King of the

Cloud Forests

Also by Michael Morpurgo

Arthur: High King of Britain

Escape from Shangri-La

Friend or Foe

The Ghost of Grania O’Malley

Kensuke’s Kingdom

Little Foxes

Long Way Home

Mr Nobody’s Eyes

My Friend Walter

The Nine Lives of Montezuma

The Sandman and the Turtles

The Sleeping Sword

Twist of Gold

Waiting for Anya

War Horse

The War of Jenkins’ Ear

The White Horse of Zennor

The Wreck of Zanzibar

Why the Whales Came

For Younger Readers

Conker

Mairi’s Mermaid

The Best Christmas Present in the World

The Marble Crusher

King of the
Cloud Forests

MICHAEL MORPURGO

For Sebastian, Olivia and Lèa

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 1

I AM CALLED ASHLEY ANDERSON, ASHLEY AFTER my mother’s father so I was told, and Anderson after my father of course, whom I remember so well that I only have to close my eyes to have him standing before me. He was an American by birth, from New England, who grew up with one single-minded and determined ambition – to go to China and spread the word of God. Some people run away to sea, or to join the army. My father ran away to become a missionary when he was fifteen. By then he was already an imposing figure, over six feet tall and broad with it, and able to pass himself off as a twenty-year-old to the Missionary Society who were only too anxious to have someone of his youth and enthusiasm. By the time he was nearly twenty he was establishing his own mission outside the town of Ping Ting Chow. With his own hands he built a chapel and hospital compound, and within a few years had become so successful that he had to send for help. There were just too many people flooding into the Mission, mostly for treatment and medicine and not for God; but as my father often said, how you bring a man to God is unimportant, just so long as he comes.

It was only a few yards from the hospital to the chapel and all the patients had to come to chapel in the morning if they did not wish to incur my father’s anger; and no one ever wanted to do that. He stood fully a foot higher than everyone else and with his thunderous voice and obvious physical strength was not a person to tangle with. He was feared, respected and even worshipped by the congregation to whom he had devoted his life. I never once heard him preach a sermon to them. He always said Jesus had done that better than he ever could. Example was the only way to bring Jesus to the Chinese. That is what he said, but if example did not work he would resort to persuasion of almost any kind. He was not a man to be thwarted. So they came to the Mission in their hundreds and that was why he had to send for another doctor, and that was why my mother came.

I have no face to remember my mother by, but my father spoke of her so often that I feel I know her as well as if I had grown up with her. My father first saw her, so he often told me, at the railway station in Ping Ting Chow when he went to meet her. She had been working as a doctor at the Mission headquarters in Shanghai for some years. She did not come alone, but with a Tibetan, called Zong Sung, soon to be known by all of us as Uncle Sung. My father adored her the moment he first set eyes on her. ‘Sent from God,’ were the first words he spoke to her; and she replied: ‘Stuff and nonsense, Mr Anderson. Now you’d best help Sung with the luggage. Sung is not my servant, he is my medical assistant. There’s a lot of it, Mr Anderson. It’s very heavy and you’re a lot younger than he is – Oh, and by the way, Sung is a Buddhist and he’s staying a Buddhist so don’t even try to convert him. If you do he’s quite liable to convert you – I know, I’ve tried.’

‘Perhaps you haven’t tried hard enough,’ said my father.

‘She has,’ said Uncle Sung.

‘We’ll see,’ said my father. And that challenge was to make them allies in life from the first meeting. How often I was to witness their long, philosophical debates, under-standing little or nothing of what was said, but sensing always their deep mutual respect and affection.

As the years passed Uncle Sung became the cement that held the Mission together. He was the tireless organiser, the foreman, the negotiator, the peacemaker. As the Mission flourished he became more and more indispensable to my father and mother, indeed it was Uncle Sung that brought them together. I suppose you could say I wouldn’t ever have been born without Uncle Sung.

With Uncle Sung’s help and encouragement my father courted my mother for a full year before she even realised it. All the while the Mission became more and more overstretched. The people poured in as news of the wonderful new lady doctor from Shanghai spread throughout the Province. Uncle Sung always told me that it was he who suggested that the two of them went out together into the countryside to take medicine to the villages, and so the two of them set off for the hills leaving Uncle Sung to manage the Mission without them for a few days. When they came back she scolded Uncle Sung for deliberately engineering the whole thing, but asked him to give her away at her wedding.

Uncle Sung told me there were nearly a thousand people crowding into the Mission the day they were married. He himself took over my father’s old room in the hospital whilst the newly married couple moved into a house built up against the chapel wall. They only had one year of each other before I arrived. It seems I came awkwardly into this world and somewhat later than I should have done. I was my mother’s death knell. The birth weakened her and in spite of all that Uncle Sung and my father could do, in spite of constant prayer, she died six months after I was born. My mother was a gravestone to me as I grew up. I passed her every day on the way from the house to the hospital, for she was buried in the centre of the compound with nothing on her grave but her name, ‘Charlotte Anderson’.

In one sense though my mother never really died at all. She became the spirit of the place, its guardian angel. My father even named the Mission after her, and each year he would climb up and repaint her name in large black letters above the gate of the compound. Uncle Sung took her place as the Mission doctor and ran the hospital just as my mother had done. No problem it seemed was ever too difficult for him to solve, and my father came to rely on him totally.

As I grew up Uncle Sung became a second father to me, indeed I spent more time with him than I ever did with my father, watching him at work with the patients in the hospital and helping out when I could, making beds, rolling bandages and washing floors. It was not that my father was not loving towards me. He was stern with me certainly, and sometimes even distant, but he was loving nonetheless. It was just that he was always on his way to somewhere else and seemed to have little time for me. I remember him mostly striding off through the gates of the town or running up the steps of the hospital. Uncle Sung went everywhere more slowly, at a speed I could manage, and I could see he liked me to be with him. I was always made to feel wanted and useful. What’s more, as I grew up he was more my size too and therefore less daunting to me than my father. A ready toothy smile always shone out from his copper brown face, a smile that never failed to radiate calm and warmth. He was never sour or short with me. Only when he was meditating did I feel I could not approach him. This he did often and anywhere, sitting bolt upright, hands on his knees. It was the only time he ever looked serious.

The Mission school was as crowded as the hospital. There was no building. It was held in the open just inside the gate. There I learned to read and write in Chinese – difficult for me since I spoke English to my father and Uncle Sung was doing his best to teach me Tibetan – and my father would come each day just as we were about to finish and tell us a parable that few of us could understand, or a grisly story from the Old Testament that everyone preferred. I remember he told us once of the dry bones that got up and walked about again, and for days after that we were all walking skeletons rattling our arms and legs and chattering our teeth.

Lin was my particular friend. He did not come every day to school for his father was always keeping him at home as a punishment. He should have known better for punishment did Lin no good at all. To the delight of everyone at school he was always wonderfully wicked. One morning before school began he climbed the tree close to where the teacher always stood during lessons and lay hidden on a branch right above her making ludicrous faces at everyone below. He was only discovered when he fell out of the tree and landed at the teacher’s feet. He got up, rubbed his sore shoulder and said, ‘Sorry I’m late’. I cannot remember the teacher’s name, but I do remember Lin tormented her dreadfully.

Lin was the smallest boy in the class. I was already a head higher than anyone else and two heads higher than him. I took after my father it seemed. When we were alone I would often carry Lin on my back, because it was quicker that way, and anyway he said he could see better. We always used horses to get down to the river though and he rode with superlative ease as if he was attached to the horse’s back. Lin loved to fish – he would turn exultant cartwheels whenever he caught one. He tried to teach me but I never had the talent or the patience for it so I was given the job of killing whatever he caught. He was more successful in teaching me how to swim. He taught me how to float. ‘You just have to believe you can,’ he told me and after that I found it easy enough to swim, although I never could speed through the water as he did.

I learned more with Lin than I ever did at school. It was Lin who first taught me that things are not always how they seem to be, how they should be or how I had been told they were. It was from him I learned for the first time that there were some Chinese that disliked and even hated missionaries like my father. There were even people in the town who would burn down the Charlotte Anderson Mission, given some encouragement. Lin told me too of the Japanese invasion and how their armies were marching through China from the East. He showed me with his fishing spear how he would treat them if they ever reached Ping Ting Chow.

‘But that’s killing,’ I said.

‘So?’ said Lin.

‘You know what my father says,’ I told him. ‘Thou shalt not kill, remember?’

‘We kill to eat, don’t we?’ said Lin, suddenly serious. And so we debated hotly until sunset not only whether it was ever right to kill, but also whether or not Jesus Christ could ever be wrong about anything. Lin was the first person in my hearing ever to challenge directly what my father always called ‘the word of the Lord’. I knew he and Uncle Sung talked about these things but this was different. I worried more about that than the advancing Japanese army. I began for the first time in my life to find it difficult to say my prayers at night and mean them. I had begun to doubt.

Uncle Sung was reassuring about the Japanese. ‘Do not worry yourself over the Japanese, Ashley. Between us and them is the whole Chinese army. They will not let them pass.’ I dared not mention what Lin had said about Jesus for I knew he would refer me to my father about such matters. I kept my doubts to myself.

But it was not long after this that we heard for the first time the dull rumble of distant bombing and soon the town began to fill with tired soldiers. The first wounded arrived at the hospital and I found my father and Uncle Sung working day and night alongside a Chinese army doctor who demanded that the soldiers always had to be looked after before the civilians. One evening I remember he insisted once too often. I witnessed my father’s anger from the bottom of the hospital steps as he turned on the army doctor. ‘Major, this place is for the healing of the sick and that we will do whether or not they are soldiers. We are all God’s children in or out of uniform, whatever the uniform.’ The army doctor looked hard at my father, his eyes blazing with anger. I was quite sure at that moment that my father would be taken away and shot, and I’ve always thought if Uncle Sung had not intervened that could indeed have happened. Uncle Sung led the army doctor away and pacified him somehow. I don’t know what he said, but whatever it was it worked. After that although Father and the army doctor were never the best of friends, they at least tolerated each other.

There was no school any more now and Lin and I sketched out elaborate plans in the river mud for the defeat of the Japanese. They were coming from the south and the north now, Lin told me, and we knew from the soldiers’ stories where the battle fronts were. ‘Let them come,’ he said fiercely. He was ready for them.

Then one day Lin did not come to the Mission and I was on my own. I rode down to the river bank, but he wasn’t there. As evening fell I searched the narrow streets of the town for news of him, but no one seemed to know where he had gone. It was almost dark as I walked back up the hill towards the Mission gates. A small figure came out from the shadows to meet me. He was wearing a uniform. He saluted and laughed. It was Lin. ‘But you’re only fourteen,’ I protested.

He held up his rifle in front of me. ‘I can shoot this and that’s all that matters,’ he said. ‘And anyway I’m not fourteen, not really. I only said that to be the same age as you – I’m not so small if I’m fourteen, am I? I’m sixteen and I won’t be much taller by the time I’m twenty. Make a smaller target, don’t I?’ We laughed and shared a cigarette before shaking hands solemnly. I watched him walk away and vanish into the smoky dark of the town.

The bombers came the next morning, throbbing and roaring above us. Father and I were in the middle of breakfast and we heard the cheering outside in the compound. I remember Father looking out of the window and saying, ‘What are they cheering about? Can’t they see they’re Japanese?’ Then he was shouting to them to take cover. He pushed me under the table and threw himself on top of me as the first bomb fell.

CHAPTER 2

I WAS CONSCIOUS OF DUST AND SMOKE AND OF Father’s weight on top of me. I could hear screaming from the compound and I thought I should say a prayer if I was going to die, but as the fifth and sixth bombs fell, and fell further and further away, I thought there was no need. The drone of the bombers faded and all about me was a terrible stillness.

‘Is it over?’ I whispered. ‘Have they gone away? Father? Father, can you hear me? Will they come back?’ There was no answer. I twisted under my Father’s weight to look at him. His eyes were closed and there was blood in his black hair and on his forehead. I looked past him and only then understood that the house had collapsed on top of us. The table top was on my Father’s back and all around us lay the splintered, torn timbers that had been our walls and ceilings. The teapot with the blue fish on it that Uncle Sung had given us one Christmas long ago lay so close that I could reach out and touch it with my fingers. It was broken in half so that the fish was cut in two. There was tea trickling out of the spout, warm on my hand.

I do not think it was the bombing itself that frightened me so much. Indeed I remember feeling momentarily exhilarated that I had survived. It was the growing fear that my father was dead that fetched up the terror from inside me. With my free hand I shook his shoulder and screamed at him to wake up, but he did not. His eyes remained obstinately closed and his body limp and heavy around me. Exhausted at last by my own fear I lay still. Only then did I feel Father breathing rhythmically on top of me. In my confused state of mind it took me some time to understand that if he was breathing then he must at least be alive. I tried again to shake him awake and was rewarded at long last with a murmur and a half smile.

That was how Uncle Sung and the others found us some minutes later. Through a forest of timbers I saw Uncle Sung’s sandalled feet, the sun on his dusty toes. He was standing where the chapel wall should have been. There was the sound of whimpering and wailing from the compound beyond and then they were pulling away the timbers to get to us. But they were taking so long, and Father’s weight was making it difficult for me to breathe. Uncle Sung was constantly there, encouraging me, reassuring me, and I heard the strident voice of the Chinese army doctor as he organised the rescue. I remember how Lin and I used to imitate his strutting gait and squeaky voice. I’d never really liked the man ever since his argument with Father on the hospital steps. We had put him down as an arrogant, unfeeling man who cared for little except his own dignity. Now here he was urging his men on to yet greater efforts as bit by bit they pulled away the timber and fought their way through to us. Lin and I had been a bit unfair on him I decided.

The rescue was painfully slow – each timber it seemed had to be extracted carefully for fear of further collapse – but at last the table top was being lifted and there were hands grasping at Father’s shoulders and pulling him off me. Uncle Sung asked me whether I was all right. I tried to speak but could find no voice. I felt suddenly free of Father’s body and saw Uncle Sung’s smiling face above me. ‘Playing hide-and-seek?’ he said. ‘Bit old for that aren’t you?’ A searing, sudden pain invaded my chest. Uncle Sung’s face swam into a dark void full of distant echoes and I slipped away from him. If this is dying I thought, then it’s not so bad, just a pity that’s all.

I woke to find myself in the hospital. I could feel there was a bandage tight around my chest and my arm was held in a sling. There were three figures at the bottom of my bed who came into focus as they spoke. ‘At least he was the only one,’ said the Chinese army doctor. ‘We were lucky,’ he went on. ‘The only bomb that fell in the town itself did not explode. They think nothing of bombing towns. Life is cheap to them. It was more to frighten us than anything else. The nearest Japanese soldiers are a hundred miles away, maybe more. Headquarters have assured me they are no closer.’

‘But they’ll be back, won’t they?’ said Father. ‘And you have no planes to stop them with, have you?’ There was a white bandage across his head and he was leaning heavily on a stick. ‘If they can do it once, they can do it again. What’s to stop them? You tell me that. And next time we might not be so lucky – it might not be just one boy. One bomb in that warren of a town and there’d be hundreds dead.’

‘I have faith in our soldiers,’ said the Chinese army doctor, stiffening. ‘The Japanese will come no closer, Mr Anderson, I can assure you.’

‘I have faith only in God, Major,’ said Father. ‘Fifty yards the other way and every one in the compound, everyone in the hospital would have been killed. The chapel we can rebuild – we will rebuild; but the first thing we must do after the funeral is over is to paint a red cross on the roof. There’ll be some safety in that surely.’

‘I doubt it,’ said the army doctor. ‘The Japanese are barbarians, but you can try.’

‘Mr Anderson,’ said Uncle Sung, who had his back to me. He spoke softly, almost secretly. ‘What do we say to Ashley? How do we tell him about Lin?’

‘Let’s wait till he’s better,’ said my father, ‘though God knows where I’ll find the courage from to tell him even then.’

‘I can’t think what made him do it,’ said the army doctor. ‘Everyone hid when the planes came, everyone except that boy. He was warned. They told him to keep down. They told him it was no use shooting at planes, but he wouldn’t listen. He ran out into the open and began firing. You might as well spit at a tiger. Someone said he was only fourteen years old, just a boy.’

I wished at that moment that I had died in the ruins of the house. I closed my eyes and swallowed the scream inside me.

‘He was sixteen,’ I said as they walked away. ‘He told everyone he was fourteen because he was so small.’ The three of them turned and stared at me and then my father came back and sat on the bed beside me. ‘Fourteen or sixteen, he was still too young, Ashley. But we must thank God he was the only one killed. It could have been much worse.’

‘Not for Lin,’ I said. ‘And why did God pick on Lin, Father? What did Lin ever do to God to make him that angry?’ There was pain and bewilderment in Father’s eyes and I regretted at once the venom in my question.

‘I don’t know what Lin did, Ashley,’ he said, the tears coming into his eyes, ‘any more than I know why your mother was taken away from us so young. I don’t know all the answers, but I do know they are together now, Lin and your Mother. They are both with God. There’ll be no pain for either of them, no more sorrow, and that is why we must be happy for them.’

But no matter how I reasoned it during those long days lying on my back in the hospital, I could not be happy for Lin, for Mother or for me. Lin was gone. My best friend had been taken from me. I was bitter at a God I no longer loved nor cared to understand.

It was essential, the Chinese army doctor said, that I kept still for I had broken two ribs and there was a serious risk of infection from the gash in my right arm. So I sat in the shade of the hospital veranda whilst my father directed the rebuilding of the chapel and the house. Uncle Sung and the Chinese army doctor ran the hospital together that spring whilst Father turned carpenter, builder and painter. He painted red crosses on the roof of every building in the Mission compound, just in case the Japanese planes came back.

As the weeks passed though I could sense in Father a growing feeling of unease. In spite of the army doctor’s continuing reassurances that all was well in the east and that the Japanese were being held in the south, there was increasing evidence to the contrary. The new timber for the chapel did not come through on the train. There had been no post from the Mission Headquarters in Shanghai for nearly two months and the vital medical supplies Uncle Sung had asked for never arrived. The post arrived, but weeks late. More and more wounded soldiers poured in through the gates of the Mission and all the news they brought was bad. The Japanese advances had not been halted and the Chinese were retreating on all fronts. Even the government had been forced to leave Peking and move west. As well as this there was the terrible news of the burning of a mission not more than fifty miles away. Two French nuns had been killed in the blaze so the story went. No one was sure whether it was the mob that turned on the mission or a band of brigands. Thinking back I think it was probably this atrocity rather than the Japanese threat that finally persuaded my Father to send me away.

It all happened so quickly and without any warning. It was in the middle of the night that Uncle Sung came to fetch me from the hospital and walked me across the moonlit compound into the chapel that was still waiting for its new roof. Father was pacing up and down, his hands clasped behind his back. He stopped when he saw me and sat me down beside him on a bench.

He began to talk without even looking at me, hands clenched on his lap and leaning forward. ‘Ashley, I know your mother would want me to do this, I know she would. I am doing it for her and I’m doing it for you. This Mission is no place any more for a child. We must let Lin’s sacrifice be a lesson to us. You’ve heard what happened to the French Mission, the nuns?’ I nodded. ‘And even if the Japanese do not overrun all of China, as they well may, we have seen already what their planes can do. I cannot leave. My work is here, Ashley, with the Mission. God brought me here and God needs me here. I cannot desert these people. I have the chapel to complete and the hospital will be needed more than ever now. So I shall stay and perhaps I shall follow on later, if God wills it. But you will leave now, you and Uncle Sung.’ I tried to interrupt, but he turned on me, almost in anger. ‘Do not make this more difficult for me than it is already, Ashley. I have asked God’s guidance in this and I know it is right. Can’t you see that if I did what I wanted to do I would go tonight with you and Uncle Sung? It is a lesson to learn in life that we cannot always do what we want.’

‘Tonight?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘You’re fit enough now if you keep your arm clean and the ribs have healed nicely enough. Uncle Sung has agreed to go with you, to take you to India. It’s taken weeks to persuade him to leave the Mission but he knows there’s no other way, and he knows it’s what your mother would have wanted. You’ll have to go, Ashley.’ And my father turned away. I knew from the tone of his voice that he would brook no argument, but I tried nonetheless. ‘Why can’t we just hide somewhere?’ I asked.

My father’s voice was gentler now. ‘There is nowhere left to hide. China is in ferment. The Japanese have brought destruction into the very heart of China. Bands of brigands roam the countryside at will and terrorise the people. Missionaries have been stoned to death – yes, it’s true, Ashley. Warring factions fight each other everywhere for power. No one is safe in China today, least of all the missionaries or sons of missionaries. For many reasons, Ashley, which you are too young to understand, we are not much loved here.’ He put an arm around me. ‘It’s all arranged. For safety’s sake you will travel as Uncle Sung’s son – he has made Tibetan clothes for you. So until we meet again, Ashley, Uncle Sung will be your father. I could wish you no better guardian and guide. He will take you to the mountains in the far west, through Tibet and the Himalayas. It is Uncle Sung’s country, he knows it well. And perhaps in the spring of next year you can cross into Nepal and then down into India. As you know, your dear mother was from England and it is the English who rule in India. You will be safe there. I have written to the Mission Headquarters in Delhi. They will I’m sure provide you both with passage to England. And I have written to your grandmother in England telling her to expect you. She will look after you and I will join you as soon as I can.’

‘But when will that be, Father?’

‘When God wills it,’ my father said quietly and he stood up in front of me. ‘I shall help pack the horses now. You must be gone before dawn. I want no one to see you leave.’

The last I saw of my father was a tall black figure standing in his cassock at the gates of the Mission, waving his stick in the air. He called out, ‘God bless’, and then he was gone, closing the gates behind him. I felt then that I would never see him again. Uncle Sung reached across to me and took my hand. ‘You’re not alone,’ he said.

The moon skulked behind a cloud and we rode away together, my horse coughing in the cold night air.

CHAPTER 3

AN HOUR OR SO AFTER WE LEFT THE MISSION – IT was still not quite morning – Uncle Sung turned off the road into the trees and dismounted. He drew out of his saddlebag a pair of felt boots and a bulky quilted coat with deep pockets just like the one he always wore. ‘I made it myself,’ he said with some pride, holding it up against me. The coat was far too big for me and I told him so. ‘Time will take care of that,’ he said. ‘This will be a long, long journey. By the end of it you may well find these clothes too small, but then by the time we reach India you will have no need for them any more.’ He buttoned it up to my neck. ‘From now on I am not your Uncle Sung and you are not Ashley Anderson. You are Zong Ho, only son of Zong Sung. We are pilgrims on our way to Tibet, to Lhasa.’

Holding my arms out, I could barely see my finger-tips emerging from the sleeves. Uncle Sung laughed, sat me down and set to work on my face. ‘And you must be dark, nut brown like I am, like all Tibetans are,’ he said.

Within an hour my hair was blackened with Chinese ink, and a pigtail made of yak hair was plaited into my own hair. The makeup he used to darken my face was a mixture of crushed charcoal and cocoa, and bitter to lick. Uncle Sung worked fast, stepping back and turning my face into the light to consider it more carefully. Lastly, my hands were dusted with charcoal and a round, flat felt cap pushed down on my head. He lifted my chin, stood me up and turned me round. He was pleased with his work. ‘Zong Ho,’ he said. ‘You are now really my son. Two things you must not do. You must not wash, unless we are alone and it is safe; and you must not talk unless we are alone, and then only when I say you can. My son, Zong Ho, was born dumb. He has never uttered a word in his life, not a word.’

Not to wash was, I thought, a wonderful notion, but not to talk – that was quite a different matter. I protested strongly. It was impossible I said. I was bound to blurt something out. He took me by the shoulders. Uncle Sung had not often been stern with me, but now he was in deadly earnest. ‘In China, you are a white man, a foreigner – that is bad enough in these times, but if they discover you are the son of a missionary there are men who would murder you without even thinking about it, men on this road, and me too if I’m caught with you. And in Tibet where I come from and where we are going there are men who believe all “phillings” are devils, and no one there minds killing devils.’

‘Phillings?’ I said.

‘Foreigners. Tibetans call them “phillings”. You must understand that all men of your race are not like your mother and father. Many of them come only to take what they can and leave. Such people are not welcome, not in China and not in Tibet.’ He made me walk away from him and turn round and walk back. ‘Now remember you must speak only when I say you can, when it is safe. You’ll do, Ho Zong,’ he said, ‘just as long as you don’t wash, you’ll do. We must go on now. I want to be a long way from here before dark.’

We rode out of the trees together into the frail light of dawn. ‘Goodbye Ashley Anderson,’ I said, ‘I’m Zong Ho. Zong Ho. Zong Ho.’ I liked the sound of the name and said it again and again until Uncle Sung stopped me.

‘You may be Zong Ho,’ said Uncle Sung, ‘but you’re not the son of Zong Sung.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because Zong Ho, the son of Zong Sung, is dumb,’ he said. ‘He has been since birth, remember?’

I thought he would be smiling when I looked across at him, but he was not. As our eyes met I think I understood the seriousness of our situation for the first time. ‘You must never forget it, Ho. Never,’ he said.

I was used to riding, but I had never travelled far on horseback before, only to the town and along the river banks with Lin. By that first evening, after a day in the saddle, I was sore and stiff. As I dismounted, my leg must have touched the horse’s rump for he started forward suddenly and I was thrown off.

I fell on my side, my arm trapped underneath me. It was not a hard fall; but my chest pained me a bit as Uncle Sung helped me to my feet. My coat was torn. When he took it off to make sure I had not damaged myself I noticed that my arm was bleeding again. The old wound was open. Uncle Sung bound it up and we both thought no more about it. It did not trouble me much. It was a clean wound after all, and almost healed.

I remember well enough the heat and the flies and the dust as we rode across the plains that summer, the filthy water we had to drink, and the rats. I shall never forget the rats, nor the infernal dogs that leapt out at us at every farmstead we passed and threatened to tear us to pieces. Without Uncle Sung’s long staff to protect us I feel sure they would have done so. But at least no one appeared to doubt we were father and son. My disguise, renewed each morning, clearly worked. Our story seemed to be believed wherever we went. We were accepted as pilgrims and much compassion was expressed at my unfortunate disability. I began to feel comfortable in my new persona and confident enough to revel in the deception. But my arm was beginning to pain me now and I found it difficult to sleep at nights.

From time to time though I felt I was regarded with some curiosity – not least I thought because I was two or three inches taller than my father (something I could not disguise) – and indeed on one occasion we did come very close to discovery.

For the most part we kept away from others, but sometimes meetings on the road with traders or pilgrims or herders forced us into company. It was the hospitality of the farmers who took us in at night that proved the most dangerous, and it was on just such an occasion that I forgot myself once over supper. The soup on this particular evening was thick with barley and steaming hot and I was famished. I ate ravenously and made the mistake of licking my fingers when I had finished. The eyes of the little girl standing at my elbow should have warned me. I saw the inquisitiveness in her face turn to a look of alarm, and only then realised that my fingers were licked quite white. Uncle Sung had noticed and kicked me hard under the table. Either the girl was too young to speak or too terrified because she ran across the room and buried herself in her mother’s skirts, sobbing hysterically. I sat on my hand until I had collected my thoughts and prayed that the little girl would not find her tongue. She kept looking back at me from over her shoulder and then she began to babble incoherently to her mother. Uncle Sung kicked me again and I looked across at him. He was reaching down and rubbing his hand on the sole of his boot, feigning a fit of coughing as he did so. By the time the little girl dragged her mother over to look at me my hand was grimy with the dirt from my boot and quite as dark as the other. She took one look at it, screamed and ran out of the door, her bewildered mother in hot pursuit. I never licked my fingers again.

As we travelled westwards Uncle Sung taught me to understand Tibetan well enough not to look stupid if I was spoken to. I remembered a little of what he had taught me when I was younger, but now I think I was quicker to learn. To speak it though would have betrayed me at once. I was happy enough to be dumb. He taught me how to blow my nose with my fingers as all Tibetans do, and to spit like a Tibetan herdsman, long and loud and often, to click my tongue as he did to show amazement – a practice I did not find difficult for I had in the past often mimicked Uncle Sung’s own peculiar way of expressing himself. It did not matter yet, he said, but once we were amongst Tibetans I would need to be more convincing if I was to be accepted as one of them.

We had to walk a lot now as we left the plains behind us that autumn and began to climb higher into the hills. The horses were sturdy, thickset creatures but hardly bigger than donkeys, and with our packs we were a heavy load. To rest them we dismounted at the foot of every hill and walked up. I remember that I found it difficult to keep up with Uncle Sung on the hills and that my arm still would not heal properly despite all Uncle Sung’s efforts. It ached continuously now and throbbed down to my finger-tips. I knew I was getting weaker but did not want to admit it either to myself or to Uncle Sung. It was not courage, just obstinacy.

I have a clear picture in my mind of Uncle Sung walking ahead of me, one arm on the neck of his horse and leaning on his staff. Beyond him the sun came up over the mountains and set the peaks on fire. They were the first high mountains I had ever seen. ‘Tibet?’ I called out. ‘Not yet,’ said Uncle Sung. ‘But soon. Soon now.’ And suddenly my legs gave way and I found myself on my hands and knees incapable of moving. Uncle Sung was helping me to my feet, but I was too feeble even to stand. There was not enough strength in my arms to hold on to him. I looked up. Uncle Sung’s face glowed copper gold and flames from the mountains licked about his head.

That is all I can honestly say that I remember of the first stage of our journey. For the missing months of winter I must rely on Uncle Sung’s account of my illness and the trek up through the mountain passes of Tibet onto the plateau. The horses were sold and he bought a yak and a cart to carry me and the baggage – a horse cannot negotiate snowdrifts as well as a yak. I have only incoherent flashes of recollection, the stifling smell of smoke, greasy sheepskins, the rocking of a cart and the swaying vision of white mountains against a grey pall of sky, and a cold whining wind biting at my face. I remember, or rather I think I remember because my grip on reality was so tenuous I may well have dreamed it, but I recall lying at night with the stars so close I could almost reach out and touch them; and then there were the strong colours of the high plateau with its dark, deep skies and everywhere rocks of red and yellow.

It seems it was the poison in my arm that nearly killed me. Unnoticed it had affected my whole body. For nearly two months, Uncle Sung told me, I hovered near to death. He found refuge for us in a disused butcher’s house in a mountain village, built entirely of bones and horns. The people of the village were used to pilgrims and treated us with great kindness. The house was dry and warm. The yak dung for the fire was brought to the house every day by the villagers, who prayed as Uncle Sung did for my recovery. More than once, Uncle Sung told me, my feverish ravings had almost given us away. Many was the time he had to clap his hand over my mouth in case someone passing by outside the house should hear me. English or Chinese – I raved in both and both were equally dangerous. After all I was supposed to be dumb. Somehow I survived. Uncle Sung never believed in miracles, but he often said afterwards that he now understood why many people did. Reason tells me that if it wasn’t a miracle that saved me, it must have been Uncle Sung.

The next spring, when he thought I was strong enough to travel again and when the snows had cleared from the high passes, Uncle Sung decided to move on. So, buried under a pile of sheepskins, each one a parting gift from the villagers, I lay in the back of the cart whilst Uncle Sung led me up into the foothills of the Himalayas.

We followed a well-trodden path now and almost every day we would meet parties of pilgrims on the road. Uncle Sung tried to avoid them, but it was inevitable that we should often camp with them at night, sometimes in the open but more often we were offered the hospitality of a farmer and slept in his house. The fog of my memory clears now I suppose, because all the while I was regaining my strength and health. I must have been fully recovered by the time I met the lama for I remember clearly every word he said to me. It was a meeting that was to change the course of my life.

That evening we were amongst a dozen or so fellow pilgrims gathered together in an isolated farmhouse. We were relieved to have found it for outside the weather was worsening. We were talking and eating together in a first floor room – like all Tibetan houses, the ground floor was the stables. I was looking out of the window and up towards the mountains, trying to ignore the inquisitive eyes of the farmer’s children, when the lama came in through the door. He was dressed in a humble travelling robe tied around the middle with a red belt, and he wore a tall, red cap on his head. The children were silenced for a few moments and settled down to stare at him. Some meat and freshly dug turnips were cut up unwashed and thrown into the pot. When he had finished eating, each of the pilgrims asked him for an omen, or ‘mo’ as they call it in Tibetan. I knew enough of the Tibetan language now to make some sense of what was being said – Uncle Sung had seen to that. The lama answered each pilgrim patiently in low, considered tones and then turned to Uncle Sung. ‘You do not ask for “mo”,’ he said. ‘Do you fear for what lies ahead?’

‘No,’ said Uncle Sung. ‘I have no desire to know what will happen to me on this earth, and what happens to me afterwards I shall deserve – that’s all I know. We decide for ourselves. It is in our hands, is it not?’ The lama nodded and smiled.

‘And your companion?’ said the lama.

‘He is my son, Zong Ho,’ said Uncle Sung.

‘Bring him where I can see him.’

Uncle Sung nudged me to my feet. Reluctantly I got up and stood in the circle of pilgrims, looking down at the lama. He looked me in the eye for long and dangerous moments. I could not hold his gaze. I looked down to Uncle Sung and he smiled encouragement. I was confident enough in my disguise, indeed so confident by now that I had even forgotten that I was at risk, but this man was not looking at my clothes nor at my skin. His eyes reached into my soul and found me out. I felt like running, but the way to the door was blocked by the farmer’s family who had crowded into the room. There was no escape.

‘He does not speak,’ said Uncle Sung. ‘Since the day he was born he has never spoken a word.’

The lama’s eyes never left my face. And then he spoke very slowly and with great deliberation. ‘You have a fine son but he has the blue eyes of a “philling”,’ he said. The word sent a shiver of suspicion around the room. The lama held up his hand. I think Uncle Sung and I then acted better than we ever dreamed we could. I feigned furious outrage, and blew my nose with my fingers and Uncle Sung cursed all phillings roundly for good measure.

‘My son’s eyes,’ he finished angrily, ‘are an accident of birth as is his dumbness. Would you blame him for that?’

‘I did not mean any offence,’ said the lama. ‘But he has strangely light eyes for one of our country. He is taller than you, taller than any grown man in this room – and he has the giant feet of a yeti. But it is not his great size that troubles me. There is something about him that tells me he is not like one of us. I see a ruler standing before me. I tell you, this boy of yours will be a king, and soon.’ The lama had his eyes closed now and was speaking in a whisper. ‘He will be a king of the cloud forests. He will rule among the clouds.’ He opened his eyes. ‘That is all I can tell. Ask me no more.’

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