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  Alobar took his simple meal with the lamas, as was his custom. After dinner, with Fosco's assistance, he found Kudra a place to sleep in the stable.

  “I apologize,” Alobar said, “but this is the way women are regarded around here.”

  “I am used to that,” said Kudra. “The way you regard women, however, is more of a novelty to me.” She squeezed his hand. “Come back when the moon is above the stable,” she whispered.

  Alobar went outside and walked around in the Himalayan night, the dark at the top of the stairs. The thin, crisp air vibrated like a hive with the chants of the lamas. White stars pimpled the atmosphere. It was easy to imagine that the stars were bees, that they were the source of the ubiquitous lama-buzz. It was easy to imagine that the pale crescent moon was the beekeeper's paddle, dipping into the hum and honey.

  The nightful of chanting was soothing to him in the way that the sound of a turning screw would one day be soothing to men at sea. In those days, boats were only as noisy as the winds that drove them, and there were no sailors in the Himalayas, of course; there were not even leafy trees that could unfurl flotillas of little sails, as green as mermaids' curtains. Himalayan winds blew snow-flakes about, and grass seed and panda hairs and the serious, droning vowels of lamas.

  Alobar had, himself, learned a chant. The abbot had given him the syllables personally. The chant transported him to a place inside himself impervious to gales or breezes, a place as unruffled as the abbot's shaved noggin, as smooth as Buddha's belly. That night, however, he felt more inclined to sing that little ditty he had made up long ago, the one that went: The world is round-o, round-o. . . . Obviously, it was the dusky widow who was reviving in him those old sensations.

  Kudra had awakened him from a long sleep. No, that was false, he hadn't been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth. His stay at the lamasery had become a rut, a tranquil, nourishing, educational rut that had done him little harm and much good, but a rut, nonetheless; his wheel was stuck in a ditch of light, so to speak, and he felt an overpowering urge to steer in the direction of darkness. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn't it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?

  In any event, Alobar had lost his calm satisfaction only to gain a kind of anxious, electric joy. Whether it was a temporary state, tied to the licentious yearning that Kudra had reawakened in him, or whether it signaled the end of his serene years as Samye's token pagan, he could not ascertain. What he did know was that the lunar rooster was crowing on the stable lintel now, and that, inside, the fugitive widow had some need or other of him.

  It is said that when a man is anticipating sexual activity, his whiskers grow at an accelerated rate. Alobar might have to stop and shave before we reach the end of this paragraph. Before the last of the chanting dies out behind the high walls and the condensed breath of a dozing yak momentarily fogs the page.

  Having finished a bath in a pony trough, Kudra was debating whether or not she should squirm back into her nephew's clothes. There was a chill in the May night that had set her to shivering, but the prospect of pulling those soiled, unfeminine garments over her glistening brown body was less inviting than goose bumps. Besides, Alobar would only undress her again, would he not?

  She was resigned to having him mount her. She would have preferred to postpone, if not avoid it—with so many things to sort out in the head, the body must be regarded as a distraction—but he was as bent on carnal embrace as a pilgrim was bent on the Ganges. To see him again would be to roll around with him, and she simply must see him.

  He is overwhelmingly exiting, she thought. Then she added, Not in any sexual way, of course. He excited her because he was as damned as she was, yet had no regrets. He actually made damnation seem attractive. She had heard of men who rejected the gods, who professed not to believe, but here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to Shiva, to Buddha, to the gods of his own race, whoever they might be, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered its captive audience little choice in matters concerning duration of performance.

  The Brahmans could explain away such complaints; she was well acquainted with their explanations, and, furthermore, she believed that they were right; she just wasn't in the market for theological justifications, not anymore. She was a sinner now, and her options were these: she could repent and pay the certain price, or she could cast her lot with this handsome heretic and see where it might lead. Oh, did she call him “handsome"? She didn't mean to say that, although he wasn't bad to look at, now that she'd mentioned it. It didn't bother her that he was over sixty, he was fit and youthful, and besides, Hindu women customarily were paired with older men. Not that she had any notion of being paired with him, you understand.

  Perhaps the gods were sympathetic to Alobar's demands. Perhaps they were considering alterations in the divine order of things. Perhaps it was a mistake, an oversight, that human beings had been granted short, unhappy lives, only the error had never been corrected because no one had ever openly complained before. No thunderbolt, in any case, had struck Alobar down. Another thought occurred to her, then, and it stacked goose bumps upon her goose bumps. Had Alobar been spared out of indifference? What if the gods had not even noticed his rebellion?

  For the moment, it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was caught up in something large and important, or so it seemed. She felt that she had embarked on an adventure far greater than the merchandising trip that she'd taken with her father, that wondrous journey that had erected a towered city on the scrubby plane of her brain and spoiled her for a life of normal, sedentary wifehood for all time.

  Pale moonlight was seeping over the stable eaves and puddling on the surface of the pony trough. Alobar's arrival was imminent. Good, she could inquire further about those Bandaloopers, the magic that they practiced, and the secrets that they knew. That was why she had invited him back, for that and for no other reason. Let it be known.

  Suddenly, he walked through the door, catching her unaware, not even dressed yet. Kudra recalled later that he had rushed up to her, although the ponies, the moon, and the trough water remembered it another way. At any rate, there was no denying that she was in his arms, that her tongue was sliding about in his mouth, and that her hand was groping for something perpendicular—praise Kali—in the general vicinity of his groin.

  Something was wrong. Instead of an elephant prod, Kudra found a braid of hemp. Was rope to be her destiny? Alobar was limp enough to knot, and even now he was pulling away from her embrace.

  Bewildered and embarrassed, she grabbed a shredded old pony blanket and tried to cover her nakedness. “Is it my color?” she asked.

  “What about your color?”

  “A horse cannot mate with a cow. Is it possible that a fair-skinned man is incapable of intercourse with a dark-skinned woman?” Kudra had slept with only one man in her life and had experience neither with impotence nor rejection.

  “No,” said Alobar. The idea made him snort. “I had a reputation, in fact, as a man who relishes dark meat.”

  Kudra thought, You also had a reputation as a warrior, to hear you tell it, but you did not fare too well against the Bandaloop. She asked, “Is it my nose, then? Perhaps its size offends you.”

  “You are lucky to own such a fine large nose. It will serve you as a rudder and steer you through the troubled waters of life.”

  Was he sincere? She had never considered her proboscis in that regard. “Well, I must have been too forward: my kiss, my tongue . . .”

  “A new experience for me, I do admit.”

  “Truly?"You need only open your mouth not your mind, she thought. But she said, “Then why do you spurn me?” She adjusted the worn-out blanket in an attempt to protect a larger area
of her body from the evening's chill and Alobar's gaze.

  “Yes, this 'kizz' as you call it is unknown in the west. A rather odd sensation, but one I would not object to repeating. I have an open mind.”

  “To be absolutely frank, it is your smell.”

  “My smell?!” She was incredulous. “But I have just bathed and rubbed myself with fragrant oils. You were willing enough to take me in the grass, when I was caked with grime and sweat; I saw the bulge in your robes; yet, here on the soft, private straw, when I am clean and perfumed . . .”

  “You smelled fine up there on the hill, you smelled like a woman. Right now you smell like one of those little piles of powder they burned in the caves; you smell like a—like a fruit bush!”

  They worked it out. It was back to the trough for Kudra, to scrub the jasmine and patchouli scents from her skin, whereupon, Alobar, whose wives and concubines had known little of the science of the bath and nothing of the art of perfumery (save for the rare spices they sewed in their harem cushions), sniffed her from head to heel, pronouncing her, if not arousing, at least inoffensive. With a little help from her rope-yard-deft fingers, he commenced to wax. And wax. And wax. Until she squealed.

  “Did not I explain that I was once a king?”

  A king you are still, she thought, vowing never again to doubt his various reputations.

  Within the hour, the molecules reaching his nose were more to his liking, although the sounds in his ears—dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, sparrow, flamingo, duck, and quail—destroyed any illusions he might harbor that he was on familiar ground.

  Later, by what little moonlight that remained, she cataloged five types of scratch marks on his shoulders and back. To him, they each stung the same.

  “I would like to read this Kama Sutra,” said Alobar. “Except that I cannot read.”

  “Nor can I. But I can teach you those of its contents that might benefit you most. Unless you object, I will demonstrate rather than recite.” She had had four orgasms and was feeling assured. “For now, however, you must tell me more of the Bandaloop doctors.”

  “There is nothing left to tell.”

  “You mean that you never heard of them again?”

  “Oh, stories about them abound, but their veracity. . . . Actually, something happened once . . .”

  “What happened, Alobar?”

  “One spring, on the pass south of here, there was a snow slide. Travelers were buried. Some of us from Samye went to help dig them out. We removed several bodies, frozen stiff, which we laid on the side of the road. After a bit, one of them stirred. It was a female. She stood and stretched, and thanked us and walked away. Just walked away. Fosco must have noticed that I was stunned, for he put a hand on me and whispered, 'She was a Bandaloop woman.' That was all that was ever said about it. The rest of the victims behaved the way corpses ought to.”

  Kudra, propped on her elbows, shaking her head in amazement, said, “And she was merely one of their women.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm.” She lowered herself into the straw, her rump in the air. The last moonbeam of the evening was snagged in the tangle of her pubic moraine. Alobar reached in from the rear, as if to free it. Like a careless animal on the lip of a tar pit, his middle finger slipped and sank quickly from view. Kudra writhed automatically, then lay still. Her mind was off somewhere. Her body and Alobar waited patiently for its return. He fell asleep with his hand still in place. When the lamas awoke him, well after sunrise, his finger was waterlogged. But Kudra was gone.

  One thing about moving out of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery, you don't have to hire a cart. Alobar's worldly possessions—a tea bowl, a change of clothing, and a knife that in twenty years had been used only for shaving—were packed in a flash. He bid farewell solely to Fosco. Fosco put down his brush, folded his inky hands upon his belly, and regarded Alobar affectionately. The little lama did not seem surprised by the departure, but rather hurried him to the gate, where, looking into the only blue eyes the Himalayas had ever known, he said something so incomprehensible that Alobar was ready to delay his leave to get to the bottom of it. Fosco withheld any explanation, however, and soon Alobar was winding down the mountainside, pausing every few hundred yards to glance back at the placid walls of Samye. Stone remains, water goes, he thought. For once, at least, he knew where he was going.

  In less than a day, he caught up with Kudra. She was squatting by the path relieving herself when he rounded the bend. She leapt to her feet in midstream and threw her arms about him.

  “I knew you would follow me,” she said, with the kind of confidence some women exude when they sense that they have made a clean capture with the vaginal net.

  “You left without a word,” he said. Her kiss, so wet and exotic upon his unpracticed Western lips, vented much of the steam from his accusation.

  “I feared that you would talk me out of it. You have talked me out of several things already, including my widow's virtue and my obligation on the funeral pyre.”

  “Praise Shiva,” he said mockingly.

  “Praise Shiva,” she repeated, after a long pause, and with more than a hint of the poignant.

  She still had not pulled up her boy's trousers, and Alobar kneaded her bare, piss-damp thighs. “You made it impossible for me to remain at Samye,” he said.

  “Your stories of the Bandaloop made it impossible for me to remain there.”

  “So, your destination was the caves.”

  “My destination is the caves. And you are going with me.”

  Any protest he might have uttered was drowned out by the fluttering of the pages of the Kama Sutra, dog-eared pages with notes in their margins, which she taught Alobar to read with his one oozing eye, the Kama Sutra being a book that usually opens in the middle and begins at the end.

  When the volume had been wiped and placed back on the shelf, they again took to the path. Irrigated by snow-melt, the recently awakened grass on the slopes glittered like spinach between the teeth of the hard earth. Far below them, in deep, narrow gorges, streams worked themselves into a lather, roaring like all the seashells in the world turned inside out; and above, great cold peaks in mineral armor were trying to smash the sky. Step by step, the path led them down and away from this terrible beauty.

  “I have been considering,” said Kudra, a tad out of breath, “what you said about desire.”

  “Ah,” said Alobar. “And now you agree that the devotee's desire to be without desire is the most insidious desire of all.”

  “Not exactly, Alobar. Look at it this way. The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.” She stopped to catch her breath. “To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

  Alobar thought, She is a smart one, smarter even than Wrenna, whom she resembles in odd physical ways. And her vulva is as clever as her speech. I was right to pursue her, though I must be careful that her power does not turn against me, and I must come between her and those sickening oils she likes to smear upon her flesh.

  Aloud, he asked, “Do we have everything, you and I?”

  They were descending into a small valley. The valley had clouds tipping into it, and the clouds were dark, as if bruised by the jagged thrusts of the peaks. One cloud was so black that Chomolungma herself might have battered it. The wind was at their heels and beginning to bark.

  “I have lost my husband, my children, my people, my faith,” said Kudra. “Yet I feel that still I have everything. Everything, at least, that I deserve. Brrr. It is growing cold.”

  “A storm is building,” said Alobar. “There is one thing we have not, and it is that thing we are obliged to desire.”

  “And that is?” Kudra bu
ttoned her vest against the first blown drops of gelid rain.

  “Some influence over the unknown tribunal that sentences us to die against our wishes. A reform of that law that decrees death a certain consequence of birth.”

  The wind had grown so strong it practically rolled them down the path. When Kudra said, “I cannot tell if that be the one valid desire or the greatest deception,” she had to yell to be heard. “Perhaps we shall have our answer from the Bandaloop.”

  “The what?”

  “The Bandaloo-oo-p.” The word sailed away on the wind, its vowels banging together and scattering, its consonants tearing the lips of the word like the bit of a runaway horse.

  There proved to be no shelter in the valley, not even a boulder leaning at a protective angle, so Alobar and Kudra pressed on. Soon, they were regaining altitude. By nightfall, the rain had turned to snow, the last blizzard of the Himalayan spring. Should they continue to walk, they might topple into a gorge; should they stop, they might freeze. They walked, keeping to a pace just fast enough to promote circulation.

  When dawn finally came, it was only a stain in the sky. Kudra prayed to Shiva and Kali, separately and together, and while looking for a signal from the gods that light was still on their payroll, she crashed into the trunk of a Yünnan pine that a gale had muscled into the presumed path. She had to sit in a drift until the pain subsided, Alobar draped over her like a human tent. The kneecap swelled up until it was as round as one of her breasts and as tight as a devil drum. She leaned against Alobar and, she hobbling and he shuffling, their bellies agonizing and their energy all but gone, they reentered the mainstream of the storm.