The Ninth Buddha (53 page)

They camped late that night, well away from the blazing forest.
 
A wall of fire shimmered on the horizon still, creeping with the prevailing wind across an unassuming backdrop of night sky.
 
The three prisoners were kept together in a single tent under heavy guard.
 
They slept fitfully or lay awake listening to the sounds of the darkness: birds calling, remote and tuneless; men calling out in their sleep; the crackling of camp fires lit to stave off the penetrating cold.
 
The guards discouraged them from talking together when they woke, though they refrained from using any real violence against them.
 
All that night, Christopher held Chindamani without speaking.
 
She was silent in his arms, preoccupied with some private sadness, sleepless and dreamless.

Throughout the next day they rode on in gloomy silence, strung out across the empty plain like a broken necklace of cheap glass.

One man died of wounds sustained in the skirmish at the forest.

They left him on the grass, naked and pitifully pale.
 
His horse came with them now, bearing an empty saddle.

By the second night, the men had started to grow restless.

Suffused with killing and the infant joy of setting alight a forest merely to lay black ashes on the scene of their crimes, they had ridden until then in a state of morbid contentment, their flagging spirits buoyed up by an infusion of vanity.

But during the second day’s riding, and certainly after the death of the wounded man, a terrible ennui had begun to fix its grip on them.
 
They shifted in their saddles mile after mile, itching to be back in Urga or off on another hunt for Bolshevik infiltrators.

Someone rode out from the road to a nomad encampment and returned with a plentiful supply of han chi a local drink.

That evening, han chi Was passed round after supper and the men’s mood changed.
 
They sang old songs, Russian songs about girls with flaxen hair and birches waving in the mists of autumn, and as they sang they grew sentimental and even maudlin.

The older men regaled their juniors with pathetic tales of valour that had grown tarnished from overmuch recounting.
 
As the night progressed, stories of bravery gave way to accounts of bawdy excess.
 
New songs replaced those of the early evening.
 
In a spot set apart from the rest of the camp, Rezukhin sat by a solitary fire, his black sling invisible against the night, smoking hashish from a private supply kept in his saddlebag.

It was just after midnight when they decided to come for Chindamani.
 
The fires had died down and clouds had come up from the south to cover the moon.
 
Perhaps the han chi rendered them incautious, perhaps the darkness gave them a sense of security in what they planned.
 
Rezukhin had ordered the woman off limits in spite of everything, he knew enough to cover himself against the possibility that the Englishmen might indeed prove of value to Ungern Sternberg.
 
But he had gone to sleep in his tent and would be oblivious to anything that went on.

Some of the men had been watching her furtively all that day, but no-one had approached her or tried to speak to her.
 
It had been years since any of them had had anything to do with a woman who was not a prostitute or the near equivalent.
 
But, coarsened as they had become, in some part of them they retained memories, however dim, of the social conventions that had formed their upbringing.
 
Some of them still had wives or sweethearts at home.

And Chindamani, unconsciously perhaps, but with unmistakable clarity, set up a barrier between herself and the men around her which, however imperceptible, served to restrict their activities to sidelong glances.

That had all changed with the onset of night and the powerful effects of the han chi
 
From sentimentality they passed to self-pity and from self-pity to regret.
 
It was not long before regret had wakened in them feelings of resentment against Germans, Bolsheviks, and anyone else responsible for the loss of Russia and its privileges.
 
And out of resentment was born a curious and unreasonable lust, not merely physical but shaped out of the greed and bitterness that lay in the depths of wounded psyches.

Chindamani was to be their victim, not merely because she was the only woman there, but because she represented too many conflicting opposites for them to cope with.
 
She reminded them at once of the women they had left behind in their homes in Moscow or St.
 
Petersburg and of the eastern women they had known since then.
 
She was physically attractive in a way that only their lost sweethearts had been, yet untouchable, a Madonna-like figure who inflamed them while making them feel like children or priests, castrated, pure, yet seething with impurities.
 
They could not bear the contradictions.

Four of them came to the tent where she and the others had at last fallen into an uneasy sleep.
 
Only a single guard was left, half asleep himself and a little drunk on han chi that some friends had brought for him.

They kicked Chindamani awake, and before she had time to protest, hauled her roughly to her feet.
 
She could tell at once that they were in no mood to be reasoned with, and at once gave up the attempt to struggle.
 
Christopher woke at once, but one of the men grabbed him, holding a gun at his head.

“One word out of you, tovarisch, and I’ll send your brains to Urga before the rest of you.
 
Pommaete?”

Christopher nodded and sank back.
 
He had not understood much, but he got the general idea.
 
Behind the man with the gun, the guard was watching him, his rifle poised.
 
Winterpole came awake, unable at first to comprehend what was happening.

Chindamani turned as they dragged her to the entrance and spoke rapidly to Christopher in Tibetan.

“Ka-ris To-feh!
 
Find him!
 
Tell him I love him!
 
If you can, hide him!

It’s not time yet!
 
Tell him it isn’t time!”

One of the men clamped a heavy hand over her mouth.
 
They wanted her out of the tent, away from the light of the oil-lamp.

They did not want light for what they were going to do.
 
The fourth man let go of Christopher, holstered the gun, and followed the others.
 
The guard remained, intently watching his charges.

A terrible silence formed round them.
 
They knew what was happening, what would happen when the men had finished with her.
 
They heard coarse shouts, then a laugh, raucous and prolonged.
 
Then the laugh was cut short and a group of men cheered.

Someone began to sing a song, not a melancholy dirge about maidens or birches, but a coarse drinking song of German origin which Hebe something-or-other, but transposed into Russian, witless, brash, more sordid than usual out here in the wilderness.
 
It was a song that needed a tavern and the smell of sour beer.

Christopher threw his bedclothes back and made as if to stand.

The guard levelled his rifle at him nervously.
 
A hand grabbed his arm and pulled him back down to the ground.

“For God’s sake, Christopher, don’t be such a bloody fool!”
 
It was Winterpole’s voice, hissing in the semi-darkness like a snake.

“They’re raping her!”
 
Christopher shouted back.

“Don’t you understand?
 
Those bastards are raping her!”

“It doesn’t matter, Christopher, really it doesn’t.
 
She’s just a darkie.
 
Don’t get things out of proportion.
 
She isn’t important, you know that.
 
Don’t get yourself killed for her sake.”

Christopher sat up again, but Winterpole got in front of him and fastened his hand on his arm even more tightly.

“There are plenty like her, Christopher, plenty.
 
They breed like rabbits, these Asiatics.
 
You can have as many as you like once this is all over.
 
The best, the very best, I swear.
 
Lovely women, I guarantee it.
 
Just don’t let this one get to you.
 
Try to behave like a professional for once.
 
It’s part of their way of life here, they expect it.
 
You can’t stop it.
 
They’ll kill you if you try to interfere.
 
So just stay out of it.”

Christopher hit him harder than he had ever hit anyone.
 
The blow caught Winterpole full on the jaw and sent him sprawling back on to the floor.
 
Christopher started to get to his feet, but Winterpole, groaning from the blow, somehow managed to twist round and make a grab for Christopher’s legs, toppling him.

That was when the guard made his mistake.
 
He moved across to separate the struggling men, using his right hand while he held his rifle awkwardly in the other.
 
Perhaps he thought he was invulnerable since he carried the gun.
 
Perhaps he imagined the combatants were more interested in one another than in him.
 
On both counts, he was wrong.

As the guard reached for Winterpole, Christopher lunged for his left arm, swinging it back hard against the shoulder.
 
He heard a bone give with a snap and the guard scream in pain.
 
The rifle dropped from paralysed fingers.
 
The guard had sufficient presence of mind to throw himself round on Christopher as he scrabbled on the floor for the weapon.
 
But Christopher was impatient now and out of control.

As the guard rounded on him, he heard a scream outside, a woman’s scream.
 
Instinctively, he recoiled from his opponent’s grip, straightened, and lunged upwards with his knee, catching the man hard in the groin.

Christopher reached for the abandoned Mannlicher.
 
It had been rendered clumsy by the long bayonet at its end.
 
He heard Chindamani cry out again, a tight scream followed by a sob.
 
They were hurting her.
 
Without pausing, he turned and made for the entrance.

“Christopher!”

It was Winterpole, shouting urgently.

“He’s got a pistol, Christopher!
 
I can’t get to him!”

The guard had struggled to his feet in spite of the pain and was fumbling with a pistol in his side-holster.

Christopher swung round.
 
The man held the pistol in his right hand, trembling.
 
He was swaying, dizzy with pain, unable to take aim.
 
Christopher did not want to fire it would bring attention in his direction too soon.
 
He swung the rifle round, feeling it move like a spear in his hand.
 
Men had fought a war with weapons like this, in cold trenches, over rusted wire, yet he had never so much as handled one before.
 
He felt primitive, a sort of god, cold metal in his hands.
 
The man had steadied and was pointing the pistol at his chest.
 
It was heavy, black and diabolical.

Christopher lunged, images of parade grounds in his mind.
 
He had seen men stabbing bags of straw, shouting as they did so.
 
The revolver fired, a sudden light, and a sound of roaring filling the world.
 
He felt the rifle grow heavy, felt something cumbrous move at the end of the long spike, felt the rifle jerk in his hands, heard the revolver fire again, felt himself fall forward into the heaviness.

The bayonet twisted and there was a sound of screaming.

Christopher realized he had closed his eyes.
 
He opened them and saw the guard beside him, vomiting blood, rearing against the long spike in his stomach like a fish made passionate against death on the angler’s gaff.
 
He closed his eyes again and turned the blade once more, drawing away, empty, entranced, striving to escape the tearing of flesh.
 
There was a softer cry and a silence and a pulling away, and suddenly he was adrift in the supremacy of life over death.

“There is no death.
 
There is no death,” he kept repeating, but he opened his eyes and saw the guard on the floor, entering another world.
 
The bullets had not touched Christopher.
 
He was unhurt, but blood from the guard had splashed on his hands and the bayonet he held was dark and wet.

“You bloody fool!”
 
screeched Winterpole from his corner of the tent.

“You’ve ruined us!”

Christopher ignored him and ran out, clutching the rifle.

A fire had been brought back to life about twenty yards away, a red fire that threw tremendous sparks out to tease the darkness.
 
A semicircle of men stood near it, their faces lit like carnival masks, inflamed and bestial.
 
They were cheering as though watching a cockfight.
 
They seemed not to have heard the gunshots, or perhaps they had decided mutually to ignore them in order to concentrate on more immediate concerns.

Christopher raced towards them, pulling back the bolt on the rifle, gauging the distance and the positions of the men round the fire.
 
Coming from the darkness across soft ground, he was at an advantage.

There was a cry and the circle parted a fraction.