2

A DISCOVERY

The tea chest was dust bare.

“You can go,” a gruff voice consented.

Eight-year-old Pema Chöje didn’t need telling twice. In an instant the boy’s arms were forced into his sheepskin chuba, fast fingers quickly cinching the heavy jacket’s cord belt and pushing inside his sheaved knife and some cloth-wrapped tsampa cakes from his mother. He darted out of the door before anyone could change their mind, hearing only half of the demands that tried to follow him into the street.

It didn’t matter.

Pema knew the rules because he had broken them so often.

“Stay with the others. Watch the weather. If the cloud goes dark from the south, come down immediately. Beware the river. The water is high from the melting snows. Do not walk on the paddocks. The barley seedlings are shooting. Do not throw stones at the idiot or the dogs or the Rinpoche’s novices—particularly your brother. Do not go beyond the slopes to the holy lake. Return with at least twenty pieces or else . . .”

Outside, his three friends, Temba, Dorje, and Lobsang, stopped their dusty push-and-shove to immediately race him down the street, their imaginary steeds galloping as fast as the invisible hooves could go. The four young knights of King Gesar waved and cheered as the quartet passed old Hao Ping, standing in his open doorway sizing up the new day overhead. The skies were open, the mountainsides clear, the air crisp and still: the first traders would be arriving soon. He raised his long clay pipe in return, his smile at the boys’ exuberance hitching up the long wisp of white hair that hung from his chin.

At the end of the single thoroughfare, the gang kicked left in an impossibly tight turn and galloped on, keeping just beyond the reach of the mastiffs that guarded the town’s perimeters. The furious dogs jumped and roared at their passing, wrenching their iron chains so hard they threatened to separate the links. The boys howled back at them only to abandon the cacophony of barking and snarling they had incited by jumping the stepping-stones that studded the wide river.

On the far bank, they cantered the raised earth walkway that ran between the barley paddocks to reach the foot of the steep hillside that walled the eastern side of their valley. Only there did the four of them slow to an intuitive, even pace that permitted air enough to banter but without the need to stop and rest; not even the knights of Gesar could race uphill in Amling.

With every step the boys’ known world shrank beneath them. The village became a cluster of grubby white boxes scabbed with flat brown roofs. The wide road that ran down its middle tightened into an old scar. The river, so broad and furious when they crossed it, stretched white and thin like Hao Ping’s beard. The paddocks interlocked into a single tortoiseshell of green and brown. Even that barren stand-alone hill that bore the monastery dwindled to little more than a distant mound of barley flour topped with a single white molar.

The boys joked and laughed, telling stories as tall as the valley sides until, beyond its ridge, they stepped onto the wide alpine pasture that ended in the forbidding ring of jagged hills that surrounded the Holy Lake of Palden Lhamo. Immediately they spread out and began the hunt. Huddled close to the ground, backs turned against the chill wind that always whipped that place, they searched and searched for tiny black stalks amidst the stunted new shoots of spring grass.

It took nearly an hour before Pema’s shout told the others he had found a piece. The first of the year always merited special attention, so the boys quickly gathered around their friend as he took out his knife to prize the brittle worm from the earth. They watched with bated breath as the long blade slid down into the barely defrosted ground aside the small stalk. Gently, Pema levered the knife, first from side to side, then in a circular motion to make a hole big enough to insert a finger. With a fingernail he began to carefully scratch at the dirt until he could feel the side of the dead worm.

“Be careful. Don’t break it,” his best friend, Temba, whispered as if fearful that even the sound of his voice might cause the brittle worm to disintegrate.

Pema gave the gentlest of tugs, but the stalk didn’t move.

Instantly releasing so that the piece didn’t snap, he slid his index finger back in until it stopped at something hard, cold to the touch. “A stone . . . trapping the tail,” the boy said, returning his knife blade to the hole and pushing straight down in an attempt to dislodge the rock.

The sharp tip held for a moment then slid off the surface to stab deeper into the earth. The boy cursed like a man and instead squeezed his bare hand back into the hole to claw at the earth again.

His fingertips began to trace an oval hole in the rock through which the worm emerged. Digging out still more dirt, he felt another crater form. Pema pushed his face to the cold ground to better see the obstruction.

From the bottom of the hole two eye sockets stared back at him. Shocked, the boy quickly pulled his face from the earth’s black gaze.

“What is it?” Lobsang asked.

“A skull.”

“Yak? Fox?” Temba asked.

“No. Man.”

Together all the boys began to furiously dig until, with both hands, Pema finally pulled his find free.

The human skull came out in one piece, a brown muddy ball, the only white, two complete rows of long-rooted teeth held within jaws tightly clamped together with rusty screws.

Pushing the earth away and freeing the forgotten shoot of yartsa, Pema saw that the entire surface had been cut and engraved. Symbols, figures, and signs covered every piece of exposed bone. On the forehead was carved an inverted triangle.

The boys looked at the skull in wonder and awe until Temba finally broke the silence.

“Pema has found the head of King Gesar!”

The boys began to shout and cheer as Pema slowly and theatrically offered the skull up to the blue sky with both hands. At that exact moment, a loud thump like thunder sounded, not from beyond the boy’s offering to the heavens but from below, down in the valley.

There was another, then three more.

A plume of dust and smoke began to rise.

Temba, Dorje, and Lobsang immediately raced to the ridge to see what was happening below.

Pema, deserted, pushed the skull down into the front of his chuba, gathered up his knife and his single piece of yartsa, and chased after them, the heavy skull pounding against his chest as he ran from its shallow grave.