The Lotus and the Wind (35 page)

Robin put out his arm. ‘No.’

Jagbir slowly brought the butt of the rifle to rest on his thigh, keeping his finger on the trigger and his eyes fixed hungrily on Muralev.

The time for pretence was past. Robin said in English, ‘Muralev, if you try and harm us I won’t be able to prevent Jagbir from killing you.’ He could feel the surge of Jagbir’s long-held, long-nourished hope.

Muralev said, ‘I don’t want to harm you. Don’t you know that?’ His English was slow but good. His shy smile broadened.

He pulled at the lobe of his right ear and twisted his head. ‘We might say, sir, that we are prisoners of each other.’

‘You are unarmed.’

‘Yes. The Kirghiz are my friends, though. You would not get far. Well, let us call ourselves each other’s guests. Come in and rest.’

‘No, thank you. We want provisions. Are there any?’

‘Come in. There’s no one.’ He swept back the felt flap at the entrance of the big yurt. The women had re-entered their own yurt. Jagbir said, seeing Muralev’s gesture, ‘Don’t go in, sahib. Let us get provisions, then make him walk five miles out with us, and there kill him.’

Muralev stood at the entrance to the big yurt, his hands behind his back, his feet enormous in the Kirghiz boots. He said, ‘He is a good man. Greetings there, Jagbir--or Turfan--how are you?’ He added the last words in the kind of Turki Jagbir had spoken when they last met. Jagbir’s face remained implacable, and Muralev said to Robin, ‘He’s not really a Hazara, is he?’

‘No.’

Jagbir broke in roughly. ‘Food, grain. Where are they?’

Muralev waved at the yurt behind him. ‘Help yourself.’ Jagbir dismounted, leaving the pony standing, pushed his rifle forward, and entered the yurt. While he loaded the ponies with small sacks, Muralev raised his eyes, blinked twice, and said, ‘May I come with you?’

Robin did not believe the other understood the meaning of the English words he had used. He said, ‘What? Come with us?’

Muralev nodded, and Robin muttered, ‘Where to? I don’t understand. Your wife--?’

Muralev said, ‘We have been married for ten years. We have been lovers--I suppose’--this last after a long pause. ‘She will shortly be pursuing me with cavalry, if she has not already set out. I have left her and I have deserted the service of the Czar. She pursues me because she loves me. She is sure that I am only overwrought, that I need only rest and affection. She pursues me also as a servant of our government, whose secrets I hold.’

Robin said slowly, ‘You’ve--deserted? You are coming over to us?’ He did not want to believe it. It would solve so many problems--all except the greatest--but it would be wrong.

Muralev shook his head. Jagbir said harshly, ‘Ready now, sahib. Shall I make him walk?’

‘Wait.’

Muralev, with a glance at Jagbir, continued, ‘I am deserting, but I am not joining you. That would be one degree worse than what I was doing before. I feel for my country as much as you do for yours.
You
understand why I’m going, don’t you? I can’t carry the loads they set on me. One morning in Andijan when a cold wind blew down from the pamir I knew I had to go. I told her.’ He kicked the ground aimlessly with the toe of his boot, and Robin saw tears in his eyes. ‘She cried and cajoled and swore. I might have given in. She could have broken me for good then, I was so weak. But word came that you had been there in Andijan and that you’d left. So it was her duty to go. She went. When she had gone, like a whirlwind of love and fear and anger, I went. She rode west, I east.’

Robin listened with growing recognition. Muralev loved his wife and his country, but he had to go. There had been a temporary, patched-up solution--Muralev’s applying himself to this particular work--but it had not lasted.

Jagbir remounted his pony and sat with the rifle ready on his thigh. One of the dogs crept out and licked the backs of Muralev’s boots. Muralev put his hand down absently to fondle its head. ‘So you see, she is coming for both of us now. And I am going the same way as you, at least for a time--south and east.’

Robin said, ‘We’re going south-east. Your people control the country to the west. She can deploy big forces there to catch us, and use whatever telegraphs you’ve had built, but she daren’t bring more than a dozen cavalrymen over on to the Chinese side.’ It never crossed his mind to disbelieve Muralev. They had reached the level of truth, and all the words he heard from Muralev’s lips were truth.

Muralev said, ‘I am going to the Tsaidam first. And you to India?’

‘India.’ Robin thought of India, of Anne, of the babies, looked again at the pamir around him, and added, ‘I suppose.’

Muralev walked away to catch a hobbled pony grazing close by. Robin told Jagbir that Muralev would be coming with them and explained why. Jagbir asked where Muralev was going and, when he was told, thought for a minute and said, ‘He ought to stay with his wife and his raj. He’s running away.’

Robin answered angrily, ‘Perhaps. But he’s coming with us.’

When the pony was loaded Muralev went into the black tent and came out with a thick leather wallet in his hand. The wallet had a small brass lock. He stowed it into his offside saddlebag. Jagbir whispered, ’See that?’ Robin nodded. He saw it, but it was not important.

Muralev mounted. From horseback he spoke briefly with one of the women, who had come out to make butter in a crude churn. Then he shook the reins and walked over to Robin.

Robin took a deep breath. Happiness flooded in like draughts of ice-cold champagne. It was not a steadily mounting sense of well-being but a series of unaccountable lifts, each one more exhilarating than the last. The pamir rolled away in front and behind, to the right and to the left. A blue lake sparkled in the vivid distance. All deception had gone, truth reigned, his task was done. He had seen the horses in the north and the meadows where they fed. He had seen the men who would ride the horses and the men who would direct the course of the riders. He had seen the horses and the riders rehearsing for their assault on the mountains. When their day dawned the hordes would darken this pamir where his pony now plodded southward. They would force by thousands into the passes, leaving their dead, swirling on in thousands still. They were going to come over this northern route.

And it was axiomatic, first, that the Russian heavy forces could not use this route; and second, that the main and subsidiary efforts must be on adjoining routes. These had been his Notes Two and Three that long night of worry in Balkh. If the Mongol cavalry was going to use the northern route, therefore, the main attack must be going in on the central route; and the southern route was the level of deception.

He was happy because he understood all that Lenya Muralev had done from the beginning. She had led him and Jagbir south, every yard of the way. They had felt the leading reins but had not been able to believe in them because she was trying so hard to kill them. And she was trying--to the limit--trusting to his intuition and Jagbir’s endurance that they would, in spite of everything, survive. The poison bottle had been a prop in a charade after all. She had thought they would live through it, and they had.

So the true, the last word was as clear as the sapphire lake in the east: The Russians would use two routes, their main weight centre, their Mongol hordes north. Up to the moment of assault they would lead their victims to believe that the main weight of attack was going south and might even be directed against the Turkish Empire. Such a deception, if successful, would catch the British and Indian forces up to a thousand miles out of place.

But would the commander-in-chief in India, who had never met Lenya Muralev, believe there existed a woman with the nerve, the skill, and the judgment to use a poisoned well as bait to catch men already dying of thirst?

He glanced sideways at Muralev’s calm profile. Muralev had the written, irrefutable evidence in a wallet in that off-side saddlebag. It would be wrong to demand to see it, though. That would soil the wind of truth that blew over the pamir and gave him this calm certainty. He would not do it.

Above all he was happy because he had found Muralev in the place where he ought to be and doing what he ought to do. Now they would have a chance to talk together. Perhaps, even, they would together find the home of the inaccessible bird. He might be able to persuade Muralev to come to India for a time. Once they were over the border there’d be no need for hurry. They’d have time to talk and think. He would be able to ask and learn, and in learning gather some of Muralev’s hard-won peace.

Three days passed in rapid travelling. On the fourth morning Robin awoke two hours before the first light and awakened the others. At this time the wind was dark. Free-found, it raced across the pamir and tugged at the mean lean-to shelter, two pieces of felt, which Muralev shared with them. Jagbir slept always with his rifle between his knees, embracing its cold wood and burning steel as a Dutch burgomaster embraces his Dutch wife. The season was far advanced, and their fingers often became solid so that they fumbled for minutes on end to fasten a single leather toggle. They ate ground barley mixed with curds in a bowl.

Muralev said, ‘It will be a hard day. And remember, those Kirghiz told us the road’s bad.’

Yesterday they had come upon four nomads who had told them that a thousand horsemen had moved into camp just over the Russian border. Muralev thought that three or four small parties of cavalry would already be on the Chinese side, looking for them. There were no boundary fences on the pamir, and an officer could easily say he had crossed over by mistake. One such party would surely be on the pass ahead. Muralev had agreed, therefore, that it wasn’t safe to try the pass. Instead they must to-day find their own way over the spurs of Muztagh Ata. The pass was higher than sixteen thousand feet; their route would take them nearer nineteen thousand.

They mounted stiffly, and stiffly the ponies began to move. In the evening they had seen yurts in the plain five miles to the east, but no lights showed there now. In the fading stars, by the dawning rumours of day, Robin saw the two men ahead of him riding forward over the black nothingness of the ground. Here there were not even the bones of the preceding dead to guide them. After an hour he called out to Jagbir, ‘
Choro
, it sounds as though one of your food sacks is loose.’

Jagbir secured the thong, then turned his head with a smile. ‘Thank you, sahib.’

The answering smile faded from Robin’s lips. Jagbir’s face was yellow under a spectral yellow wash evenly laid on, thin but bright over his dark skin. He glowed with an emanation like that from decaying bodies or from jellyfish in eastern seas at night. His almond eyes contracted in amazement as he stared at something over Robin’s shoulder. Robin turned.

Usually in the first light the world was pale and green as though lying under shallow coastal water. The pallor deadened all colours, so that a woman’s scarlet sash would be seen as a lifeless, neutral slab. Now the light fanning out above the pamir, slanting up behind the distant serrations of the Alai, was yellow.

Muralev looked around and reined in his pony. The three came together and stared fearfully at the eastern horizon. Muralev said, ‘It is the burhan--to-day of all days!’

Often in the caravanserais travellers talked of the burhan. Robin, watching the yellow light crawl up the face of Muztagh Ata, muttered, ‘Shall we stay here until it’s blown over?’

‘We can’t. The men in the yurts saw us. She’ll know by now. To-morrow she’ll be here.’

Robin said, ‘It will be hard.’

Muralev answered, ‘To-day you will see God.’

Jagbir said curtly, ‘We’re wasting time.’

The ground sloped up. An hour later the plateau broke into soaring ridges, and they entered a steep gorge. All the while the light brightened until the sky from end to end shone brilliant yellow, chrome yellow, unspeckled by cloud or shadow, possessing no centre because the sun was invisible. The wind died away, and in the new, fearful hush they struggled on. At the snowline no sound but the roaring blast of the horses’ breath cracked the yellow ball of sky and snow imprisoning them.

The air began to move. A loud sound broke out, at once distant, close, unfocused, and oppressively loud, as though giants rolled rocks in the mountain under their feet and dwarfs rattled pebbles by their ears. The light flickered unsteadily, shading down from clear yellow to dull, to dark, to burnt ochre, to umber, the tones spreading across the horizon and racing up the sky. The blast hit them and threw them down, men and ponies, upon the shale and the snow.

Robin lay on his face, his fingers and nails pressed out and clawing into the shale to hold him. The wind boomed across the face of the ridge and dragged him with it. Pebbles and grit and snow lashed into his head and broke the skin, but the blood could not force out against the wind. The wind blew the breath back down his throat and he thought he would suffocate. The naked shingles of the world shifted under his fingers and tilted sideways.

Silence burst over the mountain, hurting his ears. He lay twenty yards from where he had stood when the blast came, and all the nails of his left hand were torn out by the roots. He began to bleed profusely. One pony lay kicking on its side, its back pressed against the rock whither the wind had blown it. A second screamed and struggled to its knees a hundred yards ahead. The third had vanished, leaving a broken rein in Jagbir’s hand.

‘Gone!’ Muralev shrieked and pointed down the long buttress-slope, not steep, not shallow, on which they tremblingly stood. The wind had dropped to gale force, and they could think. ‘Oh, hurry on! It’ll come again, all day.’

‘How often?’

‘Every ten, fifteen minutes--less, more.’

They hurried upwards. When the burhan came the second time they saw it thundering down the mountain, jerking at the pyramid of Muztagh Ata. Then they flung themselves to the ground, each clutching with one hand at rocks, boulders, rifles, whatever was near, their ponies’ reins looped around them. For the second time the burhan passed.

They stumbled upwards hour after hour through powder snow. This snow had been here since the beginning. The passing falls of the years were gone. The burhan took them and whipped them away across the roof of Asia. The light changed through the hours, minute by minute--yellow, green, yellow again, black suddenly, when they could see nothing, then yellow once more, and against it the needle-eyed notch in the snow wall ahead. The snow--green, yellow, with the light--hissed and crawled across the mountain. The burhan shouted to them that it came not from above the earth but from under it.