Nyma stepped forward, her beads held conspicuously in her raised hand. "There are mantras to be said," she suggested. Gyalo replied with a pleased nod and Lokesh stepped forward, beads in hand, followed by two of the villagers.
The monk followed Nyma toward a large flat rock near the fire. He paused and surveyed the others in the camp. "My name is Gyalo," he said. "This is Jampa. And the other's name is Chemi," he added with a gesture down the trail. "She wanted to sit and watch some clouds for a while."
Shan looked up to see a woman emerging out of the shadows, one of the mastiffs at her side, wagging its tail.
"She was at that ruined gompa, helping them sift through those ashes," Gyalo explained. "But she said she was on her way north, too, to her home."
The woman smiled shyly as she approached the fire, and Nyma handed her a bowl of tea. She leaned back against a boulder and explained to Lhandro she was returning to her family in the hills above Yapchi Valley. Nyma and Lhandro welcomed her warmly, explaining to Shan they knew her family, who lived in a compound of five small houses only four miles from their own village. Lokesh sat beside her and began speaking with her in low tones as if he knew her, and then suddenly a wind blew and she put on the hat she had been carrying in her hand.
Shan stared in disbelief. It was his hat, or had been his hat. She was the woman Dremu had found on the trail, sick and too weak to stand. He knelt beside Lokesh. "That tonde," she was saying to the old Tibetan. "It was a good one, I think." Shan remembered the fossil Lokesh had given her, and the confused way she had looked at Lokesh when he had first placed it in her hand. He saw now that there was still weakness in her face, but her color was back and her eyes bright.
Shan stepped to her side. "What happened? Who came that day?"
The woman offered a thin smile. "I am better now," she said, and her hand moved to the mala at her yak-hair belt. She began a mantra, her way of avoiding Shan's questions.
He stared at her, then at Lokesh. She had been waiting for someone that day on the trail, alone and sick but so confident the one she awaited was coming she had resisted their offer of help. A healer had come to her in the mountains, and Shan and Lokesh had seen a healer, at least the ghost of a healer, in the mountains two days later.
They ate their meal in the twilight, Lokesh and Shan sitting with Lhandro in the shelter of a rock with a candle, studying the rongpa's tattered map. They would be out of the high mountains in a day, and in Yapchi the day after. Shan stared at the map in silence, as in a trance, thinking absently that it might show him where a deity might reside if only he knew how to read it.
Chemi fell asleep beside the fire under a heavy felt blanket. Lokesh and Gyalo sat watching the moon. Tenzin settled onto a flat rock nearby, silhouetted against the night sky, saying his silent rosary, seeming to have lost his tongue again. When the wind ebbed Lokesh and Shan sometimes gazed at the mute Tibetan and shared a meaningful glance. They had been used to such scenes in the gulag, where monks learned to do their rosaries in their bunks without violating the strict curfew rules against speaking. After years of living in such barracks Shan had begun to discern something like a sound from the monks. At first he had thought it was simply the sound of their lips touching, but later he had begun to hear more: a strange low noise like a rolling, constant moan, as if his ears had become attuned to a different range of sound that the monks were using to reach out to their deities.
Suddenly a dog barked. Lhandro was up at once, one of the heavy staffs in his hand. "Someone's coming from above," he warned, and motioned Shan to take cover in the rocks.
"Is it you, Yapchi?" a strained voice called out from the darkness. Lhandro dropped more fuel on the fire and stepped to the trail as two horses came into view. There were two men, but both were mounted on the lead horse.
"The Golok," Lhandro announced quietly, then called out to Dremu. "What did you do to our horse?"
"The horse is fine," Dremu said wearily. "It's the American."
Shan shot forward to help ease Winslow's limp form out of Dremu's saddle, where he had been riding in front of the Golok, as though he needed support.
"Something in his head," the Golok reported. "I knew he had to come down, fast. He kept asking to go higher. He thought he saw someone higher. But it was too high for him. He's from America."
Altitude sickness, Dremu meant. As they lay Winslow on a blanket by the fire the Golok explained that in the late afternoon the American had seen something, a reflection of bright light, as though from a piece of metal, from equipment, but when they had stopped on a ledge to study it in the binoculars, the American had acted drunk, staggering about the ledge, almost tumbling off the edge.
It was a common problem for visitors to Tibet and could strike even seasoned mountain climbers without warning. Winslow himself had told Shan about the American tourists who died every year of the sickness. It could be an embolism, or edema in the lungs or the brain. Usually the only treatment was significant and immediate descent.
Winslow's eyes fluttered open. "Pills. I have pills," he said in ragged gasps. "I left them with the pack horses."
Shan quickly found the American's rucksack among the caravan packs and located a small glass bottle labeled Diamox. He gave two of the white tablets to the American with some tea, and a few minutes later Winslow opened his eyes and raised his thumb and index finger in a circle, the American okay sign.
Shan and Lokesh sat with him as he gulped down a bowl of tea. "Sorry," Winslow said. "It happens. No big deal really. Except I was at a five-hundred-foot drop off when it hit me. This guy," he said, pointing to Dremu. "He saved my life."
The words seemed to confuse Lhandro, who had never lost his distrust of the Golok. The rongpa stood hesitantly, poured a bowl of tea and handed it to Dremu. The Golok slowly extended his hand and accepted the tea with an uncertain expression.
As if he had to prove his point, Winslow reached for his pack and ceremoniously unpacked his little metal stove. He called Dremu to his side and handed the device to him. "I've only got the one extra fuel tank," the American said apologetically, and handed the Golok the little blue tank Shan had seen in the pack.
Dremu gazed wide-eyed at the stove, smiling one instant, then looking solemnly at the American, then smiling again. "You saved my life," the American said again, loudly, as if he wanted to be certain everyone in the camp heard. "I was looking out over the cliff and suddenly everything was spinning. Next thing I know I'm leaning over the abyss and Dremu has me by the belt, pulling like a yak. He saved me for certain."
Unexpectedly, a sense of contentment fell over the camp. The American had recovered from near death. Chemi, a new friend, was healed and heading home. The brave monk Gyalo had chosen to spend the first night of his new life with them. Shan, Lokesh, Winslow, Lhandro, and Gyalo sat huddled in their blankets, watching the moon again, exclaiming every few minutes over shooting stars.
Suddenly a low agonized groan resonated through the darkness. Winslow pulled his electric lamp from his pocket. Lhandro grabbed his staff. Lokesh grabbed his mala.
Shan darted toward the sound. It was Nyma. She was rapidly uttering a mantra, with the sound of crying, bent over Anya.
"She was feeling strange all afternoon, she told me, said she stopped once by the trail, shaking all over, then it passed. She said it was okay now, that sometimes it didn't mean anything, that he might not be waking up, that sometimes it was like this, and nothing happened, as if he had dreamed something, or had a nightmare, but was still asleep."
A chill crept down Shan's spine. Nyma meant the oracle, the deity that spoke through the young girl.
"But look at her…" Anya was shaking visibly, convulsing, her arms and legs jerking off the blanket she lay on. One of the girl's hands was clenched around one of Nyma's. A trickle of blood ran down the back of Nyma's hand. The girl's fingernails were digging into the nun's flesh.
"Christ!" Winslow cried with a helpless glance at Shan. "She must be epileptic. It's a seizure.
Grand mal they call it. Put something in her mouth," he gasped, "to protect her tongue."
"Above all," Lhandro said in a solemn tone with a hand raised as though ready to deflect the American, "you cannot block her tongue."
Shan pulled Winslow away and tried to explain to the American what the Tibetans thought was happening.
"An oracle!" Winslow cried out, anger in his voice now. "Dammit, she's a little girl. You can't believe-" His words choked off as he studied the Tibetans, half a dozen now, sitting around the girl with grave, even scared expressions, not trying to help Anya despite their affection for her, only waiting. Lhandro darted to the packs and returned with a pencil and paper.
"Christ almighty," Winslow whispered in frustration. He stared uncertainly at the Tibetans, who gathered around the girl with butter lamps. "Jesus, Shan, you can't believe…" His voice drifted off and he stepped closer to the convulsing girl, as though he still might intervene to protect her from injuring herself.
Shan didn't know what to believe, except that he knew what the Tibetans believed about the girl. All he and the American could do was watch.
Gyalo sat near Anya's head. "My grandmother was visited, too," he declared in a soft voice. "We should make a welcoming place," he said, and began a quiet mantra. The others joined in immediately. Shan found that his hand was clasping his own gau.
"In my mountains," Anya suddenly said, "in my heart, in my blood." It sounded like Anya, Shan told himself, though a weary, distracted Anya. It could be a dream of some kind. Perhaps the girl had simply been exhausted from the trail, perhaps she had collapsed in slumber and was singing one of her spirit songs in her sleep.
Anya stopped trembling and seemed to stiffen, then grew very still as she spoke again. "Deep is the eye, brilliant blue eye, the nagas will hold it true." A chill crept down Shan's spine. Winslow gasped and stepped back. This wasn't Anya's voice. It was a cracked, dry voice, an old person's voice. It sounded hollow, like it was coming down a long tube.
There was movement at Shan's side. Lhandro was busily recording the words of the oracle. The voice echoed in Shan's mind. The eye, the oracle said. But the eye was not blue.
"Bind them, bind them, bind them, you have to wash it to bind them!" the voice croaked on. "So many dead. So many to die," it said in a mournful tone. A chilled silence hung over the camp and Lhandro, his face ghastly pale, looked up from his writing.
"Who will give voice when the songbird is gone?" the voice said, then spoke no more. With these final words Anya, though lying flat, somehow seemed to collapse. They waited in silence, no one moving, as though the words had somehow paralyzed them. Nyma stared into Anya's eyes, as though searching for the girl. Lokesh kept slowly nodding, and Nyma began rocking back and forth on her knees. Gyalo washed the girl's face from a bowl of water. No one spoke. Lokesh began his mantra again. Lhandro stared at the words he had written, then handed the paper to Shan as if Shan would know what to do about them. Shan stared uncertainly at the hurried scrawl, unable to read the handwriting. But he had watched, and knew Lhandro had not written the final words of the oracle. Who will give voice when the songbird is gone? the oracle had asked.
They sat for almost an hour, until Anya revived, rubbing her eyes as though coming out of a deep sleep, then suddenly pointing upward. A brilliant meteor shot through the sky, so close they heard it.
"The deity of Yapchi, the one whose eye you have, and that oracle," Winslow said in a small voice, still shaken by what he had witnessed, "they are the same? I mean I know there can't really be…" The American's words drifted away. There can't be a deity in the valley, he was about to say, just as, a few minutes earlier, he had been about to say there could be no oracle.
"I don't know," Shan replied hesitantly. "I don't think so."
Neither man seemed able to put their feelings into words. Because what they mostly felt, Shan suspected, was confusion.
After a long time Shan borrowed the American's light and went out with the red-circle pack among the sheep. He found a flat rock and salt in a pool of moonlight, cutting the threads away, reaching in for the chenyi stone. It was the first time he had looked at the stone since the day it had been sewn into the salt pack at Lamtso. He sat with the eye in front of him and stared at the dim outline in the rock, not knowing why. At least it might help him focus, might help him reach into his awareness in the way Gendun had taught him.
A loose pebble rattled behind Shan. As he turned, a shadow leapt forward and something hard pounded into his skull. He fell forward and drifted toward unconsciousness, quickly, yet still slow enough that before the blackness took him he realized dimly, like observing it from afar, that someone was kicking him in the ribs.
Chapter Ten
The eye of Yapchi was gone. In a fog of pain Shan squinted into the patch of moonlight where he had set the eye and reached out with one hand, futilely groping for the stone. He braced himself on one arm to peer into the shadows around him, fighting a stab of pain in his ribs. There was a glimmer of movement in the distance. He threw himself onto his feet, took a step- but the world spun about and he found himself on his knees, then on the ground. Blackness overtook him again.
When he awoke he was by the fire, on a blanket beside Anya. The girl, propped against a rock, offered a weak smile. Lokesh was on his other side, dabbing a bloody cloth against Shan's forehead. "It's gone," Shan said in a forlorn gasp. "I lost the eye."
"They're out there," Lokesh said softly. "Our friends are looking." He lifted Shan's hand and pressed it firmly, keeping it in his grip a moment.
As Shan tried to sit up blood roared in his ears. His eyes fluttered closed in another spell of dizziness. He became vaguely aware of people approaching, and urgent words in low voices. He heard hoofbeats, and in the distance, someone calling to the dogs. His mind went somewhere like slumber, but not slumber, and suddenly he was awake.
Hours had passed. The moon was setting. It was perhaps three in the morning. The villagers had used all the spare fuel to make half a dozen fires in a circle around the camp. A rider was dismounting. Lhandro was with the sheep, checking their harnesses. One sheep sat beside Anya, alone, without a pack, the brown ram that had carried the red-circle pack. The girl was stroking its head, as if to comfort it, as though it, too, shared their anguish.
Lokesh brought a bowl of tea and at last Shan was able to sit up. The old Tibetan shook his head grimly.
"There is no sign," Lhandro said when he approached Shan minutes later. "The eye is gone. The pack it was in is gone. We had a guard out but he was on the trail, watching for anyone following. The thief did not come up the trail. We searched the slopes in every direction. The moon was bright enough that we could scan the slopes with field glasses. Nothing," Lhandro concluded wearily. "That thing burns temples and tries to kill monks," he said, as though to explain his hopelessness. His face seemed to have aged many years. The eye was gone. He had failed his people. He looked up the slope, then jogged away into the darkness.
"It is my fault," Shan said, "I took it away from camp." Had it indeed been the dobdob? He tried to remember, but the memory was only of night, and pain. He touched the knot on his head. Something hard had hit him. It could have been the gnarled end of the dobdob's staff.
"No!" Nyma protested. "You probably saved others from injury. A thief like that would just have brought his violence to the rest of us if you hadn't taken the eye aside."
The searchers returned one by one over the next two hours, the last coming by horseback from the trail above. Some shook their heads, others just shrugged. Only Dremu, the last rider, from the slope above, had anything to report. A wild goat had run past him on the trail as though frightened by something above.
"The army," Winslow sighed. "If it was the army…" he began.
"How could it be the army?" Nyma asked. "If it had been the army, if it had been that Colonel Lin, they would not care about stealth, they would have just pounced on us, taken all of us away in chains like he tried to that day."
Some of the villagers murmured agreement. But Winslow and Shan exchanged a glance. Lin might have acted quietly, sending only one of his commandos for an ambush, if he had known the American was present.
"If the army took the eye," Shan said, "then it is gone, out of our reach. But if the army did not take the eye," he said with an expectant look at Lhandro, "then the eye may still be in our grasp." Lhandro shook his head, but seemed to ponder the words and looked up at Shan with interest.
"What would be the other reasons to take it?" another voice asked from the shadows. Gyalo appeared. "Nyma explained things to me," he said in an aside to Shan, before he turned to the others. "Shan is saying we must know the why of this theft."
"To destroy it," Nyma suggested. "So the valley could not be saved. Or to hide it."
"That would mean it could be those who wish to use your valley," Gyalo observed.
Lhandro nodded. "The oil crews. The geologists who work for the petroleum joint venture."
"And if not to destroy it or hide it?" Shan asked. "Perhaps the thief wants it back in Yapchi, too, just in a different way."
"Return it?" Nyma asked, creasing her brow. "Someone else… someone who didn't believe we would make it to Yapchi," she said in a hollow voice. "Maybe someone who didn't understand the oracle," she added with a quick glance toward Shan. "Or someone who just thought they could acquire merit somehow."
"That goat that ran from up the slope, it could have been someone climbing above who spooked it. Someone taking the eye over the mountain," Winslow observed.
"The army wouldn't take it over the mountain," Lhandro said quietly. "They would take it back to Lhasa."
"If the army didn't take the eye," Shan said, "then we must get to the valley, and quickly. Someone attempting to return it to the deity might be conspicuous. Maybe we can find the thief before the army does." It was a slim chance, he knew. But it was the only one they had.
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