The Pulse of Danger. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ side as she was on his. I’m up against the British Raj, Marquis thought; now I know how Gandhi felt. ‘Love, I don’t dispute his need. But that will cut our own stay short—’

      ‘You could send Chungma and Tashi back to get supplies for us.’

      He grinned, admiring her strategy: the war colleges of the world had never known what they had missed when they refused to admit women. ‘It would take too long. And I’d be without two men just when I need them most. My wife is in a hurry to leave here, Colonel.’

      ‘I don’t blame her, old man. It must be a lonely life up here for a woman. And uncomfortable.’

      ‘I don’t blame her, either,’ said Marquis, suddenly trapped into admitting what he had felt for some weeks. But he felt more than just concern for her discomfort. All at once he knew she was in danger; everyone in camp was in danger, but all his concern at this moment was for her. He looked at her and, not wanting to frighten her, disguised his anxiety with a wink. She smiled at him, a little puzzled by his sudden change of attitude, but said nothing.

      Marquis turned back to Singh. ‘I’ll give you the food, Colonel. And some blankets and a pup tent.’

      Singh bowed his head slightly. His look of arrogant amusement suddenly went and at once he seemed to take on a new dignity. ‘There is something I did not tell you before – a reason why I must get back to India—’ He hesitated, as if wondering whether he should go ahead; then he reached into his battle tunic and took out some papers. ‘I found these in the post where’ – he faltered a moment – ‘where I lost the last of my men. A dying Chinese was trying to burn them. I killed him and took them from him. Then the general appeared out of nowhere and we had quite a bash, just the two of us.’ He touched the dried cut above his eye. ‘He seemed terribly keen that I should not read these papers. Do you read Chinese?’ Marquis and Eve shook their heads. ‘Neither do I. At Oxford I read English History. Not an awfully useful subject for this part of the world. I should have taken languages.’

      ‘What do you reckon they are?’ Marquis nodded at the papers.

      ‘I don’t know. But if the general thought they were so important, they could be battle orders or something along those lines. Whatever they are, he thought them important enough to try and kill me for them.’

      ‘I’m no soldier, as I told you, but why should valuable papers be kept in a forward post? Aren’t those sort of things kept well behind the lines?’

      ‘That’s the idea, old chap. But somehow it never seems to work. You would be surprised at the number of mistakes our side made in World War Two. And don’t forget, our friend up there is a general – it was probably one of his staff whom I caught trying to burn them. If these papers are important, I’m very happy to know that the Chinese can be just as incompetent as we. It gives one hope.’

      Marquis looked up towards Li Bu-fang, who was staring down at them, his face as blank as one of the rocks that studded the bank behind him. He had the look of a man who possessed more than hope; he was a man who had faith: he wore it like another badge of rank. He turned his head and looked down the valley again. The bastard is so confident, Marquis thought; and looked down the valley himself, but saw nothing to shake his own confidence. But I’m not confident, he told himself, I’m worried; and tried to borrow some of the Chinese inscrutability.

      ‘If those papers are important,’ he said, ‘the Chow hasn’t yet finished with trying to kill you.’

      ‘No,’ said Singh. ‘But I haven’t given up the idea of killing him, either.’

      ‘Just don’t do it in my camp,’ said Marquis, and left Eve and Singh and went up to the porters’ tents. Nimchu saw him coming and came a few steps to met him. ‘Nimchu, I want Chungma to leave now for Sham Dzong. He’s to buy enough rice and tsampa to last us for a week, and get back here as soon as he can.’

      ‘Chungma is only one man, sahib. He will not be able to carry so much food himself.’

      ‘I know that!’ Marquis snapped, and was at once regretful of his sharpness; there was no need to work off his worry on Nimchu. He smiled, trying to take the edge off his voice: ‘Get him to hire two more porters, Nimchu, bring them back with him. We’ll need them anyway, to help us carry out the collection. Tell him to get moving at once. If he takes his finger out, he can make four or five miles before dark. I want him back in three days at the outside.’

      Nimchu nodded, then shouted orders in his own language. Chungma, the youngest of the porters, short, squat, moving always in quick jerky movements like a boxer waiting for an opponent to make a move, showed no surprise at the sudden journey he had to make. He grinned cheerfully and ducked into his tent to collect what he would take with him. Marquis knew that most Bhutanese, for all their country’s isolation, were gregarious and he had noticed that over the past few weeks the porters had begun to ask when they would be returning to Thimbu. He was sure that Chungma would find a diversion or two in the three days that he would be gone.

      Nimchu watched Chungma disappear into the tent, then he turned back to Marquis. He was the oldest of the porters, somewhere in his early forties, and the most travelled. The leader of a previous expedition had taken him to London as a bonus; it had been such a shock to his system that he had almost died of lack of oxygen climbing Highgate Hill. He had returned to Bhutan after only a month, shaking his head at the devastation that could be caused by civilisation. There had been similar reactions to other trips he had made, to Delhi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore. An itching curiosity had drawn him to the wider world, but always he came back to this land where the mountains and the gods were one and the same. Marquis had first met him in Burma in 1950 and had used him as a porter on an expedition to the headwaters of the Irrawaddy. He had used him again in 1956 on a trip through Assam, and an affection and respect for each other had developed and still survived despite the six years’ separation between that last trip and this one. Sometimes, feeling traitorous towards Eve, Marquis felt that Nimchu was the only one with whom he had real affinity on these journeys into the wild and lonely mountains.

      ‘The strangers, sahib.’ Nimchu ran a finger up and down the side of his long well-shaped nose. He was a handsome man, spoiled only by his wall eye and the long scar on the cheek below it, a legacy of an encounter with a leopard. His voice was soft, that of a man used to the silences of nature; but Marquis knew that it could erupt in terrible storms of temper, and there were several lesser porters who had made the mistake of thinking Nimchu’s soft voice was a sign of weakness. ‘Are they staying with us?’

      ‘They are leaving in the morning, Nimchu. What do you think of them?’

      Nimchu knew Marquis well enough to know that the latter wanted a frank answer; the sahib didn’t ask idle questions of his porters. ‘I do not like them in my country, sahib. I heard the news on the wireless, that China and India are fighting. We do not want them to bring the fight into our country.’

      ‘How do the other porters feel?’

      ‘The same as I, sahib.’

      ‘I know you will not touch them here in my camp—’ Marquis hoped he spoke the truth, but he gave Nimchu no chance to deny it. ‘But if you met them somewhere in the mountains, alone, what would you do?’

      Nimchu stroked his nose again while he considered, then he looked up at Marquis. ‘Kill them, sahib. It would be the simplest thing to do.’

      Marquis knew that the Bhutanese religion, a mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism and, the country’s original cult of sorcery and animism, Bon, all meant a great deal to Nimchu. ‘You’re СКАЧАТЬ