The Pulse of Danger

‘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. ‘This is the only time I ever see you without your clothes.’

‘Whose fault is that?’ Then she looked down at the sponge in her hand and squeezed the water slowly from it. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been pretty bitchy to-day, haven’t I?’

He leaned towards her, savouring the warm smell of her, and kissed the hollow between her shoulder and throat. ‘It won’t be long now. I’m ready for home myself.’

She lay back as far as she could in the short bath and looked at him carefully. ‘Would you care to make me pregnant?’

‘Not under water.’

‘Not here, silly.’ She laughed, and raised a dripping hand to stroke his cheek. He shaved only once a week, on their rest day, and he now had four days’ growth of stubble; but she didn’t mind that, she knew that beards protected the men’s faces from sunburn in the high thin air. She had never been a woman who wanted her man sculptured out of soap and shaving cream. The weatherbeaten skin, the calloused hands, the bone and muscle, all made up part of what she loved in this man. She, too, had never asked for perfection in him. ‘No, when we get back home. Because you know, don’t you, that I’m not coming on any more trips with you?’

He hesitated before he nodded. ‘Will that keep us together – a child?’

‘It will help.’

He stared at her for a while, then he lay back on his bed. They lay side by side, she in the bath, he on his bed. ‘It’s so bloody cold-blooded. Let’s have a baby, just like that. It’s like deciding to take out an insurance policy.’

‘It wouldn’t be cold-blooded once we got down to it.’

‘Don’t be sexy, love. I’m not in the mood for it.’

‘All right, I’ll be sensible, then. It’s not being cold-blooded, darling. People plan to have children, just as they plan not to have them. We decided not to have any—’

‘You mean I decided.’

‘All right. But I agreed. Now I’m the one who’s doing the deciding—’

‘Decide, decide! God Almighty, what’s decision got to do with love-making?’

‘That’s a man’s outlook, darling. When a woman makes love, there’s always some decision about it.’

‘Even with her husband?’

‘Not always, but sometimes. Like now. Hand me my towel.’

‘You still look as good as you ever did. Will you look as good as that after you’ve had a baby?’

‘Better.’

‘I’m a lucky bastard.’

‘So am I, darling. Don’t ever let our luck run out.’

She bent and kissed him. He held her to him, his rough hands scratching like bark on the silk of her body. Outside the radio was switched on: Wilkins, the other pessimist, searched for Delhi on the dial. Then the voice came over the mountains, lugubrious and hopeless: ‘The Chinese continue to advance …’

Chapter Three (#ulink_96087225-88a4-55c6-9df9-6855fc0818c4)

Marquis came awake with a start, the shot ringing in his ears like an echo from a dream. Then he heard the shout, and he knew he hadn’t been dreaming. Eve sat up in her bed, her voice cracking with sleep and shock. ‘What’s that?’

Marquis tumbled out of bed, pulled on trousers and sweater over his pyjamas, slid his feet into the old desert boots he wore around camp; then just before he stepped out of the tent he dragged on his anorak and zipped it up to the neck. He was glad that he did: as soon as he came out into the dark morning the cold attacked him. The wind had swung right round to the north, was blowing out of Tibet with all the chill of approaching winter. Marquis shivered, chilled by omen as much as by the wind.