"If they had any money," Shan added.
Kaju gave a weak smile, as if thanking Shan for understanding a bad joke. "I have friends in Chengdu," he said, still gazing at the disc player. "Maybe they could send some old discs." He shrugged again and looked at Shan. "You were there that day at the garage. When the Tibetan warned about the boys."
"Why is Ko doing this with the orphans? What is the rush?"
"Not orphans," Kaju said. "There was a memorandum. We are to call them Emerging Members."
"Members of what?"
Kaju hesitated. "The memorandum didn't say. School. Society. Socialism." He shrugged once more. The movement seemed be one of his defining characteristics. "What he's doing is rewarding everyone, pursuant to new Brigade policy. Ko didn't decide it on his own. It came from Urumqi. But he wants this county to lead in the initiative." The Tibetan looked up with a self-conscious grin. "If I get all the children back within two weeks, he's going to give me a special apartment. One of those reserved for Brigade managers. And access to the motor pool. And a title, Director of Economic Assimilation."
"Economic?"
Kaju nodded. "He says that's why assimilation failed, because it was always made political. People don't understand that economics bring people together far more effectively. Use common cultural themes to build common economic interests to bind them together. That's how Director Ko defines my job. Ko said the Brigade itself is the best example. A company owned by Hans, Kazakhs, Uighurs, Kirghiz, Tadjiks, Xibo, Hui, probably ten other cultural groups. But everyone works together successfully. No one refers to Han shareholders versus Kazakh shareholders, just shareholders." Kaju looked back at his machine. "The disc players are not the right reward, that's all. He wants so much to help them, to bring them into the new society. His enthusiasm gets misunderstood sometimes. I will speak with him. Maybe new saddles. Maybe even foals from the Brigade herd." Kaju paused and nodded. "Foals would be perfect."
"Maybe not," Shan said. "I thought horses have been declared reactionary. They're all being arrested by the knobs."
The Tibetan's face clouded, and he shrugged again. "You just don't understand Ko. He wants to do the right thing. A few days ago he started a new children's health program, all on his own."
"Health program?"
Kaju nodded energetically. "Special help from local Brigade resources at the clinic, for newborns. Ko says it will build trust."
Shan looked at him in confusion. Was it was possible that he had indeed misunderstood Ko? Ko, after all, was a creature of the new economy, a creature of a kind Shan had never known. "You said there was a memorandum from Urumqi?" he asked.
"Sure, about the gifts. Ko left a copy on all the teachers' desks today." He looked up at Shan and his brightness faded. He looked toward the door as if to confirm no one could hear, then turned back to Shan. "How did you know that day at the garage, that the boys were in danger? That Tibetan with you said they were dying. Then two days later one is killed."
"Two had already been killed. We had just come from one of their graves."
Kaju stared at him with a chastising frown, shaking his head. "No," Kaju insisted. "You don't understand. What you're talking about is just a blood feud. Ko said so at a Brigade briefing. He spoke to Public Security. Bystanders get caught in fights between rival clans sometimes. A vestige of the old ways. Proof of why the clans need to be brought in, need to enroll in the Poverty Eradication Scheme. If they don't, eventually Public Security will have no choice but to just take them away."
Shan looked out into the hallway, which remained quiet, and back to the Tibetan. "Kaju," he said very quietly, causing the Tibetan to lean toward him. "Lau was murdered. Tortured, and then murdered."
The Tibetan seemed to search for something in Shan's eyes, then he frowned and shook his head again, as if disappointed. "That kind of talk," he said, still shaking his head, "it just doesn't help anyone. Not the children. Not the clans. Not the assimilation effort." He stepped past Shan into the hallway, then turned and lowered his voice. "You sound like one of the radical elements, one of the lung ma. Don't let anyone else-" He was interrupted by another sound on the public address speaker, a two-tone chime. He glanced up at the speaker with a grateful expression. "I have a meeting," he said with a final shrug, then tucked the disc player under his arm and moved briskly down the hall toward the rear door of the building.
Shan waited a few seconds, watching Kaju cross the yard to one of the classroom buildings, then stepped silently toward the main entrance. Halfway down the hall, turning to confirm the hall was still empty, he stepped into a vacant office. There were two sheets of paper on the desk inside. A memo from Director Ko, attached to another memorandum from Urumqi- from Headquarters, People's Development and Construction Corporation. Regarding Economic Assimilation. Shan folded it and put it in his pocket.
Jakli was at the door, and Lokesh still swept at the gate, singing to himself. As the Tibetan saw them he retrieved a burlap sack from the bottom of the post and extended it to Jakli. "A man gave this to me for you," he said. "A Uighur, I think. He said his name was Mao."
Jakli accepted the bag with a tentative, outstretched hand, but as she opened it the caution on her face abruptly changed to joy. She pulled out a horse's bridle, a bridle of rich black leather studded with silver. "Nikki!" she exclaimed, and darted down the street.
"I spoke to the Mao," Lokesh said, leaning on the broom as he watched Jakli disappear in the direction of the livestock sheds. "The boy Kublai was buried outside of town. People came, a lot of people, chanting that woman's name. Niya." He gestured with a nod of his head toward the other side of the street, where a poster had been freshly pasted to the wall, another of the posters of Niya Gazuli Shan had seen at the square. "That Mao said to tell you something, that the boy was missing a shoe. He said you would understand." But Shan didn't understand. It was as though shoes were the artifacts being sought by the killer.
Lokesh looked back at the poster, as if he were conversing with the red-haired woman. "Knobs were there, at the burial," Lokesh sighed toward her. "Imagine that," he said, with disbelief in his eyes. "Knobs come, to bury a boy."
When they caught up with her at the sheds, Jakli was dancing a jig with Marco, as the Eluosi waved the bridle over his head. They stopped and embraced each other when Shan and Lokesh approached.
"It means Nikki is back?" Shan ventured.
Marco nodded vigorously. "Not home. But close, across the border now. The pack animals are slow. He sent someone ahead." He halted his dance and looked at Jakli, suddenly sober. "There's much work to be done. Only a week now." He began tightening the harnesses on the camels, humming a tune as he worked.
"It's going to be all right now," Jakli said, stroking Sophie, her face still aglow. "Nikki will know things. Nikki will-" The words died in her throat.
A figure had appeared at the front of the shed, a bedraggled boy with a tangled mop of black hair. His dirty red shirt was torn in several places and his face was gaunt, a mask of exhaustion and fear.
"Batu!" Jakli gasped, and stared.
"I just keep running," the boy said, breathing hard. "With no place to go. I just run. I stop and get some water, then I run again." His voice was shaking, and he looked over his shoulder as he spoke "I saw you on the street, and I followed."
Jakli leapt forward and put her arms around the boy. "The clan," she asked, pressing the boy's head against her. "Where is your clan?"
"I heard about the zheli boys dying. The last time a lamb was killed too," the boy said with a long dry sob. "If the thing comes looking for me I want it away from that clan. They've been good to me. And away from the lambs," the boy added as he looked at Jakli.
Batu. Shan didn't need to pull the list of the zheli from his pocket, because he had memorized the boys' names. Batu was the third boy from the top of the list. The next boy.
"I didn't do anything," the boy said, his voice breaking with a sob. "Why would they want to-" Jakli held the boy at ar
m's length as he spoke, then cut him off by placing a finger on his lips. She held him tightly and stroked his head. "Khoshakhan, khoshakhan," she whispered. The word for comforting lambs. At last she looked from Marco to Shan, then Lokesh with a grave, determined expression.
"I must go," she said. "I must go to the Maos, help them find the others. I know places they do not." She looked at Shan. "Where the shadow clans may be."
"I'll go with you," Lokesh blurted out with great emotion. He was looking at the boy as he spoke. "I have to find it."
Jakli looked at the old Tibetan with moist eyes. For a moment Shan thought she was going to embrace Lokesh and murmur the lamb word again. "No," she said firmly, as she might with a child, and put a hand on his shoulder, pushing him gently toward Shan.
"I'll give you food for the boy," Marco offered and reached into one his saddlebags.
"But I'm staying in town," Shan said with a worried glance toward Lokesh. "I'll sleep here. I must see the prosecutor. I said I would."
"Impossible!" Jakli exclaimed, but then seemed to recognize the determination in Shan's eyes and frowned. She watched as Marco handed the boy an apple and he attacked it with ravenous bites. "No," she said, in a new, insistent tone as she looked in the direction of town. "Not back there, not in one of her traps. Tomorrow in the afternoon. Say three o'clock, at the highway station, where we met the rice truck. Our ground."
"I need food for the others," Batu said tentatively.
"Others?" Jakli asked then, as if grasping his meaning, she knelt by the boy, her hand on his arm. "You know where other zheli boys are?"
The boy looked about warily. "At a place called the old lama field. It is safe there, high in the mountains. I was going there. Khitai told us that it is protected by the mountain deities."
Lokesh looked up with a new alertness in his eyes.
"You mean he took you there?" Shan asked.
"Yes. Years ago, the first time, when he was only seven. He had never been there then, but somehow he sensed where it was. When he found it he kept laughing, like he had found an old friend. Just some ruined walls. But a beautiful painting. I think Khitai is there now. He might go for the flowers, the assignment."
"Assignment?" Shan asked.
"Lau's last assignment to the zheli. A collection of autumn flowers. The flowers were beautiful by the lama field, she always said so."
Shan looked at Jakli, remembering the flowers at Lau's cave. Some of the other zheli children had remembered their assignment.
"Khitai knows that one of the shadow clans tended sheep in the mountains above the field," Batu continued. "That is where he might go after getting his flowers, with the clan who watched over Suwan."
Lokesh stood up, erect, like a soldier preparing for action. Suwan had visited the Red Stone camp and died. But his clan might have left with another zheli boy, with Khitai, knowing that Lau sometimes let the zheli switch families, unaware of Suwan's fate.
Jakli went to the front of the shed and looked out, as if collecting her thoughts, then turned. "I know this place. It's near an old Russian lodge," she said, looking to Marco.
"Like hell-" the Eluosi sputtered.
"They have nowhere to go," Jakli pressed. "You can't stay here. The Brigade is bringing in horses all the time."
"I can't-" Marco spat, then he looked at Jakli and a low audible exhalation escaped his lips, not quite a whistle, almost a snort. He looked to Shan in exasperation. "May as well argue with a gnat up your nose," he groused. Sophie turned and made a snickering noise toward Marco, her tongue exposed. "God's breath," he muttered, "not you too."
And then Jakli took the boy's hand and suddenly placed it in Shan's.
The action shook Shan so greatly he almost jerked his hand away. He stood in silence, unable at first to even look the boy in the eyes, unable to understand the sudden acrid taste of fear in his mouth or the welling of emotion within. Slowly he brought his eyes up and Batu looked at him with a small, uncertain smile. He knew children, he could talk with children, he had shared secrets with Malik. But this boy, he was Lau's boy. Shan had had such a boy once, a son, and he had lost him when he was Batu's age.
"This is Shan," he heard Jakli say. "A friend of Auntie Lau's."
Shan found himself on his knees in front of Batu and saw that he was tying the dangling laces of the boy's boots. His hands had taken him where his heart needed to be.
As Jakli tied the bag with the bridle to Sophie's saddle, Marco found a brown shirt in his saddlebag and told Batu to slip it on over his red shirt, then leaned into the camel's ears. The camel make a slow, snickering sound, then Marco straightened. "Okay, mount up," he said, with raised brows, as if expressing surprise. "She says okay. But-" he pointed to Shan, "you've got boots and-" he added, pointing to Lokesh "-you've got bags." He ignored the inquisitive looks on the their faces and led Sophie out of the shed, then turned as he reached the sunlight. "One more thing. She says if any of you ever breathe a word of where you are going or how we get there, the blue wolf will track you down and put you in his belly."
Batu nodded solemnly and looked at Sophie with wide eyes.
Jakli hugged Batu again. "You're safe now," she said, then broke away with a quick glance at Marco and Shan. "Three o'clock tomorrow," she reminded them, then jogged away toward town.
As they led the camels away from the settlement, they passed a cemetery on the far side of the river. Near the bank was a fresh grave, with a small brown and white horse standing nearby, its head hung low. They paused to look at it.
"Most of the zheli didn't even have their own horses," Batu explained. "Kublai was singing for a month last year when they gave it to him." The Kazakh boy shook his head and sighed like an old man as he looked again at the animal waiting at the boy's grave. "Now look. It's hard on a horse."
***
The three camels moved quickly up the valley, along a trail that paralleled the river, then over a long ridge into a landscape that Shan recognized, the small valley where Lau's cabin lay. Shan kept his eyes on the wooded slope above as they passed the building, toward the cave where Lau lay waiting for her justice.
They quickly left the valley behind, and the sun had passed its zenith before Marco slackened the pace, pausing at a pool below a small waterfall. They were deep in the Kunlun, and the wind blew cool and fresh out of the icefields above them. Marco watched the horizon with restless eyes.
"If something happens," he said in a voice that seemed taut with premonition, "do what I do. Do it fast. Don't talk. Listen to me. Listen to the camels."
Batu rode with Shan, sitting double on the camel behind Sophie, and they followed the silver camel southwestward on a trail that opened to long vistas over the distant desert. Then the trail dropped abruptly into a long valley of brown grass and gravel, down which a swift stream rushed. The path through the landscape was surprisingly wide, as if cleared long ago for heavier traffic. Batu pointed out things Shan did not see. A pika stuffing its cheeks with grass to store in its winter den. An eagle soaring over the adjoining ridge.
Suddenly Sophie stopped. Shan clenched his jaw, but relaxed as he saw that Marco was not searching about for danger. Then he realized that the Eluosi was watching Sophie's head. The silver camel jerked her nose toward the western ridge and brayed. Marco shot out of his saddle. "Helicopter!" he roared and shouted several words in Russian.
The camels bolted off in different directions just as their riders began to climb down. They tumbled to the ground as the camels themselves dropped, folding their legs under their bodies, tucking their heads against their shoulders. From somewhere nearby Shan heard Lokesh laughing. He looked over the side of the camel to see Marco lying against Sophie, curled in the shadow of her body. Lokesh, still wheezing with laughter, was slowly doing the same. The appearance of the animals with their riders pressed against them, would be that of three more boulders in the grey and brown landscape. It was why Marco had asked Batu to cover his red shirt. A surveillance team, flying fast, could e
asily overlook them.
A low ululating rumble rolled up the valley now, a sound that took Shan to the edge of terror, for fear that Lokesh and the boy would be taken. This was how the army and the knobs kept the nomads intimidated, by suddenly appearing out of the sky to check for illegal weapons or identity papers. You can't hide from Chinese, an old dropka had told Shan once. They have machines with guns that live in the clouds.
Shan caught a glimpse of the helicopter as it cleared the ridge. Then someone pulled his head down and pushed it against the camel. Batu.
Marco waited ten minutes after the whine of the engine had faded, then called a hasty word to the camels and the animals unfolded their heads. Moments later they were moving up the trail at a fast trot.
A quarter hour later Lokesh rose in his saddle and called out. "Lha gyal lo!" He waved to get Shan's attention.
"The field!" Batu exclaimed.
They had been to the lama field before, Shan saw as he followed Lokesh's pointing arm. The huge red prayer flag on the rock monolith was before them, rumbling in the wind.
Batu led them to a small outcropping three hundred yards from the monolith, where low mounds of rocks outlined the remains of a four-room structure. It had been built against the rock, facing the monolith. A place of hermits. "On the other side, there are more walls," Batu explained excitedly as they dismounted, "and you can see the faces of Tibetan gods." He ran toward the ruins, stopping every few seconds to call out that it was safe, that it was only Batu and their friends.
They caught up with the boy at the back of the rock, where a large room had been built against the outcropping, staring forlornly at the wall. As Shan approached he smelled fresh paint. There had indeed been a mural, no doubt a beautiful one, protected even after the collapse of the outer walls by an overhanging shelf of rock. But it was no more. The wall had been covered with black spray paint, and over the paint two posters had been freshly pasted. Escape the Chains of Feudalism, one said. The other, in fine Chinese print, was a copy of a state decree prohibiting religious practices which had not been authorized by the Bureau of Religious Affairs.
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