The Rose of Tibet

by Lionel Davidson

  A voice spoke behind him in the room, a woman’s voice speaking in Tibetan.

  ‘Stay, Hu-Tzung,’ said the voice.

  Houston stayed.

  ‘Did you think I had forgotten? Turn and look at me.’

  With his bowels turned all to water, Houston turned and looked.

  The eighteenth devil had risen, with her lamp; she was walking towards him.

  3

  He was so utterly terrorized in that moment that all normal thought processes seemed to stop. He had an idea that the she- devil took him by the hand, that she took him to a bed. He was certainly sitting on a bed with her some minutes later. He remembered thinking that since the bed was still warm she could not have been out of it long; an exercise in deduction that restored him at last to his senses. (But it was some minutes more before he could grasp where he was: he clung stubbornly to the impression that he was in the first monastery when it was obvious that he must have climbed blindly through all seven to the topmost one.)

  The abbess had brought her lamp to the bed, for it stood in a dark corner of the room, and was studying him in its light. Behind the emerald eyeballs a pair of narrow eyes flickered over him. There was something so blood-chillingly hideous about the devil’s mask that Houston looked away. He looked at her body instead; and at first glance found it scarcely less fearful.

  There was no hair on the she-devil’s body. Her breasts were painted with spirals of green and gold. Her skin was shining and aromatic with ointment. She was a small supple figure of a woman who might have been anything from thirty to fifty. Something in her bearing, in the muffled voice issuing from the mask, and in the talon-like painted fingernails, inclined him to the latter age. He shrank from her in dread.

  The abbess set down her lamp.

  She said, ‘Hu-Tzung, what have you to say to me?’

  Houston opened his mouth and found that he had nothing to say.

  ‘I have waited two hundred years for you.’

  Houston licked his lips and found his voice then. He said, ‘Good Mother, you are mistaken. You have mistaken me.’

  ‘Mistaken you? How could I mistake you, Hu-Tzung?’

  ‘I am the trulku, Good Mother – the unconscious trulku –’

  ‘No longer unconscious,’ the abbess said. She was touching him curiously, his eyebrows, his ears, his forehead. ‘And no longer a trulku. You have found the way to me and now you must follow your destiny. You cannot deceive me, yidag.’

  Houston had no thought of deceiving her. Something about her, a certain sanctified quality about her nudity, quite terrified him. He felt he was indeed in the presence of supernatural forces, and in his halting Tibetan found himself confessing his identity and his purpose, and how he had found the tunnel, and why, when the abbess stopped him.

  She stopped him with a cold hand on his mouth. Her devil’s head was turned to the door; and she rose and listened for a moment; and watching her, Houston experienced a curious pang (that years later he could still remember, and most poignantly), half of relief, half of regret. For he saw that she was indeed only a woman, and that she was not herself free of supervision; and that she did not want him discovered yet.

  Something else occurred to him in this short hiatus. He saw that the situation was by no means unsalvageable, and that the crazy logic that had sustained him in the past dream-like weeks could sustain him again if only he made the effort.

  He held out his hand to her. He said in a low voice, ‘Good Mother, what do you know of me?’

  The abbess turned to him again.

  ‘What your lips have told me, Hu-Tzung, and what is written.’

  ‘You have not seen me before.’

  ‘We loved with other bodies, Hu-Tzung.’

  ‘And did you love me truly?’

  ‘Yes, I loved you truly.’

  ‘And do you love me now?’

  ‘Now and always, poor yidag. There is no help for me.’

  Houston nerved himself to stare into the emerald eyeballs, glinting like a cat’s in the lamplight. He said, ‘Then tell me my destiny.’

  ‘Only the God knows that, Hu-Tzung.’

  ‘Then tell me why I have come.’

  ‘To love me again and take me away and my treasure with me.’

  ‘And will I do these things?’

  ‘Ah, poor yidag, how can you? I have discovered you.’

  ‘And must you betray me?’

  The abbess took his face between cold hands. ‘Yidag, yidag,’ she said. ‘I can never betray. I must release you.’

  ‘How release me?’

  ‘By destroying the prison that holds your yidag captive.’

  Houston had taken the word yidag as one of endearment, but he saw now that it might have technical connotations.

  He said softly, ‘Why do you call me yidag?’

  ‘Because this is what you are, poor soul – a suffering ghost in a body that is not yours. It is host, your host, yidag, and your prison, and you must be released from it.’

  Houston felt his toes begin to curl inside his boots and his neck to break out in a fine cold sweat.

  He said, ‘Is it written that you will release me?’

  ‘It is written that you will be released.’

  ‘Is it written when I will be released?’

  The devil’s head shook. ‘That is not written, yidag. ’

  Houston was very glad to hear it. He was shaking all over like a leaf. But he saw that the situation, dangerously insane though it appeared, was not without loopholes, and that with time he might widen them. Time, however, was something that was now growing very short.

  He took the icy hands from his face.

  He said, ‘Good Mother, I must go.’

  The she-devil rose with him and caught his wrists in her thin hands. ‘You will come back, yidag.’

  ‘I will come back.’

  ‘When will you come?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Come tonight.’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘Tonight, yidag.’

  ‘Tonight,’ Houston said.

  Something seemed to have happened to the she-devil’s breathing. It was coming very thickly through the mask. She said, ‘And will you look on my face, yidag?’

  ‘I will look on your face.’

  ‘And love me again?’

  ‘And love you,’ Houston said sickly.

  The abbess’s hands were trembling on his wrists.

  She said, ‘Go then, yidag.’

  The yidag went, as fast as his feet would carry him.

  In the tunnel he heard her calling softly.

  ‘Yidag!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It must be tonight. Be early.’

  He went early. He went at half past ten, reckless of discovery, and half hoping he might be discovered, for he didn’t know which was worse, to be apprehended and thrown back on his wits, or to face the pent-up appetites of eighteen generations of she-devil. He saw that to survive he would have to exercise the combined talents of a Scheherazade and a demon lover, and he was not feeling up to it.

  He was exhausted. He had slept hardly at all for the past two nights. He thought that at another time and in another place he might see a certain ghastly humour in the situation, but all he could see in it now was horror – and of a peculiarly repellent kind. For the thought of the cold, sinewy body with its sacerdotal ointments and its painted breasts quite nauseated him, and the prospect of seeing her face gave it no added attraction. The women of Tibet aged early: by 50 they were toothless and seamed. The thought of such a face under a shaven head quite unmanned him.

  But he forced himself, for he saw that he was acting not only on his own account; and as he entered the shrine and approached the monkey was even able to raise a certain jocular camaraderie in his dealings with it.

  But in the tunnel he smelt her … and his heart failed him again. How could he do it? How had it happened? By what lunatic series of misadventures had it come about that the art
master of the Edith Road Girls’ Secondary should find himself burrowing beneath the waters of a Tibetan lake to share the bed of a she-devil?

  There were no rational answers to these questions, and so Houston shuffled on – in the manner of his earliest predecessor perhaps, with head down and arms shambling, and with fear in his heart and nausea in his stomach – to a dreadful rendezvous with an old cold virgin in a room of seventeen corpses.

  But in his assessment of the woman who awaited him, as in so many of his assessments that year, Houston erred. For the abbess was not old, and she was not cold; and she was far from being a virgin.

  4

  At the time that Houston was shuffling along to his uninviting bed, the governor of Hodzo was just getting out of his. He had been in it alone, for he preferred it so these days, and he had not been in it long; but he turned out with only the mildest expression of annoyance.

  The governor was not indeed annoyed at all. He exclaimed a little, for the benefit of his servant; but as the man blew in his slippers and bent to slip them on him, the governor’s heart was beating with a pleasurable sick excitement.

  He had spent a month of unparalleled tranquillity. His wives had been obedient, his clerks efficient; nobody had bothered him and no outside event had come to disturb him. For an entire splendid month he had strolled about his park and meditated in his library, wholly free of intrusion.

  The governor had begun to suspect this tranquillity. It had begun to disturb him. He had begun to lay awake at nights wondering what diabolical trouble could possibly be accumulating for him. For he knew enough of the workings of Karma to know that it was not done with him yet. There had been about the earlier series of events a kind of muscular flexing of forces, a rippling beneath the surface so powerful that even he, a layman, quite without knowledge of the Gift, had been able to sense the presence of the Prime Mover.

  The governor was not immodest enough to think that such a concentration of malign energy had been activated solely on his account. He did not believe a stranger had been brought half way round the world merely to give him a hernia. But the mechanism that had – so incidentally! – produced the hernia was turning all about him still. He could feel it. He had the impression that subtle new formations were taking place on the periphery, that fresh series of wheels had been engaged and that movement of an unusual and sinister kind would shortly be imparted to his own quiet sector.

  Why, for instance, was his sector so quiet? It should not have been so quiet. As the governor of a province he should have been receiving the normal annoying, but regular, stream of directives from Lhasa. He was not receiving this stream. It had dried up.

  After a lifetime in the public service, the governor knew how ominous a sign this was. No news from Lhasa was bad news. In the face of trouble the central government did not work late in the night. It simply closed down. It turned its back on the trouble. It prayed that the trouble would go away.

  In the past week the governor had begun to wonder if his own province of Hodzo could possibly be concerned with this trouble, with any of the nationally predicted trouble. It was, it was true, a remote province, far from the eye of Chinese warlords; and indeed owed its comparative immunity from invasion to this fact. But it had not been always, or entirely, immune, for it contained a unique national institution – the female monastery of Yamdring – and on two occasions at least an invader had sought to violate it.

  On both occasions, the governor of the time had been ordered to regard the monastery as his first charge and to treat personally with the invader for its safety. On the first occasion, in 1717, the invader treated with had been Hu- Tzung. Hu-Tzung had boiled the governor of the time. On the second occasion, in 1911, it had been a General Feng. Feng had merely decapitated the governor. Yet on each occasion the monastery itself had been spared, and the general feeling was that the sacrifices were worthwhile.

  The governor considered them worthwhile himself. He knew that in similar circumstances he would be prepared to make a like sacrifice. All the same, he could hardly see the need arising. The Chinese communists, with their many failings, had no interest in violating a monastery of women; and the climate of the time seemed to be against the sacrifice of scapegoats.

  And yet he couldn’t tell; and it was ruining his tranquillity. He longed for news, for any news, but particularly news from Lhasa; and at a quarter past eleven on the night when Houston shuffled through the tunnel for the second time, his wish was gratified.

  He could hear the courier’s horse blowing still as it was led away to the stables, and the imperious stamp of official boots in the hall below. The governor thrust impatient arms into his waiting gown, briskly adjusted his truss, and went down the stairs.

  Several of the kitchen women had turned out to greet the welcome new male from Lhasa, and were plying him with chang as his boots were pulled off. The courier smelled very strongly of horses and the governor kept upwind of him. But his hands went eagerly enough to the man’s equally pungent pouch. He broke the seal and opened it, and at sight of the contents felt his heart begin to bump a little more unevenly. The single dispatch inside did not bear the black wafer of the Department of Home Security; it bore the red one of External Affairs.

  The governor took it into his study, and sat himself trembling in a chair while the lamps were lit.

  External Affairs? He had a brother-in-law in the Department of External Affairs. What could his brother-in-law be writing to him about under the official wafer? The governor broke the wafer, and was not left long in doubt. His brother- in-law had written in haste and in confidence; he urged the governor to burn the letter as soon as he had read it; he trusted him not to reveal the source of his information.

  The governor read on with a sinking heart. There had been in the past six weeks, his brother-in-law wrote, two Notes from Peking. The Notes had not of course teen answered. The Ministry had closed down to enable the executive to pray that there would not be a third Note. But Peking had not closed down. Chinese newspapers had arrived in the brother-in-law’s office. They contained many grave and menacing items. He enclosed a cutting of one of these items.

  The cutting was stuck to the back of the letter, and the governor’s eyes went slowly up and down the Chinese characters. It was headed From People’s Tibet, and as he read the third paragraph he saw the reason for his brother-in-law’s alarm.

  ‘In the west also,’ read the paragraph, ‘reactionary lordlings are plundering the people to feather their own nests. In Hodzo, the so-called governor negotiates with an American Kuomintang spy for the sale of the people’s assets. By a crude manoeuvre he tries to deceive the people that the spy is a messenger from God! Tsaring Doma –’ such was the governor’s name and his heart almost stopped to see it in cold print – ‘be warned! The people are not deceived! The two hundred milliards of yuan can never be yours! Be prepared to give an account of them!’

  The governor’s first thought on reading this abominable paragraph was to call for his horse and fly. He had no doubt that this was what his brother-in-law intended him to do. He read it over again, however, and called for a glass of arak instead.

  There was about the malicious catalogue of lies just enough semblance of truth for him to realize what it could refer to. The American Kuomintang spy was evidently the Englishman Houtson. But what possible assets amounting to two hundred milliards of yan were they accusing him of trying to sell?

  The governor pored over the paragraph again and again. The sum quite baffled him. Perhaps if he converted it into its Tibetan equivalent. … But the Chinese yuan was in a state of inflation; the rate fluctuated every month. He bethought himself suddenly that Lhasa must have sent him a notice quoting the current rate, and that this notice would certainly be filed in his pigeon-hole board; and he picked up his lamp and went across to the board.

  The pigeon-hole board extended fully along one wall of the room and contained several thousand rolled documents. It took him ten minutes to find the righ
t one. Jen Min Paio – People’s Bank Dollar – People’s Republic of China.

  The governor blew off the dust and took up a brush and began to jot a number of rapid calculations in the margin.

  The current yuan went 330 to the Tibetan sang; the sang six and a half to the rupee. … The number was still quite astronomical, and he hurriedly crossed off noughts and converted it to lakhs. It came to four hundred lakhs. That was four crores. Four crores of rupees. What assets to the value of four crores of rupees came within his domain?

  The governor did not have to think hard or long over this new figure. It came to him in a shellburst of illumination so blinding that he lowered himself heavily into a chair, gasping at the enormity of the crime of which he had been accused. He was more shocked than he had ever been in his life at the naked malice behind the accusation, at the ravening spite the anonymous writer in Peking must feel for him.

  And yet, he reflected, watching his hands begin to tremble again, the writer in Peking had not invented the information; he had not produced it out of his own head. Houtson was indeed in Hodzo province, and so were the assets to the value of four crores of rupees. How could the writer have so accurate an assessment of the value? How could anyone in China make such an assessment? It was known to barely a handful of people – to no one, indeed, apart from the governor himself, outside the monastery.

  Alas, the answer was all too plain. If nobody outside the monastery had told the writer, someone inside had.

  This was a conclusion so utterly unthinkable that the governor could not bring himself to consider it. He closed his eyes. He hissed. He tried to think of other things instead.

  Why, for instance, he thought instead, had Lhasa not informed him of this attack upon him? And why had his brother-in-law bound him not to reveal the source of his information?