CHAPTER ELEVEN

The sound of engines and clinking metal broke through their stunned silence. Chemi did not hesitate, did not look back, just ran for the cover of the outcroppings that lined the slope beyond the ruined village. Shan grabbed Lokesh and pulled him into the same rocks as Winslow threw Anya onto his back and followed. Only when they had run nearly a hundred yards did Chemi stop. She seemed unable to speak, not because of her exertion but because of the emotion that twisted her face. She bent into the rocks and retched. When she turned back Shan glimpsed the sick woman again, the frail creature they had encountered on the trail.

It wasn’t battle tanks, as Shan feared, but two bulldozers that appeared from around the high rock wall that sheltered the southern and eastern sides of the village. One of the machines did not slow, only lowered its blade and began carving a swath through the ruins of the village, sweeping through the remains of the buildings, throwing before it a rolling wave of debris. A chair flew into the air, the shards of a window and a bed, then something swollen and white that could have been the body of a dog.

The second bulldozer pulled a two-axle trailer from which at least a dozen men climbed down. They quickly unhitched the trailer and, as the second earthmover crawled forward, began unloading building materials.

“The petroleum venture,” Anya said in a pained voice. “Only they have such equipment.”

Her words seemed to say it all, or at least there seemed to be nothing else anyone could say. Anya took Chemi’s hand and led them through the rocks. Yapchi Village, Chemi had said, was only an hour’s walk past her home.

Shan had never understood the subtleties of traveling by foot, the many ways one could walk, the messages of human stepping, until he had come to Tibet. Lokesh had once reminded Shan that Tibet had known the wheel for many centuries, as long as China and India, but for most of its existence Tibet had used the device not for transportation, but only for prayer wheels. Tibetans liked to walk, Lokesh said, for it kept them connected to the earth and gave them time to contemplate. But there were many ways of walking in Tibet. There were pilgrim’s steps, the slow reverent pace of those bound for holy places. There were caravaners, who moved firmly and steadily, eyes fixed on the horizon or their animals. There were prisoners, who moved in short shuffling steps, heads bowed, sometimes even, by habit, long after they were released. Now Chemi assumed another, an uneven stuttering pace that involved frequent steps to look nervously over the shoulder or to simply sigh and let a wave of emotion break and ebb before moving on. It was the walk of the refugee. It pained Shan to see Chemi fall into it so readily.

They walked in silence, until Anya led them to a narrow ledge of rock that opened with views to the north and west. They stood on a saddle of land that rose up to separate the grey rolling hills to the east from a small fertile valley, bounded on three sides by a long high curving outrider of Yapchi Mountain. The walls gave a symmetrical shape to its curving sides, so that the valley, lush with spring growth, had the appearance of a green oval bowl. Except for the open grass-covered saddle of land they stood on, the sides of the bowl were trimmed with a swath of conifers perhaps a quarter-mile wide. Above the trees were cliffs and towers of rock. Below them were pastures, and fields concentrated at the end nearest them—some crudely terraced, some of them a warm willow green, the color of sprouting barley, others the deeper green of pastures used for sheep.

Anya pointed excitedly to the small cluster of buildings at the south end of the bowl and pressed her rosary to her chin as if in silent prayer. Her village was intact. The girl glanced up at Chemi with an apologetic air and reached for the grim woman’s hand. Chemi seemed to be in shock. Shan was not certain her eyes even saw the valley below them. “You’ll stay with us. You’ll like Yapchi,” the girl said. “Soon we will have Lamtso salt for our tea,” she added, and led them back onto the trail.

Winslow lingered, scanning the far side of the valley with his binoculars. Shan saw his frowning expression and reached for his own field glasses. As he adjusted the focus another village came into view at the far end of the valley, more than two miles away, where a dirt road descended into the valley from a gap at the end of the high saddle of land. A line of heavy trucks were parked beside two rows of box-like structures.

“They bring in offices and quarters on the back of trucks. Long trailers,” the American explained. Shan nodded as he swept the valley with the lenses. He had seen oil convoys in Xinjiang, the vast arid province to the northwest. Once he had encountered one over a mile long, waiting at the edge of the highway, trucks of many sizes, and buses, derricks and laboratory vans, a small city on wheels.

On the slope above the oil camp, crews were leveling the forest. A section a quarter mile wide had been clearcut, and the logs were being rolled down to the oil camp. The swath of stumps looked like an open wound on the side of the mountain.

Winslow pointed again and Shan trained the lenses closer, to a point near the center of the valley where a heavy derrick stood with two trucks parked beside it. “An easy place to work,” Winslow said. “That’s what the manager told me. Very dry. They like dry. Water makes everything more complicated, more costly. Yapchi is so dry they have to bring water in with big tank trucks. No water at the bottom of the valley means they can easily work the center, the lowest point, shortest distance to their target.”

Their target. Shan remembered Lhandro’s words. The company wanted to take the blood from Yapchi’s earth.

Winslow turned to follow the others but saw that Shan still scanned the slopes. “It was a pretty small piece of stone,” the American observed.

Shan lowered the glasses with a weak smile. “It’s not that I expect to see the stolen eye,” he said quietly. “I’m just trying to understand how to look for a blind deity.”

The American studied Shan as if trying to decide if Shan were joking, then looked at the derrick with unmistakable resentment. “Where I come from, we were taught if you did something bad enough, your god would come out of the heavens and find you.”

“You mean I should look for a wrathful deity?” Shan asked.

But the American just turned and walked on.

As they descended the winding trail through several narrow defiles and along game trails in the junipers, the image of the valley stayed with Shan. He began to understand more clearly the villagers’ fierce love of their home. It was such a tiny piece of the world, so isolated it had no electricity, not even anything that could be called a road, a quiet, self-sufficient place that the world had bypassed, where one might be able to forget the outside for weeks, even months. Until the Qinghai Petroleum Venture arrived.

Thirty minutes later they stepped out of a narrow defile under several tall junipers and the village of Yapchi spread out before them, less than a quarter mile away. It was smaller than Shan had expected, no bigger than the little rongpa town where they had first met Winslow. To the right, where a thin growth of trees gave way to the grassy slope, stood an ancient chorten, nearly ten feet high. Shan walked around the shrine, touching the stone. The prayers that had been written around its base had mostly weathered away.

Shan saw Winslow lingering in the shadow of the last tree and realized their companions were not to be seen. He took a tentative step toward the village, then a small stone flew by and landed near his foot. He turned to see Tenzin, behind Winslow, with a somber Tibetan man in a soiled green pullover sweater, beside what once had been a long mani wall, a wall of stones inscribed with mantras. Tenzin gestured for Shan, then moved deeper into the trees with the stranger, behind another of the outcroppings that were scattered about the thin forest. Shan hesitantly followed, but paused at the mani wall, kneeling. He lifted one of the lichen-covered stones. It was centuries old, its carved inscription so embedded with a dark lichen that it appeared that the prayer had been formed by the lichen itself. A self-actuating prayer, Lokesh might have called it.

He leaned the stone against a tree so the prayer faced outward, then followed Winslow, Tenzin, and the stranger down the winding trail toward the sound of voices. The scent of burning juniper floated through the air. They cleared a tall wall of rock and found themselves in a bustling camp. A lean Tibetan youth with a pockmarked face darted forward and grabbed Tenzin’s arm, pulling him toward the back of the small blind canyon, followed closely by the man in the tattered green sweater.

Shan lingered near the narrow canyon entrance, surveying the chaotic scene inside. At least forty people were arrayed on blankets or sitting around fires, some of them with bruised faces, some with arms in slings. On one blanket a young man lay prostrate, tended by a grey-haired woman.

Chemi was at the side of the canyon, speaking rapidly with an older woman as she rubbed the hand of a large man who lay beside the rock face, his face swollen and eyes glazed, blood oozing through a sling on his left arm, a bloody bandage around his forehead.

“Ours was the closest village so her family fled here,” Anya explained as she stepped to Shan’s side. “The company said they had to build a water collection facility at Chemi’s home, to install tanks to take water from the stream for the work camp. They said the houses could not stay because it would foul the water needed for the workers. They said the venture would pay compensation. The venture people didn’t understand, Chemi’s sister told them, they would need to hear from the township council before they could leave their homes. But the company had soldiers to help them.”

“The government was there, not just the army,” interjected the old woman. “He showed us his card. From some Ministry. It said Beijing. We never expected Beijing to take notice of us. My son always wanted to meet someone from Beijing, because in his school they say many heroes live there. But it was only a Mongolian man with dark glasses.”

“Special Projects,” Winslow muttered bitterly over Shan’s shoulder. Zhu, the Special Projects Director, had been there when the village had been destroyed.

Several of the Yapchi villagers were there to help the injured and spoke excitedly with Anya about the return of the caravan. Some of the villagers looked solemnly toward Shan after speaking with the girl, but soon their gaze shifted toward Winslow as the American began moving about the camp. It was impossible to ignore the tall fair-skinned stranger. He stopped at the pallets and spoke in low words to those lying on them, then reached into his pack and emptied it of its food. A bag of raisins, a bag of nuts, and a bag of hard candy. There were not many children in the camp, only four other than Anya, but all four surrounded the American and gleefully shared out the treasure. Anya watched with a strangely detached expression, as though, Shan thought, she had forgotten how to be a child.

The man beside Chemi groaned, closed his glazed eyes and seemed to sink into unconsciousness. She pulled off her coat, lifted his head, and propped it behind him as a pillow.

“It’s my uncle Dzopa,” she whispered. “He’d been gone for ten years. He went to India to live.”

Shan studied the man. He looked at the woman, perplexed. “Why did he return now?”

“I can’t understand him when he speaks,” she said, with pools of moisture in her eyes. She nodded toward a woman sitting nearby, churning tea with a sad, distant expression. “My cousin says he was trying to clear out the village when the tank started shooting. Things exploded and hit his head. He had just returned the day before, looking for me. He had heard I was sick. He has no other family. When he was young he was at a gompa and never married.”

The big Tibetan appeared to be in his late fifties. His arms were like logs, his neck like that of a bull. “He’s a farmer now?” Shan asked.

Chemi nodded. “He sent a letter once. He settled in Dharmasala,” she said, referring to the seat of the exiled Tibetan government.

“What do you think, why would he return?”

“Sometimes the Dalai Lama gives speeches, and says the biggest contribution a refugee from Tibet can make is to return. Because those who have crossed over to India have demonstrated their faith, and their strength, and those are the traits needed to keep Tibet alive.”

Shan studied the battered man again. His injuries looked severe. The fingers on Dzopa’s left hand trembled, a sign of possible nerve damage. “Did he bring something from India? A message perhaps? Was he coming to take others to India?” But Shan looked up to see that Chemi had turned away and was walking toward the back of the small canyon. He found her with Lokesh and Anya, who sat with bowls of tea behind a circle of people reciting a mantra.

“They are not going to stop the mantra until those people leave,” Lokesh explained. Beyond the circle was a flat stone with several wooden offering bowls and a charred metal disc where incense had burned. Anya and Nyma had made a chapel in the rocks behind the village, Lhandro had said.

“You mean the bulldozers in Chemi’s village?” Shan asked.

“No,” Anya said. Her tone was excited, and her eyes wide. “Not until the Chinese and foreigners leave our valley. Night and day they say, they have made a vow to Tara. A mantra chain, for as long as it takes. We will all take turns, when we can.”

Shan studied the girl and recognized the fierce light in her eye. There had been an old Khampa warrior in his prison barracks, imprisoned for life for leading ambushes against soldiers, who had always marveled at how the monks resisted by resort to prayer, even when being beaten or electroshocked. “All I could do was shoot guns,” the Khampa had often said in a voice that never lost its awe for the holy men. “That’s nothing compared to them.”

Shan was tempted to sit in the circle himself. Perhaps that was all any of them could do now, just pray. “Why would Chemi’s uncle want to have cleared out his village, why warn them now?” he asked the girl.

“Probably because he had met others who had lived near Chinese development projects. He thought the venture would take them away.”

“Away?”

“To work for it. Or move the families to a strange place. All the time we have been gone the venture has been torturing our village, harassing it, trying to drive everyone away our people say. The venture took all the young men who were in Yapchi to work cutting trees. They have to stay in that camp, in those metal boxes, that are locked at night. The others are scared to even go ask for them, for fear they will be taken, too.” Anya spoke with a defiance Shan had never heard in her voice. But as she returned his stare, confusion crossed her eyes, then fear. “Locked in a metal box,” the girl repeated, and she turned away to join the circle.

Thirty feet away, in a corner of the little canyon, Tenzin sat with the two Tibetans who had brought him into the camp, and another man, older, but who wore the same deep-seated anger that etched the faces of the first two. The youngest of the men suddenly turned, stood, and took a step toward Shan, straightening into the pose of a sentry. They were not men who resisted the Chinese merely by reciting mantras. Shan looked beyond the man toward Tenzin, who leaned forward, listening earnestly to the older man. Beside them was a stack of equipment: braided leather ropes; bottles of water; a compass, hanging from a lanyard; a portable shovel, folded into its handle; nylon sleeping bags.

Suddenly there was a wrenching moan from the front of the camp. Shan leapt toward the sound, the purbas at his heels, to find Chemi draped over her uncle’s shoulders, trying to pull him back. He was sitting up, holding the wooden handle of a tea churn, savagely beating a small stump. The handle was shredding in his hands. Shan tried to grab Dzopa’s arm. The man flung him away effortlessly, then Chemi put her hands on his cheeks. “Uncle!” she cried. “You must stop!” Dzopa paused, and his eyes seemed to find her, though they could not focus.

“Stop them!” he said with another of the chilling moans. “They are burning all the lamas!” He fell back, unconscious, the splintered stump of the handle in his hand.

Still on the ground where the man had pushed him, Shan stared in alarm at Dzopa.

“His head,” Chemi whispered, looking at Shan. She reached for the cloth to wipe his brow and froze as she saw those around her. All those within earshot had stopped and were staring fearfully at the unconscious man. Several pulled out their rosaries and began mantras.

Anya did not resist when Shan asked her to take him into her village, despite the protests of the older women. He had to understand the valley, the girl insisted, for the eye was destined to be returned to him and he would have to act quickly when that happened. One of those who listened, a big-boned, ungainly woman in a long felt skirt and red apron, nodded grimly. “If that oil starts coming up,” she declared in a defiant tone, as if chastising her fellow villagers, “those Chinese will never leave.” Shan pulled his field glasses from his sack and followed Anya and the woman back to the village.

The deity had lived on a low knoll near the center of the valley, the woman explained. Nearly three hundred years earlier a lama had found it living in a rock on the knoll, and the villagers had built a mani wall around it. Lamas from the famous Rapjung gompa had come every year to bless the rock and the people who protected it.

A brown dog burst out of the first house, its loud barking quickly shifting into excited yelps as it recognized Anya. A man with a face blackened with soot, nearly toothless, appeared at the door of the second house and called out affectionately to the girl, who promised him fresh Lamtso salt the next day. A middle-aged man in a tattered derby looked from a crumbling pressed-earth wall that surrounded a third house and asked for news of Lhandro. Shan continued along the broad path that served as the only road of the village as Anya ran from one to another of the few inhabitants who showed themselves. One house, the outermost, was made of substantial timbers and had a loft overhead for storing fodder. It was an old, elegant structure, built in the tradition of Kham, the eastern region where wood had once been plentiful. On its wall hung a large wooden drum, nearly two feet wide and a foot deep, a hide stretched across its top, used for attracting the attention of deities. Shan studied the house, remembering Nyma’s description of the attack by the Lujun troops. Only one house had survived. A miniature chorten, two feet high, stood near its door, the kind of shrine made for a sacred household relic. Across from it, inside another pressed-earth enclosure, stood a stable, looking more solid than several of the houses, in which half a dozen sheep and as many lambs lay basking in the late afternoon sun.

He wandered past the village toward a long low mound nearly a mile away, a man-made mound that rose a stone’s throw from a smaller, lower-knoll. A few grazing sheep looked up as he walked along the wide path that connected the village to the far end of the valley, the rumble of machinery growing louder with each step. The venture’s drilling rig was operating less than a hundred yards beyond the mound.

He studied the path before approaching the mound. It ran along the base of the grassy ridge, passing outside the valley through a small gap at the north end of the valley, by the oil camp. From the derrick to the gap leading to the outside world it had been ripped open, widened by a bulldozer. An army had come up that same path once, he reminded himself, a vengeful Chinese army, taking a slight detour in its retreat to Beijing to ravage the beautiful valley. He replayed the tale in his mind as he climbed the small hill. It had happened on such a spring day, perhaps in the same month, for Nyma had explained that the salt caravan had been away at the time. The army had shelled the village with its cannons, and the villagers had retreated, not to the mountain slopes, but to their deity on the small knoll for protection. Then the Chinese officer had sent soldiers to work with swords until none of the villagers survived. He looked back along the encircling slopes of the valley. There were ruins of small structures and the outlines of fields not worked for many years. Once the community had been larger. Entire families had been wiped out that day, the day the deity had been broken by the Lujun soldiers.

A low mani wall surrounded the mound, with two strands of prayer flags affixed to weathered posts at each end. On top of the mound, weighted by small stones, were over twenty khatas, prayer scarves, most in tatters. Shan lifted a mani stone and, not certain why, held it out toward the mound, then toward the oil camp. In the same instant a gust of wind snapped the prayer flags, and one of the old tattered khatas worked loose and blew away across the valley floor toward the western slope.

Lokesh would have said it was no coincidence, that Shan was always going to be there that hour, and that the scarf, after so many years on the mound, was always going to blow away in that same moment. The junction of events was woven into Shan’s particular tapestry, Lokesh might say. It was why Lokesh and many other Tibetans Shan knew would stop and stare when a hawk flew low across their path, a dried leaf danced in the air before them, or a peculiar cloud scudded across the moon just as they looked up. Acts of nature might to them seem unexpected, but they would never seem random.

He lowered the mani stone and reverently gazed at the mound, at the mass grave of the Yapchi villagers, then did what Lokesh would have done. He followed the khata.

The scarf tumbled across the valley more than a hundred paces away, dropping to the earth one moment, drifting upward the next as if lifted by some invisible hand. He studied the upper rim of the valley as he walked toward the cloth. It was a rocky, ragged landscape, a place likely to hold caves—a place, Nyma said, full of caves—where men, or deities, might hide. He followed slowly, absorbing the Yapchi land, expecting the khata to settle or be snagged on one of the low shrubs where the meadow ended and the steeper slope began. But when it reached the slope the prayer scarf shot high in the air, soaring, tumbling like some caged dove experiencing newfound freedom, gliding toward the edge of the forest to the north.

As Shan watched it speed away he considered turning back. But there was more than an hour of light left, and even in the dark he could certainly find his way back along the path. He needed to understand the valley. He needed to learn where a deity might be hiding. Or at least where an escaping prayer scarf might flee. Several times he paused to study the drilling tower and the oil camp as he climbed to the cover of the treeline before heading in the direction he had last seen the khata. After ten minutes he saw a patch of white hanging in the low branches of a pine tree where the slope curved toward the east.

The wind brought the rumble of chain saws and Shan paused to study with his field glasses the end of the valley that was being civilized by the oil company. There were more trailers than he had at first thought, two rows each containing five of the rectangular units. Metal boxes, the villagers called them, because he knew, to the rongpa they did not deserve the name house. Beyond the trailers were several tents, and trucks of all sizes and shapes from light cargo vehicles to heavy dump trucks, and a large open tent that appeared to be serving as a garage. Above the camp the wide swath of stumps reached all the way to the cliff that defined the upper rim of the valley. As least two dozen men labored there, felling trees at an alarming rate.

Shan retrieved the khata, folding it into his pocket, then wandered closer, more wary, conscious of each tree and rock he might use for cover. He was only two hundred yards from the edge of the camp when he found a thick log, felled by age and not a saw, and sat to study the camp. At the near end a dozen men kicked a soccer ball around a meadow that appeared to have been grazed by sheep. They played hard, yelling but not cheering. Beyond them, close to the tents rose the smoke of several cooking fires. Shan was familiar with the scene. A tentacle, Drakte had called one such camp they had seen when traveling together, a lumber harvesting complex. One of the tentacles that extended from Beijing, the purba had groused. It was the way Beijing reached out to assert itself in the remotest corners of the land, to show its power, to extract riches.

Looking back up to the timber crew, he noticed men stationed at intervals along the work area. What were they guarding against? he wondered. Surely there were not enough predators left to threaten the crew. Then with a shudder he remembered that Yapchi villagers had been conscripted. The men at the edge were not protecting the workers, they were preventing them from escaping. What a cruel torture, he thought, not simply to make the rongpa prisoners in their own valley but to make them destroy the wealth of their own land.

As the sun began to fall below the valley wall he ventured closer to the meadow, hoping to catch a scrap of dialogue, an accent, anything to help him understand more about the Qinghai Petroleum Venture. But as he grew closer he slowed, and a chill crept down his back. Although the soccer players wore tee shirts or undershirts they all seemed to have the same sturdy, trim pants—one side wearing green, the other grey—and all wore the same heavy high black boots, had the same lean muscular build. At the far end of the meadow was a large grey truck with something painted on its door. He raised his glasses, expecting to see the derrick logo of the venture. But it was not a derrick on the door, it was a snow leopard. Beyond the truck were sleek utility vehicles in gunmetal grey. His gut tightened. The soccer players were not oil workers. They were two groups of competing soldiers. Lin’s mountain troops were at the oil camp, playing soccer with the knobs.

*   *   *

At dawn the next morning a small band of Tibetans arrived at the camp behind Yapchi Village. Anya ran at the sound of their footsteps, thinking, Shan knew, that the caravan had arrived, but she stopped at the mouth of the little canyon. A woman hobbled forward on a crutch, followed by a little boy who shuffled awkwardly, his feet bent inward, a line of drool hanging from his mouth. There were four others, a woman with eyes clouded with cataracts led by a teenage boy and a sturdy man in a tattered chuba carrying a frail-looking woman, asleep in his arms like a child.

They stood in silence, looking about the sleeping forms on the blankets.

“He’s not here,” Chemi said softly, apologetically, and suddenly Shan understood. The sick were coming to Yapchi. They must have walked through the night to find the medicine lama. The herder carrying the woman lowered her to a blanket and rubbed his eyes. Shan thought he saw tears.

“But I met him,” Chemi added in a hopeful tone. “He healed me.”

The crippled woman looked up in disbelief. “The one we seek is from the old days. There were stories from the mountains. But all those … they died a long time ago. Sometimes all we can do is follow the stories.…” Her voice drifted away and she stared at the ground. “Some people are saying he came to take the chair of Siddhi. Some say he came from a bayal, just to ease our suffering.”

“I met him,” Chemi repeated, more urgently. “He healed me.”

The woman on the crutch stared at Chemi as if just hearing her, her mouth open. “Lha gyal lo,” the woman said in a dry, croaking voice, then she began to sway. Chemi leapt forward as the woman collapsed into her arms.

Shan stepped to the small fire at the rear of the canyon and brought Chemi a bowl of tea for the woman. “What did she mean the chair of Siddhi?” he asked as he handed her the bowl.

“It’s an old thing,” Chemi said in a worried voice, cutting her eyes at him, then looking away.

“Resistance,” Lokesh whispered as he suddenly appeared to kneel beside the sick woman. “I heard the purbas talking about it, very excited. They say in this region centuries ago a lama named Siddhi organized resistance against Mongol invaders. He rallied the people like no one ever had and made sure the Mongols never came back to their lands.”

“There was a place he stayed in the mountains,” Chemi continued, “a small meadow high on the upper slope of the mountain. There is a rock like a chair where he would sit and speak to the people. People have been going there for years to pray. Some say he was a fighter. Some say he was a healer who just gave hope and strength to the people.”

Lokesh seemed to recognize the disbelief on Shan’s face. “They want to believe in such things,” the old Tibetan said, and nodded to another group of new arrivals who sat speaking with the older purba. “They say everyone is talking about Yapchi, for many miles. They say if a real lama would take the chair of Siddhi they could make the Chinese leave Yapchi, could make the Chinese leave the whole region.”

Shan returned alone to the village heavy with a strange sense of guilt that had crept upon him during the night, unable to look at the haggard faces that searched his own for explanations. The faces of the sick Tibetans haunted him. He was wrong to have come, for to come had meant giving the people of Yapchi hope, and there was no hope. Beijing had discovered the beautiful valley, and given it to the petroleum company and their American partners. It may as well have been seized by the army for a new missile base, for such a venture would never be dissolved, never be moved. There was only one thing in China more inexorable than the march of the army, and that was the march of economic development. When the venture found oil it would seize the entire valley, drain it of its life force, strip it of everything of value and leave it, years later, soiled and barren. Shan had spent his four years in prison building roads for the economic forces deployed by Beijing, roads to penetrate the remote valleys that had been overlooked in the first wave of Chinese immigration. One of the worst cruelties inflicted on the prisoners had not been forcing them to pound the rocks of high mountain passes into shards, so trucks could traverse the high slopes, but to be forced to watch, from another new road site, as every tree in a newly opened valley was cut down, every seam of coal blasted open.

Yapchi Village was even emptier than the day before. The only sign of life seemed to be the lambs which pranced about in their earthen-walled pen, as though wildly excited that the sun had risen. Then he noticed faces in some of the windows watching him, and watching the path up the valley. The rumble of the drilling rig echoed off the valley walls in the still air, accompanied by the distant whine of chain saws. At the door of the last house, the simple timber house he had admired the day before, an old woman appeared. She offered Shan a quick bow of her head, then slowly, shyly, still standing in the doorway, extended a bowl of tea toward him. He stepped hesitantly through the open gate of the low wall that surrounded the house and nodded, accepting the bowl. The woman retreated silently into the shadow of her house, beckoning him inside.

The house consisted of one large room with a sleeping platform built into the north end and an alcove for preparing and eating food on the opposite side. The finely worked planks that made up the walls and floor bore a rich patina of age. A small wooden altar stood against the rear wall, near the sleeping platform, bearing the seven traditional offering bowls, and a framed photograph of the Dalai Lama, a single smoking stick of incense beside it. The carpet at the center of the room, though worn almost threadbare near the altar, depicted the endless knot, symbol of the unity of all things, and the other eight sacred emblems in rich reds and browns. Everything in the room seemed to be made of wood, or clay, or wool. The chamber was like a clearing in an ancient forest, radiating a natural, soothing tranquility.

The woman smiled awkwardly and sat on a squat stool near the sleeping platform, assuming a somber expression. Shan followed her uncertainly, and saw a figure in the shadows, leaning against the wall, on one of the two pallets unrolled on the platform. The figure turned, rising very slowly, his hand on the wall for support. The aged man moved with obvious effort toward Shan, one hand still on the wall. He sat on the edge of the platform, near the woman, and studied Shan as he smacked his cracked, dried lips together. Silence, Shan suspected, prevailed in the room, a fixture as real as the little altar and the simple benches that lined the wall. In the stillness he became aware of quick, shallow breathing and his eyes fell upon a small shape lying on a blanket in the corner of the platform. A lamb.

“We just wanted to thank you,” the man said. His voice was hoarse, nearly a whisper, as though it had not been used in a long time. “I am called Lepka.”

Shan lowered himself to the floor in front of the man, balancing the bowl between his legs. “I have done nothing. I lost the eye.”

“But you came anyway,” the man said, in a lama’s voice. “Already things happen. You got the eye closer than it has been for a hundred years.”

Things happen. Shan could not bring himself to question the aged Tibetan. What things? The destruction of Chemi’s village? The gathering of knobs and army troops in the valley, probably for the first time since the terrible day when the eye was stolen? The distant rumbling of the oil derrick, scraping and grinding deep in the earth? The reckless talk of opposing the Chinese in the valley?

He offered a sad smile and studied Lepka. He had learned to think of such aged Tibetans as one of the treasures that the hidden parts of Tibet offered up, men and women who seemed to defy time, or at least to resist aging, who might live a century or more, and whose most vibrant memories were not of the times since Beijing had arrived, but before. The man’s skin was like ancient parchment. He was very old, perhaps old enough to have been alive when the eye was taken from Yapchi. His gnarled fingers, Shan saw, were formed into a mudra, his thumbs pressed together, the knuckles of the first joints above the hands joined, the middle fingers extended and pressed together. With a blush of shame, Shan recognized the gesture. It was an offering mudra, the offering of water for the feet, used for initiating monks or receiving sanctified visitors.

“I went down to that place,” Lepka declared. “I leaned on my staff and went down to that Chinese machine.” He smacked his lips again and the woman handed him a bowl of water from the side of the platform, which he sipped from before speaking again. “I threw a stone at it.” A thin line of water dribbled from his mouth as he spoke. “Sometimes demons make people have visions, make them see evil things that are not really there. But the stone hit metal, and bounced back. The workers laughed and said, ‘look at the crazy old man.’” Lepka looked at Shan and grinned. He was missing most of his teeth. “But I can throw rocks good. When I was young I kept wolves away from the herds, with rocks and my sling. I threw another rock, and another, at different places. They laughed some more. But you know what?” he asked, then coughed and made a long wheezing sound before continuing. “I found a place that was a bell,” he said with a meaningful gaze. “It didn’t look like a bell, because it had been hidden in a different shape. But it sounded like a bell,” he declared with a grin. “It was the essence of a bell, hiding there.”

Bells, in traditional Tibet, were sometimes used to frighten demons away.

“And they didn’t even know,” Lepka said, and made the wheezing sound again. Shan realized it was a laugh.

Shan answered with a solemn nod and drank some tea. “Your home,” he said, searching for something to say, “is so peaceful. Like a temple.”

The woman smiled, and the old man surveyed the chamber slowly, as though seeing it for the first time. “The grandfather of my grandfather built this house,” he said. “In the first year of the Eighth.” He was speaking of the eighteenth century.

“It has heard many prayers,” the woman added quietly. “Our son likes to bring the village here to meet with him on important decisions because he says no one ever speaks rudely in this house, for all the prayers that live in the wood.”

Shan gazed back over the sleeping platform. He saw that there was another pallet, rolled, against the back wall, and suddenly he realized whose house he was in. “It’s a long journey, to Lamtso.”

The old man smiled. “When he was three years old, I took my boy for the first time. He sat on my shoulders as we walked and we would sing. For hours we would sing. And there was a dog, a huge mastiff that let him ride on its back. Sometimes he would lie down and fall asleep on that dog’s broad back and the dog would just keep walking. I said it was too dangerous.…” The hoarseness was gone from the man’s voice, as though the memories had revived something inside.

“But you made all the other dogs work,” a voice said softly, behind Shan. “You put packs on all the other dogs when we left the lake. All but that one, so I could ride it home.”

“Son!” the woman cried and leapt up to embrace Lhandro.

The village headman looked up from his mother’s arms and smiled wearily.

“Lha gyal lo, Lha gyal lo,” Lepka intoned quietly, his eyes filling with moisture. “The salt has found its way again.”

Lhandro stepped to his father and knelt, opening his hand to reveal a mound of brilliant white crystals. He raised his father’s hand and solemnly poured the salt onto the dry, wrinkled palm and closed the gnarled fingers around it. The wheezing laugh erupted again from Lepka’s throat, and he pressed the handful of salt against his heart.

As Shan stepped to the door sheep began streaming past the outer gate, salt packs still on their backs, coming from north of the valley. Excited greetings echoed down the central path of the village, but also warnings. He stepped outside in confusion. On the slope above the village, near the trees, several of those from camp stood waiting, some waving, some pointing toward the arriving caravan. Then he saw a figure run from the group, in the opposite direction, as if to hide. He turned and saw that not all the Tibetans had been pointing toward the caravan.

Nyma appeared in the midst of the sheep, worry clouding her face. “They searched all our bags, and made us leave five sheep for them,” she blurted out, without a greeting. She looked at the rear of the caravan. Two army trucks were winding their way up their valley, just a few hundred yards behind the last of the sheep.

Lhandro appeared in the doorway behind Shan, raised a hand to warn his parents to stay inside, then swept past Shan, pushing him into the shadows. As Shan took a position just inside the door, the headman stepped out into the central path to wait for the trucks. A knot tightened in Shan’s belly as he watched the trucks stop and a dozen soldiers jump out. One of them opened the side door of the first truck, emblazoned with a snow leopard, and a man in an officer’s tunic stepped down.

“Good morning, Colonel Lin,” a voice called out with false warmth from behind Lhandro. Through the open door Shan watched Winslow walk jauntily to Lhandro’s side. The American had washed and shaved, and put on a clean shirt. “Another glorious day for youth league maneuvers.”

One side of Lin’s mouth curled up as he recognized the American. He turned and spoke to someone behind him, out of Shan’s sight. A moment later a soldier marched past Winslow and Lhandro, holding a clipboard as he surveyed the village with restless, hawk-like eyes.

“The American embassy has no authority to meddle in the internal affairs of China,” Lin growled as he took a step toward Winslow. He spoke loudly, as if to address a larger audience.

“Of course not,” the American agreed in a business-like tone. “The Qinghai Petroleum Venture has an American partner. One of its American workers is missing. Matter of international relations,” he added pointedly, in a voice as loud as Lin’s.

“Not missing,” Lin said readily, as if he had made it his business to know what the American had been doing in the mountains. “Dead. Most unfortunate.”

Through the door Shan glimpsed a pair of soldiers advancing around the back of the village, behind the animal pens on the opposite side of the path. They seemed to be searching for something.

“Our village is honored by the presence of the glorious soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army,” Lhandro said in a flat voice, casting an uneasy glance at Winslow.

“Of course you are,” Lin said in an amused tone as he lit a cigarette and shot a stream of smoke toward Lhandro. “And your honor can only increase.”

The knot in Shan’s gut drew so tight it hurt.

Lin stared at Winslow intensely, as though trying to will the American to back down. “There were others with you before. Tibetans. Two tall men.” He paused and stared at Lhandro expectantly, then shifted his gaze toward Lhandro’s feet as though reminding Lhandro that Lin had once had the headman in manacles.

“I had a driver…” Winslow offered in a speculative tone.

Lin’s hand made a quick jerking motion upward, as if he meant to strike the American. But he stopped it in midair and it collapsed into a fist. He surveyed the soldiers moving through the village, then turned back to the American. “But later that day you insisted your driver leave you at the side of the road. Just drop you there and drive away. He was wrong to do that. His report caused quite a disturbance at Public Security. He was punished for his irresponsibility.”

“I wanted to walk. Fresh mountain air and all. We call it trekking.”

“But how did you get over here?” the colonel pressed. “The mountains are impassable.”

“Almost.”

Lin frowned. “The petroleum venture is going to bring great wealth to this valley,” he observed to Lhandro in his loud, public address voice. “Comrade Lhandro,” he added, as if the colonel wanted to remind the village headman that he still knew his name, still held his papers.

“Perhaps,” Lhandro offered in an anguished tone, “there isn’t any oil.”

The amusement returned to Lin’s face as he drew deeply on his cigarette. “There’s oil. The geologists just have to prove how much. Already there is not enough room in the camp for all the workers, and others will be coming when the oil starts to flow. A pipeline will need to be built. Workers will be stationed here permanently to operate the pumps.”

Lhandro stared at the colonel’s boots. “We have an empty stable,” he said in a hollow tone. “We could convert it, make straw pallets.”

Lin’s eyes flared, but it seemed as though with pleasure, not anger.

“Please colonel,” Lhandro pleaded. “We are simple farmers. We have farmed this valley for centuries. We pay taxes. We could supply food to the workers.…” His voice seemed to lose strength. “We have done nothing wrong,” he added despondently, still staring at Lin’s boots.

“You never explained what you were doing a hundred miles south of here that day.”

“Salt,” Lhandro said, extending his hand toward the sheep, which the villagers were herding into pens at the far end of the village. “We always go for salt in the spring.” Even from his distance Shan saw the hand was shaking.

Lin answered with another frown. “This is the twenty-first century, comrade. You are required to have certificates from the salt monopoly.”

Lhandro shrugged morosely, and stepped toward the gate that led to his house. A salt pouch lay on the low wall. He pushed his hand into the open side and extended a handful of salt toward Lin. “We have some money. We could pay the monopoly,” he offered.

The colonel sighed impatiently, motioned to one of the nearby soldiers. The man roughly seized the pouch and tossed it on the ground, kicking it with the toe of his boot so that both of the side pockets lay flat. He produced a short bayonet from his belt and probed the contents of the open pocket, then looked up expectantly at Lin, who nodded. The soldier began stabbing the still-sealed second pocket, ripping apart its tight woolen weave, spilling the precious salt onto the ground.

“It is special salt,” a woman’s voice interjected. Shan saw Nyma step past the door opening to stand by Lhandro. “It could heal you,” she declared to Lin, looking straight into the colonel’s eyes.

“I’m not sick.”

Nyma stared back, as if she didn’t agree, but would not argue.

“You should be careful,” Lin said icily. “Someone might mistake you for a nun. Yesterday Public Security arrested someone a few miles from here. Under his coat he wore a maroon band on his sleeve. He had a little piece of yellow cloth in his pocket.”

Even from a distance Shan could see Nyma swallow hard. Lin meant an outlawed monk had been caught nearby, one reckless enough to carry a Tibetan flag in his pocket.

The tension became a tangible thing, like a frigid cloud in the air about them. Lin cast a gloating grin toward the American. “Even in America, Mr. Winslow,” the colonel said, “those who commit treason are sent to prison.” He gestured to the headman. “This man Lhandro knows about prisons. He had an old man with him, a former criminal who wore a lao gai registration.” Lin’s eyes squeezed into tight slits. “Where is that old man?” he barked abruptly. “And the one named Shan, the one who has no papers. They were not with you when you arrived with the sheep. If you are hiding them it will go worse for you when we catch them. And if any of you have something of mine,” he said pointedly, “we will consider the entire village guilty of the crime.”

There was another long silence as Lin surveyed the village with smoldering eyes. His gaze finally drifted downward, and he pushed the pouch of salt with the toe of his well-polished boot. “I am a simple man,” the colonel said in a strangely frustrated tone. “I keep my world simple. There are those who belong to the new order, and those who are trying to. Everyone else,” he said in a tone of mock apology, “has no place, and is owed nothing.”

Winslow pulled the cover off his camera lens and Lin’s face hardened. “The Qinghai Petroleum Venture,” he said in a loud voice, as if he were making a proclamation to the entire village, “is prepared to give liberal compensation to all those who cooperate in building the new economy, in building the new valley. We are even honoring it with a new name. We have decided to call it Lujun Valley now,” he said with a taunting expression. “I will be issuing orders for the maps to be changed.”

Lhandro’s head shot up and he lurched forward as if about to attack the colonel, until Winslow restrained him with a hand on his arm. Lin was renaming the valley to honor the Chinese soldiers who had destroyed its people a century earlier.

Lin paused, as if inviting Lhandro to attack, and seemed about to offer another taunt when he was interrupted by a booming noise, a distant, hollow repetitive thumping sound that echoed through the valley. Lin twisted about as though searching the derrick and the oil camp for the source of the noise. But it was not a mechanical sound. It was almost like a heartbeat, slow but steady. Shan found himself inching out the doorway, his eyes searching the outside wall. The deity drum was missing.

Lin’s thin lips folded into something like a snarl. He gestured to the soldier who had stabbed the salt pouch, who instantly whistled toward the village. As the soldiers sweeping through the village turned he raised his left arm and clenched his right hand around the left forearm, then pointed to the west side of the valley and made a spiraling motion with his fingers. They were to deploy west, Shan guessed, and climb toward the sound.

“I will need to know about the men I saw with you,” Lin said in a low voice to Lhandro. “There can be many ways to ask.” He climbed into the nearest truck.

The drumbeat continued. In the distance Shan saw workers on the derrick standing still, looking toward the upper slopes. The few Tibetans who were left in the village had also emerged from their houses and were also gazing at the slopes, some with expressions of hope, others of fear.

The sound of the truck engines starting drew Shan’s gaze away from the slopes, and he watched the vehicles drive away, not back down the path but directly to the west, across the fields of sprouting barley. A whimper rose from nearby and he turned to see a small figure huddled inside the earthen wall near where Lin had been standing. Anya had been hiding, listening to the colonel.

She gazed at Shan with wide, afraid eyes, then leapt up and ran down the village path, disappearing into the rocks and trees of the slope.

“Your drum,” he asked Lepka as the old man stepped into the sunlight. “Where is it?”

“Gone, disappeared in the night,” Lepka said with a shrug, and he placed his hand over his heart and closed his eyes a moment, as if seeking a connection between the drumming and the beating of his own heart.

“You mean someone from the village is up there?”

“No,” Lepka exclaimed happily, his eyes wide, as if that were his real point.

Shan and Winslow exchanged worried glances and when Shan began jogging out of the village, in the direction Anya had taken, the American followed a step behind. They found Anya standing alone in the center of the canyon camp with only Lokesh and a handful of the Yapchi villagers. Tenzin and the purbas were gone. The sick strangers were gone.

“Up the trails,” Anya said with a puzzled expression. “But these trails are for goats,” she said, gesturing toward the end of the short canyon, where the slope was nearly vertical. “So many sick people…” she added, her voice drifting off. “They are fleeing. They saw the soldiers. They heard there are knobs at the camp. There is no healing in this valley any longer.” The girl’s voice faded again as she began staring intensely at a small hole near the base of a large boulder. She limped to the rock, then dropped to her knees and pressed her eye near the hole, as though she expected to see something inside it.

“He’s so interested in Lokesh,” Winslow said at Shan’s shoulder as they both watched the girl in confusion. “Why?”

“When he found travelers from Yapchi coming from the south a former lao gai prisoner was among them,” Shan said, his voice heavy with worry. “I think what he really means is that Lokesh could be a convenient suspect, could be arrested if no one else produces whatever Lin wants.”

“You mean the eye.”

“I don’t think it’s the eye anymore. Lin wouldn’t trouble himself so over a piece of stone. I think what he wants is the one who stole the eye. Because whoever stole it committed a security breach.”

“Dremu was going to steal the stone but the purbas stopped him,” Winslow recalled.

Shan nodded. “They had other plans. They could have placed someone on the inside. Lin couldn’t afford to let such a person escape. There would have been things more important than the chenyi stone in Lin’s office.”

“You mean Lin thinks the thief stole secrets. You mean they’re looking for some kind of spy?”

Spy. The word had not occurred to Shan. But it had doubtlessly occurred to Lin. It would make sense. It would explain why the mountain commandos had come all the way from Lhasa, following a piece of a deity.

A figure rushed past them and bent towards Anya. It was Lhandro, and as he gently pulled the girl up he cast an apologetic glance toward Shan and Winslow. “Sometimes she forgets things,” he said, as though the girl could not hear him. When Anya straightened her eyes were hooded, and she searched the landscape restlessly, without any sign that she saw them. “Sometimes all she can do is look for deities. I think it is another way they speak with her,” he said awkwardly. “Sometimes we have to go out and search for Anya, with the dogs, like an old monk,” he added, referring to the way some old monks might wander away in a spiritual reverie, or lose themselves while meditating on their feet.

Lhandro showed relief for a moment as Lokesh put his arm around the girl and guided her to a pallet. Then his eyes hardened and he surveyed the canyon. “Where is he? Horsetracks led into the valley.”

“Dremu?” Shan asked. He had not thought of the Golok since seeing him ride away the day before.

“No sign of the bastard,” Lhandro said. “He could be negotiating to sell it back to the soldiers right now.”

“The eye?” Shan asked.

“Of course the eye. He knew exactly where it was. He ran away the morning after it was stolen. He knew the mountain trails. And he has helpers. We saw the tracks of three horses, not one.” Lhandro looked back at Anya and Lokesh. “He will sell all of us if the price is right.”

*   *   *

Shan walked one step behind Winslow as they approached the oil camp an hour later. The American had protested when Shan had said he was going with him to meet the camp manager, but Shan had insisted he would just go alone if the American did not want to accompany him. “Lin will pounce on you,” Winslow protested. “He wants you in manacles.”

“Lin is in the army camp, in those tents past the oil camp,” Shan said in a thin voice. “He doesn’t expect me to walk into the camp. And no one else will suspect me if they think I am connected with you.”

Winslow had reluctantly agreed, but only if Shan stayed with him, and spoke only English, playing the part of an assistant. For thirty minutes they had worked on making Shan’s clothes presentable, finding a nearly new shirt in the village for Shan to wear, over which the American had put his own red nylon coat. Finally, Winslow hung his expensive binoculars around Shan’s neck.

The American began to whistle as they approached the derrick, and took several photographs as the workers waved, as though he were a tourist. They were broad shouldered, beefy men, Chinese and Tibetans, who smiled with pride and paused to pose for Winslow, their huge wrenches and hammers raised.

Two hundred yards before the camp was an open square of earth, the size of a large vegetable garden, where two figures knelt. They wore aprons, and one held a large magnifying lens as he studied something in the soil.

“Wasn’t there last time,” Winslow observed in a voice tinged with curiosity as they walked past the bent figures. “Guess the colonel lost a button.”

No one at the camp seemed surprised to see the American. The workers who scurried about the complex of trailers and tents nodded briefly as Shan and Winslow slowly circuited the compound, or made no eye contact at all. Tall stacks of logs lay at the base of the slope where the logging was being conducted, a heavy gas-powered saw on a metal frame whirled and groaned as it cut the logs into long planks.

Shan was watching a huge diesel truck being unloaded of its cargo of heavy pipe, its engine idling loudly, when Winslow pulled him away. A young Han woman, looking out of place in a bright white blouse and neatly pressed blue skirt, had appeared at the door of one of the center trailers. She greeted them with a solicitous nod, then gestured them inside, into the fastidious world of the venture’s management. Passing through a short hallway lined with dirt-caked boots and jackets they stepped onto a clean tile floor in a room furnished with two metal desks and a long sofa. Shan might have forgotten he was inside one of the metal boxes, except that all the furniture was bolted to the floor. Black framed, color photographs of famous Chinese landscapes—the Great Wall, the natural limestone towers of Guilin, the Shanghai waterfront—were screwed on the wall above the sofa. The woman opened the door to a small conference room. “I will bring tea,” she announced, and left them to sit at the table.

The table was brown plastic, with simulated wood grain, as were the chairs. On the wall hung maps, many kinds of maps. Shan pulled a chair out, then found himself being drawn toward the walls. The oil venture needed precision in its geography. Three maps clearly depicted Yapchi, in sharply different scales, including one large one with a highlighted yellow line that wandered along the base of the nearby mountains to connect Yapchi to a red circle just west of Golmud, the large city more than two hundred miles to the north, the nearest airport and railhead. On a small metal side table there was a stack of single-page sheets that bore a reduced map outlining the route from Golmud to Yapchi, with landmarks highlighted. Shan took one, quickly folded it and stuffed it into his pocket.

“She’s dead, Winslow,” a gruff voice suddenly announced. “I’m goddamned sorry, but she’s dead.” The Westerner who spoke filled the doorframe. His hair, though close-cropped, was speckled brown and grey, as was the stubble of whiskers on his face, untouched by a razor for several days. His blue denim pants were held up by bright red suspenders. A cigar in a plastic wrapper protruded from the pocket of his light blue workshirt. The steaming liquid in the mug he set on the table was black coffee.

“My name is Jenkins,” he said to Shan, extending a beefy hand.

Shan took the hand and the man squeezed his own, hard. “I am called Shan.”

“Shan is helping me,” Winslow interjected quickly, as though Shan had already said too much. “Do you know for certain, Jenkins? A man in the mountains said she fell. Said he saw it.”

“Right off the edge of the world,” Jenkins said, touching the map behind him at the same spot Zhu had shown them. “A thousand feet, she could have fallen.” He turned back with surprise in his deep set eyes. “You saw Zhu? Here?”

Shan looked at the American manager in surprise. Had the Special Projects Director not informed Jenkins of his presence?

Winslow stared at the map intensely. “Did anyone try to find the body?” he demanded in a new, sterner tone.

Jenkins sighed. “You have any idea of the work we have to deal with here? I have deadlines. The goddamned banks are coming for inspection. Thieves stole half my garage tools last night. And I’ve got a horde of bureaucrats ready to descend in less than two weeks to celebrate our oil, even though I haven’t struck it yet.”

“Did you try to find her?” Winslow repeated.

Jenkins sighed once more and sat down heavily as the woman arrived with two oversized mugs of black tea. “The supply helicopter from Golmud. I asked them to do a flyover as soon as I got the details from Zhu. They saw nothing, and got called back to base. I’ll send a team in on foot. I will. I promise I will. But not in the next two weeks. She’s not going anywhere. Unless she went into the river, in which case she’s gone already.”

The big American looked from Shan to Winslow. “I’m sorry, Winslow. But plain talk is the only kind I know. I knew her before. This was our second project together. She was a star. My mother said the brightest stars always burn out early. I’ve lain awake nights trying to think if I did something wrong. I’ve written three letters to her family and torn each up. What do I say? Your daughter the trained field geologist, who had led field teams in Siberia, the Andes, and Africa, took a wrong step and fell? One of my Tibetan foremen said maybe she was called by the deities in the mountains,” he added in an exasperated tone, and for a moment his head cocked at an angle, looking toward the wall.

“But even before she fell, she was missing,” Shan interjected. He studied the room again. On a low shelf in the metal table was a stack of newspapers, the weekly paper published in Lhasa.

Jenkins drank deeply from his mug. “Sort of,” he said, addressing his coffee mug. “I learned early on to give her slack. A strong head requires a loose rein. And if she had an excuse to be out of a city and in a camp she’d take it in a second, and likewise for being out of the camp to stay out in exploration. She got close to the Tibetans, started giving them English lessons. Once in a staff meeting she said America needed Tibet, whatever the hell that meant. She loved what she did, said she felt like an early explorer. She loved it here especially, even skipped days off to go back up on the mountain. Making new maps. The Chinese maps are rotten. Deliberate misplacement of locations, for security reasons, they say. Entire regions have never been surveyed. Who the hell knows what’s out there?” He drank again. “There’s another joint venture camp, a British one, two ranges north of here, about fifty miles away. I thought maybe her radio went dead, and she set out for the other camp. Or maybe one of her team got hurt and it was easier to take him out on the other side of the mountains. Could be a hundred reasons for no contact, I kept telling myself. Trapped in a blind canyon by an avalanche, maybe. When she left here the last time she left a whole pack of food behind, half her rations. Maybe she went to a village for food.

“But there was no doubt after an eyewitness report. Zhu took over, called headquarters from here. Filled out the report, in triplicate. The venture has forms for deaths. With ten thousand workers, people have accidents. Never had an expatriate die though.” Jenkins stared into his mug again. “He sent in the form. Got me to countersign and sent it in. Just a damned bureaucratic exercise for them,” he grunted. “Only acknowledgment I got was a memo from the company that said they will pay for a memorial stone for her back home.”

“Did you speak with Zhu about the details, like how far exactly he was when he saw her fall, what he did to try to recover the body?”

“By radiotelephone. I was in Golmud when he came in. Faxed his report to me. Lucky there was any witness at all. Otherwise her family would be worrying for years. Now they can move on.”

“Only Zhu though?” Winslow asked. “I mean didn’t others on his crew see something, weren’t they listed as witnesses?”

A low rumble erupted from Jenkins’s throat. “He’s the Director for Special Projects, for chrissakes.”

“How long has he been with the venture?” Shan asked.

Jenkins frowned and stared at Winslow before answering. “Not long. Only met him on this project.”

“And what exactly do Special Projects consist of?” Winslow asked.

“Whatever the company says.” Jenkins shrugged. “He works for someone two or three levels above my pay grade. Someone in the Ministry, I think. Maybe his main job is investor relations.”

“Investor relations?” Winslow asked.

“Watching over the foreigners in the venture,” Jenkins said in a contemplative tone as he rubbed his grizzled jaw. “Probably wears grey underwear,” he observed in a matter-of-fact tone. Meaning, Shan realized, that Jenkins thought Zhu worked for Public Security.

“Zhu brought in these Public Security troops?” Shan asked abruptly, in English. “To look for her?”

The beefy American manager studied him a moment before answering, and shot a peeved glance at Winslow. “Those troops are from Golmud. Sure, maybe Zhu called them. Public Security helps the ventures sometimes, mostly to enforce discipline among the Chinese workers. They never helped us look for Larkin.”

“At the other camp,” Winslow said, “how many foreigners are there? Would there be other Americans at that second camp?”

Jenkins shook his head. “British. The venture is very regimented. My American employer holds a ten-percent interest in the venture, and the venture has ten exploration camps. So we get to manage one camp. Same for each of the other foreign investors.”

“Why here?” Shan asked. “What was it about Yapchi Mountain that got her so interested?”

“She was just a perfectionist,” Jenkins said, “and the maps for this area were worthless, lots of holes to be filled in. When she worked a site she made a catalog of everything, wanted to know the surrounding geology for ten miles around and two miles deep. It’s a compulsion for oil geologists. In our company they record it all, eventually feed the data into a big computer back home which models the data. Looking for new tracers, similar characteristics, indicators of the presence and type of oil. Geology repeats itself in strange ways. Information about a site in Pakistan might explain a site we’re working in Alaska.”

“What happened to the others on Miss Larkin’s crew?” Shan asked.

“We change field crews all the time. Those who were with her that day, they were shipped back to the main base near Golmud, the operations center. Our hell on wheels.”

“Sorry?” Shan said in confusion.

“An old railroad term. Temporary cities spring up around big construction projects. Attract all levels of the food chain, you might say. Booming for a few months, a year, then the whole thing packs up and moves on to be more central to the next set of big projects. We’re in an exploration frenzy. Someone came from Beijing and gave a speech in Golmud to all the managers. We’re opening China’s west, we’re the bringers of prosperity. Heroes of the proletariat and all,” Jenkins said in a hollow tone. “First the exploration teams, then the drilling camps. Once we finish, pipe fitters move in and the camps move on.” Jenkins pulled the cigar out of his pocket. “Mind?”

Winslow and Shan shook their heads, and Jenkins opened the wrapper and ran the cigar under his nose with a small sound of contentment.

“But Miss Larkin’s crew,” Shan suggested. “You could find them in Golmud, to speak with.”

“Me? Hell no. Needle in a haystack. At any one time they have two to three hundred workers rotating through the base. Those men from her team, they could be in four different places now, hundreds of miles away, even shipped off to other provinces. Our Chinese partner has operations all over China.”

“Do you have their names?” Shan pressed.

Jenkins lit the cigar, blowing smoke over his shoulder, out the door. He studied Winslow with a disbelieving frown. “You sure you didn’t know her? A man might think you and she had—”

“I told you before,” Winslow interjected peevishly. “Just doing my job.”

Jenkins inhaled deeply on the cigar. “Okay. Some damned computer disc must have some names on it.” He rose and stepped to the door, calling out in Chinese to the woman who had brought the tea. They conversed a moment, then he stepped back to the table. He wrinkled his brow and stared into his mug once more, then looked up at Winslow. “A lot of crazy shit goes on here. It’s the wild west. It’s the end of the world. Everyone is far from home. We’re paid to go to some godforsaken place and pump money out of the ground, and we make it happen. Some things I don’t totally understand. Not my business. Soldiers come and go. I hear things about people from Beijing coming in for midnight meetings. They tell me not to get involved in politics. So I don’t get involved in politics. Nothing criminal about all this, just politics.”

It was Winslow’s turn to stare into his cup. “Why, Jenkins,” he said at last, “would the word criminal come to mind?”

The manager’s mouth twisted, as if he had bit something sour. “Just the way you talk. No other reason,” he added emphatically.

“But how could you do this to the land when you have no connection to it?” Shan heard himself ask. The words leapt off his tongue before they crossed his mind. As though a deity was speaking through him. It is not your land, the Tibetans would say, and therefore you may ask nothing of it.

“Connection?” Jenkins asked, as if he didn’t understand. But then he winced and his eyes drifted downward. “It’s my job,” he said in a voice that sounded suddenly weary, and Shan knew the American manager understood his question perfectly. “I heard that sound,” Jenkins added, almost in a whisper. “It was like a heartbeat.” He looked up at Winslow. “You heard it, too, right?”

They sat in silence for what seemed a long time.

“There are two people outside your camp,” Shan said, “working on their knees in the earth.”

Jenkins snorted and grinned at Shan, as though grateful for the change in subject. “One of the development banks is providing some big dollars for the project. Which means volumes of rules and criteria that have been dreamed up by bureaucrats. One is that we do an archaeological assessment. Someone kicked up an artifact and made the mistake of telling Golmud. Next thing we know two experts arrive with a letter saying we have to cooperate. They will catalog the site, write a report, and move on. Just more red tape.”

“What kind of artifact?” Shan asked.

“An old piece of bronze with writing on it. Kind of thing any Tibetan farmer turns up twice a day.” As he spoke his secretary appeared with a single sheet of paper with a short list of names. She looked at each of the three men in turn, and handed the paper to Winslow. Then she turned to Jenkins. “Don’t tell that Zhu,” she said and hurried away.

Jenkins took another puff and looked after the woman with worry in his eyes.

“If Public Security is here, why would you need the army too?” Winslow asked offhandedly.

“PLA often helps with relocations,” Jenkins grunted. “They say it is good training for the soldiers.”

A shiver ran down Shan’s spine. Training for the soldiers. It was one thing the army did better than anyone else in Tibet. Relocate Tibetans. Rip apart the roots people had to their land, and to each other. Proclaim people to be refugees and move them to make room for soldiers or Han immigrants. Tibetans seldom complained. They remembered that the army had once relocated them with cannons and aerial bombs.

“You mean moving towns?”

“Sometimes. I heard about some village up in the mountains. Damned shame. No one said destroy it. Some hot dog in a tank started shooting it from half a mile away. Said he thought it was abandoned, said his crews practice that way.”

“Practice?” Winslow snapped. “You mean find an old Tibetan building and blow it up?”

Jenkins inhaled on his cigar and studied Winslow closely, but made no reply.

A phone rang, with a sound more like a buzzer than a ring. A radio telephone, the manager had said. Jenkins’s secretary called out his name. Jenkins stood and shrugged. “The venture will compensate,” he said, and stepped out of the room.

Shan leapt to the metal table and lifted the top half of the newspaper stack.

“We have to go,” Winslow said nervously.

Shan nodded, pulled out the paper dated the week after the stone eye was stolen, folded it, placed it inside his shirt, and returned the stack to the shelf.

As they approached the cleared patch of earth five minutes later the two figures in aprons kept at their work, one now lifting a plastic bucket to fill a round tray with dirt as the second slowly shook the tray. The dirt sifted out the bottom of the tray in fine grains, until there was a small mound under it. Then the man with the bucket shuffled back to the cleared patch and began refilling the bucket. He had nearly completed the task when he looked up and acknowledged Shan and Winslow. He was a Chinese, in his sixties, with thick black-rimmed spectacles and long thick snow-white hair under a broad-rimmed hat. His apron, apparently tailored for the task, had four rows of small pockets. From his belt hung a small nylon pouch, and a holster bearing a small hammer and two thick brushes. He cast what looked like a grimace toward them and returned to the bucket.

Shan wandered to the far side of the patch, where the man’s assistant waited with the soil sieve beside what looked like a pile of coats. She was also Chinese, much younger, with very short hair, wearing a tee shirt that said, in English, Bones Are Us.

“Some Tibetans,” Shan observed quietly, “think there are things buried in the earth that, once discovered, have the power to change the world.”

The young woman cocked her head at him. “Mostly,” she replied after studying him for a moment, “the things we find have the power to make your back ache and your hands blister.” She accepted another bucket of earth, bending over the sieve with a business-like manner. A blue pottery shard appeared, which the man lifted and inserted into one of his pockets.

“The manager says you found something with writing,” Winslow said.

The man looked up in surprise. “Your Mandarin is very good. Most of the foreigners don’t even try.”

“If you asked,” Shan suggested, “some of the villagers might help you. It is a lot of work for only the two of you.”

The man looked at Shan with the same curiosity the woman had shown. “They don’t like us digging in their valley. The first day we opened the ground, they drove some of their animals over our dig.”

“Surely not on purpose,” Shan said in surprise. It didn’t seem possible that the peaceful villagers of Yapchi would try to damage the professor’s work.

The man shrugged. “No one is too welcoming.” He lowered the bucket. “I am sorry. I thought you were more of the oil workers. They come and make fun of us sometimes, say we seem to be taking a long time to plant our garden. Or how they could move this dirt out in five minutes, when it takes us five days.”

“But you don’t work for the venture?”

The elderly Han shook his head. “Our university has a contract with the development bank. The cost will be deducted from the funds advanced to the venture. It is how the banks make sure the proper study is conducted before production ruins the site.” He removed his hat and wiped his brow. “I am Professor Ma from Chengdu. This is my assistant Miss Ming.”

As Shan and Winslow introduced themselves the professor stepped to the pile of coats and lifted them, revealing a wooden box that had the appearance of an old tool chest. He inserted a key in the padlock that held the box shut, opened it, and extended an object wrapped in black felt toward Shan. It was a heavy piece of bronze, two inches wide, slightly curved, with two rows of writing. The top row was Tibetan script, the bottom Chinese ideograms. Both scripts were heavily ornate, the Tibetan in the special ornate form traditionally used for recording scriptures and sutras. The fragments gave little sense of the original message. Until the communist government had abandoned the tradition fifty years before, Chinese ideograms had been written vertically, from top to bottom, so that the few Chinese characters that appeared on the bronze shard were not connected in meaning. The first character was lao, the word for old. The second said yu. Jade. The third, broken at the center, was impossible to identify. The ornate Tibetan script eluded him. He thought he saw the word treasure, but could not be certain.

“A samkang,” Shan suggested. The bronze shard could have come from a large bronze temple burner.

The professor nodded. “As good a guess as any.”

Shan tried to visualize a little Tibetan temple at the head of the valley, trying to translate its teachings into Chinese. The lessons, he thought sadly, had not stuck. He watched as the professor filled another bucket and Winslow carried it to the sieve. “Have you dated the site?” he asked.

“Two or three centuries old at most. There is a layer of char three inches under the surface. A wooden temple, once it burns, leaves so little behind.”

“How large a complex?” Shan asked. Those who lived in the temple surely would have known how to find the valley’s deity.

“Small,” the professor said, pointing to a pattern of holes that radiated out from the cleared rectangle, which he must have used to gauge the extent of the char layer. “One central building, with a small walled yard.”

“What happens to your findings?” Shan asked.

“We are allowed one more week,” the professor sighed. “Then we write a report and send it to the bank. They have a form we complete, certifying that a comprehensive analysis was performed and that no unique artifacts of importance were discovered. Then someone puts it in a file and forgets it.”

Shan studied the rigid set of the professor’s jaw. “You’ve done this before.”

“All over the Tibetan regions. Amdo. Kham. Tsang.” He was using the old Tibetan names for the lands, not Beijing’s. “Good summer projects for my graduate students.”

The sound of a heavy truck interrupted the professor. They turned to see Lin’s troop trucks driving rapidly along the western side of the valley, abreast of each other, deliberately destroying the spring barley.

Winslow cursed. “I could get on the radio telephone,” he said, “tell the embassy that the army is interfering with an American investment project.”

“Not,” Shan said, “if Mr. Jenkins did not agree.”

The professor studied the truck with a grim expression, settled his hat back over his head, and resumed working, as though the appearance of the soldiers meant they could no longer speak.

Suddenly Shan became aware of the drumming again, from high on the slopes, though it seemed farther south and higher than before. Ma paused, not looking up, just staring at the ground with worry in his eyes. Shan recalled Jenkins’s strange reaction to the drumbeats. The sound seemed to tug at something inside Ma as well.

“Back to the village,” Winslow said. “Right away.”

But Shan hesitated, following the American’s gaze toward two new vehicles that had appeared at the camp. A white utility vehicle with two men in business suits standing beside it, and a nearly identical black truck parked behind it. “Senior managers from the venture,” he suggested. “You could make an official request, ask them to help in locating Larkin’s work crew.”

“Too risky if they don’t—” Winslow began. But Shan was already walking back toward the camp. He heard a curse behind his back, and the American jogged to his side.

Two minutes later they were among the sterile metal trailers, Winslow looking for the new arrivals, while Shan wandered about the camp trying to determine where the Yapchi workers were housed. He inched along the side of a huge dump truck, until he was only forty feet from the white vehicle and the men in suits. The men were Chinese, and they were not talking with Jenkins or anyone else from the venture. They were speaking with the knobs who were camped near the army tents. With a chill Shan recognized one of the men. Director Tuan from Religious Affairs, whom they had left at the stable in Norbu. He leaned forward to inspect the small, elegant lettering on the door of the white truck. Bureau of Religious Affairs, it said, in Chinese only. And with Tuan were four of the men in white shirts who looked like guards.

Suddenly, out of the shadows by the army trucks, Colonel Lin emerged, striding purposefully toward the new arrivals. An instant later the engine of the dump truck that concealed Shan roared and the vehicle pulled away, leaving him in plain sight of the howlers from Norbu. He turned, but out of the corner of his eye saw Tuan dart to Colonel Lin’s side. As the two officers conferred in low, urgent tones Tuan and his men began studying the faces in the camp. Shan walked as fast he dared without appearing conspicuous, desperately looking for Winslow, or at least a place to hide. He was just about to round the corner of the first trailer when Director Tuan called out in a shrill voice, “There! That’s the one! The one who knows about both! Arrest that man!” One of the white-shirted guards began blowing a whistle. Tuan was pointing at Shan.