“Smell it,” he said.
But the smell was already everywhere, filling the air all about them, rich and strange and unbearably fragrant, like a woman’s perfume, warmed by the bright sun.
“I told you there were flowers in Mongolia,” she whispered. A thin breeze came down from the north and lifted her hair. The grass and the pasque-flowers waved: it was a great ocean, shoreless and moving to unseen music.
“Are they worth your coming here?” he asked.
She stood up and smiled, ravished by the sight of so much greenery. It was ordinary to him, just a meadow filled with flowers.
But to her it was the world turned upside down.
She laughed suddenly and began to run, weaving among the scattered flowers like a child on its first picnic. Christopher tried to picture her at home in Northumberland, in an English summer, running down to the river at Carfax across trim, delicate lawns:
but her moving form called for something else, something that would tear that prim and tidy world to pieces.
Suddenly she stopped running. She did not scream or cry out, but Christopher knew at once that something was wrong, badly wrong. She was standing stock-still, her body rigid, her hands clenched, staring at something just out of his range of vision.
“Stay here,” Chru top her ordered Winterpole, taking command at once.
“Get your revolver from the car. It may be nothing, but we can’t afford to take chances. Keep the engine running.”
He ran towards her, praying she was all right, that it was only something startling she had seen, something unexpected, like a running fawn. But her silence alarmed him more than a cry or call for help would have done.
He could not make out what the objects were at first. Chindamani was standing at the top of a gentle slope that ran down towards a small river. In either direction, as far as the eye could see, the slope was covered by round objects that looked at first sight like the stems of plants topped by gourds or small melons.
But as he drew alongside Chindamani, he saw what she saw.
Stakes had been cut from a nearby forest and planted all along the banks of the river and as high as the slopes on either side. On each stake, like a grotesque offering of some sort, a human head had been impaled.
Christopher guessed the heads had been there for perhaps a month. Some were little more than bone, others had shrivelled like the heads of mummies, parched and old and leathery. On several, he could see the caps of Chinese soldiers. It was impossible to guess how many there were. He imagined them stretching on for mile after mile until the river reached the sea. As it was, he could not see the end of them, whichever way he looked.
He took Chindamani by the shoulders and led her away from the river. As they turned, his eyes caught sight of a stake at the top of the slope. It was one of several to which a board had been nailed. Christopher went across and examined it.
It bore writing in Chinese and Russian characters. He read the
Russian, but it made no sense to him:
One hundred and thirty days yet and it is finished. I am Death. I am the Destroyer of Worlds. Roman van Ungem Sternberg.
He recognized the last two sentences as quotations from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad Gita. But the first sentence remained mysterious. It read like something from the Apocalypse.
But he was sure he had never read it in St. John’s Revelation.
He looked back again at the grim trophies, at the tokens of Ungern’s carnage. Then he glanced at the river. It was peaceful and unsullied now, free of its winter ice and flowing once more to the sea. But he imagined it a month ago, filled with the headless corpses of ten thousand Chinese soldiers slaughtered by von Ungern Sternberg and his men.
The Saviour of Mongolia had come at last and was at work among men.
They heard the first shots about an hour before sunset. It was the day after their discovery of the field of heads. Each time they passed by clumps of flowers after that, Chindamani turned her face away.
“O Rose, thou art sick,” Christopher whispered beneath his breath; but the worm that had entered the bud of Chindamani’s life was far from invisible.
“Stop the car!” he cried. Another shot rang out, somewhere in the distance, carried to them by a slight echo.
Winterpole braked hard, slewing the car round on its tracks, and killed the engine. A profound silence rushed into the world.
Somewhere a bird sang, a quirky, warbling note. Then there was a sharp crack, followed by a second, then silence again.
“What the devil’s going on?” demanded Winterpole.
“Shut up,” said Christopher. He was trying to guess the direction from which the shots had come. They were gunshots, he could not have mistaken them.
Two more reports sounded nearby. There was something careful, something methodical about the shooting that Christopher did not like. It was not the seasons for woodcocks, and Mongols did not hunt birds with guns.
“Winterpole,” he said, ‘stay in the car with Chindamani. Keep your pistol ready and use it if you have to if anyone comes, frighten him off. Even if he looks harmless. We can’t afford to take chances. I’m going to check out those shots.”
“Why don’t we just drive on?” queried Winterpole.
“Drive on into what?” Christopher retorted.
“Before I go any further, I want to know just what they ‘re shooting out there birds or people. I doubt very much if it’s the first, and if it’s the second I want to know who’s doing the shooting and who’s being shot at.
I’m relying on you to keep Chindamani safe. You’re a man of action now, Winterpole. It’s time you got your lily-white hands a little dirty.”
“At least call me Simon, old boy. Do me that courtesy.”
Christopher said nothing. He reached down and found his pistol, the one he had brought from Dorje-la, Tsarong Rinpoche’s pistol.
They had been driving along the edge of a vast pine forest, which lay to their right. Christopher was sure the shots had come from there. His suspicion was confirmed when another two rang out in quick succession as he got out of the car. Making allowance for the trees, he guessed they had come from a spot about half a mile away.
“Be careful, Ka-ris To-feh,” Chindamani said in her quietest voice, addressing herself to him alone, in their private universe.
“I’m frightened for you please take care.”
He bent and kissed her cheek.
The trees swallowed him up instantly. He was like a diver entering the sea, plunging out of the sunshine into a green world fingered by narrow shafts of broken light that struggled past murky shadows. His footsteps died away into a thick carpet of pine needles.
Everywhere, fallen cones lay in profusion. Silence reigned like a mad king over an unpeopled kingdom, determined and murderous, eager to lay waste. His breathing was the only sound, raw and melancholy, vexed by the heavy scent of pine resin and dead undergrowth. If there were birds here, they were hidden away, voiceless and wingless, watching from secret branches. If there were other animals, they licked their teeth in dark burrows deep beneath the earth.
The forest went on, breeding itself with a green intensity on every side. He was enveloped in a lacework of boughs and low hanging branches. He cocked his pistol nervously. This must be near the spot from which the shots had come.
Nearby, a man’s voice sounded, barking out what seemed to be words of command. A brief silence followed, then two more shots shook the trees. He thought they came from a clump of trees to his left. A murmur of voices came indistinctly from that direction, but he could not make out what they were saying, or even what language they spoke.
