Shan touched his finger to his left temple, where a low throbbing had started again. Before he could speak Jakli's hand was on his arm, pulling him away, guiding him back toward his pallet.
"They need to understand. Their son is in grave danger," he said through his pain as she led him down the tunnel.
"The family he's with, they're wary as leopards. No one sees them unless they want to be seen," she said but did not sound convinced. She gave him more water and lit the small lamp by the pallet, then left him to sleep.
He did sleep, at least he thought he slept, but not for long. Sounds in the tunnel brought him to full wakefulness, the throbbing not gone but subsided. He picked up the clay lamp and rose, then listened to the sounds and returned the lamp to the floor. There were voices speaking in the herders' tongue. He could not recognize the words, but they were nervous and harried, filled with the urgency of a task at hand.
Shan ventured toward the sounds, edging around the corner where the tunnel entered the chamber, where he saw two men, wearing the woolen vests and caps of herdsmen, carrying something into one of the meditation cells. A third, dressed in the same garb, held a bright kerosene lantern. The bundle carried by the first two was long and narrow. They carried it gingerly, as if it could break.
The men disappeared into the cell, then quickly emerged without their bundle and jogged down the corridor. He was about to move toward the cell to investigate when another light appeared. Jacob Deacon approached, carrying a bag like a doctor's kit, accompanied by Dr. Najan, who still wore his lab coat, and carried a bright battery-powered lamp. Speaking in low tones, they entered the same cell. Shan inched along the wall for a better view. Deacon was kneeling at the blanketed bundle left by the herdsmen, with a large syringe. He pressed it into an opening in the blanket, handed it to Najan, and accepted a second syringe from Najan. The American repeated the process with the syringe, then both men quickly rose and retreated back into the darkened tunnel.
He realized now that it was a person they had carried into the cell, an ill person who needed the American's medication. He waited five minutes, then retrieved his lamp and returned to the entrance of the cell. He recalled that this was where he had previously seen two sleeping forms. Were they all sick, perhaps injured like Shan in the karaburan? He stepped into the cell and saw three blanketed forms on the floor.
Each was wrapped in a heavy felt blanket, with a small roll of felt for a pillow. On the blanket of each an embroidered scarf had been carefully laid, smoothed out so its pattern of leaping horses and large trees was clearly visible. Careful not to wake the sleepers, he moved the lamp closer to the first figure and froze. There was something terribly wrong with the face. The man had no nose. With a trembling hand Shan moved the lamp directly above the face. He had no eyes. And the man, Shan realized as he studied the dried, mummified features, had not seen for centuries. The sand and dryness preserved things, Abigail Deacon had said. He had thought she was only talking about textiles. Shan gently pulled the blanket open to reveal a brown twill robe and understood how she received her textile samples. The burial clothes, worn by the mummies of the Taklamakan.
After the first moment of fright, Shan felt no fear, no revulsion. Quickly he looked at the other two figures, a woman with long brown hair in two braids, in the fashion of Niya Gazuli, and a man so complete, so well preserved he appeared in the dim light to be sleeping. The man was extraordinary, a visitor from a lost world. His face, though leathery, was light in color, and his thick, long, dark hair had a distinctly reddish hue, as did the man's thin beard. A cord of woven multicolored yarn connected his wrists, placing his long, delicate fingers in a reverent repose. He wore a heavy woolen shirt with cuffs that reminded Shan of the strip he had seen in the laboratory. On his feet were boots of thin leather, perhaps deerskin, and felt leggings extended to his knees.
He meant to leave, to go on to avoid detection and not to disturb the mummies further, but something held him back. He dropped to his knees by the bearded man and with a slow, tentative motion touched the cloth of his sleeve. Perhaps the man was a builder of Karachuk, Shan thought with a strange excitement. Perhaps he had plucked an apricot and sat to eat it in the shadow of the reclining Buddha. The serene face of the dead man seemed to hold great wisdom, and the man seemed to be challenging Shan to discover it.
He did not know how long he knelt, contemplating the figures. Eventually he became aware of cigarette smoke. He looked up to see Dr. Najan.
"You've met our silent partners," Najan observed quietly.
"How is it possible? Where-"
"The tracks of all the dead rivers are well known. All the old settlements were on the rivers, that's where we always look. The oldest burial grounds can be easily identified, because burials were made inside circles of logs, built like a small fortress. After a big storm, sometimes a ring of logs is exposed. There are a few old Kazakhs and Uighurs who know the desert ways, who aren't afraid to camp in the desert at night."
"With three, you are able to determine so much?"
"Three? These are only the latest, exposed after the karaburan. Over fifty have been collected. Another thirty have been examined in situ."
"Fifty mummies are here?"
"We take our samples, take photos and videos, then return them to their sleep. If we feel the site has become known to looters, we bury them in a new, secret location." As the scientist gazed upon the three mummies, Shan saw a strange, sad pride in his eyes. "We have words we read over them, to apologize for disturbing their rest, to let them know we have not forgotten."
Shan remembered the syringes of Deacon. "You take samples of tissues," he said, "not just samples of textiles."
"Whenever possible. Only a tiny sample of tissue, to be sent to labs in the United States and Switzerland that are secretly helping us. We need a statistically significant set of DNA data." Najan squatted and leaned against the wall, looking at the mummy Shan had exposed. He felt the spell too. "We don't think they would mind. The first time, we had a Kazakh here, one descended from the people of Karachuk. He went inside, alone, while his grey dog kept watch outside. He said words over the dead ones and explained to them. He said afterward that the old ones would be proud to help."
Shan smiled. He had met the one who spoke to the dead. Osman.
"It is so dangerous, what you do," Shan said after a long silence. "They would call you a traitor. They would say you are collaborating with foreigners to undermine the state. Don't you have a family?"
A sad smile grew on the scientist's face. "I come from a Uighur clan. When I was young, I had uncles, many uncles. I loved my uncles and aunts and cousins. My uncles would sit around the fires and drink kumiss and tell stories of the clan from back to the time of the great khans. We rode fast horses on festival days and performed ceremonies that had been done for a thousand years. They taught me the names of the spirits that watch over animals and how to hold their eagles."
"Eagles?"
"Hunting eagles. My clan was famous for its hunting eagles. They were raised from hatchlings, as part of the family." The Uighur drew deeply on his cigarette. "But there are no more uncles and aunts. I have only one child, because the government said so. My daughter will be permitted by the goverment to have but one child. Without brothers and sisters there are no more uncles and aunts, no cousins. Festival days aren't the same, some are even forgotten altogether. My uncles are dead. No more hunting eagles. No one remembers all the stories. Maybe I do it for them." Najan pulled on his cigarette, then nodded at the mummy with the beard. "This one, he was someone's uncle."
They walked back down the tunnel together. Najan showed Shan a second row of cells, containing another dozen mummies. They were arranged by age. One cell held those known to be from a two-thousand-year-old burial site, another even older mummies. Or parts of mummies, for most of the cell's contents were pieces of bodies, all that were left in some graves after the storms, and time, did their work. The first cell, where Shan and Najan had sat, contained bodies from a known Tibetan garrison town, from the end of the first millenium.
"I was frightened at first," the Uighur said. "Now, I just come sometimes and sit with them. I know that these people lying here, they would approve."
"Do you know the old tablets?" Shan asked after a moment.
Najan put his palms together horizontally and slid them apart, as though opening one of the wooden tablets. "The Kharoshthi texts? Sure. They were first uncovered a hundred years ago, by European archaeologists working the ruins of Niya. We found dozens here, in a cell at Sand Mountain."
"Public Security knows about them," Shan told him.
The Uighur scientist shrugged. "It was just a matter of time before they found out."
"They're looking for a trail to get to the source, to get to the rebels working with foreigners. Major Bao thinks that maybe he found a connection through Lau."
"But Lau has gone beyond speaking."
Except, Shan reflected bitterly, in the last few minutes of her life, when she had undoubtedly spoken through a haze of drugs and pain. It seemed more certain than ever that this had been the secret her killer had wanted, that Bao was on a relentless, bloodthirsty drive to expose the dissidents and their foreign collaborators. And if so, Bao wasn't after all the zheli, but only the boys, finding and killing the boys, because it was a zheli boy named Micah who was the link to the American scientist.
"Bao spoke about the Antiquities Institute."
Najan gave a bitter smile as he finished his cigarette. "They tried to get me to work for them once. Wanted me to prove to the world that the Kharoshthi writing is actually a form of ancient Chinese. They're not scientists, they're propaganda agents, dedicated to fostering the myths. They tell the newspapers that Niya Gazuli was faked by foreign subversives. They would try to prove that cavemen in Africa ate with chopsticks if they thought they could get away with it." He shook his head sadly, then nodded toward Shan and headed back in the direction of the laboratory.
The cell with the thousand-year-old Buddhists had a new visitor when he returned. Lokesh had brought in several lamps and uncovered all the faces. He was reciting a mantra, a prayer for the souls, Shan thought at first, then he saw the joy in his friend's eyes. It was a celebration, not a mourner's chant.
Shan sat across from Lokesh, one of the mummies between them, the man with the dark red beard. Around the man's neck was a chain, bearing a gau that lay on his chest. He wore a heavy vest, with a small pocket from which a cup made of cow horn protruded.
Lokesh looked up with a huge grin. "He waited a thousand years so we could meet him."
Shan started to say that the man's soul had long departed, but he knew his friend understood. It wasn't that he was paying homage to souls that may have been reincarnated twenty times since leaving these frail bodies. It was just that these people were so real. In that moment, if the man had sat up on his blanket, Shan would not have run. He would have wanted to clasp the man's hand.
"Look in the blanket, Xiao Shan," Lokesh said excitedly, lifting a corner of the felt covering the man's lower body. "I know him."
Shan studied his friend uncertainly, then looked back at the mummy. "I don't understand."
"I mean, I know he was man of good deeds. He was a man who had suffered and didn't mind the suffering. He was a man who understood the things that we understand. Look."
As Lokesh raised the felt Shan saw that around the mummified wrist was a string of beads. A Buddhist rosary. Lokesh pulled the blanket away further and pointed to two thick rectangular objects with cracked leather straps, placed beside the man's hips, where the man's hands could reach them if he extended his arms. They were the hand blocks used by pilgrims, the smooth wooden blocks with leather straps into which a pilgrim inserted his hands to protect them while making ten thousand prostrations on the ground each day. Shan had seen identical blocks used by pilgrims along Tibetan roads, along the sacred Barkhor path in Lhasa. From a standing position they would kneel, then place the hands on the ground and drop to a completely prone position, reciting a mantra as they did so, then rise, take one step forward, and repeat the process.
"There's writing on the blocks," Lokesh said. "Tibetan, in the old style. I studied it. It tells his story. This man," -Lokesh seemed almost overcome with emotion as he spoke- "he was going to Mount Kailas," he continued, referring to the holiest of Tibetan places, the father mountain at the edge of the Himalayas. The first of the mountains, the Tibetans called it. "He was going to leave these blocks on the mountain after completing a circuit of prostrations around it, as an offering for the spirits of his daughter, who had died falling from a horse, and his wife, who had died giving birth to his daughter."
Lokesh looked at Shan and sighed. Something had happened, something had stopped the man hundreds of miles from his destination. "He had come far," Lokesh said, admiration in his voice. "His home, it says, was Loulan, one of the old cities, gone now, at the eastern edge of the desert. He had come almost halfway."
It could have been a sandstorm, Shan thought, or the bitter cold of the winter desert that stopped him. It could have been the arrow of a bandit. Or a Chinese soldier.
They sat in quiet reverence for several minutes, with Lokesh sometimes making soulful moaning sounds.
"Do you sense it, my friend?" Lokesh asked. "It makes some part of me feel alive like never before." The old man seemed to struggle to find his words. "It's as though when they were put in the ground they were wondering would the world survive, would people like us still be here. For all the pain, the wars, the famines, the sandstorms, the persecutions. And now they emerged to find out."
They fell silent again, in a strange communion with the thousand-year-old Buddhist, then a thought seemed to capture Lokesh. He sobered and looked up at Shan. "If I knew this," he said solemnly, "if I knew in a thousand years another human could reach and touch me this way, like a link in the chain of the goodness in souls, I would lie down and die right now."
Shan remembered Lokesh's words at Senge Drak. Maybe humans existed, he had said, just to keep virtue alive and to pass it on to someone else.
They ate outside, as the sun set, by a small brazier into which Deacon set a cannister of gas that burned like a stove. His wife made flat cakes of buckwheat flour, then fried together an assortment of canned goods that Deacon produced with a festive air from his rucksack. Bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, and even pineapple wound up in the same pan, served on the buckwheat cakes.
Shan was ravenous.
"So you had an audience with the Jade Bitch," Marco observed as he joined Shan on a flat rock. There were no plates, no chairs, no tables- nothing, Shan realized, that could not be carried inside quickly if an aircraft approached. Between bites Shan explained what Xu had said, and done, at her office.
"Why would she think you were from Beijing?" Abigail Deacon asked.
"Listen to his voice, woman," Marco interjected. "It has the tones of Beijing."
"That," Shan agreed, "but mostly because she expected someone from Beijing. From Public Security headquarters."
"The boot squad reservations at Glory Camp," Dr. Najan muttered.
Shan looked at him, considering the implications of his words.
"You have friends who watch over you," Shan suggested. "Friends with laptop computers."
The Uighur nodded soberly. "Brave friends. Named Mao."
"Xu had evidence in her office," Shan said. "Lau's things, from the school."
"But Lau drowned," Marco said. "That is what Xu thinks."
"The prosecutor had looked at the evidence," Shan said. "The statement that she failed to report to the school. The horse on the trail. The jacket. And her identity papers."
"Identity papers?" Jakli said with alarm in her voice. "We never-"
"Public Security reported them turned in the day the jacket was found. Taken out of the mud on the river bank near Yoktian."
"Who turned them in?"
"Lieutenant Sui."
"The killer!" Jakli gasped. "Lau's murderer planted the papers with Sui, to complete the story."
"Or Sui was the killer," Marco said grimly. "I've seen him on a horse. He could ride well."
"Impossible," Jakli argued, "the knobs would have been all over Karachuk if he had seen things there."
"Not if it was just one knob," Shan suggested, "on a special mission. Sui, or one like him. Xu thought there were secret knobs operating in Yoktian," he reminded them.
"A secret mission to kill a teacher?" Deacon asked.
"A special mission to kill a Tibetan nun," Shan said.
"A nun who becomes a teacher," Jakli observed, "not such a strange story in the border country." She said it tentatively, as if trying to convince herself. "There are more Tibetans here than people think, they change their identity to be safe. They have good reasons."
"Some can leave their past behind," Shan said. "Some can't. And it wasn't just about her past. Perhaps something from her past was the link, the trigger that got the knobs interested in the zheli, a way to find what the knobs were already seeking. What boot squads were seeking," he added in a near whisper.
No one spoke for a moment. No one needed to be told what the boot squads were looking for. They watched the blaze of crimson that was all that remained of the day as it faded into pink and gold and then grey. The American woman rose, then settled on the sand in front of her husband, who rubbed her shoulders.
"Three boys dead," Marco said gravely.
"Micah's out there," Abigail Deacon said, worry in her voice now.
"He's all right, Warp," her husband said reassuringly. "He's in the high mountains. Untouchable. Not long until the full moon, and we'll be together. A new performance."
Warp wrapped her arm around his leg. "You and your damned crickets," she said. "Micah's going to wind up with a bedroom full of insects when we go home."
"Good company. Smarter than fish," quipped Deacon. "Good joss."
His wife laughed, a soft infectious laugh. "My father kept crickets one summer," she said, "used them for fish bait." Deacon, who seemed to have heard the story before, lowered his hands over her face, and she playfully batted them away. "My mother hated them but she let him keep them so long as they were away from the house. One day he left a can of them in the bedroom, while he took a shower, and forgot them. A few days later he puts on his underwear and it falls to pieces. Every pair, full of holes eaten by the crickets. He never said anything. But he got rid of all the crickets that day."
"See?" Marco said with a laugh. "Good luck. Good luck for your mother."
They laughed. They all laughed, even Shan made a sound like a laugh. Marco told a story of how a pet squirrel had made a nest in his mother's only surviving dress from Russia, and they laughed again. Jakli explained how Nikki had once caught an albino mouse for her, and when he got to her camp it had given birth to five tiny pink mice in his pocket. Dr. Najan spoke of a pet pika that always chewed off the buttons of his mother's clothes and took them to his box as treasure.
As he listened a little lump grew in Shan's throat, and a stranger feeling in his heart. What was it? They were happy and he was happy for them. But there was something else. Something they were doing had reached a place inside, a hollow place, another of the chambers that had been unoccupied for so long he had forgotten how to open it. But once it had been full, once it had been overflowing. He recognized the place at last, in a pang of emotion. It was family, it was the way they spoke so openly and laughed so readily, the way Marco and the Americans and even Jakli were so familiar and confiding of the little things, the personal things. Long ago, Shan had shared it with his father and mother, but never with his wife, never with his son.
"How about you, Inspector?" Marco asked in a jovial tone. "Ever have a pet?"
It took a moment before he realized the Eluosi was speaking to him. Shan looked out over the dunes, mottled in evening shadow, like a rolling sea. It seemed like he spent a long time, exploring the forgotten chamber, but they all waited in silence.
"Not a pet," he heard himself say in a near whisper. "In the China of my boyhood you never had enough food to keep your own belly full. Pets never survived. But when I was young my father and I would go to the river and watch the world go by. In the fall farmers would bring ducks to market from far inland. They would clip the wings of the ducks, thousands of ducks, and herd them downriver like vast flocks of sheep, the shepherds in sampans wearing black shirts and straw hats. Once I cried because I realized all the ducks were going to be killed and eaten." He sighed and looked toward the stars. "My father said don't be sad, that for a duck, it was a grand adventure, to float hundreds of miles out into the world, that the ducks would have chosen the river even if they knew their fate. Then he looked all about, very serious, to be sure no one listened, and told me a big secret. That sometimes ducks escaped and made it all the way to the sea and became famous pirate ducks."
No one spoke. No one laughed. He glanced at Marco, who was just nodding toward the horizon, as if he knew all about pirate ducks.
"After that," Shan continued, "every time we went to the river we took paper and inkstones and brushes. We wrote poems sometimes, about the grandeur of the river and how the moon looked when it rose over the silver water. Sometimes I just wrote directions to the sea. Then we folded the paper into little boats and sailed them into the duck herds."
They watched the stars. After a few minutes Marco outlined with his finger the constellations and challenged the Americans to tell the English names. The Northern Bushel they instantly knew as the Big Dipper, and the White Tiger as Orion the Hunter. The game continued good-naturedly. The Porch Way was Cassiopeia, and the Azure Dragon, Sagittarius.
Lokesh wandered from the group and sat on the sand twenty feet away, facing the darkness. He seemed to be looking at something, or at least toward something. Shan considered the direction and noted the position of the small mountain they sat beside. His friend was looking toward the Well of Tears. Lokesh had heard lost souls there.
"Xu had a file on Americans," Shan said suddenly. He was reluctant to break the mood, but the words had to be spoken. Everyone seemed to freeze, and they all watched him intently now. "A list of visiting groups." He looked at Abigail Deacon. "She has your name."
She shrugged. "I was in a delegation. A group of professors, looking at the ruins of the Silk Road market towns. The Marco Polo tour, they called it."
"But only one name was circled on the list. Yours."
The American woman looked at him uncertainly, almost resentfully, as if Shan were accusing her.
"There could be a dozen reasons, Warp," her husband said. "Your flight connections were delayed."
"Sure," Dr. Najan confirmed. "They had to arrange a special car for you to catch up. That's when we first met, the day you caught up with us. Warp, she always wanted to do things not on the itinerary. Asked for a guide to take her to some of the old watch towers on the mountains. Asked for special food." He looked at Shan as if scolding him. "So they circle a name. Lots of reasons."
"Lots of reasons," Shan agreed woodenly. Good reasons. And bad reasons. He surveyed the team that lived in the little outpost. So far from the world, so absorbed in the grand mystery of their science, it would be easy to forget the bad reasons. The Public Security reasons. The Ministry of Justice reasons.
"The killer," Marco said. "He's hiding far away by now. With Sui murdered, he'll know the knobs will be angry as hornets."
"No," Shan said, and he pulled from his pocket the list of names that Jakli had retrieved from Lau's office. "He killed a third boy," he reminded them. "He has a plan." Shan handed the paper to Deacon, who produced a tiny flashlight. His wife held the paper as Deacon held the light and the others gathered around.
"Twenty-three names," Shan explained. "The zheli. The list is from the school records, the official roll of participants. Anyone could get it. You could print it from a government computer in Urumqi or Lhasa or Beijing if you wanted. Eleven girls. Twelve boys, nine left alive. First Suwan-" Shan pointed to the center of the list, then to two others. "Alta, and Kublai."
"But there's no logic, no way to know what the killer is thinking," Marco said.
"Wrong." Shan pulled a pencil from his pocket and reached for the paper, then handed pencil and paper to Jakli. "Eliminate the girls," he said.
She studied the paper and quickly drew lines through eleven names.
"Then Suwan," he said, and she put an X by the boy's name. "And the boy with the dropka parents who was killed-" Jakli made another mark. "And then Kublai." She made a third mark and returned the paper to the American woman.
The first X was on the center of the page. The next two were the top two names of boys.
"That's his great logic?" Marco asked skeptically, as if he thought little of Shan's discovery. "Just go down the list?"
"He targeted Suwan, and when Suwan proved not to have what he wanted he started from the top of the list."
Abigail Deacon gasped and grabbed her husband's leg tightly. "Micah!" she said in alarm, pointing to a name midway down the list. The fourth boy from the top. After Kublai came a boy named Batu, then Micah Karachuk.
"You can't run to him," Marco warned as he watched the Americans. "It may be what the knobs expect. They're watching everywhere. It must be why they haven't acted on Sui's murder, hoping you'll come out of hiding. You're too conspicuous. You'd be seen in the mountains, reported. Then Micah-" Marco shrugged. "Micah needs you to stay where you are."
Deacon nodded. "We made up the name," the American said in a near whisper as he stared at the list, then began to explain their decision to entrust their son to Lau. Soon after they had arrived in the desert it had become clear that their cavern at Sand Mountain was no place for a ten year old. He had met some of the zheli, had met Khitai, at a horse festival in the spring. Micah spoke Mandarin, as did most of the children, and was quickly picking up enough of the Turkic tongue to get by. He loved animals. The zheli was the perfect answer. He would be well protected, watched over by Lau and the nomads. "Besides," Deacon said, trying to lighten his wife's mood, "He's such a mischievous pup, the discipline of the sheep camps would be great for him. He loves it. Been with four different families so far."
"Lau knew this?" Shan asked.
"She suggested it. But kept it secret from the others. So Micah was just a Kazakh boy from a distant part of Xinjiang. Several of the children only spoke Mandarin, because they had been raised in government schools, so his not speaking the clan's tongue was not suspicious."
"So none of the children knew?" Shan asked.
"Not supposed to. But you know ten-year-old boys. Last month, Lau told us Micah had bragged about his parents, then at a class he handed around a jar of American peanut butter. We didn't know he had taken one. Then when I went to see him, he surprised me with three of his friends. Made me promise to come to some classes just before we left Xinjiang, to talk about our discoveries."
Shan stared at Deacon a moment. The Americans were planning to leave soon. Had the boys' killer learned this, and been forced into desperate action?
"He's made some good friends, better friends than in America," the boy's mother added. "Especially Khitai. Micah asked if Khitai could come to our moon festival, to hear the singers." There was no fear in her voice now, which comforted Shan. She had decided her son was safe.
"Stone Lake," Deacon said. "The next two classes are at Stone Lake. Lau always took the children there in the fall."
"If he comes," Jakli said. "Warnings have been going out. Some of the children may stay hidden in the mountains."
"The people he's with now," Deacon said, looking at his wife, "they are as hidden as hidden can be. Not a clan, just two men, a woman and two children. No assigned lands. No contact with the Brigade. The other children don't know where they are. Not even Lau knew all their hiding places. They just stay high up, until winter, roaming just below the ice fields. Lau said we shouldn't expect Micah to see us or anyone else, except on the class days."
"But the others," Jakli said in a forlorn voice. She read the next few names on the list. "They are in danger. The killer could be stalking them. Tonight."
The color had faded from the sky. A cricket sang from the rocks above. Lokesh took another cup of tea and sat, as if listening to something in the darkness. Then, from the edge of the little circle Lokesh spoke, unexpectedly, still looking out into the desert sky. "They say the Jade Basket can vanish, when evil draws near."
"What do you mean, Lokesh?" Jakli asked.
But even if the old Tibetan had been speaking to them a moment earlier, which was far from certain, he was conversing only with the stars now.
Shan realized that Marco had gone, then turned toward the entrance and saw him standing above, on a tall boulder that gave him a perch to see far out into the desert. And he was looking, looking hard. It was for Nikki, Shan realized, his son who was on caravan, smuggling goods across the border. Nikki, who was going to change Jakli's life forever. Shan saw that Jakli had noticed too. She followed Marco's gaze for a moment toward the darkness, then quickly turned back to the others.
"My cousins and the Maos won't find them all. We have to be there to warn them," she declared urgently. "They're supposed to be at Stone Lake in five days. Kaju is going there." She looked back at Shan. They had no vehicle, he realized. They were stranded in the desert.
"That Tibetan?" Najan asked. "He's one of them. Works for Ko. For the Poverty Scheme. Who best to trap the zheli than their own teacher?"
The words seemed to create a stillness in the air, like the calm Shan had felt before the horrible sand storm.
"No," Jakli said slowly. "The Brigade is only conducting business," she said uncertainly. "It has to be the knobs. Or Xu."
"Either way," Deacon said heavily, "the other boys have to be protected. They're in greater danger than Micah."
"A boy named Batu," Shan said toward the night sky. "Next on the list."
Marco appeared, his eyes still watching the desert. He poured himself a mug of tea, drained most of it in one gulp, then threw the remainder into the sand. "It's a clear night. With the stars out, we can navigate. I leave for the Kunlun in three hours. Sophie and I, we'll take you as far as town. The Maos are there, they can get you a truck."
"Then I suggest we get some sleep," Jakli said. She walked over and put her hand on Lokesh's shoulder. The old Tibetan turned his head, still wearing his distant expression, then rose and silently let her lead him inside.
Shan did not feel like sleeping. He had slept for two days already. He helped the others remove the cooking implements to one of the cells that had been converted to a pantry, then wandered along the murals on the walls. Lokesh was right, Shan felt it too. Never had he been anywhere where he felt so connected to the ancient world. It wasn't a quality of history he felt, nothing like the distance created by museum displays. It was a direct, visceral quality of continuity, of the great chain of life. No, perhaps it was only the chain of truth he sensed. Or maybe even simpler, a realization that people always had done good things, and it was only good things, not people, that endured.
But Shan was not sure what good things were anymore, or at least how he connected to good things. He was adrift, without answers to save the boys who were dying. His friends seemed to have secrets they could not share. His enemies seemed everywhere, yet impossible to find. His government would like nothing better than to put him behind prison walls again.
He found an oil lamp and wandered outside, climbing up the narrow trail that led to the top of the rocks. He lay back on a flat rock and mingled with the stars for several minutes, then lit the little lamp and took out his note pad and pencil.
Dear Father, he started. I have found a place from a different world, where I made a thousand-year-old friend. He should have been using an inkstone and brush and was shamed that he had only his pad and a stub of a pencil. Now I am supposed to provide everyone's answer, he wrote, but instead it feels like each person's tragedies and sorrows, now and in the future, cast a shadow and I attract the sorrows of all I meet, until I stand in the one place where all the shadows intersect, the darkest place of all.
I travel, but I have no destination. I have no family. I have no home to long for. I can only long for the longing. This is not what I expected my life to be, Father, when you and I wrote poems to the ducks.
Come closer, Father. Help me watch the stars.
He read it twice, then signed it. Xiao Shan. Little Shan, the way his father would have called him.
He would have liked to have bamboo splints and juniper, to make the kind of small fragrant fire that attracted spirits. But he had none. So he picked a few dried stems from the wiry bushes on top of the rock and arranged them in a small dense pile. He took a sheet of blank paper and folded it into an envelope, wrote his father's name on it, and set the letter on the twigs. It was a meager offering. He should have had rice paper, he should have spent an hour just practicing the rhythm of the ideograms before inscribing them in the bold flowing strokes his father had taught him. Forgive me, father, for these my shortcomings, he said in his heart, and lit the fire with the little lamp.
The ashes floated upward, toward the heavens. For a fleeting moment they drifted across the Northern Bushel, then they were gone.
After a long time Shan wandered back inside. The tunnels were silent. Even the camels were sleeping. With his little lamp held in front of him, he found the cell with the ancient pilgrim and sat beside him, gently pulling open the blanket that covered him so that Shan could see his hands and the worn spots at his knees that were the signs of a pilgrim. More than ever the man seemed to be asleep. Sometimes, when the light flickered, it seemed his mouth moved. He had been exposed in the karaburan that had almost killed Shan, the one that had made it impossible for Shan to leave for a new life. The scientists would take their samples from the pilgrim and he would be returned to the desert, perhaps to be exposed by another storm in a thousand years. A messenger. Or still a pilgrim, Gendun would have said, brought back to visit important places of virtue, to stir mindfulness in others, across time.
"My name is Shan Tao Yun," he said quietly to the silent figure. "I was born in Liaoning Province, near the sea, more than four decades ago." The words just came out, suddenly, without conscious effort. "When I was very small we made sweet rice cakes on festival days and took them to the temple. But sometimes I ate one when my parents weren't looking. They never found out." He spoke on, of memories that he thought he had lost until that instant, of his forgotten cousins and the way his mother sang opera songs to goats when they had been sent to a work camp. He smiled as he spoke, because the ancient man had come back and unlocked more doors in chambers he had forgotten how to visit.
The man's hands were held together, as if in prayer. Shan realized there was something between them, pressed together in the palms, with a protruding end barely visible. A stalk of something. A piece of grass, maybe. Shan leaned over with the lamp. As he did so he touched the arm and the top palm lifted fractionally. With a choke in his breath, Shan recognized it. A feather. A feather had been placed in the man's palms, a thousand years before.
He settled back, his heart racing. Then, with a slow, reverent motion he reached out and pulled it from the pilgrim's clasp far enough to see it in the lamplight. It was an owl feather, desiccated, its shaft bare for a quarter of its length, but still almost identical to the one in his gau, the one Gendun had given him before they had parted. He stared at it, overcome with wonder. Time passed, and still he stared. Not at the feather. At the man's face. At his long delicate fingers. The man had not been a shepherd. He had been an artist, or a teacher perhaps.
Finally, with utter confidence in the rightness of what he was doing, he lifted the feather from his gau, then carefully extracted the feather from the pilgrim's palms and inserted his own in its place. He placed the pilgrim's feather, the thousand-year-old feather, into his gau, then gently closed the man's hands, unprepared for the wave of emotion that swept over him. His own hands trembled. When they calmed he saw that they had come to rest on those of the pilgrim.
He pushed the rosary down the man's wrist, to be close to the fingers. Then, without knowing why, he cried.