Shan went from his truck back to the door of his quarters three times, each time tearing up the note he had left and replacing it with another. Although he had buried his sentiments for years, he had genuine affection for Meng, more than he had ever felt for any woman, but their lives had no overlap. They had almost nothing to share, and now he was not even able to share time with her.
I’m very sorry, he finally wrote. I am glad that you sought me out, but my work demands I be elsewhere. Now that you know where I am, come again, but give me some notice. Be safe.
Shan felt ashamed to leave Meng such a cold, meager note, but he could settle on no other words and his foreboding about Gekho’s Roost would not let him linger.
He sped down the highway, twice dodging antelope in the gray light of early dawn, then slowing after half an hour to find the rough dirt track that Lhakpa had marked on his map. He drove faster than he should on the rutted, uneven road, then realized he was raising a long cloud of dust that could be seen for miles and slowed. After crossing the first of the long ridges that ascended like stairs toward the high mountains, he pulled over and unfolded the charm Shiva had given him in the dark alley outside her door.
The astrologer had looked not simply exhausted but somehow drained, almost battle-weary, as if she had spent the night locked in some war to empower the ancient symbols and words on her paper. He was not surprised that he did not entirely understand the images and shapes she had rendered. Gekho the blue god was in the center. Each of his eight arms on either side extended one of the weapons or tools used in aid of the sacred earth. Along the top right border were goats on a grassy slope, then, in a clockwise sequence were three small hills with a white chorten on the center one, and one of the long woolen caps pilgrims sometimes wore. Next was a pair of what looked like stone pillars with little balls on them with one of the auspicious signs, a parasol, inked below them. In several places on the heavy sheet were bharal, the rare blue sheep of Tibet’s high alpine slopes, and Shan surmised that meant to follow the paths of the bharal. Blue sheep lived on the blue god’s mountain. At the apex, above the god’s head, was a garuda, a sacred bird known to protect the gods, and though it had its wings extended for flight, its talons seemed rooted in the mountain, as if made of stone. To the left of the great bird was a line of yaks, each with a tiny glowing Buddha riding on its back.
“This is the same as you gave to Lhakpa?” he had asked the astrologer.
“Everyone has the same destination in the end,” she had said enigmatically, then stepped inside and shut her door.
He studied his official public map, the military map marked by Lhakpa, and a satellite photo Zhu had given him before they had parted company in Lhadrung. Each told its own story. The public map delineated the road from the east, from Sichuan, in a long sloping line along the bottom that he knew was only a general approximation of the route. The photographic image, over a year old, showed only a flat compression of the landscape with peaks indicated by splays of white snow but clearly captured the Valley of the Gods, marked by its turquoise lake of glacial water and even a smudge of shadow where the standing stones stood. The military map showed the road in much greater, more accurate detail, had altitudes for several mountains, but its printed version showed no trails and none of the rough tracks like the one Shan now drove on. These had been carefully inscribed by Lhakpa, sometimes with tiny Tibetan annotations like antelope passage or fresh water here. He estimated he was ten miles southwest of the Five Claws project, and Lhakpa’s dotted lines over a steep saddle of land on the high mountain slope made it clear he would have to complete the last few miles on foot.
Scanning the terrain with his binoculars, he could make out more trails that traversed the verdant slopes, made by bharal and the more common mountain goats over the course of centuries, all converging on the massive peak, as if the animals too had been making pilgrimages. The peak itself was unmistakable, the jagged tower pointing toward the heavens, its western side split by the narrow pass where the Five Claws dam was being built. Something moved on the heights and he braced the lenses against a ledge rock to focus on a line of figures. They were so distant and the slope they traversed so mottled in shadow that it took several breaths for him to make them out, then he paused in surprise and looked at them with his naked eye. He was seeing something very rare for that sparsely populated quarter of Lhadrung County, something so improbable that he bent to study the figures again with his lenses. He was looking at a yak train, a convoy of eight or ten yaks loaded with packs, heading toward the deep mountains of Kham, the most rugged and inaccessible of Tibet’s regions.
It was an image from old Tibet, when yak convoys had been the predominant link between distant communities, when commerce depended on such convoys, and the role of caravaner was a romantic and honored profession. But this is not old Tibet, he reminded himself, then reconsidered as he recalled that Shiva had drawn a train of yaks carrying Buddhas, and realized the yaks were coming from the direction of the Five Claws project. Old Tibet was there in the valley, at least dying vestiges of it, as well as the forces of modern China. The conundrums he faced were rooted in both worlds, and he was the inadequate black bull dob dob sent to resolve them.
He laid out his maps on the flat rock, then set Shiva’s chart beside them, for he had realized it too was a map of sorts. He had passed herds of sheep on grassy hills, then a trio of steep hills with a decrepit chorten on the center one. The signs and symbols the astrologer had painted were a guide. Each of the maps embodied the perception of the world from a different view, that of soldier, scientist, snow monk, and Shiva. Most called her an astrologer but some whispered a different name: sorceress. How could the old woman, who almost never left Yangkar, know this terrain? And what were the secrets she was trying to lead him to? He put away the map and the satellite photo, keeping only the guidance of the snow monk and the sorceress.
Every few hundred yards along his road were lhatse, rock cairns, most so overtaken by lichen they almost seemed like misshapen ancient statues. The track he drove down had clearly been a pilgrims’ path, which aligned with the path Lhakpa had shown. There was another line on Lhakpa’s map that intersected his own track a few miles ahead. He saw now that the snow hermit had inscribed one of his tiny legends under it. Ice Ball Alley.
His utility vehicle groaned more loudly with each slope. The cairns became more frequent as he climbed higher, and several showed recent additions of mani stones, carved, or simply scratched, with the mani mantra on their face, invoking the Compassionate Buddha. Here and there the spars of old withered pines extended out of the heather. All those near the track held wind-battered prayer flags. He had an odd sense that as he ascended he was going backward in time, into Old Tibet.
He halted at the intersection with the Ice Ball Alley—a wider, firmer gravel track—and got out to walk eastward, in the direction the prisoner convoy from Sichuan would have taken over a year earlier. Something yellow fluttered in the wind two hundred feet in front of him and he hastened his pace. It was a tattered length of plastic tape, anchored under a rock and printed with the bold words Public Security Crime Scene. The knobs had their own sacred flags.
This then was where the hail chaser had called to the skies and done his dance, where two soldiers had died, where Huan had arrested the old Tibetan for murder. Shan sat on a boulder and studied the scene. It was at the crest of the highest ridge that reached out from the massive snowcapped peak above, which itself was the highest summit for scores of miles to the south, probably the highest until the mighty Himalayas, which were visible as a gray smudge on the horizon. It would be a cloud catcher, where moisture-laden clouds that had made it over the barrier of the Himalayas would pile on, colliding with the frigid air of the peak. It didn’t require sorcery to know that if hail was going to fall anywhere in the surrounding countryside, it was likely to be on this slope.
As he approached his truck he saw two stone pillars matching those of Shiva’s drawing. They led to a little flat overlooking the vast landscape, beside a spring that bubbled up out of the ground, surrounded by more of the overgrown cairns and a jutting ledge that made a roof under which three or four people could have slept. It would have been a stopping place on the pilgrims’ path. It also had to be where the hail chaser would have sheltered when the hail had pelted down on the nearby convoy. Not just pilgrims had stopped there, for Shan found the faint traces of hoof prints. He turned and studied the landscape to the south, then lifted his binoculars, locating more gray blots on the land below. The distance was too great to make out specific structures, but he knew the pattern of the blots, and he realized he had looked at these same snowcapped peaks many times during his years behind razor wire. The gray blots were Tan’s prison camps. On the day of Yankay Namdol’s release the hail chaser had come in this direction, on horseback, with the young woman who released prayer flag kites over the dam construction site.
Shan folded his legs into the meditation position and sat in the pilgrims’ flat, facing the high mountains, reciting first the mani mantra then the mantra Shiva had written at the bottom of his chart, a mantra that invoked the mountain deities. Eventually he rose, parked his truck off the road, and pulled his pack from the back seat. He emptied his water bottle from Yangkar and refilled it in the pilgrims’ spring, then proceeded up the trail. He might have driven another two or three miles, but this was the respectful approach, as a pilgrim trying to meet the mountain god on his own terms.
He walked for nearly four hours, alternately contemplating the pilgrims who had trod the path for centuries before him or trying to fit together the pieces of the puzzle that somehow included the hail chaser, the snow hermit, Larung Gar, and the American archaeologist. At each cairn he encountered he followed the tradition of reciting the mani mantra and adding a stone. He often sensed having his old friend Lokesh at his side and recalled with a pang how when released from prison, they had naively vowed to spend a year walking pilgrims’ paths together. He and the old Tibetan had still been able to spend days off from time to time exploring and rehabilitating ancient pilgrim trails. Once, for a moment, he was sure he heard the old man’s joyful laugh, then realized it was just the chuckling call of a snow partridge sunning itself near the trail.
The air had grown thin, and much cooler, when he crested a small ridge and looked down into a north-facing flat at the base of a huge rock formation from which four long spines protruded. He extracted Shiva’s chart and saw that the spines matched the talons of her garuda bird, the last in her sequence of landmarks. With a bit of imagination, he could see that the curving expanse of stone above the talons might be seen as the wings of a giant bird. The flat was shielded from the wind and opened onto a grove of thick junipers beyond which lay a long field of ragged rock outcroppings. A dozen paces past the talons the flat disappeared into the sky, its thin lip of shale hanging over a cliff that had to be hundreds of feet high. Two horses were tethered by a small spring that ran along the edge of the trees. Folded blankets were stacked by a smoldering fire pit, and at the back, just beyond the farthest talon, a length of heavy black felt had been draped across a rope strung between two trees to make a makeshift shelter, in which he could see a few pots and kettles. He studied Lhakpa’s map, realizing that he was at the opposite side of the rock field where he had chased the kite flyer.
No one called out in challenge as he reached the fire pit. He circled the campfire then knelt at the little spring to rub water onto his face. Suddenly he heard a grunt, a rush of small feet, then something slammed into his hindquarters, sending him sprawling into the spring.
“It requires real effort to accidentally find this camp,” came a simmering voice above him. He righted himself slowly, rising to his knees to find a young Tibetan woman with a wool cap pulled low over her head and a heavy shepherd’s staff raised in her hands. But it hadn’t been the staff that struck him. With a now joyful bleat Tara the goat charged him again, but this time to push her face against him, mouthing his jacket in her usual greeting.
The woman relaxed her hold on the staff. “She acts like she knows you,” she said, question in her voice.
“Animals like me,” Shan said, and slowly rose to his feet. “I was on the pilgrims’ path,” he offered. “Does it continue into the stone field?” He took a step toward the outcroppings.
Tara, however, would not let him avoid her. She leapt up on her two back feet, nuzzling his belly.
“No, she does know you,” the woman insisted, raising the staff again.
Shan sighed and sat on a flat boulder, putting his hat beside him as he rubbed Tara’s head. “Can we perhaps start over?” he asked. “Yes. Last month Tara ate a pair of my shoes, then a shirt she pulled off my clothesline. And she seems to enjoy visiting the cells in my jail.”
The woman stiffened, raising the club higher as she retreated toward the shadows, calling Tara. The goat looked at her with a curious expression but did not leave Shan. The Tibetan hesitated. “She trusts you,” she said in surprise.
“I was there when you took Yankay away from his detention camp. I never liked those reeducation camps. Not really a prison, not really a school. Just one of those limbo hells where souls bide their time for life to begin again.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong!” the woman snapped.
“I am not your enemy,” Shan said.
“You are Chinese! You admit you are a government officer!”
“Officer seems too big a word for what I do. Just a lowly constable. And I am outside my jurisdiction.”
“No,” came an amused voice from the shadows. “Shan is more like the Abbot of Yangkar. And the gods’ valley was always in the jurisdiction of Yangkar gompa.” Lhakpa emerged into the daylight.
“He is a policeman, Uncle!” the woman pressed, alarm in her voice. “And there is no more gompa at Yangkar.”
“No. The gompa remains, just harder to see than it once was. Shan is a policeman who opens his jail beds to half-frozen monks and helps paint the chorten in the town square, always ignoring the Mao at the other end.”
“He was trying to deceive me when he arrived,” his niece pressed.
“In Tibet a wise man learns to test new ground before revealing himself.” Lhakpa turned to Shan. “This is Jaya, my other niece.”
“I can barely tell them apart.”
Lhakpa laughed. “She is the human one, though I warn her often that she gets dangerously close to transmigration these days.”
“As when she flies kites over bulldozers.”
Jaya cocked her head at him. “It was you who followed me on the ridge that day.”
“I thought it silly when she first suggested it,” Lhakpa said. “But it makes them hesitate when they find prayers mysteriously draped over equipment. I especially like the night flights. The director came out of his quarters one morning and prayer flags were all over the trees by his door. He was furious, cursed his security team for allowing it, but they said they were certain no one came close in the night. So they installed security cameras. They were even more disturbed when it happened again, and the cameras proved no one had set foot in his compound. Tibetan ghosts!”
Shan chewed on Lhakpa’s words. Was the snow monk revealing that they had helpers secretly working in the valley below? “They have a drone now,” Shan warned. “One of those used by the army for battlefield reconnaissance. You won’t be able to hide in the outcroppings when they watch from above.”
Lhakpa cast a worried glance toward the sky, no doubt realizing that their camp would be conspicuous from the sky.
“Maybe the gods would send an eagle,” Jaya suggested. “Eagles don’t like drones.”
“You have a relative who’s an eagle perhaps?” Shan asked. “I’ve always wondered, is that a lower- or a higher-level reincarnation?”
Jaya gave him a dangerous smile, then began moving the blankets under the lean-to of black cloth, which would look like just another shadow from above.
“You’re not really a snow monk,” Shan said to Lhakpa.
Lhakpa shrugged. “I think I have the heart of a snow monk, and I was looking forward to a few months wandering the remote peaks. But I was needed for the valley.”
“For the valley or for its cavern?” Shan asked. “I saw heavily loaded yaks coming out of the mountains when I was climbing up.”
As Lhakpa motioned Shan toward the lean-to, Jaya uttered an angry protest and stubbornly planted herself, arms akimbo, in front of it. “Uncle, no! We don’t know him well enough.”
Lhakpa raised a palm to quiet her. “If he meant to do us harm, he would not have come as a pilgrim. He stopped to pray at each of the cairns. He had no idea anyone was watching, niece.”
As Jaya reluctantly stepped aside, Lhakpa opened a flap in the back wall of the shelter and Shan discovered it was an entry into a wide, dry cavity created by a huge overhanging ledge that was obscured by the juniper trees. Crude shelves had been constructed of long flat slabs of slate set on smaller, squarish rocks. The entire hundred-foot stone wall at the back of the chamber was lined with the shelves and two-thirds of the shelves were full of artifacts.
“The local herders say that Gekho’s cavern was used since the first man met the gods,” Lhakpa explained as he guided an awestruck Shan along the shelves. “There were many small chapels off the main tunnel of the cavern, and each chapel’s contents were kept together here, as the professor recovered them, with the more modern images, probably one or two hundred years old, at the shelf to the right, progressing to the oldest at the other end.” Among those more recent images Shan recognized exquisitely carved and cast representations of the Buddhas of the Three Times, the five peaceful meditational Buddhas sitting astride golden lotus flowers, then many of the twenty-one aspects of Mother Tara. He lingered for a moment at a particularly fierce-looking Red Tara, painfully recalling how Metok had invoked the protectress with his last breath. As they progressed along the shelves the images grew less familiar, many of them appearing to be angry demons and protector gods. The last images left on the shelves were a group of primitive figures that looked more like tigers than gods, frightening in aspect. Lhakpa pulled away a large piece of dark cloth. Under it were two intricately crafted figures, one of the blue mountain god and one of Yamantaka, the Lord of Death. Propped between the small statues were photographs of Professor Gangfen and a blond Western woman who had to be Natalie Pike.
The grainy photos were from an instant camera, close-ups taking in only their subjects’ upper bodies, but Shan saw the joy in both their eyes as they held the same two figurines. There was sadness there too, for the only reason they had been collecting the treasures was because they knew the sacred cavern would be sacrificed in the building of Beijing’s dam.
The woman who gazed out of the photo had Cato Pike’s intelligent-but-defiant blue eyes. She was in her mid-twenties, and her high cheekbones would have given most women an elegant beauty, but he could see from her smudged face, tangled hair, and dirt-stained clothing that she was not one much concerned about outward appearances.
Professor Gangfen reminded Shan so much of his own father that he felt a pang as he studied the archaeologist’s image. Even without his wire-rimmed spectacles he would have looked the scholar. Shan imagined that the many pockets of the photographer’s vest he wore were filled with little brushes, dental picks, glassine envelopes, and other tools of his beloved trade. A pencil was lodged behind an ear, sticking out of shaggy salt-and-pepper hair. Like Natalie Pike, he had died an unsung hero, perhaps even more so than the American woman, for he had known that his government would severely punish him if they had discovered what he was doing. He had not only defied his government, he had given his life to save a vital history, to preserve the truth.
“Shan,” Lhakpa urged, standing at the flap in the felt wall. Shan realized the Tibetan had been calling his name. Shan bowed his head respectfully to the images of the two dead archaeologists and rejoined the snow monk.
“They must have gotten most of the artifacts out,” Shan observed as Lhakpa led him back to the campsite.
“Three yak trains have already left. But even so, and including those still here, it is only part of the total. It wasn’t just one cavern shrine, there were tunnels and chambers deep in the mountain, an unexplored labyrinth of shrines. Just imagine all those people for all those centuries, carrying dim butter lamps for half a mile or more into the darkened corridors to reach the gods.”
Lhakpa stepped across the camp into the shadows of the field of outcroppings with a summoning gesture to Shan, who retrieved his pack and followed. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Jaya behind him.
“I don’t understand how they could have taken so much out of the cavern without being spotted,” he said to the Tibetan woman as they caught up with Lhakpa.
“There are friends below. There’s a Tibetan named Metok, a senior engineer, who helps sometimes. He had trucks and other equipment parked across the mouth of the cave at the end of the workdays before…” her voice trailed off.
“Before the explosion,” Lhakpa finished. “He gave us cover that way, so we could move in and out of the cave at night without being seen. Metok took a great risk. He’s a good friend.”
“Metok loved going inside,” Jaya explained. “He came back again, and again, each time more worried. He wanted us to give him our photos and inventory lists, so he could persuade the authorities to stop the project.” Jaya winced. “I asked him if he had somehow missed the fact that six thousand temples and monasteries had already been destroyed. Where was the big monastery at Yangkar, I asked him, or the one at Lhadrung? Where were the millions of artifacts already taken by the government? When Natalie told him that some of the artifacts here were truly ancient and showed that riders had likely come here from Scythia and Central Asia, that the standing stones were from those cultures, he said yes, that was his point, that the stones proved that this was a unique site, that it was so important it could be one of those heritage sites protected by the United Nations. But then just days later the standing stones were bulldozed, all signs of them destroyed. He never argued with us again, just asked how he could help. So I said move the trucks in front of the cave. He has a good soul, that Metok. The gods are in his heart. He thinks he might convince the government that the site is too unstable to continue the work, says he knows of maps in Golmud that show a fault line here that was left off the maps used by the Five Claws engineers. He was called away unexpectedly but before he left, he said he sent a friend named Sun to bring them back.”
Shan looked away. Sun had abruptly gone to Golmud to retrieve maps, but there had been no maps with his baggage. He spoke no more until they emerged onto a field thick with grass and wildflowers. They were at one of the highest points overlooking the valley, a few hundred yards from the narrow pass where the dam was to be constructed, looking down at the frenzied construction activity at the bottom of the valley.
It was Shan who broke the silence. “I pray you will not hate me for the news I must give you.” He sat on a ledge and motioned them to join him.
“I was forced to witness an execution in Lhadrung town,” he said, his heart feeling like a cold stone. “I didn’t know about all this,” he said, gesturing to the huge work site below. “I just saw a man convicted of corruption, who had defiance in his eyes and a prayer in his heart.” He looked each of his companions in the eyes. “It was Metok Rentzig.”
The color drained from Jaya’s face. “No! No, no, no!” she cried. “Impossible!”
Lhakpa sank his face into his hands.
“Impossible but true,” Shan said.
“He was not corrupt!” Jaya said with a sob.
“I know that now. He smuggled a note out. He said he was being held because he had seen the professor and Natalie Pike murdered. I know now that he meant that he was there when the cave was collapsed, and that whoever directed it knew he was killing those inside.”
Jaya wiped at her tears. “They killed Metok. The government murdered him.”
“And his friend Sun died on the sky train. But it wasn’t the government, only certain people in the government,” Shan said, and gazed despairingly down at the construction. “We can’t stop this, but we can expose the truth,” he said.
“For whom?” Jaya snapped. “No one in the government will care!”
“For us. For Metok and his friend Sun. For Professor Gangfen and Natalie Pike. For Gekho.”
Lhakpa shook his head as if disagreeing. “We have more chance of stopping the dam than finding the truth. Buddha’s blood, Shan, you’re talking about Public Security and a project led by Party officials from Beijing. The deputy director, that man Jiao, has a satellite phone. He talks with Beijing almost every day.”
Shan decided not to ask how Lhakpa could possibly know that. “If you keep resisting, they’ll call out armed patrols.”
“If they call out patrols,” Lhakpa said, heat entering his voice, “we keep resisting.” Jaya murmured her agreement, then whispered a mantra to the Mother Protector.
“I’m going down,” Shan announced.
“Bad timing. They’ve had a high-level visitor,” Lhakpa said, and pointed to the Five Claws office building. Shan made out the shape of a white utility vehicle parked between the flagpole and the director’s office.
“Good. I’m not going down to see the director. I am happy for him to be distracted.”
“Then wait,” Jaya said, and reached into her pack, extracting one of the lanyards with a security badge Shan had seen the workers wearing. She reminded Shan that there were usually spare hard hats in the bin by the mess hall, then had one question before he turned away. “What can you tell us about that drone?”
It was midafternoon by the time Shan reached the administrative compound at the bottom of the valley. He found a hat in the bin described by Jaya and a worker’s tunic hanging on a row of pegs inside the now-empty hall. He went as close to the headquarters office as he dared, wary of the guard now posted there, but near enough to see the nondescript white utility vehicle parked by the front door and the young Chinese driver slumped behind the wheel, asleep.
Beyond the compound of modular units that comprised the administrative center of the huge project was the equipment yard. The fence had been completed around the equipment and in one corner, two more walls of wire had been added to create a square perhaps two hundred feet on each side. Inside the wired-off corner, canvas tarps had been spread overhead and cots placed underneath, creating what looked like temporary living quarters for a few dozen men, some of whom were lying on the cots while others played cards or walked along the perimeter of the wire. They were all Tibetans.
“New rules,” came a voice over his shoulder. “Gotta’ sign in at the office if you need any laborers and register each name and identity card number.” A sturdy, square-shouldered Chinese man was at his side, casting an appraising eye over the Tibetans. He wore a red safety helmet, which Shan took to be the sign of a foreman. “Took me almost an hour just to get six ditch diggers this morning,” the man groused. “Deputy Director Jiao tells us in all his speeches that we’re on the urgent business of the Chairman, then he puts more damned obstacles in the way.”
“Only the Tibetans?” Shan asked.
“Right. Suddenly Jiao doesn’t trust them. Too much talk about the blue god and such. He says all the troubles we’re having can’t be coincidence. But the Tibetans are the hardest workers we got and trying to bring in others from the east could take weeks.”
“More troubles?” Shan asked. “I just got back,” he added, trying to cover his curiosity.
“Yesterday the brakes on a truck failed and it drove right into the lake at the end of the valley. Into Gekho’s belly, one of the Tibetans said. Today a bulldozer broke down with dirt inside the engine. Could be a bad gasket, could be someone put dirt in the fuel tank. Either way, it’ll take days to strip the engine and get it running again. And more of those Tibetan prayers materializing out of the sky. They just drift down out of the clouds. That spooks people the most. Anyway, Deputy Director Jiao ordered the fence erected and ordered most of the Tibetan laborers to stay inside it when not assigned to work crews. For their own good, he told them. They’ll take meals in the mess hall with the rest of us but are kept under watch by one of us foremen until the real guards arrive. He called Public Security in Lhasa.”
Shan tried to push the worry from his voice. “He can’t just arrest people,” he said.
A guttural sound that might have been a laugh came from the foreman’s throat. “I guess you haven’t crossed Jiao yet. He’s the one with the real power. One step out of line and he becomes like a scolding schoolmaster. ‘Would you defy the Chairman?’ he’ll demand. That’s his response to anyone who even hints at not agreeing with him. ‘Why would you add another reinforcing rod to that new wall, would you defy the Chairman? Why are you digging that foundation so deep, would you defy the Chairman?’” The foreman lit a cigarette. “Never knew the Chairman had an engineering degree,” he muttered, then walked toward the gate that led into the pen of Tibetan workers.
Shan was about to follow, to talk with the Tibetans, when he saw someone darting toward the white utility vehicle. It was the driver, coming from a side door in the administration building, who now climbed back behind the wheel as several men emerged from the main entrance. Snippets of loud conversation came from the group. The director was using his public voice, boasting proudly of his project to a Westerner in a business suit, who was replying in perfect Mandarin. Shan froze as the man turned toward him. It was Cato Pike.
He watched from the shadow of a truck as the director helped Pike into his own car, driven by Deputy Director Jiao, and they pulled away, apparently on the same tour Shan had received the week before. The white utility vehicle followed. The driver was Natalie Pike’s friend Cao.
As they disappeared down the valley, Shan moved toward the administrative complex, casting nervous glances toward the twisting road on the slope above that connected the project to the outside world. Public Security was coming, and soon there would be jackbooted guards stationed in the complex. He paced along the long message board outside the mess hall, reading notices about work shift schedules, meal hours, meetings of a Patriotic Workers Alliance, and sun-bleached photos of the ceremony that had launched construction months earlier. On October 1, the first caption read, the provincial Party chairman had come with a small brass band to celebrate the glorious event. The photos showed the first few modular units of the administrative compound, the first busload of joyful workers who would work on site preparation during the winter, and included a staged image of the provincial chairman at the controls of a bulldozer. The first step in the historic event happily coincided with the destruction of the feudal remnants that blighted the valley, boasted the caption. The bulldozer was plowing down the ancient standing stones. Shan paused, trying to understand several tiny tear-shaped blue objects in the photo, then realized that someone had deposited a line of blue paint along the top that had dripped below. Blue was the color of Gekho’s blood.
On top of an announcement about evening entertainments someone had pinned a photocopy of an aerial photo of the project. Shan took it down, puzzling over the annotations that had been made on it. Buddhist symbols were drawn along the top in a crude hand, then lines had been drawn along the edges of the valley and what looked like eyes drawn in the lake above the waterfall that dropped into the valley. More drops of blue paint had been added to the bottom. Seeing that two more identical images had been pinned elsewhere on the board, he folded the paper into his pocket.
Shan returned the tunic he had borrowed to the peg he had taken it from, tossed his hard hat into the bin, and marched into the administrative offices. The director’s secretary fortunately recognized him and expressed chagrin that he had not arrived in time to join the director and their distinguished foreign visitor.
He feigned surprise. “A foreigner?”
“Our first of many to come, the director told us,” she exclaimed. “We didn’t really expect him, although a woman from the United Nations office in Lhasa did call this morning to leave a message for him to call some ambassador, so we had a couple hours’ notice. At least he brought a copy of the letter he had sent, which we haven’t even received yet. We apologized and said in the future email would be sufficient.” She lifted the letter with a proud, excited expression. “The United Nations!” she exclaimed.
“May I?” Shan asked and accepted the letter with a respectful nod. It explained that the global director of Hydrogeology Development, Mr. Constantine Speare, was in Lhasa on official business and would be visiting the project to witness its remarkable construction and see if the director would be interested in speaking at a global sustainability conference in Kuala Lumpur. “The director must be very proud,” Shan said as he handed the letter back. Pike had known how to get his foot in the director’s door
The woman gave a vigorous nod. “Director Ren was disappointed in his offer to host a banquet tonight in honor of Mr. Speare, but the gentleman has to return to Lhasa today.” She gave a sigh of relief. “As if such an important personage would care to eat in our simple executive’s hall,” she added in a whisper, then she brightened. “But maybe we can get a photo of him for our wall,” she said, pointing to the wall of framed photos between the empty offices of the director and deputy director.
Shan paced along the wall, offering polite exclamations over the distinguished visitors in the images. At Jiao’s door he pushed aside a windbreaker with Jiao’s name, ostensibly to view another photo, making sure it dropped to the floor. He was out of sight of the woman as he bent to retrieve it, and quickly searched the pockets. He found them empty, but he paused over the embroidered badge over the breast pocket. It showed a red hammer over a white chorten, encircled by the words Safety in Serenity. The secretary noticed his interest in it as he hung the jacket back on its peg.
“From an old job,” she explained.
Back outside, Shan walked along the perimeter of the compound and found himself facing the caged Tibetans. None of them would make eye contact with him. He took out his gau and murmured the mani mantra several times. Heads snapped up. Three men darted to the wire in front of him.
“We didn’t do anything!” the nearest said in a plaintive tone. “We just want work! I need to feed my family!” Another man produced a little red book as if to prove his loyalty. He was, no doubt, a graduate of a reeducation camp.
“Don’t argue with them,” Shan said. “The director will soon realize he can’t treat his best workers this way.”
“The director?” asked the third, older Tibetan. “It wasn’t the director, it was that damned deputy of his. At least the director overrruled him when he said we would have to take all our meals in here.”
“Tell me,” Shan said, with a worried glance toward the high road again, “were any of you here on that first day, when they leveled the standing stones?”
The man with the book turned and called out, summoning a compact middle-aged man in a herder’s coat. “Where are the old stones they pushed down last October?” Shan asked him.
“Gone. Back to the gods, sir,” the man explained.
“To the gods?”
“There was a great long crack in the ground that led toward the cave shrine from the standing stones, a half-mile long and who knows how deep. My grandmother said such things were openings to the bayal, to the land of bliss where the gods waited for the human world to improve. But the director said that was to be our first task, to fill it in and cover all traces since it would be a distraction to the engineers. So he had all those stones pushed into it, even the ones that had old writing and images cut into them. Then he ordered more big boulders to be pushed in and block the crack and used all the gravel that had been brought in for the roads, so the bulldozers could drive right across. All gone now.”
“The cave is gone too,” Shan observed.
The Tibetan replied in a forlorn whisper, “If the cave is truly gone, the gods are trapped.”
Shan found himself unable to answer. He reached into his tunic pocket and searched for the cones of incense he often kept there, then handed the man all he had, six cones, and his box of matches. “You are not forgotten,” he said, feeling painfully inadequate.
“Maybe we should be,” the worker said. “Maybe we shouldn’t light incense to call in protecting spirits. I’m not sure we deserve it.”
Shan cocked his head in question.
“Because of what we’re doing,” another man explained. Half a dozen Tibetans had now gathered near Shan. “We’re destroying the gods’ home.”
“The gods’ home isn’t a few feet of soil on the valley floor,” Shan said, and gestured toward the surrounding mountains. “You haven’t destroyed their home. You haven’t trapped them, at least not for long. You’ve just confused them. Let them know you are here.”
The man who had taken the incense considered Shan’s words and began to nod, joined by others. Someone brought a flat rock and put a cone on it as another struck a match.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Shan asked.
“Yeshe,” a man said, and reached inside his shirt to produce a small copper gau on a strand of braided leather. “He was attacked. We worry about him.” The Tibetan nodded toward a small building behind the mess hall, fifty yards away, that Shan had not noticed. A sign on the path leading to it said Infirmary. Shan accepted the gau and the man backed away with a grateful nod.
The well-fed Chinese woman at the desk inside the infirmary door was watching a movie on a laptop and gave only a disinterested glance as Shan walked past her. Behind the screen that separated her desk was the ward, with six beds. Only two were occupied, one by a sleeping Chinese man with his ankle in a fresh plaster cast. The second patient was a Tibetan in his thirties who shuddered as Shan drew near. He closed his eyes as if pretending to sleep.
“My name is Shan,” Shan said in Tibetan. “I come from Yangkar. The monastery town.” It was the first time he had given voice to the description, but it was how he was beginning to think of the town. “Hold the dagger in your heart,” he added after a moment.
The man’s eyes snapped open. Shan had spoken one of the secret signs of the purba, the resistance. The purba was a ritual dagger meant to pierce the demons of fear and confusion. Shan extended the gau, which the man instantly snatched away, pressing it in both hands over his heart. As he did so, Shan saw the healing bruises and scrapes on the back of his hands and forearms and saw fading bruises on his face. The young Tibetan seemed about to speak but as he opened his mouth he grimaced in pain. He had cracked or broken ribs.
He tried again. “I fell off some rocks,” he said with a wince.
Shan was familiar with the pattern of the man’s injuries. “No, Yeshe. Someone beat you.”
Yeshe looked down at his gau and slowly nodded, then held up four fingers.
“Four people beat you.”
He nodded again and gestured Shan closer. “The cleanup crew they call them. Special janitors, though you never see them actually cleaning anything.”
Shan was not sure he heard right. “Janitors?”
Whispering apparently did not cause Yeshe as much pain, and Shan bent to listen. “That’s what they call themselves, because they wear the gray coveralls and gray windbreakers that the custodians wear. They drive a pickup with a mop stained with red paint like blood hanging off the tailgate. It’s like their banner. The cleanup crew they may be called, but my bet is that they are soldiers.”
Shan studied the Tibetan. “What do you mean?”
“I just left the army five months ago. They’re all in good shape, all follow a strict discipline. And I heard them call their leader sergeant. They sing an old battle song sometimes, about holding the flag high as the bullets fly.”
The news struck a nerve. Shan had heard the song often, sung by guards in his former prison. “But why attack you?”
“Fireworks.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I worked in demolition in the army. Ten years, then I came home.”
“You mean you worked with explosives.”
“Right. When the construction company heard that, they hired me right away. Good pay. Blast a ledge here, a stubborn boulder there. Shatter a rock face so it can be straightened.”
Shan cast a glance toward the entrance. He could see the back of the nurse, still watching her laptop. “Why assault you for blasting rocks?” he asked
“More like for not blasting,” Yeshe said. “The deputy director told me to destroy that old cave and I said I couldn’t, that I would have to ask a monk before doing so, because it was a holy place. That night the cleanup crew pulled me from my bunk.”
Shan saw the torment in the Tibetan’s eyes. “But the real reason you wouldn’t help was that you knew there were probably people inside.”
Yeshe looked away, staring at the wall. “So the deputy director did it himself,” he said toward the wall. “He could have sent men to clear it, to check it to be certain there was no one inside. The deputy engineer argued with him, said people might die. Jiao struck him, then had him escorted to his room. Then Jiao managed the detonations himself. The next day the deputy engineer was gone, summoned away on urgent business, Jiao said.”
The Tibetan stared forlornly at his prayer amulet. “Later, some of the hill people came down and told us a man and a woman had been inside. Such a terrible way to die. I have nightmares every night now, like I was one of those trapped inside. I am lingering for hours, slowly suffocating, dying with the agony of broken bones and pierced organs, alone in the total darkness with the trapped gods screaming all around me.”