Blue Poppies Read online

  A herd of eight wild asses had tried to swim the river. Why had they attempted it? Perhaps, half starved, they’d believed there might be fodder on this near bank. Perhaps they had been driven by wolves. They had come into the water one after another, breaking through a crust of ice that was forming rapidly as the wind screeched down the valley. Jumping and breaking, floundering weakly with their legs being tugged away underneath them by the current, they’d slowed, their strength failing. And there, in line astern, they’d halted, just as the wind ripped the last movement out of the water and it froze solid. There they would remain, pecked and torn, until the spring thaw.

  Family by family, Jyeko went past the spectacle, shrinking from it, goading on their own faltering beasts, following the radio mule.

  “Tonight,” said Khenpo Nima glumly, “we shall be practicing tummo, the yoga of inner heat.”

  They camped that night in the lee of a ridge, on sloping ground that in summer would have been pasture. The snow was thin and patchy, and the children began grubbing after desiccated yak dung for the fires. The tea was cold moments after it was made. Jamie had set up the radio mast but, as the wind intensified, there was no gathering, no consultation, only blue, swollen faces. They fed the animals, then crept into their tents and cowered.

  Jamie lay in his heap of furs, listening to the gale. He was effectively alone: Karjen was fast asleep, exhausted, and the herdsman had gone to a relative’s tent. Over Jamie’s head, the tent flexed and shuddered, reverberating like an old drum; the guy lines moaned dismally. Hard snow was tossed against the sides with a hollow rattling. The incessant noise got to you, dulled you, killed sensible thought with its interruptions, its attrition. What if the tent split or the ropes failed? What would he do? He pictured himself not moving but remaining in his bed under the collapsed heap, not caring if he suffocated, Hector mute with misery beside him.

  It was long weeks since they had left Jyeko. If they survived this blizzard, if they were ever able to move again, they might make Moro-La in three days. There he would find Puton! He would leave the villagers to their troubles and take her south to India, to safety. In his deepest core, that fire still burned and propelled him. His brain was too deadened by cold to sense it directly; still, it was there. But, as the wind battered his tent again and again, Jamie now felt his nerve begin to fail.

  He had kept a butter-oil lamp alight for the weak reminder of warmth it gave. In the shadow behind, he glimpsed the radio pack and, beyond that, the dynamo set. It was more than a month since he’d turned it to anything other than Lhasa or the Chinese military, since he’d had any other company through the machine. He wormed one hand out from his covers and twisted his arm to glimpse his watch, then found the strap of the cloth pack and eased it open. Tugging the stiff canvas downwards, he looked at the brittle, cold dials. Lifeless: no glow for him. The dead eyes of the radio reproached him. He’d given them no chance. Ungratefully, he’d blocked the world out. More than a month since he’d listened.

  He slipped out of his covers, trying to ignore the cold. At his side, Hector raised his head in surprise (they weren’t going outside, surely?). Before he could think better of it, Jamie was squatting alongside the radio, heaving his jacket close about him with one hand while the other tugged at the pedal generator. In a moment he had the dynamo set connected. Near Karjen’s head was the coil of wire from the antenna that snaked in under the tent’s edge. Jamie grabbed at it, the action drawing a cold draft into his clothes that made him shiver uncontrollably for several seconds. He pulled himself together with a stretch of his collar and shoulder blades, set his back against the tent pole, flicked two switches and began to pedal.

  The slow, steady turn of the flywheel distracted him, so that awareness of the chill receded. The dials warmed and shone again. There was nothing but a watery hiss from the Chinese frequency. Perhaps they too were all huddled in bed. He twisted the tuning dial, passing over shrill and uncouth music. On, through a chatter of coded Morse from India, gabbling voices—Japanese, Dutch, goodness knows what—until he reached the frequency for Fox-trot 5 Sugar Dog, position Rosyth, Great Britain. It was Mr. Dinsmore’s regular time: what was he doing? There was nothing. Oh, what was he doing, was the man on holiday, had he taken his mousy wife and spotty brats cycling or what? Jamie pumped the dynamo in a fury. How dare he be away from his set? There was no sound, nobody there. He touched the control ever so delicately, a feather tap to left, to right. Nothing.

  Another fit of shivering overcame Jamie. He forgot to keep his legs moving and the dials’ glow began to fade. He shook himself and started once again to pump and pump: he’d put a volt or two through Dinsmore, he’d wake him up! But nothing happened. And after some thirty seconds of only wind and the whir of the flywheel, Jamie let his feet go still. The ratchet on the flywheel clicked noisily and Karjen stirred. Suddenly Jamie felt his eyes swell with tears—and in a moment he was weeping, shaking silently, weeping for everything, weeping for his farness from everything.

  Nearby, Hector opened his eyes again and watched, puzzled. A succession of rapid but profound sighs lifted Jamie’s chest and shoulders and dropped them again, as though his lungs were trying to expel a lump of wet arsenic. He returned Hector’s unhappy stare, glared with frustrated loathing at the radio—and then, all of a sudden, sat up straight. His eyes lit on a small switch by the tuning dial. He cursed, he nearly laughed, he lunged for it. He was on the wrong frequency band.

  Once more, he pedaled. Immediately, there came a slow stammer of amateurish Morse. Jamie listened, and found he was listening to a shopping list, a music request program, almost. An expatriate Scot with the BAOR, asking Mr. Dinsmore to post gramophone records. He wanted Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, with the Hallé Orchestra. And Mussorgsky, A Night on the Bare Mountain, if you please! Break, break, tapped Jamie rudely. Please, let me in!

  A brief silence, then: Go ahead. There was the very slightest hesitation in Jamie, accompanied by a surge of nausea. Mr. Dinsmore, Jamie signaled, this is Tare 4 Jig William, Tibet, over.

  —Tibet, we’ve been trying you every week! Your parents . . .

  —Mr. Dinsmore, this must be very quick . . .

  Hardly two minutes later, Jamie was back under the covers, shivering enough to come apart at the seams. He thought he’d die of shivering. He tugged the red scarf tighter around his neck, fingering the embroidery, and lay curled up, working desperately to believe that his chest was naked against Puton’s back, her buttocks in his lap, the front of his thighs snug against the rear of hers, his forearm close about her chest. Forcing this into his mind, he managed to find an idea of warmth—and slowly the shivers subsided.

  “Your young British says that he is going home,” said Major Duan to Puton, the triumph in his voice bitten back, barely discernible. “He’s an exceptionally foolish young man. We shall be meeting him at Moro-La. He will go home if and when I send him.”

  She was giving Dechen her evening meal, seated on a woven saddlebag at the door of her tent. They both held wooden bowls of barley cooked in the Chinese field kitchen. All across the wide camp, soldiers stood or squatted by their fires, shoveling the same stodge into their mouths. Puton glimpsed the Abbot of Jyeko, seventy yards away, seated on a thin mat on the frozen ground and attended by his monks. The old gentleman was weakening daily: this journey was too much for him. His attendants fussed about him with more tea and more furs. Puton had attempted to join them, hoping that her duty to the Abbot would gain her admittance and shelter but the monks had looked uneasily at Major Duan behind her and had driven her off with a cold scowl.

  “Well?” said Duan, standing over her now, irritated. She looked up at him, trying to keep the sullenness out of her voice. The cold fact gripped her: this was her protector, and Dechen’s.

  “How do you know this?” said Puton.

  Duan smiled, as though he’d been waiting for the opening. There was a packsaddle by them and he perched on it. Some yards off, three infantrymen glanced in th
eir direction, at the almost domestic scene: mother, child, guardian.

  “He has been speaking on the radio. I have been expecting him to do so, and now he has given himself away. He tells his friends that he will be in India in ten days. Therefore, he must be close to the border. I am certain that he is near Moro-La.”

  Puton felt sick with depression. China was swarming over her, hanging over her face like a wet cloth that suffocated. She felt that her very eyesight was slipping away: that, when she looked about the hills among which they were camped, she no longer recognized Tibet. A last flicker of rebellion stirred in her. “He is not going home. He will stay in India.”

  “Oh!” said Duan, raising his eyebrows in mockery. “So, he’ll be raising a force to come and rescue Miss Puton. I must flee, I think.”

  Crushed again, crushed so easily. Puton took the empty bowl from Dechen and refilled it with tea. Duan watched her, penetrating as always, his voice calmly insistent. “He is a spy. He knows what it means for him to be caught. You must understand that he is running away.”

  She saw, in her mind’s eye, Jamie receding over a high pass, taking her courage away in his saddlebags. Still she did not look at the Major: it was the last of her resistance.

  “For you, all that time is now over,” said Duan, quite gently.

  At last, her eyes filled with tears. She tightened her jaw as best she could, hoping to stem the flow. But inexorably the tears billowed up from deep within her. Dechen, cuddling her bowl of tea, regarded her in mute horror. Her mother’s face was awash with misery, the dam broken.

  Major Duan raised his hand. With the back of it, almost imperceptibly, he brushed the wet hair off her face. It was the first time that he had touched her since Jyeko.

  “We shall be leaving for Moro-La at first light; your tent and bags must be packed tonight.”

  She peered at him through her tears.

  “Bring your bedding to my tent after your meal,” he said.

  When Jamie crawled from the radio tent at dawn, he was virtually alone. Only one or two dark figures had emerged elsewhere in the camp, creeping about like ghouls in lumps of stiff sheepskin. The cold slashed at Jamie’s furs and defenses, and for a second he thought of turning straight back inside. Then he saw the radio mule.

  He had wrapped the animal in two heavy blankets of yak hair for the night, and fed it over-generous handfuls of barley. He had thought the mule was still hardy; unlike most, it had seemed to stamp and shake its neck with some vigor. But it now lay a few feet from the tent, ice on its lips, the red and green halter stiff on the snow. Only the eyes had not yet been taken, for the wind did not allow the ravens to move in.

  “Oh, shit,” said Jamie aloud. “Shit!”

  He looked around anxiously. His pony was still alive, miraculously, but he could see other slumped shapes that would be perished pack animals. There was precious little sign of life from nearby tents. In the distance a figure was struggling to light a fire in the lee of a crescent of bags. Khenpo Nima’s face appeared, half buried in a fur hat, scanning the dreadful morning.

  “Nima! We have to get moving!” shouted Jamie. But Khenpo Nima retreated back into his tent. “Nima! Karjen, come on!” Jamie opened his tent and shouted angrily, “Karjen!” Then he stood straight and roared above the wind, “Jyeko! Jyeko!”

  Still the gale blew. There had been no fresh snowfall in the night, but the dawn sky was dark purple and the clouds streamed in a hectic torrent eastward. They’d be marching into the wind again.

  Crawling from their shelters, the villagers grubbed about for fuel. The large black nomad tents had a fire within, but half the village was forced outside and huddled as close to the ground as they could. They searched for flints, trembling with cold, striking sparks with frozen clumsiness into the tinder, puffing at the wisps of smoke with little bellows of soft marmot skin. When the pot of ice was positioned on the fire, most people disappeared back into their tents.

  “Oh, dear God,” thought Jamie, “we have to move.”

  “It is bad,” said the monk, standing upright at last and peering about the miserable camp. “See this lady? Dawa, how is the salt?”

  At the next tent, a woman had managed to coax up flames. She was crouched by the fire with a small leather bag at her side into which she dipped her hand. She brought out a pinch of grayish salt.

  “You see, Jemmy? If the salt is dry, it will crackle on the fire. Then there is no snow coming. But if it is wet . . .”

  The woman held her hand over the fire; the salt trickled into the flames—and made not a sound.

  “If there is much snow today we shall have trouble,” said Khenpo Nima.

  “Nima, get them out, get them moving! You must do it! I heard the Chinese last night, you understand? I listened, I heard them, I heard them say Moro-La! Moro-La, that’s where they’re heading too, do you understand me? Are we going to wait to see who gets there first? Do you understand me, Nima?”

  Jamie reached down and heaved out the guy lines supporting the radio antenna. It collapsed instantly under the gale. He seized the steel sections and lifted them, holding the antenna like a musket from which the wind horses galloped hysterically, the flag flicking loudly at electric speed. He drove Khenpo Nima among the tents. He took him by the hand and pulled him through the snowy camp from shelter to shelter: Tell them, Nima! Tell them to move! These . . . Now these . . . On they went, Jamie pushing Khenpo Nima on, past dead ponies, dogs with their hair quivering in the wind and their eyes streaming, astonished villagers looking up at them, frightened children: Tell them to move, Nima! Jyeko, Jyeko! We’re leaving now, we’re leaving!

  He bellowed and bellowed as he strapped the radio onto his own pony. The people of Jyeko crept from their tents and, almost in spite of themselves, followed suit. He jammed the antenna into its accustomed position, and began the march.

  Later that day, when the wind was thumping and the sharp snow grating their faces, Jamie saw a woman collapse. He was walking sideways at the time, as was half the village, because the gale made it difficult to breathe. The woman was just behind him, leading a famished mule. She had been stumbling along for hours, not stopping, not complaining. She must have spent all her reserves of energy on keeping up speed near the head of the column, for fear that if she slipped to the back, she’d be lost. Suddenly, it was too much and she sank down.

  Jamie stopped and tugged his pony off the trampled path to let others pass. He let go of the leading rope (the animal wasn’t going anywhere) and went the few steps back to the woman. She was feebly trying to prop herself up on her elbows, but had not the strength to lift her head. Jamie crouched beside her and, with a clumsy heave, sat her up. Her eyes rolled and wandered, unfocused; her head lolled. Jamie looked around. The caravan trudged past them unseeing, as though in a collective daze, until a bulky figure leading a yak paused by them.

  “Leave her, Mr. Jemmy,” said Jamyang Sangay. “It is the only thing. I think she is not the first.” He looked back down the caravan, as though there might well be a long line of the fallen. Then he plodded ahead.

  Jamie remained beside the defeated woman. He pulled his pony towards her. With his stiffly gloved fingers, he unlashed the two panniers that held the radio and the generator. These thumped into the snow by the pony, which started nervously. Jamie dragged the woman to a standing position, grasped her around the waist and attempted to heave her over the pony—but he lost his balance, and they both fell in the snow. Through the wind he heard her moan softly. Then there were other arms under his, and he stood again quickly. Someone (he never saw who) helped him grasp the inert figure and haul her upright, then onto the pony’s back. There she slumped.

  Their unknown helper moved on ahead as Jamie panted for breath. He reached down to the radio pack and tugged the cords free. In a clumsy, makeshift manner he bound these around her waist and under the pony’s girth, then tied the ends to her wrists. The woman lolled on the animal’s neck without gripping but at least she did not fal
l. The radio lay on its side in the snow. Tibet, we’ve been trying you every week! Your parents . . . Jamie stared at the set a brief moment. Already a snowdrift was forming around the case: in five minutes it would be covered. He left it there. But he tugged the antenna free and jammed it into his own belt so that it stuck high up over his head, the flag buzzing in the wind. Then he pulled at the pony’s leading rope and returned to the path.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PASS AT Moro-La is broad and smooth, a relatively easy passage at sixteen thousand, three hundred and sixty feet. It is quite well used, although dangerously exposed in winter and surrounded by vast expanses of heavy black scree flogged and scoured by the gales. Traders fear the sudden, engulfing blizzards for which the pass is infamous and generally prefer Jewe-La well to the north.

  In the very center of Moro-La, an enormous onion-shaped chorten shrine stands, the size of a house, its windward side pitted and blasted. Beyond, a thousand feet below the chorten, lies a more tranquil plateau of high alpine pasture that in summer is spattered with trumpet gentians and purple dwarf delphiniums. From the pass, the panoramas are grand even by Tibet’s superlative standards. Herds of wild ass and antelope move freely on the broad slopes, with their dedicated predators—bear, wolf, snow leopard—never far distant.

  On the pasture table, three trails meet: that which climbs up from Kham in the east; that which leads due south to the Brahmaputra river crossing and thence through forested valleys to Assam and India; and the way westward to Lhasa, a hard trail winding through the colossal central ranges.

  In 1950 an antique fortress still stood by the Lhasa route. Kantu-Dzong was some miles from the division of the ways, down in the wide valley below. In Tibet’s thin air it appeared quite near but took three hours of walking down the snaking path to reach. It was a small castle, owing its strength to position more than to impregnable design. It stood high on a shelf of glacial moraine, two hundred feet above the hamlet and hard up against the mountain flank. At the rear, the castle simply molded itself to the steep hillside, trusting to the forbidding crags behind for protection. But from the front it looked like stone castles anywhere, a mass of walls and towers. It has been destroyed now, blasted to ruins by Chinese artillery in the awful, despairing revolt of 1959. The howitzers had a little problem with its masonry, which was on a quite massive scale. But the guns still took only a morning to demolish a fortress that had controlled a broad tract for four hundred and fifty years.