Tulku (2 page)

A slow, warm rain began before dawn. In his sleep Theodore imagined that he was awake, dozing on the floor of his own room, from which somebody had stolen the roof. It seemed to him that nothing could be done about this till Father came back. It was a miserable sort of dream with no centre or focus to the misery to turn it into a proper nightmare. His sleeping body tried to huddle further into the roll of blanket, whose coarse, oily, close-packed wool took a long time to let the wet through. He was properly woken at last by a little river that had formed where the rain runnelled off the mound on either side of him and flowed along the hollow in which he lay; at first the fold of blanket under his head had dammed its path, but when he groaned and shifted, the tiny torrent rushed through.

He sat up violently, trying to shake the rain out of his hair. The memory of last night swept through him like a storm-gust, making him
huddle
back instantly into his soggy hiding-place and then twist, taut-muscled and slow, until he lay on his stomach and could inch his head up to peer around. The low gravestone of the right-hand mound confronted him. ‘Constance Halliday Tewker. Born in darkness. Died in Grace. April 17 1891, aged 32.’ Theodore could barely remember his mother, except as a vague and silent presence, far back. She was more real to him dead than alive, a grave-mound to be mown and weeded, a source of warmth and cheerfulness in Father’s voice, a saint known to be at the side of Christ in heaven. The message on the stone struck him with no new force; he was aware of it, but more aware of the stone itself as some cover for his raised head as he peered through the veils of dawn-grey rain into the dripping shadows under the trees.

Nothing but rain moved. No hunting cry told that he had been seen. No far voices called. A low roll of thunder trundled its way among the clouds, emphasizing the absence of man-made noises. He wriggled out of his squelching blanket, picked it up, and his food-bag, and walked steadily towards the nearest trees. There, after a little searching, he found a drip-free area and knelt down on the soft leaf-litter to pray.

It was impossible to concentrate. As soon as he closed his eyes the wood was full of creeping presences, their movements muffled by the rattling streamlets shed from the leafage far above; but when he opened them and looked round he saw nothing but the smooth, reddish trunks and the glistening thin threads of falling water. He would start again, but inside his mind the memories of last night nudged and jostled for attention: Father’s voice, the shouts, the flames,
the
dwindling hymn, Fu T’iao in the ravine, the demon-figures running along the cliff-top. ‘When you speak to God you may be sure that He will hear, but you must not assume that He will answer.’ That was one of Father’s favourite sayings, but now Theodore felt for the first time in his life that his attempts to speak were being cut short, were not going out of him towards any hearer, but instead were scurrying round in his skull like mice in a box.

He tried several times, even finding a fresh dry place to pray in in case that made a difference, but it was no good. Something enormous had changed, inside him as well as outside, and slowly, achingly, he realized what it was. Suppose he were to go back to the Settlement and find out that all was well there, that nobody had been really hurt and only a few huts burnt, and that Father had persuaded the attackers to go away – even then things could not be the same. He had run away. He was cast out from the Congregation.

As this certainty dawned he stopped trying to pray, rose to his feet and walked round towards the cemetery path. By the time he was on it he was running, but where it branched into the path that led from the road to the cliff he stopped again. If he was cast out it was because he had obeyed Father’s orders, or thought he had. At least he could continue to obey. To be both cast out and disobedient . . . He must look from far off to see what was happening in the Settlement, Fu T’iao had said. There was only one place this side of the ravine where he could do that.

He walked cautiously along the path that led to the road, looked left and right through the drizzle,
then
darted across into the trees beyond. The wood was younger here, and the leaf-cover not thick enough to suppress all the undergrowth, so the people from the Settlement did not come here much, but there was a place some way down where the whole Settlement was visible, tilted on its small plateau towards the west with its fields and terraces rising behind it. Theodore knew this because there was a painting by Mother of the Settlement from the place; it hung – had hung – on the wall beside Father’s desk. He took a chunk of bread from his bag, blessed it automatically as he broke it, and munched untasting as he picked his way south.

Twenty minutes later he stood at the edge of the ravine once more; the rain had let up for the moment and the low cloud-roof was ridged with pink and gold where the rising sun, almost straight in front of him, shot its horizontal rays through some gap out of sight behind the hill. The Settlement was still in shadow. Slant in the south wind the streams of smoke rose thinly from the huts until they reached the sunlight, where they changed from grey to gold. Each hut sent up its wisp, though only memory and longing told Theodore that those shaggy piles had once been dwelling-places. No-one moved between the charred heaps. The roof-tree of the Church was down, but its end-frames still stood, draped with smouldering thatch. Someone had left a brass cooking-pot upside down on a doorpost. One or two of the smoking piles showed a patch of colour where a cloth or blanket had not burnt completely. There was nothing else. Where were the pigs, the cats, the ploughs, the rakes and hoes,
the
water-buckets, the beehives, the looms and spinning-wheels? Where were the people?

A movement below the terraces caught his eye, but it was only three monkeys sidling with waving tails to and fro along an invisible boundary, peering at the changed scene with inquisitive wariness; having looked that way Theodore now saw that the pipe-line was gone – the cunning structure of giant bamboo-stems, raised on stilts, that carried water from the spring to the terraces. It was not just pulled down; it was gone. He could see no sign of the pieces. Somewhere among the smoking heaps lay the ashes of those pipes, which Father had been so proud of. Their disappearance seemed final proof that the Settlement was wiped out, burnt, or looted, or slaughtered and thrown into the ravine.

All gone! It was as if a child had been playing in the sand, building its toy village with detailed passion, when the wheel of a passing cart had rolled across and demolished it into mere sand.

He couldn’t tell how long he stood there, staring, trembling, gasping as if he had a fever, shaking his head to and fro. It was no use praying. Even God, the strong, unchanging presence who had filled every second of sleep and waking in the life of the Settlement; creator, judge, friend – he too had been driven away by that heedless wheel.

A fresh downpour from the uncaring clouds broke the trance, and because there was nothing else to do Theodore picked his way back towards the road, careless of whether he was seen. His mind was numb, but his body had decided it was going back to explore the ruins of the Settlement.

2

OUT ON THE
open road the rain was a fine drizzle. Theodore’s feet walked his body along the grassy edge, still obeying Fu T’iao’s advice to be wary – in this case to leave no tracks on the slithery bare clay at the road’s centre. When he reached the ravine he halted. The bridge was gone.

His mind, which seemed for a while to have been wandering somewhere outside his body, came back and stared at the wreckage, unsurprised. He remembered the hammer of the axe-strokes in the night. He remembered Father fondling the hand-rail and saying, ‘With God’s will, that’ll stay put for a hundred years.’ The bridge was somehow part of Father, of his belief that man must worship with his hands as much as his mind, of his ingenuity in combining Chinese techniques with American knowledge to produce structures which were both light and strong and always managed to look as though they belonged where he put them, of his seeing that if he built the bridge then the road would take the short-cut and bring trade to nourish the Settlement. And now, for the very reasons that Father had built it, the people who had come in the night had smashed it down. Sure. But the old path would still be there – they wouldn’t trouble to destroy that because it was not Father’s work.

Theodore turned heavily, and felt his eyes
widen
at the sight of the people who had appeared behind him in the road, their coming muffled by the swish and whisper of rain. He gazed at them, too exhausted and uncaring to bolt for the cover of the trees. About ten people, and four horses. A slim young man, bedraggled despite the brown umbrella he carried, walked in front. His clothes were those of a peasant but he wore a neat little embroidered cap and moved in a manner which declared that he was not accustomed to trudging along sodden upland tracks. Behind him came the first of the horses, a creature so strikingly noble in its bearing – its coat a glossy brown, with a white blaze, its neck arched and ears pricked despite the drenching morning – that it took Theodore a moment to observe that its rider was almost equally out of place in this setting. The rider, who carried a dark green umbrella and sat sideways in the saddle, was clearly a woman and not Chinese, though her long reddy-brown cloak concealed her figure and her face was hidden by a veil which hung from the brim of her hat and was knotted under her chin.

The others were nothing unusual, ponies and peasants, hired to carry burdens – in the ponies’ case a pair of long wicker baskets slung on either side of their saddles and covered with green canvas, and in the men’s case a pair of smaller baskets slung fore and aft on a coolie-pole, which each man carried on his shoulder. All, except the noble horse and its veiled rider, trudged with a sullen and despairing air, as if they could hope for no end to their journey or to the rain. None paid any attention to Theodore, who was also a normal enough sight, a sodden peasant boy carrying a blanket and a satchel. The woman rode to
the
edge of the ravine and stared at the wreckage of Father’s bridge.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ she said. ‘Why did I ever leave Battersea?’

She spoke good English but with a curious, clipped whine. Theodore winced at the blasphemy but couldn’t stop staring. The men put down their loads and muttered.

‘Ah, for Christ’s sake!’ she said. ‘There’s got to be another way across. Ask the men, Lung. Ask them how far it is to this here mission.’

The young man with the cap and brown umbrella turned to the porters.

‘How far is to foreign village?’ he said in bad Miao.

The men shrugged and looked away. One muttered something inaudible. The young man turned back to the woman.

‘No way cross,’ he said in English as bad as his Miao. ‘Mission place very far.’

‘Come off it,’ said the woman. ‘That bloke don’t know nothing and what’s more he didn’t tell you nothing. Ask that kid there.’

The young man turned to Theodore.

‘Do you speak Mandarin?’ he asked despairingly.

Theodore nodded.

‘Why is there no bridge?’ said the young man. ‘This foreign princess is hideously dishonoured by the inadequacy of these roads. Can this appalling chasm be crossed elsewhere? How far is it to the Christian village? Is the missionary rich and charitable?’

‘Mission is burnt,’ said Theodore, wary now with human contact and trying to speak as though Mandarin didn’t come naturally to him and also
as
though the news meant nothing to him. ‘Men came in night. Break bridge. Burn mission. Is another path cross river.’

‘Men burnt the mission?’ said Lung, disappointment shading into alarm. He took a couple of paces to the woman’s side and began to whisper to her in English, voluble and frightened. Theodore, as he had turned to point the way to the path, had noticed some of the porters listening and had guessed that they spoke more Mandarin than they’d admitted. Now they drew back behind the horses in a close group, the Mandarin-speakers clearly explaining to the others what had happened.

‘It is begun,’ said one of them in Miao.

Lung and the woman were at the edge of the ravine now, peering across the gorge and no doubt seeing for the first time the wisps of smoke that still drifted above the blossoming orchard. The group of porters opened out and came forward in a stealthy line, one with a stubby knife in his hand and two others with clubs.

‘Miss! Watch out! Behind you!’ shouted Theodore.

His yell made the men hesitate, but the woman moved with extraordinary speed, dropping her umbrella, kicking her horse round and reining him back as he half-reared, and at the same time snatching a stocky-barrelled rifle from the holster by her saddle. She dropped the reins but remained steady in the saddle as the horse fidgeted back into stillness, and the gun swung along the line of porters, who fell back a pace, glancing at each other out of the corner of their eyes, waiting for someone else to start the attack.

‘Slimy bunch of bastards,’ she said. ‘Knew it the
minute
we hired them. Where’ve you skived off to, Lung, you yellow bleeder?’

There was no answer. The young man had vanished.

‘Show your face or I’ll leave you here,’ she said calmly. ‘And you won’t get no wages, neither.’

Lung emerged creepingly from behind a tree on the other side of the road.

‘Jesus, what a cock-up!’ said the woman. ‘Have we hired a bunch of bleeding Boxers, then?’

‘Not honourable Boxers, Missy. This men robbers, pirates. Think rob Missy, kill Missy, say they honourable Boxers.’

‘’Spect you’re right,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t make no odds. Tell ’em this gun here’s a twelve-shot repeater – that’s one bullet each and a few to spare. Tell ’em to drop their knives and turn round. I’ll count three and then I’ll shoot – I’ll start with that beggar with the club.’

Tremblingly Lung managed to put the sentences together. Nobody moved. The woman raised the gun to her shoulder, aiming at a squat, angry-looking man near the centre of the line.