Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  "These textiles and the others we have, they span over two thousand years," the American continued. "They share nothing with the lands east of here. Many designs coincide with Persia, even Macedonia. And this-" Warp pointed to a plaid with blue, yellow, and brown. "This twill is a direct match to shreds preserved in salt mines in what is now Austria, made by ancestors of the Celts."

  "Dr. Najan," she said, nodding to the balding man at the microscope, "is retired from the museum in Urumqi. He has deconstructed the weaving of several pieces and can tell you exactly how the looms were built to produce such weaving. They were primitive looms of a kind still used today in Turkey and Afghanistan." There was a glimmer of challenge in the American's eyes now. "The evidence is irrefutable. When we publish we'll have enough to fill five volumes."

  The People's Republic, Shan knew, was itself the oddest of fabrics, a patchwork of peoples and cultures and histories woven together and compelled to stay together by force and doctrine. History books were crafted in Party workshops to validate that patchwork, and the annexation of the vast lands of Xinjiang and Tibet had been politically justified by pronouncements that the native peoples had always been part of the Chinese people. Every few months headlines proclaimed more Party-sponsored research that proved the common roots of the Chinese and the Tibetans, or the Chinese and the nomads of Xinjiang. A favorite of Party bosses was a permanent Chinese chromosome project designed to prove scientifically that Tibetans and the other minorities all descended from Han Chinese stock. Shan knew about such studies, had even known some of the scientists involved in Beijing, for the same scientists sometimes worked on forensic teams. First came the doctrine, and the science was designed to accomodate the doctrine. It was not unlike his own work in Beijing, where in every investigation he had been assigned a political mentor and where it was even possible for investigators who defied doctrine to be accused of the crimes they were investigating.

  Abigail Deacon seemed to be reading his mind, "Party scientists have announced with great fanfare that Tibetans and Han Chinese share 99.9 percent of the same DNA material," she said with a sour smile. "Likewise Kazakhs or Uighurs with the Han. What they don't tell anyone is that Han Chinese and Nigerians, or Amazon Indians, or Scottish Highlanders also share 99.9 percent of the same DNA. Because we all happen to be the same species."

  Shan looked silently from Abigail Deacon to Jakli, to Dr. Najan, who was now looking at him with a defiant stare, then raised his teacup in salute. The painstaking research was for their science. The secrecy was for the independence movement.

  "The woman," he said, remembering the square in Yoktian, "the woman on the posters. Niya."

  "Niya Gazuli?" Jakli asked. "It means the Beauty of Niya, from the ruins of ancient Niya where she was found. In the desert, less than two hundred miles from here. They found her mummified remains after a storm uncovered a burial site. Dr. Najan was on the recovery team. She's at least twenty-five hundred years old. Red hair. A robe decorated with figures of horses and birds. And not a drop of Chinese blood in her. She's become a symbol, a rallying cry. Posters. Songs. Mother Niya, who taught us that the government lied. The government seized the research after word leaked out," she said with a meaningful glance at Dr. Najan. "Since then-" She shrugged.

  "We know of at least one instance," Najan continued the story, "where the government confiscated mummies and destroyed them. They control research much more tightly now. Foreign involvement is suspect. Some scientists from Kazakhstan and Europe gave speeches and were condemned by Beijing as subversive agents, trying to meddle in the internal affairs of China." Bao had a term for such scientists, Shan recalled. The insects he intended to crush.

  "But Beijing has no right to these treasures," the American interjected. "No one owns knowledge. It doesn't belong to Americans or Europeans or Chinese. We take small samples and return the specimens to the desert, to places only Kazakhs and Uighurs know."

  "Are there others in Xinjiang?" Shan asked, remembering the steel ring in his pocket, where he had kept it since the night at Glory Camp. "Other American scientists?"

  The American woman tightened her brow, as if uncertain how to reply. "Probably. We hear rumors of others. A German graduate student was discovered conducting an unauthorized excavation with Uighur students a few years ago. He disappeared, never heard of again, here or in Germany. Now everything is secret, compartmentalized for security. We only know about our project," she said.

  Shan looked back around the lab, then at the two scientists, staggered by the size of the effort and the size of the risk. Bao had a scent. The Americans wouldn't be deported if found. They were illegals, invisible to officialdom. Bao would know that the best solution would be to make them disappear. Like another American who had been captured by the knobs and brought to Glory Camp.

  Did they truly understand the danger? he wondered. With a chill he remembered that special knobs from headquarters were in the county. They didn't come for dead boys or a missing teacher. They had come for foreign subversives. They could arrive by helicopter at any time- the next hour, the next minute. He surveyed the resolute scientists as they returned to their work. Jakli understood. Surely Najan understood. If the knobs landed in airships they would have incendiary bombs, special bombs that could suck all the oxygen out of a place like this. They might take the trouble to march through and shoot each of them in the head. Or they might just seal the cavern up and let them all die more slowly. The knobs would have many options if they discovered Sand Mountain, but none would include taking prisoners.

  "Your son," Shan suddenly remembered. "Your son is here," he said, instantly regretting the alarm in his voice.

  Abigail Deacon searched his eyes for a moment. "What about him?" she asked.

  "Is he here, at Sand Mountain?"

  The American looked at Jakli. "He's safe. Not here, in the Kunlun."

  "What do you mean?" Shan asked.

  "With some herders. Lau arranged it, as if he were another of her orphans. One of the border families, a shadow clan, Lau called them. She said it was the safest place he could be."

  "The zheli?" Jakli gasped. "Your son is with the zheli?"

  Abigail Deacon didn't know, Shan realized with a chill as the woman looked at them in confusion. She had sent her son to safety in the mountains. But now the American boy was on the zheli death list.

  Chapter Eleven

  Shan touched his finger to his left temple, where a low throbbing had started again. Before he could speak Jakli's hand was on his arm, pulling him away, guiding him back toward his pallet.

  "They need to understand. Their son is in grave danger," he said through his pain as she led him down the tunnel.

  "The family he's with, they're wary as leopards. No one sees them unless they want to be seen," she said but did not sound convinced. She gave him more water and lit the small lamp by the pallet, then left him to sleep.

  He did sleep, at least he thought he slept, but not for long. Sounds in the tunnel brought him to full wakefulness, the throbbing not gone but subsided. He picked up the clay lamp and rose, then listened to the sounds and returned the lamp to the floor. There were voices speaking in the herders' tongue. He could not recognize the words, but they were nervous and harried, filled with the urgency of a task at hand.

  Shan ventured toward the sounds, edging around the corner where the tunnel entered the chamber, where he saw two men, wearing the woolen vests and caps of herdsmen, carrying something into one of the meditation cells. A third, dressed in the same garb, held a bright kerosene lantern. The bundle carried by the first two was long and narrow. They carried it gingerly, as if it could break.

  The men disappeared into the cell, then quickly emerged without their bundle and jogged down the corridor. He was about to move toward the cell to investigate when another light appeared. Jacob Deacon approached, carrying a bag like a doctor's kit, accompanied by Dr. Najan, who still wore his lab coat, and carried a bright battery-powered lamp. Speaking in low tones,
they entered the same cell. Shan inched along the wall for a better view. Deacon was kneeling at the blanketed bundle left by the herdsmen, with a large syringe. He pressed it into an opening in the blanket, handed it to Najan, and accepted a second syringe from Najan. The American repeated the process with the syringe, then both men quickly rose and retreated back into the darkened tunnel.

  He realized now that it was a person they had carried into the cell, an ill person who needed the American's medication. He waited five minutes, then retrieved his lamp and returned to the entrance of the cell. He recalled that this was where he had previously seen two sleeping forms. Were they all sick, perhaps injured like Shan in the karaburan? He stepped into the cell and saw three blanketed forms on the floor.

  Each was wrapped in a heavy felt blanket, with a small roll of felt for a pillow. On the blanket of each an embroidered scarf had been carefully laid, smoothed out so its pattern of leaping horses and large trees was clearly visible. Careful not to wake the sleepers, he moved the lamp closer to the first figure and froze. There was something terribly wrong with the face. The man had no nose. With a trembling hand Shan moved the lamp directly above the face. He had no eyes. And the man, Shan realized as he studied the dried, mummified features, had not seen for centuries. The sand and dryness preserved things, Abigail Deacon had said. He had thought she was only talking about textiles. Shan gently pulled the blanket open to reveal a brown twill robe and understood how she received her textile samples. The burial clothes, worn by the mummies of the Taklamakan.

  After the first moment of fright, Shan felt no fear, no revulsion. Quickly he looked at the other two figures, a woman with long brown hair in two braids, in the fashion of Niya Gazuli, and a man so complete, so well preserved he appeared in the dim light to be sleeping. The man was extraordinary, a visitor from a lost world. His face, though leathery, was light in color, and his thick, long, dark hair had a distinctly reddish hue, as did the man's thin beard. A cord of woven multicolored yarn connected his wrists, placing his long, delicate fingers in a reverent repose. He wore a heavy woolen shirt with cuffs that reminded Shan of the strip he had seen in the laboratory. On his feet were boots of thin leather, perhaps deerskin, and felt leggings extended to his knees.

  He meant to leave, to go on to avoid detection and not to disturb the mummies further, but something held him back. He dropped to his knees by the bearded man and with a slow, tentative motion touched the cloth of his sleeve. Perhaps the man was a builder of Karachuk, Shan thought with a strange excitement. Perhaps he had plucked an apricot and sat to eat it in the shadow of the reclining Buddha. The serene face of the dead man seemed to hold great wisdom, and the man seemed to be challenging Shan to discover it.

  He did not know how long he knelt, contemplating the figures. Eventually he became aware of cigarette smoke. He looked up to see Dr. Najan.

  "You've met our silent partners," Najan observed quietly.

  "How is it possible? Where-"

  "The tracks of all the dead rivers are well known. All the old settlements were on the rivers, that's where we always look. The oldest burial grounds can be easily identified, because burials were made inside circles of logs, built like a small fortress. After a big storm, sometimes a ring of logs is exposed. There are a few old Kazakhs and Uighurs who know the desert ways, who aren't afraid to camp in the desert at night."

  "With three, you are able to determine so much?"

  "Three? These are only the latest, exposed after the karaburan. Over fifty have been collected. Another thirty have been examined in situ."

  "Fifty mummies are here?"

  "We take our samples, take photos and videos, then return them to their sleep. If we feel the site has become known to looters, we bury them in a new, secret location." As the scientist gazed upon the three mummies, Shan saw a strange, sad pride in his eyes. "We have words we read over them, to apologize for disturbing their rest, to let them know we have not forgotten."

  Shan remembered the syringes of Deacon. "You take samples of tissues," he said, "not just samples of textiles."

  "Whenever possible. Only a tiny sample of tissue, to be sent to labs in the United States and Switzerland that are secretly helping us. We need a statistically significant set of DNA data." Najan squatted and leaned against the wall, looking at the mummy Shan had exposed. He felt the spell too. "We don't think they would mind. The first time, we had a Kazakh here, one descended from the people of Karachuk. He went inside, alone, while his grey dog kept watch outside. He said words over the dead ones and explained to them. He said afterward that the old ones would be proud to help."

  Shan smiled. He had met the one who spoke to the dead. Osman.

  "It is so dangerous, what you do," Shan said after a long silence. "They would call you a traitor. They would say you are collaborating with foreigners to undermine the state. Don't you have a family?"

  A sad smile grew on the scientist's face. "I come from a Uighur clan. When I was young, I had uncles, many uncles. I loved my uncles and aunts and cousins. My uncles would sit around the fires and drink kumiss and tell stories of the clan from back to the time of the great khans. We rode fast horses on festival days and performed ceremonies that had been done for a thousand years. They taught me the names of the spirits that watch over animals and how to hold their eagles."

  "Eagles?"

  "Hunting eagles. My clan was famous for its hunting eagles. They were raised from hatchlings, as part of the family." The Uighur drew deeply on his cigarette. "But there are no more uncles and aunts. I have only one child, because the government said so. My daughter will be permitted by the goverment to have but one child. Without brothers and sisters there are no more uncles and aunts, no cousins. Festival days aren't the same, some are even forgotten altogether. My uncles are dead. No more hunting eagles. No one remembers all the stories. Maybe I do it for them." Najan pulled on his cigarette, then nodded at the mummy with the beard. "This one, he was someone's uncle."

  They walked back down the tunnel together. Najan showed Shan a second row of cells, containing another dozen mummies. They were arranged by age. One cell held those known to be from a two-thousand-year-old burial site, another even older mummies. Or parts of mummies, for most of the cell's contents were pieces of bodies, all that were left in some graves after the storms, and time, did their work. The first cell, where Shan and Najan had sat, contained bodies from a known Tibetan garrison town, from the end of the first millenium.

  "I was frightened at first," the Uighur said. "Now, I just come sometimes and sit with them. I know that these people lying here, they would approve."

  "Do you know the old tablets?" Shan asked after a moment.

  Najan put his palms together horizontally and slid them apart, as though opening one of the wooden tablets. "The Kharoshthi texts? Sure. They were first uncovered a hundred years ago, by European archaeologists working the ruins of Niya. We found dozens here, in a cell at Sand Mountain."

  "Public Security knows about them," Shan told him.

  The Uighur scientist shrugged. "It was just a matter of time before they found out."

  "They're looking for a trail to get to the source, to get to the rebels working with foreigners. Major Bao thinks that maybe he found a connection through Lau."

  "But Lau has gone beyond speaking."

  Except, Shan reflected bitterly, in the last few minutes of her life, when she had undoubtedly spoken through a haze of drugs and pain. It seemed more certain than ever that this had been the secret her killer had wanted, that Bao was on a relentless, bloodthirsty drive to expose the dissidents and their foreign collaborators. And if so, Bao wasn't after all the zheli, but only the boys, finding and killing the boys, because it was a zheli boy named Micah who was the link to the American scientist.

  "Bao spoke about the Antiquities Institute."

  Najan gave a bitter smile as he finished his cigarette. "They tried to get me to work for them once. Wanted me to prove to the world that the Kharoshth
i writing is actually a form of ancient Chinese. They're not scientists, they're propaganda agents, dedicated to fostering the myths. They tell the newspapers that Niya Gazuli was faked by foreign subversives. They would try to prove that cavemen in Africa ate with chopsticks if they thought they could get away with it." He shook his head sadly, then nodded toward Shan and headed back in the direction of the laboratory.

  The cell with the thousand-year-old Buddhists had a new visitor when he returned. Lokesh had brought in several lamps and uncovered all the faces. He was reciting a mantra, a prayer for the souls, Shan thought at first, then he saw the joy in his friend's eyes. It was a celebration, not a mourner's chant.

  Shan sat across from Lokesh, one of the mummies between them, the man with the dark red beard. Around the man's neck was a chain, bearing a gau that lay on his chest. He wore a heavy vest, with a small pocket from which a cup made of cow horn protruded.

  Lokesh looked up with a huge grin. "He waited a thousand years so we could meet him."

  Shan started to say that the man's soul had long departed, but he knew his friend understood. It wasn't that he was paying homage to souls that may have been reincarnated twenty times since leaving these frail bodies. It was just that these people were so real. In that moment, if the man had sat up on his blanket, Shan would not have run. He would have wanted to clasp the man's hand.

  "Look in the blanket, Xiao Shan," Lokesh said excitedly, lifting a corner of the felt covering the man's lower body. "I know him."

  Shan studied his friend uncertainly, then looked back at the mummy. "I don't understand."

  "I mean, I know he was man of good deeds. He was a man who had suffered and didn't mind the suffering. He was a man who understood the things that we understand. Look."

  As Lokesh raised the felt Shan saw that around the mummified wrist was a string of beads. A Buddhist rosary. Lokesh pulled the blanket away further and pointed to two thick rectangular objects with cracked leather straps, placed beside the man's hips, where the man's hands could reach them if he extended his arms. They were the hand blocks used by pilgrims, the smooth wooden blocks with leather straps into which a pilgrim inserted his hands to protect them while making ten thousand prostrations on the ground each day. Shan had seen identical blocks used by pilgrims along Tibetan roads, along the sacred Barkhor path in Lhasa. From a standing position they would kneel, then place the hands on the ground and drop to a completely prone position, reciting a mantra as they did so, then rise, take one step forward, and repeat the process.