"But this mountain," Shan said, "this mountain has many secrets still to tell us. Not just about Larkin."
"I thought everything was finished yesterday."
Shan nodded with a grim expression. "Some things were finished. But I think something else started."
The American's only response was to point to a massive blue sheep, a bharal, standing majestically on a ledge above them, leaning so far over the edge it almost seemed to be floating in the air. Winslow stared intensely at the animal and Shan remembered his story of being called by something to climb up a mountain and retrieve a small stone. The American began jogging up the trail, as if worried he was going to miss something.
Shan caught up with Winslow several minutes later at a strange nook in the rock, a slight recess in a high cliff face, where water seeped out of the mountain fifty feet above and flowed down the nearly vertical wall, not in a waterfall but in a broad, thin glistening sheet of moisture, nearly thirty feet wide, covered with moss and small ferns, falling onto a shelf of stone that appeared to have sloughed off the cliff eons earlier to form a sheltered alcove. Not falling onto the rock itself, Shan saw as he approached. The water fell behind the slab and flowed under it. The effect was of a perfectly level dry shelf bounded by a lush, living wall of plants, protected from the wind but open to the sun. More plants grew in pockets of soil on the shelf itself, plants he had not seen elsewhere on the mountain.
"Look at this," Winslow said in a tone of wonder, and Shan joined him on the other side of a large squarish boulder near the edge of the fallen slab. There were half a dozen flat rocks, each about eighteen inches high and a foot wide, arrayed in a semicircle before three evenly spaced indentations in the stone floor, each of them half-spheres about a foot wide and eight inches deep.
"Who… what was… how did this get made?" Winslow asked, with wonder in his voice.
Shan knelt at one of the indentations, touching its surface. The stones and holes were not perfectly shaped. They did not appear to be manmade, but they must have been- for mixing medicine. He turned to see the American rubbing his fingers along the flat back of the boulder that shielded the semicircle of stones. The surface, though partially encrusted with lichen, was covered with Tibetan script carved into the rock.
"The herb shelf," Shan whispered, and explained to Winslow what Lokesh had told him, how medicine lamas had once used the mountain.
Winslow seemed deeply moved by the place. He kept rubbing his fingers over the ancient script. "They knew so much," he said, "so much that we don't know. That we'll never know."
Shan sat, tentatively, on one of the stool stones, as lamas had once done. A gentle breeze stirred over the shelf, filled with unfamiliar smells. He smelled something like mint, and something like fennel, mixed with more acrid odors. The power of the place hung over it like a mist, though not in any frightening way. He felt strangely relaxed, and intensely aware. It was a place where healing began.
Winslow called Shan to a patch of moss below the shelf. It had been pressed down recently, by feet, and by reclining bodies.
"Two people," the American said as he squatted by the moss to study it. "Not last night, but recently." He turned and scanned the landscape urgently. Above Rapjung, in a small meadow less than five miles from where they now stood, they had seen two people who sought herbs, the ghost lama and his attendant. The American sprang up and began walking quickly, almost jogging, up the trail.
Twenty minutes later Winslow stopped and looked at a patch of snow high on the slope above them. "Why would Zhu hide?" he asked abruptly. "Why would he sneak around in the mountains without telling Jenkins?" He moved on, without waiting for a reply, walking rapidly until they reached the crest of the long ridge they climbed, where he flattened his map on a boulder. A high cliff jutted out to the west of them, forming a huge vertical wall that ran several hundred yards before cascading downward to the gorges below.
"We never asked where Zhu's team was," Shan said, "where they were when Zhu saw her body. We asked Jenkins about Larkin's team, but not about Zhu's." He studied the landscape. The cliff was the place Zhu had indicated on the map, the place where Larkin had fallen. Someone could have watched Larkin from the slope they had walked up, or from the flat ridge that ran parallel to the cliff, the one on which they stood. But not anyone on official venture business, for the ridge was outside the boundaries of the concession Jenkins had drawn on Winslow's map. Neither Larkin nor Zhu would have been inside their company's concession.
Half an hour later they were on top of the cliff, walking in grim silence, every few minutes pausing to gaze down into the shadows far below. Shan watched apprehensively as the American leaned out over the edge. In spots the footing was hard granite, but in many places debris of shattered rock and gravel lay underfoot. It would not be difficult for someone to slip and fall and certainly possible, even likely, for someone dizzy from altitude sickness to tumble into the shadows far below. Suddenly Winslow pressed his hand to his brow and Shan leapt forward.
"It's okay," Winslow said in a tight voice, pushing him away. "I took a pill."
"Did she have pills?" Shan asked.
"I don't know," the American replied, in a helpless tone. He stared down at a narrow ribbon of water that led away from the bottom of the cliff disappearing into the shadows of one of the gorges that twisted their way south.
Suddenly a patch of color caught Shan's eye; on a small ledge that jutted from the cliff face, a hundred feet away, twenty feet below the rim, a patch of light grey and blue in a pool of sunlight emerged from a tumble of boulders that filled a narrow fissure in the cliff face. He pointed, and Winslow darted away. By the time Shan reached him Winslow had already disappeared into the fissure that led to the ledge. "It's too dangerous," Shan called out. He saw now that the ledge had been formed when a slab of rock had cleaved away from the cliff and wedged itself in the fissure. It could be balanced there, for all he knew, ready to slide away under the pressure of a few more pounds of weight.
But Winslow was already on the ledge by the time Shan climbed into the fissure, and did not acknowledge Shan until he joined him on the tiny unprotected ledge. Shan shuddered as he saw how pale Winslow had become, and followed his gaze toward a body in the rocks. It was a dead bharal, one of the rare blue sheep that were nearing extinction. The animal had probably been dead a week, though it was hard to tell in the dry, cold air.
Winslow reached out to stroke the huge horns. "I thought…" the American began, then his voice drifted away. "I thought they never fell, a sheep like this, I thought their hooves gripped the rock."
Shan inched beside him and pointed to a patch of brown in the animal's neck, where the hair was matted together. "It didn't kill itself by falling," he said. "It was shot."
"Shoot it and leave it here? Who would…" Winslow's voice drifted again. After a long silence he stroked the horns again, then placed a tentative fingertip on the rich coat between the animal's ears. "I was sitting in the airport with a Tibetan bureaucrat, waiting while one of those bodies was loaded on a plane. He thought my job was very funny. He said the one thing Tibet is about, has always been about, is impermanence, and people should know that before coming." Winslow seemed to be trying to explain something to the sheep. "Afterwards I realized he thought it was amusing that people were surprised by impermanence." He began stroking the sheep between the ears, as if it needed comforting.
It felt as though they could not leave the dead animal, as though the beautiful sheep that had died alone, snatched unsuspecting from life in one cruel instant, deserved more. Shan considered the position of the body and the cliff above. The bharal had been on the top of the cliff, at the edge, surveying its domain, not knowing of the ways, until the last instant, when the ways of men had caught up with it.
"Larkin didn't do this," Winslow said, as if he knew the woman.
"No," Shan agreed. "Someone else was here."
The shot had been clean, probably with a high-powered rifle with a tel
escopic sight. It had not been made by a hunter, for the body could have been easily retrieved. It had been whimsy that had killed the beautiful creature, the act of one who killed because he could kill, a casual act by one who had snapped off a quick shot, laughed, and moved on.
They exchanged a grim glance and when Winslow rose it seemed he had a great weight on his back. He held onto the side of the fissure as though having trouble standing.
"We should do something," the American said, the helplessness back in his voice.
Shan did not reply, but began building a cairn on a flat rock above the sheep's head, exposed to the light and the wind. Working in silence, in ten minutes they had built a narrow two-foot cairn. Shan remembered the old khata, still in his pocket from where he had retrieved it above the oil camp, and anchored it under the top stone.
Winslow nodded solemnly and closed his eyes in what might have been a prayer, then climbed back up to the rim of the cliff. At the top he turned back toward the mixing ledge, apparently no longer interested in searching the cliff, and when they reached the main spine of the mountain he studied his map once more. "Yapchi," he said, "from here, if we could cross those two ridges-" He pointed to two long steep outriders to the north. "It's only four miles." He turned to Shan. "I want to know where Zhu's team is, where the other witnesses are."
An ache of foreboding coursed through Shan as the American spoke, for he knew Winslow was suggesting they try to traverse the treacherous terrain to reach the valley, which by now would be crowded with angry soldiers searching for Lin, but Shan knew the answers to their mysteries lay in the valley and the slopes above it. He offered a reluctant nod and gestured for him to lead the way. Ten minutes later Winslow stopped him with an upraised hand. Between them and the first of the ridges was a deep, impassable gorge not marked on the map. They would not reach Yapchi that day. The American began to turn back, then paused and pointed with a grin. On the crest of the ridge beyond, far beyond earshot, walked a monk and a yak, with the yak in front, as though leading the monk somewhere. Gyalo and Jampa had disappeared, Lepka had explained, after leaving him on the narrow trail that descended to the mixing ledge.
Remembering the bharal, Shan feared for the monk. He was helping the local people, Shan knew, transporting the sick, or supplies, or perhaps just looking for a good meditation rock. Perhaps letting Jampa look for a good rock.
"He's going to visit me, your friend," Winslow said suddenly as he watched the pair move toward the higher elevation.
"Gyalo?"
"Lokesh. He talked to me on the trail yesterday. He wanted to know everything I could tell him about Beijing. He said he had heard there were lights on the street that told you when to walk, and he wanted to know how to read them. He said he will be coming to the city in a few months, and asked if he could sleep on my floor. He asked if I could draw him a map to show where the Chairman lives."
Shan grimaced. "Lokesh doesn't understand."
"No," Winslow agreed. "But he said he is on the path his deity takes him." The American studied Shan's pained expression and shrugged. "I will do my best to watch over him when he comes," he promised, then moved down the trail that led back to the mixing ledge.
Anya and Tenzin were with Lin when they returned, the girl holding his hand again, Tenzin wiping his brow with a wet cloth. To Shan's surprise Lin's head moved, and his eyes fluttered open and shut. "He just does that," Anya whispered. "He doesn't speak. He doesn't focus. I am not sure where he is," she said solemnly. "He may not find awareness again," she added sadly.
But suddenly, as Tenzin wiped his brow, Lin's eyes opened wide. "You!" he groaned, and jerked his hand from Anya to grab Tenzin's neck, squeezing him, pulling him down. Tenzin, strangely, did not resist, even though Lin was clearly choking him. Then, as suddenly as they had opened, Lin's eyes rolled back into his head and his hand went limp, falling onto his chest.
"He has bad dreams," Anya said to Tenzin in an oddly apologetic tone.
Tenzin looked at the girl, expressionless, and began wiping Lin's brow again. A minute later, as Anya rose for fresh water, Shan knelt at the pallet and slipped his fingers into the pockets of Lin's tunic. There was no sign of Lhandro's identity papers. But he pulled out a folded photograph from a breast pocket, which he carried to the doorway to examine in the sunlight.
It was a grainy blurred black-and-white image, probably captured from a security camera. It showed two men in an office hallway, wearing the long work tunics of janitors and carrying buckets and mops. They were facing the opposite direction, but the taller, older of the men had his head slightly turned to look over his shoulder. The first man could have been Drakte. But there was no mistake about the second man in janitor's garb. It was Tenzin. In one of the buckets, Shan suspected, was the eye of Yapchi.
"You need to know something," Winslow said from behind him, with warning in his voice. He was pulling his binoculars from their case as Nyma appeared behind him.
"It's Lokesh," Nyma blurted out, stepping around the American. "Lokesh disappeared." He had left soon after Shan and Winslow had departed, Nyma explained, going down the narrow goat trail that led below, carrying only some cold tsampa and a water bottle, talking, seemingly speaking to people no one else could see. Shan darted out onto the ledge, pulling out his battered field glasses. He could see half a dozen trails as well as several long, gradual slopes where a man could climb without a trail. For the next hour he and Winslow scanned every trail, every flat rock where someone might sit to meditate. Shan ran down the trail where Lokesh had last been seen, stopping often to call his name. Nowhere was there sign of his old friend. Lin's soldiers knew Lokesh's face. If the colonel's men found him they would have no patience, no incentive even to give him to the knobs. They would work on him, frantically, as long as it took, with any tool they could find, to discover what had happened to their colonel.
Shan sank onto a rock at the top of the cliff, fighting the dark thing that seemed to be clenching his heart. He watched the sun disappear over the distant changtang, losing himself in the dark, threatening swirls of shadow on the horizon.
Suddenly someone touched him and his head jerked up off his chest. He had been asleep. The colors were gone from the horizon. It was nearly dark. Nyma knelt beside him, crying.
"Lokesh?" he asked in alarm.
She nodded, scrubbing away tears with the back of her hand. "He found him. He went into the mountains and found him. Lepka saw them coming, and said we must be near a portal to one of the hidden lands. We didn't understand, but then Winslow saw the two of them on a goat path above. It was Lokesh, walking ahead of him, and turning all the time, as if always trying to coax him forward a few more steps, like a wild animal being tamed." She looked back toward the hidden chambers.
Shan climbed to his feet, confused.
"It's a spirit creature," Nyma said. "It has to be a spirit creature come to save us."
He ran, and stumbled, falling to a knee, picked himself up and ran again. Inside, the main chamber was like a temple, filled with a reverent silence, the air sluiced with incense smoke. Lhandro and his parents sat near the wall, eyes round and excited. The headman's mother rocked back and forth, as Lhandro and Lepka silently mouthed their beads. Winslow sat in the furthest shadows, his countenance lit with an odd, puzzled joy.
At the foot of the pallet sat Lokesh, and at one side Anya still held Lin's hand. Opposite the girl, one hand stroking Lin's forehead, the other reading his wrist pulse, was an ancient Tibetan, older even than Lhandro's father. He appeared frail and strong at once, thin as a reed yet vibrant and serene in his countenance. He wore a tattered quilted worker's jacket over an equally tattered maroon robe, and on his feet were old black athletic shoes that were on the verge of disintegration. A sturdy staff leaned on the wall beside him.
Lokesh gave a small croaking sound as he saw Shan, then he reached out and grabbed Shan's hand in both of his own. Lokesh squeezed it hard, again and again. His friend seemed to be in the grip of some strang
e rapture. "It's Jokar Rinpoche!" Lokesh said when he was finally able to speak. "From Rapjung," he added, as if the ruined monastery was still routinely sending out old healers. "From before. The same Jokar," he whispered, as though someone might think it was a different incarnation of the lama.
It was the medicine lama, the apparition they had seen in the herb meadow, the lama, Shan knew, who had healed Chemi. He had convinced himself that the lama had to be real, that such a man, despite all odds, was walking the mountains, a flesh-and-blood vestige of another world, not a deity or demon or spirit creature. But in that moment, as the lama turned and lifted his hand toward Shan, for some reason Shan could not comprehend, it seemed his father was reaching out to touch him, and when the lama grasped his hand Shan gasped, and felt his breath rush out.
"Lha gyal lo," the lama said softy, with a small, familiar smile, then turned back to his patient.
They sat in silence as the lama worked, incense filling the room, wind fluting around the rocks overhead. Lepka broke into a low song. The purbas stood in the shadows with wary, bewildered expressions.
Shan rose and stepped backwards into the shadows. In the flickering light he saw Winslow in the corner, still grinning. In the nearest of the meditation cells Tenzin sat alone, and apart, in deep meditation. Shan sat at the edge of the light and studied the lama, and Lokesh- whose face still glowed in wonder, reverence mixed with the eagerness of a young student.
Shan sensed that everyone in the room felt the same detached, otherworldly nature of the moment. It was indeed as though Jokar had come from another world, had been spirited there because he was needed, and was only visiting before ascending again to the deities. The lama was unlike any man Shan had ever seen, ancient yet ageless. When he had touched Shan, in the moment he had sensed his father nearby, something like a surge of electricity had shot up Shan's arm. Sometimes deities visit, Anya had said, and change people's lives forever.
Oddly, the lama was missing the little finger on his left hand. Only a tiny stump remained where one had been. Shan remembered Lokesh speaking of how the medicine makers in Rapjung had sometimes wielded huge cleavers to chop herbs and how young students, before understanding the rhythm of the cleavers, sometimes lost fingers to the blades. It must have happened decades ago.
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