Her voice was answered by yells from the wood, and a shot. From the trees ahead, a little above the path, sprang a group of men as wild as animals, brandishing short curved swords or rough clubs. The porters dropped their loads and stampeded down the slope into the trees. Bewildered, Theodore looked to see what their guard, Uncle Sam, was doing. The old man had drawn his pistol and was pointing it roughly level with the tree-tops; with his head turned well away he pressed the trigger; there was a far louder explosion than any normal shot, and a lot of black smoke. The last coherent thing Theodore saw for a while was Uncle Sam running for the trees, screaming and nursing his arm.
By this time Albert was rearing and twisting sideways between the shafts and Bessie was trying to bolt down the path. The litter was empty. Theodore wrestled with the bridle, dragging Bessie’s head down. Under her neck he glimpsed Lung toppling from his saddle and still beating down with his umbrella at a wild man swinging a sword. Three sharp bangs. The shriek of a bamboo litter-pole twisting into shredded splinters, but still not breaking. A scream of pain from Albert, and a lunge that rushed Bessie forward, with Theodore tumbling under hooves, and then somehow up, still holding the bridle, with a bandit rushing down at him, club swung high two-handed. A fresh lunge from Bessie, dragging him off his feet, letting him slither somehow round to her far side. He struggled up, still gripping the plunging halter and twisting to face the attacker, but as he rose he saw the bandit topple, all of a piece like a falling tree, with his mouth wide open. He remembered hearing the shot as another banged out, and another, close by. Mrs Jones was kneeling in her Chinese clothes, with her doll-face cradled to the stock of her rifle and her left elbow steadied on a fallen basket. Her finger tightened on the trigger, and before the snap of the shot ended she was working the bolt again. The triple click of metal seemed to create new silence. Even Albert stopped rearing and stood between the broken shafts, twitching and foamy with sweat. Mrs Jones got to her feet. Theodore could hear that she was swearing to herself. She turned to him biting her scarlet lip.
‘Give me that horse,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘Go and see what’s happened with Lung. Don’t get near any of them others.’
On his way up the clearing Theodore found that his left upper arm and the ribs beside it seemed very sore and guessed that a hoof had caught them. He passed Sir Nigel, who was nervously edging down towards his mistress, head high and alert, tail swishing. A little above the path a bandit lay face down, arms spread wide. All the porters had vanished, but a heavy erratic rustling came from the trees below the clearing.
Two bodies lay close to each other in the grass. One was a bandit, huddled sideways, the rags round his chest stained with blood. The other, lying on his back, was Lung. A sword lay between them, its hilt hidden in one of the patches of pink flowers.
‘Lung?’ whispered Theodore.
The young man groaned and sat slowly up. His right hand felt the back of his head and then patted around among the grass until it touched his little cap. He put it on and stood up.
‘The Princess is not hurt?’ he said, staring down the glade to where Mrs Jones, bridle in one hand and gun in the other, had moved up the slope to look at a third body.
‘She shot them,’ said Theodore.
‘She is a soldier,’ exclaimed Lung.
He prodded the dead bandit with his foot, then stooped and picked up the sword. They went slowly back down the twinkling turf, glancing from side to side among the trees but seeing no movement. Mrs Jones turned towards them as they came and Theodore saw that her make-up was runnelled with tears which still flowed helplessly down.
‘Never thought as how I’d have to do that,’ she whispered. ‘Always thought just pointing a gun would be enough . . . Theo, see if you can catch that Rollo – he’s got the shot-gun in his left-hand basket. Then Lung can hold that and look dangerous while I re-load this one – I’ll have to get the fresh rounds out of my saddle-bags, and Rollo’s got that too. I don’t want the bastards rushing us while I’m mucking around.’
‘Not many live,’ said Lung. ‘Missy shoot three.’
‘Them porters is in it too,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘They knew as it was coming – look how quick they scarpered.’
‘The old man shot at the top of the trees,’ said Theodore. ‘His pistol blew up. He wasn’t aiming anywhere near them.’
‘That shows,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Fair enough, we’ll get along like we was before we reached Mr What’s-is-name’s. If we don’t have the litter there’ll be two horses spare . . .’
It must have been more than an hour before they were ready to move again. Mrs Jones was unusually sharp and bossy about the details of packing. All round them the rotting woods seemed to watch them move, and Theodore’s nape prickled at every crackle and whisper from the shadows, but even while Lung and Theodore held the guns so that Mrs Jones could change into her riding-habit, no sign of attack came. The ponies grazed. Sir Nigel champed at his feed-bag. Lung and Mrs Jones mimed an elaborate argument about whether to go on up the track or back to the porter’s village and pretended to settle on the latter. At last, shivery with nerves, they were ready.
‘Now Missy foreign woman again,’ said Lung, with a touch of sadness in his voice which rang strangely in this scene of danger and urgency. Theodore guessed he felt that somehow he had been demoted – there was a difference between leading a ritual procession for an important Chinese woman and being guide and factotum for a foreign plant-hunter.
‘Looks like you’re as foreign as I am round these parts,’ snapped Mrs Jones. ‘Tuck that sword you found away and take the shot-gun. Ride with your thumb on the safety-catch, too, and keep your eyes skinned. With a bit of luck they’ve guessed we’re going back, but then again they might of split up, ready to have a go at us either way, once we’re in among the trees. You first, Lung. Theo, you’ll have to ride Bessie and lead Albert – don’t stand no nonsense from him. I’ll be rear-guard. Off we go.’
Lung started towards the dark chasm between the trees. Theodore coaxed Bessie into movement and Albert followed, nervous but subdued. As they reached the trees a voice called in the wood below, but some way back.
‘Don’t hang about, Lung,’ shouted Mrs Jones. ‘We got to get well ahead.’
Lung slapped his pony into a bouncy trot, and Bessie followed the example. One more alarm, Theodore guessed, and she’d try to bolt again. He was tense with readiness when, just before he reached the first bend in the track, a weird wailing rose behind him, shrill and throbbing, like a dog baying. He glanced back and saw that Mrs Jones did the same. Beyond her, framed in the arch of light where the path opened into the glade, Uncle Sam was kneeling by one of the bodies. He looked up to the sky and raised his arms, one swathed in blood-soaked rags. Still wailing, he bowed over the body and covered his face with his hands. His fingers tore at his tangled grey hair.
‘Move along,’ called Mrs Jones. ‘I can’t stomach no more of this. Looks like it might of been his son.’
5
IN THE REST of that day, though the track became steadily narrower and steeper, they travelled further than they had done in any two previous days. They heard and saw no sign of pursuit, but Mrs Jones would rest no more than the horses needed. She was unusually silent, riding close behind Albert so that at the slightest sign of jibbing she could flick him across the haunches with a long withy she had cut – but indeed she seemed to drive them all on, horses and humans, as though she had funnelled her swirling energies into a single blast before which they were nothing but wind-borne seed, blown steadily up the track. It wasn’t that she was scared, Theodore guessed. It was something else.
The map which P’iu-Chun had given them looked like an illustration to a fairy-tale, with a curly dragon blowing the prevailing wind from the south-east corner and delicate drawings crowding the blank spaces; but it was surprisingly accurate, marking every fork in the track, and at last the endless series of zigzags which brought them up into the Plain of Shrines. For more than
an hour they had climbed this last section, with the tree-tops below the path not reaching high enough to obscure the view across to the opposite side of the valley, just as steep and now astonishingly near. And then they were in the open.
The trees ended as though a line had been shaved along the rim of the valley and they came out wearily on to a vast, undulating, grassy plateau which seemed to reach right to where the wall of the true mountains shot towards the sky. Scattered all across this plain were strange rock outcrops, carved by wind and water into pinnacles and pillars and shapes like fortresses, and pocked with caves. Sometimes a fuzz of twisted trees crowned these outcrops, and nearly always there was a shrine or tomb, mostly in ruins but once or twice looking almost new.
To Theodore’s eye the path vanished – you could roam where you wished over the measureless grassland – but Mrs Jones seemed to see where it lay. The grass itself was deceptive, shimmering green in the distance but underfoot only tufts and sparse blades protruding through shaly soil. The air was almost painfully sharp and clear after the muggy heat of the valley. At first their path took them back to the line of the river, which now ran a thousand feet below them, cutting its way through a gorge which made the ravine at the Settlement seem no more than a trivial crack. Even from this height, though, they could hear the mutter of rock-torn water. Then the river curled away south and for three hours they rode through the weird plateau, with no landmarks except the rock formations, which often looked completely different from different angles. It became steadily colder, and Theodore was grateful for another of P’iu-Chun’s ‘gifts’, a hip-length jacket of coarse-woven wool, with a breast-pocket he could fill with bread to munch as he rode.
Towards dusk they came to a pillar crowned by a shrine and a single, leaning birch-tree. A flight of steps had been cut in the sheer side. Mrs Jones reined and looked at it.
‘This’ll do,’ she said. ‘You two give the horses a feed, and I’ll nip up with the glasses and see if I can spot if we’re being followed. If we ain’t, then we’ll camp here – if we are, then we’ll have to plug on.’
She dismounted, took a pair of binoculars from her saddle-bag and started to climb the steps. Lung seemed even more absent-minded than usual, so Theodore saw to the horses single-handed. When he had finished he found Lung staring up at the rock-pillar and followed his gaze. Mrs Jones was there, standing on a slant of rock stair forty feet up, her back braced against the cliff and the binoculars to her eyes.
‘She has a great head for heights,’ said Theodore.
‘She is the osprey on the crag,’ said Lung. ‘She is the song men sing when they march under banners. Her heart beats with the blood of dragons.’
‘Yes, she doesn’t seemed scared of anything.’
‘But she is the duck on the nest. She is flute music heard under willows in the evening. Her eyes shine with lamplight from old gardens.’
‘Is that your own poem?’
‘A beginning. You have fed the horses?’
‘Yes. Do you . . .’
‘Look, she has seen us.’
Mrs Jones’s voice floated down through the evening stillness. ‘Cooee! I can’t see nothing, and that’s right to the forest. We’ll camp here. And I’ve found a nice cave a little up the cliff.’
* * *
The cave was dry and surprisingly clean. Lung said it had probably been used by a hermit. They made no fire, but cooked hot stew from a can using Mrs Jones’s patent stove, whose white tablets of solid fuel reeked vilely in the clean air. They ate their food in the dark, by feel and smell, and watched a storm build itself against the mountain wall far to the north. Lightning whipped and blinked, too distant for them to hear the thunder, but overhead the sky was full of stars.
‘Going to be a moon,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘We better keep watch, I suppose. Don’t feel like sleeping, myself, so you go and kip down, Lung, and I’ll wake you when it’s your turn . . . No, you stay along of me, young Theo, and I’ll tell you my life history. I need a bit of company, stop me thinking. You’re not too fagged?’
‘No, not at all,’ said Theodore with automatic politeness, though his eyes were sticky with needed sleep and his whole body chilled through.
‘That’s the ticket. Here, wrap yourself in a couple of blankets. Off you go. Lung, and don’t lie awake half the night making up poetry – I can see you’re in the mood. You’ll have the other half for that, when you’re doing sentry.’
Lung mumbled his goodnights absent-mindedly and felt his way down the stair to the single tent they had pitched for him and Theodore. Mrs Jones had decided to sleep in the cave.
‘He’s all right,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Matter of fact he’s a sight better-mannered than some of the poets I’ve known – he can hold his liquor, for a start. You think I’m a wicked old woman, don’t you, young man?’
Theodore was too surprised to answer.
‘I’ll lay you do, though, don’t you?’ insisted Mrs Jones.
‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’
‘Jesus said that, didn’t he? ‘Bout a harlot, what’s more. I was never that, not really. Wouldn’t do me much good in any case, would it, young man? You’ve not had the time to do much by way of sinning, nor the opportunity neither. Do you want to chuck any stones?’
Behind the flippant words there was an urgency which cut through exhaustion, cut through the carelessness of the past few days, and woke the numb centre.
‘I am worse than anyone,’ muttered Theodore. ‘I have betrayed my faith.’
‘Ah, come off it! You couldn’t help that – you did what you had to! Now see here . . . it ain’t no good, though, just having to. I suppose I had to shoot those blokes this morning – ‘nother second and Lung would of been a goner if I hadn’t got that feller what was swiping at him with his sword . . . but it’s shook me up a lot worse than a lot of other things I done what you’d call wickedness I dare say . . . Do you like me, young man? Spite of it all, do you like me?’
Her voice had dropped to a throaty mutter, but all her energies lay behind the question, compelling an answer.
‘Yes,’ said Theodore, ‘I like you all right. And my father says . . . used to say . . . it’s no odds what a man’s done in his past life. It’s what you’re going to do in your future life – that’s what counts.’
‘Good for him, then – not that I’d stake much on me becoming a holy body for the rest of my born days.’
She was silent for a while, as if brooding on the possibility. Theodore became aware that he could see her now, sitting at the mouth of the cave, surrounded by an irregular glow, a mere paling of the blackness. For a while he thought that he was imagining the effect in his weariness, that his mind was playing tricks, making him see the invisible forces that beamed out from her. Then, rather to his relief, he realized that the moon must be rising.
‘Do you want to know why I’m here?’ said Mrs Jones suddenly.
‘So you can watch and see if we’re being attacked.’
‘That ain’t what I meant. Here I am, bundling round these heathen parts, looking for odds and bobs of plants, running for my life now, ’cause of a young man whose family paid me to stay out of England for ten years.’
‘Was that Mr Jones?’
‘Lord no. I give him the push years before. He was a wrong g’un, if ever. Like to hear about this other bloke?’
‘If you want to tell me,’ said Theodore.
‘He’s a nice young man,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Least, he was when I met him. I suppose he must be around thirty-five now. That’s right, he’s four years younger than what I am . . . rich as crazes . . . you see, he’s the one and only white-headed boy of one of them old Jewish banking families. He never took me home, of course, but he told me about it. There’s his Dad, what ran the bank and could of bought up the Prince of Wales twice over, and his Mum, come from just the same kind of family only in Paris, dripping with diamonds, handsome, full of brains, sharp as a green lemon, and all his sisters
and his aunts, them as nobody’s managed to marry off into other banks, all sitting around of an evening in this great big house north of the Park; and in the middle of them, all in black, deaf as a post but still missing nothing, is his Gran – his Dad’s Mum, and what she says goes. Even my Monty’s Dad, with his hunting-lodge in Scotland and his yacht at Cowes and his pack of hounds in the Midlands – even he’s scared stiff of her. Now, I don’t think any of them minded a straw when Monty hit it off with me – only an actress, my dear, keep him out of trouble till we choose a wife for him. What they didn’t realize was it was going to get serious between Monty and me . . .
‘I suppose I better explain about that. I told you I wasn’t a harlot, ’cause I’ve never been with a gentleman what I didn’t fancy a bit, and I let them give me jewels and things, but it wasn’t serious, not more than once or twice . . . anyway, I was too young then to know what I was doing, almost. But Monty and me . . .
‘When his family saw what was going on, they done their best to break it up, but it didn’t work ’cause Monty upped sticks and took me to Africa. Funny, ain’t it, how a rich Jew-boy, brought up in the middle of London, should want more than anything else in the world to have a great big garden full of foreign plants . . . two years we spent at it, fossicking round after roots and bulbs and things. We done Africa. We done Inja. We done South America. I used to tell Monty, teasing him like, as I was only his excuse for getting away from his bank and going plant-hunting. Course, it wasn’t true . . . he was gone on me and I was gone on him . . . mercy, yes! Not that he’s much to look at, a little bloke, trim, going a bit bald even when I first met him, something about him made him look like he’s just been polished, even in the middle of a jungle, know what I mean? Oh, they was good times . . .
‘Funny how things work out. We was in Mexico, and I started having a baby. I’d always managed to miss that before, but now it seemed like the best thing of all, and Monty took it into his head that he was going to bring me back to London, where I could have good doctors – and spite of his family he was going to marry me. Me, I didn’t care what happened, I was that happy for him. So we come home.
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