The rider was a woman, although the cuts and welts on her face made it difficult to discern her features. Blood mixed with rain streaked down her face. She was not unconscious, but her wild, unblinking eyes were little different than those of the inconsolable horse, who paced back and forth among the other mounts, its flanks quivering, unwilling to be touched.
Then the woman glimpsed Shan and she clamped her hand around his arm. "I found them, those herders you needed to know about." Shan recognized the weary voice, and the braided red cloth she wore around her head. It was the dropka woman from the ridge, the guard who had blamed herself for letting the dobdob through to Drakte. Lokesh gently wiped the blood from her cheeks. "They had a terrible fright," the woman gasped. "There was just an old man and woman, with a small herd and dogs," she said. "They never saw Drakte, they said, but an old lama was with them, just for the night, and he was attacked." Tears mixed with the blood that still trickled down her face. She forced a smile for Lokesh as he wiped her cheek again, then continued. "The knobs want that lama. They have been chasing him, those herders say."
"What lama?" Shan asked in alarm, leaning over her. Surely she did not mean Gendun, or Shopo, both of whom had been in the hermitage the night before.
The dropka shook her head. "I don't know. Those old people didn't make sense, they were so scared. They were shy of speaking about him. A ghost lama, they called him. Sometimes ghosts are real, they said. They were very upset. The lama disappeared before dawn. The old man said the knobs must have taken him. But the woman insisted otherwise. She said ghosts always fade away when the sun rises."
The wind blew harder, screeching around the outcropping. The woman stared at her palm, where a drop of blood had fallen. Shan looked up in surprise, searching for its source, then she lifted a trembling hand and touched his cheek, her fingers coming away bloody.
"You're injured," she said softly.
"It's only hail," Shan said.
The woman's eyes cleared, and she pulled away the rag Lokesh was using to clean her own face to clean Shan's. "I didn't understand," she continued. "But you said you needed to know. I had to find you, because of the danger it may mean for the eye." She paused and clenched Shan's arm again. "It was knobs who wounded Drakte, it must have been. Our Drakte, he would have fought knobs to protect a lama." She twisted to see her horse. "And that," she said, pointing to the crude wooden saddle. "I wanted you to have it. We couldn't keep it because those knobs are coming and maybe some night that thing…" She swallowed hard and looked away, as though unable to speak of the dobdob.
Shan stood and lifted a pouch from the saddle, the pouch Drakte had carried to the hermitage the night before, the pouch with the sling and ledger book.
Suddenly the storm was over. The air cleared, and sunlight burst across the barren landscape. But the woman's words hung over them like a portent of another, far worse storm.
Nyma looked to Dremu, as if expecting him to lead them on. But the Golok was gazing with hooded eyes, shifting from the dropka woman to her horse to Tenzin. When he felt the nun's stare he forced a thin smile, then ventured around the corner of the rock with the field glasses. "Soldiers kneeling on the hood of the truck," he reported a moment later. "Maybe the windshield was shattered. They'll probably give up for the day."
"Go," the dropka woman pleaded. Threads of blood still streaked her cheek. "I will watch Shopo and the Pure Water Lama."
Tenzin dumped a small mound of yak dung beside her and ignited it. As she gestured for them to hurry, they reluctantly climbed onto their horses.
Shan paused as the others rode away. "Tell those riders behind us to go back," he said. "Tell them to help protect the lamas."
When Shan emerged around the outcropping the truck was moving back in the direction it had come, toward the south. "Was it the 54th Mountain Brigade?" he wondered out loud.
Dremu grunted but offered no answer. Nyma stared at the ground, her lower lip between her teeth. The Golok circled his horse about them, looking not toward the lake but behind them, before setting off down the western slope. Shan settled his horse into a slow walk at the back of the column, keeping Lokesh before him. The army was in front of them but there was no turning back, for behind were the knobs and the furious dobdob.
In another hour they crested the last of the low hills that surrounded the lake and gained an unobstructed view of the vast turquoise waters. The twenty-five-mile-long lake seemed alive as the waters shivered in the wind and sun. Nyma pointed out several low dark shapes scattered along the distant shoreline, mere dots on the horizon, the heavy felt yurts of the dropka clans who had brought their sheep to the rich spring pastures.
They rode through meadows dense with spring growth, splashing through countless rivulets of runoff from the mountains, until they reached the lake and dismounted near a huge raft of black and white geese that floated offshore, their white crowns gleaming in the sun. Bar-headed geese the Tibetans called them. The wind ebbed and their chattering filled the air.
Suddenly Lokesh leapt past him, arms extended, and ran into the cold waters of the lake, laughing like a child, pushing through the water until it reached his knees. "Aw! Aw! Aw!" he cried toward the birds, then turned toward Shan with a huge grin. "It's a sound my mother used to make to geese. It's good luck, she always said, to see so many geese resting on water. It means the spirits of the air are in harmony with the spirits of the water."
His mother. Lokesh almost never spoke of his mother, who occupied a special, sacred place in his heart, much as Shan's father did in his. Lokesh's mother had died in 1940, the year that the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama had arrived in Lhasa, a year of great celebration and affirmation of the old ways. She had led a perfect life, Lokesh once said, and died at the perfect time, for afterwards came the decades of darkness and destruction.
The old Tibetan bent and splashed water on his face, then gestured for Shan to join him. Shan hesitated only a moment, then stepped into the lake beside his friend. "Aw! Aw! Aw!" Shan cried toward the geese, hands upraised.
Lokesh laughed heartily. "Lha gyal lo!" he called out joyfully toward the birds.
Shan washed his face in the frigid water, then cupped some in his hand to drink.
"No," Lokesh warned, touching Shan's arm. "Too salty. Drink from the streams."
Shan tasted a drop on his finger and confirmed Lokesh's words, then surveyed the landscape again. Lamtso was one of the great basin lakes that were spread across the eastern changtang, lakes that had no outlets and therefore concentrated the salts and other minerals that washed off the surrounding mountains.
The Golok found a boulder and sat, drinking his chang as Nyma and Tenzin collected rocks for a small cairn to honor the nagas before moving on. "Auspicious start," Nyma observed repeatedly as she worked, then paused to watch Tenzin. The mute Tibetan, whom she had stayed beside since the hailstorm, put a frantic energy into building the cairn. Her face clouded with concern, Nyma stepped to her horse pack, reached in, and extracted a mala, her spare rosary, which she extended toward Tenzin.
Tenzin looked at the beads but his eyes seemed unable to focus on them. His jaw worked up and down as if something inside was trying to speak, perhaps trying to remember the mouthing of a mantra. Ever since Drakte's death he had been more distant than ever, more withdrawn into his strange personal anguish. Shan knew survivors of the gulag often lived this way. An event would trigger a door inside and some nightmare from his imprisonment would be relived. Nyma pressed the beads into his hands and led Tenzin to his horse as Dremu trotted away.
They had followed the lakeside trail for only twenty minutes when Dremu halted at the top of a hill and dismounted, staring down the far side with a worried expression.
Shan dismounted and followed the Golok's gaze toward a white vehicle, a heavy compact minibus of the type sometimes used to convey passengers between Tibet's cities. It had apparently arrived from the southeast by means of a narrow dirt road, and had just turned onto the rough track that p
aralleled the shores of the lake. Two men sat on a large flat rock in front of the vehicle, one in the maroon robe of a monk, the other dressed like a businessman in a white shirt and tie, while three men in monks' robes struggled to free the left rear wheel, which was mired in mud.
"Better to go around," Dremu warned.
But Shan was already striding down the hill as the Golok spoke.
The men on the rock watched Shan with disinterested expressions as he approached. With his broad-rimmed hat and tattered coat, he looked like just another dropka. The man in the tie was a middle-aged Han, bald on the top of his head, his remaining hair thin and long on the sides, combed back. The small black eyes that looked out of his wide, fleshy face seemed as brightly polished as his shoes. A cigarette dangled from the man's lips. The Tibetan he sat with had thick, neatly trimmed hair, and wore a robe unlike any Shan had ever seen, for it was fringed with gold and appeared, implausibly, to have a monogram embroidered over its left breast. Between them on the rock was a bottle of orange drink and what seemed to be a plastic bag of sunflower seeds.
The Han exhaled a long plume of smoke toward Shan as he approached the rock, as though to warn him away. Shan offered a hesitant nod and stepped around the two men, slowing to read the six-inch-high Tibetan and Chinese characters painted on the side of the bus. New Beliefs for the New Century, they said, and below them in smaller letters an adaptation of a familiar slogan: Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism.
He looked back toward his companions. Lokesh and Nyma followed, but Dremu and Tenzin had retreated, so that only their heads were visible above the crest of the hill. Nyma approached the rock with the two men, then froze and cast a nervous glance up the hill as if thinking of fleeing. Shan saw a small legend stenciled on the driver's door: Bureau of Religious Affairs.
"Howlers!" Nyma whispered in alarm as she reached him. It was what many of the purbas called the members of the Bureau, for the strident way they often addressed Tibetans. At first the howlers had screamed at tamzing, the criticism sessions that had long been the Party's favorite tool for political correction. Now, with tamzing losing favor in Party circles, they continued to be howlers, just in subtler ways, fervently preaching to Tibetans about the socialist sins of traditional Buddhism.
Shan's throat went bone dry as he glanced back at the Han in the tie. These were the men who granted, and revoked, the licenses of nuns and monks; the ones who anointed gompas based on the political correctness of their inhabitants; the ones who opened or shut monasteries with the stroke of a pen and granted the right to practice spirituality as though they were courtiers granting political favors.
Nyma pressed her hat low over her head and stepped close to Shan. The chuba she wore hid her makeshift robe.
The three monks were struggling to free the wheel, a small trowel and a long jack handle their only tools. Two of the men, spattered with mud, knelt by the wheel as the third, a stocky monk with the thick arms and broad hands of a laborer, carried stones from the hillside to the mired wheel.
"A flock of sheep was on the road," the broad-shouldered monk explained as he dropped the stones by the bus. The other two monks, both younger than the first, cast sharp glances at the man as though warning him not to speak. "They couldn't wait, so they drove around them, off the road. I don't know which made them angrier, getting stuck or the way all of those sheep stopped and stared at them after we went into the mud." Nyma gave a small sound of amusement and nervously looked back at the men on the rock.
"Digging around the wheel just moves the mud around," Lokesh suggested to the mud-spattered monks. "You need to make the wheel grip something," he said, pointing approvingly to the stack of rocks collected by the third monk, then followed the stocky man toward the hill to collect more.
They were a mobile education unit, the monk explained as Shan joined them on the hillside, bringing news of government programs to the local population. "Counting the barley fields," the monk added.
Shan stared out over the landscape. It was a land of herders. He doubted there was a barley field within fifty miles. "But you're from a gompa," he observed.
"Khang-nyi." It meant Second House. "The only gompa for a hundred miles." He paused and looked at the men on the flat rock. The wind had died, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung about them. A puzzled expression crossed the monk's face, as though the two men on the rock confused him. He bent to retrieve another stone.
"What kind of government programs?" Shan asked.
The monk looked at Shan uncertainly. "Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism," he recited in the formal tone of a mantra, as though to correct any wrong impression he may have made, and carried away his stones.
Ten minutes later, the vehicle freed, the men on the rock stretched lazily and stepped toward the front doors of the minibus. As Nyma and Lokesh hurried back up the hill, the one wearing the elegant robe reached inside the bus and pulled out several pamphlets, handing one to Shan.
"Have you come to understand, comrade?" the man asked abruptly. His eyes burned brightly above a hooked nose that gave him a hawk-like appearance. His companion stepped closer and pointed sternly to the words on the cover of the pamphlet: Serene Prosperity.
Shan stared at the men uncertainly. For some reason he remembered being stopped years earlier on a Beijing street by an earnest young woman in a brilliant white blouse, who handed him a pamphlet and asked, "Do you believe?" This team from Religious Affairs were also missionaries of a sort, for the godless agency that regulated the deities of Tibet.
Serene Prosperity. He stared at the words. They had the sound of a cruel joke played on the Tibetans. Suddenly Shan realized the man in the white shirt, the howler, was staring at him. "This is a land for herders," the man observed. "The ones they call dropka." He seemed to have suddenly recognized Shan as a fellow Han. His small black eyes moved restlessly back and forth, scanning the hill behind, though his head did not turn.
Shan sensed the muscles of his legs tensing, as if something in him expected the howler to coil and strike.
"You have companions who are hiding from us," the elegant monk observed in a casual tone. "So shy, like pups, running when a vehicle comes." His voice was smooth and refined, an orator's voice. "These people need to understand," he added, as if enlisting Shan's aid, "they need our help." Then he handed Shan the pamphlets remaining in his hand. "I am their abbot. Khodrak Rinpoche."
Shan found himself staring at the man. He had never heard a monk introduce himself as a revered teacher.
"They need our protection," Khodrak said. "Are you a school instructor?" The government sometimes sent Han instructors among the nomads, riding circuits through the vast pasture lands. "They don't understand what is at stake," he continued, not waiting for an answer. "The Bureau of Religious Affairs is the key to their prosperity. Misinterpretation of events is dangerous."
Shan didn't understand a word the men were saying. The Han in the white shirt acted anxious, on the edge of anger; the abbot as if engaged in some form of political dialectic with Shan. They both assumed they could confide in Shan. In their world Han did not travel with Tibetans on the remote changtang voluntarily, so he must be on government duty.
"News comes slow this far away from the highway," Shan ventured.
The two men exchanged a puzzled, uncertain glance. "Director Tuan suffered a terrible loss," Khodrak said, indicating his companion with a nod. "His deputy, a man named Chao, was murdered in Amdo town. We all must work to prevent the wrong kind of reaction."
"A Deputy Director in Religious Affairs was murdered?" Shan asked the question slowly, fighting the chill that crept over his limbs. The purba at the river had said an official was killed but had not known it was a howler. It was the worst possible news, the kind of news that brought martial law to a district, for Religious Affairs was a favored child of Beijing, its most important political vehicle in Tibet.
Khodrak nodded gravely. "Killed in a stable near his office. Deputy Di
rector Chao is a martyr to our noble cause. You must be watchful. Important things will be happening."
A senior howler had been killed and the reaction of his superior and the abbot was to distribute propaganda among the herders. Shan tried to make his bone-dry tongue move. He raised the pamphlets Khodrak had given him. "I will do what I can," he said, and backed away.
The stocky monk lingered a moment at the rear of the vehicle, wiping mud from his hand with a tuft of grass as the others climbed inside. Shan offered him the rag he carried in his back pocket as a handkerchief. The man declined with a grateful nod, then leaned toward Shan. "Be careful with their words," he said in a low, confiding tone. "The abbot is really looking for a man with a fish."
Shan studied the monk in confusion. "You mean the killer? From the lake? A fisherman?" It made no sense. The Tibetans of the region almost never ate fish, would never take fish from a holy lake.
"Warn the dropka, warn my people," the monk said urgently, then quickly joined the others. He had not even fully shut his door when Director Tuan gunned the engine and the minibus roared away.
Shan stared at the minibus as it disappeared down the track that ran along the shoreline. Had the monk been suggesting that a man with a fish was connected to the killing? But Religious Affairs did not conduct murder investigations, Public Security did. And the knobs were chasing an old lama. Did they think the lama was the murderer?
He handed one of the pamphlets to Lokesh as they reached the top of the hill. Inside was a photograph of the Chairman of the Communist Party, crudely interposed over the image of the Potola in Lhasa, above several paragraphs of small print. Dremu reached out and grabbed the brochure from the old Tibetan, inserting it in his pocket without opening it. "Firestarters. The howlers always have good paper for burning."
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