“Have a chocolate, William,” Zamyatin urged, holding the box up to him. But the boy did not even look down or show that he had heard. He was not eating properly, and Zamyatin was growing worried.
Strictly speaking, he should have dumped the English boy weeks ago. Tibet was still a long way in the future, and he was not sure how useful William would prove anyway. But something in the boy’s situation had awakened what little conscience there was in Zamyatin. He identified with him and in some respects regretted having taken him from his home. All the more now that he was sure the boy would not survive much longer unless he received proper medical attention.
The two boys had formed a strangely intense friendship in spite of their inability to understand one another’s language. William had taught Samdup a little English and learned some Tibetan in return, but they had only words without grammar or syntax. They communicated in some manner that transcended or side-stepped language. William would let only Samdup tend to him when his neck was particularly bad. And Samdup would go nowhere unless William was by his side. They had become like brothers.
Zamyatin tried without success to win the favour of one or the other.
He knew that, if William accepted him, Samdup would come round in time. Without Samdup, Zamyatin would lose all purpose in being here. True, there were communist cells at Urga and elsewhere now, with which he could liaise. But he knew that another Comintern agent, Sorokovikov, was already in the country and that he had organized the existing revolutionary group into the Mongol People’s Party under the leadership of a man called Sukebator. Udinskii had told him that a delegation from the MPP had visited the head of the People’s Section of the East for the Party’s Siberian Bureau in Irkutsk. That had been last August.
After that, a Mongol-Tibetan section of Comintern had been founded. The first Mongolian Party Congress had been held in Russian Khiakhta in March. Puzorin, commander of the Soviet of the Fifth Army, was already mobilizing his men.
So events had overtaken Zamyatin while he had been tucked away in his little monastery in the Himalayas. He could feel the reins of power slipping out of his grasp before he had even learned to move them through his fingers with any real dexterity. More than ever, everything hinged on the boy. Ungern’s defeat, the Khutukhtu’s overthrow, and Zamyatin’s elevation to the vice regency of the East. Others might move cells and parties and armies, but what could they achieve in the end without the underpinning only a Saviour-child could give them?
Already his expedition had met with success, as he had anticipated. The riot at Uliassutai had been a mere beginning. He had met with the Sain Noyon Khan and one of the princes from his aim ak a man called Damdinsuren, and had presented them to the boy. It had gone exactly as planned both men, together with the lamas in their entourage had recognized Samdup as the new Khutukhtu and promised their support, moral and military both.
They had given him letters to other princes, to the Tushetu and Setsen Khans, and to the heads of several key monasteries.
Somehow he could not explain it, did not wholly admire or admit it even to himself- the boy exerted some sort of charm over everyone he met. He played the part, but there was more to it than that. Perhaps it was simply that Samdup had throughout his life been little else but a god, so that he behaved as a god might be expected. And the boy did not have to act: he really believed he was the Maidari Buddha. But the Mongols, like the Tibetans, were accustomed to little boys who deported themselves as god lings yet they responded to Samdup with genuine respect.
Mongolia then was divided into several large provinces or aimaks, each of which was further divided into several ho shun Zamyatin calculated that he had already perhaps ten ho shun solidly behind him or, to be precise, behind the boy, which was the same thing as far as he was concerned. There would be more riots, and next time he would see to it that the participants were armed.
The main thing was to keep the boys on the move. Word would be out by now, and if what he had heard about Ungern Stern berg was even partly true, the baron would stop at nothing to crush the rebellion breeding beneath his nose. Every night, Zamyatin and the boys stayed at the juris of a different clan, moving in a broken pattern across the country, never keeping to a straight line, never staying in one place long enough to make tracing them easy.
Tomorrow they would start for Urga. The Sain Noyon Khan
would organize a series of uprisings in the west and north while Zamyatin and his young Pretender took horses to the capital. By the time they arrived there, Ungern’s attention would be focused elsewhere. They would make their way into the city with the assistance of a few sympathizers. Zamyatin would make contact with Sukebator and the other revolutionaries, explain what was happening, and put himself in charge.
Up ahead, Samdup had stopped and sat down by the side of the track.
Zamyatin went up to him slowly, holding the rein of William’s pony.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“My feet hurt,” Samdup said.
“What do you want me to do about it?” snapped Zamyatin. His own feet hurt.
“We’ve still got miles to go. Do you want to spend the night out here with the wolves?”
But he liked the boy. He really did. He liked both of them. It was just that he did not know how to show it. He had never known.
No-one had ever told him.
Urga
Urga lay in the sunshine uneasily, trapped in a hollow between dark hills. Sunlight had entered it in proper measure, scattered from a cloudless and smiling sky, but no sooner did it touch its narrow lanes and fetid alleyways than it lost whatever lustre it had possessed and became a grey and sickly thing. The city’s rooftops were golden and the spires on its temple tipped with sunlight and precious stones, but shadows hung over them and the sound of great trumpets echoed round them with a mournful and desperate flatness.
Mountains enclosed a melancholy plain across which the city stretched
for mile after mile, in three separate sections: Mai-maich’eng, the
Chinese trading city, to the east, its stores and warehouses deserted
and empty; Gandan, the grey city of the lamas, with its temples and
colleges for the study of theology and medicine, to the west; and in
the centre, Ta Khure, where the Living Buddha dwelt behind thick walls
of dull red and white, among rooms full of holy relics and a thousand
ticking clocks, each set to a different hour and minute. Time passed
in those chambers to a morbid creeping sound, like ice moving down a
mountain slope
In slow procession, pilgrims walked or crawled in circles about their god, while trumpets played and gongs shivered and the voices of ten thousand dreaming priests shimmered and echoed in the hollow air. All was as it had been, nothing was changed, nothing was altered except for the actors and their faces. They wore ancient robes and spoke ancient lines, turning and bowing and lighting the proper incense in the proper places, as generations of actors had done before them, as they themselves had no doubt done in former lifetimes. Precise, mannered, without a syllable altered or a gesture changed. And in the Buddha’s chambers, clocks ticked and rang out in the stillness.
In the centre, brooding, dressed in scarlet, his eyes heavy from sleepless nights, Roman von Ungern Sternberg sat among the warm tents of his troops, planning the stages of a small apocalypse.
He drank small cups of Chinese tea and smoked dark-scented cigarettes, but all the time his mind was on other things.
He stood up and went to the door of hisjwrt. It was situated in the courtyard of an abandoned hong that had once belonged to the great Shansi house of Ta Sheng K’uei. The Buriat regiment under Sukharev was stationed here by Ungern’s choice; nearby were the Chahar and Tatar regiments commanded by Bair Gur and Rezukhin. But Rezukhin had gone south with a Russian detachment two weeks ago and still had not returned.
The city filled his nostrils with its peculiar smell, a rich, sour smell that was a blend of holiness and corruption, sanctity mixed with greed and simple, raw humanity. He had not chosen Urga a malign Fate had chosen him for it and sent him there to serve its purposes.
Stubbing out a half-finished cigarette on the door-post, he lit another. His nicotine-stained fingers trembled slightly. It was late afternoon, time to receive the reports that had come in at lunchtime. The combined sounds of
