Tulku

by Peter Dickinson

  At the peak of the music a monk danced out of the temple swinging a brass bowl on a chain. Pale blue smoke poured up from the bowl, swirling into wreaths as the monk pranced and postured round the altar, but before he had finished his dance Theodore was aware of the focus of the crowd’s attention shifting towards the back of the courtyard. The music throbbed into silence. The dancer disappeared through the temple doors, but at the same time two other monks appeared carrying a long, pale robe and a tall forward-curling hat. As they came round the altar to the steps the Lama Amchi glided out from the aisle between the massed monks. He let one of the men put the robe round his shoulders, then walked up the steps, round the altar and up to the temple doors, where he stood for twenty seconds with his hands above his head, palms together. Slowly he knelt, bowing to the invisible idol until his forehead touched the stone.

  A monk began to chant in a bass monotone which echoed the wave-pattern of the now hushed horns. Bells clinked. The massed choir of monks in the courtyard answered with a booming swell of voices, and as that sound died the monks lining the gallery took up the chant. The pattern of solo, bells, response and echo continued while the Lama Amchi rose and disappeared into the temple, then reappeared, had his tall hat placed on his head, and settled into the chair opposite Mrs Jones.

  Now the huge horns started their droning and the other instruments joined in, working up to a surge of sound at whose climax four soldier-monks carried a man out of the temple and placed him on the central throne.

  If Theodore hadn’t been expecting to see the oracle-priest he wouldn’t have recognized him. He was wearing a gold helmet rising to three spikes, a breast-plate covered with jewels and ornate fretwork, under the breast-plate a heavy brocade jacket reaching to his knees and with full long sleeves, and boots of orange leather, very massive, with enormous soles. He lolled on the throne, inert, eyes closed, like a clumsily manufactured doll.

  When the roaring of the horns ceased the choir-leader began another chant, interrupted as before by bells and responses. At the clink of the second lot of bells the oracle’s eyes opened and for a moment he was the man Theodore knew, staring around but not seeming to see anything. The muscles of his face bunched into a grimace, making him unrecognizable again. He sat quite still, staring pop-eyed over the heads of the congregation, while the rhythm of the chant increased and horns and drums and cymbals joined their sounds. Slowly he began to quiver, as if he too was an instrument vibrating to the beat of the universe. Shaking more and more violently, but with his massive boots rooted to the stone, he rose to a standing position. The soldier-monks who had carried him out moved forward to hold him by the arms and prevent him from falling, and an old monk hobbled out from behind the Lama Amchi’s chair and started to wave what looked like a folded sheet of paper in front of the oracle’s face. The noise increased. People all over the courtyard were shouting, even screaming. The group round the throne convulsed. The oracle seemed to toss aside the four men who were holding him so fiercely that one of them fell flat on his back with a thud which Theodore could hear through the uproar. He dashed towards the altar, snatched up a sword and stood there, his face dark purple and snarling, like the rabid ape that had once attacked the Settlement and bitten two people before Father had shot it. Now he darted from the altar, swinging the sword in both hands, slashing with definite aim as if at targets only he could see. The boots and the clothes bulked him out, but even allowing for them he seemed to have grown both taller and broader than the calm and unremarkable man who had chatted with Theodore about the tracks into China.

  All the while the uproar in the courtyard rose. The screams of the people steadied to a shrill and wavering wail which wove through the unvarying chant of the monks and the boom of the big horns, rattles and thunders from the drums, the clink and clank of bells and other hoots and twitterings. Theodore discovered his throat was sore because he was yelling with the rest. He clamped his mouth shut and shook his head in violent refusal, breaking the hypnotic tendrils that had begun to bind him into the ceremony.

  Thus freed he could see that the soldier-monks were advancing on the oracle-priest in a wrestler’s crouch, ducking under the whirling blade, scuttling away crabwise when a darting lunge came their way. The priest charged suddenly down the steps, causing one of the retreating soldier-monks to stumble against the Lama Amchi where he sat impassive on his throne, but the other two seized their moment and leaped like tigers at the priest’s back and clung there, each gripping an arm. The sword clanged to the stone. The priest spun round. One of the men lost his grip and was hurled against the steps, but at the same time the first two closed in. In a series of convulsions they forced the priest up the steps, round the altar and back to his throne where they held him, one at each arm, one at his legs, and one using both hands to clamp the priest’s head to the back of the throne. The spasms that shook his body dwindled. The purple flush left his face, fading like a healing bruise through vivid yellow to chalky grey. Theodore realized that the shouting had ceased some time back, and the chant and the music were now softening towards silence.

  The old monk who had waved the paper came hobbling up the steps again, this time carrying what looked like a writing-slate with a jewelled frame. He stood beside the throne and bent his body forward so that his ear was close against the priest’s mouth. In total silence and steadily increasing tension the whole courtyard waited until the monk with the slate nodded his head a couple of times and started to write; then a low sigh of release breathed into the mountain air. Theodore couldn’t see whether the priest’s lips were in fact moving because the old monk’s head screened them. Less than a couple of lines had been written when the monk straightened, backed away, bowed and returned to his place. A murmur of comment rippled round among the watchers and then the horns began their boom and the chant of invocation rose once more.

  Incredibly the ritual repeated itself six times in all. Six times the chants began the pattern, and the people shouted, and the priest convulsed on his throne, threw off his attendants, seized a weapon from the altar, fought with invisible powers and was wrestled back to his throne. Theodore kept his mouth shut now, but he noticed Lung beside him yelling like a demon. He couldn’t see more than the side of Mrs Jones’s face, but she sat as still as the Lama Amchi and seemed to be smiling slightly, as though she was watching a play. The fights were not always the same. The next four times the priest stayed at the top of the steps, and once climbed on to the altar and made his fiercest lunges upward, as if battling with a giant; but there were enough repeated elements – particular strokes and charges by the priest and feints and scuttlings by the attendants – for Theodore to tell himself that the whole ritual had been rehearsed, and that was why nobody was really hurt. On the other hand there was no doubting the appalling effort that went into each fight. Even the spasms that shook the priest when he was sitting on his throne seemed as much as a man could endure just once, let alone six times.

  Sometimes the monk with the slate wrote only a word or two, and once several lines.

  When the sixth episode began Theodore knew it must be the last because there was only one weapon left on the altar, a stubby mace whose shaft twinkled with crusted jewels but whose head was a plain ball of spiked iron. This time, when the noise in the courtyard seemed enough to shake fresh avalanches from the mountains the priest came staggering round the altar and down the steps. The attendant in front of him ducked clear and he rushed straight at Mrs Jones, whirling up his mace as he came. She rose, calmly, as if to greet or confront him. He seemed to see her, a visible enemy for the first time, and halted with the mace poised two-handed above his head. She stood her ground, gazing up into his contorted face. The noise in the nearer part of the courtyard had snapped short at his rush, but there was still some shouting in the distance from people who couldn’t see what was happening. Theodore stood terrified as the mace hung there, but couldn’t move a muscle to help her. He heard a grunt and a threshing noise beside him and was awar
e of Lung struggling in the arms of two large monks. The priest gave a long, rattling groan as though something other than air was being forced or torn from his lungs. The mace fell with a clatter to the paving. He swayed, shrank, tottered. The attendants caught him as he collapsed and carried him back to the throne.

  During the business with the slate, Mrs Jones stood quite still. Any flush was hidden under the layers of make-up. But Theodore could sense the excitement that throbbed through her. As the old monk came hobbling back to his place by the Lama Amchi’s chair the attendants picked the priest up, throne and all, and carried him back into the temple. The music began again, and then the chanting – solo, bells, responses – without any of the untamed yelling that had accompanied the performance by the oracle priest. Mrs Jones turned and spoke to Lung, who smiled and hung his head. She patted his hand and made motions to the two monks still holding him to let him go.

  ‘Dead brave he was, wasn’t he?’ she whispered to Theodore. ‘Stone me if I could of moved a finger . . . Hi, look at old Amchi rigging the vote!’

  Theodore followed her glance and saw the group round the Lama Amchi’s chair – the monk with the slate and two other dignified old men – poring over the slate itself. The Lama Amchi was running a thin finger down the written lines, pausing here and there and tapping, as if to emphasize a point.

  Theodore found he was shivering. Just as the throb of the big horns had seemed to set up the vibrations of the other instruments, so Theodore’s shudders felt like an echo of the violent convulsions that had shaken the priest. He tried to force his muscles still, but it was no use. He knew that he had not merely witnessed a pagan ceremony from the outside. He had taken part – he had been part of it. He had accepted the powers which had occupied the body of the priest. He stood, shivering, shaking his head, aware that Mrs Jones was watching him, until the group round the Lama Amchi’s throne broke up.

  The monk with the slate moved up the steps. The Lama Amchi rose to his feet. The other two disappeared among the chanting ranks. The music swelled to a climax, then faded to a single voice, each monotone phrase followed by a thick drumbeat. Soon those sounds stopped too and the priest with the slate raised his arms for silence.

  At first he chanted his words, like any priest following a known formula, but after a minute his voice changed to something nearer speech and as it did so the reaction of his audience also changed. Now he was telling them something they had not heard before, and they were listening with taut attention. Between each phrase he paused to let the twanging syllables echo off the further walls. First he would read from the slate, then look up and speak at greater length, as if expounding the meaning of what he had read, and then he would slip back for a sentence or two into the tone of prayer, and be answered by a short response from the monks. Theodore, calmer now, guessed that this would happen six times, and then Tomdzay or somebody would perhaps tell him what it all meant. He was quite unprepared for what happened as the final phrase ended.

  The horns were still booming when the nearest monks broke from their ranks and rushed toward him. Theodore was dragged aside and almost fell among the crush of bodies. He heard Lung shouting angrily, some yards away. He stumbled backwards against something hard, the lowest of the temple steps, and scrambled up clear of the crowd. Once there he turned and looked out over the heads of the struggling mob.

  Below him the monks were crowding to a focus like bees at swarm-time clustering round their queen. At the thickest centre of the mass a slow eruption began, an upwelling of arms with a dark object half-hidden among them. Jerkily it took shape as it separated itself from the jostle of russet robes and became a black, high-backed chair with carrying-poles at either side. The monks, a dozen to each pole, were holding it not shoulder-high but at arm’s length above their heads. At first its back was towards Theodore, but then it swung sideways like a boat at tide-change as the monks began to carry it through the press, and he could see Mrs Jones sitting up there, smoothing her skirt down with one hand and with the other tucking a loose whorl of hair back into place under the silly little hat. A low, baying hum rose all round the courtyard.

  The crowd was too thick-packed for the monks to carry her through, so they passed her from hand to hand above their heads. The arms rose round her chair like waving wheat to take the load, or to touch chair or skirt, or simply to stretch towards her. Her face was stiff and calm, her back straight as a soldier’s. She came quite close to Theodore at the beginning of the wide sweep she was to move in, and even through her veil he imagined he could see the electric energies flashing from those huge eyes. The hand on her lap moved as if to begin a gesture, then stilled, so he guessed she had seen him, but she didn’t smile. They had that chair ready, he thought. They knew it was going to happen. They knew what the oracle would say.

  As the crowd jostled to follow her the crush below the steps eased and Lung came panting up to stand beside Theodore. He looked pale, drained, furious. For a while he stared at the retreating chair where it bobbed and wallowed above the threshing arms, then he sighed and struck his fist into his palm.

  ‘She thinks there is nothing in the world that can out-face her,’ he muttered. ‘She does not understand what she has met today.’

  13

  AT ONCE THE routine of days changed.

  Theodore had intended to visit Major Price-Evans immediately after the ceremony, to find out what it all meant and how it affected him and his friends; but he was too shaken to resist Lung’s demand that they should return to the guest-house, so now he was kneeling on the floor and pumping the primus stove, while Lung sat withdrawn and brooding on his cot. In theory Theodore was getting ready to welcome Mrs Jones after her adventure, but really he was trying to restore his own centre of balance by contact with things he knew, by handling a western gadget and making tea the way Mrs Jones liked it. He had just got the flame to roar and steady when Tomdzay came striding through the door with no warning at all. He beckoned to Theodore.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You are needed.’

  ‘Where is Mrs Jones?’ said Lung and Theodore together.

  ‘The Mother of the Tulku is in the house of the Lama Amchi Geshe Rimpoche. It is there that we go.’

  As Lung took a pace towards the door Tomdzay barred his way.

  ‘Only the Guide is needed,’ he said. ‘The much-honoured Father of the Tulku may stay here.’

  He made a slight movement, not enough to let Lung pass but enough to make sure he could see the three soldier-monks waiting beyond the door. Lung took a half-pace towards them, hesitated and turned.

  ‘Not permit Missy think she strongest,’ he muttered in English.

  Theodore smiled bleakly at him and followed Tomdzay out of the door.

  This time they entered through the main gate of the monastery. The crowd was still streaming out, but whatever the crush they jostled aside to let Tomdzay pass; it took Theodore a little while to realize that their eyes were turned not on Tomdzay but on him. He was used to being stared at on his wanderings through the monastery, by eyes inquisitive but wary, but these stares were different, open and respectful – they might have stared at one of their idols in much the same way.

  When the little procession he was now part of reached the main courtyard there were still plenty of people about, who behaved as though they had been waiting to see him, not pushing close as they had round Mrs Jones but forming a wide clear path between two packed lines of watchers. Tomdzay led the way down the centre of this space to the flights of stairs that zigzagged up the rock towards the two houses that stood there. One of these, Major Price-Evans had said, belonged to the Lama Amchi and the other was kept in permanent readiness for the return of the Lama Tojing or the arrival of his successor.

  The escorting monks stopped at the bottom of the stair, but Tomdzay led the way up to the door of the left-hand house where he paused and whispered a brief prayer or incantation, then held the door open for Theodore.

  ‘Enter,’ he said in a low voic
e. ‘Be reverent.’

  Automatically Theodore returned his solemn bow and crossed the threshold. As the door closed behind him his immediate impression was of yet another temple, not of stone but of wood, all polished to gleam in the near dark, and cluttered with jewelled idols and ornaments, and hung with garish cloths. Butter lamps glowed in front of some of the idols and the still air prickled with incense, but not so heavily as it did in the temple – the smell was thinner, or perhaps finer.

  ‘Coo-ee, Theo,’ called Mrs Jones’s voice. ‘We’re up here. Come and look. I never seen such a view.’

  Theodore followed the sound up a flight of stairs, polished till they were as slippery as an ice-fall. At the top was a little vestibule, beyond which he found a large airy room which ran all across the front of the house with its windows looking out over the monastery roofs to the tremendous range beyond. This room too glistened with polish and twinkled with knick-knacks and idols.

  In the many hours he was to spend there with Mrs Jones and the Lama Amchi, Theodore never became used to the nudging presences of the idols, whispering in his mind, You have felt us. You have known our power. We are real. He could look at a particular statue and perceive that it was mere stone, lacquered and gilded; its staring eyes had no mind behind them, its expression was whatever the sculptor had thought proper to carve there; that was all it consisted of. But out of his direct line of vision the idols were never quite empty; behind each half-seen mask a power brooded. Most of the Lama Amchi’s statues were of the Buddha, and so were the innumerable pictures in the hangings and paintings. All these seemed to express a strange multiple being; it was as though Theodore was being watched by an eye, many-faceted like an insect’s, but turned not outward but inward, inspecting through all those facets the object – Theodore – at its centre. Furthermore the silver or brass bowls and the butter lamps and the bright-patterned rugs and cushions and the hundreds of other garish or glittering objects, each with its own meaning and use and all bright with jewels and gold, served to increase the feeling of light refracted and splintered so that the eye could watch not only from all possible angles but in all possible hues. Sometimes Theodore could close a facet off, as if drawing a blind across a window. He might learn, for instance, the symbolism of an object or the myth behind a particular pose of the Buddha, and by refusing to accept them he could rob a presence of some of its power; but it would still be there, and much as he longed to he was never able to deny the whole vast system of beliefs and myths and symbols. Even if he had had the knowledge and intelligence to understand it all – and there was so much of it, so sharp and intricate in detail, so vague and ungraspable in outline – Theodore knew he would not have been able to argue it out of existence. You needed more than understanding for that. You needed a sort of spiritual energy, a soul-force, such as Father had possessed. The Lama Amchi possessed it too, and so did Mrs Jones, but not Theodore.