He had been wrong, Shan told himself, to think they could be safe in their hidden hermitage, wrong to have let himself be drawn so deeply into the mandala ritual when danger lurked so near. Perhaps it had even been wrong for him to have become so focused, obsessed even, with the mandala and the hope it embodied. Shan had often listened as the lamas spoke with men like Drakte about the importance of letting compassion become the weapon of their struggle. Most of them replied that if they tried to defend their cause only with compassion, eventually all the compassionate would be dead.
He found himself wandering, walking as if in a daze, finally reaching his meditation place by the rocks. A cloud passed over the moon. The terrible scene kept playing again and again in his mind's eye: Drakte's life blood oozing over the mandala, Drakte staring helplessly at Shan. He restlessly watched the dimly lit horizon, then ventured toward the death hut again, thinking of entering. But the door was closed, and as he stepped closer he heard the Bardo, not in one voice but in two. The second voice was not that of Nyma, or Lokesh, or Shopo, all of whom remained in the lhakang. Someone else, a stranger, had joined Gendun. The second voice was almost like an echo of Gendun's soft, seasoned voice, but deeper- the voice of someone long schooled in the traditional ways, the voice of a teacher like Gendun. Shopo had told him other lamas sometimes came to meditate in secret at the hermitage. Or perhaps one of the dropka from the encampment knew the ceremony. Shan backed away. He could not bear to interrupt. Somehow he felt he had made it hard for Drakte to live. He didn't want to make it harder for him to die.
At dawn Shan asked the dropka woman to take him to the ridge and show him where she had first seen Drakte the night before. He followed her in silence through the grey light, up the steep switchback trail that connected the hermitage to the outside world. At the crest the dropka sank to the earth and warily inched herself forward to survey the valley beyond, as if expecting an ambush. After a long moment the woman pushed herself up and signaled for Shan to join her, but she did not wait for him. She jogged along the path at the crest for two hundred yards to the highest point of the ridge, where a rock cairn had been raised. When Shan caught up with the woman, she was busily adding rocks to the stack. The base of the cairn was ancient, thickly covered with grey-green lichen. But during the past weeks, while the dropka had been standing guard on the ridge, the herders had added several rocks a day, building it to a height of over six feet, to gain the attention of the local deities. Now the woman was gathering rocks at a feverish pace, her face drawn with worry. If the dropka were not permitted weapons at the hermitage, at least they could add rocks to the cairn.
Shan lifted a large rock as he approached and set it near the top of the stack. A sad smile split the woman's leathery face and she pushed back the red braided headband she always wore, then silently retrieved another stone.
"I can't stop thinking that I caused it," she said at last, studying the valley with a haunted expression. "Maybe what I did brought that thing that killed him. I blew the horn when I saw Drakte coming, before I recognized him." She stared at the horn, laying on a cloth near the cairn. "Maybe my dungchen attracted it somehow."
"No," Shan said, trying to sound more certain than he felt, "this thing was already after Drakte, already after the stone. Drakte came to warn us." But the purba had also been coming to help them start their journey with the stone eye. The purba's last words haunted him as much as the image of the young Tibetan's blood soaking the mandala. Had he apologized to Shan for something he, Drakte, had done? Or because the journey would be impossible now? Perhaps both, because he had unleashed the demon on them.
"And died for it," the herder said. She grimaced in pain and clutched her chest, as if something inside had torn. "I knew Drakte. He was born in this county, to herders living only a day's walk from here. His mother was so proud when he became a monk. He helped rebuild this hermitage years ago. He always knew which families had members imprisoned, and brought others like him to help in their places. Drakte even brought me messages from my son, who is in prison near Lhasa for sheltering a monk years ago." She touched the headband, braided of red cloth. "He brought me this from my son, made from the robe of a monk who died."
The woman stared out over the long valley as the dawning sun washed over it. "But the thing he came to warn us about did not harm us," she said in a confused tone. "It just killed him and left. It could have taken the stone but it didn't. I heard Drakte say it will kill for the stone. We saw it kill him." The dropka searched Shan's face. "It must be waiting somewhere in the mountains to return. Now that it knows. Tonight. Does it only do its killing at night?"
Shan only shook his head sadly. He extended a hand toward the head of the valley. "How did you see Drakte in the dark? You must have sounded the horn because you saw him. Was it only him?"
"There was nearly a half-moon. I have sat with our herds on many such nights, watching for wolves and snow lions with my sling. In such light, without clouds, I can see a great distance. I knew someone was coming. By the time he reached the valley floor I could see him plainly where he passed through patches of snow. Only him. But first I heard the dogs."
"Dogs?"
"From down the valley. Dogs barked from where the valley bends, where there had been no dogs for all these weeks." She pointed toward a large set of outcroppings nearly a mile away. "I began to watch more closely. At first I thought it might have been Tenzin."
"Tenzin?" Shan asked in surprise.
"He goes away at night sometimes. Two nights ago, and one night last week. I think he goes to places where he can pray in the moonlight. There are prayers that should only be said at night, and things that are perhaps best said only to the moon." She looked at Shan pointedly then shook her head and looked back down the valley. "I never suspected it was Drakte. I wouldn't have sounded the warning. He would always stop to talk with dogs he met, they wouldn't bark like that. And I knew his gait. He always walked straight, proud, like a warrior. But last night he acted so strange, trotting in plain sight in the moonlight, then sometimes stopping at rock outcroppings, as if trying to hide, like for an ambush."
"Or to see if he were being followed." In his mind's eye Shan replayed Drakte's entry into the chamber, followed moments later by the intruder. No, the purba had been shocked to see the huge man with the staff. He had not expected the intruder, had not expected to be followed. There had to be another reason he had been pausing at the rocks, another explanation for his strange behavior.
"When he finally climbed the ridge and he saw you what did he say?"
"I recognized him when he reached the crest, and waved. He said nothing, just pointed toward the hermitage. I went down with him, because I had blown the horn and didn't want the others to be alarmed, to think trouble was…" The words choked in the woman's throat. She had gone down from her post to assure them no one dangerous was coming after all. But while she was away from her post something very dangerous indeed had come.
"That thing. It was a powerful demon, to make us see the spear that way." The woman's voice was nearly a whisper.
"Spear? There was no spear."
"Of course you didn't see it, none of us did. But we all saw how Drakte was stabbed. That demon made the rest of us see it as just a staff."
Shan stared at the woman, considering her words, until he saw that the dropka had begun to stare past his shoulder. He turned to see Shopo cresting the ridge, walking down toward the long valley below, a cloth bundle slung over his shoulder.
"Blessed Buddha," the woman said in her mournful voice. "The sand." She touched the gau on her neck as she spoke. "He has to return the sands to the nagas, to the water deities."
"But in daylight he can be easily spotted by the patrols," Shan said in alarm, taking a step forward as he considered whether to run and stop the lama. "He could be arrested. Can't he wait?"
The dropka looked at Shan, gazing plaintively toward the mountains across the valley, as if asking the deities why she had to be burdened w
ith such a Chinese. She shook her head. "All that blood. And just as they were finishing, after all the weeks of prayers. At least it hadn't received the final consecration," she said heavily, as if an even greater catastrophe had been narrowly avoided. She gazed down at the solitary figure descending into the empty valley, and shook her head. "When they had finished Shopo would have gone to thank the nagas and tell them what a beautiful thing had been done with their gift, how it had been used to begin patching a god. Think of what he'll have to say to them now," the woman whispered, and a tear rolled down her cheek.
Shan watched the lama's retreating figure a moment in silence. "If there were dogs," he said, "maybe herders were at the head of the valley last night. Maybe someone could find them, and ask them what happened. I must stay with Gendun, but we need to know what happened out there last night."
When the woman gave no sign of hearing, Shan wandered back toward the switchback trail, leaving the forlorn dropka alone, stacking rocks again. He paused before beginning the descent to the hermitage, surveying the vast rugged landscape. Beyond the low spine of mountains on the far side of the valley he saw another range, higher again, the air shimmering behind it, its peaks snowcovered and lit a dazzling white by the early sun. It was how he felt. No matter how he tried, how hard he climbed, whenever he reached a new height, a new understanding, a new connection with his teachers, another mountain rose up, another obstacle presented itself, another mystery blocked his path. Once Lokesh had described it to him as the burden of being Shan. "Things we see as inevitable turns in the path of our lives, you see as enigmas you must stop to understand. It is the way you have of teaching yourself," his friend had added with a tinge of curiosity in his voice. But teaching implied learning, advancing with new knowledge. And Shan's path seemed to be relentlessly telling him how much he did not know.
As he began to turn toward the hermitage he caught movement on the valley floor. A black figure moved impossibly fast along the trail- on foot- so fast another pang of fear stabbed through Shan. Was it the same unnatural creature that had caught up with Drakte in the lhakang? Shan crouched in the low grass and watched in alarm as, far below, Shopo stopped and stared at the approaching figure. The dropka at the cairn groaned loudly and grabbed her horn, then stared at the figure in confusion. Old Tibetans told tales of mystic runners called lunggompas who could travel hundreds of miles in a day by summoning superhuman strength and training their bodies to ignore fatigue.
The figure slowed momentarily as it passed Shopo, then resumed its unnatural gait to ascend the ridge where Shan stood, toward the hermitage. The dropka lowered the horn. The intruder had not harmed nor even challenged the lama with his bundle of sand. Shan sat down on a rock near the path and waited. The runner, clad in a black-hooded sweatsuit, saw Shan from fifty feet away, slowed, then silently approached and sat across from him, cross-legged. After a moment the stranger produced a water bottle from a belt under the sweatsuit, briefly drank, and flipped back the hood.
It was a young Tibetan woman with a thin face and intense black eyes. "You must be the Chinese." She spoke in a stern voice, breathing deeply, though not panting as she should have been after such an arduous climb. After studying him a moment, she reached back to release two braids of hair which had been pinned close to her ears and arranged them, as if suddenly concerned about her appearance. "I am looking for Drakte."
"You're a purba," Shan suggested.
"I am a schoolteacher," the young woman shot back.
"There are no children here," Shan observed quietly.
The woman fixed Shan with a cold, challenging stare. "The Chinese said go to university to become a teacher, become a model for Tibetan youth," she said when he silently returned the stare. "So I went to university. They said run on the track team so we can have a Tibetan endurance runner to compete in China. So I did. I won medals in Beijing and I returned to my home district to be that model citizen." She spoke loudly. She was relating the story to taunt him. "But after a year of teaching they said no more classes in Tibetan. Only speak Chinese, only use Chinese books. And I said no, I will speak to Tibetan children in their own tongue. That is what a model Tibetan citizen does." She raised the bottle and drank deeply. "One day I came to my school and a Chinese teacher had taken my class. They had emptied my office, even took all my medals." She gazed down at the hermitage, then looked back at Shan. "But they didn't take my legs."
"So now you run for the purbas."
"I can go places horses and trucks can't."
"A purba lunggompa."
The woman gave an impatient shrug and pursed her lips in a frown, as if to emphasize that she was not impressed with his wit. After a moment she glanced back at the trail she had climbed.
"Are you being followed?" Shan asked.
"I need to see Drakte," she said.
"He's-" Shan's tongue seemed to grow heavy. He looked toward the buildings below.
Without waiting for another word the woman sprang up, bottle still in hand, and descended the steep ridge with the long leaps of an antelope.
Shan caught up with the woman in the death hut. She was leaning against the wall, drained of color, clutching her belly as she stared at the dead man. Her water bottle lay by her feet, its contents trickling onto the floor. Lokesh and Tenzin sat by the body with a bowl of water and a cloth, reverently washing Drakte's limbs. The brother of the woman on the ridge was lighting sticks of incense. Gendun sat in the shadows, softly continuing the Bardo rites, his eyes closed.
Shan lifted the water bottle. "Did you have a message for him?" he asked in a near whisper.
The woman did not reply. She approached the corpse and knelt, then slowly extended her fingers toward its face, as though to touch Drakte's cheek, but pulled them back before reaching his skin. "Who?" she asked in a cracking voice. "Who saw this happen? Who did this?" Her eyes shot toward Shan. Everyone knew who killed purbas.
"We all saw him killed," the dropka said with a shudder. "A curse was put on him and his blood poured out."
"No one," Shan disagreed. "No one saw him killed. We just saw him die. An intruder came and hit him in the belly with a staff. But not hard enough to make him bleed that way." He returned the woman's icy stare, until she raised a hand to wipe away a tear. "Our sentry above said Drakte was acting strange," he said more softly, "stopping along the valley floor. I think it was because he was already hurt." Shan approached the body and knelt by Lokesh, then lifted the bloodstained shirttail. He had been too shocked to investigate the body the night before. But now he had to understand. He raised the shirt and folded it back to expose the right abdomen. A four inch gout of tissue lay open, surrounded by a stain of congealed blood that ran down his hip. Now he remembered how, when he helped lift Drakte onto the blanket the night before, the purba's abdomen had felt unnaturally hard. Because he had been hemorrhaging internally.
"He was stabbed!" the woman groaned.
"Not last night," Shan said, and pointed to several threads extending from the sides of the wound, where it had been crudely sewn together. "This wound was made earlier, slicing deep into his organs." The makeshift sutures had burst apart, no doubt when the intruder pummeled Drakte with his staff.
The woman made a wrenching sound- half groan, half cry- then cut it off by clenching a knuckle between her teeth. "Last year," she said after a moment, her voice trembling, "Drakte slashed his arm when we were climbing some rocks above an army base." She knelt and rolled up Drakte's left sleeve, exposing a rough six-inch scar on his forearm. "He laughed when I said, Go to a doctor. He said it was too hard to find a good Tibetan doctor. He said bad things happened to Tibetans in Chinese hospitals. So he just sewed it up himself. No painkillers. Just a big needle and some yak hair thread he borrowed from a dropka who was repairing his tent."
Shan remembered how weak Drakte had appeared when he had arrived the night before, how he had leaned against the wall for support before stumbling toward the center of the room. The dropka guard said he had li
ngered at outcroppings as though watching for someone. He hadn't been watching, Shan was certain now, he had been resting, nursing his wound, summoning his strength to reach the hermitage. Drakte had thought he was free of his attacker, had even taken the time, hours earlier, to sew up the wound.
The purba runner leaned closer to Drakte's head and seemed to whisper something in the dead man's ear. When she straightened more tears were streaming down her cheeks. Shan remembered how she had tended to her braids on the ridge.
They sat in silence, watching as Lokesh gently washed the blood from the wound and replaced the shirttail. Tenzin continued to help, holding a bowl of water, but then he suddenly halted, his breath catching, and he set the bowl down with shaking hands as he studied the dead man again. He pushed back and leaned against the wall, grief abruptly twisting his face. The woman's eyes glazed and she seemed to forget the rest of them. Her hand rose again and she traced with one finger the long curving scar on Drakte's forehead, cupped her palm around his cheek then absently traced the scar once more. The motion had an intimate air, like a gesture of affection Drakte might still recognize.
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