"But that's what our Shan does," Lokesh blurted out. "He saves people."
The man shrugged, not trying to conceal his disappointment. He looked up the valley, his right hand grasping a string of plastic beads hanging from his red waist sash. "It used to be, when trouble came," he said in a distant voice, as if no longer speaking to the three men, "we knew how to find a priest." He picked out a brilliant white cloud on the horizon and decided to address it. "We had a real priest once," he said to the cloud, "but the Chinese took him."
His expression was one Shan had seen on many faces since arriving in Tibet, a sad confusion about what outsiders had done to their world, a helplessness for which the proud, independent Tibetan spirit was ill-prepared. Shan followed the man's eyes as they turned back up the valley.
Someone was emerging from the dust cloud, a rider on a horse that appeared to be near collapse. The animal moved at a wobbling, uneven pace, as if dizzy with fatigue.
"When I was young," the man said, turning to Lokesh now, with a new, urgent tone, "there was a shaman who could take the life force of one to save another. Old people would do it sometimes, to save a sick child." He looked back forlornly at the approaching rider. "I would give mine, give it gladly, to save him. Can you do that?" he asked, stepping closer to study Lokesh's face. "You have the eyes of a priest."
"Why did you come?" Jowa asked again, but this time the harshness had left his voice.
The man reached inside his shirt and produced a yak-hair cord from which hung a silver gau, one of the small boxes used to carry a prayer close to the heart. He clamped both hands around the gau and looked back up the valley, not at the rider now but at the far ranges capped with snow. "They took my father to prison and he died. They put my mother in a town but gave her no food coupons to live on, and she starved to death." He spoke slowly, his eyes drifting from the mountains to the ground at his feet. "They said no medical help would be given to our children unless we took them to their clinic. So I take my daughter with a fever but they said the medicine was for sick Chinese children first, and she died. Then we found a boy and he had no one and we had no one, so we called him our son." A tear rolled down his cheek.
"We only wanted to live in peace with our son," he said, his voice barely audible above the wind. "But our old priest, he used to say it was a sin, to want something too much." He looked back toward the second rider, his face long and barren. "They said you were coming, to save the children."
A chill crept down Shan's spine as he heard the words. He looked at Lokesh, who seemed even more shaken by the man's announcement. The color was draining from the old man's face.
"We are going because of a woman named Lau," Shan replied softly.
"No," the dropka said with an unsettling certainty. "It is because of the children, to keep all the children from dying."
On the road below them, a hundred yards before the outcropping, the second horse staggered forward, then stopped. Its rider, wrapped in a heavy felt blanket, slumped in the saddle, then slowly fell to the ground.
The herder let out a sound that wasn't just a moan, nor just a cry of fear. It was a sound of raw, animal agony.
Shan began to run.
He ran in the shortest line toward the fallen rider, darting to where the path met the ledge, then leaping and stumbling down the loose scree of the slope, twice falling painfully on his knees among the rocks, then finally landing on all fours in the coarse grass where the valley floor began. As he rose he glanced over his shoulder. No one followed.
The exhausted horse stood quivering, its nose, edged with a froth of blood, nearly touching the ground beside a mound of black yak-hair felt. Shan slowly lifted an edge of the blanket and saw dozens of hair braids, a bead woven into the end of each. It was an old style for devout women, one hundred eight braids, one hundred eight beads, the number of beads in a mala. The woman was breathing shallowly. Her face was stained with dirt and tears. Her eyes, like those of the horse, were so overcome with exhaustion that they seemed not to notice Shan. Inside the blanket she had used as a cloak was another blanket, around a long bundle that lay across her legs.
He looked back. Jowa and Lokesh were slowly working their way down the path, Jowa leading the herdsman by hand, Lokesh thirty paces behind leading Gendun, as though both men were blind.
Shan raised the second blanket and froze. It was a boy, his face so battered and bruised that one eye was swollen shut. He slowly pulled the blanket away and gasped. Blood was everywhere, saturating the boy's shirt and pants, soaking the inside of the heavy felt.
He tried to lift the boy with the blanket, to take the weight from the woman, but the blanket was twisted in the reins. He tried to pull the reins away and found they were connected to the woman, tied around her forearm above her wrist, because her hand was useless. The wrist was an ugly purple color, and the hand hung at an unnatural angle.
As Shan lifted the boy out of the blanket and laid him on the dried grass, the boy's mouth contorted, but he made no sound. The boy, no more than ten years old, had been savagely mauled and slashed across the shoulder, through his shirt. He was conscious, and though he had to be in great pain, he lay still and silent, his one good eye watching as Shan examined him. The eye showed no fear, no anger, no pain. It was only sad- and confused, like the look on the herdsman's face.
The boy had fought back. His hands were cut deeply in the palms, wounds that could only have been made if the boy had grabbed at the thing that had slashed him. His shirt had been ripped open at the neck, the buttons torn away. Shan clenched his jaw so tightly it hurt. The boy had been stabbed lower on his body, a blow that had penetrated the ribs and left a long open gout of tissue that oozed dark blood. His pants too had been ripped in the fight, a long tear below the left knee. He was missing a shoe.
Shan looked back at the solitary, unblinking eye that stared at him from the ruin of the boy's face, but found no words to say. He gazed at his hands. They were covered with the boy's blood. Overcome for a moment with helplessness, he just watched the blood drip from his fingertips onto the blades of brown grass.
Lokesh appeared at Shan's side, carrying one of the drawstring sacks that contained their supplies. Producing a plastic water bottle from the bag, the old Tibetan held the water to the boy's lips and began to utter a low, singsong chant in syllables unfamiliar to Shan. Before he had been plucked from his gompa, his monastery, to serve the Dalai Lama, Lokesh had intended to take up medicine. He had apprenticed himself to a lama healer before being called to Lhasa, then continued his training during his decades in prison by ministering to prisoners, learning from the old healers who were sometimes thrown behind wire for encouraging citizens to cling to the traditional ways.
The old Tibetan nodded to the woman as he chanted, and gradually the words seemed to bring her back to awareness. When her eyes found their focus and she returned his gaze with a pained smile, Lokesh leaned toward Shan. "Her wrist is broken," he said in his quiet monk's voice. "She needs tea."
As Lokesh sat with the boy, Jowa settled Gendun into the grass by the truck, then brought a soot-covered pot and a piece of canvas stuffed with yak dung for a fire. When the pot was on the low blue flames, Lokesh looked up expectantly and Jowa motioned for Shan to help with the larger blanket. They untangled it from the woman, and Shan, following Jowa's example, secured the blanket with his feet so that, with both men holding the top corners of the long rectangle of felt, they created a windbreak. Lokesh needed still air for his diagnosis. As soon as the blanket was up he stopped his healing mantra and raised the boy's left hand in his own. He spread the three center fingers of his long boney hand along the wrist and closed his eyes, listening for more than a minute, then lowering the arm and repeating the process with the right arm as he tried to locate the twelve pulses on which diagnosis was based in Tibetan medicine. He finished by clasping the boy's earlobe with his fingers, closing his eyes again, and slowly nodding his head.
The boy just watched, without blinking, wit
hout speaking, without giving voice to the pain that surely wracked his body. The herdsman knelt silently beside him, his hands still tightly grasping his gau, tears rolling down his dark, leathery cheeks.
Lokesh finished and stared at the boy with a desolate expression. As if the motion were an afterthought, he slowly, stiffly raised the torn fabric of the boy's pants leg and looked at the skin underneath. The swing of the blade that had apparently slashed the fabric had not touched the skin.
"We can't stay in the open," Jowa warned, with nervous glances along the road.
"We could all have been killed," the dropka said in a hollow voice. "It was death on legs."
"You saw it?" Shan asked.
"I was bringing sheep down from the pasture. She was making camp. When I got to camp the dogs were barking on a ledge below. I followed the sound, with a torch. One of the dogs was dead, its brains scattered across a rock. Then I found the two of them. I thought they were dead too."
The woman's eyes opened as Jowa held a mug of tea in front of her. She raised her right hand with a grimace of pain. Jowa held the mug as she drank.
"Tujaychay," the woman said in a hoarse voice. Thank you. She took the mug with her good hand and drained its contents.
"The boy was bringing water from a spring down by the road," she said, her voice now stronger than her husband's. "He was late. I heard the sheep coming down the mountain. I needed to begin the cooking. Then the dogs started, the way they shout at a wolf." Jowa began fashioning a sling for her arm out of the canvas. "I ran. I saw it first from a ledge above, as it was attacking Alta. It was standing on its two rear legs. It had the skin of a leopard. I ran faster. I tripped and hit my head. I ran again. It turned as I came. Its front legs had paws like a man's hands, and one held a man's knife. But it dropped the knife and picked up a shiny stick, like a man's arm. It picked up the stick in both paws and hit me as I raised my hand. I fell and my hand hurt like it was in a fire. I crawled to the boy and covered him with my body. The thing came at us, waving the stick, but lightning called it back."
"Lightning?"
"In the north. A single lightning bolt. A message. It is the way that demons speak to each other," the woman said in a voice full of fear. "The thing looked at the lightning bolt and began backing away. Then I remember only blackness. When I awoke I thought we had both died and gone to one of the dark hells, but my husband was there and said it was just that the sun was gone."
"You saw its face?" asked Shan.
The woman's eyes were locked on the boy she had called Alta. She shook her head. "The thing had no face."
The announcement brought a low moan from Lokesh. Shan turned. The old Tibetan was holding the boy's wrist but gazing forlornly up the road, as if expecting the faceless demon to appear at any moment.
Shan bent over the boy. "Alta, did it speak to you?" he asked. "Did you know who it was? It was a man. It must have been a man."
The boy kept staring, his eye like a hard black pebble. He gave no sign of having heard Shan.
"It was in leopard shape," the dropka woman said. "If it needs a man shape," she added in a haunting tone, "it becomes a man shape."
"There is a demon from the old days," the herdsman said in his distant voice. "Hariti the child eater. Sometimes," he added, his voice fading as if he were losing all his strength, "it just gets hungry. After the first kill, it can't stop itself." Hariti was a demon of old Tibet, Shan knew, for whom monks once set aside a small portion of their daily food to slack her hunger for children.
His eyes rested on Lokesh, who stared at the boy. Lokesh laid his hand on the boy's scalp for a moment, then reached into his sack and produced a leather pouch, inside which were several smaller pouches. He opened three of the small pouches, placed a pinch of powder from each into his hand, and emptied his hand into the steaming pot. "For the pain," Lokesh said. "He is in great pain."
"What can we do?" the woman asked.
Lokesh looked forlornly at Shan, then turned slowly back to the woman. "There are words that must be spoken," he said in a cracking voice.
The announcement seemed to strike the two dropka like a physical blow. The woman groaned and bent over, holding her abdomen. The herdsman's head sank into his hands. There are words that must be spoken. Lokesh meant the rites for the transition of a soul. The boy just kept staring at Shan with his confused, fading eye.
Suddenly the woman gave a frightened gasp. Shan looked up to see her staring over his shoulder. Gendun was there, wearing his Buddha smile. The herdsman called out in surprise and knelt with his forehead on the grass at Gendun's feet.
Shan realized that neither the herder nor his wife had noticed Gendun before. They might have thought that he was an apparition or that he had been spirited there by Lokesh. The lama put his hand on the herdsman's head and offered a prayer to the compassionate Buddha, then did the same with the woman, whose eyes, though still forlorn, grew calmer. We had a real priest once, the man had said. But the Chinese took him.
Gendun knelt by the boy and held his hand. Then Lokesh sat beside him, and Gendun put his free hand on Lokesh's head in a blessing for the healer. The lama gazed at the boy in silence for a long time as Shan began to wash the wounds.
"I have no prayers for this boy's god," he said to the woman in a soft, apologetic tone.
She cast an anxious glance at her husband. "We are teaching him our ways. He has a mala." With an effort that caused her obvious pain, she leaned forward and pushed the boy's sleeve up. She looked at his naked wrist in puzzlement. "It's gone. The demon took his rosary." She lowered her eyes from the lama, as if shamed. "He has wished to make the ways of Buddha his ways."
"But does he pray toward the sunset still?" Gendun asked.
The woman looked to the ground, as if frightened by the conversation. She shook her head slowly. "He said that that god let his clan die."
Shan stared at Gendun in confusion. The boy was Muslim. But how had Gendun seen it?
Instead of touching the boy's head, Gendun gently raised the back of the boy's hand to his own cheek. "Then I say a prayer that whatever god resides in this boy's heart gives him strength against the pain he knows from now and from the past and mindfulness for the path he must now follow."
In the silence a raven croaked nearby. They turned to see it sitting on top of the outcropping, studying them intently. The herder took a step forward as if to say something to the bird, then looked back at Gendun and remained silent, as if the lama would not approve.
"We have to leave," Jowa said hesitantly. "Go north. Into the Kunlun mountains." He cast an uncertain glance toward the herder.
"These people need help," Shan protested.
"Go north," the herder said, nodding his head vigorously. "We heard about the killings, it is why we fled across the mountains. They said you were going there, to save the children."
Jowa's eyes were full of impatience as he looked at the herder. Shan understood. Jowa knew that the dropka in this far corner of Tibet lived in a world of superstition, not far removed from the days before Buddhism when shamans ruled the land. Something terrible had happened to the boy, but to such people a falling rock could be an angry demon and a man shape with fur could easily be a wolf or a leopard. "We're going about the woman," Jowa said.
The dropka nodded again. "About Lau," he said. "Our Alta, he is one of her students."
Lokesh gasped and turned to Gendun. "Lau was this boy's teacher?" the lama asked.
"One of the zheli." The man nodded. "Lau introduced us when we said we wanted to help the children." The dropka kept his eyes on the boy as he spoke.
"The zheli?" Shan asked. It was not a Tibetan word, though the herder spoke in Tibetan. Nor was it Chinese.
But the man seemed not to have heard. Lokesh sighed and helped the boy drink the tea, then they carried the boy to the shelter of the rock, out of the wind, in a patch of sunlight. Lokesh listened again, at his heart, his shoulder, and his neck, then the old Tibetan shook his head and gazed at
the boy, tears welling in his eyes.
They sat without speaking, helpless, as the light faded from the boy's eye. For an awful moment there was terror in his eye, as if suddenly, at last, he understood his fate. A sound came from the boy, one syllable and nothing more. It could have been the beginning of a question, or a prayer. It could have been simply an expression of pain. But there was no more, as if the effort had sapped the last of the boy's strength. The woman, crying, held the boy's hand to her cheek.
Shan knelt by Alta and leaned forward, struggling to find words of comfort. But after a moment he dropped back, unable to speak, numbed by his helplessness and the cruelty that had been inflicted on the boy.
A hard dark silence descended over the dropka man, who kept opening and shutting his mouth as if he too wanted to speak, but grief had seized his tongue. At last, as the boy shifted his gaze to meet the herder's eyes, the dropka found his voice and began softly speaking about going to spring pastures and of finding flowers and young birds on the southern slopes, about nothing in particular, only pleasant memories of the dropka life. The boy's face grew peaceful as he listened.
Jowa, his face drawn with sorrow, left to keep watch on the rocks. Gendun and Lokesh offered prayers. The herder kept speaking in a near whisper, leaning over the boy. And in an hour, with a long soft groan, the boy named Alta died.
No one spoke for a long time, then finally the woman wiped the boy's face and covered it with the blanket.
"The custom of his people," Shan said slowly, not certain how the two dropka might react, "would be to bury him before sunset."
The dropka nodded, and Shan retrieved a shovel from the truck. As he dug, the woman gathered small rocks for a cairn to mark the grave. While the boy was laid to rest in his blanket, Gendun spoke in soft tones, using a Buddhist prayer for the dead.
The dropka man stood for only five minutes, then sighed heavily and stepped away to retrieve their horses.
Shan helped the woman stack the rocks at the head of the small mound. "It's a Kazakh word," she said to him when they had finished, referring to one of the Muslim peoples who lived on the northern side of the Kunlun range. "A zheli is a line tied between two trees, or two pegs, to tether a line of young animals. It's how the young ones learn about each other, and the world. Lau used the word for her classes with the orphans, her special children. Her tether for the orphans."
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