For a long time he lay in the darkness like that, listening to the wind dance beyond the thin walls of the tent, listening to her breathe softly against the exposed skin of his neck. Then, wordlessly, as though still in a dream, he turned and lay face to face with her.
With one arm he pulled her to him until she was close against him. His fingers caressed her quietly, sadly, in a dream. She stiffened at his first clumsy embrace, then let herself be held by him.
Neither spoke. As she moved to him, she felt the dark and the loneliness grow around and within her. Her very nearness to him seemed to intensify whatever distance still rested in her mind.
He laid his voice on her like an anxious hand.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
“Does it matter?”
He stroked her back.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
She said nothing, then put one hand behind his head and drew herself closer to him. Then, in a very quiet voice, she said ‘yes’.
“Of me?”
“Not of you,” she answered.
“Of wanting you. Of wanting to lie with you like this. To become flesh with you.”
“To become flesh?”
Not ‘one flesh’, she had said, but ‘flesh’.
“All my life I have been a vehicle for the spirit,” she said.
“I
pretended my body was a mirror, that the image was what counted,
not the glass.” She paused.
“I’m tired of pretending. I am what I am. Even if the glass breaks, I want to be more than the mirror.”
He kissed her gently on the forehead, then over her entire face, small kisses, delicate as flakes of falling snow. She trembled and pressed herself against him.
He caressed her back now with longer, softer strokes. She was wearing her indoor clothes from the monastery: a silk tunic and trousers. His hand touched the rising curve of her small buttocks and he felt desire begin in him.
“Desire is greedy. It will devour you,” his father had said. But what if one were already being devoured? By loneliness. By incapacity to love. By simple bereavement of the flesh.
With shaking hands, he undressed her. Her body felt young and supple and quiet as silk. Outside, the wind had fallen and snow fell in un resisted profusion, softening, whitening everything it touched. He bent over her and kissed her forehead again, then her eyes, in equal proportion. She shivered and moaned gently. His lips felt hot against her skin. She thought that, deep inside her, the goddess shivered too.
“I love you,” she said. It was the second time she had told him, but the words still seemed strange to her, a phrase from a liturgy she had heard spoken often but never until now seen enacted.
She felt desire for him grow, suffusing her as a light suffuses a hitherto-darkened room. His fingers moved across her flesh slowly and quietly, like the wings of pigeons stroking the bright air. His mouth found hers in the darkness, without speech or sound, and she opened her lips to his, her breath mingling with his breath, her heart beating alongside his. She reached up a hand to touch his cheek. He felt strange to her: her fingers strayed blindly among the thick hairs of his beard.
As desire grew in both of them, it blotted out everything else.
The world shrank to a tiny point, then vanished. Only their bodies remained, floating in the void. They had become a single universe into which no light or sound or good or evil entered.
She helped him undress with fingers made clumsy by passion.
Why had no-one told her this, that a man’s body was more beautiful than a god’s, the awkwardness of desire more satisfying than the most perfect ritual, a moment’s fulfilment worth more than a lifetime of righteous virginity? Even the gods cohabited with their celestial consorts: the rhythms of their bodies in the act of love cast shadows over the world of men.
His hands moved over her now with the ease of love that has become whole. Out of his past, memories came to inform and guide his fingers along the uncharted waters of her flesh. He sensed her uncertainty and her hesitation in this strange novitiate. She had no memories to guide her, only instinct and the patterns set by her impassioned deities.
And yet, as he moved into her and they gave themselves up wholly to the dance, they discovered a fierce harmony, a single rhythm that possessed their bodies and their hearts entirely. She moved beneath him, easily, softly, without guilt or shame, in slow, erotic measures no art or artifice could match. And he moved in her perfectly, matching his actions to hers, seeking her in the dark with a dream-like intensity. And so the memories fell away and there was only this moment, only love for her, transcending the past, driving it out, remaking it in her image.
And finally there was silence. And darkness that seemed to stretch into eternity. They lay together, only their fingers touching.
Neither spoke.
By morning, the snow had stopped. They were the only living things in a white immensity that seemed to have no end.
At noon on the same day, they found a pass leading into the Tsangpo valley region. Beyond the pass, they came upon a hut inhabited by two hunters. The men were sullen at first, but when Chindamani told them who she was, the frowns left their faces and food and drink appeared as if from nowhere. Christopher realized how little he really knew of her. Here, she was a sort of queen, a holy person whom others would obey without question or hesitation. He kept his distance from her while they remained at the hut.
The hunters gave them directions to Gharoling, the monastery to which Tobchen Geshe had tried to take Samdup for refuge.
They arrived there two days later. The monastery was situated to the north of the mountain range through which they had passed, in a secluded valley through which ran a tributary of the Yarlong Tsangpo, the northern section of the Brahmaputra. Shigatse, the capital of Tsang province, was only a few days away to the northeast.
An early spring had come to the valley. Grass grew on the banks of the river, riveted to the earth by small blue flowers that neither of them could name. There were trees, and birds to sing in them, and green buds forming on their branches. A small village nestled beneath the gompa, which stood on a low hill near the head of the valley. White prayer-flags fluttered everywhere, filling the air with a soft flapping sound.
They stood at the entrance to the valley, dressed in their travel worn clothes, pinched and hungry, gazing at the scene in front of them like damned souls gazing into paradise. Chindamani’s eyes were wide with amazement: she had never known a world that was not bound by winter. The seasons meant nothing to her. She touched the grass with unbelieving fingers, smelled the warm air, and watched the birds collect twigs for their nests.
Christopher picked a flower for her and placed it in her hair.
“I’ll keep it always, Ka-ris To-feh,” she said.
He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“It will die soon. If you put it in water, it will last a few days more. But then it will die.”
She looked crestfallen for a moment, then smiled.
“Perhaps that is why it is so beautiful,” she said.
He looked at her, at the flower on her temple.
“Yes,” he said. And he thought she was beautiful. And that she would die.
She spent most of the day following their arrival closeted with the abbot, Khyongla Rinpoche. When she emerged that evening, her face was serious, and Christopher’s best efforts could not secure a smile. She would not tell him what the abbot had said.
They slept in separate rooms, and that night she did not come to him. He waited for her until dawn, but in the end resigned himself to her absence and slept fitfully through the morning.