Tulku by Peter Dickinson

Author:Peter Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448172634
Publisher: RHCP

11

FOR ONLY THE second time since the destruction of the Settlement Theodore was suddenly convinced that his prayers were being listened to. Once, at the top of that far-away rock pillar, when he had tried to pray for Mrs Jones; and now, here, in the guest-house below the gates of Dong Pe monastery, with the bitter mountain air fingering his shoulder-blades as he knelt on the rug beside his cot, while his lips moved as usual through the automatic phrases and his mind roamed helplessly.

He had been thinking, as it happened, about Lung. Two images had floated side by side into his head – that last morning in the valley, Lung lying with his head in Mrs Jones’s lap, drifting in love; and his arrival at the guest-house last night, snarling with sulky suspicion. Theodore liked Lung; at the start of the journey he had seemed at least half-absurd, but slowly Theodore had discovered some of what Mrs Jones had seen in him: humour and intelligence, and a kind of exulting innocence which he occasionally let gleam from behind the fastidious façade. But Theodore, despite that liking, had not been able to grasp the depth and strength of Lung’s love for Mrs Jones, and so had found it hard to bear the apparently childish fits of sulks that had followed its ending. Now, in his half-dreamy state, self-hypnotized by the empty repetition of words, he found himself laying the two images side by side, the exultation and the misery, as if they were two pieces of cloth he was comparing. He was swept with a wave of sympathy for poor Lung, as sudden and powerful as the scent of honeysuckle come upon at dusk.

As the wave ebbed he knew he was being listened to – not the movement of his lips, but his thought. It was as though, wandering round the deserted chapel of his soul, he had found a footprint in the dust that was not his own. He stopped praying, opened his eyes and stared around. Opposite him hung a shimmery cloth woven with a picture of the Buddha cross-legged on his throne and surrounded by grimacing warriors and monsters and calm, bare-breasted women. The guest-house was a gaudy tunnel, sharp-lit by the morning light through small square windows. Lung lay curled on his cot. From behind a partition of blue and scarlet hangings came Mrs Jones’s light snore, contented as the purr of a cat. Neither of them had been the listener. The Buddha was only a picture, smiling that sweet inane smile. And the listener was fading now, fading, gone – frightened, as it were, by the sudden concentration of Theodore’s thought. That first morning he rose, smiling self mockingly at the sudden whimsy that his visitor might have been the Siddha Asara; he could not then know how many times, morning and evening, he would find the same nameless presence waiting to pray beside him.

As they breakfasted he became aware that the relationship between Mrs Jones and Lung had changed again.

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