The Ninth Buddha (38 page)

all other reasons, all other motivations had vanished.

Suddenly, her left foot slipped and she started to topple sideways. For long moments she hung poised, all her weight on the right foot, desperately fighting against the awful pull of gravity that was trying to bear her down and give her to the wind.
 
Her frozen fingers clutched at bare stone, blindly searching for the tiniest crack to hold on to.

Part of the ledge had given way.
 
Perhaps it had always been that way she could not remember how far she had got the last time.
 
The problem was: just how wide was the gap?
 
Six inches?
 
A foot?
 
Ten?
 
She was carrying nothing with which to test the distance.
 
In the pitch dark, she could see nothing.
 
If she tired and misjudged, she would lose her balance and fall to her death on the rocks below.
 
If she returned for something to measure the gap, she knew she would lose her nerve and be unable to climb back out again.

Gingerly, holding her weight on her right leg, pressing hard against the wall for maximum balance, she edged her left foot out again, feeling for the resumption of the ledge.
 
The wind whistled in her ears, distracting her.
 
It tugged at her body, trying to tear her away from the wall.
 
Her heart shuddered inside her chest.

Her weight was already beginning to shift, and she still had not found the next stretch of ledge.
 
She wanted to bend her right knee, to bring her torso lower, but that would only push her out further from the wall.
 
Sweat poured out of her.
 
On her face and the palms of her hands, it turned almost instantly to ice.
 
She shivered and felt herself teeter on the edge of balance.
 
Still nothing.
 
She could not be sure just where to put her left foot down.
 
The muscles of her right leg were pulling badly.
 
A vicious pain shot up her thigh;

the leg felt as though about to go into cramp.
 
Still nothing.
 
She wanted to scream, to break the tension somehow, to relax her muscles.

She moved her left arm just a fraction, then her right.
 
She stretched another inch left wards with her foot.
 
Still nothing.
 
Inside her brain, an insidious voice was repeating: “Let go, let go, let go!”

She wanted to drop, to let the void solve all her problems.
 
Why not?

The Lady would find another body.
 
Still nothing.

In another fraction of an inch she would have reached her limit.

And already she was frightened that, without realizing it, she had passed a point of no return, where no effort on her part would rectify her state of imbalance and return to her starting position.

Her right leg was screaming in agony, it could not possibly support the strain of moving back.
 
She moved the final fraction.
 
Still nothing.
 
She moved again.

She felt her balance go.
 
One second she was static, just holding on; the next she was out of control, moving, lurching into the darkness.

Her toe caught the corner of the ledge and held.
 
Just.
 
She hung there, between life and nothingness, mentally letting go, forcing herself to strain every muscle until she had balance again.
 
Her heart pounded as if about to burst.
 
The darkness seemed to vanish, and she was alone in a world of light.
 
Then the light faded and she was back again on the cold ledge, shuddering and on the verge of panic.

She fought down the rising terror and edged her left foot up on to the ledge, praying it would hold.
 
Somewhere in her mind, the Tara mantra was being recited, but she had lost all sight of the goddess within herself.
 
Her senses were the only things binding her to reality now.
 
The feel of her foot on the hard ledge was bliss beyond any bliss that prayers or offerings could bring.

Gradually, her heartbeat and her breathing slowed and life began to come back into her right leg.
 
She moved her left foot along just far enough to leave room for the right, shifted her balance towards the left, and crossed the gap.
 
That was it.
 
She knew she could never face that a second time.
 
If she could not find a way back into the monastery from here, she would either freeze to death or fall out of the world forever.

By her calculation, Ka-ris To-feh’s room should be the fifth along, but it was difficult to make out anything clearly in the dark and she was terrified that she would make a mistake and go past unwittingly.
 
She prayed his shutters had not been closed since the morning before: she could not remember how they had been earlier that night when she had gone to his room to waken him.

She was grimly conscious that time was passing quickly.
 
Fear urged her to panic and hurry, but she forced herself to move slowly, inch by inch, willing time itself to slow down and keep pace with her.

Her fingers had become a problem.
 
If she remained outside much longer without caring for them, she could contract serious frost-bite.
 
Already, feeling had gone from them and she was able to use them only by an effort of will.

She felt that hours had passed by the time she reached the fifth window.
 
To her joy, she could make out the glow of a dim light coming from inside the room.
 
Once she was positioned right underneath, she reached up and peered through the window, using the heels of her hands, then her elbows.

She looked inside.
 
Christopher was not there.

Tsarong Rinpoche was growing more worried by the minute.
 
With the help of the Buriat Zam-ya-ting, he had taken control of Dorjela at last.
 
Zam-ya-ting thought he was in charge, but he would soon show him who had the final say in things here.
 
He was more worried by the woman, Chindamani.
 
She represented the goddess Tara, and Tara was extremely popular among the monks, just as she was with the people.
 
Given time, the bitch could undermine all his efforts by a direct appeal to the loyalty of the trap as couched in suitably emotive language.
 
She would have to be eliminated and that would take some subtle arranging if it were not to backfire.

The Englishman Wy-lam had served his purpose.
 
By bringing him to the monastery, he had helped implicate the pee-ling abbot in the machinations of the British.
 
Zam-ya-ting had known a lot about Wy-lam and had been able to persuade the monks that both he and his father were involved in some sort of plot together.

Perhaps they had been.
 
But it didn’t seem to matter now.

What did matter was that Wy-lam could prove more of a threat than even the woman.
 
The office of abbot was not hereditary.
 
The Englishman could not claim to be a trulku, nor did Tsarong Rinpoche fear he would.
 
But everyone at Dorje-la knew the words of the prophecy found in an old terma book: “When Dorje-la is ruled by a pee-ling, the world shall be ruled from Dorje-la’.
 
And they knew the sentence that followed it in the book: “In the year that the son of a pee-ling’s son comes to the Land of Snows, in that year shall Maidari appear.
 
He shall be the last abbot of Dorje-la, and the greatest.”

The Englishman would not know any of that, of course; but he was sure the girl would make him aware of it and use it to help them rally support within the monastery.
 
All it needed was for Wy-lam to persuade his son to co-operate by playing whatever role the girl suggested for him.
 
The Rinpoche could not be sure of most of the monks yet.
 
A little push might send them running in another direction.

That would have to be prevented at all costs.
 
He did not know what plans the Burial had for Wy-lam or the woman.
 
But his own were unambiguous: the girl and the Englishman must be killed tonight.

The catch on the window gave without much pressure.
 
It had not been designed to keep anyone out from the pass, it was impossible to climb anywhere within one hundred feet of it.
 
Chindamani dropped down into the room.
 
It felt warm.
 
Christopher had been here since she last saw him.
 
His outdoor clothes the ones in which he had come to Dorje-la were gone.
 
He must have been brought back here, dressed in them, then left again.
 
Just what was going on?

She stepped cautiously to the door.
 
Her heart was still beating hard from her nerve-racking passage of the ledge outside, and her hands hurt as the circulation tried to return to normal.
 
More than anything, she longed to throw herself on the bed and sleep.
 
To escape all this in dreams seemed to her the most desirable of all things at this moment.

The door was partly open.
 
Holding her breath, she opened it further. A man was lying on the ground about a yard away, not moving.
 
A long halberd from the gon-kang had fallen from his hand and lay near him.
 
Chindamani walked to the man and bent down.
 
He was dead.
 
As far as she could tell, someone had broken his neck.
 
Was the fighting still going on?
 
Or had Ka-ris To-feh done this in his determination to escape?

If it had been Ka-ris To-feh, he would be trying to find a way out of

the monastery.
 
And the quickest way he knew was over the roof- the way

they had gone together when she had taken him to see the boys in the

lab rang
 
But if he hoped to escape that way he was making a stupid

mistake: the roof led nowhere.
 
And the bridge only led to the lab

rang

She set off rapidly in the direction of the hatch through which she and Christopher had got on to the roof.
 
The monastery had fallen silent again, but tonight it was a threatening silence, not the meditative quiet to which Chindamani was accustomed.
 
Before, she had moved quietly when she went abroad at night out of respect for the sleep or the prayers of the monks in their cells.

Tonight, she did so out of fear for her life.

When she got to the hatch it was closed.
 
But the ladder had gone, and she guessed Ka-ris To-feh had pulled it up after him in order to delay any possible pursuit.
 
Without it, there was no way she could get out through the hatch.
 
The only other possibility was a second hatch nearby, a private hatch used by the abbot whenever he wanted to go to the lab rang or just spend time on the roof watching the clouds pass.

The ladder to the second hatch was in place.
 
It was a matter of moments for Chindamani to get out on to the roof.
 
She prayed no one would come and find the ladder and the open hatch, but there was no time to waste covering her tracks.

The cold seized her with vicious fingers, jealous of the time she had just spent out of its clutches.
 
On the rooftop, the wind blew unimpeded by any obstacles.
 
Pieces of dry snow whipped across her face out of the unrelieved darkness.
 
The roaring of the wind combined with the pounding in her chest to blot out any other sounds.
 
Like a swimmer swimming in green depths amid a terrible silence, she opened her mouth and called his name but heard nothing.
 
The sound of her voice was swallowed up in the general din, thin and futile.
 
Again and again she strained to be heard, shouting his name aloud in steady measures, a repeated mantra unheard and unheeded.
 
He was here somewhere, there was nowhere else for him to go.

She wandered through the blackness calling him.
 
It was a secret wonder to her, invoking his name like this, a man’s name, a name she could scarcely pronounce.
 
It disturbed her that just to call his name in the darkness gave her such pleasure, even while the thought that he might have gone out here to his death disquieted her deeply.

She found him sitting on the plinth of an old bronze dragon set to guard the chortens, staring into the blackness, a dim shape in the night, scarcely distinguishable from his surroundings.

“Ka-ris To-feh,” she said, sitting beside him.

“We have to go.
 
We have to get out of Dorje-la.”

“I’ve tried,” he said.

“But there’s no way out.
 
And even if there was a way out, there’s nowhere to go.
 
It’s all like this cold and bleak and meaningless. What does it matter if you’re alive or dead up here?
 
There isn’t even anyone to care.”

“I care,” she said.

“You?”
 
he exclaimed.
 
A dry sound like a laugh leapt from his lips and was carried away on the wind.

“You care about nothing but your gods and your Buddhas and your child incarnations.
 
You don’t know what the real world’s like.
 
You don’t know what damage they can do, these gods of yours.
 
What wounds they can inflict.”