The Ninth Buddha (41 page)

“Are you hungry?”
 
It was Samdup’s voice, close beside him.

Christopher looked down and shook his head.

“No, my Lord,” he said.

“Are you thirsty?”

“No.”

“Then you have no need of them.
 
There is food in our bags: we will not starve.
 
There is snow: we will not go thirsty.
 
If you take them, they will become a heavier burden than the whole of Dorjela.”

Christopher opened his fingers and the jewels dropped one by one back into the box.
 
This time, for no real reason that he could see, they seemed trivial to him, like pieces of coloured paste or red and green candies for a greedy child.
 
He closed the lid and raised his lamp again.

The walls were alive with paintings: among the usual gods and demons were vividly coloured mandalas and charms in the shape of lotus-flowers covered in fine writing.
 
Little square flags printed with the image of a winged horse bearing a mystic jewel on its back had been hung at intervals; they were faded and tattered and covered in dust.
 
Thick cobwebs hung everywhere, some ancient and tattered like prayer-flags, others clearly fresh.

They listened for the sound of something living, but the room was occupied only by inanimate objects.
 
Christopher began to think that talk of a guardian was little more than a ploy to deter would-be thieves.
 
But in that case, why had the story been kept so quiet?

In the wall opposite the spot where they had entered the room was the entrance to a broad tunnel.
 
It had obviously not been used in some time: a thick, dusty spider’s web covered most of it.

“At least,” Christopher whispered, ‘we don’t have to make up our minds which way to go.”

Using the short sword, he swept away the web: it tumbled down, leaving the gaping opening free for them to pass through.

Christopher went ahead, holding his lamp out in front of him in his left hand while hefting the sword in his right, ready to strike out at the first signs of life.
 
His heart pounded heavily in his chest:

he thought he could hear it echo off the walls of the tunnel.
 
The stench was more pronounced here and seemed to be growing stronger all the time.

The passage was not quite high enough for Christopher to walk in un stooped but it was sufficiently wide to allow him to pass through without difficulty.
 
He felt certain that they were already passing out of the monastery.
 
The chill that pervaded the tunnel was unlike that in any of the passages they had come through on their way from Chindamani’s apartment.
 
That had been icy, but tinged with a residual warmth that seemed to have seeped through the walls from the inhabited areas through which the tunnels passed.
 
This was a fetid, uneasy chill, raw and bitter, as though nothing human had breathed the air down here for centuries.

Christopher’s foot touched something.
 
Something hard and slightly brittle.
 
He lowered the lamp slowly, trying to hold it at an angle in order to shed light on the ground in front of him.

He could not make it out at first.
 
It seemed to be a bundle of some kind, about five feet long, angular in places, dirty and grey.

Then he held the light closer and all at once it became clear to him what it was ... or what it had been.

The small body had shrunk beyond all reason, as if something had sucked it dry over a long period.
 
Nothing was left but dry skin stretched over old bones.
 
Thin hands like talons clutched at the throat.
 
The head was pulled back acutely, away from the body, as if death had been an agony.
 
From head to foot, the corpse was covered in dust-laden strands of something like rotten fabric, similar to the cobwebs they had seen earlier.
 
The whole thing resembled a cocoon, neatly packaged and left to dehydrate here in the tunnel.
 
It had been down here a long time.
 
Perhaps as long as five centuries.
 
Christopher shuddered and lifted his lamp.

“What is it, Christopher?”
 
Chindamani whispered.

“Why have you stopped?”

“It’s nothing.
 
Just ... an obstruction in the tunnel.
 
Keep to the right and you’ll be able to get by.”

He walked on, hesitant now, on the alert for whatever might be waiting further along the tunnel.
 
Sonam’s guardian was slipping out of the mists of legend and growing into a thing of substance.

Behind him, he heard the others gasp as they caught sight of the obstruction.

The next body was a few yards further along.
 
It had died in a seated position, propped against one wall.
 
Its arms were thrust out in front of it, as thought fending off something coming out of the darkness.
 
Like the other corpse, it was shrivelled and shrunken.

Pieces of leathery flesh, dark brown in colour, could be glimpsed beneath layers of the dusty fabric.
 
It seemed to Christopher as though something had trussed it up and sucked it slowly dry.

“Who are they, Christopher?”
 
Chindamani’s voice came from close behind him.
 
She was standing, one arm around Samdup, looking down at the little corpse.
 
The boy seemed disturbed, but not frightened.
 
Christopher remembered that he had been brought up in a culture that had little fear of the paraphernalia of death.

Instead of Bo Peep and Humpty Dumpty, the walls of Samdup’s nursery would have been painted with dead flesh and mouldering bones.
 
Instead of a teddy-bear, he would have been given a statue of Yama to place by his bedside.

“I think this one was a child,” he said.
 
But it was only a guess, based on the corpse’s apparent height.

“It seems .. . more recent than the other.
 
Less dusty.”
 
He paused.

“There may be more.
 
Do you want to go on?”

“Of course.
 
We have no choice you said so yourself.”

About five yards after that, Christopher encountered a heavy web that all but blocked the tunnel.
 
He swept it aside only to meet another and then another.
 
Vast, heavy strands of cobwebs filled the air.
 
The miasmatic odour was growing in intensity.
 
Christopher was beginning to have a good idea what had trussed up the bodies they had found.
 
But surely no ordinary spider could have sucked them dry as well.

All at once the tunnel ended and opened out into an area of undefined proportions.
 
The light from Christopher’s lamp shed illumination over a limited radius, but as the children and Chindamani added their lights to his, the nature of their surroundings became gradually clear.

It was a chamber thick with spiders’ webs, huge structures of ancient manufacture that looped a fantastic tracery from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall.
 
The lamplight played complicated shadow-games among the interlacing cords and filaments.
 
Some hung like hammocks, others billowed from the wall like grey lace curtains.
 
No matter where they looked, the room was thick with them.

And no matter where they cast their eyes, they could make out the bundled, mummified remains of human beings.
 
The webs were full of them; they hung like flies, light and grey and bloodless.
 
The room was a subterranean larder of God knows what antiquity.
 
In places, body had been piled upon body, the mouldering remains sewn together in huge packages.
 
In one corner, what seemed to be a relatively recent addition to their meat supply was being drained of its remaining fluids by a small army of spiders that moved across their prey with quick, quivering motions.
 
To his horror, Christopher estimated the size of the spiders: the largest had a leg-span longer than a man’s forearm, from fingertips to elbow.

Everywhere black shapes were walking in the shadows.
 
The webs were alive with them, trembling as they crawled from thread to thread on huge, misshapen legs.

“For God’s sake, get back into the tunnel!”
 
Christopher cried.
 
He had seen stings on the ends of the bulbous bodies and he guessed that the spiders had not overpowered their prey by brute force.

Woodenly, they stumbled back, past the webs at the entrance to the food-chamber, as far as the first body.
 
William was shaking with fright and loathing nothing in his worst nightmares had prepared him for such a sight.
 
Samdup too was rigid with fear.

“The horror of it!
 
The horror of it!”
 
Chindamani kept repeating.

She was brushing and brushing her arms and body, desperately trying to rid herself of anything that might be clinging to her.
 
She could feel their soft bodies and cold legs against her flesh.
 
To be poisoned and pinned down and sucked dry by such creatures .. .

Christopher checked for spiders.
 
None seemed to have dropped on them or followed them so far.
 
These, then, were the guardians set over the Oracle’s treasure.
 
A species of spider, mutated by the thin air and the darkness, discovered or placed down here to sting and kill intruders.
 
But why had there been none in the treasure chamber
 
And where did their victims come from?

“Chindamani, Samdup,” Christopher ordered.

“Get out any extra items of clothing you have in your bags.
 
Wrap your hands and faces tightly.
 
Leave no gaps, just a space for your eyes.
 
Help each other.
 
And hurry.
 
We’ve disturbed them it won’t be long before they start investigating.”
 
He bent down and quickly repeated what he had said to William.
 
The boy had taken Samuel out of his bag and was clutching it to him nervously.

“Put Samuel away,” Christopher said softly.

“You’ll need your hands free.”
 
William complied reluctantly.

Feverishly, Chindamani and Samdup wrapped each other up, using spare scarves and leggings they had packed.
 
When they were ready, Chindamani helped William bind himself, then Christopher.

“We can still go back,” he said.

She shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“Zam-ya-ting is waiting for us there.
 
It’s death whichever way we go.

But perhaps we have a chance down here.

That place is their lair.
 
The stairs of Yama must be beyond it.
 
If we can make it that far, we’ll be all right.”

Christopher prayed she was right.

When they were ready, he led the way down to the exit from the tunnel.
 
He could hear the rustling of their legs in the darkness, stiff wire bristles on paper a host of spiders coming to investigate the disturbance.

If only he could make out an opening somewhere that would enable them to make a straight run for it.
 
There was a risk that, if they became entangled in the vast network of spiders’ webs and confused by fighting off their hideous inhabitants, they would lose their lamps and be plunged into absolute darkness.
 
And that would almost certainly be fatal.

A large spider, its legs moving jerkily, like a badly oiled machine, came scuttling towards him at shoulder height along a swathe of tattered web.
 
He swept at it with the sword and sent it tumbling back into the shadows.
 
Another ran at his feet with a queer sideways motion.
 
He kicked down hard and felt it give way beneath the heel of his boot.

“Which way do we go, Christopher?”
 
Chindamani asked, pressing against him from behind.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“If there are stairs, they could be anywhere.”

“There have to be stairs.
 
Sonam was right about everything else.”

“Perhaps.”
 
He paused.

“There’s one way to find out.
 
The most likely place is right opposite.
 
I’ll make a dash for it.
 
Watch me closely.
 
If I get through and there are stairs, I’ll call.
 
Don’t waste any time come running.”

“Be careful, Christopher,” she said.
 
He could only see her eyes peering out above her scarf.
 
With one hand, he reached out and touched her.
 
She lifted a hand and put it over his.
 
In a world of spiders, among dark threads and silken fabrics of most intricate and passionless death, they touched for a moment in silence.
 
Skin did not touch skin, lips could not meet, there was a deathly chill upon their hampered breath.

A huge spider landed on Christopher’s back.
 
William cried out and Christopher spun, dashing the monster to the ground and crushing it.

“Run!”
 
cried Chindamani.

He ran, cutting a path through meshes of doubled and redoubled web, pulling, tearing, scything as he staggered through the room.

The floor was littered with small wizened corpses, pathetic bundles no longer recognizable as human.
 
At every step, more spiders dropped on to him, clinging to his back and arms and legs, stinging again and again into the thick layers of cloth and fur.