Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  "The rocks," Marco muttered suddenly, and pointed toward Sophie. The camel had taken a step forward and was stretching her neck toward a large outcropping on the slope above them. The Eluosi jogged stealthily toward the rocks, gesturing for Shan to follow as he disappeared into a narrow opening between two huge boulders.

  Shan caught up with him as he stood on the far side of the boulders, at the edge of a large clearing ringed with several rock cairns and the remains of a long rock wall consisting of hundreds of long thin stones. Shan recognized it, a sacred mani wall, each of whose stones was inscribed with a Buddhist prayer. They had found the lama field itself, and in the center of it was a single boy who knelt at a fresh mound of earth.

  It was Malik, from the Red Stone camp, and he was stroking the top of the mound, speaking in a low tone.

  Malik turned and gasped as he heard them approach, then leapt away, running toward another outcropping further up the slope, where Shan saw a grey horse tethered. He had almost reached the horse when he was stopped by a call from behind Shan.

  "Seksek Ata!" a young voice called out. Shan turned to look at Batu, ten feet behind him. He had heard the words before, the name of the protective deity for goats, the nickname for Malik.

  Malik turned and stared at them, not moving until Shan reached his side. The boy's eyes seemed glazed over with grief, and he looked not at Shan but at the mound of earth. "I came fast, because the other boys I found said Khitai might be here. But they were already lowering him into the ground when I arrived," Malik said, his voice cracking with grief. "If I had come a few hours earlier I could have taken him away to safety." The boy was swaying on his feet. His hands trembled. He seemed but a shadow of the sturdy youth Shan had met at the Red Stone camp. It had been nearly a week. The boy had been riding the hills, tracking the zheli, knowing death was lurking everywhere, desperately trying to do something to stop it. He had brought two boys back to the Red Stone camp, Jakli had reported. But when he had finally found another of the boys, the grave had already been dug.

  Lokesh appeared and stepped to the side of the grave. A burlap sack lay on a rock ten feet from the mound of earth. Lokesh stared at the sack with wide, frightened eyes, then moved toward it in tiny, mincing steps. As Shan stepped to his side, Lokesh bent and emptied the bag onto the rock. His friend's face seemed to collapse.

  On the rock lay a short chain of small iron links and a long tarnished copper case inlaid with turquoise circles- a pen case. A battered metal cup lay beside the case with several short strings of beads, different colored beads of wood and plastic and a single one of green jade. He looked back at the pen case. It was the one Lokesh had asked about in Lau's office.

  Something had lodged in the mouth of the bag and Shan pulled it free. A wedge-shaped piece of wood with a top that slid open. One of the Kharoshthi letters.

  The embers inside Lokesh had ignited and seemed to be consuming him from within. A noise was coming from his chest- it had the tone of a mantra, but it was just a long continuous moan, as if he had forgotten the words. The old Tibetan clasped the metal cup with both hands and he looked up at Shan with moist, forlorn eyes. For the first time since Shan had known him, Shan saw something else on Lokesh's face. He had seen the expression before, on Bajys's face when they had found him at Lau's cave, when Bajys had proclaimed that the world had ended.

  "The herders thought he had fallen at first," Malik said from behind him, "that maybe he was trying to climb the rock with the god flag on it." Shan turned. The Kazakh youth stared stiffly straight ahead, like a soldier making dutiful report. His lips quivered as he spoke. "But his pants were covered with blood. It was because a knife had gone into his belly, up into his heart. His pants were ripped, and a shoe was off. They said his face was battered, like it had been kicked. I think Khitai fought back."

  Batu stepped to Lokesh and began patting the old man's back.

  "What was in his pockets?" Shan asked. "Did he have something around his neck?"

  Malik still stared woodenly at the grave. "Nothing. His things were in his bag. Because they were getting ready to leave."

  "The herders, boy," Marco said grimly. "Where did they go? What did they see?"

  "Gone, back into the shadows. Those dropka came here for the day because Khitai said so, and left their sheep alone with their dogs. All they could do was say words over Khitai and hurry back to their flock. They won't come down for a long time." Malik looked at Lokesh as he spoke. The frail old Tibetan was rocking back and forth now, as if Batu's touch had set him in motion. "I asked. They didn't see anything. They left Khitai here, sitting at the painting while they checked the high pastures above here for strays. But it was that woman who did it, the one they call the Jade Bitch. I saw her later, after the herders left. I had told them that I would stay, because Khitai was my friend, that I wanted to talk to him a while, that I could say words for a Kazakh burial that dropka might not know. That's what I was doing when I saw her come back to blind the gods."

  Blind the gods. He meant the spray paint on the deities, Shan realized.

  Marco handed the boy a water bottle and a piece of nan, which he consumed ravenously. "God's breath," the Eluosi muttered to Shan. "They're practically babies. The bitch hunts them down like carrion." He put his hand on Malik's shoulder. "We have to go," he said, scanning the sky. "She knows this place."

  Shan silently returned Khitai's possessions to the sack, prying the cup from Lokesh's hands as Malik and Batu helped the old Tibetan to his feet. He lingered at the grave as the small, sad procession disappeared between the boulders. Four boys were dead. A third of the zheli list had been extinguished. A wave of helplessness, as palpable as a blow to his belly, struck him, and he found himself on his knees, with his hands on the grave.

  "I'm sorry," he heard himself say. He knew there were no words he could give the dead boy. What had Marco said- no one was innocent anymore. "I would have given my own life," he said in a steadier voice, "to keep more of you from dying." As he spoke he realized that Khitai had not been the next name on the list. Because perhaps he simply had the bad luck to be at the lama field when the killer appeared. Or perhaps, he thought, remembering Lokesh's reaction at the grave, Shan had been wrong, and the killings had not been about the Americans. Had Khitai always been the target? It was as if there two were motives, two killers, two mysteries at work.

  He knelt in silence until he heard Marco call from below. Then, quickly, he ran his fingers through the loose soil. He found a familiar object at the head of the grave, a curved piece of wood carved to look like a bird. It was what Malik made for dead children. A few inches away his fingers touched something so hard and cold it made him start. He pulled out a black, hinged, metal container and opened it. It was a compass, an elegant device filled with oil and bearing a red cross on its face, above the words Made in Switzerland. He stared at it in confusion. Such an instrument cost more than most herders made in a month.

  Marco called out again. Shan buried the bird and pocketed the compass, stood and paused. He ran to the mani wall, selected one of the stones inscribed with a Tibetan prayer and placed it at the head of the grave, then jogged back to his companions.

  As he reached the others, Malik was pulling Marco away from a small boulder near the ruins. It had a hole at its base. "Don't go near that nest," Malik warned. "That pika, he has a demon in him now."

  Shan and Marco exchanged a puzzled glance and stepped to the hole, around which dried grass and twigs had been stacked. Marco knelt and cursed as he looked into the shadow. Shan bent and saw it too, a gleaming red dot of light in the hole, like an angry eye. The Eluosi reached in and pulled out first the battered, lifeless body of a ground squirrel, then a small video recorder.

  "Motion activated," Marco spat, as he pulled out the tape. He threw it high overhead, where it lodged on a shelf in the rocks, then slammed the camera against the boulder.

  ***

  "When they left they tried to get the helicopter to land by the flag," Ma
lik explained as they were poised to mount, "but the wind deities protected it. So they shot at the flag with a gun." The flag did indeed seem more tattered than when Shan had first seen it.

  "But that's all right," Batu assured them. "That man Bajys, Khitai's friend, he told us old men come and fix the flag sometimes, that they have for hundreds of years. Old men," the boy repeated with a wise nod. "Or maybe they're mountain deities."

  They mounted, with the younger boy riding behind Lokesh, and after crossing a low ridge soon reached the head of a deep valley. Marco dismounted. "It is dangerous now. Walk, and walk carefully." He checked the harnesses of each of the camels and tied the reins to the saddles. "The camels know the way." He patted Sophie's hindquarters and she bolted onto a side trail that led to what appeared to be the base of a cliff. Not a cliff, Shan soon saw as the camel began to climb a narrow switchback trail. It was a steeply sloped rock face. At the top, far above, Shan could see a chimney-like rock formation.

  The arduous climb took nearly an hour. After they cleared the crest, Shan stood in wonder. Behind the crest was a small plateau, invisible from below. Thick clumps of conifers surrounded the bottom of the rock formation, which, he quickly realized, was man-made. An ancient watch tower. Two sides of the plateau were surrounded by steep rock walls rising to the summit of a mountain more than a thousand feet above them. Two hundred feet up the wall, a spring emerged, descending in a long crystal ribbon to a small pond. A grass-strewn meadow covered two-thirds of the plateau. Scattered across it were half a dozen Bactrian camels.

  "The armies of the Tibetan empire," Marco explained as he joined Shan. "They built roads down the river valleys leading out of the Kunlun, then garrisoned troops where the roads could be defended." He gestured toward the old tower. "Shepherds rebuilt it. When my father tried to take our family out of China, into India, an army patrol chased him. We hid here while the soldiers searched. A week, then my mother got sick. A month, then the camels ran away. After a while my father just started building. 'Stay the winter,' he said, 'it's safe here.' 'Might as well stay the summer,' he said later, 'good hunting here.' " Marco shrugged. "Almost forty years ago. We just kept building."

  As they led the camels past the base of the tower, a large structure of logs came into view. It had clearly been built from the tower in stages, with a chamber butting against the tower that led into three sections of varying height. Neglected flowerbeds sat on either side of an oversized wooden door with handwrought ironwork. At the end of the building, under the largest pine on the plateau, a large double-barred cross stood over three graves.

  Shan and Marco pulled the saddles from the camels as Malik and Batu helped Lokesh to a stump, where the Tibetan sat with his head in his hands. He had not spoken since leaving Khitai's grave. Marco cast a sad look at the old man, then wrapped an arm around each boy and led them to the doorway. Stepping in front of them he made a small bow and with a sweep of his hand gestured them inside. "Welcome," he said, "to the Czar's summer palace."

  The Eluosi escorted them into a warm, intimate room whose plank floors had been lined with thick carpets. On the front wall, flanking the door, hung the skins of several large animals. The afternoon sun that found its way through the open door reflected off a large brass samovar sitting on a table at the far side of the chamber. Shan moved toward the urn in admiration, but was distracted by several small, faded, black and white photographs hanging above it. They were of figures inhabiting a different world. From one yellowed photo stared an old man with spectacles and a long white beard; his eyes seemed to be animated with rebellion, or anger perhaps. In the next frame a man with a sharply trimmed beard stood beside a beautiful fur-clad woman with light-colored hair. A horse-drawn buggy and driver waited behind them. The woman's mouth was opened in a smile, as if she were announcing good news.

  The man and woman appeared again in a photograph set in rugged mountainous terrain. They were dressed in simple woolen tunics now. The man's beard was no longer trimmed, and the woman's hair was in braids, the way female workers wore their hair in the fields. In the man's arm was a child, a boy who stared defiantly with a strength that seemed to have been lost in his parents. Inserted into a bottom corner of the frame was another photo, also faded but more recent. It was of another woman, with strong weathered features and light-colored hair tied in a scarf. Batu stepped outside and a moment later reappeared, leading Lokesh.

  "Family," Marco said behind Shan, in a mellow voice. "In a better year. Near Yining, in the north." He stepped across the room to a large door that stood ajar, leading into a room of stone walls. The base of the ancient guard tower. "The best place for a Russian to be, where Moscow had forgotten you. But then in 1950 somebody in some god-rotten Party headquarters in Beijing opened a map and saw a big wide open space with not enough red flags on it. When they sent troops to Turkistan, they decided that the mountains to the west should be the obvious border. Yining was on this side so they shipped in a few thousand retired soldiers." He snapped his fingers. "Just like that, Yining was no longer a free White Russian town, it was a Chinese town. And the original inhabitants had only one right, the right to leave. Except there was no place to go by then."

  "This is not such a bad place," Shan offered.

  Marco shrugged. "Sure. Our own little world. The shepherds came, sometimes. My father traded furs for the things my mother wanted. We made a good life. Then a fever came. I was fourteen. There were no doctors for people like us. I awoke after my fever broke, in my bed alone. My father was dead, lying on a pile of fresh earth. I thought he had buried the family treasure. I uncovered it. He did bury our treasure. He had died burying my mother." Marco turned and disappeared into the tower.

  Shan looked about to see Lokesh holding the tapestry that hung at the far corner of the room, looking down a dark hallway. Lokesh entered the hallway and Shan followed, leaving Batu and Malik staring at their reflections in the samovar.

  The hall had three doorways framed in hewn logs. The first led to a large room with a small iron stove and a plank table surrounded by mismatched chairs, some made of sturdy tree limbs, others of fine carved wood with soiled, though once elegant, silk seat cushions. A dried shank of meat hung from the ceiling, as did small strings of onions.

  Lokesh stood at the second doorway, studying the next room's contents with intense curiosity. Over his shoulder Shan saw that the walls of the room were covered with photographs torn out of magazines, images of horses and birds and Western actors and actresses, most with captions in English. From two heavy log beams overhead hung several pelts of fur. On one wall above a shelf jammed with books was a poster of a Hong Kong rock star. Near the door there was a sleeping pallet on a rough wooden frame. A row of military caps hung on pegs over the bed. Chinese, but also foreign army caps. Shan studied them. Indian. And Pakistani, and another he did not recognize. Below the caps was a single photograph of a girl on a horse, laughing. Jakli. On the upended log that served as a bedside table stood a cassette player, a tape box on top. Advanced conversational English, it said. Lokesh picked up a heavy walking stick leaning in the corner by the door and extended it for Shan to see. Carved along the length of the stick in English letters was the name Niccolo.

  "It's not Russian," Shan said. "Niccolo. Not Russian, not Kazakh."

  "Italian," came a bass voice from behind him. "Marco Polo visited strange lands, but before him his father Niccolo went down the Silk Road. He went to foreign lands first, before Marco. Niccolo Polo Myagov," Marco said with pride.

  "And so history repeats itself," Shan ventured as he turned in the doorway. It wasn't just her marriage that Jakli was anticipating, and it wasn't just the marriage that Lau had wanted to protect her for by keeping her in probation. Nikki was making one last caravan, Osman had said. Shan had not at first understood what Jakli had written when the karaburan was bearing down on them, because she had written in English. I'll be with you in the beautiful country. She had meant Mei Guo, because it was translated as beautiful country
in Chinese. America.

  Marco's eyes widened as he studied Shan a moment, then the Eluosi shrugged. Marco picked up one of the two other wooden sticks that stood in the corner by the walking stick, and examined it absently. It was tapered and smooth, with a knob at the narrow end. For hitting baseballs, Shan suddenly realized. "He wasn't sure at first. Even then he had to convince Jakli. She said she didn't think America had horses, that all Americans had two cars and wouldn't want horses. But Deacon told her that people have horses for pleasure. Said he has a ranch. Said he would buy horses for them. So now they're getting out, thank god."

  Getting out. For a while Shan had been getting out, or at least could pretend he was getting out. The truck to Nepal was gone. He had lost track of the days. Maybe today was the day that someone on the border would be waiting for him, waiting for an hour or two, perhaps the whole day, before deciding that Shan had been prevented from being liberated. Somehow his own failure to reach the outside seemed to make it all the more important that Nikki and Jakli succeeded.

  Marco sighed and surveyed his son's room in silence, then motioned for his visitors to follow him. "Time to earn your keep."

  He led them outside to Sophie, who was standing beside Lokesh, her big moist eyes only two feet from the Tibetan's own, staring intently at the old man. Marco pulled a small metal hook from a nearby stump and handed it to Shan. "Boots," he said to Shan, then extended a brush to Lokesh. "Bags." The Tibetan seemed to awaken at the words, and accepted the brush with a small grin.

  Marco showed Shan how to use the hook to clean the camels' feet of any stones or twigs that had lodged in their hooves, then demonstrated on Sophie how Lokesh should brush the thick hair on their humps. Then Marco produced a handful of sugar cubes from his pocket and handed them to the boys, who eagerly offered the treats to the camels.