The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  Since his presence seemed only to exacerbate the child’s terror, Christopher left her with Chindamani and went outside. Even in the clean air, a stench of death seemed to hang over everything.

  He wondered if his nostrils would ever be free of the smell.

  He found the remains of several ponies just beyond the tents.

  They had clearly been tethered together and most had died of hunger only a day or two earlier. One was still alive: he put it out of its misery with a single shot. When that was done, he walked away from the tents for a while.

  At the head of the valley, there was a cairn built from loosely piled flat slates. It was an obo, built to propitiate the local gods.

  Pieces of cloth fluttered from it, the offerings of travellers. The slates themselves were inscribed in Tibetan characters and propped against one another at all angles, with four laid flat across the top as a sort of roof. Christopher made out the man trie formula of om mam pad me hum inscribed again and again across the dark green stone. He had an urge to tear down the stones, to smash the obo and scatter the pieces. What use were gods if they slept?

  When he got back to the little camp, Chindamani had succeeded in calming the girl. She was still distressed, but outright terror had begun to give way to grief, an unstaunchable torrent that filled the tiny tent. This time, she did not react to Christopher, so he sat by Chindamani while she soothed and comforted the child.

  A little later, the girl fell into a heavy sleep, the first she had known for days. They decided it would be better for her if she did not waken in the camp or near it. Christopher lifted her carefully and put her on Pip, flat across the panniers the pony carried. A nomad child, she would be accustomed from birth to sleeping on the move.

  Before leaving, they brought the remaining corpses out of the tents and exposed them for the vultures. Chindamani recited prayers in a quiet voice, then they rode on before the girl should awaken and have her grief renewed or redoubled by the sight of the open burial.

  They spent that night in the broad valley just beyond the pass.

  The child woke briefly once. She ate a little, then returned to sleep.

  They took turns to stand guard over their tiny camp. It was a cold night, and the stars kept watch with them until dawn.

  In the morning, over breakfast, the girl told them what had happened. Her name was Chodron and she thought she was ten years old. The victims at the camp-site had been her family father, mother, brothers, sisters, grandmother and grandfather, two uncles, two aunts, and six cousins.

  Several days earlier Christopher guessed about a week a Mongol had come riding into their camp. He had been accompanied by two boys a Tangut or Tibetan and one that she said looked like Christopher. The boys wore fine clothes that had been caked in mud and dirt, but they looked unhappy. She had come out of her tent with her mother to see the strangers.

  The man had demanded a change of ponies, offering to exchange those on which he and the boys rode for better mounts, along with a sum in cash. Her uncle had refused the offer with the coming of spring, the men all needed their ponies and could ill afford to be left with two worn-out animals. In any case, the man’s manner had been brusque and peremptory, and she had sensed that her uncle had refused out of dislike for the stranger as much as anything.

  There had been angry words, she remembered, then someone had fired a shot. She could not be sure whether her uncle or the Mongol had fired first. But the stranger’s rapid-firing pistol had made light work of men armed with single-shot muskets.

  She could neither explain nor remember with any clarity the massacre that had followed; nor had Chindamani or Christopher any wish to make her relive those insane moments. Her mother had somehow contrived to hide her in the chest behind which they had found her hiding, and she had escaped the notice of the Mongol. There had been no room in the chest for her mother, no room for anyone but her.

  Christopher described Zamyatin to her, though he knew what her answer would be. She shivered and said it was the same man, no other. He asked about the boys, and she said they had seemed pale and unhappy, but unhurt.

  On the following day, they continued east towards Sining-fu. At Tsagan-tokko, a small village of clay houses, they enquired about Zamyatin. Neither he nor the boys had been seen there.

  They had just passed out of sight of the village when they heard the sound of hoofbeats behind them. A Mongol horseman came cantering towards them and drew up alongside. He was a big man, dressed in furs and equipped with a breech-loading rifle slung across his shoulders.

  “They tell me you are looking for a Burial riding with two boys,” he said.

  Christopher nodded.

  “I saw them five days ago,” the horseman said.

  “I was riding in the Tsun-ula, the mountains north of Koko-nor. We spoke briefly.

  I asked the man where they were headed.

  “We must be in Kanchow ten days from now,” he told me. When I asked him why, he said he had to meet someone there. That’s all. The Tibetan boy tried to say something to me, but the man told him to be quiet.”

  “Is it possible,” Christopher asked, ‘to make it to Kanchow that quickly? Won’t they have to go through the Nan-shan mountains?”

  The Mongol nodded.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But they can make it if there are no delays. All the passes are open.

  I told him the best route to take.”

  He shifted awkwardly in his saddle.

  “The Tibetan boy,” he said.

  “He was pale, frightened. I dreamed of him that night. He came to me smiling. He wore the robes of a buddha. There was light all round him.” He paused.

  “Who is he?”

  he asked.

  Chindamani answered in a low voice, with an authority Christopher had never heard in it before.

  “He is the Maidri Buddha,” she said.

  The horseman looked at her intently, but said nothing. Half a minute passed like that, then he smiled broadly, wheeled his horse round, and set off at a gallop in the direction of Tsagan-tokko.

  They crossed into China quietly on a long afternoon in April, like cattle thieves or scouts sent ahead by an invader, unseen, unsuspected, unchallenged. There was no true border here, no moment when one might say “This is Tibet’ and then, in an instant, “This is China’. Just a gradual shift, a change of tone, a series of dimly perceived modulations in the landscape and the faces. The nomadic world of Amdo began to fade, and in its place a new terrain slowly asserted itself: a world of valleys and high, fortified villages, of narrow gorges and fast waterways, of gilded temples, ornamental gates, and narrow, fluted pagodas that rose above dull walls of beaten clay.

  The people of the margins and the salt-lakes of the Tsaidam basin fur-clad and dirty and scarred by constant winds gradually made way for the inhabitants of the settled regions that lay within the confines of the Great Wall. Traders and artisans, peasant farmers and hong-merchants eager to return to Canton or Peking. The chief difference or so it seemed to Christopher lay in their eyes. The nomads and the men who came with the long camel-trains down from the Mongolian steppes or the regions beyond Urumchi had a far-away look:

  they saw vast distances and open horizons unencumbered by city walls a world that was never the same from one day to the next. But the Han Chinese of Kansu dwelt in a world of narrower horizons, and in their eyes Christopher could see the walls and doors and mental bars that hemmed them in.

  Mandarins with sallow faces and tired eyes, many still wearing their hair in the Manchu style, with long pigtails behind and their foreheads uncovered in front, rode past in the company of Hui Muslim soldiers on their way to Sining-fu and, beyond it, the provincial capital of Lanchow. But none of them challenged Christopher or his companions. To the casual eye, Christopher seemed of no interest merely a nomad who had travelled far with his wife and child for reasons that could be of no possible interest to Chinese officials. His face had grown dirty and his hair unkempt, a
nd all traces of foreignness had been burned out of him by the wind and ice and snow.

  Sining-fu received them with indifference. Three travellers more or less meant nothing to the town or its inhabitants. All along the top of the square wall that enclosed the city, soldiers walked on a narrow street, keeping watch over the countryside around and across the mosaic of roofs below, a jumble of red pan tiles and dragon arabesques. But no-one noticed the three newcomers among so many.

  They walked down the main street that lay through the centre of the town, passing on right and left they amens of local officialdom, small painted houses guarded by stone lions and dragons, each bearing a sign in Chinese lettering to indicate its function. At every step they were jostled by passers-by: Mongols leading hairy Bactrian camels as they went from shop to shop trading yak-hair or fur for pots and pans and kitchen knives; mules with huge blocks of Shansi coal; carts carrying Chinese girls in bright red coats, their hair well greased and their tiny feet crippled forever by a lifetime’s binding.

  In a side-street, near one of the large trading houses, they found a small deng where they could stay for the night. The inn was dirtier and more cramped than most, but it was out of the way and attracted the sort of clientele who knew better than to show too much interest in their fellow guests. They cajoled the nemo, a small, reserved woman in her mid-forties, to provide them with a room to themselves. She was reluctant at first, but Chodron seemed so tired and sad that she gave them the room for her sake.

  It was early evening by the time they settled down. The nemo provided food and a tripod brazier on which to cook it all at a price. Chodron fell asleep soon after they had eaten. Chindamani and Christopher stayed awake a little longer, talking. They would have made love, but with Chodron around they felt inhibited. At last they slept, in one another’s arms, not safe, but alone Christopher was wakened in the middle of the night by the sound of knocking on the door. At first he thought he had been mistaken, but the knock came again, a little louder this time.

  Chindamani stirred but did not waken.

  He got up and walked to the door. The wooden floor was cold against his bare feet. In the distance, someone coughed. And coughed and coughed again and fell silent, breathless. It was utterly dark.

  He opened the door and squinted. A man was standing in the doorway holding a lantern.

  The stranger’s arm got in the way of the light and cast a shadow over his face.

  “Yes?” said Christopher sleepily.

  “What do you want?” He spoke in Tibetan, hoping the man would understand.

  “Hello, Christopher,” said the stranger. The words were English, the voice icily familiar.

  The stranger moved his arm and the light fell on his face. Simon Winterpole had travelled a long way. But he had not changed a bit.

  Christopher stepped into the passage and closed the door behind him. Winterpole was dressed in European clothes, dapper as ever, a vision from a world Christopher had thought he had left behind for good.

  “Don’t stand there staring at me, Christopher. For God’s sake, I’m not a ghost.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Christopher.

  “I hadn’t .. . You’re the last person I expected to see. How on earth did you get here? How did you find me?”

  “Good Lord, you don’t imagine you’re invisible do you?” The light wobbled as Winterpole moved his arm, shadows scuttled with crab-like dexterity across his face.

  “You were seen near Lhasa a few weeks ago. After that, we had tabs kept on you all the way here. You wouldn’t believe the things we can do. I came up from Peking last week in order to be here when you came. I knew you’d have to pass through Sining-fu. You and I have things to talk about; things to do.”

  “You’re mistaken. We don’t have anything to talk about. Not any more.

  Enough is enough. I’m not working for you any longer.

  I’m not working for anyone.”

  “Don’t be tiresome, Christopher. We went through all this before. When I came up to Hexham. Surely you haven’t forgotten.”

  “No,” said Christoper in a tight voice.

  “I haven’t forgotten. I told you then I no longer belonged to you. You helped me get on the track of my son, and I’m grateful. But I came here to find him, that’s all. I don’t want you meddling in things that don’t concern you. Stay out of this, Winterpole. It has nothing to do with you.”

  Down the corridor, the coughing recommenced.

  “But I’m afraid it does,” Winterpole objected.

  “Listen, we can’t talk here. There’s a room we can use downstairs. Come and hear me out. I’ve travelled a long way to speak with you. Do me that favour. Please.”

  It was useless to resist, just as it had been useless that night in Hexham. The dark current that had reached out for him then surged beneath Christopher once more, drawing him out further into the depths of a cold and lightless ocean.

  The room to which Winterpole took Christopher was low ceilinged and lit by tallow candles. Two groups of four men sat at low tables playing mak-jong for small stakes. The small ivory tiles stood in neatly assembled ranks in front of each player wind tiles and dragon tiles, flower tiles and character tiles. A few other men were smoking opium through long-stemmed pipes tipped with old silver. The soft brown sap melted and bubbled as they applied hot coals held in long iron tongs. They glanced up as the two strangers entered, eyeing them with the air of men who live by suspicion.

  It took Winterpole less than a minute to clear the room of them.

  He had come equipped with a letter bearing the chop of Ma Ch’i, the Dao T’ai of Sining-fu, a Hui Muslim whose cousin, Ma Hungk’uei, was the warlord currently in control of Kansu province.

  Christopher knew that Winterpole was not above using his influence to have a man flogged or tortured or even beheaded if it suited his purpose. And tonight it might just suit.

  “I know you found Zamyatin,” Winterpole commenced once the door of the room had closed on them.

  “And I know about the Tibetan boy he is spiriting away to Urga.”

  “You knew before you sent me, didn’t you?” said Christopher.

  Winterpole nodded.

  “Yes. Not everything. But a little, yes. We had to be sure: our sources weren’t reliable. We thought it would be a mistake to tell you too much in case it made you look for the wrong things.

  “Of course, we probably wouldn’t have done anything much about the reports we had received if it hadn’t been for Zamyatin kidnapping your boy. I still don’t understand what the point of that was. Were you able to find out anything?”

  Christopher stared at him. Not “Did you find your son?” Not “Is he well?” But “Were you able to find out anything?” Information that was all that interested Winterpole. Anything else was superfluous.

  “Yes,” said Christopher, “I found out something.” But how could he begin to explain it to a man like Winterpole.

  “Well? What was he up to? How did your boy come into his schemes?”

  “As a pawn that’s all you need to know. William was part of a deal Zamyatin made. What he really wanted was the Tibetan boy.

  His name is Sarndup. Dorje Samdup Rinpoche.”

  “And who is he precisely? Some sort of incarnation, is he? Is that what Zamyatin’s up to?”

  “Yes.” Christopher signed.

  “The boy is the Maidari Buddha.

  That means he can be proclaimed ruler of Mongolia in place of the present Khutukhtu. That’s what Zamyatin’s gone to Mongolia for.

  To make the boy a god.”

  Winterpole was silent. He seemed to be weighing up what Christopher had told him, fitting it into some scheme of his own.

  “I see,” he said.

  “It all makes sense now. All we have to do is find Zamyatin.”

  “That’s easier said than done. I’ve lost them Zamyatin, William, Samdup. They’re half-way to Urga by now. Before anyone can catch up with them, Zamyatin will have a cordon of
Red soldiers round Samdup and a ringside ticket for the coronation in his own pocket.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on it.”

  “No? Listen. I lost them at Hadda-ulan, all three of them.

  Zamyatin had made a rendezvous with someone in Kanchow about three days ago. He’s well on his way to Urga by now. Or .” He hesitated.

  “Yes,” prompted Winterpole casually.

  “Or he’s on his way to Moscow.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” said Winterpole.

  “I’d already heard about Zamyatin’s rendezvous. He’s made contact with a man called Udinskii - a Russian and a fellow-Bolshevik who was until recently involved in the fur and wool trade at Urga He worked for a Danish-American company called Andersen and Myer Udinskii was waiting for him in Kanchow for over a month He’s to be Zamyatin’s courier to Urga. He has a motor-truck, a strong one capable of making the journey across the Gobi in a matter of days.

  They’ll be in Urga any day now, I expect. Or at least .. ‘ Winterpole paused, as though the well of his omniscience had suddenly dried up “At least?” repeated Christopher.

  “He’ll probably not try to go straight to the city. Things have changed in Mongolia since all this started. The Chinese have been pushed out. The man in charge now is a White Russian general called von Ungern Sternberg. Baron Roman von Ungern Sternberg, to be precise Now, there’s a mouthful for you.

  “Ungern was pushed out of Siberia last year by the Bolsheviks.

  He and his men were almost the last of the Whites. They made for Mongolia, picking up reinforcements on the way. At the start of February, they took control of Urga. Ungern rescued the Living Buddha from the Chinese and put him back on the throne. But the real ruler is Ungern himself.

  “So, you see, Zamyatm can’t just turn up in Urga, with or without some incarnation. Von Ungern Sternberg isn’t the sort of man to make a deal with the Bolsheviks. And Mongolia is turning into the sort of place sensible people steer clear of. If Zamyatin has any sense, he’ll go somewhere else. What do you think? Has he got any sense?”