Authors: Daniel Easterman
He lay in bed, trying to get warm, his thoughts in turmoil.
There were so many unanswered questions.
Who was the woman who had brought him to the gon-kang?
What did she really want with him?
And could she really help him get William out of this place?
He tossed and turned in the darkness, tiring himself without coming any closer to satisfactory answers.
In the end, his restless thoughts became restless dreams.
But even in sleep there were no answers.
He was woken abruptly by a sound.
His light had gone out and the room was in pitch darkness.
He could hear his own breathing but nothing else.
What had wakened him?
Breathing evenly, he lay in the darkness listening.
It came again, a soft, fumbling sound.
Someone or something was outside his door, trying to get in.
This was not like the sound he had heard before, when his door had been unlocked and locked again.
This was furtive, secretive, not intended to be heard.
A key turned in the lock.
Whoever was outside was taking great care not to waken him.
He cast back his blankets and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
Working by instinct, he found his boots and slipped them on.
The key turned gently, with an almost inaudible grating sound.
He stood up, careful not to make the bed creak.
The door began to open, an inch at a time.
He got up and crept to the other side of the room, next to the shrine.
The intruder did not carry a light.
Christopher could see nothing,
hear nothing.
He pressed himself against the wall.
As his eyes grew
accustomed to the darkness, he realized that a small amount of
illumination came through the shutter, which he had
closed imperfectly.
A slight creak drew his attention back to the door.
A shadow was easing itself through the opening.
Christopher held his breath.
The shadow moved to the bed on silent feet.
There was an abrupt movement as it bent down, then Christopher saw it fumble with the blankets in confusion.
There was a glint of something metallic in the darkness: a knife-blade.
Christopher waited for the figure to straighten up, then dashed forward, his right arm extended, and grabbed for the neck.
The intruder grunted as Christopher pulled back with his forearm against his throat.
He heard the knife clatter to the floor.
Then there was a quick movement and Christopher felt himself being twisted.
A sudden blow took him in the small of his back, near his kidneys.
As he jerked away from the blow, the man turned again and freed himself from the arm lock
A second blow took Christopher in the pit of his stomach and sent him reeling back against the shrine.
Bowls crashed to the ground, spilling water everywhere and clanging like bells in the stillness.
The stranger did not speak.
Suddenly he lunged, and Christopher felt something tighten round his neck.
It was a thin cord and the man was pulling hard on it His head spun as the cord tightened and air and blood were cut off.
He had seconds before he began to weaken.
Throwing himself forward, he crashed into his assailant, causing him to stumble and fall back against the bed.
The cord slackened and Christopher grabbed hold of it, ripping it from the man’s hands.
He tossed it aside.
Christopher realized that his one advantage was his weight.
The man beneath him was much smaller than he, but clever with his hands.
Without warning, Christopher’s attacker uncoiled himself and directed a blow to his throat.
His chin took most of the blow’s force, but he felt a searing pain run through his jaw.
He remembered the way the monk in Kalimpong had disabled him so effortlessly.
Springing back, he hit the chair and knocked it over.
Without thinking, he picked it up.
“Who are you?”
he hissed, but his assailant said nothing in reply.
He saw the shadow move towards him, lifted the chair, and struck out.
He felt the chair connect with his attacker, lifted it again, and struck a second time.
There was a dull cry, then the sound of feet stumbling as Christopher’s assailant tried to find his balance.
He saw the man stagger, then straighten up and make for the door.
Christopher made a dash after the man, groping for him in the semi-darkness, but one foot caught on an altar-bowl and he tripped.
When he got to his feet, his attacker had gone.
Christopher went to the open door and looked in both directions along the corridor.
There was no sign of anyone.
He took the key from the lock and closed the door, locked it and put the key inside his boot.
Further sleep would have been madness.
He remained awake until dawn, then tidied the room, replacing the bowls on the altar as accurately as possible.
He found his assailant’s knife, a thin weapon with an eight-inch blade, and tucked it into his other boot.
He was beginning to feel that the attack had turned in his favour.
Breakfast came long after dawn and the first morning service.
There was no message in the cup this time.
When the monk returned later that morning to take the crockery away, Christopher told him that he wanted to see the abbot.
At first the man denied that this was possible, but Christopher implied there would be trouble if his message were not passed on.
The monk said nothing when he left, but later that afternoon the steward returned and told Christopher to come with him.
They did not follow the same route they had taken the day before.
Instead, they climbed dark stairs that led to the top floor of the building.
Christopher guessed that he was being taken to the abbot’s private quarters.
As befitted an incarnation, he would live in the highest storey, so that no-one would be able to stand or sit above his head.
They seemed to be leaving behind more than just the lower monastery. Up here, it was another world.
At the top of the stairs, a large window looked out across the pass; it was glazed, not with the wax paper often used in Tibet, but with panes of real glass that must have been carried all the way from India.
Christopher paused for breath and looked out: in the distance, sunlight was resting on the peaks of dazzled mountains, dappled and quiet among the white snow.
He felt closed in, a prisoner in this murky place, shut away from the air and the sunshine.
The steward led him through a doorway with huge bronze rings round
which coloured ribbons had been tied.
Above the door, a
Chinese inscription proclaimed a message incomprehensible to Christopher.
An imperial name, a paean, a warning?
The door closed behind them and they were in a square chamber filled with painted cages within which birds of all sizes fluttered and hopped.
The air was thick with birdsong, a greedy twittering that bounced off the walls and ceiling in strange, bewildered echoes.
There were blue pigeons and red starts grey and red accentors, snow pigeons cloaked in white, thrushes, finches, and canaries from China, bright-plum aged parakeets from India, and two birds of paradise with feathers like the edges of rainbows.
Coloured plumage coruscated in the light of the lamps, awakening silent echoes on the unpainted walls.
But for all that, the room was a prison, a cell where shadows and wood and wire conspired to dim all brightness.
As Christopher passed through, heavy wings flapped against bars on every side; there was a deep, deep fluttering, like cloth in a nightmare.
The steward opened a second door and ushered Christopher into another room.
Great bottles stood everywhere, each the height of a tall man and correspondingly broad terraria filled with living plants brought up from the jungle regions below.
Each was a universe forever sealed in a cycle of growth and decay.
Among the plants, huge butterflies soared and swooped, beating cramped wings silently against the glass sides of the bottles, or moving from flower to flower restlessly.
More prisons, more cells.
Light fell on the bottles through glass shafts set in the ceiling, and the plants fought and strained to suck what life they could from the thin blades of tired sunshine that entered.
They went through several more rooms, each as bizarre as the one before.
In one, great spiders scuttled in glass cases and wove savage webs like clouds of silk.
In another, fish swam in giant tanks, endlessly prowling back and forth in the dark, quiet waters, turning and turning nervously, never still, never at rest, like sharks that will die if they stop moving.
And finally there came a small room filled with bright flames.
Everywhere, lamps burned, throwing tongues of fire into the shadow-encrusted air.
Earth and air, water and fire all the elements and creatures from each one.
The world in miniature.
At the end of the fire-room was a door different to the others they had passed through.
It was painted with mandalas circular patterns in which the worlds of air and land and sea were depicted.
From reality to shadow, from the shell to the kernel.
The steward opened the door and stood aside to let Christopher pass.
Beyond the mandala door lay a great chamber that seemed to stretch across most of the upper storey.
Shafts of dust-laden light drifted lazily through apertures in the ceiling, but they were insufficient to dispel the abundant shadows lurking everywhere.
The tiny flames of butter-lamps wavered in the distance like fireflies above a dark lake.
Christopher heard a sound behind him.
He turned to see the door close.
The steward had gone.
As his eyes grew accustomed once more to the gloom, Christopher saw what sort of room it was he had entered.
He had heard of such places before, but had never expected to see one.
This was the chorten hall, where the tombs of all the past abbots of the monastery were ranged along one wall: great boxes, vaster than the deaths they contained, untarnished, polished, dusted gleaming receptacles for decaying flesh and mouldering bones.
The lights flickered and picked out the facades of the great tombs, built from bronze and gold and silver, encrusted with jewels and precious ornaments.
Each chorten stood on a large pedestal and rose almost to the ceiling.
In an impermanent world, they were tokens of permanence, like crystal in ice or gold in sunlight, never melting, never shifting through the dark, uncertain boundaries of change and chance.
Inside each one, the mummified remains of an abbot had been placed.
From time to time, salt was added to keep the mummies in a state of semi-preservation.
Through grilles set in the front of the chortens, the gilded faces of their inhabitants gazed out forlornly on a world of grey shadows.
Slowly, Christopher walked along the row of golden tombs.
Outside, he could hear the whistling of the afternoon wind.
It was cold up here, cold and alone and, somehow, futile.
There were twelve chortens in all.
Some of the abbots would have died as old men, some as children but if the monks were to be believed, they were one and all incarnations of the same spirit, the same being in a multitude of bodies.
Each living abbot would dwell up here all his life, side by side with his old bodies, as a man will dwell with his memories or his castoff clothes, waiting for his own body to join the others, waiting to take on a new form but never a new identity.
‘
The abbot was waiting for him just like the day before, in a niche at the far end of the long hall, seated on cushions among gilded shadows and gods like fire.
He seemed more diminished here, dwarfed by the huge chortens, a pale figure lost among his own past lives.
It was as if he had been sitting there, on that same throne, on that same spot, down long centuries, watching the chortens being built and occupied, waiting for someone to come and say it was finished, that it was time to leave at last.
Christopher bowed low and was told to seat himself on a padded seat facing the abbot.
“You asked to see me,” said the old man.
“Yes.”
“An important matter.”
“Yes,” said Christopher.
“Go on.”
“Someone came to my room last night.
While I was sleeping.
Do you understand?
He entered my room while I was sleeping.
He tried to kill me.
I want to know why.
I want you to tell me why.”
The abbot did not answer straight away.
He appeared shaken by Christopher’s revelation.