The Flowers of Time

Prologue: Leaving Little Tibet-2

After her father’s words of caution, of course, Jones could do nothing but look at the book.

She did wait until her father had passed. Under woollen blankets piled high on the wood and rope bed, he faded away to a husk of the man he’d been. The funeral followed quickly, as was the monastic custom, and she scattered his ashes in the tributary of the Indus river as he had instructed.

Then, on the road to Bombay, the first night they camped, she had curled up in her blankets with Argo laid alongside her and had opened the worn green leather boards and started to read.

It hadn’t been as immediately dangerous as she had expected from the warnings he had issued. It was a notebook. It was written in various hands, in various inks and in various languages. Some of them, much less than half, she could easily understand. Some of them were nothing she had ever seen before. She spent the long sea voyage translating what she could and cursing herself for leaving her father’s journals behind at the monastery. By the time she was halfway home on the Gryphon, she had realised it purported to be a book of magic spells, appended with notes on outcomes, locations, and geography.

When she worked that out, she hid it underneath her linens in the travelling trunk in her cabin for a week, horrified. Then she convinced herself it was merely a collection of notes on different cultural beliefs and got it out and started working again. It certainly explained her father’s obsession with a certain kind of statuary and architecture. There were sketches that closely resembled some of the ruined buildings that he always wanted to investigate, the ones with peculiar, twisted carvings of plants. It made her wonder what he had been doing that last spring whilst she was tied up with improving her written Chagatai and scrutinising the geography scripts in the monastery library with a view to travelling further north-east the following year.

Sonam had been with him, but Sonam was now on his way back to the mountains. He had said he would meet her in Srinagar in three years, the quickest she could travel to England and back. It was a question that would have to wait.

One of the pages certainly threw perspective on an event she had done her best to put out of her mind. It spoke of ‘hollows’. Creatures that were somehow…not right. It brought to mind the night of her mother’s death. She had been eight years old when her mama died. It was a night she had done her best to put out of her mind since then. But the gliding gait of the single bandit who had invaded their camp, the screaming from outside the tent, the leaping flames of the fire illuminating it all had never really left her. She remembered the man’s eyes. The way they had been black. Completely black and looking right through her as if she wasn’t there.

She remembered her mother dead on the ground by the campfire, hair tangled around her face and blood pouring from her throat as the bandit bent over her. Her own childish screams had stopped short when her father and his men arrived, Pater falling to his knees beside Mama, and Dechen sweeping her up and burying her head in his shoulder with a hand on the back of her head. The others had chased the bandit off, swords drawn, and Sonam had eventually killed him with a lucky shot from his musket.

Her memories of the subsequent months were blurred. They had buried Mama and Pater had withdrawn into himself, spending more time than ever with his books. They had mounted a watch every night they camped in the open from then on.

She had put the attacker’s black eyes down to her childish imagination. However, she found a piece in the green book…Creatures made hollow, who do not see with their own eyes, come through the gate for their own reasons. Their eyes are dark and they will kill for kias.

It certainly seemed to fit. Or was her adult mind weaving stories from her childhood terror? What was kias? She put the book back under her shifts at that point, struggled into in her uncomfortable stays and gown, and went to dine with the captain.

By the time the Gryphon docked in England, she was ready to give up on her translations, but she was not ready to leave the book at Penel Orlieu.