Tulku

by Peter Dickinson

  As Lung came crunching up through the wood Theodore discovered that her small fingers had been gripping his wrist like a steel bracelet. He rubbed the place, feeling dazed and uncertain.

  ‘Number one fine place,’ panted Lung. ‘Plenty grass, plenty water.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘You two take the horses down, set up camp, while I nip back for my Lilium Jonesii. How’s that strike you, Theo? Lilium . . .’

  ‘Missy come along this way,’ interrupted Lung. ‘All day walk too far. I fetch this flower.’

  ‘So who’s being masterful?’ said Mrs Jones, only half-mockingly. ‘All right if you say so – I’m fair tucked-up, to be honest, and I’m surprised you ain’t too. You got to promise to do the job proper, like you seen me doing it. I want every hair off every root. First off you got to dig . . .’

  ‘I know. I dig very well,’ said Lung, seizing Mrs Jones’s wrist in his impatience and trying to drag her from the path. She shook him off, laughing.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘Here’s the trowel. You cut along up the path or it’ll be too dark to see where you’re digging. Come on, Theo.’

  For a moment Lung seemed reluctant to obey, but then he made up his mind and started back along the path.

  ‘See any hoof-prints, try and wipe them out,’ called Mrs Jones as she led Albert down between the bushes. ‘We’ll have to make a proper job of that tomorrow, if we’re going to have a bit of a rest here.’

  Theodore saw that she was already picking her way with extra care, choosing patches of fallen leafage that left no trace of their passage, and making wide circuits to avoid breaking through undergrowth.

  ‘Do you really think they’ve followed us this far?’ said Theodore, after a while.

  ‘You can’t never tell with blood feuds. Besides, they ain’t the only ones we got to look out for – there’s other people use that path, and some of them might think as we was easy pickings like that first lot did. Nearly there. Hi! What’s this? Ooh, the yellow monkey! I thought as he was up to something!’

  The spate of exclamations had begun with a squeak and ended in a whisper. Theodore, his eyes on the ground to choose the least betraying path, looked up to see what had caused that note of hushed excitement, almost of awe. At first all he noticed was that she was standing beside Albert on the edge of open ground; a mile beyond her a wall of dark cliff reared up, but in the middle distance was only the pale and mist-tinged luminosity of evening. He led Rollo up to her side and found that he was looking down a green coomb that reached right to the lake shore. The green was grass and looked good for grazing. A thin stream threaded through it.

  Slowly his eyes were drawn away from these practicalities by the mountain opposite, the enormous wall of granite rising from the water, and above it the glittering ice-peak, pink and gold with sunset. The lake surface mingled the colours of the dark cliff and the pearly sky into a silky shimmer. The mountain was a huge presence, imposing awe and quiet.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed ’em!’ said Mrs Jones, flinging out an arm. Theodore followed the direction of her gesture.

  The flanks of the coomb were not as steep as its head, where they were standing. The trees reached the rim and stopped, leaving caves of shadow beneath their lower branches. In this shadow the lilies glowed.

  ‘Did you ever see anything like it?’ said Mrs Jones. ‘In your wildest dreams, even? Ooh, Where’s that fancy-dan of a poet? I could of told he was being artful!’

  ‘Here, Missy,’ said Lung with a chuckle in his voice, coming quietly up behind the horses. ‘You find plenty flowers?’

  ‘Oh! You!’ cried Mrs Jones, spinning round to seize and hug him. ‘I’d kiss you, too, young man, only I’m scared what he might do to us.’

  ‘Missy go see flowers,’ said Lung, disengaging himself. ‘I make tent.’

  There was a note in his voice as though he had created the coomb for her sake and was now presenting it to her, like an emperor giving his beloved a kingdom. But Mrs Jones stayed where she was.

  ‘Funny thing,’ she whispered. ‘Ever since we crossed the Yangtze I’ve had a feeling something was sending for me, calling me westward. Perhaps this might of been it.’

  7

  FROM THE VERY first day in the valley a routine seemed to spring into being, ready made. Mrs Jones’s mornings were for Theodore, her afternoons for Lung, and the evenings for the three of them to eat a slow supper and then sit round and talk a little, and listen to Mrs Jones’s songs, and watch the stars moving behind the mountain-tops or the big pale moths that came from nowhere and floated among the lily-banks, settling to drink their nectar or floating soundlessly from flower to flower. As the dusk came on the lilies began to produce a pungent, peppery scent and it was that, Mrs Jones said, which attracted the moths.

  On the first morning, after they had groomed and tethered the horses and had breakfast, Mrs Jones sent Lung down to the lake and told him to see if he could catch some fish.

  ‘You’re always on about old fishermen in them poems of yours,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if you can do anything more than talk about it. Now come along here, young man. I got to start painting my lilies before they goes over, but you’ll find that a bit dull. What’d you like to have a go at?’

  ‘The mountain,’ said Theodore immediately.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Bit of a mouthful,’ she said. ‘Surprising how tricky that sort of subject is. No, supposing you settle up there and have a go at that bit of the hollow. You got the tents there, give it a bit of shape, and Albert. Not that horses is easy, but they’re easier than mountains . . . Don’t waste more paper than you can help . . .’

  She gave him two pencils, a piece of charcoal and a brand-new notebook, and he settled down to do as he was told. He drew a tent and decided it looked quite like, so he put the other one into the same picture. He started to draw the bottoms of the tree-trunks beyond but found that they seemed to be floating in mid-air, so he experimented with grass-tussocks to try and suggest the bank of the coomb, but they floated too. He was beginning on Albert when Mrs Jones came over and sat beside him.

  ‘Why, that’s not so dusty,’ she said. ‘Who’s been teaching you?’

  ‘Nobody. Mother was an artist, but she died when I was four.’

  ‘Then you got it in you. I see we’re going to have to take this serious. Look, I’ll show you a trick for doing shadows. Lend me that pencil. Ta . . . like this, see. It ain’t the only way, course, but it’s the easiest. And this bit here . . . you don’t want to draw quite so careful as I do, mind you. It’s the only way I know how, but except for flowers it’s a bit . . . oh, I don’t know. Remember how Mr What’s-is-name drew? That’s the thing to aim for.’

  Theodore could see what she meant. She had added several touches to his picture which had anchored the trees to the top of a definite slope, but there was something vaguely niggling about them. It was as though the richness of her personality stopped at her finger-tips and could find no way out through her pencil. When she left him he practised shadows for a while and then went back to Albert, achieving a shoulder and a haunch that were quite horse-like but a head that was far too small and looked more like a dragon’s or even a sheep’s. Not that Albert’s head was really a model for all horses . . .

  He was surprised to find how high the sun was above the mountain by the time of the next interruption. At a low whistle from the bottom of the coomb he glanced up and there was Lung, looking both shy and triumphant and carrying something hidden behind his back. He marched up to Mrs Jones, still hiding his booty.

  ‘I catch fish,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Mrs Jones.

  ‘Flying fish?’

  ‘Garn!’

  She grabbed at him and he dodged away, slipping on the slope and almost falling. He flung out his hidden hand to steady himself, revealing the body of
a dark brown duck.

  ‘Ho! Mighty hunter!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘How did you manage that? Make yourself a bow and arrow?’

  ‘I make trap,’ said Lung, producing a length of cord with a noose on the end. ‘Tomorrow I make better trap, with basket. Plenty reed for basket.’

  ‘Good for you. Let me have it. H’m, bit of meat there. I better pluck it while it’s still warm. Now, you two, you can go up to the path, back along the way we come, try and wipe out any marks we might of made . . .’

  Theodore and Lung spent the rest of the morning doing that, smoothing out hoof-prints and foot-prints and sprinkling pine-needles over them. After lunch Lung showed no inclination to leave the coomb, so Theodore climbed up through the wood and continued to work alone, doggedly smoothing and scattering till he reached the beginning of the trees and found that the sun was almost down behind the mountain ranges to the west. He had to pick his way down in near dark, trying not to spoil his work by leaving yet more foot-prints, and met Lung coming up the path to look for him. They smelt the roasting meat before they reached the clearing.

  The duck was oily and incredibly tough, but they chewed up every scrap and threw the bones on the fire. After the chill nights on the plateau it was strange to be sitting out under the stars without having to creep at once into a blanket-roll; they talked, and tried to prevent the big moths from flying into the fire, and listened to the steady tearing rasp of the grazing horses. Mrs Jones began to tease Lung into translating his poem about her and he made up uncomplimentary lines and pretended they were parts of it, but when he quoted in Mandarin it was clearly the real thing. Mrs Jones answered him with flowery speeches from old pantomimes, and even once a bit of Shakespeare. Then she started to sing.

  ‘The boy I love sits up in the gallery,

  The boy I love is looking down at me . . .

  ‘Not that I’m the right type to sing that one,’ she broke off. ‘What you want is a neat little ingenue, all pink and white and countrified, rolling her big blue eyes up at the clerks and ’prentices in the top of the house. Never mind. You’ll have to make do with what you got . . .

  ‘There he is, can’t you see, waving of his handkerchief . . .’

  It was a sign which Theodore understood perfectly well. She wanted to be alone with her lover. He rose, muttered a goodnight and walked up the dell to his tent, where he slid between his blankets and started to say his prayers. The singing stopped, replaced by whispers. A low laugh reminded him that he ought to pray for the other two, that they should recognize their sinfulness and be forgiven, but he had hardly begun when he stopped, feeling that it wasn’t right. The peppery wild scent of the lilies drifted through the night. He felt the stillness and the isolation of the valley all around with the three humans at the centre of it, as though they were cradled in the palm of the mountains. Things that happened here seemed to him to have no weight, no effect on the rest of the world. Any act was simply itself, neither good nor evil. It existed, and that was all, like one of the lilies.

  So day followed day, restful and quiet. The only serious effort anyone made came on the third day when Lung, irritated perhaps by Mrs Jones’s obsession with her lilies, announced that he was going to explore the path to the bridge marked on P’iu-Chun’s map. Theodore went with him.

  They followed the track through the wood and came quite soon to a place by the water’s edge which was clearly used as a camp-site by other travellers. There were remains of cooking-fires, and scatterings of yak-dung. After that the path climbed for a couple of miles through the wood and came out on a vast slope of sour-looking earth, above which the rock face rose precipitously to the snow-fields. The path continued to climb, but far less steeply than it would have needed to if it had been aiming to leave the valley at the skyline. Instead it led towards a point where the mountain cliffs seemed to come down and close the valley off. Steadily, as Lung and Theodore climbed, the tilt of the slope became steeper, until it was a slope no more, and the path was a mountain ledge running with vertical cliffs above and below, and the cliffs of the opposite mountain now incredibly near. They were, in fact, now walking along the wall of a vast ravine, with a river growling towards the lake a thousand feet below. An unsteady wind whipped through these narrows, with sudden little lulls, as though it was trying to trick the traveller into unwariness and then hurl him over the edge with its next gust.

  After a couple of hundred yards the ravine began to open out as the opposite cliff tilted away, but before that happened, at the narrowest place of all, the path ended and there hung the bridge.

  It was a single strand of rope, sagging hideously over the drop, and that was all. At either end was a fair-sized platform, with the rope running a few feet above it; on the further side the rope seemed to start from a timber structure, but here it was anchored into a big iron ring set into the cliff. Theodore stared at the curving rope, which swung slowly from left to right as the wind gusted down the gorge. His palms began to prickle with the idea of height. Yes, he could imagine hooking his legs over the rope and hauling himself across, hand over hand, though when he reached the far side his weight would drag it down to such a steepness that perhaps he wouldn’t be strong enough to pull himself up those last few feet. He could see on the far side where the path led across another barren slope and vanished into a steep wood of larches. Perhaps he could reach there, and Lung, and even Mrs Jones – she could do anything – but the horses? The baggage?

  ‘This is a place of devils,’ said Lung. He usually spoke Mandarin to Theodore, though his English was steadily improving.

  ‘People get yaks across here, I think,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps there is another path, though none is marked on the map. I think we will return and tell the Princess that we can go no further.’

  He turned decisively away and began to walk back along the ledge. Theodore understood very well – if it was impossible to go on and dangerous to go back, then they must stay where they were, and the idyll could be prolonged. He smiled and shook his head in sympathy, but from that moment there started to grow inside him a conviction that the idyll was not free. It would have to be paid for in the end.

  Mrs Jones took the news very calmly, saying that the valley was as good a place to be as any while the weather lasted, and there were enough plants around to last her another couple of weeks, at least, and after that they’d start thinking what was the best thing to do next.

  In fact it was an extraordinary relief to settle back into the coomb of the lilies, and to know that they would be staying here for another day, and another after that. Theodore hadn’t realized how weary he was with travel, not simply weary in nerves and muscles, but soul-weary with ceaseless change. Time on the journey had been like a muddy spate, full of whirling and uprooted objects, but here it settled to a clear, still stream, with even the eddies in it returning again and again to the same pattern.

  Mrs Jones botanized and sketched her finds, including a small dark-red clematis which she thought was new. There were delicate little plants too in the barren-looking slopes above the tree-line, which Theodore helped her press. But the lily remained her chief delight. It grew in drifts in several places along the lake shore, often mixed with a shorter, dark-orange lily which Mrs Jones said was quite common. The yellow one stood up to four feet high and carried as many as a dozen trumpets at the top of its scrawny and metallic-looking stem; the flowers were about five inches long and less than three across at the tips of the outcurved petals; from a distance they seemed to be all of a uniform intense yellow, but in fact each petal had a streak of green along its outside, and inside the bell the colour slowly darkened from the rim and was flecked with a pattern of small orange spots; at the mouth of the trumpet poised the six large anthers on their curving stalks, the colour of plain chocolate.

  ‘I seen bigger lilies, of course,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I mean, there’s Lilium auratum – I seen that a foot across, and with twenty flowers on a stalk – dead vulgar if you
ask me – not a patch on this little beauty. How are you getting on, young man?’

  Theodore had become obsessed with a desire to produce a drawing of Sir Nigel that would do justice to that animal’s look of utter nobility, a problem, he found, far subtler and more difficult than rendering Albert’s coarse-grained ill-will. He was developing his own style of drawing, neither like Mrs Jones’s nor P’iu-Chun’s, but chunky and stolid, as though he was as much interested in the weight of things as their shape and texture. He was unaware of this – or rather he was only aware that he liked certain effects when he got them right – until Mrs Jones pointed it out.

  ‘That’s not at all dusty,’ she said, looking at a picture he had made of a tree overhanging the lake shore. ‘You got it in you, more than what I have. You draw like you are.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Someone as didn’t know you, suppose I showed him this, he might make a guess what kind of person you are, and that’s good. It ain’t true of my pictures.’

  ‘If it was you’d keep running off at the edge of the paper,’ said Theodore.

  She laughed and went back to her fiftieth attempt to render the spirit of her lily.

  In the afternoon Theodore explored. They did not have the valley to themselves. The wood was full of birds, which sometimes called until the cliffs echoed and at other times for an hour on end failed to break the intense silence of the place. There were porcupines, and a lot of other small animals too briefly glimpsed to be sure of. There was something larger, perhaps a bear, which raided the camp one night, frightened the horses and upset one of the baggage baskets – Theodore slept through this episode, but Mrs Jones and Lung woke and drove it off. Next day they moved camp to another lake-side clearing Theodore had found, an even more secret place, further from the path because of a curve of the shore and screened by thicker undergrowth. It too had its drift of lilies, but no stream.