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 a Buddhist, Nimchu. Killing is against your principles.’
‘I am a practical man, sahib. I can only try to be a religious one.’ He smiled up at Marquis, not impudently but with the smile of a man who had recognised the need of compromise. The path to Heaven was narrow, but the gods had never taught that one had to walk on the precipice edge. He put a finger to the scar on his cheek, ran it up to the eye that could see only with memory. ‘I killed the leopard that did this. A man should not lie down and die if he is not ready for Heaven.’
Marquis grinned. ‘When will you be ready?’ His own religion was a frayed and tattered thing, taken out, mended and worn like an old garment that didn’t fit but could not be thrown away. Eve, a non-Catholic, never laughed at his occasional bursts of piety, but he knew she would never understand them. The Catholic could never really rid himself of his Catholicism: his own father’s atheism had been more an act of defiance than an act of belief. The message was engraved on your soul, even if you bellowed to Heaven that you didn’t have a soul: Rome never took no for an answer. He never decried another man’s compromises with his religion: he knew how far short most of us fell of being a saint.
Nimchu shook his head, enjoying his own good humour and that of the sahib. ‘Not for a long time, sahib.’ Then, still smiling, he looked across at the Indian and the Chinese, the invaders, and said, ‘That is why I should kill the strangers if I met them in the mountains. Our only way to stay alive is to have no masters but ourselves. Kill them both and drop their bodies in the river. That way nobody would know and nobody could say we were taking sides.’
So Singh had accurately guessed the Bhutanese reaction to his and his prisoner’s presence. ‘I’m not taking sides, either, Nimchu. That’s why the colonel and his prisoner are leaving the camp first thing in the morning.’
‘You are a wise man, sahib.’
‘Not always, Nimchu.’ Wisdom was often a question of luck: if he had been wise in the past, it was because he had been lucky. He hoped his luck would hold.
He went up towards his tent, past the kitchen tent, where Li Bu-fang sat staring impassively at Nancy Breck while she abused him. ‘You’re a menace! I could kill you and all your kind, you know that? You’ve got no—’ Nancy’s anger made her almost incoherent; her eyes shone with tears, she looked blindly at her enemy, sometimes talking right past him. When Marquis spoke to her, she looked around, trying to find him in the fog of tears. ‘Jack? I—’ She rubbed her eyes, fumbled in a pocket for her glasses, put them on; they began to mist up at once and she snatched them off again, wore them like glass knuckledusters on her fingers. ‘Jack, why do you let him stay? Why don’t you—’
‘He’s not my prisoner, Nancy. Colonel Singh is taking him out first thing to-morrow morning.’ He looked down at Li Bu-fang. ‘You people killed the parents of Mrs. Breck’s husband.’
Li bowed his head to Nancy. ‘I am sorry.’
‘Sorry? How could you be sorry—’
‘Nancy—’ But she took no notice of Marquis, and he had to bark at her: ‘Nancy!’ She stopped with her mouth open, peered at him as if he were a stranger she was trying to identify. ‘Forget it. Abusing him isn’t going to bring back Tom’s mother and father.’
‘I could kill him!’ Her voice hissed with hate. Even Li Bu-fang looked up disturbed; for a moment there was a flash of something that could have been fear in the dark blank eyes.
‘Not in my camp,’ said Marquis gently but firmly. ‘There are seven hundred million of them. Killing one gets you nowhere. Killing a million would get you nowhere. You’ve got to think of some other way of beating them. Don’t ask me how—’ He looked down at Li. ‘Do you think we shall ever beat you?’
‘No,’ said Li, and looked after Nancy as she turned quickly, her voice catching in a sob of anger, and ran across the camp to her own tent. Then he looked back at Marquis. ‘I am truly sorry if Mr. Breck’s parents were killed. What were they?’
‘Missionaries.’ Marquis looked across towards the Brecks’ tent. ‘Mr. Breck is a Quaker. So were his parents. I feel sorry for Mrs. Breck – she has to dig up enough anger and hatred of you bastards for all of them.’
‘We have made mistakes, killing the missionaries. We have only made martyrs of them, and they were not worth it. Christianity is not a threat, not in China. Even in the capitalist world, who pays much attention to it? The emptiest places in England are the churches.’
‘You’re well informed. Where did you get that – in the People’s Daily?’
‘In The Times. I go to Peking occasionally. At the British Legation you can read the English newspapers. Democracy is stupid – it advertises its mistakes.’
‘Stupid but honest. Or anyway we try to be – honest, I mean.’
Li laughed. He had a not unpleasant face, especially when he smiled; the three scars on his cheeks melted then into the laughter lines. He looked the sort of man born to laugh, but the circumstances had never presented themselves; even now the laugh broke off short, as if he had had a sudden sense of guilt. ‘You are stupid if you believe that the men who run your capitalist world are honest.’
In five minutes he had been called both wise and stupid. It was a fair assessment of him in general, he guessed. Marquis shrugged: he had never aspired to perfection. He left Li and went on over to his own tent. He would not ask Eve what she thought of him: a wife’s truth had a more cutting edge than that of a stranger.
Eve was immersed in steaming hot water in the collapsible rubber-and-canvas bath. It was a tight fit even for someone her size; when he got into it, he always felt like a five-fingered hand in a three-fingered glove. He sat down on the edge of his camp-bed and looked appreciatively at her.