“I don’t know,” he said.
“If there are stairs, they could be anywhere.”
“There have to be stairs. Sonam was right about everything else.”
“Perhaps.” He paused.
“There’s one way to find out. The most likely place is right opposite. I’ll make a dash for it. Watch me closely. If I get through and there are stairs, I’ll call. Don’t waste any time come running.”
“Be careful, Christopher,” she said. He could only see her eyes peering out above her scarf. With one hand, he reached out and touched her. She lifted a hand and put it over his. In a world of spiders, among dark threads and silken fabrics of most intricate and passionless death, they touched for a moment in silence. Skin did not touch skin, lips could not meet, there was a deathly chill upon their hampered breath.
A huge spider landed on Christopher’s back. William cried out and Christopher spun, dashing the monster to the ground and crushing it.
“Run!” cried Chindamani.
He ran, cutting a path through meshes of doubled and redoubled web, pulling, tearing, scything as he staggered through the room.
The floor was littered with small wizened corpses, pathetic bundles no longer recognizable as human. At every step, more spiders dropped on to him, clinging to his back and arms and legs, stinging again and again into the thick layers of cloth and fur.
How he made it to the other side he did not know. He swept the last web curtains aside. There was nothing but rock. Frantically, he thrashed about, severing webs like cheesecloth, ripping them apart. There was nothing but bare rock. Something struck his lamp and sent it skittering from his hand. The world was plunged into darkness. He dropped the sword with a clatter.
A large spider dropped on to his head, then another on to his shoulders. One of the corpses caught his foot and he fell helplessly to his knees. He reached out desperately and his fingers caught nothing but a tangled mass of spider’s web.
“Christopher!”
Her voice echoed in the narrow confines of the tunnel. There was no answer, and she called again, more desperately this time.
“Christopher, where are you? What’s happening? Answer me!”
But after the echoes, there was only silence. She had seen
Christopher’s lamp go out. Now he did not answer. The spiders were everywhere now, malign, implacable, without pity. She shuddered and called again.
“Christopher!”
There was something a muffled sound from the far side of the room.
“He must have fallen,” Samdup said.
“We’ve got to get to him!”
Chindamani clenched her teeth and prayed to Chenrezi for the strength to do what had to be done now.
She took the boy by the shoulders and made him face her.
William looked on, his eyes filled with terror.
“Samdup,” she said.
“I’ve got to help Ka-ris To-feh. Wait as long as you dare. If I don’t come back, leave the way we came. Go back to the gon-kang. Take the boy with you. You’ll both be safe; they won’t harm you. Do you understand?”
But even as she spoke, William suddenly broke away from them, running into the room of webs, his lamp bobbing as he ran, calling after his father. Chindamani reached out a hand frantically, but he had already eluded her grasp and her fingers found nothing but cobwebs, old and dirty.
Without a moment’s thought, she hurried after him, threshing her way through the hanging threads, flailing her arms to knock away the quivering bodies with which she came in contact.
A last grey curtain parted and she saw them Christopher on his back, fighting to throw off the dozens of spiders that crawled over him, his son using Christopher’s sword to sweep them aside.
But the black shapes kept on coming and coming.
She grabbed Christopher’s hand and helped him stagger to his feet. Had he been poisoned? If so, how long did he have before the venom began to work?
“There’s no way out!” he cried.
“We’ve got to get back to the tunnel.”
A spider moved on to Chindamani’s left leg, then another, then a third. She kicked them away, but others came. One brute landed on William’s neck and clung there. Christopher grabbed it with his bare hands, dragging it off. He thought it had stung the boy, but there was no time to check.
Suddenly, William shouted: “Look!”
He was pointing at a spot in the rear wall. There was a door heavily encrusted with spider’s webs but just distinguishable.
Chindamani shouted frantically to Samdup.
“Hurry!” she cried.
“This way! This way!”
They could see his lamp weaving through the darkness. He stumbled and Chindamani dashed back for him. There were spiders everywhere now, angry and murderous. Chindamani found Samdup and helped him over the last few yards.
“It’s over here!” Christopher shouted, pointing to the door. They ran, scything through layer after layer of soft web. And the dried bodies everywhere, like pods that had spawned the spider brood.
The door was jammed. Christopher pulled on the ring handle, but it would not give. William and Samdup did what they could to keep the spiders at bay. Chindamani joined Christopher at the door, pulling with him, tearing her muscles in desperation. How long since the door had last been opened? A century? Ten centuries? They redoubled their efforts, knowing they would never make it back to the tunnel now. It was the door or nothing.
It gave an inch then stuck again, harder than before. Christopher thought his fingers were breaking, but he kept pulling, using the pain to spur him.
There was a snapping sound and the door moved. Not much, but just enough for them to get past. Christopher grabbed William and pushed him through, then Samdup, then Chindamani. He picked up the lamp Chindamani had left on the ground. She took it from him and he pulled the door closed. They had made it. So far.
Several spiders had made it with them. William struck at them with the sword, hewing them again and again with a sustained and vicious anger that had grown too immense for his child’s body to contain. It was the first adult anger he had known, a rage less against the spiders that had provoked his immediate fear and revulsion, more against Tsarong Rinpoche and the Russian, against all those that had torn the fabric of his world to shreds. It was rage and sadness and doubt combined: rage at betrayal, sadness at the loss of all he had known, doubt of the fixed certainties that had framed his world until then.
There were stairs as Sonam had said: stark and steep and very beautiful in the light from their single lamp. They sat forever on the small landing at the top, no-one speaking, willing the horror to leave their minds, willing the last descent to the open air and freedom. The thought that no-one voiced was whether the stairs held any hidden surprises for them.
Christopher held William tightly. Once, he looked at the boy’s neck. There was an angry red mark where the spider must have stung him. But William said it scarcely hurt. He had had a lucky escape.
“It will soon be dawn,” Chindamani said.
“We should be away from here before then.”
Christopher nodded. She was right. He wanted to put as much distance between them and Dorje-la before Zamyatin realized they had escaped from the monastery.
In single file, with Christopher in the lead as before, they started down the stairs. The steps had been cut roughly in the rock, without precision or refinement. They were cold and dark, and they plunged down perilously, as though eager to be finished. They had not been made to linger on.
The cold air took away the awful stench. They uncovered their mouths and breathed in deeply, filling their lungs. With every step they took, a weight lifted from their shoulders. Death had never seemed so real or so close or so unwholesome. Not even a belief in endless reincarnation could mitigate the horror of death when it became so unnatural and so intimate.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. The rock wall had been cunningly cut in order to r
ender the opening invisible from outside, and to make the deceit perfect, a curtain of ice hung over the front.
Outside, the wind had cleared the clouds away. A pale moon thin as silver-leaf was just setting behind a dim peak to the west.
Across a purple sky, broad swathes of stars trembled with cold and their own brightness. High above where they stood, the dark shape of Dorje-la Gompa loomed over the pass, vast and sinister, harbouring its secrets in silence.
Christopher looked up, peering into the darkness. A single light could be seen, in an unshuttered window on the top floor.
Chindamani stepped close beside him and took his hands in hers.
“Look,” he whispered.
Her eyes followed his to the lighted window.
“He’s watching for us,” he said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Zamyatin. I can sense it.” He paused.
“He won’t let us go this easily. Samdup belongs to him. In a way, I belong to him too.
He’ll come after us be sure of it.”
She said nothing for a while, but stood with Christopher’s hand in hers, staring up at the lighted window, wondering.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
But Christopher did not move. Like a moth held by the yellow light, he stood lost in thought.
“Ka-ris To-feh,” she said, tugging gently at his arm.
He looked round. In the moonlight, her face was pale and ghostly. He felt remote, impermanent, displaced. He could hold nothing, like a sieve from which water runs out.
“Do you understand what will happen if you come with me?” he said.
“I have to go to India, then back to England. It’s William’s home, I have to take him there. Once we reach India, I will no longer be able to help you. There are others there, men like Zamyatin who will want Samdup for their own purposes. Once they learn who he is and they will learn, believe me he will become their pawn. You don’t know what the world is like, what it does to people. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
She shook her head. One culture shaking its head at another, a world denying another world.
“We seem to have no understanding of each other, Ka-ris Tofeh. Is it so much to be human? Not to understand?”
“Don’t you see?” he said.
“Your Maidari Buddha has become a commodity, a coin. He’s worth so much to Zamyatin. He would be worth so much more or less to my own masters. What Zamyatin does not or cannot control, they would have me manipulate for their own ends. I don’t want to play that game. I’ll finish the one I began, but that’s as far as I go. I’ll take you to Lhasa, but I’ll leave you there. Do you understand?”
Desire for her was like a fever inside him. Denying his will in her, his love and his lust for her, was an even greater hurt, a stinging that filled his flesh and his mind equally, making him whole and tearing him apart at once.
She did not reply. Instead, she stood and picked up her bag.
With Samdup’s hand in hers, she set off in the direction of the pass. Christopher felt his heart contract. He stood up and helped William to his feet. They followed Chindamani and Samdup at a short distance.
As they picked their way down the slope, William raised his face to Christopher.
“What about grandfather?” he said.
“I don’t understand,” said Christopher. His father must have told the boy who he was, he realized.
“Aren’t we going to take him with us?”
Christopher shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Your grandfather is dead. Really dead this time.”
“How do you know?”
“Tsarong Rinpoche told us. Just before we were brought into the room where you and Samdup were sitting with Zamyatin. He said he had killed him himself.”
William stopped, forcing his father to do the same.
“But that can’t be true,” the boy said.
“Why not?”
“Because I was with grandfather just before you came.”
“How long before?” Christopher felt his heart grow cold with apprehension.
“Not long. A few minutes. Some men came and said I had to leave. Grandfather told me they were going to lock him in his rooms. The Rinpoche man was never there.”
“Are you sure, William? Maybe they killed him after you left?”
“No, because we went past his rooms on our way to the lady’s room. I knocked on his door and called. He answered me. He wished me goodnight.”
Christopher called to Chindamani to halt. He ran up to her with William and explained what his son had just told him.
“Zamyatin said nothing about the abbot being killed,” he said, ‘only that he had been replaced. Tsarong Rinpoche was lying. He wanted to make us believe my father was dead, because the old man could still be a threat to him. But even he must have drawn the line at actually putting an incarnation to death.”
Christopher remembered the Rinpoche’s words to him: “You are holy to me, I cannot touch you.” He had been holy because he was the son of an incarnation. Brutal as he was, it was clear that the Rinpoche had still been deeply superstitious. Some crimes were beyond the pale.
But Zamyatin would not feel constrained by superstitious awe.
He was more than capable of having Tsarong Rinpoche’s boast translated into stark reality.
“I have to go back,” said Christopher.
“Even if it’s only a hope, I can’t leave without trying to save him. He is my father. Whatever he’s done, I can’t just abandon him.”
Chindamani reached out a hand. She wanted so much to hold him to her until all this had passed away.
“Take me with you,” she said.
Christopher shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You know I can’t. We’ve been through so much to escape, we can’t just throw it all away by going back up there. You must stay here with William and Samdup. If I don’t return by noon tomorrow, you’ll know I’m not coming back. Take the boys and leave. Try to find your way to Lhasa: you’re an incarnation; Samdup’s an incarnation they’ll find a place for you there. Take William to a man called Bell he’s the British representative in Tibet. He’ll see to it that the boy is taken home safely.”
“I’m frightened for you, Ka-ris To-feh!”
f “I know. And I for you. But I have no choice. I intend to return with my father. Wait for me here.”
He turned to William and explained to him as well as he could } that he had to go back for his father.
“Chindamani will look after you until I return,” he said.
“Do I what she tells you, even if you don’t understand a word she says.
Will you be all right?
William nodded. He hated to see his father go again, but he understood.
“How’s your neck? Does it hurt?”
William shook his head.
“It itches a little, that’s all.”
Christopher smiled, kissed the boy on the cheek, and began the ascent to the monastery. Chindamani watched him go. As he disappeared into the darkness, she saw shadows creep across the stars. She could feel the world going out of her, far, far away, like a cloud dissolving in a storm.
It took him an hour to reach the foot of the main building. The ladder was in place. He looked up, but from where he stood he could not see Zamyatin’s window. He put a foot on the first rung and began to climb.
Two men had been put on the door. They opened it to Christopher’s pounding, their faces surly, unfriendly and, Christopher thought, more than a little frightened. They guessed that he might be the dangerous pee-ling they had been given orders to capture. But they had expected to find him inside the monastery, not coming from the outside.
Christopher had taken Tsarong Rinpoche’s gun before leaving
Chindamani’s room. Now he fingered it in his pocket, a dull weight reminding him of another existence.
“I’ve come to
speak with Zamyatin,” he said.
The monks eyed him cautiously, unable to understand where he had sprung from. His clothes were soiled and matted with cobwebs and his eyes were troubled by something beyond their guessing.
They were armed with Chinese halberds, heavy, long-bladed tools of war that could inflict serious injury even when blunt. But neither man felt comfort in the feel of the heavy weapon in his hands. They had heard in a much embellished form of Tsarong Rinpoche’s fate. Zamyatin had ordered them to watch the door, but superstition travelled more easily in their veins than the stranger’s commands.
“No-one is allowed to disturb Zam-ya-ting,” said one of the men, braver or more stupid than his companion.
“I intend to disturb him,” Christopher replied in a matter-of-fact tone. It rattled the monk even more to find the pee-ling implacable rather than angry or blustering. They were in any case already feeling the first pangs of conscience about what had happened.
From an orgy of death, they and most of their colleagues had passed to a hangover of uncertainty. Without the Rinpoche to hector them, they were like children whom a party game has led into unintended naughtiness.
Christopher sensed their hesitation and walked past. One of the men called out to him to stop, but he went on regardless and the shouting subsided.
The monastery was silent. Although dawn was near, no-one had ventured out to sound the summons to morning prayers. Dorje-la would sleep late to-day if it slept at all.
He climbed to the top storey, tired, sad, defeated. He passed quickly through the rooms of the five elements and reached the hall of the chortens. No-one stopped him. He heard no voices, saw no sign that anyone had been there.
The long hall was empty. Only the bodies of the dead watched him enter. The first pale light of dawn crept through the unshuttered window, near which a lamp still burned. Christopher’s weariness changed slowly to a profound sense of unease. Where was the Russian?
“Zamyatin!” he called. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the echoing room. There was no answer.
“Zamyatin! Are you there?” he called again, but no-one replied.
He walked down the room, past the window that overlooked the pass, past memories all the more poignant for their freshness, past his father coming to life again among the shadows, past himself staring astonished at the old man. Too many ghosts. Too many shadows.
The Ninth Buddha Page 29