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Marquis cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering at her amusement, then he turned back to Wilkins. ‘We’re safe enough, Nick. We’re a long way from where the fighting is, and in any case we’ll be out of here in a fortnight.’
‘So you can start preparing, Nick, for the shock of civilisation,’ said Eve, wiping honey from her chin with a finger; and Marquis grinned at her.
Wilkins was aware of the undercurrent between the Marquises. He and the Brecks had discussed it once or twice when they had come back here to the main camp for their periodic reports to Marquis. Each scientist took two porters and moved out into an area of his own choosing, staying there for periods varying from two weeks to a month. The Brecks, both botanists, went together and since this was virtually a honeymoon trip did not seem to mind the isolation from the others. But Wilkins, though shy in speech, was naturally gregarious and always looked forward to his return to the main camp. On the last couple of visits he had noticed that the Marquises had become uncertain in their attitudes towards each other; they were like climbers negotiating the slopes in the mountains beyond the camp where new snow lay across old snow and an avalanche could start with one false step. He had an Englishman’s distaste for viewing other people’s private feelings and he was now wishing urgently for an end to the expedition. He had begun by liking the cheerful, argumentative Marquis, but he had made up his mind now he would not come on another trip with him. For one thing he envied and resented Marquis’s ability to deal with almost anything that came up, his gift for leadership. And for another thing, there was Eve.
Then the Brecks came up from the garden, smiling at each other in the open, yet somehow secret way that, Eve had noticed, was international among young lovers. Perhaps she and Jack had once smiled like that at each other; she couldn’t remember. Memory, if it hadn’t yet turned sour, had begun to fail her when she needed it most. She turned to greet them, looking for herself and Jack in their faces.
‘Boy, what a morning!’ Tom Breck flung his arms wide, as if trying to split himself apart. All his actions and gestures were exaggerated, like those of a clockwork toy whose engine was too powerful. ‘And we’re packing up to go home!’
‘Another month up here and you’d have your behind frozen off,’ Marquis said. ‘Ask the porters what it’s like up here once the winds turn.’
‘I’d like to take a couple of those guys back home with us.’ Breck nodded down towards the porters laughing among themselves as they worked in the garden. ‘Boy, they’re happy!’
‘They wouldn’t be in Bucks County,’ said Nancy Breck, practical as ever. She sat down at the table beside Eve, dipped a tsampa cake in the jar of honey and ate it. ‘That’s where we’re going to live. Lots of tweedy types live there. Bucks County, P.A., is no place for a Bhutanese.’
Tom Breck grinned and sat down opposite his wife, looking at her with undisguised love. He was a tall thin boy who, with his crew-cut and his wispy blond beard, looked even younger than twenty-four. A Quaker from Colorado, he had spent six months in New York where he had met and married Nancy, and in his seven months here on the Indian sub-continent had lost none of his enthusiasm for the world at large. He was a bumbler, forgetful and unmethodical and a poor botanist; and several times Marquis had had to speak bluntly and harshly to him. Always Breck, unresentful of the dressing-down, genuinely apologetic, had gone back to work with the same cheerful enthusiasm. But already in nine months of marriage it had become evident to him that Nancy had come along just in time to save him from disaster. She was and would be his only means of survival; and unlike so many men in the same predicament, he was grateful for and not resentful of the fact. Tom Breck was a pacifist in the battle of the sexes.
‘Bucks County sounds just like Bucks, England,’ said Marquis. ‘Eve’s old man was always in tweeds. Even at our wedding. She had me all dolled up in striped pants from Moss Bros. I looked like a good argument for living in sin, and her old man turned up looking like a second-hand sofa. Twice at the reception I nearly sat down on him.’
Eve smiled sweetly at him, not taking the bait. She had seen the glance pass between Wilkins and the Brecks. She wrapped herself in silence and a smile, aware for the first time that the coolness between Jack and herself was now apparent to the others. Oh, to be back in London, where you had the privacy of congestion! One was too naked here in the mountains. She wondered how the monks in the mountain monasteries, who valued introspection so much, managed to survive the exposure to each other.
Wilkins broke the moment, bluntly, like a man treading too heavily on thin ice. ‘I wouldn’t mind being tweedy and all in Bucks, England, or Bucks County, P.A., wherever that is. Anywhere, just so long as we’re out of here.’
Tom Breck, the morning sun making newly-minted pennies of his dark glasses, looked up towards the mountains north and east of them. The valley ran north-east between tree-cloaked slopes that rose steeply towards the peaks of the Great Himalaya Range. Oak, birch and pine made a varied green pattern against the hillsides; clumps of rhododendrons were turning brown under the autumn chill; gentians that had miraculously survived the frosts lay like fragments of mirror among the rocks, reflecting the blue above. The morning wind, still blowing from the south although it was late October, snatched snow from the high peaks and drew it in skeins, miles long, across the shining sky. He had loved the Rockies in his home state, but they had never prepared him for the grandeur and breath-taking excitement of these mountains on the roof of the world.
‘I’d be quite happy to stay here forever.’ He looked across at Nancy, grinning boyishly, twisting his beard as if wringing water from it. ‘What d’you say, honey?’
Nancy nodded. ‘Maybe for a while. Not forever, though. It’s too close to China. Sooner or later you’d be wanting to climb the mountains—’She nodded towards the north.
‘This is as close as I want us ever to get.’
Breck’s face had sobered. The light went out of his dark glasses as he lowered his head, and a deep frown cut his brows above them. ‘You’re right, honey. I’d find nothing. Nothing that would help.’
Then he got up, awkwardly, quickly, and went back down to the porters in the garden. There was a moment which, to Eve, was so tangible that she felt she could see it; the wrong remark, even the wrong look, could have punctured it as a balloon might have been. She sat waiting for someone to say the wrong thing; but no one did. Marquis and Wilkins turned away from the table as naturally as if they had decided some moments ago to do so, and went down to join Breck and the porters.
Nancy Breck looked after them. ‘Tom forgets sometimes. I mean, what happened to his parents. Then when he does remember—’She looked back to the north, to the mountains, with the skeins of wind-blown snow now turning to scimitars, riding like demons out of China. ‘I mean, it’s almost as if he wanted to forget—’
‘Wouldn’t that be best?’
Nancy shook her head. She was a big girl, strong and well-proportioned; she looked a farm girl from Minnesota rather than a doctor’s daughter from Main Line Philadelphia. Later on she would be massive, perhaps even a little frightening; but now she was attractive, if you liked big healthy girls. And Tom Breck obviously did; and what anyone else thought didn’t matter at all. She was not wearing her glasses now, and her big short-sighted brown eyes were dark with concentration.
‘He mustn’t forget! I’m not religious, God knows – there, that makes me sound contradictory, doesn’t it? Are you religious, Eve? No, I shouldn’t ask.’ At times Nancy could lose herself and her audience in a flood of words; conversation became a one-way torrent of questions, opinions and non-sequiturs. ‘Anyhow. Tom’s parents died because they were religious. Marvellously so – I’ve read some of the letters they sent him. Every second line read like a prayer.’
I talked like this once, Eve was thinking, listening with only half an ear. I used all those extravagant adjectives; non-sequiturs were a regular diet with me. But I never had Nancy’s passion, not about the world in general; perhaps that is the American in her, they make an empire of their conscience. I only had (have?) passion for my husband, a most un-English habit.
She came back to the tail-end of Nancy’s monologue: ‘Don’t you feel that way about Jack? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘No,’ said Eve, and left Nancy to wonder if it was meant as an answer to either or both the questions. She turned to the kitchen tent, calling to Tsering to bring her more tea.
‘Sorry.’ Nancy stood up, mumbled something, then walked away towards her tent, stumbling a little as if embarrassment had only added to her myopia to make her almost blind.
Eve sat alone at the rough table, warming her hands round the fresh mug of tea Tsering had brought her. She wanted to run after Nancy, apologise for the rudeness of her answer; but that would only lead to explanation, and she would never be able to explain to anyone what had gone wrong between herself and Jack. Because she hated scenes, she had done her best to keep their conflict to themselves; they had had one or two fierce rows, but they had always been in their tent and never while Wilkins and the Brecks had been in camp. She knew that Nimchu and the other main camp porters must have heard the rows and discussed them; but she knew also that the Bhutanese would not have gossiped with the Englishman and the Americans. It shocked and embarrassed her to the point of sickness to discover now that Nancy knew that all was not well between her and Jack. To have Nick and Tom know could somehow be ignored. To have another woman, one so newly and happily married, know was almost unbearable.
Tsering hovered behind her, his round fat face split in the perpetual smile that made life seem one huge joke. His name, Tsering Yeshe, meant Long Lived Wisdom; he had never shown any signs of being wise, unless constant cheerfulness showed a wisdom of acceptance of what life offered. He was proud of his attraction for women, and on the trek out he had almost shouted himself hoarse calling to every woman he had passed, even those who were sometimes half a mile away, standing like dark storks in the flooded rice paddies. Eve had no idea how old he was and he himself could only guess; but he had been accompanying expeditions here in the Himalayas, in Nepal, Sikkim and his native Bhutan, every year since the end of World War Two. He had a wife and four children back at Dzongsa Dzong on the Indian border, but he hardly ever saw them; he claimed three other wives in various parts of the country, but Eve suspected these were inventions to bolster his reputation. Eve, a wife driven by her own needs to accompany her husband wherever he went, wondered what Tsering’s wife felt about his long absences.
‘More cake, memsahib? More tea?’ Tsering liked his women fat, and he thought the memsahib much too thin for a really beautiful woman. She had good breasts, but the rest of her was much too flat for a woman who would be really good to make love to. He wondered if that was why the sahib sometimes shouted at the memsahib when they were alone in their tent. ‘You do not eat enough, memsahib.’
‘You’ve told me that, Tsering. If I ate as much as you try to push into me, we’d soon run out of food. How are the stores, anyway?’ It was her job to supervise the stores. Even on their first expedition she had insisted that she be given a job and as time had gone by she had become an efficient and reliable supply officer.
Tsering made a face and ran a greasy hand over his close-cropped black hair. Men and women here in Bhutan all wore the same close-cropped style, and when Eve had first arrived in the country she had several times been confused as to what sex she was talking to. ‘Meat is almost gone, memsahib. Rice, too. Maybe the sahib better shoot something. Yesterday I saw gooral up on hill.’ He nodded back at the tangled hills that, like a green waterfall, tumbled down into the pit of the valley.
Eve did not particularly like the meat of the gooral, the Himalayan chamois, but she had tasted worse goats’ meat and it was at least better than some of the village sheep they had bought on their way out. ‘I’ll speak to the sahib. And you’d better check again on the rice. If it’s really low, we may have to send Chungma and Tashi back down the valley to buy some at Sham Dzong.’
That was two days’ walk: four days there and back. Jack would consider it a waste of time and two men. If she played her stores carefully, she might have them all out of here within a week.
She smiled to herself, like a schoolgirl who was about to bring the holidays forward by burning down the school.
2
Marquis was secretly pleased when Eve told him they needed more meat and would he try for the gooral. There were still some botanical specimens that had to be gathered to make the collection complete, and time was running out; snow was already beginning to fall heavily on the high peaks, and any day now the winds would swing to the north to bring blizzards. On top of that he had been more disturbed than he had shown by this morning’s news on the radio. He was not a fool, and he knew that the Chinese Reds had long regarded Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the North-East Frontier Agency as only extensions of Tibet. But he wanted at least another week; he wanted to complete the collection, his best ever. He had fought against the idea, was still fighting it, but this might be his last expedition. He wanted it to be one that botanists at least would remember.
But now only the gooral was on his mind; or so he told himself. He always welcomed the opportunity to hunt game, and it eased his conscience when the hunt was for food and not just for sport. He would go out again this afternoon and collect the swertia racemosa he had seen yesterday in the ravine farther up the valley.
He was now a mile above the camp, moving up a narrow track through a stand of evergreen oak. The valley here was almost narrow enough to be called a gorge, a cleft between two steep wooded ridges; the river raced down the floor of the valley, twisting and turning like a rusted knife cutting its way out of the mountains. He knew that the river sped on to join other mountain streams, became a slower-moving river that merged into the Brahmaputra, a procession of waters that wended their majestic way, carrying the prayers, dreams and excreta of men, down to the Bay of Bengal over a thousand miles away. Rivers, as well as mountains, had always fascinated him; he had a voice like a bookmaker’s lament, but his heart always rang with a Caruso-note when he came for the first time on a river. Heaven was a high mountain peak somewhere and he would reach it by way of a river that flowed uphill. It thrilled him to walk beside such a stream as this one, to look at the water tearing its way over the rocks and to see it as the birth pangs of a giant river that, a thousand miles away, carried ships to the sea. He was passionately interested in everything that grew in nature: plants, trees, rivers. And once, in South America, he had seen the birth of a mountain as a volcano had exploded out of the belly of a plain.
The opposite ridge was bathed in sunlight, the trees glittering like the plumage of some giant green bird, but this side of the valley had never seen the sun and was dank and cold. Strangers to the Himalayas were always surprised at the difference in temperature between a sunny slope and one where the sun never reached; he remembered Nancy Breck’s shock when she had taken a sun and shade reading and found a difference of 30 degrees centigrade. He shivered now as he trudged up beneath the trees. But this was where he would find the gooral; it did not like the sun. A Monal pheasant broke from a clump of rhododendron ahead of him and flashed like a huge jewel as it crossed to the opposite ridge, but he resisted the quick impulse to shoot at it. The .30 Double would just blow the bird to pieces, and he had never been able to bring himself to kill just for killing’s sake.
He breathed deeply as he walked, enjoying the thin sharp air in his nose and throat. Unlike other expedition leaders to remote places, he had never written a book on his experiences, had never tried to explain the mystique that brought him to these high mountains, took him to tropical jungles or, once, had taken him to the loneliness of the Australian Centre. He was a botanist by profession and it was his job to collect plant specimens; it was a job he enjoyed and one in which he knew he had a high reputation. But deep in his heart, and he was a man of more secrets than even Eve suspected, he knew that the botanical searches were now more of an excuse for an escape from civilisation. Not civilisation, in itself, although he had no deep love of it; no city could ever bring on the euphoria that the isolation of those mountains could give him. He wanted to escape from what civilisation meant: surrender to Eve and her money, a scarecrow man papered over with his wife’s cheques. During their brief engagement he had referred to her as his financée; it was a joke that had soon gone sour, like a penny on the tongue. She always contributed a major part of the finance of these expeditions, but he had now convinced himself that this was her money being spent in a good cause, not just in keeping a husband. Which was what would happen to him if he gave in to her and retired to pottering about on the family estate in Buckinghamshire. Civilisation had once meant something else again, a semidetached morgue in a drab suburb of Sydney where his mother and his two sisters had done their best to lay him out with cold looks of disapproval. Only his father, a rebel who couldn’t afford a flag, drunk every Saturday on republicanism and three bottles of Resch’s Pilsener, had never complained; but he had never really understood why any man should choose to leave the greatest bloody country in the world, Australia. His parents had worked their fingers bare of prints to put him through university; they had neither understood nor forgiven him when he had changed from law to botany at the end of his first year. In the end he had run away because he knew he was in their debt and he would never be able to repay them. They were dead now, but his conscience would give a free ride to their ghosts for the rest of his life.
Now Eve, not yet a ghost, had swung a leg over his conscience. And he felt the weight of her more than that of his parents. The time had come when he owed her a decision. He could not expect her to go on accompanying him forever to the ends of the earth and comfort; she was a woman who had been brought up in comfort and it had surprised him that she had borne so long the hardships of their trips without complaint. But maybe that was her heritage: English boarding schools, English plumbing, English cooking, bred pioneers. The Stoics of ancient Greece would have tossed in the towel, taken out life subscriptions to hedonism, if they had ever been exposed to life in some of the more benighted ancestral halls of England.
There was also the matter of children.
She had talked about having a family almost from the moment they had decided to marry. She had then been a girl of impulsive ideas and quick decisions; it had shocked him, a slow starter at romance, to learn how eager she had been, first, to have him make love to her, then, to have him marry her. He had never met anyone like her: she exploded love like a boxful of fireworks. They had met, become lovers, married and she had started talking about a family all within six weeks.
That had been in the autumn of 1954. He had taken a rare holiday and gone to Switzerland for some climbing. He had climbed the Mönch and in the late evening come back to the small hotel where he was staying. In those days English tourists were still limited in their travel allowance and at even the cheapest hotel one met a very mixed bag of visitors. When he had gone into the hotel’s small bar the only vacant seat had been beside hers. He had not been then, and still was not, a ladies’ man; but his easy-going, casual approach attracted a lot of women. It had attracted Eve and she had attracted him. Within forty-eight hours they had been lovers and were in love: it had been that sort of romance.
It had taken him the same time to discover whose daughter she was and how much money she had. ‘Sir Humphrey Aidan – you’re his daughter? You mean I’ve been to bed with the Bank of England?’
‘Da-ahling, he has nothing to do with the Bank of England.’ She sat up in bed and ran a hand through her tousled hair. In those days she wore it long, down to her shoulders. It was the way he still liked it, and he hated it when he had to chop it short for her when they were out on these field trips. ‘Da-ahling, we’re not going to waste our time talking about money, are we? I hate people who have a thing about money.’
‘A thing? What d’you mean? Oh, if only my dad was here—’
‘Thank God he’s not. Can I help the bed I was born in? Look at me, stark. Am I any different from the daughter of some man on the dole?’
‘Look, love—’
‘I absolutely adore it when you call me love. It’s such a divine change after da-ahling. In my set everyone—’
‘Set? You’re the sort who belongs to a set?’
‘Da-ahling, all right then, my crowd. The people I go around with.’ She shook her head, suddenly sober. ‘Somehow I don’t think you’re going to like them.’
He ignored that and walked to the window to look out at Jungfrau standing out like a mountain of glass against the brilliant sky. A party of four climbers was working its way up the lower slopes of the mountain; that was what he should have done, concentrated on climbing. She lay back on the bed and looked at him, already loving him with a depth of feeling that surprised even herself. ‘Have you ever been in love before?’
He looked back at her, then at last nodded. ‘Twice. With the same girl.’
‘I didn’t say how many times have you made love—’
‘I know you didn’t. I fell in love with this girl twice. Once when she was sixteen. Then she went off with another bloke, and I swore off love for life, took the pledge and a double dose of bromide. Then I met her again when she was twenty and by then the bromide had worn off, I fell in love with her again.’
‘You were still in love with her—’
He shook his head. ‘No, it was a new feeling. It can happen. Fall in love all over again, I mean.’
‘What was she like? She must have been something special, to make you fall in love with her twice.’
‘She was no raving beauty. She had a mouth like an armpit full of loose teeth, and though her eyes weren’t exactly crossed they had designs on each other—’ She threw a pillow at him. He caught it and came and sat back on the bed beside her. ‘Look, love, Aussies have no great reputation as lovers. The only time an Aussie ever compliments a woman, he’s asking for a loan or she’s got a gun at his head. But one thing we do know – never tell your current girl friend what the last one looked like. Always make out she was about as sexy as a porridge doll. One thing a woman can’t stand is to look in a mirror and see another woman’s face there.’
‘Who told you that?’
He grinned. ‘My last girl.’
‘I wish Mummy was still alive to meet you. She would have absolutely adored you. But you and Daddy should get on. You have something in common.’
‘You mean he has an overdraft, too?’
She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, da-ahling. No, he really is like you. He’s frightfully interested in flowers. He grows roses.’
He looked as if he was about to swear, then suddenly he laughed and slapped her on the rump. ‘Love, the last thing I ever want to do is raise bloody roses. I collect plants, not grow them. A lot of botanists do like to grow things, but not me. I’m like the obstetrician who doesn’t like to be surrounded by kids.’
‘Oh,’ she said, linking her hands behind his neck, ‘I was hoping we’d have lots of kids. We could start now.’
Two days later he had introduced her to climbing and she took to it as if she had been born on a mountain. He was an expert climber and had been invited to lead several mountaineering expeditions. But always he had found excuses and in the end he had not been asked to join a climbing team even as a member. He knew he had been branded with a reputation for stand-offishness, a climber who considered himself too good to climb with others. He had let the libel stand because it was better than broadcasting the truth. As time had gone on he had wondered if Eve had ever begun to suspect the truth.
He feared leadership. All his life, even as a boy at school, he had been big and confident-looking: a born leader, everyone had said. He had been captain of the school cricket and rugger teams in his last year and they had been the most disastrous seasons in the school’s history; but no one had blamed him and instead had commiserated with him on the poor material he had been given. At university he had been elected captain of the rugger team and the only two matches the team had won had been when he was out of action through injury. Again no one had blamed him, but by then he had come to know the truth about himself.
Still he had been plagued by people wanting to elect him a leader. Or, what was just as bad, wanting to dispute his title to leadership. It never seemed to matter to them that he had never been known to nominate himself for any leader’s job: they took it for granted that he was in the running and began attacking him sometimes even before his name was mentioned. They were invariably small men: the Big Bastard, as he knew he was called, was always fair game for small men. Sometimes he had wished a big man would dispute his title to leader: he couldn’t bring himself to throw a punch or two at the small men, even if they had attacked him in pairs. So he had retreated farther and farther, never committing himself to any expedition larger than this current one, comfortable in the thought that in such circumstances he was not called upon to be responsible for any man’s life. In small groups such as this each man was accountable for himself and indeed resented that it should be otherwise. Leadership of such an expedition often entailed no more than being responsible for the cost and the day-to-day running of the camp.
But he had regretted missing the opportunity to climb with some of the top mountaineering teams. Hunt had passed him over for the Everest ascent the year before, and his omission from other teams had been conspicuous to those who knew of his ability. He regretted the reputation he had and it worried him. He did not like arrogance in others and it disturbed him to know he was branded with the same sin.
He had also been worried when Eve had insisted she was going to accompany him on the trip to Ruwenzori, wondering if he would have the patience to tolerate her when he was immersed in his work; but she had proved more help than hindrance, and from then on he had never thought of making a trip without her. Her father had died a year after their marriage, leaving her without any close relatives and a fortune that came from shipping and mining. The first fact had bound her closer to him, the second was a barrier that kept pushing itself between them. He was depressed, weighed down by his wife’s wealth, a form of slavery dreamed of by most men who don’t know the value of their freedom.
But now, as it so often did, his depression suddenly lifted. Up ahead he saw the gooral working its way along the steep slope above him. Everything else now dropped out of his mind. He stopped, turning slowly as the gooral, still unaware of him, moved with unhurried and uncanny agility among the rocks and trees on the precipitous slope of the hill. It was no use going up there after it: the gooral would stop, look at him curiously, then be gone out of sight while he was still trying to find a foothold on the hillside. He had learned long ago never act like a goat to catch a goat. He would have to be patient, hope that the animal would come down closer within range. He started up the hill, all his concentration focused on the grey moving shape above him, his ears only half-hearing the other sounds here in the gorge: the hissing rumble of the racing river, the soft explosion of a pheasant taking off from a bush close by, the rattle of falling stones disturbed by the gooral as it bounded from one spot to another.
It worked its way above and past him, began moving back down the gorge towards the camp. He turned and began to follow it, keeping to the track and the cover of the trees. Sometimes it would disappear behind a screen of trees or bushes, and a moment later it would come into view again, still moving down towards the camp. It was lower down the hill now and he could see that it was a male and a big one. Both male and female gooral had horns and often it was difficult to tell which was which. But Marquis had remarkably good eyesight and on this beast he could see the thicker horns and the way they diverged outwards, the mark of the male.
The breeze had freshened and was now coming down the gorge, putting him at a disadvantage. He glanced up anxiously when he saw the gooral stop and look down towards him; he froze, wondering if it had caught his scent and was about to take off farther up the hill. He kept absolutely still, remembering the cardinal rule that even some experienced hunters often forgot in their excitement: that a wild animal, having no education in such things, was more times than not unable to distinguish a man at a glance unless the latter betrayed himself by some movement. To the gooral he could be no more than another object among the trees and rocks which surrounded him. Only his scent, if it got to the gooral, would give him away. The gooral would not recognise the scent, but it would be a strange one and he would be warned.
Then the animal bent down, wrenched at a shrub and a moment later, still chewing, moved on. Marquis relaxed, then he too began to move on. He knew now that the gooral could not smell him, despite the fact that the breeze was blowing from behind him. This often happened in these narrow valleys of the Himalayas: the breeze created its own crosscurrents by bouncing off the steep hills and a scent could be lost within a hundred yards.
The gooral was moving slowly down the hillside, and Marquis quickened his pace. The camp would soon be in sight, round the next bend in the valley, and he wanted to get his shot in before the gooral sighted the camp and was possibly frightened by some of the moving figures it would see down there. He was sweating a little with excitement, but his hands were cold from the breeze, which had a rumour of snow on it, and he kept blowing on his right hand, trying to get some flexibility into his trigger finger. The breeze was quickening by the minute, and once he turned his head it caught at his eye, making it water. Autumn was not the best time for hunting in these mountains: the cold fingers, the chill of the metal against the cheek, the wind that watered the eyes, none of it made for easy marksmanship.
The gooral stopped again, its head raised; it gave a hissing whistle, a sign that it was frightened. Then suddenly it bounded down the hill, racing with incredible swiftness ahead of the stones and small rocks disturbed by its progress. The hillside was open here and Marquis had a clear view of the animal as it raced down at right angles to him. Something had frightened the gooral, but there was no time to look for what it was; he raised his gun, tracking a little ahead of the flying gooral, then let go. The shot reverberated around the narrow valley, its echoes dying away quickly as the breeze caught them; the gooral missed its step, then turned a somersault and went plunging down to finish up against a rock just above the path. Marquis felt the thrill that a good shot always gave him. He moved down the path towards the dead gooral, the gun held loosely in one hand, relaxed and happy and forgetful of everything but what he had just done. He would not boast of his shot, but he never denied to himself the pride that he felt. He might have seemed less self-confident if he had talked more about his accomplishments, but at thirty-six a man found it difficult to change the habits and faults of a lifetime. A leopard couldn’t change his spots …
The leopard! He knew now what had frightened the gooral. He turned his head quickly, and the breeze, now a rising wind, sliced at his eyes. His gaze dimmed with tears, but not before he recognised the leopard coming down the hillside in smooth bounding strides that he knew would culminate in a great leap to bring the beast crashing down on him. He whipped up the gun, but even as he did he knew the shot would be useless: he could not see a thing.
Then he felt the bullets rip the air inches above his head and he ducked. The short burst of automatic fire started the valley thundering; again the echoes were snatched away by the wind. But he heard nothing, only felt the thud on the ground as the leopard landed less than a yard from him; his eyes suddenly cleared, and he stepped back as the dying beast reached out for him with a weakly savage paw. He stood on shivering legs, staring down at the leopard as it snarled up at him, coughing angrily in its throat, its jaws working to get at him, its eyes yellow with a fierceness about which its body could do nothing. Then the head dropped and it was dead.
‘Jolly lucky shot, that. I almost blew your head off, instead of hitting him. Just as well you ducked, old man.’
Marquis turned, in control of himself again. On the other side of the river stood an Indian soldier, a Sten gun held loosely in the crook of his arm. Beside him, his hands bound together, was a second soldier, a Chinese.
Chapter Two (#ulink_27464b23-76ed-5a81-b422-5dea1fd47171)
‘Is there any way of crossing this river?’ the Indian asked.
Marquis nodded downstream. ‘There’s a bridge down opposite our camp.’
‘Jolly good.’ They had to shout to make themselves heard above the hiss of the water as it boiled past the rocks that tried to block its path. ‘Are you going back there now?’
Marquis looked down at the dead leopard, then at the gooral still wedged in above the rock. He would send Nimchu and a couple of the other porters back for them. The shots would have frightened off any other game that might be about, and the carcasses would be safe for some time. In any case he had to find out what the Indian and the Chinese were doing here.
He walked back along the bank of the river, watching the other two men as they picked their way along the narrow track on the other side. The Chinese walked with his head bent; with his hands tied in front of him he looked like a man deep in meditative prayer. The Indian kept glancing across at Marquis, smiling and nodding like a man throwing silent greetings across a crowded room. Occasionally he prodded the man in front of him with the barrel of his Sten gun, but the Chinese either ignored it or did not feel it. Captor and captive, it was obvious to Marquis even at this distance that they hated each other’s guts.
Before they reached the camp, Eve, Nimchu and three of the porters had come up the track to meet them. ‘What’s the matter? I heard the shots—’ Then Eve looked across the river and saw the two strangers as they came round an outcrop of rock. She saw the Sten gun carried by the Indian, and she looked quickly at Marquis to see if he had been wounded. ‘Did he shoot at you?’
He shook his head, warmed by her concern for him. He took the hand she had put out to him, and quickly told her what had happened. He spoke to the porters, telling them to collect the dead beasts; then, still hand in hand with Eve, he continued on towards the camp. She kept glancing across towards the two men opposite, and Marquis saw the Indian smile at her and incline his head in a slight bow. The Chinese remained uninterested.
‘Who are they?’ He could feel the tightness of her fingers on his. ‘The shorter one’s Chinese, isn’t he?’
‘I think so. He’s too big for a Bhutanese or a Sherpa.’ He looked across at the baggy grey uniform and the cap with ear-flaps that the man wore. ‘I’ve never seen a Chinese uniform before. If he’s a Red, he’s out of his territory. So’s the Indian, for that matter.’
‘What about the Indian? He looks pretty pleased with himself.’
‘Maybe he’s just glad to see us.’
‘Are you glad to see him?’
He didn’t answer that, just pressed her fingers. They came into the camp and walked down to the end of the bridge to wait for the two strangers as they crossed it. The Chinese slipped once or twice as the narrow catwalk swayed beneath him and, with his hands tied together, had trouble in keeping his balance; but the Indian made no attempt to help him, just paused and watched as if he would be pleased to see the Chinese topple over on to the rocks and be swept away by the rushing cataract. Then, wet from the spray flung up from below the bridge, they were clambering up the bank and Marquis and Eve advanced to meet them. The Indian slung his Sten gun over one shoulder, saluted Eve and put out his hand to Marquis.
‘Awfully pleased to meet you.’ His accent was high and fluting, a northern Indian provinces accent overlaid with an Oxford exaggeration that was now out of date. It suggested a languid world that was also gone: tea at four, Ascot hats in a Delhi garden, polo, gossip, and a shoving match among the rajahs to see who could stand closest to the British Raj. But the hand the Indian put out was not languid: the fingers were almost as strong as Marquis’s own. ‘I am Lieutenant-Colonel Dalpat Singh, Indian Army. This is General Li Bu-fang, Chinese Army.’ His black eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘The wrong Chinese Army, I’m afraid. He’s not one of Chiang Kai-shek’s chaps, are you, old man?’ He looked at the Chinese, who turned his head away and stared down the valley. Singh looked back at Marquis and Eve. ‘Chinese politeness died out with Communism. It’s always the way when one allows the masses to take over.’
Marquis, a paid-up member of the masses, ignored the Indian’s remark and introduced himself and Eve. ‘You’re out of your territory, aren’t you, Colonel?’
‘Oh, indeed we are. Both of us.’ He looked at the Chinese again, but the latter still remained detached from them, continuing to stare down the valley as if waiting patiently for someone to come. For a moment a flush of temper stained the Indian’s face, then he shrugged and smiled. He was a handsome man, tall and well-built, his jowls and waist perhaps a little soft and thick for a soldier in the field. He wore thick woollen khaki battle-dress with his badges of rank woven on the shoulder-straps, and a chocolate-brown turban that was stained with blood from a dried cut above his right eye. The eyes themselves were black and amused, almost mocking: they would have seen the human in Indra, the god who drank ambrosia for no other reason but to get drunk. But now, too, they were tired eyes: the Indian had almost reached the point of exhaustion where he would begin to mock himself. ‘I wonder if we might have a cup of tea? We haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday at noon.’
Marquis led them up to the camp, and soon Tsering brought them tea, tsampa cakes, honey and fruit. At first it looked as if the Chinese would refuse to eat; then he seemed to make up his mind that it was pointless to starve himself to death. He sat down at the rough table opposite Singh and awkwardly, with his hands still bound, began to eat. The Indian himself was obviously famished and had begun to eat as soon as the food was put in front of him.
