The Ninth Buddha (55 page)

Winterpole was fine.
 
He had done his bit.
 
There was no need to apologize now for anything: they were quits.

They rode on at a steady pace.
 
Rezukhin’s men could not catch them now, without horses, in the darkness.
 
But Christopher wished there was more light, that the moon would put in an appearance, however briefly.
 
The sky was thick with clouds, through which not even the faintest glimmer of light escaped.
 
They had no conception of the direction in which they were headed, nor could they easily measure how far they travelled.
 
Time seemed to pass to a different measure, desperately slow and unrelenting.
 
Only the horses were indifferent.

From time to time, one or another would fall into a fitful sleep, only to waken soon after, jolted by a change in the horse’s rhythm or a cry out of the darkness.

For a long time Chindamani did not sleep.
 
Christopher held her about the waist, steadying her against the swaying of the horse, but he sensed that she did not wish to talk.
 
Perhaps she would never be able to discuss the events of that night; but he wanted her to know that he would be there if she wanted to.
 
A few times he felt her body quivering, not from cold though the night was icy but from unwanted memories suddenly crowding in on her.

A little before dawn, he felt her grow more relaxed and realized she had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep.
 
Though desperately fatigued himself, he struggled to keep awake in order to prevent her slipping.
 
The horses were walking now.

Dawn, when it finally came, was torn between splendour and drabness. On the edge of the horizon, directly ahead of them, a pale and insignificant light suddenly erupted in jets of red and gold only to be swallowed up lazily by sordid banks of tattered cloud.
 
It was not a dawn in which to look for auguries.
 
It promised neither peace nor war, but something infinitely more grotesque than either.

With the light, it was possible to make out the sort of country they were in, a barren scrubland, devoid of any interesting features or signs of life.
 
It seemed to stretch behind and ahead of them forever.
 
They were strung out across it, Winterpole far in front, followed by Christopher and Chindamani with their two horses.

Christopher called at the top of his voice to Winterpole, telling him to stop.
 
It was time they halted and rested properly.
 
At first Winterpole paid no need, then he raised a tired hand to show he had heard, reined in his horse, and slipped awkwardly to the ground.
 
He waited for them to catch up with him, his arms folded across his chest, relaxed and apparently un flustered by their adventures.
 
They did not hurry to reach him nor, when they did, did Christopher find anything to say to him.
 
He dismounted and helped Chindamani to the ground.
 
She yawned and held on to him tightly, shivering in the dawn breeze.

“Where are we?”
 
she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Christopher.
 
He turned and spoke to Winterpole in English.

“Do you know where we are?”

Winterpole smiled.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said.

“I overheard some of them talking last night, before all the trouble started.
 
I got a rough idea which way we were travelling.”

He turned and pointed.

“Do you see those mountains ahead of us?”

Christopher nodded.

“That’s the Bogdo Ula range.
 
Urga is on the other side.”

“I’m tired.”

They had been walking for days now, but Zamyatm showed no signs of slacking off.
 
Samdup had begun to wonder if he was human at all.

“Won’t you have another chocolate?”
 
the Buriat said, holding out a large beribboned box to the boy.
 
God knows where or how the man obtained the thing, but it had appeared one evening at Uliassutai, a burning temptation to a child who had scarcely tasted sugar in his life.
 
The box bore the legend “Debauve & Gallais’, and had clearly originated in their little shop near the top of the Rue des Saints-Peres, whence it had travelled to St.
 
Petersburg in the halcyon days before crowns and chocolates were together interdicted.
 
But by what circuitous route the box now in far from pristine condition had come to the steppes of western Mongolia or how it had in the end fallen into Zamyatin’s egalitarian hands as an offering for his little god-prince, it was impossible to know.

Samdup shook his head and walked on in silence.
 
He was not to be drawn so easily from his tiredness.
 
It had not been petulance that led him to complain.
 
The boy really was tired and needed more than battered chocolates to fortify his spirits or his body against the rig ours of another day.
 
He hated Zamyatin with a raw and pitiless loathing, and longed to be rid of him.
 
Yet a mutual dependence had grown up between man and boy, such that Samdup had little comfort in the thought of their parting.

Zamyatin fell back a little to where William was trailing along behind on his pony.
 
They had agreed that he should have the remaining pony since he was in such poor shape.
 
The bite he had received in the tunnels beneath Dorje-la had swollen out of all proportion.
 
In the past week, it had become red and angry, the skin over it drawn taut like the skin of a drum.
 
The boy suffered constant pain from it now and could scarcely sleep at night.
 
At each of their recent halts, he had been examined by Mongol doctors, but all they had been able to do was to prepare herbal concoctions, which William drank without effect.

“Have a chocolate, William,” Zamyatin urged, holding the box up to him.
 
But the boy did not even look down or show that he had heard.
 
He was not eating properly, and Zamyatin was growing worried.

Strictly speaking, he should have dumped the English boy weeks ago.
 
Tibet was still a long way in the future, and he was not sure how useful William would prove anyway.
 
But something in the boy’s situation had awakened what little conscience there was in Zamyatin. He identified with him and in some respects regretted having taken him from his home.
 
All the more now that he was sure the boy would not survive much longer unless he received proper medical attention.

The two boys had formed a strangely intense friendship in spite of their inability to understand one another’s language.
 
William had taught Samdup a little English and learned some Tibetan in return, but they had only words without grammar or syntax.
 
They communicated in some manner that transcended or side-stepped language.
 
William would let only Samdup tend to him when his neck was particularly bad.
 
And Samdup would go nowhere unless William was by his side.
 
They had become like brothers.

Zamyatin tried without success to win the favour of one or the other.

He knew that, if William accepted him, Samdup would come round in time.
 
Without Samdup, Zamyatin would lose all purpose in being here.
 
True, there were communist cells at Urga and elsewhere now, with which he could liaise.
 
But he knew that another Comintern agent, Sorokovikov, was already in the country and that he had organized the existing revolutionary group into the Mongol People’s Party under the leadership of a man called Sukebator.
 
Udinskii had told him that a delegation from the MPP had visited the head of the People’s Section of the East for the Party’s Siberian Bureau in Irkutsk.
 
That had been last August.

After that, a Mongol-Tibetan section of Comintern had been founded. The first Mongolian Party Congress had been held in Russian Khiakhta in March.
 
Puzorin, commander of the Soviet of the Fifth Army, was already mobilizing his men.

So events had overtaken Zamyatin while he had been tucked away in his little monastery in the Himalayas.
 
He could feel the reins of power slipping out of his grasp before he had even learned to move them through his fingers with any real dexterity.
 
More than ever, everything hinged on the boy.
 
Ungern’s defeat, the Khutukhtu’s overthrow, and Zamyatin’s elevation to the vice regency of the East.
 
Others might move cells and parties and armies, but what could they achieve in the end without the underpinning only a Saviour-child could give them?

Already his expedition had met with success, as he had anticipated. The riot at Uliassutai had been a mere beginning.
 
He had met with the Sain Noyon Khan and one of the princes from his aim ak a man called Damdinsuren, and had presented them to the boy.
 
It had gone exactly as planned both men, together with the lamas in their entourage had recognized Samdup as the new Khutukhtu and promised their support, moral and military both.

They had given him letters to other princes, to the Tushetu and Setsen Khans, and to the heads of several key monasteries.

Somehow he could not explain it, did not wholly admire or admit it even to himself- the boy exerted some sort of charm over everyone he met. He played the part, but there was more to it than that.
 
Perhaps it was simply that Samdup had throughout his life been little else but a god, so that he behaved as a god might be expected.
 
And the boy did not have to act: he really believed he was the Maidari Buddha.
 
But the Mongols, like the Tibetans, were accustomed to little boys who deported themselves as god lings yet they responded to Samdup with genuine respect.

Mongolia then was divided into several large provinces or aimaks, each of which was further divided into several ho shun
 
Zamyatin calculated that he had already perhaps ten ho shun solidly behind him or, to be precise, behind the boy, which was the same thing as far as he was concerned.
 
There would be more riots, and next time he would see to it that the participants were armed.

The main thing was to keep the boys on the move.
 
Word would be out by now, and if what he had heard about Ungern Stern berg was even partly true, the baron would stop at nothing to crush the rebellion breeding beneath his nose.
 
Every night, Zamyatin and the boys stayed at the juris of a different clan, moving in a broken pattern across the country, never keeping to a straight line, never staying in one place long enough to make tracing them easy.

Tomorrow they would start for Urga.
 
The Sain Noyon Khan

would organize a series of uprisings in the west and north while Zamyatin and his young Pretender took horses to the capital.
 
By the time they arrived there, Ungern’s attention would be focused elsewhere.
 
They would make their way into the city with the assistance of a few sympathizers.
 
Zamyatin would make contact with Sukebator and the other revolutionaries, explain what was happening, and put himself in charge.

Up ahead, Samdup had stopped and sat down by the side of the track.

Zamyatin went up to him slowly, holding the rein of William’s pony.

“What’s wrong?”
 
he asked.

“My feet hurt,” Samdup said.

“What do you want me to do about it?”
 
snapped Zamyatin.
 
His own feet hurt.

“We’ve still got miles to go.
 
Do you want to spend the night out here with the wolves?”

But he liked the boy.
 
He really did.
 
He liked both of them.
 
It was just that he did not know how to show it.
 
He had never known.

No-one had ever told him.

Urga

Urga lay in the sunshine uneasily, trapped in a hollow between dark hills.
 
Sunlight had entered it in proper measure, scattered from a cloudless and smiling sky, but no sooner did it touch its narrow lanes and fetid alleyways than it lost whatever lustre it had possessed and became a grey and sickly thing.
 
The city’s rooftops were golden and the spires on its temple tipped with sunlight and precious stones, but shadows hung over them and the sound of great trumpets echoed round them with a mournful and desperate flatness.

Mountains enclosed a melancholy plain across which the city stretched

for mile after mile, in three separate sections: Mai-maich’eng, the

Chinese trading city, to the east, its stores and warehouses deserted

and empty; Gandan, the grey city of the lamas, with its temples and

colleges for the study of theology and medicine, to the west; and in

the centre, Ta Khure, where the Living Buddha dwelt behind thick walls

of dull red and white, among rooms full of holy relics and a thousand

ticking clocks, each set to a different hour and minute.
 
Time passed

in those chambers to a morbid creeping sound, like ice moving down a

mountain slope

In slow procession, pilgrims walked or crawled in circles about their god, while trumpets played and gongs shivered and the voices of ten thousand dreaming priests shimmered and echoed in the hollow air.
 
All was as it had been, nothing was changed, nothing was altered except for the actors and their faces.
 
They wore ancient robes and spoke ancient lines, turning and bowing and lighting the proper incense in the proper places, as generations of actors had done before them, as they themselves had no doubt done in former lifetimes.
 
Precise, mannered, without a syllable altered or a gesture changed.
 
And in the Buddha’s chambers, clocks ticked and rang out in the stillness.