They reached the bottom of the stairs. The rock wall had been cunningly cut in order to render the opening invisible from outside, and to make the deceit perfect, a curtain of ice hung over the front.
Outside, the wind had cleared the clouds away. A pale moon thin as silver-leaf was just setting behind a dim peak to the west.
Across a purple sky, broad swathes of stars trembled with cold and their own brightness. High above where they stood, the dark shape of Dorje-la Gompa loomed over the pass, vast and sinister, harbouring its secrets in silence.
Christopher looked up, peering into the darkness. A single light could be seen, in an unshuttered window on the top floor.
Chindamani stepped close beside him and took his hands in hers.
“Look,” he whispered.
Her eyes followed his to the lighted window.
“He’s watching for us,” he said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Zamyatin. I can sense it.” He paused.
“He won’t let us go this easily. Samdup belongs to him. In a way, I belong to him too.
He’ll come after us be sure of it.”
She said nothing for a while, but stood with Christopher’s hand in hers, staring up at the lighted window, wondering.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
But Christopher did not move. Like a moth held by the yellow light, he stood lost in thought.
“Ka-ris To-feh,” she said, tugging gently at his arm.
He looked round. In the moonlight, her face was pale and ghostly. He felt remote, impermanent, displaced. He could hold nothing, like a sieve from which water runs out.
“Do you understand what will happen if you come with me?” he said.
“I have to go to India, then back to England. It’s William’s home, I have to take him there. Once we reach India, I will no longer be able to help you. There are others there, men like Zamyatin who will want Samdup for their own purposes. Once they learn who he is and they will learn, believe me he will become their pawn. You don’t know what the world is like, what it does to people. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
She shook her head. One culture shaking its head at another, a world denying another world.
“We seem to have no understanding of each other, Ka-ris Tofeh. Is it so much to be human? Not to understand?”
“Don’t you see?” he said.
“Your Maidari Buddha has become a commodity, a coin. He’s worth so much to Zamyatin. He would be worth so much more or less to my own masters. What Zamyatin does not or cannot control, they would have me manipulate for their own ends. I don’t want to play that game. I’ll finish the one I began, but that’s as far as I go. I’ll take you to Lhasa, but I’ll leave you there. Do you understand?”
Desire for her was like a fever inside him. Denying his will in her, his love and his lust for her, was an even greater hurt, a stinging that filled his flesh and his mind equally, making him whole and tearing him apart at once.
She did not reply. Instead, she stood and picked up her bag.
With Samdup’s hand in hers, she set off in the direction of the pass. Christopher felt his heart contract. He stood up and helped William to his feet. They followed Chindamani and Samdup at a short distance.
As they picked their way down the slope, William raised his face to Christopher.
“What about grandfather?” he said.
“I don’t understand,” said Christopher. His father must have told the boy who he was, he realized.
“Aren’t we going to take him with us?”
Christopher shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Your grandfather is dead. Really dead this time.”
“How do you know?”
“Tsarong Rinpoche told us. Just before we were brought into the room where you and Samdup were sitting with Zamyatin. He said he had killed him himself.”
William stopped, forcing his father to do the same.
“But that can’t be true,” the boy said.
“Why not?”
“Because I was with grandfather just before you came.”
“How long before?” Christopher felt his heart grow cold with apprehension.
“Not long. A few minutes. Some men came and said I had to leave. Grandfather told me they were going to lock him in his rooms. The Rinpoche man was never there.”
“Are you sure, William? Maybe they killed him after you left?”
“No, because we went past his rooms on our way to the lady’s room. I knocked on his door and called. He answered me. He wished me goodnight.”
Christopher called to Chindamani to halt. He ran up to her with William and explained what his son had just told him.
“Zamyatin said nothing about the abbot being killed,” he said, ‘only that he had been replaced. Tsarong Rinpoche was lying. He wanted to make us believe my father was dead, because the old man could still be a threat to him. But even he must have drawn the line at actually putting an incarnation to death.”
Christopher remembered the Rinpoche’s words to him: “You are holy to me, I cannot touch you.” He had been holy because he was the son of an incarnation. Brutal as he was, it was clear that the Rinpoche had still been deeply superstitious. Some crimes were beyond the pale.
But Zamyatin would not feel constrained by superstitious awe.
He was more than capable of having Tsarong Rinpoche’s boast translated into stark reality.
“I have to go back,” said Christopher.
“Even if it’s only a hope, I can’t leave without trying to save him. He is my father. Whatever he’s done, I can’t just abandon him.”
Chindamani reached out a hand. She wanted so much to hold him to her until all this had passed away.
“Take me with you,” she said.
Christopher shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You know I can’t. We’ve been through so much to escape, we can’t just throw it all away by going back up there. You must stay here with William and Samdup. If I don’t return by noon tomorrow, you’ll know I’m not coming back. Take the boys and leave. Try to find your way to Lhasa: you’re an incarnation; Samdup’s an incarnation they’ll find a place for you there. Take William to a man called Bell he’s the British representative in Tibet. He’ll see to it that the boy is taken home safely.”
“I’m frightened for you, Ka-ris To-feh!”
f “I know. And I for you. But I have no choice. I intend to return with my father. Wait for me here.”
He turned to William and explained to him as well as he could } that he had to go back for his father.
“Chindamani will look after you until I return,” he said.
“Do I what she tells you, even if you don’t understand a word she says.
Will you be all right?
William nodded. He hated to see his father go again, but he understood.
“How’s your neck? Does it hurt?”
William shook his head.
“It itches a little, that’s all.”
Christopher smiled, kissed the boy on the cheek, and began the ascent to the monastery. Chindamani watched him go. As he disappeared into the darkness, she saw shadows creep across the stars. She could feel the world going out of her, far, far away, like a cloud dissolving in a storm.
It took him an hour to reach the foot of the main building. The ladder was in place. He looked up, but from where he stood he could not see Zamyatin’s window. He put a foot on the first rung and began to climb.
Two men had been put on the door. They opened it to Christopher’s pounding, their faces surly, unfriendly and, Christopher thought, more than a little frightened. They guessed that he might be the dangerous pee-ling they had been given orders to capture. But they had expected to find him inside the monastery, not coming from the outside.