"All right, all right," Osman mumbled to the creature and sat up. As his eyes cleared he made a sudden motion toward something lying at his side, then relaxed as he recognized his visitors.
"Sorry to disturb your dreams," Shan said.
"Not sleeping, exactly," Osman said gruffly. "Listening." He spoke quietly into his dog's ear, and the animal trotted away, down the tunnel. Back to its post.
"Listening?" Shan asked.
Osman nodded and gazed down the dimly lit corridor. "For the wind. For helicopters. For spirits." He was in a dark mood. He seemed to be waiting for something evil to arrive.
"Any sign of Nikki?" Jakli asked softly.
"Of course not, girl," Osman grunted, rubbing his hand over his face. "He's too smart to come out of the mountains now. Probably go straight to the horse festival," the Kazakh added, casting a small, expectant grin toward Jakli.
Lokesh stepped to the altar and lit one of the butter lamps with a candle, then gestured for Shan to do likewise, paying homage to Buddha. As Shan stepped over Osman's pallet a glint of light caught his eye. On the floor, beside the pallet, was a long chopping knife, nearly as big as a sword.
"Too early to come back," Osman growled. He spoke to Jakli, but his eyes were fixed suspiciously on Shan. "The knobs could still come."
"We're not staying," Jakli replied. "We came to learn the way to the American. Deacon. He went into the desert. Which oasis?"
"No oasis."
"He has to be at an oasis," she said impatiently. "We must find him, Osman. There is no time to argue."
Shan looked about the room, which was growing increasingly brighter as Lokesh lit more lamps. The statue of Buddha had been covered again with the canvas. There were wooden crates stuffed with liquor bottles, a basket full of glassware, and in the farthest shadows something else. Cardboard cartons. Shan took three steps toward them before Osman warned him off with a raised palm. "Too much curiosity can be a dangerous thing," the grizzled Kazakh said.
But Shan had seen enough to recognize the cartons. He had seen identical cartons before, the new cartons of electronic goods from Glory Camp. In the hut with the dead American. On top of the cartons was a small, high-powered portable radio transmitter.
"Go back," Osman said. "Wait a few days. Deacon will return here."
"There may be no time to wait," Jakli said, her voice rising. "The Americans may be in danger."
"No one will welcome you, even if you find it. And if you don't find it, the desert will eat you. Nikki, he would kill me many times over if I sent you out there and something happened."
"Which is why you must give us very good directions," Jakli said, folding her arms with a determined stare.
Muttering under his breath, Osman produced a bottle of vodka from his pallet. As he reached for glasses, he studied his visitors again, then returned the vodka and pulled out a bottle of water. He filled a glass for each of them and motioned for everyone to sit on the floor. "You go due east ten miles, with your shadow always in front of you, then exactly northeast, through the Well of Tears, between the two walls. Then three miles due north. Sand Mountain, it is called," he began, drawing with his finger in the sand on the floor, describing the landmarks they would see. It was the old way, Shan realized, the way of the herders, imparting information orally, before everyone, so together all the details would be remembered. "If you had horses I'd say don't go today. Bad day on the desert, maybe. Smells wrong. With a truck, maybe, I don't know. Not the best sand for a truck." He shrugged and shook his head. "No. Wait here tonight. Tomorrow will be better."
Jakli exchanged a glance with Shan. Before they had left Yoktian she had arranged for a Mao truck to meet him on the road outside of town by evening of the next day, to begin his journey to Nepal. It was all they could hope for, she had said on the drive to Karachuk, to protect the boys and shield the endangered Americans. Then Shan could go on to his new life. Osman looked up at the glint in Jakli's eyes and sighed, then retrieved an old compass from one of his baskets. "Make it in less two hours," the Kazakh said as he handed Shan the compass. "Go like hell. There is no place of safety on the way."
Osman's ominous tone made no sense until forty minutes later, as the rugged little truck lurched across the sands. Then, as Jakli slowed to check first the compass, then her mirror to verify that she was navigating in a straight line, a small cry of distress escaped her throat. Shan followed her gaze toward the northwest. A tiny piece of the sky was missing. On the horizon, framed by dark clouds on either end, a green-black hole seemed to hover above the desert.
Jakli pushed the accelerator. "A storm," she said with alarm. "That color. It is the seed of a death storm. A karaburan."
"But it is too far away," Shan said. "It could blow in any direction. No need to-" He stopped as he saw the grim set of Jakli's eyes and silently accepted the compass as she put both hands on the steering wheel.
Minutes later Lokesh began chanting. But it wasn't a prayer, Shan realized after a moment. He was chanting the directions to the Sand Mountain. There was a long, treacherous gully, the Well of Tears, down which they would drive, then it was a sprint of three miles north until they reached the Claws. "How will we recognize the Well?" Shan had asked. Osman had only laughed, as though it were a foolish question.
"It's just a storm," Shan said, without conviction. He had never seen a sky like the one in the north. It didn't simply look like a hole in the horizon now. It looked like a huge mouth, and the mouth was clearly getting closer, like a predator that had somehow sensed their presence.
"It's why he said to hurry," Jakli said. "Osman has the old desert senses. He smelled something in the air." She gripped the wheel with white knuckles. Her foot held the accelerator to the floor. The rear axle fishtailed when it hit patches of soft sand. They crested a small dune and the front wheels left the sand, spinning in the air before dropping into the desert with a sickening digging sound as they landed. The sturdy little truck hesitated, then lurched forward again. At such a speed, they could land the wrong way and roll the vehicle. And an immobile truck in a sandstorm would be like a boat on a beach as a typhoon approached. Before long it would simply be engulfed.
"The Well!" Lokesh called out from the back, and his hand shot between Jakli and Shan to point to a long low ridge in front of them that seemed to have split apart at the center. "Straight northeast, into the Well of Tears," he recited in a singsong fashion. "Out of the Well, three miles north like an arrow," he continued, repeating the words exactly as Osman had last spoken them.
The Well was a gully between two walls of rock and gravel, and as they neared it the pathway grew more stable. Their wheels did not slip as much. But the walls seemed to go on endlessly, as far as the horizon. Had Osman said how far? No, just all the way through.
"Maybe the storm will go west of us," Shan offered.
"Maybe," Jakli said, but there was no sign of hope in her voice. The color had been slowly draining from her face.
"This canyon," Shan said as they entered the walls, "surely it will protect us."
"The storm comes from the northwest," Jakli said, her voice rising. "It builds its force below the western mountains, then grows as it eats the heat of the desert. Bigger and faster. A caravan in such a place might escape if the wind is right. If the wind is wrong, the wave of sand breaks over them. Or the canyon can act like a funnel, like a narrow bay in a storm that suddenly surges with a wall of water. They can be buried twenty feet under in minutes."
From inside the walls they could no longer see the storm. But there was something else. Shan opened his window an inch. There was a low steady groan, above which were cries and moans in many voices.
"Ai yi!" Lokesh cried out. "The misery!"
Certainly it could only be the rising wind playing on the strangely formed fingers and crevasses of sandstone that topped the walls, but the sounds seemed so human that a chill crept down Shan's spine. The Well of Tears.
"They come here," Jakli said, leaning fo
rward in her seat as though she could make the truck move faster by sheer force of her will. "The souls lost in the desert for all the ages. The weak ones, the young ones, who have no direction, no strength to guide themselves to the next life. They gather here, pushed by the wind, trapped forever."
A strange, haunting feeling gripped Shan as he looked at Jakli. "You mean, the old legends say that," he said. Or had he just thought it? His tongue felt strangely thick, his mouth so dry he couldn't move his lips. Jakli wasn't sure they were just legends. Lokesh, sitting at the edge of his seat, his face nearly pressing against the glass, seemed to have no doubt. He knew they were not legends.
"Do you feel it?" the old Tibetan moaned, in a voice Shan had never heard from Lokesh, a voice of agony. Lokesh began doing his beads with one hand, his other hand pressing against the glass as though to reach out to the lost souls. His chant had changed now, and his mantra grew in volume. He wanted the Compassionate Buddha to hear above the din, to come and rescue all the stranded souls, those lost in the past and those about to be lost in the present.
Jakli was no longer able to hide her fear. Her hands began to tremble. A thin sheet of sand began blowing over the gully, creating an eerie, shifting ceiling ten feet above the truck. She pressed on. "Get it ready!" she cried above the rising sound of the wind.
Shan looked at her in confusion, then saw that his hands seemed to have understood her on their own. They held the compass close to the dashboard. The desperate travelers would have only one chance, one sprint across the desert to the Sand Mountain, a place they had never seen, a place they might not even recognize, a place that might even be buried by the storm by the time they approached it.
Would the compass work in the storm? he wondered. Would the rock walls interfere with it? Would the lost souls, eager for company, misdirect the needle?
The needle swung wildly back and forth until he realized it was because his hands were shaking. He clenched the instrument tightly and the needle began to stabilize.
Suddenly the sand sheet overhead dropped almost to the roof of the truck, then the walls disappeared. The truck shuddered as a blast of wind hit it, and Jakli struggled to align the wheel with Shan's arm, which he threw out in the direction of the needle. He glanced at the odometer. Three miles was all they had to cover. Three miles to outrun the storm and avoid death.
Jakli's head began to turn toward the storm.
"No!" Shan shouted. "Don't look at it!" He did not want her to see what he himself saw now, did not want her feeling the terror that now gripped him as he stared at the maelstrom. The storm covered the entire western sky, and the giant black-green mouth was open, moving directly at them. No, he saw, it wasn't that the storm covered the sky, for everything, above and below them, seemed the same disturbing color. There was no longer a sky, no longer a ground. The whole world was turning into a chaos of churning sand. This was the way it would feel, something said in the back of his mind, to face a tidal wave on a tiny island in the middle of the sea.
Lokesh shouted his mantra louder than ever, as though warning the storm away.
"Two more miles!" Shan shouted, glancing at the odometer. His arm ached with the tension as he continued to point with the needle. A tear rolled down Jakli's cheek. A mile and a half. Maybe they could do this, maybe they could beat the monster. A mile and a quarter.
Then Jakli was sobbing and Shan realized the truck wasn't moving. The wind gave the impression of movement, but the big wheels of the truck had bogged in the newly churned sand and were spinning uselessly, the odometer still turning. Then the engine coughed and died.
With the mechanical noises gone, there was only the howl of the wind. The truck rocked, like a small boat in high seas. Jakli stared outside a moment, then turned to him with a strange calmness. "That little pad," she said in a tiny voice. "May I borrow it?"
He handed her his pad and pencil, and she quickly wrote something, tore out the page, then folded it into the tattered envelope he had seen her with at Glory Camp, then put them inside her shirt, against her skin.
Shan could not see what she had written, did not want to see. But when she handed the pad back with a sad smile, she had pressed so hard that the indentations on the page below were clear. "Don't stay, Nikki. I'll be with you in the beautiful country. I love you forever," it said in English, and Shan was shamed to have seen it.
"We could run," he said. Somehow he remembered that she had warned him. The Taklamakan. It meant, once you go in, you never come out.
Lokesh's mantra had grown softer now.
"A lot of good people are out here," Jakli said in a hollow voice, still wearing her small smile. "Warrior monks. Merchants from the Silk Road. Pilgrims. I never thought…" Her voice drifted away, and she settled back into her seat, watching a small stream of sand particles that had begun to blow in through a crack in the rubber that sealed the windshield. She began singing a song in Tibetan. Shan had heard it before, a very old song called a spirit wedding song. It was for loved ones separated by death.
A distant feeling seemed to settle over him as he looked toward the maw of the storm, as if he were somewhere else, just watching. He opened the pad to an empty page in the back. Spilled ink in the sky, he saw himself write. Coming to drown me.
He watched his hand take the slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Then he, Shan, was back. "No!" he shouted to the storm, putting aside the part of him that was ready to die. He was not going to spend eternity in the Well of Tears. His door was in the lee of the wind. He tied the string of his bag to his arm, then opened the door and stepped out. The sand was nearly over the wheel wells now. He tried to read the compass but could not hold it steady, so decided to walk in the general direction the truck was facing. The wind beat him back after two steps. It clawed at his face, the sand stinging like hornets. There were storms, he had heard, in which the sand blew so hard that it etched the skin and flesh from the faces of living men. He remembered the statues at Karachuk. Maybe he would end like that, gnawed to ruin by wind and sand, a mere suggestion of a human.
Something was forcing its way into his mouth and nose. It was gritty and tasted of salt. He realized, from a strange distance, as though he were watching someone else, that he had fallen. He lifted his hand to his head, which was against the bumper of the truck and throbbed with pain, and his hand came away wet and red. Then he discovered with mild surprise that his legs were gone. No, not gone, he decided, just buried in the wave of sand that was rapidly moving up the body of the truck. Half a grave. Is there such a thing as half a grave? he considered dully. A sound like the croak of a dying frog escaped his throat, then he shook his head violently. "No!" he shouted. "Gendun!"
He dragged himself along the truck until he found the door and with great effort pulled it open far enough to slip inside.
Lokesh was singing with Jakli now, not a mantra, but the spirit wedding song, and Shan lay in his seat, gasping for air, listening. Then the others grew strangely silent.
"The old ones," Lokesh said in a whisper not of fear, but of awe. "They are coming for us, to take us to the Well." He started singing again, his voice calmer.
The rubber sealing began to crumble, eaten by the wind, and sand began churning through the truck. But Shan no longer heard the wind. There was a chorus of soft voices and he recognized each one of them, the lamas who had saved his soul. He wasn't going to have a new life. He was reliving old lives. An image flashed through his mind like a dream. He was on the Silk Road, and he was losing the emperor's treasures. He smelled ginger. His father was close.
Then he heard a strange sound, like a laugh, from behind him. He blinked the sand from his eyes and saw an exuberant smile on Lokesh's face. "I had always hoped it would be like this," his old friend said, "to be able to see them when they came for me."
And indeed, out of the maw of the storm two phantoms appeared, shrouded in black, faceless, arms extended toward the truck to receive them. The old ones had come for their souls.
***<
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There were many kinds of hells, the old Tibetans taught, but the atmosphere in all was the deepest of black. The tiny dull hint of consciousness, all that remained of Shan, clung to that thought. There were many kinds of hells, as there were many kinds of sin, but the worst were the cold hells, and the one Shan had gone to was surely the coldest and the blackest. There was nothing, only the cold and the black, and the silence to let him agonize over all his failures. He had abandoned the children, who would now die. He had abandoned Gendun, who would be captured and devoured by the knobs. He had lost the waterkeeper, who would just fade away among the political priests who had captured him.
His agony ebbed and flowed with his consciousness. Whenever he was aware, he was aware of pain. And when he tried to conjure faces, they were always the faces of dead children.
Once something soft touched his head. His eyes fluttered open and saw a blurred flame, and for an instant he seemed to see a woman with wise green eyes leaning over him. Her face, lit by the flame, seemed to be made of fine porcelain. He knew her skin would squeak if he touched it. Then the light went out and he was back in his cold hell.
After some time- hours, days, years, he could not tell- the visions sometimes became beautiful, with faces of sacred figures, sometimes one of the many Buddhas he had met in Tibet, sometimes Lao Tzu, the sage of the Tao, who centuries earlier had himself disappeared into the western desert. Sometimes he seemed to be in a great warehouse of the Silk Road and heard the braying of camels and excited voices in many tongues calling out, then he was being condemned for losing the emperor's caravan and was being tied to a post for the death by a thousand slices.
Once in his visions a man with light skin sat before him with a brilliant lantern, reading from a large book in a rich, deep voice, and the words he read were in English.
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