The Tibetan stopped and stared at the flags after he had fastened them, as if seeing prayer flags for the first time in his life, then turned and walked slowly toward the garage building. Shan stood and waved and in a few moments Kaju had joined them.
He greeted them in Tibetan, not Mandarin, and for the first time since Shan had known him continued the conversation in his native tongue. There had been no contact from Micah, he reported, no chance to warn him away. But in the night, Kaju said hopefully, there had been many sirens and many knobs had rushed out of town. Maybe they were gone, or at least distracted. Maybe Bao would forget one small boy in the face of whatever Public Security emergency had arisen.
They were sitting in a circle, listening to Kaju explain how he planned to one day return with all the zheli and truly see the fossils, when someone threw a plastic bag of raisins into their midst. They looked up to see Marco's broad face, looking grim but determined.
He squatted by Shan with a handful of raisins. "Took an hour for them to decide to let the prisoners out to fight the fires," he reported without emotion. "Fools. By then all they could do was throw sand on the embers. Nothing left but smoldering bags of rice where the warehouse was. No administration building. The little house at the gate, even that." There was no victory in his voice, but when he looked at Shan an odd glint rose in his eyes. "Nikki approved," he said in a low tone, and nodded as though to acknowledge that although it might not feel like victory, it did feel like completion.
As Kaju stood and walked along the top of the dune, watching for Micah, Lokesh lifted the raisin bag and passed it around. Breakfast. "You'll see," Kaju called out to Shan. "It's only Bao. If he comes and tries to take the boy it will be the proof I need. I'll go to Ko," he said as he stepped nearly out of earshot. "Ko will know what to do." Shan and Jowa exchanged a glance. Kaju still refused to accept the truth.
As Marco ate his raisins Shan explained the new plan for the Red Stone clan. The Eluosi didn't argue. "That old Tibetan hunter at the border, the one with the coracles, only way he'll do it now is if he sees I'm with them," the Eluosi said and looked at Shan. "I'll need help."
Shan didn't understand at first. The words weren't spontaneous. They had been chewed over by Marco and he meant them.
"Come with me, Johnny," Marco said in English. "I'm leaving this forsaken land. You should too. I've got buckets of money in banks outside. We'll go to Alaska. Catch big fish. Build a cabin by the ocean."
Shan's mouth opened and closed again. He looked at Gendun and Lokesh, and explained to them in Tibetan, but they offered only small serene smiles and nodded.
"It isn't over," Shan said. "There's no time-"
As if Shan's words were a cue, Kaju shouted. Two riders on horseback had appeared from the desert, leading a heavily loaded packhorse and an empty saddle horse along the back of the dune they sat on. "The Americans," Kaju announced brightly, as if somehow the arrival of Deacon and his wife assured their success.
But Shan just looked at the sand by his feet. He realized that unconsciously he had hoped they would not come.
Deacon's wife seemed to overflow with energy and excitement. She had brought a large jar of peanut butter, which Kaju explained to Gendun and Lokesh, offering samples to them as they examined it with schoolboy curiosity. She spoke to Marco, to make sure the bags on the horse were not too big, then flattened an area of sand and laid a towel on it, then arranged things on it. One of the leather gloves used for baseball. A small green toy truck. A pack of chewing gum. And a red can, battered and dented from heavy travels, an unopened can of American soda. Then, with a puzzled glance from her husband, who just stood and stared down into the bowl, she untied a narrow wooden box from the top of the packhorse, digging a recess for it so that it was shaded. She pulled away the cloth that covered the top of the box and Shan saw that it was perforated with holes. Deacon's insect singers.
Marco took over like an officer instructing his troops, moving them all down into the shadow of the dune, on the opposite side from the bowl. No one was to go on top, in plain sight, except Kaju. He sent Jowa with Gendun and Lokesh even further, to a place two hundred yards to the north where a small outcropping provided some cover. If anyone came for the boy, the Eluosi announced, he and Sophie would grab the boy and take him into the soft desert sand where trucks could not follow.
Twenty minutes later, at the far end of the bowl, where it flattened and opened into the desert, three figures came into view, riding horses, less than a mile away. Lying flat at the crest of the dune with the binoculars Shan could see that it was two men in the garb of herders and between them, on a pony, a boy. Two large mastiffs ran on either side of the horses.
"Micah!" the American woman called out, and stood as though to run toward the distant figures.
"Warp- no!" her husband yelled, and pulled his wife back behind the dune.
In the same moment, over the dune on the opposite side of the wide, sandy bowl, a vehicle appeared. Not a red Brigade truck as Shan had expected but one of the sleek black utility vehicles of the boot squads. It inched to the top of the dune and stopped. A figure in a red nylon jacket climbed out of the driver's seat. Even without the binoculars Shan knew it was Ko Yonghong.
"The bastards," Marco spat at his side as the remaining doors opened. Two men in grey uniforms, carrying submachine guns, darted half a dozen paces in opposite directions to flank the vehicle, then each dropped to one knee, guns raised, as if prepared for combat. A third man, a barrel-chested figure who walked with a swagger, moved to Ko's side. Major Bao.
A gasp escaped from Kaju, standing halfway down the dune below Shan. The Tibetan stared in disbelief, glanced at Shan with an anguished expression, then looked back as one more figure emerged, a tall, thin, older man with an imperious bearing. Ko solicitiously handed him a pair of binoculars and the man studied the approaching riders, then patted Ko on the shoulder. Shan studied the stranger with his lenses. He had seen him before, in the photograph at Ko's office. "Rongqi," he heard Kaju gasp. It was the general himself, come to witness his ultimate triumph over the Tibetans.
"Dammit, No!" he heard Deacon's urgent whisper from behind, and he turned to see Lokesh and Gendun walking toward the end of the dune, as if to intercept the riders, waving them toward the outcropping as though it might hide them from the men in the truck. Shan felt a hand on his arm. Marco pointed silently toward the entrance to the oil camp, where another car had appeared, a Red Flag. It stopped and backed up, out of sight, then Prosecutor Xu appeared, alone, aiming a pair of binoculars toward the black truck.
Bao's attention was fixed on the riders. He raised his hand and seemed to snap out a command. The two knob soldiers sprang back to the truck.
"No!" Kaju moaned. He stumbled forward, his face twisted with pain. His eyes moved from the riders to the truck and then drifted back into the center of the bowl, where the single shrub grew between him and the truck. He stared at it curiously for a moment, then he began tearing at the neck of his shirt. He pulled a chain from his neck, a chain holding a large silver gau.
Raising the gau over his head, he leapt forward, bounding down the side of the dune, calling out, shouting Ko's name, then shouting for Major Bao, running hard toward the center of the bowl as if trying to meet the truck there. The men at the black truck stared at him for a moment, then jumped into the vehicle, the soldiers leaping on the sideboards, guns still at the ready, as Ko drove over the crest of the dune.
As he ran Kaju kept gesturing with an emphatic energy, as if he urgently needed them, dangling the gau as if they should recognize it. As if it were the Jade Basket. His pace slackened as he approached the bush, stopping for a moment thirty feet away from it, then starting again with a much slower movement, still waving the truck toward him.
Suddenly Shan understood. "No!" he gasped and began to rise. But a beefy hand settled over his shoulder. Marco pushed him down.
"You don't understand-" Shan protested. "He remembers the shrub. He saw the roots before! Deacon!" he call
ed out desperately. The American would know.
Kaju had arrived at the bush and stopped, in the center of the bowl, still waving desperately as the truck sped forward. For a moment he turned, and looked back, as though seeking Shan, then he lowered himself into the lotus position, the gau now clutched at his chest, his head raised not toward the truck but toward the sky.
Deacon appeared at Shan's side. "Jesus!" he bellowed. "No! The cistern!"
The truck lurched to a stop beside the Tibetan and the soldiers jumped off. As the doors opened the truck began to sink and the soldiers shouted frantically at the men inside, one stumbling toward the door where the general had climbed in. Then the soldiers themselves began to drop as if being consumed by the sand itself.
It seemed to happen not in slow motion, but in fast motion, in a blurring sequence, as the desert opened up and swallowed the vehicle into the depths of the ancient cistern, then the sand of the bowl and the adjacent dunes swept inward in a great violent surge. A deep crater appeared for an instant where the huge cistern had been built centuries before, and Shan thought he saw arms and legs swimming in the sand and rock rubble. Then the desert filled the crater, the dunes shifting and sliding with a dreadful hissing and swirling as the tons of sand moved in.
Then, abruptly, there was stillness.
Deacon stood beside him. Shan had not had time to rise from his knees. At the road Xu stood staring, the binoculars at her side, then slowly she disappeared from view, walking backward, still facing the empty bowl. A moment later Shan heard the engine of the car as she drove away.
They walked silently, in shock, toward the shallow depression that marked where the cistern had been.
"We have to dig!" Abigail Deacon shouted repeatedly as she leapt down the dune and began scooping the sand with her hands.
"It's forty feet at least, Warp," her husband said quietly, as he and Shan reached her. "Thousands of tons of sand. Not a chance."
They stood, paralyzed, for a moment as the American woman, still kneeling, pounded the sand forlornly. The desert had claimed more dead. The karez had become a tomb after all. Ko who worshipped money. Rongqi who worshipped power. Bao who worshipped force. And one Tibetan who, however wasted in life, had been steadfast in his death.
A horse whinnied and they looked up to see the riders standing beside their horses now, with Lokesh and Gendun. They did not advance, but stood two hundred yards away, as if frightened.
"Micah!" the American woman called out, and jumped up to move toward the figures. Deacon started after her but stopped and looked back uncertainly as Shan called his name. Shamed by his weakness, Shan handed the American the gau he had taken from Malik, the gau from the grave at the lama field. The American's face went stiff, and his arm drooped when he reached for it, as if it had lost its strength. Shan pushed the gau into Deacon's hand and stepped away. He remembered the stab of pain in his heart when he had opened it the first time, the only time, the day after Malik had given it to him. For inside there had been no Jade Basket, no secret prayer. There had only been the shriveled remains of a small brown cricket.
The American woman kept stumbling in the soft sand, calling her son's name even as she fell. Deacon stood a moment staring at Shan, then at the short, slender figure with the two herders, his face growing dim, as if a veil were descending over it. Then he made a gasping sound as though he were back in the suffocating karez and stepped forward, calling his wife in a voice no one could hear at first, then louder, until as she stumbled to her knees again he caught up with her.
There was no need to explain, Shan saw, for Jacob Deacon understood. The American had been glimpsing another of the nightmares that had shadowed Shan since the nadam. Two mischevious boys had fooled their foster parents, their shadow clan guardians, because one had wanted to move to the lower pastures to be with the horses, while the other had been trying to reach the high Kunlun, the land of the lama field. Khitai had already played the same innocent game by trading places with Suwan at the Red Stone camp. Only for a few days, Khitai and Micah would have said, for everyone would meet at Stone Lake on the full moon. Malik had been certain Khitai died at the lama field but Malik had seen only a battered boy with dark hair already in his shroud, in possession of Khitai's belongings, at the place he expected Khitai to be.
"Micah!" the American woman called again, when her husband pulled her up from the sand. "Our boy!" she cried to her husband, as if Deacon did not understand. But Deacon held her from the back, his arms locked around her, as she faced the riders, keeping her there as Shan and Marco passed by, their pace slower and slower as they approached. The two herders, holding the horses, looked at the Americans with wild, confused expressions.
When they reached the horses Lokesh was sitting on the sand with a slim Tibetan boy, chanting a mantra with him, pointing out the possessions that he had recovered for him at the lama field. Tears ran down the old Tibetan's cheeks.
Gendun stood, his eyes wide and sad, looking from Shan to Khitai and back to the Americans. "Thank you, friend Shan," he said, his voice cracking. "For raising our Yakde Lama from the dead."
Chapter Twenty-Two
No one discussed staying at Stone Lake. But stay they did, for hours, Shan staring in silence at the shallow depression that marked the tomb, Deacon and his wife alone with their grief, Marco introducing the boy lama to Sophie and offering him a ride. Fat Mao came to find Marco and left after speaking with Jowa, taking the Americans to the grave at the lama field. By midday people began to appear, Kazakhs and Uighurs mostly, some on horses, some walking down the road from the highway. They gathered around the depression in the sand with puzzled expressions. Shan heard someone point out the holy man in the robe, and many nodded, as if Gendun's presence explained everything. They raised a small cairn at the site of the collapsed cistern, using rubble from the oil camp buildings and stones from the old ruins. Shan and Jowa removed the prayer flags from the building frame where Kaju had erected them and fastened them to the cairn.
The boy lama seemed to avoid Shan at first, then finally came and sat beside him as he contemplated the bowl of sand that had become Kaju's grave. The boy appeared about to speak, and Shan leaned forward as if to say something himself, but neither of their tongues found words. They sat silently, for an hour, then the boy moved in front of Shan and slowly lifted Shan's hand. He spread Shan's fingers to make an open palm, and then placed the palm over his heart.
When the boy raised his hand Shan reached inside his shirt and pulled out his gau. "I met one of the old ones at Sand Mountain," he said to the boy as he opened the gau. "Before he returned to the sand he gave me this," Shan explained as he pulled out the feather. He stared at it, cupped in his hand. "I gave him a new one, to take back." Shan looked up to see the boy lama staring reverently at the feather, and he extended his hand toward the boy. "I want you to take it now."
The boy did not take the feather at first, but pulled his own gau from his neck, opening the finely worked silver filigree lid to reveal a similar filigree worked in jade. He lifted the top of the Jade Basket and Shan dropped the feather into it.
The Yakde stared at the feather, his eyes filled with emotion. "Micah loved owls," he said softly. "When we were together we would stay up and listen for owls. He had learned from his shadow clan how to call to them. One night he grew very still and said there was one old owl calling for him now, that it felt like the owl was trying to call him somewhere." The boy shook his head slowly, then gently lifted the box close to his face to study the feather. "It will become one of the treasures," he said.
He meant, Shan realized after a moment, that it would become a permanent part of the Yakde Lama's chain of existence, one of the treasures that would become an indicator for future incarnations of the Yakde.
By late afternoon the Maos returned with two trucks, and spoke again in hushed tones to Jowa. They helped Shan and the Tibetans into a truck, then loaded Sophie into the other. Shan jumped out at the last minute and climbed in with Sop
hie and Marco. They looked at each other without speaking, stroking Sophie as the truck lurched down the road.
"Where will you leave her?" Shan asked. "When you go across the ocean."
Marco's face still had no cheer but it seemed to have found a certain peacefulness. "Leave her?" The Eluosi grunted. "Sophie never leaves me. She goes, she always goes."
"To Alaska? They don't have camels in Alaska."
"They will now," Marco declared in a loud voice. "We'll take her on a big ship, one where we can walk with her on the deck. You and me."
It was such an impossible thing that Shan wanted to laugh. But it was an impossibly wonderful thing. He was young enough to start a new life. Jakli had given him the medallion because she too wanted him to go. Tibet, the lamas always told him, was the starting point for his new incarnation, but no one could know where it would lead. He had missed the trip to Nepal and the new life in England, but now another path was unfolding.
They were close to Yoktian, Shan saw, and suddenly they were passing a familiar set of hills on the edge of the town. At the top of a hill was a boxy black car. Shan pounded on the window for the truck to stop, then jogged up the hill, past the empty Red Flag.
He spotted her in the middle of the cemetery, slowly sweeping a grave with a ragged broom, dust on her clothes. She could have been a groundskeeper or a mourner.
Xu showed no surprise at seeing him and continued sweeping around the grave before speaking. "Glory Camp is dead," she said, huddling over the broom. "Can't use it after the accident, not for weeks at least, probably not until spring." All the prisoners sentenced to six months or more were being transferred to other facilities, she explained, all the others released.
"And those taken by Bao?" Shan asked.
Those too, the prosecutor confirmed without looking up, then she walked to a bag by a grave ten feet away. She pulled out a videotape and tossed it toward Shan's feet.
"I told Loshi to get it, to make them get it back for her. I told her she was fired if she didn't get it, because she had tampered with an official file, that she'd never have a chance for a transfer back east. I was going to bury it." She kicked it closer to him, then, as if impatient with his indecision over touching it, smashed it with her foot. An end of the loose tape broke free of the cassette and the wind grabbed it, unwinding it with such force that it broke when it reached the end. The tape slithered across the graves like a snake, then blew out into the desert.
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