Tulku

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘How do you know the country so well?’ asked Theodore. ‘Were you born there?’

  ‘No indeed. From the monastery wall I could show you the house where I was born, on the far side of the valley. But my father kept a team of yaks and used to trade into China, and he brought me up to that life. I would be at it still if I hadn’t been chosen to become the oracle.’

  ‘The oracle?’

  Theodore had guessed that he was talking to the oracle-priest, but had assumed that his function was to perform some special sort of mumbo-jumbo with an idol. There was something shocking about this bluff, earthy man’s casual announcement that he himself was that idol.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘That’s me. You wouldn’t think at it to look at me, would you? And I’ll tell you another thing that might surprise you – it’s a lot harder work than driving yaks.’

  Mrs Jones was in a bad temper that evening, and took it out on Lung. Theodore had heard a little thunderstorm grumbling away below the monastery during the afternoon, but hadn’t realized that Mrs Jones had been lower down still. Her escort, none of whom spoke any language she knew, had insisted on keeping to well-worn paths and on coming home the moment the first drops fell.

  Lung endured her malice very well and teased her gravely in return. They were both very interested in Theodore’s meeting with Major Price-Evans.

  ‘He might give us a hand,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘It ain’t as surprising as you might think, finding him here. Lot of sappers go bats in the belfry. Ask him to tea, Theo, and I’ll see if I can’t wheedle him.’

  Lung refused to say anything about his own adventures during the day. He looked smug and knowing, but Theodore guessed that this was only a way of teasing Mrs Jones and concealing the fact that he had achieved nothing at all.

  12

  THE VISIT FROM Major Price-Evans was not a success. He came eagerly enough; Theodore met him at the door of the temple of the oracle and led him down to the guest-house. As they passed through the main gate of the monastery he said, ‘Last time I set foot outside Dong Pe, why, it must have been sixteen years ago.’ He sounded like a child being taken on a long-promised outing, but as soon as he was introduced to Mrs Jones his manner began to change. Though Theodore had told her the Major was blind she had made herself up with extra care and was wearing the lacy pink blouse and red skirt she had used to impress P’iu-Chun. Her manner was more formal than usual, and she spoke all the time in what she called her drawing-room voice, level and grave and a little throaty. Theodore was amazed. He had heard her acting this part for a sentence or two, but he had no idea that she would be able to corset her extravagant personality so easily into this constrained and tasteful style. The thought struck him that supposing her story had taken a different path and she had married the man she called Monty, this would have been her normal appearance, and the woman he knew as Mrs Jones would only have been allowed to erupt at odd and secret moments.

  Her conversation was exactly right too, Theodore thought. She seemed to know India quite well, and claimed to have travelled along several of the roads the Major had helped to build; and she had been to Ceylon and most of the other countries he had visited on his pilgrimages. She talked about these, asked questions, very gently tried to draw him out. But for all her care he seemed to retreat further and further into his shell, and to shrink his slight body into the folds of his russet robe. His answers, which had begun as the rambling untroubled flow that Theodore had heard on their first meeting, became shorter but even less coherent, and he began to have trouble with his breathing, wheezing heavily in the silences until it seemed an agony to draw each breath.

  This gasping eased quickly as Theodore led him back up the hill, and he was perfectly happy and cheerful by the time he reached his cell.

  ‘Well, that weren’t much cop,’ said Mrs Jones when Theodore got back to the guest-house. ‘Shy as a schoolboy, poor feller. You’ll have to try and handle him, Theo – but don’t ask him for help till he’s got over the shock of meeting me.’

  Next day the Major never mentioned Mrs Jones and seemed to have forgotten the incident. Theodore had already evolved a routine for his visits: the Major would be waiting for him at the wicket – on the third day even in one of the rare thunderstorms which rose high enough along the mountain wall to drench the monastery; then they would have tea and talk; then clean the Temple; when the oracle-priest came Theodore would gossip briefly with him; and when he left they would retire to the Major’s cell for a lesson in Tibetan.

  Provided the Major was there Theodore enjoyed the cleaning and found it helped him master his horror of the convoluted heathen mysteries which the idol symbolized for him. It was a thoroughly mundane process, picking loose fluff out of a demon’s snarl; the grimace lost all its meaning and became only an awkward pattern of crannies which let Theodore think more about the sculptor’s stupidity in producing such a shape than about the myth he had tried to embody. In a quite different way the Major helped make the monsters ordinary. The old man accepted them, as he accepted everything, with the same innocent delight. He accepted the meaning behind the grimace, but seemed to drain the nightmare into himself and remove its terrors in the process, so much so that Theodore found himself beginning to think that anything the Major believed in or approved of must have something to be said for it. He knew this was a dangerous idea, but he couldn’t help it.

  Only once did something happen which broke this pattern. Theodore had his ladder up against the idol of the Buddha and was using a soft brush to dust among the crannies of an intricate jewelled shoulder-piece when it struck him what a contrast this was with the almost appalling smoothness of the face. He paused and looked up. This particular statue had the eyes closed in contemplation, but from where he was standing on the ladder Theodore could see that the lids were not completely shut, and that through the slit between them and the gold underlid Someone might be watching him.

  As if to prove that the face was nothing but gold and stone, Theodore climbed the last two rungs and deliberately scuffed the dust from its smile. He had been going to rootle with his brush into the inch-wide nostrils, but suddenly he felt ashamed and returned to the jewelled shoulder-piece. The gesture seemed to have worked, and the idol was inanimate once more.

  Conversation with the oracle-priest was untroubled.

  ‘Don’t tell him nothing,’ Mrs Jones had said. ‘He only wants to use it for his oracling. My Auntie Rosa, she was a fortune-teller at all the fairgrounds, so I know the tricks. She said that all you got to tell a feller is one true thing about him which he doesn’t think you could of known, and he’ll believe everything else, no matter what.’

  In fact the oracle-priest seemed as happy to answer questions as to ask them. The Lama Tojing Rimpoche had chosen him – ‘recognized him’ was what he said – as the new Dong Pe oracle soon after the old one had died. One day he and his father and his brother and his uncle had been leading a train of yaks across the Stone Lake when they had found the Lama Tojing, all alone, waiting for them on the near shore. The Lama Tojing had simply beckoned him out from among the other three. He hadn’t wanted the job, but he’d been chosen, hadn’t he? There was no escape from that. Next he’d been sent on a four-year training course in Lhasa, and by the time he’d come back to Dong Pe the Lama Tojing had vanished. No, he’d no theories about where he’d got to – of course the other Lamas had kept asking him when he was performing his duties as oracle, but apparently he’d never given answers that anybody could understand. Of course he didn’t remember any of that himself – he was only telling Theodore what the others had told him afterwards.

  ‘It must have been very difficult getting trains of yaks across the Stone Lake,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Not as bad then as it is now. Since Lama Tojing vanished the Guardians have got a lot worse, throwing the stones about and that. We used to be able to keep the causeway in much better shape – the Guardians seem to know we haven’t got a Siddha here, and they do what they like
.’

  The Tibetan lessons seemed to go off the rails almost at once. Major Price-Evans had learnt the language mainly in order to understand the prayers and chants of worship, and the sacred books stored in the temple. It was difficult for him to remember that there might be any other reason for learning the language. His Buddhism was just as intense as Father’s Christianity, but in a quite different manner; Father had been, so to speak, an athlete of faith, funnelling all his energies into his worship, consciously driving himself on to further attainments and endurances; the Major seemed to make no effort at all – he was like some natural creature, it might be a grass-hopper, which can flick itself across a space a hundred times its own length because that is what it was made to do. So he tried to teach Theodore by chants and ritual, which Theodore’s mind refused to accept, even when his tongue mouthed the incomprehensible syllables. Learning went slowly.

  Theodore did learn, though. On about the fourth morning he was able to give an adequate greeting to a group of women who had dragged a communal loom out into a courtyard and were weaving a patterned piece of cloth too long and narrow for a blanket, too fine for a rug. They laughed as they answered him and tried to explain what the cloth was for, but he understood very little of their quick chatter. He got the impression that they knew who he was and why he was there, and were excited but a little wary of him, as though he might bring ill luck on them if he said or did the wrong thing.

  In the afternoons Theodore would have a drawing-lesson from Mrs Jones, and then help her clear and prepare the patch of earth she was planning to use as a garden for her finds – or at least pretending to plan. ‘Nothing like a bit of garden to make it look like you’re meaning to stay,’ she said. On days when her expeditions took her further afield Theodore would draw for a while, and then wander by himself through the steep, many-tracked wood below the monastery, with its pockets of clustered shrines and groves of prayer-flags.

  Sometimes Lung joined Mrs Jones on her expeditions – she had her escort thoroughly tame by now, of course, so that they did what she said without question – but often he spent the day in the monastery, where the Lama Tomdzay had introduced him to the Librarian. Most of the sacred books were kept in one of the two temples, but the monastery over the years had amassed a weird collection of other volumes; one evening Lung produced a collection of Latin sermons, printed in Madrid in 1743 – heaven knows how it had wandered, almost like Major Price-Evans, to this last nook. Theodore, who to Lung’s disappointment knew no Latin, feigned interest but took it back to the Library next day, and found Lung there sitting with a middle-aged Lama, drinking tea Chinese-fashion, and discussing the exact meaning of an ancient Chinese Buddhist hymn with a scholarly absorption that seemed to show he’d completely forgotten why he was supposed to be there.

  On the seventh evening of their stay Tomdzay came to the guest-house in the dusk and told them that the stars were propitious for the oracle ceremony to be held next morning, and that the Lama Amchi had finished his period of contemplation and would appear. The three foreign guests were expected to be present.

  ‘I’m not going,’ said Theodore in English.

  ‘Oh, I think you better,’ said Mrs Jones.

  ‘I will not attend a ceremony in a heathen temple.’

  Theodore would have liked the words to come out with heroic firmness but all he achieved was a feeble mutter. The Lama Tomdzay looked at him enquiringly. Lung translated what Theodore had said into Mandarin, toning down its bluntness with polite twirls.

  ‘The ceremony will not be held in the temple,’ said the Lama Tomdzay.

  ‘That makes no difference. I’m not going,’ said Theodore, still speaking English and leaving Lung to translate. The Lama Tomdzay stood for a moment, nodding his head gently, then took Lung by the elbow and led him to the door, where they spoke for a while in low voices. Lung came back looking embarrassed.

  ‘Tomdzay say this,’ he said in English. ‘If Theo not come gladly to oracle ceremony, then monks bind him and carry him to temple.’

  ‘No!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I won’t have it! If they’re going to do that to Theo, they’ll have to do it to me as well!’

  ‘I say this,’ said Lung. ‘I tell him Missy fight for Theo. He say monks bind and carry Missy also.’

  ‘Let ’em,’ said Mrs Jones grimly.

  ‘No,’ said Theodore. ‘I’ll come.’

  Lung looked immensely relieved, but Mrs Jones shook her head.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Theodore. ‘They can’t touch me.’

  ‘Course they can’t,’ said Mrs Jones with one of her sudden, marvellous smiles. ‘Only it just shows how far they’re ready to go, don’t it?’

  Next morning she appeared from behind her screen wearing a long black dress, padded at the hips, narrow at the waist, with a double row of pearl buttons running up the curve of her bosom to her high lace collar. She took half an hour to coax her hair into a tall structure of curling swags, and grumbled about her hat, a little black nonsense which she pinned to the front of the hair-pile so that its two bright blue feathers curved up over the top and its fine veil just covered her eyes.

  ‘If only I hadn’t left that other hat-box behind,’ she said, ‘where that first lot of beggars had a go at us. I had a lovely hat in there, just the job for getting me fortune told in church.’

  Theodore thought she looked extremely striking, and he could sense Lung almost shivering with pleasure at the sight of her – indeed, the dress had about it a hint of military uniform, with its stiffness and formality disciplining her bouncy curves. She had painted her face several layers thick and her eyes flashed with excitement behind the veil.

  When the Lama Tomdzay led them out of the guest-house Theodore saw that the paths of the mountainside were covered with little processions, as if the whole valley was emptying itself up into the monastery. A crowd jostled at the main gate, but Tomdzay headed further west to a narrow dark door which Theodore had always seen closed before now. Inside it they climbed a steep stair to the series of open galleries which linked the upper storeys of the courtyards; below them the crowd moved and bustled at random, and even up in these apparently private areas they came on several groups of gossiping peasants, usually with a monk or two among them. Once they picked their way through a full-blown family meal with children scampering round while adults sucked noisily at the reeking tea.

  ‘A big ceremony is also a time for visiting,’ explained Tomdzay. ‘Every family has a son or two in the monastery.’

  Again, despite all the strangeness, Theodore felt a powerful sense of familiarity, of a community all of whose activities centred round the main business of worship, as they had at the Settlement. Here belief was not a frill or decoration on the structure of life, not something that happened on Sundays as a change from everyday affairs, but something that happened all the time, so that it too was everyday. He felt an urge to linger, to lean on a railing and watch the steady gathering, but Tomdzay led them briskly on till they reached the long gallery which ran down the eastern side of the central courtyard.

  ‘Here we will wait,’ he said.

  ‘Hi! Look at the orchestra!’ said Mrs Jones, craning over the railing.

  Below them, on the steps of the temple of the oracle, a throne had been placed. In front of it was a table, or portable altar, bearing several swords, a mace, and two objects like fire-irons, all ornately jewelled. In front of the altar, below the steps, two chairs faced each other, the nearer one quite plain and the further much larger with an immensely high back carved to represent the sacred wheel. Now a group of monks was filing in and parting to stand behind the chairs. In addition to the normal russet robes, they wore hats, or rather helmets, of gold with immensely exaggerated crests, like coxcombs. They carried various instruments, the most impressive of which were a pair of twelve-foot horns, quite straight but widening to a bell which one monk supported on his shoulder while the monk who was going to blow the instrument followed four yards behind, carryi
ng the mouthpiece end. Others bore smaller horns, and flute-like pipes, others gongs and bells, and others strange twisted objects which it was hard to imagine producing any sound at all.

  More monks followed, massing in rows facing the temple steps but split by an aisle down the middle, so that now the steps and the space with the two chairs in it was surrounded on three sides by a russet phalanx. Beyond this more people came crowding in to the courtyard, peasants and monks mingling in a much less organized fashion, like spectators at a fair. The Lama Tomdzay, as if he had received a signal, gave a little nod and led the way along the gallery, walking behind a double row of monks who were now lining the rail. At the far end he turned down a steep and narrow stair and brought them out at the back of the courtyard, near the steps of the other temple. Here his pace slowed, and the four of them began to move with a drifting motion, first along a path that had been kept open by the crowd near the courtyard wall, and then down the central aisle towards the altar. As they passed they seemed to create a moving patch of silence among the muttering bustle.

  ‘Like getting married,’ whispered Mrs Jones. ‘Here comes the bride.’

  At last they reached the space in front of the altar where the two chairs faced each other, and at a sign from Tomdzay Mrs Jones settled on to the smaller one. Lung and Theodore stood behind her. There was a longish pause. The line of prayer-wheels tinkled monotonously. The crowd stirred and muttered until, at no noticeable signal, a noise began, a heavy, continuous groan at so deep a pitch that each vibration was a separate pulse. Theodore saw the monk at the back of the vast horn opposite blowing fat-cheeked into the mouthpiece, but when at last he drew breath the sound continued, rumbling on from the horn behind Theodore, rising in volume like a slowed wave; as it began to dwindle the first monk put his lips to the mouthpiece again and started to blow, creating another wave. It was impossible to imagine a deeper note that would be a sound at all. When a bass drum began to thud, its boom seemed light by comparison. Now cymbals clinked and flutes twittered. There was no tune, but the noise was not formless, because the underlying vibrations from the big horns held it together, as if the other sounds were building themselves out of that groundswell and dying back into it. Theodore thought it was somehow like the noise you hear when you hold a sea-shell to your ear, but enormously louder and richer, the hum not just of the distant ocean but of the whole universe, purring along its unimaginable nerve-lines.