Lhakpa ignored Shan’s queries, making only light conversation as they returned down the treacherous path along the side of the mountain. The nurse too had declined to answer any of his questions, only explaining that they had found Natalie on the day after the explosion, under the debris of a half-collapsed chapel. When they reached the safety of the forested trail Lhakpa finally turned and answered the first of Shan’s questions. “How could we tell anyone?” the snow monk asked. “As soon as they learned she was alive those who intended to kill her would come to finish the job, along with all who helped her.”
“It’s why you and Jaya reacted so strangely when I said her father had come to the valley.”
Lhakpa eyed Shan as if searching for something hidden in his choice of words. A heavy weight seemed to descend on the Tibetan. “What could we do for her father, Shan? The hope we might give him would probably be false.”
“Surely you know what must be done. Get her to a hospital.”
“Some of the old ones say her spirit was separated from her body in the explosion, that it is wandering in the dark and will never find her body if she is moved from that cave. Once I was confident I had learned so much, but now I know how hollow that knowledge is. What if they are right? Yankay insists the best healing place for her is right where she is. And the nurse knows many of the old ways. She rubs Natalie’s pulse points and sings to her, saying if she can just ignite a tiny spark inside her, it will kindle her life fire again. And some of the old women have been summoning the Mother Protector, never stopping no matter what the hour.” He shrugged. There was anguish in his voice. “Who are we to say a hospital will be better?”
“But isn’t it a lie to keep acting like she died?” Shan asked.
“You saw her. Which is the lie? That she is dead, or that she is alive? Does it change anything you are doing?”
When Shan had no reply, Lhakpa turned back to the trail and led him into the gathering shadows.
They were already walking along the empty shelves where the artifacts had been stored when Lhakpa held up his hand in alarm. There were strange sounds coming from the campsite by the Talons. It took them a few moments to realize it was laughter.
As they reached the little flat, Jaya was speaking excitedly with two Tibetan men, some of the herders who were helping her, and pointed to Zhu, who sat by the fire with a cup of tea.
“Did you find all the devices?” Shan asked as he reached the young lieutenant.
“I had some devices of my own,” Zhu reminded him with a mischievous smile.
“They may never come back!” Jaya said with another laugh.
“You used your own devices?” Shan asked.
It was Jaya who responded. “We found all their listening machines and moved them to the top of rock spires or down animal burrows. One went inside an old pilgrim’s cairn. We placed one of Zhu’s boxes with each of the listening devices, rigged with a loop, a recording that will just repeat until the batteries run down in a few days.”
“A loop?” Lhakpa asked.
“We got one of the old shepherds to record for us. Whenever Public Security listens to their sentry devices they will hear nothing but the mani mantra! Lord Gekho will be speaking to them!”
The Chinese soldier had unexpectedly lifted the spirits of the camp, and as the stars rose, they shared stories of adventures in the mountains. When Zhu began speaking of serving in the Himalayas, Shan feared his tale would relate to intercepting refugees leaving from Tibet, but instead he spoke of encountering a snow leopard with two cubs, which deeply impressed the Tibetans, who considered such encounters good luck. Yankay then offered his own story from his boyhood about an old man who could change shape into a snow leopard. Jaya countered with a tale of a woman who could turn into a mouse, and the Tibetans began a bemused dialogue about the advantages of mousehood versus leopardhood. As Zhu good-naturedly defended the leopard—not because of its claws, but because of its grace and stealth in movement—Shan slipped down the path that led through the labyrinth of the rock outcroppings. He emerged onto a ledge and sat, looking down on the moonlit Valley of the Gods.
Rows of lights marked the workers compound. Here and there twin shafts of light indicated the trucks that worked around the clock. At the far end, a silvery column shimmered where the moonlight touched the tall waterfall. The blanket of night brought a deceiving peacefulness to the valley. How could it be possible that such a placid place, where simple people had touched their gods for centuries, could have attracted so much greed, so many lies, and so many murders? He tried to push the crimes out of his mind and imagine how it had once been. Bold but devout tribesmen had come before history, to erect rows of standing stones. Bonpo pilgrims had arrived in later centuries, to pray and paint the faces of their gods on the walls of the cave. Later Buddhists had come with their own gods, not to attack the older deities, but to find ways to harmonize them, for the sake of the Tibetan soul.
He patted his pockets, looking for incense, then recalled he had given his last piece to Zhu. Instead, he steepled his fingers in a mudra, the Diamond of the Mind sign, and stared at the glistening waterfall in the distance as he tried to fit together the ever-shifting pieces of his puzzle. Despite all he had learned, he could not find the lever, the handle he needed to get inside the conspiracy so he could break it apart. It was as if there were a shadow in its center he could not penetrate. The valley may be a vortex that was causing lives to violently collide, but something else had started events in motion.
But that piece of the puzzle was invisible to him and without it, he was powerless. He had no angle, no explosive piece of evidence, no leverage point he could push to pivot the disastrous events of recent weeks. The forces against him were too powerful. Public Security was against him, the ruthless Amban Council was against him, the governments in Lhasa and Beijing were against him. He was wise enough to know he had lost this time. They would have to claim the miraculous survival of Natalie Pike as their victory and move on. The dam would never be stopped. The Amban Council could not be stopped. Lhadrung County would be swept clean in a few months. He and Tan would be pushed aside, debris of an earlier age. Yangkar would get a new Chinese constable, who would inevitably discover the precious, illegal archives under its streets. Ko would lose Tan’s protection at the 404th.
He was about to rise and return to the camp, his heart heavy, when a match flared beside him. Lhakpa lit a cone of incense and set it between them, as if he too needed the gods close.
“An old lama once told me that Tibet is ripe with lives,” Lhakpa said after a long silence. “The words nagged at me, and when I later confessed to him that I didn’t understand, he said Tibet today forces people to juggle more than one life. Everyone’s forced to appear as a loyal citizen who would never publicly acknowledge their faith. But many are also devout followers of the Dalai Lama, who hide illegal images of him in their homes. We can’t be faithful without being liars. And then we have lives as productive workers, though seldom in the job we would have chosen for ourselves. We’re all actors, with different audiences for each mask we wear, each life we lead.”
Shan weighed Lhakpa’s words as he gazed out over the moonlit valley. “It is an age of troubled souls,” he agreed. “A renowned scientist,” Shan observed after another silence. “A professor at a famed Buddist school. A dissident. A prisoner. A snow monk. That’s a soul ripe with lives.”
Lhakpa went very still. “I’m not sure I follow, Constable.”
“My son was nearly beaten to death at the 404th labor brigade because he started asking questions about prisoners who arrived from Larung Gar last year.”
“I’m sorry. I will pray for him.”
“He’ll live. Funny thing, he found out that one of the prisoners who arrived in that convoy didn’t seem to know the others, even sometimes didn’t seem to recognize his own name.” Shan paused, watching the headlights of a patrol car drive along the perimeter road below them. “Understandable, of course, since he had no time to train to become you, Professor Lin. Or Lhakpa. How many other names have you used?”
Lhakpa took a long time to reply. His voice cracked when he finally spoke. “It wasn’t my idea. I argued against it, saying I could not subject another man to the suffering of imprisonment intended for me. But they said he had volunteered to switch, to take my place in that prison, that he had no family, that he had been in prison before and could endure it. He was about my age, about my build, so he could pass with those who didn’t know me well. They said I was needed on the mountain, that I understand mountains in ways no one else did.”
“Meaning the science of mountains,” Shan suggested. “Geology. Engineering. Who were they?”
“Those ones who call themselves purba, the resistance. They were here earlier but the old ones sent them away, because they began to suggest violence. Some of them went below, getting hired as workers, and stayed in touch with Jaya.” Lhakpa reached into a pocket. “Do you mind?” he asked and produced a pack of cigarettes. Shan had never seen him smoke. “The snow monk doesn’t smoke,” Lhakpa said with a sheepish tone, “but the professor often did, a habit from university days. I thought I had quit but the last few days of evading Public Security has been nerve-wracking.” He lit a cigarette with a book of matches before speaking again. “Yes. Geology and engineering. When I was seventeen, they sent me before what the school called academic commissioners. They were just young Party members who had graduated with degrees in socialist philosophy and such. They never asked me if I wanted to go to university myself, never asked me what I wanted to study. If I had stayed,” he shrugged. “If things had been as before, I would have gone to a monastery.”
“You would have made a wise lama,” Shan said.
Lhakpa gave a grunt that hinted at bitter amusement. “Geology and engineering. They said they were the sciences of progress, for so many mines had to be opened, so many mountains had to be leveled, so many fortifications and dams had to be built.
“Our parents were gone by then and my brother had disappeared with some old unregistered Bonpo monk, so I assumed the worst. I became an engineer then later a professor. They would call me into government service for especially challenging projects. The last one was a dam designed to flood a valley up in Heilongjiang Province by the Russian border. I went out with a survey team and discovered a village of the Oroqen people there, an ancient tribe of which there were only a few thousand left. I went back and told the truth, that there were better dam sites in the region and this one would destroy a village of indigenous people who had lived there for centuries. I was told no, this will be the valley because those people needed to enter the twenty-first century. They were using the dam as cover for their political goals, as a way to justify the destruction of those people. I left the next day. Left the project, left the university, and without a word to anyone, I went to Larung Gar, the school colony, because I had heard people could start over there, could learn to live the life of a monk or nun no matter how old they were, or what their prior life had been.”
“You honored your Tibetan roots,” Shan said.
“My soul had become a dried, shriveled thing. I honored it for the first time in my life. I had never forgotten a passage an old lama showed me when I was young, written by another lama centuries ago. The man wrote that he was leaving to be a snow monk, that he was going to go up and sit with the mountain for a few years, until only the mountain remained. For a while it seemed there was nothing better in all the world for me to do.”
“But you couldn’t entirely leave that old life behind,” Shan suggested.
Lhakpa nodded. “After a few months my teachers at Larung Gar discovered my background. They said that I had an obligation to share my knowledge, that Larung Gar was about understanding the spiritual and natural world. There were Bonpo lamas there who were excited by my published teachings on earth science because, they said, I was demonstrating the magic of the earth. I had never thought of it that way but came to realize they were right. The huge anchor mountains they considered sacred were sacred for scientific reasons as well, because they were the source of so many ecosystems and of the headwaters for all the great rivers of Asia. The environmental experts with college degrees were just engaged in a form of worshipful penance, the lamas said, required because so many for so long had forgotten how to respect the earth. One of them declared that the earth has ways of speaking we don’t always understand, and my science was one of the languages of earth magic. I was a bridge, he said, standing in the middle, connecting those who worshipped the earth in these different ways. Then one day a year and a half ago, that lama came to me in the night and began whispering of a place called Gekho’s Roost.”
“So putting on the clothes of a snow monk was an act,” Shan said.
“Not at all. I told you, that was my intention when I went to Larung Gar. Even in Yangkar I was clinging to that dream for a while, before the business here arose. But that lama Tsomo Rabten changed my mind with his stories of Gekho’s home.”
Shan cocked his head. He had heard the name elsewhere. “Tsomo was the lama who died on October 1.”
Lhakpa nodded. “The hour the standing stones came down. His soul was connected to them, Shan, I am convinced of it. He was of the prior generation, who touched wonders that are lost to us now.”
“Was your other niece, Tara, at Larung Gar? Is everything you told me about her a lie?”
Lhakpa drew on his cigarette and blew out a long silvery plume of smoke toward the heavens. “I’m sorry, Shan. Jaya says the goat was sent by the gods to keep me honest. Tara was my niece, yes, but she didn’t die coming back from her school. She did leave her school but had gone to Larung Gar to seek me out and began attending our secret meetings about the Valley of the Gods. She was fiery, a leader who wasn’t shy about declaring that those at Larung Gar owed a broader duty to Tibet.”
“Someone on that Institute team that came to Yangkar recognized you from Larung Gar,” Shan suggested after a moment.
“The photographer had worked with Jiao there, and one of his assignments was to photograph all those who Jiao branded as troublemakers. Yes, he recognized me. He was confused, because he must have known I had been driven away to prison. Your deputy saved me that day.” Lhakpa sighed. “You do know why they were there, don’t you, Shan?”
“To begin planning for Yangkar to be the project’s administrative headquarters,” Shan said.
Lhakpa gave a forlorn nod of his head. “It will be the end of Yangkar as we know it. They poison everything they touch.”
In the valley below, Huan’s men had mounted a large searchlight on a truck bed and its beam was sweeping the workers compound. Little by little the valley was taking on the air of a prison.
“We can’t stop the dam, Professor,” Shan said.
“Just Lhakpa. That life is over. And we must stop the dam. The young ones are talking about a night of violence, about burning the equipment and the buildings.”
“They will be killed,” Shan said. “And their families will be punished.” New directives had made it a crime to simply have a family member who had engaged in acts of dissent or sabotage.
Lhakpa gave a melancholy nod of agreement. “No one will win,” he conceded.
“Sometimes in Tibet,” Shan whispered, “winning is just enduring.”
They watched the wispy line of smoke from the incense reach up toward the stars. Lives hung by such threads.
“But it is the wrong site,” Lhakpa said after a long silence. “The geology isn’t right, too many fractures in the valley rock structure. There were seismic tests that confirmed that but all those maps have disappeared, all traces of the tests are gone.”
“Which is why Sun Lunshi was bringing more maps back on the train,” Shan said.
Lhakpa nodded. “Even the economics are wrong. The investment needed for the transmission lines and the loss of power along the lines will make recovery of costs impossible. But this area has nagged the government for decades. Too Tibetan. Too religious. Too suggestive that we are not who we think we are.”
“Sorry?”
“Tibetans didn’t sprout from seeds planted here. Long ago they came from somewhere to the west and north, from the horse tribes of central Asia, not from China. The cavern and those standing stones were proof of that but…” Lhakpa shrugged and stared into the glowing ember of his cigarette. “I tried science. I tried reasoning. I tried compassion. What’s left?”
“Prayer?” Shan wondered out loud.
In the moonlight he saw the hint of a smile on the professor’s face. “The old herders in the cavern you found, they were praying for months before the explosion in the cave, from the first time those Institute surveyors were spotted in the valley. Now they pray nonstop, all night and all day, in shifts, pray for the valley, pray for Gekho, pray for the American woman. We don’t know how long it will be before Public Security discovers them. They won’t flee. Public Security will arrest them. That Lieutenant Huan will call them saboteurs and traitors.”
“Is that what the others from Larung Gar were charged with?”
Lhakpa sighed. “I hear the 404th is a terrible place.”
“There was a meeting at the prison last week. Jiao was there, with Lieutenant Huan and a man named Major Xun, deputy to the governor of the county. Afterward all the Larung Gar prisoners were put in solitary confinement. It means they intend to do individual interrogations of them now, probably brutal interrogations.”
The news seemed to strike a painful blow. Lhakpa lowered his head into his hands for a moment. “Our world is such a broken place, Shan. Sometimes I feel like my soul is so withered it will just blow away in the next strong wind. Maybe we should all become snow monks and lose ourselves in the mountains.”
“I’ve tried that. All I got was cold.”
Lhakpa gave a grunt of acknowledgment and sighed. “The seeds of this battle didn’t sprout in the valley below, but at Larung Gar. It was only the two of them at first, Jiao and Xun. Jiao came in from some high political office in Lhasa, claiming to be the expert at subduing Tibetans. Xun was from some paramilitary unit that targeted social unrest. They showed up one day at our morning prayers, pushing their way through the assembly of monks and nuns, and announced they headed the new Committee of Reconstruction and Safety. The chief lama, our abbot, offered them a blessing and placed prayer scarves around their necks. They laughed, and Jiao blew his nose on the scarf. The next morning they drove up in a limousine in front of a line of cranes and bulldozers. They sounded a siren, though none of us knew what it meant. It became a fixture of our lives for weeks. It was the five-minute warning, after which the bulldozers and wrecking cranes went to work. They ripped right through classroom buildings without even bothering to check if they had been evacuated. Several of our students suffered terrible injuries. The abbot and I went to Jiao and Xun to complain, and they said we should be thanking them for they were going to create a new, sanitary community where everyone would be much healthier. They even showed us their plans, with new cinder block buildings that looked more like one of those reeducation camps than a Buddhist school. I tried to keep my temper and just remarked that the compound in the drawings was not nearly big enough. They laughed again and said several thousand would be leaving, for their own safety. They even offered us jackets with that ridiculous slogan of theirs.”
“Safety in Serenity,” Shan said.
Lhakpa nodded. “I said they had no right to attack a peaceful community. They called me by my Chinese name and said I was lucky, that I was a traitor who had been allowed to go into exile instead of prison, but the government could always change its mind.
“I didn’t care. What they were doing was wrong, like what was done to those poor people in Heilongjiang Province was wrong, and what they were doing at the Valley of the Gods was wrong. I had to find new places for my classes, but the new Committee always knew and disrupted them no matter where I went, saying they were too crowded, or my classroom had no inspection certificate, or my students were not officially registered. One night when we were gone, they leveled the building I had used that day. The next night, when I was giving a class under the moon, they leveled my home. Then Xun and Jiao came to me and ordered me to leave. I said what they were doing at Larung Gar and the Five Claws was illegal, and that if they persisted I would hold a press conference to announce that none of the proper tests for the new Five Claws dam had been done. We thought putting a spotlight on the dam gave us leverage, that it could be an indirect weapon against them. They backed off for a few days. We formed our own committee, separate from the abbot and managers of the school, who could not risk polarizing their Chinese overseers. We staged sit-ins, surrounding the demolition equipment with hundreds of monks and nuns reciting mantras. We held a prayer vigil with over a thousand people, blocking a key crossroads for forty-eight hours. Metok brought in workers from nearby hotels to join us, shutting down the hotels.”
A chill crept down Shan’s spine. “Metok? But Metok was here, at the Five Claws.”
“Not until eight months ago. He had been working on a highway project west of Lhasa that was abruptly suspended, so he was assigned as engineer for the Committee of Reconstruction and Safety at Larung Gar. He was Jiao’s man, or Jiao thought he was. But he changed at Larung Gar. He would come sit with us at prayers. One night he declared that he wanted to help. Tara said he could make maps for us, for retreats and hiding places in the mountains. He became a great friend, and even saved some of our buildings from the bulldozers.”
Shan’s mind raced. He had to rip apart the puzzle pieces he had thought he had assembled and start over. “But why would Jiao bring him to this valley?”
“Jiao got him the job. A big promotion. But it was because Jiao wanted to keep a close eye on him. I think now it was because Jiao meant to find a way to eliminate him.”
“For sympathizing with fellow Tibetans?”
“For seeing Jiao and his accomplices murder my niece Tara.”
Shan could not speak for a moment. “You mean she was lost in the demolition of one of the buildings?”
Lhakpa looked at the glowing stub of his cigarette and reached for another, then reconsidered. He reached into a different pocket and produced another cone of incense and lit it with his cigarette. “Their committee published a list of agitators and cautioned them against further activity,” he continued. “They used all the favorite terms from the propaganda mills. Antisocialist hooligans. Reactionaries. Hotheads. Outsiders, even, though the gods only know what that meant at Larung Gar. Everyone was an outsider there. Some of those on the lists took the warning and left. But Tara redoubled her efforts, holding more meetings, printing her own notices about freedom of religion and freedom of speech, passing them out in the shelters where more and more people slept at night. She never spoke a harsh word directly about Jiao and Xun, or even their leaders in Beijing. It was always about praying and abiding steadfastly to the Buddhist way of compassion. She encouraged people to distribute flowers to the soldiers, and with each flower people were supposed to say a prayer for the soldier. She developed a following, and her meetings kept growing in size. Jiao loathed her but had to be careful because Beijing officials kept visiting and there were so many tourists coming that new hotels were being built. Larung Gar was becoming a business proposition that just had to be managed responsibly, that’s how Jiao put it. There was talk of human rights observers secretly entering the town as well, and they also had to be managed. Public Security started playing a bigger role. Huan arrived.
“Tara heard that some minister from Beijing was coming so she began planning a peaceful demonstration to greet him. She intended to stop his limousine by surrounding it with praying Tibetans and drape prayer scarves over his neck in the hope that the Compassionate Buddha would help him understand. It would have been a deep embarrassment to Jiao, who had told us more than once that when Beijing gave him a task no one was allowed to interfere. He was furious. ‘The motherland will not tolerate obstructionism!’ he often shouted at her.
“My niece called for a planning meeting on a ledge above the wreckage of a building. Jiao and Xun had an informer inside her group. I was suspicious of one of the nuns who befriended Tara, because she did not seem to know many of the prayers. It was that young nun who told Tara about the ledge that she said was a good meeting place. She led Tara there as we watched from above. We were praying at an old pilgrim shrine with Metok and a friend before going down to join them. Jiao, Xun, Huan, and an army officer came out of hiding when Tara arrived early, alone. It happened so fast. They suddenly started pushing her toward the edge of the cliff, shouting at her. Then there were little flashes and Tara clutched her belly and collapsed. Xun and Huan both had pistols out. They had shot her. Then Jiao kicked her over the edge into the debris of concrete slabs. Bulldozers and trucks began clearing it out minutes later. It took us nearly a day to locate her body at the dump where they took the rubble.”
Lhakpa turned at the sound of footsteps. Jaya joined them, sitting beside the snow monk. As she sat the little goat appeared and lay beside the woman, snugging against her leg.
It’s all about the goat. The words that had nagged Shan suddenly had meaning. They had misunderstood the death chart. It had not invoked the Mother Protectress, had not set forth the name of a goddess and the hail chaser. The Tibetan names had not been two but one, that of a young vibrant woman who had been named for the Mother Protectress, the niece of Lhakpa and the hail chaser. The inquisitive goat who stayed at Lhakpa’s side was Tara. In human form, the one who had been murdered, she had been Tara Namdol, the name written on the haunting death chart given to the fourth man, the army officer who was now the warden of the 404th.
Shan found himself clutching at the gau under his shirt. “So it was the word of a few Tibetans against two senior officials,” he whispered.
“Metok and his friend wanted to confront them right away. But the rest of us said no, that we had to wait for the right time, for the right official, for the right leverage.”
“But it would always be Tibetan undesirables speaking against two of Beijing’s favorite sons.”
“Not exactly. We had a video.”
Surely Shan had not heard correctly. He turned toward Lhakpa. “You’re not suggesting there was a recording of the murder?”
“Not suggesting. It is a fact. Tara had told people that whenever possible we should record all interchanges with the government, because there might be a chance of getting the recording to the outside world, so all the world could then witness the atrocities at Larung Gar. So our visitor had her phone out and had started recording from our vantage point. She thought they might try to beat Tara.”
“Visitor?”
“Metok’s American friend. A strong woman who smiled a lot, very interested in history.”
Shan’s head seemed to spin. How could he have missed this? She had written to her father that she had seen something terrible but that she was learning Tibetan ways to fix things. “You mean Natalie Pike.”
Lhakpa nodded. “It was her idea, after we convinced the others to hold the video back. There had been an announcement the next day that Jiao was leaving to become deputy director at the Five Claws, based on his success at Larung Gar. She said we might be able to use the video to stop the project somehow. But the six of us were arrested by Huan.”
“I had just arrived, with friends from the mountains,” Jaya inserted. “I found horses for Natalie and Metok and we fled.”
“So where is the video now?”
“Everyone is too frightened to transmit it,” Lhakpa explained, “because Public Security monitors most transmissions in Tibet. When we saw her again she said it was safe, in the hands of a nameless friend in Lhasa. She said before they began pouring the foundations for the dam we would confront Jiao with it.”
“So Jiao didn’t know about it.”
“He must know now,” Jaya said. “After Metok’s arrest they searched his room. Metok wouldn’t have willingly given up the information but they use drugs in interrogation.”
“They use drugs that wring the last drop of truth from a prisoner,” Shan confirmed. “So they must know that the American woman took the video, and that it is in Lhasa somewhere. How long did Metok know Natalie?”
“A few weeks. Before arriving in Larung Gar he had been assigned to that bridge project that was stopped when they found the remains of that Green Standard Army camp she was working on. That’s how they met. Metok invited Natalie to Larung Gar so she could see a Buddhist teaching institution, to show her that Buddhism still thrived among Tibetans. Natalie and Professor Gangfen even visited his home in Lhasa.”
As the words sank in, a terrible realization struck Shan. An image of the frightened woman with the teenage daughter he had met in Lhasa flashed through his mind. “Then someone has to warn her!” he exclaimed. “The secret Tibetan in Lhasa has to be Metok’s wife!”
Lhakpa turned to Shan, then to Jaya, who cocked her head in confusion. “But Metok never had a wife, Shan,” she said.