flag, then lowering it again. She did not seem to notice. Then, abruptly, she shivered and looked round at him.
“I have been here before,” she said. She looked out at the temple once more.
“And I shall come here again.”
That afternoon, they stumbled across Zamyatin’s trail again.
Leaving the lake behind them, they turned east towards Sining-fu.
In spite of the risks, Christopher had decided to head for the town in order to obtain provisions and a guide to cross the Gobi: any other course of action would be suicide. A little before the Haddaulan Pass, they came upon a small encampment of black yak-hair tents.
It was strangely quiet. No dogs rushed out to snarl and snap about their heels, as was normal at nomad camps. No smoke rose from a dung fire. No children squealed. Nothing moved. Christopher took his revolver from his belt and cocked it. Bandits were a common feature of life here. Bandits and sudden death.
He saw the first body or what remained of it -just outside the nearest of the four tents. The vultures had picked it clean, leaving white bones and strips of tattered clothing. A black rifle one of the long, forked variety carried by all Tanguts and Mongols in the region lay near the bones.
A second skeleton stood out stark and white against the earth a few yards away, and beside it a third, that of a child of perhaps five or six. The breeze played with the hair on their skulls, lifting and dropping it nervously. A thin cloud of dust blew forlornly between the silent tents and disappeared.
There was a sudden flapping sound, loud and terrifying in the stillness. Christopher swung round and saw a single vulture lift itself up awkwardly from the ground and stumble into the air.
There was an indistinct bundle of clothing where it had been feeding. The banquet had not yet ended. As at any meal, there were late arrivals.
They found half a dozen skeletons outside the tents and almost twenty cadavers inside. The ones under cover had not been picked clean, and the cold Tibetan air had so far kept decomposition at bay. The bodies were mainly those of women and children, but several men lay among them. It was immediately apparent how they had died a single bullet, usually in the forehead or temple.
Why would bandits have done this? Christopher wondered. Had China’s civil war spilled over into Amdo?
The girl was hiding behind a large chest in the fourth tent. They found her by chance, when Christopher went to pick up a piece of cloth with which to cover one of the bodies. She was ten or eleven years old, shivering with cold, dirty, hungry, and terrified.
Since his presence seemed only to exacerbate the child’s terror, Christopher left her with Chindamani and went outside. Even in the clean air, a stench of death seemed to hang over everything.
He wondered if his nostrils would ever be free of the smell.
He found the remains of several ponies just beyond the tents.
They had clearly been tethered together and most had died of hunger only a day or two earlier. One was still alive: he put it out of its misery with a single shot. When that was done, he walked away from the tents for a while.
At the head of the valley, there was a cairn built from loosely piled flat slates. It was an obo, built to propitiate the local gods.
Pieces of cloth fluttered from it, the offerings of travellers. The slates themselves were inscribed in Tibetan characters and propped against one another at all angles, with four laid flat across the top as a sort of roof. Christopher made out the man trie formula of om mam pad me hum inscribed again and again across the dark green stone. He had an urge to tear down the stones, to smash the obo and scatter the pieces. What use were gods if they slept?
When he got back to the little camp, Chindamani had succeeded in calming the girl. She was still distressed, but outright terror had begun to give way to grief, an unstaunchable torrent that filled the tiny tent. This time, she did not react to Christopher, so he sat by Chindamani while she soothed and comforted the child.
A little later, the girl fell into a heavy sleep, the first she had known for days. They decided it would be better for her if she did not waken in the camp or near it. Christopher lifted her carefully and put her on Pip, flat across the panniers the pony carried. A nomad child, she would be accustomed from birth to sleeping on the move.
Before leaving, they brought the remaining corpses out of the tents and exposed them for the vultures. Chindamani recited prayers in a quiet voice, then they rode on before the girl should awaken and have her grief renewed or redoubled by the sight of the open burial.
They spent that night in the broad valley just beyond the pass.
The child woke briefly once. She ate a little, then returned to sleep.
They took turns to stand guard over their tiny camp. It was a cold night, and the stars kept watch with them until dawn.
In the morning, over breakfast, the girl told them what had happened. Her name was Chodron and she thought she was ten years old. The victims at the camp-site had been her family father, mother, brothers, sisters, grandmother and grandfather, two uncles, two aunts, and six cousins.
Several days earlier Christopher guessed about a week a Mongol had come riding into their camp. He had been accompanied by two boys a Tangut or Tibetan and one that she said looked like Christopher. The boys wore fine clothes that had been caked in mud and dirt, but they looked unhappy. She had come out of her tent with her mother to see the strangers.
The man had demanded a change of ponies, offering to exchange those on which he and the boys rode for better mounts, along with a sum in cash. Her uncle had refused the offer with the coming of spring, the men all needed their ponies and could ill afford to be left with two worn-out animals. In any case, the man’s manner had been brusque and peremptory, and she had sensed that her uncle had refused out of dislike for the stranger as much as anything.
There had been angry words, she remembered, then someone had fired a shot. She could not be sure whether her uncle or the Mongol had fired first. But the stranger’s rapid-firing pistol had made light work of men armed with single-shot muskets.
She could neither explain nor remember with any clarity the massacre that had followed; nor had Chindamani or Christopher any wish to make her relive those insane moments. Her mother had somehow contrived to hide her in the chest behind which they had found her hiding, and she had escaped the notice of the Mongol. There had been no room in the chest for her mother, no room for anyone but her.
Christopher described Zamyatin to her, though he knew what her answer would be. She shivered and said it was the same man, no other. He asked about the boys, and she said they had seemed pale and unhappy, but unhurt.
On the following day, they continued east towards Sining-fu. At Tsagan-tokko, a small village of clay houses, they enquired about Zamyatin. Neither he nor the boys had been seen there.
They had just passed out of sight of the village when they heard the sound of hoofbeats behind them. A Mongol horseman came cantering towards them and drew up alongside. He was a big man, dressed in furs and equipped with a breech-loading rifle slung across his shoulders.
“They tell me you are looking for a Burial riding with two boys,” he said.
Christopher nodded.
“I saw them five days ago,” the horseman said.
“I was riding in the Tsun-ula, the mountains north of Koko-nor. We spoke briefly.
I asked the man where they were headed.
“We must be in Kanchow ten days from now,” he told me. When I asked him why, he said he had to meet someone there. That’s all. The Tibetan boy tried to say something to me, but the man told him to be quiet.”
“Is it possible,” Christopher asked, ‘to make it to Kanchow that quickly? Won’t they have to go through the Nan-shan mountains?”
The Mongol nodded.
“Yes,” he said.
“But they can make it if there are no delays. All the passes are open.
I told him the best route to take.”
He shifted awkwardly in his saddle.
