‘We will consider these meanings later,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘Let the Chinese be brought in.’
Theodore twisted on his stool in time to see the doors swing open and a shape outlined against the light from the further room. Though the shape was clearly composed of three people standing close together there was something inhuman, something monstrous about it. The shape split as the two men on the outside let go of the central figure and pushed it forward. It came at a slow, dragging walk, which still had that inhuman look, as though the figure were an automaton which would walk like this for ever. Even when it reached the area lit by the lamps in the Council Room Theodore was unable to recognize it as Lung. It was not just that the side of the face was puffy with a huge bruise and that dried blood had dribbled from the corner of the swollen lips. The face was not a man’s face at all. It was expressionless. The eyes stared like an idol’s, round as marbles, unfocused and unblinking. The head was unnaturally stiff on the neck, and the arms, held close to the side of the body, looked as though they were clamped rigid.
As this figure came up the aisle between the benches Mrs Jones rose from her stool, took two paces towards it and clutched it to her side. For a moment its legs tried to continue walking, but then they stilled. Lung, if it was Lung, showed no sign of knowing her.
‘Oh, what have you done to him? What have you done to him?’ she cried.
‘If we hadn’t protected him from the crowd in the courtyard,’ said one of the monks, ‘they would have torn him to fragments as we tear the dough giant.’
‘That ain’t what I meant,’ she snapped. ‘And you know it. What have you done to him?’
‘He was questioned and he would not answer,’ said the Lama Amchi. ‘That accounts for his having been beaten a little. Then, while we are considering the proper punishment for a breaker of idols, we locked his soul within him, as you see.’
‘Can you unlock it?’
‘It can sometimes be done. But the Mother of the Tulku must understand that the Chinese is not now, so to speak, a person. He is in abeyance. Once he is himself again, with his soul guiding his body, he becomes again responsible for all that he has done. It is impossible that such a one should remain within the holy valley of Dong Pe, at the height of our great festival. He would be as it were a corruption, infecting all our rituals and ceremonies.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Give him his soul back and he can leave tomorrow morning. First thing. Theo can go with him.’
The Lama seemed about to agree when somebody spoke angrily from among the monks.
‘He cannot go back to China,’ explained the Lama. ‘There are those here who still believe that he is an agent of Pekin.’
‘It’ll have to be Inja then. You can cope with that? They’ll need an escort as far as the border. I’ve got enough money to see them through . . .’
‘We will provide for such needs,’ said the Lama.
‘It won’t be cheap,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Theo’ll need a ticket to England and then to America, and Lung’ll want a bit too . . .’
‘Dong Pe is rich. It will be done. Now let us perform the ritual, for the longer a man’s soul stays thus locked up the harder is his return.’
He gave orders in Tibetan. The monks rose and rearranged themselves. A pair of small drums and a silver incense-lamp were fetched from a curtained niche. The butter-lamps were collected and lined up in a single row at the feet of the Buddha, making the statue seem to float, gold and warm, in the darkness of the rest of the room.
‘Theo,’ whispered Mrs Jones. ‘Come here a tick. I want a word with you.’
She was still standing, clutching Lung to her side as though he would fall without her. Theodore rose achingly and joined her.
‘When this palaver is over,’ she whispered. ‘Come up to my cave. Nobody won’t stop you. We’ll have a bit of a chat, say good-bye, like. And there’s something important I want you to do for me.’
‘I’ll do anything,’ said Theodore.
‘Sorry to make you go all sudden like this,’ she said. ‘But I ’spect you’ll be glad of it, really. You’ll see Lung’s in good hands in Inja, won’t you?’
‘If I can.’
‘Course you can. Then there’s this other thing. It won’t be easy, but it’s got to be done. Laying a ghost, like. And I shan’t have the baby easy unless I know . . . shh, they’re starting. Tell you after.’
To Theodore’s surprise it wasn’t the Lama Amchi who performed the ceremony, but a gaunt, middle-aged monk wearing a black scarf across his shoulders and a black hat shaped like the prow of a ship. The small drums beat in the dark with a slow rhythm. The monks began to hum, a deep, throbbing note, enough of them keeping it up while the others paused for breath to make the hum continuous. Mrs Jones led Lung forward till she stood with him at the edge of the circle of light, but at a sign from the monk in the black hat she moved a little to one side. The smoke that rose from the incense-burner was not blue but orange, and had a heavy but acid smell that hung dazingly in the air. Now the noise from the monks’ throats seemed to be throbbing through the solid stones of the walls and timbers of the roof, waking in them stone and timber voices which answered with the same vibration. The monk in the black hat picked up a small drum and beat a pattering roll on it, which he echoed with a sort of chant, a monotonous rattle of syllables all on one note but ending with an explosion of breath as though the air had been forced from his lungs by a violent blow from within. This – drum-roll, rattle and explosion – happened several times, and as it did so the monk visibly changed, becoming taller and yet more gaunt until his face in the upthrown light of the butter-lamps was a skull with no gleam of any eye in the black sockets. When he had completed this change he put the drum down and became as still as the Buddha, though the rest of the room was now quivering to the vibrations of the noise made by the monks. Even the floor seemed to be trembling – Theodore could feel it through the soles of his boots – and Lung’s silhouette, which had before stood sharp against the smoky globe of light in which the monk was working his magic, was now shadowy in outline as though the vibrations were centred on Lung, making him quiver like a tuning-fork.
Theodore concentrated his energies. He willed the magic to succeed. He did not hum with the monks, but for Lung’s sake he joined his soul to theirs, letting it shudder to the same harmonics, so that there was nothing in the room that was not part of that single purpose. Perhaps he was praying, but if so it was not in any fashion that Father had taught him. He became pure prayer – not a boy praying to a separate God, but a single process in which boy and prayer and God were the same thing. He joined the ritual.
And now the globe of light seemed to contract, as though the magician were using the energies in the room to gather the light into himself. The shapeless hum also gathered to a focus, which was Lung. The walls became still and the floor no longer tingled beneath Theodore’s feet, but the noise rose in pitch and came from a single point above Lung’s head, and still rose and narrowed till it reached a tension where it had to disintegrate or become a new mode of sound. At that moment of breaking, the magician, motionless for so long, suddenly spread his arms wide, threw them forward at Lung’s body, and at last drew them slowly and heavily back. The noise had stopped. The globe of light widened and was ordinary. The magician, a skull no longer, stepped a pace back and said a few quiet words. As he spoke the rigid creature in front of him lost tension, slackened, became human, and at the same moment started to fall. It was Mrs Jones who caught him and eased him to the floor in front of the Buddha.