It comforted Shan that there were places on earth like the terrain they now rode through, places that could never be tamed. Some said such places were good for the planet, others that they were good for the soul. But Shan had met an old priest of a tiny, nearly extinct Tibetan sect who had insisted that such distinctions were misleading, that souls could not thrive unless the land thrived and that where the land deities had been shackled souls became grey, hollow things. The lama had lived all his life in the high ranges, but said that he had seen how Chinese made roads of asphalt and concrete. He had professed quite confidently that man, without knowing it, was making shackles of asphalt around the entire planet. When the last link of asphalt completed the last connection across the continents, he said, the world would end.
They rode for three hours in the shadows of rock walls, dashing over low passes where the sunlight exposed them, circuiting the perimeter of a vast grassland bowl because, Shan realized, there was no cover for riders who moved across it.
As they rode Shan asked Jakli about Auntie Lau. A teacher, she said, and until recently a member of the local Agricultural Council, a body which advised the local government on agricultural policy, elected by the local agricultural enterprises. Lau had been perhaps fifty-five years old, an orphan herself, without a family "but a mother to everyone," Jakli said, pushing her horse forward as Akzu turned with a chastizing frown. Sound carried far off the faces of the rock, and Shan had not missed the anxious way the old Kazakh studied the landscape.
A grim silence had descended over Akzu and Fat Mao as they trotted down the trail. At first Shan had thought it was still resentment over his presence, but then at a fork in the trail where Akzu led them down the least used of the two paths, he had seen that it was skittishness, even fear. Even the horses seemed reluctant to take the path and had to be reined tightly, before the riders could pull them between the two boulders that marked the trailhead. Akzu had dismounted to cut the bells from the harness of the camel.
Jakli rode in front of Shan. "A shortcut," she called back. But Shan saw the skittishness in her eyes too.
As they rode in the shadow of another rock wall he studied the five-mile-long valley it surrounded. It was not as fertile as the valleys in central Tibet but still held enough vegetation and water to support the small flocks of the dropka. There should have been herds, he knew. There should have been sheep or goats or yak, even the low-slung felt tents of a shepherd's camp. But it was empty, barren of life, as if somehow it had been sterilized.
The trail rose toward the crest of the ridge that defined the south end of the valley, and a small cleft in the rocks at the top appeared. Akzu signaled for the column to stop, then dismounted and led his horse to the opening. He pressed himself against the side of the cleft and peered through it. A moment later, visibly relaxed, he stepped quickly past the cleft and signaled for them to dismount and proceed. Shan awkwardly slid off his mount and followed their lead, but paused as he moved past the opening.
The object of their fear dominated the landscape beyond the ridge, a compound that, although at least two miles away, was clearly of huge dimensions. A long line of high wire fence, punctuated at intervals by guard towers, surrounded a complex of low, gleaming white buildings and cement bunkers.
"When I was young," a soft voice said behind Shan, "there was a nest of scorpions on the next hill from ours at our summer pasture camp. My brothers always wanted to kill them."
Shan looked at Jakli in confusion, then back at the complex. He knew what a Chinese prison looked like, and this was no prison. It had many guard towers but was too new and clean; too much of Beijing's money had been spent on the facility for it to be simply part of the gulag. But it also wasn't like any army base he had ever seen. Everything seemed to be made of cement. He saw nothing that looked like barracks. There were small buildings, the size of toolsheds, at regular intervals inside the wire.
"No, my father said," Jakli continued. "Let them live. I would not have you walk the land without fear."
As he shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun, now high in the sky, Shan could see a large radar antenna sweeping the sky from the center of the compound. Brilliant white domes were arrayed beyond the antenna. Satellite communications links. The small buildings were not sheds, he realized, but entrances to an underground complex.
"We call it the Mushroom Bowl. One night I saw them do a test," Jakli said. "It went far into the sky, like a shooting star going back to its home."
A shiver swept down Shan's spine, and he could bear to look no longer. "I'm sorry," he said, without knowing why.
Jakli returned his gaze with a small, wise smile. "It is just our nest of scorpions."
The main purpose of Tibet and western China was to act as a buffer, Shan had once heard a top general opine at a Beijing banquet, a staging area and shield against the next wave of aggression. Which meant, more than anything, that the vast wilderness was the hiding place for the country's most important weapons. Many politicians boasted in the capital that Tibet received the equivalent of billions of dollars from Beijing. All but a fraction of that money went to hollowing out mountains for troop garrisons and building secret nuclear missile installations like the one Shan had just seen. The Mushroom Bowl. Named for the white domes that had sprouted there after Beijing's invasion and perhaps also for the specter of the warheads inside its missiles.
The wilderness had been tamed after all, he thought. Maybe the old priest was right. When a sacred land got harnessed this way, it could mean the end of the world. The People's Liberation Army had its secret, buried ways to protect the world, or at least Beijing's world. For some reason he remembered the low rumble that was always present at their Lhadrung hermitage, the sound of the giant prayer wheel, kept moving by two monks at all hours, in a small chamber carved into a nameless mountain in remote Tibet. The lamas' secret, buried way to protect the world.
Now he understood the vacant grassland. Such bases were surrounded by military zones that would be patrolled by PLA commandos. In the imperial days there had been many places reserved exclusively for the emperor's family and high officials. To enter into them, sometimes to even look into them, meant instant death for any commoner. China still had its Forbidden Cities. There would be no excuses for a civilian caught in such a zone.
Another shudder moved down his spine. He wished he had not seen the base, wished he had not looked. It made a cold, hard, black place in his heart beside the many scars already there. After building installations like this, how could Beijing ever leave Tibet?
As he pulled his eyes away he saw that a large rock on the slope by the cleft had been painted red, and then saw another on the slope at the end of the bowl. It was a traditional way to mark the homes of the protective deities that lived inside mountains, the local land gods. At great risk Tibetans had painted the rocks, as if to fence in the base with watchful deities.
"Such danger," Shan said to Jakli, "just to save us time." His words were barely above a whisper, as if the Mushroom Bowl cast its shadow from miles away.
"You heard Akzu," Jakli said soberly. "We will take as many shortcuts as we need to, until the treachery stops." She gazed back toward the bowl. "The patrols are lazy. This time of year, they are mostly interested in animals."
"Animals?"
"With no herders here, it is like a giant game preserve. Generals come from Beijing, to shoot ibex and antelope. Snow leopards, sometimes."
"But still, if you are discovered-"
"Then we become the game," she said with a forced grin, and placed her open hands around her neck to give the impression of a head on a wall. "Mounted in some general's tearoom in Beijing. Rare counterrevolutionaries bagged in the wilderness."
Shan looked at Jakli, trying to understand how she fit into the complex puzzle of the group led by Akzu. "Akzu is your uncle," he said. "But you don't live with your clan."
"Sometimes. Right now I live in town. In Yoktian. I have a job in a factory. Making hats."
He asked her about the clan and Akzu. The question seemed to make her sad. After a moment she explained that the leathery old Kazakh was their headman, the elder of what was left of the Red Stone clan. Once the Red Stone had been a mighty clan with vast pastures in the north. But it had lost all those pastures to the government, and its people had been dispossessed. Akzu and Jakli's father had come thirty years before with a hundred surviving members to the borderland along the Kunlun, where the land and climate were so harsh that the population was sparse and nearly forgotten. They thought they could live without interference, out of sight in such a place. Now all that was left of the clan was one camp, and three families, coaxing a subsistence living out of the lands at the edge of the desert. And Auntie Lau, Jakli explained was no one's aunt, not a part of the clan, but a Kazakh woman who had brought the zheli under her wing, a kind, wise, soul loved by everyone.
Almost everyone, Shan nearly added. "I thought you were from Tibet at first," he said.
"It's a border land, has been for thousands of years. Many bloods get mixed here. My father was Kazakh. His brother was Akzu. My mother was Tibetan. She died when I was a baby. My father disappeared ten years ago," she said with a slight shrug. "I ride with my father's clan when I can. In the spring I like to go to the oasis in the desert to train the camels."
"You speak Tibetan very well."
"My father loved my mother very much. He encouraged me to keep her ways alive. Auntie Lau helped, when she learned about my mother."
"She gave you Buddhist teachings?" Shan asked.
"Not really. She said discovering my personal god, that was for me to do privately. But she knew Tibetan things, like she knew Kazakh and Uighur things. She said it was important to understand what the government said about new ways but that the old ways should not be forgotten."
Shan studied the woman, wondering whether the words had been Lau's or were simply Jakli's. Understanding what the government said was not the same as heeding it. "I did not know that Kazakhs lived in Tibet."
Jakli smiled and flashed her green eyes at him. "Some do, I suppose." She shifted in her saddle and pointed to the line of mountains they were leaving, the wall that separated them from the missile base. "But that last ridge is the border. We are now in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region."
Shan halted his horse and surveyed the dry, rugged landscape. The sky was a brilliant cobalt. Behind him the majestic snow-covered central peaks of the Kunlun connected the eastern and western horizons. In a gap between the peaks he had earlier glimpsed the vast Karakorum mountains that, rising out of the northern end of the Himalayas, created a nearly impassable border with India and Pakistan. To the north lay a brown haze that he now recognized as the beginning of the vast desert, the Taklamakan, that dominated the geography of southern Xinjiang.
He had been taken to that desert nearly four years earlier, and the haze sparked disjointed images of sand and razor wire and hypodermic needles. The Kazakhs might use the desert to train camels, but the Public Security Bureau used it for other purposes. They had beaten him and questioned him and drugged him and questioned him until he was a hollow, shriveled thing, more dead than alive, then discarded what was left of him in a lao gai hard labor camp deep in Tibet.
"Have you visited Xinjiang before?" Jakli asked, as if recognizing something in his face.
"I don't know Xinjiang," Shan said quickly and urged his mount forward, fighting an unreasonable fear that the men who had tortured him in the desert prison would reappear at any moment. Shan had had a cellmate for a few days while he had been with the knobs, an escapee from one of Xinjiang's infamous lao gai coal mine prisons, caught fleeing through the desert. The man had no papers, and they hadn't bothered to track down his genealogy, meaning, in the knobs' parlance, to cross-check the tattoo that was his lao gai registration number to its source, to the history of his political infidelities and the gulag camp he belonged to. One of the knob officers had called the man a "free one" for the new recruits. The last time Shan had seen him he had been crouched in the corner of his cell, naked, covered in his own filth, drumming his head against the wall.
Two hours after the Mushroom Bowl, their mounts found a new energy, quickening their pace as they descended into a small green valley lined at its edges with pines and poplars. A dog barked in the distance. The horses and camels began to trot. As they cleared a bend in the trail, the Red Stone encampment came into view.
Three round tents of heavy felt lay in a clearing at the bottom of the fertile valley. Beyond them, against a steep slope, were ruins of two stone structures that had been spanned by canvas tops to shelter livestock. They were not the ruins Shan was accustomed to seeing in central Tibet, not the scorched rocks and bricks pockmarked from the bombs and shells of the People's Liberation Army. These were the remains of ancient buildings, overtaken only by time and nature.
Their small caravan was seen first by a lamb frolicking up the trail, then by the adolescent girl who was chasing it. Both lamb and girl gave a bleat of surprise, then turned and scurried back toward the tents. Four large dogs, one of them a big black Tibetan mastiff, barked in warning, then ran to greet the riders as they emerged from the trail.
Akzu and Jowa had already disappeared inside the center tent by the time Shan and Lokesh dismounted. The girl reappeared, her eyes round with excitement. Three women, one with grey hair tied in a red checked scarf, and two others a few years younger, looked up from blankets spread on the ground, where they were crumbling pieces of soft cheese to dry in the sun. The older woman called out excitedly to Jakli, as one of the others leapt up, grabbed a white dress hanging from a tree branch, and darted inside the center yurt. Two men with strong, leathery faces and thick black moustaches appeared at the flap of the center tent, smiling at Jakli, then casting suspicious glances at Shan. Akzu's sons, Jakli explained after she had greeted each of them.
"Jakli!" a youth of perhaps twelve or thirteen years exclaimed from the nearest of the stables as the woman entered the clearing, walking her horse. A tiny goat lay draped across his shoulders. He gently deposited it beside an older goat, then ran to Jakli's side and embraced her.
"My youngest cousin," Jakli explained to Shan. "Malik. He stays with the animals so much we call him Seksek Ata sometimes. The protective spirit for goats," she added.
The boy's smile faded and tension crossed his face as he hugged her again. This time it was not for joy, Shan saw, but for solace, for comfort.
Jakli held him tightly against her shoulder, planting a light kiss on the top of his head. "Khitai was your friend," she said in a melancholy tone.
An angry shout rose from the tent on the left. A disheveled, wild-eyed woman stood in the entrance, pointing at Shan and yelling in her Turkic tongue. Jakli stepped in front of Shan as though to shield him from the shrill woman, then pushed him away, toward the stables. The woman took a step into the sunlight, still shouting at Shan.
"She's crazy," Jakli said in a low voice when Shan asked her what the words meant. "Something about children." Jakli frowned as she saw that Shan would not turn away. "She says you always want the children. She says you killed the children." Jakli pushed his arm but Shan did not move. "Years ago she was pregnant. They told her she had to go to a government clinic to give birth. When she went, they gave her a needle that made her sleep. When she woke up the baby was out of her, and it was dead. Later she found out that she had been sterilized."
The angry woman picked up pebbles and began throwing them at Shan. "She changed after that," Jakli continued. "In winter, she sits with a rolled blanket and sings a besik zhyry to it."
"Besik zhyry?" Lokesh asked as he watched the woman.
"Kazakhs have songs for everything. Weddings, births, horses races, the death of a friend, the death of a horse," Jakli explained, and thought a moment. "She sings cradle songs. The songs that Kazakh women sing to babies."
They stood in silence. Several pebbles hit Shan in the leg.
"Every time a child dies," Jakli added quietly, "she thinks it was hers."
In the light Shan saw the woman's clothing was covered with dirt. Bits of dried leaves clung to her shoulder-length braids.
Shan let Jakli pull him away as a larger stone hit his knee. But a moment later Jakli stopped. Malik was waiting for them on a path on the slope above the stables. She looked back at the crazed woman, as if maybe she preferred to face the woman than to follow Malik, then sighed and gestured Shan toward the path. As they approached the boy, Shan saw that he had a sprig of heather in his hand. Jakli bent and picked a sprig for herself, then Shan did the same.
As they followed Malik, a dark form rushed past them. The woman's anger seemed to have disappeared, replaced by sobs that sounded almost like the bleating of one of the animals.
They made a silent procession up the path: the dark, wild-eyed woman, then Malik, followed by Shan and Jakli. After perhaps a hundred paces they entered a small hollow near the top of the hill, a sheltered place closed to the north by a huge slab of rock, open with a view for miles to the south, into the Kunlun, toward Tibet. At the back, in the shadow below the rock slab, was a five-foot-long mound of earth.
To the left of the grave was an indentation of packed earth. The wild-eyed woman, he realized, had been sleeping by the grave. Strips of bark lay at the head of the grave, bearing offerings of food. Two large feathers and twigs of heather had been pushed into the earth at the foot of the mound of earth. Shan and Jakli followed Malik's example and offered their sprigs in the same manner.
The woman sat at the head of the grave, rocking back and forth, her face now twisted with grief, singing a soft song, giving no acknowledgment of Shan.
Feeling helpless, not knowing what to do, Shan knelt at the foot of the grave. A moment later Jakli silently knelt beside him and began murmuring under her breath in the Kazakh tongue. Malik stood behind Jakli, his hand on her shoulder. Shan became aware of movement behind him and turned to see Lokesh, Jowa, and Akzu approaching the grave.
Lokesh sat and placed a palm on the grave. "Khitai," he said in a low, doleful voice, and stared at the freshly turned earth, his jaw open. As the others watched in silence, the old Tibetan's other hand found his rosary and, leaning back, he began a low mantra. Jowa sat beside him, then hesitantly produced his own rosary and joined the mantra.
The woman at the head of the grave blinked several times and rubbed her eyes as though awakening from a trance. She looked uncertainly about the circle, as if wondering how so many had joined her, or perhaps who was mortal and who was visiting from another world. Her eyes fixed on the rosary beads, first Jowa's, then Lokesh's, and light seemed to return to her face. She spoke to Akzu in their native tongue. The Kazakh headman looked at the two Tibetans and replied to her, then turned to the visitors. "She said it is good to have a mullah at last. I said you are not mullahs, you are Buddhists, but you are holy men nonetheless."
The woman was nodding vigorously, then patted the dirt the way she might a sleeping child.
"Who did he belong to, this boy?" Shan asked. "He was an orphan, but where was the rest of his clan?"
"Gone. Extinct, probably. We do not know the details of his birthing. Nor did he. He was from the zheli," Akzu said, as if it explained much.
Shan watched the haggard woman in silence, then pushed back from the pile of earth to stand beside Akzu. "You mean he lived here, but Lau was his teacher."
Akzu nodded. "Lived here for a short while. Some children have to be taken care of by everyone. He wasn't any trouble," Akzu said. "One of the zheli often comes and stays a month or two. Lau didn't like them staying in the town all the time. In the warm weather she arranged for them to go to the clans."
"But Khitai, he was new?"
"New to us. He had not stayed with the Red Stone before. But sometimes, when we took one of the orphans to Lau's meeting place, we would see him. Always smiling. He was luckier than most, because he at least had his companion, this man Bajys." He winced as he spoke, as if understanding the irony of his words.
"So Bajys was an orphan too?" Shan asked.
"Yes. But older, so he didn't go to school. They said the two of them had discovered years earlier they were from the same clan in the north and had promised to watch over each other. Bajys taught Khitai things."
"What happened to their clan?" Shan asked, remembering Akzu's words at the trailhead. Maybe the demon was finishing something started years before.
Akzu shrugged and stepped away from the grave as if leaving, then stopped in the center of the clearing and stared out over the hills to the south, toward the high plateau of Tibet. Shan followed him. "All the clans have been troubled since it began," Akzu said.
"The murders, you mean."
Akzu did not look away from the hills. He offered a sour smile, as if Shan had made a joke. "Sure, the murders. All the murders. All the arrests. Since I was a boy, when all the green shirts arrived."
Akzu was speaking of the People's Liberation Army and their invasion of the western lands fifty years before, when the region had been absorbed into the People's Republic. The story had been spoken of so often by some of Shan's former cellmates, the captured warriors, that it had been turned into a song which they whistled sometimes in front of their guards. The PLA had taken Xinjiang; then, after training on the Muslims, they had started on Tibet. Xinjiang had taken a year to subjugate, Tibet nearly a decade.
"Many old clans disappeared entirely," Akzu said, "lost forever. Others were broken up, separated by lines on Chinese maps." He looked back to Shan. "Emperors from Beijing had come to Xinjiang many times. They wanted to buy our horses. They wanted to guard their own frontiers with advance garrisons. Their armies stayed a few years and went home. It didn't affect the Kazakhs or the Uighurs who lived here. But Emperor Mao was different." He shook his head. "We have always been nomads. The greenshirts sent by Mao drew boxes on maps and gave us papers that permitted us to live only in those boxes. We laughed. Obviously the Chinese didn't understand the way of the herds, or of our people. But when we traveled outside their boxes they sent us to prison. Or worse."
"You're saying the boy was displaced somehow."
"Displaced," Akzu spat. "You sound like Beijing." He sighed and looked toward Jakli, as if reminding himself that he had to get along with Shan. "The restrictions are not being enforced as much today," the headman offered. "We get visitors now, people roaming in search of family they haven't seen for twenty, thirty years because they were assigned to live in different boxes on the Chinese maps. Lau was like that at first, but she decided to stay in Yoktian County to help all the others that wandered through."
"Khitai and Bajys came like that, looking for family?"
"Mostly, now, the orphans just try to find places to fit in, try to make a new life. Auntie Lau said maybe we should get to know Khitai. She said he was better suited for the smaller clans, the ones that stay in the higher pastures away from town. We said of course he and Bajys could come. Many such people never find their home hearths. Things have changed so much. The children are not permitted to learn the old ways." He shook his head slowly. "I got a letter last year from a cousin who married into a clan in the north. She said things were so much better that Chinese come to their camp and pay to sleep in their yurts and eat food from a wood fire. Tourists. I wrote a letter to say that doesn't mean it's better, that if it feels good to have them come and treat us like their pets, like a circus show, then you have lost the why of it, you have forgotten what being Kazakh is supposed to feel like." Akzu shrugged. "I didn't mail it. Sometimes Public Security stills reads letters.
"But when travelers like Khitai come, we must make room for them. We lost many from our own clan in the struggles. Maybe some are still alive, in the north perhaps, or even in Kazakhstan," he said, referring to the independent Kazakh nation to the west of China. "Sometimes broken clans go to a town to start a new life, like Lau. But some just wander. Maybe we have family wandering too. We would want them to find friends along the way." Shan looked to Jakli. Her father had disappeared, she said. Akzu's brother. The headman sighed heavily. "We will know ourselves what it is like soon enough, what it is to be orphans."
Shan was about to ask him what he meant when Jakli stepped to his side. "Uncle, how long was this boy here?"
"Nearly three weeks. Before the last full moon. Khitai was quiet. A good boy. Mischievious sometimes. Once he climbed a tree near camp and threw nuts down on everyone who passed, making sounds like a squirrel. Always wore a red cap, his dopa, like a good Muslim. Stayed with Bajys working in the hills except when he played with Malik. We were glad to have them for the autumn chores. We were cutting hay for the winter." He cast a bitter glance at Jakli as he spoke the last words, as if cutting hay for the next winter had come to represent a cruel joke.
"How did the boy die?" Shan asked abruptly.
Akzu sighed again. "One of the old families visited that day, not a clan, the remnants of clans. The shadow clans, we call them. They're distrustful of everyone, wary as deer. They stay off roads whenever possible, just herd enough sheep to feed themselves. Usually stay in the highest pastures where no one else ever goes, near the ice fields. If they need supplies they come to one of the small camps like ours to trade. Some took children from Lau too. She said it helped keep the shadow clans connected to the world," Akzu added, gazing back at the woman at the head of the grave. "We made a meal together, then they moved on at dusk. Malik was away, so Khitai played with the boy from the other family, one of his friends from the zheli. They played in the hills most of the day. The other zheli boy was happy, he told me at the meal, because his shadow family didn't speak the Turkic tongue so well, or Mandarin."
"They weren't Kazakhs?"
Akzu shook his head. "Dropka, Tibetans. One of the border families. Many of the dropka on this side of the border worked with Lau."
Shan closed his eyes as a new surge of grief swept through him. To stand at two children's graves in just two days was as hard as anything he had faced in the gulag. "We saw them," he announced after a moment, having a hard time forming the words. "We buried their boy," he said, and explained what had happened on the changtang. Jakli gave a small moan. Akzu lowered his eyes and spoke several words in his native tongue that sounded like a prayer.
"Where was Bajys that day?" Long ago Shan had learned not to believe in coincidence. The killer had targeted both boys and killed both, two days apart. "Why would he turn on Khitai this way? And why Alta, afterward?"
Akzu looked solemnly at Jakli before speaking. "The day before, Fat Mao was here, to ask if we would help when people came from Tibet to help about Lau." As he spoke, the headman glanced at Lokesh, looking old and frail at the edge of the grave, then glanced at Shan, and finally Jowa. An aged Tibetan, a Chinese exile, and a sullen, unhappy warrior. Not, Shan suspected, the help Akzu had anticipated.
"Bajys was there? He knew about Lau's death?"
"No, Lau's death was kept a secret from the zheli. At most they just heard the rumors from town, that she had disappeared. But Bajys came into the tent and stared at Fat Mao. We asked him what he wanted, but he just stared at Fat Mao, then turned and ran away. He must have understood, must have eavesdropped, maybe he knew Fat Mao from town. It's the kind of information that could change a man's life. For certain men it would be like finding gold lying on a trail. Go to the prosecutor, tell about the secret resistance, give some names. Get a reward, get a new job somewhere, a new life. I think Bajys told the boy that day what he was going to do, and Khitai resisted it, said he would tell Fat Mao, that he would stop him. But Bajys had no kind of life. It was the biggest opportunity he might ever hope for. That other boy, he must have heard too."
"Did Bajys have a gun?"
"Apparently. Lots of Kazakhs keep guns for hunting."
"Where did it happen?"
"Here, in this same clearing. We found the boy sitting against the rock, not far from where he is buried."
"Who, exactly, found him?"
"The next morning Malik went to look for him when he didn't come for breakfast. The boy passed much of his time here. It's quiet. He had lessons here with Bajys. Malik went up the path at dawn and came back running, shouting for us. It had to be some sort of terrible accident, I thought at first. He had found a gun and was playing with it."
"But there was no gun," Shan stated.
Akzu shook his head slowly.
"Did anyone examine his body?"
"We have no holy man nearby. No mullah. We must bury our dead quickly, before sunset. My wife came up here and washed him and placed him in a shroud. She didn't know Khitai well." Akzu sighed. "But she knows how to bury children. We sang songs, but such songs should be sung about the dead one's life, and no one knew what to sing." He looked at Jakli, as though to reassure her. "So we sang about riding horses in the high pastures and how eagles fly." He cast a meaningful glance at Shan. "It was one bullet in the center of the forehead," he explained in a lower voice. "A small gun. The bullet did not have much velocity. Quiet. No one heard the shot." Akzu gazed at Shan, as though challenging him to ask how the headman had knowledge of weapons. "No wound in the back of his skull. The bullet stayed inside."
"Nothing else? Any sign of a struggle?"
"His clothes were torn. Shirt ripped open, and one of his pants legs got torn. A shoe was missing." Akzu's eyes shifted toward the hills, his gaze returning tinged with worry. There was something else on his mind. Akzu had intended to bring only Jowa to his camp, Shan recalled. Because he knew about Public Security.
"But you said Bajys and Khitai were related, the last of their clan. They had been together so long."
Akzu shook his head slowly. "Bajys was unsettled. Some people are always nervous around children. Sometimes he was like an uncle to the boy. When we ate, he would remind Khitai of his manners. Sometimes he was like a teacher. But sometimes it was like he was scared of the boy."
"Scared?"
"Not scared." The headman frowned. "I don't have words. Sometimes it was like Khitai was the older brother. Bajys was nervous about pleasing him." Akzu stared at the sky a moment, then shrugged. "When a colt grows up without a herd, it is always skittish."
"Orphans have reasons to be skittish," Shan suggested.
Akzu nodded. "But the dogs liked Bajys," he added in a confused tone, as if that were the greatest mystery of all. He shrugged again. "We will find him if he ever leaves the Chinese town. The clans won't go to the government about it. We find our own justice. But he knows we can't go to town to take him. Too many knobs there."
"Your own justice?"
"We know the killer," the headman said with a chill in his voice. "He will be found eventually and he will pay the price of all killers."
The words surprised Shan, who had lived in Tibet for so long. Revenge was not something that Buddhists sought. But they were in a Muslim land now, and Muslims believed in retribution.
"What about Lau's other children, the rest of the zheli?" Shan asked. "Have they been warned? Until the killer is found, until we understand why he is killing they are all in danger." Akzu's words from the trailhead still haunted him. Maybe the demon is going to kill them all, the headman had said. Twenty-three orphans, and only twenty-one left.
Akzu and Jakli exchanged a worried look. "Word has gone out," Akzu said in a pained tone. "We do what we can."
"It's not easy," Jakli said. "It's why Lau called them her zheli. Those children are like wild horses, scattered over the mountains, always moving, always wary."
"But surely their homes are known. Their foster families."
Akzu shook his head. "Homes? They're with nomads, traveling with their flocks until winter, bringing the children together only for Lau's classes. Sometimes they pick up mail at farms, or in town. People know the names of the clans, maybe know the pastures they traditionally use. We knew where two zheli girls were staying, in a valley near here. They're being kept in their tents now, with someone always watching." Akzu looked out over the mountains. "Since she retired from the Agricultural Council, Lau was going out alone into the ranges, giving the children medical exams, bringing food to the poorest families, teaching special lessons. I think only Lau would know where all the children might be at any one time. Maybe that will save them, their secrecy."
"So Lau knew Red Stone clan was here, at this camp?"
Akzu nodded. "She knew we come here in the autumn, knew we use it as a base to gather our flocks for the winter. But it's not important what Lau knew. Bajys was here." Akzu gazed back at the mound of fresh earth. "The only children killed were one at Red Stone camp and one who visited Red Stone camp," the herder said somberly, and began walking back down the trail.
The front flap of the center tent had been tied back when they returned to camp, and as they approached a grey-haired woman appeared at the flap. She studied them with strong, proud eyes, then gestured them inside. Shan followed the example of Jakli and her uncle, rinsing his hands in a basin of water by the front flap, then sitting on a cushion near the center of the heavy carpet that served as the floor of the tent as the woman handed them small, chipped porcelain cups filled with steaming liquid.
"My wife is baking today," Akzu announced as the woman leaned over a brazier where a kettle simmered. Beside the brazier sat a clay pot of yogurt and, on a large flat stone, a stack of nan, the flat bread favored by China's Muslims. "You will sleep with our clan, in the tent near the stables."
The woman smiled shyly as Shan nodded in greeting and sipped his cup. It was not tea, as he had expected.
"Warm goat's milk," Jakli explained. From behind a rug suspended at the back of the tent Shan heard voices. The two other women he had seen earlier peered out from the edge of the carpet and looked at Jakli with small, expectant smiles, then disappeared.
The milk was surprisingly bitter, but the liquid filled him with warmth as it hit his stomach. "Had he been away, this Bajys?" Shan asked.
"Away?" the headman asked. He drained his cup, then reached behind him and produced a small drinking skin. With a slight bow of his head he extended it to Shan with both hands.
Shan held the skin without looking at it. "Auntie Lau died more than a week before. Could Bajys have killed her as well?"
Jakli's head snapped up with sudden interest, as if she had not considered the possibility.
"No," Akzu said after a moment. "He was with the clan for the past month. That place in the desert where she died, Karachuk, to go there and back would be more than a day. He was never gone more than four or five hours, when he went with Khitai to the high pastures." The headman nodded at the skin. "Kumiss," he said. "Drink."
So there were two killers, Shan thought. And Bajys was only part of the answer. "Karachuk?" he asked. "Why was she there?"
Jakli and Akzu frowned into their cups and exchanged a glance. "An oasis place, that's all," he said enigmatically, then steered the conversation away from Lau and the dead boy, speaking instead as a host spoke to his guests, following the code of hospitality Shan had experienced in nomad tents in Tibet. He showed Shan how to twist the wooden plug off the skin and raise it to squirt into his mouth. Shan did so uncertainly, for he had not seen such skins in Tibet, then nearly choked as the acrid liquid hit his pallet.
Akzu grinned. "Fermented mare's milk," he explained, then accepted the skin back from Shan and took a long swallow of the pale white liquor. He sighed with satisfaction, then spoke of how the horses were growing heavy coats, the sign of a harsh season to come. After a quarter hour Jakli rose and stepped behind the carpet partition at the rear, triggering a hushed, excited chatter from the women behind it. After a few minutes she reappeared, flushed with color, as though embarrassed, then retrieved Shan's drawstring bag where it sat by the entrance. Shan offered his gratitude to Akzu's wife, then followed Jakli to the tent by the animals.
Malik appeared, holding the flap open as if he had been waiting for them. But Jakli lingered, looking toward the tent on the opposite side of the camp, then handed Shan's bag to the boy and silently moved into the third tent. Shan hesitated, wondering if Malik would explain. But the boy shrugged and moved back behind the flap. Shan followed Jakli and heard a strange, irregular clicking sound as he approached the third tent. Five faces looked up at him as he stepped inside. Jowa, Jakli, Fat Mao, and Akzu's sons.
Jakli sat with Jowa near a small smoldering brazier. The Uighur and the two Kazakh men were kneeling behind them, a sheen of excitement on their faces, looking at a small portable computer in Jowa's lap.
Jakli looked up, startled. "By the stable. There is a pallet for you in the tent with Lokesh."
But Shan stepped closer. One of the Kazakhs muttered a curse as he approached. Jowa seemed undisturbed. He glanced at Shan and kept working, tapping the keyboard, reading the screen with intense curiosity.
Jakli stood, uncertainty on her face. "It's only some records about agricultural production units. Jowa is helping with the computer."
Shan stepped to Jowa's side and studied the screen as the purba slowly scrolled through a computer file. The data was in Chinese, with the same heading on each screen, "Agricultural Production Inventories, Yoktian County." There were subheadings for cotton, wool, barley, and wheat, each with production records. Over seventy percent of the production was credited to the People's Construction and Development Corporation. Other, smaller entries, were for the patchwork of collectives and family enterprises comprising the remaining participants in the local industry.
Jowa stopped at the screen for wool production. One of the Kazakh men hovering over his shoulder pointed to an entry at the bottom of the screen. "Red Stone," it read. "That's us," the man said. "Red Stone Herding Enterprise. The clan enterprise."
Jowa highlighted the name and tapped a button. A five-year record of production from Red Stone appeared, with a graph at the bottom. The clan's wool production had steadily declined. Jowa tapped another button, producing a screen for five-year comparisons with others in Yoktian County. Red Stone had the lowest productivity in every year and by far the lowest cumulative total.
Jakli leaned over Jowa and translated what the screen said. While most of those present clearly understood Chinese, few, apparently, could read it. When she had finished, one of the Kazakh men spat a curse. "The Brigade," he said. "They beat us down for years, treat us like slaves in our own land, and still they are not satisfied."
"The People's Brigade, they call it," Jakli explained to Shan. "It was Beijing's first stage of settlement. Many of the soldiers sent here as occupation troops were given economic incentives to stay and develop the land. A company was formed for them and land grants made to the company. They took prime pastures and plowed them under for cotton and other crops. They became bigger and bigger. Now the Brigade is practically as powerful as the government. Runs schools. Runs local clinics. Even operates some of the prisons, on contract to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security. Thousands of workers. Hundreds of enterprises. We could never compete."
"The Brigade and the army, they are the same?" Shan asked. China's military had a long tradition of investing in commercial companies.
"Five years ago the Brigade was privatized," Jakli explained. "But it's still run like the army. Run by Han Chinese who used to be generals."
"Like a kingdom," someone said in a bitter tone from behind them. Akzu had entered the tent. "A separate kingdom within the country, supported by Beijing."
"But what are you-" Shan began.
"They say production must be more efficient," Akzu said bitterly. "They say small clans are no longer cost effective."
"Cost effective?"
"The Poverty Eradication Scheme, they call it," Jakli said. "A government policy, implemented by the Brigade."
"But what does it have to do with your clan?"
Jowa interrupted by closing the screen with a loud snap. "The smallest producers are being bought out," he explained. "The Brigade is identifying the least efficient producers and will integrate those workers into more efficient production. Higher value added, they call it."
"You mean the clan is getting new lands?"
"No," Akzu said. "Our clan runs its business through a company with shares, something the government established several years ago. Now the Brigade is buying all the shares."
"But if you didn't agree to it-" Jowa began.
"There's a term I heard in the town," Jakli interjected. "A hostile takeover. Everyone kept repeating it, like they thought it was funny, like something you read about in American magazines."
"But just having its shares bought shouldn't affect the clan," Shan suggested.
Jakli grimaced. "To them, we aren't a clan, just new employees. The Brigade already has plans for Red Stone. Everyone will be assigned to towns, different towns, to break up the clan. Apartments will be given to parents with a child. Others will live in workers' dormitories." As she spoke a shudder seemed to move through her. She clutched her chest as though short of breath.
The headman pulled a folded envelope from inside his coat as he sat by his sons. "We received a letter last week. We are to deliver our herds, our horses, our dogs, even our tents to the Brigade by the end of the month. In ten days, just after our autumn horse festival, our nadam. All members report for reassignment." He gestured toward a stack of papers by the computer. "Final inventory of assets required. Every sheep, every lamb, every damned spoon and pot."
"Poverty Eradication Scheme," Jowa said in a hollow tone. "The bastards are liquidating the clan."
In the heavy silence that descended over the tent, nothing could be heard but the breath of the horses tethered outside.
"No one's said it like that before," Akzu said.
Fat Mao stood. "But it's the truth. This Tibetan speaks the truth. They've done it to Uighur farms. They've done it to Kazakhs in the north." His eyes narrowed and he looked at Shan. "Poverty Eradication Scheme." He spat the words and grimaced. "It's not about economics. It's about politics. People in Beijing planned it all. They want to make it impossible for a Uighur to be a Uighur, or a Kazakh to be a Kazakh." The man's eyes drifted toward Jowa. "The Chinese are very clever. They study a people and determine what is most important of all to that people, then they find a means to hollow that thing out, to first take away its power, then eventually remove it completely. In Tibet they take your holy men. Tell me, friend, without your holy men can a Tibetan be a Tibetan?"
Jowa looked away, then his eyes met Shan's. They had already lost their holy man. Jowa's hands closed tightly around the corners of the computer screen. "I grew up in the grasslands, with the herds," he said suddenly. Everyone stopped and looked at him, surprised by the sudden anguish in his voice. "It was like that in the valley where my family lived. They came in big trucks one day. They loaded everyone in two trucks, about fifty of us. Said that because our family owned land we were reactionaries. Said that the land needed Chinese technology, that they were going to bring tractors and plant Chinese wheat. They sorted through everything in the camp as we watched. Anything that was used for taking care of the herds or moving camp, even the carpets used in my family for eight generations, they put inside the main tent. They collapsed all the other tents and threw them on the big one. Then they set it on fire.
"My mother screamed. A soldier hit her with the butt of his rifle and knocked out four teeth. My sister ran to embrace her pony so they shot the pony. My father said a mantra to the compassionate Buddha and they grabbed his rosary, a coral rosary from the time of the Seventh Dalai Lama, and cut it so the beads were lost in the grass. My aunt jumped on the back of a soldier, screaming, scratching at his face." Jowa's voice drifted off.
"If your enemy leaves you only your hands," Akzu observed with a chill in his voice, "then you scratch them with your hands. If they take your hands and only leave your teeth, then you bite them." The words had the tone of an old war song.
Jowa nodded slowly. "But some soldiers took her out in a pasture." The anguish was back in his voice. "They did things to her, and then she died. They threw her body in the fire and then they drove us away. In the trucks they sang songs in praise of the Chairman. They hit us with rifles until we sang too."
"It's not so bad now," one of the Kazakhs said, but his voice lacked confidence. "Not so violent."
Jowa gave an angry snort. "Now they do it with computers and bureaucrats. And corporations." He turned to Akzu. "You think they'll send all of you to one place, mothers and fathers with their children? It didn't happen that way in Tibet. The families would arrive at a new apartment and the next day a Chinese comes for your child. Has to go to a special school, they say. A boarding school, far away. They learn to sing out of a little red book. And when they come back they all have Chinese names and mock all your old ways."
Akzu looked like he had been kicked in the belly. He held his hand tightly over his abdomen and slowly rose, as if with great effort. Without looking back, he walked out of the tent.
"Until last night," Shan said in the silence that followed, "we had a holy man with us. Then he disappeared."
Jakli sighed heavily. Fat Mao seemed to visibly stiffen. "Who took him?" he demanded.
But Shan could not reply. Just saying the words had filled him with fear again. He felt a desperate compulsion to run, to return to the mountains and find Gendun. The lamas hadn't understood, had expected too much of him. He didn't know the Muslims. He didn't know Xinjiang. He could do nothing about these Kazakhs who were being killed. Someone had been mistaken. None of this was about Tibetans.
Jowa quietly explained what had happened the night before.
"Uniforms?" Fat Mao asked.
"None."
"What color was the truck?"
Jowa looked at Shan. "Hong," the purba said. Red.
The Uighur and Jakli exchanged a glance of alarm. Fat Mao spat a curse.
Jakli looked at Shan. "The Brigade," she said slowly. "They drive red trucks." She looked back at the Uighur with question in her eyes. "But they can't be in Tibet. They're not authorized." She grimaced, as if realizing as she spoke that formal authority was unimportant to the Brigade. "I mean, they've never been there before."
Shan found his voice again. "If they took him," he said urgently, "if the red truck drove Gendun Rinpoche back to Xinjiang, where would they go? Where would they hold him?"
The Uighur slowly reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, from which he produced a computer disc. "On to Glory," he said with a sour smile.
As Shan watched in confusion, Jowa accepted the disc and inserted it into the machine. When the screen lit again, it was dominated by huge Chinese characters that had once been part of Shan's daily existence as an investigator in Beijing. Nei Lou, it said. Classified. Internal government use only. A fire seemed to grow in Jowa's eyes as he stared at the screen.
The Uighur leaned forward and tapped the keyboard several times.
"Glory to the People Reeducation Facility," Jowa read out loud as the screen changed. "Lao jiao Camp 947." Lao jiao facilities were reeducation camps, jails for lesser offenders than those sent to the gulag, used to punish minor political sins. Admission to lao jiao was administrative, meaning that citizens could be sentenced on the authority of a single official, without a judge, without a trial.
"The Jade Bitch," Fat Mao said in a low voice.
Shan looked up at him.
"The prosecutor in Yoktian. Xu Li," the Uighur explained. "As cold and hard as jade. Glory Camp is her personal dungeon. Pass gas near her and off you go to eat rice for a few months in Glory Camp."
"Recent admission records," Jowa read off the screen. "But it's too soon," he said. "The disc is-"
"Up to date as of six o'clock last night," Fat Mao announced in a conspiratorial tone.
"Gendun was only taken last night."
"Keep looking," the Uighur said, nodding toward the screen.
"Unassigned numbers," Jowa read in a puzzled tone.
"Right. She always has a few numbers assigned to the others authorized to use the camp. The knobs. The army. The Brigade security teams. Her obsession with efficiency. Open prisoner registration files without names, based on anticipated arrests. They order food, arrange bedding, and staff assignments based on all the files. The Brigade can just take someone there and fill in the name at the gate. Sometimes she lists the reasons in advance. Youth gangs. Cultural recividists."
"A few files?" Jowa asked. "Thirty or forty you mean."
The Uighur bent over the screen in alarm. "Ta ma de!" he spat. "Damn it! What is she up to?"
They scrolled back and forth between recent admissions and the open files. After several minutes Fat Mao stood up with anger in his eyes. "Usually, Glory gets maybe five, six new inmates each week. A week ago she established forty open files. Gave ten to the Brigade to fill, ten to the knobs. Kept twenty for herself. Three days later half of the files are filled. Twenty new inmates. Yesterday six more, then-" He stopped in midsentence and pointed halfway down the screen. "And there's something new," he said. "Six more open files created yesterday. Assigned to the Public Security Bureau."
"But you said the knobs already get-" Jakli interjected.
"No. The local knobs, I meant," Fat Mao said in a low voice, like a growl. "This is different. This says Public Security Headquarters. Boot squads. Working for the bastard kings in a bastard government."
The words cast a pall over the company. They stared at the screen without speaking.
"Nothing about monks," Jowa said finally in a low aside to Shan. "Nothing about Gendun or Tibetans."
"Headquarters," Jakli repeated the words. "It could mean regional headquarters in Urumqi," she said, referring to the capital city of Xinjiang, six hundred miles to the northeast. "Or it could mean Beijing." She looked about, wide-eyed, as if she had seen a phantom. In either case it meant someone else was watching Yoktian County, from high above. Jakli moved as though to rise but seemed to have lost her strength. She sat back heavily and stared at the screen.
Shan stood suddenly. He felt short of breath. He stepped outside and breathed in the cool air. It had been Public Security headquarters in Beijing that had sent him to the gulag. He had assumed that the very worst that could happen to Gendun would be capture by the local knobs. But the headquarters knobs had university degrees and high ranks in the Party. The boot squads were their special soldiers, always led by a political officer. They would see Gendun differently. He would be an experiment. They might seek to use him, after breaking him with technologies not even the most serene mind could resist. They had done it before, more than once. They had even taken the Panchen Lama, the highest of all reincarnate lamas after the Dalai Lama, and imprisoned him for ten years in a maximum security prison near Beijing after he had spoken out for Tibetan independence. He had emerged a different man, married to a Han Chinese woman.
Inside the tent by the stables Shan found Malik kneeling by his bag, smoothing out a pallet consisting of three small carpets stacked together. Lokesh was sitting cross-legged on a similar pallet facing an assortment of objects that lay on a small red carpet, a Muslim prayer rug. He was holding the stub of a wooden pencil in his palm, in front of his chest, his eyes closed.
Shan's foot brushed against a tin can containing small bits of glass that lay at the edge of the red carpet. It tipped over, making a tinkling sound that snapped Lokesh out of his trance.
"He didn't have much," the old Tibetan sighed, gesturing toward the objects before him.
"These were the boy's?"
Lokesh nodded and stared inquisitively at the objects. The tin can with glass baubles. Three pencil stubs. A small, lute-like instrument with only two strings. A braid of leather straps that showed signs of having been repeatedly braided and unbraided, as if in practice. A single jade ball, the size of a large marble. Five pieces of dry, brittle wood with black marks that could have been writing on them. A young boy's treasures.
Malik raised the lute and plucked a string absently. "A dombra," he said sadly, "for singing the old clan songs."
Shan knelt and lifted one of the pieces of wood.
"We found them, that day," Malik said, looking at the pieces with a puzzled expression. "It had been smashed, the pieces scattered around his body."
What had been smashed, Shan almost asked, but he began fitting the pieces together and soon saw that the object was composed of two pieces, a flat bottom frame into which a wedge slid. The top of the wedge held two lines of text written in small fluid characters that resembled Sanskrit, the nearly extinct language of the lands south of Tibet. When it slid open, the flat surface inside, complete except for a large splinter missing from the center, was filled with writing in the same script. Like a letter, he thought, with the address on top.
He looked up to see Lokesh staring intensely at the collection of objects. Like an investigator, Shan thought. No, not exactly, he realized as he watched Lokesh slowly extend his hand and brush his fingertips over each item, for the old Buddhist would never see the collection as physical objects, as the meager trail of a young life. He would see them as the vestiges of a young soul, as signals for the boy's spirit, the tracks of the boy's inner god. Lokesh seemed to no longer be aware of Shan, as if once again the unpredictable embers within had ignited. The old Tibetan stared at the jade ball and slowly leaned toward it, as if it beckoned him. Shan picked it up and extended it toward Lokesh. They were in the land of jade. China had always obtained its jade from the Turkistan kingdoms north of the Kunlun. The Jade Bitch, the Uighur had called the prosecutor. Shan saw that the jade was delicately carved with tiny lotus flowers, with a hole running through its center. A bead. He dropped it into the Tibetan's open palm.
"What is it, old friend," Shan asked. "Who was the boy? Did you know Khitai?"
Lokesh sighed. "Not this boy," he said, as if there were multiple Khitais, then stared at the bead as a single tear rolled down his cheek.
It was almost dusk before Shan was able to return to the boy's grave, having finally left Lokesh in Jakli's care. His friend seemed to have gone into a strange trance, staring at the jade bead for more than an hour, during which the wild-eyed woman had reappeared, with a quiet, morose air, and sat beside the old Tibetan. When Shan had left the tent, the woman was patting Lokesh on the back like a sick child, humming one of her cradle songs as Jakli tried to coax him into eating some buckwheat porridge.
The last rays of the sun washed the back of the clearing, causing the grave to glow with an eerie pink light. Inside the rock enclosure the air was deathly still. A solitary cricket chirped.
Shan moved slowly along the edge of the rocks, then dropped to his knees beside the small mound of earth. He placed his palms on top of the loose soil, then stroked it, realizing after a moment that he was repeating the motion of the crazed woman, rubbing it the way a parent would smooth the blanket of a sleeping child. He had a son somewhere, not seen in years. With a stab of pain he realized that he didn't know if his own son was still alive. The possibility of his son's death had never occurred to him. But the tides of insane violence that had surged through his country did not discriminate between young and old. Children died for the sins of their parents, sometimes quickly, sometimes by the slow extinction of being abandoned. No, that was history, a voice in his head argued, and Shan's son would have the protection of his mother, a high cadre in the Party. Then he looked back at the grave under his hands. Khitai no doubt had thought himself well protected with the Red Stone clan. Children still died.
Was that indeed why he was here? he wondered. Was there something historic in the death of the woman Lau, something sensed by the old lamas that signaled a new tide of destruction, that meant a new demon of repression had been unleashed?
He absently scooped some of the loose earth from the grave, then slowly sprinkled the soil back over the mound and patted it smooth again. What was it about this homeless Kazakh boy that made him suddenly so dangerous to Bajys that he had to be shot? Had he indeed tried to stop Bajys's betrayal of the clans and the secrets of Fat Mao? Had he stolen something? Was it punishment? A mischievious boy who wandered from camp to camp might learn things, might be tempted by things that in turn could tempt Bajys. But what? The meager possessions of impoverished nomads? And what could he have that Bajys did not also have? Both boys, he remembered. Alta and Khitai had played together and had then been killed two days apart. One beaten and shot, the other beaten and stabbed. Maybe the boys had known something, had discovered something so dangerous to their killer they could not be left alive. They lived in a land of secrets. Secret families. Secret dissidents. Secret army bases.
As he idly stroked the earth, his fingers brushed something hard. He probed the soil and retrieved a curved piece of wood, small enough to fit into his hand. It had been crudely carved into the image of a bird in flight. It could have been one of Khitai's toys. It could have been a religious symbol. He pushed his fingers into the sandy soil and dragged them along the length of the grave. Near the head of the mound they touched something else, a five-inch splinter of wood. It was the missing piece from the strange wooden letter, containing a single line of the Sanskrit-like text. What did it mean? Was it an epitaph? Could the killer read the strange text? Did it contain a message that had caused the boy's death? He laid the two objects, the splinter of text and the crude bird, before him. Had they been buried by the same person? Perhaps they were both just offerings, or mementos. Did they mean something when put together?
He stared at them a long time, then scooped out two small holes and reverently returned the bird and the splinter of wood to the grave.
The cricket chirped again. Crickets were supposed to bring good luck. But they had brought none to Khitai. And none to Red Stone clan.
He rose and paced about the darkening clearing, considering it not as a graveyard but as a killing place. Bajys could have come up from the encampment or climbed along the ridge, over the rocks, into the clearing. He had come near the end of day, the end of a day when Khitai had been playing with Alta, the boy with the dropka. He had shot, but no one had heard a gun.
He realized the wind that coursed over the rocks could mask such a sound. As he paused to listen to its low moan, Shan felt something black and icy surge within him. It came like this sometimes, a dark coldness welling within, and when it did he had to stop and fight it. Sometimes it came on him with a spell of shaking, other times as a burning spot on his arm where he wore his lao gai tattoo, or along his spine where the knobs had used cattle prods. It was black and shapeless, and he had no name for it. It wasn't fear, or hate, it was just the thing that lingered from his years in the gulag, especially from the first weeks when all he could remember was a miasma of pain and people shouting at him. He closed his eyes and remembered the first time he had met one of the lamas, when the old Tibetan had pulled Shan's face out of the mud as he lay beneath a raging guard, about to suffocate. The lama had straddled Shan's body to take the baton blows meant for Shan. He remembered the serene smile on the lama's face as the guard beat him, and his weakness passed. He put a hand against the rock wall for a moment to steady himself, then continued around the clearing.
As he walked he found a place in the wall opposite the entry path where a thick slab of rock had tumbled from above, creating a small sheltered alcove. He stepped into its shadows and struck a match. A white cylindrical object lay at the base of the rock, partially covered with sand. He reached for it and found that it was a candle, which he lit just as the match flickered out.
Protected as it was from the wind, the sandy floor of the little enclosure still showed shallow indentations where two people had sat, facing the flat rear wall. On the wall, inscribed in chalk, was a circle eighteen inches wide. Only a circle. It could be a drawing game played by children. Shan's mind drifted to other circles he had seen on walls, those drawn on prison walls to symbolize a mandala, which always began with a circle to focus the mind into awareness of inner space and emptiness. Some circles were drawn to help focus meditation. But that was in Tibet, not in a Kazakh herding camp.
He held the flame higher and saw more writing on the adjacent wall. Two horizontal lines intersected by two perpendicular lines, with two Xs and two Os in four of the boxes formed by the lines. A drawing game popular in the West, played by Shan with his father when Shan had been Khitai's age. He looked back at the circle. No doubt it too had been part of a game, perhaps simply a target for boys throwing stones. He turned to the line game. It had been interrupted. He shuddered as he saw in his mind the young boy playing his innocent game, only to be dragged away by someone intent on killing him. Did it mean Alta had been a witness, left sitting in the alcove? Or did it mean the murderer himself had been playing the game with Khitai? A murderer so heartless as to kill a child would be capable of anything, even luring a child to his death by an act of playfulness. What kind was it, Lokesh would have asked, what kind of demon had taken over Bajys? Hariti, the dropka had said. The child-eating demon.
As Shan descended the hill, Malik was sitting in the evening greyness at a small fire by the animal pens, the big mastiff laying beside him. He was studying the sky and seemed not to notice when Shan sat beside him.
The sky was still and vast, dominated by a brilliant half moon. From a distance an animal howled. On the far side of the fire Shan saw a large peg in the ground from which a rope extended into the darkness. Tethered to the rope were several young horses.
When he had been released from prison, he had spent many nights like this, under the stars in secret meditation places shown him by the old lamas. Sometimes one of them, usually Gendun, had sat with him, trying, he eventually realized, to draw out the torment that resided in his soul. They had reconstructed his life year by year, sometimes month by month, having him speak over an old ceramic urn decorated with a simple line drawing of the Compassionate Buddha.
"The pot is now full," Gendun had said when they had finished, and he had capped the vessel with a ceramic lid. He had handed Shan a rock and one of the small, melodic bells used in the temple, then left Shan under the stars without further explanation.
Shan had been on an open ledge, so high that the sky had been almost as broad below him as above him. Once he had tried to move the urn and it had seemed incomprehensibly heavy. After several hours, in the darkest of the night, Shan had shattered the urn with the rock and picked up the bell. He had rung the small bell, making a sound like a brilliant vibrating crystal, until the sun rose.
He fingered the tiny shard of the urn that he still carried in his pocket. He had returned days later to retrieve it, for there was one piece of his prior life he could not leave behind. His son.
When Malik reached over to nudge his leg, the touch was so unexpected that Shan jumped. "Do you think he went there?" the boy asked quietly. "Last year, when a baby died, my uncle said they go to a beautiful valley on the moon."
Shan followed his gaze toward the moon. It made his heart ache, that the boy was so familiar with death. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe. It is very beautiful."
"It's so white," Malik whispered. "It must be the color of their sand." He was silent a moment, then asked another question. "Where would they get water?"
"Perhaps," Shan suggested, "they need no water."
The comment seemed to confuse the boy. He looked into the flames. "Water is life," he said, sounding very wise. "Is that how you know you're dead? You have no more thirst?" When Shan didn't answer he slowly bent and lifted something lying at his feet. A knife. And a thin piece of wood that widened into an oval at the end. He began slicing away slivers of the wood, aiming the cuttings into the embers where they curled in the heat, then flashed into a quick, hot flame.
"A spoon," Malik volunteered. "A present for Jakli and-" he paused. "A present, for the horse festival."
Shan watched him work the wood with firm expert strokes. "I saw the bird you gave him," he ventured quietly.
The boy showed no surprise. "My mother asked me to carve one when the baby died last year. To help guide him through the sky, she said. This time no one asked but-" Malik shrugged. "The zheli are younger than me. It made me sad, to know they had grown up always running. Khitai, he had no ashamai saddle, no sundet horse."
"I don't understand."
"Those orphans, they never have a real home. Khitai said when he was young people passed him around, to protect him. Sometimes he was in the mountains, sometimes in a city. Once he spent a year living in a cave. He said it was better with Bajys and Lau, but growing up like that, it meant he didn't know the old Kazakh ways. I was sorry he had no saddle." Malik paused and glanced at Shan. "When a boy is five years old he can ride alone," he explained, "and is given a special soft saddle, an ashamai saddle, decorated with feathers and red paint. Later, when a mullah pronounces him ready to start the road to manhood, there are ceremonies and a feast and he gets a sundet horse, his first horse. But Khitai never had any. Not a saddle, not a horse. He said it was all right, that he loved all the animals, and they taught him things. He climbed a tree to see baby birds once. He followed butterflies."
"Were you good friends?"
"We only knew each other a little while and only were together two or three times a week. Sometimes he helped me tie the zheli out at night," the boy said, and gestured toward the line of tethered horses. "He spent most of his time with Bajys, looking for sheep on the high slopes or in their spot above the camp."
"What did they do there?"
"Talked, mostly. I think Bajys wanted to tell Khitai all the things he could remember about their old clan, so the memories wouldn't die too."
"Why would they go away like that?"
"Clans have secrets. There are memories that can't be shared in front of strangers."
Shan leaned forward and pushed a stick into the fire. "You and Khitai, what did you do together?"
"We played when we could. Sometimes we would climb into the lamb pens and laugh because they would try to nurse on our fingers. Sometimes we would go on walks and pretend things."
"What kind of things?"
"You know. Shooting soldiers."
The words made Shan look back at the yurt where Jowa and Fat Mao still sat with the computer. "Does Fat Mao come here a lot?"
"Not often. He's a soldier too," Malik said, as if understanding why Shan asked. "A special kind. Lung ma," he whispered with awe in his voice.
"Lung ma?" It was an old term, from the ancient courts. It meant horse dragon, a mythical beast, part horse, part dragon, that protected the common people from injustice.
"Sure. Like your Tibetan soldier."
Like Jowa. The lung ma, Shan realized, was a counterpart to the purbas.
"They all call themselves Mao. Like a joke. You know this Mao, that Mao. Too dangerous for real names, he told me once. They make things happen to the government sometimes," Malik declared with a knowing nod.
"Did Khitai know about them?"
"No. It's a secret. Fat Mao made me promise. Says if I can keep the secret maybe someday I can be one too," the boy said, and it saddened Shan somehow. Did Lau know about the lung ma, he almost asked, then realized he didn't need to. Fat Mao had sent the message to the purbas about her death. If Lau had been part of the lung ma she may have been killed for it. The main job of boot squads was to stamp out resistance, and nowhere in China was there more violent resistance than in Xinjiang.
"Did you know Lau?" he asked.
"Sure. She brought medicine for the animals sometimes."
"Did you hear she was dead?"
"Only yesterday. It was a secret until then."
"Do you think she was killed for what she did for the orphans?"
Malik took a long time to answer. When he did, he looked toward the young horses. "She didn't do anything for them that I don't do for our zheli," he said, and there was an edge of fear in the boy's voice. He spoke several Turkic words to the horses, calming words that had the rhythm of a song, then suddenly turned to Shan with an expression of pain. "If they take us to the city, we won't know who we are. We won't have horses. We won't have tents, maybe not even dogs." He fell silent for a long moment. "And what will happen when I am old? There will be no more clan. No one to carve me a bird when I die."
Shan cradled the boy's hand in his own. "You are strong. A strong spirit will always find the way."
They sat in silence. How long had it been since he had talked with his son like this? Years. No, never like this. Shan's wife, the dutiful party cadre, had raised their son hundreds of miles from Shan and jealously guarded the boy when they were together. He had always told himself that it would be like this one day with his son, but that had been just one more of the lies that had kept him alive during his Beijing incarnation.
A shooting star blazed across the sky in the direction of the moon. Another child perhaps, going to the beautiful white valley.
"Were you with Khitai when he played his line game on the rock?"
"We played those games sometimes. He knew games I had never seen before. But not that last day. A late lamb had been born in a grove of trees two miles from here. It is my job to watch the babies, or they could die. I had to stay with the lamb all day. Then I could be sure it knew the scent of its mother and that it was strong enough for me to bring it back to the other lambs."
"Until that night?"
"When I returned at dusk I was going to go up to Khitai's spot, to look for him. But one of the young rams got caught in a vine and cut its leg. I had to put on salve. It was crying. I spoke to it. Khoshakhan, khoshakhan, you have to say to lambs. It's an old word, like a charm. It's how they know you love them," the boy said, with the voice of an old man. He sighed. "It was dark. I stayed up late, because it was then that I began telling them why we have to leave them soon. The Brigade will take good care of the sheep, I said. What else can I say? All the lambs and young goats would have grown up with me in the mountains. And now none of us will. I have to at least leave them with hope." He looked at Shan with an empty expression and shook his head. "The next morning I asked my aunt where he was, and she said probably up in his place in the rocks."
"What was it like, when you found him?"
Malik looked at the moon. "It was still dawn. He was sitting in the shadows against the rock, near where he is buried. He seemed surprised."
"Surprised?"
"I couldn't look after the first instant. But when I first found him I thought he was looking behind me, in surprise, like someone was creeping up on us. I said, you look funny. And you have three eyes." Malik looked down to the embers. "But his eyes had no seeing. I called for Khitai and ran away."
As Shan repeated the boy's words in his mind the dog's head shot up. Shan looked in the direction of the dog's gaze to see Lokesh standing in the shadows, looking as frail as a stick figure. The Tibetan sat down beside the dog, which immediately laid its head on his leg.
"I don't understand," Shan said to the boy. "Why did you call for Khitai?"
Malik frowned and looked back toward the moon.
"Because this boy," Lokesh answered Shan in a trembling voice, "the boy in the grave, he is not Khitai."
Malik sighed, as though with great relief, and nodded.
Shan looked back and forth from the boy to the old man. For a moment he felt as though he was not in the middle of a murder investigation but in a teaching, as if he sat between two lamas who were asking him to explain impossible contradictions.
"I told Akzu it wasn't Khitai," Malik blurted out. "Those things in the tent, the dombra and the jade bead, they weren't Khitai's. It was the other boy of the zheli who had visited that day, whose name was Suwan. He just had Khitai's red cap on. Akzu wasn't certain. The boy's face was so bruised and swollen. Akzu didn't know Khitai well, he's been away many times these past weeks. He said Khitai was the name of the boy Lau had sent, that whichever boy it was, Bajys had killed him, that if Khitai had gone with the other clan to escape Bajys, then may God protect him. He said I should not tell this to others, because it would just add to the sorrow of my aunts. He said either way an orphan had died, that a good Kazakh boy had been buried, and that was the end of it. I was not to tell the secret."
But now, Shan realized, Lokesh had divined the truth, and spoken it first, so Malik could explain.
The dog's head shot up again, and its tail wagged. Shan looked over his shoulder to see Jakli standing with the tethered horses, listening.
"Do you know Khitai?" Malik asked Lokesh.
The old Tibetan shook his head slowly.
Malik stared at Lokesh with round eyes, feeling, Shan knew, the same emotion as Shan himself, a confused awe of the strange magic that seemed to be working in the Tibetan. Shan had been wrong. It had not been Alta who had visited the camp but another family, another dropka family with a boy named Suwan, who had taken his belongings into the Red Stone tent, as if moving in. Khitai had changed places, switched positions on the zheli tether, with this boy, who had complained that his foster family couldn't speak his native tongue.
"Did Khitai speak Tibetan?" Shan asked.
"No. He was Kazakh," Malik said with a puzzled tone. "But he wanted to go higher."
"Higher?"
"Deeper into the mountains than Red Stone goes. The season is almost over, and the herding families live close to town in the winter. But word came that the Brigade was breaking up all the clans, that maybe the zheli would be broken up and shipped away to Chinese places. Khitai was very scared of the Chinese. I think they did bad things to his people when he was young. Khitai talked about getting away, to the last range, we call it. The highest part of the Kunlun, where the glaciers live."
They watched the fire in silence.
"Did you return that piece of wood to his grave?" Shan asked at last.
His words seemed to frighten Malik. He squeezed Shan's hand tighter, as if to remind him that he was not an old man after all, just a boy who kept burying other children. "I found it the next day," Malik said. "My aunt had collected all the other pieces and put them with his things. I was going to bring it to the tent too. But I didn't want to touch it so I pushed it into the grave with a stick."
"Why?"
"Maybe that was what had called to the demon. The killer broke the secret writing apart. Maybe that's what had made the killer so angry."
"You mean Bajys?"
Shan saw Malik nod in the dark. "The thing that Bajys became, my uncle said." The boy was quiet a long time, watching the dying flames. "I know there are protective deities, like those that watch over animals. I know, because I have seen how lost babies find their mothers on the far side of a mountain. And if there are protective deities then there must be the opposite kind," the boy said in a knowing tone, as if he had often thought about the possibility.
A destructive deity, Shan thought. A demon.
"And it's still out there," Malik said in a haunted voice. "The thing that kills children."
"We have to leave as soon as possible," Lokesh announced suddenly in a weak voice. "We must go and talk with Auntie Lau."
Shan looked at his friend with worry. Something inside Lokesh seemed to have been collapsing since he had first heard Khitai's name. "Do you know about lamas here?" Shan asked Malik. "Was there one who was a friend of Lau's perhaps? One who is missing?"
"Holy men?" the boy asked. "No. That Prosecutor Xu in Yoktian, she would never allow it. She gives speeches sometimes. She hates Tibetans. She says they are all traitors." Malik thought in silence for a moment. "She wouldn't kill them, though," he said with a certainty that chilled Shan. "But she would take them to a place where it is easy for a holy man to die."