Tulku (4 page)

‘Why in hell not?’ she said, turning and straightening. He shook his head.

‘Ah, come off it. Theo. We’re much best off, all together. There’s more to our friend Lung than meets the eye, but he only speaks pukka Chinee. You know the lingo in these parts, and you know where we’re going, and I can manage the horses and the rifle. What’s biting you?’

Theodore found himself unable to speak. He stood dumb while she stared at him, her expression invisible behind the thick veil, until she took
a
pace towards him, lifting her arms in a gesture of appeal.

‘What’s up, Theo?’ she said in the gentlest of voices. ‘Is it something I done? Spit it out, then. I got to know, ain’t I, or how can I do anything about it?’

It would have been easier if she’d stayed in the saddle and cursed him as she did Lung and the horses. He could have borne that in silence. Now, he didn’t know how, she forced him to speak.

‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ he said in a toneless mutter.

‘Je . . .’ she began and bit the word short. ‘Is
that
it?’

She stood for a moment in silence, then slowly raised both hands and unpinned the large green brooch that held the veil in place beneath her chin, continuing the movement to lift the filmy stuff aside and settle it behind her shoulders.

Her eyes were large, round, blue – not sky-blue, but the colour of still water on a cloudless noon. Strong black eyebrows made them seem bluer still. The skin of her plump cheeks was white and flaky, so that for a moment Theodore thought she wore the veil to hide a disfiguring skin-disease, but then he saw that the flakes were a mixture of powder and sweat, concealing innumerable tiny wrinkles. Her wide mouth was painted poppy-red, and its emphasis made her chin seem absurdly small, just the first of a series of receding folds that eventually became her neck. Her nose was small and snub, like an afterthought.

‘I bet I don’t half look a picture,’ she said, turning her head slightly and watching him a little sideways, as if suddenly shy. ‘Now, listen here,
duck
. You can’t stay in these here parts – it’s dangerous, and there ain’t nothing to eat, and I’m not having you go down in the village, not if I have to tie you up and carry you along of me. Lung and me could do that easy – he’s ever so handy with knots. But I want you to come willing, so let’s start all over again, shall we? I’ll mind my lip and you’ll forget as you ever heard me cussing. It won’t half do me good – I been letting myself get out of hand in these heathen parts. So is it a deal, young man?’

Theodore hesitated. Whether she cursed or not she was certainly a wicked woman – the paint on her face only confirmed that. But the eyes in the painted face were earnest and pleading, and her voice, though still faintly mocking, seemed to be mocking only herself and was as gentle as the contented chucking of a mother hen.

‘Oh, I can do it,’ she said suddenly in a quite different accent. ‘I’ve had to mind my tongue before. I’ve passed myself off in swell houses, taking tea with Lady This and the Duchess of That, and not one of them spotted I didn’t belong.’

She giggled and dropped back to her normal voice.

‘You’ll come along of us, won’t you, Theo? Didn’t Jesus himself go along of harlots and sinners?’

She was still looking at him with her head tilted a little away, and now her eyes were half-closed. He noticed that her eyelashes were enormously long and paler than her eyebrows, glinting here and there with gold. His lips seemed to make up his mind for him.

‘I guess I’ll go along with you,’ he said. ‘Are they all dead in the Settlement?’

‘I didn’t see anyone as wasn’t,’ she said, beginning to refasten her veil. ‘Looks like they herded them into that big building and . . .’

‘The church. Did you . . . did you see the missionary?’

‘Big feller in a night-shirt? ‘Fraid so. What was his name?’

‘The Reverend Simeon Tewker.’

She nodded, turning towards the horses, then slowly swinging back.

‘’Scuse my asking,’ she said, ‘but you’re speaking English pretty nice all of a sudden. American, I should say. Been faking it, have you?’

The danger and action of the morning, the vigour and warmth of her company, had faded in the instant that she told him for certain that Father was dead, and now he was settling again into the numbness of shock. The question barely broke through his consciousness but once more his lips answered for him.

‘He was my father.’

3

THEY TRAVELLED NORTH
along the forested foothills, taking the old track that had barely been used since Father had built the bridge. It would have been easier to go east, but that would have taken them to Shiacheng, where the men who had attacked the Settlement must have come from; so the best chance was to make a detour and hope to strike another road to Taho. All the first day Theodore rode, sitting sideways, peasant-fashion, across the rump of his pony, slumped into the trance of shock. He barely noticed where they went, what they ate or how they camped. They met no-one. The woods, the whole of China, the world – they were as empty as his soul.

In the middle of next morning Mrs Jones dragged him out of his stupor to talk to a couple of hunters who spoke a rough version of Miao which he could just understand. They insisted that the best way to Taho was back, through Shiacheng, but agreed that it was possible to travel on north. They seemed to know nothing of any Boxer uprisings, or anything that happened beyond the valleys they hunted. As soon as the talk was over Theodore slid back into numbness. The usual morning rain drizzled on. It took an age to climb each rise and to plod down into the next valley, where the usual stream, steeper and angrier each time, had to be somehow forded.

Around midday the clouds lifted and the rains died. They halted on a rounded upland of grass and stunted scrub, where they fed the horses and then ate their own meal; but barely had they moved off again when Mrs Jones reined in, dismounted and peered at something growing beside the track. Then to Lung’s obvious disgust she opened one of the baskets, brought out a folding stool and some equipment, and settled to painting a little flower, mauve and hairy, which she had found. Lung made a parade of taking the rifle and standing sentry, scowling down the path they had travelled; the horses grazed; and Theodore, somehow unsettled from scurrying round the endlessly repeated maze of his despair, looked around him. East and south the hills were veiled with heat-haze, but west and north a chain of larger hills stood clear. He realized that the landscape had indeed been changing as they travelled, and the seeming steepness and weariness had not simply been products of his own misery. He shrugged, and was about to retreat into the maze when Mrs Jones closed the paint-box with a deliberate snap and pointed.

‘See there? That’s where I’m going, some day.’

Theodore gazed along the line of her arm and saw, through a notch in the hill-range, a glimmer of silver and purple – snow-peaks, clearer each instant as the clouds thinned, a hundred miles away or more, but even at that distance making the hills among which he stood seem like little more than dimples in the earth’s crust.

‘Tibet,’ he said dully. ‘You can’t go there. They don’t let you in.’

‘That’s as may be, young man, but I’m going
there
before I die. I bet there’s things in them valleys like what nobody’s never seen.’

‘Things?’

‘Plants,’ she said, strapping her kit together. ‘What else do you fancy I’m doing in these heathen parts? I’m a plant-collector, see? One day there’ll be a flower what everybody grows in their garden and it’ll have my name on it.
Something-or-other Jonesii
. Won’t that be grand?’

She laughed, self-mocking, as Lung helped her into the saddle, but she had been talking with a sudden intensity, enough to draw Theodore’s whole attention. Now, as they rode on across the upland, she continued to chatter away.

‘Mind you, I have got a rose called after me, Daisy Dancer, but it ain’t a proper wild species and it ain’t my real name. I was born Daisy Snuggett, see, but you could hardly put that at the top of a bill, could you? I’m not saying as Daisy Dancer ain’t a pretty little rose, pinky with hundreds of curly petals, though it’s turned out a devil for mildew, I hear . . . oh, I beg your pardon, young man. Does that count?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. In fact he knew quite well – Satan counted. But Mrs Jones was already chattering on and he had no urge to stop her though often he had little idea what she was talking about. She had made a break in the monotony of his grief, and he was grateful, though without any conscious awareness of gratitude. Only when he knew her better did he guess that she had deliberately chosen the moment, had understood his needs, first for privacy and now for interruption. At one point she tried to involve Lung in the talk, but to Theodore’s surprise he held up a reproving hand, though he smiled with
sudden
charm as he did so, then reined his pony in and fell behind.

‘Making up one of his poems,’ muttered Mrs Jones. ‘Didn’t I say there’s more to him than what meets the eye?’

After that she gossiped on all day, unwearied as one of the mountain streams.

Two evenings later they waited, half-hidden by a wattle fence that had been built as a shelter for young vines, and watched an old woman hoeing her garden. The flies, which had swarmed and settled and stung all the weary afternoon as they worked their way round through the hill-scrub above the fields, had gone. To the west the sky was palest yellow, streaked with pink along the mountain rims. The thin moon that floated in the darkening edge of night seemed to be nearer than those snow-peaks. Quarter of a mile ahead lay the river, a network of shallows and gravel banks. They knew it could be crossed here because from the hillside they had seen small herds of cattle fording it, and had decided that it was safer to make this circuit than to risk using the bridge in the middle of the town that lay at the head of this sudden fertile valley. The last peasant they had met up in the hills had seemed dangerously sullen. They had discussed concealing Mrs Jones somehow among the baggage and letting Lung and Theodore take the horses through; but even so there would be a good chance that someone would want to see the strangers’ travel papers, and the baggage would be searched, if only for loot. Then they had seen the ford.

‘Ah, get on with it, you old besom,’ whispered Mrs Jones.

She stood as straight as ever, but Theodore could hear the exhaustion in her voice. He himself was ready to lie down and sleep where they stood. The horses could smell the river and were restless with thirst. Beyond the river a good road ran due east, but between them and the river, less than a quarter of a mile away now, lay this last lone cottage, with the old woman hoeing and hoeing. It seemed a pity, now they had come so far without being seen, to let this one person witness their passing. At last she straightened her back and hobbled away. Mrs Jones waited another minute and started down the path. The cottage was in darkness, but just as Theodore came level with its gate a voice spoke from the vine-shrouded porch.

‘A peach-blossom sky—

Men lead horses to the ford . . .’

Even to Theodore, whose sole reading was his Bible, the tone was unmistakable – an old man’s voice, detached and amused, quoting poetry and ending on a note of question. The horse-hooves padded on the soft track for a few paces, then another voice spoke, whispering but clear.

‘A boat-shaped moon—

I fetch rice-wine for a friend.’

Before Theodore had fully grasped that this second voice was Lung’s, a cackle of pleasure rose from the porch.

‘My flagon is already half-empty, Traveller, but anyone who can quote Tu Fu in this wilderness
must
stay and help me finish it, that we may start on another.’

Lung hesitated. The hoof-sounds of his pony had ceased.

‘Weng,’ he called suddenly in an authoritative voice, ‘run ahead and ask the Captain to wait.’

Theodore dropped Bessie’s reins and trotted down the path. He found Mrs Jones had already halted.

‘What’s the bleeder up to now?’ she muttered. ‘We got to get across while it’s still light enough to see.’

‘He wants us to wait. He’s being careful. He called me Weng and you the Captain. Maybe he’s getting news, or faking a story so the man won’t guess he’s seen foreigners.’

‘Let’s hope,’ she sighed.

They waited for several minutes, listening to the murmur of voices. At last a gate creaked and Lung appeared from the loom of the cottage.

‘Missy, we sleep here this night,’ he whispered.

‘Here! You think we can trust this bloke? What have you done with the horses?’

‘This fellow not a bloke, Missy. He very OK gentleman. He official long time in yamen at Pekin, but not in favour now, so he live here. He say put horses in shed, eat here, sleep here, maybe cross river before sun rise.’

‘Oh, fair enough. I’m that fagged . . . What did you tell him about me?’

‘I say you English Princess.’

‘Oh, Lor! I’m going to have to mind my manners, ain’t I?’

Mrs Jones insisted on seeing that the horses were properly groomed and fed and watered before she
would
come into the house. She and Theodore did the work while Lung held the lantern and talked to their host, a fat little man with a bald head and a leathery face puckered into a million wrinkles. His name was P’iu-Chun. He needed a crutch to walk, and wore clothes like any peasant’s, but Lung was very respectful to him. He was polite to Lung, if a bit grand, but he watched Mrs Jones all the time with bright-eyed amusement.

As P’iu-Chun led the way into the house at last Lung said in English, ‘Is not custom for woman to eat along by man, but honoured P’iu-Chun say this night forget custom.’

‘That’s very good of him,’ said Mrs Jones in her grandest voice. ‘Tell him that my gratitude for his hospitality is exceeded only by my pleasure at the prospect of his company. Oh, and you might ask if there’s anywhere I can give myself a bit of a wash.’