They rode urgently through the night, the three camels in single file as Sophie and Marco led the way toward Yoktian. Marco invited Shan to ride double behind him, and though the Eluosi was silent for the first two hours, he began speaking to Shan of camels and the beauty of the high lonely places he called his home. Just before dawn, as they crossed the Kashgar highway and Sophie settled into a trot for the final miles to Yoktian, Marco began singing loudly: old songs, Russian songs, songs he said were for drinking on long winter nights.
The sun was an hour over the horizon when they arrived at a series of low sheds by the river, a large complex of holding pens for livestock shaded by a row of tall poplar trees in the golden plumage of autumn. The pens near them were all empty, but five or six at the far end, a hundred yards away, were full of horses. The Kazakh herds were being collected. Marco tied the camels in the shadows of the first shed, then led Shan up a small knoll. They were on the outskirts of the town, less than two hundred feet from the main road leading to the town square.
Half an hour later, Shan, Jakli, and Lokesh approached the low mud-brick buildings of the hat factory. Workers were on benches, milling at the gate, and as they stepped into the compound, someone called Jakli's name. Akzu sat on a nearby bench, smoking with one of his sons. Their hands were stained purple.
"You're making hats?" Jakli blurted out.
"Of course. Wonderful hats," he said with a nod to Shan and Lokesh. "The best hats. Always wanted to make hats, niece," he said dryly, looking at his stained hands. "Thank you for the opportunity."
"But why-" Jakli began, but did not finish her sentence. She had realized, Shan knew, that they were to cover for her.
"No sense in taking undue risk, not so close to nadam. The manager here is a Kazakh. He said he won't cover up for anyone if he's asked, but as long as production is above quota not many questions get asked," Akzu explained, standing and stretching. "As long as the boot squads don't come." He looked at a woman who appeared on the steps of the main building, holding a clipboard. "There's worker attendance forms inside the door, niece. Go sign a few."
"But the zheli-" Jakli began.
Akzu held up a hand to cut her off and looked about before answering in a low voice. "The clan still searches for them. And for Malik. We can't find Malik. He was seen galloping down a highway yesterday, as if in pursuit of someone." He looked toward the southern horizon. "I go back into the mountains tonight. One of your cousins will stay here until nadam."
As Akzu spoke a low moan came from a nearby bench. An old man with a long drooping moustache sat and stared at a piece of paper in his hand.
"Been that way for hours," Akzu said. "He came here to ask the manager to explain where his sheep were. He thought it must be some kind of map or directions to a pasture."
"His sheep?" Shan asked.
"It's a share certificate in the Brigade company," Akzu explained in a bitter tone. "He surrendered his sheep to the Brigade, and all they gave him was a piece of paper. Sixty years with his herd and just a piece of paper."
As Jakli took a step toward the man as though to comfort him, Akzu pulled her arm and led her to the gate of the compound. Her eyes never left the mournful old herder.
Ten minutes later Shan and Jakli were at the school compound. There was a ragged broom leaning against the crumbling concrete gatepost. Lokesh picked it up.
"Cleanliness is an overlooked virtue," he said with a twinkle in his eye. Shan nodded and smiled. Lokesh meant he would wait, and watch, at the gate.
Shan and Jakli stood in the shadow of the empty entryway, checking for signs of knobs. Seeing none, they quickly moved down the empty corridor to Lau's office. They searched Lau's office again, looking for more information on the zheli. In her desk. In the computer. Under her desk drawers. Nothing. A number of the photographs had been pulled from the wall since their last visit, some ripped away, their remnants hanging loose. Someone else had come back to the office, searching. Looking for what? The photo of the Dalai Lama that Jakli had removed on their last visit? Jakli went outside, toward the class buildings, hoping to find children who might have word on the missing zheli. As she departed Shan saw that the light was on in the opposite office.
He stepped to the door, which was open a few inches, and looked at the little hand-lettered sign again. Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. He looked back. The sign would have been in front of Lau whenever she walked out her office. There were voices inside. As he pushed on the door, it swung open to reveal the short plump man he had met at the rice camp, Committee Chairman Hu, wearing a bulky, brown cardigan sweater. He was sitting sideways on his desk, facing the rear of his office as he spoke enthusiastically to a tall lean man who leaned against the rear window casement. Kaju Drogme.
They stopped speaking and looked at Shan as he took a step inside. The Han was holding something, explaining it to Kaju- a thin, sleek, grey box, curved at the front corners, with earphones hooked to its rear. The man raised his eyebrows toward Shan but his gleaming expression did not change.
Shan nodded at Hu. "Just looking at her office again," Shan said to the Committee Chairman.
Not only did Hu not seem surprised, he appeared to welcome the comment, as if it were an invitation. "A suicide, I told them," he said with an oddly bright tone. "Obviously it was a suicide. Disgraced from the loss of her council position. Facing retirement, with no prospects, no family."
Shan stepped closer to the man. The box was a music player of some kind. On the lid he saw a stylized logo for a Japanese company. A plastic bag with an instruction manual lay on the man's desk.
"Just the day before she did it, Comrade Ko came in and told her she would be welcome to move to Urumqi. Said there was a retirement complex, a high-rise building just for retired citizens. A number of heroes from the Revolution live there, they give speeches about the liberation battles every week. Said he was going to Urumqi and that he wanted her to go with him to see it. At Brigade expense." Hu shook his head, looking back and forth from Kaju to Shan. "But Lau wouldn't have it. Acted like Director Ko had kicked her. She sat down, out of breath. Too old-fashioned, she was. No flexibility." He lowered his voice and leaned toward Shan. "She had allowed herself to become isolated, cut off from the socialist fabric. A latent reactionary," he said in a knowing tone. "Go, I said, don't you recognize the offer? They are offering rehabilitation. I told them at the camp, wrote it all down for them."
Hu had become much more talkative now that he was out of the rice camp. He had a story now, and he had his job back. When Shan met him at Glory Camp he had said he had nothing to report about Lau. But Prosecutor Xu had kept him behind the wire, to think about things.
"You found a way to get out of Glory Camp," Shan observed. "Not really a place for a man like you."
Hu nodded energetically. "It was getting unbearable. Like an insane asylum with the patients taking over."
"What do you mean?"
"It was those men, the crazy ones who disrupted the camp."
"Disrupted?" Shan asked.
"One of the damned fools without thumbs. Or not him, really- he just translated."
Shan looked from Kaju to Hu in confusion.
"The senile old Xibo could make that man without thumbs understand him. Anyway, at three o'clock one morning they were all found sitting in a circle on the floor, the whole barracks, with the thumbless one and the Xibo sitting in front of them, chanting the political slogans they had been taught that day. When their officer stormed in and demanded an explanation, the old Xibo explained through the other. He said he was unfamiliar with the particular path to enlightenment being taught at the camp but that it was important to strive for perfection in its practice, since enlightenment must be the goal. Everyone in the barracks was different after that, obedient and polite, smiling like fools all the time. The officer was furious but the prisoners were doing nothing wrong. The guards kept the Xibo separated from the others after that, let him wander around alone. Mostly he sat at the bed of some Mongol boy who couldn't walk."
Shan sighed. He remembered the waterkeeper sitting alone at the flagpole. Maybe at least it might improve the chances for rescuing the waterkeeper, if the old man were able to freely move about the camp. He had vowed to himself that as soon as he knew all the boys were safe, he would return to Glory Camp and find a way out for the old Tibetan. Shan saw that Kaju was staring at the teacher with a puzzled expression.
"You mean there is a lama at the camp?" Kaju asked.
Hu laughed. "Not a damned lama. Just a crazy Xibo."
Kaju leaned forward and seemed about to correct the man, then shrugged and looked into his hands.
"What did you mean," Shan asked Hu, "that Ko was offering Lau rehabilitation?"
"People misunderstand Ko. He has the best of intentions. Comrade Director Ko was saying in his way that she was being forgiven for all the unauthorized teaching, for the misappropriations. Take the retirement flat, I told her. They'll have elevators there. Television."
"What kind of misappropriations?" Shan asked. Kaju still leaned against the window, gazing uncertainly at the Han teacher.
"Using Ministry of Education cars without permission. She took Ministry paper and pencils out of the school. Food from the school kitchen. Not to mention teaching unapproved curriculum or encouraging religious practices."
"Chairman Mao," Shan declared stiffly, "taught us to be vigilant. He warned us about religion."
"Exactly!" Hu agreed, and turned with a victorious smile toward Kaju.
"A good citizen like you would try to stop it, to do what you could," Shan suggested.
Hu nodded gravely. "I tried to warn her first. I've been teaching thirty-five years now. I went to university in Urumqi. It's not how things are done, I told her. She was never trained for teaching. What she did, it was never done that way."
Shan looked at the machine in the man's hand. "There're new ways now," he observed. There were crates at Glory Camp, he remembered, with the same logo. Crates he had seen with the dead American. And also crates with Osman, at Karachuk. Had Osman stolen from the knobs? No. It wasn't the knobs who were passing out machines, it was the Brigade. The Brigade was using the knobs' inventory, even though everyone insisted Ko and Bao never cooperated.
Hu followed Shan's gaze. "From Director Ko! Part of the new incentive scheme. We're not going to just punish bad actors, we are going to reward good behavior."
Kaju had one of the machines too, sitting unopened in its plastic bag on the window sill. He picked it up. "The orphans," the Tibetan said. "All the orphans who return to class, who enroll in our new program, will get a disc player. They-" He was interrupted by a loud buzz from the public address system in the hall.
Hu rose from his desk abruptly. "My class is starting," he announced, and pulled a cap with a snap-down visor from a drawer. "Political history." He pulled the cap low around his head and looked at Shan and Kaju as if about to ask them to leave.
"We'll just be a few moments," Shan said in a reassuring tone. "The investigation."
The man nodded soberly and scurried out of the room.
Kaju Drogme looked at Shan, then at the machine in his hands. He shrugged. "These children," the Tibetan said in a confused tone. "They hardly know what radios are. Maybe they've seen tape players, in town. Maybe even if they got to a city, some day, some year, they could buy a disc to play."
"If they had any money," Shan added.
Kaju gave a weak smile, as if thanking Shan for understanding a bad joke. "I have friends in Chengdu," he said, still gazing at the disc player. "Maybe they could send some old discs." He shrugged again and looked at Shan. "You were there that day at the garage. When the Tibetan warned about the boys."
"Why is Ko doing this with the orphans? What is the rush?"
"Not orphans," Kaju said. "There was a memorandum. We are to call them Emerging Members."
"Members of what?"
Kaju hesitated. "The memorandum didn't say. School. Society. Socialism." He shrugged once more. The movement seemed be one of his defining characteristics. "What he's doing is rewarding everyone, pursuant to new Brigade policy. Ko didn't decide it on his own. It came from Urumqi. But he wants this county to lead in the initiative." The Tibetan looked up with a self-conscious grin. "If I get all the children back within two weeks, he's going to give me a special apartment. One of those reserved for Brigade managers. And access to the motor pool. And a title, Director of Economic Assimilation."
"Economic?"
Kaju nodded. "He says that's why assimilation failed, because it was always made political. People don't understand that economics bring people together far more effectively. Use common cultural themes to build common economic interests to bind them together. That's how Director Ko defines my job. Ko said the Brigade itself is the best example. A company owned by Hans, Kazakhs, Uighurs, Kirghiz, Tadjiks, Xibo, Hui, probably ten other cultural groups. But everyone works together successfully. No one refers to Han shareholders versus Kazakh shareholders, just shareholders." Kaju looked back at his machine. "The disc players are not the right reward, that's all. He wants so much to help them, to bring them into the new society. His enthusiasm gets misunderstood sometimes. I will speak with him. Maybe new saddles. Maybe even foals from the Brigade herd." Kaju paused and nodded. "Foals would be perfect."
"Maybe not," Shan said. "I thought horses have been declared reactionary. They're all being arrested by the knobs."
The Tibetan's face clouded, and he shrugged again. "You just don't understand Ko. He wants to do the right thing. A few days ago he started a new children's health program, all on his own."
"Health program?"
Kaju nodded energetically. "Special help from local Brigade resources at the clinic, for newborns. Ko says it will build trust."
Shan looked at him in confusion. Was it was possible that he had indeed misunderstood Ko? Ko, after all, was a creature of the new economy, a creature of a kind Shan had never known. "You said there was a memorandum from Urumqi?" he asked.
"Sure, about the gifts. Ko left a copy on all the teachers' desks today." He looked up at Shan and his brightness faded. He looked toward the door as if to confirm no one could hear, then turned back to Shan. "How did you know that day at the garage, that the boys were in danger? That Tibetan with you said they were dying. Then two days later one is killed."
"Two had already been killed. We had just come from one of their graves."
Kaju stared at him with a chastising frown, shaking his head. "No," Kaju insisted. "You don't understand. What you're talking about is just a blood feud. Ko said so at a Brigade briefing. He spoke to Public Security. Bystanders get caught in fights between rival clans sometimes. A vestige of the old ways. Proof of why the clans need to be brought in, need to enroll in the Poverty Eradication Scheme. If they don't, eventually Public Security will have no choice but to just take them away."
Shan looked out into the hallway, which remained quiet, and back to the Tibetan. "Kaju," he said very quietly, causing the Tibetan to lean toward him. "Lau was murdered. Tortured, and then murdered."
The Tibetan seemed to search for something in Shan's eyes, then he frowned and shook his head again, as if disappointed. "That kind of talk," he said, still shaking his head, "it just doesn't help anyone. Not the children. Not the clans. Not the assimilation effort." He stepped past Shan into the hallway, then turned and lowered his voice. "You sound like one of the radical elements, one of the lung ma. Don't let anyone else-" He was interrupted by another sound on the public address speaker, a two-tone chime. He glanced up at the speaker with a grateful expression. "I have a meeting," he said with a final shrug, then tucked the disc player under his arm and moved briskly down the hall toward the rear door of the building.
Shan waited a few seconds, watching Kaju cross the yard to one of the classroom buildings, then stepped silently toward the main entrance. Halfway down the hall, turning to confirm the hall was still empty, he stepped into a vacant office. There were two sheets of paper on the desk inside. A memo from Director Ko, attached to another memorandum from Urumqi- from Headquarters, People's Development and Construction Corporation. Regarding Economic Assimilation. Shan folded it and put it in his pocket.
Jakli was at the door, and Lokesh still swept at the gate, singing to himself. As the Tibetan saw them he retrieved a burlap sack from the bottom of the post and extended it to Jakli. "A man gave this to me for you," he said. "A Uighur, I think. He said his name was Mao."
Jakli accepted the bag with a tentative, outstretched hand, but as she opened it the caution on her face abruptly changed to joy. She pulled out a horse's bridle, a bridle of rich black leather studded with silver. "Nikki!" she exclaimed, and darted down the street.
"I spoke to the Mao," Lokesh said, leaning on the broom as he watched Jakli disappear in the direction of the livestock sheds. "The boy Kublai was buried outside of town. People came, a lot of people, chanting that woman's name. Niya." He gestured with a nod of his head toward the other side of the street, where a poster had been freshly pasted to the wall, another of the posters of Niya Gazuli Shan had seen at the square. "That Mao said to tell you something, that the boy was missing a shoe. He said you would understand." But Shan didn't understand. It was as though shoes were the artifacts being sought by the killer.
Lokesh looked back at the poster, as if he were conversing with the red-haired woman. "Knobs were there, at the burial," Lokesh sighed toward her. "Imagine that," he said, with disbelief in his eyes. "Knobs come, to bury a boy."
When they caught up with her at the sheds, Jakli was dancing a jig with Marco, as the Eluosi waved the bridle over his head. They stopped and embraced each other when Shan and Lokesh approached.
"It means Nikki is back?" Shan ventured.
Marco nodded vigorously. "Not home. But close, across the border now. The pack animals are slow. He sent someone ahead." He halted his dance and looked at Jakli, suddenly sober. "There's much work to be done. Only a week now." He began tightening the harnesses on the camels, humming a tune as he worked.
"It's going to be all right now," Jakli said, stroking Sophie, her face still aglow. "Nikki will know things. Nikki will-" The words died in her throat.
A figure had appeared at the front of the shed, a bedraggled boy with a tangled mop of black hair. His dirty red shirt was torn in several places and his face was gaunt, a mask of exhaustion and fear.
"Batu!" Jakli gasped, and stared.
"I just keep running," the boy said, breathing hard. "With no place to go. I just run. I stop and get some water, then I run again." His voice was shaking, and he looked over his shoulder as he spoke "I saw you on the street, and I followed."
Jakli leapt forward and put her arms around the boy. "The clan," she asked, pressing the boy's head against her. "Where is your clan?"
"I heard about the zheli boys dying. The last time a lamb was killed too," the boy said with a long dry sob. "If the thing comes looking for me I want it away from that clan. They've been good to me. And away from the lambs," the boy added as he looked at Jakli.
Batu. Shan didn't need to pull the list of the zheli from his pocket, because he had memorized the boys' names. Batu was the third boy from the top of the list. The next boy.
"I didn't do anything," the boy said, his voice breaking with a sob. "Why would they want to-" Jakli held the boy at arm's length as he spoke, then cut him off by placing a finger on his lips. She held him tightly and stroked his head. "Khoshakhan, khoshakhan," she whispered. The word for comforting lambs. At last she looked from Marco to Shan, then Lokesh with a grave, determined expression.
"I must go," she said. "I must go to the Maos, help them find the others. I know places they do not." She looked at Shan. "Where the shadow clans may be."
"I'll go with you," Lokesh blurted out with great emotion. He was looking at the boy as he spoke. "I have to find it."
Jakli looked at the old Tibetan with moist eyes. For a moment Shan thought she was going to embrace Lokesh and murmur the lamb word again. "No," she said firmly, as she might with a child, and put a hand on his shoulder, pushing him gently toward Shan.
"I'll give you food for the boy," Marco offered and reached into one his saddlebags.
"But I'm staying in town," Shan said with a worried glance toward Lokesh. "I'll sleep here. I must see the prosecutor. I said I would."
"Impossible!" Jakli exclaimed, but then seemed to recognize the determination in Shan's eyes and frowned. She watched as Marco handed the boy an apple and he attacked it with ravenous bites. "No," she said, in a new, insistent tone as she looked in the direction of town. "Not back there, not in one of her traps. Tomorrow in the afternoon. Say three o'clock, at the highway station, where we met the rice truck. Our ground."
"I need food for the others," Batu said tentatively.
"Others?" Jakli asked then, as if grasping his meaning, she knelt by the boy, her hand on his arm. "You know where other zheli boys are?"
The boy looked about warily. "At a place called the old lama field. It is safe there, high in the mountains. I was going there. Khitai told us that it is protected by the mountain deities."
Lokesh looked up with a new alertness in his eyes.
"You mean he took you there?" Shan asked.
"Yes. Years ago, the first time, when he was only seven. He had never been there then, but somehow he sensed where it was. When he found it he kept laughing, like he had found an old friend. Just some ruined walls. But a beautiful painting. I think Khitai is there now. He might go for the flowers, the assignment."
"Assignment?" Shan asked.
"Lau's last assignment to the zheli. A collection of autumn flowers. The flowers were beautiful by the lama field, she always said so."
Shan looked at Jakli, remembering the flowers at Lau's cave. Some of the other zheli children had remembered their assignment.
"Khitai knows that one of the shadow clans tended sheep in the mountains above the field," Batu continued. "That is where he might go after getting his flowers, with the clan who watched over Suwan."
Lokesh stood up, erect, like a soldier preparing for action. Suwan had visited the Red Stone camp and died. But his clan might have left with another zheli boy, with Khitai, knowing that Lau sometimes let the zheli switch families, unaware of Suwan's fate.
Jakli went to the front of the shed and looked out, as if collecting her thoughts, then turned. "I know this place. It's near an old Russian lodge," she said, looking to Marco.
"Like hell-" the Eluosi sputtered.
"They have nowhere to go," Jakli pressed. "You can't stay here. The Brigade is bringing in horses all the time."
"I can't-" Marco spat, then he looked at Jakli and a low audible exhalation escaped his lips, not quite a whistle, almost a snort. He looked to Shan in exasperation. "May as well argue with a gnat up your nose," he groused. Sophie turned and made a snickering noise toward Marco, her tongue exposed. "God's breath," he muttered, "not you too."
And then Jakli took the boy's hand and suddenly placed it in Shan's.
The action shook Shan so greatly he almost jerked his hand away. He stood in silence, unable at first to even look the boy in the eyes, unable to understand the sudden acrid taste of fear in his mouth or the welling of emotion within. Slowly he brought his eyes up and Batu looked at him with a small, uncertain smile. He knew children, he could talk with children, he had shared secrets with Malik. But this boy, he was Lau's boy. Shan had had such a boy once, a son, and he had lost him when he was Batu's age.
"This is Shan," he heard Jakli say. "A friend of Auntie Lau's."
Shan found himself on his knees in front of Batu and saw that he was tying the dangling laces of the boy's boots. His hands had taken him where his heart needed to be.
As Jakli tied the bag with the bridle to Sophie's saddle, Marco found a brown shirt in his saddlebag and told Batu to slip it on over his red shirt, then leaned into the camel's ears. The camel make a slow, snickering sound, then Marco straightened. "Okay, mount up," he said, with raised brows, as if expressing surprise. "She says okay. But-" he pointed to Shan, "you've got boots and-" he added, pointing to Lokesh "-you've got bags." He ignored the inquisitive looks on the their faces and led Sophie out of the shed, then turned as he reached the sunlight. "One more thing. She says if any of you ever breathe a word of where you are going or how we get there, the blue wolf will track you down and put you in his belly."
Batu nodded solemnly and looked at Sophie with wide eyes.
Jakli hugged Batu again. "You're safe now," she said, then broke away with a quick glance at Marco and Shan. "Three o'clock tomorrow," she reminded them, then jogged away toward town.
As they led the camels away from the settlement, they passed a cemetery on the far side of the river. Near the bank was a fresh grave, with a small brown and white horse standing nearby, its head hung low. They paused to look at it.
"Most of the zheli didn't even have their own horses," Batu explained. "Kublai was singing for a month last year when they gave it to him." The Kazakh boy shook his head and sighed like an old man as he looked again at the animal waiting at the boy's grave. "Now look. It's hard on a horse."
The three camels moved quickly up the valley, along a trail that paralleled the river, then over a long ridge into a landscape that Shan recognized, the small valley where Lau's cabin lay. Shan kept his eyes on the wooded slope above as they passed the building, toward the cave where Lau lay waiting for her justice.
They quickly left the valley behind, and the sun had passed its zenith before Marco slackened the pace, pausing at a pool below a small waterfall. They were deep in the Kunlun, and the wind blew cool and fresh out of the icefields above them. Marco watched the horizon with restless eyes.
"If something happens," he said in a voice that seemed taut with premonition, "do what I do. Do it fast. Don't talk. Listen to me. Listen to the camels."
Batu rode with Shan, sitting double on the camel behind Sophie, and they followed the silver camel southwestward on a trail that opened to long vistas over the distant desert. Then the trail dropped abruptly into a long valley of brown grass and gravel, down which a swift stream rushed. The path through the landscape was surprisingly wide, as if cleared long ago for heavier traffic. Batu pointed out things Shan did not see. A pika stuffing its cheeks with grass to store in its winter den. An eagle soaring over the adjoining ridge.
Suddenly Sophie stopped. Shan clenched his jaw, but relaxed as he saw that Marco was not searching about for danger. Then he realized that the Eluosi was watching Sophie's head. The silver camel jerked her nose toward the western ridge and brayed. Marco shot out of his saddle. "Helicopter!" he roared and shouted several words in Russian.
The camels bolted off in different directions just as their riders began to climb down. They tumbled to the ground as the camels themselves dropped, folding their legs under their bodies, tucking their heads against their shoulders. From somewhere nearby Shan heard Lokesh laughing. He looked over the side of the camel to see Marco lying against Sophie, curled in the shadow of her body. Lokesh, still wheezing with laughter, was slowly doing the same. The appearance of the animals with their riders pressed against them, would be that of three more boulders in the grey and brown landscape. It was why Marco had asked Batu to cover his red shirt. A surveillance team, flying fast, could easily overlook them.
A low ululating rumble rolled up the valley now, a sound that took Shan to the edge of terror, for fear that Lokesh and the boy would be taken. This was how the army and the knobs kept the nomads intimidated, by suddenly appearing out of the sky to check for illegal weapons or identity papers. You can't hide from Chinese, an old dropka had told Shan once. They have machines with guns that live in the clouds.
Shan caught a glimpse of the helicopter as it cleared the ridge. Then someone pulled his head down and pushed it against the camel. Batu.
Marco waited ten minutes after the whine of the engine had faded, then called a hasty word to the camels and the animals unfolded their heads. Moments later they were moving up the trail at a fast trot.
A quarter hour later Lokesh rose in his saddle and called out. "Lha gyal lo!" He waved to get Shan's attention.
"The field!" Batu exclaimed.
They had been to the lama field before, Shan saw as he followed Lokesh's pointing arm. The huge red prayer flag on the rock monolith was before them, rumbling in the wind.
Batu led them to a small outcropping three hundred yards from the monolith, where low mounds of rocks outlined the remains of a four-room structure. It had been built against the rock, facing the monolith. A place of hermits. "On the other side, there are more walls," Batu explained excitedly as they dismounted, "and you can see the faces of Tibetan gods." He ran toward the ruins, stopping every few seconds to call out that it was safe, that it was only Batu and their friends.
They caught up with the boy at the back of the rock, where a large room had been built against the outcropping, staring forlornly at the wall. As Shan approached he smelled fresh paint. There had indeed been a mural, no doubt a beautiful one, protected even after the collapse of the outer walls by an overhanging shelf of rock. But it was no more. The wall had been covered with black spray paint, and over the paint two posters had been freshly pasted. Escape the Chains of Feudalism, one said. The other, in fine Chinese print, was a copy of a state decree prohibiting religious practices which had not been authorized by the Bureau of Religious Affairs.
"The rocks," Marco muttered suddenly, and pointed toward Sophie. The camel had taken a step forward and was stretching her neck toward a large outcropping on the slope above them. The Eluosi jogged stealthily toward the rocks, gesturing for Shan to follow as he disappeared into a narrow opening between two huge boulders.
Shan caught up with him as he stood on the far side of the boulders, at the edge of a large clearing ringed with several rock cairns and the remains of a long rock wall consisting of hundreds of long thin stones. Shan recognized it, a sacred mani wall, each of whose stones was inscribed with a Buddhist prayer. They had found the lama field itself, and in the center of it was a single boy who knelt at a fresh mound of earth.
It was Malik, from the Red Stone camp, and he was stroking the top of the mound, speaking in a low tone.
Malik turned and gasped as he heard them approach, then leapt away, running toward another outcropping further up the slope, where Shan saw a grey horse tethered. He had almost reached the horse when he was stopped by a call from behind Shan.
"Seksek Ata!" a young voice called out. Shan turned to look at Batu, ten feet behind him. He had heard the words before, the name of the protective deity for goats, the nickname for Malik.
Malik turned and stared at them, not moving until Shan reached his side. The boy's eyes seemed glazed over with grief, and he looked not at Shan but at the mound of earth. "I came fast, because the other boys I found said Khitai might be here. But they were already lowering him into the ground when I arrived," Malik said, his voice cracking with grief. "If I had come a few hours earlier I could have taken him away to safety." The boy was swaying on his feet. His hands trembled. He seemed but a shadow of the sturdy youth Shan had met at the Red Stone camp. It had been nearly a week. The boy had been riding the hills, tracking the zheli, knowing death was lurking everywhere, desperately trying to do something to stop it. He had brought two boys back to the Red Stone camp, Jakli had reported. But when he had finally found another of the boys, the grave had already been dug.
Lokesh appeared and stepped to the side of the grave. A burlap sack lay on a rock ten feet from the mound of earth. Lokesh stared at the sack with wide, frightened eyes, then moved toward it in tiny, mincing steps. As Shan stepped to his side, Lokesh bent and emptied the bag onto the rock. His friend's face seemed to collapse.
On the rock lay a short chain of small iron links and a long tarnished copper case inlaid with turquoise circles- a pen case. A battered metal cup lay beside the case with several short strings of beads, different colored beads of wood and plastic and a single one of green jade. He looked back at the pen case. It was the one Lokesh had asked about in Lau's office.
Something had lodged in the mouth of the bag and Shan pulled it free. A wedge-shaped piece of wood with a top that slid open. One of the Kharoshthi letters.
The embers inside Lokesh had ignited and seemed to be consuming him from within. A noise was coming from his chest- it had the tone of a mantra, but it was just a long continuous moan, as if he had forgotten the words. The old Tibetan clasped the metal cup with both hands and he looked up at Shan with moist, forlorn eyes. For the first time since Shan had known him, Shan saw something else on Lokesh's face. He had seen the expression before, on Bajys's face when they had found him at Lau's cave, when Bajys had proclaimed that the world had ended.
"The herders thought he had fallen at first," Malik said from behind him, "that maybe he was trying to climb the rock with the god flag on it." Shan turned. The Kazakh youth stared stiffly straight ahead, like a soldier making dutiful report. His lips quivered as he spoke. "But his pants were covered with blood. It was because a knife had gone into his belly, up into his heart. His pants were ripped, and a shoe was off. They said his face was battered, like it had been kicked. I think Khitai fought back."
Batu stepped to Lokesh and began patting the old man's back.
"What was in his pockets?" Shan asked. "Did he have something around his neck?"
Malik still stared woodenly at the grave. "Nothing. His things were in his bag. Because they were getting ready to leave."
"The herders, boy," Marco said grimly. "Where did they go? What did they see?"
"Gone, back into the shadows. Those dropka came here for the day because Khitai said so, and left their sheep alone with their dogs. All they could do was say words over Khitai and hurry back to their flock. They won't come down for a long time." Malik looked at Lokesh as he spoke. The frail old Tibetan was rocking back and forth now, as if Batu's touch had set him in motion. "I asked. They didn't see anything. They left Khitai here, sitting at the painting while they checked the high pastures above here for strays. But it was that woman who did it, the one they call the Jade Bitch. I saw her later, after the herders left. I had told them that I would stay, because Khitai was my friend, that I wanted to talk to him a while, that I could say words for a Kazakh burial that dropka might not know. That's what I was doing when I saw her come back to blind the gods."
Blind the gods. He meant the spray paint on the deities, Shan realized.
Marco handed the boy a water bottle and a piece of nan, which he consumed ravenously. "God's breath," the Eluosi muttered to Shan. "They're practically babies. The bitch hunts them down like carrion." He put his hand on Malik's shoulder. "We have to go," he said, scanning the sky. "She knows this place."
Shan silently returned Khitai's possessions to the sack, prying the cup from Lokesh's hands as Malik and Batu helped the old Tibetan to his feet. He lingered at the grave as the small, sad procession disappeared between the boulders. Four boys were dead. A third of the zheli list had been extinguished. A wave of helplessness, as palpable as a blow to his belly, struck him, and he found himself on his knees, with his hands on the grave.
"I'm sorry," he heard himself say. He knew there were no words he could give the dead boy. What had Marco said- no one was innocent anymore. "I would have given my own life," he said in a steadier voice, "to keep more of you from dying." As he spoke he realized that Khitai had not been the next name on the list. Because perhaps he simply had the bad luck to be at the lama field when the killer appeared. Or perhaps, he thought, remembering Lokesh's reaction at the grave, Shan had been wrong, and the killings had not been about the Americans. Had Khitai always been the target? It was as if there two were motives, two killers, two mysteries at work.
He knelt in silence until he heard Marco call from below. Then, quickly, he ran his fingers through the loose soil. He found a familiar object at the head of the grave, a curved piece of wood carved to look like a bird. It was what Malik made for dead children. A few inches away his fingers touched something so hard and cold it made him start. He pulled out a black, hinged, metal container and opened it. It was a compass, an elegant device filled with oil and bearing a red cross on its face, above the words Made in Switzerland. He stared at it in confusion. Such an instrument cost more than most herders made in a month.
Marco called out again. Shan buried the bird and pocketed the compass, stood and paused. He ran to the mani wall, selected one of the stones inscribed with a Tibetan prayer and placed it at the head of the grave, then jogged back to his companions.
As he reached the others, Malik was pulling Marco away from a small boulder near the ruins. It had a hole at its base. "Don't go near that nest," Malik warned. "That pika, he has a demon in him now."
Shan and Marco exchanged a puzzled glance and stepped to the hole, around which dried grass and twigs had been stacked. Marco knelt and cursed as he looked into the shadow. Shan bent and saw it too, a gleaming red dot of light in the hole, like an angry eye. The Eluosi reached in and pulled out first the battered, lifeless body of a ground squirrel, then a small video recorder.
"Motion activated," Marco spat, as he pulled out the tape. He threw it high overhead, where it lodged on a shelf in the rocks, then slammed the camera against the boulder.
"When they left they tried to get the helicopter to land by the flag," Malik explained as they were poised to mount, "but the wind deities protected it. So they shot at the flag with a gun." The flag did indeed seem more tattered than when Shan had first seen it.
"But that's all right," Batu assured them. "That man Bajys, Khitai's friend, he told us old men come and fix the flag sometimes, that they have for hundreds of years. Old men," the boy repeated with a wise nod. "Or maybe they're mountain deities."
They mounted, with the younger boy riding behind Lokesh, and after crossing a low ridge soon reached the head of a deep valley. Marco dismounted. "It is dangerous now. Walk, and walk carefully." He checked the harnesses of each of the camels and tied the reins to the saddles. "The camels know the way." He patted Sophie's hindquarters and she bolted onto a side trail that led to what appeared to be the base of a cliff. Not a cliff, Shan soon saw as the camel began to climb a narrow switchback trail. It was a steeply sloped rock face. At the top, far above, Shan could see a chimney-like rock formation.
The arduous climb took nearly an hour. After they cleared the crest, Shan stood in wonder. Behind the crest was a small plateau, invisible from below. Thick clumps of conifers surrounded the bottom of the rock formation, which, he quickly realized, was man-made. An ancient watch tower. Two sides of the plateau were surrounded by steep rock walls rising to the summit of a mountain more than a thousand feet above them. Two hundred feet up the wall, a spring emerged, descending in a long crystal ribbon to a small pond. A grass-strewn meadow covered two-thirds of the plateau. Scattered across it were half a dozen Bactrian camels.
"The armies of the Tibetan empire," Marco explained as he joined Shan. "They built roads down the river valleys leading out of the Kunlun, then garrisoned troops where the roads could be defended." He gestured toward the old tower. "Shepherds rebuilt it. When my father tried to take our family out of China, into India, an army patrol chased him. We hid here while the soldiers searched. A week, then my mother got sick. A month, then the camels ran away. After a while my father just started building. 'Stay the winter,' he said, 'it's safe here.' 'Might as well stay the summer,' he said later, 'good hunting here.' " Marco shrugged. "Almost forty years ago. We just kept building."
As they led the camels past the base of the tower, a large structure of logs came into view. It had clearly been built from the tower in stages, with a chamber butting against the tower that led into three sections of varying height. Neglected flowerbeds sat on either side of an oversized wooden door with handwrought ironwork. At the end of the building, under the largest pine on the plateau, a large double-barred cross stood over three graves.
Shan and Marco pulled the saddles from the camels as Malik and Batu helped Lokesh to a stump, where the Tibetan sat with his head in his hands. He had not spoken since leaving Khitai's grave. Marco cast a sad look at the old man, then wrapped an arm around each boy and led them to the doorway. Stepping in front of them he made a small bow and with a sweep of his hand gestured them inside. "Welcome," he said, "to the Czar's summer palace."
The Eluosi escorted them into a warm, intimate room whose plank floors had been lined with thick carpets. On the front wall, flanking the door, hung the skins of several large animals. The afternoon sun that found its way through the open door reflected off a large brass samovar sitting on a table at the far side of the chamber. Shan moved toward the urn in admiration, but was distracted by several small, faded, black and white photographs hanging above it. They were of figures inhabiting a different world. From one yellowed photo stared an old man with spectacles and a long white beard; his eyes seemed to be animated with rebellion, or anger perhaps. In the next frame a man with a sharply trimmed beard stood beside a beautiful fur-clad woman with light-colored hair. A horse-drawn buggy and driver waited behind them. The woman's mouth was opened in a smile, as if she were announcing good news.
The man and woman appeared again in a photograph set in rugged mountainous terrain. They were dressed in simple woolen tunics now. The man's beard was no longer trimmed, and the woman's hair was in braids, the way female workers wore their hair in the fields. In the man's arm was a child, a boy who stared defiantly with a strength that seemed to have been lost in his parents. Inserted into a bottom corner of the frame was another photo, also faded but more recent. It was of another woman, with strong weathered features and light-colored hair tied in a scarf. Batu stepped outside and a moment later reappeared, leading Lokesh.
"Family," Marco said behind Shan, in a mellow voice. "In a better year. Near Yining, in the north." He stepped across the room to a large door that stood ajar, leading into a room of stone walls. The base of the ancient guard tower. "The best place for a Russian to be, where Moscow had forgotten you. But then in 1950 somebody in some god-rotten Party headquarters in Beijing opened a map and saw a big wide open space with not enough red flags on it. When they sent troops to Turkistan, they decided that the mountains to the west should be the obvious border. Yining was on this side so they shipped in a few thousand retired soldiers." He snapped his fingers. "Just like that, Yining was no longer a free White Russian town, it was a Chinese town. And the original inhabitants had only one right, the right to leave. Except there was no place to go by then."
"This is not such a bad place," Shan offered.
Marco shrugged. "Sure. Our own little world. The shepherds came, sometimes. My father traded furs for the things my mother wanted. We made a good life. Then a fever came. I was fourteen. There were no doctors for people like us. I awoke after my fever broke, in my bed alone. My father was dead, lying on a pile of fresh earth. I thought he had buried the family treasure. I uncovered it. He did bury our treasure. He had died burying my mother." Marco turned and disappeared into the tower.
Shan looked about to see Lokesh holding the tapestry that hung at the far corner of the room, looking down a dark hallway. Lokesh entered the hallway and Shan followed, leaving Batu and Malik staring at their reflections in the samovar.
The hall had three doorways framed in hewn logs. The first led to a large room with a small iron stove and a plank table surrounded by mismatched chairs, some made of sturdy tree limbs, others of fine carved wood with soiled, though once elegant, silk seat cushions. A dried shank of meat hung from the ceiling, as did small strings of onions.
Lokesh stood at the second doorway, studying the next room's contents with intense curiosity. Over his shoulder Shan saw that the walls of the room were covered with photographs torn out of magazines, images of horses and birds and Western actors and actresses, most with captions in English. From two heavy log beams overhead hung several pelts of fur. On one wall above a shelf jammed with books was a poster of a Hong Kong rock star. Near the door there was a sleeping pallet on a rough wooden frame. A row of military caps hung on pegs over the bed. Chinese, but also foreign army caps. Shan studied them. Indian. And Pakistani, and another he did not recognize. Below the caps was a single photograph of a girl on a horse, laughing. Jakli. On the upended log that served as a bedside table stood a cassette player, a tape box on top. Advanced conversational English, it said. Lokesh picked up a heavy walking stick leaning in the corner by the door and extended it for Shan to see. Carved along the length of the stick in English letters was the name Niccolo.
"It's not Russian," Shan said. "Niccolo. Not Russian, not Kazakh."
"Italian," came a bass voice from behind him. "Marco Polo visited strange lands, but before him his father Niccolo went down the Silk Road. He went to foreign lands first, before Marco. Niccolo Polo Myagov," Marco said with pride.
"And so history repeats itself," Shan ventured as he turned in the doorway. It wasn't just her marriage that Jakli was anticipating, and it wasn't just the marriage that Lau had wanted to protect her for by keeping her in probation. Nikki was making one last caravan, Osman had said. Shan had not at first understood what Jakli had written when the karaburan was bearing down on them, because she had written in English. I'll be with you in the beautiful country. She had meant Mei Guo, because it was translated as beautiful country in Chinese. America.
Marco's eyes widened as he studied Shan a moment, then the Eluosi shrugged. Marco picked up one of the two other wooden sticks that stood in the corner by the walking stick, and examined it absently. It was tapered and smooth, with a knob at the narrow end. For hitting baseballs, Shan suddenly realized. "He wasn't sure at first. Even then he had to convince Jakli. She said she didn't think America had horses, that all Americans had two cars and wouldn't want horses. But Deacon told her that people have horses for pleasure. Said he has a ranch. Said he would buy horses for them. So now they're getting out, thank god."
Getting out. For a while Shan had been getting out, or at least could pretend he was getting out. The truck to Nepal was gone. He had lost track of the days. Maybe today was the day that someone on the border would be waiting for him, waiting for an hour or two, perhaps the whole day, before deciding that Shan had been prevented from being liberated. Somehow his own failure to reach the outside seemed to make it all the more important that Nikki and Jakli succeeded.
Marco sighed and surveyed his son's room in silence, then motioned for his visitors to follow him. "Time to earn your keep."
He led them outside to Sophie, who was standing beside Lokesh, her big moist eyes only two feet from the Tibetan's own, staring intently at the old man. Marco pulled a small metal hook from a nearby stump and handed it to Shan. "Boots," he said to Shan, then extended a brush to Lokesh. "Bags." The Tibetan seemed to awaken at the words, and accepted the brush with a small grin.
Marco showed Shan how to use the hook to clean the camels' feet of any stones or twigs that had lodged in their hooves, then demonstrated on Sophie how Lokesh should brush the thick hair on their humps. Then Marco produced a handful of sugar cubes from his pocket and handed them to the boys, who eagerly offered the treats to the camels.
As Malik moved away to offer the last cube to his own horse, Shan followed. "I saw what was in his grave," he said to the youth's back. The boy only nodded as he stroked his horse's mane.
"Was it Khitai's compass?" Shan asked.
"No," Malik said in a whisper, as if frightened to speak of the thing. "His zheli parents, they said they found it near his body, lying against a rock. Khitai must have knocked it away from the killer." Malik turned to face Shan. "In the old days if a warrior died in battle, you buried him with the trophies he had taken from his enemies." The boy shrugged and turned back to his horse.
They ate a vegetable stew prepared by Lokesh on the little iron stove. Afterward Shan wandered out toward the pasture, watching as the evening stars rose, listening to the serene sound of the waterfall, immersing himself in the peacefulness of the place. He saw a glimmer of light and discovered Marco with a lantern at the end of the cabin, talking in low tones to Sophie as he stroked her back. Shan sat on a log and watched, not thinking the Eluosi had seen him until a few minutes later, when Marco's hand swung out and gestured for him. "You can scratch her ears," he said. "She likes that, after a long day."
The two men worked on the animal in silence for several minutes.
"She's a handsome creature," Shan offered.
Marco nodded approvingly. "And smart as any two Chinese." A moment later he looked up, his mouth open, as though to apologize, but did not.
"Your son," Shan said. "He has his own camels?"
"He prefers horses. Grew up riding with the Red Stone clan. He rides a strong black mountain horse. His mother's stock had Cossack blood."
"Is she traveling too then?" Shan asked.
Marco grew silent. "Not here," he said in a tone that made it clear Shan had gone too far. Marco's parents had died at the cabin, Shan recalled, but there were three graves.
"I have a boy," Shan volunteered quietly. "He would be eighteen."
"Would be?"
"I don't know," Shan began. "I haven't seen him for eight years." Marco looked at him and seemed to recognize that Shan too had pieces of his life too painful to probe.
"Eighteen. Not a boy, then," Marco said. "A man. Not much younger than my Nikki. Did he have a horse when he was young?"
"No. No horses."
"A camel, perhaps?" Sophie stood with her eyes closed, but her ears moved as if she were following their conversation.
"No."
"Ah," Marco acknowledged with a sympathetic tone. "Not everyone gets to ride in this life." He produced a wooden comb, which he began to run through the hairs of Sophie's neck. He handed it to Shan after a minute and showed him how to use it, putting his huge hand over Shan's to pull it through the hair.
"My Sophie," Marco sighed, "she has a soul deeper than most men. I talk to her. She talks to me. Smells strangers from two mountains away. Damned few people I'd rather be with." He walked around the camel, as if making a final inspection, then looked at Shan with an expectant expression.
"Come with me, Mr. Shan. I've got something to show you."
Shan looked up in surprise. Marco was speaking in English.
"Shan. Sh-aann," Marco tongued the word as he led Shan toward the front door. "Not an English name. In English you should be John. Yes," he said with a look of satisfaction. "John. Johnny, they say sometimes."
Shan smiled. "Like an American movie," he said in the same language.
"Ah! Exactly. John Wayne!" Marco exclaimed, then returned to Mandarin. "You speak it better than I do."
"My father," Shan said, and Marco nodded, as if it were all the explanation he needed.
They stepped into the room at the end of the inside corridor, a large chamber with rough log walls and a huge bed constructed of split logs, piled with felt blankets and furs. Pelts hung from log rafters. A sword hung on the wall. Two old pistols with cylinder magazines hung from pegs near the door. Flung across a table by the bed was a stack of magazines, in English. Oddly, all seemed to be about ocean fishing. Shan picked up the top magazine.
"Do you know the ocean?" the Eluosi asked tentatively. He seemed reluctant to show curiosity in his voice, but his eyes betrayed it. For an instant Shan saw the eagerness of a schoolboy. On the wall behind Marco there was a series of old calendars, all with a single color photograph of an ocean beach or an island. The region Marco lived in, Shan suspected, was further from an ocean than any place on the planet.
"As a boy, I lived in Liaoning Province," Shan replied, "near the sea. My mother's family was from a fishing village."
"Beaches!" Marco exclaimed in English. "Of white sand, like warm snow. Water as far as you can see. And the tuna fish." He looked at one of his calendar pictures, of a rocky coastline containing conifers and a single log cabin with bright yellow shutters. "It can reach over one thousand American pounds," he said soberly. "A fighting fish that's not for the faint of heart or weak of limb." He looked back at his magazines.
Shan had a vision of Marco, lying on his furs as it snowed for days, memorizing passages from his magazines.
One of the calendars had a photo of a man in a brilliant white shirt landing a long silver fish on a brilliant white boat. "Not a man in my family for five generations has ever seen an ocean," Marco declared, with longing in his deep voice. "Salt water. It has fish, delicious fish, as heavy as mutton, as delicate as sugar cake." He fixed Shan with a stern gaze and leaned toward him, as if about to disclose an important secret. "There is a place called Alaska," he declared, lowering his voice. "It has mountains like here. It has ocean too. I have seen pictures. Nikki has books that talk about it. Monster fish. Fry them in butter. And you know what else, Johnny?" Marco asked with a spark in his eye.
Shan shrugged. "I have never been there."
"It has Russians. Emigres from the Czar's days. Russians who speak English. Who are free men."
Shan smiled. He realized that he liked the man not so much for the boldness of his actions, but for the boldness of his dreams.
Marco pulled a thick book from a wooden crate, an album of old photographs, and gestured for Shan to sit beside him on the bed as he quickly leafed through the pages until he found what he was looking for: a brittle, faded photograph of a Bactrian camel draped in what looked like a silk banner. Holding the camel's head was a man with a thick moustache and a bald head. On the other side of the animal was another man, a European, wearing a heavy fur ushanka, the winter cap favored by Russians. On the European's coat was a shining medal in the shape of a star. Flanking the two smiling men were two stern guards in turbans, each holding a long rifle.
"Sophie's great-grandmother," Marco said proudly.
"I see a certain resemblance," Shan said, to be polite.
His words delighted Marco, who shut the book with a huge grin. He pointed to an object that hung from a leather strap around a bedpost and lifted it to show Shan. It was the medal from the photograph. "Given to my great-grandfather by the Czar himself," Marco explained proudly. It was a golden star with red enamel borders and the image of a mounted cavalryman in the center. Marco gazed upon it with silent satisfaction, then looked at the wall, as if consulting an invisible clock. "Time to go up. We always go up," he announced, then stood and left the room with long, deliberate strides.
Shan checked on the boys, who slept in Nikki's room, then found Marco on the tower, staring out over landscape as if searching for someone.
"It's a dangerous thing, your seeing the Jade Bitch," Marco said in a slow, contemplative tone without turning toward him. "You heard that boy. She killed Khitai."
"I don't know that. Malik just saw her the day after. You didn't see Zu's face when Kublai was brought to her door. She was horrified. It was no act."
"The worst thing you could do is to underestimate her."
"The worst thing," Shan countered, "would be for me to misunderstand her."
Marco offered a skeptical grunt in reply.
"Why would she go to that place twice? Why not apply the spray paint the same time she killed Khitai?"
Marco threw his hands up in a gesture of frustration. "Didn't have the paint. Wanted to go back for that camera."
"I don't know. Maybe there wasn't just one killer," Shan said. "Kublai and Suwan were shot. Alta and Khitai were beaten and stabbed."
"Maybe it was four killers," Marco said darkly. "Someone declared an open season on boys."
"But they all had one shoe missing," Shan said in a distant voice. He had no answer. They watched the moon. He found himself listening for crickets. "When you arrived here today," Shan said after several minutes, "you thought someone might be waiting. Because of the silver bridle."
Shan could see Marco's nod through the moonlight. "Osman. With more horses."
"The silver bridle," Shan suggested, "it was a signal, it meant a new plan. A faster plan, for the next caravan."
Marco nodded. "The silver bridle was a gift for Jakli. For the wedding. It just means get ready, at the horse festival, at the nadam."
But Jakli wasn't making bridal preparations. She was in the mountains, evading the knobs, trying to save the lives of orphan boys. Maybe, he hoped, she would meet her Nikki in the mountains, maybe Nikki could persuade her to stay out of danger. "I don't understand something, Marco," Shan said after a long silence. "You are a smuggler, but you live over a hundred miles from the border."
"I would never live closer, too dangerous. Like lingering in the breath of a dragon." The Eluosi looked up at the moon and yawned. "You're too traditional. You think too much like a policeman. There're many kinds of borders. Over the next ridge, it's Aksai Chin. Disputed land. India says it's hers. Traditionally it was part of Ladakh," he added, referring to the border region between Pakistan and India that held the upper waters of the Indus river.
"But the People's Liberation Army controls it," Shan reminded him. "Soldiers everywhere. And villages. Muslim villages. Old Tibetan villages." He had been driven through the disputed zone in one of the armored cars used by the knobs to transport special prisoners. On a break, when they allowed him ten minutes of exercise, he had seen prayer flags for the first time, fastened to a distant cairn of rocks. He remembered thinking through a drugged haze that it must be some kind of festival day.
"I found something out, Johnny," Marco said in a conspiratorial tone. "Sometimes the more you watch, the less you see."
The edge of the moon appeared so brilliant, so crisp, that it seemed like a shining piece of porcelain. In the distance, high snow fields glowed.
"They have huge caves, the army," Marco said. "Brought in thousands of gulag slaves to hollow out entire mountains. Some say the whole Tibetan border is just a series of hollowed-out mountains, full of soldiers. They have their damned missiles and radar dishes. An Indian plane goes through, or a Pakistani, and they can shoot it down in seconds. But say an eagle goes through- they never see it, because they use machines to do the watching. They watch for metal things, not real things. You and I, we would watch the sky. But they just sit and watch screens inside the mountains.
"And if army trucks or tanks come across one of the passes, they see them on their detectors. But maybe not a camel or two. Elsewhere they have patrols, but in some places it's so important they use only electronic surveillance. A small group, if it's careful, can sneak through. Don't carry metal. Don't make sharp noises. Don't do it often, got to use different routes, many techniques." He sighed and pointed toward a falling star. "Things can be arranged from a hundred miles away. Sometimes a wise man may even find ways to smuggle without smugglers."
"I don't understand."
"Trucks, for example. Big market for heavy trucks in Xinjiang. So last year I brought in five heavy trucks, filled with Indian dyestuff for the carpet factories. The border patrol, they searched those trucks good, but everything is legal. Never realized I was smuggling in the trucks. Even had trucks going out, with the same paperwork. But they were twenty years older and about to fall to pieces." Marco chuckled to himself. "Even did it with a bus.
"And something else I have learned. When is contraband not contraband?" He turned to face Shan, leaning on the old stone parapet. "When the government brings it in."
Shan nodded. In his Beijing incarnation his main activity had been investigating corruption. Once he had discovered that an entire shipload of equipment had breezed through customs clearances because the smugglers had falsified papers saying it belonged to the Ministry of Petroleum Industry.
"Sometimes, if someone in the government has a shopping list, they won't ask where you got it. They may even be willing to turn a blind eye at a checkpoint."
"You mean, you work for the government sometimes?"
Marco spat a curse. "Never. I mean sometimes, if a certain greedy officer wants some Western goods, he may want to place an order, and may want to misdirect a patrol so his order gets through."
"And sometimes," Shan said, "people go out. People go out to stay. Nikki, he goes in and out."
"Sure. You can sneak past the missile silos, once in a while. And there are places you can use, between snows, high passes no good for trucks or Chinese soldiers. Places that only a few old hunters know about. Where you can die from the cold or wind as easily as a bullet. Nikki knows them well. He went across for horses. He knows a horse trader in Ladakh, across the border."
"White horses," Shan suggested.
"Right. For Jakli."
"For getting married. At the nadam festival."
Marco nodded. "All the Kazakhs will be there, the few old clans left here. Starts in four days. The last one for the clans in Poktian County," he added somberly.
Shan thought a moment. "Lau was going to be there, wasn't she?"
"Jakli asked Lau to stand for her. Lau was the closest she had to a mother."
"But why get horses if they're leaving?"
Marco grunted. "You can't stop, can you? Can't stop asking questions."
"Not while there is a murderer stalking boys."
Marco made a frustrated, rumbling sort of sound that Shan took to be a token of surrender. "Nikki has to get the horses. You have to understand about Kazakhs and their horses. Not like anything Chinese. Or anything Russian. Horses can be as important as family."
"Like some camels."
"Different than me and Sophie. The old ones, they talk about how the souls of horses and the souls of Kazakhs are intertwined. They name horses after their children, and children after their horses. The rite of passage for a Kazakh is when he gets his first saddle, meaning he is old enough to ride alone. They have a whole vocabulary for types of horses and movements of horses. They tell stories about horses that lived five hundred years ago. They have old shamans who can speak to horses. The old Kazakhs, they won't go near a Chinese clinic for themselves. But if their horse gets sick, they'll do anything, even ask a Chinese doctor for help. Nikki knew how important it was to Jakli, to observe the tradition by giving at least one white horse to the bride's family. To honor her, to honor Akzu. To honor her lost father. In the old days, there would have been many horse gifts, from friends and cousins. Once I saw a nadam camp with two hundred white horses."
"So Akzu gets the horses," Shan said. Akzu, whose clan was being dissolved, whose herds were being surrendered to the government. "But Jakli and Nikki, they are going. Out of China. To America. It's why she isn't worried about Prosecutor Xu anymore, only angry at her. But how? Out of Aksai Chin?"
Marco made one of his growling sounds. "Don't ask what cannot be told."
"This isn't about Lau anymore," Shan said. "It's about keeping Jakli and Nikki safe. About the boys. About the Red Stone clan."
Marco put both hands on the parapet and looked out over the moonlit range. "Okay," he sighed. "A special route. Foolproof. Can only be used once. By boat."
"But the rivers aren't navigable," Shan said in a puzzled tone.
"In the missile region they still use laborers to dig out mountains. Prisoners- Kazakh, Tibetan, and Uighurs, mostly. There's buses that take them, shuttle them in and out twice a month. Big project at the end of the road, past the main base at Rutog, in Tibet."
Shan knew about Rutog. About one hundred twenty miles from Xinjiang. Close to India. A nuclear zone, a missile command center.
"There's a village called Ramchang, on a lake about twenty miles long. The border with India, the real border, cuts right through the lake."
"Then the army must have surveillance."
"Sure. Electronic, it's so important. You know, in case the Indians launch a battleship at them. But we know a man there, a Tibetan hunter who was allowed to stay on the border because his daughter was in a special Party school in Lhasa."
"A hostage."
"Right. Except Lhasa forgot to tell the army that his daughter died in a traffic accident a few months ago. He's leaving, and he needs some money."
"Even if he takes you over the lake the army could detect-"
"He has stealth boats," Marco said with a hint of amusement. "Coracles, made of willow branches and yak skin. They can't be detected on radar. It works."
"You mean," Shan said, "that the purbas use them."
"A boy named Mao went too, with some scientific specimens. They have their own boats. We have the Panda boats."
"Panda boats?"
"That's what he charges. Four people in a boat. One gold Panda per boat."
Shan's hand clenched the stone wall in front of him. "Auntie Lau," he whispered.
"What's that?"
"Lau was going."
"It was for Nikki and Jakli. I arranged it. Part of my gift, for their new life."
"But Nikki and Jakli are going to America."
Marco sighed. "They weren't at first. But then they met the Americans. That Warp, she became like another aunt to Jakli. Warp was going out, with their son, back to start writing her book, to get him back in American schools. The Maos were working on it. Then Jakli spoke to Warp. Warp spoke to some Maos. Some Maos spoke to me. Before long they're getting a Panda boat too. Then Warp and Deacon, they offer for Nikki and Jakli to live with them. Nikki, he wants to go to Alaska, to build a cabin so I can come someday. But Warp says first come to their university, she will get them money to help with the translation and explain the research. The Maos want it too, now- they say Jakli can give speeches in America about what Beijing does in Xinjiang."
Shan told Marco about the gold Panda hidden in Lau's puzzle box. "Money for a boat," he said. "For Lau, to leave. Lau and someone else. Maybe Bajys and Khitai."
Shan looked at Marco, who stared with a frown at the moon. "What was it you said? I never stop? Like you never stop trying to hide things. She came to you at Karachuk, didn't she? She was frightened. She knew about Jakli leaving. And that night she asked to go out at the same time, because suddenly she knew she was in danger. But the killer had followed her there."
Marco made no reply. He seemed to be searching the moon for something to say.
Shan pulled the bronze medallion from his pocket. "This was with the gold piece. Half of a pair. I got it before Bao did." The light was too poor to show its details, so he pressed it into Marco's hand.
"God's breath," the Eluosi muttered, and sighed heavily. "No good, so many people talking about secrets. It's the ticket. That old Tibetan with the boats, he doesn't know anyone's face but mine. And I'm staying. He'll have the matching medallion from each set. They're unique, not available outside museums. Until Deacon found them at Sand Mountain. So the Tibetan is given the match to each pair, delivered to him by the Maos. Show the medallion, pay the Panda. No chance for him to be tricked."
The ticket. Lau had a ticket for freedom, for a new life. She had kept it in her office, before riding to Karachuk to be killed. "Where was Lau going? To America?"
"I don't know. I didn't want to know. She was a Tibetan nun, you said. Maybe Dharmsala. From the far end of the lake it's only two hundred miles away." Dharmsala, on the southern slope of the Himalayas, was the home of the Dalai Lama, the capital of free Tibet.
Shan found Lokesh in the entry chamber, sitting on the floor below the samovar, their blankets unrolled on the carpet. The old Tibetan was chanting his rosary, staring at a small mound of felt on the floor in front of him. Shan watched a moment, confused, then lowered himself beside his friend. He sat silently and soon realized that Lokesh was not chanting a mantra anymore, but a pilgrim's prayer, an invocation for the protective deities to watch over a pilgrim. Slowly, giving time for Lokesh to object, he raised the felt. Two blocks of wood lay underneath, two pieces of carved wood with cracked, dried leather straps fastened loosely over the top of each. With a flood of realization Shan recognized them.
"You brought them out," he whispered in surprise. "They're his."
"Yes," Lokesh said in a bright voice. "I am going to take them to Mt. Kailas. I am going to complete his pilgrimage around the sacred mountain, using his blocks, then leave the blocks as he promised."
Shan grinned at Lokesh's joke, then saw the strange excitement in Lokesh's eyes. "You can't," he protested as he realized it was no joke. "Even for a young man it would be difficult. Winter is coming. To circle the mountain on your hands and knees could take many days in the snow and wind." Perhaps weeks, he thought. Pilgrims sometimes took several days to complete the thirty mile circuit on their feet.
"I promised him," Lokesh replied in a serene voice.
Shan began to speak, but the protest died in his throat. Lokesh had made a promise to the dead pilgrim, to the thousand-year-old mummy. But as his hand closed around his gau and its feather he realized that somehow he had made a promise to the dead man too, to carry on the virtue. He fell silent and listened as Lokesh continued his prayer.
After a few minutes he moved to the kitchen table, and in front of two candles spread the meager possessions of Khitai. The strings of beads. The small length of chain. The pen case. The battered silver cup. He held each in his hands. Maybe it hadn't begun with Lau or the American boy. Maybe it had begun with Khitai. Lokesh and Gendun had come to find the Jade Basket, which had been entrusted to Khitai. Why? Because he was a bright, resourceful, Kazakh orphan, the last place an enemy would look? Or was the boy special for another reason?
He idly picked up the chain and saw that each of the small links had a tiny lotus blossom worked into the metal. Perhaps it was simply a random piece of treasure collected by a curious boy. Or it could be an artifact, he realized, like the twelve linked dorje chains sometimes depicted in the hands of Tibet's protective deities. He counted the links. Twelve.
He lifted the beads in his hand. Wood and plastic and one jade bead. Why was the string so long at the end of each set? What was the significance of several yellow beads among the brown ones? Why was one strand composed of ten smaller beads tied tightly together? He tied one strand to another and looked at it, trying to find a logic in the sequence of the colors or varying shapes of the beads. Then, more quickly, he tied the pieces together to make a loop, then fastened the smaller string of ten beads onto the string, so it hung down. With a tinge of excitement he counted the beads. The colored beads divided the strand into four equal sections. The smaller beads that dangled from the string were for marking tens and hundreds. In total there were one hundred eight on the loop. It was a mala. The dead Kazakh boy Khitai had a Tibetan dorje chain and a secret Buddhist rosary. He had found the waterkeeper's hidden student.