The Ninth Buddha

by Daniel Easterman

  Winterpole looked out of the window to his left. In the west, the sun was setting, blood-red in a haze of sand. Behind them, the dust laid a long plume across the desert.

  “Something else happened while I was there,” he went on.

  “They brought in an old man, a Jew. His son had been executed on Ungern’s orders the day before, for no reason I was able to ascertain.

  The old man had come to ask for the body. That’s all. He wanted to give his son a Jewish burial, not leave him to be eaten by the dogs the way they do in those parts. He made no complaint. He didn’t criticize. But whether it was his face or his manner or his being Jewish or something else, he infuriated the baron.

  “Ungern called two of his aides and had them take the old man outside. He told me to come out and watch, to see how he punished traitors. I saw I would have to obey: being a foreigner was no guarantee of immunity there.

  “They took the old man and put him in a tall wooden box. There was a hole in the side of it, and they had the old man put his arm through it. It was freezing, well below zero: we were all dressed in warm furs, but it still felt cold, bitterly cold.

  “They tied the old man’s arm so he couldn’t get it back inside the box. Then they poured water over it until it was soaking. It didn’t take long to freeze. Three hours later, they came back. The arm had frozen solid, like a lump of ice. Ungern just walked up and snapped it off. I watched him do it. As if he were snapping off a rotten twig. It made a cracking sound, like an old branch. It didn’t even bleed.”

  He paused. It was growing dark suddenly. He switched on the headlights of the car, long white cones that stabbed into the darkness far ahead, catching insects in their beams, creating narrow worlds in which small creatures stirred for brief moments before being swept away again into the blackness.

  “The old man died, of course. He died that night in great pain, and by morning the dogs had eaten what was left of him, along with his son.”

  Winterpole looked up. All the aplomb, all the casual affectation had drained away to leave him empty and bereft, like a shell far away from the heart of the sea.

  “So now you know,” he said.

  “Now you know who we’re dealing with. Who our friends are.” His eyes filled with a sense of horror.

  “He’s all we have here, Christopher. He’s all that stands between us and the Bolsheviks.”

  There was silence. The car drove on through the dark waste, a brightly lit warning of times yet to come. The desert was coming awake. Between them, Winterpole and Ungern Sternberg and Zamyatin would bring the benefits of their cold civilization into the wilderness. If it did not blossom, they would not despair: they had time: they would water it with blood.

  “Do we need friends like that?” asked Christopher. He failed to see the necessity. He failed to understand how such a frail barrier could stand between two philosophies.

  “It’s hard for you to understand, Christopher. You weren’t in Europe during the war. You didn’t see what we did to one another.

  We lost our heads. We became animals. When the war ended, it was the general opinion that the beastliness had ended with it. As if that could ever be.

  “The war to end wars” that’s what we called it. But how can war end?

  It’s part of us, it’s in our blood.

  “If the Bolsheviks spread their creed any further, there’ll be another war, one worse than the last. My job is to prevent that, at any cost. Our people back home have just won a war, and peace has never seemed so good to them. They want it to go on forever:

  poppies in the fields, photographs of Uncle Arthur wearing his medals on the mantelpiece, the flag unfurling day after day in a stiff breeze, the home fires burning all winter long. And I’m afraid for them. They’re about to be overtaken by Zamyatin and History, and they don’t even know it. That’s why Ungern Sternberg is necessary. Regrettable, but necessary, I assure you.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “He won’t last long, don’t worry. Men like him serve a purpose in times like these. He cleared the Chinese out of the way and did a good job of it. There would have been an incident if we’d done the same Diplomatic rows. Reparations.

  “He’ll hold off the Bolsheviks until we can organize something better, something more permanent. Then we’ll put our own man on the throne in his place. The Tibetan boy, perhaps. We’ll supply arms and advisers, monetary reserves. We’ll put up telegraphs and open banks and start trade flowing. It’ll all work out in the end you’ll see. Believe me, people in very high places have discussed this thing. Very high places indeed. Discussed it inside and out.

  It’s for the best. You’ll see. All for the best.”

  The roaring of the engines filled the world. In front, the darkness was forced aside only to fall in again behind them, thick and unappeased.

  Chindamani turned and spoke to Christopher.

  “It’s like magic,” she said.

  “Lamps that can turn the darkness to daylight. Boxes that can run faster than wind-stallions. You never told me about any of this, that your people could do such wonderful things.”

  “No,” said Christopher, staring into the darkness.

  “I didn’t tell you. Everything we do is magic. One day we’ll turn the whole world into fairyland. Wait and see.”

  They halted that night in the centre of a vast depression one hundred and eighty miles north of Sining-fu. A large moon gave them light out of a cloistered sky, turning the sand to silver and the hollow in which they rested to a giant, polished bowl. Without the sun, the sands had given up their heat. They lit a fire with charcoal bought in Sining-fu and ate in silence, shivering.

  Christopher was unable to explain his worries properly to Chindamani. He told her they would be in Urga in a matter of days. Brought up to believe in miracles, and entranced by the magical pulse of the motor vehicle that had already carried her so far into this ice less and snowless land, she believed him.

  He told her what he knew of Ungern Sternberg, not to frighten, but to warn her. He said the Russian had kept a pack of wolves in Dauria so Winterpole had told him and that he had fed his victims to them on occasion. But she had never seen a wolf or even heard one calling in the stillness of the night, and thought he was telling her tales like those she had once delighted Samdup with in his lab rang when winter was at its height.

  She missed the boy terribly and was afraid for him, the more so now that the distance between them was growing shorter every day. Some superstitious fear had been aroused in her that she might somehow cayse his death. More realistically, she had seen what Zamyatin was capable of, that the killing of children was not beyond the bounds of possibility for such a man.

  Her relationship with Christopher gave her growing cause for uncertainty. She had found she loved him in ways that constantly surprised and delighted her. His eyes, his hands, the foreign roughness of his beard, the odd ways he used Tibetan words, the tenderness of his fingers, the lightness of his breath against her wet skin all filled her at different times with alien and undefinable pleasure and a simple contentment at being with him. When she shared his bed, she experienced an intensity of joy that nothing in her experience had prepared her for. She had always regarded sensual pleasure as a thing reserved for ordinary mortals or for gods: since she was neither, it had been remote from her until now.

  For the first time, she understood the meaning of temptation: its power, its subtlety, its intimacy. She would have given lifetimes to have him enter her just one more time or to feel his lips on her breasts or even merely to lie naked with him in the darkness. On their first night in the desert, he came to her urgently, with a desperation she had never known in him before. At the moment when she felt him enter her, she understood something vital: love did not diminish. It increased daily until nothing could contain it except itself.

  And she wondered again how she would manage when the moment came for her to leave him and go back to the shadows where she belonged.

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nbsp; It took them another two days to complete the crossing of the Gobi and a low range of mountains just beyond. The car broke down five times, and each time Winterpole swore it was the end. But he cursed and tinkered, tinkered and cursed until something happened, the car bowed to the inevitable, and they were on their way again. Christopher was astonished by this display of manual dexterity in a man of Winterpole’s apparent indolence. Cars, it appeared, were Winterpole’s passion. He said he preferred them to people, and Christopher believed him.

  At last the desert was behind them and they were driving on the open plains. Grass stretched ahead of them as far as the eye could see. This was nomad country, a world of white felt yurts and prancing horses, of gently sloping meadows and winding streams where vast herds of sheep and goats and cows grazed in a tranquil silence. They passed a small herd of white horses wearing talismans wrapped in bags of felt across their broad chests sacred animals belonging to a nearby monastery. Dogs rushed out to bark at the car as they passed small encampments, then they were out of reach, gliding into the blue horizon in top gear. Their spirits lifted.

  “Urga’s only about one hundred and fifty miles away now,” said Winterpole.

  “We’ll be there tomorrow with any luck.”

  That afternoon, they came upon masses of purple and white pasque-flowers in a vast expanse of waving grass. Suddenly, winter seemed impossibly far away, and the deep snows of Tibet nothing but a mirage. Wherever they looked, a coloured carpet stretched to the horizon. At Christopher’s request, Winterpole stopped the car and they got out.

  He watched as Chindamani bent down in wonder and cupped her hands about the head of a purple flower.

  “Smell it,” he said.

  But the smell was already everywhere, filling the air all about them, rich and strange and unbearably fragrant, like a woman’s perfume, warmed by the bright sun.

  “I told you there were flowers in Mongolia,” she whispered. A thin breeze came down from the north and lifted her hair. The grass and the pasque-flowers waved: it was a great ocean, shoreless and moving to unseen music.

  “Are they worth your coming here?” he asked.

  She stood up and smiled, ravished by the sight of so much greenery. It was ordinary to him, just a meadow filled with flowers.

  But to her it was the world turned upside down.

  She laughed suddenly and began to run, weaving among the scattered flowers like a child on its first picnic. Christopher tried to picture her at home in Northumberland, in an English summer, running down to the river at Carfax across trim, delicate lawns:

  but her moving form called for something else, something that would tear that prim and tidy world to pieces.

  Suddenly she stopped running. She did not scream or cry out, but Christopher knew at once that something was wrong, badly wrong. She was standing stock-still, her body rigid, her hands clenched, staring at something just out of his range of vision.

  “Stay here,” Chru top her ordered Winterpole, taking command at once.

  “Get your revolver from the car. It may be nothing, but we can’t afford to take chances. Keep the engine running.”

  He ran towards her, praying she was all right, that it was only something startling she had seen, something unexpected, like a running fawn. But her silence alarmed him more than a cry or call for help would have done.

  He could not make out what the objects were at first. Chindamani was standing at the top of a gentle slope that ran down towards a small river. In either direction, as far as the eye could see, the slope was covered by round objects that looked at first sight like the stems of plants topped by gourds or small melons.

  But as he drew alongside Chindamani, he saw what she saw.

  Stakes had been cut from a nearby forest and planted all along the banks of the river and as high as the slopes on either side. On each stake, like a grotesque offering of some sort, a human head had been impaled.

  Christopher guessed the heads had been there for perhaps a month. Some were little more than bone, others had shrivelled like the heads of mummies, parched and old and leathery. On several, he could see the caps of Chinese soldiers. It was impossible to guess how many there were. He imagined them stretching on for mile after mile until the river reached the sea. As it was, he could not see the end of them, whichever way he looked.

  He took Chindamani by the shoulders and led her away from the river. As they turned, his eyes caught sight of a stake at the top of the slope. It was one of several to which a board had been nailed. Christopher went across and examined it.

  It bore writing in Chinese and Russian characters. He read the

  Russian, but it made no sense to him:

  One hundred and thirty days yet and it is finished. I am Death. I am the Destroyer of Worlds. Roman van Ungem Sternberg.

  He recognized the last two sentences as quotations from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad Gita. But the first sentence remained mysterious. It read like something from the Apocalypse.

  But he was sure he had never read it in St. John’s Revelation.

  He looked back again at the grim trophies, at the tokens of Ungern’s carnage. Then he glanced at the river. It was peaceful and unsullied now, free of its winter ice and flowing once more to the sea. But he imagined it a month ago, filled with the headless corpses of ten thousand Chinese soldiers slaughtered by von Ungern Sternberg and his men.

  The Saviour of Mongolia had come at last and was at work among men.

  They heard the first shots about an hour before sunset. It was the day after their discovery of the field of heads. Each time they passed by clumps of flowers after that, Chindamani turned her face away.

  “O Rose, thou art sick,” Christopher whispered beneath his breath; but the worm that had entered the bud of Chindamani’s life was far from invisible.

  “Stop the car!” he cried. Another shot rang out, somewhere in the distance, carried to them by a slight echo.

  Winterpole braked hard, slewing the car round on its tracks, and killed the engine. A profound silence rushed into the world.

  Somewhere a bird sang, a quirky, warbling note. Then there was a sharp crack, followed by a second, then silence again.

  “What the devil’s going on?” demanded Winterpole.

  “Shut up,” said Christopher. He was trying to guess the direction from which the shots had come. They were gunshots, he could not have mistaken them.

  Two more reports sounded nearby. There was something careful, something methodical about the shooting that Christopher did not like. It was not the seasons for woodcocks, and Mongols did not hunt birds with guns.

  “Winterpole,” he said, ‘stay in the car with Chindamani. Keep your pistol ready and use it if you have to if anyone comes, frighten him off. Even if he looks harmless. We can’t afford to take chances. I’m going to check out those shots.”

  “Why don’t we just drive on?” queried Winterpole.

  “Drive on into what?” Christopher retorted.

  “Before I go any further, I want to know just what they ‘re shooting out there birds or people. I doubt very much if it’s the first, and if it’s the second I want to know who’s doing the shooting and who’s being shot at.

  I’m relying on you to keep Chindamani safe. You’re a man of action now, Winterpole. It’s time you got your lily-white hands a little dirty.”

  “At least call me Simon, old boy. Do me that courtesy.”

  Christopher said nothing. He reached down and found his pistol, the one he had brought from Dorje-la, Tsarong Rinpoche’s pistol.

  They had been driving along the edge of a vast pine forest, which lay to their right. Christopher was sure the shots had come from there. His suspicion was confirmed when another two rang out in quick succession as he got out of the car. Making allowance for the trees, he guessed they had come from a spot about half a mile away.

  “Be careful, Ka-ris To-feh,” Chindamani said in her quietest voice, addressing herself to him alone, in their private
universe.

  “I’m frightened for you please take care.”

  He bent and kissed her cheek.

  The trees swallowed him up instantly. He was like a diver entering the sea, plunging out of the sunshine into a green world fingered by narrow shafts of broken light that struggled past murky shadows. His footsteps died away into a thick carpet of pine needles.

  Everywhere, fallen cones lay in profusion. Silence reigned like a mad king over an unpeopled kingdom, determined and murderous, eager to lay waste. His breathing was the only sound, raw and melancholy, vexed by the heavy scent of pine resin and dead undergrowth. If there were birds here, they were hidden away, voiceless and wingless, watching from secret branches. If there were other animals, they licked their teeth in dark burrows deep beneath the earth.

  The forest went on, breeding itself with a green intensity on every side. He was enveloped in a lacework of boughs and low hanging branches. He cocked his pistol nervously. This must be near the spot from which the shots had come.

  Nearby, a man’s voice sounded, barking out what seemed to be words of command. A brief silence followed, then two more shots shook the trees. He thought they came from a clump of trees to his left. A murmur of voices came indistinctly from that direction, but he could not make out what they were saying, or even what language they spoke.

  He slipped into the close-set thicket and made for the voices.

  The trees concealed him but they also concealed whoever was responsible for the shooting. Perhaps it was rabbits. Perhaps they were shooting rabbits. But nothing ran through the undergrowth.

  If he had been a rabbit, Christopher might have bolted at the next shot and run straight into the clearing. But he froze and pressed himself against the trunk of a tree. Out in the clearing just beyond where he stood, night was being summoned into the world.