The valley was washed in shadow as Shan planted himself in the road between two boulders, just beyond where the road leveled off at the top of the ridge. He had watched the white utility vehicle slowly mount the long switchbacks that led out of the valley, and now stood in its path with folded arms. As the car approached he took off his hat. He could see Cato Pike in the passenger seat, muttering to Cao as they skidded to a stop.
“Constantine Speare,” Shan said when Pike approached him. “Another Roman name and another pointed weapon.”
“Glad someone here appreciates my subtle wit,” Pike replied with a peeved grin. The American glanced in the direction of the valley, out of sight below. “I’d rather not linger.”
“Afraid someone will discover there is no UN office of Hydrogeology Development? Or that you don’t even work for the UN? Back in America that might just be considered a prank. Here it is suicidal.”
“Think of it more as vengeful curiosity,” the American said. The glint in his eye made Shan uneasy. Once again he became aware of the beast that seemed to hover behind Pike’s gaze. “And you’re the one who told me about this valley. Did you honestly think I would stay away?”
“I thought I would eventually find a way to bring you here, to pay respects to where…” Shan searched for words. “Where the deaths actually occurred.” He nodded to Cao as the Chinese student climbed out, standing behind the car to watch the road below. “You probably think you know China, Pike, that you probably would just be deported if they found you out. But not here, not in Tibet, not if you interfere with this project. They will shoot you and drop your body where no one will ever find it but the vultures.”
“They? Give me their names and you and I don’t have to cross paths again.”
Shan gestured to Cao. “Think about him. If they didn’t kill him outright, they would ruin his life if he were caught aiding a foreigner in some illegal activity. Assuming false credentials sounds like espionage. Beijing is ravenous for American spies.”
“Actually, today was mostly Cao’s idea. I was just the decoy, although I did want to see the place and meet the men responsible for it. I made an interesting discovery. Director Ren is a figurehead. It is Jiao who runs this place.”
“Very astute. Took me two visits to figure that out,” Shan said, then gestured to a flat boulder where they could sit and told the American what he had learned.
“Need a ride?” Pike asked when he had finished.
Shan gestured up the darkening slope. “My truck is up in the mountains,” he said with a sinking feeling, knowing he would never find it in the night. As Pike opened the door to climb inside, he realized the American had not reciprocated. “You said you were a decoy. To distract them from what?”
Pike grinned. “You have your ways and I have mine. China breeds the best talent in the world for surveillance of electronic communication. I used to pay a lot of Uncle Sam’s money to buy black-market surveillance software in Beijing. I kept my own copies, but Cao had even better ones. Kind of a hobby of his it turns out.”
Shan remembered seeing Cao dash from the administration building. He hadn’t been sleeping, he had been waiting for someone to come out the side door, for a chance to sneak inside while the senior managers were distracted with Pike.
Cao returned Shan’s inquiring gaze. “You’re just an archaeology student,” Shan said.
“I’m just an archaeology student,” Cao repeated. A student, Shan reminded himself, who helped his professor keep records of work that would have been banned by the government if it had known.
Pike held up a memory stick. “And now because of him we have a copy of all the office emails for the past six months.” He pulled his door shut and rolled down the window. “Oh, and right about now their communication link with Beijing is crashing. Probably take a day or two to recover.”
Shan paused to catch his breath on the steep climb up to the outcropping field. He could see the work site far below, where some equipment was still being operated with headlights on. In the distance a huge pile of toppled trees burned. Something still nagged at the back of his mind, a lurking question about his visit that he couldn’t quite articulate. Something else still tore at his heart, the destruction and burial of the ancient standing stones. He had begun to grasp the excitement the professor and the American woman had felt about the valley. They hadn’t been doing archaeology of long-ago tribes, they had been engaged in archaeology of the human spirit, at the place that anchored all the bones of the earth.
He had to climb the final heights in short stages, pausing when his lungs strained in the thin air. At the next stop, as he looked down at the shadowed place where the standing stones had once stood, the engima of his afternoon found his tongue.
“October 1!” he said out loud. October 1 was the day the stones had been destroyed. October 1 was National Day. National Day was when Tsomo, the old lama at Ko’s prison, had suddenly gasped, thrust his arms toward the north, and died.
Two hours later Shan sat at the campfire in the little sheltered flat below the stone talons and told Lhakpa and Jaya of his afternoon at the work site, ending with his realization that the standing stones and the old prisoner from the Larung Gar monastery had essentially died the same day.
“The same hour,” Jaya said. “2:00 p.m. on October 1.” She knew. She knew more than Shan. “The mysteries of spiritual transmigration in Tibet,” she added, then saw the confusion on Shan’s face. “Yankay calls in hail and two soldiers die. They destroy the ancient stones and an aged lama dies. Maybe it’s true what the old Bonpo say. We are all puppets. The gods decree it all.”
Lhakpa murmured something in a voice that had grown desolate, and Jaya kicked him. He gave his niece a stern shake of his head, as if chastising her. Shan did not react, acting as though he had not heard. But he had heard. Lhakpa had said I should have been the one.
“On the road you stopped that white car, Constable,” Jaya said.
Shan hesitated. The Tibetan woman seemed to spend much of her time watching the valley. “I discovered that I knew the visitor, someone from Lhasa,” he replied.
Lhakpa stirred the embers of their dung-fed fire. “Tell me, Constable, are you investigating the death of Metok or the death of the gods?”
Shan leaned closer to the fire. “I only have jurisdiction over the former.”
“That is just the jurisdiction that other men give you,” Lhakpa replied, seeming to disagree.
Shan, suddenly feeling very small and very cold, pulled his borrowed blanket around his shoulders.
“There are many old statues of deities up in the hills above Yangkar,” Lhakpa continued, “toppled by the government. Marpa told me how on days off you go up by yourself with a shovel and bar to stand them tall again.”
“Sometimes herders come and help me.”
“And if Religious Affairs knew of this, or what you do below the streets of Yangkar, they would call Public Security on you. You talk of jurisdiction but you act based on higher duties.”
Shan looked up at the Tibetan. Talking with the snow hermit was like talking with Lokesh. Nothing could be hidden.
“So again, who was in the white truck?” Lhakpa pressed. “Jaya said it might be Public Security. I said no, because I trust you.” The two Tibetans stared at him with expectant, impatient expressions.
“It was a student from Professor Gangfen’s dig. He was driving Natalie Pike’s father.”
“Uncle!” Jaya cried out and threw a hand out to grasp Lhakpa’s shoulder. Shan’s announcement seemed to stun both Lhakpa and his niece.
“He came from America?” Lhakpa asked at last. “What does he hope to do?”
Shan thought about describing Pike but he was not sure how to do so. “He received notice that she died in a terrible accident. The government sent her ashes and they had a funeral for her. But he has been in law enforcement and possesses a great curiosity. And he lived in Beijing, knew the ways of Beijing and its police. He tested some of the ashes. They had sent him the remains of a sheep.”
Lhakpa stared into the fire with a solemn expression. “A cruel thing to do to a father.”
“He asked me where the crematorium was that had done it,” Shan continued. “Two nights ago he went there and locked the manager into one of the ovens for the night.”
Lhakpa gave a surprised laugh and patted Jaya on the back, as if she needed comforting. Shan realized she must have been a friend of Natalie Pike. “I like this man Pike,” the snow hermit said. “He does what an old teacher told me the best lamas always did. He puts teeth in his virtue.”
One of the horses tethered in the trees wickered and Jaya rose to investigate. Whispers came out of the darkness, and she returned with three Tibetans who eagerly accepted servings of the stew she had made. The two men, judging by their sheepskin vests and caps, were herders. The third, a sturdy woman of perhaps forty years, nodded at Shan as she accepted her bowl from Jaya. He had a vague sense that he knew her but could not put a name to her face. Only when one of the herders added sticks from the bundle of fuel he had carried into the camp did Shan make the connection, for the flames illuminated the big leather bag she kept at her side, clearly showing the painted image of Menla, the Medicine Buddha. The woman was the nurse who usually roamed the Yangkar hills.
The matronly Tibetan woman remained silent as Jaya filled a small pot with stew and kept her head bent down in a melancholy expression. She did not eat, only murmured her gratitude to Jaya, picked up the pot and a bundle of incense that had been left near the fire, and stepped back into the shadows behind the wall of black felt.
Ten minutes later a Tibetan man in the denim clothing of the construction workers appeared at the edge of the trees and Jaya and Lhakpa quickly stepped to his side, speaking with him in urgent, worried tones. Shan slipped behind the felt wall. At the end of the rows of artifacts, past a bend in the mountain, he discovered a smaller campfire. The nurse and two other Tibetans sat there, one an older man with long, ragged, graying hair that hung about his shoulders, the other a squarely built woman who was working a strand of prayer beads. The man looked up and cocked his head as if hearing Shan’s approach.
The two women gasped as he stepped out of the darkness. The man’s leathery face lifted in a small, uncertain smile, though he did put one hand on the carved staff that leaned on a tree beside him.
“He was talking with Lhakpa,” the nurse explained to her companions.
“I was hoping to get better acquainted with the hail chaser,” Shan said, nodding to the old man.
“The constable of Yangkar,” the nurse added in warning. The other woman grabbed the pot of stew and fled into the night.
The hail chaser spoke in the quiet voice of a lama. “Come share our fire, Constable.” As Shan moved to sit on one of the flat stones by the flames, the nurse rose, lifted her medicine bag and a smaller, bulging leather bag of the kind used for collecting yak dung for fires, and disappeared in the direction of the other woman.
“Such an effect you have on women,” the old Tibetan said with a low chuckle.
Shan looked down the path the nurse had taken. She had always been standoffish with him. He did not even know her name, only that she was called the walking healer. The herders she served always praised her abilities.
“I wouldn’t have thought the sick would stay so close to the Five Claws,” Shan observed as he extended his hands over the warmth of the flames. He glanced back toward the trail. There was plenty of firewood but the nurse had taken dung for fuel, which he did not understand.
“There are many forms of healing needed on this mountain,” the hail chaser said. Shan saw that beside him were half a dozen bunches of juniper twigs, bound with vines.
“I am honored to meet you, Yankay Namdol. I am called Shan. I regretted not being able to speak with you when I saw you released at the Shoe Factory.” Shan recalled the strange movements the hail chaser had made that morning. Now he realized part of the strangeness had been because the old man seemed subtly deformed. A hand was bent at a slightly unnatural angle. One shoulder seemed higher than the other. His left forearm was twisted, and his jaw seemed a bit off-center, giving his grizzled face a crooked appearance.
The old man tightened his grip on his staff, which Shan now saw was intricately carved with Buddhist and Bonpo symbols.
“I had never seen a man summon an earthquake.”
Yankay’s smile showed a row of uneven yellowed teeth. “You’re mistaken. I don’t summon earthquakes. Earthquakes summon me.”
“At precisely the moment of your release. I was deeply impressed. It was magical. I think the warden might have fled if the colonel hadn’t been there. And I expect the prisoners were treated with a bit more respect for a few days.”
“You aren’t prepared to understand how the earth works here,” Yankay said, in the tone of a patient old teacher.
Shan stared into the fire, weighing the man’s choice of words. “No,” he admitted, “I always thought as I grew older I would grow wiser. But I only learned how ignorant I am.”
Yankay let go of his staff and extended his hands over the flames. “Good. The first step to wisdom.”
“And the next?” Shan asked and realized he sounded like a nervous student.
“Surrender to the wonder of it all.”
“The wonder of men who would kill gods?”
Yankay sighed and did not reply right away. “There is an ice cave near the top of the mountain,” he said eventually. “If you sit there long enough you can hear the vibration coming from the heart of the mountain. Like a heartbeat.”
“Sounds cold.”
The hail chaser seemed disappointed. “So you are one of those who has to be beaten into surrender.”
“I tend to think that I am simply a survivor, hardened by long experience.” He looked up into the open, inquiring countenance of the disheveled man. “How does one become a hail chaser?” he asked.
“You could never do it, Constable, if you couldn’t sit to listen to the mountain.”
“You mean it is a gift. A heavy burden of a gift, I suspect. Men die in hailstorms.”
Yankay grimaced. “There used to be shrines dedicated to those who died in hailstorms. The lamas always had a hard time knowing how to treat them. Those who died violently usually can’t attain a higher level of existence, but many people felt a man killed by hail had been called by the gods.” He stood and dropped more wood on the fire. “I never wanted those soldiers to die. Sometimes I think that Lieutenant Huan was right, maybe I had committed murder that day. If I hadn’t stopped the convoy, they would have lived.”
“If they had worn their helmets, they would have lived,” Shan said. “If the trucks had broken down climbing the mountain, they would have lived. If Huan had not been in such a hurry and taken the shortcut, they would have lived. If they had left that morning ten minutes later, they would have lived.” He shrugged. “Murder is a construct of human law,” he observed. “I’m not sure those laws apply on this mountain.”
“They don’t,” Yankay agreed.
“Then one year in the Shoe Factory seems penance enough.”
Yankay lifted a foot, showing a heavy boot. “Every graduate gets a pair of the army boots made there, did you know that? Best boots I’ve ever owned. Cost one year of my life. Sometimes I think I should put them on a shrine.” The old man sighed loudly. “But the stones of the trails are sharp, and my bones get weary.”
Shan had so many questions, about how Yankay had become a hail chaser, about how he had sensed the earthquake, about how he had evaded capture by the authorities all these years, and what he knew about the sacred valley before the heavy equipment had arrived, but he said nothing. He felt like a nervous young novice in the presence of a renowned lama. Even after so many years of living in Tibet there were so many things about the land, about such Tibetans of the old world, that he didn’t understand. He knew Lokesh would say his compulsion to understand everything was Shan’s particular weakness, that he had to stop questioning and, as Yankay suggested, immerse himself in the wonder. But wonder was proving elusive in the Valley of the Gods.
They sat in silence. A night bird called from the trees. The shadows shortened as the moon rose higher.
“The ancient ways are always just beyond,” Yankay suddenly said. He seemed to be speaking to the fire, for he then nodded as if the flames had replied with something profound.
“Once it was a noble profession,” he declared, lifting his eyes toward Shan. “Only very learned men would chase the hail. It took as many years of study as that for a lama abbot, with hundreds of long prayers to memorize. But all those teachers fell off the earth in the last century.”
He raised a hand and pointed to the northwestern sky. A moment later a meteor shot across the heavens, exactly where he pointed. It had to be a coincidence, Shan told himself. There could be no explanation for it, just as there could be none for Yankay’s knowing of the earthquake at the Shoe Factory. He heard Lokesh’s whisper in his ear. Just accept the wonder.
“There are many evil demons roaming the earth in our time. That was the true job of the hail chaser, to use lightning, hail, and earthquake to subdue the demons that sought to harm humans.” He poked the fire with a long stick. “The charm against the inner-earth demon is soil that has been fused by lightning. The charm against the lesser female water demons is hellebore. The charm against the more powerful ones is powdered copper and black sulphur mixed with soil from a crossroads. The list is long, and some charms are lost forever. I didn’t have the right training. The gods speak to me, they tell me about hail, and lightning, and earthquakes, even meteors, but I don’t really know how to speak back to them. I am a mute wandering alone in the house of the gods,” he said, with a tinge of anguish in his dry voice.
The hail chaser shrugged. “I can always dance and have people think it is magic but it’s not magic. It’s the gods whispering in my ear. That day at the Shoe Factory, did you not hear all the dogs barking and see the mules bolting? There’s a special bark dogs have when an earthquake is minutes away. My early teacher taught me that much. All the birds had gone from the camp, though no one else seemed to notice. There’s a vibration in the air just before the ground shakes, though most humans have forgotten how to feel that as well. Maybe I just have obsolete senses that have died out in other humans.” He sighed. “I hear that down in the lower lands there are actually rivers a man can’t drink from and air that makes a man sick to breathe. If that’s true, it’s because no one knows how to speak with the earth gods anymore. I’m just a miserable fool who can only hear them. Which makes it a curse, really.”
The words pressed against Shan’s heart. Not for the first time he felt a deep loathing for what the world had done to such men. Why, he wondered, was Yankay confessing such things to him? And why was his old body so misshapen? He gazed into the shallow cave where Yankay stored his belongings and saw a dented helmet. “Tell me, Rinpoche,” he said, using the form of address reserved for learned lamas, “how many times have your bones been broken by hail?”
A sad smile rose on the old man’s face. “You do me too great an honor, Constable. Maybe in the former world I would have become such but never in this one.” He shrugged, then began touching parts of his body and counting. His left collarbone, his right collarbone, his left radius bone, his right ulna bone, the back of one hand, the wrist of the other. He stopped counting at ten. “I tend to think of these as blessings, for each time the gods decided not to kill me. ‘Here we are!’ they are saying. ‘We have decided to let you live a while longer, you old fool!’” He touched his crooked jaw. “This one was just my stupidity. Never look up into a hailstorm.”
The hail chaser quieted and added more wood to the fire. “How well do you know the dead?” he suddenly asked Shan.
A chill ran down Shan’s spine. “I’m sorry?”
Yankay motioned in the direction the nurse had taken. “Our walking healer says you are the constable of Yangkar. Surely the constable of the old gompa town must know the dead. They say the dogs there are always barking because more ghosts than humans live there.”
“I have experienced the dead far too often,” Shan admitted.
The ragged old man gave a sympathetic nod, then pushed the end of one of his bundles of juniper into the embers. “We all know the Bardo, the words for the truly dead. But how do you deal with the half-dead? How do you raise them from in-between?”
“I don’t understand,” Shan confessed.
“When the body and soul change their mind. I keep thinking if I let the gods take me, I might see enough to—”
“There you are, Constable!” a female voice interrupted. Jaya appeared out of the shadows. “The worker who came to visit wants to thank you in person for helping Yeshe in the infirmary. He wrote a prayer he wants you to keep in your pocket.” She pulled Shan to his feet with an insistent gleam in her eyes. As they left the little clearing Shan looked back at the old man, then paused until Jaya yanked his arm. Yankay was shaking his staff with one hand and waving the bundle of smoldering juniper with the other as he murmured beseechingly to the heavens. He was trying to raise the half-dead.
The next morning Jaya insisted Shan ride a horse back to his truck and she accompanied him so she could lead the mount back to their mountain camp. They left under the harsh gaze of four rough-looking Tibetan men, who had arrived in the night, all of whom wore red yarn in their long shaggy hair, marking them as khampa, the fierce, defiant people of the Kham highlands who would probably still be fighting the Chinese if the Dalai Lama hadn’t implored them to stop years earlier. The khampa were filling the packs of half a dozen yaks with artifacts from the hidden cache, assisted by Lhakpa, who packed the more fragile pieces in layers of dried grass. The khampa did not acknowledge either Jaya or Shan as they rode past, other than to pull scarves up to cover half their faces, which suited Shan. He did not want to know who they were or where they were going with the treasures. As he watched them he recalled how Shiva had painted a line of yaks with Buddhas on their backs. How could she have known about the convoys carrying Buddhist treasures?
As they rode, Jaya frequently looked up at the sky. A storm had passed through in the night, but the sky had cleared. He knew she was skittish about the aerial drone, which could reveal their secrets to Public Security. Her worries faded as they began to descend the southern slope of the huge mountain and she spoke to her horse in admiring tones, sometimes even singing old songs from Tibetan horse festivals. She even asked Shan wary questions about Lhasa and asked him to explain what the Olympics were. She reminded him a lot of Yara, another bright, inquisitive woman who had been denied a broader engagement with the world.
“I was honored to meet Yankay last night,” Shan said.
“He seemed…” Jaya tried to find a word, “comfortable with you.”
“I sensed he was somehow sad about being a hail chaser.”
Jaya nodded. “He says his soul is always itching, and he does not know how to scratch it. Sometimes Uncle Yankay says he is just the edge of a sword that can never be sharpened.”
Shan looked at her in surprise. “Your uncle? Yankay and Lhakpa are brothers?” He had not understood the connection between the two men, just as he had not understood Lhakpa’s bitter statement uttered when Shan had described the death of the old lama at the 404th. It should have been me, he had said, as if Lhakpa had wanted to die.
“Yes. Yankay is many years older and as the first son had gone to a monastery. He was still a novice when the Chinese army came. He had always felt he would be a hail chaser, for even as a boy something inside him stirred at the coming of storms and earthquakes. His gompa had two of the most celebrated hail chasers in all of Tibet, who had begun to teach him. But they died when the Chinese came, and he fled into a cave with some of their books. Once when I was seven or eight I saw a demon dancing above our barley field, dressed in twigs and grass, with a long white horse tail fixed to a staff. My mother said, ‘That’s no demon, that’s your uncle Yankay.’ He would come like that every few months, and my mother would have me take a sack of barley and leave it at the edge of the field for him.
“Then after my parents died, I lived with neighbors and he would still come, though my new family had little to spare. I would save half the barley I was supposed to eat and give it to him. Once there was a letter on the rock where I left his food. It simply said, Jaya, I will try to be near, but I cannot be at your side, for your own safety. After that, he would leave letters each time he came, and when I was twelve he wrote that I must go to school and bloom into the flower I was meant to be.” She grew melancholy for a moment, then brightened. “He didn’t know I was going to be a prickly rose,” she said and urged her horse down the trail.
When they reached his truck, he expected her to quickly ride back up the mountain, but instead she dismounted and tied the horses to a gnarled pine. At first, she walked cautiously toward the truck, watching the surrounding outcroppings, but then she abruptly gasped and ran past him.
Shan stared in some chagrin as she excitedly pointed to half a dozen pockmarks on the hood and roof of his truck. The storm from the night had brought hail to Ice Ball Alley.
“Look!” Jaya exclaimed, pointing in turn to each of the dents, which looked like they had been made by hail the size of ping-pong balls.
“I should have parked lower on the slope,” Shan said.
“No, no! You don’t understand! The water from the melted hail is in each of the dents! The old ones claim such water is very powerful, straight from the hands of the earth gods. They soak charms in it. We must save it!”
In an energetic search of Shan’s truck, the Tibetan woman found an old drinking straw and an empty soda bottle left by the soldier who had followed Zhu in Shan’s vehicle the night they had driven to Lhadrung from Lhasa. Jaya cleansed both in the spring at the nearby pilgrims’ rest, then, clamping a thumb over one end of the straw, used it to suction up the water. She collected less than two inches in the bottle but pressed the sacred water to her breast for a quick prayer, then made Shan hold it while she carved a plug from a piece of the old pine. She carefully secured the bottle in the bag behind her saddle but hesitated before mounting. “Do you need that old newspaper on the seat?” she asked, then quickly snatched it up when Shan gestured to it with a nod. “Do you have any tape? String?”
Despite his confusion, Shan let her search the truck more thoroughly, and soon she added to her saddlebag a roll of adhesive tape from his small medical kit and a length of thin wire from his glove box. She looked longingly at Shan’s high boots, and with a grin he gave up his laces. Then she put her hand on the canvas medical kit, emitting a joyful cry when he nodded again. To his surprise she gave him a quick embrace before darting to the horses. He watched, amused and still confused, as she trotted up the slope, then he filled his water bottle at the pilgrim spring and climbed back into his truck.
He had driven almost an hour before he noticed that in searching the glove box Jaya had left his new satellite phone on the seat, under his maps. He switched it on. Five minutes later it rang.
Amah Jiejie spoke in a peeved tone. “The colonel gave you the phone for communication, not as a paperweight. He’s been trying to reach you since yesterday afternoon.”
“I’ve been in the mountains,” Shan said, before he realized it was no excuse for a satellite phone.
He could hear her sigh. “I’ll tell him you had battery problems. Hold on.”
Tan was never one for the niceties of conversation. “My janitor was attacked,” the colonel declared. “He’s in the hospital.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jampa, the one who smuggled out the message from Metok. Thieves assaulted him. How soon can you get to the hospital?”
Lhadrung’s small infirmary had grown as the army had expanded its presence in the town, so that it now sat not at the edge of town but at the edge of the sprawling military compound that adjoined the town, with a new wing that provided a door for civilians at the front and one for military patients at the rear. The hospital’s handful of doctors were all army officers.
Major Xun was waiting at the front steps and escorted Shan around the building to the military entrance. Tan was pacing, very impatiently, outside a patient room on the first floor, next to the small emergency center. Jampa, the old Tibetan Shan had met at Tan’s office, lay in the solitary bed inside, his face and hands swollen and bandaged. His eyes were fixed so blankly on the ceiling that Shan thought he was dead. Tan motioned Shan inside and shut the door, leaving Xun in the corridor.
“I don’t care about Metok or Huan right now,” the colonel snapped. “I want the bastards who did this!”
“What happened?”
“He was set upon in an alley last night. In my town! Took what little money he had and fled, the cowards! I want you to find whoever did this and I will personally inflict blows to match what they did to him!”
Shan lifted the chart from the bedstand then looked again at the man’s arms, one of which was broken, held up in a sling, exposing its tattooed number. Jampa had been a prisoner, one of the many who found menial jobs in Lhadrung after release because travel papers were denied them. He gazed for a moment at the man, wondering what he had been before imprisonment.
Tan followed his gaze. “Yes, a convict. But he was a good man. He had been a scribe in the old days, you know, making those manuscripts the Tibetans use.” The colonel caught himself. “He was tainted by his reactionary ways but was cured of them. We never talked about all that. He paid his price and learned very passable Chinese during his time. Reformed his ways,” Tan added uneasily.
Years earlier it would have been unheard of for the tyrant of Lhadrung to engage in conversation with a former prisoner, let alone befriend and defend one. Was the colonel just finding compromise, or growing weak? Probably, Shan decided, Tan would consider them the same thing.
He read the rest of the chart, then studied the old Tibetan more closely. Broken arm, broken ankle, and a skull fracture. His assailants had used a metal bar on him, probably a reinforcing rod from one of the construction sites, judging by the ridges Shan saw along the fracture of his skull. But none of these would kill him. What was killing him was his ruptured kidney.
“Jampa!” Tan said, barking the name like an order. The old man stirred slowly, painfully turning his head toward Tan to smile. His chest rattled as he breathed. His body seemed to shake and he nodded. Then he looked at Shan with pleading eyes and the rattling stopped.
“Jampa!” Tan shook the man’s shoulder.
Shan lifted the Tibetan’s wrist, searching for a pulse. “He’s gone, Colonel.”
Tan seemed not to hear. “Jampa!” he repeated, then turned to Shan. “Get a doctor!”
“He’s dead.”
Tan collapsed onto the bedside chair. “He wasn’t so old really, only seventy-four, he told me last week. He said he knew a place where we could go fishing, up in the hills.” He looked up with despair. “Find those damned thieves!”
“It wasn’t thieves,” Shan said, still feeling the shock of those beseeching eyes. “Somehow the killers found out that he had delivered the message from Metok. They had to silence him. What else did he know?”
“He never said anything more to me. I only saw him once since the day he delivered Metok’s message. He was terrified. He said he had stopped sleeping so he could spend his free time praying.”
“Lieutenant Huan,” Shan said. “You need to find out if he was in Lhadrung last night.”
Tan cursed, then nodded. He lifted the dead man’s gnarled, withered hand and clasped it between his own hands. After several breaths he turned away to summon an army doctor, who bent over Jampa for a moment, glanced at his watch, and made a note on the dead man’s chart. “Dr. Anwei,” Tan muttered in introduction to Shan, then threw an unwelcoming glance at Xun, who had followed the doctor into the room.
“The other one has to go now,” Anwei declared.
“Other one?” Shan asked.
The doctor gestured with his pen toward the door adjoining the room. “The old man in the bathroom. He said he could make any place an altar.” The doctor suddenly saw Colonel Tan’s withering glance. “They were friends. It seemed to calm the patient,” he added.
The scent of incense wafted from the darkened bathroom as Shan opened the door. He could hear a whispered mantra and the rattle of rosary beads. Major Xun pushed past Shan and switched on the light. Suddenly the painful visit to the hospital became a nightmare.
Sitting on the floor before a smoky cone of incense was Shan’s old friend Lokesh. The aged Tibetan looked up, blinking from the harsh, sudden light. “You can join me!” he said as he recognized Shan. Lokesh, who had once worked in the Dalai Lama’s government, had spent most of his life behind the wire of prison camps. Shan had been nearly dead, in body and soul, when he had first collapsed onto a bunk in the 404th People’s Construction Brigade. More than anyone else, Lokesh had been responsible for reviving him, first nursing him to health and then nurturing his spirit. The gentle old Tibetan, long suffering from guilt over being a citizen of the government that had destroyed Tibet, had absolved it by destroying his identity card and now lived in a secret outpost helping the resistance preserve old manuscripts.
“Whatever are you doing here?” Shan demanded. Tan’s anger was visibly rising. Xun pushed forward to see Lokesh.
“Helping Jampa recover!” Lokesh explained in Tibetan. “He had written to me, said terrible things were happening in Lhadrung, and that he and I should take some days together to build a mandala in the old style, so the gods would pay better attention to events here.” He was referring to the sand paintings of intricate symbols and patterns that once had been one of the most sacred elements of Buddhist ritual.
Shan helped the old man to his feet. Xun had fixed Tan with an expectant look, waiting for the signal to detain Lokesh. If arrested, he would spend the rest of his life in prison, assuming he would survive his interrogation. “It’s too late,” Shan said as Lokesh rose. With a wrenching groan Lokesh stumbled to the dead man’s bed. Low sounds of despair escaped his throat, and he bent over Jampa, urgently whispering the first words of the Bardo, the death ceremony that was needed to ease the old man’s passage into the next life.
Surprisingly no one uttered a word, and no one tried to stop Lokesh. After two or three minutes he straightened and spoke to Shan, but switched to Mandarin as if to taunt Tan and Xun. “In the letter Jampa sent me he said a man named Metok was being falsely condemned to death, that Metok was being executed because he knew certain things about that new project on the sacred mountain.”
A tight knot formed in Shan’s belly. “You need to go,” he said, pulling on Lokesh’s arm. “My truck is outside.”
“No, not possible. I will have to stay here, to help Jampa. Someone has to say the death rites.”
Xun laughed. Tan glared at Shan, who desperately looked about the chamber as if it might reveal a solution. He spied a bag of clothing on a chair in the corner.
“You don’t have to be beside his body,” Shan reminded Lokesh. “You just have to be in touch with his spirit.”
“It’s better to be with the body for the first day or two of the rites,” Lokesh replied.
“Not possible,” Shan pushed back as he retrieved the bag of clothing. “This is an army base.”
“He was one of my closest friends in prison during my first twenty years. I knew him as a boy even, Shan, before I was…” Lokesh had the sense not to announce his old role in the Dalai Lama’s government. “I knew him before.”
Shan lifted the bag. “We will take his mala and his gau. We will take his belongings. His spirit will follow. We will arrange them somewhere in Yangkar, and you can sit with them and continue the Bardo.”
“But I need to confront the evil men here with the truth,” Lokesh protested, still speaking in Mandarin. “I promised Jampa. They need cleansing, or more evil will follow.”
Tan looked like he was close to erupting. Xun watched with a ravenous expression.
“Look to Jampa’s spirit first,” Shan said. Lokesh contemplated Shan’s words then slowly nodded his agreement and removed Jampa’s gau and mala. The old man shook them over Jampa’s head, as if to get the dead man’s attention, then slowly backed out of the room, the rosary and prayer amulet raised in the air as he continued the words of the death ritual.
Shan had loaded Lokesh into his vehicle under the watchful eye of Major Xun when he realized he had forgotten Jampa’s shoes, which Lokesh would want for his ritual. As he lifted them from under the dead man’s bed he heard a quiet sob and looked up to see Amah Jiejie sitting on a chair in the shadowed corner.
“He never hurt anyone,” she said with a sob as Shan approached. “He never deserved this.” The matronly Chinese woman dabbed at her cheek, then fixed her eyes on Jampa. “He was softening the colonel, helping us understand things.”
“Us?” Shan asked.
She nodded. “I was frightened for my life and Jampa took away my fear.”
Shan pulled up a chair beside her. “Please, I want to hear about it.”
The gray-haired woman spoke in a whisper, watching the door. “Last month something terrible happened. Jampa helped me. It was a piece of paper rolled up and inserted into the eye sockets of a little animal skull, left in my lunch bag. The paper had words in Tibetan and terrible drawings. A big scorpion. A fox or a wolf, rows of human skulls, and above them a sketch of a larger skull, with three eye holes. It was a death threat, what else could it be? Jampa found me staring at it, pale as a ghost. But Jampa took it and said not to worry. He threw the skull out the window and said the paper was more like someone’s bad joke.”
“Why would he call it a joke?” Shan asked.
Amah Jiejie reached down and extracted a wad of paper from the bottom of the big bag she used as a purse. “I wasn’t sure how to destroy it. I was going to ask Jampa.”
Shan took the paper and straightened it, pressing out the many creases against the wall. It was a Tibetan death curse, or rather someone’s idea of a Tibetan curse.
“Jampa said the words weren’t right and that the three-eyed skull wasn’t a Buddhist thing at all, so it had no effect, it represented no danger.”
Shan saw that the old Tibetan had been right. He had seen death threats, and this was just a poor imitation of one.
“It still scares me, Shan. Maybe it wasn’t really a death curse but surely it was meant as one.”
“No, just meant to scare you, to have you think Tibetans were stalking you,” Shan told her. It meant, he knew, that whoever had done this had not been Tibetan.
She nodded. “I suppose.”
Shan folded the paper. “May I keep this?”
“Yes, yes, please do,” Amah Jiejie said. “But just don’t…” her voice trailed off
“Don’t what?”
“Please don’t tell the colonel, Shan. He would worry.”
Shan passed a desperate night at a pilgrims’ rest near the road to the prison camp, keeping nervous watch as Lokesh, Jampa’s belongings arranged before him on a rock, continued reciting the death rites, which would take days to complete. He relented only for quick swallows from Shan’s water bottle and bites of the rice cakes Shan had in his pack, then later, long after midnight, for quick responses to Shan’s questions about his trip to Lhadrung. Lokesh had hitched a ride on a truck with a Tibetan driver after riding a horse to the nearest road. The joyful old man, who was like a close uncle to Shan, was showing conspicuous signs of his age. His firm, steady stride which had taken them over hundreds of miles of pilgrims’ trails, had slowed and sometimes was only a tenuous shuffle. His bright eyes were watery, and at times Shan saw a tremor in one hand.
They were outside the gate when the boxy old sedan, dented and badly in need of new paint, pulled up at the 404th People’s Construction Brigade. They had not been the first in line despite arriving before dawn, and Shan recalled from his years as an inmate that relatives often arrived the day before for the infrequent family visitation days, spending the night in sleeping bags or wrapped in blankets, sometimes after traveling for days.
“I’m sorry, Tserung,” he said as the mechanic wearily climbed from behind the wheel. Shan had called to ask him to bring Yara for the long-awaited visit when he had realized he would never make it to Yangkar and back in time. “But at least you have a companion for the ride home. Find a safe place for him until I get back,” Shan said and opened the back door of his car.
“Lokesh!” Yara exclaimed. Her cry awakened the old man, who groggily returned her embrace and let himself be pulled to Tserung’s car.
Ko was no longer counted among the high-risk prisoners, so he was not chained to a chair for the visit but rather allowed into a side yard, enclosed with razor wire, with other prisoners and their families. Mothers and wives wept. Fathers and sons clenched their jaws and tried not to glare at the armed guards as the thin, ragged prisoners filed in, some supported by other inmates. Half a dozen prisoners, the oldest, never had visitors but were allowed to sit at the perimeter and contentedly watch the brief, tearful reunions. The families of hard labor prisoners never knew whether a loved one would survive to the next visit. More than once Shan had seen family members collapse, sobbing, as they were greeted not by the prisoner they had come to see but by a certificate attesting to his death.
Shan hung back as Ko appeared, letting Yara run forward and wrap her arms around him. They held each other tightly, without a word, until a couple of prisoners nearby noticed and laughed. When Ko finally released the Tibetan woman, there was a new, deep strength behind his eyes. Yara recalled the bags Shan had carried from Tserung’s car. Prisoners were not permitted to take food back into their barracks but could eat in the yard, and she unpacked a bag of Marpa’s momo dumplings. Then, in a custom she had established the year before, she walked with a second bag to the sergeant of the guards and placed it at his feet, with a murmured blessing. The sergeant responded with a stern, tight nod.
Shan gave his son and Yara time to speak alone by going to the circle of old men. He knew most of the aged lamas and pushed down his emotion as he struggled to keep their conversation cheerful, trying to ignore how frail some had become. He had his own bag of momos which he distributed among them, and the rail-thin prisoners accepted them with an eager gratitude that made him feel shamed for being so well-fed himself.
There were thirty minutes left in the visitation period when he returned to Ko. Yara stood at his side, holding his calloused hand, as Shan asked about the prisoners from Larung Gar.
“Good men, every one of them,” his son reported. “They’re not in my barracks but sometimes I work with them. They hold teachings in the night. Some from other barracks sneak out after curfew to go listen.”
“You mustn’t!” Yara interrupted. Being caught outside one’s barracks after curfew brought at least a month’s solitary confinement.
“I only went the one time,” Ko said. “They had an altar made out of an old carton and they had made clever cardboard cutouts that by themselves looked like nothing more than the remnants of cardboard men stuff in their clothing for insulation. But when fitted together they made the images of gods and deity protectors. They spoke of the timelessness of who we are. At first I didn’t understand, but by the end I grasped that they were saying that the difficulties of our existence don’t really matter, that what mattered was the chain of compassion and truth that had connected humans for thousands of years, and that was more important than any physical chains that may encumber us.”
Ko hesitated, seeing the surprised looks of both Shan and Yara. They were not used to him waxing philosophically. He flushed. “Any of those momos left?”
As he ate the last dumpling, Ko recalled an odd story he had heard from two different prisoners in the barracks of the Larung Gar men. “There was one who didn’t seem to belong with them at first. It was almost like they didn’t know him, and one of my friends said at night they gave him extra blessings and thanked him for his sacrifice, like he was enduring a greater hardship than the others. And during those early days there were times when he seemed not to respond to his name, though most dismissed that because everyone knows how the shock of arriving here plays games with your mind.”
“What was his name?” Shan asked.
“Lin. Lin Fochow.”
Shan weighed the news a moment. “Tell me, son, the day those prisoners arrived, when their convoy came with the two dead soldiers, were the prisoners all wearing robes?”
Ko thought a moment then nodded. “Seven men, all but one in robes, yes. All wearing wool caps pulled low over their heads. No one would have seen except like I said they came in as we were unloading from the work crew trucks.”
“Seven? I thought there were six prisoners.”
“Six in robes for the 404th. Another Tibetan man who was pounded by a Public Security officer with his baton and immediately shoved into one of the knob cars after being pulled from a truck. The officer drove away with him.”
Shan realized that Ko had seen Lieutenant Huan take Yankay the hail chaser away to face murder charges. He glanced at his watch. Their time was almost over, and he did not want to spend what was left speaking of his investigation. “Marpa says he wants to plan a big feast for next time you come to visit,” Shan said, forcing a smile. While Ko had been given a brief parole months earlier, no others had followed, and there was no way to predict when Tan would allow another. It could be in two months or two years. Ko had been convicted of several crimes, some of which carried indefinite sentences, subject to the review of his file every two years.
“A lammergeier!” Yara called and pointed nearly straight up toward a huge bird soaring overhead. “A good sign, Ko!”
Ko lifted his head to follow her pointing arm, and Shan saw a long bruise on his neck that disappeared under his shirt. “What happened?” he asked with a gesture to the injury.
Ko snapped his head down. “It’s nothing. From work. I fell down when pushing a wheelbarrow and the handle slammed into me,” he said, then pointed toward a nearby family, where three children had formed a circle around a prisoner and were singing to him. Shan smiled and accepted his son’s obvious change of subject, knowing he had made up the story of how the injury had happened. Sometimes there were fights among prisoners, often Chinese versus Tibetans, but Ko was smarter than to be drawn into such feuds. More painful to contemplate was the alternative. Most of the guards knew Ko was his son. Ko was his weak spot. If he hadn’t been in brawls with other prisoners, then his injuries could only mean he was being beaten by the guards.