"The edge of beyond." Shan repeated the words like a prayer. It was true. Gendun, as always, was at the edge of beyond.
After a quarter hour, Jakli pointed to a grove of trees at a bend in the stream and leaned forward in anticipation, then eased the truck to a stop under the shade of a grove of poplar trees. There was a small log building near the water, a tiny cabin with a porch, a single plank door and no window.
"It used to be a herder's hut, for the summer when the high pastures are green," Jakli explained as they climbed out. "One of Auntie Lau's favorite places."
"She lived here?"
"Sometimes. She had a room in Yoktian for many years, in the unmarried teachers' quarters. Officially, she lived there. But she stayed here in the warm weather, after the herds got so small the pastures here weren't needed. This was like a- I don't know. A retreat. A sanctuary, in a way. She came here years ago to help a flock of sick sheep. She kept coming back. Not so far from the highway to be inaccessible by car or truck, but far enough to be quiet, to be a world apart."
Shan saw the fond way Jakli looked at the cabin and the meadow beyond, filled with heather and asters in brilliant autumn hues, surrounded by rhododendron with leaves of crimson. It was like an oasis in the high dry mountains, the long slope above facing south so that it was protected, capturing more heat and water than the surrounding landscape. "It was that kind of place for you too," Shan suggested.
She nodded. "Auntie Lau taught me many things here."
"About animals?"
"About animals. About nature. About medicine. About people. About the stars. She was full of knowledge. Sort of overflowing with knowledge. I never knew anyone like her. Everyone, all the Kazakhs and Uighurs loved her. She was from nobody's family but everyone's aunt. It's why she got elected to the Agricultural Council."
"She brought the zheli here?"
Jakli nodded again. "Several times a year. Sometimes for what she called a reverence day."
"Reverence day?"
"Sort of meditation all day, whatever kind of quiet each of the orphans felt comfortable with. Some drew pictures. Some wrote letters. Some stared at flowers."
"What did Khitai do?"
Jakli considered the question for a moment. "I was there at the end of the day the last time. I think he climbed up the trail and sat near the top of the hill. Yes. I remember him. He was on a rock ledge," she said, pointing toward a slab of rock that jutted from the hillside. "Like an old goat, looking out over the mountains. Not with pride, just lost in the beauty."
Shan looked at the empty ledge. Was Khitai sitting on some other rock today, watching? Did he even know a killer was coming? Had Malik found him? With a shudder he realized that, by seeking out the zheli, Malik might be putting himself in the path of the killer.
Jakli stepped onto the narrow porch of the hut. "This place was like a shrine when she was here."
"A shrine?"
"A mosque. A temple. A religious place, is all I mean. You wanted to think big thoughts, just to please her." She opened a wooden latch on the door and led Shan into the cabin.
It was indeed as sparse as a temple inside. A small table, a chair, two benches, and a bedframe made of hand-hewn timbers comprised the only furnishings. Its walls were unfinished logs, many still holding their bark. A tin basin with two cups sat on the chair and a felt blanket lay folded on the bed. In the center of the table sat a single pine cone.
Shan stepped to read a sturdy piece of paper pinned to the log wall. It contained two flowing Chinese ideograms, one over the other, elegantly drawn with brush and ink. The liquid strokes combined the image of a bird flying away into the sky and the symbol of two hands struggling for a single object. It meant do not contend and was associated with the Eighth Chapter of the Tao te Ching, the greatest of the Tao teachings he had learned as a child. The characters brought a momentary aching to his heart, for the Eighth had been his father's favorite verse. Shan knew the passage well:
The greatest good is like water
Which benefits all things
And yet it does not contend
It stays in places that others disdain
And therefore is close to the way of truth
The verse was used to describe how enlightened individuals found contentment by not struggling, by staying in lonely, quiet places where truth, like water, was more likely to be found. Sometimes the final words of the passage were translated as the way of life. Truth or life. Perhaps, he thought, looking back at the ideograms, for Lau there was little difference.
He touched a corner of the paper with his fingertips, then pulled them quickly away, as if he were intruding on Lau.
"She was like that," Jakli explained from his back.
He turned and nodded. "I need to understand something," Shan said as she roamed about the small room, gazing upon its contents. "Yesterday when you came to us, Akzu said you didn't owe Lau anything, after what she had done to you."
Jakli turned from the opposite side of the table. "I never understood. A misunderstanding of some kind, I guess. I was in a camp, for reeducation. Lau wrote a letter to the prosecutor, saying I should not be released as scheduled, that I should serve extra time on probation at the factory in Yoktian they use for former prisoners. The hat factory. When they told me why I couldn't go back to the clan I didn't believe it. But they showed me Lau's letter." Jakli sat in the chair and cupped her hands around the pine cone. "It's okay," she said in a confused tone, toward the cone, as if somehow it were a vehicle for reaching Lau. "Just a mistake, I know. She had been nervous lately."
Shan heard someone enter behind him. "There's no sign of her. Nothing that speaks of her," Jowa said over Shan's shoulder.
"Maybe that is her sign," Shan suggested, looking at the paper on the wall, "the simplicity."
Jakli led them to a trail at the far end of the meadow. As she disappeared into the brush, Lokesh halted in front of Shan. A small waterfall could be seen at the edge of the woods. Birds sang. "It's the kind of place where the soul of a boy could linger," Lokesh said with a sigh, then excitedly called Shan to watch a large beetle crossing the path.
Their small procession followed the stream above the meadow for nearly a mile on a foot trail that wound its way through more rhododendron thickets and stands of tall evergreens. He studied the path. It was little more than a game trail, but judging from the many recently broken plants and seedlings at its side, it appeared to have seen heavy recent use.
The path opened into a small clearing bordered on the opposite side by a rock wall that rose vertically nearly fifty feet. From the lower limbs of an ancient pine that towered over the wall, something man-made dangled in the wind. It was a diamond-shaped frame of sticks bound with twine, with strands of brightly colored yarn connecting the sides. A spirit catcher, a talisman used in many of the nomadic cultures, to trap the devils that fly in the air.
Jakli stopped at the foot of the wall and motioned her three companions toward the far side of the tree. Shan stepped forward. In the shadow of the tree was a darker shadow. It was a hole in the rock, a narrow cleft perhaps six feet high and wide enough to slip through sideways.
Shan followed Lokesh's eyes toward a small pile of brush at the side of the hole. No, he saw, it wasn't a pile of brush, it was flowers, bundles of flowers dropped at the side of the opening. They were mostly asters, the autumn wildflower that was in bloom on the slopes. Some looked so fresh they could have been dropped an hour earlier; others were dried and brittle. Beside the stack were over a dozen crude animal shapes of twigs bound with brown twine and vines, creatures with long legs that Shan took to be horses and creatures with short legs that might have been sheep or goats. Beside the stick creatures were several small clay objects, in the shapes of pots and bells. As he bent to examine them more closely, the air suddenly chilled. A frigid draft swept over Shan, raising the hairs on his arms. It was coming from the cave.
Jakli appeared beside him. She stood in the chill wind with her eyes closed, r
everence on her face, as though praying. He had heard of such caves. Some said that death lived in these frigid places and that such wind was its breath. Some of the old Tibetans said such places were portals to the eight levels of cold hells that were taught by the oldest of the Tibetan sects.
Jakli reached into her pocket and produced a small battery lamp that she handed to Shan, then reached behind the pile of flowers and retrieved two sticks saturated with resin at the tips. She handed them to Jowa, produced a box of wooden matches, lit the torches, then took one for herself and stepped into the cave. Shan followed her closely, his throat suddenly dry. They were going to visit Auntie Lau.
After half a dozen steps, the passage widened to ten feet, but the ceiling dropped so low they had to bend over, holding their lights extended at their sides. The cold wind seemed to increase, dampening the light of the torches. Moments later they emerged into a larger chamber, perhaps fifty feet wide and three times as long, with a twenty foot ceiling. The air was more still, but even colder. Jowa uttered a gasp of surprise as he extended the torch over his head. The ceiling was glowing. Long stalactites of crystal hung down. It was ice, Shan saw. The entire ceiling was coated with ice.
"It wasn't so long ago that the glaciers left these hills," Jakli explained in a low voice. "Their roots are still here." She led them across the chamber to a five-foot-wide opening, which led into a smaller chamber with the same high ceiling but no more than twenty feet long.
In the dark and the cold, Auntie Lau was waiting.
She lay on a knee-high rock slab at the rear of the chamber, her hands on her stomach, her face so peaceful it seemed she was only napping.
Jakli knelt at the dead woman's side. Shan watched as she pulled a sprig of heather from her pocket and dropped it on the slab beside the body.
"I met her when I was just a girl that first summer she appeared. I was just eight or nine years old. My horse had a stomach sickness. I heard a healer was at a sheep camp so I was going to walk my horse to her. But after three or four hours my horse would go no further. He gave a long bellow and stood, weak and aching. I sat and made a fire, and suddenly she was there. She said she had heard a sick animal call. But she wouldn't give it medicine, not right away. She wanted to know about my horse, about how long we had known each other and where it had been born and how it acted in the rain. Then she touched the horse in many places and spoke to it. Finally she mixed some herbs and told me to stay there that night and sing to it. In the morning he was better, so strong he wanted to run all the way home."
Lokesh sat beside the slab, giving Jakli a small nod as if to encourage her to continue.
"One of my cousins said she must be some kind of sorcerer, when I told him," Jakli recounted. "But I said she laughed too much to be a sorcerer. I saw her many times after that, often unexpectedly, in the mountains, in the desert, wherever. Once she was healing a small squirrel that had been dropped by an owl. She said it was her duty to heal all the injured and the sick but that the greatest duty of a healer was to the smallest and the weakest."
"What do you mean, she appeared?" Shan asked.
"You know. One of the homeless. Her family had been lost too. She was like a wandering healer. We were fortunate she decided to stay in Yoktian County."
Lau's hair, black with a few strands of grey, had been set in two short braids tied with dark red ribbon. She was dressed in a long grey robe embroidered with flowers along its edges, her legs wrapped in red woolen leggings that covered the tops of a pair of small, well-worn leather boots. A red scarf, embroidered with flowers and leaping deer, covered most of her head, pulled low over her brow. Someone had dressed her for the cold.
"How far away is the place where she was killed?" Shan asked.
"Karachuk? In the desert, many miles inside the desert. They used her horse, then a truck to bring her body. Half a day's travel."
"Did you bring her?"
Jakli nodded. "From the road. The Maos came and told me at the factory, and I met them at the road."
"So the Maos were at this Karachuk when she was killed?"
"No. Some others, who went to the Maos." Jakli returned his steady stare with a cool, determined expression. There were secrets she would not tell.
"And she told you she wanted to be left here? Is this the Kazakh way?"
"No. But she had ideas. I mean, she lived her life in her own way. I think she wanted to leave it in her own way as well. She said to take her to this cave above the cabin."
"Who?" Shan asked. "Who did she ask?"
"She told her friends. About three months ago, she told her friends this is where she wanted to go."
The body had been kept remarkably fresh by the cold. It could stay like that for months, he thought. Maybe years. "It's a lot to ask of friends."
Jakli looked at Lau with a sorrowful smile. "It wasn't any trouble."
"But the way you speak about her, she wasn't the kind to put burdens on her friends."
Jakli knitted her brow, as if trying to understand Shan's point. "Lau was only going to die once," she said slowly.
But why this cave? Shan asked himself. It was as if the cave itself meant something. But what? A place where demons lived. Or maybe a place that demons feared. He walked slowly around the slab of rock, studying the dead woman. "If she was an outsider, without papers for a work unit here, how could she have been elected to the local council?"
Jakli shrugged. "She was checked, no doubt. She was Kazakh, and the herders loved her. As I said, she was everyone's aunt. And it was only the Agricultural Council. No real power."
"But the authorities. To get on even such a council a background check would have been required."
Shan could see in Jakli's eyes that she understood. Lau's family could have been lost in many ways, for many reasons. If it had been imprisoned, officially disbanded, or executed, its members by definition were bad elements in the eyes of the state. Holding office even in a lowly Agricultural Council was a privilege denied bad elements. He remembered Akzu's suggestion at the grave of the boy buried by the Red Stone clan. The demon wants to finish what it started with the parents of the zheli. Lau too had been from a lost clan. The secret that bound the victims could be from decades earlier, when the Kazakhs and Uighurs were being subdued by the People's Liberation Army.
"She was rehabilitated. I don't know. The people wanted her. The government is more forgiving now." Jakli spoke the last words without conviction, while looking at the slab of ice that covered much of the wall behind Auntie Lau.
Shan knelt by Lokesh, at the woman's head. The light of the torches gave her bloodless flesh an orange glow, adding to the sense that she was only sleeping. It seemed that at any moment the woman might sit up and chide them for disturbing her rest.
"We had to let people think there was an accident," Jakli said. "There had to be an explanation. We couldn't report her murdered and have the government involved."
Shan looked up. It was as if Jakli had waited to explain, so there would be no secret from Lau.
"A riding accident," Jakli continued, looking at Lau now. "We arranged for your-" She paused and drew in a deep breath. "We arranged for her horse to be found walking along the high road that follows the Yoktian River. The next day, someone at school reported her missing. She had a jacket, given her by the Agricultural Council, with her name on it. Fat Mao dropped it in the river. A woman found it floating downstream, near town."
Slowly, as reverently as he knew how, he eased the scarf above her forehead. A hole, over a quarter-inch wide, was at the hairline. He brought his lantern closer and saw dark smudges around the wound. It had been done at close range, execution style.
"Do you think it will keep growing?" Jakli inquired. She was looking at the ice patch again. "Maybe it will reach out and cover her. She could last a long time like that. Thousands of years."
Shan rose with a reverent bow of his head and noticed Jowa standing at the entrance. The purba had not ventured further into the chamber, as
if he had decided to stand guard. Or was frightened.
On the wall that curved away to the left, toward the entrance, Shan noticed dark shapes in the ice. He extended his electric torch toward them and saw that they were hands. At least a dozen hands had been pressed into the ice and left their unique indentations on the wall, like farewell salutes.
A tomb of ice, Shan thought. A guardian to the cold hells. What had Auntie Lau's final hell been like? She had not been killed randomly. She had been sought out. But why?
He gave voice to his thought. "Could she have been robbed of something?"
"She owned almost nothing," Jakli said. "The Brigade school gave her a room and an office."
Shan stepped to the end of the platform and knelt. "When she was prepared, before she was brought here, did anyone see-" As he slowly, painstakingly unwrapped the leggings, he answered his own question. "Ai yi!" he gasped under his breath. Bruises and welts, never healed, were on top of her feet. She had been beaten, beaten long enough before dying for the bruises to appear.
"We saw," Jakli said, her eyes welling with tears. "She must have been in such pain." Her hand shot to her mouth and she turned away. "But she wouldn't have talked. She was strong."
Shan nodded, not because he understood Lau but because he understood interrogation. Either she would have talked after the torture on one leg began, or she would have kept silent through the torture on both legs. He moved to her side after quickly covering the legs again and slowly rolled up the sleeve on Lau's lifeless right arm. Inside the elbow was another welt, centered over a tiny red spot.
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