Blue Poppies Read online

  Outside the tent, the wind had not given up. Over the taut fabric it tossed hard grains of snow with a dry sugary rattle. It whispered the threat of the winter road. The temperature was plunging; Hector whined piteously. Without leaving his bed, Jamie reached out and opened the flap a fraction. The mastiff slipped inside at once, shook off the snow and lay by the radio. The huge dog, trained to knock a man from a running horse and a match for most wolves, was reduced to a shivering heap peering around pathetically in the darkness. In his nest of furs, Jamie drew up his legs for warmth. For a terrible moment he thought of fires, and then of fireplaces and houses and houses on fire and then . . . Mercifully, exhaustion claimed him.

  He slept fitfully. But the whole chilly camp woke early, creeping out into a clinging gray mist. By Khenpo Nima’s baggage a mule lay frozen on the ground, its eyes clouded over.

  They moved among low foothills. In the black tent at evening, the radio confided that the pursuing force remained at Gyamotang. On the third day, the Chinese commander told Chamdo that he had new information. Nomads reported a large party going southward towards the mountains. He, Duan, was taking that route in the morning, towards the Marjya-Kou valley.

  “Where we are now,” observed Khenpo Nima.

  “Well, let’s get out of it,” said Jamie, turning off the radio.

  “It depends which way he’s coming in,” said Nima. “If he’s coming from Gyamotang, he could be in front of us. But he might follow the route we came.”

  “In which case,” said Jamie, “if we turn around we’ll run straight into him.”

  Khenpo Nima trailed his finger across the matting, tracing a ghost map.

  “We can travel just as well in the Dre-Kou valley, the next one south. Is there anywhere we can cross over?”

  “At Shang,” called someone.

  “Where’s that? Before or after the river?”

  “Before. He wouldn’t see us.”

  At first light, the caravan went deeper into the Marjya-Kou valley. Three men with rifles and quick ponies were sent a mile ahead as scouts. Time was against them. The Chinese cavalry would be moving at twice the speed of the caravan with its yaks and baggage.

  Mid-morning, the outriders came trotting back to point out a cluster of deserted stone animal pens on the valley floor ahead. That was Shang. Above them to the left, a narrow sheep track led to the saddle in the hills that they should cross into the parallel Dre-Kou valley. In front of them, the Marjya-Kou turned a corner, passing behind a long, barren spur.

  They began to climb in single file. Two thirds of the way up, almost at the smooth brow of the spur, the scouts halted suddenly. One began to run back down the hill, calling, “We can see them! We can see the Chinese!”

  The caravan leaders crept to the crest and looked down. In the middle distance, little more than a mile away, were crags of silvery-gray gneiss in which the quartz sparkled. At the foot of these crags, almost hidden, was a large encampment of soldiers: trim tents, horses tethered in lines and pyramid stacks of rifles.

  “They’ve got machine-guns, look,” said Jamie. The villagers at his side were silent with awe.

  “We’d have ridden straight into that,” someone whispered.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, don’t let them see us now.” Jamie grabbed at Hector who was strolling on the skyline.

  “Everyone dismount!” cried Khenpo Nima. A moment later the muted call went down the caravan, “Off the path!”

  Stumbling on the icy slope thirty feet below the crest, exposed for just fifty yards, the animals were dragged into a trot, villagers heaving at the leading ropes and slapping at their rumps, hurrying them over the crest to safety with their loads swaying. Crouching in the snow at the top, Jamie and Karjen, Wangdu and Khenpo Nima peered back at the soldiers who were hunting them. The Chinese hadn’t stirred. Karjen grinned broadly and began to laugh. “Ha! They’ve lost us. They’re sitting on their arses just where they said they’d be sitting on their arses. Excellent! Ha!”

  “Wonderful!” said Wangdu.

  “You see?” beamed Khenpo Nima. “That’s Jemmy’s radio, our oracle. Isn’t that fine?”

  Jamie smiled with narrow eyes. “It is rather useful,” he agreed. “Come on, Jyeko, let’s leave them far behind.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SO A CAT-AND-MOUSE game was played out in the mountains. The Jyeko caravan moved deeper into the protective maze, climbing towards the watershed and the high passes, hoping to emerge from the farther slopes well to the south and clear of the Chinese. The rolling grasslands were long forgotten now. The valleys were deep wounds slashed into the Tibetan massif, lined with black rock and scatterings of dwarf rhododendron. There were half-hidden cols and sunless gorges, pockets of iced-over marsh through which the yaks’ hoofs smashed into greasy mud, and waterfalls like frozen mares’ tails. The narrow paths wound this way and that, around spurs and over ridges, and could readily plunge or leap five hundred feet at a turn. At times they would glimpse a powerful torrent glittering a thousand feet below them. They’d see it foaming, but would not be able to hear it.

  The pursuing Chinese were more mobile than a train of slow-moving yaks, but were not used to the terrain. Neither side had maps, since none had ever been drawn. The Chinese had crude, small-scale plans; the Tibetans had a smattering of local knowledge. Sometimes the soldiers could pick up the trail left by the yaks, mules and ponies, but mostly the high winds threw snow about and covered it. The Chinese sent out scouts, but their ponies slipped and stumbled on the precipitous and icy tracks just as the Tibetans did.

  The troops were men from warm, lowland plains, ill used to floundering in snow-clogged gullies. They clambered cursing up to ridges, hoping to spot the fleeing caravan and cut it off, but they never set eyes on it. At times they came perilously close. Once the villagers were obliged to hurry for concealment in a gorge. They had to search for fuel and fodder, and this made them vulnerable. The radio was erratic here. Each evening they strained to catch the Chinese commander’s reports, tried to relate what they heard to the landscape they saw about them, and agreed on a route for the next day. Each morning they moved off at first light, praying that they had made the right choice. West and south they aimed, but more than once they were almost trapped and had to double back and look for another trail.

  At first Jamie thought them worryingly undisciplined. They argued incessantly: two men spent a week furiously disputing the ownership of a yak that might or might not have been purchased for the journey. Those ready first in the morning would start off without waiting and might well have become lost in the steep twistings of the valleys. But after a while he noticed that no one went more than half a mile or so from Khenpo Nima, Wangdu and the other monks, who themselves traveled in a compact group. And, within an hour, they had all formed up behind the radio mule, which traveled at the head of the party, its antenna and flag whipping and cutting the air. It had become a mascot; they followed it as obediently as tourists follow a furled red umbrella through cobbled streets.

  Jamie saw other things. A laden mule was stumbling up the snowy track led by an old woman who was herself staggering. A family came from behind, took the rope from her hand and removed all the baggage from the mule while the old lady stood mute. Having distributed the load among their own animals, the family lifted her onto the mule and continued with her in tow. A man shot a musk deer and presented roast meat to every child in the caravan that night. A pony, suffering badly from the cold and poor grazing, could no longer carry its owner. It was not abandoned, but was allowed to follow at its own pace while its master took the wooden saddle and carried it on his own back until the pony regained some strength. So the village went on together.

  They climbed towards the Siekan-La, a pass at eighteen thousand feet surrounded by towers and pinnacles of iron-stained limestone. The track became narrower still, no more than steep erratic steps stacked there a century before. Snow pockets hid crevices into which feet and hoofs jammed. The animals
protested and refused; the people cursed and struck at them, heaving on the ropes. At dusk, nearing exhaustion, they gained the pass.

  “Once again, the gods are victorious and the devils are defeated,” puffed Khenpo Nima, heaving a rock out of the muddy snow and dumping it on the cairn. Two or three gruff villagers followed suit.

  High in the far distant haze, the interminable complexity of the Himalayan ranges was heaped, peak after ridge after gorge, with snowfields shining in a palette of pale blues according to their angle in the sun. Below in the middle ground spread a region of broad valleys. There would be some scanty winter grazing there, and the trail would not be an endless icy clamber. But there were many cold miles to descend, and a choice of routes: two deep ravines curved downward, both with deep snow drifts and, way below, sprinklings of juniper and larch that gathered into thin forest. They chose the southernmost.

  On the descent they slithered and scrambled uncomfortably. The track dropped suddenly from ledge to ledge, between boulders and over little runs of frosted scree. The animals peered, balked and resisted, eyes big with fright, and their owners held their tails to steady them. People sank to their thighs in snow, or twisted their ankles between wet boulders, or slid on the muddy paste stirred by the pack animals. Hector sprawled awkwardly and gave Jamie reproachful looks.

  The incline eased and the long column spread out once again on the threadlike trail that descended the valley. By late afternoon they had regained the tree line: first the dwarf rhododendrons, then a few brave larches, a scattering of fir. The caravan picked up a little speed, their shoulders lifted and they felt warmer in both their spirits and their feet. The river drew near on the right hand, now shrugging off its ice casing and running cheerfully. Through the trees they glimpsed the open plain again; beyond that, they would begin the ascent towards the pass at Moro-La. The sight buoyed them . . . and then they stopped short.

  At least, the head of the march stopped short. The long column behind did not react instantly and threatened to telescope into the leaders. An anxious call of inquiry came from the rear, and met an urgent order for silence. Everyone strained to see.

  Where the long spurs of the mountain met the plain a short distance ahead, a larger river debouched from another steep gorge to the right, and the two joined forces. There, on flat ground above a bend in the stream, were the Chinese soldiers.

  “What,” asked Wangdu, “are they doing there?”

  “Waiting for us, I’m afraid,” replied Jamie. “I thought we heard them say somewhere else.”

  “Nupkong,” said Khenpo Nima. “They were meant to be at Nupkong.”

  “Perhaps this is Nupkong.”

  “Wherever it is,” said Jamie, “there they are and we almost walked straight into them. So what do we do? Go back?”

  Everyone turned to look behind them. The trail climbed, steeper, narrower and colder with every yard, until it disappeared into the mist.

  “I can’t see that being very popular,” observed Wangdu.

  “I can’t see that we have a lot of choice.”

  “We can attack!”

  “Hush, Karjen.”

  “Well—”

  “Talk sense, man. Look at them!”

  They all regarded the camp below. It was well organized with machine-gun nests behind stacked rocks, well-drilled lines of tents and fires, the horses tethered in the rear. There might be eighty or a hundred soldiers, and two or three civilians were visible: reluctant guides perhaps. By one larger tent in the center, a tall radio mast had been erected.

  “Is that Duan?” wondered someone by Jamie’s elbow.

  “Who knows? He won’t be able to hear Chamdo too well with the mountains on top of him. He probably wouldn’t even try to transmit from here. Waste of time.”

  “You can see he doesn’t know where we’re coming from,” said Karjen.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He’s facing the wrong valley.” They all turned to Karjen, who shrugged in a superior way and continued, “Just look how his guns are placed. He thinks we’re coming down the other river.”

  Jamie kicked himself in chagrin. He was meant to be the trained soldier, but it took a retired bandit to point out the obvious: the northern valley was broader, easier, the preferred way to the pass. And all the Chinese guns were trained on it.

  “We’re behind them!”

  “Don’t get too excited. They’ll turn around fast enough when they see us.”

  “If they see us.”

  “A hundred or more people and fourscore animals? They might notice something.”

  They surveyed the landscape. Certainly, the Chinese were not actually on their path, which kept close to the foot of the mountain. At no point was it less than three hundred yards from the Chinese. But it was completely exposed—like marching across a shooting gallery.

  “So, let’s wait here and attack in the dark,” proposed Karjen, enjoying his newfound celebrity as a military pundit.

  “Karjen, we are not commandos,” retorted Khenpo Nima in irritation. “We have to turn back.”

  “They might hear us even then,” said Wangdu, “and come after us on the trail. Imagine: they’d shoot us in the back one after another, all the way up the line. We have to get around somehow.”

  “Put socks on the yaks,” a woman called softly. It was Tsering Norzu, a market harridan. She stood now with her hands on her hips and a challenge in her eyes.

  “Socks?” queried Nima.

  “Socks, Reverence, socks, like Mr. Jemmy wears. We tie cloth around the animals’ feet and ankles.”

  “What for?” inquired Nima, still confused.

  “So they’ll be quiet. Then we go at night, right past the camp. There’s no moon.”

  “Ridiculous,” Karjen spat. “I can’t see why we don’t attack. We can get close up along the gully after dark, then cut that shit Duan to pieces. They are facing the wrong way—”

  “Karjen!” hissed Khenpo Nima. “I will not listen to that talk anymore. We are here to save our families, not to butcher those young men.”

  “But they’re Chinese!” protested Karjen.

  “If you persist in this evil, Karjen, that’s what you’ll be in your next life: Chinese.”

  “So what do we do, Reverence?”

  Khenpo Nima looked unhappily at the camp below, at its machine-guns, stacked rifles and poised brutality. Everyone waited, hanging on his next words.

  “We’ll bind the animals’ feet, and go past at night.”

  Tsering Norzu grinned cheerfully at Jamie—and he smiled back.

  They waited on the path. They could not move for fear of making a noise or catching a soldier’s eye. Nor could they cook: smoke would betray them instantly. So they sat in the snow behind the thin screen of trees, shivering, murmuring. They tied the animals to branches and prayed there’d be no whinnying or protest. The men muttered that they’d cut a mule’s throat if it started to bray. They passed handfuls of dry barleymeal to each other and ate it with a little snow to soften it. They hushed their children, pulling the smallest under their heavy coats. And they waited.

  Jamie pulled the radio mule close by, taking down the top sections of the flag mast before they caught in the branches. Hector, his long legs going into the drifts like spikes, curled up in the snow. Jamie had in his pocket a little dried fruit that he’d brought from Jyeko market; he tossed Hector a fig which the dog nosed then ignored.

  Sitting in silence, Jamie let himself think of Puton, keeping this to a sternly practical level. How might she have coped with their journey so far? Not without considerable difficulty. She could ride easily enough, but there had been little chance of riding for much of this last week. He envisaged her struggling up over rocks, or her stick becoming snagged in roots, or Dechen whimpering and her mother unable to carry her. It would have been hard. But she would have done it somehow, they’d have managed. He could see her in his mind’s eye on some precipitous trail, and pride filled out his imagination. It
was less awful to think of her thus than to speculate on what had actually happened.

  He considered the people around him. Two weeks before, he’d been hardly able to look at them without wanting to spit, then burst into tears. Time and the route had dulled his fury and despair. Not that he was any happier, but one cannot traverse Tibet in a spasm of misery. His anger was near exhausted, like everything else.

  Over these weakened defenses, a touch of admiration had begun to creep upon Jamie: at how little complaining there had been; at the dogged endurance, the resourcefulness and resolve, the unquestioning redistribution of fallen loads, the promptness with which the women now dug into the packs for cloth to cut up and bind the feet of the bemused pack animals, with quick whispers and suggestions exchanged. At the stubbornness of good humor. He thought, I have often needed help—and it has generally come before I’ve had to ask for it.

  But then the cold took hold of him. It brought back his sadness, the enervating despondency of memory and loss. It wearied him so deeply that he seemed to sleep as he sat, with dulled but open eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. He remained thus a long while as the darkness deepened. When at last Wangdu whispered to him, “Jemmy, it is time now!” he shivered profoundly, then snapped back thankfully to full attention.

  In the starlight he saw figures rise from the ground, silent and expectant. A whisper went back: “No hurrying, no running. Pick your way slowly, carefully, don’t fall!” They began to move at a snail’s pace, the column stretching like elastic. The villagers stepped carefully over roots and rocks; the animals plodded softly, their feet swathed, making little fuss. They emerged from the last tree cover. To the right, a dozen campfires spilled small pools of yellow into the darkness. Black silhouettes clustered by these, or moved between them. A most unpleasant image haunted Jamie: a mule stumbling and slithering noisily in the rocks, a Chinese flare drenching the night sky with phosphorescence, catching them on the open path. A machine-gun would start at one end of the column and turn towards the other . . .