The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  He took her face in his hands. The tears on her cheeks were cold and frosted.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I love you. That’s enough. Wherever you go, I’ll follow you. I swear.”

  She bowed her head and put her arms around his waist. In the darkness outside, an owl swooped low across a frosted field in search of mice.

  They set off the next day on ponies supplied by the abbot of Gharoling. He had wanted to send a monk with them as guide, but Chindamani had vetoed his suggestion for reasons not altogether clear to Christopher. He, for his part, was entirely happy to be alone with her. Her downcast mood of the previous evening had passed, and she smiled at him often while they packed the ponies with the provisions they would need.

  The abbot accompanied them to the gates of the monastery, Christopher sensed in his manner a calmness and a self-possession he had not encountered previously in a lama. It was as if every gesture he made, every word he spoke was intended to convey the simplest of messages: that everything is transient, and even the greatest concerns will soon pass into insignificance.

  “Travel in easy stages,” he advised them.

  “Rest when you are tired. Do not drive your animals hard. Be easy with yourselves and the road will be easy with you.”

  They thanked him and turned to leave. As they passed through the gates and started down the hill, a small processions of monks wound its way past them, carrying what seemed to be a human figure wrapped in a white sheet.

  “What’s happening?” Christopher asked.

  “Is it a burial?”

  Chindamani nodded, sober again.

  “It’s the hermit,” she said.

  “They found him dead last night. He had not taken the food they left him for six days.” She paused.

  “He died on the day after we arrived.”

  The monks passed by reciting a slow dirge, heading towards a secluded area high on the hillside, where the gomchen’s emaciated remains would be cut into food for vultures. A cloud passed over the sky and threw a shadow across the valley of Gharoling.

  Tibet moved past beneath their feet, a carpet of grass and barren soil and rock that sometimes erupted in patterns of broken ice or bright mountain rivulets. At times they rode, at others they walked, leading their ponies by their bridles. They had named the animals Pip and Squeak, after the little dog and penguin whose adventures William followed every day in the Daily Mirror. To Chindamani, who had never seen a cartoon or a newspaper, much less a penguin, the names were little more than pee-ling eccentricities.

  The ponies were indifferent to names, English or Tibetan, and simply got on with the job of plodding along the road. That was what life was about, after all: plodding and eating and sleeping.

  It was not all that different for the two humans, except that they at least could choose when to move and when to halt, when to eat and when to sleep. They avoided all major towns, preferring not to draw official attention to Christopher’s presence. The abbot of Gharoling had given Chindamani a letter bearing his seal, and this they used from time to time to secure them lodging. They stayed in tasam houses caravanserais where they could find fodder for their animals and shelter for themselves or in small monasteries where Chindamani’s letter secured them more than just a bed for the night.

  Wherever she went, Chindamani was received with respect, even reverence. Christopher was an appendage to her holiness as the incarnation of Tara and a lifetime’s inexperience of the world outside Dorje-la made it impossible for her to act as though she were an ordinary mortal. With Christopher she could be herself or at least, that part of herself that she reserved from others but to everyone else she showed only her incarnation al face.

  They travelled ever northwards and a little to the east, heading for the Great Wall and the border with Inner Mongolia. They passed to the west of Shigatse, following the course of the Tsangpo.

  On their right, at the foot of Mount Dromari lay the red walls and golden roofs of Tashilhunpo Monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama. On Chindamani’s instructions, they hurried past, eager to leave Tashilhunpo behind.

  Six days later, they passed through Yanbanchen, where a road struck east for Lhasa and Peak Potala. Just outside the town, an official stopped them- and began to question Christopher. But Chindamani interrupted him sharply. The abbot’s letter was again produced and the official wilted visibly. They did not stop again until Pip and Squeak were about to drop and Yanbanchen was far behind.

  After Shigatse, the going was hard: steep ridges, dark ravines and furious mountain streams blocked their path again and again.

  They found numerous villages and monasteries, but the mountains through which they rode were bare and forbidding, cleft by narrow gorges whose walls towered above them, blotting out the sunlight.

  Each day the world was reborn for Chindamani. The simplest things held her attention as though they were miracles. And in their fashion they were, for her at least. She had come from a world of un melting snow and ice into a land of changes, where sun and shadows played complicated games with grass and rocks and shimmering lakes, and where sudden openings in the hills revealed clear vistas stretching for mile after unexpected mile. She had never seen so clearly or so far.

  She saw men and women as though for the first time. So many faces, so many styles of dress, so many occupations: she had never guessed that such variety existed.

  “Is the whole world like this, Ka-ris?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Every part of it is different. This is only a little part.”

  Her eyes grew large.

  “And where you came from ... is it not like this?”

  He shook his head again. How could he explain? He thought of the London underground, of motor cars and trains and the tall chimneys of factories. Of the multitudes on the streets and in the omnibuses, tumbling like bees in a hive after a thousand different honeys, each without taste or savour. Of churches hung with military flags and cluttered with dead soldiers’ monuments. Of polluted streams and scarred hillsides and black palls of smoke choking the sky. She would consider all those a lurid kind of madness. And yet beneath them there lay a deeper malaise that he thought she would be unable to understand. But when he thought again, he suspected she would understand it only too well.

  “There’s a place called Scotland,” he said.

  “I went there once for a holiday with my aunt Tabitha. To a place called the Kyle of Lochalsh. This is very like it.”

  She smiled.

  “Perhaps we can go there together some day,” she said.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Perhaps.”

  Several times a whole day would pass when they rode together in silence, neither speaking, each wrapped in thought. Spring winds blew across empty plains almost without respite, forcing them to bend across the necks of the ponies, blinded and chilled to the bone. They passed frozen lakes and rivers in which patches of ice still lay, thick and scarred by the winds.

  There were mists, white and cold and clinging, through which they and their ponies passed like ghosts. Chindamani’s black hair gleamed with bright droplets of half-frozen air. Christopher watched her ride ahead of him, a dim figure passing from visibility to invisibility and back again. The edges of their world were blurred. Nothing was defined: not speech, not thought, not memory. They walked or rode in a silence of their own making, apart from the world, travellers without a destination, voyagers through a timeless, formless space.

  Everywhere they saw signs of faith, reminders of the presence of the gods: prayer-flags and chortens, long mam-walls, and once, two pilgrims making their way across the freezing ground, prostrating themselves full length time after time.

  “Where are they going?” Christopher asked.

  “To thejokhang,” she said.

  “The great temple at Lhasa. They are going there to pay respect to Jovo Rinpoche.”

  Christopher looked puzzled.

  “It’s a great
statue of the Lord Buddha when he was a child,” she explained.

  “It’s the holiest image in the whole of Tibet. People come from all parts of the world to visit it. Some travel hundreds of miles, measuring the ground by their own bodies just like these two. It takes months, even years. Sometimes they die before they reach the holy city. It’s a very good way to die.”

  “Why do they do it?” he asked.

  “To wipe out bad karma they have acquired in previous lives. To acquire good karma for their next life. So that they may be reborn in a condition nearer to the Buddha nate. That is all any of us can do.”

  He looked at her.

  “Is our journey worth any merit?” he asked.

  She nodded, serious.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “He is the Maidari Buddha. Our aim is to find him and bring him to his people. We are his tools: you will see.”

  “Do you really think we’ll find him again?”

  She looked at him a long time before replying.

  “What do you think?” she said finally.

  Christopher said nothing. But as they rode on, he wondered what sort of karma he would acquire if he rescued the boy from Zamyatin only to put him on the throne of Mongolia as a British puppet.

  They caught their first whiff of Zamyatin at a small village near Nagchu Dzong, about one hundred and sixty miles from Lhasa.

  The nemo at their rest-house there remembered a man and two boys who had come through about ten days before. They had been travelling by pony, hard. Zamyatin had been forced to risk visiting the rest-house in order to obtain much-needed provisions and fresh ponies.

  “They came here with three of the scraggiest animals I’ve ever seen,” the woman said.

  “All but dead they were. They’d driven them into the ground, riding them hell for leather, I could tell. It was the Mongol’s doing, I could see that. He was desperate to move on. Nervous he was, jittery, but I could tell he wasn’t the sort to argue with. The children were worn out, poor things. I said they should rest, but he swore at me and said he’d have none of it.

  They had to be up and going; not even time to take tea.”

  She scowled at the memory of such impolite ness

  “I sold them new ponies, but I wouldn’t give much for the ones they

  left. They’ll fatten up in time, no doubt; but one’s no use for riding

  any longer he’s broken-winded and fit for the butcher. I

  asked five hundred trangkas for the two I sold them, and he paid it over without so much as a whimper. That’s forty Hang in Chinese money. I said to my husband he must be up to no good I was half of a mind to send someone after them, to see were the little boys all right. But my husband said we’d best not interfere, and maybe he was right.”

  “Did either of the boys try to get your attention at all?” asked Chindamani.

  “Well, now you mention it, I think one of them did. I think he wanted to speak to me. But the man would have none of it and whisked him out of the room as quick as a flash.”

  “Didn’t you try to do something? Protest to him?”

  The nemo looked at Chindamani hard.

  “If you’d seen him you’d understand. I’d no wish to cross him.

  Perhaps I should have done, I don’t rightly know. But if you’d been in my shoes, if you’d seen him .. . But then, perhaps you have, my lady.”

  Chindamani said nothing.

  “Were the ponies you sold them healthy? Strong enough to take them far?”

  The old nemo looked offended.

  “Of course they were. Do you think I would sell anything but a sound animal? Would I cheat, would I pass off a sprained horse as fit for the road?”

  He fancied she would, and for an inflated price as well.

  “I meant no offence,” he apologized.

  “But you had seen what happened to the beasts they came on. Perhaps you were reluctant to let your best animals into his hands.”

  Somewhat mollified but only somewhat she snorted.

  “I might have thought that,” she said.

  “But he looked over all the ponies I had and chose three for himself. They were the best in my stable and worth a pretty penny too. He’ll do for them what he did for the others. But they’ll get him a distance. They’ll be twenty shasas or more away by now.”

  A shasa was a full day’s march, between ten and twenty miles.

  At Zamyatin’s rate of progress, they’d very likely be thirty full shasas ahead of them.

  “They’re beyond our reach now, Ka-ris,” said Chindamani in a crestfallen voice.

  “They’ll get to Urga before we do, that’s all,” he said. But he felt disadvantaged by his rival’s easy lead.

  “We’ll catch up with them there, not before. Slow and steady does it. They still have a long way to go. There won’t always be fresh ponies when they need them. And they have to face the Gobi desert or go round it.”

  “And so have we,” she said.

  Dispirited at first, they continued their journey. They rode a little faster, rested less often, rose earlier to set off before dawn each morning. At least, Christopher reasoned, they were thus far on the right track. Zamyatin and the boys had passed this way; however much they deviated from the road, they would ultimately return to it there was only one destination for all of them.

  They travelled across the broad steppe regions to the east of Chang Tang, the great central plateau of Tibet. Beyond the northern reaches of the Yangtse River, they passed into Amdo.

  Always north-east, always towards Mongolia.

  Each day, they passed small nomad encampments low black tents quite distinct from the round Mongol yurts of the north.

  Shepherds grazed small herds of yaks in the valleys: they watched Christopher and Chindamani ride by, then turned back to their endless vigil.

  Ten days after leaving Nagchu Dzong, they reached the southern shores of Koko Nor, the great lake that stands guard over the north-east border of Tibet. A few miles further and they would enter China’s Kansu province.

  Christopher was nervous. The Chinese were on edge, feeling the pinch in Mongolia and toying with Tibet as a possible recompense should the former territory slip out of their hands again. If he were caught by Chinese guards and identified as an Englishman crossing into Kansu, he doubted very much if his captors would observe the diplomatic niceties. In all probability, his head would soon adorn a sharp, pointed stick on the battlements of Sining-fu.

  These were the days of the great war-lords. China was torn by civil war, and no central authority was capable of returning the country to normal. The Manchus had gone, the Republic was little more than a name, and in the provinces chaos and bloodshed reigned. Armies of peasants marched and fought and were wiped out. And in their place, new armies were raised up. It was one of Death’s finest hours.

  The steppe sloped down gently to the dark waters of the lake.

  Thin waves moved across its surface, making Christopher think of home and the sea. To the north, the mountains of the Tsun-ula range stretched east and west out of sight. On several peaks, white caps of snow nestled against the sky.

  In the centre of the lake lay a rocky island on which a small temple stood, cut off from the world now that the winter ice had melted. Chindamani sat still in her saddle for a long time, gazing out at the little temple, watching the dark waters tremble against the rock on which it stood, listening to the waves falling lifeless to the shore. A stiff breeze came down from the mountains suddenly and flattened the waves. Clouds scudded across the sky.

  “Let’s ride on,” said Christopher.

  But still she sat, unmoving, gazing out at the island. The breeze moved her hair, raising it like a dark prayer-flag, then lowering it again. She did not seem to notice. Then, abruptly, she shivered and looked round at him.

  “I have been here before,” she said. She looked out at the temple once more.

  “And I shall come here again.”

  That after
noon, they stumbled across Zamyatin’s trail again.

  Leaving the lake behind them, they turned east towards Sining-fu.

  In spite of the risks, Christopher had decided to head for the town in order to obtain provisions and a guide to cross the Gobi: any other course of action would be suicide. A little before the Haddaulan Pass, they came upon a small encampment of black yak-hair tents.

  It was strangely quiet. No dogs rushed out to snarl and snap about their heels, as was normal at nomad camps. No smoke rose from a dung fire. No children squealed. Nothing moved. Christopher took his revolver from his belt and cocked it. Bandits were a common feature of life here. Bandits and sudden death.

  He saw the first body or what remained of it -just outside the nearest of the four tents. The vultures had picked it clean, leaving white bones and strips of tattered clothing. A black rifle one of the long, forked variety carried by all Tanguts and Mongols in the region lay near the bones.

  A second skeleton stood out stark and white against the earth a few yards away, and beside it a third, that of a child of perhaps five or six. The breeze played with the hair on their skulls, lifting and dropping it nervously. A thin cloud of dust blew forlornly between the silent tents and disappeared.

  There was a sudden flapping sound, loud and terrifying in the stillness. Christopher swung round and saw a single vulture lift itself up awkwardly from the ground and stumble into the air.

  There was an indistinct bundle of clothing where it had been feeding. The banquet had not yet ended. As at any meal, there were late arrivals.

  They found half a dozen skeletons outside the tents and almost twenty cadavers inside. The ones under cover had not been picked clean, and the cold Tibetan air had so far kept decomposition at bay. The bodies were mainly those of women and children, but several men lay among them. It was immediately apparent how they had died a single bullet, usually in the forehead or temple.

  Why would bandits have done this? Christopher wondered. Had China’s civil war spilled over into Amdo?

  The girl was hiding behind a large chest in the fourth tent. They found her by chance, when Christopher went to pick up a piece of cloth with which to cover one of the bodies. She was ten or eleven years old, shivering with cold, dirty, hungry, and terrified.