Chapter Three
It comforted Shan that there were places on earth like the terrain they now rode through, places that could never be tamed. Some said such places were good for the planet, others that they were good for the soul. But Shan had met an old priest of a tiny, nearly extinct Tibetan sect who had insisted that such distinctions were misleading, that souls could not thrive unless the land thrived and that where the land deities had been shackled souls became grey, hollow things. The lama had lived all his life in the high ranges, but said that he had seen how Chinese made roads of asphalt and concrete. He had professed quite confidently that man, without knowing it, was making shackles of asphalt around the entire planet. When the last link of asphalt completed the last connection across the continents, he said, the world would end.
They rode for three hours in the shadows of rock walls, dashing over low passes where the sunlight exposed them, circuiting the perimeter of a vast grassland bowl because, Shan realized, there was no cover for riders who moved across it.
As they rode Shan asked Jakli about Auntie Lau. A teacher, she said, and until recently a member of the local Agricultural Council, a body which advised the local government on agricultural policy, elected by the local agricultural enterprises. Lau had been perhaps fifty-five years old, an orphan herself, without a family "but a mother to everyone," Jakli said, pushing her horse forward as Akzu turned with a chastizing frown. Sound carried far off the faces of the rock, and Shan had not missed the anxious way the old Kazakh studied the landscape.
A grim silence had descended over Akzu and Fat Mao as they trotted down the trail. At first Shan had thought it was still resentment over his presence, but then at a fork in the trail where Akzu led them down the least used of the two paths, he had seen that it was skittishness, even fear. Even the horses seemed reluctant to take the path and had to be reined tightly, before the riders could pull them between the two boulders that marked the trailhead. Akzu had dismounted to cut the bells from the harness of the camel.
Jakli rode in front of Shan. "A shortcut," she called back. But Shan saw the skittishness in her eyes too.
As they rode in the shadow of another rock wall he studied the five-mile-long valley it surrounded. It was not as fertile as the valleys in central Tibet but still held enough vegetation and water to support the small flocks of the dropka. There should have been herds, he knew. There should have been sheep or goats or yak, even the low-slung felt tents of a shepherd's camp. But it was empty, barren of life, as if somehow it had been sterilized.
The trail rose toward the crest of the ridge that defined the south end of the valley, and a small cleft in the rocks at the top appeared. Akzu signaled for the column to stop, then dismounted and led his horse to the opening. He pressed himself against the side of the cleft and peered through it. A moment later, visibly relaxed, he stepped quickly past the cleft and signaled for them to dismount and proceed. Shan awkwardly slid off his mount and followed their lead, but paused as he moved past the opening.
The object of their fear dominated the landscape beyond the ridge, a compound that, although at least two miles away, was clearly of huge dimensions. A long line of high wire fence, punctuated at intervals by guard towers, surrounded a complex of low, gleaming white buildings and cement bunkers.
"When I was young," a soft voice said behind Shan, "there was a nest of scorpions on the next hill from ours at our summer pasture camp. My brothers always wanted to kill them."
Shan looked at Jakli in confusion, then back at the complex. He knew what a Chinese prison looked like, and this was no prison. It had many guard towers but was too new and clean; too much of Beijing's money had been spent on the facility for it to be simply part of the gulag. But it also wasn't like any army base he had ever seen. Everything seemed to be made of cement. He saw nothing that looked like barracks. There were small buildings, the size of toolsheds, at regular intervals inside the wire.
"No, my father said," Jakli continued. "Let them live. I would not have you walk the land without fear."
As he shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun, now high in the sky, Shan could see a large radar antenna sweeping the sky from the center of the compound. Brilliant white domes were arrayed beyond the antenna. Satellite communications links. The small buildings were not sheds, he realized, but entrances to an underground complex.
"We call it the Mushroom Bowl. One night I saw them do a test," Jakli said. "It went far into the sky, like a shooting star going back to its home."
A shiver swept down Shan's spine, and he could bear to look no longer. "I'm sorry," he said, without knowing why.
Jakli returned his gaze with a small, wise smile. "It is just our nest of scorpions."
The main purpose of Tibet and western China was to act as a buffer, Shan had once heard a top general opine at a Beijing banquet, a staging area and shield against the next wave of aggression. Which meant, more than anything, that the vast wilderness was the hiding place for the country's most important weapons. Many politicians boasted in the capital that Tibet received the equivalent of billions of dollars from Beijing. All but a fraction of that money went to hollowing out mountains for troop garrisons and building secret nuclear missile installations like the one Shan had just seen. The Mushroom Bowl. Named for the white domes that had sprouted there after Beijing's invasion and perhaps also for the specter of the warheads inside its missiles.
The wilderness had been tamed after all, he thought. Maybe the old priest was right. When a sacred land got harnessed this way, it could mean the end of the world. The People's Liberation Army had its secret, buried ways to protect the world, or at least Beijing's world. For some reason he remembered the low rumble that was always present at their Lhadrung hermitage, the sound of the giant prayer wheel, kept moving by two monks at all hours, in a small chamber carved into a nameless mountain in remote Tibet. The lamas' secret, buried way to protect the world.
Now he understood the vacant grassland. Such bases were surrounded by military zones that would be patrolled by PLA commandos. In the imperial days there had been many places reserved exclusively for the emperor's family and high officials. To enter into them, sometimes to even look into them, meant instant death for any commoner. China still had its Forbidden Cities. There would be no excuses for a civilian caught in such a zone.
Another shudder moved down his spine. He wished he had not seen the base, wished he had not looked. It made a cold, hard, black place in his heart beside the many scars already there. After building installations like this, how could Beijing ever leave Tibet?
As he pulled his eyes away he saw that a large rock on the slope by the cleft had been painted red, and then saw another on the slope at the end of the bowl. It was a traditional way to mark the homes of the protective deities that lived inside mountains, the local land gods. At great risk Tibetans had painted the rocks, as if to fence in the base with watchful deities.
"Such danger," Shan said to Jakli, "just to save us time." His words were barely above a whisper, as if the Mushroom Bowl cast its shadow from miles away.
"You heard Akzu," Jakli said soberly. "We will take as many shortcuts as we need to, until the treachery stops." She gazed back toward the bowl. "The patrols are lazy. This time of year, they are mostly interested in animals."
"Animals?"
"With no herders here, it is like a giant game preserve. Generals come from Beijing, to shoot ibex and antelope. Snow leopards, sometimes."
"But still, if you are discovered-"
"Then we become the game," she said with a forced grin, and placed her open hands around her neck to give the impression of a head on a wall. "Mounted in some general's tearoom in Beijing. Rare counterrevolutionaries bagged in the wilderness."
Shan looked at Jakli, trying to understand how she fit into the complex puzzle of the group led by Akzu. "Akzu is your uncle," he said. "But you don't live with your clan."
"Sometimes. Right now I live in town. In Yoktian. I have a job i
n a factory. Making hats."
He asked her about the clan and Akzu. The question seemed to make her sad. After a moment she explained that the leathery old Kazakh was their headman, the elder of what was left of the Red Stone clan. Once the Red Stone had been a mighty clan with vast pastures in the north. But it had lost all those pastures to the government, and its people had been dispossessed. Akzu and Jakli's father had come thirty years before with a hundred surviving members to the borderland along the Kunlun, where the land and climate were so harsh that the population was sparse and nearly forgotten. They thought they could live without interference, out of sight in such a place. Now all that was left of the clan was one camp, and three families, coaxing a subsistence living out of the lands at the edge of the desert. And Auntie Lau, Jakli explained was no one's aunt, not a part of the clan, but a Kazakh woman who had brought the zheli under her wing, a kind, wise, soul loved by everyone.
Almost everyone, Shan nearly added. "I thought you were from Tibet at first," he said.
"It's a border land, has been for thousands of years. Many bloods get mixed here. My father was Kazakh. His brother was Akzu. My mother was Tibetan. She died when I was a baby. My father disappeared ten years ago," she said with a slight shrug. "I ride with my father's clan when I can. In the spring I like to go to the oasis in the desert to train the camels."
"You speak Tibetan very well."
"My father loved my mother very much. He encouraged me to keep her ways alive. Auntie Lau helped, when she learned about my mother."
"She gave you Buddhist teachings?" Shan asked.
"Not really. She said discovering my personal god, that was for me to do privately. But she knew Tibetan things, like she knew Kazakh and Uighur things. She said it was important to understand what the government said about new ways but that the old ways should not be forgotten."
Shan studied the woman, wondering whether the words had been Lau's or were simply Jakli's. Understanding what the government said was not the same as heeding it. "I did not know that Kazakhs lived in Tibet."
Jakli smiled and flashed her green eyes at him. "Some do, I suppose." She shifted in her saddle and pointed to the line of mountains they were leaving, the wall that separated them from the missile base. "But that last ridge is the border. We are now in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region."
Shan halted his horse and surveyed the dry, rugged landscape. The sky was a brilliant cobalt. Behind him the majestic snow-covered central peaks of the Kunlun connected the eastern and western horizons. In a gap between the peaks he had earlier glimpsed the vast Karakorum mountains that, rising out of the northern end of the Himalayas, created a nearly impassable border with India and Pakistan. To the north lay a brown haze that he now recognized as the beginning of the vast desert, the Taklamakan, that dominated the geography of southern Xinjiang.
He had been taken to that desert nearly four years earlier, and the haze sparked disjointed images of sand and razor wire and hypodermic needles. The Kazakhs might use the desert to train camels, but the Public Security Bureau used it for other purposes. They had beaten him and questioned him and drugged him and questioned him until he was a hollow, shriveled thing, more dead than alive, then discarded what was left of him in a lao gai hard labor camp deep in Tibet.
"Have you visited Xinjiang before?" Jakli asked, as if recognizing something in his face.
"I don't know Xinjiang," Shan said quickly and urged his mount forward, fighting an unreasonable fear that the men who had tortured him in the desert prison would reappear at any moment. Shan had had a cellmate for a few days while he had been with the knobs, an escapee from one of Xinjiang's infamous lao gai coal mine prisons, caught fleeing through the desert. The man had no papers, and they hadn't bothered to track down his genealogy, meaning, in the knobs' parlance, to cross-check the tattoo that was his lao gai registration number to its source, to the history of his political infidelities and the gulag camp he belonged to. One of the knob officers had called the man a "free one" for the new recruits. The last time Shan had seen him he had been crouched in the corner of his cell, naked, covered in his own filth, drumming his head against the wall.
Two hours after the Mushroom Bowl, their mounts found a new energy, quickening their pace as they descended into a small green valley lined at its edges with pines and poplars. A dog barked in the distance. The horses and camels began to trot. As they cleared a bend in the trail, the Red Stone encampment came into view.
Three round tents of heavy felt lay in a clearing at the bottom of the fertile valley. Beyond them, against a steep slope, were ruins of two stone structures that had been spanned by canvas tops to shelter livestock. They were not the ruins Shan was accustomed to seeing in central Tibet, not the scorched rocks and bricks pockmarked from the bombs and shells of the People's Liberation Army. These were the remains of ancient buildings, overtaken only by time and nature.
Their small caravan was seen first by a lamb frolicking up the trail, then by the adolescent girl who was chasing it. Both lamb and girl gave a bleat of surprise, then turned and scurried back toward the tents. Four large dogs, one of them a big black Tibetan mastiff, barked in warning, then ran to greet the riders as they emerged from the trail.
Akzu and Jowa had already disappeared inside the center tent by the time Shan and Lokesh dismounted. The girl reappeared, her eyes round with excitement. Three women, one with grey hair tied in a red checked scarf, and two others a few years younger, looked up from blankets spread on the ground, where they were crumbling pieces of soft cheese to dry in the sun. The older woman called out excitedly to Jakli, as one of the others leapt up, grabbed a white dress hanging from a tree branch, and darted inside the center yurt. Two men with strong, leathery faces and thick black moustaches appeared at the flap of the center tent, smiling at Jakli, then casting suspicious glances at Shan. Akzu's sons, Jakli explained after she had greeted each of them.
"Jakli!" a youth of perhaps twelve or thirteen years exclaimed from the nearest of the stables as the woman entered the clearing, walking her horse. A tiny goat lay draped across his shoulders. He gently deposited it beside an older goat, then ran to Jakli's side and embraced her.
"My youngest cousin," Jakli explained to Shan. "Malik. He stays with the animals so much we call him Seksek Ata sometimes. The protective spirit for goats," she added.
The boy's smile faded and tension crossed his face as he hugged her again. This time it was not for joy, Shan saw, but for solace, for comfort.
Jakli held him tightly against her shoulder, planting a light kiss on the top of his head. "Khitai was your friend," she said in a melancholy tone.
An angry shout rose from the tent on the left. A disheveled, wild-eyed woman stood in the entrance, pointing at Shan and yelling in her Turkic tongue. Jakli stepped in front of Shan as though to shield him from the shrill woman, then pushed him away, toward the stables. The woman took a step into the sunlight, still shouting at Shan.
"She's crazy," Jakli said in a low voice when Shan asked her what the words meant. "Something about children." Jakli frowned as she saw that Shan would not turn away. "She says you always want the children. She says you killed the children." Jakli pushed his arm but Shan did not move. "Years ago she was pregnant. They told her she had to go to a government clinic to give birth. When she went, they gave her a needle that made her sleep. When she woke up the baby was out of her, and it was dead. Later she found out that she had been sterilized."
The angry woman picked up pebbles and began throwing them at Shan. "She changed after that," Jakli continued. "In winter, she sits with a rolled blanket and sings a besik zhyry to it."
"Besik zhyry?" Lokesh asked as he watched the woman.
"Kazakhs have songs for everything. Weddings, births, horses races, the death of a friend, the death of a horse," Jakli explained, and thought a moment. "She sings cradle songs. The songs that Kazakh women sing to babies."
They stood in silence. Several pebbles hit Shan in the leg.
&
nbsp; "Every time a child dies," Jakli added quietly, "she thinks it was hers."
In the light Shan saw the woman's clothing was covered with dirt. Bits of dried leaves clung to her shoulder-length braids.
Shan let Jakli pull him away as a larger stone hit his knee. But a moment later Jakli stopped. Malik was waiting for them on a path on the slope above the stables. She looked back at the crazed woman, as if maybe she preferred to face the woman than to follow Malik, then sighed and gestured Shan toward the path. As they approached the boy, Shan saw that he had a sprig of heather in his hand. Jakli bent and picked a sprig for herself, then Shan did the same.
As they followed Malik, a dark form rushed past them. The woman's anger seemed to have disappeared, replaced by sobs that sounded almost like the bleating of one of the animals.
They made a silent procession up the path: the dark, wild-eyed woman, then Malik, followed by Shan and Jakli. After perhaps a hundred paces they entered a small hollow near the top of the hill, a sheltered place closed to the north by a huge slab of rock, open with a view for miles to the south, into the Kunlun, toward Tibet. At the back, in the shadow below the rock slab, was a five-foot-long mound of earth.
To the left of the grave was an indentation of packed earth. The wild-eyed woman, he realized, had been sleeping by the grave. Strips of bark lay at the head of the grave, bearing offerings of food. Two large feathers and twigs of heather had been pushed into the earth at the foot of the mound of earth. Shan and Jakli followed Malik's example and offered their sprigs in the same manner.
The woman sat at the head of the grave, rocking back and forth, her face now twisted with grief, singing a soft song, giving no acknowledgment of Shan.
Feeling helpless, not knowing what to do, Shan knelt at the foot of the grave. A moment later Jakli silently knelt beside him and began murmuring under her breath in the Kazakh tongue. Malik stood behind Jakli, his hand on her shoulder. Shan became aware of movement behind him and turned to see Lokesh, Jowa, and Akzu approaching the grave.
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