'Yes.'
But I couldn't tell if he did, or if he just saying it, this bloody wind freezing against the skin, the eyes streaming. 'I'll give you your bag, and the insulin's there, all right? All you do is lie low and wait, and I'll send for help. Understand?'
'Yes.'
All he could say, like an automaton, lurching over the stones. 'I'll radio your position, as close as I can get, if I have to send for help.' If the situation changes — Pepperidge — I can send in a whole cadre. 'All you do is lie low, and use the insulin when you need to. Are you listening to me?'
'Yes.'
He tripped and started to go down and I pulled him upright, poor little bastard, doing his best, facing straight ahead of him against the wind with tears freezing on his cheeks, one foot in front of the other, soldiering on, I must not let them get this man, he was the messiah, potentially a name to go down in history if I could get him to walk faster, for Christ's sake, faster than this, we could still hear them shouting down there and all it wanted was for one of them to turn his truck and pick up our Dongfeng in his lights and we'd have to separate because they'd take a look at it and find the engine warm and then they'd start looking for the driver, finis.
Snow on the wind, flakes sticking to our faces and freezing the skin, he tripped again and I caught him, held him closer, an arm around his shoulders, the rim of the foothills rising and dipping and the stars swinging, I would like to sleep, swinging across the night sky and swinging back, the stone loose underfoot, treacherous, the night treacherous with stones and soldiery, Lord, I will lay me down to sleep in another mile, another mile of this, lay me down to sleep.
'I must get to Beijing,' he said, Xingyu, and tripped and dropped like a dead weight and I wasn't quick enough and he stayed there on his knees, a dark shapeless bundle against the stones, the messiah, head hanging like a dog's, the wind howling among the boulders and his voice crying in it, 'I must get to Beijing,' his gloved hands hitting the ground in frustration, and I dragged him onto his feet and he started walking, my arm around him again, walking into the wind and the whirling snow, and I said to him, 'Yes, you must get to Beijing.'
Chapter 24: Fugue
It was very quiet.
There was a hole in the sky and I watched it.
Feet ached, my feet ached, those bloody boots. Feet were cold, too, frozen, looked down at them, felt them, no boots on, that was the trouble, I'd pulled them off when we got here.
'I must go to Beijing.'
'What?' Then everything came back and I said, 'Yes,' and looked at the luminous digits of my watch, slept for three hours, I'd slept for three hours and six minutes because I'd checked the time when we'd got here and reported to my DIF.
Not a hole in the sky, this was the cave and the hole was the entrance down there, full of moonlight.
Missing something.
'Dr Xingyu, are you all right?'
'Yes.'
'Need insulin?'
'No.'
I was missing something and it worried me; I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was something important. Xingyu was sitting upright against the wall of the cave, looking straight in front of him, and I felt gooseflesh along my arms; this man had changed; he was different now, giving me answers like an automaton, yes and no, sitting bolt upright like that and staring in front of him, saying he'd got to go to Beijing, hadn't said it before, at the monastery, so what was in his mind, I didn't like this, there were things I wanted to know.
Oh Jesus yes, got up and staggered as far as the mouth of the cave and switched to send-'DIF, DIF DIF.'
'Hear you.'
'Have you been trying to raise me?'
'No.'
So relax, but I wasn't terribly pleased with myself; there was a bloody mountain on top of this cave and he couldn't have raised me if he'd wanted to. The last time I'd signalled him we'd been still outside in the open.
'Three hours' sleep.'
'Excellent.'
Sounded happy about that. Part of the job of your DIF is to look after your welfare, hour by hour, and Pepperidge had known when I'd last got any sleep because I'd reported on it.
'Subject is with me, no injuries.'
I confirmed the bearing I'd given Pepperidge when we'd got here three hours ago and then began giving him the general picture, not terribly reassuring.
The snow was still coming down in flurries, making a hazy screen across the terrain below the hills, and through it I saw lights moving. This cave was the third opening along from a granite bluff an estimated four miles, south by south-east of the road where it turned north in a wide curve with an estimated radius of one mile; it was the fifth opening from a low escarpment in the other direction that jutted at thirty degrees from the lie of the hills. There were no other landmarks except for the boulders, some of them huge, ten or fifteen feet high, but they were strewn across the scree at random like thrown dice.
They'd set up a roadblock, the military, halfway through the curve in the road. They'd been alerted by the shooting from the jeep behind me and the obvious decision would have been to trap all traffic in the area: there'd be another road block set up toward the west, though I couldn't see its lights from here because of the snow. But I could see the lights of the convoy; it was still stationary, most of the vehicles facing west, the way we'd come in from the temple. It was difficult to say how many vehicles there were down there: perhaps twenty, twenty-five; the ones that had passed me from the east had been personnel carriers. Estimate, then, three hundred armed troops, at least three hundred. Some of the vehicles had been swung at various angles to the road, providing a fan of light southward toward the hills and containing 180 degrees.
From this distance and with the snow flurries blowing I couldn't see the Dongfeng truck we'd abandoned near the road, or if I could see it I wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the boulders. But it would be there, standing in the fan of light, and they would have checked it out, three hours ago, and found the engine warm, and they would now be looking for the driver and any passengers. Those were the moving lights I could see as the soldiers spread out in a systematic search. They were already a mile from the road, making their way across the scree like a tide rising toward the hills, toward the cave.
I reported this to Pepperidge.
The line of soldiers was at ninety degrees to my angle of vision, and we'd have to allow a margin of error: perhaps fifteen, even twenty percent. This being given, I estimated that they would reach the caves in the hillside before morning, at the latest.
This too I reported.
Nothing but static for a moment or two, then: 'And at the earliest?'
'I can't predict that. If they increase their speed they could be here sooner than that.'
I didn't like telling him, I did not like telling him this, crouching here in the cave mouth in the freezing wind with that man inside there looking so strange, talking so strangely, giving me ideas, one of them so appalling that I couldn't express it to my director in the field until I'd tested it out, because it would change everything, it would blow Bamboo into Christendom.
'But if it occurs to them,' I told Pepperidge, 'that the people in the truck might have headed for the caves, they'll logically send troops in three or four files straight in this direction and spread out and start a search at this level.'
Static. I waited. 'They could reach you, then, in two or three hours.'