Fat Mao drove quickly, always south, faster than was safe on the rough roads. There had been no argument, no discussion. Shan would go no further until he saw Lokesh back to Tibet, safely away from the knobs. Fat Mao had grimaced but said nothing, just pointing to the smallest of the trucks. Lokesh had shrugged in disappointment and let Jakli help him into the vehicle.
As they had started down the highway Shan watched Jakli depart in the horse cart down a dirt track that led into the hills, sitting beside the driver as the man urged the horse to a fast trot. She wouldn't listen to Shan's entreaty to go back to her factory, where knobs were soon likely to notice her absence. The zheli was meeting in four days at Stone Lake. Major Bao knew it. Director Ko knew it. Prosecutor Xu knew it. It was in the Brigade computer. The whole world knew where the surviving boys could be found in four days.
The old Tibetan leaned his head against the seat and sang in a low voice as Fat Mao drove. He seemed to be losing strength, and not just since being told he had to leave Xinjiang. Since they had found Khitai's grave there had been times when Shan would look at his friend and think that he was somehow shriveling, as if something essential was going out of him. It was like a tide that coursed through the old man, for at other times he was still vibrant and strong. Yet the weakness seemed to plague him increasingly now, so that Shan had begun to worry that old age and the stress of their search was beginning to overwhelm Lokesh. He feared greatly for his old friend, and what could happen to him if they didn't finish their search soon. Shan had not put into words his other reason for returning to Senge Drak. He wasn't going just to assure Lokesh's protection. He had to solve the secret of the Jade Basket. And the answer was not in Xinjiang.
The sun was nearly on the western horizon when the truck approached the rough path that marked the final climb to Senge Drak. But Fat Mao could go no further, for he had urgent business below. He cautioned them against missteps in the evening light, then offered them blankets and told them where a small cave was, the safest place to go, to wait for the sun of the next day. But neither Shan nor Lokesh intended to wait. Fat Mao had no light to offer them and left with a warning.
"We never go in the dark," the Uighur warned. "You could fall, and no one would ever know. No one would come if you were injured."
A blustering wind blew off the changtang. The ends of the blankets, rolled and carried over their shoulders, whipped and fluttered. Shan's eyes watered sometimes, and he remembered Mao's warning. The Uighur warrior had sounded unnaturally fearful, as though Senge Drak was a phantom place that could not be found in the dark, that perhaps didn't exist in the dark. But, Shan mused as he led Lokesh around the bend of another steep switchback, Senge Drak didn't exist in the world most people inhabited. It didn't exist at all in the world of the communists and flatlands and empty people who chanted the Chairman's verses. It existed in the world of Gendun and Lokesh, whose weakness, Shan suspected, had something to do with being cut off from that world.
He turned and watched his old friend as he pushed against the wind, a smile on his face, one of the harmless Tibetans who somehow worried Xu more than all the others. He remembered the strange way she had looked toward the Kunlun, as if remembering something or seeing something she could not understand. Oddly, one question kept echoing in Shan's mind. What had it been like when she had sprayed paint over the faces of the Tibetan deities? Had she gloated? Or had she trembled?
But Shan was still caught between both worlds. And more than ever he knew that the reason he had been selected by the priests was because he belonged to neither. Something had shifted the delicate balance between the two, and people were dying because of it. The key to everything was understanding what there was of the priests' world that drew them to this strange, remote land. There were pieces of it, he knew, out in the desert, where pilgrims lay long dead. There were pieces in Senge Drak and in Karachuk, and with Jakli and the old waterkeeper. The Jade Basket was part of it, but still a mysterious one, for though he knew the Tibetans did not covet things, they seemed to covet the mysterious gau. The boy, Khitai, was part of it. The boy who had carefully hidden his rosary and dorje chain, and who, Shan was somehow certain, had sat in the teaching chamber with the waterkeeper.
Shan only had pieces. Pieces of the Tibetans' mystery. And pieces of the other, the Americans' mystery. But none of the pieces would fit together. Was it because he had confused the pieces, because some of those in the Americans' mystery belonged in that of the Tibetans?
A new light began to shine in Lokesh's eyes, a new bounce seemed to rise in his step. Their path wasn't just up the huge rock monolith that housed the dzong, it was to sanctuary. And Senge Drak was not just sanctuary, Shan knew, it was timelessness, it was mindfulness. Shan decided that perhaps as much as Lokesh he himself needed to partake of it. He walked as if in a dream, letting his feet drop as though in an act of faith, into the shadows that covered the narrow path. Timelessness. The great barriers to understanding, Gendun had once told him, were material possessions, which only built hunger for more, and time, which pushed so many to rush through life, fearful they would miss something if they slowed, as though, if they were quick enough, they could change their destiny. Time seemed so unimportant when sitting in a meditation cell or watching the night sky. Shan too could drift if he let himself, so that the thousand-year-old mummy, and Lokesh, and Buddha's deer on the wall painting, and the tiny autumn flowers that bloomed for a few days before dropping were all mingled in the same serene place that, for lack of a better word, was his life force.
But no, Shan thought, he could not drift. There was someone out there for whom time was important. Someone racing to kill young boys.
He became aware in the distance of the large blunt cliff face with two outcroppings on top. There was a thin line of shadow on its lower slopes that was the path into the tunnels, snaking along the side of the lion. Below them the huge gully dropped hundreds of feet to a dark tumble of rocks below, splinters that had sloughed off the mountain. They stood for a moment together at the edge, in the last dim light of dusk, the wind blowing hard against their faces. A large bird flew past and Lokesh cocked his head to watch it as it moved over the lion-shaped mountain and appeared to settle on one of the outcroppings, a small shadow on one of the lion's ears.
Without looking back at Shan the old man started walking toward the bird.
As they moved along the slope Lokesh led at an increasingly brisk pace, until Shan almost had to trot to keep up. It was indeed as though time had become something different for Lokesh, as though there was an old, weak Lokesh time and a stronger, younger Lokesh time and the two didn't proceed in any particular sequence or with any predictability. No, maybe it was predictable, Shan thought, remembering how energized Lokesh had been in the old dzong. Lokesh the younger was moving toward Gendun Rinpoche and Senge Drak. Shan had to find a way to keep him there, deep in the dzong or hidden elsewhere in Tibet, for that was the land of Lokesh the strong. If he went back to Xinjiang where the frail, weak Lokesh seemed to reside, the old man might not survive.
The dzong was empty as they entered. The brazier in the large room where they had eaten was cold. There was a half-eaten plate of tsampa on the table. They stood at one of the open portals, silently looking out over the vast empty plain until Shan became aware of a presence behind him.
It was Jowa, but not the proud purba he had known. This was a subdued, haggard Jowa, looking half-dead with fatigue.
"You came back," Shan said. "You didn't go with the purbas." He remembered the boasting that last night they had been together, how Jowa the warrior had taunted even Gendun. And he remembered the confused Jowa on an earlier night when Gendun had first disappeared, the Jowa who had said fighting was futile if the lamas didn't survive.
Jowa seemed not to hear him. "I've seen them like this," he said in a haunted tone. "Three days and two nights now. Someone's got to stay with them when they're like this. He could try to fly out the window. His spirit wouldn't know what his body had done until it was too late."
Shan found a ladle of water on the table and handed it to Jowa, who seized it and swallowed the liquid in huge gulps that somehow seemed like sobs. Shan led him to a pallet in one of the cells. When the purba dropped his head to the floor he fell asleep so fast it seemed he had simply lost consciousness.
Lokesh was not in the hall when he returned. But Shan knew where to look. He stepped over the sleeping form of Bajys, sprawled across the threshold of the doorway to the fragrant room, and found Lokesh sitting beside a single oil lamp. With Gendun. The old lama had anchored himself with a gomthag strap, a strip of cloth used by hermits that ran around the knees and the back to prevent the body from toppling over while the spirit was elsewhere.
For Gendun was indeed not there.
Shan had seen deep meditation, had meditated himself for hours at a time, but never anything like this. The man's eyes were open, but he saw nothing. He seemed to have stopped breathing. Shan bent low with a lamp and watched his wrist. There was almost no pulse, only the barest of flickers every few seconds. The danger in talking to mountains, Shan thought, was that you could become one yourself.
They waited for an hour. Lokesh lit more incense and began a mantra. "Om gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhih svaha," he chanted. Shan had been taught the ancient mantra in prison, though he had almost never heard it used. "Gone, gone completely, totally crossed over to enlightenment," Lokesh was saying. Gendun, like Shan, was seeking the truth.
Shan brought more lamps. Still, Gendun did not stir. Three days, Jowa had said. As strong as Gendun's spirit might be, his body was not young, and Shan feared for it. He rose and brought a ladle of water from the stone cistern at the back of the corridor of cells. But Gendun's mouth was closed, his head perfectly perpendicular to the floor, so Shan could not drip water into it. He dared not push Gendun's head back, dared not to touch his body, for a body in such a state sometimes had its own kind of fear. It could react to the slightest touch with spasms or flinch so violently it could harm itself. Imagine he is a ceramic pot, a monk had once said to him of a hermit in deep meditation, and your finger the sharp point of a nail.
Shan let the ladle drip on Gendun's hands. At first they did not react. Then slowly, like tendrils seeking a spring, his fingers unraveled and, as if with their own consciousness, searched the back of the hands for more. Shan let a few more drops fall, and the fingers found the moisture and brought it to the lips, which quivered at the sensation of the liquid. The fingers lowered and Shan repeated the process. Gendun's eyes did not move. He dripped the water a third time and finally there was a blink. He heard an audible sigh of relief from Lokesh, then raised the dipper to the lama's lips. At its touch they opened to receive the water. He offered a quarter of the ladle, then leaned back, sharing Lokesh's relief. It might still be an hour before Gendun returned but the water was bringing him back, reminding him that at least part of him was still bound to the earth.
They sat in the fragrant room until there was a sharp, audible exhalation from Gendun, the kind of sound monks trained in the old gompas often made when awakening from deep sleep. His respiration rose and his eyes began to flutter into focus. He gazed upon Lokesh and Shan for a moment as though he did not recognize them, then a serene smile rose on his face.
"You know," he said in a, hoarse but casual voice, as if they had been speaking all the while, "I have an exquisite hunger."
They found barley kernels in a sack, lit the brazier, and roasted the kernels for tsampa. Lokesh brought water from the cistern in a clay jar and Bajys, revived but as frail and exhausted as Jowa, found a ceramic pot filled with pickled turnips. They ate the simple fare with relish as a gibbous moon inched across the open portal, brilliant as a flame. At the far end of the table, where no one sat, Lokesh had arranged the items from Khitai's sack. The battered cup. The pen case, the iron chain, the beads.
When they had finished, Shan cleaned the pan and boiled water for tea. Lokesh discovered a bundle of incense and lit three sticks as Shan explained the death of Khitai to Gendun.
The lama sighed. "It is so difficult for a child to find its way," he said. His shoulders sagged, and he seemed a frail old man.
"I am going to talk with Jowa tomorrow, Rinpoche," Shan said to the lama as Bajys wandered out of the room. The diminutive Tibetan had frozen, barely breathing, as Shan had explained about Khitai's death. But he had not taken his eyes from the floor, had not shown any sign of grief, or even surprise. For him Khitai had already died, at Red Stone camp, where Bajys had found a dead boy and concluded that his world was ending. "The soldiers are looking for Tibetans," Shan continued. "Jowa knows the way of soldiers. You must let him take you somewhere safe." He heard the low rumble of the hallway. Bajys was turning the ancient prayer wheel. "You and Lokesh must go deeper into Tibet, away from the border." So difficult for a child. The words echoed in Shan's mind. Gendun meant, difficult for a dead child to make the progression to the next incarnation.
The lama looked at the patch of the night sky visible through the open portal. "I talked to a monk once who had spent years down below," he said, meaning the world outside the high ranges of Tibet. "He had gone away lighthearted and came back full of sad news. He said to me that many people had lost the way, that they ignored what was in their hearts because it was the safe way. He thought, incredible as it sounds, that there were millions of people down below who just wanted to live to be old, as if they were enslaved to their bodies."
Gendun lifted one of the sticks of incense and waved it slowly in the space over the table. "So instead of human beings fighting the wrong, he told me, they just say it is for governments to do so. And governments say we must have armies to be safe, so armies are raised. And armies say we must have wars to be safe, so wars are fought. And wars kill children and devour souls that have not ripened. All because people just want to be old, instead of being true."
"The history of the world," Lokesh sighed.
Shan poured the tea into three chipped mugs and they drank in perfect silence.
"I have never expected to grow old, Rinpoche," Shan said at last.
Gendun gave a small laugh. He studied Shan over the steam of his mug, then looked towards the open portal. "Sometimes I wonder, have I just been hiding all these years? Did I take the easy path, while so many have suffered?"
"There is no easy path in Tibet, Rinpoche," Shan said. With an ache in his heart he recognized, for the first time since he had met Gendun, something like regret in the lama's voice. "You were not hiding. You were being true." The old lama still stared out the portal. "There are people who are treasures, people who are irreplaceable. You are so vital to all of us that the right thing for me, for Jowa, and many others, is to protect you."
"I have lived in caves for many decades," Gendun said. "It never felt like hiding until now."
Shan wrapped his hands around his mug and looked at Gendun. "Auntie Lau was hiding, and what she was doing was the right thing."
Gendun turned to face him. "But she wasn't fleeing."
"No," Shan agreed. "She was protecting someone. The boy. Protecting him and teaching him."
Gendun and Lokesh did not respond immediately. Lokesh rose and filled their mugs again.
Shan moved to the portal and looked out into the night sky.
Lokesh began singing the old spirit wedding song in a hoarse whisper.
"The boy Khitai was not aware. He didn't know she was dead," Gendun said suddenly. "He is still looking for her."
He was. He is. Shan was there for the dead boy. Gendun and Lokesh were there for the living spirit, the thing that survived Khitai. A small boy spirit.
"The boy," Shan said tentatively. "The boy who was not a boy." He thought of the strange words uttered by Bajys. That was the one I loved. That was the one I was to keep safe. He'll be dead again. But that was the one I knew, Bajys had said.
Gendun slowly approached, carrying a stick of incense.
"It is a way of saying it," Gendun agreed. "But words of the tongue are not made for such things. I have searched, and I can find no words to explain it. All we knew was that Lau's death was of this world. All we wanted to do was protect the boy. We thought if you would find the truth about the killer of his teacher, then the truth would protect him." Gendun moved so close to the open portal that he seemed in danger of falling out.
"And the rest was-" Shan struggled to find the words. They hadn't intended to mislead him. They had not misled him. They had been unable to translate between worlds.
"Not secret," Gendun said, "just-" He sighed as he looked at a star. "Just not a thing of the world below." The wind tugged at his robe, giving it the appearance of a great rippling prayer flag.
Shan stepped to the portal and put his hand on Gendun's shoulder. "Rinpoche, I am trying to see to the other world, I must see to it. Because the answer lies where the two worlds intersect."
Gendun looked out into the night. A shooting star burst across the horizon below them.
"He was a friend of mine," Lokesh said in his distant voice. "Once, when I was a small boy, he saved me in a snow avalanche. He pulled me in and held me behind a rock as the snow tumbled over a cliff." He smiled. "After that we walked and found high places where we recited the sutras." He reached out and placed his hand around the battered cup from the boy's bag. "He carried this cup, and we would drink with it from mountain springs. We played with dogs and looked for caves. Sometimes we found things left by hermits."
"Khitai?" Shan said in a helpless voice.
Lokesh nodded and sighed with a strange dreamy expression. "Once on the Dalai Lama's birthday we climbed a mountain and threw paper horses into the sky," he said, referring to the old custom of sending paper horses into the wind. When they were found by needy travelers they would turn into flesh and blood creatures. Lokesh drifted back to the brazier and dropped in several juniper splints, then saw the confusion on Shan's face. "He wasn't called Khitai then. He was Tsering," Lokesh spoke with a satisfied smile, as if he had explained everything. "Tsering Raluk."
"And before that," Gendun prodded.
Lokesh shrugged. "Before that he was born in Kham, with the name of Dorjing." He looked at Gendun, who nodded for him to continue. "Before that his incarnation name was Ragta, born in Amdo. Before that, my brain is in shadows. In a long ago time I remember there was a boy in Nepal."
Shan found his way to the table and dropped onto the bench. "I don't understand. Incarnations have no prelife memories. They have no direction over where they reemerge."
He looked at his two friends, who stared at him with wide smiles, like children sharing something wonderful.
"Ai, yi," Shan whispered in realization. "He is a tulku." He never felt more ignorant than when the truth slammed into him, never more blind than when at last he could see. It wasn't a boy they were after. It never had been. He walked back to the exposed portal, and stood where the wind, now quite chilling, hit him with its full strength. He closed his eyes, his mind racing, and let the wind do its work, peeling away the chaff. A tulku was a reincarnate lama, a soul so evolved it could direct its reincarnation, could even have memories of its past incarnations.
"There was a gompa in the mountains halfway between Mount Kailas and Shigatse, for many centuries one of the largest in Tibet," Gendun explained. "The first abbot was a tulku, the Yakde Lama, the leader of one of the old sects, one of the lost sects." Although traditionally Tibet had been led by the Yellow Hat, the Gelukpa sect, many other sects had existed in the country, most small and nearly extinct, some tiny but still vitally alive after all the centuries. "Or nearly lost. The last Yakde Lama had a dozen gompas, small ones, mostly built during the old empire period. He had always trained at Shigatse as a young boy," Gendun said, referring to the huge Tashilhunpo gompa that had once dominated Tibet's second largest town. Only a small number of the reincarnate lamas survived in Tibet. But they were the essence of the church, for many Tibetans the most important leaders, the ones they rallied to.
"We can't let them do what they did to the Panchen Lama," a voice said from behind them. Jowa stood there, still looking haggard. But his eyes had fire in them.
Shan nodded sadly. The Tenth Panchen Lama, the highest reincarnate lama next to the Dalai Lama, the traditional head of Tashilhunpo gompa, had at first chosen to cooperate with Beijing, hoping to avoid bloodshed, accepting assurances that Beijing would preserve his gompa and the Buddhist traditions of Tibet. After he had been taken to live in Beijing, the army had imprisoned the four thousand monks of his gompa. Following years of indoctrination, he had been deemed sufficiently subdued to return to Tibet, but at a festival in 1964 he had discarded his speech prepared by the Bureau of Religious Affairs and shouted out his support for Tibetan independence before an audience of thousands. For that one act of defiance he had been sent back to Beijing in chains. After his death, under highly suspicious circumstances, the Bureau of Religious Affairs announced that it had found his reincarnation in the son of two Party members and took the boy into its custody for special education. The Buddhists, with the help of the Dalai Lama in India, using ages old divination practices, had separately identified a Tibetan boy as the rightful Panchen Lama, but the boy had been abducted by the government and not seen for years.
"I heard about a speech in Lhasa," Lokesh said with pain in his voice. "The government said it had been too tolerant, that they won't allow any more incarnations of senior lamas to be recognized. That there will be no more Dalai Lama after the fourteenth dies."
Gendun sighed. "Khitai was found when he was three years old," he explained, "by elders of his sect." There were special procedures, Shan knew, used for the identification of reincarnate lamas, each different according to the traditions of the sect. "The boy identified things from the lama's prior incarnations. The oracle lake gave a sign in the shape of his initials. He bore the birthmark, on his left calf. It was decided immediately that he must be kept hidden until he could assume the full role of the Yakde."
A birthmark. The dead boys had all had their pant leg sliced open.
"Lau, a nun from his order, had already been sent to make a place for the reincarnation when he was identified, in the north, in the borderlands. Then when the time came, Bajys accompanied him, because he had been a novice and because he came from a dropka family and knew the ways of herders."
Lau's records, Shan recalled, had been in order for the past ten years. It had all been for the boy lama, her settling in Yoktian, her election to the Agricultural Council, her adoption of the zheli. Not a mere ploy, for he knew she had loved the zheli, but an elaborate way to create a hiding place while still remaining true. "But Lokesh said he played with-"
Gendun smiled at the old man. "As Lokesh said, they used to play together. The one called Khitai was in the boy age of the last incarnation then, and Lokesh knew him in the boy age, the last time. Khitai would recognize him and know a friend had arrived." Gendun looked out the portal. "Or, if the worst happened, we would collect his artifacts, his special possessions."
Shan remembered Lokesh with Khitai's possessions at the boy's grave, staring at them as if they spoke to him.
"If Beijing understood," Lokesh said in a pained voice, "it would try to seize them, to forestall the selection process."
A chill crept down Shan's spine. "But you didn't find everything," he said to Lokesh, "You didn't find the Jade Basket."
Lokesh sighed. "No. We have the silver cup that my friend the Ninth used to drink from the oracle lake at their oldest gompa. We have the pen case. But not the most important of all, his gau. We need the gau. It is very old. It has always belonged to the Yakde Lama."
"The killer has it now," Shan said in an agonized voice. "He found Khitai." He stared down into his hands. "So I will find the killer, and I will get the gau."
"You'll never beat the government," Jowa said.
Shan looked up at him. "Is that what you think, that it's all of them together?"
"Sure. That's the way they work. Always directed from Beijing."
"I don't know," Shan said. "Some things have changed."
Jowa frowned and slowly shook his head.
Lokesh stood and placed his hands over the brazier, breathing in the fragrant juniper smoke. "So we must go," he announced, with a strange determination in his voice.
"Yes," sighed Gendun, rising from the table. He swayed, unsteady on his feet. "Perhaps I will rest a few hours first."
Shan looked with new hope at his friends. "You can be back in Lhadrung in a few days."
Jowa nodded heavily. "I will get a truck."
The two Tibetans looked at Shan with obvious bemusement in their eyes. "Not Lhadrung," Gendun said. "Down there, in the world. That is where we are needed."
"No, Rinpoche," Shan said in sudden alarm. "Please."
"Khitai is dead," Gendun said calmly, "and there is a boy spirit, undeveloped, unprepared, still trying to understand what happened. He needs our help. No one read him the Bardo rites. He will be confused. Even for a tulku it can be difficult if he had not obtained full mindfulness in his last incarnation. We will help him. A spirit who is uncertain may look for familiar faces. We must try to help him into the next life. And you must find the Jade Basket."
"Please," Shan asked in a desperate, pleading voice and stood, stepping toward Gendun. "What could you do? Nothing. The knobs are down there. The Brigade is down there. The prosecutor is down there. I can only find the gau if you go to shelter."
"Shelter?" Gendun said slowly, as if unfamiliar with the word. "We can go to the grave of the boy. We can pray and meditate. Then we will follow the signs."
You investigate in your world, Gendun was saying, and we will investigate in ours.
"No," Shan pleaded, his voice heavy with dread. "The place of his grave is watched by the prosecutor. You have no protection. No papers. You could never survive."
Gendun offered a patient smile. "We have our faith. We have the Compassionate Buddha."
Shan looked at Gendun, the reclusive monk who led a fragile existence in the cave hermitage of Lhadrung, who had never been in a truck until two weeks earlier, who did not know guns and helicopters and the electric cattle prods favored by knob interrogators. He stepped to the brazier beside Lokesh. "I promise you. If you return to the safety of Lhadrung, I will find the killer. I will bring back the Jade Basket, if I have to go to Beijing to do it. Get rest tonight and then go back to the fragrant room until Jowa arranges a truck. You can go home."
"Get rest tonight," Lokesh agreed with a nod. "Home would be good," he added in a contemplative tone. Gendun took Shan's hand and squeezed it, then the two Tibetans let Shan lead them to pallets in the nearest meditation cell.
But when morning came Jowa sat at the table, his face desolate. Bajys was running up and down the tunnels desperately calling out their names, his woeful voice echoing into the chamber. But they were not to be found. Gendun and Lokesh had left in the night. They had gone down to the world.