‘When will he come?’
‘When the dance of Yidam Yamantaka is about to begin. First there will be some singing, then another dance, then more singing and then the dance of Yidam Yamantaka.’
Now, knowing what to look for, Theodore could indeed perceive that the crowd was thickest at the foot of the steps that zigzagged up to the two houses and the caves beyond. The sense of patient waiting, of adoration, of awe, struck him like a wave. All for this one man . . .
‘But when the child is born . . .’ he muttered.
‘He will be a child for many years,’ said the oracle-priest. ‘A Tulku does not come into his powers at once, so the Lama Amchi will guide him. And even when the child is a man . . .’
He gave a cynical little chuckle, and shrugged as if to show he was not a monk through and through, but had once been a yak-driver and seen other lands. It was a relief to hear him speak so, to share a moment of disbelief at the centre of this factory of appalling faiths. Perhaps Theodore’s feelings showed on his face, because the oracle-priest smiled and shook his head reprovingly.
‘The Lama Amchi is a truly spiritual person, and of great wisdom and power,’ he said. ‘And the child that is born will be the Tulku. Through my mouth the oracle spoke.’
‘How do you know?’ cried Theodore. ‘How do you know it isn’t all made up? You can’t remember anything you said!’
The oracle-priest looked at him for a moment with the same reproving smile and was just about to answer when a change came over him. He seemed to be having a fit. He shook. The smile became a snarl, and his coppery clear skin suffused red and purple, while the veins of his forehead swelled until they were like knotted roots of trees. He took one staggering pace towards Theodore and towered above him.
‘Go to your room, Theodore,’ he whispered. ‘Go to your room and wait.’
The voice was not human, a rasping sigh coming from a great distance, but it seemed to Theodore as he flinched back that the words were English. Once only in his life, when Theodore had offended, Father had used those exact words; and the voice, through all the distortion of distance, spoke with Father’s exact tone.
Theodore’s cringeing movement away from the swollen creature became a stagger and collapse as the shock struck him. He picked himself up and scuttled, cowering, until he collided with the back wall of the gallery. There he turned and ran, hunching his shoulders, not daring to look behind him; he twisted through a dark opening, scuttled down a corridor and out on to the gallery of a small courtyard, thronging with folk below him. Two more turns and he was lost. Yesterday he had known almost every winding of this maze, but suddenly all that knowledge was wiped away; his flight became like a journey in a dream, a panic rush through familiar country whose parts no longer fit together. He stopped at the entrance to another dark corridor and stood shaking his head, as though trying to clear the chaos from it, but all the time he heard the rasping whispered words. A monk glided out of the dark and spoke to him in Tibetan.
‘My room. My room,’ whispered Theodore.
He spoke in English, but the monk seemed to guess his need and took him gently by the elbow and guided him like a blind man through the maze until they reached a familiar gallery and a familiar door. At the touch of the latch Theodore’s wits came back to him, enough to make him mutter his thanks to his guide before darting through the door and heaving it shut. He drew a deep breath and turned to face Lung, but the room was empty.
Perhaps even in his terror Theodore had been unconsciously bracing himself to face his friend’s snarl of fury and rejection, and now, finding there was no need, he let a long sigh shake his body as that strand of tension slid away. The process did not stop, but ran on and on all through the web of fear, and self-pity, and self-distrust, loosing first the tautness of the morning’s nightmare and then ravelling on through ancient knots and cords that had shaped his nature.
The process was timeless, his whole life, two or three breaths drawn a pace inside the door. There had been a pool in the ravine in which Father baptized his converts. Out of a place like that Theodore stepped into the middle of the room, where he stretched and sighed, as if waking from a dream.
I am re-born, he thought. He said the words aloud.
‘I am re-born.’
Ideas came to him, fully shaped, not needing to be thought out but already solid in their rightness, things he could hold in his mind and inspect and accept like an object held in the hand. The words which the oracle had spoken had been Father’s, but they had not been spoken in anger. He had been sent back to this place to receive this blessing. The whole prodigious landscape centred on this point, this hidden room. Mountain, forest, meadow, the packed maze of the monastery, the Lama Amchi, Mrs Jones – they were all waiting for a birth, and perhaps it would come. But for Theodore it had happened now and here. If only he had had more faith he would have known it would be so – he too had been given signs, but he had failed to read them, confused by his own fears and longings, and the passions and expectations around him. Only a few days back, when he had given that vehement ‘yes’ to the Major’s question about the gods he had at once felt that it had meant much more than he could grasp; no wonder, since it had been a signal as sudden and strong as the kick Mrs Jones had felt from the child in her womb . . . He remembered the many times in the past weeks when he had been conscious of the hovering presence of the expected soul, the being for whom the peasants and the monks, Lama Amchi and Mrs Jones all waited. Perhaps it had been the weight of their longing which had made him aware of it; but all the time the soul had been his own. The birth had happened here.
Theodore didn’t for a moment think or hope or fear that he might himself be after all the Tulku of the Siddha Asara. That other birth might or might not happen, with results which those who longed for it might or might not expect. That was something else. But now, here, he was fiercely conscious of himself as Theodore, of the central numbness flooding with life, the broken roof rebuilt and the cold hearth glowing. He had heard Lama Amchi talk of those moments on the path to enlightenment when the soul seems to leave the body and soar free, and of the agony of its return to clogging flesh. Theodore felt the exact opposite. The return was the ecstasy. He was whole, and body and mind and soul sang at their healing.
He sat on the edge of his cot, staring at a patch of brilliant green and absorbing the greenness of it. There was no need to say prayers – it was better to sit with mind and soul spread out and relaxed, like a bather after a long swim who lies on a smooth rock and lets the sun dry him while its warmth purrs through nerve and muscle. Though he could have sat like that for hours, he felt the nature of his inner peace altering as his energies gathered to meet some as yet unknown need. The green patch stopped being only an embodiment of green and became a scroll-like leaf at the edge of a painting of the sacred lotus; the room took shape in detail so clear that to look at any object was to accept a blast of vision. He found himself staring at a few crumbs and a still-damp tea-stain on Lung’s cot, seeing them in a way that let him experience, without any pain but with total understanding, the depth of Lung’s desolation. Lung’s absence built itself into his vision, an emptiness as strong as if it had been a presence. With a shock of sadness he remembered that Lung needed help far more than he did. At the same moment he was aware of another absence. The hunched outline of the robe, pinned by Lung’s sword to the far wall, was no longer there. The sword had gone too.
His mind accepted the meaning of this with the same clarity as that with which his eyes were seeing. Lung was wearing the robe and carrying the sword. He had eaten that morning for the first time for three days, and as if it were a duty. He had driven Theodore from the room. Then he had disguised himself as a monk, and now he was walking through the maze of the monastery with his sword hidden beneath his robe. He was going to kill somebody. The Lama Amchi? Mrs Jones? Himself?