In the early morning light the stone sentinels of Karachuk seemed to have crouched, as though coiled for battle, sensing an approaching enemy. Indeed, the news brought by Akzu seemed to have transformed most of the town's inhabitants. The bright clothing Shan had seen the day before had been replaced by shades of brown and grey that blended with the desert. Long knives had appeared on many belts and, to Shan's great discomfort, rifles were slung on the shoulders of some of the Kazakhs.
He found Akzu and Osman at the corral, speaking in hushed, hurried tones.
"Where was Sui killed?" Shan asked. "Usually these things happen in the cities. Surely they wouldn't suspect the herdsmen."
"On the Kashgar highway," Akzu sighed, "twenty miles outside of Yoktian. No one lives there but Kazakh and Uighur herders. You know what the knobs will do. Sweep the camps for political undesirables. Curfews will be imposed. Four years ago when an army sergeant died martial law was declared for six months. Suspects were sent directly to the coal mines, their families to Glory Camp. The fools who did it have no idea of the suffering they will cause."
"What fools?" Shan asked. "You know who did it?"
Akzu was gazing toward the mountains. "Malik is still out there. He brought a boy back to us, then left again. Now my sons have gone too, to gather those of the zheli who can still be found." He turned to Shan as if just hearing his question and shrugged. "The Maos. It's what they do. That's who did it four years ago. The hotheads. The ones who think change can come overnight."
"Think?" a loud voice interjected over Shan's shoulder. "They don't think. They're just arrogant predators, as bad as the knobs sometimes. An easy kill comes along, bang. They just satisfy their appetite and move on." Marco didn't seem frightened like the others. He only seemed angry. "The whelps! How dare they do this to us!"
Surely the murder would mean added pressure from Public Security. But Marco's rage seemed more focused, as if the incident meant interference with a particular plan.
The Eluosi's fury choked off as he looked in the direction of the outcropping. His oxlike breathing dominated the silence. Shan followed his gaze toward the highest point. Jakli was sitting there, arms around her raised knees, watching the western horizon.
"Mother of God," Marco said, his voice suddenly soft and pained.
"She fears for her- for your son?" Shan asked awkwardly.
"Not that," Marco muttered. "Nikki is fine. Nikki is invincible." He kicked the wall of the building. A piece of the old mud stucco fell away.
"Something else," Osman explained. "If the knobs mobilize, they will check all undesirables. She is supposed to be at her factory job in town. A violation of probation, not to be there. Her friends cover for her, because her friends know it is for Auntie Lau. Everyone loved Auntie Lau. Normally the knobs won't bother to check there. But now, with Sui dead, they are bound to look everywhere. No one can cover when the knobs come looking for her. If they arrest her," he said, turning to speak toward the distant mountains, "she won't be at the horse festival. She won't be getting married. They'll take her to one of the coal mines. I was at a coal prison once, delivering food with some Maos. Hammers and chisels is all they get. No gloves. No mining machines. Never enough food. I saw prisoners whose hands were nothing but bone and skin, like skeletons." He looked back at Jakli. "So young," he said in a near whisper, "so full of life. A few months in a coal mine and she'll be old and empty."
The silver camel in the corral made a snickering sound. Shan moved to the corner of the building just as Osman led two horses behind the nearest hut, one saddled, the other bearing a heavy load of crates with canvas lashed around them. Where was he going? To warn his family? To make a suicidal dash across the border? He studied the others, nearly all mounted now. They looked more like a raiding party than a band of refugees.
A gust from the east blew a sound toward him. He turned and saw that Jakli was standing now, waving at someone. It was a mounted man, trotting briskly toward the north of the compound, toward the heart of the endless desert. Shan caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Osman appeared, nodding toward Marco. Shan swung his head back toward the rider. It was Deacon. The American was trotting alone into the desert, leading the pack horse.
Shan quickly walked to the hut the American had been using. Two men were in front of it, shoveling sand against a barrier of sunbleached planks that had been set against the entrance, which itself was now blocked by a heavy beam, arranged to look like it had dropped from the roof. The hut was being transformed back into a ruin.
Shan paced around the building. It had no other opening, except a small chink in the wall at ground level where, he surmised, the conduit for the solar panels had run to the batteries. As he stared at the hole one of the men threw a shovelful of sand to cover it. No, Shan almost protested, there are singers inside. Old Ironlegs had to be fed. But in the same instant he knew somehow that Deacon had taken the crickets with him. In the few minutes Shan had spent with him he had sensed that there were few things more important to Deacon than the date he had with his son, Micah, the rendezvous to sit with their singers under the full moon.
But was the other thing still inside? The appendage, the human leg. What had the American been doing with it? Dissecting it? Gloating over it? Whose leg had it been? Shan realized that perhaps it had not been as old as it first appeared. This was the desert, where things became desiccated almost overnight. Perhaps it had been someone who had died recently. Perhaps Deacon was doing his own detective work. Only then did he remember Bajys' words about his desperate search at Karachuk. About how he had found pieces of people, like in the paintings of demons.
Shan saw that all of the huts in the hollow had been reduced to apparent ruins by the addition of sand and ancient planks to blend in with the rest of Karachuk. As he watched the evacuation sadness flooded through him again. He had been mistaken, of course, to think he had arrived in another world. This was the same world, the world of knobs and bloodstained Buddhas.
He felt a sense of loss, a sense of defeat, as he absorbed the news of Sui's murder. It meant he would be unable to travel anywhere, that everyone, including the murderer, would drop into holes, doing their best to disappear for what could be weeks, even months.
Marco was with the silver camel at Osman's door when Shan rounded the corner of the building. Shan had not really studied the animal before, but as he looked at her he realized she was unlike any of the creatures he had yet seen in Xinjiang. Her eyes were bright with intelligence, her hair lustrous. Her head was bent to one side as she looked back at him, as though cocked in curiosity. To his surprise he saw that her left ear was pierced with a small, elegant silver ring.
Shan stepped forward as Marco hoisted a simple wood-frame saddle between the animal's humps. The camel bent her head still further, then pushed her nose into Shan's hands and licked them.
Marco stared at her uncertainly. "Sophie! You harlot!" he barked and scratched the camel between the ears. "She doesn't do that," he said with a puzzled expression. "Only for family. For me and Nikki. And Jakli," he added.
"She's handsome."
Marco hugged the camel. "She's beautiful. Like a beautiful woman. The Emir of Bukhara," he said, referring to the ruler of one of the ancient walled cities of central Asia, "had a stable of two hundred racing camels until the Bolsheviks laid siege to his city. For three years the Emir fought from the city walls. The Bolsheviks built a damned railroad right up to the walls while he watched helplessly. Had to feed most of his camels to his troops. But when the Bolshevik troop trains began arriving, he made the bastards promise safe conduct for the surviving twenty camels and their grooms before his surrender. He refused to let the invaders in until he saw the camels were free. Sophie came from one of those survivors."
Shan dared to put his hand on the camel's neck. Sophie pushed against him as though asking for him to rub it. He did so. "I thought Karachuk was safe."
Osman carried out two large pannier baskets stuffed with smaller boxes and bundles wrapped in cloth. "The safest of places," Marco agreed. "Next to my home. Which is why we won't risk it. Knobs never venture this far onto the sand. But when this kind of trouble hits they call in helicopters. They see us down here and-" He shrugged and looked at Osman. "Then no more week-long chess games, right, old friend?" He stepped to a smaller camel standing behind Sophie and helped Osman tie the baskets to her pack frame.
Jakli appeared behind Sophie, looking worn and fretful. She was carrying Shan's drawstring bag.
"You need to go home, Chinese," Marco said.
"I have no home."
"All right, Back to Tibet."
"I am not finished."
"Sure you are. The knobs are finishing it." Marco seemed to see the determination in Shan's eyes. "The hornet's nest has opened up. You don't want to push another stick up it."
"I cannot stop unless asked by those who sent me here," Shan said quietly.
Marco shook his head. "They don't know this land. You don't know this land." He looked past Sophie's neck toward the desert. "It's the way it has always been. Like a tide on the great sea, the beast comes. People build a good life around a herd, an oasis, a small valley in the mountains. Every few years it is swept away. They know it. They come to expect it. Long ago, when Karachuk was fertile, sometimes locusts came and ate everything green for a thousand miles. Sometimes, before the desert finally consumed everything forever, it was a giant sandstorm, a karaburan, the kind that can blow for days and destroys anything softer than a stone. Sometimes it's an army. The Mongols invaded. The Chinese invaded. The Persians invaded. They say the Romans invaded once. If you believe all the stories, even an army of tigers invaded, ridden by monkeys." He looked back at his knots, gave them a final tug and unwound Sophie's reins from her neck.
"Monkeys on tigers, knobs on tanks, it's all the same. If you want to live and keep those important to you alive, you fade away. Become invisible. Go underground. Go to the high mountains. Just get out of the path of the beast."
Shan well knew the beast Marco referred to. He had been swallowed into its belly for over three years. "The beast doesn't always have to win," he said stubbornly. Jakli was near him now, looking anxious to be gone.
Marco stared soberly at Shan. "That," he said after a moment, "depends on how you define winning." He turned and nuzzled his face into the thick hair on Sophie's forehead, as if consulting the animal. "Look, Comrade Inspector," he said, lifting his head, "Jakli says you have no papers at all. Let her take you back to shelter. Wait a week or two at least. Go to Red Stone clan. Count the sheep."
Shan did not move, did not take his eyes off Marco. "Red Stone has enough troubles of their own."
The Eluosi frowned and shifted his gaze to Jakli. He stroked his beard and glanced at Osman, as though remembering the innkeeper's warning about the coal mine prisons. "You have to hide, girl. Come with me. Don't get taken now, not so close to the festival."
Jakli smiled and, standing on her toes, kissed Marco on his cheek. "I'm staying with Shan," she declared brightly. "I made a promise to Lau."
But you also made a promise to Nikki, Shan almost said, then he looked into her eyes and realized it wasn't simply defiance he saw there. She had made a vow not just to Lau but to herself. She had to find justice for Lau before she was married.
Marco stepped back, rubbing his hand on his cheek where she had kissed him. The boisterous Eluosi seemed at a loss for words. "Damn it," he muttered, "then take him to Senge Drak," he said to Jakli. "Shan's their problem, not ours."
"Senge Drak?" Shan asked, looking to Jakli.
"In the Kunlun," Marco said, and paused with a meaningful look at Jakli. "Whoever killed Sui could be there," he said to her in a quizzical tone, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He turned back to Shan. "You want to stop the beast? Then take Sui's killer to the knobs."
The whinny of a horse interrupted Marco. They turned to see the remaining men of the compound mounted and moving in single file up the path that Shan and Jakli had taken the day before. The riders at the top of the column had stopped and were waving.
As if understanding the distant gesture, Sophie knelt in the sand for Marco to mount. The instant he was in the saddle she leapt forward at a trot. An energetic laugh escaped the Eluosi. "May the god of all creatures watch over you, Chinese," he called out. "Since I cannot." In a few seconds he was at the head of the column.
A strange emotion surged through Shan as he watched the line of riders and pack animals file out of the compound. It was a sight out of the past, out of the Silk Road, out of Karachuk as she was meant to be. A caravan of adventurers heading toward dangers known and unknown.
Jakli steered in a new direction as she drove the truck away from the ruined city, straight south, toward the high peaks that were the walls of Tibet. Toward the edge of beyond. Shan watched the barren landscape, fading in and out of wakefulness as the truck rocked along another river bed. After an hour Jakli stopped in a grove of willows and poplars by the Kashgar highway and asked him to climb out to confirm that no other vehicles were in sight. He waved her across, and they followed another stream bed for a mile until, with a lurch of speed, Jakli shot over the bank and onto a track just wide enough to accommodate the truck.
Shan studied the map on the seat. "It's not far to Glory Camp," he observed.
"Too risky for that again," Jakli said, shaking her head. "Not with knobs watching. Not after what Xu did with you."
"There were sheep on the hills over the camp," he said, and explained what he wanted to do.
Jakli sighed and stopped to study the map again. Half an hour later they had parked in a clump of trees and were climbing over a low ridge that ran along the east side of the rice camp. Halfway up, Jakli stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, then whistled sharply. Thirty seconds later a huge dog appeared above them, followed by a man whose face showed no sign of welcome. They approached the man, who acknowledged them with a conspicuous frown, then bent over the dog and ordered it away with a low command.
The shepherd pulled a pair of high-powered binoculars from his neck and handed them to Jakli, then spun about and led them up the trail. As they passed under a large poplar tree near the crest of the ridge, the man muttered a word of the Turkic tongue, and the same word was called back from above. Shan looked up to see a second man perched with another set of binoculars. They weren't shepherds. They were Maos.
Jakli handed the glasses to Shan as Glory Camp came into view and motioned him into the shadows of a large shrub. Nothing unusual was happening yet, Shan heard the man report to Jakli as he surveyed the compound. No more truckloads of detainees. The prisoners were in class. The grounds were empty. The building with the holding cells appeared quiet.
"Nothing," the man repeated impatiently to Shan's back.
But there was something. At the flagpole in the center of the compound, a compound, a grey shape that could have been mistaken for a rock. He pointed at it.
"Him?" the Mao asked. "Been there all day. You think he's suffering? He's not suffering."
Shan extended the binoculars to Jakli. Was the man being punished? he wondered. Had he chosen to sit for hours in the sun and wind?
"It's nobody," the Mao said. "You couldn't recognize anyone from here anyway," he added and stepped away.
But Shan did recognize the man.
After ten feet the Mao turned. "You can't break them out," he called in a surly tone. "People get killed trying to break out," he warned and continued down the trail.
"I don't understand," Jakli said. "You know him?"
"You didn't know he spoke Tibetan, did you? You didn't know he used the cave."
She leaned forward with the binoculars, trying to see the man better.
"When he stood that day, did you see how tall he was?"
She lowered the glasses and searched his face, then drew in a sharp breath. "The waterkeeper," she gasped. Her lower lip went between her teeth and she raised the binoculars once again. "All those times," she whispered. "I could have asked for a blessing."
He looked at her, worried.
They walked back in silence and drove away.
As they climbed the long gravel-strewn slopes that led to the mountains, Jakli's mood lightened, and she spoke of familiar sights, pointing out where her clan had once camped, where she had once rescued a stranded lamb, where Lau had once shown her a nest of pikas. Once she stopped and pointed, almost breathless, toward movement on a hill in the distance. A small herd of wild horses. She climbed out and called something in the tongue of her clan, words lost in the wind. A horse prayer, she explained with a sheepish grin when she returned, to keep them from the Brigade.
They reached another road, which she eased onto warily, her eyes restlessly watching for approaching traffic, then slowly began climbing toward the snow-capped peaks as Shan continued to fade in and out of wakefulness. Once he awoke and the truck was stopped at the base of a huge grey cliff, with a meadow of asters on the opposite side of the road. Jakli was kneeling at the roadside, looking up at the tree-topped cliffs, holding a handful of flowers. He watched as she bowed her head and laid the flowers at the base of the cliff. When she returned he pretended to be still sleeping.
He faded back into slumber, and when he awoke it was late afternoon. They were driving in an unfamiliar landscape, amid mountains framed by a sky of deepening purple. He studied the ways the mountains folded into high mysterious valleys, the crags that spun upward as though they were giant hands pointing to heaven. He opened the window and tasted the chill rarefied air, fresh from icefields above. His memory did not know the terrain but his heart recognized it.
"How long have we been in Tibet?" he asked Jakli.
"The border isn't well defined here. Maybe five, ten miles ago."
"You must be exhausted. Let me drive."
"You don't know the way. Not much further."
They topped a high ridge and slowed to gaze on its fifty-mile view of the changtang plateau. In the far distance a large brown shape shifted and flowed across the grassland, a herd of wild animals. Antelopes perhaps, or even kiangs, the fleet mulelike creatures that still roamed the plateau. A few minutes later Jakli stopped the truck and stepped out into the wind. "I haven't been here in four years," she said. "There are no maps for it. Do you see it?"
"I've never been there," Shan said, and he turned to look toward the north. A pang of guilt swept through him. He had left the waterkeeper, and the zheli children, and Gendun.
"Senge Drak," Jakli explained. "It means lion rock. Shaped like a lion."
They studied the surrounding peaks, then climbed back inside, and Jakli eased the truck onto a narrow track that mounted the next ridge in a long, low ascent. At the top she stopped again and pointed. The mountain they were climbing unfolded to the south in a long U shape. They had reached the center of the ridge and were facing the opposite arm, a long bare ridge that ended in a huge cliff with the contours of a face. On top of the face were two outcroppings that might have been ears. Far below a small ridge jutted along the edge of the base, giving the appearance of a leg at rest.
In another hundred yards the track ended and Jakli parked the truck under a huge overhanging rock. Together they covered the truck with a dirty grey canvas she found in the cargo bay and began walking along the narrow goat path that traversed the steep slope. After a few steps she stopped and threw a pebble into the shadow of a second overhang. The pebble bounced back with a metallic clank. A second truck had been hidden at the head of the path.
Shan detected a subtle pattern of shadows on the face of the cliff as they approached it. Not all the shadows were just clefts in the rock, some were openings, portals that had been cut out of the cliff-face. The Lion Rock, Shan realized, was an ancient fortress, one of the dzong that once guarded Tibet. The dzong had been built into the formation, utilizing the lines of the towering rock to blend with the mountain, which commanded a view far out into the changtang and the pass through the Kunlun.
"It was so far away from the heart of Tibet that the government overlooked it," Jakli explained. "Or maybe the PLA just didn't think it worth bothering with. Couldn't be bombed from the air like most of the dzong. And it had been abandoned for centuries. No invaders would come from this direction. No meaningful armed resistance could be mounted from it. It doesn't stand in the way of anything."
They hiked to the end of the path as the remaining daylight quickly faded. Jakli paused to gaze at the last blush of crimson to the west, as if sending a silent prayer that way, then led Shan into a darker patch of shadow that was the entrance to the dzong. Following the dim light of butter lamps, placed at long intervals along an entry corridor, they arrived at a narrow door of heavy hand-hewn timber. As Jakli pushed it open, its iron hinges groaned loudly.
"Their alarm system," she said as she bent and led Shan through the door. Not just an alarm system, Shan saw, as he studied the door. It was so low that most of those entering would need to bow their heads, exposing their necks to a defender's blow, and so narrow that no more than one intruder could enter at a time. In an age when soldiers fought with swords and arrows, one or two defenders could hold off a small army at such an entrance. Jakli put a restraining hand on his arm after two steps. They would wait in the room.
The empty chamber was perhaps forty feet wide, the far side lit by a dozen butter lamps on a long table of hand-hewn timbers. To the right the wall sloped with the natural curve of the rock, as if the room had once been a natural cave that had been expanded. The wall beyond the table was hung with old carpets, which were slowly moving. From the draft that flickered the lamps Shan surmised that the carpets covered openings to the outside, the portals he had seen from the path.
He walked slowly along the hanging carpets. Some weren't just carpets, he discovered, they were thangkas depicting scenes of life in a monastery. The hangings by the portals were nearly threadbare, eroded by the wind. In one space a simple black felt blanket had been hung. Suddenly the hairs on Shan's neck moved. Someone was watching, from the other end of the room. Seeing nothing but shadow he lifted a lamp and ventured toward the darkness.
After five steps he froze. Two huge unblinking eyes stared back at him, level with his own. The serene head of the figure was slightly cocked, as if in inquiry, and one of its hands clutched a bell. It was a seated Buddha, carved so as to appear to be rising out of the living rock, so that although the head was nearly complete in circumference, at the bottom, where its legs were folded into the robe, the remarkable Buddha was little more than a bas-relief.
As he approached he saw that the rock on which the Buddha sat had been sculpted to simulate an altar, on which the figure seemed to be resting. On either side large niches were carved to receive offerings, their tops coated with the black soot of torma offerings, the butter figures that were burned on festival days.
Jakli stepped past him and placed a lamp in one of the niches. "The soldiers who built this place," she explained, "they were from the Tibetan empire period. Warrior monks. Sometimes they fought under the same lamas who led them in worship. We found an old writing about life at Senge Drak." She raised her hand to the head of the Buddha as she spoke, not touching it but following the gentle contours of its face with her fingers. "The monks were fabulous archers. They would not practice like others by shooting birds or deer or other living creatures, for they believed in the sanctity of life. So the archers would stand at the open portals and their teachers would drop paper birds into the wind for them to shoot."
"If all armies were like that," a familiar voice added, "war would be obsolete."
Shan turned. It was Lokesh, wearing his crooked grin. His eyes twinkled and he stepped forward to embrace Shan.
"But not every army shoots only paper birds," said another figure, emerging from the shadows as he spoke. Jowa. He seemed less happy to see Shan.
Lokesh winced, as though disappointed at Jowa for intruding.
"Are they here?" Jakli asked abruptly. "Did they come to celebrate while everyone pays the penalty down below?"
Jowa looked at her in confusion and seemed about to ask her a question when another figure emerged from the shadows. It was Fat Mao. Jakli bolted across the room, launching into a tirade in their Turkic tongue, raising her hands, not to strike him but to pound the air in front of the startled Uighur.
"Sui was a son of a bitch working for a bigger son of a bitch," Fat Mao said in Mandarin, and stepped closer to Shan and Jowa, as if he needed protection. Shan studied the Uighur. He seemed exhausted, and his clothes were soiled and torn in places. He had been traveling too. Perhaps fleeing. "He deserved to die. But I didn't kill him."
"Maybe not you," Jakli snapped, "but the other Maos. At the worst possible time. You're not warriors, you're just predators. Make a kill and run away. Let everyone else pay for it-" Her voice choked with emotion.
"It was not a Mao," Fat Mao insisted.
"You don't know that," Jakli shot back.
"I know it," the Uighur said. "If it happens in Yoktian County, I know it. Sui was being watched, whenever possible. But no one- no one of us- killed him. I know what you think. The knobs will think the same thing."
"Saving Red Stone clan. Finding Lau's killer, the killer of the children-" She stopped as if about to add to the list, but did not. "Impossible now."
Was that why? Shan wondered. Had someone killed Sui to distract the knobs from something, or, knowing how the knobs would react, to keep their little group from proceeding with their own investigation of Lau's disappearance?
Someone else stirred in the darkness. A short, slender figure appeared, carrying bowls on a wooden plank. "Jah," he announced in Tibetan. Tea. It was Bajys. Not the terrified, ranting Bajys, but another Bajys, or the beginning of another Bajys, for he still had the hollowness, the emptiness in his face that Shan had seen at Lau's cave. As Shan accepted the bowl from Bajys, he saw that the man's hand was steady, but there was a tremble in his eyes.
Jowa took a bowl and sat on the table, away from them, drawing a paper from his pocket to read, as if uninterested in further conversation.
Shan felt a tug at his sleeve. "The Maos must know something, if you were watching Sui," he said to Fat Mao. He turned and saw Lokesh beside him, pulling his sleeve, urging him toward the shadows.
"The first man to find the body was a Uighur truck driver," Fat Mao explained. "Driving alone with a load of wool for Kashgar. Sui's body was propped up against a rock at the side of the road."
"The killer made no attempt to hide it?"
"More like an attempt to make it conspicuous. The trucker saw him clearly in his headlights, thought he was sick or hurt, so he stopped. But Sui was shot through his heart. Twice. A quick death."
"You mean the body was arranged afterward."
"Exactly. In the sand beside the body a finger had written lung ma. No way Sui wrote it. He would have dropped like a stone."
"The knobs found him like that?"
"Not like that," Mao said. "The driver wasn't sure what to do, wasn't sure who Sui was."
"Sui was a knob. Everyone knows the uniform."
Fat Mao shook his head. "Sui wasn't in uniform." He looked from Shan to Jakli, letting the words sink in. "But Sui had a pistol in his belt. And then the next person on the road helped."
"Someone who knew Sui?" Shan asked. He turned toward the shadows. Lokesh had disappeared.
"Someone who was looking for Sui. Who erased the words in the sand. A Mao. He was going to hide the body, but there was no time because of traffic coming on the highway. All he could do was put Sui behind some rocks."
"You mean a Mao was following Sui?" Shan asked.
The Uighur nodded. "One of us had been watching Sui but lost him in Yoktian. Sui was to meet Prosecutor Xu at Glory Camp, so the follower drove in that direction."
Fat Mao stared at Jakli with a grim expression. Perhaps Xu had decided to meet Sui early, on the highway, to dispose of him for some reason.
"Sui's pistol," Shan asked, "what type?" The knob had died with his pistol in his belt, as though surprised by his killer.
"Not official. Small caliber, like a target gun."
"The size of the bullets used on Lau and Suwan, at the Red Stone camp," Shan sighed. Jakli sat down heavily at the table. "What happened? Why were you following Sui?"
"When the trucker understood who Sui was, he had no interest in staying. He drove away. After he spat on the body."
"Thank you," Shan murmured, "for that important detail."
Fat Mao shrugged. "We were watching because that's what we do, whenever we can. To warn people. To learn things." He pressed the heel of his hand against his temple. The Uighur's head was hurting, Shan realized. He wasn't used to the altitude.
"The Poverty Eradication Scheme," Jakli said. Her words brought a look of reproach from Fat Mao, but she did not stop. "Public Security is involved somehow. Sui came that day at the garage, when Ko was there for inventory."
"You mean Sui was working with the Brigade?" Shan asked.
The Uighur sat at the table, elbows on the table, and lowered his head into his hands.
"Probably," Jakli said. "Maybe just to make sure there's no dissension, make sure the clans get moved when they've been told to move, make sure no one evades the scheme."
"It was Sui who said the Brigade was going to collect all the wild horses," Shan reminded her.
Fat Mao raised his head. "Sui was following Director Ko," he announced.
"You mean, to Glory Camp?" Shan asked.
"I mean, to lots of places. For the past three weeks, at least. Like Ko was under suspicion by the Bureau." He pressed his hand to his temple again, then shifted on the bench and lay down upon it.
Shan looked about. Lokesh had not returned. Bajys had disappeared as well. He took a step into the shadows and discerned the outline of a doorway. He stepped through it into another tunnel, lit by small lamps. After thirty feet he stopped, confused by a new sensation. Not really a sensation, but a beginning of awareness, a glimmer of realization. He steadied himself with a hand on the rock wall, closed his eyes a moment, then suddenly opened them and began to run.
After a hundred feet, the corridor divided into two passages in front of a large wood pedestal holding a three-foot-high prayer wheel. Without hesitation Shan followed the left tunnel and came to a timbered door. The door was open far enough for him to see a square chamber of perhaps thirty feet to the side, softly lit by a ring of butter lamps in the center. It was a soft, silent room, lined entirely- floor, walls, and ceiling- with planks of fragrant wood. It was the kind of chamber built in temples to hold treasure. Shan stepped inside.
Lokesh was sitting near the lamps beside a man in a monk's robe, who was settled in the lotus position, his elbows on his knees, his fingers spread out to support his bowed head. Shan struggled to calm his racing heart. It was Gendun.
Shan joined the two Tibetans by the circle of light and sat silently, breathing in the scent of the old wood. He picked a flame and stared into it, seeking to focus himself, to cleanse his mind for Gendun. If what you selected was pure enough, absolute enough, you could immerse yourself in it; it could become your shield from distraction. Anything could work- a ball of mud, a drop of blood, a tiny heather flower- as long as it was pure.
"I met a hermit once," said a voice that drifted into his consciousness. "He claimed to have been reincarnated from a juniper tree. He said he could hear wood speak." The voice resonated in his heart and filled Shan with warmth. "He said we were all trees once in the past. I said I didn't think so, that I was still striving to become a cedar."
Shan blinked away from the flame and looked up to Gendun's broad smile.
The lama pressed his palms together over his heart in greeting, then stretched out his palms, forearms extended from his knees. It was his way of embracing Shan.
"Rinpoche," Shan said slowly. "We have come far from your mountain at Lhadrung."
"As long as I have a mountain to sit inside of," Gendun said, "there will be my home." His voice sounded like sand falling on a smooth rock.
Shan smiled. Gendun had meditated for so many years inside his rock hermitage that all those who knew him believed he could sense the life force of mountains.
"Have you been well?" he asked Shan.
"I have been confused."
Gendun smiled. "So have I, my friend." He fell silent again, but his smile did not fade as he looked from Shan to Lokesh.
"We thought those men took you that night," Shan said.
"The mountains here," Gendun said with a tone of wonder. "They have a different voice. Have you noticed? My eyes see them as a stranger, but in my heart I know them, from all those years ago."
Shan could only smile in reply. "Have you been here all these days, Rinpoche?" he asked after a moment.
"He left the truck when the Brigade stopped us," someone replied from behind him. Shan turned to see Jowa in the doorway.
"I came two days later," another voice said, and the youthful purba who had driven the truck away after they had met the Kazakhs appeared. The young Tibetan stepped past Jowa and into the room, his eyes wide as he looked at Gendun. "Just sitting right here, alone. He wouldn't leave."
Jowa lingered at the door, as if reluctant to approach the lama.
"How far, from where we stopped on the road?" Shan asked.
"Fifteen, maybe twenty miles." The young Tibetan shook his head. "But Senge Drak is secret," he said in a tone that suggested a question, as if asking Shan to explain it. "He had never been here. There were no trails from where he left the road."
Gendun gave no sign of having heard the conversation. He had already explained it to Shan. The mountains had their own voices.
Shan looked at Jowa, not the young Tibetan. Jowa looked not just tired, but uncomfortable, as if Gendun, one of the holy men he fought for, somehow intimidated the purba.
"We have told him about the second boy," Lokesh said in a suddenly somber tone.
Told him what? Shan wanted to blurt out. How would Lokesh have described Suwan's murder? Another young soul has gone beyond sorrow, perhaps.
But then Gendun spoke. "Have you come far?" he asked Shan.
Feels like far, Shan almost said, thinking of the grave at Red Stone, Lau's cave, the rice camp, and Karachuk. Feels like I've traveled a year in the last four days. "I met Auntie Lau," he offered.
"Do you like her so far?" Gendun asked with twinkling eyes.
"I think she honored all the worlds she lived in."
As Gendun nodded he slowly opened and shut his eyes.
"And I met an old waterkeeper."
Gendun nodded again and made a tiny flicker with his eyebrow. Shan recognized his question. "He is still in this life," Shan said. "In prison, but not suffering." His eyes moved from Gendun to the flame of the nearest lamp. "I am going to get him released."
Some things are not real until they are said out loud. Gendun looked at him, but not as intensely as Shan looked at himself. The words, though unexpected, though unintentional, rang like a bell. It took only a moment for Shan to realize, as some unconscious part of him already had, that in the miasma of people and events he had encountered since arriving in Xinjiang the only certainty was that the waterkeeper, the old lama with whom he had spent no more than two minutes, had to be freed from prison. And Shan was the only one who could do it, for only Shan understood.
The bell in his mind rang again. It grew louder. Not a bell, he realized, but the delicate tingling of tsingha, the small circular brass chimes used in Tibetan temples.
Bajys appeared at the door, smiling shyly while he rang the tsingha twice more, as if just for the pleasure of doing so. "There is food," he announced and turned back down the tunnel.
They followed the sound of the chimes down the hall to another large room cut into the living rock, nearly as large as the entry chamber, with similar portals opening to the sky. Shan realized they were on the opposite side of the cliff face now, the other side of the lion's head. The room was brightly lit with kerosene lanterns and butter lamps, and beside a timber table a brazier burned, fueled by large chips of yak dung. Fat Mao and Jakli were already at the table with another Tibetan, a large man with a heavily scarred face, who greeted Jowa and the young purba with a familiar nod. Shan looked back at Fat Mao. He had traveled hard that day, ever since Sui had died. But doubtlessly he had other, easier, places to hide. He had rushed to Senge Drak to see the purbas.
Bajys waited until Gendun was seated at the center of the table, then retrieved a pot of barley porridge from the brazier. No one offered introductions.
As they ate, the three purbas and Fat Mao spoke in hushed tones about the death of Sui, and Shan explained the killing to Gendun.
"I am sorry a government man had to die. We must be hopeful for his soul," the lama said quietly.
Fat Mao reacted to the lama's words with an exaggerated wince. His gaze moved along the faces of the purbas as he shook his head, as though to express his frustration that they should have Gendun among them. "We should just be hopeful for all those who are going to suffer now. The innocents. The families. The old people. Hope they hide well. Hope the monster eats its fill quickly and moves on."
"The pain will come," Jowa agreed. "Which is why we are going home. When the jackal comes to eat the turtle, the turtle must go inside its shell. We must protect ourselves. We must protect Rinpoche."
The lama tilted his head toward Jowa. "I don't understand your word. Protect?"
"We can do more good alive, and free, in Lhadrung," Jowa said. "The danger will pass. If you wish to return when it is safe here again I promise I will bring you. In a month, maybe two."
Jakli pushed her bowl to the center of the table. "Somebody in the purbas or the Maos knows what happened to this knob Sui," she declared sharply. "There are only a few who would ever touch such a man. People move to the other side of the street when they see such a man approaching. They avert their eyes. Men like Sui are like the dragons that roamed the land in the lost ages, inflicting random terror. The people don't seek out dragons. There were only special soldiers, sanctified by priests, who fought dragons." She glanced at Shan. "Warrior monks. Only they dealt with dragons. And if in killing one dragon they provoked a whole nest of dragons they still stood between the dragons and the people."
A sneer rose on Fat Mao's face. "And who is fool enough to stand before these dragons? These are Beijing dragons. Cut off a head and two heads grow back."
"There is no magic weapon," Shan said in the silence that followed. "There is only the truth. Whoever killed Sui must accept responsibility for the action."
"You mean, go to the nest of dragons and be eaten," Fat Mao shot back.
"If that is what is necessary to protect the innocent."
Jowa stood with a sour expression and gestured for the other two purbas to join him. "We're leaving. All of us. My job is to keep us safe. All of us. That means all of us go back to Lhadrung. We're not going to die for someone else's fight. I fight for Tibet. I fight for Tibetans."
Gendun's eyes settled on Jowa. "It is only the chance of birth that made you Tibetan in this life," he said in a tentative tone, as if puzzled by the purba's words. "You may be Chinese in your next. You may have been Kazakh in your previous."
"It is enough, just to watch out for this life," Jowa said sharply, but as the words left his mouth regret was already in his eyes, as if he had forgotten whom he was addressing. "Rinpoche," he added in a low, awkward voice. His hand went to the dagger at his belt, not in a threatening way, but self-consciously, as if to hide the weapon.
Gendun frowned. A fresh silence descended on the room. The lama stood and filled everyone's tea mug. He moved to Jowa, who still stood, and slowly lifted the purba's hand and placed it, palm open, over his own heart. Shan had seen it before, among the more orthodox Buddhists. It was how some lamas conveyed truth to a student.
"We do not struggle for Tibet or Xinjiang or for any other lines on a map. We do not struggle for Tibetans or for Kazakhs. We struggle for those who love the god within and for those who can learn to do so." Gendun withdrew his hand and looked into Jowa's determined eyes, then into Shan's and Jakli's. He moved across the room and stood near one of the portals, where the covering had been tied back, and faced the open sky, the wind rustling his robe.
"If I had killed a man like Sui," Jowa said to Gendun's back, a pleading tone in his voice, "I would not hide. I would give them my head proudly. But it was not me, and so I will not offer my head." He looked toward the floor. Despair passed over his face, then his eyes grew hard again. "We have to return to Lhadrung. There are other fights to wage. Fights we have a chance of winning." His eyes shifted toward Shan, then he looked back at Gendun and hesitantly pulled a paper from his pocket, the one he had been reading earlier.
"And you," Jowa said to Shan, with an expression that seemed to mix resentment and pride, "you have been rescued. You have an appointment at the Nepal border." He sighed loudly and waved the paper toward Shan. "A UN inspection team got permission for a quick tour of gompas south of Lhasa. We have a way to get you across with them when they leave, and they will take you from there." He unfolded the paper and extended it toward Shan.
"You won," Jowa continued, a trace of bitterness in his voice. "A chance in a million. But we have only eight days to get you there. Barely enough time to make it." He looked about the room, surveying the faces of the Maos and Jakli, then back to Shan. "No need to worry about other people's business now."
Shan gazed at his companions. Jakli was smiling brightly at him. Lokesh was nodding. "It is everything you need," the old Tibetan said. Gendun just smiled at him.
"Our truck is at the head of the path," Jowa explained. "There are barrels in the back, and blankets, like before. Everyone goes, including Bajys. When the moon rises we will all go to the truck and sleep there tonight, and we will begin before dawn." He drained his cup of tea and looked at Shan as he laid the paper on the table. "If we see any dragons on the path we will be sure to wake you," he added in a taunting voice. Jowa's companions joined in his laughter and followed him out of the room.
Gendun wandered into the shadows of the corridor, followed a moment later by Bajys. Shan poured more tea for Jakli and Lokesh.
"I had a teacher once," Lokesh said after a moment. "He didn't believe that the human incarnation was particularly important in the chain of existence. He said humans come and go, they throw off faces all the time, that the whole purpose of humans was to keep virtue alive, to be a vessel for virtue. He said that if you lived enough lives that way, you became virtue, and then you had a chance at true enlightenment."
Jakli, Shan, and Fat Mao sat in silence, considering his words. Certainly Lokesh was right about one thing, Shan thought. Humans were throwing off faces all the time. Somehow life seemed even cheaper in Yoktian county than in the gulag. Jakli picked up the paper and read it, then pushed it toward Shan, with wide, excited eyes. He scanned it quickly. It was true. Someone had put a new life together for him. He was to be reincarnated once more. There was a community of Chinese exiles in England who would welcome him. He was to live with a professor of Chinese history in Cambridge until he was settled. Eight days. It would take six days of hard travel to arrive at the appointed place near Nepal.
A low rumbling sound rose from the corridor. Shan recognized it immediately. The prayer wheel.
"Bajys," Lokesh explained. "That first night we came he was still incoherent, and he barely had the strength to walk. But then he saw the wheel and began turning it. He was crying at first, then laughing, and he kept turning it all night long." The old Tibetan's eyes were wide and bright, as though he were describing a miracle.
They listened to the rumble for several minutes without speaking. Maybe all would be right, if Bajys just kept turning the prayer wheel. Some of the old lamas might have said that Shan's work was indeed finished, because he had found someone to turn the wheel that had not spoken for centuries.
Finally Lokesh rose. "I must prepare Rinpoche's blankets for the truck," he said and left through the rear doorway.
Shan found Gendun in the room of fragrant wood.
"It is right that you come back with us," the lama said. "This was all a mistake. We didn't understand. We will go to Lhadrung together. We can watch the moon from the truck, like before, and you can go to your new life."
"I have only just begun here," Shan said woodenly. It was happening too fast.
The lama shook his head. "Even without the letter Jowa gave you, you should have gone back south. The thing that dwells below, it's like a cloud that covers a beautiful moon. I have no words for it, except death. But that is too simple a word. If you were lost, Shan, without your soul in balance…" He studied his clasped hands a moment, then looked up with wide eyes. "It would be worse than losing Lau."
"Because she was prepared?" Shan asked.
Gendun nodded.
"Not just prepared," Shan suggested. "She expected it. She expected to die for her secrets." Gendun turned his head toward Shan as if about to correct him. Shan exchanged a long silent look with the lama. "Not her secrets, really," Shan said. "Her faith. She was Tibetan, but not just Tibetan. I think she had religious training. I need to know for certain, Rinpoche."
"It seems you already know, my son."
Shan nodded slowly. "She was an ani, a Tibetan nun."
Shan heard a sound behind him, a small murmur of approval. Lokesh was there, and came forward to sit with them.
Gendun offered a sad smile. "Once she was a nun, but her convent was destroyed."
"I have known many monks who lost their gompas to Chinese bombs," Shan observed. "Some said, Without my gompa, I am no longer a monk. Others said being a monk had nothing to do with a building. An old monk in my prison said it best. I carry my gompa on my back. It's all about serving the inner god, he said, and no bombs can destroy the god within. I think Lau found a way to serve her inner god in Yoktian."
Gendun didn't just look at Shan. He seemed to be watching him, as if something important was happening to Shan.
"She lived a Kazakh life these past years and was buried in Kazakh clothing," Shan continued slowly, "But she asked to be laid to rest near the teaching room of the old lama who posed as the waterkeeper. She taught Jakli the old Tibetan ways. She helped the lama with his secret teaching."
There was another sound at the door and movement behind him. He did not turn as the figure sat beside him. He knew it was Jakli.
"We used to meet on festival days," Lokesh said in a faraway tone. "The monks from our gompa and those nuns. Lau came from a small sect, from a tiny gompa built near a glacier north of Shigatse. We would unfurl a giant thangka down the hillside- a hundred feet long, it was. There would be archery contests and acrobats who climbed to the top of huge poles to bring back prayers tacked to the top. The nuns would sing to us, and we would serve special tsampa we made with cardamom spice." As he extended his long bony hand, spotted with age, toward the lights, Jakli reached out and clasped it between her own, as if to thank Lokesh. Or perhaps comfort him. "Later," he said with a sigh, "people came and burnt her gompa." He began humming one of the old songs as they watched the flames of the lamps, then paused. "It was a long way she went," he added, "to die like that in the desert."
"Now they have sent another Tibetan to teach the orphans," Shan said.
"Is he not also in danger, then?" Gendun asked.
No, Shan started to say, because Kaju works for the Brigade. "No," he said instead, "because the killer already found the orphans."
"You mean, at the camp of the Kazakh clan."
"And after that, the boy we buried by the road. First Lau, because Lau had to tell the killer about the orphans. Maybe," Shan said in a grim voice, "the killer is after all the orphans. The old Kazakh says it is a killer from the old days, returned to destroy the children of his enemies."
Lokesh shook his head, with a tiny, almost imperceptible motion. But Shan noticed.
"Or maybe he asked Lau about one boy, but then that boy was unexpected, was not right," Shan suggested. "The killer tore each boy's shirt open. He tore the pant leg. First with Suwan, then with Alta." He looked at Lokesh, still trying to understand. "He had gone for a boy at Red Stone camp, but the boy didn't have what he wanted. Maybe the killer was looking for something, perhaps something of Lau's that she had entrusted to an orphan. If he had found it, why would he go on to attack the second boy?"
"Maybe," Lokesh said slowly, "the children did something Lau, or her killer, never expected."
Shan looked at his old friend and nodded.
"If it is true, then maybe the demon isn't after all the children," Jakli said. "Just always the next one, until he finds what he needs. Or she," she added with a glance toward Shan.
They stared at the flames. A deep groan seemed to come from somewhere. It could have been the wind. It could have been the mountain, trying to make itself understood.
"You have the solved the mystery of Lau," Gendun said with a slow nod, looking back toward Jakli as he spoke. "That is enough, perhaps. To reveal Lau's secret teaching."
Jakli spoke Lau's name with a sound like a sigh and looked up with a nod. "Her path has been identified," she agreed. "Lau's truth can be told to those who were close to her, to close the circle of her life. She was a secret Buddhist. It should be enough to know that." Jakli looked at Shan and shrugged. "We know who is the enemy of secret Buddhists. I think it will be enough to persuade more herders to protect the zheli, to hide them for the winter at least." The demon was the government, she meant, and no one could stop the government. "It is all any of us can do," Jakli said to Shan, biting her lip as if she were in pain. "Now you can go on to your new life."
Gendun's eyes moved toward the floor and took on the distant look of deep meditation. Lokesh began counting his beads, appealing to the Compassionate Buddha.
The two Tibetans would not hear Shan even if he pressed on with the questions that burned on his tongue. Jakli too seemed lost in her own sort of trance, watching the two Tibetans so intensely she did not appear to notice when Shan rose. He picked up his lamp and wandered out, into the dark, silent corridors of Senge Drak. He longed to see all of the remarkable dzong and regretted that he had only a few hours to experience it. He passed down a long row of tiny rooms carved out of the rock, several with shreds of cloth hanging in front of them. Meditation chambers. He walked for over fifty yards without seeing an end to the rooms, and stopped, awed by the sheer number of the cells. Some fortresses had training grounds for their garrison. Senge Drak had meditation chambers.
He stepped to a cell that had most of its covering intact, slipped inside, and settled into the lotus position with the lamp at his side. He closed his eyes. He might not be able to speak with the mountain, but he could feel its serene power. The suspicion and fears, the possibilities swirled about his mind. He was more confused than ever. Everything was too unfocused. There were too many disconnected people, too many disconnected forces pulling him apart. Someone was going to rescue him, to give him a new life. Everything he needed, Lokesh had said. But that wasn't justice for Lau or her boys. Who would find her killer? Who would save the waterkeeper?
He put his hands in a mudra, the Diamond of the Mind. He had to explain things to Jakli and the Maos, but he did not understand them himself. He had to simplify, to focus on the simple explanations, for they were usually the right ones. Prosecutor Xu hated Tibetans. She was the likely one to have discovered that Lau was a Tibetan nun and, if so, was tracing any of the zheli with Tibetan roots. She or her enforcer had gone to the Red Stone camp and killed the first boy, who had been with Khitai. They said Khitai had no Tibetan roots, but they had said the same about Bajys. Or perhaps Khitai, who had been the first target when the killer had extracted information from Lau, was just a Kazakh boy who had the Tibetan thing that Gendun and Lokesh were so concerned about- Lau's treasure, the thing that now was being passed from orphan to orphan, one step ahead of the killer.
When he opened his eyes he noticed something in the corner, a long piece of coarsely woven woolen that might once have covered a meditation cushion. He lifted it and saw with a start that it covered an artifact of Senge Drak. It was a graceful bow, unstrung. Pulling the cloth entirely away, Shan found a small bowl of camphor wood, carved with intricate geometric designs. He lifted its top and found, lying in a neat curl, a bowstring, exactly as its owner had left it- when? A century ago? No. Jakli had said the dzong had been abandoned for centuries. Two or three hundred years, perhaps. He picked up the bow and laid it in his lap.
He retrieved the covered bowl. There were four rows of repeating designs, two on top, two on the bottom. He and his father had passed many hours exploring the Tao te Ching by using throwing sticks or dice to randomly identify verses. But their favorite method was finding patterns in their environment and reading the patterns to derive tetragrams, the four line combinations that, in the charts memorized by all students of the Tao, referenced one of the book's eighty-one chapters.
Shan counted by sixes along the top rows of tiny triangles. After the final set of six, three remained. Three was represented by a broken line of two parts in the system, the base of the tetragram. He drew the line in the dust of the floor with his finger. After counting the second row, comprised of tiny flowers, two remained, meaning a solid line for the next segment of the tetragram. The third row, of miniscule circles, added up to ninety-seven, leaving one, which in their improvised system meant another solid line. The last row of little squares yielded five at the end, for a line broken in thirds. The tetragram he had drawn in the dust was a line of three parts over a solid line, then a second solid line, over a final line of two parts. In the Tao te Ching chart the tetragram translated to fifty-six. He smiled sadly. The verse had been inscribed on the door of the secret temple he had frequented in Beijing during the years when the government had kept temples closed. He recited it out loud, whispering it the way a warrior monk in the cell might have whispered his rosary.
Those who know do not speak
Those who speak do not know
Block the passages
Close the door
Blunt the sharpness
Untie the tangles
Harmonize with the brightness
Identify with the way of the world
Shan contemplated the aged bow a long time after he finished. Then, slowly, with a tremble in his hands, he unrolled the ancient bowstring and fitted it to the bow. Why weren't bows used in all meditation? he wondered. So perfectly flexible, so perfectly taut, so perfectly focused. He remembered a blizzard day in his prison when a lama had issued all the prisoners imaginary bows and had them shoot imaginary arrows for hours, until no one could tell if they were drawing the bow or the bow was drawing them. He drew the bow back and held it, reciting the Tao chapter again and again. He held it until it hurt, until he knew what he had to do, and longer, until the danger of the thing he had to do was out of his mind and the bow was drawing him. Then he closed his eyes and in his mind took aim at a paper bird.