CHAPTER FOUR

The crust of the earth under Tibet is twice as thick as elsewhere on the planet. Shan had heard that fact twice in his life. First from a professor in Beijing, who had emphasized that because plates of the earth had piled up on themselves in Tibet the land was constantly rising, causing many dangerous, unpredictable seismic events. But the point had also been related to Shan by an old lama in prison, who had explained that it meant the power of the land deities was more concentrated in Tibet than anywhere else on earth, that the roots that connected the land with its people ran much deeper, that the land expressed itself in more powerful ways.

As they left the next morning Shan remembered the words of the lama, for the earth was indeed expressing itself in powerful ways. A small but violent squall raced over the peaks to the north, one moment enveloping them in the white curtain that meant swirling snow, the next breaking to let the sun brilliantly illuminate a patch of slope. To the south clouds were scudding over another range, washing peaks with swaths of shadow that shifted so rapidly that the mountains themselves seemed to be in motion. And in between, the air over the great lake was clear and crisp under a cobalt sky. During the night the geese had gathered close to the salt camp, and Lokesh was standing close to the shore, speaking with them, or perhaps his mother, as he waved a farewell. The night before, his old friend had decided not to sleep. As the moon had risen over the holy waters, he had announced that he felt closer to his mother than he had in years, and he wanted to experience the sensation as long as possible. It was the geese, Lokesh had decided, and he wanted to stay near them all night.

As Shan had watched his friend settling onto a rock at the darkened shoreline he, too, decided to begin a vigil of sorts, atop a small hill, hoping for one of the rare moments when he connected with his father, when he would suddenly sense the smell of ginger and hear a hoarse, throaty laugh down some long empty corridor in his mind. But after an hour he had given up, realizing his father would never approach when the vision of Drakte’s death lingered so close to Shan’s consciousness.

Nyma, too, had been moved by the moonlight on the lake, for he found the nun sitting on a white rock, the water lapping against it. Fearful of disturbing her, he had been about to move on when she spoke.

“Once,” she said in hollow voice, “the village would have visitors from gompas several times a year. Now no one comes. No monks. No nuns. Maybe that’s all it is, maybe we have drifted so far away that no deity is interested in helping.”

Shan wasn’t even certain she was speaking to him until she paused and turned to stare at him. “They have you,” he offered awkwardly, stepping closer. He saw that for the first time since he had known her, she had let her hair down. It was long, nearly to her waist, and she absently ran her fingers through it.

“A real nun, I mean. I’m not a real nun,” Nyma said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Somehow the words seemed to hurt him more than her. “I think you’re a real nun,” Shan said.

In the moonlight he could see the trace of a sad smile on her face. “No,” Nyma sighed. “They closed the convent where I was training and sent away all the real nuns. I had nowhere to go but to my village.” She raised her face to the moon. “When I go to towns, I wear the clothes of a poor farmer. I do not have the courage to wear a robe in towns,” she confessed to the moon. “I don’t even cut my hair short like a nun. Lhandro says it could be too dangerous if howlers came.”

“And what good would you do for Yapchi in prison?” Shan asked, for that was where she would go if plucked off the street in an illegal robe.

Nyma did not answer, or did not hear. A solitary goose called out.

“I remember someone sitting waiting for ice to melt for days, to get some sand,” Shan said after studying the moonlit water a long time. “That woman was a nun.”

“It was me acting like a nun. I can act like a shepherd, or a farmer, too.”

Shan sat on a nearby rock. “Why are you so hard on yourself?” he whispered, feeling an unexpected helplessness. There were thousands of Nymas all over Tibet, men and women who had aspired to be monks and nuns and been denied the opportunity. Some just gave up, resigned to the notion that such a life would have to wait for a future incarnation. Others struggled on, trying to learn how to be a nun or monk without the benefit of regular teachers or role models. You must carry your gompa on your back, Shan had heard Gendun say to a despairing former monk.

“It feels like a lie, what we’ve done to you,” Nyma blurted out. “A nun who understands the path of compassion would have done different, I am sure. You didn’t know about the soldiers and the chenyi stone. We didn’t tell you about the Chinese and Americans drilling for oil at Yapchi. I could have told you at the hermitage about the oil but I didn’t, for fear of scaring you away. Now a killer is following us and that crazy Golok is watching the eye and all I feel is guilt over what we have done to you. And fear. When Drakte said that demon kills prayers he was right. I have been unable to pray, not truly pray in my heart, since that thing walked into the chapel. All day I have felt such fear. Terrible things are going to happen, I can feel it. You must think we have betrayed you. You must think we are so foolish, so reckless. Letting the oracle’s words bring us to this.”

“I would have come,” Shan said. “Even if you had told me it all, I would not have understood, but I still would have come. If the lamas asked me to go to the moon I would tie a hundred geese together and give it a try.”

In the moonlight Nyma’s sad smile reminded him of an old Buddha statue in ivory.

“Do you still have family at Yapchi?” Shan asked after another long silence. The woman had never spoken of her connection to the village.

“I call Lhandro uncle sometimes, but he is only a cousin. I have no close family left. He has only his parents. He was going to be married many years ago, but the woman who was intended for him was sent away for reeducation and never came back. My mother’s house is there. I have a home.”

Home. For a moment Shan was shamed because of the envy he felt for the Yapchi villagers, despite all the trouble in their valley. They had a home and a bond among them, roots in the land. He had no one, except Lokesh and Gendun, and a son who had disowned him and no doubt thought his father dead.

Shan had awakened to find Lhandro, Nyma, and Anya with two of the sturdy men from Yapchi arranging the small tandem salt sacks on a blanket. As Lhandro finished counting forty sets of pouches, Anya led a sheep forward and Nyma, her cheeks now smeared with red doja cream, quickly arranged the sacks on the back of the animal, tying the loose cords around the sheep’s belly so that each animal appeared to be wearing a woven saddle. The men from Yapchi worked quickly, some bringing the animals one at a time, others waiting in turns with the bulging sacks. When all the sheep were loaded, except a sturdy brown ram, Nyma called Shan to the ram’s side and opened one of the pouches, the only one that seemed to be empty. As Lhandro appeared with a leather bucket of salt, the nun pointed at the saddlebag which Shan carried in his hand, the bag he had brought from the hermitage. Shan hesitated, then opened the bag and extended it to the nun. But Nyma shook her head, as if still afraid of the bag’s contents, and gestured toward the pouch as Lhandro poured a handful of salt into it. Shan pulled out the cedar box and lowered it into the pouch, watching it with an unexpected sense of foreboding as Lhandro covered it with salt, produced a long needle, and began sewing the bag shut. The pouch was woven in a multicolored pattern with a round red circle in its center surrounded with white. Like an angry, watchful eye.

As the red-eyed pouch was loaded on the brown ram, Lhandro began watching the lake trail to the south, the trail Shan and his friends had arrived on the day before. A solitary figure, jogging along the trail, appeared on the crest of the nearest hill and waved to Lhandro. Shan saw that it was one of the Yapchi men he had met the day before, looking exhausted, an old muzzleloading rifle in his hand. He had been watching over them, guarding the trail in the night, Shan realized.

The other inhabitants of the salt camp gathered by the trail that opened to the north, watching with strangely solemn faces as Lhandro surveyed the line of loaded sheep and his companions, then nodded toward Anya, in the lead. The girl settled her chuba on her shoulders, whistled to the dogs, and began walking with her crooked gait, singing one of her eerie songs, the sheep and dogs following the girl as if under a spell.

“Lha gyal lo!” a woman by one of the dropka tents cried out, and the call was taken up by others, to Lokesh’s obvious delight. The old Tibetan echoed the words back to the camp as the caravan left the salt gatherers behind, Tenzin and the Yapchi men leading horses laden with equipment.

Yapchi had been sending salt caravans to the lake for as long as people remembered, Lhandro explained to Shan as they walked together—meaning not simply as long as the farmer and his family remembered, but for centuries, even before Buddha and the dharma path came to Tibet. More than twelve centuries. For much of the morning Lhandro walked beside Shan and spoke of those older caravans, recalling names and events from fifty, a hundred, even five hundred years earlier as if they had just happened. A Yapchi farmer named Saga had once found a dying Western priest, a Jesuit, near the lake, and had stopped for a week to carve one of his god’s crosses out of rock for his grave, since no wood could be found. Once, when there had been terrible sickness during the winter, the entire village had come to bathe in the healing waters of the lake. Another time a wild yak, white as snow, had followed a caravan all the way home and settled on the mountain above Yapchi where, for twenty years afterwards, it would be seen every year on Buddha’s birthday.

The tales echoed in Shan’s mind throughout the morning as the long empty miles of grassland seemed to put their dangers behind them. A sense of timelessness settled into Shan as they led the sheep along the eastern shoreline then into a long grassy valley that rose toward a pass over the first range of mountains. What had changed? he wondered. The Tibetans had taught him many ways to look at the world. One of them was to perceive the strange way that most humans viewed progress, even the very thing called civilization. He had evolved more as a person in four years in prison, enslaved, than he had in all the previous three decades he had spent in Beijing, accumulating the meager belongings by which most people judged a life’s progress. And now, carrying salt to Yapchi, walking by the sheep with the serene, joyful Tibetans under a cobalt sky rimmed with snowcapped peaks, a simple drawstring bag holding all his earthly possessions, Shan felt he had perhaps reached the pinnacle of civilization.

Had anything really changed since those first caravans, he wondered. The herdsmen still ventured by foot over the rough, rocky landscape, still broke the salt crust with their wooden pestles, slept in tents made of yak hair and packed their salt on their sheep in bags woven from wool taken from the same animals, still rejoiced over the sweet taste of milk from animals that grazed on the spring blossoms. Nothing had changed. Or everything, he thought sadly as he glanced at the short, sturdy ram carrying the bag with the red circle. For this time one of the sheep bore the eye of a deity, stolen by those who had massacred a village. And a killer was stalking the eye. A killer and a platoon of mountain troops. And perhaps even someone else. The more he replayed Drakte’s last moments in his mind the more he wondered whether Drakte had been warning about someone else, not the dobdob. If he had known the dobdob intended them harm, or if it had been a knob or soldier standing there, the Drakte Shan knew would have flung himself at the intruder to defend the lamas. But Drakte had just stood there when the dobdob arrived, frozen with the same confusion Shan and the others had felt.

He paused and waited for Lokesh, who had been walking at the rear of the caravan. “If you saw that dobdob in your mind again,” Shan asked his old friend, “would you see a real dobdob or someone dressed to look like one?” It was possible, Shan knew from his own experience, for a killer to don the old costumes to intimidate and confuse his victims.

Lokesh gazed toward a juniper tree that grew at the top of a nearby hill, the only tree visible anywhere in the landscape. “I see him. I see him when I try to sleep at night. I see him when I wake in the morning,” he said heavily and turned back to Shan. “It was not a pretend thing. It was a real monk policeman.”

“But you said they hadn’t been seen for decades.”

“Not by me. And I think not by anyone else. Almost anyone else.”

“To a dobdob, a Religious Affairs official would be an enemy,” Shan suggested. The coincidence still troubled him. Drakte and the man Chao had probably been attacked the same night.

“To a howler, a dobdob would be an enemy,” Lokesh said, correcting Shan. He stepped away as if to discourage further questions. A monk, Lokesh was saying, a true monk, would not perceive enemies at Religious Affairs, only people whose awareness had been stunted.

But a real dobdob would take orders only from a lama or senior monk. Had Drakte infuriated a lama?

Shan became aware of a robed figure walking far to one side of the caravan, gaze on the ground, almost as if wandering, unaware, of the caravan. When he saw Lhandro watching the figure with a worried expression he stepped to the village headman’s side.

“When she was with you,” Lhandro began, “did she always…” He struggled to find words, then turned with inquiry on his face. “She was going to run away to India last year, to find a convent there. I convinced her not to go. But now I think I was wrong.”

“She has always been a great help,” Shan offered, uncertain what Lhandro was asking.

The rongpa seemed relieved. “She was only fifteen when the government closed that convent of hers. She had gone away two years before. Not long after, her mother died. She had no hope of finding another convent so she took her robe off and tended the village sheep. But then one day three years later she found Anya lying on a rock, shaking, reciting old scriptures none of us had even heard before. It disturbed Nyma more than it did Anya herself. She said the fabric of our deity was being unraveled, and she put her robe back on. She and Anya made a little chapel in a small canyon behind the village and would stay there meditating for hours, for entire days. She asks me, how would a nun do this, what would a nun do about that, what was it like when monks used to come to the valley.”

He sighed and took a step forward as Anya called out to Nyma, and the nun began walking toward the head of the column. Then he paused and looked back at Shan. “But it has been many, many years since monks came to us. My father said to her once, you need not worry about studying the Compassionate Buddha, just study the Compassionate Nyma.” He offered a strained smile then stepped on a boulder to look behind the column, his face clouded with worry again.

At least the other villagers showed no concern about a killer or the dangers of the chenyi stone. Their spirits seemed to lighten as the day progressed, and they sang songs sung by salt trekkers for centuries, sometimes teaching them to Shan and Lokesh. As they sat at midday and ate cold tsampa, Lhandro and Nyma described the beautiful valley where they lived. For long miles Shan let himself be absorbed into the simple carefree joy of the others. At nightfall, after they had made camp in the shelter of a large rock outcropping miles beyond the first pass, where the villagers had stockpiled yak dung on their journey to the lake, Lokesh sat facing the south. His old friend chanted his beads, squinting as if searching for something beyond the mountains. Sunrise would mark the third day, when Drakte would arrive at the charnel ground for his sky burial. Perhaps they had already left the hermitage by now, Gendun, Shopo, and Somo, bearing the dead purba up and down the mountains with the help of the dropka.

Shan sat beside Lokesh, facing the same direction, and made a mudra, arranging his fingers in one of the traditional forms to invoke a ritual symbol or teaching. He closed the fingers of each hand, with the thumb out, extended up, then put the right hand on top of the left thumb. It was called the Banner of Victory, invoking the triumph of compassion over ignorance and death. As he sat contemplating first the mudra and then the distant mountains where Gendun traveled with Drakte’s remains, the pain he felt over Drakte’s killing surged through him again. Not simply because the purba had been steadfast and brave and selfless but because Shan’s confusion over his death only seemed to grow, and with greater confusion came greater fear for those he traveled with. Gendun would have said Shan’s awareness was being distorted by his emotion, for death never had a reason, only an appointed time, that Drakte was always meant to end this particular incarnation at that particular hour. There was no cause and effect in such a death because, Gendun would say, the world was never so orderly as Shan seemed to imagine. But even the Tibetans accepted that all things in the universe were interrelated, and a stone dropped in a remote lake caused ripples that changed, however subtly, the contour of the world. Something had happened in Lhasa, more than just a simple theft, and its consequences were catching up with those who had the chenyi stone.

Shan looked back toward the sheep, which were settling into sleep for the night. Despite the danger, despite the apparent urgency surrounding the eye, those responsible for taking Shan and Lokesh to the distant valley had chosen the slowest possible course.

“You could just say no.” The words were spoken to him so abruptly, so unexpectedly, Shan turned to see if someone had crept behind him before he realized it was Lokesh who spoke. “Tell them no, that you are not the one,” his old friend sighed, “and go back to that durtro. You can return to Lhadrung with Gendun. Go no further if you have doubt. Go no further if you can only think about killers. There would be no dishonor if you return. I will go on with the salt. I am going north anyway.”

Shan was silent a long time. He realized his fingers had formed a new mudra, hands clasped together, fingers intertwined, the two middle fingers raised, pressing against each other like a small steeple. Diamond of the Mind, it was called, used to help focus awareness. At first he thought his old friend was again helping him focus on his responsibility to the broken deity but then he saw the expectation on Lokesh’s face. “Going north anyway?” Shan asked.

Lokesh nodded solemnly. “Last night those geese helped me find my mother. I told her of the sadness in the land, of how people have lost the way of compassion and how we are taking the chenyi stone home. She said what we are doing is for the broken deities everywhere. She said afterwards I must find the true heart of those who oppressed us and shine a light of compassion on it.”

Shan searched his friend’s face for an explanation.

“I should have thought of this long ago,” Lokesh said with a sense of wonder. “It took my mother. He is flesh and blood, he has a heart like any other man. He has a deity that has been broken, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am going to Beijing,” Lokesh announced, his eyes glistening now. “I will travel north like a pilgrim, to gain merit. And my destination will be the home of the one they call the Chairman, in the capital.”

At first Shan wanted to laugh, but then he saw the determination in the old Tibetan’s eyes, and a chill rose inside him. He clenched his jaw and stared at his mudra again. “You cannot.”

Lokesh shrugged. “I have strong legs. I just go north for perhaps two months, then east for another three or four.”

“I mean you will never be permitted. You could not make it,” Shan said, with a sound like a moan.

“I must go alone, my friend,” Lokesh said, as if Shan had offered to accompany him. “This is a thing for my deity, not yours. And it is too dangerous for you in China.”

“They will never let you within half a mile of him,” Shan said, and for a moment found himself short of breath. His Tibetan uncle wanted to sacrifice himself to the same people who had killed Shan’s father and his blood uncles.

Lokesh put a hand on Shan’s back and held it there, as if trying to get the sense of his heart. “I am not telling you to frighten you. I told my mother I would go and speak with the Chairman, so he understands the truth of things here. I wanted you to understand, for when the time comes for us to separate.” He pointed out a solitary goose flying toward the setting sun. Shan watched him, then the goose, until Nyma called them to eat.

At the camp Lhandro revealed a bladder of fresh yogurt, a gift from the dropka at the lake, and a skin of cream which, having been jostled all day on one of the pack saddles, had become thick, sweet butter. The rongpa rolled the butter with their tsampa into little balls and enthusiastically consumed them with bowls of tea. As the others arranged the heavy felt blankets about the floor of the tent, Shan took his blanket outside and lay studying the night sky, fighting a bleakness inside. Some of the Tibetans believed struggling souls passed through many levels of hell before freeing themselves. In his particular hell he alone could see the torment and suffering approaching those he held closest to his heart, but could do nothing to prevent it.

He awoke suddenly, not aware until that moment that he had been asleep. With a catch in his breath he realized that a meteor had passed overhead, close by. But he had no memory of having seen it. It was not the first time this had happened in recent months. He had told Lokesh about a similar incident during their pilgrimage, and his old friend had seemed to find it cause for celebration, saying it was a sign of new awareness. “If your awareness experienced it within,” Lokesh had said, “is it not as real as if your eyes had seen it from without?” But then, as now, the experience unnerved Shan. Holding on to reality was difficult enough in his world, without having his Tibetan friends try to teach him it came in many different forms.

Wide awake now, he lay watching the moon rise over the mountains and gradually was able to push back the pain that obscured the way he saw Drakte’s death in his mind’s eye, so he could replay it slowly, again and again, searching for a clue, for a hidden meaning. He saw Drakte’s chin rise and his brow tighten as the dobdob had appeared. Though the purba had carried a belt knife his hand had gone not to the knife but to his prayer amulet. Drakte’s reaction had not been that of a warrior defending those he had vowed to protect. But the purba’s other hand had been doing something else. He played the scene again and again. Drakte’s left hand had been pushing his bag back, hiding the drawstring sack with the sling and the ledger book with the innocuous entries about the dropka.

Shan became aware of a strange ebbing and flowing in the gentle breeze, then realized it was a low sound, rising and falling, a moan. He sat up. Not a moan. A chant, even a song.

Slowly, stealthily, he followed the sound over a hillock. A dark shape blocked the path. Lhandro had set a guard, he knew. But he froze as he saw it was one of the mastiffs. The animal simply raised its head toward him and turned toward a rock ten feet down the slope, as if directing Shan’s attention there.

Anya sat on the rocks staring at a brilliant star on the horizon. The sound Shan heard, louder now, was coming from her lips, though he couldn’t say what it was. Not a song exactly, but a sound like some of the old lamas made when using their voices in meditation, a sound that grew out of a mantra but became, at least to the untrained ear, a resonation that communicated not to the ears but some other sense, a folding of sound that could not possibly have come simply from the tongue and vocal cords.

He had heard such a sound before. Shan had asked Lokesh about it once when they had found a hermit making the same low wrenching sound on a high ledge. Lokesh had shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. “It’s what you get, when you strip away the flesh of words,” he had said earnestly. “It’s just the way a spirit sounds when it’s not communicating with humans.”

He sat beside the girl and watched the stars. If she was not communicating with humans, he wondered, who was it she was trying to reach?

At last Anya’s voice drifted off and they sat in silence.

“It’s a long way we have to go,” the girl said.

Although he felt strangely close to the girl, Shan realized it was the first time she had spoken to him. “Nearly a hundred miles to Yapchi,” he observed quietly.

“No, not that,” the girl said slowly, in the patient tone of a teacher, “if you and I are to bring the old eye into focus, there are many shadows to explore first, many knots to untie.”

Shan considered the words for a moment. “You and I?”

“When it said this in me,” the girl said cryptically, “I didn’t understand at first. But I believe it now.”

“I’m sorry,” Shan said with a chill in his belly. “Who said something to you?”

“I was in a barley field turning earth with a hoe when it found me the first time. Nyma found me, shaking on the ground. It’s only happened four times before. They say when I’m older they may need to keep me in a nunnery, if they can find one. They said in the old days I would have been sent to live in the convent after the first time.”

Shan stared at the girl hard, trying to piece together the puzzle she had spoken. Then, he recalled Lhandro’s words, how Anya had been found lying on a rock, reciting strange scriptures. And before, at the lake. She spoke the words of deities, Lhandro had said. “The oracle,” he whispered. “You are the oracle.”

The girl gave a thin laugh. “Not the oracle,” she explained in a patient voice. “Some call me that, but an oracle is not in human form. Oracle deities just use certain humans as vehicles sometimes.”

The words made Shan sad somehow. Maybe it was the hint of helplessness in Anya’s voice. Maybe it was because he remembered stories from the monks about the mediums who had once resided in the large gompas near Lhasa. They had been nervous, often frail creatures, usually shortlived, because when they were taken over by the oracle they suffered terrible fits and spasms, like seizures, that could last for days and exacted a terrible toll on their bodies.

Anya studied the stars, then abruptly turned to him again. “What if the valley was locked for some reason and the eye was its key? What if we opened it without understanding why it was locked?” The words came in an urgent rush, as if she had been contemplating a long time how to ask him.

“All I know,” Shan said after another silence, “is that when I begin a long journey my mind is often plagued with doubt over where it will lead, about what comes after the one thousandth step, or the ten thousandth. So I try to make myself concerned only with the next step, then the next after that, so that eventually the ten thousandth becomes just another next step. By then we will all understand the eye better.” His own words surprised him. He was speaking like the Tibetans, as if the chenyi stone were alive.

The girl nodded vigorously, as if it were exactly the answer she needed. Behind her, the dog stood, then she stood, as though the dog’s movement had been a signal, and she stepped with the animal into the darkness.

Shan looked after her, not sure he had understood any of their conversation. In fact, the more he learned of the people from Yapchi the more it seemed he didn’t know. They seemed to have been cut off from the world for so long a wary, feral spirituality had overtaken them. But in his heart he knew they weren’t that different from many other Tibetans he had met, each of who seemed comprised of many layers of mysteries and perceptions. The land itself was such a rich, vast tapestry of people and beliefs that the term Buddhism often seemed a meager label for the complex ways Tibetans viewed their world.

A low rumble rose over the blackened landscape. Shan searched for thundercaps but saw none in the clear night sky, instead spying a cluster of four red lights soaring across the heavens. Chinese fighter jets on high altitude patrol. As he watched the planes a deep sense of grief welled up within him, and stayed with him long after the planes disappeared over the horizon.

*   *   *

The caravan had been underway for two hours the next day when Shan, leading a packhorse, noticed a flicker of movement on the slope a hundred yards above them. He stopped and stared, finally discerning a man standing with a horse in the shadow of a large boulder.

Lhandro, behind Shan, whistled sharply, halting the caravan. “Damned Golok,” he muttered.

As the figure on the slope stepped into the sunlight Shan saw that it was indeed Dremu, who seemed to search the caravan, then began waving at Shan, gesturing for him to come closer.

“Don’t,” Lhandro warned. “He could have friends hidden in the rocks. A man like that can’t stop being a bandit.”

Shan ignored the advice, but found himself watching the surrounding rocks warily as he jogged toward the Golok. “I didn’t expect to see you again,” he called out when he got within earshot.

“I got paid, didn’t I?” Dremu snapped back. “Paid to get you through to Yapchi. Not to share tea with the likes of them,” he said with a nod toward the caravan. “I go where the eye goes,” he said in an oddly fierce tone.

“They’re good people,” Shan said.

Dremu frowned. “There’s something,” he said, “someone—” He glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t know what to do with her,” he said in a low voice, as though he did not want the rongpa to hear. He pulled his horse about and stepped behind the boulder onto a game trail that led toward the top of the low ridge. Shan turned to see Lokesh climbing the slope toward him, then slowly followed Dremu up the trail. He caught up with him just beyond the crest, where Dremu was kneeling beside a short, stunted juniper growing in the lee of a boulder.

Shan stepped past Dremu and discovered a small, frail-looking woman sitting against the rock. Perhaps fifty years of age, she wore a ragged grey wool scarf on her shoulders, over which hung several necklaces of coral and turquoise. Two small, tough hands extended from her heavily patched chuba, one clutching a mala, a rosary, the other a prayer scarf. On the ground beside her, resting on a piece of cloth, was a small copper prayer wheel.

Shan bent over the woman. “Ku su depo yinbay?” he asked in Tibetan. How are you?

“La yin, la yin,” she replied with a weak smile. I’m fine.

But she wasn’t fine. Her eyes had a sickly yellow cast, and Shan saw now that the hand with the khata, the prayer scarf, was pressed against her side, as if trying to touch the scarf to a pain in her abdomen. The woman gazed past Shan with a determined glint, as if trying to will him away.

“She was sitting here when I rode by,” Dremu said. “Didn’t even seem to notice me. She just kept staring down the trail,” he said, gesturing toward the trail that climbed along the far side of the ridge, coming from the south.

Shan looked down the trail. “As if she’s expecting someone.” It was a remote, inhospitable landscape. Weeks could pass without a human entering the small, high valley the woman was looking into. He sensed movement behind him, and Lokesh appeared, his face creased with worry, his palm extended to touch the woman’s head. He lifted her hand with the beads and placed three fingers, spread apart, inside the wrist. Once Shan had heard Lokesh bemoan how little he knew about healing despite his years with medicine lamas, but Gendun had rejoined that the most important aspect of healing was the moral quality of the healer, and in that aspect Lokesh was an adept.

After listening to the woman’s pulses at both wrists Lokesh straightened and placed his fingertips on her cheek. “We must restore you,” he said quietly.

The woman stared a long time at Lokesh, studying him, as if perhaps trying to recognize him, then she offered her weak smile again. Her hand with the mala reached out and touched the prayer wheel.

“Come with us,” Lokesh said. “We can make you comfortable.”

“Are you truly one of the old ones?” she asked, still studying Lokesh intently.

Lokesh rubbed the white stubble of whisker on his chin and looked at Shan as though uncertain how to reply. “We have horses,” he said. “You could ride a horse.”

The woman shielded her eyes with one hand and stared at Lokesh’s face. She offered another strained smile, then settled her gaze on the trail again. It was as if she were expecting a healer, but had decided that Lokesh was not the healer she was waiting for.

“How long have you been here?” Shan asked.

The woman shrugged, without moving her gaze from the slope. “Two days I think.” She slowly turned and searched Shan’s face a moment as though she were about to ask him what day it was.

“Can you walk?”

“Of course,” she said with a slightly impatient tone, then was seized by a fit of coughing. “I got here,” she added hoarsely when the coughing had passed.

Shan sighed and exchanged a frustrated glance with Lokesh. “You should have a hat for the sun. What happened to your hat?”

“It blew away,” she stated flatly and watched the trail again. Some Tibetans clung steadfastly to the old belief that once a hat blew off it was bad luck to retrieve it.

Shan removed the brown, broad-rimmed hat he had been wearing for the past three months and placed it on the woman’s head, tugging it down for a tight fit. The woman slowly lifted her hand and touched the brim, as though about to pull it off.

“A monk gave me that hat,” Shan said, “near the sacred mountain, Kailas. He said I looked cold. I’m not cold anymore.”

The woman’s yellow eyes blinked at him, as if to express gratitude, and the hand dropped into her lap.

Shan left her with Lokesh, passing Dremu, who still hung back watching nervously, and retrieved a bag of tsampa and a water bottle from the caravan. When he returned no one seemed to have moved, except Lokesh was holding his own beads now, reciting a mantra.

“Who is coming here?” Shan asked as he stuffed the food and water between the woman and the rock. “Who do you expect?”

“The one who understands it all,” she said in a new, serene voice. Her gaze still did not leave the trail.

Shan touched Lokesh on the shoulder and the old man reluctantly rose, fumbled in his pocket, then placed the fossil rock in the woman’s lap. “It’s a powerful tonde,” he said, “from Lamtso.”

But she did not seem to hear, did not acknowledge the gesture, or shift her gaze from the trail as they stepped back over the crest of the ridge.

“Right,” Dremu said. “The one who knows it all. Uncle Yama, that’s who she expects, he’s the one who knows.” Dremu meant the Lord of Death, Yamantaka. “Waste of food and water,” he groused. “Just her way of ending things. Hell, with the leopards and wolves in these hills, she won’t even need to be taken to the body cutters.” He mounted his horse and trotted away to the north, still keeping the caravan at a distance.

*   *   *

The image of the feeble woman alone on the side of the mountain haunted Shan most of the day as they wound their way toward the pass over the second of the four ranges of mountains that separated them from Yapchi. The woman had been waiting for someone coming from the south, coming along the difficult, unlikely trail that followed the crest of the ridges. But the ones most likely to come from the south were not healers.

As they stopped for lunch, Lhandro unfolded his tattered map on a flat stone and with his finger traced the course they would take for the seventy miles remaining to Yapchi Valley. It was not the most direct route, but a remote path that kept them far from the north-south highway and even away from the few low valleys at the edge of the changtang that held farming settlements. It would take two or three days longer than the traditional route of the salt caravans, Lhandro explained, but it would almost guarantee they would not be observed. Shan had seen Nyma speaking with Lhandro on several occasions, pointing south, scanning the horizon. As Lhandro folded his map Shan saw a solitary figure on a ledge, also looking south. Lokesh joked sometimes that Tenzin must be worried about leaving behind all the yak droppings they were passing in their travels. But Shan saw the worry etched on the mute Tibetan’s face, and remembered the anguish he had evidenced over Drakte’s death.

Tenzin turned at Shan’s approach and began to step off the ledge, but Shan stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Did Drakte help you escape from your prison?” Shan asked. Tenzin tried to pull away with a resentful glance but Shan would not let him go, fixing him with a level stare until the emotion left the Tibetan’s face. Tenzin nodded soberly, then pulled from Shan’s grip.

After another hour on the trail they rounded a bend to find Dremu squarely in the path, sitting in his saddle with his left leg on his horse’s neck, lazily cutting an apple with the elaborate knife the purba runner Somo had given to him.

Shan hurried to the front of the column.

“Pass is blocked!” the Golok called out loudly, as if he preferred that they keep their distance. “Snow avalanche.”

“Not likely,” Lhandro called back, just as loudly. “It was clear when we came through. Supplies are hidden there. Food for the sheep. There is no grass that high in the mountains.”

“Spring melt shifted the slopes. That pass is under twenty feet of snow now,” Dremu declared, and pointed toward the pass, still miles away. Its outline was visible, but its details obscured under the shadows of low clouds. But when Shan handed Lhandro his field glasses the rongpa studied not the pass but the alternative trail that could be seen leading toward the east, circumventing the tallest of the peaks. He suspected the Golok’s motives, Shan realized, and was studying the trail for signs of unwelcome strangers. After a long moment the village headman gazed at the Golok with a sour frown, then motioned for the caravan to continue north.

Dremu pulled his horse to the side of the trail, watching with a sullen expression as the column of animals passed him, then wheeled his horse and galloped to the top of a small hill that overlooked the junction with the eastern trail, where he dismounted and made a conspicuous show of throwing his blanket onto the grass, languidly stretching upon it.

An hour later the sky cleared over the mountains and Lhandro examined the range once more with Shan’s glasses. He stared hard, constantly shifting the focus, then handed the glasses to Shan, pointing between two peaks. The pass was gone, replaced by a large wall of brilliant white, at the top of which were great ragged blocks of snow that indicated an avalanche.

“The bastard,” Lhandro growled, as if Dremu had caused the avalanche. He called for the caravan to reverse its course.

Shan studied the pass and the steep forbidding mountains that flanked it. “You came through there on the way to the lake?”

“Supplies were hidden there.”

Shan examined Lhandro’s face. “Are you saying someone else put supplies there?”

The rongpa did not reply.

“Purbas,” Shan ventured.

“He liked climbing the high lands,” Lhandro said after a moment. “He said he had a friend he would bring back and they would run up the mountain together.”

“Drakte? Drakte was there?”

“He said everything was secret, that it was dangerous to speak about him or anything he did.” Lhandro looked back into Shan’s eyes. “But I guess now the danger for him is over. He was at Yapchi over two months ago. He said lamas were preparing for the return of the eye, but he had to find a safe way to get it north, a way no one would suspect. When we agreed on the salt caravan Nyma went away with him.”

Drakte had been here, or near here. Shan began surveying the landscape. It was as though Shan was retracing the last days of Drakte’s life, in reverse. “Did he travel with you and the sheep?”

“No. But he came to our village three times. Once, just after it was recovered in Lhasa, after Nyma told about the oracle’s words. Then that time two months ago, and again last month, when he asked about details of the salt caravan, and he gave me his map so we would know the places where he left supplies, so we could avoid going near any settlements. He said when you came you would be on horses. He said we could keep the horses.” Horses were prized possessions, beyond the reach of many herders and farmers.

“At the lake the herder spoke about the purba general the knobs are hunting. The Tiger. Did he help? Is he involved with the stone?” It might explain much. Perhaps the army and knobs were not after them at all. The scent of such a senior resistance leader would make the soldiers ravenous.

“I don’t know. Maybe. One night Drakte met someone in the rocks above our village. I followed, to help keep guard. Drakte would not let me close. But I could hear a voice like I have never known. Deep like a growl but not exactly. Like someone roaring in a whisper. Drakte wouldn’t say who it was, but later I found out that this Tiger had something broken in his voice box once, by a knob baton.”

Dremu was sitting on his blanket as they approached the eastern trail. He did not greet them, did not pause to gloat, but simply tied his blanket to his saddle and trotted toward the east, ahead of the caravan.

It was midafternoon when a cluster of houses, animal sheds, and ragged fields came into view, a small rongpa village at the head of the narrow gravel road that the caravan would need to follow for several miles to reach the next pass to the north. Both the Tibetans and the animals seemed to quicken their pace as they approached the village, as if in anticipation of a warm meal and perhaps shelter from the steady, chill wind that had begun to blow.

But the village was abandoned. Tables in front of two houses held bowls of cold tea and tsampa. A blanket was spread on the dirt track in front of another, littered with the remnants of walnut shells. A small fire smoldered by the door of another of the decrepit buildings, its sheep dung fuel left to smolder when someone had dropped the crude leather bellows at its side. A large mastiff tied to a post barked loudly, not at the strangers arriving in the village but toward the eastbound road.

Lhandro halted the caravan, his eyes filled with alarm, then quickly ordered them back up the trail, behind the cover of the hillock they had just crossed, until he and Shan explored the empty village. At the first house, Lhandro stopped and called out a greeting, then stepped into its open door when no one answered. He moved into its shadows and reappeared a moment later wearing a grim expression, staring at a frame of sticks, ten inches square, that hung from the doorframe. Yarns of many colors had been stretched across the sticks, and it twisted in the wind. It was a spirit catcher, meant to trap evil spirits that wandered too near the house.

“No one,” Lhandro said, as he scanned the remaining houses, then the surrounding hills. “Not even that damned Dremu,” he added, as if now he blamed the Golok for emptying the village. “Bandits could do this, take the people until they ransom themselves.”

The sudden sound of footsteps from behind caused Lhandro to spin about, crouching as if to meet an attack. Lokesh emerged from between two houses, followed a moment later by Nyma. Lokesh walked past them silently, his head cocked in curiosity.

“Not bandits! Don’t you recognize it?” the young nun cried. “It’s what the knobs do sometimes,” she added in a tormented tone. “If they suspect someone of subversive activity, they just round up all his neighbors and question them, keep them locked up while their animals are starving and crops are dying. Eventually someone remembers something to implicate the suspect, true or otherwise.”

The four of them walked uneasily down the track that led out of the village, moving in shadows when they could, following the rough road around a huge outcropping where they discovered a red utility vehicle parked, empty, at the side of the road. It was the kind of truck few Tibetans could afford, the kind primarily used in government service. As they stared uncertainly at the vehicle a scream echoed over the rocks. Shan hesitated, not certain where the sound had come from, then saw Lokesh jogging toward a narrow, two-foot-wide gap in the huge rock ledge that lined the road. Shan quickly followed as another loud cry split the still air, Nyma and Lhandro close behind.

The short passage opened into a natural, grassy bowl where slopes intersected at the base of the ledge. They had found the inhabitants of the village, and Shan realized the cries had not been from fear or pain, but excitement. Nearly fifty people sat on the slope or stood along the edge of the small flat clearing at the bottom of the bowl. Someone shrieked in surprise, another laughed. Not at Shan or his companions, for no one had seemed to notice their arrival. The population of the village was watching a man mounted on a huge, angry yak, one hand in the air, the other clutching a leather strap that had been fastened around the belly of the creature. The animal was bucking and twisting and, as Shan watched, it reared its broad head with a loud bellow that caused several children to run toward the back of the crowd. The animal was magnificent, probably not far removed in its breeding from the drong, the massive wild yaks that still roamed the Tibetan wilderness.

But Shan’s eyes did not linger on the powerful creature, for as surprised as he was to see the rampaging yak, he was even more startled to see its rider. The man was long-boned and lean, with straw-colored hair that hung over his ears. The rider seemed to be conversing with the yak, for each time the animal bellowed the man yelled out strange syllables. “Ya! Ya!!!!” the man called for no apparent reason, then “Yi ha!” and “Yo!”

“Listen to him,” Lhandro said at his side. “The man must be in great pain. Who would make a goserpa do such a thing?” he asked in alarm, as if it were a form of torture. “Goserpa.” Nyma repeated the word twice, gaping at the man. It meant yellow head, one of the terms Tibetans used for Westerners. To most of those in the region, Shan knew, seeing a Westerner would be as rare as seeing one of the nearly extinct wild yaks.

Suddenly the Westerner was thrown clear of the furious animal, his legs flying in the air in front of him, as if he were sitting. But somehow his hand still clutched the strap, and when he dropped he found his seat on the yak again. Three large men stood anxiously at the front of the crowd with ropes, as if trying to find a way to capture the yak. A small pale Tibetan in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie stood by a large boulder at the far side of the clearing, every few seconds scrambling behind the rock then slowly reappearing, staring at the rider with a terrified expression, timidly raising his hand every few seconds as though to get the foreigner’s attention.

With a sudden mighty heave the yak arched his back and the rider was off, shooting in a long arc through the air, arms and legs still working frantically as if the Westerner expected to return to the animal. But as the crowd watched in abrupt silence he soared across the little bowl and slammed into the ground with a loud groan. He lay flat on his back, without sign of life, as the three men with the ropes frantically closed around the yak. The little man in the suit produced a pair of spectacles from his pocket and slowly stepped forward to retrieve a black cap from the ground. Shan took a hesitant step toward the limp Westerner as Lokesh rushed past him.

The Westerner began convulsing. His hands clutched his belly and his chest began heaving. The little Tibetan in the suit shouted angrily at the three men with ropes, not in Tibetan but in Chinese. “Public Security will know about this!” he screeched, suddenly assuming an important air, shaking the black hat toward them. “You fools! People from Lhasa will have to come! You’ll see what happens when a foreigner—” the man stopped as he stared at the blond man on the ground. Lokesh, too, stopped, the worry on his face evaporating. The Westerner was laughing.

“Yeee–esss! Oh mama, yes!” the man shouted in English, the first words from him Shan understood, and his hands shot up in the air as if in celebration. He sat up, laughing so hard one hand returned to his belly.

The biggest of the Tibetans with the ropes, a burly man with three front teeth missing, hesitantly approached and pulled the Westerner to his feet. Immediately the Westerner embraced the Tibetan, then studied the man’s companions, who had the yak secured with two ropes around its thick neck. The tall, lean man pushed back his long hair, and grinned at the crowd.

The villagers were laughing now, some pointing with derision at the man in the suit, who stood with a surly expression, arms akimbo, staring at the Westerner as though deeply disappointed the man had not died. The blond man’s gaze settled on Shan a moment, his head cocked in curiosity, then he pushed another strand of his hair from his eyes and looked toward the man in the suit, the Tibetan who had shouted in Chinese at his countrymen. The Westerner paused for a moment, frowning, as if about to speak to the nervous little man, then his eyes drifted toward the yak and the joy returned to his face. Strangely, the animal returned the man’s gaze, its wide brown eyes seeming full not only of wild energy but also inquiry. The Westerner stepped in front of the animal and suddenly, before the yak could react, reached out, grabbed its head, and kissed the animal on its wet nose. The villagers broke into a cheer. The Tibetan in the suit lowered his head and covered his face with one hand.

“How much would it take, to buy this king of beasts?” the Westerner asked the three men loudly, in perfectly intonated Tibetan.

The men stared at him in confusion but after a moment quickly huddled to confer. “A thousand RMB,” the tall one announced solemnly. The animal was clearly a prized possession. The price, though not much more than a hundred American dollars, was probably more than many of the villagers earned in a year.

To the obvious astonishment of the three men the stranger produced a wallet and counted out the asking price. When he had finished he studied the assembled villagers and approached a young woman. In a loud voice that carried through the hushed crowd he offered to buy one of the two red ribbons that bound her braids. She blushed, then nodded excitedly. He filled her palm with coins, accepting the ribbon with a small bow, then tied the ribbon tightly to a lock of the yak’s mane. With the ease of one accustomed to working with animals he slipped the ropes off the yak’s neck, then slapped its flank with one of the rope ends. The animal burst away, shooting through the shocked crowd and galloping up the slope like a young stallion. It did not stop until it reached the top of the first ridge where it turned and gazed defiantly over the hushed villagers, who suddenly burst into another wild cheer. The Westerner had not only given the magnificent beast its freedom, the ribbon meant that he had marked the animal as one ransomed, a mark of protection to honor the deities. Typically ransoming was for beasts marked for slaughter and such a ribbon would free them from the butcher, assuring them a long life. The ribbon on the yak meant it was freed from labor and could not be used by men again without offending the gods.

Half the villagers gathered excitedly around the three men who stood staring at the vast bounty they had suddenly received. Many of the others ran to the Westerner, some just reaching to touch him, some thanking him for his act of homage, others praising his riding of the yak. Still others held back, working their beads as they watched the foreigner with round, awed eyes.

After a few moments the stranger took a tentative step toward Shan.

“If you are hurt,” Shan ventured, “we could look to your injuries.”

The man reacted with an amused smile. He studied Shan, and Lokesh, with the same cocked head and curiosity as before, then turned to gaze back at the yak, which still surveyed them from above. “With an animal like that, I could get rich back in Oklahoma,” he observed, in his perfect Tibetan, his blue eyes sparkling.

“I don’t understand what you were doing,” Shan said.

The man smiled again and surveyed Nyma, Lokesh, and Lhandro, nodding at each one as they returned his gaze with looks of bewilderment. “It’s that impermanence thing,” the stranger declared, extending his right hand to each of them. “Shannslow,” he repeated, and when he took each of their hands he covered it with his left hand, not shaking it but squeezing it like a tiny embrace as he heard and repeated each of their names.

“Why would you ride that animal?” Shan tried again.

Winslow ran his hand through his hair. “I told you,” he said, and spoke toward Lokesh. “It’s just like your chod ritual,” he said matter of factly, “except that cowboys do it by riding bulls.”

Shan stared at the man in astonishment. Chod was one of the rituals Gendun had often discussed with him. It was usually conducted only late in a monk’s training; the monk sat for hours alone with the bones at a sky burial site, often overnight, to experience and contemplate the frailty of human existence. It was a brutal ordeal for most, from which some returned babbling incoherently.

“Cowboys?” Nyma asked slowly. Winslow had used the American word, for which there was no Tibetan equivalent. “What is cowboys?”

“Mostly you ride horses around mountains, looking for cows and singing,” Winslow said with another grin.

Nyma nodded, slowly at first, then quite vigorously, as if now she perfectly understood about cowboys. Shan realized that somehow the American had made it sound like a pilgrimage.

A young girl appeared between Lokesh and Lhandro, holding out a blue ribbon toward the American. Winslow squatted by her, a hand on her shoulder. “The yak just needed the one,” he said in a gentle tone. He unfastened the button that fastened his shirt pocket and pulled out a photograph, printed on heavy stock, half the size of a postcard. He extended the photo in both hands, like a gift, and the girl accepted it with wide eyes. She cried out and turned, unable to contain her sudden joy. Those near her crowded close and called out in turn. They seemed just as excited as when the American had released the yak.

The photograph, Shan saw, was of the Dalai Lama. In years past Tibetans had suffered imprisonment for mere possession of such a photograph. The pictures were still officially banned and routinely seized by the authorities. In the campaigns of repressions that periodically surged through the land they were used as evidence of political unreliability. But Tibetans treasured such photos, and Shan had seen many displayed on the portable altars used in dropka tents.

He studied the strange American as the man lifted the girl, who called excitedly for her mother now. Shan had encountered such foreigners before, men and women who roamed Tibet looking for adventure, or enlightenment. Lokesh called them wanderers, which made them all sound lost. Shan always kept his distance from them, for they seldom had the proper travel papers and always attracted the attention of Public Security or army patrols. The real danger wasn’t for the foreigner, who, if picked up would simply be deported. Those found with such foreigners would be detained and questioned, because talking with foreigners evidenced dangerous propensities.

The girl pointed toward the gap in the boulders that led to the road, as if she had decided that was where her mother had gone, and wiggled out of Winslow’s arms. The American smiled as he watched her disappear. “You’re not from the village,” he said to Lhandro in a conversational tone, then shifted his grin toward the distant yak, which was standing at the crest of the ridge. As he did so Shan noticed movement far up the slope opposite the animal. A man on a grey horse.

“We came with a caravan,” Lhandro replied.

The horseman looked like Dremu, Shan realized, and the Golok seemed to be waving at them.

The American’s head snapped back toward the rongpa. “From the north? West? Not on the road?” He glanced at Shan. “All of you?” When Lhandro nodded, Winslow quickly produced a map from his hip pocket. “Show me,” he said with a new, urgent tone. “Tell me who you saw, where exactly you were. I need to know if—”

A frightened cry split the air. The little girl shot back out of the gap, frantically crying for her mother. In her hand was a jagged piece of paper that showed a man’s smiling mouth and chin. Someone had ripped away the top half of her treasured photograph. Shan looked back up the slope at Dremu, who had stopped and dismounted. The Golok wasn’t waving at them, Shan realized with a chill, he was frantically trying to call them away, to warn them.

But in the next instant Nyma darted into the gap in the rocks, Lhandro at her heels. Lokesh pulled on Shan’s sleeve as though to restrain him, to keep him from following. “Go,” the old Tibetan urged, pushing Shan toward Dremu. “Get to the Golok.”

People were scattering, running up the slope in every direction. When he looked back Lokesh was gone. Without a second thought Shan ran through the gap toward the road.

He stepped into the brilliant sunlight to find a body lying on the gravel. It was Lhandro, moaning, holding his scalp. Blood oozed between his fingers. Nyma knelt over him. Lokesh stood nearby, his arms pinioned behind him by two large Chinese in the green uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. A dozen more soldiers stood deployed in a V-shape facing the opening in the rock to trap anyone emerging from the far side. Two grey troop trucks were parked on the road behind them, each with a fierce looking snow leopard painted on the front door. Between the heavy vehicles, sitting on a folding metal chair, was an officer watching with satisfaction as his trap filled. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. As Shan watched the man began writing on a clipboard balanced on one knee, with the casual, amused air of a scorekeeper at an athletic event.

Someone grabbed his hand roughly and Shan suddenly realized he had been bound to Lokesh, his left wrist fastened to Lokesh’s right wrist, not by manacles but by a thin piece of wire, its ends twisted tightly together so that any movement was painful.

They were prisoners again.