‘So that’s it!’ said Mrs Jones with a teasing chuckle. ‘What do you make of that, Theo? I ’spect you’re glad you’re not some kind of incarnation, ain’t you?’
‘Of course I’m not!’ said Theodore in a spitting whisper. ‘It’s . . . it’s rubbish!’
He surprised himself with his own fury. The calm of the Lama’s voice, and Theodore’s tiredness, and the complexity of turning one language into another, had softened and somehow made remote the actual meaning of what was being said. Fear and repugnance shook him now in the silence. And it wasn’t any use saying it was superstition, to be pitied and disregarded, because the Lama Amchi was what he was, neither pitiful nor stupid, but a man of intelligence and authority. You would need an inner power equal to his own to argue with him, and Theodore felt now that you might never reach the limits of that power. How had he known at once that Theodore wasn’t Chinese when in the past many Chinese had been mistaken about that? How had he caused the bandit with the pistol to miss him at point blank range? How did he keep his body so unnaturally warm in the Himalayan night?
Mrs Jones chuckled again.
‘Wonder what he’ll think of now?’ she said. ‘He can’t go back like this, can he? Must of been a disappointment for him when he seen how set you were on your Bible-reading.’
She was interrupted by a movement. In the moonlight Theodore saw the Lama lean forward from the waist and reach out a thin arm to touch her wrist.
‘I sense more lives than our three,’ he said, in that remote and dreamy-seeming voice with which Theodore had first heard him speak. ‘The woman carries a child in her womb. He must be the one I seek.’
Theodore hesitated. Flushing with embarrassment in the dark he stammered the translation. Mrs Jones drew in her breath sharply and let it slowly out.
‘Lord, I hope not,’ she whispered. ‘I been beginning to wonder. How on earth did the old geezer know?’
‘We will go to Dong Pe and ask the oracle,’ said the Lama.
10
AT NOON NEXT day they halted among the snows on the highest pass they had yet tried to cross. Theodore had lost all sense of direction among the intertwining mountains, though the position of the sun seemed to say that three days ago they had been heading south and now they were going north again.
‘We done a detour,’ explained Mrs Jones. ‘He went out of his way south, so as the old holy man at Daparang could have a dekko at you, and now he’s taking a short cut north, save time, instead of going the whole way back and round.’
They had halted not for the noon rest – the thin icy air made stillness seem half way to death – but because a wall of snow had slid down from the peak on the right and was lying, twenty feet high in some places, across the narrows of the pass. Two of the escort were stamping and digging a narrow passage at the lowest part, but they hadn’t gone more than a few feet in when the wall of the passage collapsed on them and they had to be dug out; the hindmost man emerged laughing, as though being buried alive was a splendid joke, but the leader took longer to rescue and therefore longer to see the humour of it.
Meanwhile three of the escort had been expostulating with the Lama, clearly from their gestures saying it would be better to go back. He listened to them without a word, then turned away and moved along the obstacle, wading knee-deep through loose drift. He stopped and stood with slowly nodding head by a place in the wall that looked no better than the first they had tried. The escort, grumbling and unwilling, started to hack and dig and stamp again until they were out of sight. This time they wore ropes round their waists in case of another collapse. Lung was holding Albert’s head while Mrs Jones cleared a ball of snow from his hoof. Sir Nigel, unloaded and swathed in blankets hung his head and gasped at the useless air.
Suddenly there was an excited cry and the escort started to lead the yaks into the gap. Theodore followed in his turn, leading Bessie, and found that at the point which the Lama had chosen, the ground on the far side fell sharply away and most of the thickness of the snow wall had spilt down it. Now the escort were stamping a ledge back along to the path, which dropped precipitously down through snow-fields to another of the lushly forested valleys that threaded among the peaks.
They had not reached the trees when they heard from above and behind them a long, slow grumbling roar; the air quivered with shock-waves below the threshold of hearing, and lesser roars followed as snows loosened by the first vibrations slid and settled. The escort broke into mutters, which seemed centred as much on the Lama as on the noise in the mountains.
‘Avalanche,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I bet his Reverence has managed to make ’em think it come just where we was standing. He’s a sly old geezer, ain’t he?’
‘He was right about where to make the path,’ said Theodore over his shoulder.
‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘But you mustn’t go thinking that proves he’s right about everything else.’
There was a note in her voice which made him look round to where she was leading Albert down the path. Even through the dimness of the veil he saw one large eye wink.
‘Are you sure?’ he cried.
‘Course I ain’t,’ she snapped, suddenly angry. ‘And watch where you’re walking. And keep your voice down.’
Theodore turned his head and trudged on, confused. The night before, on their way down from their interview with the Lama, she had suddenly said, ‘I’m not telling old Lung till I know for certain, one way or the other. I don’t want him puppying round, all anxious, right? And that means you’ll have to ask His Reverence not to mention it in front of him – don’t tell him why – perhaps he won’t fancy the kid having a Chinese Daddy. Just let him think I don’t want Lung to know ’cause I’m a bit ashamed, like.’ No doubt that accounted for her asking Theodore to keep his voice down now, but not for the violent shift of tone. She had sung most of the time on their way up to the pass, until the air became too thin for wasted breath, but between whiles Theodore had noticed her riding or walking with an unaccustomed slouch, as if deep in thought.
He was confused at a deeper level too. Obviously it would be best if there were no child – an infant conceived in sin, born out of wedlock and doomed to be reared in an idolatrous creed . . . but Theodore had slept uneasily, and in the timeless slithering intervals when he was neither awake nor asleep he had been conscious that somebody or something was standing at the top of the ladder outside the upper room in the farm, waiting to be let in. Sometimes he thought it was the Lama Amchi, come down from the hillside; once he had been certain that it was Father, alive and safe; but several times it had been a vaguer being, a bodiless cloud, the soul of the unborn Tulku. Theodore had even dreamed that he had slid out of his cot and opened the door and found nothing there but the starlit mountains – and then he would be awake in his blankets, raging with fleas and knowing he had never opened the door at all. Of course it was only dreams, but the memory was still strong as he picked his way down the tilt of the track towards the cedar-scented woods.
They slept that night in a village in the valley, where the villagers held an impromptu festival to celebrate the Lama’s presence. It seemed that the expedition was now returning to territory where he was well known and revered. Next day they climbed a good broad track up the far side of the valley and came to a wide plateau, ringed with ridged peaks, quite barren and without even snow to vary the deadness. For two hours the track wound north across this desert and all the time the peaks funnelled in until, about the middle of the afternoon, they crossed a slight ridge and looked down on an extraordinary bowl or plain. It was four or five miles across, almost circular, reaching on this side to the foot of the ridge where they stood, rimmed to left and right with cliffs which were really the beginnings of the peaks, and on the far side apparently ending with a steepish slope of bare ground which rose to a horizon between the flanking mountains. The floor of the plain was made entirely of close-packed rounded boulders, some as small as a clenched fist and others large as a hay-bale, but all lying so level that from the distance they looked like dark grey water, made opaque by the ruffling of a breeze.