Читать онлайн «Tulku»

1

THEODORE WOKE IN the dark, sucked harshly out of the pit of sleep by a hand shaking his shoulder and a voice hissing in his ear. Before he could groan a question the hand covered his mouth. He jerked himself free and sat up, making the straps of his bed creak with the strain, but by now he had recognized the voice, and guessed at the urgency.

‘Fu T’iao! What? Why?’ he whispered.

‘Dress. Be quick. Your father says .

No more questions, then. As Theodore reached for his clothes where they hung from a peg in the beam above his head he saw Fu T’iao moving across the room, and knew by the fact that he could see at all that there was more light than there should be, a pinkish flicker of moving flame through the window. And there were more noises in the night than the usual faint water-rattle from the ravine and wind-hiss from the woods beyond – there was a grumbling murmur, which suddenly clacked into recognizably human shouts, and now there was Father’s voice riding above the racket, slow, heavy and confident, with the unmistakable mid-Western honk only half-modulated into the tones of the local dialect, Miao. (A visiting Baptist had once told Father that he spoke Chinese languages as though he was wearing native clothes but had forgotten to remove his tall hat. )

Theodore pulled on his trousers, then stood and wriggled into his long over-shirt, automatically twitching his pigtail clear of the collar as his head poked into the open. Father’s voice was half-drowned now by the shouting, but he spoke on as steadily as if he had been arguing a point of doctrine. In the moment of stillness after putting on his clothes Theodore was appalled with sudden terror – not ordinary alarm, but a feeling which seemed to rush up through his body from the floor, like water surging up one of the bamboo irrigation pipes on the terraces. It was as much shock as fear, the shock of uncertainty rushing into a life whose every detail was fixed and known. Slowly he sat back on to his bed. Unwilled, his hand slid under his pillow and grasped his Bible. He was still sitting there, shivering, listening to the yells – to Father trying to speak still, and his voice stopping with a grunt in mid-sentence – when Fu T’iao came scuttling in from the living-room with a bundle in his arms.