Winslow opened his map with a puzzled look, and shared it with Shan. Wenquan was the first town in Qinghai, going north. Amdo was the next town south for anyone going toward Lhasa.
"They weren't taken where anyone would expect," Somo said in a hushed, urgent voice. "Not to jails. Not to Lhasa. Not to the airport to be sent to some other prisoner facility. Not to any known reprogramming facility." There was nothing on the section of highway between the cities, except a short thin grey line intersecting it from the west. "There is only one place," she said, pointing to the end of the line. "Norbu gompa."
It made no sense. But it would make less sense for Religious Affairs and the soldiers to hold the prisoners at Yapchi, and certainly the soldiers knew about Norbu. Shan's mouth went dry as he recalled the political signs at the gompa, the strange, bullying air of the men in white shirts and the predatory gaze of Chairman Khodrak.
"And there's something else, something that has the others confused. The howlers and the soldiers had a big argument at Yapchi. Tuan and one of Lin's officers were shouting at each other the night after Tenzin and Lokesh were taken, and the next morning Tuan and all his men were gone."
Suddenly there was a whistle from across the top of the ridge. A helicopter soared into view, the same sleek machine that had deposited them there the day before. In moments it landed, and two men began unloading several small cartons and nylon bags. In less than five minutes they were done. The men pounded a tall stake into the ground, an orange pennant fixed to the top, and leapt back inside. In seconds the machine was gone.
Winslow leapt to his feet, Somo a step behind him. "I need those supplies!" Larkin called after him, then sighed and sank back against her rock to read her notes.
Ten minutes later Winslow and Somo had returned and the two purba sentries began stealing back along the perimeter of the clearing, having signaled that someone was approaching. The boxes still stood in the center of the field but they had been rearranged. In the center were two figures wearing the coveralls and green helmets Shan and Somo had worn from Golmud. Winslow had fastened a twist of brown grass at the back of one helmet, like a braid of hair. They were dummies, stuffed with the blankets from the shipment, one held up with the stake, the other propped on the boxes. The green figures were slightly bent, as though reading the manifest, their backs toward the path the purbas watched.
"Thirty minutes," Larkin announced impatiently when the purbas returned. "Thirty minutes and I go out and take my equipment." But barely five minutes had passed when one of the purbas snapped his fingers and pointed to the north. Shan ventured a glance around the rocks. Three figures had appeared at the top of the trail, and were bent, running for cover.
"That idiot Zhu probably just wants to pilfer some of my supplies," Larkin fumed. "The little bastard probably sells things on the-" She was interrupted by the sickening crack of a long-range rifle. It shot twice more, and the purbas, their faces drained of color, began pushing Larkin away, down the other side of the ridge.
Shan slipped his head around the rock one more time. The dummies were sprawled over the boxes, one of the helmets in pieces. And from the other side of the clearing strode Special Director Zhu, a hunting rifle perched on his shoulder. His pace was jaunty, as if he were going to collect a trophy.
They dared not take the trail back to the gorge, for it exposed them on a long open slope where they would make easy targets for anyone with such a weapon. Shan led them downward, onto a path at the back of the mountain. In an hour they arrived at the mixing ledge.
Nyma, on a rock near the hidden entrance, called out excitedly, then ran to greet them. As she reached them, however, she paused and looked uncertainly at Shan's companions. She studied Melissa Larkin then turned toward Winslow with a knowing nod. "You never really thought she was dead," she observed solemnly. "I knew that, but to speak of such things could be bad luck."
Larkin smiled awkwardly. She had been deeply shaken by what Zhu had done. She had, Shan suspected, assumed she would go back to the venture when her work with the purbas was done. Now she knew the Special Projects Director would rather see her dead.
Shan quickly introduced Lhandro and his parents, the only occupants of the rooms. They had not seen the medicine lama. Lhandro and his mother served tea as Shan explained what had happened to Tenzin and Lokesh, and the news of Tenzin's true identity. Afterwards Shan found Anya and Lin beyond the gnarled old juniper on a blanket with a bowl of cold tsampa balls, talking and pointing toward clouds. It had the air of a picnic. He stopped fifty feet away. They did not see him. The colonel had his hands together, and the girl was tying a complex pattern of yarn around his fingers. There was an odd noise coming from Lin, as if he were in pain. Shan stepped closer. No, Lin was laughing.
As Shan approached the girl finished her tying. She looked into Lin's face expectantly then pulled one end of the yarn and the entire structure of yarn collapsed. Lin laughed again. Shan stepped forward. They both looked up, startled. Lin frowned and seemed to curse under his breath. Anya patted the blanket beside her and Shan sat.
They did not speak. Anya offered Shan the bowl of tsampa, then pointed at a large bird of prey, a lammergeier, soaring over one of the long ridges below. Shan looked toward the south. Somewhere in the haze near the horizon stood Norbu. Lin pointed to a flight of geese moving in the direction of Lamtso. Once, Shan recalled, Lin had ravaged a line of geese with an automatic rifle.
Suddenly a gust of wind grabbed the yarn on the blanket and carried it to the rocks thirty feet away. Anya sprang up to chase it.
"They took my friends," Shan said quietly.
"That old one, and the tall one who calls himself Tenzin," Lin said. It was not a question, as if he had known they would be taken.
"Tenzin was the abbot of Sangchi, the one who disappeared."
"Fled," Lin snapped. "That's what thieves do. I don't care what the others call him. He is a thief. My thief." He frowned at Shan. "They will never do a hostage exchange."
"No," Shan said in a slow voice, and studied the officer, gradually grasping Lin's meaning. "You are not a hostage, colonel. Not a prisoner."
When Lin turned his head it caused him obvious pain. "You say that because you know I can't leave anyway," he said with a grimace. "I get dizzy when I walk just a few paces. The girl helps me."
"She saved your life. No one would have dug you out of those rocks if she had not been there. The least you can do is use her name."
"They call her Anya," Lin acknowledged in a tight, resentful tone.
"My friends were captured because they went to look for medicine for you."
Lin made a sound like a snort, and his lips curled into a cold smile as though the news pleased him. Anya still chased the yarn up the slope, her uneven gait causing her to stumble frequently.
"If you had asked them to get that medicine, to go back to that valley where your soldiers waited," Shan said pointedly, "they still would have gone."
Lin looked at Shan through squinting eyes, his lips pursing as if he had bit something sour. He said nothing, and his gaze drifted toward Anya, who looked like a child at play now. They watched in silence a long time. The girl seemed to have forgotten them for a moment, as she knelt to look at some flowers.
"The girl shows me things," Lin said. "Anya," he added hesitantly, and turned slowly back to the landscape below. "When they come, I'll see that she is not harmed. She can go back to her home."
Shan stared at the officer. When they come. He meant his mountain combat troops. "She has no home," Shan said, ignoring the threat in Lin's words.
Lin frowned again and watched another skein of geese. "I'll get her some food to take, some shoes maybe. In the mountains you need good shoes."
"Where she lived is burned down. Yapchi."
"Damned fools," Lin shot back. "I didn't make them do that."
"Of course you did," Shan replied, just as quickly. He and Lin exchanged a taut stare, then Lin broke away as Anya called out. She was limping back
with the yarn, and a rock she wanted to show them with yellow lichen in the form of a lotus flower.
As he retreated to the back of the plateau, Shan looked up and froze. There was something new in the rocks above, just a hundred yards away, just past where the field of talus started. He climbed a rock for a better view. There was a figure sitting among the boulders. Jokar. The old medicine lama was meditating above them. How long had he been there? No one had seen him for three days. Had he been meditating in the rocks all the time, watching over the mixing ledge and the distant Plain of Flowers? Where, Shan wondered, was his guardian? At the herb shelf there had been signs that two people had slept there.
Inside, Lhandro and his father were arguing. His father, having heard about Tenzin and Lokesh, wanted to return immediately to Yapchi. Lhandro kept telling his father that there was nothing to be done at Yapchi for the two prisoners. As Lepka saw Shan he broke off his dialogue and stepped to the doorway of one of the empty meditation cells, staring into the darkness. "It's the stickmen," the old man muttered toward the shadows. His voice was strangely feeble. "The stickmen never let up."
Nyma glanced at Shan with a sad expression as Lepka stepped inside the cell. "Sometimes he is like this. His mind wanders."
"What does he mean?" Shan asked.
"It's from his childhood," Nyma said. "A toy I think."
"Monsters from his dreams," Lhandro's mother said over Shan's shoulder in a voice tight with worry. "For years he has had nightmares every few weeks, crying out about stickmen," she added. "But this month, almost every night the bad dreams come."
Shan looked about the chamber. Winslow and Larkin were talking excitedly. The two purbas who had come with Larkin were speaking in low urgent tones with Somo about Lin. Shan studied the purbas. Perhaps he had spoken too hastily in telling Lin he was not a prisoner.
How many crimes, how many motives, he thought as he watched Lin, then the purbas. Everything was compartmentalized, as Somo had pointed out. Like Beijing's operations. The knobs had been looking for the medicine lama. The mountain troops had been looking for Tenzin. Tuan and his shadow Public Security squad were looking for the killer of Deputy Director Chao. Khodrak sought a man with a fish. Special Projects Director Zhu had falsely reported Larkin's death so he could stalk and kill her. Why? Because she had been taken under the wing of the purbas, she said. But Shan no longer believed it. Everyone had their own plans, their own mission, and none seemed to know what the others were doing, or why. Shan did not even understand what Jokar was doing. Had the medicine lama really come so far from India only to wander about the mountains above the Plain of Flowers?
"How long has Jokar been back?" Shan asked Nyma.
"Back? We told you. He's been gone since the day you left."
"But I saw him. On the rocks above."
Nyma rushed outside, Shan close behind. Jokar was gone. Had Shan only imagined seeing the lama?
They stepped around the talus, studying the rocks closely. The old man could easily have fallen. In fact it seemed almost impossible to climb to where Shan had seen him.
But when they returned there was an air of excitement. The purbas had quieted. Lhandro and his father wore looks of confused awe. Lhandro's mother was on a pallet, and the medicine lama was bent over her.
"Suddenly he was just there," Lhandro said. "Standing beside my father in the meditation cell, as if he had just spirited there. No one saw him come in. He said my mother should lie down and asked if she was over her stiff knees. Her knees had been stiff, until we brought the Lamtso salt back."
Jokar moved to Lhandro's father, who sat nearby. Close to the butter lamps. In the brighter light Shan saw a discoloration on Jokar's neck, a large dark bruise that he had not noticed before. As if the lama had been beaten.
Jokar touched Lepka's pulse and the two men began speaking, in low tones at first, then in a more relaxed, louder fashion- of Rapjung and how the herb gatherers once came every autumn to Yapchi, how sometimes a lama and student would come for a month to stay and mix medicine.
"I remember a beautiful house there," Jokar said, "like an old wooden temple." His voice was like shifting sand. He kept holding Lepka's wrist as he spoke.
Lepka smiled back. "That house brought serenity to many people."
When the lama was finished with Lepka, he looked at him, and then his wife. "Sometimes," Jokar said quietly, "don't always use that staff of yours. Lean on your wife. She is a strong staff, too."
Nyma sat in the corner, watching Jokar with an expression of guilt and awe. She still wore her rongpa clothes. Shan had not seen her doing her rosary since the day the village burned.
The purbas lingered in the shadows of the opposite corner, watching uncertainly. "Are they scared of him?" Shan asked Somo, when she retreated toward the door.
"No. But I'm scared. They seem sure he is the one now, they're saying more purbas should come and guard him."
"The one?"
"The monk who has come to fill the chair of Siddhi."
Shan stared at Somo in disbelief and fear. The frail old medicine lama would never propose aggression against the Chinese. But he might know of the chair of Siddhi and want to go there to speak with the people about the Compassionate Buddha. To the purbas it might make little difference, what Jokar said, as long as he took the seat. A prophesy fulfilled would have much power among the people of the mountains, and the legend could be made to serve the purbas' goals. The legend said the lama who sat in the chair was the leader of revolution. Suddenly one of the young Tibetans from Larkin's team rushed forward and knelt beside Jokar.
"Rinpoche," the youth blurted out, "will you come, will you do this thing for all of us?"
Jokar slowly turned, cocking his head at the man.
"Will you take the chair of Siddhi?" When Jokar replied with only a stare the purba repeated the question in a shaking, excited voice.
The lama offered a small smile and nodded. The purba's eyes flared, and he looked back triumphantly at Somo. He leapt up, fastened a small pack to his back, and ran out the door.
When Jokar stood again he walked purposefully to Winslow, who sat only a few feet from Shan, and sat down. The American grinned, then shot an awkward glance at Shan, as if asking what to do. The lama's hand rose and settled over the crown of Winslow's head, not touching it. The hand slowly drifted along his head, neck, and body, an inch off the American's skin. When he finished the lama sighed, and lifted Winslow's wrist. "The mountains have a hard time with you," Jokar said softly.
Winslow cocked his head at the lama, as if trying to understand. "I'm doing better," he said, grinning awkwardly, as if he had decided the lama was referring to his altitude sickness.
"You have come far for this," the old man said. His deep, moist eyes surveyed Winslow again, settling on the crown of his head. "There is that one black thing. You must get rid of that black thing." He paused again and gazed into the American's eyes. He seemed about to speak again, but sighed. It was his turn to cock his head, as if to better understand something he saw in the American. "You've come far," he said again, and slowly rose.
Winslow stared at the floor. He seemed shaken, somehow. He swallowed hard, and looked up at Melissa Larkin, who returned his solemn stare. He grinned awkwardly. "Feels like far," Winslow quipped, then rose and stepped outside.
Five minutes later Shan found the American sitting by the gnarled juniper tree. "You found her," he said uncertainly. "Now you can go back."
"There's a path I'm on," the American said softly, with an odd curiosity in his voice, the curiosity of one who was confused by one's own actions, or emotions. They stared at the tree together. A small brown bird lighted on a nearby branch and watched them. "I'm meant to be on it. It's just that sometimes it's hard to see it."
There was another mystery Shan had not had time to consider, the mystery of who Winslow was, or who he was becoming. "You came to find Miss Larkin's body," Shan reminded him. "You found her alive. You saved her life. Go. Everything that's
left-" he struggled for words. "From here, everything becomes very dangerous."
"Zhu's still out there. What if I left and something happened to her?"
"The purbas protect her. They understand the danger now, thanks to you."
Winslow sighed, and rose to his knees, leaning closer to the bird. "In my heart, I have stopped working for the government," he confessed to the little creature, which seemed to listen carefully. Shan detected a new serenity in the American's voice. "Giving up my passport was like a great weight being lifted from me, somehow. It was part of that path, it was meant to be." He turned to Shan. "And now, what Jokar said. He said I had come far for this. I don't think he meant far like in far from America. But what did he mean, the mountains have a hard time with me?"
"I don't know," Shan said, feeling an unexpected sadness. "Something between the mountain deities and you."
"It's just that I'm not finished in Tibet," Winslow said, still to the bird, which stared directly into the American's eyes.
He turned abruptly and looked at Shan. "I had a dream last night. I was floating over the mountains, more peaceful than I have ever felt. I was holding Jokar's hand, and we were floating over the mountains while he laughed and pointed out his special places. We flew with geese over a deep blue lake," Winslow said in a hollow voice. "At the end I looked at him and I said, Rinpoche, every lama needs a cowboy, and he just nodded solemnly." The American looked back at the bird, which still showed great interest in his words.
"It was just a dream," Shan suggested. If Lokesh had heard about such a dream, he would have asked Winslow if he was sure he had been asleep. Lokesh might have said it wasn't a dream, but an awareness event.
"I think it means I'm supposed to help Melissa and the Tibetans. Help Lokesh and Tenzin."
"I thought," Shan sighed, "that you were supposed to be back in Beijing."
"And tell the bureaucrats Larkin's not dead, but don't worry she soon will be? They probably have a form for it. Report of Future Murder." Winslow looked into his hands. "I know you're not going to give up on Lokesh."
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