For a moment Shan wanted to forget everything, to bask in the wisdom of the old hermit, who was so much like his friends in Lhadrung. But then the hermit spoke again.
“On this mountain, though, there is no room for strangers. Strangers just die. When the incense burns down you must leave.”
Shan’s throat went dry. The man was no longer speaking like a hermit, but like a sentinel, a protector demon. “My name is Shan,” he said. “I seek a ghost, and one who makes ghosts.”
“I am called Dakpo. I speak for the mountain. When she wakes she will shake you off like a flea.”
“I am no intruder,” Shan ventured. “I am the corpse carrier, named by the astrologer of Tumkot.”
It sounded like a line from a fairy tale, but the words gave the hermit pause. He puffed on his pipe, studying Shan intently. “I saw you on the road burying your first corpse under rocks.”
Shan looked up in surprise. On his first visit to the base camp he had stopped to remove the corpse of a dog from the road. He had given it a quick burial under a mound of stones, whispering a prayer to send the dog on its way.
“I said to myself, there is a man who appreciates death.”
Shan hesitated, biting down the questions that leaped to his tongue. Dakpo had not been on the road itself, and the slope on the far side of Tumkot mountain was said to be impassable. He replayed the words in his mind. Had the hermit just told Shan why he had been selected as corpse carrier?
Shan pointed to the valley below. “There, against the wall, you can still see the soot of the pyre. When we burned her uncle, only Ama Apte and I were there but I sensed someone else close by. He was a friend of yours too. If I had not lost the corpse our mule friend would still be alive. It is a heavy debt I owe, Dakpo. To the corpse, to your old friend, to the mountain. I must be allowed to pay it.”
The hermit’s brow furrowed. He cast a mournful gaze toward the barely discernible smudge on the distant cliff face and puffed again on his chillum. “His name was Kundu. I knew him all my life,” he said at last. “It is a rare honor, when a friend comes back the way he did.”
“But he came back on four legs.”
Dakpo offered a strangely sad smile, then swept his hand across the horizon. “For as far as you can see there will be none of us coming back on two legs.”
It was the most remarkable statement of a remarkable conversation. Shan dared not ask what terrible sin the inhabitants of the region had committed to all be reborn as lower life forms. “Do you live in a cave, Rinpoche?” he asked instead.
The hermit’s mood had darkened. He only nodded.
“Above the cliff where the mule was killed?”
He nodded again.
“I don’t think he was going up the trail for grass. I think he was coming down. Did you see him?”
“He was not anywhere above,” Dakpo shot back, too insistent. “There is nowhere above.”
“He would not have been alone,” Shan continued. “He would have been with his killer, or closely followed by his killer.”
“He went to get grass. He fell. Someone shot him in an act of mercy.”
“No. He was first shot above.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. That wound was on the far side of his body, against the wall. His killer could not have done it after he fell.”
Dakpo fell silent.
“How long have you lived in your cave, Dakpo?”
“As long as I care to remember.”
“But you are from the village?”
“A long time ago.”
“Then you must know the secrets that Ama Apte’s uncle died for.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mule took a secret trail home. The minister’s killer was on the same trail, eluding his pursuers. But I can’t find the truth, can’t release the soul of your friend without knowing that secret. There are probably helpful signs on the trail, clues I could use. What is so important that it keeps you from helping him?”
“There is no such trail. And we have our own ways of dealing with death, Shan. The mountain will work it out.” Dakpo stood, stowed his pipe in the pouch at his waist and without another word walked away. Shan watched a long time, watched as the patch of red against the massive stonewall grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared, then he turned back to the shrine.
Thirty minutes later he had settled into the shadows of a small ledge from which he could watch both the path from below and the sheltered altar where the deities, both Eastern and Western, patiently waited.
Purple and gold fingers stretched out in the sky above the snowcapped western peaks. He relaxed, wondering absently if his son was watching the same sunset, constructing dragons and fish out of the clouds as Shan and his father often had done. Then, as so often happened, a whisper of reality crushed his dream. It had been his particular psychosis during his years in prison, one for which he still had found no cure. He would dream of his son Ko as a happy, innocent youth, had laid on his own dark prison bunk for hours imagining his son studying the old poets, flying kites, folding paper hats. But all the time, unknown to Shan, his son had been a criminal, a gang leader, a drug dealer, a drug user. And just as Ko had begun to transform, to heal in the hands of the prisoner lamas of Shan’s own former camp, he had been transported for being a chronic disciplinary problem to the knobs’ infamous prison hospital. Ko, the only person on the planet who shared blood with Shan, lingered on a slow but certain path to death. With one of the silent, wracking sobs that sometimes woke Shan from a dead sleep, he had a vision of Ko emptied out, cauterized by chemicals and electrodes.
He steadied himself, forming a calming mudra with his hands, pushing himself into the present, remembering that he too had a path to follow that might, with the slenderest reed of a chance, allow him to alter Ko’s fate. His lips began to move in a silent mantra. Stars twinkled to life above the mother mountain, around which a silvery moonlit plume of wind-driven snow hung like a prayer scarf. A tide of fatigue surged through Shan’s limbs. He leaned against the rock behind him.
He awoke with a terrible sense of falling, so vivid he clutched at the stone beside him, his heart pounding. Above, the stars had shifted hours to the west. And below, someone stalked the gods.
Shan rose silently to his feet. The dark figure held a flashlight near his head as he surveyed the makeshift altar. No, Shan saw as he advanced, the man had a light strapped to his head, leaving both his hands free to handle the figurines. The intruder worked quickly, hefting each little statue, shaking it, stuffing two, then three, into a bag hanging from his shoulder. A light on his head. What had the old woman in the village seen? A ghost with a star over its head. Shan rose and stealthily descended into the ruins.
He felt the pressure of the ceramic shard under his boot an instant too late to prevent it from snapping. Twenty feet away, the thief spun about at the crunching sound, instantly switching off the light, crouching so that he was just another low, dark shadow among the moonlit rocks.
“I just want to speak with you!” Shan called out in Chinese, then Tibetan, as he took another step forward. A ball of shadow exploded from under the overhanging ledge, colliding with Shan, knocking him off his feet before bounding down the path.
Shan was up in an instant, in frantic pursuit, stumbling on the loose gravel, running with his arm slightly extended to warn him of the outcroppings hidden in shadow, then sprinting forward as he spotted the thief in a patch of moonlight a hundred feet ahead of him.
He sensed the fist a moment before it connected, just as he rounded a column of rock. It would have pounded his eye but he twisted so it bounced off his ear, feeling like someone had taken a mallet to his head. As he fell he swung wildly, grabbing a booted foot, jerking his assailant off his feet but inviting a kick that sent an explosion of pain into his ribs. He rolled, thinking he had knocked the man down, then realized it was not the man’s body he clutched but the nylon bag of figurines.
&
nbsp; The two men began a treacherous tug of war. Shan suddenly sensed that they were at the cliff’s edge, with a thousand feet of void less than a yard away. He reached for his flashlight and hammered with it on the man’s knuckles until it was wrestled from Shan’s grip and tossed away. The bag caught on a rock and began to rip. The ancient figures tumbled out, rolling on the ground. The man gasped, losing interest in Shan as he desperately reached for them, grabbing the last one just as Shan’s own fingers closed around it. It was one of the very old bronze Yamas, its jeweled eyes lit with moonlight. Shan jerked it onto his shoulder, the intruder wrenched it back. The deity seemed to watch their struggle in disappointment.
Shan found a handhold on a boulder and heaved backward. The Yama broke out of the man’s grip but the force of Shan’s effort sent the statue tumbling backward, out of Shan’s hand. A choked cry left the thief’s throat as the bronze disappeared over the cliff. Then a boot slammed into Shan’s chest, and he lurched backward, sprawling on the ground, gasping for air as he clutched at his heart. When he could breathe again he saw the shadowy figure running in another pool of moonlight a hundred yards below.
Shan crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked down, overcome with desolation. He hadn’t just lost the thief. He had killed a god.
Shan stayed bent, his head touching the ground, at first because it relieved the pain in his chest and then because of his shame. When at last he rose it was not to stumble downhill but toward the altar, gathering a small bundle of dried grass which he lit to examine the thief’s work. The intruder had started at the end opposite the crucifix, had been stopped by Shan before he reached the Buddha in the center of the altar. But five of the bronze Yamas, the largest ones, were gone.
As his makeshift torch sputtered and died he glanced at the stars and the shadow-black trail. It was only a few hours until dawn. He gathered more wood and lit a fire a few feet in front of the altar, then retrieved his blanket and pack, withdrawing the pouch of food he had brought. Ignoring his hunger pangs, he emptied all his food onto the altar and divided it into seven portions and distributed them along the front of the altar, adding a smoldering, fragrant juniper twig to each offering. He murmured prayers of apology then placed another smoldering twig by the crucifix. It was as out of place as a fish in a tree but it seemed the most significant discovery he had yet made.
Although it was only an hour after sunrise when Shan reached her house, Ama Apte was not at home. He settled against the frame of the doorless front entry, pushing to one side the copper pot of milk someone had left beside a worn butter churn, then shifted to pull his shirt away from the blood matted on his ribs. The only thing he knew for certain about the thief was what he wore on his feet. Where the stranger had kicked him his skin had been torn and bruised in the clear pattern of a cleated climbing boot. Pulling his hat low over his face, he watched the villagers go by for several minutes, glancing at the women who sat at several doorways working their own churns before exploring the chamber that comprised the first floor of the astrologer’s house. A pallet with a folded blanket still lay on the packed earth by a stall, as if she waited for her mule in the night. Two buckets, one of water and one of fresh grain, stood by the pallet. Ama Apte was conducting the traditional Bardo death rites for the lost mule, during which food and drink were left for the departed.
At a small bench by the solitary window at the rear, squares of yellow cloth lay under a spool of red thread beside the sheets of handmade paper on which fortunes were recorded. He opened the door of a small wooden cabinet above the bench, finding more spools of thread and old nibbed pens with a bottle of ink. On the inside of the door, yellowed tape held a photo of a young Dalai Lama on a horse, with armed men escorting him. Leaning on the back of the cabinet was a tattered book of Mo divination tables and several worn pairs of the astrologer’s dice.
His gaze drifted back to the photo. Though they were considered contraband and were regularly burned by the Bureau of Religious Affairs, images of the Dalai Lama were secretly kept by many, probably most, Tibetans. But he had never seen one like this. He studied it closely, swinging the door into the sunlight, considering the teenaged countenance of the reincarnate leader, the fur-capped soldiers with old British Enfield rifles. All the faces were tired and travel worn. One soldier could be seen on a slope in the distance, watching the trail behind them. He suspected it had been taken during the Dalai Lama’s secret flight across the border, while the Chinese army had been trying to kill him by shelling his living compound in Lhasa.
He returned to the entryway, watched the women at their chores, then bent and poured the milk into the fortuneteller’s churn and began to work the plunger. It was a daily ritual performed for centuries by millions of Tibetans, still very much part of life for nomads and remote villagers.
When Ama Apte finally arrived, leading a goat, she offered neither complaint nor greeting, but uttered a grunt of satisfaction as she lifted the lid to the churn and saw that the morning chore was almost complete. Dropping in a palmful of salt from a small crock near the door, she disappeared into a neighbor’s house and returned moments later with a steaming kettle, two tin cups, and one of the tall, narrow churns used for mixing buttered tea. Whether he was invited or not Shan was a guest and she would serve him buttered tea.
She did not speak as she prepared the tea, nor as she arranged two low milking stools just inside the house and finally handed him his steaming cup, straightening her colorful apron before sitting down.
“What happened here?” Shan asked. “I mean before, when the Yama temple was still used. Were there priests from far away?” He knew no Tibetan word for missionaries.
“People used to say we were the most faraway of any place in all the world,” the woman replied. “We were proud of that. The Himalayas protected us. What I remember most of all was the peacefulness. Villagers sang songs at the well. There was a village loom where everyone worked on rugs to sell to the caravans that came across from Nepal. Monks were always in the square, prayerflags on every house. ”
“From the Yama temple?”
“They say before that temple there was another, to earth deities and the mountain spirits. Before that, the gods played there.”
“I was thinking more of the past century.”
“In 1924 Westerners began driving nails into our mountain,” Ama Apte declared, her voice growing distant as she referred to the first expedition to climb Everest.
Shan sipped his tea in silence. “Kypo said his grandfather took climbers up. You knew some early climbers?”
“None of us called it climbing. Monks had gone up the mountains for centuries, not to reach new heights but to visit the gods. We called it paying homage, or said we were going to speak with the goddess. The Westerners mostly climb her because she happens to be a few feet taller than other mountains. Put a pole on the peak and they would climb that too.”
Shan struggled to understand, not what she was saying but what she was not saying. He replayed her words in his mind several times, then abruptly understood the question he had to ask. “Climbers come to the village sometimes, to talk with Kypo, mostly the expedition leaders. You give them blessings.”
“Do I look like a monk?”
“Forgive me. You provide them with propitious dates and words to say at the top. I’ve seen the climbers carry charms in little yellow bags sewn shut with red thread.”
When she did not reply Shan pressed on. “Did Megan Ross first come to you last year or was it earlier?”
The astrologer went very still.
“I read she was working with Tibetans and sherpas to spread the word that the mountain was sacred,” Shan explained. “She was working with someone to learn the old ways of going up mountains.”
Ama Apte began to stroke the back of the goat.
“Did she learn to drink your buttered tea?” he tried, hoping to get her to admit she at least knew the American.
“She carried a little bottle of mint extract,” Ama Apte
said in a strained voice. “With a few drops of that Megan said she could swallow the strongest Tibetan tea.”
“Surely she couldn’t speak Tibetan.”
“She spoke some Chinese.”
“Why would she go see the minister? She could never have expected to persuade Wu to stop the climbing tours.”
“You will have to ask her yourself.”
Shan watched the woman carefully as he spoke. “Megan Ross is dead.”
Ama Apte cocked her head at Shan. There was no grief in her eyes, no surprise. “She plays tricks, that American girl. She goes places the government doesn’t want her to, so she lets stories be spread to divert their interest. She may seem dead to you. She would pretend to be dead if it helped preserve one of her secrets.”
“She isn’t on one of her secret climbs. I found her, Ama Apte. Shot twice, lying beside the murdered minister. She died in my arms.”
It was not grief that came now but anger. “No,” Ama Apte said in a simmering voice.
“I was a good friend of your uncle’s,” he ventured. “You and I said prayers for him. When speaking of the dead the truth must be spoken.”
“She is not dead,” Ama Apte insisted. “I would know it.”
“Are you saying that as her friend,” Shan said, “or as her fortuneteller?”
The Tibetan woman turned back to the goat. “She is on some high peak, laughing into the wind. And Tenzin will not be found until he is ready. The dead of the mountain will keep coming back if they have unfinished business,” she declared to the animal. “That has always been the way of the mountain.”
Reality is nothing but a shared perception, a lama had once told him. It didn’t seem to matter that Shan had been stained with the blood of the dead woman, for the reality that everyone perceived was that she had not died. Shan had never encountered a murder where the dead kept moving, where the dead were still players in events even after they stopped breathing.
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