‘Everybody out, please. We’re moving now.’
‘They’re back, are they?’ Hugh said with relief.
‘Not yet. We’ve just spotted them going up the cliff for a better look.’
‘Aren’t you waiting for them, then?’
‘We can get organized meanwhile.’
He didn’t want to explain anything. He didn’t know what there was to explain; merely a profound feeling in his bones that they must not be caught here in a confusion of tents and bedding, and that he must not himself spread panic.
He thought he would go stark raving mad at the slow motion quality that descended on them suddenly. Endless hours seemed to elapse while the tents were struck and bedding rolled and equipment packed on the horses. But he bethought himself in this hiatus of something else the governor had suggested, and moved over to the palanquin.
He said, ‘Little Daughter, the Mother wished to leave her palanquin and ride in the open. She can do so now.’
‘She cannot,
trulku
. She cannot ride. She has never ridden a horse.’
‘I will help her.’
‘No,
trulku
, this is not wise. It is my duty to help her, not yours.’
He said in her ear, ‘Little Daughter,
you
must go in the palanquin, and the bags must come out. She will ride your horse. It is for her safety.’
Little Daughter’s face went stiff and her mouth trembled. But she dismounted without another word.
The guards turned their heads as the abbess stepped out of the palanquin. She was blind in her heavy veil, and Houston helped her to mount, and adjusted the stirrups and held her gloved hand while the two cloth-bound bales were strapped to the horse.
She said clearly, ‘Is there some trouble,
trulku
?’
‘No trouble, Good Mother. We are getting guides. It will be an easy ride today. I will be beside you.’
‘I know it,’ she said, squeezing his hand.
The governor’s wives had put up their own veils against the wind, and with fur hats and earmuffs in place were indistinguishable at a few paces from the abbess.
‘All right,’ Houston said. ‘Let’s go.’
They had to pass within sight of the monastery; there was no help for that. But nothing moved in the now sinister little eyrie high on its mountain perch.
Hugh came up beside him.
‘What about the fellows you sent up to the monastery? Aren’t you leaving anyone to tell them?’
‘There’s only one way we can go. They’ll have to follow.’
‘There isn’t anything wrong, is there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I don’t bloody well know,’ Houston said.
Hugh dropped back.
Ringling moved up.
‘You are not leaving anyone to wait for the guards in the monastery, sahib?’
‘No.’
The boy rode silently beside him for some minutes. He said softly, ‘I have two pistols, sahib. I have them under my cape. One is for you.’
‘All right.’
‘I will keep close to you, sahib.’
‘All right,’ Houston said again.
The idea seemed to be catching on.
They had gone for perhaps a quarter of an hour when the voices began calling them from the hills. Because the monastery was on the right, and the guards had gone to the right, they looked to the right; it was a minute or two with the sound ricocheting deceptively from side to side of the defile before they realized the cries were coming from the left.
They halted to listen, and Houston found the procession bunched closely in round him.
It was possible to see that the cries were coming from the
two monks and the guard; now far to the left on the opposite side of the defile.
‘What are they shouting?’
Nobody could tell what they were shouting, the sound distorted in the hills.
‘Should we call to them, sahib?’ Ringling said.
‘All right,’ Houston said, seeing there was no point now in silence. ‘Tell them to come down here.’
The party on the hilltop did not come down.
‘They are waving,
trulku
. They are waving us to come to them.’
‘How? Where is the track?’
Nobody could tell that, either.
He sent a guard trotting ahead to see if he could find a track. They waited, bunched closely together. From behind them, the faint reverberations of the monastery gong began to sound again in the thin air.
Hugh said, ‘How the hell did they get up there? There doesn’t seem to be any way down from where they were.’
‘Maybe there is a wall of rock bridging one side of the valley with the other, sahib,’ Ringling said. ‘It would be easier than climbing down. We have seen it before.’
They had seen it before. They had seen every kind of geological freak in the past three days.
The guard trotted back.
‘There is a kind of track,
trulku
, very rocky. It is a hard climb.’
‘Where does this main track go to?’
‘There is a rock ridge ahead of us. The track goes on underneath it. There is a bad fall of rock there.’
There seemed to be a kind of sense in this. There would be little point in the guard climbing dangerously down to lead them away from the rock fall when he could do so with ease merely by walking over the rock bridge to a point where he could see them coming.
The party on the hilltop had stopped shouting now. They had stopped waving, too. They must have seen the guard ride out to look for the track, and now they stood and waited; they had shouted enough only to attract attention.
‘What about it?’ Hugh said.
Houston turned to the guard. ‘This rock fall – how bad is it? Can we get past?’
‘I don’t know,
trulku
. I don’t know if it is blocked farther on.’
‘Maybe that’s what they were shouting about,’ Hugh said.
‘Maybe.’
Maybe it was. He couldn’t see very much else for it.
He said with a good deal more cheer than he felt, ‘Well, let’s have a go.’
As the guard had said, it was a hard climb. To spare the horses, only the women remained mounted. The palanquin bearers cursed as they stumbled with the weight of Little Daughter from one ice-glazed rock to the next.
From time to time, with outcrops of rock between them, they lost sight of the three figures silhouetted against the skyline. They lost sight of them once for a quarter of an hour. Houston called a halt for a rest. He found himself alone on a slab with the abbess on horseback beside him and Ringling at his heels.
‘It will snow soon, sahib.’
‘Yes.’
There was a grey density in the air. He couldn’t tell if it had become warmer. He was sweating under his fur jacket, the breeze hissing on the rocky hillside.
‘The track is not blocked, sahib.’
‘It’s hard to see from here.’
‘It is not blocked.’
‘
Trulku
.’
‘I am here, Mother.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Nine o’clock.’
‘I was listening for the third gong. I forgot we must have passed the monastery miles ago.’
He looked at the heavy veil, blinding her, and then across to the monastery, facing him very plainly now, not a mile away across the gorge.
He said, ‘When should it have sounded, Good Mother?’
‘At eight-thirty, half an hour after the second, of course.’
‘What are the first two?’
‘The first for waking and prayers, the second for breakfast. They will be praying again now,’ she said, and fell into a little prayer herself, on horseback.
He saw the boy’s eyes upon him, wide with alarm; and looked down upon the track that they had come up, and imagined what kind of panic there would be if he turned them round and went back down it.
He said, ‘We’d better move on again.’
The watchers were still there, waiting, when they came out from the overhang, some hundreds of feet above them still.
The snow started shortly after; the path began to disappear under the white blanket. The abbess’s horse slipped.
‘
Trulku
, we should rest again. The horse is tired.’
‘Later, Mother. In a few minutes we can rest.’
‘The poor animal is sweating. He has the weight of the bags, also. I must protect all animals,
trulku
.’
‘When we get to the top, Mother. It is dangerous to stop here.’
‘Dangerous for the horse?’
‘Very dangerous for the horse.’
‘Very well.’
He thought the veil of snow had blanked out the watchers and that they must be waiting there, at the top. But they were not. The party reached the summit, and looked about them, sweating and panting.
‘Down below, sahib. See, they are waving.’
From the crest the hill swooped down again; it fell easily into a broad bare saddle of land. Beyond the saddle it fell again, very steeply, a boulder-strewn slope plummeting down to a river, a thin white foaming strand half a mile below.
The two monks and the guard had walked down into the saddle; their tracks were just discernible in the thickly falling snow.
‘What the hell are they playing at?’ Hugh said.
‘Maybe they had to go ahead to show the track before the snow wiped it out, sahib,’ Ringling said.
‘You think that’s what it is?’
‘I don’t know, sahib.’
Houston didn’t know, either. He would have been prepared to bet that the saddle was covered with turf; apart from two massive boulders, one at each end, the land was quite unbroken. It did not look to him as if there had been any particular track. It looked to him very unpleasantly as if men might be waiting behind the boulders and that he had been led into an ambush.
He said, ‘We’ll take a rest here.’
It was after ten o’clock. The breeze had dropped and the snow fell straight down, thickly and silently. The breath of the party hung in the air.
Hugh said, ‘Shouldn’t we get on while we can see the tracks?’
‘Hugh, come here a minute, will you.’
‘What is it?’
He waited till Hugh was beside him. He said softly, ‘Something funny is going on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The track below wasn’t blocked. And there’s something wrong in the monastery. Their normal routine has been interrupted. Apparently there should have been a third gong for prayers. There wasn’t.’
‘What do you think –’
‘I think these jokers have been leading us by the nose all the morning.’
‘Why for God’s sake?’
Houston didn’t answer. He looked down at the boulders.
Hugh licked his lips. ‘How about sending someone ahead to see?’
‘What would be the point?’
‘We could get down again bloody quick.’
‘No,’ Houston said wearily. ‘No, we couldn’t. You can’t see the track with the snow. It’s too dangerous, anyway. They’d half kill themselves in the rush.’
‘What do you want to do, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you sure of this?’
‘No, I’m not sure. I’ve not been sure all the morning,’ Houston said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
‘Where are we?’
Ringling had been listening to the quiet conversation in English. He said sombrely, ‘We’re near the caravan route, sahib. That is the Li-Chu river. I know it. We should be across it and much farther south.’
Hugh said, in the pause, ‘Do you think if we just turned quietly round, no panic, and went back down again …’
‘You wouldn’t do it quietly,’ Houston said. ‘And who are you supposed to be fooling? If the Chinese are here, you won’t be fooling them. If they’re not, what’s the point of going down again? We’ve got to get across that river.’
Hugh licked his lips again.
He said, ‘Do you think they
are
here?’
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Houston said. He saw that the others were watching them intently. ‘Better get back in place now. There’s no point in spreading panic.’
He waited till Hugh had done so, and at once, without allowing himself time for second thoughts, for no alternative seemed to be offered, gave the signal to move. They moved quite silently, in thick snow. Houston found himself shaking in every limb; for despite what he had told his brother, he thought he was by now pretty sure. If this little contretemps in the alley in Kalimpong had taught him anything it was that when all the signs pointed to a certain conclusion it was as well to accept it. The signs had been pointing all morning to a conclusion he had not wished to accept. And they were still pointing now. For the two monks and the guard had stopped waving, and they had stopped moving. They stood quite still and watched, as men whose task was completed.
He had been wearing his goggles, but the snow was falling so thickly that he pushed them up from his eyes. All the same he sensed rather than saw, in the white swirling air, the men who suddenly appeared, the small, stocky apparitions in padded olive uniforms cradling like children in their arms their automatic weapons.
Because he had been watching for them, he thought he was the first to notice; and yet the phantoms seemed to materialize in an incredible kind of slow motion; the bulky figure on horseback moving quite casually forward, loudhailer raised to his lips; the eight boatmen from whom they had parted
five days ago, emerging from the steam-coloured landscape like well-remembered wraiths from a dream.
‘My friends, we have come to find you!’ cried the horseman in Tibetan. ‘See, your comrades are here, waiting. We will not harm you. Stop and throw down your guns. We are your friends!’
What happened then, although it happened in the space of seconds, had about it the kind of elaborate spontaneity of some minutely rehearsed ballet. The men holding the palanquin dropped it. Little Daughter tumbled out into the snow. A body of the Chinese, perhaps ten or twelve, moved towards her. One of the guards dropped to one knee and fired. The Chinese brought up their little cradled toys and fired back; a harmless pop-popping in the thin air like the distant sound of a two-stroke motor-cycle. Suddenly, but quite slowly, everybody was firing; the protagonists dropping to their positions in the swirling snow, the little make-believe weapons sneezing dryly, the whole evolution so solemnly unreal that Houston lost all sense of fear, and took up his own cue as if he had been waiting for it all his life.