The Chinese Assassin (10 page)

Mongolia in its eastern half is mainly plain, circled about with mountains. But its western half is mainly mountains interspersed only intermittently with flatlands. By November, we had left the eastern plains and entered this western mountainous region. By then my fractured legs had mended sufficiently for
m
e to
si
t
painfully astride a walking horse, and we had begun travelling by day and resting by night. Soon we reached the foothills of the mighty Altai range that provide, in the north-west corner of the country, both a natural barrier and the official border with the Soviet
Union.
In this region the shallow bowls of the
mount
a
in-
ringed flatlands are much smaller
and the
rims
of
the interve
ni
ng heights twist
and
interlock
like
irregular honeycombs.
Here, while the herds grazed on the
plains, we found shelter from the winds in
narrow dales where
patches
of green,
pleasant
woodland stretch clown out
of the dense mountain
forests above.
We rested in this region for the winter
and
gradually I recovered and grew strong again. It was there that I
learned to
live
the simple life of old Tsereng and his family, and began helping
with
the daily domestic
tasks.

It was there too that I began later to take my turn with the herds, holding a long rifle astride a
horse through the night,
guarding the livestock against the marauding bands of wolves that came down swiftly and silently out of the dark mountain forests. I felt at peace
in
that remote land.
It
was not very long before I decided that I wanted no more in life than to repay
through
such service the debt of gratitude to
old
Tsereng
for
delivering
me from
the holocaust of the Trident. After the constant turmoil an4 suspicion
in China,
the harsh, simple life was paradise.

Tser
e
ng’s wife and daughter spoke no Chinese and I
needed
only a very few words to assist them in the simple tasks of sus
tai
ning our lives through the bitter winter. But nevertheless, a warm
unspoken
sympathy grew up
among
us. His daughter, plump,
heavy-
h
ipped
and approaching middle-age, had once lived in the capital, Ulan Bator. But she had lost her
husband
and
children in a terrible fire that gutted the worke
r’s
apartment block where they lived, so she had returned sadly to her family on the grasslands. A silent, inward-looking woman, she carried the tragedy with her always in her eyes. Sometimes at night I caught her unawares, staring at mc over the flickering flames of the hearth, and slowly I came to realise, without he
r
saying, that we shared an instinctive fellowship—because I
t
oo had escaped death by fire.

Nevertheless I was still astonished when,
on
the coldest night of the winter, with Tsereng and his wife and the animals grunting and snorting in their sleep, she crawled naked to
me
across the yurt and slipped silently beneath
my
sheepskin. Without words and with tears
on
her cheeks she offered
me the
comfort
of
her body. On many nights after that as
the
screaming wind whipped
the
bare trees
outside,
and the wolves
bowled higher up the
forested slopes
of the Altai, she came secretly to join me
in
a mute physical
communion that
eased her unbearable
anguish and
brought
warmth and refreshment to
both
our
injured souls.

I
believed then
I would stay
with
old Tsereng forever.
The snows came and went,
spring blossomed early
and
we moved
eastward
once more. When summer
arrived
we shifted dow
n
into the river
valleys and
in May and
June I assisted in the
sheep-shearing and
the
calving
of the cows. At the end of
June I
joined
in the
almost celebratory ritual of
rounding
up
and tethering
the foals
in
lines
alongside their
mothers
so that the milking
of the
mares
could
begin—and with it
of course the ‘vital preparation of the new supply of
kumiss.

It
was only when
the
second
sheep
s
hearing began at
the beginning of September
that
I
realised
suddenly a whole
year had
passed
since
the crash. About the
same time I
began
to
fancy that
old
Tsereng’s
daughter,
whose name
was Kiki, was
gro
w
ing even
plumper than before.
It
was with sudden surge
of
pleasure that I began to suspect she
might
be pregnant with
my child.

But it
was just then that
it all ended, without warning, on a
night
of torrential rain.

The day had
been filled
with
bright autumn
sunshine
under a
sky
of piercing blue, such as I have only ever seen in Mongolia. As we were gathering for
the evening meal
before the
yurt,
however,
clouds
raced up over
the horizon,
darkening
the sky like a hastily drawn curtain.
We moved inside to eat and
soon a monsoon downpour was ham
m
ering loudly on the felt roof. Darkness fell immediately and
a dung
fire was
lit in the open
hearth
to keep out the
damp chill
which
had descended.
I
nside,
crouched around the fire, we
felt secure and warm, and
we
ate in
silence,
listening
to the fierce
beat
of the
rain. I
remember
smiling
happily at Kiki,
and
she
did
a rare thing—she smiled back. I had never seen her smile before. I looked down
directly
at her thickening girth but she looked away
qui
ckl
y into the fire. I felt
sure,
with
a surge of
pride,
that
she was
pregnant.

One of Tsereng’s sons had been helping us
with
the milking
and
was eating with us. When the force of
the
downpour
and a
sudden
wind
began to
shake
the yurt, he got up
with a laugh and
went out to tighten the rope
bands
bound around it
to prevent it
falling
in on us. It was his dying
scream
from outside
that
gave us
our
first warning.

The next moment there was a great rending sound and the felt
wall
beside me
was
slashed
open
from top to bottom. I
stared
in horror at
the figure
of a
man standing
outside in the storm.
Even
though he
was drenched with rain and disguised in
the
clothes
of a nomadic herdsman I recognised Chiao Feng, one of Wang Tung-hsing’s chief lieutenants from Peking. He held a long curved
knife
in one
hand and
a pistol in
the
other. His
lips
were
draw
n
back from his
teeth
in a snarl of
t
r
iu
m
ph—and
his eyes held unwavering on
mine.

Old Tsereng rose slowly to his
feet, his hand
reaching for the hilt of the decorated dagger at his belt. But there
was
a shout from the doorway
behind us and
we turned to
find
another
dripping figure
holding a sub-machine
gun pointing in our direction.
Old Tsereng’s hands fell to his sides
and
for a moment nobody moved or spoke. The rain on the
roof and the
shriek of the rising
wind
were the only
sounds
in the yurt. Tsereng’s
wife and Kiki remained squatting motionle
s
s
on the floor,
their
mouths agape
with
fear.

Chiao waved his
knife
menacingly in
the
air towards old Tsereng
and the
women, then stepped warily up
behind me.
He pinioned my
arms
quickly and
had just
begun to bind my
wrists
when the old man sprang. The long
pointed
dagger that
he’d taken from the dead
body of the
vanquished camel train
leader forty years before
buried itself in Chiao’s chest above his heart.
At
the same
moment the man in the doorway opened
fire with
the machine gun.

He held his finger
curled tight
around the trigger until the
magazine was exhausted, turning
the
muzzle
this way
and
that across
the
yurt, dragging a broken
line
of gaping scarlet
punctures across the
back of old
Tsere
n
g and the
bodies of his
wife and
daughter on the floor. Neither of
them screamed
or
uttered any
sound as they died, Old
Tsereng clung to his adversary
for a moment
then his heavy
bulk toppled slowly
backward to the groun
d
His hand
was
cl
enched
so tight round the hilt of his dagger that he dragged it out of
Chiao’s
lung
and
fell dead
with
the crimson-bladed
weapon still clutched
in his right fist

Chiao’s companion
was
joined
silently in
the doorway by a
third
Chinese
and together they finished binding
my wrists Then they
attended to
Chiao’s wound
and
one of
them
helped
him
outside into his
saddle. I was dragged
outside too
and thrust
onto the back of another horse. The
third man mounted
up behind me
and
turned the
a
n
i
m
a
l’s
head
back towards the yurt. I
could see
now
that
old
Tsereng’s son was lying dead
on the
ground
outside.

The
first of
Chiao’s companions
took a large can of
petrol
and splashed it
around quickly
inside the yurt.
Then
he threw
the can inside, lit a large
rag-bound torch
already
soaked in
petrol and
raced for
his horse. He rode to the
door
and tossed
the
burning
torch
inside. As
we turned to ride into the
driving rain,
the interior of the yurt
exploded with a thump and began
burning fiercely. It continued
blazing despite
the
torrential downpour and
faded only slowly into
the darkness behind us as we rode
away.