The Messiah Secret

Pänämik was the same as almost every other village they’d seen since they’d arrived in Ladakh, but perhaps a little bigger than most. Bronson slowed right down as they approached the northern end, and they both looked ahead. They’d almost cleared the settlement before they saw the barrier across the road, and the handful of Indian Army soldiers standing casually beside it, weapons slung over their shoulders.

‘Time for Plan B, I suppose,’ Bronson said with a sigh. ‘I hope you’ve got a decent map there.’ He pulled the four-by-four into the side of the road and switched off the engine. Angela unfolded the map she’d been using and used a pen to point at a spot to the north-east of Leh.

‘There’s Pänämik,’ she said. ‘And this is where we need to get to.’

She indicated a right-hand junction in the road perhaps ten or twelve miles beyond the village.

‘And from there?’ Bronson asked.

‘From there we use our eyes and our imagination,’ she said, ‘because I think that junction is what the author of the text meant when he wrote that line, “Then turned to face the glory.” So once we get there, we’ll have to start looking for anything that could fit the expression “between the pillars”, which may be somewhere to the north of the road.’

‘Because of the phrase “beyond their shadows”?’ Bronson offered.

‘Exactly.’

Bronson studied the map, working out distances and checking the contour lines. If they were going to venture off the road and go cross-country, he needed to be sure their jeep could handle the terrain. If they got stuck, there would be nobody they could call for help, for obvious reasons.

That was one factor. The other was that they couldn’t just pick a nice level route and power along it, because the car would throw up a plume of dust that would be visible for miles, and that would be a pretty sure way of attracting the attention of an Indian Army patrol. So they needed to keep it slow, and ideally drive along valleys or gullies – providing they could climb out of them when they had to.

‘I think we need to go back down the road and head south,’ Bronson said. ‘When we leave the road we can’t go west, because we’d have to drive through this village called Arann to rejoin the road. So once we get clear of Pänämik, we’ll have to swing over to the east and go along the slopes of this mountain here – I think it’s called Saser – in the Karakoram Range. Then we can turn north and join the road that runs east out of Arann without having to go into the village itself.’

Angela nodded. ‘It’s a hell of a long way round,’ she said doubtfully, ‘but I don’t see any other options, unless we just drive up to the roadblock, wave the letter at the soldiers and tell them we’re an advance guard from the British Museum. That might work.’

‘Yeah,’ Bronson said, ‘and it might not. I’d rather hang on to the letter and use it if we’re stopped by a patrol out in the hills. If the soldiers at the roadblock don’t allow us through, we’ll have alerted them that we’re trying to get further north. They might radio any roving patrols they’ve got in the area to warn them to look out for this jeep, and that’s the last thing we want. The best bet is to just creep along the side of the mountain and hope nobody spots us. If we are stopped, we just plead ignorance, and then show them the letter.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘Do you want to start now or find somewhere here to stay for the night?’

‘Let’s leave now. I’d rather we got clear of Pänämik and at least tried to get into the right area.’

As Bronson started the Nissan, three men walked past the four-by-four and glanced at it incuriously. Two had the typical features that they’d got used to seeing since their arrival in Ladakh, but the third man had a much fairer – almost ruddy – complexion, and auburn hair.

‘Is he a tourist, or what?’ Bronson muttered to Angela, as the three men walked past the jeep.

‘Not the way you mean it,’ she replied. He’s almost certainly from Baigdandu, a village about forty miles to the west of here. Every now and then a boy or girl is born there with red hair and blue eyes. There’s a local legend that centuries ago a tribe of Greeks arrived and then settled there, and it’s their genes that cause the aberration.’

‘Greeks?’ Bronson asked. ‘But why—’

‘I know,’ Angela interrupted. ‘The story makes no sense. Even if a bunch of Greeks did turn up here and inter-marry with the locals, that’s still not an explanation for that complexion. I mean, how many Greeks have you ever seen who have red hair?’

‘But what was a group of Greeks doing here in the first place? We’re a hell of a long way from the Mediterranean.’

Angela paused, then rubbed the back of her neck to ease her tension. ‘Exactly the same as us, actually.’

Bronson whistled. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘That’s what the legend says.’

‘But they didn’t succeed?’

‘We wouldn’t be here, Chris, if I thought there was the slightest chance that anyone had beaten us to it.’