The Ninth Buddha (20 page)

“You will be tired tomorrow, and we still have a long way to go before we leave the villages behind.
 
Even if you can’t sleep, you should rest.
 
I’m going to sleep.
 
I’ve had a tiring day .. . and I know what’s ahead.”

It was as if Lhaten had shed a false skin since leaving Kalimpong.
 
There, he had been obsequious, almost servile, constantly calling Christopher ‘sahib’ and behaving in all respects as a member of a subject race should behave towards his master.
 
The further they moved away from the town, however, the more some innate sense of independence asserted itself in him.
 
He used the word sahib far less frequently and with increasing irony coupled, perhaps, with a little affection.
 
Christopher still wondered why the boy had volunteered to act as guide to a murder suspect.
 
But it was evident from the start that he had not been boasting when he said he had done this sort of thing before.

Christopher made an effort to sleep, but he managed nothing more than a fitful doze, out of which he would start from time to time to hear Lhaten breathing evenly beside him.
 
The ground was hard and the air bitterly cold.
 
It would soon warm up during the day, but that was no comfort now.
 
For Christopher, the images of the day before were still too close and fresh to shut out from his thoughts.

The sky turned hazily purple, then scarlet and gold, as the sun returned above the hills of Bhutan.
 
Lhaten woke with the light.
 
He wanted to make good progress today, to get as far away as possible from the beaten track.
 
At a distance, the pee-ling might pass as a Nepali traveller, but he did not want the disguise put to the test close up.
 
Apart from anything, Christopher’s height would draw unwelcome attention.
 
And there was nothing they could do about that.

At Damtung, the road forked.
 
On their left, a path led to the Buddhist monastery of Pemayangtse, and on the right a broader road began to descend toward the River Tista.
 
This was the main road to Gantok, the Sikkimese capital.

“We’ve got to take the Gantok road, sahib.
 
No choice.
 
If you’re seen, leave the talking to me.
 
I’ll say you’re dumb.”

The descent was steep.
 
At the bottom, the Tista ran high, still swollen from recent rains.
 
It was a large river, but it had the tight violence of a mountain stream churning through steep gorges.

They bypassed the villages of Temi and Tarko, like men in a hurry, eager to get to Gantok by market day.
 
The heat became unbearable.
 
By noon, they were walking stripped to the waist.
 
The cold of the night was like a dream or a distant memory.

All around them, the dark, humid jungle closed in with suffocating intimacy.
 
It touched them as they passed, with fingers of damp green leaves and tendrils that hung from moss-covered boughs, snake-like and slimy to the touch.
 
Giant ferns struggled for space with bamboos and palms.
 
Vines and creepers twisted themselves round everything in sight.
 
Orchids grew in profusion, white grave flowers heavy with a drugged and sickly scent.
 
In the shadows, bright-patterned snakes glided through tangled and rotten undergrowth.
 
The air was moist and heavy and full of corruption.
 
They breathed it reluctantly, like men in a place they know to be full of contagion.

Here in the forest, life and death were inextricable: things died and rotted and provided food for the profusion of new life that sprang up everywhere.
 
Life seethed around them, hot and green and restless.
 
There was a fever upon everything: insects, flowers, birds, snakes, animals all were burning with it.

Once, Christopher saw a horde of butterflies quivering in a sunbeam close to the ground.
 
Their wings caught fire: reds and blues and yellows spun like fragments of stained glass in a dark cathedral.
 
But when he approached more closely, he saw that they had battened on the decaying body of a small animal, on which they seemed to be feeding in some fashion.
 
On another occasion, Lhaten showed him an isolated flower of great beauty, a scarlet jewel hanging from a long branch: and above it, secreted in darkness, spun about the flower’s stem, was a thick spider’s web in which dying insects, attracted by the red petals, struggled helplessly.

From the beginning, they were plagued by leeches.
 
Like short, thin earthworms, the little creatures dropped on them at every available opportunity, insinuating themselves through the narrowest of apertures until they reached the naked flesh they so coveted.

Once there, they would suck blood until sated.
 
It was useless to pull them off- if they snapped, the mouth would remain intact, if torn away, they would leave a suppurating wound.
 
Every few miles, Lhaten and Christopher would stop and apply small bags of salt dipped in water and the leeches would shrivel and fall away.

For much of the time, they walked in silence.
 
The heat and the stifling air made speech a luxury.
 
There were bright-plum aged birds to speak for them, and frogs and monkeys and all the chattering denizens of their greenhouse world.
 
The jungle itself wove a spell over them, sucking words from their tongues as the leeches sucked blood from their veins.

But at night when they stopped to sleep, they would whisper in the darkness while beasts of prey stalked their victims and the ripe flowers gave up their perfumes to the night.

“Did you fight in the war, sahib?
 
In the Great War?
 
Did you see tanks and aeroplanes?”

“No, Lhaten.
 
I saw none of those things.
 
I was here in India.

There were spies, German spies.
 
They wanted to bring the war here, to take India away from us.”

“From you.
 
They wanted to take India from you.”

“Yes, of course.
 
But not to give back to the Indians.
 
They wanted it for themselves.
 
There would have been a German Raj.”

“Would that have made a difference?”

Christopher pondered.
 
For the British, yes; of course.
 
But for the Indians?
 
Or Nepalese like Lhaten?
 
He would have liked to say “Yes’ to that as well, but he felt no conviction and could not say it.

“Did you catch Germans in India?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill them?”

“Some of them.
 
The rest were put in prison.”

“Because they wanted to conquer India?”

“Yes.”

“Like the British?”

“Yes.”

In the darkness, something moved.
 
An inarticulate cry was followed by the fluttering of wings.
 
Predators and victims came and went in an intricate night-time game.

On the third day, they stumbled across the ruins of a temple in a weed-choked clearing.
 
Ivy worshipped the fallen images of Shiva and Vishnu after its own fashion, with slow and intimate fingers.

Eveywhere, stone lay upon fallen stone, cracked and twisted by rain and heat and the green creeping flesh of the jungle.

Christopher stepped inside the clearing, drawn by morbid curiosity. But Lhaten hung back, unwilling to set foot within a place so long abandoned.
 
He watched Christopher walk from moss-covered stone to moss-covered stone, his fingers tracing ancient carvings and forgotten inscriptions.
 
He glanced fearfully at the strange gods, leaning at crazy angles in the grass.
 
He watched a black snake glide through the fingers of Shiva like a living rod in the god’s hand.

“You should not go there, sahib,” he called from the trees, his obsequiousness returning through fear.

“There are bad spirits in this place.
 
You should apologize and go, sahib.”

High up, in the treetops, a bird screeched once and was silent.

Here, in the vicinity of the ruins, the jungle seemed quieter, as though this was the heart of some ancient silence.
 
Christopher turned and saw Lhaten beckoning to him from the side of the clearing, fear visible on his face.

“It’s all right, Lhaten,” he shouted, but his voice sounded flat and coarse and out of place.
 
On a low wall to his left, he could make out the figures of men and women making love, their limbs softened by the remorseless green moss.
 
Nothing stirred.
 
There was no breeze, no freshening wind to move the leaves.
 
At his feet, the broken hand of a statue clutched at the moist air.
 
Christopher felt the walls of the jungle close in on him.
 
He wanted to get on suddenly, to break away from this place and breathe the air of the mountains.
 
Wordlessly, he rejoined Lhaten.
 
They skirted the clearing and pushed on through the undergrowth, heading north.

That night in the darkness, Lhaten returned to his questioning.

“There are no Germans now, are there, sahib?”

“In India, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The British and the Germans are good friends now.
 
Is that right?”

Christopher shrugged.

“I don’t know about “good”, but we have made peace with one another.”

“So you are not looking for Germans.”

“No, Lhaten.
 
I’m not looking for Germans.”

“Who are you looking for?”

Christopher wished they could light a fire.
 
How many more nights of this darkness would there be?

“I have a son,” he said.

“A boy often called William.
 
Someone kidnapped him.
 
He was brought to Kalimpong.
 
But they’ve taken him further now into Tibet, across the Sebu-la.”

Lhaten was silent for a while.

“You have spoken about this to the Reverend Carpenter Sahib?”

he asked at last.

“Why should I talk to him?”

“Because he knows about such things.
 
About boys who disappear.
 
Girls who are never seen again.
 
He is a very religious man.

A very Christian man don’t you think, sahib?”I “What do you know about the Knox Homes, Lhaten?”
 
Christopher remembered the boy’s original reaction to his enquiry about the place.

“It is a place where they keep children.
 
And sometimes the children leave and go elsewhere.
 
A very Christian place.”

“Do many people know about this, Lhaten?
 
That the Reverend Carpenter sells boys and girls to rich customers?”

Lhaten nodded.

“Some people know, yes.
 
But the Reverend Carpenter is a very holy man, a very good man.
 
We are all very grateful for his Christian charity.
 
If I had told you when you first came that children disappeared, would you have believed me?
 
If your own son had not been one, would you have gone to look for them?”

Christopher shivered.
 
The boy was right.
 
Hypocrisy had more allies than any other vice.

“Where are they taking your son?”
 
asked Lhaten.

Christopher knew the answer, or at least he was reasonably sure he did.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Dorje-la?”
 
he asked.

Only the jungle answered.

“Lhaten, I asked if you had heard of somewhere called Dorje-la.”

The thin piping of a bat echoed nearby.

“I think it is time for sleep, sahib,” Lhaten said at last.
 
He did not answer Christopher’s question.

They crossed the river on a shaky bridge at Shamdong three bamboo poles across the icy torrent.
 
The jungle gave way abruptly to more open country.
 
By the sixth day, they had reached seven thousand feet and the climate had started to change.
 
It was no longer warm.
 
On the mountain-tops, now visible from time to time, snow fell in broken patterns.
 
Shadows shifted on the distant peaks, as though shelves of ice were cracking and breaking away.

Grey and white clouds gathered and dispersed above them, bringing a chill, drizzling rain that fell in cold spasms.
 
They took their mountain clothing out of the rolls on their backs and put it on.

Christopher’s heart felt heavy.
 
Not even Lhaten’s banter and laughter could dispel the gloom that had fallen over him.
 
He looked up at the mountains, watching the shadows move behind the snow, and he shivered as though he were already there, in that dark solitude.

They passed deserted bamboo houses, abandoned for the winter.

Sometimes they would shelter in one.
 
Sometimes there was nothing but rain for miles.
 
They saw almost no-one, for they gave a wide berth to any villages or clusters of huts that fell across their path.

Those few travellers they did meet they ignored, walking on huddled and unresponsive into the driving rain.

After Tsontang, the river branched, becoming the Lachung on the right and the Lachen on the left.
 
A soft dank mist filled the narrow Lachen valley.
 
Without speaking, Lhaten led the way into it, picking his path nervously between stones and clumps of dukshing, a poisonous weed that seemed ubiquitous.
 
On the following day, the mist lifted and by evening they saw the first real signs that they were close to the passes: patches of ice and unmelted snow lay in pockets across the valley floor.