The Rose of Tibet (27 page)

The boy knew this river: he was certain the Chinese would not come down the mountain after them, for there was a bridge a few miles along, and they would cross there and spread out to pick them up at the other side. It was therefore a matter of urgency for them to cross as soon as possible and make what speed they could before the Chinese were in a position to cut them off.

He had a reasonable working knowledge of the country beyond, and thought he would have a better one as soon as they spotted the caravan route; it was along this route that the Chinese had come and picked up the boatmen and taken control of the monastery. They had been waiting in the monastery for two whole days, with pickets on the cliffs above and a mounted squadron out investigating the best site for an ambush; for they had wanted the abbess and the treasure out of the defile; they had wanted them in an open space where the slow-moving palanquin would be within their sights, and there would be no possibility of the abbess and her treasure being spirited away.

The old wily man in Hodzo had thought of that; he had thought of a number of ingenious measures to allow the abbess to escape. But he hadn’t, it occurred to Houston as he stumbled miserably along in the spray-drenched darkness, thought of what was to be done after the escape. Something had had to be left to the heir of Colonel Younghusband.  

It was getting on for eight o’clock before they found the negotiable stretch of river; the banks widened here, the beach was broader, the water, evidently, shallower. Massive rocks stood out of the bed, and about their tops was wreathed the debris of the spring floods. The boy anchored himself by rope to the horse and waded out. Houston glimpsed him, through the spray pulling down a branch from a rock and trying to plumb the depth. He returned, soaked.

‘Is it deep?’

‘Very deep, and very fast.’

‘What’s to be done?’

‘I could try with the horse, to get a line across.’

They worked out a system of signals: two pulls for Houston to heave him back, three that he had landed safely at the other side, four that he was ready to heave them across; and four also from Houston that he was ready to be heaved.

The boy tied the rope in a bowline round himself, and exchanged places with the abbess, averting his eyes as she dismounted.

‘Good luck!’

The boy slapped the horse without answering and rode straight into the river. He went in quickly before the horse could express an opinion, and Houston lost him almost at once. The rope jumped and quivered so much in his hands he couldn’t tell what frenzied signals might be intended, and, swearing once, began a half-hearted heave back before he felt in his hands three slow, strong tugs, and a minute later four more.

The girl had been sitting on a little rock, huddled in her cloak and shivering violently in the clammy chill. Houston got her to her feet and roped her about the waist, and himself also, and allowing several yards of rope in between so that they would not be dragged down, attached the bales.

‘We must cross now, Mei-Hua.’

‘I cannot swim, Chao-li.’

‘The horse will pull us. I will hold you,’ he said, and kissed her, and while he was kissing her gave four tugs at the rope, and a moment later felt the drag, and held her as she fell, and then they were in the water.

The spray had been cold, but it had not the deathly bone- searching iciness of the river, and he heard her gasp and cry out at the appalling shock of it, and hung on to her grimly. It was impossible to tread water, the thrumming current carrying away his legs, and his arms, about the girl, powerless to keep him up. The roaring white water blinded and choked him, and he was under, the girl struggling in his arms, the rope about his middle pulling strongly. He felt the pair of them, locked together, turning over and over in the water,
and the dull pain of limbs striking rock; and then he was on his feet, and off them again, and on his knees and dragging on the rough bottom, and they had made it. The girl was retching and spluttering and he tried to stand up to help her, but was dragged down again, the rope sawing and pulling at him from two directions, and he realized what had happened and cried out to the boy with all his strength. The boy seemed to realize it himself a moment later, for the pressure from the bank eased, and the boy was beside him in the water, swearing, and going out beyond him, and the rope thrummed and came free, the bales releasing from whatever underwater obstruction had held them.

They took a few minutes, gasping and coughing, to wring out their clothes as best they could, and then the boy retied the bales on the horse, and Houston helped the abbess remount, and they were off again, teeth chattering in the freezing night.

The moon came out from behind mountains as they struck the caravan route, and the boy mounted a small hill for a reconnaissance before tackling it. He was back down again quickly.

‘The soldiers are all about here, sahib. I saw their fires. We will have to keep going all night.’

They cut across the track, the boy going surely now, for he had travelled this country before, and went across rough hills before choosing, towards midnight, a secondary track, a mere gutter between high cliffs, but one that went due east.

Houston was by now almost out on his feet, and kept awake solely by the searing agony of fallen arches and wet clothes rubbing against sores. The insides of his thighs seemed to be quite raw. There was a sore across the back of his neck, and when he had leaned forward to ease it, he had raised another under his chin. He had tried walking bow-legged to ease the chafing at his thighs, and had produced two new sores where his boots rubbed his ankles. They seemed to be telegraphing him now from every point of his body, and he no longer tried to evade them, registering the sequence with a kind of ashen stoicism, and keeping, as it were, a kind of count, for he had fallen into a belief that if one outpost of pain failed, the rest
might fail, and that horrors of some new and less familiar kind would supervene.

The boy had been walking stolidly ahead with the bridle; but when the moon began to go again, he slowed, looking about him. The track had widened quite suddenly. He halted them, and gave the bridle to Houston, and went on by himself with the coiled rope in the darkness.

Houston heard the girl moaning and trying to sit up on the horse, and he knew he must stir himself to catch her if she fell; but she sank back presently, eyes closed and teeth chattering, to the spot she had made warm on the horse’s neck.

He was not himself any longer aware of the cold, so obsessed with his interior network of pain and the necessity of keeping it going while he stood still, and that he did not even at first hear the boy calling him, and was only conscious of it when stones began to fall about him. He looked up.

‘Sahib! Can you see me, sahib?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Can you see anything at all?’

‘No.’

The boy said nothing more, but he could hear him banging about faintly above, and presently a rope’s end fell, and in a shower of ice and snow the boy came down it. He walked up and down in the track, looking upwards.

‘There are caves here, sahib. We had better stop now. There is open ground a few miles ahead. We mustn’t be caught on it in daylight.’

‘How do we get up there?’

‘By the rope. The abbess will never manage the other way. I will go up again and pull her.’

Houston didn’t know how he would manage himself, but he was beyond further questioning, and merely, in a kind of nightmare, found himself doing as the boy instructed, helping the abbess off the horse, tying the rope round her waist, and hoisting her up while the boy, who had shinned back up again, pulled. He saw her limbs working feebly in the frozen undergrowth, and then lost her in darkness, following her progress only by the shower of snow-clumps and her soft moaning. And then the rope landed at his feet once more, and
he tied it about his waist, and went up himself. It was steep but not impossible, with plenty of toe-holds and patches of strongly rooted spiny undergrowth, and only one smooth vertical face below the cave itself, and he got his hands on the ledge, and with the boy pulling, and his own exhausted muscles making a last effort, rolled over and fell inside on his face.

He thought that he was dreaming, and that in the dream he had climbed out of a black and icy hell into some warm and radiant compartment of heaven; for the cave was bathed in a soft rosy light and he felt the breath of heat and aromatic smoke fanning towards him. The abbess was sitting over the fire, staring into its orange heart, her cloak open and steaming gently; and, too exhausted to get to his feet, and fearful that the vision would vanish unless he embraced it at once, he began to hobble towards it on his hands and knees, thrusting aside a clutching obstacle in his way.

‘The rope, sahib. I must have the rope. There is the horse to be seen to.’

He felt the fumbling at his waist, but did not stop, and then he was there, and he reached for her and sank back into the marvellous softness of the rock floor, washed by wonderful waves of light, and gliding instantly away into them. Something was happening remotely to his limbs, and he opened his eyes after a moment and in the flickering glow observed the boy stumbling over him, dragging something, two large sacks. Sacks of what? Sacks of something important; sacks that gave him just then a feeling of completion; of knowing that all was right with the warm and gentle world that was drawing him so deliciously into itself once more.

Somebody was singing, and he was eating a meal of many courses, and he sat back savouring a new mouth-watering dish that had been placed before him, and awoke like that, very gradually, with his mouth still watering.

He lay for some seconds trying to place where he was. He was very hungry. He was very cold. He knew he had been dreaming and that he was still between two worlds, and he
lay screwing up his eyes in the bleak grey light anxiously trying to retain the best of both of them; a certain snugness about his lower quarters in one, a delicious sensation of food and singing in the other. He realized quite suddenly that the food and singing were common to both worlds and that the singing was screaming and sat up in alarm and saw where he was.

The girl was sleeping across his legs. The fire was out. They were alone in the cave. The piercing screams rang out one after the other.

He came up fast off the floor, shifting the girl from his legs, in such a panic that he scarcely knew what he was doing. His first thought was that the boy had impaled himself in some way; had gone foraging for food and had cooked it and had tried to return up the rope and had hurt himself, and was lying out there, screaming; and as the thought flashed through his head, found himself at the cave mouth, peering out.

He saw the boy immediately. He was lying a little below, on a projection of rock a yard or two to the right. He was lying on his stomach, gazing intently through the undergrowth. He was not screaming. Somebody else was screaming. The screams rang out with terrifying clarity punctuated by a gurgling intake of breath that was in a way more horrifying still. At the same time, Houston was aware of other voices; of somebody laughing and of a conversation going on. He could not see where this was taking place, his view of the track obscured by undergrowth.

The boy had got the rope looped round him. Houston tugged it, and saw him look up and motion him back into the cave; and a few moments later he appeared inside himself, trembling and quite grey in the face with fear.

‘Sahib, the Chinese! They are right below us. They have got a woman. They are hurting her.’

Houston could hear that. He thought the screams would drive him out of his mind. He pulled the boy to the back of the cave to get as far away from them as he could and they stared at each other, so distracted by the ghastly row that they could not speak.

The boy said at last, ‘They’ve put all their kit in a cave
below us, sahib, just to the left. I missed it in the dark. They’re cooking now. They’re making the midday meal.’

‘What are they doing to the woman?’

‘They have got her feet in the fire. They say it’s to stop her running away again. There are five of them with a jeep. Two helicopters went over earlier and landed on open ground, ahead. They must have come with it.’

‘Where is the horse?’

‘Five minutes away along the track. I took it up a hill last night and staked it behind a rock. You can’t see it from below.’

They gazed at each other, horrifyingly aware of the danger of the horse making its presence known.

‘Do they look as if they mean to stay?’

‘Sahib, I can’t tell. Come and see,’ the boy said distractedly.

The screaming had mercifully stopped as they went out of the cave. The boy sat on the edge and lowered himself, and stepped sideways on to the rock, and turned to help Houston. His mouth was shaking and the narrow wrist trembling. Houston looked below through the frozen straggling bushes, and could see at first very little; a couple of bobbing caps, a steel rod swaying, the back of a jeep.

The boy had got down on his stomach and parted the vegetation, and Houston did the same. Two men were squatting over a fire prodding at food in a swinging pot. Another was sitting in the jeep fiddling with a wireless set; the rod was the aerial. He couldn’t see anything else. The boy shook his arm, and he followed his glance and by craning could see, a little farther along the track, two more soldiers. He couldn’t make out what they were doing. One seemed to be kneeling as if in prayer, and the other was standing watching him. As he watched, the kneeling man got up, and he saw what he had been doing. The woman was lying on the icy track with her clothes bundled about her head like a bag of rubbish. As one man got up, the other got down, and Houston turned away, afraid he was going to be sick.

The boy had caught his arm tightly, however, as he turned, and Houston saw that he was watching not the men along the track but the one in the jeep, who had now begun to speak into his microphone.

He was shaking so violently that even with the boy’s help he could barely drag himself back into the cave. He lay just inside, sickened and infuriated, fighting down a savage desire to hurl himself among them; aware that for the first time in his life he wanted with his own hands to kill somebody.