Incredibly the ritual repeated itself six times in all. Six times the chants began the pattern, and the people shouted, and the priest convulsed on his throne, threw off his attendants, seized a weapon from the altar, fought with invisible powers and was wrestled back to his throne. Theodore kept his mouth shut now, but he noticed Lung beside him yelling like a demon. He couldn’t see more than the side of Mrs Jones’s face, but she sat as still as the Lama Amchi and seemed to be smiling slightly, as though she was watching a play. The fights were not always the same. The next four times the priest stayed at the top of the steps, and once climbed on to the altar and made his fiercest lunges upward, as if battling with a giant; but there were enough repeated elements – particular strokes and charges by the priest and feints and scuttlings by the attendants – for Theodore to tell himself that the whole ritual had been rehearsed, and that was why nobody was really hurt. On the other hand there was no doubting the appalling effort that went into each fight. Even the spasms that shook the priest when he was sitting on his throne seemed as much as a man could endure just once, let alone six times.
Sometimes the monk with the slate wrote only a word or two, and once several lines.
When the sixth episode began Theodore knew it must be the last because there was only one weapon left on the altar, a stubby mace whose shaft twinkled with crusted jewels but whose head was a plain ball of spiked iron. This time, when the noise in the courtyard seemed enough to shake fresh avalanches from the mountains the priest came staggering round the altar and down the steps. The attendant in front of him ducked clear and he rushed straight at Mrs Jones, whirling up his mace as he came. She rose, calmly, as if to greet or confront him. He seemed to see her, a visible enemy for the first time, and halted with the mace poised two-handed above his head. She stood her ground, gazing up into his contorted face. The noise in the nearer part of the courtyard had snapped short at his rush, but there was still some shouting in the distance from people who couldn’t see what was happening. Theodore stood terrified as the mace hung there, but couldn’t move a muscle to help her. He heard a grunt and a threshing noise beside him and was aware of Lung struggling in the arms of two large monks. The priest gave a long, rattling groan as though something other than air was being forced or torn from his lungs. The mace fell with a clatter to the paving. He swayed, shrank, tottered. The attendants caught him as he collapsed and carried him back to the throne.
During the business with the slate, Mrs Jones stood quite still. Any flush was hidden under the layers of make-up. But Theodore could sense the excitement that throbbed through her. As the old monk came hobbling back to his place by the Lama Amchi’s chair the attendants picked the priest up, throne and all, and carried him back into the temple. The music began again, and then the chanting – solo, bells, responses – without any of the untamed yelling that had accompanied the performance by the oracle priest. Mrs Jones turned and spoke to Lung, who smiled and hung his head. She patted his hand and made motions to the two monks still holding him to let him go.
‘Dead brave he was, wasn’t he?’ she whispered to Theodore. ‘Stone me if I could of moved a finger . . . Hi, look at old Amchi rigging the vote!’
Theodore followed her glance and saw the group round the Lama Amchi’s chair – the monk with the slate and two other dignified old men – poring over the slate itself. The Lama Amchi was running a thin finger down the written lines, pausing here and there and tapping, as if to emphasize a point.
Theodore found he was shivering. Just as the throb of the big horns had seemed to set up the vibrations of the other instruments, so Theodore’s shudders felt like an echo of the violent convulsions that had shaken the priest. He tried to force his muscles still, but it was no use. He knew that he had not merely witnessed a pagan ceremony from the outside. He had taken part – he had been part of it. He had accepted the powers which had occupied the body of the priest. He stood, shivering, shaking his head, aware that Mrs Jones was watching him, until the group round the Lama Amchi’s throne broke up.
The monk with the slate moved up the steps. The Lama Amchi rose to his feet. The other two disappeared among the chanting ranks. The music swelled to a climax, then faded to a single voice, each monotone phrase followed by a thick drumbeat. Soon those sounds stopped too and the priest with the slate raised his arms for silence.
At first he chanted his words, like any priest following a known formula, but after a minute his voice changed to something nearer speech and as it did so the reaction of his audience also changed. Now he was telling them something they had not heard before, and they were listening with taut attention. Between each phrase he paused to let the twanging syllables echo off the further walls. First he would read from the slate, then look up and speak at greater length, as if expounding the meaning of what he had read, and then he would slip back for a sentence or two into the tone of prayer, and be answered by a short response from the monks. Theodore, calmer now, guessed that this would happen six times, and then Tomdzay or somebody would perhaps tell him what it all meant. He was quite unprepared for what happened as the final phrase ended.
The horns were still booming when the nearest monks broke from their ranks and rushed toward him. Theodore was dragged aside and almost fell among the crush of bodies. He heard Lung shouting angrily, some yards away. He stumbled backwards against something hard, the lowest of the temple steps, and scrambled up clear of the crowd. Once there he turned and looked out over the heads of the struggling mob.
Below him the monks were crowding to a focus like bees at swarm-time clustering round their queen. At the thickest centre of the mass a slow eruption began, an upwelling of arms with a dark object half-hidden among them. Jerkily it took shape as it separated itself from the jostle of russet robes and became a black, high-backed chair with carrying-poles at either side. The monks, a dozen to each pole, were holding it not shoulder-high but at arm’s length above their heads. At first its back was towards Theodore, but then it swung sideways like a boat at tide-change as the monks began to carry it through the press, and he could see Mrs Jones sitting up there, smoothing her skirt down with one hand and with the other tucking a loose whorl of hair back into place under the silly little hat. A low, baying hum rose all round the courtyard.
The crowd was too thick-packed for the monks to carry her through, so they passed her from hand to hand above their heads. The arms rose round her chair like waving wheat to take the load, or to touch chair or skirt, or simply to stretch towards her. Her face was stiff and calm, her back straight as a soldier’s. She came quite close to Theodore at the beginning of the wide sweep she was to move in, and even through her veil he imagined he could see the electric energies flashing from those huge eyes. The hand on her lap moved as if to begin a gesture, then stilled, so he guessed she had seen him, but she didn’t smile. They had that chair ready, he thought. They knew it was going to happen. They knew what the oracle would say.
As the crowd jostled to follow her the crush below the steps eased and Lung came panting up to stand beside Theodore. He looked pale, drained, furious. For a while he stared at the retreating chair where it bobbed and wallowed above the threshing arms, then he sighed and struck his fist into his palm.
‘She thinks there is nothing in the world that can out-face her,’ he muttered. ‘She does not understand what she has met today.’
13