CHAPTER FIVE

More than twenty villagers were lined up against the rock, all wearing expressions of defeat, hands at their sides, waiting as two soldiers checked their identity papers. Their faces told Shan the villagers had been through such checks often. Some suppressed anger, some fear. All suppressed indignation at being treated like outsiders in their own land. “Where’s your papers?” Shan had heard a Tibetan boy shout out at a knob at a Public Security checkpoint just three months before. The knob had shackled the boy and in an hour’s time the youth had been on the way to a year’s imprisonment.

The villagers moved slowly when asked to reach inside their clothing to produce their papers, and watched not the sergeant who barked orders at them but a second soldier, behind the first, who held a semiautomatic rifle, an AK-47, barrel pointed down, hand on the trigger guard. It was impossible to predict what would happen when Public Security or the army came to such a place. More often than not any Tibetans who had their registration papers would be released. But if the patrol had a mission beyond merely sweeping for illegals, even those with perfect papers might be detained. In slow seasons some enforcement officials were known to pick up innocent Tibetans and detain them until they offered up an accusation. “Everyone is guilty of something,” an interrogation officer had once declared to Shan, “we just don’t have time to investigate them all.”

Nyma pulled Lhandro into a sitting position. Blood trickled down his left temple, where he had obviously been struck, probably by the butt of a rifle. The nun put her arms around him, like a protecting mother, and glanced at Shan with moist eyes. She knew about such patrols, too. The villagers might be left alone, but Nyma, who had insisted she was not a real nun, could still be sentenced to prison for wearing the robe of a nun without a license from the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

“That yak, it ran like an antelope,” Lokesh said quietly, toward the sky. The nearest soldier made a growling sound and raised the butt of his gun, warning Lokesh to be silent.

Shan looked at his old friend. At least they had been able to see the American with the yak, Lokesh meant. It was a prisoner’s game Shan and Lokesh had often played during their years in the gulag. Fix an image in your mind and let it fill your awareness, blocking out the pain and hunger and fear. Shan remembered once coming back in a prison truck from a road construction site where several old monks had collapsed in weakness and been beaten and dragged away by the guards, too weak to do their work because their breakfast and lunch had consisted of a thin gruel made of ground corncobs and water. “I saw a snowflake land on a butterfly today,” one of the battered lamas suddenly said, and earned a blow to his skull from a guard’s baton for breaking the rule of silence. But by the time they had reached the prison every man in the truck had been smiling serenely, their minds filled with the image of the butterfly.

They would be taken to an army prison first, Shan suspected, then he would be separated from Lokesh. Lokesh’s only crime was not having papers to travel outside Lhadrung, where he had been released from prison. But once they focused on Shan they would quickly discover the tattoo on his arm, and check it with Public Security computers. They would treat Shan as a fugitive from the gulag, and to such men a fugitive was like fresh meat thrown to starved dogs. He fought the temptation to look back toward the hills beyond the village, where another fugitive, without a tongue, hid.

The man in the chair tossed his cigarette to the ground, stood, and stepped toward the team checking papers. He impatiently ordered the soldiers to stop, then surveyed the expanding line of villagers. After he rose he strutted along the line with an imperious air, pausing to light another cigarette with an elegant gold lighter, and tapped the shoulders of several of those in line, ordering them away with a gesture of his index finger. A middle-aged woman a few feet down the line suddenly stepped forward and pointed to Shan and his three companions.

“They aren’t from our village,” she shouted, “just remember that, we never saw them before. We never helped them!”

Shan sighed. He didn’t resent the woman’s words. No doubt she had been before security squads before, had learned from the Chinese that the best way to protect herself and her family was to deflect official attention to others. But he felt sorry for the way she would feel later, and the way her neighbors would look at her.

The officer paused and stared at Shan, as if noticing him for the first time, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and blowing a stream of smoke in Shan’s direction before he turned back to the line. He was finished in another minute, having dismissed all the women and children, and all the younger men. Every man remaining in the line was at least thirty years old, Shan guessed. The officer walked along the line again and dismissed two more men. They were older but short, less than five and a half feet tall, the shortest in the line.

At a snap of the officer’s fingers the two soldiers who had been checking papers sprang back into action, scrutinizing the papers of the six men remaining with louder voices and rougher actions than they had used before. The officer paced impatiently as they worked, finishing his cigarette in three long inhalations, then lighting another from its butt. They were at the fifth man in the line when he lost interest and stepped inside the two lines of soldiers that still guarded the boulders. They weren’t a patrol, Shan realized. They were what the purbas called a snatch team. They were looking for someone in particular.

“She said you’re outsiders,” the officer observed in a thin, slow voice, blowing smoke into Shan’s face.

Shan and Lokesh looked at the ground. He felt strangely removed from the scene, as if he observed himself from afar. A part of him had never doubted he would one day return to the gulag. The yak ran like an antelope. He thought of the joyful American wanderer, hoping the man had escaped. It had been an impossible task, foolish to think Shan could help save their valley. Maybe in another hundred years the Tibetans could find a truly virtuous Chinese.

The sergeant held something up for the officer to see, the torn half of the Dalai Lama photograph. He flipped the card in his fingers when he caught the officer’s attention. It was part of what soldiers did when they saw such photos, one of the thousand mannerisms of oppression ingrained in soldiers and knobs. Sometimes on the reverse of such photos a Tibetan flag was printed, which would guarantee arrest, and worse. This photo was blank on the reverse.

“My name,” the officer announced abruptly, “is Colonel Lin of the 54th Mountain Combat Brigade.” He spoke slowly, a strange anticipation in his voice. He surveyed the line of villagers before turning to Shan and his companions. “I will ask questions. You will give answers.”

Shan looked into the Colonel’s face, hard and gnarled as a fist. The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade had caught up with them. He fought the temptation to look toward the village again. Surely someone in the caravan had seen, surely they would all be fleeing into the mountains by now. He glanced at his companions. Nyma looked at the ground, the color gone from her face. Lokesh looked at the sky. Lhandro, still on the ground, blood trickling down his face, glared at the colonel with a mix of fear and loathing. He was looking at the Lujun Division, the soldiers who had massacred his ancestors.

Colonel Lin reached out suddenly and pulled a baton from the belt of the nearest soldier. He stepped to Shan, who had fixed his gaze on the little pool of blood beneath Lhandro, then silently placed the end of the baton under Shan’s chin and lifted his head with it. Their eyes met and Lin studied him for a moment.

“Han,” Lin observed under his breath, like a curse. Lin was Shan’s age, slightly shorter than Shan, with a metallic cast to his eyes. The officer hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether he saw challenge in Shan’s face, frowned, dropped the baton, gesturing his sergeant forward as he turned to Lokesh. Lin examined the old Tibetan much more intensely than he had studied Shan. Shan barely noticed as the sergeant padded his pockets. He was watching the end of the baton, tensing his legs to leap and take the blow if Lin raised it to strike Lokesh. But the colonel took Lokesh’s free hand by the wrist and turned it over to study the palm.

“Nothing,” the sergeant spat.

Lin’s eyes lit with an icy gleam as he looked back at Shan. “You have no papers?” he asked quietly.

“Just a brochure to teach me serenity,” Shan said.

Lin seemed to welcome his defiance. A thin smile creased his face, and he pointed the sergeant toward the clipboard on the chair. “You will give me your name.”

Shan looked back at the pool of blood.

Lin dropped Lokesh’s hand and presented his raised palm toward the old Tibetan.

“Do you have papers, comrade?” Lin asked in Chinese.

What had he been looking for in Lokesh’s palm? Lin was not looking for a piece of stone. He was looking for a specific person, a person with what on his palm: The calluses of a hard labor fugitive perhaps? Or not calluses? Scars? Did it mean Lin knew who had stolen his stone?

Instead of presenting his Lhadrung registration paper, Lokesh offered his lopsided grin, which seemed to amuse Lin. The colonel studied Shan again, then bent his head to gaze with interest at Lokesh’s grizzled jaw, which obviously had been broken, as though he were a connoisseur of fractured jaws. He looked into Lokesh’s eyes, then lifted up the old man’s arm and pushed up his sleeve. Six inches up the arm, on the inside, was a tattooed line of numbers.

“Lao gai,” Lin announced with a tone of satisfaction, and called out the number to the sergeant, now standing at his shoulder with the clipboard. “We asked his name,” the colonel said to his sergeant, for Shan’s sake, then sighed and lifted Lokesh’s hat from his head, handing it carefully to the nearest soldier. He studied the crown of Lokesh’s head and tapped the baton in his palm.

“My name is Shan,” Shan said, watching the tip of the baton.

“A Han traveling with a Tibetan criminal,” Lin observed in an accusing tone.

Lokesh’s head shifted upward. Shan followed his gaze toward a line of birds flying low, approaching the village. A dozen bar-headed geese, bound, Shan suspected, for Lamtso.

As the colonel twisted his head and saw the birds his eyes lit with a new hunger and he snapped out a sharp syllable. A soldier ran to the first truck, opened the door painted with a fierce, leaping snow leopard, and retrieved a heavy gun, a long semiautomatic rifle. Lin grabbed the weapon, waited a moment, and when the line of birds was fifty yards away, no more than thirty high, he jerked the rifle to his shoulder and fired half a dozen rounds. Nyma cried out. Lokesh gave a small, disbelieving groan. Two of the big geese tumbled to the earth, a third somersaulted in the air, dropping low to the ground, but kept flying. Several of the soldiers cheered, and one darted away to fetch the dead birds. Lin returned the gun to the soldier who had retrieved it for him and turned back to his prisoners, his icy expression unchanged.

Lhandro was on his knees now, blood trickling down his cheek. As Nyma began to help him to his feet the soldier beside her pulled her away. When she resisted the soldier slapped her hard across the cheek. Shan watched in horror as the nun recoiled, then pushed back as though to strike the soldier, who lashed out with his hand again, grabbing her necklace, twisting it until it choked her, until it broke and the large gau it supported dropped free into his hand. He glanced at the amulet then slammed it against the rock wall. Nyma groaned and seemed about to jump for the prayer box, but froze as if she realized she should not draw the soldier’s attention to it. She had once opened her gau to show Shan the treasure inside, covering her prayer. A photo of the Dalai Lama, with the Tibetan flag on the reverse.

Lhandro struggled to his feet, reached into his shirt pocket and with a shaking hand pulled out his papers.

Lin seized them before the sergeant reached Lhandro. “Yapchi,” he read with sudden interest. “Yapchi,” he repeated in a meaningful tone. His eyes flared, first with anger, then satisfaction. A murmur spread through his soldiers, several of whom raised the barrels of their weapons toward Lhandro. “Over fifty miles from your fields, farmer,” the colonel observed, then surveyed Nyma, Shan, and Lokesh. “All of you from Yapchi?” He growled, his fingers clenching, the knuckles white. “Why here? Why so far away?” His lips curled to reveal a row of teeth stained with tobacco and Lin paused, as if relishing the moment. His eyelids seemed to droop. It was an expression Shan had seen in many such officials, a casual, patient cruelty hidden in a languid face.

“It’s too early to weed our barley,” Lhandro ventured weakly.

Lin gestured to the sergeant, who trotted to the cab of the first truck and marched back with an expectant gaze, holding a foot-long metal object in both hands.

“Have you been to Lhasa?” the colonel asked, gripping Lhandro’s arm tightly. “Where’s your bags? Your packs? I must see them!” The sergeant snapped his heels together and extended the object to Lin. Something frigid seized Shan’s stomach. It was Public Security’s favorite import from America, an electric cattle prod.

Nyma also recognized the instrument. She gave a high-pitched moan and stepped in front of Lhandro. Shan stared at the colonel in confusion. The prod was something the knobs used, seldom the army. It was for interrogation cells, not a remote roadside at the edge of the changtang. The colonel was desperate to extract information from his prisoners.

As Lin shot an amused glance toward Nyma and accepted the prod from the soldier a loud, bold voice rang out from the rocks.

“Yo, General, your majesty! My friends and I were having a peaceful picnic. No one invited the Boy Scouts.” Shan turned to see the American at the split in the rocks. He spoke in Mandarin. His mouth was turned up in a grin but his eyes were cool, and fixed on the colonel.

The colonel’s lips pursed in a silent snarl, and the officer stepped closer to the American. A green nylon rucksack hung from one of Winslow’s shoulders. In his hand was a water bottle, from which he drank with a casual, unconcerned air as several soldiers closed about him.

“You’ve made a serious mistake,” Colonel Lin growled. Lhandro’s papers, still in his hand, disappeared into the pocket of Lin’s tunic.

“Someone has,” Winslow agreed, in English, and slipped his free hand into a pocket of his rucksack. The nearest soldier lifted the barrel of his gun. The American produced a thick carrot, leveled it at the soldier as if it were a weapon, then raised it to his mouth and loudly bit off the end. Several of the freed villagers, watching now from beyond the army trucks, laughed.

“You have no idea,” Lin said icily. With a gesture of his hand two soldiers sprang into action, one leaping to each side of the American, pinning his arms behind him. The rucksack and water bottle dropped to the ground. The carrot flew through the air and landed at Shan’s feet.

Winslow seemed not to notice the rough treatment. “Not much,” he agreed, in Mandarin, grinning at Lin as the soldiers, still holding his arms, pressed him against the rock wall.

The sergeant jammed his hand into the breast pocket of the American’s shirt and pulled out a bundle of papers, with half a dozen photographs of the Dalai Lama, which he dropped in disgust, grinding them into the soil with his boot. The American looked forlornly at the ruined photos. “You know,” he sighed, “they say that man is the reincarnation of the Compassionate Buddha.” His gaze drifted toward Colonel Lin, and Shan shuddered. The American was deliberately badgering the colonel. Lin returned the American’s stare, then pointedly looked at the cattle prod. With a nod from him the soldiers began dragging Winslow toward the first truck.

Lin spat a curse under his breath and turned back to Lhandro, the prod still in his hand. The American was but a momentary distraction. A clanging of metal rose from the rear of the second truck and a soldier began tossing leg manacles onto the ground.

Lin stepped back to Lhandro and abruptly hit his face with the back of his hand. “Answer my questions!” he snarled, and hit him again. The farmer gave a small, surprised whimper, then swayed. Lin looked at his hand and frowned again. There was fresh blood on it. A metallic snap punctuated the momentary silence. The sergeant had fastened the manacle on Lhandro’s ankles.

As Shan watched Lin, the icy knot in his gut grew tighter and more painful. Everything—first Lhandro’s evasiveness, then the American’s appearance and his disrespectful attitude, and finally the stain of blood on Lin’s fingers—had only served to fan the flames of Lin’s rage. His hand made a tiny, almost imperceptible motion toward his belt, snapping open the holster that held a small automatic pistol.

“You are going to write statements,” Lin barked. “Every detail of how you arrived at this place, why you are traveling so far from your home, who else is with you, whom you encountered on the way, where you have been for the past three months.” As he spoke, the soldier who had produced the manacles held up a roll of heavy, wide grey tape. It would be used, Shan knew, to seal their mouths as they wrote. “You will write them separately, and if your reports do not perfectly match you will be charged with conspiracy to obstruct administration of the people’s justice.”

“Hell, General, you’re not Public Security,” Winslow said in a loud, glib voice. Never in his life had Shan encountered anyone so foolish as to deliberately mock a senior PLA officer. “Just the damned army.” One of the soldiers twisted the American’s arm behind him, and pain erupted on Winslow’s face. But as the soldier kept twisting the American forced his mouth back into a grin.

Suddenly the short Tibetan in the business suit emerged from the rocks. He stared in dismay at the American, and seemed about to shout. He turned to the colonel and opened his mouth, but still no words came out. Then his shoulders sagged and he stared at the black cap in his hands, stepped toward Winslow and placed it on the American’s head. Everyone stared, confused, except Winslow, who laughed.

An instant later the sergeant gave a cry of alarm and darted to Lin’s side, handing him Winslow’s documents. As Shan stared in confusion the colonel’s eyes grew round, then he threw the papers on the ground with a look of disgust and barked out a series of orders so quickly Shan could not understand them. The men behind Winslow released him. The soldier holding Lokesh’s hat threw it at the old Tibetan and followed the others of the squad into the second truck. The sergeant released the manacles from Lhandro and threw all the chains, and the colonel’s chair, into the rear of the truck.

Colonel Lin stepped backwards toward the first vehicle, silently watching Lhandro and Lokesh, fury back in his eyes. In another thirty seconds he had climbed into the lead truck and both vehicles were speeding down the road. As the Tibetans watched in disbelief Shan unwrapped the wire from his wrist, then bent and picked up the carrot and the papers. He studied the American’s passport a moment and looked up, more confused than ever. The passport in his hand said that Shane Winslow was an American diplomat.

“It was just a piece of paper,” Nyma said in confusion as she watched the American and the short Tibetan jog toward their own truck. Winslow had said nothing after the soldiers sped away, only cast a satisfied grin toward Shan and his companions before gesturing his nervous escort toward the red truck. They seemed in as much a hurry to leave as Lhandro, who had sent Nyma to run and bring the caravan to the road.

“But it had powerful words,” Lokesh suggested in a tentative voice.

Shan glanced at his friend, who had been taught that there were adepts who could write special, secret words that would unleash powerful forces upon those who read them. In a sense Shan knew Lokesh was right. He could not imagine any paper a foreigner could show a man like Colonel Lin that would cause him to reverse his behavior, except the very paper Winslow had produced. Lin would gleefully help deport a troublesome foreigner, and would not hesitate to detain suspicious citizens in front of a foreigner. But whatever he had had in mind for Shan and his companions, he would not do it in front of a foreign government. And Winslow’s paper said he was the U.S. government, or at least its only representative for probably hundreds of miles.

Still, that did not explain why the American was in such a hurry to leave. It was as if, although not concerned about confronting the ruthless colonel, he was nonetheless worried that Lin would report his presence to other authorities. Perhaps, Shan suspected, his own American authorities. Shan could not imagine a reason why an American diplomat would be in such an unlikely place, a forgotten village in a remote corner of the changtang wilderness.

Winslow tossed his rucksack into the back of the truck amid a throng of villagers who were quietly offering their gratitude, some pressing forward to touch him for good luck again. He opened the passenger’s door as the nervous Tibetan, still in his suit coat, started the motor, then reached into his rucksack and produced a stack of the Dalai Lama photographs, the first of which he handed to the young girl whose photo had been destroyed by the soldiers. Shan stared at the strange American as he distributed a dozen more photos to the eager villagers. Whatever his official duties might be, Shan was certain they did not include passing out contraband photos of the exiled Tibetan leader.

As Winslow raised a foot into the truck the first of the caravan sheep appeared, trotting with Anya and Tenzin down the dirt track that ran through the center of the village. The American paused, as if the sheep reminded him of something, and he turned toward Shan. He hesitated a moment, pulled a map from the dashboard of the truck, and trotted to Shan’s side. Suddenly Shan recalled the American’s inquiries just before Lin had arrived. He had been asking about their travels through the mountains.

Winslow held the map, folded to show the region north of Lhasa into Qinghai Province. “You came from the west?” he said. “Can you show me? How close to the Kunlun?” he asked, referring to the vast range of mountains that divided Tibet from the Moslem lands to the north, running his finger along the provincial border. “Which way? What route?”

“South, we came from the south,” Nyma volunteered, from behind Shan. Winslow nodded energetically, and his gaze shifted from the map to the sheep.

“Those bags,” he said in a surprised tone. “Salt? I’ve heard that in the old days caravans—by god it is, isn’t it?” he exclaimed to Shan, in a tone that almost suggested envy. The American’s fingers began roaming across the map. “That means one of the big lake basins, right?”

“Lamtso,” Nyma answered enthusiastically.

The American nodded slowly, and traced his finger along the space between the lake and the village.

“You are looking for someone?” Shan asked.

Winslow nodded. “An American woman. Missing for several weeks. Presumed dead.”

“We saw no Americans,” Lhandro interjected from Shan’s side. The rongpa cast a glance of warning at Shan. “We thank you for your help,” he added hurriedly. “We will watch for her.” Lhandro pressed Shan’s arm, as though to push him way.

The American paused and studied the two men. “Your route is to the north,” he said with a speculative look in that direction. “But you turned onto the road to the east.”

Lhandro stepped away and gestured for Shan to follow. “Thank you,” the Tibetan said again.

Winslow grinned, held up his hands as though in surrender and backed away. He climbed into the truck and the nervous little man behind the wheel put it into gear and sped down the road, away from the village and toward the northern highway that would take them to Lhasa.

As Shan watched the truck an animal brushed his knees, and he looked down. The ram with the red-spotted pouch was at his side, looking up at him with frightened eyes.

*   *   *

Every creature in the caravan, from the silent Tenzin to Anya to the sheep and dogs seemed to sense an urgency that afternoon. They moved at a half-walk, half-trot, not pausing for food or drink. After an hour Lhandro stopped and unloaded one of the horses, redistributing its cargo among the other four horses as he nervously watched the road. His eyes heavy with worry, he gave the horse to one of the Yapchi men, who trotted away to scout ahead, and in the adjacent hills. Dremu had not appeared since their encounter with the army.

When they had covered the ten miles of road two hours of daylight remained. Lhandro pushed them on, up the trail to the north until it curved, blocking the road from view. As the others rested Shan and Lhandro studied the steep, rough track that led north, looking for any sign of soldiers. Lin sent the man on the horse into the hills ahead. Everything seemed to have changed since the village. Colonel Lin, from whom the eye of Yapchi had been stolen, now knew about a band of travelers from Yapchi. He knew Lokesh was from a lao gai camp. He had lost them as prisoners only because of the American’s intervention. But Lin would not give up, and his soldiers were trained for setting traps in the rough mountain terrain. Such men could easily elude the caravan scout, or trick him into thinking the path was safe.

“The colonel doesn’t know our path,” Shan said to Lhandro. “And he doesn’t know about the sheep.” In the hours on the road Lhandro had seemed to transform from the spirited, energetic rongpa to a man carrying a heavy burden of fear. The colonel had taken his papers and kept them, had discovered he was from Yapchi. He had felt Lin’s manacles and for a few terrible minutes Lhandro had no doubt believed that he would spend his remaining years in a Chinese prison, losing everything, even, or perhaps especially, losing the chenyi stone.

“I didn’t have to bring Anya on the caravan,” the farmer said. “It should have just been me and the older men. And we shouldn’t have involved Nyma. She wants to be a nun so bad.… She needs to be a nun.… This is not a nun’s work. Some of us would gladly…”

“Somehow,” Shan said, “I don’t think Anya or Nyma would have let you deny them the opportunity.”

Lhandro offered a weak smile, then whistled sharply and began moving up the track with long, determined strides. At first only the dogs followed him, but he did not call out, he did not turn, he did not gesture for the others. The largest of the mastiffs paused when Lhandro had gone a hundred feet, then turned and barked once. The sheep raised their weary heads and began to follow. Anya stood and extended her hand to Lokesh. The two walked by the sheep, hand in hand, and Anya began to sing one of her songs. Slowly, groaning as they lifted their exhausted limbs, the others of the caravan silently rose and followed.

After a mile Lhandro gestured Shan to his side and pointed up the trail. Shan raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw their scout, two hundred yards away, unmounted, facing them with his hands raised above his waist, open, as if in an expression of chagrin. Lhandro and Shan jogged toward the man.

As they approached the scout disappeared behind a large outcropping. Lhandro halted and led Shan off the trail, around the backside of the outcropping. They edged around the rock to see the back of a large man in a bright red nylon coat and black cap sitting before a tiny metal frame that hissed and produced a small blue flame. Their scout squatted beside the man, drinking from a steaming metal cup. As Shan ventured forward the man in the red coat turned.

“Only have two cups in my kitchen,” Winslow declared, extending a second mug toward Shan. “You’re welcome to share. No butter, no salt. Just good Chinese green.” Shan accepted the mug, savoring the aroma of the green leaves for a moment. He saw the others staring at him, then self-consciously extended the mug to Lhandro. He blinked for a second, something blurred in his mind’s eye, and he saw his mother, sitting with him, patiently watching a steaming porcelain pot as green leaves infused the water. The pot had a picture of a boat on a river by willow trees. It was the way his memory sometimes worked now, after the knobs had used electricity and chemicals on him. His early years lay down a long dark corridor, where doors sometimes, but rarely, were unlatched by a random, unexpected event. Not events as such, but smells, or other sensations, even the inflection in someone’s voice.

“Wasn’t hard to figure,” he heard Winslow saying. “You were going north from the lake and suddenly veered east, to the road. If you had been intending all along to go east you would have taken the road from the lake to the east. So you were blocked unexpectedly from going further north. The pass you intended to take got blocked by a snow avalanche or rock slide, I figure. If you were on the road it was just to get to the next pass.” He gestured toward the high northern peaks. “Up there. The Tangula Mountains they call them, a spur from the Kunlun.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said.

“My government will pay a transportation fee if you want,” Winslow said, and grinned as he saw Shan’s confusion. “I’m going with you.”

Lhandro stared woodenly at the American, then quietly asked the scout to make sure the caravan kept moving.

“You don’t know where we’re going,” Shan pointed out.

“Sure I do. North. Same direction I’m going.”

“To look for the missing woman,” Shan said.

“They say she’s dead,” Winslow said, and left the words hanging like an unfinished sentence.

The announcement silenced Shan and his friends. Shan took a step back, as though to better see the American. He glanced at Lhandro, who shrugged, as if to say he knew nothing of dead Americans.

“He saved us from that colonel,” Lhandro observed to Shan after a long silence.

“With a piece of paper,” Shan recalled. “Could I see it again?”

The American stared at Shan coolly for a moment, unzipped the breast pocket of his nylon coat and produced the passport. Shan studied the document, not knowing what he was looking for. Benjamin Shane Winslow, it said, with a home address in the state of Oklahoma. It had over twenty entry stamps for the People’s Republic of China, and many more for countries in South America and Africa.

Winslow took the mug, now empty, from Lhandro and refilled it from a pot on his tiny stove. “Just how would you go about identifying a fake diplomatic passport, tangzhou?”

Tangzhou. It meant comrade. It was the American’s way of taunting Shan, he suspected, or perhaps any Chinese he met.

Shan handed the passport back to the American. “I’ve met several diplomats in my life, Mr. Winslow. None were remotely like you. And my name is Shan, not comrade.”

Winslow made a great show of looking into his pack and rummaging through its contents, then looked up. “Damn. Forgot my black tie and patent leather shoes,” he declared with exaggerated chagrin.

“Perhaps you would share with us what’s in the bag,” Shan said.

“You want my dirty underwear? Sure, welcome to it. Light on the starch please.” Then Winslow studied Shan’s stern countenance and his face hardened. “I’ve taken enough shit off Chinese today,” he said. “You don’t even have a uniform.”

“You’re the only one claiming to work for a government.” As Shan spoke the herd of sheep appeared around the outcropping and the caravan began marching past the rocks. Moments later Lokesh appeared, then Nyma and Anya. They stepped toward the American with uncertain expressions, sensing the tension in the air.

“You had a driver and a truck. Where are they?” Shan asked.

“Sent them back to Lhasa. I didn’t like him. When the embassy asks the Chinese government for drivers you can be sure they work for Public Security.”

Shan considered the American’s words and realized he was right, which meant the knobs would soon know all about the confrontation at the village, and the caravan.

“This man saved us at the village,” Nyma said to Shan in a low voice that had a hint of pleading. “You especially should know what it would have meant if that colonel had taken us back with him.”

The nun’s words caused Winslow to look at Shan with a sudden intense curiosity.

“I only asked him to show us what he is carrying in his bag,” Shan declared quietly.

“He’s American,” Lokesh said.

“He works for the American government. The government in Washington cultivates relations with Beijing, not with Tibetans.”

The American seemed pained by Shan’s words, but he offered no argument. He raised his open palms to his shoulder, then extracted an expensive-looking camera and a compact set of binoculars before turning his rucksack upside down, spilling its contents onto the ground. Shan squatted to study the items. A large plastic bag of raisins. A grey sweatshirt rolled into a ball. A box of sweet biscuits. A small blue metal cylinder that matched the one fueling the stove. Two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks, knotted together. Half a dozen bars of chocolate. A one liter bottle of water. A tattered guide book on Tibet, in English. A tiny first-aid kit. And a small black two-way radio.

“You could call your driver on that?” Shan asked, pointing to the radio.

“The driver, or the office he is assigned to. It’s how I get back.”

“You said the driver works for the knobs.”

Winslow grimaced.

Shan realized that Nyma had stepped behind him now, with Lhandro. They were frightened of the little black box.

“It’s my lifeline for Christ’s sake,” the American protested. “You think I’m trying to interfere with your caravan, maybe steal your animals?” he said impatiently, then studied Shan and the others for a long moment. His eyes widened. “Christ. You’re illegal. That’s why you were so scared about Colonel Lin. You have no papers or—” the American looked back at the animals as they wound their way up the slope “—you’re carrying something illegal.”

No one spoke, which was answer enough. The wind moaned around the corner of the rocks. The little stove continued its low hiss. In the distance sheep bleated.

The American looked into his hands with a pained expression. “The missing woman is named Melissa Larkin,” he explained. “People seem to have given up on her. She is presumed dead. You’d be surprised how many Americans die in Tibet,” he added. “For tourists, it’s an expensive destination that takes a long time to see, which means many of the tourists are senior citizens. Then there’s the dropouts who don’t understand about bandits in remote places or the diseases they would never catch at home, or how altitude sickness can kill them overnight. You can die of things here that would never kill you in the States, because medical treatment can be so far away.” He looked up with a frown. “It’s the embassy that has to get the bodies home for burial.”

“But surely the Chinese authorities must help when foreign bodies have to be collected,” Shan stated with a pointed glance at the American.

Winslow bent to turn a knob on the stove. The hissing stopped. “This Larkin woman is different. Thirty-five years old. A scientist. Geologist, seismologist. Worked in the North Sea, Alaska, Patagonia. Someone who can handle herself.”

“You mean she was working in Tibet?”

“In old Amdo for the past year,” Winslow nodded. “Southern Qinghai Province, just across the border from the TAR,” he said, meaning the Tibet Autonomous Region, Beijing’s misleading name for what had been the central Tibetan provinces.

“A snow avalanche. Rockslide. Bandits,” Shan said. “Just because she was independent didn’t mean she could avoid bad luck.”

“Right. That’s what they all say. I had to argue with my boss just to get the right to look for her.” Winslow spoke with an odd note of challenge in his voice. “I have two weeks, then off to a conference in Shanghai.”

No one spoke. Shan and Lhandro exchanged sad glances, and Shan knew the Tibetan and he were sharing the same thought. They had been brought up in a world where people went missing all the time, where almost no family was exempt from the pain of losing someone. People might walk into the mountains and never come back. People were dragged off to prison without warning, without announcement. People might come back from prison and find that all those they had known had vanished. Shan himself was missing, although he doubted his former wife or even his son cared, and would prefer to assume him dead. Shan saw that his companions were all staring at the American. Winslow lived in a truly different world.

The entire caravan was visible above them now, climbing up a switchback trail on the slope above.

“I don’t know these mountains,” Winslow said in a softer, pleading tone. “I just need a way in, so I don’t waste my time finding the right trail.”

Still no one spoke. Suddenly the American sighed and handed Shan the radio. Shan held it in his hands a moment, then laid it on a flat rock, the American watching uncertainly. The Tibetans inched away. Shan grabbed a large stone, raised it over his head, and, as Nyma uttered a small surprised cry, slammed it down on the device. He hammered the radio once, twice, three times, until the case burst and bits of broken circuit board and wiring fell into the dirt.

“Dammit,” the American growled. “You could have just taken the battery.”

Shan ignored him, silently gathering the pieces of the radio and throwing them into a narrow cleft in the rock. “I still don’t understand something,” he said as he turned to face the American. “Why this pass? This woman could be anywhere in the mountains.”

Winslow stared at the hole where the shards of his radio had disappeared, shook his head, and turned to Shan. “I spent four days looking around her base camp to the north and found nothing. Her company had other field teams out searching for her body. I thought I would work from the south up. But I didn’t know where exactly. Then today after that yak and I met, I stopped to study the map with my driver, on the road below this spot.”

The American hesitated a moment, pushing his hair back with a self-conscious expression. “A large bird, like a grouse, with white in its plumage, landed on a boulder nearby while I was working with the map. It kept staring at me. I walked over and it kept staring until it flew to another boulder a little way up the trail.” Winslow shrugged and looked up sheepishly. “Like something was waiting for me up the trail.”

Lokesh nodded solemnly. Shan studied the man. When speaking of the day’s events, he had not mentioned meeting Colonel Lin, only meeting the yak.

“A bird,” Nyma whispered soberly, to no one in particular.

“Where is this base camp exactly?” Shan asked. “How far north?”

“In one of the valleys where they are drilling. There’s a mountain called Geladaintong, which holds the headwaters for the Yangtze. This place is twenty miles west of there, inside the ridges of another huge mountain. It’s called Yapchi Valley.”

Lhandro let out a gasp of surprise. Lokesh began nodding his head, as if it all made perfect sense.

Winslow stared in confusion as Shan replayed what had happened at the village. The American had emerged from the rocks to confront Lin after the colonel and Lhandro had spoken of Yapchi. He had not heard them speak of the distant valley.

“The Yapchi oil project,” Shan said.

“Right. She works there.”

Shan sighed, looking into his friends’ expectant faces. There would be no denying the American now. The Tibetans would say it was predestined that the American travel with them. He knelt and helped the American repack his bag.

They camped that night below the pass in a field of boulders where the wind blew incessantly and they could light a fire only after building a small wall of rocks to shield the flame. The American offered to cook on his little stove but Nyma simply pointed to a figure climbing along the slope above them. It was Tenzin, who still seemed unable to complete a day without gathering dung.

“It must have been a bad thing he did,” Lhandro had observed when he had first seen Tenzin with his sack, exchanging a knowing glance with Shan. The rongpa, like Shan, had guessed that Tenzin was performing penance. Shan remembered Tenzin’s strange behavior in the hailstorm, and later at the lake. Drakte had freed him from prison and he was going north because someone had died.

Winslow studied the silent, stooped figure with a bewildered expression. “I don’t think a cowboy could be a cowboy,” he said slowly, in English, to himself, “if he had to collect cow shit every night.”

“Keeps you close to the earth,” Shan offered in the same tongue.

The American looked up in surprise. “You speak American well.”

“My father taught me English before he died.”

Winslow contemplated Shan, as if sensing a story in Shan’s words, but did not press. “Don’t see my bird,” he said, switching to Tibetan as he gazed back over the slope. “I never believed in signs, until I started coming to Tibet. First couple trips, no big deal. Flew into the airport to meet the coffin of a former governor who had a heart attack climbing the Potola steps. Second time, I just went into Lhasa for a mountain climber who had died of altitude sickness. But the third time I was on the road to Shigatse and told the driver to stop for a monk who was looking for a ride.” He paused, seeing the others had closed around the fire and were listening. “An hour later I told him to stop again,” Winslow continued. “I got out without knowing why and stared at this high hill. Not really a mountain but big and steep, all rock and heather. I had to climb it. I still don’t know why, it was like a dream. Afterwards, I thought maybe it was the medicine I was taking. But I started walking. Took almost an hour to get to the top.”

“What was there?” Nyma asked.

“Nothing. Not a thing. Except an old piece of cloth jammed under a rock. An old square of silk with Tibetan writing on it. At the time I didn’t even know it was one of those wind horses, a prayer flag. But I freed it so it flapped in the wind. Then I picked up a rock, a small red rock, and I threw it far down the slope without knowing why. It just struck me that the rock didn’t belong there, that it needed to be thrown. Afterwards, when I got to the truck I told the two Tibetans. The monk nodded with this wise expression and said that clearly it had to be done, and thanked me for coming to Tibet to do it.”

The Tibetans at the fire nodded knowingly.

Nyma filled her bowl with buttered tea, then shaped three butter balls and set them on the edge of the bowl. Shan had often seen dropka do the same thing, reserving the morsels for the deities. “I’m sorry,” the American said. “I know I don’t make any sense.”

But Nyma and Lhandro seemed not to be listening. Lhandro was pointing. There, thirty yards up the slope, a grey shape rested on a boulder. A large bird, watching over the camp.

“It can’t be,” the American muttered, but he stared long at the creature, then turned away with an unsettled expression, as if he could not decide if the bird had come to guide him or haunt him.

Movement caught Shan’s eye and he saw Tenzin emerge from some rocks not far from the bird, his sack on his shoulder. A second figure came into view above him, leading a horse, extending a yak chip toward the mute Tibetan. They had not seen the Golok since the village.

“He’s with you?” the American asked. “He was riding above that village.”

Lhandro looked at Shan as though for help. “He’s part of the caravan,” Shan said, and was struggling to find more words to explain the Golok when Anya suddenly stepped close to the fire, wedging herself in a sitting position between Winslow and Shan. The American shared his mug with the girl and she drank heavily as Shan and Winslow gazed at the bird again.

“I understand the sheep carrying salt,” Winslow said after a few minutes. “I understand that some of you don’t have papers. But,” he said to Shan, “I still don’t know what you are doing here.”

“The Chinese forced him out of China,” Anya blurted out. “And now,” the girl made a gesture toward the mountains, “now he has to be here.”

“Forced him out?”

“He has a tattoo,” Nyma said with a loud whisper, leaning toward the American.

“Jesus,” Winslow muttered. “Lao gai.” The American seemed to understand much about Tibet, or at least about China’s role in Tibet. He studied Shan with pain in his eyes. “How long?”

“Four years. Not so bad.”

“Not so bad? Christ! You were in slave labor for four years?”

Shan looked at Lokesh, who was gazing with a look of wonder at the stars that were appearing over the mountains. “Not as bad as thirty.”

Winslow followed Shan’s gaze toward the grizzled old Tibetan and his mouth opened. But all that came out was a small moan.

As Shan studied the strange American again he recognized the awed, confused feeling that Shan, too, had experienced years ago when arriving in Tibet. Winslow was not just visiting the country, or encountering it like a stranger. The land was drawing him into it, beginning to change him in the deep, mysterious ways it had changed Shan. And no one, not Anya, not the lamas, certainly not Shan, could predict what Winslow would be when Tibet was done with him.

*   *   *

The next morning the Yapchi farmers offered the American a horse for the steep climb up the pass, but Winslow refused it. The American took his place behind Shan, near the end of the line, leading one of the pack horses as they climbed through a thick snow squall for thirty minutes, then broke into brilliant sunlight as they entered the high pass.

No one spoke as they wound through the dangerous passage. A twenty-foot-high ledge of ice and snowpack, rendered unstable by the spring winds, loomed close on the left, leaning over the trail. A nearly vertical wall of splintered shale rose on the right, and down the center of the high winding trail ran frigid melt water, turning the path into a long narrow track of cold mud.

When they cleared the pass Shan turned to see the American had paused and was staring back at the treacherous wall of snow that seemed about to collapse. “Geologists sometimes set off explosions,” Shan observed. “Avalanches can happen.”

Winslow nodded his head solemnly. “Especially oil geologists. There’s probably a thousand places like this where she could have died in an accident.”

“Why would she be alone?” Shan asked as he gazed out over the barren landscape they had passed through. There were indeed a thousand places to die. And a thousand places for the dobdob or Lin’s troops to hide. “Geologists need a team for support. People to collect and carry samples. People to take measurements. People to watch people,” he added, meaning that if a foreign scientist was wandering the mountains Public Security would be interested.

Winslow nodded again. “A team of four or five. She took two Tibetan assistants up a slope five miles from the field camp and sent them off to collect rocks at a ledge she saw through binoculars, told them to meet her in three hours at another ledge. She never showed up. They backtracked. They called in a company helicopter the next day. They even took dogs to search. Nothing.” Winslow paused, turning to stare at the long high plain the pass had led them to. Suddenly he pointed. Something was moving across it, a rider galloping toward them, raising a long plume of dust behind him.

Lhandro, at the front of the column, raised his hand for them to halt, then jumped on a rock to better see the rider as the others anxiously gathered around him for a report. But Shan did not need to be told. He knew it was Dremu, and the Golok was frightened.

Dremu wheeled his horse around Shan. “He’s out there,” the Golok said, gasping, shaking his head as though in disbelief. “It must be that demon again.” He extended his hand and pulled Shan up behind him as Lhandro began stripping the bags off the lead packhorse.

They rode hard out onto the plateau, Shan not understanding what to look for, part of him fearing the Golok had led them into a trap. But when they had gone less than a mile the horse stopped so abruptly that Shan almost flew off. A body lay on the path, a man in a red robe.

Shan and Dremu leapt off, the Golok circling the man, facing outward, his long knife in his hand. Shan knelt by the man’s side. The monk lay outstretched, his arm extended toward the south. One leg was bent under him as if he had been crawling when he had collapsed. The short-cropped hair on his scalp was matted with blood. His mouth lay open against the earth, a trickle of fresh blood running onto the soil.