lump of ice. Ungern just walked up and snapped it off. I watched him do it. As if he were snapping off a rotten twig. It made a cracking sound, like an old branch. It didn’t even bleed.”
He paused. It was growing dark suddenly. He switched on the headlights of the car, long white cones that stabbed into the darkness far ahead, catching insects in their beams, creating narrow worlds in which small creatures stirred for brief moments before being swept away again into the blackness.
“The old man died, of course. He died that night in great pain, and by morning the dogs had eaten what was left of him, along with his son.”
Winterpole looked up. All the aplomb, all the casual affectation had drained away to leave him empty and bereft, like a shell far away from the heart of the sea.
“So now you know,” he said.
“Now you know who we’re dealing with. Who our friends are.” His eyes filled with a sense of horror.
“He’s all we have here, Christopher. He’s all that stands between us and the Bolsheviks.”
There was silence. The car drove on through the dark waste, a brightly lit warning of times yet to come. The desert was coming awake. Between them, Winterpole and Ungern Sternberg and Zamyatin would bring the benefits of their cold civilization into the wilderness. If it did not blossom, they would not despair: they had time: they would water it with blood.
“Do we need friends like that?” asked Christopher. He failed to see the necessity. He failed to understand how such a frail barrier could stand between two philosophies.
“It’s hard for you to understand, Christopher. You weren’t in Europe during the war. You didn’t see what we did to one another.
We lost our heads. We became animals. When the war ended, it was the general opinion that the beastliness had ended with it. As if that could ever be.
“The war to end wars” that’s what we called it. But how can war end?
It’s part of us, it’s in our blood.
“If the Bolsheviks spread their creed any further, there’ll be another war, one worse than the last. My job is to prevent that, at any cost. Our people back home have just won a war, and peace has never seemed so good to them. They want it to go on forever:
poppies in the fields, photographs of Uncle Arthur wearing his medals on the mantelpiece, the flag unfurling day after day in a stiff breeze, the home fires burning all winter long. And I’m afraid for them. They’re about to be overtaken by Zamyatin and History, and they don’t even know it. That’s why Ungern Sternberg is necessary. Regrettable, but necessary, I assure you.”
He cleared his throat.
“He won’t last long, don’t worry. Men like him serve a purpose in times like these. He cleared the Chinese out of the way and did a good job of it. There would have been an incident if we’d done the same Diplomatic rows. Reparations.
“He’ll hold off the Bolsheviks until we can organize something better, something more permanent. Then we’ll put our own man on the throne in his place. The Tibetan boy, perhaps. We’ll supply arms and advisers, monetary reserves. We’ll put up telegraphs and open banks and start trade flowing. It’ll all work out in the end you’ll see. Believe me, people in very high places have discussed this thing. Very high places indeed. Discussed it inside and out.
It’s for the best. You’ll see. All for the best.”
The roaring of the engines filled the world. In front, the darkness was forced aside only to fall in again behind them, thick and unappeased.
Chindamani turned and spoke to Christopher.
“It’s like magic,” she said.
“Lamps that can turn the darkness to daylight. Boxes that can run faster than wind-stallions. You never told me about any of this, that your people could do such wonderful things.”
“No,” said Christopher, staring into the darkness.
“I didn’t tell you. Everything we do is magic. One day we’ll turn the whole world into fairyland. Wait and see.”
They halted that night in the centre of a vast depression one hundred and eighty miles north of Sining-fu. A large moon gave them light out of a cloistered sky, turning the sand to silver and the hollow in which they rested to a giant, polished bowl. Without the sun, the sands had given up their heat. They lit a fire with charcoal bought in Sining-fu and ate in silence, shivering.
Christopher was unable to explain his worries properly to Chindamani. He told her they would be in Urga in a matter of days. Brought up to believe in miracles, and entranced by the magical pulse of the motor vehicle that had already carried her so far into this ice less and snowless land, she believed him.
He told her what he knew of Ungern Sternberg, not to frighten, but to warn her. He said the Russian had kept a pack of wolves in Dauria so Winterpole had told him and that he had fed his victims to them on occasion. But she had never seen a wolf or even heard one calling in the stillness of the night, and thought he was telling her tales like those she had once delighted Samdup with in his lab rang when winter was at its height.
She missed the boy terribly and was afraid for him, the more so now that the distance between them was growing shorter every day. Some superstitious fear had been aroused in her that she might somehow cayse his death. More realistically, she had seen what Zamyatin was capable of, that the killing of children was not beyond the bounds of possibility for such a man.
Her relationship with Christopher gave her growing cause for uncertainty. She had found she loved him in ways that constantly surprised and delighted her. His eyes, his hands, the foreign roughness of his beard, the odd ways he used Tibetan words, the tenderness of his fingers, the lightness of his breath against her wet skin all filled her at different times with alien and undefinable pleasure and a simple contentment at being with him. When she shared his bed, she experienced an intensity of joy that nothing in her experience had prepared her for. She had always regarded sensual pleasure as a thing reserved for ordinary mortals or for gods: since she was neither, it had been remote from her until now.
For the first time, she understood the meaning of temptation: its power, its subtlety, its intimacy. She would have given lifetimes to have him enter her just one more time or to feel his lips on her breasts or even merely to lie naked with him in the darkness. On their first night in the desert, he came to her urgently, with a desperation she had never known in him before. At the moment when she felt him enter her, she understood something vital: love did not diminish. It increased daily until nothing could contain it except itself.
And she wondered again how she would manage when the moment came for her to leave him and go back to the shadows where she belonged.
It took them another two days to complete the crossing of the Gobi and a low range of mountains just beyond. The car broke down five times, and each time Winterpole swore it was the end. But he cursed and tinkered, tinkered and cursed until something happened, the car bowed to the inevitable, and they were on their way again. Christopher was astonished by this display of manual dexterity in a man of Winterpole’s apparent indolence. Cars, it appeared, were Winterpole’s passion. He said he preferred them to people, and Christopher believed him.
At last the desert was behind them and they were driving on the open plains. Grass stretched ahead of them as far as the eye could see. This was nomad country, a world of white felt yurts and prancing horses, of gently sloping meadows and winding streams where vast herds of sheep and goats and cows grazed in a tranquil silence. They passed a small herd of white horses wearing talismans wrapped in bags of felt across their broad chests sacred animals belonging to a nearby monastery. Dogs rushed out to bark at the car as they passed small encampments, then they were out of reach, gliding into the blue horizon in top gear. Their spirits lifted.
“Urga’s only about one hundred and fifty miles away now,” said Winterpole.
“We’ll be there tomorrow with any luck.”
That afternoon, they came upon masses of purple and white pasque-flowers in a vast expanse of waving grass. Suddenly, winter seemed impossibly far away, and the deep snows of Tibet nothing but a mirage. Wherever they looked, a coloured carpet stretched to the horizon. At Christopher’s request, Winterpole stopped the car and they got out.
He watched as Chindamani bent down in wonder and cupped her hands about the head of a purple flower.
