“Pish and tush,” my aunt scoffed. “Schoolgirl dreams.”
“You must be after Shambala—and my map.”
“The only map I’m interested in, my girl, showed the way to the Tibetan gold fields. That map you think shows the way to paradise, actually shows the way to Thok Jalung. I met a spy captain in Simla. Did you know that?”
I remembered how Aunt Hilda had melted away from me at the Lower Bazaar in Simla. She had been so evasive that day.
“You gave me the slip in Simla, to meet your spy master?”
“The captain promised me a queen’s ransom if I found those mines. An absolute mountain of gold.”
Bleakness settled like dust on me. All my dreams had ended here, in rocky cell and greedy search for gold. Then something struck me, something not quite right. Why would the Baker Brothers risk everything for gold?
“The Baker Brothers must be after something else. They already have more than enough gold.”
Aunt Hilda sighed, and spoke very slowly, as if communicating with a nincompoop. “Kit, learn one thing and one thing only from me. You—can—never—have—enough—gold.”
I’d had enough of this conversation. If this was to be my last night on earth, I did not want it to be spent in sordid argument over riches. The cell walls pressed in on me. The slowly ticking minutes till our jailers came to collect us for the noose.
“That’s all very well, dear Auntie,” I said, sweet as honey. “But you can’t take gold where we’re going. What does the Bible say? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”
If nothing else, that stopped her mouth.
Chapter Twenty-six
I must have fallen into sleep, despite the icicles settling in my veins and in my heart. Sometime in those despairing hours I was woken by a clatter of feet, the crash of a cell door against the wall. A burly figure in a sheepskin coat stood in the darkness without. He held a butter lamp, which lit his face from below. The flickering light turned an ordinary man into monster, with dark puddles for eyes and slanting cheekbones as cruel as knife slashes.
Through our tiny cell window I could see dark sky. Deep, black, star-speckled night in the center of which cruised a gibbous moon, wrapped in scarlet clouds. A time for sleep, but already our executioner had arrived.
His entrance awakened the others. Rachel’s face like a crumpled rose, Aunt Hilda repressing a gasp. Silently we all watched the man as he stood on the threshold and raised the butter lamp to light his way.
“Yongden?” I gasped.
“Is time,” he replied.
I had been sure we would never see the monk again, yet here he was. I did not wonder where a man who we had last seen walking barefoot into the snow, had acquired a sheepskin coat, stout boots and a butter lamp. How had he suddenly appeared in our cell? With Yongden it did not do to ask too many questions. Instead we meekly did as he bid, walking past a snoring guard in a chair, down the corridor and turning right, where there was another pine door.
“Wait,” he commanded and turned the door handle. It swung open, revealing a sleeping Champlon and Isaac. Waldo was standing up, staring at the door with huge, lunatic eyes.
“I’ll die before you take me,” he muttered, clenching his fists into a ball. “I’ll kill you. Savages.”
“Shush, Waldo,” I hissed. “It’s us.”
“Kit?” His blue eyes were bleary, and he stared at me as if fearful I was an apparition.
The others had woken as Yongden stepped into their cell. Such was his mastery of us all that he didn’t need to speak, just beckoned with a crooked finger. Hardly trusting myself, not knowing whether he was a phantom borne of our need for a savior, I was the first to follow him. Aunt Hilda, Waldo and then the others falling into step behind us. We went past half a dozen soldiers, all fast asleep. Waldo removed their guns, our own Martini-Henry rifles, and they didn’t stir. As we sped by on feet of air, Waldo passed the weapons out to the others. Never had I felt so fleet, so made of spirit and light. We seemed as insubstantial as wraiths to our jailers, our passage disturbing no more than the air around them. In a flash we were outside in the cobbled courtyard where our donkeys were stamping their feet, and our Sherpas waiting for us in a mute huddle.
My breath created shimmering mushrooms of vapor in the air. It was freezing out here, with Tibet at our feet. We were ants against the majestic mountain, that jutting dazzle of ice silhouetted against the raven sky. Above it all hung the same blood-drenched moon I had glimpsed from my cell. Vultures circled above us, their harsh caws rising and falling in the wind. A dark omen? No matter. I have never been happier to feel the air on my face, to taste freedom in my mouth.
“Go,” Yongden addressed my aunt and Champlon.
“We must make haste,” Aunt Hilda agreed. “Press onwards.”
“No.”
“What … c-can … you … m-m-mean?” Aunt Hilda stuttered.
“Go home. It is time.”
Aunt Hilda blinked, for a moment I thought she was going to argue, but she merely hung her head. It was Champlon, his face naked and furious, who protested, refusing to mount his donkey and waving his gun. A bullet cut him off, cracking past his face, fizzling out in the snow. A clamor from inside the building told us the strange spell that blanketed the garrison had been lifted.
More bullets careened past us; a donkey brayed in sudden sharp pain. Ebony figures were flitting in the snow darkness; crouching, running toward us.
“Go!” urged Yongden.
There was a stampede of donkeys’ hooves, of braying and thumping of Sherpas cursing and running. More and more guards had emerged from the house, inky shadows against the overwhelming darkness. Arrows, silent and deadly, mingled with bullets. Champlon, wheeling away on his steed, was taking aim, picking off the soldiers with unerring accuracy. Waldo, I saw with a pang, was raising a quavering left hand, trying to shoot.
An arrow pelted toward me. A streak of eagle feathers, a deadly tip. I ducked. Behind me someone shrieked.
Yongden, trotting by me on a fine piebald stallion, laid his hands on the flank of my donkey, calming my panicking beast. He gestured to me to follow him. Miraculously we seemed to cut a path through the mayhem; the hiss, the cries, the bullets exploding in bursts of white light.
We were among the last to escape, bringing up the rear behind Rachel, my aunt and the mass of Sherpas. Finally came Champlon, his face set and desperate, but his pistol steady. He was holding off our attackers, cutting off their advance with deadly gunfire. On the edges of my senses I was aware of another sound, underpinning the hiss and whine of fighting. A deep ominous sledgehammer under our feet and in our ears. A rumble that froze all battle and instantaneously scattered our attackers in panic.
“Avalanche,” murmured Yongden.
He was riding fast, hooves scudding through snow. I followed, but snowflakes were whirling all around, a devilish vortex in my eyes, ears and nose. A white slab glided in front of my feet, like a magic carpet coming in to land, cutting us off from my friends. Beyond it I saw Rachel’s startled eyes.
Aunt Hilda’s mouth opened in an agonized yowl at the sight of the avalanche and clumsily, stupidly, she fell off her donkey. Champlon pounded off his own beast and hauled her upright. He half-dragged my aunt on to his mount, kicking it to make it run toward my friends and the veil of snow. Then he raced to Aunt Hilda’s panicking donkey and began to hoist himself up. Boom—a shimmering slab of ice juddered into him, obliterating him from view. I shrieked, a scream that wrenched out my guts. It was useless. In an instant Champlon and donkey were both gone; buried under a huge white cushion.
The ridge of ice shredded; broke up into pieces, pelting hard nuggets in my face. I was sliding on something, under me my beast was braying forlornly. A sooty shadow moved in front of me. Yongden, I believed, as I clutched at hope. Yongden, keep me safe, I prayed.
Where lay earth and where sky, I no longer knew. All I was aware of w
as eddying light. Glaring, dazzling white that sucked and drowned, obscuring all. Dimly, I was aware that I was sliding, but where and how I couldn’t say. My breath came in ragged gasps. I couldn’t breathe, the pressure on my chest was suffocating me.
Darkness crashed in on me, as before there had been light. I must have blacked out for I knew no more.
When I opened my eyes all I could see was Yongden’s face. He was bending over me, something hairy and ominous rearing behind him. As my eyes focused, it took the form of the nostrils and flank of his piebald stallion.
“What happened?” I rasped.
“You live,” he said sombrely.
“Rachel, Waldo! … and—”
“Your friends safe, they on other side of avalanche. This was only a—” he made a coughing noise.
“Hiccup?”
“Hiccup. The mountain, she play, not very angry.”
“Play?” I repeated in amazement, remembering the thundering lava of snow, the sensation of being buried alive in ice. “All that ice?”
“Not rock or ice,” he said, correcting me. “Powder snow. A baby avalanches. Your friends they are on other side of avalanche. The Sherpas take them back to India. They not make mistake to come back. They go down mountain. They take care. This land is not for gold hunters. They leave this place which is not for them and go home.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever heard Yongden make. Slowly, I uncoiled my limbs and stood up. Nothing seemed to be broken, though my back ached as if it had been pelted with a thousand small pebbles. Which I suppose it had. Judging from the rosy flush of the sun crawling up on the horizon, I had been unconscious for a long time.
“My donkey?” I asked.
Yongden shook his head and I gathered she was dead. It was a curse to be my mount, I thought bitterly. Two donkeys had died, serving me.
We were in a different land now, the garrison of stocky houses with their stone-freighted roofs had disappeared. It was a precipice, an icy defile with rocky, impassable peaks rearing to either side. Far, far ahead of us ran a river, speckled with a million dancing lights. Only I wasn’t sure if it was a mirage. Increasingly I wasn’t certain of what was in my head and what was the world outside. What had I been warned by the young Sherpa, so long ago? “Stay away from Yongden,” he had said. “He plays inside your head.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We fell down the mountain.”
Looking up the hundreds of feet it seemed incredible that we were still alive; we should have been smashed, pulverized, nothing but a heap of bones. In my dreams I recalled something feather-like supporting me, a floating bed of snow, and it never occurred to me to disbelieve Yongden. So we must be a long, long way from the others. How would we rejoin them? A cruel thought hit me, whipping me like a lash.
“They’ll look for me, Yongden. They’ll put themselves into danger.”
He shook his head: “They saw you die.”
“They saw me die?” I asked.
“They saw us die—you and me.”
There did not seem to be any answer to this.
“We must go,” Yongden indicated that I should climb on to the back of his mare, behind him.
“Where?”
He turned to me. I saw sorrow in his eyes, but that was only the first level of expression. Underneath were buried layers of meaning, layers of things I couldn’t understand.
“Shambala,” he replied.
I mounted the horse. Yongden tapped its flank and in silence we rode off.
Chapter Twenty-seven
It began to snow. The flurry of tiny flakes from above rapidly swelled into a storm that seemed to suck and pull in different directions. The heavens had turned leaden; on all sides of us visibility was reduced to a couple of feet. Our pace had slowed to a crawl, for it was dangerous if our horse put one hoof wrong in this blizzard.
Yongden’s back, a few inches in front of me, was painted white by the flakes, but I held on to him, a feeling which was reassuringly solid. Underneath me I could feel the steady lope of his horse, of warm, breathing flesh. Snowflakes were settling on my face in an icy mass, too cold for them to melt. I had to brush them away; lest I turned into a living snowman.
Thus we rode—I have no idea for how long. It might have been minutes or hours. All I knew was that I was living on the edge of my senses, my nerves tingling. The pain in my back, which had felt so raw, had drifted away in the snow.
“We stop here,” Yongden suddenly announced. I have no idea why. All I could see around me was the same thing, rock and mountain and a dense, white world. The stallion came to a halt, understanding Yongden, so it seemed. Yongden climbed off and delving into the small pack brought out a length of rope, which he made into a kind of simple harness.
“We climb,” Yongden said.
“Where?”
“Up.”
There was obviously no point in asking Yongden questions, he had lapsed into enigmatic mumbles. His face loomed out of the snow for an instant, like a dark moon rising. I read so many different emotions in his eyes. Pity. Compassion. Sadness.
Was he pitying me? Or was pity his normal state? I felt oddly detached from myself, from Kit Salter of the comfortable home in Park Town, Oxford. This new person was traveling through a landscape of ice with a man she barely knew. A man who spoke seldom and gave no hint of his thoughts. I felt an instant of empathy with Yongden, this monk who moved through life with no ties. He was as disconnected from everyday concerns as the shadow of an eagle flitting over a village was from the lives of those it touched. I wouldn’t want to be Yongden. I wanted to be able to love and hate, to feel life. But I admired him. To the monk, all the things that made us so passionately sad or happy were illusions, painted stage sets, while the real action went on somewhere beyond.
It was like traveling with a phantom. I would never know Yongden. He wasn’t kind, not in the ordinary sense. If anything, he was terrifying.
I held the rope Yongden gave me in my sheepskin gloves. It was tough and fibrous. Made from fronds of a willow-like tree, it felt as though it had been soaked to strengthen it. Yongden showed me how to put on the harness and adjust it using the straps at the sides. It had a big, iron hook at the back which he attached to the rope. He didn’t wear a harness himself, just carelessly tied the rope around his waist and looped a coil over his shoulder.
Yongden walked over to the stallion and stroked its muzzle. He was talking to it in a language I didn’t understand. He patted it on the back and the horse whickered, nuzzling Yongden’s hand. Then it turned round and slowly trotted off.
“You can’t do that,” I blurted. “Where is your horse going?”
“He is not my horse. He is his horse. He is going home.”
“How?” I indicated the falling snow, the ice all around us. “How will he find the way?”
“He is a child of the mountains.”
Without further explanation, Yongden threw the loop of rope into the air. It floated high, uncurling itself. I wasn’t altogether surprised when it landed around a jutting crag of rock. In fact I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had simply walked up the mountain.
I followed him, finding footholds in the icy sides. The first few paces were easy but it rapidly became hard. It was tense, slippery work with the snow blowing in my face and the surface of the mountain sliding under my gloves and boots. The pity of it—I really needed my crampons to take firm hold in the ice, but the guards had removed them at the garrison. Once I slipped and would have fallen if the rope had not pulled tight, holding me by the harness.
“Don’t look down,” Yongden warned. “Don’t look up. Look straight in front.”
Of course I did exactly the opposite of what he warned. The snow had chosen that moment to clear and I had a dizzying view down the mountain, to the gully far, far below. My stomach heaved, my insides dropping. The trotting figure of the horse was already no bigger than an ant, an ink spot against a gossamer backdrop. My hands loosened aga
inst the rope and I had a terrible sensation of falling, falling.
After that I looked neither up nor down, but concentrated on my gloved hands and the solidity of the rope. At least I hoped it was solid—when I had lurched it had creaked alarmingly. Even though I dared not risk a glance I was conscious in every fiber of my body of the mountain rearing so far above me. Kit Salter was but a tiny speck, a fleck of dust in the immensity of these ancient peaks.
Climbing thus was hard physical work, the rope of the harness cutting into my flesh, even through the layers of sheepskin wadding. My knees felt tremulous. I was aware again of a dull ache in my spine. But above it all my mind was clear, taking flight on the back of this awful adventure. This realm was free of all but birds, the warble of the mynah, the screech of the eagle. Hovering in the background the bald head and cruel beak of the flesh feeders, the vultures waiting for us to fall.
By the grace of Yongden, we didn’t fall. Eventually he stopped on a ledge and I climbed up to meet him. It was a slab of rock jutting a few inches out into the air, wide and comfortable enough to sit on. When I did look down I saw that we had climbed far above the other side of the canyon. Over that shining peak I could see that river I had glimpsed before, foaming in the distance.
“We are here,” Yongden murmured.
“Where?” I asked. Even this enigmatic sorcerer could surely not refer to a dizzying perch on the edge of a precipice as “here.” He didn’t reply so I asked again, “Where are we?”
“Your way,” he said.
I turned and saw that Yongden was pointing inwards. Behind the ledge, cutting into the face of the mountain was a cave. Too dark to see what was in the cave, but surely this was not the way to the legendary paradise.
“Here I must leave you,” Yongden said. “You will be safe.” He was holding something out to me in his hands. Numbly I took it and saw what it was. My torn half of Father Monserrate’s map.
As soon as I saw it a shock jolted through me. I snatched it greedily. “This is mine.”
“Yes.”
The Maharajah's Monkey Page 18
