"But when?" Kaju said, unable to hide the fear in his voice. "Where is a cistern? It's hard to breathe."
"I think Mr. Deacon is saying we just keep going," Shan offered.
"Right," Deacon said in a subdued voice. "A few more days, maybe we'll come out in the northern mountains, with frogs in our pockets." He aimed his light at the boys' faces. "They say there's treasure in some of the old Karez," he offered with hollow enthusiasm.
Batu smiled. Jengzi looked at the American with skepticism, but they both began to crawl with new energy, following Jakli as she probed the darkness.
No one spoke for several minutes, as though fearful that a sound might shatter another of the frail supports. Then Kaju suddenly stopped. "Here!" he said, and pointed to the beam above his head. "We have protection."
As Deacon raised the light, an inscription painted with crimson pigment in Tibetan script could be seen. "The six-syllable mantra," Kaju said with a glimmer of hope in his voice. "The tunnel has been blessed."
"Again!" Jakli called out, pointing to a beam near her own head. The same inscription, in the same paint. She crawled ahead at a faster pace, as though the mark might portend a portal. As Shan watched, she faded into the darkness, but the sound of her movements continued. Then suddenly there was a sound of stones falling and a splash. Jengzi called out Jakli's name in alarm. There was no reply.
"Nobody move!" Deacon warned. "Not a muscle. Not a hair. I'll go."
"No," Shan said. "You're in the back. Pass the light to Batu."
The boy's eyes were wide with fear, but he took the light without speaking and inched forward. He moved twenty, then thirty feet in front of them. Jakli's voice could be heard in the distance, echoing as though in a hollow chamber. The muffled words of a conversation rolled down the tunnel and then, incredibly, laughter. Kaju and Jengzi shot forward, followed closely by Shan and Deacon.
Shan and the American arrived to find Kaju and the boys arrayed on a stone ledge, depressed along its bottom to continue the main course of the karez as it curved around a huge hole lined with stones. The cistern that had been designed to capture the overflow from the main channel was at least forty feet in diameter under a dome of tightly fitting cut stones, and had been built in four tiers, each several feet higher than the one below. Jakli stood below them, on the top tier, up to her waist in water, her head three feet below the top ledge.
Deacon whistled in awe at the construction as he shined his light along the ceiling and far wall. Roots pierced the stone at the apex of the chamber. Shan remembered the surprisingly vigorous clump of shrubs that grew near the far end of the bowl.
"With Jakli's permission," the American said, "I will record Batu and Jengzi as the discoverers. The solvers of the great mystery."
"Mystery?" asked Kaju.
"Sure. We just found out why this place has always been called Stone Lake."
The boys wore grins that nearly reached their ears. Jakli splashed them from below.
"If there was a cistern," Shan suggested, "there must have been access."
Deacon was already easing himself along the ledge toward the far wall. "Probably a stone stairway leading down from something like a bath house." He stopped and aimed his light at a point just below where the dome began on the opposite side. "Right about there," he said. A large stone could be seen, supported by two cut-stone posts. But the area below the lintel stone was packed with rock, sand, and timber debris. The entrance had collapsed.
As Shan and Kaju reached down and pulled Jakli onto the ledge, Deacon's light searched the side of the cistern. "It's too fragile here," the American concluded. "We could collapse the whole thing by moving the rocks. But the cistern would have been near the center of the settlement here. There will be more access ahead."
Just as his hopeful words rang out his light flickered and went dim. He shook it and it brightened, though not nearly to the brilliance it had a moment before. "Go!" he barked.
Two hundred feet past the cistern, Jakli, in the lead, asked for the light. A moment later she began describing in a shaking voice what lay ahead. But there was no need for words. The beam of the light told them everything. Several side posts were loose, three of them fallen and leaning across the tunnel. One top beam had fallen to the bottom and had a pile of sand and stones around it. Another small beam was rotted away, with little more than a few splinters holding it up. The tunnel appeared ready to collapse at any instant.
Time seemed to have a different quality in the tomblike stillness. The small party stared at the doom ahead, and Shan had no idea how long it was before Deacon spoke.
"Okay," the American said in a taut voice. Shan heard him breathe deeply, as if trying to calm himself. "It'll be like this. The light stays with Jakli. She goes first, then the boys. We need someone strong behind, in case there's quick digging to do, so Kaju goes, then Shan. Call back when you reach a stable zone, and I'll come. I'm the biggest, and so the most dangerous."
No one argued. Jakli began inching forward.
"You'll have no light," Kaju called back to the American.
"I got matches," Deacon said in a hollow tone. "No problem."
Shan urged the Tibetan forward with a touch on his leg, and gradually the four in front made progress. Ten feet, proceeding with agonizing slowness, then twenty feet, and the light began to quickly fade, as if perhaps the tunnel had curved.
"I know you're here, damn you," Deacon said in the darkness. "You're smaller than Kaju. You can make it."
"I thought there might be crickets," Shan said. "Why should you have all the fun?"
There was silence for a long time. When he listened hard, Shan thought he could hear particles of sand turning over.
"How many do you have?" Shan asked. "Matches."
"I just counted. Ten."
"I've got maybe half a dozen." Shan said.
"Great. Run out for marshmallows. We'll have a roast."
"Marshmallows?"
"Never mind."
Silence again.
"I got Old Ironlegs to sing," Deacon announced through the darkness. "Big bass voice. I fed him some peanut butter."
They spoke of crickets again, of the ones the old monk had when Shan was a boy and those Deacon had collected so far for his son.
"Is this all we do?" Shan asked at last and heard the sadness in his own voice. The killer could strike again and he would be lying in the sand, chased into his grave by the knobs.
"Going ahead in the dark-" the American said quickly and urgently, as if forcing the words out, "-it's suicide. A handful of matches, no better. So we wait. Jakli's going to send an army of pikas with lighted helmets."
"We could go back," Shan said.
"No better chance back there. This is where we told her we'd be."
Did he mean, Shan wondered, this is where they would dig for their bodies?
A match flared, hurting Shan's eyes. Deacon was looking at him, the American's head propped on one arm, a strange peacefulness on his face.
Do we just lie here until we die of starvation? Shan wondered.
"No, no," Deacon said, with an oddly calm voice. "There's no circulation of air in here. We'll die of suffocation long before that," he added, and Shan realized he had spoken his thought out loud.
The match flashed and went out.
Shan lay on his back, his head on his hands. He could hear the American's quiet breathing behind him. He reached and ran his fingertips along the stones, feeling a strange affinity for the builders of the karez. Other men had been here before him, worshipful men laboring in the dim light of oil lamps, tapping stones and supports into place, taking the measurements that assured gravity would move the water. Some paused to paint inscriptions in the tunnel, where no one would see them. No one but a small desperate group of castoffs, centuries later.
What would it be like when someone pulled his body out in a thousand years? Someone who would study his clothes and declare, How strange, this dried-up Han with an old Tibetan gau wore tw
enty-first-century textiles and had a tenth-century medallion in his pocket.
"Is it true," Deacon's voice came through the blackness, "that there are lamas who can speak with mountains?"
Shan smiled in the dark. "I think mountains might have much to say."
"A mountain is full of age," the American said very slowly, in English now. "And water and crystal and roots. I could learn from a mountain." He breathed silently for a few moments. The lack of oxygen was beginning to tell. "I used to walk in the mountains. I sat under huge trees and just absorbed everything. I stopped thinking, I just felt it. For hours."
"A meditation," Shan said.
"I guess. There are people in Tibet who do that for years, I hear. If I did that for years I would- I don't know. I wouldn't be me anymore. I'd be something better. Something more than just human."
"I've known people like that," Shan said softly.
"Then you're lucky. Me, I guess all I do is just hope that if I do real good- you know, acquire merit- that in the next life I can get to be a hermit in Tibet."
They were quiet again. Deacon lit another match and held it closer to the bricks, apparently studying the construction. There was no sound from the others. They could be lying in a cave-in, already dead. Perhaps that would be better than the torture of slow suffocation in the blackness. Shan felt something on his hand. Moisture. He wiped the sand from a bottom stone and laid his finger across it. After a moment the finger was damp. He pushed aside the sand and laid his cheek in the dampness on the rock. There was something of a miracle about it, he thought, something of great power in the dampness, something akin to the feeling he had known when he had touched the pilgrim's mummy, as if the dampness itself were a thousand years old.
Shan pushed his cheek down against the stone. He had been to a well outside an old gompa, where pilgrims came to drink. During the Chinese invasion, a khampa child had gone there, after being forced by the soldiers to shoot both her parents. She had cried for a week over the side of the well, and later the monks had covered the hole so the invaders would not fill it in. They opened it for visits by the faithful. Her tears were still in the water, the monks said solemnly, for once the tears had mixed in the well, no matter how many buckets came out, something of the tears remained.
He felt the moisture on his cheek and wondered how many tears had mingled with it. All those who had cried in the mountains beyond, for all the centuries, had something of their tears in these waters. He realized that though he had felt a great thirst earlier, the thirst was gone. A memory, a snippet of conversation with Malik came back to him. Is that how you know you are dead, Malik had asked, when you have no more thirst?
"If mountains could talk," Deacon asked through the darkness, "what do deserts have to say?"
"The same thing," Shan said, "only with sorrow."
"What do you mean?"
"Deserts are where the mountains go when they die."
There was silence again. His consciousness seemed to fade, as if he were falling asleep. He put his fingertip on his eye, unable to tell whether it was open or shut. He heard something. Music, and a falsetto voice. If bits of water could linger for centuries, he thought, maybe particles of sound could do the same, gathered into the karez by ancient winds. Maybe it was what the wind demons did, gathered up pieces of human lives and deposited them into quiet, shadowy places.
He smelled ginger and heard a voice that was unmistakably his father's. Not specific words at first, but tones, as if his father were humming, to comfort him. Then he heard his father speak, in a tongue he had never known. Khoshakhan, he was saying to Shan. Khoshakhan.
A trickle of sand fell into his mouth and Shan choked, coughing, awake again. "Back at the Stone Lake," he said wearily, "when it was an oasis, it would have been a good place for crickets."
A sound like a muffled laugh came from behind him. "We found a scroll last week," Deacon said. "An essay, on the proper diet to feed singing crickets. Ming dynasty. I'm going to show it to Micah. We'll mix up some of the recipes and see how they work."
"At the full moon."
"Yeah." The American paused before speaking again. "It's going to be hard."
"Hard?"
"When he hears about Khitai. The Maos told us what happened."
"You said they were friends?"
"Khitai was the best friend Micah made here. Lots of mischief together. We were excited about the news, that Micah would have a brother now. Warp was already expanding the house in her mind. Buying bicycles."
"I don't understand-" Shan began, then he realized Deacon was speaking of the future. He rolled over, pressed his back against the moisture, and extended his fingers into the darkness. There was nothing like being blind to make a man see. Marco had not known where Lau had planned to take the Yakde Lama. But Deacon did. "Khitai," he said. "I understand now. You were going to take him to America. You were going to take him after the full moon." It seemed odd now, talking about the future, as if they had become disconnected from it, as if they were speaking of other people's lives.
Deacon didn't answer.
"I know about it. The Panda. The medallions. I just didn't know how far he was going."
"Somebody told me once that no one should die with secrets. So I guess I can tell you mine and you can tell me yours." Deacon paused and breathed rapidly, as if speaking had become a great labor. "Micah and Khitai were hatching out ideas to be together long before the trouble started. Then a month ago Lau came to us all upset and explained about the boy, about who he was. Said things had changed, that she might have to find a new home, that she would have to get Khitai away. Maybe we could say he's our new adopted son from China. Warp acted like it was predestined, the perfect thing for us to be doing. Marco can get us out. Marco knows people outside, he has lots of money, in banks outside. He had papers made, good ones. U.S. passports he bought in Pakistan." Deacon sighed and seemed to sink back into his thoughts.
The silence of the grave. It was weighing on the American too, Shan knew. The silence seemed to shout. It seemed physical, as if pressing down, as if the tunnel were shrinking around them. He raised his fingers slowly, until they made contact with the top of the tunnel.
"I don't understand," Shan said.
"What?" the American asked. It seemed as though sound itself had slowed, as if ages passed between his words and the reply.
"I don't know. You. Why you and your wife came to Xinjiang. Why you would send your son to clansmen you don't really know."
Deacon was quiet so long Shan wondered if he had stopped breathing. "A splinter," he said. "It's all because of a splinter."
"A splinter?"
"We were in the Amazon jungle. It got infected, real bad. Warp was with me, and two Indian guides. We were doing an article on weaving techniques in one of the disappearing tribes. I was delirious off and on, I was going to die, I knew I was going to die. Fever. In and out of consciousness. She sat with me, wiped my brow, talked with me while the Indians looked for medicine in the jungle. I made a vow that if I lived it was going to be different. We were going to make a difference."
Slowly, sometimes pausing to draw in a deep breath of the depleted air, Deacon explained that he had spent much of his youth roaming the world, seeking adventure, spending most of what his father, an automobile dealer, had left him. "Kayaking for a month in Tasmania. Climbed four mountains in Alaska and Nepal. Bungee jumping in New Zealand. The Andes. A month in Peru. A month in Patagonia."
"Doing research?"
"Hell, no. At least, not often. After we got married, sometimes Warp would go on my adventures and pay her way by writing an article. I was just a thrill seeker. She settled us down for a while, said I had to grow up. Got jobs at the university, good jobs. Micah came. Then one day we're at a shopping center, a place where many stores are all together, in a cement maze. Had a big basket of toys, waiting in line. Suddenly I see she's crying, tears rolling down her cheeks. She says here we are, playing along. It's how everyone measures their
lives, she said, when you have young children you go to the giant toy stores and buy expensive plastic things. They get older and you buy expensive electrical things at a different store. Then it's expensive clothes. If you're really successful, expensive shoes and expensive cars. It's called Western evolution, she says. You mark your existence, and your place in the herd, by what stores you shop at. I said it's just some toys, Warp. But when it came time to pay and she reached into her purse, her hands were shaking so much she couldn't hold her wallet. She couldn't move. Just cried and cried. Police came, then an ambulance. They put her in a place like a hospital for a week. Some fool heard about it and told Micah his mother had a breakdown in the toy store. He came to me- he was five- with all his toys in a big box and said he would give them up, never have toys again, if they would give his mama back. I went to the hospital and took her out, told them they were the goddamned crazy ones, not my wife. We agreed we would take every research project that came along, to get away from the world.
"Then months later I lay dying in the Amazon. I said to her, I married the wisest person in the world. You were right that day in the toy store, I told her. Nobody's accountable. People sit back and let bad things happen. Forests get leveled. Cultures get destroyed, traditions get cast aside because they're not Internet compatible. Children get raised to think watching television is required for survival and get all their culture from advertising. We pledged to each other if we got out of there we would make it different for us and Micah. We would be accountable, and we would find a place where we could make a difference."
"And here you are," Shan said distantly. "In an ancient tunnel under an ancient town, just waiting-"
"No regrets," the American shot back, as if he did not want Shan to continue. "Our government and the Chinese government doesn't want us here. Screw them. This is where it is, this is where we make the difference." Make a difference. Oddly Shan recalled, Prosecutor Xu had used the same words just the day before to explain why she was in Yoktian. "These people, Beijing thinks they're broken. They're not. They're just waiting. All we do is what you do. Help them find the truths."
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