Everything in Tibet starts with the wind. It is the wind that offers up prayer flags to the heavens, the wind that brings cold and warmth and life-giving water to the land, the wind that gives movement to the mountains themselves as it sends the clouds careening down the ranges. As he looked out from his high ledge, Shan Tao Yun remembered a lama once suggesting to him that the human soul first became aware of itself in Tibet because the wind never stops pushing against its inhabitants, and it is in pushing back against the world that a soul is defined. After nearly four years in Tibet, Shan believed it. It was as though here, the highest of all lands, was where the planet, gasping and groaning, began its rotation, here was where it learned to move, here was where it was the most difficult for people to hold on.
There was an exercise for enlightenment Shan had learned from the lamas that was called scouring the wind. Extend your awareness into the air and float with it, become mindful of the world it carries and absorb its lessons. He and his companions had hours before darkness fell, before it was safe to travel again, and he sat cross-legged on his high perch and tried it now. Drying heather, Shan sensed. A hawk soaring high over the valley. The sweet, acrid scent of junipers, tinged with the coolness of snow. The distant chatter of ground squirrels on the rock-strewn slopes. And suddenly, before a spreading plume of dust in the north, a single desperate rider.
As Shan shielded his eyes to study the intruding figure, a sharp syllable of warning cracked through the air. He turned to see Jowa, his Tibetan guide, pointing to an old man in a broad-brimmed brown hat walking toward the edge of the ledge, staring up the valley.
"Lokesh!" Shan shouted and leapt to grab his old friend, who seemed not to notice when Shan grasped his arm. He was blinking and shaking his head, staring at the figure approaching from the far end of the valley.
"Is it real?" Lokesh asked in a tentative tone, as if uncertain of his senses. The day before, he had seen a giant turtle on the top of a hill, a sign of good luck. He had insisted that they take it an offering and apologized because it had turned back into a rock by the time they had reached it.
"It is of this world," Shan confirmed as he squinted toward the horizon.
"He's frightened," Jowa said behind them. "He keeps looking back." Shan turned and saw that the wiry Tibetan had found their battered pair of binoculars and was studying the figure through the lenses. "That horse is dead if he keeps it up." The Tibetan looked back to his companions and shook his head. "Someone is chasing him," he said in a worried tone as he handed Shan the glasses.
Shan saw that the rider was clad in a dark chuba, the heavy sheepskin robe worn by the dropka, the nomads who roamed the vast plateau of northwestern Tibet. Behind the dropka's horse the dust was so thick that Shan could see no sign of a pursuer. He scanned the landscape. Snowcapped peaks edged the clear cobalt sky for miles in three directions, towering over the rugged grass-covered hills that lined the opposite side of the valley. Neither the long plain below them, brown with autumn-dried grass, nor the narrow dirt track from which they had retreated at dawn, gave any sign of life other than the solitary rider.
Shan could see the man's arms now, flailing his reins against the horse's neck. He looked down at their battered old Jiefang cargo truck, hidden behind a large outcropping a hundred feet from the road, then handed back the binoculars and stepped into the shadow of the overhanging rock where they had taken shelter after their night's ride.
Ten feet away, where the shadow was darkest, Shan dropped to his knees. By the ashes of the small fire where they had roasted barley flour for their only hot meal of the day, a solitary stick of incense had been thrust into a tiny cairn of stones. A blanket of yak felt had been folded and laid on the ground, and on the blanket, sitting silently in the cross-legged lotus fashion, was a man in a maroon robe. He had close-cropped graying hair, and his thin face would have been called old by many, but Shan never thought of Gendun as old, just as he never thought of mountains as old.
The lama's eyes were mostly closed, in what for him passed as sleep. Gendun refused to rest during the night, while they traveled in the old truck, and he did not lie down in the daylight rest shifts taken by his three companions but only drifted off like this, after Lokesh had made sure he had eaten.
"Rinpoche," Shan whispered, using the form of address for a revered teacher. "We may have to leave," he said. "There is trouble."
Gendun gave no sign of hearing him.
Shan looked toward Jowa, who was using the binoculars again to survey the landscape beyond the rider, then turned back to Gendun, noting for the first time that the lama had arranged his fingers in a mudra, one of the hand shapes used to focus meditation, a symbol of reverence to the Buddha. He studied the lama's fingers a moment. The wrists were crossed, the palms held outward, with the little fingers linked to form the shape of a chain. Shan paused and stared at the hands. It was an unusual mudra, one he had never seen Gendun make. The Spirit Subduer, it was called. It chilled Shan for a moment, then he sighed and rose with a slight bow of his head, stepping back to Jowa's side.
The young Tibetan was looking up the slope above them, as though searching for a way to climb over the mountain. They both knew that there was probably only one reason the rider was so scared. Shan looked once more at the truck. Their only hope was that it would not be seen. It would be a bad finish, to be stopped here, high on the remote plateau, short of their destination. Not simply because of the suffering they would face from the Public Security Bureau, but because they would have failed Gendun and the other lamas who had sent them.
Lokesh sighed. "I thought it would be longer," he said, and touched the beads that hung from his belt. "That woman," he said absently, "she still has to be settled in."
Settled in. The words brought back to Shan how different they all were, how differently they seemed to view the strange task that had been set for them. Gendun had been with the lamas who had summoned Shan from his meditation cell in their mountain hermitage, seated on cushions around an eight-foot mandala that had just been completed that afternoon. Four monks had worked for six months on the delicate wheel of life, composed of hundreds of intricate figures created of colored sands. Fragrant juniper had been burning in a brazier, and dozens of butter lamps lit the chamber. A low rumble like distant thunder rose from a chamber below them, the sound of a huge prayer wheel that required two strong monks to turn it. For a quarter hour they had gazed in silent reverence at the mandala, then Gendun, the senior lama and Shan's principal teacher, had spoken.
"You are needed in the north," he had announced to Shan. "A woman named Lau has been killed. A teacher. And a lama is missing." Nothing more. The lamas were shy of reality. They knew to be wary of facts. Gendun had told him the essential truth of the event; for the lamas everything else would be mere rumor. What they had meant was that this lama and the dead woman with a Chinese name were vital to them, and it was for Shan to discover the other truths surrounding the killing and translate them for the lamas' world.
He had not known how far they would travel, and when he had arrived as instructed at the hidden door that led to the outside world, he had assumed that it would be to the north end of the Lhadrung valley, to the settlement nearest the hermitage. Nor had he realized that Gendun was to accompany him. Even when Gendun appeared at the door, Shan had thought it was to bid him well or offer details of his destination. He had even assumed that the canvas bag of supplies the lama had brought was for Shan. But then he had seen Gendun's feet. The lama had removed the sandals he always wore under his robe and replaced them with heavy lace-up work boots.
They had walked until dawn, when they had met Lokesh at the ancient rope bridge that spanned the gorge separating the hermitage from the rest of the world. Lokesh and Shan had embraced as old friends, for such they had become during their time together in Lhadrung's gulag labor camp, then the three had walked another hour until a truck had stopped for them. Shan had thought it was just a coincidence, just a favor from the driver. But the driver had been Jowa, and after Gendun had examined the vehicle with wide eyes, having never been so close to a modern machine, the lama had blessed first the truck, then Jowa, and climbed inside. Jowa had eyed Shan resentfully, then started the engine and driven for twelve hours straight. That had been six days earlier.
Shan had been confused from the outset, waiting each day for the clarification from Gendun that never came. But Lokesh had never seemed to doubt their purpose. For Lokesh their job was to resettle the dead woman, meaning that they must address her soul and assure that it was balanced and ready for rebirth. For Lokesh, the woman had to settle into her death the way the living, after a momentous change, had to settle into life. Not her death, really, for to Lokesh and Gendun death was only the reverse side of birth. But a death not properly prepared for, such as a sudden violent death, could make rebirth difficult. When a monk in their prison had been suddenly killed by falling rocks, Lokesh had carried on a vigil for ten days, to help the unprepared spirit through the period when it would discover it needed to seek rebirth.
Shan gazed toward the valley floor again. The rider continued his breakneck speed, bent low now, as if studying the ground.
Shan looked at his companions with grim frustration.
"Perhaps," Shan said to Jowa, "it is one of your friends." Jowa had been a monk once himself. But the Bureau of Religious Affairs had refused to give him a license to continue as a monk, and a hard shell had grown around the monk inside him. Jowa wasn't worried about resettling a soul. A teacher had been killed and a lama was missing, things that the Chinese did to Tibetans. Jowa had simply understood that they were being sent against an enemy. Shan studied him now as Jowa unconsciously rubbed the deep scar that ran from his left eye to the base of his jaw. Shan had known many such men during his years in Tibet. He knew the familiar hardness of the eyes and the way such men turned their heads when encountering a Chinese on the street. He knew the scars made by the Public Security troops, the knobs, who were fond of wielding whips of barbed wire against public protesters. The hard labor brigade from which Shan had been released four months earlier had been heavily populated by men like Jowa.
It had taken less than a day on the road from Lhadrung, however, for Shan to understand that the essential truth about Jowa was something else. As the former monk had stealthfully exchanged passwords with the horsemen who had taken them away from the Lhasa highway, Shan had realized that Jowa was a purba, a member of the secret Tibetan resistance, named for the ceremonial dagger of Buddhist ritual. He had replaced his monastic vow with another vow, a pledge to use up the rest of this incarnation in fighting to preserve Tibet.
"No, not one of us," Jowa replied curtly. "Not like that," he added enigmatically. "If it's soldiers I will go to the truck," he said in a low, urgent tone. "I will lead them away on a chase to the south. Gendun and Lokesh cannot move fast enough. Just climb higher and hide."
"No," Shan said, watching the rider. "We stay together."
Lokesh sat near the edge of the ledge and stretched, as if the approaching threat somehow relaxed him. He pulled his mala, his rosary, from his belt, and his fingers began reflexively to work the beads. "The two of you have strength," the old man said. "Gendun needs you, both of you. I will stay with the truck. I will tell the soldiers I am a smuggler and surrender."
"No," Shan repeated. "We stay together." As much as he needed Jowa for his wisdom of the real world, the world of knob checkpoints and army patrols, he needed Lokesh for his wisdom of the other world, the world the lamas lived in, for while they had to traverse Jowa's world to get to the place of death, once they arrived Shan knew he would be seeking answers in the lamas' world. Lokesh would have been a lama himself except that long ago, before the Chinese had invaded, he had been taken from his monastery as a novice to serve in the government of the Dalai Lama.
Shan watched Jowa remove the canvas bag that hung over his shoulder and his thick woolen vest, then wrap his hand around the pommel of the short blade that hung at his waist. Jowa would not speak about the priest within him, but at their campfires he sometimes spoke proudly about his bloodline that traced back to the khampas, the nomadic clans that tended herds in eastern Tibet, a people known for centuries as fearless warriors. Jowa no longer watched the rider but the cloud of dust behind him. Soldiers would have machine guns, but, like thousands of Tibetans before him, Jowa would rush them with only his blade if that was what it took to remain true.
"But the road," Shan said suddenly. "Why is he staying on the road?"
Jowa stepped to his side and slowly nodded his head. "You're right," he replied in a puzzled tone. "If someone chased one of the nomads, first thing he'd do, he'd get off the road." As he spoke, he swept his hand toward the wilderness that lay beyond the rough dirt track. They were in the wild, windblown changtang, the vast empty plateau that ranged for hundreds of miles across central and western Tibet, a land where the dropka had hidden themselves for centuries.
Lokesh cocked his head, then looked toward the opposite end of the valley, to the south. "He's not running from someone. He is running to someone."
They watched as the rider sped past the outcropping that hid their truck, reappeared, then abruptly reined in his horse. As the horse spun about in a slow circle, the dropka studied the road.
"I thought you hid the tire tracks," Shan said to Jowa.
"I did, for Chinese eyes."
The rider dismounted and led his mount toward the outcropping. Moments later he stood by their empty truck. After tying his horse to the bumper, he warily circled the vehicle, then climbed to the edge of the open cargo bay, his hand on one of the metal ribs designed to support a canvas cover over the bay. He stepped inside and lifted the lids of the barrels that stood there, then jumped out and studied the slope above him. Most of the slope was covered with loose scree, fragments of rock broken from the ledge above. Winding through it was the solitary goat path which they had climbed after leaving the truck at dawn.
"Sometimes the soldiers have Tibetan scouts," Jowa reminded Shan.
He touched Shan on the shoulder, motioning him into the deep shadow of the overhanging rock.
The dropka began climbing the path at a fast trot. Shan fought the temptation to pull Gendun to his feet, to scale the ridge and disappear with him. The others could explain themselves, they had identity papers. But no one could explain Shan or Gendun. Gendun, who had lived so hidden from the rest of the world that Shan had been the first Chinese he ever met, had no official identity. Shan, on the other hand, had suffered from too much official scrutiny. A former government investigator who had been exiled to slave labor in Tibet, his release from the gulag had been unofficial. If captured outside Lhadrung, he would be considered an escapee. Jowa pushed Shan against the rock in the darkest part of the shadow, beside Gendun, and waited in front of them, his hand on his blade again.
The man reached the ledge where they hid, took a few steps in the opposite direction, then turned and came straight toward them. When he reached the rock, he stepped toward the shadow and shielded his eyes to peer inside. "Are you there?" he called loudly, in a voice edged with fear. The man was of slight build, wearing a dirty fleece hat over a mop of black hair and a faded red shirt under his chuba. He twisted his head and squinted, as though still uncertain of what lurked within. Predators made lairs in such places, and so did the demons that lurked in mountains. He looked back toward the northern reach of the road, as if searching for something, then pressed his palms together in supplication and stepped into the darkness.
"We say prayers for you," he called out, still in his loud, frightened voice, then halted with a sigh of relief as Lokesh took a step forward. His mouth moved into a crooked shape that Shan thought at first was a smile, then he saw that the man was choking off a sob. "For your safe journey."
Lokesh was the most emotional Tibetan Shan had ever met, and he wore his emotions like other people wore clothes, in plain view, never trying to obscure them. In the prison barracks Shan had shared with Lokesh, one of the lamas had said Lokesh carried embers inside him, embers that flared up unexpectedly, fanned by a rush of emotion or sudden realization. When the embers flared, snippets of sound, in croaks and groans and even squeals, escaped him. The sound he made now was a long high-pitched moan, as if he had seen something in the man that scared him. As the sound came out he shook his hand in front of his chest, as though to deny something.
Jowa stepped beside Lokesh. "What do you want?" he demanded loudly, not bothering to hide his suspicion of the man. No one was to have known about their journey.
The man looked at the purba uncertainly, then took another step toward them. But as he did so Lokesh shifted to the side and the dropka was suddenly face to face with Shan, who stood in front of Gendun, hiding him from the man's view.
"Chinese!" he gasped in alarm.
"What do you want?" Jowa repeated, then stepped out into the sunlight, looking warily up and down the valley.
The herder followed Shan and Lokesh out of the shadows, then circled Shan once and looked back at Jowa. "You bring a Chinese to help our people?" he asked accusingly.
Lokesh put his hand on Shan's shoulder. "Shan Tao Yun was in prison," he said brightly, as if it were Shan's crowning achievement.
The anger in the man's eyes faded into despair. "Someone was coming, they said." His voice was nearly a whisper. "Someone to save us."
"But that's what our Shan does," Lokesh blurted out. "He saves people."
The man shrugged, not trying to conceal his disappointment. He looked up the valley, his right hand grasping a string of plastic beads hanging from his red waist sash. "It used to be, when trouble came," he said in a distant voice, as if no longer speaking to the three men, "we knew how to find a priest." He picked out a brilliant white cloud on the horizon and decided to address it. "We had a real priest once," he said to the cloud, "but the Chinese took him."
His expression was one Shan had seen on many faces since arriving in Tibet, a sad confusion about what outsiders had done to their world, a helplessness for which the proud, independent Tibetan spirit was ill-prepared. Shan followed the man's eyes as they turned back up the valley.
Someone was emerging from the dust cloud, a rider on a horse that appeared to be near collapse. The animal moved at a wobbling, uneven pace, as if dizzy with fatigue.
"When I was young," the man said, turning to Lokesh now, with a new, urgent tone, "there was a shaman who could take the life force of one to save another. Old people would do it sometimes, to save a sick child." He looked back forlornly at the approaching rider. "I would give mine, give it gladly, to save him. Can you do that?" he asked, stepping closer to study Lokesh's face. "You have the eyes of a priest."
"Why did you come?" Jowa asked again, but this time the harshness had left his voice.
The man reached inside his shirt and produced a yak-hair cord from which hung a silver gau, one of the small boxes used to carry a prayer close to the heart. He clamped both hands around the gau and looked back up the valley, not at the rider now but at the far ranges capped with snow. "They took my father to prison and he died. They put my mother in a town but gave her no food coupons to live on, and she starved to death." He spoke slowly, his eyes drifting from the mountains to the ground at his feet. "They said no medical help would be given to our children unless we took them to their clinic. So I take my daughter with a fever but they said the medicine was for sick Chinese children first, and she died. Then we found a boy and he had no one and we had no one, so we called him our son." A tear rolled down his cheek.
"We only wanted to live in peace with our son," he said, his voice barely audible above the wind. "But our old priest, he used to say it was a sin, to want something too much." He looked back toward the second rider, his face long and barren. "They said you were coming, to save the children."
A chill crept down Shan's spine as he heard the words. He looked at Lokesh, who seemed even more shaken by the man's announcement. The color was draining from the old man's face.
"We are going because of a woman named Lau," Shan replied softly.
"No," the dropka said with an unsettling certainty. "It is because of the children, to keep all the children from dying."
On the road below them, a hundred yards before the outcropping, the second horse staggered forward, then stopped. Its rider, wrapped in a heavy felt blanket, slumped in the saddle, then slowly fell to the ground.
The herder let out a sound that wasn't just a moan, nor just a cry of fear. It was a sound of raw, animal agony.
Shan began to run.
He ran in the shortest line toward the fallen rider, darting to where the path met the ledge, then leaping and stumbling down the loose scree of the slope, twice falling painfully on his knees among the rocks, then finally landing on all fours in the coarse grass where the valley floor began. As he rose he glanced over his shoulder. No one followed.
The exhausted horse stood quivering, its nose, edged with a froth of blood, nearly touching the ground beside a mound of black yak-hair felt. Shan slowly lifted an edge of the blanket and saw dozens of hair braids, a bead woven into the end of each. It was an old style for devout women, one hundred eight braids, one hundred eight beads, the number of beads in a mala. The woman was breathing shallowly. Her face was stained with dirt and tears. Her eyes, like those of the horse, were so overcome with exhaustion that they seemed not to notice Shan. Inside the blanket she had used as a cloak was another blanket, around a long bundle that lay across her legs.
He looked back. Jowa and Lokesh were slowly working their way down the path, Jowa leading the herdsman by hand, Lokesh thirty paces behind leading Gendun, as though both men were blind.
Shan raised the second blanket and froze. It was a boy, his face so battered and bruised that one eye was swollen shut. He slowly pulled the blanket away and gasped. Blood was everywhere, saturating the boy's shirt and pants, soaking the inside of the heavy felt.
He tried to lift the boy with the blanket, to take the weight from the woman, but the blanket was twisted in the reins. He tried to pull the reins away and found they were connected to the woman, tied around her forearm above her wrist, because her hand was useless. The wrist was an ugly purple color, and the hand hung at an unnatural angle.
As Shan lifted the boy out of the blanket and laid him on the dried grass, the boy's mouth contorted, but he made no sound. The boy, no more than ten years old, had been savagely mauled and slashed across the shoulder, through his shirt. He was conscious, and though he had to be in great pain, he lay still and silent, his one good eye watching as Shan examined him. The eye showed no fear, no anger, no pain. It was only sad- and confused, like the look on the herdsman's face.
The boy had fought back. His hands were cut deeply in the palms, wounds that could only have been made if the boy had grabbed at the thing that had slashed him. His shirt had been ripped open at the neck, the buttons torn away. Shan clenched his jaw so tightly it hurt. The boy had been stabbed lower on his body, a blow that had penetrated the ribs and left a long open gout of tissue that oozed dark blood. His pants too had been ripped in the fight, a long tear below the left knee. He was missing a shoe.
Shan looked back at the solitary, unblinking eye that stared at him from the ruin of the boy's face, but found no words to say. He gazed at his hands. They were covered with the boy's blood. Overcome for a moment with helplessness, he just watched the blood drip from his fingertips onto the blades of brown grass.
Lokesh appeared at Shan's side, carrying one of the drawstring sacks that contained their supplies. Producing a plastic water bottle from the bag, the old Tibetan held the water to the boy's lips and began to utter a low, singsong chant in syllables unfamiliar to Shan. Before he had been plucked from his gompa, his monastery, to serve the Dalai Lama, Lokesh had intended to take up medicine. He had apprenticed himself to a lama healer before being called to Lhasa, then continued his training during his decades in prison by ministering to prisoners, learning from the old healers who were sometimes thrown behind wire for encouraging citizens to cling to the traditional ways.
The old Tibetan nodded to the woman as he chanted, and gradually the words seemed to bring her back to awareness. When her eyes found their focus and she returned his gaze with a pained smile, Lokesh leaned toward Shan. "Her wrist is broken," he said in his quiet monk's voice. "She needs tea."
As Lokesh sat with the boy, Jowa settled Gendun into the grass by the truck, then brought a soot-covered pot and a piece of canvas stuffed with yak dung for a fire. When the pot was on the low blue flames, Lokesh looked up expectantly and Jowa motioned for Shan to help with the larger blanket. They untangled it from the woman, and Shan, following Jowa's example, secured the blanket with his feet so that, with both men holding the top corners of the long rectangle of felt, they created a windbreak. Lokesh needed still air for his diagnosis. As soon as the blanket was up he stopped his healing mantra and raised the boy's left hand in his own. He spread the three center fingers of his long boney hand along the wrist and closed his eyes, listening for more than a minute, then lowering the arm and repeating the process with the right arm as he tried to locate the twelve pulses on which diagnosis was based in Tibetan medicine. He finished by clasping the boy's earlobe with his fingers, closing his eyes again, and slowly nodding his head.
The boy just watched, without blinking, without speaking, without giving voice to the pain that surely wracked his body. The herdsman knelt silently beside him, his hands still tightly grasping his gau, tears rolling down his dark, leathery cheeks.
Lokesh finished and stared at the boy with a desolate expression. As if the motion were an afterthought, he slowly, stiffly raised the torn fabric of the boy's pants leg and looked at the skin underneath. The swing of the blade that had apparently slashed the fabric had not touched the skin.
"We can't stay in the open," Jowa warned, with nervous glances along the road.
"We could all have been killed," the dropka said in a hollow voice. "It was death on legs."
"You saw it?" Shan asked.
"I was bringing sheep down from the pasture. She was making camp. When I got to camp the dogs were barking on a ledge below. I followed the sound, with a torch. One of the dogs was dead, its brains scattered across a rock. Then I found the two of them. I thought they were dead too."
The woman's eyes opened as Jowa held a mug of tea in front of her. She raised her right hand with a grimace of pain. Jowa held the mug as she drank.
"Tujaychay," the woman said in a hoarse voice. Thank you. She took the mug with her good hand and drained its contents.
"The boy was bringing water from a spring down by the road," she said, her voice now stronger than her husband's. "He was late. I heard the sheep coming down the mountain. I needed to begin the cooking. Then the dogs started, the way they shout at a wolf." Jowa began fashioning a sling for her arm out of the canvas. "I ran. I saw it first from a ledge above, as it was attacking Alta. It was standing on its two rear legs. It had the skin of a leopard. I ran faster. I tripped and hit my head. I ran again. It turned as I came. Its front legs had paws like a man's hands, and one held a man's knife. But it dropped the knife and picked up a shiny stick, like a man's arm. It picked up the stick in both paws and hit me as I raised my hand. I fell and my hand hurt like it was in a fire. I crawled to the boy and covered him with my body. The thing came at us, waving the stick, but lightning called it back."
"Lightning?"
"In the north. A single lightning bolt. A message. It is the way that demons speak to each other," the woman said in a voice full of fear. "The thing looked at the lightning bolt and began backing away. Then I remember only blackness. When I awoke I thought we had both died and gone to one of the dark hells, but my husband was there and said it was just that the sun was gone."
"You saw its face?" asked Shan.
The woman's eyes were locked on the boy she had called Alta. She shook her head. "The thing had no face."
The announcement brought a low moan from Lokesh. Shan turned. The old Tibetan was holding the boy's wrist but gazing forlornly up the road, as if expecting the faceless demon to appear at any moment.
Shan bent over the boy. "Alta, did it speak to you?" he asked. "Did you know who it was? It was a man. It must have been a man."
The boy kept staring, his eye like a hard black pebble. He gave no sign of having heard Shan.
"It was in leopard shape," the dropka woman said. "If it needs a man shape," she added in a haunting tone, "it becomes a man shape."
"There is a demon from the old days," the herdsman said in his distant voice. "Hariti the child eater. Sometimes," he added, his voice fading as if he were losing all his strength, "it just gets hungry. After the first kill, it can't stop itself." Hariti was a demon of old Tibet, Shan knew, for whom monks once set aside a small portion of their daily food to slack her hunger for children.
His eyes rested on Lokesh, who stared at the boy. Lokesh laid his hand on the boy's scalp for a moment, then reached into his sack and produced a leather pouch, inside which were several smaller pouches. He opened three of the small pouches, placed a pinch of powder from each into his hand, and emptied his hand into the steaming pot. "For the pain," Lokesh said. "He is in great pain."
"What can we do?" the woman asked.
Lokesh looked forlornly at Shan, then turned slowly back to the woman. "There are words that must be spoken," he said in a cracking voice.
The announcement seemed to strike the two dropka like a physical blow. The woman groaned and bent over, holding her abdomen. The herdsman's head sank into his hands. There are words that must be spoken. Lokesh meant the rites for the transition of a soul. The boy just kept staring at Shan with his confused, fading eye.
Suddenly the woman gave a frightened gasp. Shan looked up to see her staring over his shoulder. Gendun was there, wearing his Buddha smile. The herdsman called out in surprise and knelt with his forehead on the grass at Gendun's feet.
Shan realized that neither the herder nor his wife had noticed Gendun before. They might have thought that he was an apparition or that he had been spirited there by Lokesh. The lama put his hand on the herdsman's head and offered a prayer to the compassionate Buddha, then did the same with the woman, whose eyes, though still forlorn, grew calmer. We had a real priest once, the man had said. But the Chinese took him.
Gendun knelt by the boy and held his hand. Then Lokesh sat beside him, and Gendun put his free hand on Lokesh's head in a blessing for the healer. The lama gazed at the boy in silence for a long time as Shan began to wash the wounds.
"I have no prayers for this boy's god," he said to the woman in a soft, apologetic tone.
She cast an anxious glance at her husband. "We are teaching him our ways. He has a mala." With an effort that caused her obvious pain, she leaned forward and pushed the boy's sleeve up. She looked at his naked wrist in puzzlement. "It's gone. The demon took his rosary." She lowered her eyes from the lama, as if shamed. "He has wished to make the ways of Buddha his ways."
"But does he pray toward the sunset still?" Gendun asked.
The woman looked to the ground, as if frightened by the conversation. She shook her head slowly. "He said that that god let his clan die."
Shan stared at Gendun in confusion. The boy was Muslim. But how had Gendun seen it?
Instead of touching the boy's head, Gendun gently raised the back of the boy's hand to his own cheek. "Then I say a prayer that whatever god resides in this boy's heart gives him strength against the pain he knows from now and from the past and mindfulness for the path he must now follow."
In the silence a raven croaked nearby. They turned to see it sitting on top of the outcropping, studying them intently. The herder took a step forward as if to say something to the bird, then looked back at Gendun and remained silent, as if the lama would not approve.
"We have to leave," Jowa said hesitantly. "Go north. Into the Kunlun mountains." He cast an uncertain glance toward the herder.
"These people need help," Shan protested.
"Go north," the herder said, nodding his head vigorously. "We heard about the killings, it is why we fled across the mountains. They said you were going there, to save the children."
Jowa's eyes were full of impatience as he looked at the herder. Shan understood. Jowa knew that the dropka in this far corner of Tibet lived in a world of superstition, not far removed from the days before Buddhism when shamans ruled the land. Something terrible had happened to the boy, but to such people a falling rock could be an angry demon and a man shape with fur could easily be a wolf or a leopard. "We're going about the woman," Jowa said.
The dropka nodded again. "About Lau," he said. "Our Alta, he is one of her students."
Lokesh gasped and turned to Gendun. "Lau was this boy's teacher?" the lama asked.
"One of the zheli." The man nodded. "Lau introduced us when we said we wanted to help the children." The dropka kept his eyes on the boy as he spoke.
"The zheli?" Shan asked. It was not a Tibetan word, though the herder spoke in Tibetan. Nor was it Chinese.
But the man seemed not to have heard. Lokesh sighed and helped the boy drink the tea, then they carried the boy to the shelter of the rock, out of the wind, in a patch of sunlight. Lokesh listened again, at his heart, his shoulder, and his neck, then the old Tibetan shook his head and gazed at the boy, tears welling in his eyes.
They sat without speaking, helpless, as the light faded from the boy's eye. For an awful moment there was terror in his eye, as if suddenly, at last, he understood his fate. A sound came from the boy, one syllable and nothing more. It could have been the beginning of a question, or a prayer. It could have been simply an expression of pain. But there was no more, as if the effort had sapped the last of the boy's strength. The woman, crying, held the boy's hand to her cheek.
Shan knelt by Alta and leaned forward, struggling to find words of comfort. But after a moment he dropped back, unable to speak, numbed by his helplessness and the cruelty that had been inflicted on the boy.
A hard dark silence descended over the dropka man, who kept opening and shutting his mouth as if he too wanted to speak, but grief had seized his tongue. At last, as the boy shifted his gaze to meet the herder's eyes, the dropka found his voice and began softly speaking about going to spring pastures and of finding flowers and young birds on the southern slopes, about nothing in particular, only pleasant memories of the dropka life. The boy's face grew peaceful as he listened.
Jowa, his face drawn with sorrow, left to keep watch on the rocks. Gendun and Lokesh offered prayers. The herder kept speaking in a near whisper, leaning over the boy. And in an hour, with a long soft groan, the boy named Alta died.
No one spoke for a long time, then finally the woman wiped the boy's face and covered it with the blanket.
"The custom of his people," Shan said slowly, not certain how the two dropka might react, "would be to bury him before sunset."
The dropka nodded, and Shan retrieved a shovel from the truck. As he dug, the woman gathered small rocks for a cairn to mark the grave. While the boy was laid to rest in his blanket, Gendun spoke in soft tones, using a Buddhist prayer for the dead.
The dropka man stood for only five minutes, then sighed heavily and stepped away to retrieve their horses.
Shan helped the woman stack the rocks at the head of the small mound. "It's a Kazakh word," she said to him when they had finished, referring to one of the Muslim peoples who lived on the northern side of the Kunlun range. "A zheli is a line tied between two trees, or two pegs, to tether a line of young animals. It's how the young ones learn about each other, and the world. Lau used the word for her classes with the orphans, her special children. Her tether for the orphans."
"Your husband said we were coming to save the children. Did he mean the zheli?"
The dropka woman nodded. "When that other boy died, we knew to flee. But not," she sighed, with her eyes on the grave, "not soon enough."
A moan came from beside Shan, and Lokesh leaned forward. "Another boy?" he asked urgently. "Another of Lau's boys?"
"First Lau," she said. "Then a Kazakh boy near Yoktian town."
"Do you remember his name?" Lokesh asked in an urgent tone. Shan looked at his friend in puzzlement. It sounded as though Lokesh was interested in one particular boy.
The dropka shook her head. "There are twenty, maybe twenty-five children in the zheli. Kazakhs, Tibetans. And Uighurs," she added, referring to the largest of China's Muslim minorities. She turned and nodded at her husband, who led both horses forward. Their saddles had been removed. The man was looking to the north, toward the snowcaps of the Kunlun. "Alta," she said quietly, "Our Alta was a Kazakh."
"A lama," Shan said. "Do you know about a missing lama?"
The dropka shook his head. "Lamas have been missing here for many years," he said, obviously not understanding Shan's question. His gaze stayed on the mountains. "You must hurry," he added abruptly, in a hoarse, urgent tone. "Death keeps coming. This demon has found its way into the zheli and it won't stop killing."
Shan stared at the man in silence.
"Alta's soul is at risk," the dropka continued in his forlorn tone. "A boy like that, so unprepared." A gust of wind swept across them and seemed to snatch the man's words away. He stopped speaking and only looked toward Gendun. The dropka meant the boy's soul would be wandering, lost, without an anchor of faith or family, easy prey for the things that devoured souls.
Gendun returned the man's gaze for a moment, then spoke with Jowa, who brought him a piece of canvas and a broken pencil stub, the end of which Jowa charred in the fire. The lama retreated around the far corner of the rock and began chanting a mantra as he worked with the stub. Jowa listened and watched, then retrieved a tattered broom from the cargo bay and, wedging the head under a wheel, snapped off the handle.
When Gendun returned, he laid the cloth on the ground in front of the herders. The herdsman uttered a groan of surprise and pulled his wife's head up to see what the lama had brought them as Jowa began tying it to the broom handle. It was a charm, a very old charm, seldom used, a drawing of a scorpion with flame in its mouth. On the shoulders of the scorpion were heads of demons, with words along each side of the figures. A charm against demons, a charm that had been empowered by the words of a lama.
The man stood and nodded solemnly. "We will ransom a goat, Rinpoche," he said. "Our old priest, he would tell us to ransom a goat." Removing an animal from those readied for slaughter, usually by marking it with a ribbon around its ear, was a way of placating the deities that predated the Buddhists in Tibet.
"Then certainly," Gendun said with a somber tone, "ransom a goat."
As Jowa readied the truck, cranking the old engine to life and moving it onto the road, Shan looked up to see Gendun move back around the rock. He followed and found the lama seated on the grass, looking to the south, toward central Tibet and the hermitage where he had spent nearly his entire life.
"I fear it has already begun," the lama said, gesturing for Shan to sit beside him. "We have entered it, but we are too late."
"Entered what, Rinpoche?" Shan asked.
The lama looked over the mountains and sighed. "It has no name," Gendun said. "The home of demons who would seek to kill children." His voice was like shifting sand.
It was not an actual place, Shan knew, but a state of mind that Gendun spoke of, a place in a soul full of hate, a place a man like Gendun could never understand.
"It's a lonely land," Gendun said as he surveyed the windblown plateau. "It's where I was born," he declared.
"Here?" Shan asked, following the lama's gaze. "In the changtang?" Of all the wild, remote quarters of Tibet, the changtang plateau was the wildest and most remote.
Gendun nodded. "In the shadow of the Kunlun mountains. But when I was young, Xiao Shan, my parents gave me to monks because war came, and the monks took me to Lhadrung." Xiao Shan. Gendun used the old Chinese form of address for a younger person, the way his father or uncle might have called him. Little Shan. The lama looked toward a black cloud moving along the slope of the mountains, a snow squall perhaps. "I remember a happier place. Now-" the lama gestured toward the track and sighed, "now I think this road will take us to a place you should not be, Xiao Shan." It had the sound of an apology. What Gendun was saying was that so many murders meant the government would be involved. "I know how it is between you and the other Chinese," the lama said.
Three days earlier, Shan had returned with fuel for a campfire in time to overhear Jowa pleading with Gendun to send Shan back. "He was never released officially, just given permission to be free in Lhadrung County," the purba was explaining to the lama. "Outside Lhadrung he is still a criminal, an escapee. They can check things." When Gendun had not responded, Jowa raised his voice. "They will take him behind their jail," he said in an impatient tone. "They will put a bullet in his head. And the rest of us will be guilty of harboring a fugitive."
"Would you imprison us all with fear, then?" Gendun had quietly asked Jowa, then nodded as Shan approached with his armful of dung chips.
"It's just the government's way of honoring me," Shan had observed with a forced grin, thinking of the monks and lamas in the gulag who sometimes thanked their jailers for providing them with such an unrelenting test of their faith. The conversation had ended there, and Shan had dropped his own idea of asking Jowa to take Gendun back. Certainly Shan knew what the government would do if it captured him. But he also knew what it would do with Gendun, who did not simply have no official identity, but was practicing as an outlawed priest. There were special places for people like Gendun, places without light and heat, places where they sometimes did medical experiments, places where Party psychiatrists attempted techniques for molding grateful new proletarians out of reactionary priests.
I know how it is between you and the other Chinese. Gendun was not just referring to the physical danger. Shan remembered their last lesson together, as the two sat on a rock outside the hermitage. For four months Gendun had been speaking to him about how release from prison was a relative thing, how three years of slave labor had made scars on his soul that would never fully heal, how the greatest danger to Shan was acting like an escapee, for an escapee was only a prisoner without a cell. When the lama had reluctantly suggested that the quickest way to recover would be for Shan to leave China, to go to a new land, Shan had shared with him a letter from a United Nations official dated two months earlier, offering to sponsor Shan for political asylum in the West if he would be willing to give public testimony about the slave camps and Beijing's systematic destruction of cultural artifacts. If Shan could get out of China. They might find a way out for him, said the purba who secretly brought the letter, but it could take a year, maybe two.
Shan extended his hand, still stained with the boy's blood. It was how they often spoke to each other, not with words, but with gestures and symbols. Children are dying, he was saying, and Gendun nodded in sad understanding. If Shan left now, he would never, no matter how far he ran, escape the haunting image of the dying boy, staring at him in silent, terrified confusion.
"The way that is told is not the constant way," Gendun said. The words had become something of a personal mantra between them since the first days they had spent together, when they had discovered that the words were not only in the Buddhist teachings of Gendun's life but also in the Taoist lessons of Shan's boyhood. Together they had recognized that Shan's path was far from anyone's constant path, that the withered spirit he had brought from China had for now found new roots in Tibet but, when the dead pieces were trimmed away, some of the old roots remained, tangled around the new. The way that is told is not the constant way. Gendun had sensed it too when sitting with the dying Muslim boy. They were on a path for which there was no map.
Jowa honked the horn on the truck. Gendun seemed not to hear. Shan saw that his hands were clutched together, the palms cupped as though cradling something.
The lama extended his hands, and as Shan offered his own hand, palm upward, Gendun dropped something into it. A feather. A two-inch-long feather, delicately patterned in brown and black at the base and snow white along its top half, the end faintly mottled with black spots, as if someone had sprayed it lightly with ink. Gendun watched, fascinated, as it drifted onto Shan's palm, then rose and walked to the truck.
Jowa drove the ancient truck relentlessly, as if being chased, bouncing over washouts, sliding in and out of deep ruts, stopping with an abrupt shudder when small boulders, released from the slope above, appeared before them in the illumination of the parking lights. Jowa refused to use the headlights. Soldiers sometimes patrolled the mountains at night.
Shan had put the feather in the gau he wore around his neck and now, as the truck lurched through the night, he sat with his hand around the gau, thinking. Was it a clue? A bidding of good fortune? As he looked at the dying boy in his mind's eye he realized that no, it may have been just a token of beauty to be carried as he moved closer to the ugliness of murder.
Hours later, as Shan and Lokesh climbed into the rear cargo bay after pushing still another boulder aside, Jowa joined them. He checked the barrels lashed to the metal frame of the bay. Most were filled with salt, a vital trading commodity of the region, taken from the salt beds of the central plateau that had supported trade in the region for centuries. Directly behind the cab, under a pile of oil-stained canvas, were two empty barrels, the barrels where Shan and Gendun would hide if they were stopped by a patrol. This was their third truck, for twice they had had to cross over ranges on horseback, led by guides who would speak only to Jowa. Each of the trucks had contained similar salt barrels and two empty ones, with skillfully made inserts that allowed three inches of salt to rest on top once the barrel was occupied. The cover of salt traders might be sufficient for Lokesh and Jowa, who had their papers, but Shan and Gendun would have no chance unless they hid.
Jowa helped wrap a blanket around Lokesh. Although there was room in front, the old Tibetan had chosen to stay in the cargo bay with Shan for most of the journey. As Lokesh settled with his back against the cab, Jowa moved to the rear of the truck. He stood for a moment before stepping down, his hand braced against one of the ribs of the bay.
"Before sunrise," Jowa announced through the shadows, "someone will meet us."
"Who?" Shan asked.
"Someone to take us there," Jowa replied in the distant, almost resentful tone he always used with Shan.
"Where?"
"Where we have to be."
Shan sighed. "You still don't think I belong here."
"They told me to bring you. I am bringing you."
"Why?"
A shallow, bitter laugh escaped Jowa's lips. "You know them, maybe better than I. There is no why with the old lamas. The woman was destined to be killed. You were destined to go."
"No. I mean, why you? You could have said no."
"I know this region. Years ago, I helped watch the army up here."
"You could have said no," Shan repeated.
It took Jowa longer to answer this time. When he spoke his voice was softer, not friendly, but not resentful. "The lamas grow old. I do not know what Tibet will be without them. In twenty, thirty years, who will go and sit in the hermit cells, who will go to live inside a mountain because the land's soul needs help?"
"Maybe you will."
"No. Not me. Not those like me. The Chinese have taught me new ways. I am contaminated with hate," he said matter-of-factly, as if speaking of a physical handicap. "I have fired a gun." He looked at the moon, and for the first time Shan thought he saw sadness on the purba's face. "How could I go and sit in a mountain if I have fired a gun?" It was a question Jowa had obviously asked himself many times. "And who's left?" He stepped out of the truck but lingered in the moonlight. "When they took my monk's license away, and I began to resist," he said, speaking toward the moon, "I thought then that the whole problem with Tibet was not enough resistance. It's like we talk ourselves out of so many fights that we no longer stand for anything." He shook his head and looked away, toward the darkened peaks. "Now…" He shrugged. "In prison I decided that there weren't enough of us left to fight, that all we could do was see that the lamas would be protected, so Beijing would not kill the old ways. But I didn't stop to think. The old ways are the lamas, and the lamas are as mortal as the rest of us. We can try to stop Beijing but we can't stop time. If the lamas don't survive, if what they do doesn't survive, then what's the point?"
Shan realized that in his own way Jowa was indeed explaining why he was escorting the unlikely trio on their enigmatic mission. Through the moonlight Shan could see him shrug again. "They almost never ask us for anything. It is impossible to say no."
But Shan knew that Jowa understood something else- that nothing the lamas did was random, that they didn't ask Jowa because he could drive a truck or even because he was a purba who knew the region, but because he was Jowa.
"The herdsman and his wife," Shan said as Jowa turned to leave. "How did they know? It's supposed to be a secret. I thought the purbas brought the word to Lhadrung, and only they knew we were coming."
"They did. The purbas know how to keep a secret."
"They said we were coming to save the children. Two boys have already died."
"An old woman died, and a lama disappeared. That's all I was told." Jowa disappeared around the corner of the truck. A moment later the heavy engine roared to life.
Shan retrieved a hat from the floor, a tattered quilted army hat with heavy earflaps. He pulled it over his head and settled against one of the barrels on the side so he could watch the moon. The purbas had brought the secret of the woman's death. But now there was another secret moving south through the dropka, a warning about children and death and about the strangers from Lhadrung coming to help.
They passed by a waterfall that glistened like diamonds falling through the night. A small throaty buzz came from nearby. Lokesh was sleeping. Shan put his hands deep in his jacket pockets, for warmth, and his right hand closed around the small jar Gendun had given him that night when they began their journey, a jar of the consecrated sand taken from the mandala. He gripped it tightly as he gazed into the sky.
The moon that Shan watched was not the same moon he had known in the lands below, in the China of his first life. Like so much else in his second life, his Tibetan reincarnation, the moon was more absolute than the one he had known in Beijing. In Tibet it was so brilliant and pure, so close that one could believe the old tales that drifting souls sometimes got caught in its mountains.
There were nights when he could get lost in such a moon, let himself be absorbed for hours in its beauty. But tonight the dead boy haunted him and kept him from the beauty. You must hurry, the man had said. Death keeps coming. To anyone else the words would have been a warning to flee, to run away from death. But for Shan they had meant hurry, go to meet it. A wave of helplessness swept over him, and he knew that his face wore the same sad confusion the Tibetans sometimes wore. Even some of the lamas had shown it when they had dispatched him seven nights before. They might as well have used the same words as the dropka, for all they had told him, for all Gendun still told him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming. That was all the lamas understood. Murder was an unknown land to them, and Shan was their ambassador.