The shrine was in good repair, a little, square wooden hut, with a pointy, tiled roof which ended in up-turned eaves, all painted gaudy red and green and streaked with bird-droppings. To the south-east lay the tumble of infolded forested hills through which they had journeyed; to the north-east, more hills, ringing a vast shadowy basin; and to the west the enormous wall of the Himalaya. For days these mountains had been retreating as the travellers had trudged towards them. Now, seen from this height, they had rushed in.
Theodore had forgotten about the little heathen shrine when he had decided to climb up here to pray; he chose a smooth patch of rock the other side of the single birch tree and knelt, closing his eyes and waiting for the last beating of his heart to quieten. Then, as always, he started with the Lord’s Prayer.
‘Our Father . . .’
He moved his lips through the familiar words and held his mind to their meaning, but they were still no more than words. He was talking to a white sky and a huge, clean, empty plateau, neither of which could hear him. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been born anew. The world was the same stale, mindless place in which Father had been murdered by the Boxers and the Settlement wiped out, and the old man in the forest had wailed over the body of his bandit son, shot by Mrs Jones . . .
I’m past praying for, ain’t I?
No words formed in Theodore’s mind, but for a moment while he was considering how to begin he sensed that somewhere in the unlistening emptiness around him a crack had opened and that his thought, his image of Mrs Jones, was being perceived and received. The feeling lasted only an instant, and then the blankness walled him round. For some time he tried to recapture the feeling, but it didn’t come again. He was about to return to the routine of familiar prayer when the silence was broken by a suppressed cough.
He opened his eyes and looked round. Mrs Jones was standing in front of the shrine with her binoculars in her hand.
‘Sorry to interrupt, young man,’ she said. ‘I hope you popped one in for me.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you don’t think I’m past praying for, then? Though I’m a wicked old woman in all conscience.’
She smiled at him teasingly, as though she pitied him and was thoroughly pleased with herself. A cooing note in her voice echoed the call of the dove that had woken him at dawn. Theodore felt he wanted to shake her, to shock her, to take water and soap and harsh flannel and scrub away the make-up that plastered her wrinkled skin; and at the same time he wanted her to smile at him without mockery, to speak as she had last night when she had seemed to need him for more than his ability to speak Miao and Mandarin and to manage a pack-horse. He looked away, but was still aware enough of the tension between them to know the moment when her stance changed and her plump and pliant body stiffened into concentration.
‘Come and look here,’ she said. ‘See if you can spot what I think I just seen.’
He moved across and took the heavy binoculars.
‘See that tall lump with the pines atop?’ she said. ‘Line up on that, so you can find it in the glasses. Right? Now go up from there . . .’
The binoculars seemed to make mist, faint layers of quivering grey which were not there to the naked eye. The image jumped at the slightest tremor in his hands . . . now, there, a little blurred in the mottled grey and fawn, spots of darker matter, clumped at the centre but with a few outliers on either side. Deer? The clump changed shape. An outlier moved inwards, and for a second the blur of distance sharpened and the spot was a man.
‘People,’ he said.
‘That’s what I make ’em. What are they carrying?’
‘Not much. Not coolie-poles.’
‘Then they ain’t traders. And you see how they ain’t all sticking to the one path? Only time I seen men moving like that – in Africa, mostly – was when they was following a trail. Tracker in the middle, main party following him, couple of blokes out each side case he misses where the trail jinks.’
‘Boxers? The men from the forest?’
‘Well, they might be hunting some kind of animal, but my guess is it’s us.’
‘You mean they still want to rob us?’
‘Well, they’ll take what we got, supposing they catch us. But it ain’t just that. There’s more blokes there than what we met in the forest – Uncle Sam’s gone back and got his tribe. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
‘Burning for burning, stripe for stripe, wounding for wounding,’ quoted Theodore. ‘But it says that if you don’t lie in wait for your enemy and God delivers him into your hand, then you are allowed to flee.’
‘Doubt if they’ve read that bit,’ said Mrs Jones drily as she took the binoculars back. ‘They’ll be here by dinner time. We better get started. You nip down and explain to old Lung, though you’ll have a job getting anything into his head this morning. He’s full of his poems!’
She laughed, apparently more amused by Lung’s behaviour than alarmed by the murderers on their trail. Even in the panic of the moment Theodore found this odd.
6
FLIGHT, BUT A strange exhilaration, like the flight of a wild bird freed from the hand. They breakfasted on horseback and rode all morning, stopping only to water and feed the horses at two of the strange little circular ponds that pocked the plateau almost as dramatically as the rock pillars, impenetrably deep below the mirror surface. At their midday halt by another of these ponds Mrs Jones made them fake a struggle. Lung and Theodore wrestled vigorously on a patch of softer ground, laughing between the grunts of effort. When they rose, still laughing, Theodore found he was filled with a sudden rush of affection and comradeship, something which he had never known in the God-centred community of the Settlement. It was as though the three of them were the only people in the world. They left a couple of empty cartridge-cases by the pool and one of Mrs Jones’s scarves, bloodied with Lung’s blood, half-hidden at its edge. They loosened two boulders and threw them in, hoping that their pursuers would see the fresh sockets and guess that the boulders had been used to weight something down. Then they rode on towards a hamlet marked on the map, the only real houses for fifty miles.
Well short of this place Theodore and Mrs Jones dismounted and walked south, choosing hard ground where they would leave no footprints, while Lung rode on into the hamlet with instructions to make a parade of guilt and haste, buy what provisions he could – feed for the horses was the most urgent – and leave the place heading north.
It was almost dusk when Lung came over the horizon. The sun, low over the mountains, threw stilted shadows from the weary horses. Mrs Jones put four fingers into her mouth and produced a screeching whistle. He waved a triumphant arm and headed towards them.
‘All fine,’ he called, almost before he was in ear-shot. ‘I find Chinese trader-man. He think I rob you, kill you. I tell him going north. Find old river – no water, all rock. Ride long way. Then come round. Trader say men in village Red Lolo, men in forest Black Lolo. Black Lolo enemies with Red Lolo.’
‘Sounds promising,’ said Mrs Jones, spreading out P’iu-Chun’s map on a jut of the rock pillar they had chosen for a rendezvous. ‘Now see here. The track we been following gets up into the mountains through this pass here, but down south here, by the river – looks like it runs through a gorge all the way – there’s this other little path he marked . . .’
‘Very poor road,’ said Lung, reading the exquisite characters at the edge of the map. ‘Bad bridge. Very difficult mountains.’
‘The worse the better, far as we’re concerned, ’cause them brigands won’t imagine us trying it. Bit of luck they’ll think you done me in and shoved me in that pool, and then they’ll pack it in, ’cause it was me they was after.’