The Lotus and the Wind (31 page)

He said, ‘I must go up the mountain the other side.’ He waved his hand behind him. The tent door faced the stream, but she had examined the other side of the valley while waiting for him to come, and she remembered what she had seen. The pines climbed up from the camp site until, after several thousand feet, they died away, and the eye, climbing on, passed over a desolate square mile of scree where cloud shadows moved in procession across tumbled rocks. Above again, wisps of cloud wandered along the distant, set-back Crestline. She thought, Above the trees there will be small mosses pushing through between the stones; alpine flowers stippling a wilderness of grey and black with pinpoints of colour; the mist will embrace the climber in dank arms, then release him suddenly and set him on a platform where the view stretches for ever; the sun will shine a minute, then an icy breath will bring the cloud, and the sun will hide. She must go up and experience all these things for herself. She said, ‘I’ll be strong enough to come with you to-morrow, I hope. Won’t you fish to-day?’

‘I must go up. I’m going to paint. I’m sorry. We’ll go together to-morrow, though.’

He wiped his mouth, left the table, and went to collect his painting kit. Two minutes later he came back to say he was off. Canvases and miniature palette were slung across his back. In a hollow metal cylinder at his side he carried paints, brushes, and charcoal. He kissed her hand, looked carefully at the nails in his boot soles, and began to climb up through the pines. Soon she could not see him.

She fed the twins and after that took her rod and walked slowly down to the stream. She began listlessly to cast the pool a hundred yards above the camp. One of the coolies followed her, appointing himself the carrier of her creel and gaff, but she could not talk to him. What could he answer if she said to him, ‘There is a Russian woman, beyond those mountains somewhere, who is my ally. How can I tell her that I am her friend, that I pray for her and for myself?’ She had not managed even to tell Jagbir, before leaving Srinagar, that she was on his side.

She had not been fishing for half an hour when, looking around, she saw movement on the trail beyond the camp. There was a little pass where she had stood and watched the men putting up the tents. She peered under her hand, thinking for a moment it might be Robin, but of course it wasn’t. It was a horseman whom she saw breasting the slope, and behind him another. Other horsemen followed the first two. She did not count them but watched while they passed above the camp, disappeared into a re-entrant, and reappeared higher up the hill. At last the pines and the convolutions of the valley hid them, and she turned again to her fishing. She must remember to tell Robin about them and ask him who they could be. One or two of them had guns on their backs, which had made her think for a moment that they must be a detachment of Kashmir Cavalry, but she had dismissed that idea at once because they weren’t wearing uniform and because, apart from the men with the guns, the riders were slung about with sacks and baskets, as were most of the horses. Besides, there were women among them. They had made an odd, silent little procession as they passed north. She would like to know who they were and where they were going.

She was glad when ayah brought the twins down to the river and squatted at her side. She did not protest when ayah brought out an old stub of one of Robin’s cheroots and began to suck noisily on it, though she had told her often enough not to smoke near the babies. Ayah said, ‘Baba log like noise of water, sleep well, memsahib.’ Anne nodded and tried to concentrate on the fishing, but found herself glancing continually at the hill behind her.

The sun sank below the mountain crest, and suddenly it was cold. She packed up the rod and returned to the camp.

The dusk came, and the small sounds of day faded--the sounds that are not heard individually but by their mass nevertheless deaden other noises. So when it was dark the river roared louder, and the wind droned in the pines, and the men spoke more softly. She held up dinner for an hour, but then she had to eat because she was hungry and the babies were crying. When she was alone at last her mind leaped back to something Rupert Hayling had said on one of those hunting mornings--’He’s not so sure as you are. . . . He might bring himself to some harm.’ Robin hadn’t taken a gun with him up the mountains. But on the mountain were crags and cliffs and precipices. The terrors of doubt might drive him to the edge. She saw pictures that were darkly lighted but chillingly exact. He lay dead at the base of a cliff. Blood ran from his head. It was dark and steep, and the searchers could not see him, so he lay there for ever. It began to snow.

She jumped up, shouting, ‘Alif! Alif!’--and when he came, ‘The sahib--we must go and find him.’

The bearer clucked soothingly. ‘It is a steep hill, but the sahib is a good man on the mountains, almost as good as a Pathan. Do not fear. I will collect the coolies, and if he is not back in half an hour we will go with lanterns and look for him.’

She heard the mutter and bustle of their preparations and tried to sit still until the half-hour was up. With five minutes to go she heard shouts, and Robin came in. His hollow eyes shone in his dark, gleaming-wet face. The green lichen that clings to high rocks stained his clothes. He stood upright and did not sway on his feet, but she had never received so strong an impression of exhaustion. He was empty of physical strength, even enough to hold the flesh to his bones and the skin to his flesh. In a minute he would disintegrate before her eyes. She unstrapped his gear and led him to his bed. There he folded at the waist like a jack-knife, sat down, and lay back. She lifted his legs to the bed and called Alif. Without a word the bearer took off Robin’s boots and socks and began to massage his feet.

Robin’s eyes were open. He said in a low voice, ‘Did you see some horsemen passing up the valley?’

‘Horsemen? Oh, yes, twenty or so, but don’t worry about them now. You need----’

‘They are real, then. I didn’t imagine them?’ Alif slipped out and returned with whisky, tea, and a steaming bowl of lentils. Robin sat up in a single hurried movement, as though he must move fast or not at all. He said, ‘I saw the horsemen, on top.’

‘On top! That’s--miles up.’

‘Five thousand feet from here.’

Five up and five down, and at least four this morning--fourteen thousand feet in a single day. He’d kill himself.

‘On the way out I gathered some more flowers for you. They’re in there.’ He gestured towards his satchel. ‘I came down to a col on the Crestline. I was going to paint there. A steep trail leads over it from this valley into the next one to the east. I was moving along the mountainside towards the col. I sat down to rest in shelter a little below the col and a quarter of a mile from it. Then the horsemen came.’

He groped for the glass, swallowed the whisky in one gulp, and began to cough. His eyes, on hers, swelled out with his coughing until they seemed to fill his face.

‘I saw them coming. When they were below me, climbing up, they were little men on horses. There was mist about, and some cloud. Anne, Anne, as they went over the col they grew huge, they towered up on the skyline in the drifting cloud like giants, monsters on monstrous horses. The hill didn’t alter, it stayed the same--so the horsemen towered over me, but the ground under their horses’ hoofs was a quarter of a mile away. I couldn’t count them, I had to stop because nothing in my brain worked. On the path they’d been twenty-two. I’d counted them. They kept coming, looming up, going over the pass--scores and hundreds and thousands of them in the smoke and the cloud, and long rifles on their backs.’

‘Only two had rifles, Robin.’ He had seen a mountain mirage but his frenzy strained at her common sense until she could not be sure whether it was for his sake or for her own that she held his arm so tightly. She said, ‘It was a trick of the light. It does happen in mountains. I’ve read about it.’

‘I know. I know the horsemen were not all armed. I know they were Baltis. I know there were only twenty-two of them. I know they were crossing from this valley to the next on a short cut back to Skardu. But--now I’ve got to go.’

In the end it came suddenly, like a pistol fired in her face. She started back as though he had indeed shot a bullet between her eyes. Her head hurt, and she stammered, ‘D-darling, not now. You’re so tired you can’t think. Please lie down, let me give you a sedative.’

He did not speak.

‘You can’t go in those clothes. You had disguise before, don’t you remember?’ She had not thought of it until this moment, but of course he must have had. Without the proper clothes he’d have to go back at least to Srinagar, perhaps farther. Once in Srinagar, she would secretly send a telegram to Major Hayling, who would order him not to go--but Major Hayling had already done that. If she could only get him back to Srinagar she’d have time to think of something.

‘I have my clothes here.’

‘Money,’ she said. ‘You’ll need money. We’ve only got a few rupees in camp. You can’t use them over the passes. They’ll give you away. We’ll have to go back to get some money.’

‘I have money here, in gold bars. I bought them in Lahore with my back pay.’

‘What’ll happen to us here, to me and the babies, miles up this horrible, lonely valley?’ she cried. ‘You can’t leave us here!’ Anger began to flood into her as soon as she thought of the twins. She longed to hit him, to strike him down and hold him so that he could not escape, because she loved him and he was impossible.

‘I’m sorry. Alif can get you back to Srinagar without any trouble. It’s June the seventeenth to-day. I will sleep for a few hours because I’m tired. I told you a sign would be given to me. I will go before dawn.’

‘It wasn’t a sign, it was a mirage, you--you lunatic! Or a notion about your secret service.’

‘Mirages are outside the head, signs are inside. I suppose if I was willing to lie to myself I could call it a message from some sixth sense, about the job. But, Anne my dearest, I’ve got to go, to find Muralev. I’m sure I’ll come upon the truth this time.’

All the strength had surged back into him. He got up and walked lightly out of the tent, and she heard his soft call in the dark. His voice vibrated with energy now. The hurricane lantern burned on the table, but she could not see through her tears and fumbled her way into bed and lay down engulfed in misery. If this was her load of love it would break her too.

In the morning she awoke, and it was late, and he had gone. The sun shone in through a crack in the tent flap and set a golden fire behind the babies’ mosquito net. They began to mutter and wail, and the biting mountain air penetrated the warmth under her bedclothes. She remembered; but she was not so altogether cast down as she had expected to be. The morning crackled in Himalayan splendour, and Robin had been with her, and he would come back.

‘Horses, north.’ The giant horses walking through cloud over the pass and blowing long jets of vapour from their nostrils. . . Ahead on the trail Robin saw with his eyes the last village in India and beyond it the ramparts of the frontier, but his mind saw the horses on the pass. Selim Beg had pointed the way, and he, Robin, had not persevered in following. Lenya Muralev had led him in the wrong direction across Asia, among smoky bazaars and the smells of lamp oil and greasy candy and hot dung. He had made his mistake at Jizak that day when the sleet from the Hungry Steppe slashed his face and Jagbir shivered with fever at his side. East and north of Jizak the land lifted higher and higher to plains of swirling grass, to the mountains, to the misty roof-trees of the world. Not too far from Jizak, if he had gone on, lay the Farghana.

There were horses in the Farghana. It had been famous for them since the beginning of history. Hundreds of years ago a Chinese emperor had decided he needed better horses if his armies were to beat off the Mongolian hordes that stormed over and through his Great Wall. He had sent men to the Farghana, two thousand miles from his capital at Pekin, to bring back stallions and brood mares.

Like that dead emperor, Robin would go to the Farghana, and Muralev would be there. He was sure of that--or the horsemen on the pass would not have loomed so gigantically among the cloud wraiths. But why had he left Anne lying asleep in bed with dark rings under her eyes and her hair a lifeless dull red mass in the first dawn light? Couldn’t he even have kissed her and told her he loved her more than any other person in the world? Then he’d have had to explain again what love meant to him, and tell her that he could see the messages of love she sent him from her eyes and mouth and with her hands, but he could not read them. It was like communication by helio. There had to be two, each focused on the other. However vital the message, however brilliant the flashes, one could not understand unless the other was in the same focus. Muralev, without effort, flashed a message straight into Robin’s eyes so that he could not avoid reading. Did he then ‘love’ Muralev more than he loved Anne or his father or his children or Jagbir? Muralev’s message wasn’t about love. It was about God and the loneliness of God. He could read it, and it began to make sense as he thought of it, but not yet enough sense. He had to find Muralev.

Few travellers used this route that arched over the roof of the world to link India with Chinese Sinkiang. Most of those who did accompanied the infrequent caravans of Central Asian merchants. The farther he went the more conspicuous he would become by travelling alone; nor was it easy to carry enough food; but he could do it. He forced the little pony over double stages every day. It had started from the Sind Valley in excellent condition, but now it flagged and failed, and many times on the long ascents he had to walk, leading it behind him.

He came to the last village and spent a day and some of his money in buying food, equipment, and information. He wandered around the tiny bazaar until he found out what he wanted to know about the Chinese frontier guards. The frontier lay on the Mintaka Pass, the Pass of a Thousand Ibex .He learned that the Chinese maintained a small detachment of soldiers nine miles beyond the pass, where the valley widened out. Twenty miles beyond that post, at Paik, there was a larger post with an officer. He did not know how he would get past them; he’d have to wait and see what the ground looked like.