"Your husband said we were coming to save the children. Did he mean the zheli?"
The dropka woman nodded. "When that other boy died, we knew to flee. But not," she sighed, with her eyes on the grave, "not soon enough."
A moan came from beside Shan, and Lokesh leaned forward. "Another boy?" he asked urgently. "Another of Lau's boys?"
"First Lau," she said. "Then a Kazakh boy near Yoktian town."
"Do you remember his name?" Lokesh asked in an urgent tone. Shan looked at his friend in puzzlement. It sounded as though Lokesh was interested in one particular boy.
The dropka shook her head. "There are twenty, maybe twenty-five children in the zheli. Kazakhs, Tibetans. And Uighurs," she added, referring to the largest of China's Muslim minorities. She turned and nodded at her husband, who led both horses forward. Their saddles had been removed. The man was looking to the north, toward the snowcaps of the Kunlun. "Alta," she said quietly, "Our Alta was a Kazakh."
"A lama," Shan said. "Do you know about a missing lama?"
The dropka shook his head. "Lamas have been missing here for many years," he said, obviously not understanding Shan's question. His gaze stayed on the mountains. "You must hurry," he added abruptly, in a hoarse, urgent tone. "Death keeps coming. This demon has found its way into the zheli and it won't stop killing."
Shan stared at the man in silence.
"Alta's soul is at risk," the dropka continued in his forlorn tone. "A boy like that, so unprepared." A gust of wind swept across them and seemed to snatch the man's words away. He stopped speaking and only looked toward Gendun. The dropka meant the boy's soul would be wandering, lost, without an anchor of faith or family, easy prey for the things that devoured souls.
Gendun returned the man's gaze for a moment, then spoke with Jowa, who brought him a piece of canvas and a broken pencil stub, the end of which Jowa charred in the fire. The lama retreated around the far corner of the rock and began chanting a mantra as he worked with the stub. Jowa listened and watched, then retrieved a tattered broom from the cargo bay and, wedging the head under a wheel, snapped off the handle.
When Gendun returned, he laid the cloth on the ground in front of the herders. The herdsman uttered a groan of surprise and pulled his wife's head up to see what the lama had brought them as Jowa began tying it to the broom handle. It was a charm, a very old charm, seldom used, a drawing of a scorpion with flame in its mouth. On the shoulders of the scorpion were heads of demons, with words along each side of the figures. A charm against demons, a charm that had been empowered by the words of a lama.
The man stood and nodded solemnly. "We will ransom a goat, Rinpoche," he said. "Our old priest, he would tell us to ransom a goat." Removing an animal from those readied for slaughter, usually by marking it with a ribbon around its ear, was a way of placating the deities that predated the Buddhists in Tibet.
"Then certainly," Gendun said with a somber tone, "ransom a goat."
As Jowa readied the truck, cranking the old engine to life and moving it onto the road, Shan looked up to see Gendun move back around the rock. He followed and found the lama seated on the grass, looking to the south, toward central Tibet and the hermitage where he had spent nearly his entire life.
"I fear it has already begun," the lama said, gesturing for Shan to sit beside him. "We have entered it, but we are too late."
"Entered what, Rinpoche?" Shan asked.
The lama looked over the mountains and sighed. "It has no name," Gendun said. "The home of demons who would seek to kill children." His voice was like shifting sand.
It was not an actual place, Shan knew, but a state of mind that Gendun spoke of, a place in a soul full of hate, a place a man like Gendun could never understand.
"It's a lonely land," Gendun said as he surveyed the windblown plateau. "It's where I was born," he declared.
"Here?" Shan asked, following the lama's gaze. "In the changtang?" Of all the wild, remote quarters of Tibet, the changtang plateau was the wildest and most remote.
Gendun nodded. "In the shadow of the Kunlun mountains. But when I was young, Xiao Shan, my parents gave me to monks because war came, and the monks took me to Lhadrung." Xiao Shan. Gendun used the old Chinese form of address for a younger person, the way his father or uncle might have called him. Little Shan. The lama looked toward a black cloud moving along the slope of the mountains, a snow squall perhaps. "I remember a happier place. Now-" the lama gestured toward the track and sighed, "now I think this road will take us to a place you should not be, Xiao Shan." It had the sound of an apology. What Gendun was saying was that so many murders meant the government would be involved. "I know how it is between you and the other Chinese," the lama said.
Three days earlier, Shan had returned with fuel for a campfire in time to overhear Jowa pleading with Gendun to send Shan back. "He was never released officially, just given permission to be free in Lhadrung County," the purba was explaining to the lama. "Outside Lhadrung he is still a criminal, an escapee. They can check things." When Gendun had not responded, Jowa raised his voice. "They will take him behind their jail," he said in an impatient tone. "They will put a bullet in his head. And the rest of us will be guilty of harboring a fugitive."
"Would you imprison us all with fear, then?" Gendun had quietly asked Jowa, then nodded as Shan approached with his armful of dung chips.
"It's just the government's way of honoring me," Shan had observed with a forced grin, thinking of the monks and lamas in the gulag who sometimes thanked their jailers for providing them with such an unrelenting test of their faith. The conversation had ended there, and Shan had dropped his own idea of asking Jowa to take Gendun back. Certainly Shan knew what the government would do if it captured him. But he also knew what it would do with Gendun, who did not simply have no official identity, but was practicing as an outlawed priest. There were special places for people like Gendun, places without light and heat, places where they sometimes did medical experiments, places where Party psychiatrists attempted techniques for molding grateful new proletarians out of reactionary priests.
I know how it is between you and the other Chinese. Gendun was not just referring to the physical danger. Shan remembered their last lesson together, as the two sat on a rock outside the hermitage. For four months Gendun had been speaking to him about how release from prison was a relative thing, how three years of slave labor had made scars on his soul that would never fully heal, how the greatest danger to Shan was acting like an escapee, for an escapee was only a prisoner without a cell. When the lama had reluctantly suggested that the quickest way to recover would be for Shan to leave China, to go to a new land, Shan had shared with him a letter from a United Nations official dated two months earlier, offering to sponsor Shan for political asylum in the West if he would be willing to give public testimony about the slave camps and Beijing's systematic destruction of cultural artifacts. If Shan could get out of China. They might find a way out for him, said the purba who secretly brought the letter, but it could take a year, maybe two.
Shan extended his hand, still stained with the boy's blood. It was how they often spoke to each other, not with words, but with gestures and symbols. Children are dying, he was saying, and Gendun nodded in sad understanding. If Shan left now, he would never, no matter how far he ran, escape the haunting image of the dying boy, staring at him in silent, terrified confusion.
"The way that is told is not the constant way," Gendun said. The words had become something of a personal mantra between them since the first days they had spent together, when they had discovered that the words were not only in the Buddhist teachings of Gendun's life but also in the Taoist lessons of Shan's boyhood. Together they had recognized that Shan's path was far from anyone's constant path, that the withered spirit he had brought from China had for now found new roots in Tibet but, when the dead pieces were trimmed away, some of the old roots remained, tangled around the new. The way that is told is not the constant way. Gendun had sensed it too when si
tting with the dying Muslim boy. They were on a path for which there was no map.
Jowa honked the horn on the truck. Gendun seemed not to hear. Shan saw that his hands were clutched together, the palms cupped as though cradling something.
The lama extended his hands, and as Shan offered his own hand, palm upward, Gendun dropped something into it. A feather. A two-inch-long feather, delicately patterned in brown and black at the base and snow white along its top half, the end faintly mottled with black spots, as if someone had sprayed it lightly with ink. Gendun watched, fascinated, as it drifted onto Shan's palm, then rose and walked to the truck.
Jowa drove the ancient truck relentlessly, as if being chased, bouncing over washouts, sliding in and out of deep ruts, stopping with an abrupt shudder when small boulders, released from the slope above, appeared before them in the illumination of the parking lights. Jowa refused to use the headlights. Soldiers sometimes patrolled the mountains at night.
Shan had put the feather in the gau he wore around his neck and now, as the truck lurched through the night, he sat with his hand around the gau, thinking. Was it a clue? A bidding of good fortune? As he looked at the dying boy in his mind's eye he realized that no, it may have been just a token of beauty to be carried as he moved closer to the ugliness of murder.
Hours later, as Shan and Lokesh climbed into the rear cargo bay after pushing still another boulder aside, Jowa joined them. He checked the barrels lashed to the metal frame of the bay. Most were filled with salt, a vital trading commodity of the region, taken from the salt beds of the central plateau that had supported trade in the region for centuries. Directly behind the cab, under a pile of oil-stained canvas, were two empty barrels, the barrels where Shan and Gendun would hide if they were stopped by a patrol. This was their third truck, for twice they had had to cross over ranges on horseback, led by guides who would speak only to Jowa. Each of the trucks had contained similar salt barrels and two empty ones, with skillfully made inserts that allowed three inches of salt to rest on top once the barrel was occupied. The cover of salt traders might be sufficient for Lokesh and Jowa, who had their papers, but Shan and Gendun would have no chance unless they hid.
Jowa helped wrap a blanket around Lokesh. Although there was room in front, the old Tibetan had chosen to stay in the cargo bay with Shan for most of the journey. As Lokesh settled with his back against the cab, Jowa moved to the rear of the truck. He stood for a moment before stepping down, his hand braced against one of the ribs of the bay.
"Before sunrise," Jowa announced through the shadows, "someone will meet us."
"Who?" Shan asked.
"Someone to take us there," Jowa replied in the distant, almost resentful tone he always used with Shan.
"Where?"
"Where we have to be."
Shan sighed. "You still don't think I belong here."
"They told me to bring you. I am bringing you."
"Why?"
A shallow, bitter laugh escaped Jowa's lips. "You know them, maybe better than I. There is no why with the old lamas. The woman was destined to be killed. You were destined to go."
"No. I mean, why you? You could have said no."
"I know this region. Years ago, I helped watch the army up here."
"You could have said no," Shan repeated.
It took Jowa longer to answer this time. When he spoke his voice was softer, not friendly, but not resentful. "The lamas grow old. I do not know what Tibet will be without them. In twenty, thirty years, who will go and sit in the hermit cells, who will go to live inside a mountain because the land's soul needs help?"
"Maybe you will."
"No. Not me. Not those like me. The Chinese have taught me new ways. I am contaminated with hate," he said matter-of-factly, as if speaking of a physical handicap. "I have fired a gun." He looked at the moon, and for the first time Shan thought he saw sadness on the purba's face. "How could I go and sit in a mountain if I have fired a gun?" It was a question Jowa had obviously asked himself many times. "And who's left?" He stepped out of the truck but lingered in the moonlight. "When they took my monk's license away, and I began to resist," he said, speaking toward the moon, "I thought then that the whole problem with Tibet was not enough resistance. It's like we talk ourselves out of so many fights that we no longer stand for anything." He shook his head and looked away, toward the darkened peaks. "Now…" He shrugged. "In prison I decided that there weren't enough of us left to fight, that all we could do was see that the lamas would be protected, so Beijing would not kill the old ways. But I didn't stop to think. The old ways are the lamas, and the lamas are as mortal as the rest of us. We can try to stop Beijing but we can't stop time. If the lamas don't survive, if what they do doesn't survive, then what's the point?"
Shan realized that in his own way Jowa was indeed explaining why he was escorting the unlikely trio on their enigmatic mission. Through the moonlight Shan could see him shrug again. "They almost never ask us for anything. It is impossible to say no."
But Shan knew that Jowa understood something else- that nothing the lamas did was random, that they didn't ask Jowa because he could drive a truck or even because he was a purba who knew the region, but because he was Jowa.
"The herdsman and his wife," Shan said as Jowa turned to leave. "How did they know? It's supposed to be a secret. I thought the purbas brought the word to Lhadrung, and only they knew we were coming."
"They did. The purbas know how to keep a secret."
"They said we were coming to save the children. Two boys have already died."
"An old woman died, and a lama disappeared. That's all I was told." Jowa disappeared around the corner of the truck. A moment later the heavy engine roared to life.
Shan retrieved a hat from the floor, a tattered quilted army hat with heavy earflaps. He pulled it over his head and settled against one of the barrels on the side so he could watch the moon. The purbas had brought the secret of the woman's death. But now there was another secret moving south through the dropka, a warning about children and death and about the strangers from Lhadrung coming to help.
They passed by a waterfall that glistened like diamonds falling through the night. A small throaty buzz came from nearby. Lokesh was sleeping. Shan put his hands deep in his jacket pockets, for warmth, and his right hand closed around the small jar Gendun had given him that night when they began their journey, a jar of the consecrated sand taken from the mandala. He gripped it tightly as he gazed into the sky.
The moon that Shan watched was not the same moon he had known in the lands below, in the China of his first life. Like so much else in his second life, his Tibetan reincarnation, the moon was more absolute than the one he had known in Beijing. In Tibet it was so brilliant and pure, so close that one could believe the old tales that drifting souls sometimes got caught in its mountains.
There were nights when he could get lost in such a moon, let himself be absorbed for hours in its beauty. But tonight the dead boy haunted him and kept him from the beauty. You must hurry, the man had said. Death keeps coming. To anyone else the words would have been a warning to flee, to run away from death. But for Shan they had meant hurry, go to meet it. A wave of helplessness swept over him, and he knew that his face wore the same sad confusion the Tibetans sometimes wore. Even some of the lamas had shown it when they had dispatched him seven nights before. They might as well have used the same words as the dropka, for all they had told him, for all Gendun still told him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming. That was all the lamas understood. Murder was an unknown land to them, and Shan was their ambassador.
Chapter Two
After midnight, as they stopped once again to move rocks from the road, Shan thought he heard something. A metallic rattle, a machine noise, coming from far ahead of them. He heard only a snippet of sound, then it was gone, so quickly he wasn't sure he had heard it at all. Sound traveled unpredictably in the high, rarified atmosphere. It could have been a truck on the lonely road ahead of them. It cou
ld have been a helicopter behind them. It could have been a plane in the far distance. No one spoke about the noise, but when they finished Jowa checked the two empty barrels with his hand lantern and insisted that Gendun switch places with Lokesh. If he slammed the brakes hard three times, it was the signal for Gendun and Shan to hide.
But when the need arose there was no time for a signal. Shan woke from a deep slumber as the truck lurched to a stop, then heard Jowa calling out in anger to someone on the road.
He quickly helped Gendun into one of the barrels and covered it, then peered over the top of the truck cab as Jowa switched on their headlights. Half a dozen men stood by a heavy red truck, the size of their own, though much newer. The engine hood of the truck was braced open, and strewn across the road were a spare tire and metallic objects that could have been engine parts.
They were not Public Security, Shan saw with relief, nor the army. He could see Jowa speaking with one of the men, a big, broad-shouldered Han Chinese wearing a white shirt. Jowa was pointing at the red truck and at the road, which was blocked by the tire and parts.
Two of the men, in light brown shirts and pants of matching color, bent over the tire in the road, glancing frequently toward the man in the white shirt. Another stood with a foot on the bumper of the red truck, watching the sky. And a pair stood just behind the man who spoke with Jowa. They were all Han, and though they did not carry themselves as stiffly as soldiers, they had the quick, hunting eyes of soldiers. Shan looked back at the truck. An emblem was on the driver's door, what appeared in the dim light to be two outstretched arms, joined at the top.
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