spiders that crawled over him, his son using Christopher’s sword to sweep them aside.
But the black shapes kept on coming and coming.
She grabbed Christopher’s hand and helped him stagger to his feet. Had he been poisoned? If so, how long did he have before the venom began to work?
“There’s no way out!” he cried.
“We’ve got to get back to the tunnel.”
A spider moved on to Chindamani’s left leg, then another, then a third. She kicked them away, but others came. One brute landed on William’s neck and clung there. Christopher grabbed it with his bare hands, dragging it off. He thought it had stung the boy, but there was no time to check.
Suddenly, William shouted: “Look!”
He was pointing at a spot in the rear wall. There was a door heavily encrusted with spider’s webs but just distinguishable.
Chindamani shouted frantically to Samdup.
“Hurry!” she cried.
“This way! This way!”
They could see his lamp weaving through the darkness. He stumbled and Chindamani dashed back for him. There were spiders everywhere now, angry and murderous. Chindamani found Samdup and helped him over the last few yards.
“It’s over here!” Christopher shouted, pointing to the door. They ran, scything through layer after layer of soft web. And the dried bodies everywhere, like pods that had spawned the spider brood.
The door was jammed. Christopher pulled on the ring handle, but it would not give. William and Samdup did what they could to keep the spiders at bay. Chindamani joined Christopher at the door, pulling with him, tearing her muscles in desperation. How long since the door had last been opened? A century? Ten centuries? They redoubled their efforts, knowing they would never make it back to the tunnel now. It was the door or nothing.
It gave an inch then stuck again, harder than before. Christopher thought his fingers were breaking, but he kept pulling, using the pain to spur him.
There was a snapping sound and the door moved. Not much, but just enough for them to get past. Christopher grabbed William and pushed him through, then Samdup, then Chindamani. He picked up the lamp Chindamani had left on the ground. She took it from him and he pulled the door closed. They had made it. So far.
Several spiders had made it with them. William struck at them with the sword, hewing them again and again with a sustained and vicious anger that had grown too immense for his child’s body to contain. It was the first adult anger he had known, a rage less against the spiders that had provoked his immediate fear and revulsion, more against Tsarong Rinpoche and the Russian, against all those that had torn the fabric of his world to shreds. It was rage and sadness and doubt combined: rage at betrayal, sadness at the loss of all he had known, doubt of the fixed certainties that had framed his world until then.
There were stairs as Sonam had said: stark and steep and very beautiful in the light from their single lamp. They sat forever on the small landing at the top, no-one speaking, willing the horror to leave their minds, willing the last descent to the open air and freedom. The thought that no-one voiced was whether the stairs held any hidden surprises for them.
Christopher held William tightly. Once, he looked at the boy’s neck. There was an angry red mark where the spider must have stung him. But William said it scarcely hurt. He had had a lucky escape.
“It will soon be dawn,” Chindamani said.
“We should be away from here before then.”
Christopher nodded. She was right. He wanted to put as much distance between them and Dorje-la before Zamyatin realized they had escaped from the monastery.
In single file, with Christopher in the lead as before, they started down the stairs. The steps had been cut roughly in the rock, without precision or refinement. They were cold and dark, and they plunged down perilously, as though eager to be finished. They had not been made to linger on.
The cold air took away the awful stench. They uncovered their mouths and breathed in deeply, filling their lungs. With every step they took, a weight lifted from their shoulders. Death had never seemed so real or so close or so unwholesome. Not even a belief in endless reincarnation could mitigate the horror of death when it became so unnatural and so intimate.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. The rock wall had been cunningly cut in order to render the opening invisible from outside, and to make the deceit perfect, a curtain of ice hung over the front.
Outside, the wind had cleared the clouds away. A pale moon thin as silver-leaf was just setting behind a dim peak to the west.
Across a purple sky, broad swathes of stars trembled with cold and their own brightness. High above where they stood, the dark shape of Dorje-la Gompa loomed over the pass, vast and sinister, harbouring its secrets in silence.
Christopher looked up, peering into the darkness. A single light could be seen, in an unshuttered window on the top floor.
Chindamani stepped close beside him and took his hands in hers.
“Look,” he whispered.
Her eyes followed his to the lighted window.
“He’s watching for us,” he said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Zamyatin. I can sense it.” He paused.
“He won’t let us go this easily. Samdup belongs to him. In a way, I belong to him too.
He’ll come after us be sure of it.”
She said nothing for a while, but stood with Christopher’s hand in hers, staring up at the lighted window, wondering.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
But Christopher did not move. Like a moth held by the yellow light, he stood lost in thought.
“Ka-ris To-feh,” she said, tugging gently at his arm.
He looked round. In the moonlight, her face was pale and ghostly. He felt remote, impermanent, displaced. He could hold nothing, like a sieve from which water runs out.
“Do you understand what will happen if you come with me?” he said.
“I have to go to India, then back to England. It’s William’s home, I have to take him there. Once we reach India, I will no longer be able to help you. There are others there, men like Zamyatin who will want Samdup for their own purposes. Once they learn who he is and they will learn, believe me he will become their pawn. You don’t know what the world is like, what it does to people. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
She shook her head. One culture shaking its head at another, a world denying another world.
“We seem to have no understanding of each other, Ka-ris Tofeh. Is it so much to be human? Not to understand?”
“Don’t you see?” he said.
“Your Maidari Buddha has become a commodity, a coin. He’s worth so much to Zamyatin. He would be worth so much more or less to my own masters. What Zamyatin does not or cannot control, they would have me manipulate for their own ends. I don’t want to play that game. I’ll finish the one I began, but that’s as far as I go. I’ll take you to Lhasa, but I’ll leave you there. Do you understand?”
Desire for her was like a fever inside him. Denying his will in her, his love and his lust for her, was an even greater hurt, a stinging that filled his flesh and his mind equally, making him whole and tearing him apart at once.
She did not reply. Instead, she stood and picked up her bag.
With Samdup’s hand in hers, she set off in the direction of the pass. Christopher felt his heart contract. He stood up and helped William to his feet. They followed Chindamani and Samdup at a short distance.
As they picked their way down the slope, William raised his face to Christopher.
“What about grandfather?” he said.
“I don’t understand,” said Christopher. His father must have told the boy who he was, he realized.
