The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  Christopher leaned across the table.

  “For God’s sake, this isn’t a game of chess! Zamyatin thinks he can conquer Asia with this child. Don’t you see? Sense doesn’t enter into any of it. The stakes are too high.”

  “Then he’ll go to Urga. In that case, he’ll have to be bloody careful. Ungern’s busy killing everyone in sight: Russians, Jews, runaway Chinese. And now any White armies that are left in Siberia are moving south to join him. Kazagrandi is in Uliassutai;

  Kazantzev has taken Kobdo; Kaigorodov has been reported in Altai; and in the West Bakitch has joined up with Dutov and Annenkov. It’s a madhouse, Christopher. Ungern Sternberg believes he’s a reincarnation of the Mongolian god of war. He’s convinced half the population of the country of that fact. That means he’s answerable to no-one.”

  Winterpole paused to take a cigarette-box from his coat pocket.

  He opened it and offered a cigarette to Christopher.

  “No thank you.”

  Winterpole took one for himself and lit it.

  “So, you see,” he continued, ‘that with Ungern in control of Urga, neither Zamyatin nor Udinskii can risk heading there directly. So I think they’ll make for somewhere outside the city to dump the motor and Udinskii. That’ll leave Zamyatin free to do the rest of the journey with just the two boys for company.”

  Christopher felt a chill go through him. Wouldn’t it be even more convenient for the Russian to dump William as well?

  “Why are you here, Winterpole?”

  “To keep an eye on you, of course.”

  “That’s very touching. And I suppose you intend keeping an eye on Zamyatin as well, while you’re at it.”

  Winterpole blew out a thin jet of smoke.

  “Yes, of course. He has to be stopped. And you, I imagine, would still like to find your son. You’ve done very well so far, but it’s time to get a move on. I want to get to Urga before Zamyatin does.”

  “And exactly how do you propose to do that?”

  “The same way as Zamyatin. By motor car. I have one waiting at the Dao T’ai’s. I bought it from some Danes in Kalgan. It’s a Fiat, specially built for country like this. We can do the journey to Urga faster than Udinskii and his truck.”

  “And when we get there? What then?”

  “We sit tight and wait for Zamyatin to make his move. Ungern will co-operate with us. Zamyatin in exchange for your son. And the Tibetan boy, of course. Ungern’s position is precarious: a promise of British help isn’t something he can turn down. I’ll send him an official telegraph tomorrow, through the normal diplomatic channels. He’ll be told to expect us, to offer us protection.

  Zamyatin’s been outfoxed, Christopher. He’s walking straight into a trap.”

  Christopher looked at Winterpole as though he were far, far away. His dress, his cigarettes, his self-importance were all products of another world. He was a schemer, but he knew precious little of the world his schemes were made for.

  “I wouldn’t bank on it,” said Christopher.

  True to his word, Winterpole sent a telegram early the next morning. It was a complicated procedure the message had to be routed to Peking through Lanchow, then forwarded to Urga, where it would be received at Ungern Sternberg’s splendid new telegraph office. Even at the best of times, there were unavoidable delays, errors in transmission, and, as often as not, cut lines. And these were not the best of times not in China, not in Mongolia.

  If Winterpole had waited another day, he would have been told that the telegraph lines between Yenan and Peking had been cut by rebel troops and that his message would be delayed ‘indefinitely’. But less than an hour after dispatching the telegram, he was back with Christopher, urging that they be up and going.

  They sat in the downstairs room of the rest-house as before.

  “I’m not certain that I want to come with you,” said Christopher.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t trust you. Zamyatin doesn’t interest you. As you say, he’s walking into a trap. All you had to do was send your telegram to this man Ungern Sternberg and go home. But you want to go to Urga in person. You want the boy for yourself. You want to turn him to your advantage.”

  Winterpole took a white linen handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose carefully. With equal care, he folded the handkerchief as before and replaced it in his pocket.

  “To our advantage, Christopher.”

  “Not to mine.”

  “You want to find your son, don’t you? You want to take him home?”

  Christopher said nothing.

  “Yes, of course you do. Then come to Urga with me. And bring the Tibetan girl. You can’t leave her here.”

  Christopher guessed what Winterpole had in mind. With Chindamani on

  his side, he could hope to exert the necessary influence

  over Samdup. But he was right, of course. Christopher was not going to give UP his last chance to save William.

  “Who is von Ungern Sternberg?” Christopher asked.

  Winterpole shrugged.

  “That’s not an easy question to answer I’ve had men working on him for over a year now, and all I get are conflicting reports in triplicate. One for me, one for “C”, and one for some nameless clerk in archives who makes fifty more of them for half the files in Whitehall. But we still know next to nothing about him.”

  He halted, thinking, his expression serious.

  “What we do know, however .. .” He paused “Well, let’s just say it’s far from pleasant. Von Ungern Sternberg is what I believe the psychologists call a psychopath. He appears to have no notion of right and wrong.

  “But .. .” He paused again.

  “He is the man of the moment. The right man in the right place. God knows, we don’t always choose our friends well. But as often as not we have no choice.

  “Ungern is the sort of man who could only rise to the top at a time like this. He was bred for it; it’s in his blood and bad enough blood it is. His family are one of the four leading clans on the Baltic coast the Uxkulls, the Tiesenhausens, the Rosens, and the Ungern Sternbergs: “The Four of the Fist.”

  “The Ungerns are descended from an old line of Otsei knights who went on some sort of crusade against the Russians in the twelfth century.

  They made Riga their stronghold. A rough lot:

  always picking a fight with someone, always coming home with their pockets stuffed with loot. Bullies, pirates, raiders, robber barons: they made toughness into an art. And now the last of the line a madman who thinks he’s the Mongolian god of war and acts accordingly.”

  “How old a man is he?” asked Christopher.

  “About your age. He was born in 1887 He started out in the Russian

  navy graduated from the naval cadet school at St. Petersburg. But he

  doesn’t seem to have liked naval life a lot, in spite of having pirates

  for ancestors. Either that or the navy didn’t like him. Anyway, he

  resigned his commission, went east, and ended up with the Argun

  Cossacks in Transbaikalia. Had a great time, so they say falconing,

  duelling, hunting. But in the end,

  even the Cossacks chucked him out: too many brawls, too much insubordination.

  “After that he became a bandit for a while. Then the war broke out and he saw his chance for some action. He wrote to the Tzar personally, asking to be allowed to re-enlist. Back came the go ahead and off he went to join up with the Nerchinsk Cossacks under Wrangel. He wasn’t popular, though. By all accounts his fellow officers kept their distance. Still, Ungern could fight, there was never any question of that. He got all the decorations going, all the way up to the St. George’s Cross. He was so heavily decorated, they had to make him a major-general. Then the revolution broke out.”

  Winterpole paused and licked his lips. His fingers played idly with ivory mahjong tiles that had been left on the table, arranging them in little groups of two and three. They made tiny cl
icking sounds, faintly irritating.

  “As soon as Ungern saw which way the wind was blowing, he cleared off from the German front and made his way to Transbaikalia, where he joined up under Ataman Semenov. It wasn’t long before he was made a full general and put in charge of the region round Dauria.”

  Winterpole’s eyes had grown deeply serious. The small movements of his fingers ceased. The tiles sat untouched on the table.

  “I visited Dauria once,” he said.

  “Did you know that?”

  Christopher shook his head. Just a fraction.

  “It was in the winter of early 1920. Our troops had pulled out of Siberia. The White generals were finished. Kolchak, Wrangel, Kornilov: all dead or in exile. Only the Japanese had stayed behind, in Vladivostock. They were backing Semenov, sending him ar.-is and money and sweet promises of political recognition.

  “I was sent to visit him at his headquarters in Chita, to see if I could discover just where his loyalties lay. That was the easiest mission of my life. It took me no time at all to discover that Semenov was loyal to Semenov. And Semenov’s men were loyal to themselves.

  “I’ve never seen men more brutalized. Perhaps they thought they were already dead and had no more care to be human, I don’t know. They who red and gambled and drank not the way soldiers do on leave or before a battle, but constantly, feverishly. And the officers were worse than the men. More vicious, in the true sense.

  They didn’t just stick to beer or spirits. Most of the time, it was morphine or cocaine or opium. And they couldn’t stop killing. I think the drugs drove them to it. It had become a habit with them.

  No-one stopped them, no-one invoked penalties. They had become a law to themselves. They killed anyone they liked, it didn’t matter.

  As long as they didn’t kill one of their own kind, no-one would interfere.”

  He paused once more, and the fingers of one hand began again to play with a tile. His eyes seemed haunted by memories still not remote enough in time to have lost their shadows.

  “As you’re aware, the International Express from Siberia to Manchuria runs through Transbaikalia. I was taken for a journey along the railway, to see how Semenov was keeping communications open in the region under his control. The whole country along the Transbaikalian sector was dotted with what Semenov called his “Killing Stations”. People would be plucked off trains Jews, suspected Bolsheviks, commissars, rich merchants. They were taken straight to one of these stations. None of them ever returned to finish their journeys. If ever an enquiry were made, the official answer would always be:

  “Missing en route.” And in those days, who asked such questions anyway?”

  He hesitated briefly, then began again.

  “Once .. .” and here his eyes grew large with memory “Once I saw the strangest, most awful thing on the horizon. It seemed to go on forever: an endless line of trains, all jammed together. Miles of them, miles and miles of carriages and locomotives, all joined together like a giant serpent. A sea monster, but long enough to swallow a navy.

  “The first locomotive had run out of fuel and water and then frozen to the tracks. The metal had been soldered together by the cold. Then a second train had come up behind and tried to push the first, but without success. And it had frozen too. And all this time, no-one was getting word through about what was going on, so they kept on sending trains. Train after train.

  “We went up close. It was freezing, I remember; everything was frost, bleak white frost that lay hard on the metal of the trains, turning them white. They were full of bodies, the bodies of all the passengers who’d frozen to death there, afraid to leave the security of their compartments, not knowing what had happened, waiting for help to be sent out from Moscow. They told me that forty-five thousand people froze to death in those carriages. I don’t know if that’s true. But I saw a lot of bodies. All preserved, all beautifully preserved.”

  He stammered.

  “I ... I saw a beautiful woman in one carriage, dressed in sable, with frost clinging to her hair like lace. She hadn’t changed, not really. She’d grown pale as ice and stiff with frost, but her features were still perfect. Beautiful she’d become a sort of doll, white and sad and untouchable, like Pierrot in a mask. I wanted to break a window and go inside to look at her more closely. I wanted to kiss her, just to taste the ice on her lips. I thought I could thaw her, I thought my warmth could bring her back to life. She was so still, so very still.”

  He grew silent, lost in the pain of memory, walking alongside the frozen tracks of the Trans-Siberian Express, watching pale faces in the gathering dusk, and wooden cattle-trucks crammed with the dead.

  Christopher left him like that, brooding, and returned to the room upstairs. It would soon be time to leave. He had no choice.

  He had never had a choice.

  Mongolia

  They left later that morning. Chodron stayed in Sining-fu with the family who ran the rest-house in which they had lodged: the nemo had taken a fancy to her and, on hearing her story, expressed a wish to take her in. For her part, the child had been overjoyed: the excitement of Sining-fu, the first town of any size she had ever seen, and the luxury of living in a house instead of a tent were, for the moment, compensations of a sort for the losses she had sustained. She readily agreed to stay, and neither Chindamani nor Christopher could recommend a better solution.

  But Chindamani had found it hard to part from the little girl.

  Apart from her old nurse Sonam, she had never known female companionship; and Chodron’s loneliness had reminded her acutely of her own as a child. Perhaps the laws dictating that a child be taken from its parents at an early age merely to live out another phase in the cycle of incarnation were in their way as brutal as the violence that had made Chodron an orphan.

  The car was a sturdy little Fiat which Winterpole had obtained at a price from the Dao T’ai. It had been modified for the desert and used up until then by the Dao T’ai for brief hunting expeditions into the Gobi. There were enough cans of petrol for a journey to Siberia and back, water, food, and tents. Winterpole was to drive while Christopher navigated with the help of charts that came courtesy of the British Embassy in Peking.

  They skirted the eastern fringes of the Nan Shan mountains, travelling north from Sining-fu, then veering slightly east. Late that afternoon they passed through the Great Wall near Wuwei.

  Here, the Wall was little more than a symbol: low mud ramparts, broken and eroded by man and time alike. But for all the insignificance of mud and cracked stone, Christopher felt they had passed more than a token barrier.

  Once, they passed a long train of astonished camels For a moment, the air held a smell of spices, then they were past and the desert was all about them again. Ahead of them, the Ala Shan stretched out into a blue haze on the horizon. Beyond it, the Gobi proper shifted beneath a shimmering sun. Inside the car, it was unbearably hot.

  “You were telling me about Dauria,” Christopher reminded Winterpole.

  “About Ungern Sternberg and Dauria.” He was sitting in the rear with Chindamani, who had taken much coaxing to ride in the machine. She was still torn between terror and wonder at the speed with which the motor car travelled.

  Winterpole glanced up, like a man suddenly woken from a deep sleep.

  “Dauria? Why yes, of course. Dauria.” He looked out of the window, at the desert rushing past, at the sand piling up on all sides, pale and sterile.

  “I want you to understand what it was like, Christopher. I want you to know what you’ll be going into. Believe me, if I thought we had any choice, I’d see Ungern in hell before I made a deal with him. But it’s him or Zamyatin now.”

  He paused. Something was making him reluctant to say more about what he had seen.

  “I went there afterwards,” he said.

  “After I’d seen Semenov, I went to visit von Ungern Sternberg in Dauria. Semenov suggested it himself; he thought I might be impressed. I don’t know what he expected really. The
y didn’t understand us. Still don’t.

  “I arrived late one afternoon, just as the sun was setting. We came down into a vast plain through a narrow circle of sandy hills. The plain was devoid of life as far as we could see. Nothing grew, nothing moved there was just a collection of dirty huts, like a leper colony in the middle of nowhere. I’ve never felt so great a loss of the sense of place, of definition, boundaries. It was as though we were nowhere at all, as if we were at the centre of a great emptiness.

  “There was a little Russian church with a spire, more in the western than the Byzantine style. It might have been quite pretty once, I don’t know; but it had lost all its tiles and paint .. . and something else. Whatever it is that makes a church a church how can I explain? And down in the middle of the plain was Ungern’s headquarters. A small fortress built from red bricks. From where I first saw it, it looked very much like a slaughterhouse a slaughterhouse someone had daubed all over with blood. And there was wind blowing through it all, an empty sort of wind.”

  He paused briefly, seeing the red walls of Dauria again, hearing the empty wind whistle across the plain. Outside the car, the sands of the desert swayed past, faded, hazy, a waterless mirage shimmering in the late afternoon light.

  “That was where I first met Ungern. I won’t forget it. The way he looked at me when I walked in ... The way he waited for me.”

  He shuddered.

  “Ordinarily, I’d hit a man who looked at me like that. But I didn’t hit him. I knew better than that. I tried to stare him out, but .. . Anyway, you’ll meet him soon enough. Be very careful when you do. He can shift from complete affability to the purest sadism or rage in a matter of seconds. I saw it myself.

  “He always carries a sort of riding crop made of bamboo.

  Extremely thin and flexible, but with rough edges. One of his staff officers came in. A youngish man, probably not long out of military academy, but already showing marked signs of the dissipation I’d already seen in Chita. He reported something Ungern obviously didn’t like to hear. The baron flew into a rage and hit him full across the face with the cane. It cut the man’s cheek open, right along the bone. He almost fainted, but Ungern made him stand and finish his report. He was quivering with rage Ungern, I mean. But the second the boy left, he began talking to me as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. From what I know now, I suppose nothing had.”