Tulku (25 page)

‘You must not look at that one without due preparation,’ he muttered.

‘What is it? Why?’

‘Yidam Yamantaka. Death and slayer of death. That he should encounter one at the start of an enterprise . . . walk with me, and if we meet anyone I shall be expounding to you the meanings of Yama and Yamantaka . . . in two nights you must leave.’

‘I know. Lung told me. I don’t know if Mrs Jones knows. I only see her now when we’re at the Lama Amchi’s house. I don’t even know which is her cell . . .’

‘I will show you. But you are fully ready?’

‘Some other people have moved into our guest-house, so we’ve had an excuse to pack most of our things away.’

‘Good. Now listen. At dusk the day after tomorrow the Steward of the Guest-houses will send fresh guests to your house. The honoured Lung will protest that there is no room, and the steward will say that there is nowhere else available. I will then come and suggest that you and the honoured Lung move to a cell in the monastery, and you will accept this. Thus your
disappearance
from the guest-house will be accounted for. You must tell some story to your friend Achugla.’

‘Major Price-Evans? All right,’ said Theodore reluctantly. Deceiving the old man would be unpleasant.

‘What about the horses?’ he asked.

‘It is arranged. Your guide, whose name is Tefu, will take a paper to the groom who has looked after them, authorizing him to buy them. He will give the groom, who cannot in any case read, some money for himself. All that is not important, or if it is I shall have taken care of it. There is no time to discuss it now. Lean on the rail here and listen.’

They had reached by this time the gallery on the south side of the courtyard, and a little way along it Sumpa halted and leant his elbows on the rail. Theodore fell in beside him, as casually as he could.

‘You see the hermit-caves?’ said Sumpa.

‘Yes.’

Major Price-Evans had told Theodore about the hermit-caves. In each of them lived a monk who had vowed to endure total isolation while he performed spiritual exercises. Most of them were walled in, with only a slit left open through which food could be passed. At the end of his time the monk would emerge purified, and gifted with strange powers. Apparently the Lama Amchi had achieved this, living alone, Walled into one of the caves, for seven years. It was to this he owed his spiritual authority. Seven years!

‘Follow the left-hand stair up, then,’ Sumpa muttered, ‘and you will see a ledge branching off to left and right. Three caves on the right-hand
branch
and one on the left. The woman is in that single cave on the left.’

‘Walled in?’ whispered Theodore.

‘Of course not. There is a token stone at the entrance. Now, immediately we have left the guest-house I will take you to a side-door to the monastery – the one you used when you came to the ceremony of the oracle. Go there on the night and behind the door you will find a monk’s robe, folded. Take that with you and go to the cave. You will meet no-one of importance. All the senior monks will be in the temple for the ritual that starts the days of meditation before the festival. The woman will be there also for a while, but at a certain point in the ceremony she will leave and return to her cave. She will find you there and not be alarmed. You will explain what is happening. She must dress in the robe you carry and raise its cowl, so that in the dark she may pass for a monk. You will lead her back by way of the door through which you entered the monastery, and turn west, along beneath the wall, until you come to the place where there are many shrines on either side of the path, above and below. You know it?’

‘Yes.’

‘At the third shrine turn left and climb straight up the hill. In thirty paces you will come to a platform which was made for a shrine not yet built. Tefu will be waiting there, with the honoured Lung, and your horses. He will have yaks and men. If you leave at once, travelling in the dark, you will be able to camp by the edge of the Stone Lake and cross it next day at dawn. You can do all this? It must be you, because you speak the woman’s language, and moreover
you
are the Guide, so no-one will question or stop you.’

‘I think I can do it. I don’t see why not. I’ll make sure I know my way through the monastery so that I can find it in the dark. I’m much more worried about the journey.’

‘No difficulty there, provided you leave unnoticed. You will have three days’ start, and before the end of that time you will be among friends. I am only the furthest finger-tip of the strong hand that will take you to safety.’

A monk came pacing along the gallery. Sumpa started telling Theodore the names of the demons who inhabited the mountain peak, but as soon as the monk was out of earshot, led him away to show him where he would hide the robe Mrs Jones was to wear. Theodore by now knew the monastery well enough to notice that they were making a longish detour to avoid the courtyard where Yidam Yamantaka – Death and Slayer of Death – stared at the sky.

There was one more meeting at the Lama Amchi’s, and Theodore, despite his new nervousness, could not see that it differed at all from any of the other recent meetings. The pattern had changed from that of earlier days. Nowadays Mrs Jones wore her nun’s robe and barely seemed to notice Theodore, speaking directly to the Lama in Tibetan, stumbling but happier to communicate like this. The Lama answered her questions in short, repetitive sentences, and only called on Theodore to amplify some idea that could not be treated in simple terms. So Theodore spent most of his time at the window, reading or drawing; and even when he was taking part in the lessons,
the
ideas he was asked to translate were so strange and rarified that there was no need for him to shut his mind to them – he could not have begun to grasp them, however hard he had tried.

This made the lessons less tiring, but he was distressed by the increasing gulf that had opened between Mrs Jones and himself. It was she, now, who treated him as a mechanical device, while the Lama became increasingly polite and kindly. At the end of one meeting he had said, ‘Theodore, a guide exists by virtue of the path he has to show. Once the journey is made and the path known, he is a guide no more. A bowl of life-giving food does not itself give life. Once the food is eaten, the bowl is only a bowl.’

‘Yes, I know. I didn’t want to be anyone’s bowl.’

‘But you have served honestly, my child. I think well of you, for what my poor thoughts are worth.’

‘Thank you.’

An odd little part of Theodore’s nerves rose from the prospect of resuming the old life with Mrs Jones, the songs and the teasing and the rush of energy flowing out of her which was now all turned inward. Would it be like that again? He didn’t dare wonder. Luckily at that last lesson he was hardly called on to take part at all. It consisted largely of silences, repetitions of sacred formulae, hummings in the throat or single syllables exploding, while Theodore stood at the window and neither read nor drew, but stared at the majestic skyline he hoped he would not see again.

The scene at the guest-house went like a well-rehearsed play. For some days the over-decorated
little
room had become increasingly crowded and smelly and noisy as visitors began to gather for the festival. Tibetans seemed to have no sense of privacy at all, so wherever there was a spare patch of floor they thought it natural to spread out their flea-ridden blankets and bed down. Lung, now triply fastidious in his loneliness, fought against these invasions, using a screen and a barrier of baggage to mark out the area which belonged to him and Theodore, but even these frontiers of civilization contracted daily under pressure from the alien horde. On the evening marked for the escape there were already eight Tibetans – two of them boisterous small girls – using the guest-house when the door heaved on its frame, the latch gave, and a squat woman backed in, dragging a loose pile of baggage. Two thin little men, so alike that they were certainly brothers and therefore probably her husbands, followed laden with pots and food. Several children seemed to be hovering in the dusk beyond the door-frame.

The woman, bewildered but cheerful, stared round the room, spotted the last empty space between Lung’s cot and Theodore’s, and marched towards it. Lung rose to fend her off, but her technique for getting through the gap between the screen and the baggage was the same as the one she had used at the doorway – she reversed, pulling her belongings behind her, moving with enough momentum to knock Lung on to his cot when she collided with him. By the time he was on his feet the children – there were only two of them after all – were climbing across the baggage pile, the men were halted in the gap, and three of the other inhabitants of the guest-house were crowding behind them to watch the upheaval and
explain
to the woman that the space between the foreigners’ cots was sacred ground, or something of the sort. At the same time the two little girls came shrilling across to tell the new children about the wickedness of climbing on foreigners’ baggage, a lesson they themselves had only learnt two days ago. In the end Lung had to move the screen to reach the door where the Steward of the Guest-houses, a middle-aged monk, stood gap-toothed and blinking.

Lung began to argue. The Steward, who had acquired a smattering of Mandarin in the course of his duties, answered mostly with gestures, designed to show that the other guest-houses were even more crowded. Angrily Lung took him by the elbow and pulled him out of the door, so that it seemed perfectly natural for Theodore to wriggle through the crush and join the discussion outside. He reached them in time to see Sumpa come strolling down the path from the monastery. Lung turned to him in despair and fury.

Perhaps it was all a little too pat, but it seemed to Theodore quite convincing. Sumpa and the Steward argued for a little in Tibetan – perhaps for the benefit of the visitors now crowding the doorway, or perhaps because Sumpa had somehow engineered it that the Steward should bring the newcomers down, without letting him know the reason. But after a minute Sumpa turned to Theodore.

‘If the honoured Guide will come with me,’ he said, ‘I will show him an empty cell in the monastery which he can share with the honoured Lung. Meanwhile the honoured Lung can supervise the packing of your belongings. These peasants will bring them up to the path below the
monastery
wall and I will arrange for their collection from there.’

He spoke a couple of sentences in Tibetan and turned away, striding up the path with brisk small steps. Theodore caught him up.

‘I went out to the shrine this morning,’ he muttered. ‘There was a camp among them, three tents and some yaks.’

‘That is Tefu and his friends,’ said Sumpa. ‘I will go there now and send them to fetch the baggage. You go to the small door. The robe is where I showed you.’

When they reached the monastery wall he gave a formal little nod and hurried away, vanishing almost at once in the near-dark. Theodore followed the blank line of the wall in the other direction, noticing for the first time how noisy the evening was, with laughter and shouts from the guest-houses and the more distant throb and pulse of temple music. Below him, at the heart of the valley, a thunderstorm had brewed, and the continual flicker of its veiled lightning picked out the tree-tops and the spiky pinnacles of shrines below the path. When he came to the small side-door he found it wedged slightly open with a stone, and tied with a leather thong to prevent it from swinging in the wind. He slipped the knot by touch and slid through, kicking the stone away and latching the door from the inside. The robe was there; folded along the wall. He slung it across his shoulder and felt his way up the stair to the maze of galleries above.

This section of the monastery consisted mostly of the quarters of senior monks. Now there was no-one about, and few lamps burnt in any cells; but from the direction of the main temple came
the
murmur and throb of horns and drums and the ocean-like rumble of the monks’ responses, all echoed from the valley by the growing mutter of the storm. The building was like a vast creature, the rhythm of whose life at times draws all its living cells to the centre of its system, leaving its outer parts mere lifeless shell, untenanted. Through these veins and chambers Theodore stole like an infection. He felt totally safe.

‘I am armoured in faith,’ he whispered several times.

Whatever happened God would not let him be harmed, but moved beside him now so that all the demons of the mountain could not touch him. This exaltation of certainty lasted while he walked silently above the courtyards, round behind the temple of the oracle, down a stair and out into the main courtyard through the arch from which he had first seen it.

It was full night now, with many stars, though they were smudged out to the north where the thunderstorm was rising and nearing. He picked his way along beneath the slope of natural rock to the stairs he had climbed so often, going to lessons at the Lama Amchi’s house. Almost nonchalantly he started up them, reached the ledge where the two houses stood side by side, crossed it diagonally and began to climb the steeper, more irregular stairs to the caves. Stirred by the fringes of the storm, the night wind, icy cold, slashed and whipped at the mountain, snatching his panted breath from his lips and tugging at his clothes. He slowed his pace, taking care over each step, husbanding his energy as if he had the whole mountain to climb. When he looked over his shoulder he was astonished by how far he had
come
; the rock-face plunged down, seeming far steeper from above than from below, and the whole monastery was mapped out beneath him. The thought struck him that he should have come up here before and looked at the whole valley from this height. But mostly he kept his eyes on the individual steps, which were often no more than scooped footholds in the rock, no larger than a dinner-plate. At the steepest places a coarse rope, greasy with use, ran beside them.

At last came a change, a step that was wider than the others, and broader too, a place to rest and recover breath without feeling that the wind would scour him off the mountain. But it was too cold to stand still for long, and Theodore was about to climb on when his eye was caught by a dim yellow light to his left and he realized with a shock that he had reached the first line of caves. His eye was now trapped by that light and could see nothing else, so he had to feel his way, trembling suddenly with the knowledge of the sweep of rock below him, till he reached the cave mouth. Heavy curtain was stretched across it just inside. Eagerly he slipped through.