After midnight, as they stopped once again to move rocks from the road, Shan thought he heard something. A metallic rattle, a machine noise, coming from far ahead of them. He heard only a snippet of sound, then it was gone, so quickly he wasn't sure he had heard it at all. Sound traveled unpredictably in the high, rarified atmosphere. It could have been a truck on the lonely road ahead of them. It could have been a helicopter behind them. It could have been a plane in the far distance. No one spoke about the noise, but when they finished Jowa checked the two empty barrels with his hand lantern and insisted that Gendun switch places with Lokesh. If he slammed the brakes hard three times, it was the signal for Gendun and Shan to hide.
But when the need arose there was no time for a signal. Shan woke from a deep slumber as the truck lurched to a stop, then heard Jowa calling out in anger to someone on the road.
He quickly helped Gendun into one of the barrels and covered it, then peered over the top of the truck cab as Jowa switched on their headlights. Half a dozen men stood by a heavy red truck, the size of their own, though much newer. The engine hood of the truck was braced open, and strewn across the road were a spare tire and metallic objects that could have been engine parts.
They were not Public Security, Shan saw with relief, nor the army. He could see Jowa speaking with one of the men, a big, broad-shouldered Han Chinese wearing a white shirt. Jowa was pointing at the red truck and at the road, which was blocked by the tire and parts.
Two of the men, in light brown shirts and pants of matching color, bent over the tire in the road, glancing frequently toward the man in the white shirt. Another stood with a foot on the bumper of the red truck, watching the sky. And a pair stood just behind the man who spoke with Jowa. They were all Han, and though they did not carry themselves as stiffly as soldiers, they had the quick, hunting eyes of soldiers. Shan looked back at the truck. An emblem was on the driver's door, what appeared in the dim light to be two outstretched arms, joined at the top.
Shan silently climbed down in the shadows and inched his way along the far side of their own truck, out of the strangers' view, until he reached the passenger door, where he ventured another look over the hood. What was it, he thought, what was so peculiar about these men? They were well dressed. They all wore the same trim brown clothing, except for the white-shirted man speaking with Jowa. They had no visible weapons, but three had large wrenches extending out of their pockets, and one held a ball-peen hammer. Two had heavy wooden sticks like truncheons hanging from their belts. Inside the cab of the truck he saw a figure in the passenger seat, the face lost in the night. A bright orange ember moved to and from the face. A plume of smoke rose from the window. Shan looked back at the man who watched the sky. The demon had been called away by lightning, the woman had said. Demons used lightning to speak with each other.
They needed a few more minutes to complete repairs, Shan heard the white-shirted man explain to Jowa. But no one seemed to be working on the engine. The man asked where Jowa was heading. North, was Jowa's reply, north to sell salt. The two men behind the speaker began to move away, distancing themselves from Jowa as though wary of his reach, then circling about, toward the Tibetans' truck.
"Can we help you?" Jowa asked loudly, watching the two men as they approached his open door.
"Nothing up north," the stranger in the white shirt observed in an accusing tone, still the only one of his company to speak. "Nothing but bandits."
Lokesh climbed out of the truck and stepped to Jowa's side. The man in the white shirt stared at him intently, surveying him from head to toe.
Shan realized he could be mistaken. Public Security didn't always wear uniforms. But Public Security carried submachine guns, not wrenches.
"You a bandit, old man?" the big-shouldered Han asked with a lightless grin. His deep voice echoed off the rockface. "Where you going, sneaking about like this in the middle of the night?"
"Salt," Lokesh replied in a dry, croaking voice, and Shan saw him do something he had often seen him do in prison. He began shaking his head, and then his arm, as if he could not control it, as if he suffered from a disease of the aged. "Good Tibetan salt. Going as far as it takes to sell our salt," Lokesh said. Still shaking, he stepped toward the man, who retreated a step as if scared of him. "You should buy it so we can turn around and go home. This old truck hurts my bones," Lokesh groaned. "I want to go home."
The Han walked a complete circle around Lokesh, studying him again, then gave a shallow laugh. "Takes papers to sell things, old man. Bet you don't have papers. That's why you travel at night."
Shan's mind raced. If the strangers were bandits, what did the Tibetans have of value that might appease them? An old pair of binoculars. A week's supply of food. Perhaps the truck itself, and its barrels of salt. He had a nightmarish vision of the strangers driving away with Gendun still in his barrel.
The two men continued to circle the truck, aiming hand lanterns into the cargo bay. The man in white glanced back at the cab of his truck, toward the glowing cigarette that hung in the shadow.
Suddenly Shan was in the beams of the two brilliant lanterns held behind him. He stood like a dumb animal trapped by the light and let himself be led, one man pulling each elbow, to the man in the white shirt.
The man circled Shan as he had Lokesh, then stood in front of him, disappointment obvious on his face. He leaned close to Shan's ear. "Don't turn your back on the damned locusts," he said in a low voice. "They'll hit you with a stone and call it an avalanche." Locusts. The term was an epithet used by the Chinese for Tibetans, for the sound they made when chanting their mantras. The man looked back with a broad smile, apparently pleased with his suggestion, then stood in front of the three men.
"Don't think we can let you go north tonight," he announced. The men who had pretended to work on the tire rose, as if the words were a cue.
Shan glanced at Jowa, whose body was tightening like a coiled spring.
Shan put his hands in his pockets and shuffled forward, standing in front of Jowa. "You'll have to," he said in a good-natured tone.
The man in the white shirt seemed amused by Shan's announcement. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. "Why so, comrade?" He turned his body sideways, as if to make sure Shan saw the men assembled behind him.
"Because the People's Liberation Army is chasing us," Shan said matter-of-factly.
The man's smile broadened. "The three of you and an antique truck," he said with a skeptical air.
"You know the army," Shan shot back. "Sometimes they just do it for practice."
As Shan returned the man's steady gaze his smile began to fade. He nodded at one of the men beside him, who bolted toward the truck, disappearing into the shadows by the passenger's door. He surveyed Shan, Lokesh, and Jowa once more, as if being sure he could remember their faces, then looked at the cab a moment and snapped his fingers.
His men leapt into action. In less than a minute the road was cleared.
"Be careful, comrades," the man warned in an icy voice. "Bandits are around every corner."
Jowa stepped toward the cab with a sideways motion, his eyes jumping from man to man. Shan pulled Lokesh back to the truck, and seconds later they were in the cab and driving away.
They drove up switchbacks over a high ridge for a quarter hour, then stopped just past the top to help Gendun out of his barrel. As Lokesh slid out of the cab, Jowa touched Shan's arm. "I don't know who they were," he said. "I thought soldiers at first."
Shan realized Jowa was asking him to explain. "We're close to India and the road to Pakistan. There are smugglers. Maybe they were waiting for a shipment." Jowa pulled out his map and climbed out to study it in the parking lights. Shan turned to look through the rear window. No one was in the cargo bay. He looked in the side mirror. In the moonlight he saw Lokesh, sitting alone on the ground. Shan jumped out and jogged to the back of the truck.
Lokesh was holding his beads near his chest, counting them quickly. Shan climbed into the cargo bay. The hiding barrels were empty. Gendun was gone.
Shan stood with his hands clenched on the side of the barrel they had hidden Gendun in, his heart pounding wildly. A small white square of cloth was tied to the board above Gendun's barrel. A khata, a prayer scarf. Shan untied it and stared at it in confusion.
"Where is he?" Shan called out in alarm and darted to Lokesh, shaking his shoulder.
Lokesh looked up to the sky, slowly surveying the stars, as if they might show sign of Gendun. "He is gone now," he observed in a tiny voice.
Shan ran up the road a hundred feet and called Gendun's name, twisting the khata around his fingers. The sound flushed a bird from its roost and it flew across the face of the moon. He turned and saw that Jowa was in the bay now, staring at the empty barrels. Shan jogged back and squatted at Lokesh's side. "Where is Rinpoche?" he repeated desperately. "Was he taken by those men?"
"Lokesh, you must understand-" Jowa called out from behind Shan, "he's our-" His voice drifted off as he looked at the dark horizon. The wind seemed to rise, a cold wind that hinted of snow.
"He could be lost," Shan said in a brittle tone. "He could have fallen out of the truck on the steep slopes."
"He must have been taken," Jowa declared. "The bastards in the red truck. And we just drove away."
"Sometimes," Lokesh said with a long sigh, "a lama just gets called away." His voice was calm, but his eyes were forlorn. He saw the khata in Shan's hand, its end fluttering in the wind, and reached for it. Shan let it go. The old Tibetan laid it on his thigh and stroked it with a small, grateful smile, as though he needed reassurance that the Gendun who had traveled with them had been the flesh and blood Gendun. Shan dropped to the ground beside Lokesh, but his heart felt too heavy to pray.
Gendun was with the strange men in the red truck, the ones who acted like Public Security, who could chew up and digest a man like Gendun in hours if they chose. At best, Gendun was alone in the wilderness of mountains. Gendun, who had hardly known the outside world until seven days before. With a pang he remembered the first time he had met Gendun, hidden away in his hermitage. He had marveled over the watch on Shan's wrist. When Shan had let him examine it, he had listened to it, and shook his head, not just for the wonder of its workings but that people would think they needed such things. "You Chinese," he had said with a grin and a shake of his head.
Jowa turned the truck around and drove slowly in the direction they had come as Shan stood on the sideboard and held onto the mirror mount, calling out Gendun's name. Jowa turned on the headlights. They drove for a mile, then Jowa stopped and turned off the engine. Jowa sat at the wheel, gripping it tightly, torment twisting his face. Shan looked at him a moment. Did Jowa's pain come because he was a warrior who could find no enemy or because of what he had said before, that if the lamas didn't survive, there was no point in continuing?
"What if it just ends like this?" Jowa asked in a near whisper. "The last of the old ones just disappears. And the world stumbles on, a body without a soul." He looked out at a tall precipice that rose toward the heavens, a vast, darker shadow in a landscape of shadow. "What if he were the last one?" he asked the mountains, so low Shan barely heard.
"They said a lama was missing," Shan reminded Jowa. "Lau was killed and a lama was missing."
Jowa gave a small, stiff nod. "So your demon's appetite just gets bigger and bigger," he said in a hollow voice. "Three killings now, and two lamas gone."
They drove slowly back to Lokesh, who still prayed at the roadside. Jowa got out and sat with him in the moonlight, lighting a stick of incense as Shan climbed into the cargo bay.
"What is it?" the purba called out when he saw Shan emerge with the tattered canvas bag that carried his meager belongings.
"I will go back," Shan said. "I will go no further until I am sure he is safe."
"You can't," Jowa said.
"I have to." Shan squatted by Lokesh, who looked at him with pain in his eyes.
"You can't because they sent you," Jowa protested. "Because Gendun said you're needed in the north."
"That woman and the boys are dead," Shan said. "They are dead, and Gendun is not. Not yet."
Lokesh, his eyes now locked on the ember at the tip of the incense, slowly shook his head. "Those evil men were meant to be on the road tonight," he said. "And Gendun was meant to disappear tonight."
"And maybe I too was meant to disappear," Shan suggested.
"No," Lokesh said. "You are meant to go on." The certainty in his voice rang like a bell.
"Lokesh, my friend," Shan said, and he knelt now, putting his hand on Lokesh's shoulder. "I have been torn apart and patched back together so many times I am like a ragged old quilt. There are still so many pieces of me that don't fit together that sometimes I wonder my soul doesn't burst apart." He sensed the anguish in his voice, but he could not hide it.
"And you think Gendun has to put them together, Xiao Shan?" Lokesh asked.
"I don't know." He looked at Jowa, who stared at him, his face seeming to swirl with emotion. "But I know that of all the world I have seen, the lamas are the best part of it."
Shan stood, holding the straps of his bag, which still sat at his feet. He looked over the mountains, the snowcaps glowing in the moonlight. The wind blew steady and cold, reminding him that Gendun had nothing but his robe and a thin piece of canvas against the elements. An animal howled in the distance.
"We will wait here for Xiao Shan," Lokesh said to Jowa, as though Shan had already left, and raised the stick of incense in his hand as if it were a torch. "Xiao Shan will come back." He spoke as though Shan had already gone. "Because somewhere, on a high mountain, he will realize something. We are not responsible for Gendun. Gendun is responsible for us."
Shan realized that his fingers had closed around his gau, the box that carried his prayer and his feather. Gendun had sensed something that afternoon when he had given him the token, when he had emphasized to Shan that their trip could end in unexpected ways. Slowly, almost unconsciously, he sat down with his companions.
They prayed until the stick burned out, then they climbed back into the truck. Shan stood in the back, fiercely gripping one of the ribs of the bay, watching the blackened mountains as they moved on into the night.
He slept fitfully, often awakened with nightmarish visions of Gendun in peril, Gendun lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, Gendun in the hands of Public Security, interrogators standing by with electric cattle prods. He was roused when the truck made a sudden, wide turn onto a rough gravel track, then drifted off again, the eastern sky already grey with the hint of dawn.
It wasn't the morning light that broke the deep slumber that finally came, nor the stopping of the truck, but the braying of a large animal at the side of the vehicle, a sound so explosive that Shan sprang out of his sleep and slammed his head into one of the opposite barrels.
"End of the road," Jowa called out from behind the truck, where he stood with Shan's canvas bag. Shan stumbled to the open tailgate, holding his throbbing head, and nearly stumbled onto Lokesh as he stepped down. The old Tibetan was bent over at the rear of the truck, peering around the corner with a glint in his eye. He acknowledged Shan with an anxious nod and looked back around the truck.
As he surveyed the new landscape, Shan touched his forehead, absently noting that the fingers came away with a trace of blood. In the dim dawn light he could see that they were in what seemed to be a maze of huge boulders and outcroppings. Pockets of snow lay scattered among the rocks. No, not snow, he realized as he stared at one of the bright patches. It was sand.
He stepped around the truck and froze. Standing eight feet away was a tall brown creature with a long face and two large humps on its back, wearing a leather harness. A Bactrian camel. Lokesh ventured forward, shielding himself behind Shan as he peered over Shan's shoulder. The camel looked up at them, snorted, emitted another loud bray, then shook itself, creating an unexpected jingle. Small bells were fastened to the ends of the harness.
Lokesh burst into a low, wheezing laughter. Shan turned and stared in confusion at his old friend. The laughter could mean that Lokesh was scared, or confused, or even, on rare occasions, that he was filled with joy.
An angry syllable shot out from the shadows behind them. The camel seemed to recognize the voice or the word, and took two steps forward with an expectant look. Shan looked back for the source of the voice. He could see past the boulders more clearly now, into a gravel wash that descended slowly through the maze of outcroppings toward a series of smaller rocky ridges and long, low mountains covered with gravel and clumps of grey-green vegetation.
"Ai yi!" Lokesh exclaimed in a loud whisper, and stepped closer to Shan as though for protection. The smaller boulders were coming to life. The rising sun had given shape to several of the patches of darkness Shan had seen by the rocks. They were flesh, not stone, silent figures huddled under cloaks of gray and brown. They began to rise slowly, hesitantly, as if the sun's warmth had stirred them from hibernation. But as the faces drew up Shan could see they were not sluggish, only wary.
"Jowa!" one called, and stood up straight, throwing off his cloak. It was a Tibetan, a man several years younger than Jowa, wearing a strip of maroon cloth tied around his sleeve. It was a mark of defiance for monks broken by the government, a swath of color marking the robe that only those with a certificate from the Bureau of Religious Affairs were legally permitted to wear. The Tibetan looked from Jowa back toward a tall man in a fleece vest whose thick black hair was speckled with grey and partially covered with a brimless brown cap. Lingering in the shadows at the tall man's side was a third figure, thin as a post, a man with a stern face and restless eyes, who was wearing denim jeans and canvas running shoes. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken.
The young Tibetan sprang forward and embraced Jowa, who quickly turned and pointed over the mountaintops, toward the direction they had come. Jowa produced a stub of a pencil from his pocket and began marking on a crude map the youth pulled from his pocket. The youth nodded when Jowa was done and climbed into the driver's seat of the truck. A moment later the engine sputtered to life, and with a reluctant groan the old Jiefang edged forward, then gained speed as it maneuvered up the twisting track that led back over the mountains.
"He will watch for Gendun," Jowa said to Shan in a hollow tone. "If he sees Tibetans on the road, he will ask them to watch also."
As the truck disappeared, Shan fought a wave of emotion. The truck was his last connection to Gendun, the last link to the new life he had built in the high ranges of central Tibet, to the monks who had become the only real family he had known since the Red Guard had killed his father more than thirty years before. It was time for Shan to leave the mountains, one of the monks had told him that night at the mandala. Not forever, perhaps, but for a while, to gain distance. To understand who he was, the monk had meant. Shan wasn't a monk, though he lived with monks. But he also wasn't Chinese anymore, not a Beijing Chinese. Consider it a pilgrimage, another monk had said. But Buddhists were sent to the sacred peak of Mount Kalais or other holy sites where the spirits of deities resided. Shan's pilgrimage was to death and confusion, to places where perhaps only sorrow and distrust resided.
They had meant to honor him with their trust, he knew. But in that moment he felt no honor. He felt only fatigue and fear. Fear for Gendun. Fear for the boys who had been killed for reasons no one knew. Fear that he would be stopped before he fulfilled the trust. Imagine you are in a spirit palace, one of his Buddhist teachers had once said, with a hundred doors before you. Only one door is yours, but how long will it take to find it? He sensed the hundred doors today, and all but one led to failure. He fought the tempation to run for the truck, to catch it and climb back into his barrel.
The two strangers stepped forward, then froze at the sound of hooves rushing on the gravel slope below. A rider wearing a tattered felt coat and red wool cap appeared on a brown and white horse, dismounting in a fluid vaulting action before the horse had stopped. The rider stood silently in front of the front of the older man, offering a respectful nod, then pulled off the cap. It was a young woman, with black hair tied in two short braids behind her ears. The camel brayed, then bolted toward her, pushing past Shan and Lokesh so abruptly that Lokesh was knocked to the ground. The woman gave the camel a brief but affectionate stroke on its head, then trotted to Lokesh, extending a hand to help him to his feet.
"Grandfather," she said softly in Tibetan, using the term in the old style, as a form of respect for elders. "Please forgive her, she is but a bata, a yearling, and still has much to learn." Her voice was filled with a quiet strength.
The high pitched wheezing laughter seemed to overtake Lokesh again. "I saw one in a painting once," he said, still sitting in the dirt, shaking the woman's proffered hand as if she had intended to introduce herself. "I said it was one of the mythical creatures, a shape some deity had taken in someone's vision." His grin seemed to encompass his entire face. "My wife said no, it was just a horse with a broken back."
"Oh no, grandfather," the woman said, with twinkling eyes. She was young, Shan saw, no more than twenty-five, and where the rising sun hit her hair there seemed to be red in it. "She's just a donkey who ate two turtles."
The woman gently lifted Lokesh by his shoulder, brushing away the gravel from his back. The two remaining men began moving quickly, retrieving another camel and several small, sturdy horses from behind the rocks. The older man checked the saddles of two of the horses, then led the animals toward Shan and Lokesh, but stopped as he reached the woman's side. "You can't be here, Jakli," he said sternly. "It is too dangerous for you."
The woman he had called Jakli took one step toward him. "She was my friend, Akzu," she said soberly. "She was my teacher."
The words brought a wince to the man's face. "You owe that woman nothing," he said. "Look at what she did to you."
"I still owe her much, despite things," the woman called Jakli said, with a strange combination of defiance and pain in her voice.
The man called Akzu gazed at her for a long time, then a sad smile grew on his face. "Come here, girl," he said, and opened his arms. "Damn them all for keeping you from us. It's been too long."
As the woman embraced him, Akzu still smiled, but his face clouded, as if her presence reminded him of something he had hoped to forget.
Shan studied their new guides as Akzu began to load their bags onto the young camel. The animal had been a shock to Shan, not because he had never seen one, but because he had not appreciated how far they had traveled. This land was different. The people were different. Neither of the two men had the features of Tibetans. They had gone north, Shan reminded himself, so deep into the Kunlun mountains that they had reached a new people. As if in confirmation, the man at the camel called to the man with the bent nose in a language unintelligible to Shan. It was a dialect of the Turkic tongue spoken by the Muslims of China's far west. They were Uighur, Shan thought, or perhaps Kazakh, like the boys who had died.
The man with the bent nose stepped closer, his hand on the neck of the camel. "You're the one," he said in Mandarin to Jowa. "The one who knows about Public Security?"
Jowa glanced at Shan, discomfort obvious in his eyes.
"They told us-" the man pressed, "they said that you know the secrets of the Public Security Bureau."
Jowa frowned. "The last time I was in prison," he said in a reluctant voice, "my cell mate had worked for Public Security. In Lhasa- part of an experiment in bringing Tibetans into their ranks. The experiment failed, and they had to put him somewhere. He knew it would be years before he was freed, and he decided to share his knowledge so his time as a knob wouldn't be wasted."
The man laughed, as if it was a good joke. "They say you destroyed a convoy of Public Security trucks."
"They happened to be parked in the wrong place. An avalanche started."
"But you did it."
"It was the rocks and snow that did the damage," Jowa said soberly. "Sometimes the mountain spirits get angry." The man laughed again. Jowa cast another awkward glance at Shan. The purbas had painfully learned not to ambush the Chinese overtly or commit obvious sabotage. There was always severe retaliation, and almost always it was against the innocent.
"They say you can beat Public Security checkpoints," the man continued, stepping to Jowa's side, helping to lift his bag onto the camel. "Even electronic checkpoints."
The words seemed to surprise Jowa as much as Shan. The man was traveling in the style of the seventeenth century and speaking of computer software security systems from the twenty-first century.
"Invisible checkpoints are not much different from physical ones," Jowa replied, still with his hesitant tone. "You just need to know how to find them." Shan watched in confusion from the shadow by the truck. Only Jowa and the Tibetan who had driven away were purbas, but the others knew purba secrets.
The camel shook its head, pulling the reins from its neck.
"Good for you," the man said, slapping Jowa on the back. "Good for us."
As the man with the crooked nose bent to retrieve the reins from the ground a paper fell from his pocket. A map.
The wind tossed the map into the air, then dropped it into the circle of sunlight at the center of the clearing a few feet from Shan. He stepped into the light and picked it up.
As he did so a brittle silence descended over the two Muslim men, who seemed to notice his features for the first time. He extended the map to the man with the crooked nose, who merely stared at him with anger in his eyes. Akzu muttered a curse under his breath. Shan stuffed the map under a harness strap on the camel and stepped back toward his bag. He had taken only two steps when the man with the bent nose blocked his path.
"Who's this then?" the man snapped, speaking to Jowa but staring at Shan. He aimed a thick finger at Shan like a gun, then raised it and pushed Shan's hat off his head.
"My name is Shan."
Shan retrieved his hat and placed it back on his head. The man knocked it off again.
"You're Chinese," the man said in an accusing tone.
"In some ways," Shan answered calmly. He picked up his hat again. As soon as he pulled it over his ears the man knocked it off a third time.
"He's the one we're bringing," Jowa said, but he did not move from the side of his horse. "Because of the woman Lau."
"No one said anything about a Chinese coming."
"And I never expected a Uighur," Jowa rejoined. "They said Kazakhs would be here."
The man gestured toward the older man. "The Kazakhs and the Uighurs have many mutual interests. And we both have many mutual interests with the purbas."
Akzu stepped between them, alert, his eyes shifting from Shan to the Uighur. "We have more important work now," the older man said to the Uighur and gestured him away from Shan. Shan stared at the strangers. They wanted Jowa, he realized. Jowa who knew how to beat Public Security patrols.
"We can find our own way," a calm voice said behind him. It was Lokesh. He retrieved Shan's hat from the ground and held it.
"Fine," the Uighur said, and pointed his arm toward the foothills below them. "Northwest. Just keep calling and Lau's ghost will find you."
No one spoke as Shan and Lokesh shouldered their bags and began walking in the direction the man had pointed. Jowa muttered something under his breath and began to follow.
The young woman retrieved her horse's reins and jogged to catch up with Shan. "My name is Jakli," she said, taking Shan's bag. "I will take you to Auntie Lau."
Shan offered a grateful nod. "I need to understand how she died."
Jakli nodded. "She drowned in the river, that's what the prosecutor thinks." She cast an uncertain glance toward the older man. "But it's not true," she said quickly. "Lau was shot in the head like an execution. The prosecutor would just make lies about it if she got the body. So we hid Lau. It would be the place for you to start."
Before Shan could reply, a horse shot past them. The Uighur, now mounted, blocked their path. "You have enough trouble, Jakli," he said to the woman. "You can't share secrets. You don't know this Chinese."
"If the old priests sent this man, then he is the one we need," Jakli said to the rider. The determination in her voice seemed as sharp as a blade.
"Old priests get soft," the man muttered.
Jakli's eyes flared. "After decades in prison for defending their faith they get soft? After watching their gompas leveled to dust they get soft? After their thumbs are cut off to stop them from doing their rosaries they get soft?" She touched Lokesh's arm and looked into his eyes. "Grandfather," she said. "You were a priest."
"For a while," Lokesh said, studying the woman with a toothy grin.
"Tell him. How many years in prison?"
"Thirty," he said, still grinning.
Jakli took his hand and held it in both of hers. She gazed at Lokesh, who stared at her in surprise, then she looked at the Uighur. "They don't get soft," Jakli said, the challenge still in her voice. "They get wise. They learn to see things. And if all our priests are gone, then we have to borrow our wisdom."
"I see things," the man said sourly.
"No. You are blind." She turned toward Shan. "This man is called Fat Mao," she said, gesturing toward the thin Uighur. "He thinks his enemy is the Chinese. But our enemies are murderers and tyrants and liars, whatever they look like." There was a cold fury in the woman's words that surprised Shan. But it did not seem to surprise the man on the horse. He winced, as if recognizing the fire he had ignited. With a pull on his reins he retreated a few feet.
"Shan has ways about him," Lokesh declared. "He can see through to the truth when others cannot."
"Great," the man on the horse ventured, keeping his distance from Jakli. "People are dying. The clans are being destroyed, and you bring us an oracle."
"He used the truth to free this man from prison," Jowa said, gesturing back toward Lokesh. "And last spring when a monk was about to be executed for murder, Shan found the truth. Because of what he saw the monk was freed and the real murderers were executed."
"You mean he got more Tibetans executed."
"No. Those executed were Chinese officials and Chinese soldiers."
The Uighur stared at Jowa, then at Shan, as if uncertain whether to believe the words. Lokesh nodded his head vigorously.
"Still," a voice came from behind them. It was the old Kazakh, the one called Akzu. He stepped to the side of the Uighur's horse. "There is no kindness in your voice for this man," he said to Jowa.
Jowa looked toward the ground. "The Chinese destroyed my family and killed my lama," he said tersely. It was the first time Shan had ever heard Jowa speak of his suffering. "But I know the lamas who asked for him to come here. If they asked, I would escort the Chairman himself."
The old man sighed audibly. "But we cannot take you to Lau. It is unimportant now. Lau will forgive us."
"I will take them, Akzu." Jakli said. "I said so."
"I know what you said, niece, but things are different now. We need this man," Akzu said, nodding toward Jowa.
"I mean, I said it to Auntie Lau," Jakli said. "I vowed it after her death."
The announcement brought a grimace to Akzu's face. He rubbed the nose of the horse, then looked at Jakli with pain in his eyes.
But before he could speak the Uighur called out in alarm. "Soldiers!" he shouted, and in the next instant Shan heard what had alerted him, a low, rapid throbbing in the sky that was rapidly increasing in volume. Akzu darted to the camels and grabbed their reins, urging them back into the shadows between the rocks as Jowa and the Uighur did the same with the horses. Jakli leapt off her own mount and grabbed Lokesh's hand, pulling him urgently between two large boulders. Shan glimpsed the machine as he joined them in the shadows, one of the sleek grey helicopters of the People's Liberation Army. It flew low, following the contour of the mountains, and passed only two hundred yards overhead as they hugged the rocks.
No one spoke for a long time after the machine disappeared over the next ridge. "The bastards," the Uighur said at last, then glanced at Akzu. "We'll take the short way home."
Shan saw that Jakli remained frozen, staring at the horizon, fear in her green eyes, but he sensed that the fear was not for herself, but for others, others who might be caught exposed in the mountains.
"I am sorry, niece," Akzu said to her, putting his hand on her shoulder. "I know we said we would help about Lau when we laid her to rest, but things have changed. The Red Stone clan is betrayed."
The announcement shook Jakli from her paralysis. "Betrayed?" she asked, worry creasing her face. "Betrayed how?"
"That pig of a man named Bajys. He took our hospitality and lied to us. He killed the boy with him and ran to the Chinese." Akzu threw a meaningful glance at Fat Mao. "He will tell them things, to buy their protection."
"A boy died?" Shan asked. No one seemed to hear him.
Jakli collapsed onto a nearby rock, her face draining of color.
"Not one of our clan," Akzu said to her. "One of Lau's children. A good boy, named Khitai, only nine years old. The horses liked him. Bajys shot him in the head."
A sharp, painful gasp came from Shan's side. Lokesh was holding his belly, as if he had been kicked. "The boy Khitai?" he asked. He put a hand on Shan's shoulder as though he were in danger of falling. His face seemed to sag. "The boy Khitai was with you?"
Jakli and Akzu looked to Jowa, then Shan, for an explanation. The first boy to die had been with Akzu's clan. When the dropka had spoken about the first killing, Lokesh had asked the name of the boy. Now when Akzu spoke it, he recognized the name. As if perhaps Lokesh had come because of Khitai.
"It was a Kazakh boy," Akzu said with a confused look at Lokesh.
Lokesh seemed not to have heard. He made a small moaning noise and drifted away.
"I will take you to Lau," Jakli said to Shan once more. "Akzu will take your friend Jowa to the Red Stone camp."
Shan turned toward Lokesh, who knelt on a rock now, facing the snow-capped peaks, surveying the skyline. Shan knew somehow that he was searching for Gendun, that suddenly Lokesh needed Gendun. It had already begun, Gendun had said. He must have meant the killing of children, as if he had expected it, or as if he had hoped for Shan to stop it by explaining Auntie Lau's death.
As he approached his old friend he saw that Lokesh had his hands together, and he thought at first it was a mudra offering. But it wasn't a mudra, he saw as he knelt beside Lokesh. The Tibetan was simply twisting his fingers in some silent agony that Shan could not understand. Shan put his hand on the old man's back and spoke comforting words. But Lokesh seemed not to hear him.
"This boy," Shan said, turning back to Jakli. "He was one of the zheli?"
She looked at him in puzzlement. "Yes. He was one of the orphans, part of the zheli class Lau organized from the school in Yoktian. They're more than orphans; not only do they have no family, they have no clan left. But the zheli is not officially part of the school. More like a substitute clan, in place of the ones they lost."
Shan turned to his old friend. "Did you know this boy? Did Gendun know this boy?"
Lokesh slowly shook his head from side to side, still looking to the mountains with a desperate expression.
Jakli looked from Shan to Lokesh, her face clouded with confusion.
"Khitai," Lokesh blurted out in a despondent tone, but this time it was not just another expression of pain. It seemed he was trying to call the dead boy, with the anguish of a father calling a lost son.
"Why a child?" Shan asked in an anguished voice. "The children are just-" His tongue failed him.
When he looked into Jakli's face he saw anger growing on it. "They are all that's left," she said- meaning, Shan knew, all that was left after the torment and persecution that had destroyed their clans.
"I never believed in demons," a brittle voice said over his shoulder. It was Akzu. He was looking at Lokesh with a sad, knowing expression, as if he recognized something in the old Tibetan's countenance. "My grandfather told me demons slept in the earth, that sometimes they awoke with a blood hunger that could not be stopped, that there were seasons for demons and destruction, just as there are seasons for flowers and creation, and when their time came they could not be stopped any more than the rising sun could be stopped, that all you could do was suffer and wait for them to satisfy their appetite. I told him I didn't believe in demons, that it was just the myths of the old ones.
"But then when my grandfather wouldn't move his herds from the pastures our clan had used for five centuries, so that Chinese farmers could come with machines and rip up the land, I learned differently. A demon came and threw grenades in his tent while he and my grandmother slept, and it machine-gunned all the herd, killing everything, even the lambs." Shan looked about and saw Jowa and Fat Mao standing close now, listening with grim expressions. "I was the one who found the bodies, when I rode to sing songs with my grandfather. Their valley ran with blood. Since that day I believe in demons," Akzu said, in a calm, matter-of-fact way that chilled Shan. "The demon is released and it wants the orphans. I think it wants to finish what it started with their parents. Twenty-three orphans Lau had" he announced with foreboding in his voice, and looked toward the northern horizon. "Only twenty-one now," he added with a whisper.
He wasn't simply speaking of the traitor Bajys, because a man like Akzu understood that it was never just one man. The demons of modern China were the irrational, unpredictable political fevers that struck and infected some with hate and others with such fear that it drove them to betrayal and murder. Maybe Shan had been sent to track the demon that had killed Lau, but it could be the same demon that was now killing her children. He put his hand on Lokesh's shoulder and looked to Jowa, then Akzu. "We must go with you to this camp," Shan told the old Kazakh. "We must go to where this boy Khitai died."
Akzu stared hard at Shan, then turned to Jakli. "It may be that this demon is going to kill them all. I will not put our clan in its path," he said to her with a fierce glint in his eye, then turned back to Shan. "And if you get in its way," he warned, "it will kill you too."