Shan sat on the sentinel stone in a wind heavy with the scent of snow, letting it churn about him. Not just Gendun was lost this time but Lokesh too, wandering out into a world gone mad. He had left Jowa staring out of one of the portals with a blank expression. Bajys was walking about short of breath, as though constantly sobbing. Go back to the cell, Shan had told himself, sit with the ancient bow until you find a target again. But his mind had been too clouded, and he had climbed to the ancient sentinel post as the tide of sunlight swept over the vast open plain, sometimes watching for a glimpse of two figures in the distance, sometimes looking to the fast moving clouds for answers.
A snow squall burst upon him, suddenly engulfing him in a fury of whiteness. He did not move, ignoring the cold, ignoring the particles that bit into his face. Perhaps it wasn't a storm, he told himself, perhaps he was looking inside his mind. It was all that he felt now. Confusion. A swirl of conflicting thoughts. Adrift between worlds. The coldness of death. Even if Khitai were the Tenth Yakde, why did he have to be killed so urgently? Why would the knobs let one of their officers be killed without reprisals? What was the nameless American doing at Glory Camp? Why had Sui wanted to arrest Lokesh, but only once he was away from Director Ko? Had they discovered the old waterkeeper? Was the serene teacher of the boy lama being tortured at this very moment? A patch of sky appeared through the snow, then as suddenly as the squall had started, it stopped. And in the next moment he realized that he had at least one more piece of the puzzle and that he must act on it. He had been looking for clues in the world of Lau and the zheli boys. Now he had to look for clues in the world of the Yakde Lama.
When he went below Bajys had Jowa's coat on the table, brushing it with a tuft of horsehair, his hands trembling as he worked. Jowa sat nearby, staring at a map.
"There were gompas," Shan said to Bajys. "Gendun said there were still gompas of the Yakde. He said they grew out of the empire period, when there were armies that moved through this area. Meaning, maybe there were gompas established along the old empire routes here. How far is the nearest?"
Bajys just shook his head.
"If Khitai had lived," Shan pressed, "if you had known Lau was dead and had to take Khitai somewhere, where would you have gone?"
Bajys kept brushing. "Secret places," he said, looking over his shoulder toward the portals as if someone was hovering outside to overhear. "Lau knew them," he said, then glanced at Shan apologetically. "She was never going to die," he added in hollow tone.
Jowa looked at Bajys with a strange, expectant expression, as if at any moment to speak to him, to offer the words that might finally bring the tormented man's soul into balance. Or maybe just to embrace him, to comfort him and assure him that he had done no wrong.
"You mean, unregistered places," Shan suggested. No gompa was permitted to function unless licensed by the Bureau of Religious Affairs.
"I know about the Yakde gompas. I've read about them," Jowa said with a meaningful glance toward Shan. The purbas kept an ever-expanding chronicle of the atrocities committed by the Chinese, with copies maintained by purbas all over Tibet. "They were always in the remote places," Jowa said. "Out of touch with everything. Out of touch for years, sometimes. Places where no one would live, places where you would think no man could live. They were dying out, even when Religious Affairs started looking for them. Some were closed, their monks imprisoned. But some were too remote, too tiny for the government to worry about. The air force made bombing practice on three or four, didn't bother with the rest. Word was that in some of them disease swept through and killed all the monks."
"But Bajys," Shan said, putting his hand on the nervous man, guiding him gently onto the bench beside him. "They must have told you. A place to take Khitai in case of trouble, in emergency. A dropka, like you, could find places in the mountains."
Bayjs pressed his hand against his forehead, as if it hurt. "Lau. I was to go to Lau."
"Did she ever speak of another place? Maybe she went there herself sometimes. Maybe the waterkeeper went there."
"A diamond lake," Bajys said. "All I know is she went there for strength once, to a place with a diamond lake."
Jowa's head shot up. "There's a lake, a shrine lake, an oracle lake, a few miles from here. I saw it once from a distance, with an old hunter. He said it froze much later than others, that deities must live in it because it always shined like a diamond."
They walked in silence for hours, through the high barren landscape, wary of any sound, dashing for cover even at a sudden roar of wind, fearful that it could be a plane or helicopter. Their paths were the trails of wild goats, their landmarks distant peaks that Jowa frequently stopped to study, as if he were mentally triangulating their postion. The purba led them around a valley where a small herd of antelope ran, then passed over a saddle of rock and began climbing a long ridge, always climbing, jogging along the bare places without cover, stopping twice to add rocks to the cairns built at high points as offerings to the mountain deities. A raven flew over them for an hour, watching them closely, circling back, roosting from time to time as if waiting for them. Bajys, whom Shan always kept in front of him, stopped often to stare at the creature, as if somehow he recognized it.
They went higher, over another pass, then up a steep trail of switchbacks. Shan found himself gasping for oxygen for the first time since acclimating to the Tibetan altitude years earlier. They found a stream of blue glacier melt and drank long. Jowa remained squatting by the stream. "I was wondering," he said to Shan, "did you tell Lokesh where the waterkeeper is?"
Shan rose and looked at the purba. "He listened while I spoke about it," he recounted slowly, then saw the concern in Jowa's eyes and understood. Gendun and Lokesh might try to find the waterkeeper, a link to the lost boy. Shan closed his eyes and fought the image in his mind's eye. If the lama decided Glory Camp was where he needed to be, he would walk right up to the wire, walk right up to the knobs and Prosecutor Xu.
Before they left Bajys had collected a dozen stones and built a small cairn, a tribute to the deity who lived in the mountain they climbed. It was to gain merit, Shan realized, part of atoning for losing Khitai. Bajys started down the path as he finished, but Jowa and Shan lingered, each adding several stones himself, sharing, Shan knew, the same silent fear of Lokesh and Gendun being captured at Glory Camp.
The further they climbed, the greater became Shan's sense of entering a different world. Bajys seemed to sense it too. He hung back, trying to let Shan pass him, to let him linger behind, but Shan pushed him on. A snow squall passed over them, obscuring Jowa but leaving his tracks outlined in white for them to follow.
"If Jowa is wrong," Bajys said as Shan caught up with him, sounding suddenly very confident, "we will die in the cold that dwells this high." They had a single blanket for the three of them, only a small pouch of cold tsampa to eat, and nowhere was there sign of fuel for a fire.
Abruptly the sky cleared into a deep, brilliant cobalt.
Looking below, Shan saw that the snow had not stopped but that they had simply climbed above the storm.
They walked for another hour, over another ridge, then found Jowa waiting for them at the top of a small ledge that overlooked an extraordinary valley. They stood at the northern head of a mile-long expanse of gravel and dried grass that dropped between two long, massive rock walls with such perfect symmetry that they gave the impression of two monoliths that had once towered at the north end of the valley but that had been pushed over to shield the valley. Between them at the far end was a lake, still and clear, a piece of sky fallen to earth. The walls dropped at nearly identical angles toward the lake, each lined near its top with a tier of snow so perfectly straight that it seemed a baker had frosted them. Surprisingly, despite the cold and altitude, a few gnarled junipers grew at the edge of the water. And at the end of the valley, there was nothing but air. The world simply fell away past the strip of land that defined the end of the valley. In the far distance mountains could be seen, hugged by mist, but between the far peaks and the valley was only sky. Shan remembered stepping above the snow squall. It was as if they had arrived in a land that floated in the clouds.
"I thought this would be the place," Jowa said, with worry in his eyes. They would have no time to return to the shelter of Senge Drak before nightfall.
Shan moved to his side and looked down the face of the ledge they stood on. Three hundred feet below, past a series of ledges that jutted out like giant steps from the cliff face, there was a row of rocks. No, he saw, not a row, but a wall of rocks.
The silence was broken by a sudden hollow tapping sound from nearby, so loud it made him jump. A raven called as if in reply, and Shan looked up to see the large black bird land on a rock thirty feet away. Somehow he knew that it was the same bird that had followed them.
Jowa grabbed his arm, and Shan turned to follow his gaze toward Bajys, who had dropped to his knees by a flat rock that was immersed in the shadows. Bajys wore a look of wonder, the way Lokesh sometimes looked when his eyes saw between worlds. Shan took a hesitant step forward.
It was a rock, only a rock, or rather a large roundish boulder on top of a flat rock. But the rock had a smile on it.
They heard the hollow tapping again, louder, and it made Bajys crouch down, as if cowering. Shan drew closer, and the smile in the rock grew larger. Bajys wasn't cowering, he realized. The dropka was bowing.
A grey arm extended out of the boulder, holding the bottom of a short wooden staff, and as the base of the staff hit the rock they heard the tapping sound again. The raven spoke and hopped closer.
Shan knelt, then Jowa knelt, and as they watched, the boulder seemed to inch forward, its smile growing still bigger.
"Ai yi!" Bajys gasped.
The darkness above the smile stirred and two eyes appeared.
It was a man, an ancient man wrapped in a grey sheepskin cloak and a conical cap of the same material, shaped to cover the back of his neck and to hang low over his eyes, so that they were obscured when his head was bent. The eyes studied each of the three men in turn, sparkling with energy. The man tapped his staff again.
"After the snow my stick always rings," he said with amazement in his eyes, and he tapped it again for sheer pleasure. His voice was hoarse and slow, as if long out of practice. His skin was grey parchment, his fingers long and gnarled, as though made of jointed pebbles.
Shan looked at Bajys and Jowa. The Tibetans seemed overpowered by the old man.
The man's head drifted up and his eyes fluttered closed for a moment. "When the wind stops," he whispered, "listen to the water. You can hear it shimmering."
"We are looking for the gompa," Shan said with a quiver in his voice.
The man's head cocked to one side, and he laughed, a deep laugh that ended with a series of wheezing sounds. Then he abruptly rose, as if he had been pulled up by some unseen force. He stepped between Shan and Jowa and stopped, looking at the raven. The bird cocked its head at the man, turned toward the lake, and disappeared, not flying but jumping over the side of the ledge.
The man laughed again, stepped into a patch of shadow, and, incredibly, began to shrink.
Bajys gasped, then rose and stepped forward as if he might help the stranger. But the man had disappeared into the rock.
"A sorcerer," Bajys gasped.
"No," Shan said with slow realization. "Stairs."
They moved into the shadows and found a narrow set of steps, carved into the living rock and worn hollow in the center from centuries of use. Bajys darted forward and disappeared down into the shadows. Jowa and Shan exchanged an uneasy glance and followed.
It wasn't a cave they entered, as Shan had expected, but a dimly lit room of stone and mortar walls built against the cliff face. The light of a single butter lamp lit the room, below a long thangka of a brilliant blue Buddha. The Primordial Buddha, it was called- the Buddha of Pure Awareness. A brazier, laced with cobwebs, stood near the base of the rock steps. The wall opposite the rock face and the wall at the far end of the room each had a single heavy wooden door. Shan tried the nearest one. It opened slowly, with a groan of its iron hinges, into a chamber lit by a window that looked out over the valley.
From two wooden pegs driven into the mortar a rod was suspended, holding the remnants of an old jute sack over the stone window casement. There were cushions along the wall. On one cushion sat a small bow, like that he had used at Senge Drak. Though obscured with dust Shan could see that several cushions were made of silk, richly embroidered with shapes of conches, fish, lotus flowers, and other sacred symbols. It had the feel of a small dukhang, a monastic assembly hall, where lessons might have been given.
He stood silently as Jowa walked along the walls, feeling the reverence that permeated the chamber. "I think you have found it," Shan suggested. "One of the Yakde's gompas."
A small bronze Buddha, no more than eight inches high, had been placed on a stool near the window, facing the valley, as if to let him see the water that looked like sky. Or perhaps, Shan thought, so he could keep watch.
Jowa stood by the little Buddha. It, too, was covered with dust. He took the tail of his shirt and wiped clean not the Buddha but the stool around it, the way a monk would clean an altar without disturbing its sacred objects. When he was done he looked up at the door and back to Shan, both men realizing in the same moment that Bajys had not joined them.
They stepped back into the first chamber, then opened the second door. It opened silently into a dim passage. They followed it past half a dozen meditation cells and then descended another set of ancient stone stairs. The mountain, Shan realized, as he studied the steps and stone of the passage, did indeed descend in a series of huge stairlike ledges. What he had seen from the top had been the rock slab roofs of the structures built on those ledges.
A door at the bottom of the second set of stairs opened into a long passage, much warmer, its air hinting of incense and butter and the slightly acrid smell that came from braziers fueled by dried chips of animal dung. They passed more cells and opened a heavy timber door with ornate iron work, stepping into a large room that was brightly lit by two windows, one sealed with a frame of panes made of blown glass, uneven and bubbled, the other covered with a piece of transparent plastic sheeting that rattled in the wind.
There were half a dozen men in the room, all in faded maroon robes, seated in a circle around a large smoldering brazier. Several held the long rectangular leaves that came from pecha texts, and they appeared to have been reading to one another. One of them, now shorn of his cap and cloak, was the ancient man with the parchment complexion from above. Bajys, to Shan's surprise, was serving the monks tea, as if he were hosting them, as if he were a novice of the gompa, a familiar of the household.
Carpets, threadbare in spots, were laid on the floor, overlapping so that none of the stone floor was exposed. The walls were panelled in fragrant wood.
As Shan stepped forward, the men stared at him with wide-eyed expressions of curiosity. A bald man several years older than Shan but clearly the youngest of the group glanced at the back wall where clothing hung on pegs. The slight movement of his eyes confirmed Shan's suspicion that the monks were unlicensed. When Chinese came, the monks put on the clothes of peasants.
Jowa exchanged a glance with Shan. He had seen it too. The last gompa Shan had visited had a banner over its gate that read Buddhism Must Resonate with Chinese Socialism. It had been raised by the Democratic Management Committee of the gompa, the body appointed by the Bureau of Religious Affairs to supervise the gompa's affairs. Committee members, carefully screened by political officers before being appointed by the government, were responsible, among other things, for assuring that all monks signed certificates promising not to take part in political activity.
The tension in the room broke as Bajys stepped forward with tea for Shan and Jowa, and they silently sat with the monks in their circle. This gompa had no Democratic Management Committee, no political certificates, no licenses for its monks. If discovered by the government its residents would be arrested and sentenced to hard labor. Some monks, like Jowa, walked away from their gompas instead of signing political certificates and applying for Beijing's permission. Shan knew many who had signed, strong, devoted teachers who argued that a piece of Chinese paper made no difference, and others who insisted that no one could ever be the same after signing, that the act was like a dark stone cast into the waters of their serenity, rippling outward, changing forever the face of their inner god.
As he surveyed the circle of monks a realization warmed his heart. Although these monks had been warned about Chinese and wearing robes, he knew by looking in their faces that they had no first-hand experience with licenses or government bureaucrats who pressed monks to report what their companions prayed for. Only the youngest of the monks had hesitated and looked at the peasant clothing. The monks in the circle were like the untamed, feral animals of the changtang, untouched and pure. A species near extinction.
The monks sat quietly, smiling radiantly at their visitors. "Welcome to Raven's Nest gompa," the bald monk said.
Jowa, to Shan's surprise, spoke first. "We are sorry for the intrusion," he said. "We came about the Yakde Lama."
To a man, the monks nodded and kept smiling.
"He lived here," the bald monk said. "He's coming back."
Jowa threw a triumphant glance toward Shan, then looked back at the bald monk. "The boy Khitai? He lived here?"
The monks looked at each other in confusion.
"The Yakde," the bald monk said with a shrug, as if not understanding Jowa's questions. "He would sit and meditate in the middle of herds of wild antelope," the man said in a bright tone. "He wrote a teaching on it. We have it, in his own writing. That was the Second. The Fourth remembered and came to borrow it, and he took it to Lhasa to show the Dalai Lama."
The Second Yakde, Shan quickly calculated, would have lived at least three centuries earlier.
Jowa did not press. He did something truly remarkable. He looked at the bald man and smiled- a serene smile, a monk's smile.
"The Ninth," Shan said after a few moments. "Did the Ninth come here?"
"Once," the monk said. "He spent some months here and wrote a teaching about what we do here. The Souls of Changtang Mountains, he called it."
Shan's mind raced. He should ask about Lau, about the waterkeeper. But his heart had another question. "Did the Yakde go south, beyond Lhasa?" he heard himself ask. "To a place called Lhadrung?"
The bald monk readily nodded. The man must be the kenpo, Shan decided, the abbot of the Raven's Nest. "The Third did, and the Fifth. To a hermitage, deep in a mountain. And the last time an army came," the abbot said, "men arrived from Lhasa. Wise men. They said, send your young monks away, to hide. Some went to that mountain place. The dropka brought horses and some of their children. They were going to fight this new army, the dropka said, and their children needed a place to go until the war was over." The abbot sighed and sipped his tea. "The next year we got a letter from one of our monks. They rode for weeks," he recounted, "only at night. Near a city there was great fighting, terrible bloodshed, and the invaders shot cannons into the mountains where our people were. In the end," he said slowly, "three of our monks arrived in the Lhadrung hiding place and two of the children. A young boy and a girl."
What had Gendun said- that he saw the Kunlun with a stranger's eyes but that he knew it in his heart? When he was young, his parents had given him to monks who took him away.
A bell sounded from down another corridor, and the monks handed their pages to the abbot and rose. Jowa stepped eagerly to the shelves, gazing upon the pechas, row after row of sutras and teachings. As the abbot arranged the pages into a stack and slipped them into a silk cover, he starting explaining details of the collection to Jowa.
Shan wandered down the corridor. A door to a room at the end was ajar. Bajys was inside, squatting before a long thangka that hung on the back wall of the room, an elaborate image of a man, not one of the Buddha forms, not even one of the many prominent teachers whom Shan had learned to recognize in such paintings. The floor of the room held a carpet far richer than those he had seen elsewhere in the gompa. Indeed, the entire room was appointed in a style far more elegant than elsewhere in the gompa. A robe with bright embroidery hung on one wall. A bronze figure of a lama, possibly the ancient teacher Guru Rinpoche, sat prominently on a table by the door.
"What is it?" Shan asked, not understanding anything Bajys had done since arriving at the gompa.
Bajys just smiled, the first smile Shan had ever seen on his face. There was a low wooden platform bed against the far wall. Bajys bent to straighten the bedding, then picked up a small bronze dorje, the small scepterlike object of Buddha ritual, on the table beside the bed and carefully wiped away its dust. He looked at Shan with surprise in his eyes, as if Shan had failed to see something important, something obvious to Bajys. He took Shan's elbow and guided him to the place where he had been squatting and nodded at the thangka.
Bajys had never been there before, Shan knew. He had not known about the gompa. But he had recognized the figure in the ancient painting.
"His eyes," Bajys said a tone of awe.
Then, with a catch in his breath, Shan understood. It was the Yakde. Bajys was looking at the boy lama in another body and had recognized him.
"It's his room," someone said over his shoulder. It was the bald monk, the abbot. "The room for when the Yakde visits."
Bajys looked at both men with a small, confused smile, then looked at the dorje in his hands, as if not understanding how it got there.
"How did you know to come here?" Shan asked Bajys. He had not had time to explore the entire structure. Something had guided him to the room. "You were never here before. But you knew it was his room."
"It was just the place I was going to," Bajys began, struggling for words. "I couldn't know," he said, looking at the dorje as he turned it over and over in his hands. The dorje was called the diamond vehicle by many Buddhists, symbolizing the anchor of enlightenment, the indestructible power of Buddhahood. "My eyes didn't know," he said in a tone of awe, as if perhaps the dorje had called him. "But my feet did." He looked up, clearly pained by his inability to understand what had happened but unable to stop grinning.
The abbot took Shan down one more flight of stairs, past a storeroom that held baskets of grain and dried dung. Shan paused at the door to the room, and saw that only a tenth of the space was utilized. From pegs on one wall hung huge coils of ropes. He remembered what Batu had said at the lama's field, that Khitai had told him old men came sometimes to fix the flag on the huge rock tower. Shan followed his guide onto a long terrace that was covered by the ledge above but open on three sides, supported only by pillars of mortared stones. Along the inside wall was a long line of mounted keg-sized cylinders of bronze and wood- prayer wheels. At the far end stood a large four-legged brazier, for burning fragrant offerings. Below, on the valley floor, Shan saw the wall of rocks he had noticed from above, and he realized that it was an old corral. The Raven's Nest hung above the corral, clinging to the side of the mountain, separated from the valley floor by a precipitous drop of at least two hundred feet.
"It must be a difficult thing, to be the abbot of such a place," Shan said.
"I'm sorry?"
"Your job. To be responsible-"
The man smiled shyly. "But I am not the abbot," he said in a tone of apology. "I am just the abbot's assistant. While the abbot is away I do his job."
"Away?"
"On the other side of the mountains."
Shan stared at the brilliant waters. Maybe it was true. They brought visions of truth. "How long ago?"
"Not long. Five, maybe six years. But he's in good health. A nun came once and told us."
"What," Shan asked slowly, "what exactly did the nun do?"
"Gave us the message. No letter. She said a letter would be dangerous. She brought a dried flower, that's how we knew. Rinpoche likes to meditate on flowers. She smiled a great deal and gave us incense and bricks of tea and asked to go to the Yakde's room. She offered prayers there for a long time, and then she climbed down and sat by the oracle lake. She said she had always heard about this place, from her teachers, and she was glad to have seen it before she died. Then she asked for messages to the abbot from each of us and memorized our names and our messages. She said mostly she had come because the abbot was worried about us."
Lau had been there. Lau had sat in front of the thankga and no doubt had recognized the eyes as Bajys had. She had sat by the oracle waters after she had delivered the message from the abbot of the Raven's Nest, the waterkeeper who sat in Glory Camp. Shan vividly remembered the old lama's serene face and the dried flower in his fingers.
"Sometimes," Shan suggested, "sometimes you have other visitors."
"Herders come," the monk said, pointing out the narrow trail that followed the left side of the valley. "They bring grain and new blankets, sometimes. The herders have always kept the gompa alive. They say they can't bring their children for training anymore. But they bring us food." He looked toward a small ledge on the rock face fifty feet away. It held a nest. Three ravens sat there, all watching the two men intently. "Except, one day, the ravens were very scared, and one of the cloud riders came. Loud, like thunder."
Shan closed his eyes. "What did they want?"
"Up on his rock, Rinpoche, our old one, was rejoicing. He said there were some Buddhas who flew like that. But the rest of us saw that they were just Chinese."
"They came to find you?"
"Not really. They paid us no attention at first. We watched from here for a long time as they worked by the lake. Then I put on the clothing of a herder and went down to the valley, and they met me. The man in charge said he knew we were illegal monks. He said that bad Chinese would arrest us, but that they were good Chinese and were our friends. He and his friends came back to the gompa and we offered them tea, and they gave us boxes of sweet biscuits. They asked about us, about who our leaders were, about our sect."
"You mean they were scientists?" Shan asked in confusion. "Professors?"
The monk was watching another group of ravens, flying in circles over the lake as if engaged in some aerial dance. Shan repeated the question.
"Not scientists," he said, still watching the birds. "Builders."
"I don't understand."
He turned back to Shan, puzzled, apparently trying to find words. "Wait here," he said and trotted back to the door, leaving Shan alone.
Shan looked out over the valley with an unexpected contentment. The Raven's Nest was so high, and the horizon so distant, that the clouds seemed to be moving below them, across the mouth of the valley. The place seemed disconnected from the planet, its remoteness a quality unto itself, as if a piece of the world had indeed broken off into the wind, unaffected by time, unaffected by the world below.
But then the assistant abbot appeared, with a satisfied smile, and in his hands was a red nylon jacket and on the breast of the jacket, where he pointed, was a gold emblem of a man and a woman reaching over an oil derrick, a sheep, and a tractor in a field.
Shan felt as though he had been kicked in the belly. He turned away for a moment, fighting a sudden flood of dismay and fear, the emotions of defeat. The world had found the Raven's Nest after all.
"It's a strong coat. We all got one," the monk said in a consoling tone, as if trying to convince Shan not to be worried. "When Rinpoche goes on top this winter he can wear it."
"When they came," Shan said with a sigh, "did they give names?"
The assistant abbot shrugged. "Our Mandarin is poor, I'm afraid. The one in charge smoked many cigarettes, and we couldn't see his eyes because he wore glasses that were very dark. He asked questions about the lake."
Shan looked out over the shimmering waters. "What about it? What kind of questions?"
"When did it freeze, how deep is it, did we drink the water ourselves, where were the sources of the streams that replenished it."
"You said he worked at the lake, before you went to talk. What did they do?"
"I don't know. Maybe they prayed. Maybe they drank some. It is a holy lake, it has been holy for as long as people remember, even before the teachings of Buddha arrived."
"And his questions, how did you answer them?"
"It is always replenished, because it has no bottom. And of course we drink the water, even in winter when we melt its ice. It freezes much later than other lakes."
"Because it is protected," Shan said, "because it is exposed to the south and heat is radiated from the huge walls."
"No," the monk said with a patient smile. "Because the mountain deities bathe in it."
Shan nodded. "And that is all he asked?"
The assistant abbot stared out into the sky. "He wanted to know about the animals in the ranges here. I told him the land below is thick with antelope and wild yak, that the mountains have wild goats and lynx and snow leopard. He wanted to know how many people could sleep in the gompa. He said workers might come to help us, and afterward important people might stay here sometimes."
"Help you?"
"Build things, I think."
"Did they come back after that?"
"Twice. Once to take many buckets of water out of the lake. Once to take many photographs. They brought us more of the sweet biscuits that the old ones like."
"Did you wear your robes when he came those times?"
"No. He asked us not to. He said it could be dangerous for now, that we couldn't trust every Chinese. But he gave me great hope."
"You mean because they are coming to-" To what? Shan wondered. To shoot animals, doubtlessly, but not just that. Not if workers needed to come first. "To build?"
"Of course not, we could not permit it. But I told the old ones," the monk said with a generous smile toward Shan, "I explained that it is a new time, we don't have to be afraid of all the Chinese anymore."
"Why could you not permit them to construct something?"
"We hold the valley and the gompa in trust. We await the return of the Yakde Lama. Maybe in ten years, maybe twenty, I told him."
"I don't understand."
"Only the Yakde Lama could give such permission."
Suddenly the ravens on the ledge shot into the sky, flying in a straight line toward those who circled the lake. They began to chatter, so loudly Shan could hear the echo down the valley.
The monk studied the birds silently for a moment, then nodded and turned to Shan, excitement mounting on his face. "You have luck," he said brightly, "the cloud riders are returning."