5
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.
He swung himself up on the horse behind her. He dug in his heels and bent forward over the girl’s back and set the horse’s head to the river slope. He looked round once, and saw the horseman with the loudhailer pursuing him, and actually found himself laughing out loud with pure exhilaration. There had been no plan, no plan at all in his mind; he had acted in response to some gay, some irrepressible summons of the blood. But now the drop was approaching, and just at the last, seeing what it had not seen before, the animal jibbed; and Houston, seeing it in the same moment, jibbed also.
There was no kind of slope at all from the edge; the ground simply fell away quite sheer for fifty feet or more, and below, thickly studded with boulders, dropped only slightly less precipitously for another fifty before losing itself in the curtain of snow.
Between his legs, Houston could feel the girl’s body rigid with fright, and felt his own arms go stiff as ramrods as he leaned back to slew the animal’s head round.
But weight and momentum had done their work. With forelegs raised high like those of a rocking horse, and carrying on its back the abbess of Yamdring, the man from beyond the sunset and a fortune of three million pounds, the animal sailed sickeningly over the edge.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1
THE horse did not touch for quite sixty feet. It touched and flew, and touched and flew, screaming with every breath; for a hindleg had snapped at the first impact, and a foreleg seconds later. Houston hung on, quite paralysed with fright. Because of the bales, one at each side, he could not get his legs down; he was up high like a jockey, and leaning so far forward against the girl that her head was buried in the animal’s mane.
Despite its hideous injuries, the horse managed to remain upright, frantically dodging the enormous boulders that reared on every side; but could not dodge them all. A glancing blow on the breast slewed it round and then they were over, and rolling, the girl leeching to the horse, and Houston to the girl, so that all three, locked together, careered down the mountainside like some ungainly snowball.
The reins had become caught below Houston’s elbow, and the animal’s long hairy head was twisted round towards him, eyes rolling, yellow teeth snapping, from its mouth issuing a scream so human that Houston could not be sure it was not coming from the girl.
There was another blow, a dull stunning one to the neck, which stopped it screaming, and then a third – a blow so final that it brought a single great belch from the animal as all the air and all the life were driven from its body.
They had brought up on a slope like the side of a house, against a rock so razor-edged that the horse seemed almost to have been cut in two. A great gout of blood washed up out of it and spat back into Houston’s face, and he lay in the snow, stupefied with shock, feeling the warm rivulets trickling down his neck. He saw a leg, which was his own, and another, which was not, and tried to kick it away.
He felt her then, the faintest of movements below him.
He had landed on his side with the horse still between his legs, and she was somewhere below. He twisted about and dug frantically, and found her fur hat, and tugged at it; but realized that it was caught below her chin and that he might be strangling her, and made a space for her to breathe instead.
She gasped for air, her veil off, her face deathly pale.
‘Mei-Hua, don’t struggle. Don’t struggle. I’ll get you out.’
He bore down, swinging one leg back off the horse and wrenching the other from beneath her, and managed to drag her half out. They lay back, panting in the churned-up snow, and he felt a dreadful lurch of vertigo; for it seemed to him that even lying back they were only a few degrees off the vertical. A good deal of row seemed to be going on above: a dull deadened row, the single-shot cough of rifles, the sneezing pop-pop of the automatic weapons, voices shouting. All about them now, the snow had begun to turn red.
‘Mei-Hua, we can’t stay here.’
She didn’t answer, and he saw her face screwed up in pain.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘My foot is twisted.’
‘Give me your hand.’
But when he stood to help her, he felt so like a fly upon a wall that he fell back again abruptly.
‘Wait. Wait a minute. Rest first.’
They rested for several minutes, and he tried again, feet planted deep in the snow and leaning backwards.
‘Now.’
She cried out with pain and fright. ‘Oh, no. No, Chao-li.’
‘Don’t look below. Look at me.’
‘Chao-li, no, I can’t. Please.’
‘Mei-Hua, dearest,’ he said weakly. ‘We must get away from here. They can see the blood. Try again.’
She tried again. He turned her on her back, and on her front, holding first her arms and then her legs. The girl dug herself with terror into the snow.
‘Mei-Hua, I am holding you. I won’t let you go. Please, please, dearest. …’
She was sobbing at the last attempt. ‘Chao-li leave me alone. Leave me for a minute.’
‘If the snow stops they will see us.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘Try again. We’ll find another way.’
‘There isn’t any other way. I’ll do it. Just leave me for a minute. …’
But there was another way, and the instant he thought of it, he was climbing back the few feet to the horse. He sat in the sticky red mess and heaved at the ropes, and scooped out snow to get at the one underneath, and dragged both bales clear. Each bale was wrapped around with stout ropes which she could easily grasp, and he tied them together again, and spreadeagled her on them to distribute the weight, and lowered the sled to clear snow. It handled with ease, weighty enough to bed down a few inches and prevent it running away, wide enough not to plough in entirely.
Within minutes he had developed the technique to a degree of some proficiency, taking the strain with both arms, and shuffling down on his haunches, a brisk sideways shuffle of the backside giving sufficient lateral motion; and in this manner, with the abbess and her treasure, dropped in a gentle diagonal to the Li-Chu river.
The snow stopped at about midday, and the soldiers came over the edge soon after. Houston watched them from behind a boulder. He had not managed to get down to the river, but had taken cover some minutes earlier, aware that the snow was petering out and that he must allow for their most recent tracks to be covered. He could no longer see the red mess of the horse, but could not be sure that it was not visible from above.
The men were being lowered on ropes. He could see the officer with the loudhailer and several other horsemen directing operations from the clifftop. The shooting had stopped a long time before. The soldiers came down slowly and very cautiously, a dozen or so of them, with their automatic weapons. They began quartering the mountainside.
They found the horse soon after one o’clock, and the officer had himself lowered immediately. Houston saw them digging under the horse, and observed the officer’s growing agitation as nothing came to light. The man had himself hauled up again, and seeing soon after the flash of binoculars, Houston had to get his head down. He kept it down for a couple of hours, hearing the occasional boom of the loudhailer, and the strange chattering of the groups of soldiers on the mountainside.
The snow started again at about three o’clock; but aware that a group of Chinese soldiers was no more than fifty yards above him, Houston did not dare to move again. He lay with his arms about the girl on the two bales, listening.
‘What
are they saying?’
‘Some wish to return but the others say they have no orders and will not be pulled up. They are roped together but not from above.’
He thought after a while that the voices had passed to their right, but, afraid that the snow might suddenly stop, he still could not nerve himself to move; which was just as well, for minutes later he heard voices immediately below him, evidently of another party which had come down more directly, and was now traversing.
He lay, feeling the girl trembling in his arms; both of them on their sides facing each other, the snow settling heavily upon them. The voices passed below them. He heard the two groups calling to each other, and then a third group, and slowly all of them receded. Soon after the snow stopped again.
He could see very clearly how near the men below had come – the deep footprints not twenty yards away – and thanked providence for his decision not to move, and lay silently with the girl, waiting.
At four o’clock (breathing on his watch to clear the ice) he heard the loudhailer going again, and chancing another look, saw that ropes were being lowered to draw the men back up the cliff face. By half past, all were up, and there was no further sight or sound of the party. He stayed where he was. It would be dark in half an hour. It must be obvious to the Chinese that they were on the slope somewhere. The bales had been taken from the horse, and there had been insufficient time for them to get down to the river. He thought that if he were the Chinese officer he would himself have called off the search and quietly stationed observers to watch.
He waited till the light was almost gone before cautiously getting to his knees behind the boulder and working his limbs to restore the feeling. In the bitter, creeping cold the girl had gone into a sort of doze and he did not wake her yet. He thought she might as well enjoy what oblivion she could while she could.
He gave it a few minutes more, until he could no longer pick out the division between the clifftop and the sky, and shook her.
‘Mei-Hua, we’re going to move again now.’
She came to with a little moan, and he took her hands and removed the gloves and worked her fingers with his own.
The Rose of Tibet Page 25