of it is very old. There are three abbots in charge of the monks, but the head of the monastery is the Lama. The Lama of Tsaparang is not chosen, like the abbots. He--‘ Ishmael’s voice became suddenly sarcastic and angry. He said, ‘But you know all this, lord. Why am I telling you?’

‘Go on,’ Jason said without anger.

Ishmael said, ‘The Lama never dies. When he
seems
to die the abbots go out to find the boy in whose body the Lama has chosen to be reborn. The monastery oracle tells them where to look. This time it said, in the west. And what kind of a house to look for--it said, a house under a hill.’

A house under a hill. Yes, the farm lay under the Plain and in the west.

Ishmael said, ‘It always takes the abbots several years to find the new Lama. This time, much longer than usual--twenty-two years--because several candidates were found to be impostors when they took the final tests at Tsaparang. In truth, Jason, there is intrigue among the abbots, I expect, each putting forward his own candidate. It is not real, this thing! It is a kind of folly--a divine folly, Jason, but a folly.
It is not real
. You must understand that. The searching abbots carry with them relics of the Lama’s last time on earth, such as his prayer wheel, his bell, and his cup. Obviously the Lama will recognize his own belongings. That is what you have done!’

Ishmael went on. ‘The abbot is disturbed that you were not born into the Lama’s religion. Also he fears that you look like a man of blood--of flesh and blood, Jason--with your bleached skin and pale eyes. There are the other tests which you must undergo in the monastery before he can be sure. But so far the signs are unmistakable. You would not drink from any but the Lama’s cup ‘

Jason said, ‘Yes.’

Ishmael snapped, ‘But it was the goatskin that you were pointing at ... You drank with your left hand, as the dead Lama used to, though he was not left-handed.’

Jason said, ‘Yes.’

‘You used your left hand because you had your right on your knife. I saw ... You limp, as the dead Lama did.’

Jason said, ‘Yes.’

‘You fell off your horse today! ... You picked the dead Lama’s prayer wheel, bell, and Wheel of Life.’

Jason said, ‘Yes.’

Ishmael growled. ‘Pure chance! ... And of course your age is right. Why didn’t I tell the fools you were only eleven? You are behaving like it.’

Jason stared at the Abbot Tendong. So I am the Lama. I always wondered what I was. The lamp gave out an oily smoke in the clear night. The stars were a long way up, where the wind blew. He walked unsteadily up and down. He was a Lama. He had been a Roman. He had built Stonehenge. He had climbed the wall of the Spanish galleon before he was born. He had lain with queens, strangled tigers with his bare hands, played melting music on the flute. He had been a seagull and a fish. He had inhabited Shiva and taken the god’s lawful wife, Parvati. Who knew what happened when a man died, if all this happened while he lived?

He looked down into Catherine’s eyes. He thought: I am a blur to her, but she can see the stars. She has never seen my whole face and never will. She has looked at me, piece by piece, her spectacles an inch away, and laughed and smiled. ... He would never see her again. This was what he had been waiting for, not solitary contemplation, not the taking of alms before an idol, but this--books without end, two thousand monks under his orders. The work should be done. What work? A history of the world, to begin with.

Catherine would never reach the end of the map now. He could give her money, though, to enable her to go wherever else she wanted. He said, ‘Tell the abbot I will come to the monastery, that they may test me.’ But really there was no need for tests. It was so. But let it be disclosed in due form, that Catherine might see the truth,

Ishmael spoke. The Abbot Tendong hid his hands in his sleeves and bowed.

They travelled two days eastward, Jason in a near-trance the whole time. He saw nothing of the road or of his companions until in the middle of the third day a slow perception reached him that he was approaching a great house--no, a city.

He reined in his horse and, when his eyes came into focus, examined what he saw. He was in the centre of a circular plain, perhaps twelve miles across. Black mountains rose out of the plain on all sides, and snow dusted the serrated line of their peaks. The sun shone in a cloudless sky. A small river flowed silently with him, at his left hand. Men and women were working in the fields; the tassels of the barley waved in the wind; and three women were bathing in an irrigation channel. The women sat in the shallow water with their clothes hanging in thick bundles round their waists, and splashed each other’s naked bodies and laughed shrilly with delight.

The city stood against the farther wall of the mountains--a white city, brilliant, its feet in the plain and its summit high against the black rocks behind it.

‘The monastery of Tsaparang,’ Catherine said.--Jason rode on, now never taking his eyes off the monastery, for that was to be his kingdom.

They reached it at sunset, a towering city such as the Himalaya itself, but of a dimension sufficiently smaller for men to understand every detail of its vastness. Its walls rose in tiers to a height of three hundred feet above the plain. Tall golden cylinders stood like an army on the topmost roofs, and below them, along the upper wall, were fixed a thousand gold shields. There were balconies and terraces almost hidden by black and gold cloth which fluttered in the wind, and in the walls the rows of windows gaped like square black gunports in the side of a monstrous ship. Atop the gate ten red-robed monks blew into the mouthpieces of ten long trumpets. A little shaven boy stood between each pair of trumpets, a yoke over his shoulders supporting the two bell-mouths. The hollow, booming drone shook the air so that the massive wall itself rattled and the great gate buzzed.

They entered the courtyard and dismounted. There were stalls here, and women selling vegetables and milk, and on each side a row of doors such as Jason had seen in many Indian caravanserais. The double-bass throb of the trumpets began to quake like a fever in his body, and his head throbbed in painful sympathy.

A door opened, and they entered the lowest level of the monastery. To right and left stood a row of monks, some beating gongs and some rattling drums made of human skulls. They climbed a ladder and walked through a darkly echoing hall. Gods and devils, all hung with silk scarves, necklaces, and ropes of jewels, towered gloomily against the walls. They climbed another ladder, its rungs black and slippery--another chamber, longer, narrower, and darker than the last. On in smoky darkness--up, up ladders, and past idols; past wooden pillars like a forest, their lower parts swathed in dull red cloth; past smells of sweat and rancid butter and incense; through great halls with a hundred doors, all alike, and dim corridors alive with the sound of gongs and bells and trumpets.

The abbot opened the door of a large, plain cell, stood aside for them to enter, and silently closed the door behind them. There were two padded couches, a window, a lamp, a table.

Jason lay down slowly on one of the couches and stared at the dark beams of the ceiling.

After a time the throbbing drums marched out of his head. He said, ‘Can we make tea here, Catherine?’

Ishmael said, ‘She stayed behind in the serai by the outer gate.’

Jason sat up. ‘What! Stayed behind? Why?’ He looked round the bare cell, but she was not there.

Ishmael said, ‘Women are not allowed inside. We told you on the road that she would have to stay outside. I told you many times. She cannot come in, ever.’

Jason muttered, ‘I remember.’

This was the biggest building he had ever been in--bigger than the fortress at Agra--and soon he would be the lord of it--lord of two thousand monks, lord of knowledge beyond reckoning. Several of those great chambers they passed through had been full of books, and each chamber larger than Ishmael’s library. Catherine liked books.

But she wouldn’t be here. There was no place for her. She wouldn’t want to be here and share this life, even if it were possible. He’d never seen a female recluse or a girl yogi.

Ishmael said, ‘Tonight they will take you through the monastery in procession, Tendong told me, and there will be many tests on the way. Then you will spend tomorrow and tomorrow night locked in the dead Lama’s private apartment. It has been kept just as it was when he died. When they come to fetch you on the second morning they will see what you have done in there and what you have used. Then they will decide. This must be one of the older parts of the monastery--
gompa
, in Tibetan. It was founded seven hundred years ago by the first Lama. They call him the Great First.’

Jason said, ‘Did the Abbot Tendong talk at all of the dead Lama’s habits?’

Ishmael peered at him across the ill-lit room. He said sharply, ‘Why do you ask? Ah, you’re not so sure of yourself, after all. That’s a good sign.’

He strode agitatedly up and down the cell, tugging at his beard. He stopped by the couch and bent so quickly over Jason that his spectacles fell off. He swore and fastened them on again. He said, ‘Jason, my son--I’ll tell you. If you are meant to live the rest of your life here--even if you have made up your mind that that is what you want--that is what will come to pass. Perhaps this is the life and place you are best fitted for. Tendong thinks so. He is a wise old man, as wise as I. He told me things, on the road, that he meant me to pass along to you. He believes you are the Lama, but after all he’s an agent of God too, isn’t he? I’ll tell you. But it’s your decision, Jason, not his, or the oracles’, or even God’s. God sometimes leaves it to us to decide. That’s why he’s God. The late Lama was the eighteenth reincarnation of the Great First--that makes him the Nineteenth Lama, eh? He was a quiet and peaceful man. He liked to drink barley spirit, but never very much. He had dreams and visions, which he wrote down in books. He loved birds and animals, and never harmed one in all his life. You are a hunter, aren’t you? But you don’t need to tell them that, do you? I won’t tell them, nor will Catherine. It’s up to you. Of course no Buddhist may take life, but the Nineteenth was especially careful. He liked music.’