Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  Lokesh sat and placed a palm on the grave. "Khitai," he said in a low, doleful voice, and stared at the freshly turned earth, his jaw open. As the others watched in silence, the old Tibetan's other hand found his rosary and, leaning back, he began a low mantra. Jowa sat beside him, then hesitantly produced his own rosary and joined the mantra.

  The woman at the head of the grave blinked several times and rubbed her eyes as though awakening from a trance. She looked uncertainly about the circle, as if wondering how so many had joined her, or perhaps who was mortal and who was visiting from another world. Her eyes fixed on the rosary beads, first Jowa's, then Lokesh's, and light seemed to return to her face. She spoke to Akzu in their native tongue. The Kazakh headman looked at the two Tibetans and replied to her, then turned to the visitors. "She said it is good to have a mullah at last. I said you are not mullahs, you are Buddhists, but you are holy men nonetheless."

  The woman was nodding vigorously, then patted the dirt the way she might a sleeping child.

  "Who did he belong to, this boy?" Shan asked. "He was an orphan, but where was the rest of his clan?"

  "Gone. Extinct, probably. We do not know the details of his birthing. Nor did he. He was from the zheli," Akzu said, as if it explained much.

  Shan watched the haggard woman in silence, then pushed back from the pile of earth to stand beside Akzu. "You mean he lived here, but Lau was his teacher."

  Akzu nodded. "Lived here for a short while. Some children have to be taken care of by everyone. He wasn't any trouble," Akzu said. "One of the zheli often comes and stays a month or two. Lau didn't like them staying in the town all the time. In the warm weather she arranged for them to go to the clans."

  "But Khitai, he was new?"

  "New to us. He had not stayed with the Red Stone before. But sometimes, when we took one of the orphans to Lau's meeting place, we would see him. Always smiling. He was luckier than most, because he at least had his companion, this man Bajys." He winced as he spoke, as if understanding the irony of his words.

  "So Bajys was an orphan too?" Shan asked.

  "Yes. But older, so he didn't go to school. They said the two of them had discovered years earlier they were from the same clan in the north and had promised to watch over each other. Bajys taught Khitai things."

  "What happened to their clan?" Shan asked, remembering Akzu's words at the trailhead. Maybe the demon was finishing something started years before.

  Akzu shrugged and stepped away from the grave as if leaving, then stopped in the center of the clearing and stared out over the hills to the south, toward the high plateau of Tibet. Shan followed him. "All the clans have been troubled since it began," Akzu said.

  "The murders, you mean."

  Akzu did not look away from the hills. He offered a sour smile, as if Shan had made a joke. "Sure, the murders. All the murders. All the arrests. Since I was a boy, when all the green shirts arrived."

  Akzu was speaking of the People's Liberation Army and their invasion of the western lands fifty years before, when the region had been absorbed into the People's Republic. The story had been spoken of so often by some of Shan's former cellmates, the captured warriors, that it had been turned into a song which they whistled sometimes in front of their guards. The PLA had taken Xinjiang; then, after training on the Muslims, they had started on Tibet. Xinjiang had taken a year to subjugate, Tibet nearly a decade.

  "Many old clans disappeared entirely," Akzu said, "lost forever. Others were broken up, separated by lines on Chinese maps." He looked back to Shan. "Emperors from Beijing had come to Xinjiang many times. They wanted to buy our horses. They wanted to guard their own frontiers with advance garrisons. Their armies stayed a few years and went home. It didn't affect the Kazakhs or the Uighurs who lived here. But Emperor Mao was different." He shook his head. "We have always been nomads. The greenshirts sent by Mao drew boxes on maps and gave us papers that permitted us to live only in those boxes. We laughed. Obviously the Chinese didn't understand the way of the herds, or of our people. But when we traveled outside their boxes they sent us to prison. Or worse."

  "You're saying the boy was displaced somehow."

  "Displaced," Akzu spat. "You sound like Beijing." He sighed and looked toward Jakli, as if reminding himself that he had to get along with Shan. "The restrictions are not being enforced as much today," the headman offered. "We get visitors now, people roaming in search of family they haven't seen for twenty, thirty years because they were assigned to live in different boxes on the Chinese maps. Lau was like that at first, but she decided to stay in Yoktian County to help all the others that wandered through."

  "Khitai and Bajys came like that, looking for family?"

  "Mostly, now, the orphans just try to find places to fit in, try to make a new life. Auntie Lau said maybe we should get to know Khitai. She said he was better suited for the smaller clans, the ones that stay in the higher pastures away from town. We said of course he and Bajys could come. Many such people never find their home hearths. Things have changed so much. The children are not permitted to learn the old ways." He shook his head slowly. "I got a letter last year from a cousin who married into a clan in the north. She said things were so much better that Chinese come to their camp and pay to sleep in their yurts and eat food from a wood fire. Tourists. I wrote a letter to say that doesn't mean it's better, that if it feels good to have them come and treat us like their pets, like a circus show, then you have lost the why of it, you have forgotten what being Kazakh is supposed to feel like." Akzu shrugged. "I didn't mail it. Sometimes Public Security stills reads letters.

  "But when travelers like Khitai come, we must make room for them. We lost many from our own clan in the struggles. Maybe some are still alive, in the north perhaps, or even in Kazakhstan," he said, referring to the independent Kazakh nation to the west of China. "Sometimes broken clans go to a town to start a new life, like Lau. But some just wander. Maybe we have family wandering too. We would want them to find friends along the way." Shan looked to Jakli. Her father had disappeared, she said. Akzu's brother. The headman sighed heavily. "We will know ourselves what it is like soon enough, what it is to be orphans."

  Shan was about to ask him what he meant when Jakli stepped to his side. "Uncle, how long was this boy here?"

  "Nearly three weeks. Before the last full moon. Khitai was quiet. A good boy. Mischievious sometimes. Once he climbed a tree near camp and threw nuts down on everyone who passed, making sounds like a squirrel. Always wore a red cap, his dopa, like a good Muslim. Stayed with Bajys working in the hills except when he played with Malik. We were glad to have them for the autumn chores. We were cutting hay for the winter." He cast a bitter glance at Jakli as he spoke the last words, as if cutting hay for the next winter had come to represent a cruel joke.

  "How did the boy die?" Shan asked abruptly.

  Akzu sighed again. "One of the old families visited that day, not a clan, the remnants of clans. The shadow clans, we call them. They're distrustful of everyone, wary as deer. They stay off roads whenever possible, just herd enough sheep to feed themselves. Usually stay in the highest pastures where no one else ever goes, near the ice fields. If they need supplies they come to one of the small camps like ours to trade. Some took children from Lau too. She said it helped keep the shadow clans connected to the world," Akzu added, gazing back at the woman at the head of the grave. "We made a meal together, then they moved on at dusk. Malik was away, so Khitai played with the boy from the other family, one of his friends from the zheli. They played in the hills most of the day. The other zheli boy was happy, he told me at the meal, because his shadow family didn't speak the Turkic tongue so well, or Mandarin."

  "They weren't Kazakhs?"

  Akzu shook his head. "Dropka, Tibetans. One of the border families. Many of the dropka on this side of the border worked with Lau."

  Shan closed his eyes as a new surge of grief swept through him. To stand at two children's graves in just two days was as hard as anythin
g he had faced in the gulag. "We saw them," he announced after a moment, having a hard time forming the words. "We buried their boy," he said, and explained what had happened on the changtang. Jakli gave a small moan. Akzu lowered his eyes and spoke several words in his native tongue that sounded like a prayer.

  "Where was Bajys that day?" Long ago Shan had learned not to believe in coincidence. The killer had targeted both boys and killed both, two days apart. "Why would he turn on Khitai this way? And why Alta, afterward?"

  Akzu looked solemnly at Jakli before speaking. "The day before, Fat Mao was here, to ask if we would help when people came from Tibet to help about Lau." As he spoke, the headman glanced at Lokesh, looking old and frail at the edge of the grave, then glanced at Shan, and finally Jowa. An aged Tibetan, a Chinese exile, and a sullen, unhappy warrior. Not, Shan suspected, the help Akzu had anticipated.

  "Bajys was there? He knew about Lau's death?"

  "No, Lau's death was kept a secret from the zheli. At most they just heard the rumors from town, that she had disappeared. But Bajys came into the tent and stared at Fat Mao. We asked him what he wanted, but he just stared at Fat Mao, then turned and ran away. He must have understood, must have eavesdropped, maybe he knew Fat Mao from town. It's the kind of information that could change a man's life. For certain men it would be like finding gold lying on a trail. Go to the prosecutor, tell about the secret resistance, give some names. Get a reward, get a new job somewhere, a new life. I think Bajys told the boy that day what he was going to do, and Khitai resisted it, said he would tell Fat Mao, that he would stop him. But Bajys had no kind of life. It was the biggest opportunity he might ever hope for. That other boy, he must have heard too."

  "Did Bajys have a gun?"

  "Apparently. Lots of Kazakhs keep guns for hunting."

  "Where did it happen?"

  "Here, in this same clearing. We found the boy sitting against the rock, not far from where he is buried."

  "Who, exactly, found him?"

  "The next morning Malik went to look for him when he didn't come for breakfast. The boy passed much of his time here. It's quiet. He had lessons here with Bajys. Malik went up the path at dawn and came back running, shouting for us. It had to be some sort of terrible accident, I thought at first. He had found a gun and was playing with it."

  "But there was no gun," Shan stated.

  Akzu shook his head slowly.

  "Did anyone examine his body?"

  "We have no holy man nearby. No mullah. We must bury our dead quickly, before sunset. My wife came up here and washed him and placed him in a shroud. She didn't know Khitai well." Akzu sighed. "But she knows how to bury children. We sang songs, but such songs should be sung about the dead one's life, and no one knew what to sing." He looked at Jakli, as though to reassure her. "So we sang about riding horses in the high pastures and how eagles fly." He cast a meaningful glance at Shan. "It was one bullet in the center of the forehead," he explained in a lower voice. "A small gun. The bullet did not have much velocity. Quiet. No one heard the shot." Akzu gazed at Shan, as though challenging him to ask how the headman had knowledge of weapons. "No wound in the back of his skull. The bullet stayed inside."

  "Nothing else? Any sign of a struggle?"

  "His clothes were torn. Shirt ripped open, and one of his pants legs got torn. A shoe was missing." Akzu's eyes shifted toward the hills, his gaze returning tinged with worry. There was something else on his mind. Akzu had intended to bring only Jowa to his camp, Shan recalled. Because he knew about Public Security.

  "But you said Bajys and Khitai were related, the last of their clan. They had been together so long."

  Akzu shook his head slowly. "Bajys was unsettled. Some people are always nervous around children. Sometimes he was like an uncle to the boy. When we ate, he would remind Khitai of his manners. Sometimes he was like a teacher. But sometimes it was like he was scared of the boy."

  "Scared?"

  "Not scared." The headman frowned. "I don't have words. Sometimes it was like Khitai was the older brother. Bajys was nervous about pleasing him." Akzu stared at the sky a moment, then shrugged. "When a colt grows up without a herd, it is always skittish."

  "Orphans have reasons to be skittish," Shan suggested.

  Akzu nodded. "But the dogs liked Bajys," he added in a confused tone, as if that were the greatest mystery of all. He shrugged again. "We will find him if he ever leaves the Chinese town. The clans won't go to the government about it. We find our own justice. But he knows we can't go to town to take him. Too many knobs there."

  "Your own justice?"

  "We know the killer," the headman said with a chill in his voice. "He will be found eventually and he will pay the price of all killers."

  The words surprised Shan, who had lived in Tibet for so long. Revenge was not something that Buddhists sought. But they were in a Muslim land now, and Muslims believed in retribution.

  "What about Lau's other children, the rest of the zheli?" Shan asked. "Have they been warned? Until the killer is found, until we understand why he is killing they are all in danger." Akzu's words from the trailhead still haunted him. Maybe the demon is going to kill them all, the headman had said. Twenty-three orphans, and only twenty-one left.

  Akzu and Jakli exchanged a worried look. "Word has gone out," Akzu said in a pained tone. "We do what we can."

  "It's not easy," Jakli said. "It's why Lau called them her zheli. Those children are like wild horses, scattered over the mountains, always moving, always wary."

  "But surely their homes are known. Their foster families."

  Akzu shook his head. "Homes? They're with nomads, traveling with their flocks until winter, bringing the children together only for Lau's classes. Sometimes they pick up mail at farms, or in town. People know the names of the clans, maybe know the pastures they traditionally use. We knew where two zheli girls were staying, in a valley near here. They're being kept in their tents now, with someone always watching." Akzu looked out over the mountains. "Since she retired from the Agricultural Council, Lau was going out alone into the ranges, giving the children medical exams, bringing food to the poorest families, teaching special lessons. I think only Lau would know where all the children might be at any one time. Maybe that will save them, their secrecy."

  "So Lau knew Red Stone clan was here, at this camp?"

  Akzu nodded. "She knew we come here in the autumn, knew we use it as a base to gather our flocks for the winter. But it's not important what Lau knew. Bajys was here." Akzu gazed back at the mound of fresh earth. "The only children killed were one at Red Stone camp and one who visited Red Stone camp," the herder said somberly, and began walking back down the trail.

  The front flap of the center tent had been tied back when they returned to camp, and as they approached a grey-haired woman appeared at the flap. She studied them with strong, proud eyes, then gestured them inside. Shan followed the example of Jakli and her uncle, rinsing his hands in a basin of water by the front flap, then sitting on a cushion near the center of the heavy carpet that served as the floor of the tent as the woman handed them small, chipped porcelain cups filled with steaming liquid.

  "My wife is baking today," Akzu announced as the woman leaned over a brazier where a kettle simmered. Beside the brazier sat a clay pot of yogurt and, on a large flat stone, a stack of nan, the flat bread favored by China's Muslims. "You will sleep with our clan, in the tent near the stables."

  The woman smiled shyly as Shan nodded in greeting and sipped his cup. It was not tea, as he had expected.

  "Warm goat's milk," Jakli explained. From behind a rug suspended at the back of the tent Shan heard voices. The two other women he had seen earlier peered out from the edge of the carpet and looked at Jakli with small, expectant smiles, then disappeared.

  The milk was surprisingly bitter, but the liquid filled him with warmth as it hit his stomach. "Had he been away, this Bajys?" Shan asked.

  "Away?" the headman asked. He drained his cup, then reach
ed behind him and produced a small drinking skin. With a slight bow of his head he extended it to Shan with both hands.

  Shan held the skin without looking at it. "Auntie Lau died more than a week before. Could Bajys have killed her as well?"

  Jakli's head snapped up with sudden interest, as if she had not considered the possibility.

  "No," Akzu said after a moment. "He was with the clan for the past month. That place in the desert where she died, Karachuk, to go there and back would be more than a day. He was never gone more than four or five hours, when he went with Khitai to the high pastures." The headman nodded at the skin. "Kumiss," he said. "Drink."

  So there were two killers, Shan thought. And Bajys was only part of the answer. "Karachuk?" he asked. "Why was she there?"

  Jakli and Akzu frowned into their cups and exchanged a glance. "An oasis place, that's all," he said enigmatically, then steered the conversation away from Lau and the dead boy, speaking instead as a host spoke to his guests, following the code of hospitality Shan had experienced in nomad tents in Tibet. He showed Shan how to twist the wooden plug off the skin and raise it to squirt into his mouth. Shan did so uncertainly, for he had not seen such skins in Tibet, then nearly choked as the acrid liquid hit his pallet.

  Akzu grinned. "Fermented mare's milk," he explained, then accepted the skin back from Shan and took a long swallow of the pale white liquor. He sighed with satisfaction, then spoke of how the horses were growing heavy coats, the sign of a harsh season to come. After a quarter hour Jakli rose and stepped behind the carpet partition at the rear, triggering a hushed, excited chatter from the women behind it. After a few minutes she reappeared, flushed with color, as though embarrassed, then retrieved Shan's drawstring bag where it sat by the entrance. Shan offered his gratitude to Akzu's wife, then followed Jakli to the tent by the animals.

  Malik appeared, holding the flap open as if he had been waiting for them. But Jakli lingered, looking toward the tent on the opposite side of the camp, then handed Shan's bag to the boy and silently moved into the third tent. Shan hesitated, wondering if Malik would explain. But the boy shrugged and moved back behind the flap. Shan followed Jakli and heard a strange, irregular clicking sound as he approached the third tent. Five faces looked up at him as he stepped inside. Jowa, Jakli, Fat Mao, and Akzu's sons.