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The Pulse of Danger
Jon Cleary


THE PULSE OF DANGER is a 1989 Australian novel from the award-winning Jon Cleary, author of the Inspector Scobie Malone series.In the valleys of Bhutan, a small botanical expedition prepares to return to India after seven months field work. However Chinese forces have crossed the Indian border, and suddenly an Indian colonel appears in their camp with a captured Chinese general, closely pursued by his troops.








JON CLEARY






The Pulse of Danger










Dedication (#ulink_a0f918af-9db8-5839-8c5c-88e08aba397e)


To Innes and George


Contents

Cover (#u93d74aa0-6efd-5d1c-8bed-469ac1fdf0aa)

Title Page (#u4ef20457-7026-5d87-a5ea-a946c40e8445)

Dedication (#ulink_8878a22f-3338-57e9-9b23-3ad3939134b8)

Map (#u2e406300-2b8f-5c85-a31d-0c3a85341f77)

Chapter One (#ulink_8a5dfb2d-c477-5fd9-8471-4068b4e0114e)

Chapter Two (#ulink_c66b736b-f0e1-5a06-8bd2-4f6b7191a58e)

Chapter Three (#ulink_bb7810d9-5160-5038-8c1b-431bcda506da)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Map (#ulink_51b24bdd-5dd7-525d-a523-dd847f88a41e)










Chapter One (#ulink_51c75e54-cb32-5bab-951f-47b8ea39ef7b)


The leopard coughed somewhere on the steep slope behind the camp; and Eve Marquis awoke at once. Despite the number of trips she and Jack had made into the wildernesses of the world, she had never been able to take for granted the beasts that might prowl the outskirts of their camps. Each night she went to sleep with one ear still wide awake for any hint of danger; other people’s nightmares were supposed to be soundless, but hers were full of lions roaring, elephants trumpeting and gorillas grunting. Lately they had been echoing with the coughing of leopards. English and therefore a supposed animal-lover, a worshipper of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as much as of the Church of England, she had all her life been guilty of what she felt was treason: she hated animals, couldn’t bring herself to trust even a day-old puppy. Cruft’s dog show was something left over from Dante’s Inferno; and people who kept more esoteric pets, baby alligators and Siamese fighting fish, were devils she did her best to avoid. Yet year after year she left the comparative safety of Kensington, a region where the wilder poodles were at least kept on a leash, and ventured into these areas where the animals made the beasts of Kensington Gardens look like people-lovers.

Why? she asked herself. And the answer pulled back the flap of the tent and came in, dropping some letters on her as she rolled over on the camp-bed.

‘Mail,’ Jack said, sitting down on his own bed. ‘Chungma just got back from Thimbu. The trucks will be there waiting for us three weeks from to-day. Sleep well?’

She had indeed slept soundly, and that annoyed her. When one was afraid of being torn to pieces, one should not sleep like a new-born baby. But she had always been like that when they were camped at some height. Other people complained of headache, difficulty in getting their breath, even of heart flutters; but it was as if the higher she went, the more relaxed and at home she felt.

She remembered how pleased Jack had been when he had first discovered this fact about her. That had been on her first trip with him, their honeymoon trip, to the slopes of Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, in Uganda.

‘I was worried,’ he had grinned. ‘Someone told me honeymoons should always be taken at sea-level. Shortness of breath in the groom or bride is no foundation for a happy marriage.’

‘Ours is going to be a happy one. I don’t think either of us is going to suffer from shortness of breath. Not for years, anyway.’

That had been only eight years ago. Their lungs were still good, but she had begun to feel their marriage needed a check-up. She had decided it was suffering from a shortness of compatibility, from a congestion of selfishness; she had had plenty of time in these past seven months to diagnose the reasons. That, of course, was part of the trouble: on these trips she too often had too much time to think. And to feel sorry for herself, something of which she was secretly ashamed. Self-pity was as wasteful as lavishing love on a dog or a cat.

Jack had begun to slit open the letters with the small curved knife he used for prising plants from rock crevices. ‘I’m going up to Bayswater Road this morning. There’s a patch of swertia over there. I want to get some seeds of it.’

All the tracks, streams and ridges in their working area were given familiar names for easier identification; it was an invention that had become a habit with them as they had made these expeditions into regions that were often unmapped. It was better than referring to the ‘fourth ridge from the skyline’ or the ‘track that branches off at the Kharsu oak’; and at first she had taken it on herself to dream up the names. As it had with soldiers during the war, it evoked a certain nostalgia for home and took away some of the foreignness of an alien land: Piccadilly Circus as a jungle clearing was just as much home as the original. Or almost. But lately, abraded by the moods that had taken hold of her like a girdle that didn’t fit, she had begun to look upon the names as an irritating whimsy. But she could say nothing: after all, they had been her idea in the first place. The first Bayswater Road had been a track on Ruwenzori: it was a honeymoon memory.

‘Better take your rifle,’ she said. ‘I heard the leopard again.’

‘I’ll be loaded down enough, without taking a bloody rifle with me.’ He was the animal-lover; he would trust even a starving python. ‘I’ll be all right, love. Here.’

He handed her the bulk of the letters. She took her arms from under the blankets, felt the chill of the morning air through her pyjama-sleeves, and quickly grabbed at the sweater he tossed her. On their first trip to Ruwenzori she had insisted on taking sheets with them, but it had not taken her long to appreciate that the comfort of them did not compensate for the extra weight and the difficulty of washing them. She had grown accustomed to the roughness of blankets or the constriction of a sleeping-bag, but that did not mean she liked them. Sheets had become a symbol of civilisation for her. Small things assumed a disproportionate importance when one had time, too much time, to think about them. The linen department at Harrods had begun to look like one of the annexes of the Promised Land. She sat up, pulling on the sweater, and began to glance through her letters, the first links for weeks with that Promised Land.

She looked up. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Sort of.’ He re-read the letter he was holding, then carefully refolded it. She recognised all the signs: he was going to tell her something he guessed she did not want to hear. ‘The Bayard Institute wants me to take a party out to New Guinea.’

She put down her own letters: whatever news was in them was unimportant beside what he had just told her. ‘What are you going to tell them?’

‘Well—’

‘Jack, if you go, I’m not going with you. You promised this was our last trip.’

He grinned, as if he did not think she was serious. ‘You’d like New Guinea. And we could go down to Sydney for a few weeks. You’re always complaining I’ve never taken you back to my home—’

‘We’ll go to Sydney. But not to New Guinea. I’ve had enough—’ Suddenly she felt on the verge of tears, but she held them back. She had learned long ago that winning a man over by tears provided only a temporary victory: she was not going to spend her life in a drizzle of weeping.

‘We’ll talk about it later, on the way back to Thimbu.’ He stood up, put a huge rough hand on the back of her head and gently ran it down to stroke her neck.

‘Don’t start smoodging to me,’ she said tartly, her mind made up not to give in to him this time. Then the leopard coughed again, the ough-ough sound that told he was angry; and she looked up at her husband with true concern, all her anger at him suddenly gone. ‘Darling, please take the rifle.’

He went to say something, then he shrugged, sat down on his bed again and drew out the gun-case from beneath it. She had given him the guns as a wedding present, both from Holland and Holland, a Super .30 Double and a 12-bore Royal ejector self-opener; the type of gun had meant nothing to her, but the salesman had assured her that no sportsman could wish for more. But he hadn’t known her Jack. They had cost her nine hundred pounds each and they had almost caused a fierce row between her and Jack; he had rebelled against such extravagance, insisting she was not to buy him gifts he himself could not afford, but she had been just as stubborn as he that she would not take them back. In the end he had accepted them, but they were the last expensive gift she had given him, except for the contributions she always made towards the cost of their expeditions. Being the rich wife of a poor botanist was not an easy occupation.

He took out the Super .30 and wiped the oil from it. ‘I haven’t had much chance to use it this trip.’ His big hands moved caressingly down the barrels and over the stock, the hands of a lover.

‘That’s your baby, isn’t it?’

He looked at her from under his heavy black brows, his dark blue eyes seeming to glaze over as they always did when he wanted to retreat from an argument. It had not escaped her that he only retreated from arguments with her; with everyone else the eyes blazed almost with enjoyment when there was a conflict of opinion. That was the Irish in him: a generation removed from Ireland, the bog-water dried out of him by the Australian sun, he still had the Irishman’s belief that an argument was better than a benediction.

‘Don’t start that again, love.’

‘Wouldn’t you like a son you could teach to use a gun?’

‘With my luck I’d land a daughter.’

‘We could keep trying. I’m willing.’

He looked at her for a moment, then again his eyes glazed over. He turned away and began to fill a pouch with cartridges. She looked at his broad back, wanting to apologise, but the words were like stones stuck behind her teeth. It had become like this over the past few months; the old ability to communicate with him with just a look had gone and now there was even difficulty in finding words. She continued to stare at his back, loving him and hating him: once you gave your heart to someone, you could never take it all back. She loved him because physically he had not changed; he was still the man whose touch, sometimes even just the sight of him, could make her tremble with longing. He was big, well over six feet, with the chest and shoulders of a wrestler; she still continued to be amazed at some of the feats of strength she saw him perform on these trips. He was not handsome, with the nose that had been broken in a Rugby scrum and the cheekbones that were too high and too broad: if any Tartar had made it as far west as Connemara and not been talked impotent by the Irish, then Jack could claim him as an ancestor. It was a face which appealed to men as well as to women, one in which strength of character was marked as plainly as the irregular features. She loved the physical side of him, and she loved his warmth, his humour and his tenderness. Lately she had begun to hate him for what she thought of as his selfishness and his total disregard of any of her own ambitions. His strength of character was only a stubbornness to deny his own failings.

‘You’d better get up,’ he said without turning round. ‘Tsering has your breakfast ready.’

‘Tsampa cakes and honey?’ Their food supplies had begun to run low and for the past month she had been breakfasting on the small unappetising cakes made from roasted ground barley, the tsampa flour that was the staple diet of their Bhutanese porters. ‘I can hardly wait!’

But he had already gone out of the tent, leaving her with her sarcasm like alum on her lips. I’m becoming a real shrew, she told herself; and felt disgusted. Naturally good-tempered, she despised bitchery in herself as much as in others.

From outside she heard a few bars of music: Indian music made even more discordant to her ear by static. Nick Wilkins was fiddling with the radio, trying to get the morning news: Delhi spoke in a cracked voice across the mountains. There was a note of excitement in the voice, but she took little notice of it.

She dressed quickly in slacks, woollen shirt and sweater, washed in the basin of now tepid water that Tsering had brought in just before she had wakened, ran a comb through her short dark hair and put on some lipstick. She looked at herself in the cracked mirror that hung from the tent pole; even scarred by that mirror, she thought, I don’t look too bad. Her hair had been cut by Jack with blunt scissors a month ago; the effect was only a little worse than the deliberate casualness of some professional hair styles. Her skin was still good, but if she looked closely she could see the faint lines round the corners of her eyes, the result of too many years’ exposure to sun and wind. Nick Wilkins had told her that butterflies, at Himalayan heights, underwent a change of melanism, the dark brown pigment in their make-up asserting itself. If she stayed around here long enough she could finish up looking brown and wrinkled like the old women of the Himalayas. In the year of her début, when she had been one of the more energetic of London’s butterflies, Tatler and Queen had described her as beautiful; but in those days in those magazines any daughter of the well-to-do whose eyes were straight and whose teeth had no gaps was described as beautiful. But Life, whose standards of beauty were higher and which did not have to depend on the British middle and upper classes for its circulation, had also said she was beautiful. They had done a colour story on Alpine plants and one of the illustrations had featured Jack as a collector. The caption had read: ‘In the background is Marquis’s beautiful wife, Eve.’ She had been half-obscured by a clump of Megacarpaea polyandra, but one couldn’t have everything; she had accepted the compliment and since then had been a regular subscriber to Life.

She guessed she was still beautiful, but the thought did not exercise her; her vanity, as well as her patience, had worn itself out in these remote corners of the world. The good bonework still showed in her face; her lips were still full and had not begun to dry out; her dark eyes still held their promise of passion. Oh, there’s plenty of passion there, she told herself; only what the hell do I do with it? Her Cypriot grandmother had died early from too much exposure to the English climate and not enough attention from her phlegmatic English husband. She herself had suffered from a variety of climates and an Australian husband who had lately begun to turn into a stranger.

She turned from the distorted image of herself in the cracked mirror and went out of the tent into the cold sharp air, like a blade laid softly against the cheek, of this narrow valley on the north-eastern border of Bhutan.

Nick Wilkins, crouched by the radio outside his tent, looked up as she passed him on the way to the kitchen tent. ‘How do you manage to look so fresh and beautiful first thing in the morning?’

She stopped, pleased at the compliment; it was almost as if Nick knew she needed some reassurance this morning. One did not expect such gratuitous compliments from Englishmen, especially an entomologist from Leeds. ‘Nick, you’re a continual surprise! Used you to say nice things to the girls back in Leeds first thing in the morning?’

The compliment had slipped out, an exclamation he now regretted. He turned his attention back to the radio, covering his retreat with the blunt awkward remarks that always made him sound surlier than he actually was.

‘Never met any girls first thing in the morning back in Leeds. Except my sister and she always looked like the Bride of Frankenstein.’ As always when he was embarrassed, the trace of northern accent reappeared in his voice; despite the careful cultivation of the last six years, ever since he had fled Leeds, it was still there wrapped round the root of his tongue. He envied Marquis, the Australian, whose flat vowels would never raise an eyebrow in Knightsbridge. In England, if you were going to be an outsider, it was always better to be a Commonwealth one.

Eve recognised the rebuff, but she tried again: ‘Is your sister married?’

‘Four kids.’

‘That explains it.’ But I shouldn’t mind looking like the Bride of Frankenstein if I could have four kids. Or even one. She nodded at the radio. ‘Any news?’

‘The Chinese have crossed the border east of here, over into the North-East Frontier, and in the west, too, in Ladakh. Things look grim.’

He looked up at her, his squarely handsome face sober and worried. He was an entomologist, accustomed to the savagery of the insect world, but he knew little or nothing of what humans could do to each other. Even in Leeds it had been possible to remain innocent; the gangs and the prostitutes had never come to the quiet street on the edge of the city; the chapel singing had been the loudest noise heard at the weekend. He was twenty-eight years old and this was his first field trip to a territory where the amenities and veneer of civilisation were left behind at the border like so much excess baggage.

Eve sat down at the small table outside the kitchen tent. She was protected from the breeze that came down the valley, and the morning sun warmed her and took some of the edge off her mood. Tsering, cheerful as a lottery winner, a prizewinner every day no matter what his health or the weather was like, brought her the tsampa cakes and wild honey.

‘Very good breakfast this morning, memsahib.’ He said the same thing every morning, never realising the monotony of it; that was one of the advantages of not having a good command of English. ‘Cooked special for you.’

Everyone else had had the same breakfast, but Eve kept up the pretence. ‘Tsering, you are too good to me. Your wives will become jealous of me.’

‘Wives don’t know, memsahib.’ He grinned and ducked back into the kitchen tent.

Eve looked at Wilkins. ‘Jack heard the news?’

‘He got the early bulletin. They’re broadcasting every hour. Shows how serious it is.’ Wilkins switched off the radio and came and sat beside her. He poured some tea into a mug and sat thoughtfully watching the spinning liquid as he stirred it. Eve had the feeling that he looked at everything through a microscope before he offered an opinion on it; he dissected even the most inconsequential happening as if it were some rare entomological discovery. But she knew that the Chinese crossing of the Indian border was more than an inconsequential happening. She had been on enough expeditions with entomologists to think of an analogy: it could be an invasion of Driver ants enlarged to the human level and just as implacably destructive. She said as much, and Wilkins nodded.

‘I’ve never seen Driver ants at work, but I’ve seen pictures of what they’ve done. Given time, they can eat their way right through a farm. Crops, livestock and all. These Chinese could do the same to India.’

‘What did Jack say?’

‘Nothing much. That husband of yours isn’t all Irish blarney. He can be as uncommunicative as one of these Himalayan lamas when he wants to be.’

She looked down towards where Marquis squatted on his heels beside Tom and Nancy Breck and the porters. The camp was pitched in a grass plot beneath a tall cliff; a stand of pine trees made an effective wind-break at one end of the camp. A torrent, fifty feet at its widest, split the narrow floor of the valley, tearing its way through a tumble of huge grey-green rocks in flying scarves of white water; a footbridge, which swayed like a banner when the wind was strong, was slung on thin poles across the raging waters just below the camp. Prayer-wheels, long copper cylinders that spun the morning sun into themselves like silken thread, stood at either end of the bridge; each time Eve crossed the precarious gangway she felt she was supported only by prayer, not the most comforting aid to her sceptical mind. Two gardens had been planted on a flat patch above the river, one for growing their own vegetables, the other for keeping alive the plants that had been collected. The porters were now digging up the plants and packing them in polythene bags. The bags were stacked to one side like so many plastic cabbages, and Marquis was checking the labels the Brecks had fixed to each of them.

Eve said, ‘I think he’d move us out of here at once if he thought there was any real danger.’ But she wondered if what she had said was only a wish and not a conviction.

‘I doubt it,’ said Wilkins, and looked aggressively at Marquis as the latter stood up, said something to the Brecks that made them laugh, then came up towards the kitchen tent. ‘All you’re interested in is your bloody rhododendrons. Right?’

Marquis looked at him quizzically, smiling with a good humour that only made Wilkins more annoyed. ‘Something worrying you, Nick? Your hair shirt shrunk in the wash? Buck up, sport. You’ll be home soon, back there in the Natural History Museum, swapping philosophy and dead flies with the girl students.’

‘I’m worried about the Chinese. I think we should pack up and get out while the going’s good.’

There was a basin of water on a rough wooden stand outside the kitchen tent; Marquis moved across to it and unhurriedly began to wash his hands. He had large hands, cracked and calloused from working among rocks, and his nails were broken and dirty. Eve had grown accustomed to them, but it had taken her some time to appreciate that the hands of a field botanist had much rougher usage than the gloved hands of her father when the latter had pottered among his roses in his Buckinghamshire garden. It still amazed her, after eight years, that those same coarse hands could be so gentle in their love-making.

‘Relax, Nick. We’ll be okay.’ Marquis began to dry his hands. ‘Bhutan is one of the few independent kingdoms left in this part of the world. Any part of the world, for that matter. It took a long distance look at democracy, through a cracked telescope, I reckon, and it turned thumbs down on the idea. I’m a republican up to my dandruff, but if I have to be caught in a kingdom, this is the one I’ll vote for.’

‘Hates England,’ Eve said to Wilkins round a mouthful of cake and honey. ‘Always sticks stamps on upside down on his letters. Hopes the Queen will have a rush of blood to the head and abdicate.’

Marquis grinned at her and went on: ‘Bhutan is tied up with India for the rather back-handed relations it has with the rest of the world. And the Indians hang out bloody great signs to let everyone know they don’t interfere here. For one thing you never see an Indian army man here in Bhutan, not even as an instructor. The Bhutanese were not being just bloody-minded when they took so long to make up their minds whether to give us visas or not. They reckon the less foreigners they allow in here, the more neutral they can claim to be. Neutrality is like chastity, Nick. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Right, love?’

‘I’ve never been neutral,’ said Eve.

Marquis grinned and winked. Neutrality had once been a private privilege, taken for granted; now one had to produce proof, as if it were a concession given by belligerent outsiders. Civilisation had begun to learn the lesson of barbarism: never trust the silent bystander, give him a clout just for luck.

‘I don’t blame them,’ he went on. ‘There are only three-quarters of a million Bhutanese, most of them still living in the sixteenth century, still eating the lotus, unfrozen and not bought at bargain prices in any supermarket. On one side of them they’ve got seven hundred million Chows, itchy with all the propaganda that’s sprinkled on them like lice powder, seven hundred million pairs of legs poised for the Great Leap Forward – and it could be in this direction. On the other side of them they have nearly five hundred million Indians – and if any man can tell what one Indian is going to do from one day to the next, let alone five hundred million of them, he’s a better man than me, Gunga Din or Malcolm Muggeridge. The Bhutanese have been sitting on the fence so long they’ve got crotch-sore. But a sore crotch is preferable to a severed head. Once they start leaning one way, the other side is going to jump in here like a gate-crasher at a party. Only it will be no party for these poor bastards.’ He gestured down at the porters. ‘In no time at all they’ll be like the Tibetans, also-rans in their own country. We had it in Ireland once, till we kicked out the English.’

‘You were never in Ireland,’ said Eve.

‘I inherited the feeling of oppression. It’s in my bones.’

‘It looks to me as if the Chinese have already begun to gate-crash,’ Wilkins said.

Marquis shook his head. ‘Not here, Nick. This country is too small. The Chows don’t want to lose face with all the uncommitted countries in Asia. I can’t understand why they’ve come across the Indian border, it’s not going to win friends and influence anyone for them. But maybe they reckon attacking someone almost as big as themselves won’t lose them any popularity. Little blokes get a certain sadistic delight out of seeing big fellers knocking hell out of each other.’

Eve looked up at him and smiled sweetly and innocently, wondering when he had last had hell knocked out of him. She looked around the camp for some Dempsey or Joe Louis, but the camp was barren of heavyweights, and she went back to spreading honey on another tsampa cake.

Marquis cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering at her amusement, then he turned back to Wilkins. ‘We’re safe enough, Nick. We’re a long way from where the fighting is, and in any case we’ll be out of here in a fortnight.’

‘So you can start preparing, Nick, for the shock of civilisation,’ said Eve, wiping honey from her chin with a finger; and Marquis grinned at her.

Wilkins was aware of the undercurrent between the Marquises. He and the Brecks had discussed it once or twice when they had come back here to the main camp for their periodic reports to Marquis. Each scientist took two porters and moved out into an area of his own choosing, staying there for periods varying from two weeks to a month. The Brecks, both botanists, went together and since this was virtually a honeymoon trip did not seem to mind the isolation from the others. But Wilkins, though shy in speech, was naturally gregarious and always looked forward to his return to the main camp. On the last couple of visits he had noticed that the Marquises had become uncertain in their attitudes towards each other; they were like climbers negotiating the slopes in the mountains beyond the camp where new snow lay across old snow and an avalanche could start with one false step. He had an Englishman’s distaste for viewing other people’s private feelings and he was now wishing urgently for an end to the expedition. He had begun by liking the cheerful, argumentative Marquis, but he had made up his mind now he would not come on another trip with him. For one thing he envied and resented Marquis’s ability to deal with almost anything that came up, his gift for leadership. And for another thing, there was Eve.

Then the Brecks came up from the garden, smiling at each other in the open, yet somehow secret way that, Eve had noticed, was international among young lovers. Perhaps she and Jack had once smiled like that at each other; she couldn’t remember. Memory, if it hadn’t yet turned sour, had begun to fail her when she needed it most. She turned to greet them, looking for herself and Jack in their faces.

‘Boy, what a morning!’ Tom Breck flung his arms wide, as if trying to split himself apart. All his actions and gestures were exaggerated, like those of a clockwork toy whose engine was too powerful. ‘And we’re packing up to go home!’

‘Another month up here and you’d have your behind frozen off,’ Marquis said. ‘Ask the porters what it’s like up here once the winds turn.’

‘I’d like to take a couple of those guys back home with us.’ Breck nodded down towards the porters laughing among themselves as they worked in the garden. ‘Boy, they’re happy!’

‘They wouldn’t be in Bucks County,’ said Nancy Breck, practical as ever. She sat down at the table beside Eve, dipped a tsampa cake in the jar of honey and ate it. ‘That’s where we’re going to live. Lots of tweedy types live there. Bucks County, P.A., is no place for a Bhutanese.’

Tom Breck grinned and sat down opposite his wife, looking at her with undisguised love. He was a tall thin boy who, with his crew-cut and his wispy blond beard, looked even younger than twenty-four. A Quaker from Colorado, he had spent six months in New York where he had met and married Nancy, and in his seven months here on the Indian sub-continent had lost none of his enthusiasm for the world at large. He was a bumbler, forgetful and unmethodical and a poor botanist; and several times Marquis had had to speak bluntly and harshly to him. Always Breck, unresentful of the dressing-down, genuinely apologetic, had gone back to work with the same cheerful enthusiasm. But already in nine months of marriage it had become evident to him that Nancy had come along just in time to save him from disaster. She was and would be his only means of survival; and unlike so many men in the same predicament, he was grateful for and not resentful of the fact. Tom Breck was a pacifist in the battle of the sexes.

‘Bucks County sounds just like Bucks, England,’ said Marquis. ‘Eve’s old man was always in tweeds. Even at our wedding. She had me all dolled up in striped pants from Moss Bros. I looked like a good argument for living in sin, and her old man turned up looking like a second-hand sofa. Twice at the reception I nearly sat down on him.’

Eve smiled sweetly at him, not taking the bait. She had seen the glance pass between Wilkins and the Brecks. She wrapped herself in silence and a smile, aware for the first time that the coolness between Jack and herself was now apparent to the others. Oh, to be back in London, where you had the privacy of congestion! One was too naked here in the mountains. She wondered how the monks in the mountain monasteries, who valued introspection so much, managed to survive the exposure to each other.

Wilkins broke the moment, bluntly, like a man treading too heavily on thin ice. ‘I wouldn’t mind being tweedy and all in Bucks, England, or Bucks County, P.A., wherever that is. Anywhere, just so long as we’re out of here.’

Tom Breck, the morning sun making newly-minted pennies of his dark glasses, looked up towards the mountains north and east of them. The valley ran north-east between tree-cloaked slopes that rose steeply towards the peaks of the Great Himalaya Range. Oak, birch and pine made a varied green pattern against the hillsides; clumps of rhododendrons were turning brown under the autumn chill; gentians that had miraculously survived the frosts lay like fragments of mirror among the rocks, reflecting the blue above. The morning wind, still blowing from the south although it was late October, snatched snow from the high peaks and drew it in skeins, miles long, across the shining sky. He had loved the Rockies in his home state, but they had never prepared him for the grandeur and breath-taking excitement of these mountains on the roof of the world.

‘I’d be quite happy to stay here forever.’ He looked across at Nancy, grinning boyishly, twisting his beard as if wringing water from it. ‘What d’you say, honey?’

Nancy nodded. ‘Maybe for a while. Not forever, though. It’s too close to China. Sooner or later you’d be wanting to climb the mountains—’She nodded towards the north.

‘This is as close as I want us ever to get.’

Breck’s face had sobered. The light went out of his dark glasses as he lowered his head, and a deep frown cut his brows above them. ‘You’re right, honey. I’d find nothing. Nothing that would help.’

Then he got up, awkwardly, quickly, and went back down to the porters in the garden. There was a moment which, to Eve, was so tangible that she felt she could see it; the wrong remark, even the wrong look, could have punctured it as a balloon might have been. She sat waiting for someone to say the wrong thing; but no one did. Marquis and Wilkins turned away from the table as naturally as if they had decided some moments ago to do so, and went down to join Breck and the porters.

Nancy Breck looked after them. ‘Tom forgets sometimes. I mean, what happened to his parents. Then when he does remember—’She looked back to the north, to the mountains, with the skeins of wind-blown snow now turning to scimitars, riding like demons out of China. ‘I mean, it’s almost as if he wanted to forget—’

‘Wouldn’t that be best?’

Nancy shook her head. She was a big girl, strong and well-proportioned; she looked a farm girl from Minnesota rather than a doctor’s daughter from Main Line Philadelphia. Later on she would be massive, perhaps even a little frightening; but now she was attractive, if you liked big healthy girls. And Tom Breck obviously did; and what anyone else thought didn’t matter at all. She was not wearing her glasses now, and her big short-sighted brown eyes were dark with concentration.

‘He mustn’t forget! I’m not religious, God knows – there, that makes me sound contradictory, doesn’t it? Are you religious, Eve? No, I shouldn’t ask.’ At times Nancy could lose herself and her audience in a flood of words; conversation became a one-way torrent of questions, opinions and non-sequiturs. ‘Anyhow. Tom’s parents died because they were religious. Marvellously so – I’ve read some of the letters they sent him. Every second line read like a prayer.’

I talked like this once, Eve was thinking, listening with only half an ear. I used all those extravagant adjectives; non-sequiturs were a regular diet with me. But I never had Nancy’s passion, not about the world in general; perhaps that is the American in her, they make an empire of their conscience. I only had (have?) passion for my husband, a most un-English habit.

She came back to the tail-end of Nancy’s monologue: ‘Don’t you feel that way about Jack? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

‘No,’ said Eve, and left Nancy to wonder if it was meant as an answer to either or both the questions. She turned to the kitchen tent, calling to Tsering to bring her more tea.

‘Sorry.’ Nancy stood up, mumbled something, then walked away towards her tent, stumbling a little as if embarrassment had only added to her myopia to make her almost blind.

Eve sat alone at the rough table, warming her hands round the fresh mug of tea Tsering had brought her. She wanted to run after Nancy, apologise for the rudeness of her answer; but that would only lead to explanation, and she would never be able to explain to anyone what had gone wrong between herself and Jack. Because she hated scenes, she had done her best to keep their conflict to themselves; they had had one or two fierce rows, but they had always been in their tent and never while Wilkins and the Brecks had been in camp. She knew that Nimchu and the other main camp porters must have heard the rows and discussed them; but she knew also that the Bhutanese would not have gossiped with the Englishman and the Americans. It shocked and embarrassed her to the point of sickness to discover now that Nancy knew that all was not well between her and Jack. To have Nick and Tom know could somehow be ignored. To have another woman, one so newly and happily married, know was almost unbearable.

Tsering hovered behind her, his round fat face split in the perpetual smile that made life seem one huge joke. His name, Tsering Yeshe, meant Long Lived Wisdom; he had never shown any signs of being wise, unless constant cheerfulness showed a wisdom of acceptance of what life offered. He was proud of his attraction for women, and on the trek out he had almost shouted himself hoarse calling to every woman he had passed, even those who were sometimes half a mile away, standing like dark storks in the flooded rice paddies. Eve had no idea how old he was and he himself could only guess; but he had been accompanying expeditions here in the Himalayas, in Nepal, Sikkim and his native Bhutan, every year since the end of World War Two. He had a wife and four children back at Dzongsa Dzong on the Indian border, but he hardly ever saw them; he claimed three other wives in various parts of the country, but Eve suspected these were inventions to bolster his reputation. Eve, a wife driven by her own needs to accompany her husband wherever he went, wondered what Tsering’s wife felt about his long absences.

‘More cake, memsahib? More tea?’ Tsering liked his women fat, and he thought the memsahib much too thin for a really beautiful woman. She had good breasts, but the rest of her was much too flat for a woman who would be really good to make love to. He wondered if that was why the sahib sometimes shouted at the memsahib when they were alone in their tent. ‘You do not eat enough, memsahib.’

‘You’ve told me that, Tsering. If I ate as much as you try to push into me, we’d soon run out of food. How are the stores, anyway?’ It was her job to supervise the stores. Even on their first expedition she had insisted that she be given a job and as time had gone by she had become an efficient and reliable supply officer.

Tsering made a face and ran a greasy hand over his close-cropped black hair. Men and women here in Bhutan all wore the same close-cropped style, and when Eve had first arrived in the country she had several times been confused as to what sex she was talking to. ‘Meat is almost gone, memsahib. Rice, too. Maybe the sahib better shoot something. Yesterday I saw gooral up on hill.’ He nodded back at the tangled hills that, like a green waterfall, tumbled down into the pit of the valley.

Eve did not particularly like the meat of the gooral, the Himalayan chamois, but she had tasted worse goats’ meat and it was at least better than some of the village sheep they had bought on their way out. ‘I’ll speak to the sahib. And you’d better check again on the rice. If it’s really low, we may have to send Chungma and Tashi back down the valley to buy some at Sham Dzong.’

That was two days’ walk: four days there and back. Jack would consider it a waste of time and two men. If she played her stores carefully, she might have them all out of here within a week.

She smiled to herself, like a schoolgirl who was about to bring the holidays forward by burning down the school.

2

Marquis was secretly pleased when Eve told him they needed more meat and would he try for the gooral. There were still some botanical specimens that had to be gathered to make the collection complete, and time was running out; snow was already beginning to fall heavily on the high peaks, and any day now the winds would swing to the north to bring blizzards. On top of that he had been more disturbed than he had shown by this morning’s news on the radio. He was not a fool, and he knew that the Chinese Reds had long regarded Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the North-East Frontier Agency as only extensions of Tibet. But he wanted at least another week; he wanted to complete the collection, his best ever. He had fought against the idea, was still fighting it, but this might be his last expedition. He wanted it to be one that botanists at least would remember.

But now only the gooral was on his mind; or so he told himself. He always welcomed the opportunity to hunt game, and it eased his conscience when the hunt was for food and not just for sport. He would go out again this afternoon and collect the swertia racemosa he had seen yesterday in the ravine farther up the valley.

He was now a mile above the camp, moving up a narrow track through a stand of evergreen oak. The valley here was almost narrow enough to be called a gorge, a cleft between two steep wooded ridges; the river raced down the floor of the valley, twisting and turning like a rusted knife cutting its way out of the mountains. He knew that the river sped on to join other mountain streams, became a slower-moving river that merged into the Brahmaputra, a procession of waters that wended their majestic way, carrying the prayers, dreams and excreta of men, down to the Bay of Bengal over a thousand miles away. Rivers, as well as mountains, had always fascinated him; he had a voice like a bookmaker’s lament, but his heart always rang with a Caruso-note when he came for the first time on a river. Heaven was a high mountain peak somewhere and he would reach it by way of a river that flowed uphill. It thrilled him to walk beside such a stream as this one, to look at the water tearing its way over the rocks and to see it as the birth pangs of a giant river that, a thousand miles away, carried ships to the sea. He was passionately interested in everything that grew in nature: plants, trees, rivers. And once, in South America, he had seen the birth of a mountain as a volcano had exploded out of the belly of a plain.

The opposite ridge was bathed in sunlight, the trees glittering like the plumage of some giant green bird, but this side of the valley had never seen the sun and was dank and cold. Strangers to the Himalayas were always surprised at the difference in temperature between a sunny slope and one where the sun never reached; he remembered Nancy Breck’s shock when she had taken a sun and shade reading and found a difference of 30 degrees centigrade. He shivered now as he trudged up beneath the trees. But this was where he would find the gooral; it did not like the sun. A Monal pheasant broke from a clump of rhododendron ahead of him and flashed like a huge jewel as it crossed to the opposite ridge, but he resisted the quick impulse to shoot at it. The .30 Double would just blow the bird to pieces, and he had never been able to bring himself to kill just for killing’s sake.

He breathed deeply as he walked, enjoying the thin sharp air in his nose and throat. Unlike other expedition leaders to remote places, he had never written a book on his experiences, had never tried to explain the mystique that brought him to these high mountains, took him to tropical jungles or, once, had taken him to the loneliness of the Australian Centre. He was a botanist by profession and it was his job to collect plant specimens; it was a job he enjoyed and one in which he knew he had a high reputation. But deep in his heart, and he was a man of more secrets than even Eve suspected, he knew that the botanical searches were now more of an excuse for an escape from civilisation. Not civilisation, in itself, although he had no deep love of it; no city could ever bring on the euphoria that the isolation of those mountains could give him. He wanted to escape from what civilisation meant: surrender to Eve and her money, a scarecrow man papered over with his wife’s cheques. During their brief engagement he had referred to her as his financée; it was a joke that had soon gone sour, like a penny on the tongue. She always contributed a major part of the finance of these expeditions, but he had now convinced himself that this was her money being spent in a good cause, not just in keeping a husband. Which was what would happen to him if he gave in to her and retired to pottering about on the family estate in Buckinghamshire. Civilisation had once meant something else again, a semidetached morgue in a drab suburb of Sydney where his mother and his two sisters had done their best to lay him out with cold looks of disapproval. Only his father, a rebel who couldn’t afford a flag, drunk every Saturday on republicanism and three bottles of Resch’s Pilsener, had never complained; but he had never really understood why any man should choose to leave the greatest bloody country in the world, Australia. His parents had worked their fingers bare of prints to put him through university; they had neither understood nor forgiven him when he had changed from law to botany at the end of his first year. In the end he had run away because he knew he was in their debt and he would never be able to repay them. They were dead now, but his conscience would give a free ride to their ghosts for the rest of his life.

Now Eve, not yet a ghost, had swung a leg over his conscience. And he felt the weight of her more than that of his parents. The time had come when he owed her a decision. He could not expect her to go on accompanying him forever to the ends of the earth and comfort; she was a woman who had been brought up in comfort and it had surprised him that she had borne so long the hardships of their trips without complaint. But maybe that was her heritage: English boarding schools, English plumbing, English cooking, bred pioneers. The Stoics of ancient Greece would have tossed in the towel, taken out life subscriptions to hedonism, if they had ever been exposed to life in some of the more benighted ancestral halls of England.

There was also the matter of children.

She had talked about having a family almost from the moment they had decided to marry. She had then been a girl of impulsive ideas and quick decisions; it had shocked him, a slow starter at romance, to learn how eager she had been, first, to have him make love to her, then, to have him marry her. He had never met anyone like her: she exploded love like a boxful of fireworks. They had met, become lovers, married and she had started talking about a family all within six weeks.

That had been in the autumn of 1954. He had taken a rare holiday and gone to Switzerland for some climbing. He had climbed the Mönch and in the late evening come back to the small hotel where he was staying. In those days English tourists were still limited in their travel allowance and at even the cheapest hotel one met a very mixed bag of visitors. When he had gone into the hotel’s small bar the only vacant seat had been beside hers. He had not been then, and still was not, a ladies’ man; but his easy-going, casual approach attracted a lot of women. It had attracted Eve and she had attracted him. Within forty-eight hours they had been lovers and were in love: it had been that sort of romance.

It had taken him the same time to discover whose daughter she was and how much money she had. ‘Sir Humphrey Aidan – you’re his daughter? You mean I’ve been to bed with the Bank of England?’

‘Da-ahling, he has nothing to do with the Bank of England.’ She sat up in bed and ran a hand through her tousled hair. In those days she wore it long, down to her shoulders. It was the way he still liked it, and he hated it when he had to chop it short for her when they were out on these field trips. ‘Da-ahling, we’re not going to waste our time talking about money, are we? I hate people who have a thing about money.’

‘A thing? What d’you mean? Oh, if only my dad was here—’

‘Thank God he’s not. Can I help the bed I was born in? Look at me, stark. Am I any different from the daughter of some man on the dole?’

‘Look, love—’

‘I absolutely adore it when you call me love. It’s such a divine change after da-ahling. In my set everyone—’

‘Set? You’re the sort who belongs to a set?’

‘Da-ahling, all right then, my crowd. The people I go around with.’ She shook her head, suddenly sober. ‘Somehow I don’t think you’re going to like them.’

He ignored that and walked to the window to look out at Jungfrau standing out like a mountain of glass against the brilliant sky. A party of four climbers was working its way up the lower slopes of the mountain; that was what he should have done, concentrated on climbing. She lay back on the bed and looked at him, already loving him with a depth of feeling that surprised even herself. ‘Have you ever been in love before?’

He looked back at her, then at last nodded. ‘Twice. With the same girl.’

‘I didn’t say how many times have you made love—’

‘I know you didn’t. I fell in love with this girl twice. Once when she was sixteen. Then she went off with another bloke, and I swore off love for life, took the pledge and a double dose of bromide. Then I met her again when she was twenty and by then the bromide had worn off, I fell in love with her again.’

‘You were still in love with her—’

He shook his head. ‘No, it was a new feeling. It can happen. Fall in love all over again, I mean.’

‘What was she like? She must have been something special, to make you fall in love with her twice.’

‘She was no raving beauty. She had a mouth like an armpit full of loose teeth, and though her eyes weren’t exactly crossed they had designs on each other—’ She threw a pillow at him. He caught it and came and sat back on the bed beside her. ‘Look, love, Aussies have no great reputation as lovers. The only time an Aussie ever compliments a woman, he’s asking for a loan or she’s got a gun at his head. But one thing we do know – never tell your current girl friend what the last one looked like. Always make out she was about as sexy as a porridge doll. One thing a woman can’t stand is to look in a mirror and see another woman’s face there.’

‘Who told you that?’

He grinned. ‘My last girl.’

‘I wish Mummy was still alive to meet you. She would have absolutely adored you. But you and Daddy should get on. You have something in common.’

‘You mean he has an overdraft, too?’

She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, da-ahling. No, he really is like you. He’s frightfully interested in flowers. He grows roses.’

He looked as if he was about to swear, then suddenly he laughed and slapped her on the rump. ‘Love, the last thing I ever want to do is raise bloody roses. I collect plants, not grow them. A lot of botanists do like to grow things, but not me. I’m like the obstetrician who doesn’t like to be surrounded by kids.’

‘Oh,’ she said, linking her hands behind his neck, ‘I was hoping we’d have lots of kids. We could start now.’

Two days later he had introduced her to climbing and she took to it as if she had been born on a mountain. He was an expert climber and had been invited to lead several mountaineering expeditions. But always he had found excuses and in the end he had not been asked to join a climbing team even as a member. He knew he had been branded with a reputation for stand-offishness, a climber who considered himself too good to climb with others. He had let the libel stand because it was better than broadcasting the truth. As time had gone on he had wondered if Eve had ever begun to suspect the truth.

He feared leadership. All his life, even as a boy at school, he had been big and confident-looking: a born leader, everyone had said. He had been captain of the school cricket and rugger teams in his last year and they had been the most disastrous seasons in the school’s history; but no one had blamed him and instead had commiserated with him on the poor material he had been given. At university he had been elected captain of the rugger team and the only two matches the team had won had been when he was out of action through injury. Again no one had blamed him, but by then he had come to know the truth about himself.

Still he had been plagued by people wanting to elect him a leader. Or, what was just as bad, wanting to dispute his title to leadership. It never seemed to matter to them that he had never been known to nominate himself for any leader’s job: they took it for granted that he was in the running and began attacking him sometimes even before his name was mentioned. They were invariably small men: the Big Bastard, as he knew he was called, was always fair game for small men. Sometimes he had wished a big man would dispute his title to leader: he couldn’t bring himself to throw a punch or two at the small men, even if they had attacked him in pairs. So he had retreated farther and farther, never committing himself to any expedition larger than this current one, comfortable in the thought that in such circumstances he was not called upon to be responsible for any man’s life. In small groups such as this each man was accountable for himself and indeed resented that it should be otherwise. Leadership of such an expedition often entailed no more than being responsible for the cost and the day-to-day running of the camp.

But he had regretted missing the opportunity to climb with some of the top mountaineering teams. Hunt had passed him over for the Everest ascent the year before, and his omission from other teams had been conspicuous to those who knew of his ability. He regretted the reputation he had and it worried him. He did not like arrogance in others and it disturbed him to know he was branded with the same sin.

He had also been worried when Eve had insisted she was going to accompany him on the trip to Ruwenzori, wondering if he would have the patience to tolerate her when he was immersed in his work; but she had proved more help than hindrance, and from then on he had never thought of making a trip without her. Her father had died a year after their marriage, leaving her without any close relatives and a fortune that came from shipping and mining. The first fact had bound her closer to him, the second was a barrier that kept pushing itself between them. He was depressed, weighed down by his wife’s wealth, a form of slavery dreamed of by most men who don’t know the value of their freedom.

But now, as it so often did, his depression suddenly lifted. Up ahead he saw the gooral working its way along the steep slope above him. Everything else now dropped out of his mind. He stopped, turning slowly as the gooral, still unaware of him, moved with unhurried and uncanny agility among the rocks and trees on the precipitous slope of the hill. It was no use going up there after it: the gooral would stop, look at him curiously, then be gone out of sight while he was still trying to find a foothold on the hillside. He had learned long ago never act like a goat to catch a goat. He would have to be patient, hope that the animal would come down closer within range. He started up the hill, all his concentration focused on the grey moving shape above him, his ears only half-hearing the other sounds here in the gorge: the hissing rumble of the racing river, the soft explosion of a pheasant taking off from a bush close by, the rattle of falling stones disturbed by the gooral as it bounded from one spot to another.

It worked its way above and past him, began moving back down the gorge towards the camp. He turned and began to follow it, keeping to the track and the cover of the trees. Sometimes it would disappear behind a screen of trees or bushes, and a moment later it would come into view again, still moving down towards the camp. It was lower down the hill now and he could see that it was a male and a big one. Both male and female gooral had horns and often it was difficult to tell which was which. But Marquis had remarkably good eyesight and on this beast he could see the thicker horns and the way they diverged outwards, the mark of the male.

The breeze had freshened and was now coming down the gorge, putting him at a disadvantage. He glanced up anxiously when he saw the gooral stop and look down towards him; he froze, wondering if it had caught his scent and was about to take off farther up the hill. He kept absolutely still, remembering the cardinal rule that even some experienced hunters often forgot in their excitement: that a wild animal, having no education in such things, was more times than not unable to distinguish a man at a glance unless the latter betrayed himself by some movement. To the gooral he could be no more than another object among the trees and rocks which surrounded him. Only his scent, if it got to the gooral, would give him away. The gooral would not recognise the scent, but it would be a strange one and he would be warned.

Then the animal bent down, wrenched at a shrub and a moment later, still chewing, moved on. Marquis relaxed, then he too began to move on. He knew now that the gooral could not smell him, despite the fact that the breeze was blowing from behind him. This often happened in these narrow valleys of the Himalayas: the breeze created its own crosscurrents by bouncing off the steep hills and a scent could be lost within a hundred yards.

The gooral was moving slowly down the hillside, and Marquis quickened his pace. The camp would soon be in sight, round the next bend in the valley, and he wanted to get his shot in before the gooral sighted the camp and was possibly frightened by some of the moving figures it would see down there. He was sweating a little with excitement, but his hands were cold from the breeze, which had a rumour of snow on it, and he kept blowing on his right hand, trying to get some flexibility into his trigger finger. The breeze was quickening by the minute, and once he turned his head it caught at his eye, making it water. Autumn was not the best time for hunting in these mountains: the cold fingers, the chill of the metal against the cheek, the wind that watered the eyes, none of it made for easy marksmanship.

The gooral stopped again, its head raised; it gave a hissing whistle, a sign that it was frightened. Then suddenly it bounded down the hill, racing with incredible swiftness ahead of the stones and small rocks disturbed by its progress. The hillside was open here and Marquis had a clear view of the animal as it raced down at right angles to him. Something had frightened the gooral, but there was no time to look for what it was; he raised his gun, tracking a little ahead of the flying gooral, then let go. The shot reverberated around the narrow valley, its echoes dying away quickly as the breeze caught them; the gooral missed its step, then turned a somersault and went plunging down to finish up against a rock just above the path. Marquis felt the thrill that a good shot always gave him. He moved down the path towards the dead gooral, the gun held loosely in one hand, relaxed and happy and forgetful of everything but what he had just done. He would not boast of his shot, but he never denied to himself the pride that he felt. He might have seemed less self-confident if he had talked more about his accomplishments, but at thirty-six a man found it difficult to change the habits and faults of a lifetime. A leopard couldn’t change his spots …

The leopard! He knew now what had frightened the gooral. He turned his head quickly, and the breeze, now a rising wind, sliced at his eyes. His gaze dimmed with tears, but not before he recognised the leopard coming down the hillside in smooth bounding strides that he knew would culminate in a great leap to bring the beast crashing down on him. He whipped up the gun, but even as he did he knew the shot would be useless: he could not see a thing.

Then he felt the bullets rip the air inches above his head and he ducked. The short burst of automatic fire started the valley thundering; again the echoes were snatched away by the wind. But he heard nothing, only felt the thud on the ground as the leopard landed less than a yard from him; his eyes suddenly cleared, and he stepped back as the dying beast reached out for him with a weakly savage paw. He stood on shivering legs, staring down at the leopard as it snarled up at him, coughing angrily in its throat, its jaws working to get at him, its eyes yellow with a fierceness about which its body could do nothing. Then the head dropped and it was dead.

‘Jolly lucky shot, that. I almost blew your head off, instead of hitting him. Just as well you ducked, old man.’

Marquis turned, in control of himself again. On the other side of the river stood an Indian soldier, a Sten gun held loosely in the crook of his arm. Beside him, his hands bound together, was a second soldier, a Chinese.




Chapter Two (#ulink_27464b23-76ed-5a81-b422-5dea1fd47171)


‘Is there any way of crossing this river?’ the Indian asked.

Marquis nodded downstream. ‘There’s a bridge down opposite our camp.’

‘Jolly good.’ They had to shout to make themselves heard above the hiss of the water as it boiled past the rocks that tried to block its path. ‘Are you going back there now?’

Marquis looked down at the dead leopard, then at the gooral still wedged in above the rock. He would send Nimchu and a couple of the other porters back for them. The shots would have frightened off any other game that might be about, and the carcasses would be safe for some time. In any case he had to find out what the Indian and the Chinese were doing here.

He walked back along the bank of the river, watching the other two men as they picked their way along the narrow track on the other side. The Chinese walked with his head bent; with his hands tied in front of him he looked like a man deep in meditative prayer. The Indian kept glancing across at Marquis, smiling and nodding like a man throwing silent greetings across a crowded room. Occasionally he prodded the man in front of him with the barrel of his Sten gun, but the Chinese either ignored it or did not feel it. Captor and captive, it was obvious to Marquis even at this distance that they hated each other’s guts.

Before they reached the camp, Eve, Nimchu and three of the porters had come up the track to meet them. ‘What’s the matter? I heard the shots—’ Then Eve looked across the river and saw the two strangers as they came round an outcrop of rock. She saw the Sten gun carried by the Indian, and she looked quickly at Marquis to see if he had been wounded. ‘Did he shoot at you?’

He shook his head, warmed by her concern for him. He took the hand she had put out to him, and quickly told her what had happened. He spoke to the porters, telling them to collect the dead beasts; then, still hand in hand with Eve, he continued on towards the camp. She kept glancing across towards the two men opposite, and Marquis saw the Indian smile at her and incline his head in a slight bow. The Chinese remained uninterested.

‘Who are they?’ He could feel the tightness of her fingers on his. ‘The shorter one’s Chinese, isn’t he?’

‘I think so. He’s too big for a Bhutanese or a Sherpa.’ He looked across at the baggy grey uniform and the cap with ear-flaps that the man wore. ‘I’ve never seen a Chinese uniform before. If he’s a Red, he’s out of his territory. So’s the Indian, for that matter.’

‘What about the Indian? He looks pretty pleased with himself.’

‘Maybe he’s just glad to see us.’

‘Are you glad to see him?’

He didn’t answer that, just pressed her fingers. They came into the camp and walked down to the end of the bridge to wait for the two strangers as they crossed it. The Chinese slipped once or twice as the narrow catwalk swayed beneath him and, with his hands tied together, had trouble in keeping his balance; but the Indian made no attempt to help him, just paused and watched as if he would be pleased to see the Chinese topple over on to the rocks and be swept away by the rushing cataract. Then, wet from the spray flung up from below the bridge, they were clambering up the bank and Marquis and Eve advanced to meet them. The Indian slung his Sten gun over one shoulder, saluted Eve and put out his hand to Marquis.

‘Awfully pleased to meet you.’ His accent was high and fluting, a northern Indian provinces accent overlaid with an Oxford exaggeration that was now out of date. It suggested a languid world that was also gone: tea at four, Ascot hats in a Delhi garden, polo, gossip, and a shoving match among the rajahs to see who could stand closest to the British Raj. But the hand the Indian put out was not languid: the fingers were almost as strong as Marquis’s own. ‘I am Lieutenant-Colonel Dalpat Singh, Indian Army. This is General Li Bu-fang, Chinese Army.’ His black eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘The wrong Chinese Army, I’m afraid. He’s not one of Chiang Kai-shek’s chaps, are you, old man?’ He looked at the Chinese, who turned his head away and stared down the valley. Singh looked back at Marquis and Eve. ‘Chinese politeness died out with Communism. It’s always the way when one allows the masses to take over.’

Marquis, a paid-up member of the masses, ignored the Indian’s remark and introduced himself and Eve. ‘You’re out of your territory, aren’t you, Colonel?’

‘Oh, indeed we are. Both of us.’ He looked at the Chinese again, but the latter still remained detached from them, continuing to stare down the valley as if waiting patiently for someone to come. For a moment a flush of temper stained the Indian’s face, then he shrugged and smiled. He was a handsome man, tall and well-built, his jowls and waist perhaps a little soft and thick for a soldier in the field. He wore thick woollen khaki battle-dress with his badges of rank woven on the shoulder-straps, and a chocolate-brown turban that was stained with blood from a dried cut above his right eye. The eyes themselves were black and amused, almost mocking: they would have seen the human in Indra, the god who drank ambrosia for no other reason but to get drunk. But now, too, they were tired eyes: the Indian had almost reached the point of exhaustion where he would begin to mock himself. ‘I wonder if we might have a cup of tea? We haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday at noon.’

Marquis led them up to the camp, and soon Tsering brought them tea, tsampa cakes, honey and fruit. At first it looked as if the Chinese would refuse to eat; then he seemed to make up his mind that it was pointless to starve himself to death. He sat down at the rough table opposite Singh and awkwardly, with his hands still bound, began to eat. The Indian himself was obviously famished and had begun to eat as soon as the food was put in front of him.

While they ate, Marquis and Eve left them alone. Nimchu and the other porters had now returned to camp with the leopard and the gooral. Tsering came out of his kitchen tent with a long knife that he sharpened on a stone. He stopped once, to look up at the Chinese general; he ran the blade along his thumb, then looked at Nimchu. The latter shook his head; and Tsering shrugged like a disappointed man. Then he set to work on the two carcasses, skinning them with the practised hand of a man who had been doing this since he was a child. As he slit the throat of the leopard, he glanced once more up at the Chinese; he grinned and committed murder by proxy. Nimchu and the other porters had cast curious, hostile glances up at the two strangers outside the kitchen tent, but then they had gone back to work digging up plants from the garden. Marquis, who hadn’t seen Tsering’s gestures, looked down at Nimchu and the others, wondering what they thought of these invaders.

‘I’d like to keep the leopard skin,’ Eve said. ‘It would make a nice handbag.’

‘Too many holes in it. He put about five bullets into it. He’s a handy man with that Sten gun. It wasn’t an easy shot. I mean, if he wanted to miss me.’

‘You’re lucky he is handy with it.’ She looked down at the leopard, now almost divested of its skin, and shuddered. The bloody carcass could have been Jack’s. ‘He could have killed you, darling.’

He nodded, not wanting to disturb her further by telling her how close he had come to death. He had not yet thanked the Indian for saving his life, but he wanted to do it when and if he had a moment alone with him. For some reason he could not name, he did not want to thank Singh in front of the Chinese. He remembered something he had read: that the victors should never acknowledge their indebtedness to each other in front of the defeated enemy: it was a sign of weakness and at once gave the enemy hope for revenge. It was probably a Roman or a Chinese or a Frenchman who had written it; the English and the Americans were too sentimental about their enemies once they were defeated; and it could not have been a Russian or a German, he found them unreadable. And it could not have been an Irishman or an Australian: whenever they won anything, they then started a fight amongst themselves.

He looked up towards the kitchen tent at the two men, the tall Indian and the thickset Chinese each ignoring the other as he ate, each self-contained in a sort of national arrogance.

Then he looked down at the leopard, grudgingly admiring the dead beast. Its long tail, so beautiful when the animal was alive, now lay like a coil of frayed rope on the grass; the skin, no longer living, already looked as if it had lost its sheen. The head was still attached to the body and now the skin had been peeled away he could see the amazing muscular development of the neck, thick as that of some tigresses he had seen, even though the tigresses must have been at least twice the weight of this graceful beast. The leopard would have torn him to pieces before he could have cleared his eyes of the tears that had blinded him.

‘What actually happened?’ Eve asked; and when he told her she said, ‘That wouldn’t happen back in Kensington.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. The Jaguars on Cromwell Road are just as lethal.’

He’s dodging the argument again, she thought; but before she could say anything Wilkins and the Brecks were coming across the bridge.

‘We heard some shots. Didn’t sound like rifle shots—’ Then they all looked across at the kitchen tent and saw the two strangers. It was Tom Breck who said, ‘Soldiers? Up here?’

‘Whatever happened to Bhutan’s neutrality?’ said Wilkins, slipping his sarcasm out of its sheath for a moment.

Marquis glanced at him, and Eve prepared herself for a sharp exchange between the two men. She saw Jack’s eyes darken as they always did when temper gripped him; he had the Irish weakness of wearing his emotions on his face. Then he turned away, casually, and said, ‘Let’s find out.’

He led the way up to the kitchen tent. He introduced Wilkins and the Brecks, then he sat down at the head of the table and looked at the Indian. ‘Now maybe you’d better put us in the picture, Colonel.’ He kept the note of worry out of his voice and hoped that his expression was equally bland. ‘If our camp is going to be turned into a battleground, we’d like to get to hell out of it.’

‘Of course.’ Singh leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs; unshaven, unwashed, he still carried an air of authority with him. And an air of something else, Marquis thought. An out-of-date peacock pride? A demolished splendour? Marquis couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He had the feeling that he was looking at a ghost that was only too substantial, that mocked its own grave. The Taj Mahal could have been turned into a bowling alley, but this man would still go there.

Singh took the cigarette Wilkins offered him, lit it and drew on it with relish. Wilkins offered the packet to the Chinese, but the latter shook his head. Singh blew out smoke, then looked at the cigarette between his long elegant fingers. ‘Ah, Benson and Hedges. Jolly good.’

‘My last packet.’ They were Wilkins’s one snob symbol: he couldn’t afford the Savile Row suit, the Aston Martin. He had bought a dozen cartons just before leaving London and had severely rationed himself to a certain number of cigarettes a day. It was the story of Lis life: even his snobbery had to be on the bargain-rate level.

‘I used to smoke them when I was at Oxford. Before the war they used to make a special cigarette for my father. He was very particular about his pleasures. Pleasure, he used to say, was the foretaste of Heaven. He had sixty wives, including my dear mother. He expected a very special Heaven, too, I’m afraid.’ Singh looked at Marquis. ‘You don’t smoke, old chap?’

‘My husband is afraid of lung cancer,’ said Eve, drawing on her own cigarette. ‘He doesn’t believe in hastening towards Heaven.’

‘It is a pity all pleasures have their price. Or don’t you agree, Mr. Marquis?’

Marquis saw the Chinese flick a quick glance at the Indian, then the almond eyes were still again, staring down at the bound hands resting on the table in front of him. The inscrutable bloody Orient was not as inscrutable as it thought: behind the impassive face Marquis had glimpsed a mind that was lively and (or was he wrong?) even optimistic. He jerked a thumb at the Chinese. ‘Does he speak English?’

‘I don’t know, old chap. I’ve been chatting to him for almost eighteen hours now, but I haven’t got a word out of him. Later on, when I feel a little stronger, I’ll have a real chin-wag with him.’ There was no mistaking his meaning. He stared at the Chinese, his dark face turning to wood; for all his educated accent and his out-of-date schoolboy slang, Singh looked to Marquis as if he could be as cruel and direct as any wild tribesman of the Indian hills. He had been brought up on pig-sticking; he could turn the lance to other uses. Then abruptly Singh seemed to remember the others, and he looked back at them and smiled. ‘But to put you in the picture. I’m afraid it is not a jolly one.’

‘I knew it,’ said Wilkins, but he might just as well have not spoken for all the notice the others took of him. They all leaned forward, concerned with what Singh might have to tell them. Marquis saw the eyes of the Chinese shine for a moment, but the muscles of the face remained fixed. But the eyes had given Li Bu-fang away: he was laughing at them.

‘These chaps,’ Singh nodded at Li Bu-fang, ‘have set up some posts right across the border here in Bhutan. At least three, possibly more. Border posts with quite a large number of men manning them. Fifty or sixty men to a post. They’re building up for something.’

‘Invasion,’ said Nancy, and put on her glasses to look at the Chinese with an expression that startled Eve with its intensity.

‘That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,’ said Marquis.

The Indian’s face stiffened again, as it had when he had looked at the Chinese a moment ago. He looked obliquely at Marquis, seeming to recognise for the first time that he was not really wanted here. At the same time it became obvious to Marquis that Singh was a man who expected to be welcomed wherever he went. Not the expectation of a man looking for popularity, like a politician or pop singer on the make, but that of a man accustomed to being welcomed. You’re not only in the wrong country, Marquis thought, you’re in the wrong century.

‘No, it doesn’t, does it? Do I have to explain to you, Mr. Marquis?’

Everyone looked at Marquis, embarrassed by the sudden tension between the two men. Even the Chinese looked up for a moment, then his gaze quickly slid back to his hands. Marquis knew then that Li Bu-fang could speak English and he wondered for a moment if he should continue this discussion, which could become an argument, in front of the Chinese. Then he mentally shrugged: the man was the Indian’s prisoner and the latter’s concern.

‘You are in my camp, Colonel. Foreign military men in uniform are prohibited visitors to this country – I’m sure you know that as well as I do, and that it applies to Indians as much as Chinese. I could get it in the neck for harbouring you. That’s why I think I’m entitled to an explanation.’

Eve hesitated, then she said, ‘I think my husband is right.’

Singh looked about the table, at Wilkins and the Brecks, who nodded their agreement; then he looked back at Marquis. ‘I was – I am the commander of a battalion that has been doing border duty in the North-East Frontier Agency for the past two months. A week ago we were overrun by a brigade of Chinese. I escaped with some of my men, eighteen to be exact—’ He spoke directly to Marquis, as if the latter was the one he felt might judge him too harshly: cowardice was a disease of lesser men. ‘I did not run away, Mr. Marquis. It was the circumstances of the fighting in the mountains that I was one of those who were cut off.’

‘I’m not criticising you, Colonel,’ Marquis said quietly. ‘Go on.’

Singh hesitated, then he went on: ‘Our only way of escape was west over the mountains into Bhutan. Yesterday morning we came upon the first of the Chinese border posts, well inside the border. We managed to avoid them, but unfortunately we then ran into a second post. We had quite a scrap, didn’t we, old chap?’

Li Bu-fang took no notice. He could have been a man waiting on a railway station for a train that he knew was bound to come; Singh and the others were passengers without tickets, strangers who didn’t interest him. There was a monotony about his indifference that was beginning to irritate Marquis: the latter looked back at Singh with a little more sympathy.

‘All my men were killed, but we managed to kill most of the enemy – those we didn’t kill took to the hills, as the saying has it.’ He glanced up at the towering mountains to the north. ‘That left my friend and me facing each other, the two most senior men of the little battle. A survival of the most fitting, as you might say. I took him prisoner. I’m beginning to wish he had volunteered for suicide. He is a damn’ nuisance, you know.’

‘Why didn’t you let him make for the hills?’ Breck asked.

‘He is a general, Mr. – Breck? How often does one capture a general? Especially a Chinese general.’

‘How do you know he’s a general?’ Wilkins said. ‘He has no badges of rank.’

Singh smiled and looked at Li Bu-fang. ‘I asked him his rank. Didn’t I, old chap?’ The Chinese lifted his head a little and Marquis saw the mark on his throat, as if a cord or something had been tightened round it. ‘I told you I wished he had preferred suicide. But he didn’t. The Chinese are supposed to be awfully fatalistic about dying, but not this chappie. I think the Communists are much more realistic and practical. Since they don’t believe in Heaven, a dead comrade is a – shall we say a dead loss?’ He smiled around at them; he was proud of his English colloquialisms; the years at Oxford hadn’t been wasted. ‘When I tried a little persuasion, he told me what I wanted to know. Then I found some papers—’ He stopped as Nancy leaned forward.

‘Did he tell you in English?’ Nancy looked at the Chinese with new interest.

‘No, Hindi. He doesn’t speak it awfully well, but he does speak it. A good general should always have at least one other language, eh, old chap? Comes in handy for surrendering.’

‘He speaks English, too, I’ll bet,’ said Marquis.

‘I’m sure he does.’ The Chinese remained staring down at his hands. He was not sullen; he looked more like a man who felt he was alone. Singh shook his head, then turned back to Marquis and the others. ‘I am taking him back to India, to my headquarters. He is all I have to offer in return for the men I have lost this past week.’ He paused for a moment and his face clouded. He put his fingers to his forehead and bowed his head slightly as if in prayer. Then he went on: ‘The battalion was not at full strength up there on the border, but I have lost something like three hundred men. Men who were my children. Some of them were descendants of families who have worked for my family for generations. My batman, for instance. His father had been personal servant to my father, and his father served my grandfather.’ He noticed their polite looks of curiosity. ‘I am the Kumar Sawai Dalpat Singh. My father was the Maharajah of Samarand. It means nothing to you gentlemen? Ladies?’ He looked disappointed, then he shrugged. ‘Samarand was a princedom that no longer exists. When India became independent, my father’s state was absorbed. A democracy cannot afford princes. A pity, don’t you think?’

‘I think so,’ said Eve.

‘You would,’ said Marquis without rancour.

‘My husband is a socialist and a republican.’ Then Eve looked with surprise at the Chinese, who had grinned suddenly. ‘What’s so funny?’

Li Bu-fang bowed his head slightly to Marquis. He had an attractive smile, one that completely changed his face. ‘I am pleased to meet a fellow socialist.’ He had a soft pleasant voice, the sibilants hissing a little.

‘Up the workers!’ said Tom Breck, grinning.

‘I’m not your sort,’ Marquis said to Li Bu-fang. ‘Alongside you, I’m a right-wing reactionary, a joker who wouldn’t shake hands with a left-handed archbishop. I’m not a canvasser in your cause, mate.’ He looked back at Singh. ‘But I don’t vote for princes, either. Now where do you go from here?’

Singh seemed to be considering the remark about princes. Then once again he shrugged: even in the days of princes, no one had ever voted for them. ‘The easiest course would be to head for Thimbu, the capital, and hope the authorities there would allow me to smuggle him out over the new motor road. But they may not allow that—’

‘I wouldn’t blame them.’

Singh nodded. ‘Neither should I. No one can blame them if they don’t want to antagonise the Chinese, give them an excuse for invasion. One man, even a general, may seem an insignificant excuse for an invasion, but I don’t think the Chinese want much more. They could soon twist it into something that made very good propaganda. No, I think I shall have to by-pass Thimbu.’ He turned round in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the steep hill that blocked out the view to the south-east. ‘That’s the way I’ll have to go.’

‘Take him all that way on your own?’ Nancy’s voice cracked with incredulity. ‘It must be nearly a hundred miles into India – as the crow flies, that is. And you won’t be following the crow. You’ll be climbing up and down mountains all the way.’

Singh nodded and looked at Li Bu-fang. ‘Do you think we’ll make it, old chap?’

Li Bu-fang grinned, suddenly enjoying himself: the battle hadn’t finished back there in the mountains, it was only just beginning. ‘I assure you you won’t, Colonel.’

2

Late that afternoon Singh came to see Marquis. All through the day there had been a growing air of tension throughout the camp: the Indian and the Chinese were the eye of a storm that had yet to break. The Bhutanese porters had stopped their laughter and their games; as they worked they stared up at the camp where Singh and Li Bu-fang sat outside the kitchen tent, all their innocence now gone behind a mask that was frightening because it was unreadable. Even the Brecks had fallen silent; Nancy, uncertain of herself, now looked as vulnerable as Tom. Wilkins made no attempt to disguise what he felt: once, as he passed Singh, he called out, ‘When are you leaving, Colonel?’ and passed on before the Indian could answer: it was not a question but a suggestion, as frank and blunt as a Yorkshire question could be. Eve busied herself about the camp, trying to hide the elation she felt: she knew with the newcomers’ advent, Jack would have to think seriously about breaking camp and beginning the journey home.

As Singh came down towards him, Marquis looked up from the note-book in which he was entering the particulars of the plants now being readied to be taken back to England. Half the garden had been dug up and the stack of polythene bags had already reached a formidable size; Marquis had begun to wonder if he would need to hire more porters to carry out the collection. That would mean asking Eve for more money. He had already exceeded the budget he had been allowed by the Royal Horticultural Society, the co-backers of his part of the expedition. But he knew he would force himself to ask Eve: this was the greatest collection of plants he had ever achieved, and he would be damned if he’d leave any of it behind.

‘Marquis, I want a word with you.’

Marquis closed his note-book, stood up slowly, dismissed Nimchu and the other porters who had been working in the garden, then turned to Singh. He did it all unhurriedly and deliberately, and when he at last looked at the Indian, the latter’s face was flushed. ‘What can I do for you?’

Singh contained his anger and forced a smile, a polite grimace that looked as if it might tear a muscle or two. ‘I’m not accustomed to being kept waiting, old chap. But then you are probably aware of that.’

‘I’d guessed it,’ said Marquis and smiled broadly. ‘But then I’m not accustomed to jumping to attention when spoken to.’

‘You’d have made a poor soldier.’

Marquis nodded good-humouredly, determined not to let the other man upset him. ‘I’d have made a poor lot of things. A poor politician, a poor diplomat’ – he grinned – ‘a poor prince, too, eh?’

Singh suddenly smiled; he was not going to stoke up an antagonism that was pointless. Occasionally, very occasionally, he regretted the arrogance he had inherited: it was a birthmark that was not always acceptable in all circles. ‘Forgive my myopia, old chap, but I’ve never been able to see Australians as princes. You might have made the grade in medieval times, but you were a little late for that.’

Marquis shook his head in wonder. ‘You must have been a pain in the neck to the British Raj, Colonel. Did they ever gaol you princes?’

‘Hardly, old chap,’ said Singh, and looked horrified at the thought.

‘A pity,’ said Marquis. ‘Well, what can I do for you?’

‘I shall be on my way first thing in the morning with our friend.’ He nodded up towards the kitchen tent where Li Bu-fang, his hands still bound, sat at the table surveying the camp activity like an early spectator waiting for the main event to begin. Tsering came out of the tent and appeared to snarl at him; but the Chinese turned away with all the disdain of an old mandarin. ‘Could you give me enough food for five days for the two of us?’

‘Five days?’

Singh smiled without opening his lips, another grimace, but this time not caused by any attitude of Marquis. ‘If we are not over the mountains in five days, old chap, then we’ll be dead somewhere up there in the snow.’

The Indian’s fatalism took what remained of the antagonism out of Marquis. He had never feared death, but he had never had to contemplate it as coldly as Singh was now doing. Suddenly he was aware of it; the air for a moment was chillingly still. He looked up towards the mountains. The last of the westering sun, already gone from this narrow valley, caught the high peaks, turning them to jagged burnished shields against the darkening eastern sky. The wind had begun to turn from the south even since this morning: a mile of wind-torn snow lay like a brass sword across the sunlit sky, stretching due west from the highest peak. ‘I don’t fancy your chances, Colonel.’

Singh shrugged. ‘What other way is there? If I went the easy way, down to Thimbu, the Bhutanese might let me go on through to India. Then again they might not. They might just throw me into prison and forget all about me. They certainly wouldn’t allow me to take my prisoner with me. The last thing they want at this moment is to be accused by the Chinese of taking sides.’

Marquis nodded. ‘I guess you’re right. But I don’t know if I can give you all the food you’re asking for. We’re short as it is—’

‘You can’t refuse Colonel Singh.’ Eve, unobserved by either man, had come down from her tent. ‘He needs the food more than we do, Jack.’

Marquis wondered if Indian princes hit their wives when the latter interfered in their husbands’ affairs; but that would be a full-time job, with sixty spouses all lined up for a marital clout. He didn’t voice the question. It was obvious that Singh was as much on Eve’s side as she was on his. I’m up against the British Raj, Marquis thought; now I know how Gandhi felt. ‘Love, I don’t dispute his need. But that will cut our own stay short—’

‘You could send Chungma and Tashi back to get supplies for us.’

He grinned, admiring her strategy: the war colleges of the world had never known what they had missed when they refused to admit women. ‘It would take too long. And I’d be without two men just when I need them most. My wife is in a hurry to leave here, Colonel.’

‘I don’t blame her, old man. It must be a lonely life up here for a woman. And uncomfortable.’

‘I don’t blame her, either,’ said Marquis, suddenly trapped into admitting what he had felt for some weeks. But he felt more than just concern for her discomfort. All at once he knew she was in danger; everyone in camp was in danger, but all his concern at this moment was for her. He looked at her and, not wanting to frighten her, disguised his anxiety with a wink. She smiled at him, a little puzzled by his sudden change of attitude, but said nothing.

Marquis turned back to Singh. ‘I’ll give you the food, Colonel. And some blankets and a pup tent.’

Singh bowed his head slightly. His look of arrogant amusement suddenly went and at once he seemed to take on a new dignity. ‘There is something I did not tell you before – a reason why I must get back to India—’ He hesitated, as if wondering whether he should go ahead; then he reached into his battle tunic and took out some papers. ‘I found these in the post where’ – he faltered a moment – ‘where I lost the last of my men. A dying Chinese was trying to burn them. I killed him and took them from him. Then the general appeared out of nowhere and we had quite a bash, just the two of us.’ He touched the dried cut above his eye. ‘He seemed terribly keen that I should not read these papers. Do you read Chinese?’ Marquis and Eve shook their heads. ‘Neither do I. At Oxford I read English History. Not an awfully useful subject for this part of the world. I should have taken languages.’

‘What do you reckon they are?’ Marquis nodded at the papers.

‘I don’t know. But if the general thought they were so important, they could be battle orders or something along those lines. Whatever they are, he thought them important enough to try and kill me for them.’

‘I’m no soldier, as I told you, but why should valuable papers be kept in a forward post? Aren’t those sort of things kept well behind the lines?’

‘That’s the idea, old chap. But somehow it never seems to work. You would be surprised at the number of mistakes our side made in World War Two. And don’t forget, our friend up there is a general – it was probably one of his staff whom I caught trying to burn them. If these papers are important, I’m very happy to know that the Chinese can be just as incompetent as we. It gives one hope.’

Marquis looked up towards Li Bu-fang, who was staring down at them, his face as blank as one of the rocks that studded the bank behind him. He had the look of a man who possessed more than hope; he was a man who had faith: he wore it like another badge of rank. He turned his head and looked down the valley again. The bastard is so confident, Marquis thought; and looked down the valley himself, but saw nothing to shake his own confidence. But I’m not confident, he told himself, I’m worried; and tried to borrow some of the Chinese inscrutability.

‘If those papers are important,’ he said, ‘the Chow hasn’t yet finished with trying to kill you.’

‘No,’ said Singh. ‘But I haven’t given up the idea of killing him, either.’

‘Just don’t do it in my camp,’ said Marquis, and left Eve and Singh and went up to the porters’ tents. Nimchu saw him coming and came a few steps to met him. ‘Nimchu, I want Chungma to leave now for Sham Dzong. He’s to buy enough rice and tsampa to last us for a week, and get back here as soon as he can.’

‘Chungma is only one man, sahib. He will not be able to carry so much food himself.’

‘I know that!’ Marquis snapped, and was at once regretful of his sharpness; there was no need to work off his worry on Nimchu. He smiled, trying to take the edge off his voice: ‘Get him to hire two more porters, Nimchu, bring them back with him. We’ll need them anyway, to help us carry out the collection. Tell him to get moving at once. If he takes his finger out, he can make four or five miles before dark. I want him back in three days at the outside.’

Nimchu nodded, then shouted orders in his own language. Chungma, the youngest of the porters, short, squat, moving always in quick jerky movements like a boxer waiting for an opponent to make a move, showed no surprise at the sudden journey he had to make. He grinned cheerfully and ducked into his tent to collect what he would take with him. Marquis knew that most Bhutanese, for all their country’s isolation, were gregarious and he had noticed that over the past few weeks the porters had begun to ask when they would be returning to Thimbu. He was sure that Chungma would find a diversion or two in the three days that he would be gone.

Nimchu watched Chungma disappear into the tent, then he turned back to Marquis. He was the oldest of the porters, somewhere in his early forties, and the most travelled. The leader of a previous expedition had taken him to London as a bonus; it had been such a shock to his system that he had almost died of lack of oxygen climbing Highgate Hill. He had returned to Bhutan after only a month, shaking his head at the devastation that could be caused by civilisation. There had been similar reactions to other trips he had made, to Delhi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore. An itching curiosity had drawn him to the wider world, but always he came back to this land where the mountains and the gods were one and the same. Marquis had first met him in Burma in 1950 and had used him as a porter on an expedition to the headwaters of the Irrawaddy. He had used him again in 1956 on a trip through Assam, and an affection and respect for each other had developed and still survived despite the six years’ separation between that last trip and this one. Sometimes, feeling traitorous towards Eve, Marquis felt that Nimchu was the only one with whom he had real affinity on these journeys into the wild and lonely mountains.

‘The strangers, sahib.’ Nimchu ran a finger up and down the side of his long well-shaped nose. He was a handsome man, spoiled only by his wall eye and the long scar on the cheek below it, a legacy of an encounter with a leopard. His voice was soft, that of a man used to the silences of nature; but Marquis knew that it could erupt in terrible storms of temper, and there were several lesser porters who had made the mistake of thinking Nimchu’s soft voice was a sign of weakness. ‘Are they staying with us?’

‘They are leaving in the morning, Nimchu. What do you think of them?’

Nimchu knew Marquis well enough to know that the latter wanted a frank answer; the sahib didn’t ask idle questions of his porters. ‘I do not like them in my country, sahib. I heard the news on the wireless, that China and India are fighting. We do not want them to bring the fight into our country.’

‘How do the other porters feel?’

‘The same as I, sahib.’

‘I know you will not touch them here in my camp—’ Marquis hoped he spoke the truth, but he gave Nimchu no chance to deny it. ‘But if you met them somewhere in the mountains, alone, what would you do?’

Nimchu stroked his nose again while he considered, then he looked up at Marquis. ‘Kill them, sahib. It would be the simplest thing to do.’

Marquis knew that the Bhutanese religion, a mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism and, the country’s original cult of sorcery and animism, Bon, all meant a great deal to Nimchu. ‘You’re a Buddhist, Nimchu. Killing is against your principles.’

‘I am a practical man, sahib. I can only try to be a religious one.’ He smiled up at Marquis, not impudently but with the smile of a man who had recognised the need of compromise. The path to Heaven was narrow, but the gods had never taught that one had to walk on the precipice edge. He put a finger to the scar on his cheek, ran it up to the eye that could see only with memory. ‘I killed the leopard that did this. A man should not lie down and die if he is not ready for Heaven.’

Marquis grinned. ‘When will you be ready?’ His own religion was a frayed and tattered thing, taken out, mended and worn like an old garment that didn’t fit but could not be thrown away. Eve, a non-Catholic, never laughed at his occasional bursts of piety, but he knew she would never understand them. The Catholic could never really rid himself of his Catholicism: his own father’s atheism had been more an act of defiance than an act of belief. The message was engraved on your soul, even if you bellowed to Heaven that you didn’t have a soul: Rome never took no for an answer. He never decried another man’s compromises with his religion: he knew how far short most of us fell of being a saint.

Nimchu shook his head, enjoying his own good humour and that of the sahib. ‘Not for a long time, sahib.’ Then, still smiling, he looked across at the Indian and the Chinese, the invaders, and said, ‘That is why I should kill the strangers if I met them in the mountains. Our only way to stay alive is to have no masters but ourselves. Kill them both and drop their bodies in the river. That way nobody would know and nobody could say we were taking sides.’

So Singh had accurately guessed the Bhutanese reaction to his and his prisoner’s presence. ‘I’m not taking sides, either, Nimchu. That’s why the colonel and his prisoner are leaving the camp first thing in the morning.’

‘You are a wise man, sahib.’

‘Not always, Nimchu.’ Wisdom was often a question of luck: if he had been wise in the past, it was because he had been lucky. He hoped his luck would hold.

He went up towards his tent, past the kitchen tent, where Li Bu-fang sat staring impassively at Nancy Breck while she abused him. ‘You’re a menace! I could kill you and all your kind, you know that? You’ve got no—’ Nancy’s anger made her almost incoherent; her eyes shone with tears, she looked blindly at her enemy, sometimes talking right past him. When Marquis spoke to her, she looked around, trying to find him in the fog of tears. ‘Jack? I—’ She rubbed her eyes, fumbled in a pocket for her glasses, put them on; they began to mist up at once and she snatched them off again, wore them like glass knuckledusters on her fingers. ‘Jack, why do you let him stay? Why don’t you—’

‘He’s not my prisoner, Nancy. Colonel Singh is taking him out first thing to-morrow morning.’ He looked down at Li Bu-fang. ‘You people killed the parents of Mrs. Breck’s husband.’

Li bowed his head to Nancy. ‘I am sorry.’

‘Sorry? How could you be sorry—’

‘Nancy—’ But she took no notice of Marquis, and he had to bark at her: ‘Nancy!’ She stopped with her mouth open, peered at him as if he were a stranger she was trying to identify. ‘Forget it. Abusing him isn’t going to bring back Tom’s mother and father.’

‘I could kill him!’ Her voice hissed with hate. Even Li Bu-fang looked up disturbed; for a moment there was a flash of something that could have been fear in the dark blank eyes.

‘Not in my camp,’ said Marquis gently but firmly. ‘There are seven hundred million of them. Killing one gets you nowhere. Killing a million would get you nowhere. You’ve got to think of some other way of beating them. Don’t ask me how—’ He looked down at Li. ‘Do you think we shall ever beat you?’

‘No,’ said Li, and looked after Nancy as she turned quickly, her voice catching in a sob of anger, and ran across the camp to her own tent. Then he looked back at Marquis. ‘I am truly sorry if Mr. Breck’s parents were killed. What were they?’

‘Missionaries.’ Marquis looked across towards the Brecks’ tent. ‘Mr. Breck is a Quaker. So were his parents. I feel sorry for Mrs. Breck – she has to dig up enough anger and hatred of you bastards for all of them.’

‘We have made mistakes, killing the missionaries. We have only made martyrs of them, and they were not worth it. Christianity is not a threat, not in China. Even in the capitalist world, who pays much attention to it? The emptiest places in England are the churches.’

‘You’re well informed. Where did you get that – in the People’s Daily?’

‘In The Times. I go to Peking occasionally. At the British Legation you can read the English newspapers. Democracy is stupid – it advertises its mistakes.’

‘Stupid but honest. Or anyway we try to be – honest, I mean.’

Li laughed. He had a not unpleasant face, especially when he smiled; the three scars on his cheeks melted then into the laughter lines. He looked the sort of man born to laugh, but the circumstances had never presented themselves; even now the laugh broke off short, as if he had had a sudden sense of guilt. ‘You are stupid if you believe that the men who run your capitalist world are honest.’

In five minutes he had been called both wise and stupid. It was a fair assessment of him in general, he guessed. Marquis shrugged: he had never aspired to perfection. He left Li and went on over to his own tent. He would not ask Eve what she thought of him: a wife’s truth had a more cutting edge than that of a stranger.

Eve was immersed in steaming hot water in the collapsible rubber-and-canvas bath. It was a tight fit even for someone her size; when he got into it, he always felt like a five-fingered hand in a three-fingered glove. He sat down on the edge of his camp-bed and looked appreciatively at her. ‘This is the only time I ever see you without your clothes.’

‘Whose fault is that?’ Then she looked down at the sponge in her hand and squeezed the water slowly from it. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been pretty bitchy to-day, haven’t I?’

He leaned towards her, savouring the warm smell of her, and kissed the hollow between her shoulder and throat. ‘It won’t be long now. I’m ready for home myself.’

She lay back as far as she could in the short bath and looked at him carefully. ‘Would you care to make me pregnant?’

‘Not under water.’

‘Not here, silly.’ She laughed, and raised a dripping hand to stroke his cheek. He shaved only once a week, on their rest day, and he now had four days’ growth of stubble; but she didn’t mind that, she knew that beards protected the men’s faces from sunburn in the high thin air. She had never been a woman who wanted her man sculptured out of soap and shaving cream. The weatherbeaten skin, the calloused hands, the bone and muscle, all made up part of what she loved in this man. She, too, had never asked for perfection in him. ‘No, when we get back home. Because you know, don’t you, that I’m not coming on any more trips with you?’

He hesitated before he nodded. ‘Will that keep us together – a child?’

‘It will help.’

He stared at her for a while, then he lay back on his bed. They lay side by side, she in the bath, he on his bed. ‘It’s so bloody cold-blooded. Let’s have a baby, just like that. It’s like deciding to take out an insurance policy.’

‘It wouldn’t be cold-blooded once we got down to it.’

‘Don’t be sexy, love. I’m not in the mood for it.’

‘All right, I’ll be sensible, then. It’s not being cold-blooded, darling. People plan to have children, just as they plan not to have them. We decided not to have any—’

‘You mean I decided.’

‘All right. But I agreed. Now I’m the one who’s doing the deciding—’

‘Decide, decide! God Almighty, what’s decision got to do with love-making?’

‘That’s a man’s outlook, darling. When a woman makes love, there’s always some decision about it.’

‘Even with her husband?’

‘Not always, but sometimes. Like now. Hand me my towel.’

‘You still look as good as you ever did. Will you look as good as that after you’ve had a baby?’

‘Better.’

‘I’m a lucky bastard.’

‘So am I, darling. Don’t ever let our luck run out.’

She bent and kissed him. He held her to him, his rough hands scratching like bark on the silk of her body. Outside the radio was switched on: Wilkins, the other pessimist, searched for Delhi on the dial. Then the voice came over the mountains, lugubrious and hopeless: ‘The Chinese continue to advance …’




Chapter Three (#ulink_96087225-88a4-55c6-9df9-6855fc0818c4)


Marquis came awake with a start, the shot ringing in his ears like an echo from a dream. Then he heard the shout, and he knew he hadn’t been dreaming. Eve sat up in her bed, her voice cracking with sleep and shock. ‘What’s that?’

Marquis tumbled out of bed, pulled on trousers and sweater over his pyjamas, slid his feet into the old desert boots he wore around camp; then just before he stepped out of the tent he dragged on his anorak and zipped it up to the neck. He was glad that he did: as soon as he came out into the dark morning the cold attacked him. The wind had swung right round to the north, was blowing out of Tibet with all the chill of approaching winter. Marquis shivered, chilled by omen as much as by the wind.

His eyes watered as the wind cut at them, but he saw the dim figure running away from the kitchen tent. It ran towards the stores’ tent; Marquis shut his eyes to blink away the tears; when he opened them, the figure had gone. He wiped his eyes and looked back at the kitchen tent.

Singh had come out of the kitchen tent, a pistol in his hand.

As Marquis crossed to him, Tom Breck and Wilkins came out of their tents. ‘What’s going on? What the hell—?’

Singh said, ‘Someone tried to kill my prisoner.’

Marquis flung back the flap of the kitchen tent. Two rough beds had been made for Singh and Li Bu-fang on the floor of the kitchen; Li lay flat on his back on one of them, his hands still bound. Pots and pans lay about him like discarded helmets; whoever had tried to kill him had been clumsy. A sack of flour had burst: Li was white as far up as his waist, like a man half-way to being embalmed.

‘You all right?’ Marquis said, and the Chinese nodded. He was no inscrutable Oriental now: he was as frightened as the most emotional Occidental. Marquis turned back to Singh. ‘Who was it?’

‘I didn’t see. I heard Li cry out, I saw this shape, I fired at him, but he got away—’

The whole camp was astir now. Eve and Nancy stood in the doorways of their respective tents, each wrapped in an anorak and a blanket. The porters had come out of their tents, but had not moved up towards Marquis and the others; they stood in a broken line, watching carefully like spectators at a political rally they resented. Marquis could not see their faces, they were just black shapes against the lamps in their tents; but he recognised the stiffness of their attitude, he had seen it in Africa and other parts of Asia when trouble occurred. He, Eve, the Brecks, Wilkins were now one with Singh and Li Bu-fang: they were all foreigners.

‘We’d better ask some questions, then,’ said Wilkins. ‘It must have been one of the porters.’

‘Get them up here at once,’ Singh said.

Marquis turned his head slowly. ‘Colonel, this isn’t Poona, or wherever your barracks are. This is my camp – mine, not yours. Don’t start chucking orders around here, or you’re likely to be cut down to lance-corporal. Don’t forget, no one invited you in here.’

The two men stared at each other in the dim glow from the lamp in the kitchen tent. Singh still held his pistol; the barrel of it came up. Marquis tensed, waiting for the bullet; he found it incredible that the Indian should shoot him, but he knew it was going to happen. Singh’s face was distorted with an anger that made him ugly. I was right, Marquis thought, he does belong to another century. And waited for the bullet.

Then down by their tents the porters turned all at once, as if turning away to avoid seeing the murder. Or perhaps they were going to break and run. That thought seemed to strike Singh; the pistol swung away from Marquis in the direction of the porters. And without quite knowing why, Marquis stepped in front of the pistol again, keeping it aimed at himself, but at his back this time as he turned towards the porters. He shouted, ‘Nimchu!’, but the wind snatched away his voice and the shout sounded more like a bleat. Then Nimchu came towards him, another porter with him. It was Chungma, breathing heavily, trembling with exhaustion.

‘What the hell brought you back, Chungma?’

‘Chinese, sahib.’ The boy had only a few words of English; he hissed them into the wind. ‘Down valley.’

‘There are forty or fifty of them, sahib.’ Nimchu had been speaking to Chungma as he had brought the young porter up to Marquis. ‘Camped where this river joins the river from the east. Chungma was camped there himself when they arrived. He was very lucky to escape.’

‘Did they see you, Chungma?’

‘Not know, sahib.’ His teeth glimmered in the lightening darkness; he was still young and innocent enough to joke about disaster. ‘Ran too fast.’

Marquis also grinned, although he was in no mood for joking. He glanced over his shoulder at Singh; the latter had put away his pistol. Then he looked back at Chungma. ‘Which way were they heading?’

Nimchu spoke to Chungma, then turned back to Marquis. The older Bhutanese knew this was no time for joking; his voice had a nervous edge to it. ‘Chungma thinks they are coming this way, sahib. They were coming up the valley, he is sure of that.’

Marquis remarked the nervousness in Nimchu’s voice and at once his own apprehension increased. He cursed, and stood thinking while the wind whetted its blade against his cheek. He could hear it coming down the narrow valley, its sound drowning the hiss and rumble of the river; the trees creaked and keened under its scything, leaves whipping through the darkness like bats. Up in the high peaks he knew that a blizzard must be blowing, the snow whirling through the passes in thick blinding clouds. He wondered why the Chinese should be down the valley, below the camp; then guessed they might be from another post farther west, who had got the word that one of their generals had been captured and had come down one of the side valleys. It didn’t matter where they had come from. What mattered was where they were, down there at the bottom of the valley, oiling the bolts on their rifles, chanting some Red propaganda to keep themselves warm, just waiting for daylight to come marching up the valley.

‘Could it have been one of the Chinese who tried to kill the general?’ Tom Breck said.

‘Why would they want to do that?’ Marquis turned away for a moment, told Nimchu to have Tsering come up to the kitchen tent and start preparing breakfast; then he turned back to Breck and the other men. ‘They wouldn’t travel at night in one of these valleys. Too easy to get lost—’

‘Then it must have been one of the porters,’ said Wilkins.

‘Could be.’ Marquis glanced across at Nancy Breck, still standing in the doorway of her tent. The morning had lightened enough now for him to see more clearly; beneath the blanket she had wrapped round her he could see she was wearing trousers and boots. She was fully dressed and her boots were laced up. He looked at Tom Breck, but the latter looked as innocent as ever. Then he turned to Singh. ‘But I’m not going to start questioning the porters, Colonel. I’ve got other things on my mind right now.’

‘Such as?’

I’m going to give myself a hernia, trying to control my temper with this bastard. ‘Such as trying to work out what we can do to get out of this spot we’re in. You look after your prisoner, Colonel. We’ll look after ourselves. If we don’t, we might all be dead by to-night.’ He heard Tom Breck gasp; Wilkins made a noise that sounded like a snort. ‘Better start packing, Tom. You too, Nick.’ He looked at Singh again, felt suddenly too tired to be angry at the man; the danger of a hernia passed. ‘All these bloody mountains to get lost in, and you had to choose this valley!’

‘It’ll work out all right, Jack.’ Tom Breck rubbed his beard. ‘Nick and I have got confidence in you, haven’t we, Nick? Whatever you say, we’re right with you, aren’t we, Nick?’

That’s what’s going to give me the hernia: Tom is going to overload me with trust. He looked at Breck, who nodded his head in encouragement: one almost expected him to shout rah, rah, rah. Then Marquis looked at Wilkins, who grimaced sourly. And at that moment he felt more affection for Wilkins than he did for Breck.

‘Whatever you say, Jack,’ said Tom Breck. ‘Anything you decide, we’re with you all the way.’

‘Thanks, Tom,’ said Marquis, and wondered how many men had killed their friends for burdening them with too much devotion.

Then he walked on towards his own tent, looking up towards the east. It would be full light in another hour, a cold dawn that would show new snow on the peaks and perhaps even on the lower slopes. Something cold brushed against his cheek, a leaf, a snowflake: whatever it was, it was cold, chill as the finger of fate. He felt suddenly depressed; the fire in him was beginning to turn to ashes; if they cut him open now they would find he had a clinker for a heart. Eve had been right: they should have left for home a week ago.

She was waiting for him in the tent, still wrapped in her anorak and blanket. ‘Was that Chungma I saw?’

‘Get dressed, love. Properly dressed, put on your warmest things. Looks like we’re in for a long hike over the hills.’ He took off his outer clothing, slid out of his pyjamas, then dressed again, substituting a wool shirt for his pyjama-top and walking boots for the old desert boots. ‘There are fifty or so Chows camped down the valley. Chungma ran into them, thinks they are coming this way.’

She shivered, as much with shock as with cold. Half-dressed, she looked up at him. ‘Are we in any danger?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, but he knew he was not being honest with her. ‘I’m not going to take any risks, though.’

She recognised his restraint towards her, that he was trying not to frighten her. She was not given easily to panic, but because it had never really been severely tested she was not sure of the extent of her own courage. There had been moments of danger on expeditions in the past, but she had survived them; mainly, she thought, because they had only been moments and she had reacted by instinct. Real courage, she knew, was more than a matter of reflexes.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘We’re getting out of here as fast as we can.’

Five minutes later he was telling the rest of the camp the same thing. ‘I could tell Colonel Singh to get out of here with his prisoner, but I don’t for a moment think that would give us any guarantee of being left alone if the Chinese come up this way. The mere fact that they’ve come this far down into Bhutan shows they’re either desperate or they don’t care. Either way I wouldn’t like to have five bob on our chances.’

‘What’s your plan, then?’ Wilkins asked.

‘We’ll have breakfast, then as soon as it’s daylight we’ll be on our way.’

‘Where?’ Eve said.

To New Guinea, to Kensington, anywhere at all; even the rose garden in Buckinghamshire looked an attractive destination now. He sipped from the hot mug of tea he held. He stared down into the fire round which they all stood; then looked up at the faces all turned towards him. This was different from anything that had ever confronted him before: the problems of a cricket or a rugger captain suddenly became a joke. People stood waiting on him to be responsible for them: he looked at Tom Breck, who gave him the old nod of encouragement.

‘We’ll go over the mountains,’ he said at last, and tried to sound decisive. ‘We’ll go with Colonel Singh and his prisoner.’

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the moan of the wind. Then Wilkins said, ‘What if some of us think that isn’t a good idea? It could be damned rough, trying to get over those peaks in this weather. What about Eve and Nancy?’

Marquis looked at Nancy, but she just stared at him as if she didn’t see him. Then he looked at Eve. He felt a weakness run through him when at last she said, ‘I’ll depend on Jack.’

Then Nancy fumbled in the pocket of her anorak, put on her glasses as if she were going to read some proposition before she agreed to it. Then: ‘I’ll go with Jack.’

‘So will I,’ said Tom Breck, tugging on his beard as if to give emphasis to what he said.

Wilkins hesitated. The seven months here in the mountains had almost exhausted him mentally and physically; he had not even been looking forward to the comparatively easy walk out down the long valley to Thimbu. At last he shrugged. ‘Majority rules, I guess.’

Singh had said nothing during this short debate. Li Bu-fang stood beside him, silent, contemptuous in his lack of interest. Singh glanced at him, as if wanting to goad him into some remark; then he looked back at the others, knowing now that he was as involved with them as much as with his prisoner. For all his outward self-assurance he had not felt comfortable since entering the camp; not because he felt unwelcome, although that had disturbed him, too, but because he knew that his and Li’s presence had at once placed a premium on the safety of Marquis and the others. But apology, even diffidence, came hard to him; he still lived in the memory of a day when such an attitude, on the part of a prince, had been a sign of weakness. In certain ways he was still tongue-tied by inheritance; Oxford had educated him in Western ways, but it had not entirely eradicated the East from him. He looked at Marquis as the latter spoke to him.

‘You and I had better have a look at my map, Colonel.’

Singh hesitated, then with difficulty that none of the others recognised he said, ‘I am sorry this has happened. The Chinese would not be coming up this valley if it were not for me and my prisoner. I shall make it up to you. I shall guarantee to get you and your party safely into India.’

‘Thank you,’ said Marquis, and only Eve noticed the harsh dry note in his voice.

While the others set about packing their gear, Singh and Marquis consulted the latter’s map. ‘It’s an old one, Colonel, and it’s not too accurate. But it’ll give us some idea where to head. Nimchu tells me there was an old trade route farther east from here, one that the Tibetans used to take when they brought their wool out. We’ll try and find that.’

Singh was looking at the map. ‘The ridges run north and south. If we head south down one of the valleys, that might bring us into more settled country and we could be picked up by the Bhutanese. I must avoid that if I can.’ He looked at Marquis. ‘But you and your friends could split up and leave us when we come to a valley that runs in the right direction.’

‘We’ll do that if we get the chance. Otherwise—’ Marquis examined the map carefully. ‘We’ve got about five days’ heavy slogging ahead of us. That trade route isn’t marked on here, but I guess it finished up down in Assam. We’ll head that way—’ He ran a finger across the map. ‘Five days, and as you said, Colonel – if we haven’t made it by then, we’ll never make it.’

Singh looked across to where Li Bu-fang sat. ‘I know that every inch of the way, I’m going to want to kill that chap. But I have to get him out into India.’ He looked back at Marquis. ‘Do you understand what face means in Asia?’

‘I’ve come up against it once or twice.’

‘If I can get him out to my country, it won’t only be the positive propaganda we can make of it. There will be the other effect – the loss of face for China.’

‘What about his own loss of face? Won’t he try to do something about that?’

‘You mean perhaps commit suicide? I think not. Not at first. He’ll stay alive so long as I still have these papers.’ He tapped his pocket.

‘Then you’re going to be stuck with him all the way.’

Singh looked back at the map, then up at the distant peaks. ‘All the way.’

It took them half an hour to break camp. There was so much to be left behind, so little to pack. Enough food for five days, tents, rope and climbing gear, blankets and sleeping-bags and cooking utensils: survival, not comfort, became the yardstick of choice. Li Bu-fang, the veteran of several such hurried flights but now the only one unconcerned with this one, sat in a canvas chair, his hands and feet bound, and watched with silent amusement.

‘What are you grinning at?’ Marquis, coming up from the garden with a polythene bag in his hand, stopped beside the Chinese.

Li Bu-fang looked up. Sitting in his chair, his bound hands in his lap, the only man not on his feet working, he could have been a general idly watching his staff dismantle their field headquarters after manæuvres.

‘All this hustle and bustle. You will all be dead in twenty-four hours. Why bother?’

‘Maybe it’s because I’ve never taken anything for granted, Chow.’

‘Chow. Is that a term of insult, like Chink? You whites never grow up, do you? Always sounding like schoolboys abusing the lesser races. Why do you bother to insult me like that? It’s a sign of a small mind.’

Marquis stared down at him, then he nodded. ‘I’d never thought of it. You’re right. You’re pretty smart, aren’t you?’

‘For a Chow?’

‘You’re insulting yourself now.’

‘You’re smart, too.’

‘Where did you learn to speak English?’

‘Various places. Certain of our schools and universities teach it.’

‘Part of your preparation for taking over the world, eh?’

Li Bu-fang grinned. ‘If you like.’

‘They teach you pretty well.’

‘Oh, I have had practice. I started learning very early. I was in Chungking during the war. The one you imperialists call World War Two. Such a conceit. Less than half the world fought in it, but you still called it a world war.’

‘I wouldn’t let it worry you. A war by any name is still a war. You’re talking to a pacifist, sport. What were you doing in Chungking?’

‘Working as house-boy for an American major.’

‘That made you a Communist?’

‘No. He hated Chiang Kai-shek, too. In those days it was safe for an American to feel that way. We Communists were not the main enemy then.’

‘You were a Communist then? You must have started young.’

‘I was born one. I was twelve years old when I accompanied my father on the Long March. You’ve heard of the Long March?’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ Marquis said, and wondered if he himself could have survived such a journey when he had been twelve years old. At twelve, a day on the beach at Coogee had tired him out. But then, as a child, survival had not been a driving force: the ice-cream cone, the meat-pie and the saveloy had not been meant to fight off starvation. ‘It was back in 1934 and 35, wasn’t it?’

‘You seem to know something of China.’

‘I always wanted to collect there.’ His voice was wistful, but somehow it didn’t seem ridiculous in such a big rough man; the tone of regret and disappointment was too genuine. ‘I used to read all about the French missionaries, blokes like David and Delavay and Soulié. People pottering about in their gardens in England and America and Australia, anywhere at all, most of them don’t know where their plants originated. They came from China and most of them were found by those French missionaries. Then blokes like Wilson, Forrest, Kingdon Ward. I read all about them and I wanted to follow them. No, I wanted to go one step further, bring back something they’d never discovered. I wanted to go up into northern Yunnan, all my rainbows seemed to end there in Yunnan. Then you bastards came along and put the kybosh on the idea.’ He looked back at Li. ‘I’d have walked all the way into Yunnan if your government would have given me permission. It would have been some hike, but I don’t suppose you’d have thought it much beside the Long March?’

‘Hardly, Mr. Marquis. Six thousand miles, across twelve provinces, for three hundred and sixty-eight days. We fought fifteen major battles and I’ve forgotten how many skirmishes. We climbed eighteen mountain ranges and crossed six rivers. A hundred thousand of us.’

‘You know your facts.’

‘We were not looking for plants, Mr. Marquis. We were looking for the survival of an ideal. The facts were beaten into my brain, my heart and my body. I lost my father and my two elder brothers on the march. I have not forgotten a day nor a mile of it.’

‘I guess you wouldn’t,’ Marquis said ungrudgingly. He admired courage and endurance; he had never been the sort to withhold his respect for a man as a man because of the latter’s politics. ‘Then you won’t think much of this little walk we’re going to do in the next few days, eh?’

‘It will stretch my legs, that’s all.’

‘Well, behave yourself or you might get your neck stretched, too. Someone tried to do you in a while ago.’

Li nodded. He was more composed now, there was no sign of the fear that had gripped him immediately after the attempt on his life. ‘My comrades will still kill you.’

The dialogue had gone full circle; the Chinese had even gone back to his same grin of amusement at what was going on in the camp. Marquis, suddenly frustrated and angry, bounced the polythene bag in his hand, wanting to throw it at Li Bu-fang’s head.

‘What is that?’ The Chinese nodded at the bag.

‘A plant. It’s called Meconopsis regia, one of the poppy family.’

‘You admire flowers?’

‘When I see them growing wild, yes. But not in drawing-rooms. Or in neat little gardens.’

‘You are like the man who cannot bear to see wild animals in a zoo?’

‘If you like.’

‘But flowers are beauty. Don’t you like to see beauty indoors?’

‘Maybe it’s just that I don’t like indoors. Are you an admirer of beauty?’

‘Why not? If you had lived the life I have, you might find need of it. Indoors and outdoors, wherever you can find it. What are you going to do with it?’ He nodded at the polythene bag. ‘Take it with you?’

Marquis glanced down towards the garden. The polythene bags glistened in the early morning light, a clump of artificial blooms that seemed to mock him. ‘There’s seven months’ work there. The best collection I’ve ever made. When you come to think of it, there’s no more peaceable work than that of a botanist. Beside us, Bertrand Russell and his mob are cannibals with a tapeworm. And now I’ve got to throw away seven months’ work because of you bastards.’ He bounced the bag in his hand. ‘I’ll take this back and name it after you. It’s bright red in colour, very appropriate.’

‘I’ll be honoured.’

‘No, you won’t. I’ll explain the reason I named it after you, and then every botanist in the world will hate your guts.’




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