Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  But now, Shan realized, Lokesh had divined the truth, and spoken it first, so Malik could explain.

  The dog's head shot up again, and its tail wagged. Shan looked over his shoulder to see Jakli standing with the tethered horses, listening.

  "Do you know Khitai?" Malik asked Lokesh.

  The old Tibetan shook his head slowly.

  Malik stared at Lokesh with round eyes, feeling, Shan knew, the same emotion as Shan himself, a confused awe of the strange magic that seemed to be working in the Tibetan. Shan had been wrong. It had not been Alta who had visited the camp but another family, another dropka family with a boy named Suwan, who had taken his belongings into the Red Stone tent, as if moving in. Khitai had changed places, switched positions on the zheli tether, with this boy, who had complained that his foster family couldn't speak his native tongue.

  "Did Khitai speak Tibetan?" Shan asked.

  "No. He was Kazakh," Malik said with a puzzled tone. "But he wanted to go higher."

  "Higher?"

  "Deeper into the mountains than Red Stone goes. The season is almost over, and the herding families live close to town in the winter. But word came that the Brigade was breaking up all the clans, that maybe the zheli would be broken up and shipped away to Chinese places. Khitai was very scared of the Chinese. I think they did bad things to his people when he was young. Khitai talked about getting away, to the last range, we call it. The highest part of the Kunlun, where the glaciers live."

  They watched the fire in silence.

  "Did you return that piece of wood to his grave?" Shan asked at last.

  His words seemed to frighten Malik. He squeezed Shan's hand tighter, as if to remind him that he was not an old man after all, just a boy who kept burying other children. "I found it the next day," Malik said. "My aunt had collected all the other pieces and put them with his things. I was going to bring it to the tent too. But I didn't want to touch it so I pushed it into the grave with a stick."

  "Why?"

  "Maybe that was what had called to the demon. The killer broke the secret writing apart. Maybe that's what had made the killer so angry."

  "You mean Bajys?"

  Shan saw Malik nod in the dark. "The thing that Bajys became, my uncle said." The boy was quiet a long time, watching the dying flames. "I know there are protective deities, like those that watch over animals. I know, because I have seen how lost babies find their mothers on the far side of a mountain. And if there are protective deities then there must be the opposite kind," the boy said in a knowing tone, as if he had often thought about the possibility.

  A destructive deity, Shan thought. A demon.

  "And it's still out there," Malik said in a haunted voice. "The thing that kills children."

  "We have to leave as soon as possible," Lokesh announced suddenly in a weak voice. "We must go and talk with Auntie Lau."

  Shan looked at his friend with worry. Something inside Lokesh seemed to have been collapsing since he had first heard Khitai's name. "Do you know about lamas here?" Shan asked Malik. "Was there one who was a friend of Lau's perhaps? One who is missing?"

  "Holy men?" the boy asked. "No. That Prosecutor Xu in Yoktian, she would never allow it. She gives speeches sometimes. She hates Tibetans. She says they are all traitors." Malik thought in silence for a moment. "She wouldn't kill them, though," he said with a certainty that chilled Shan. "But she would take them to a place where it is easy for a holy man to die."

  Chapter Four

  The rising sun washed the peaks in a blush of gold and pink as they rode down the rough northern slope of the Kunlun mountains. The light seemed to revive Lokesh, and he broke into one of his traveling songs, praising the deities who preserved mountains. Akzu and Jowa rode ahead, out of earshot, speaking in the same urgent tones they had used in the yurt with Fat Mao the day before. Every few minutes Jowa stood in his stirrups, looking ahead as if searching for something. Fat Mao, perhaps. The Uighur had been gone when they awoke.

  Suddenly Akzu raised his hand in warning. As they stopped, the sound of hoofbeats came from higher on the slope, from a trail that ran along the crest of the ridge above them. A small rider appeared on a loping grey horse. Shan heard Akzu curse, then call out to the rider, who wheeled the horse to a halt fifty feet above them. It was Malik.

  "The zheli have to be warned!" the youth called out to his uncle. "Khitai is still alive. The thing that is Bajys will come for him too, and maybe the others!"

  Akzu cast a worried glance toward Jakli. "We need you, boy," he shouted in reply. "You don't know where to seek. This is not the time." Anger seemed to enter his voice as he spoke. "I am head of Red Stone clan. I tell you no."

  The young Kazakh gazed out over the mountains for a moment. When he turned back toward his uncle Shan saw pain in his eyes. "And I tell you I am tired of digging graves," he called back, then kicked his horse into a sudden gallop.

  Shan watched Akzu as the headman gazed toward the boy and saw his face shift from anger to fear and then pride. "Go with God, boy," the old man offered quietly, then muttered to his horse and continued down the trail at a fast trot.

  Half an hour later, at the top of a ridge that descended sharply in a series of switchbacks, Jakli pointed to a ribbon of grey on the northern horizon. "The highway," she said, "four hundred miles west to Kashgar."

  Shan leaned forward in his saddle and pointed toward a huge rock formation a quarter mile to the west. It stood like a massive sentinel, towering three hundred feet above the ridge. At its top, fastened to a long pole held fast with a cairn of rocks, was a large square of ragged red cloth, perhaps six feet to the side. It was a huge lungta, a Tibetan prayer flag. In front, Lokesh stopped singing and stared toward the cairn, his hands cupped around his eyes. As he recognized the flag he began to wave, first at Shan, then toward the flag.

  Shan studied the towering rock. It seemed impossible to climb. But someone had done so, as if daring the Chinese to risk their own lives to take it down. Not just someone. A Buddhist. It was a border land. Many different peoples lived here, Jakli had said. But Tibetans, Malik had warned, were singled out by the prosecutor for special treatment. Border lands had people of mixed blood. Like Jakli herself, part Kazakh, part Tibetan. Mixed blood and perhaps mixed allegiances. Like Lau, perhaps- the mysterious woman with a Han name whose death had so stirred the lamas, the dead woman Jakli was taking him to visit.

  "Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called out in his loudest voice, causing Jowa to spin about with an angry glare. The old Tibetan ignored the purba. "Lha gyal lo!" he repeated. "May the gods be victorious!"

  "Your friend," Jakli said, looking at Lokesh, who waved at the flag again. "Is he crazy? I'm sorry- is he touched from old age, perhaps?"

  "Senile?" Shan smiled as he studied his old friend. "If senile is being unaware and lost and unable to connect things, then Lokesh is the opposite of senile. He has seen too much. All he wanted was to be a monk, a monk healer. But he so excelled at his lessons that his gompa sent him to work for the government. Then Beijing came and said he couldn't be a monk anymore. After a few months he got married, to a nun who had also been expelled. Two weeks later he was thrown into prison for being a government official."

  "For thirty years," Jakli recalled.

  Shan nodded. "Every visiting day his wife would come. Usually she wasn't allowed close enough to talk, so they would wave at each other, just wave for hours. And two days after he got home his wife died."

  Jakli's eyes had grown moist as Shan spoke. She looked at Lokesh, then turned away, into the wind, and urged her horse forward.

  They rode for another hour, descending constantly, until they reached the junction of several horse trails behind a long narrow structure at the head of a gravel road. The three-sided building was constructed of cinder blocks that had begun to crumble into dust. At one end the wall had partially collapsed, causing a sharp dip in the corrugated tin roof. To avoid total calamity, stout logs had been braced on sheets of plywood that pressed agains
t the exterior walls. As they dismounted and walked around the end of the building, Shan saw half a dozen trucks in various states of disrepair, sitting in the shadows of the building. The garage and its motor pool was operated on Ministry of Agriculture subsidies, Akzu explained, for the small farming and herding enterprises in the region.

  A small cubicle had been constructed of plywood in the rear corner of the building, at the end where the wall was intact. On a crude door cobbled together of wood and cardboard was a faded poster of a dozen young men and women representing some of the scores of ethnic groups that had been liberated by Beijing. Clad in the blue uniforms of the proletariat, they all joyfully raised wrenches and hammers toward the sky. Cultivate the Wealth of the Minorities, the caption read.

  Past the door sat an emaciated short-haired dog and a short dark man with several days' growth of beard and stains of motor oil on his hands and arms. Reading a newspaper at a rusty metal desk, the man glanced up as Akzu appeared, offered a grunt of greeting and pointed to a board from which five nails extended, each holding a ring of keys.

  "Leave quickly, uncle," Jakli said softly as she approached the door. "The clan needs you."

  The man's head snapped up at the sound of her voice. He looked at Jakli with a frown, then back to Akzu. "Checkpoints," he muttered. "Four miles up the road to Yoktian, then out on the main highway, going west."

  "Jakli is taking them-" Akzu began.

  The man interrupted Akzu with an upraised hand. "Don't want to know where, old friend. Too many people asking too many questions these days. Just a mechanic, that's all I want to be." He picked up the paper, revealing an open ledger book underneath, then slammed the ledger shut and gazed at the board of keys.

  "Take the turtle," he said, pointing to the last set of keys in the row. "We never officially acquired it, so it's not on the books. Don't have to record anything."

  Akzu tossed Jakli the keys and pointed toward the last bay, which held a small sturdy truck that appeared to have been assembled from parts of other vehicles. It had wide tires, a short cargo bay constructed of rough cut lumber, an oversized gas tank that extended along the frame, and a long cab, so large it accommodated a narrow rear seat. The high, rounded lines of the cab did indeed resemble a turtle shell.

  "Who?" Akzu asked the man.

  The man frowned again. Too many questions, he had said. "Grey," he offered with a tone of resignation, and Shan realized Akzu meant, whose checkpoint? Grey was the color of the Public Security troops, the knobs. The army wore green. Traffic police wore blue. "But she's not there. Too busy elsewhere. Grabbed four yesterday. Three the day before, I hear, from town. Some teachers from the school. Motor pool. That's how I heard. They took a driver."

  Jakli, who had just gestured for Shan to join her at the truck, stopped abruptly at the announcement. She stepped back toward the cubicle. "On what grounds?" Jakli asked in a raised voice. Shan had begun to under stand something about the spirited Kazakh woman. If Lokesh sometimes unexpectedly overflowed with sorrow, then Jakli was subject to attacks of defiance in a similarly unpredictable manner.

  "On the grounds that she is the prosecutor," the man replied, but he looked at Akzu, as if he were not inclined to converse with Jakli. "It's about that woman, Lau, someone said. They're taken for questioning about her disappearance. You knew Lau. They could take you too."

  "But she drowned," Akzu said, exchanging a worried glance with Jakli. "People say she drowned."

  "So I heard. But no body was found. Anyway, must have been a slow time in town."

  "What do you mean?" Shan asked.

  The mechanic looked at him with the same reluctance he had shown with Jakli. "Army shoots someone, that's national defense. Public Security knobs shoot someone, that's for public security, by definition. We shoot one of them, that's assassination. Simple. Like inserting pegs on a board. They have forms all printed up. But this one, just an old Kazakh woman disappearing? A Kazakh or Uighur here or there, usually she doesn't care."

  "But this time," Shan observed, "the Prosecutor is putting up checkpoints and picking up witnesses."

  "Not witnesses," the mechanic shot back. "The actors in her latest production. The political gallery."

  Shan studied the man. He suspected the man had not always been a mechanic. "The prosecutor is using it," he said, nodding his agreement.

  The mechanic held up his hand again, as if signaling that he would hear no more of such dangerous talk. Akzu gently pushed Jakli out of the cubicle as the mechanic went back to his paper.

  Moments later Jakli stood at the driver's door as Akzu showed her a map pulled from the visor of the truck and pointed to several dotted lines that wandered back and forth across the dark line that represented the Kashgar highway. "Go with speed, niece," the headman said. "Then back to town. You will be missed at the factory. You take too many risks. Remember Nikki. Remember your aunts."

  Nikki. Shan remembered Malik, speaking of the present he was carving. There had been another name which the boy had been wary of speaking.

  "Always," Jakli said with a shy smile that encompassed both Akzu and Shan. "Watch for Malik, Uncle," she added. "Watch for the children." She gave Akzu a quick embrace, then froze.

  A bright red truck was skidding to a halt in the loose gravel in front of the garage. Shan recognized the gleaming vehicle as one of the four-wheel-drive trucks produced by an American joint venture in Beijing, a factory he had audited once in his prior incarnation. On the front door of the truck was a large insignia in gold, a representation of the head and shoulders of a man and a woman, their arms crossed over a rising sun, one hand holding a hammer, the other a wrench. Below the sun was an oil derrick, a tractor, and an animal that may have been a sheep. Shan realized he had seen it before, two nights earlier, on the truck that had stopped them in the Kunlun. The Brigade had arrived.

  Akzu quickly stepped out of the garage, into the sunlight, in front of the red truck, as if to distract the new arrivals. As he did so a Han Chinese emerged from the rear seat, a man of perhaps thirty years, wearing a red nylon parka that bore a minature version of the same emblem on its breast and sunglasses under an American-style front brimmed hat. He rapped a knuckle on the window of the front passenger seat and pointed toward the cubicle in the shadows. The two men in the front emerged, the driver holding a clipboard, the other a small calculator, and stepped briskly toward the cubicle.

  Shan felt a tug at his sleeve. Jakli was pulling him back, behind the turtle truck. He let himself be eased into the shadow as he watched a second figure climb out of the back seat, a tall, lean man with a thin face and high cheekbones, wearing a brown suitcoat, at least two sizes too small, over the blue pants of a factory worker. Shan glanced at Lokesh and saw from Lokesh's sudden interest that his old friend had also recognized the man's features. The tall man was unmistakably Tibetan.

  "Akzu," the man in the cap said as the headman approached. "An unexpected pleasure!" His voice was as smooth and polished as his face. An eastern voice. A university-trained voice.

  "Ko Yonghong," Jakli whispered to Shan. "District manager for the Brigade."

  Akzu greeted the younger man affably but slowly stepped around the red truck, even as Ko put his hand on the Kazakh's shoulder. Akzu wanted him away from the garage, away from Jakli and her companions.

  The wind caught Ko's parka as he walked and opened it. He was wearing a white shirt. Only then did Shan notice that the two men who had gone to the desk wore light brown shirts, clean shirts with collars and cuffs, like uniforms, like those he had seen on the high road in the Kunlun. He glanced into the windows of the red truck, as though hoping for a glimpse of Gendun, then studied the district manager carefully. Ko Yonghong. Ko Forever Red. It was a name favored by parents who were ambitious Party members. The man who was liquidating the Red Stone clan.

  Suddenly, before Shan or Jakli could restrain him, Lokesh stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand toward the tall stranger.

  "Tashi delek," Lokes
h said in an affable voice. Hello, in Tibetan.

  Though softly spoken, as if not to be overheard, the words stopped Ko Yonghong, twenty feet away. He spun about and stared at Lokesh with intense interest for a moment, then paused to light a cigarette with a gold lighter and grinned at Akzu, as if the herdsman had presented him with an unexpected gift.

  "Ni zao. Ni hao ma?" the Tibetan replied with an awkward smile and a quick glance at Ko. Good morning. How are you? in Mandarin. "I am called Kaju. Kaju Drogme."

  The announcement instantly brought Jakli out of the shadows. At the same moment Ko stepped to Kaju's side, still studying Lokesh. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then gazed slowly down the line of trucks in the garage, as if looking to see what other surprises lurked in the shadows.

  He wasn't the man who had challenged them two nights before in the Kunlun, Shan knew, but he could have been the man in the seat, smoking in the dark. Why would the Brigade be inside Tibet, why would it be waiting on a deserted road in the middle of the night? What had they done to Gendun, he wanted to shout. But why, he wondered in the same instant, why had they not just taken all of them, Jowa and Lokesh too, if the Brigade was so interested in Tibetans? Shan slipped around the front of the truck, into the light, suddenly feeling the need to protect Lokesh.

  "Red Stone has no vehicles," Akzu said suddenly, and Shan understood what the men in the garage were doing. Taking inventory.

  Two streams of smoke snaked out of Ko's nostrils as he stepped around Kaju to the front of the red truck, where he could see all of them at once. "You will be pleased to know the enrichment program has been expanded. We're privatizing the motor pool as well."

  "Enrichment?" Akzu asked tersely. Shan could see that he was restraining himself, trying not to antagonize the Brigade manager.

  "Poverty Eradication seems such a demeaning term," Ko said, sounding more like a political officer than a businessman. "Think of all the shares in the company you'll have, comrade. You'll be an owner of the garage now too. We will be launching stock exchange shares soon. We have special advisers working on it from Beijing. Consultants from America, even."