Shan arrived at his house an hour before sunset so he could have hot embers on the brazier to warm the feast Marpa had sent. He put the book of poetry on the windowsill and was lighting incense on the little altar when he heard a yelp of joy.
He found Ati sitting on a boulder, bouncing with excitement as he watched two figures on horseback racing along the trail that ran to the next farm, a mile away. “Go! Go! Go!” the boy shouted as the rear rider whooped and began passing the first.
Shan gazed in mute amazement. His son was the second rider, and he was passing Yara. They were mounted on two sturdy mountain ponies, galloping at breakneck speed across the rocky terrain. “They went for butter,” Ati explained. “The farmer is an old friend. My mother must have asked for the loan of the horses.”
Ko didn’t know how to ride. Ko was going to fall and crack his skull. A dozen fears shot through Shan’s mind, but then he saw the joy on his son’s face and he forget all else. His son was due back in prison soon enough, and he was cramming every hour with experiences. Shan was painfully aware of what Ko would return to. These were the memories that would sustain him, memories that would strengthen him more than meat and noodles. He would lie awake at night and forget his empty belly and the bruises of the guards’ batons by dissecting each of these minutes and living them again.
“A tie!” Ati shouted as the horses wheeled up in a cloud of dust. Ko was off his horse in an instant and at Yara’s side, helping her dismount. The Tibetan woman tossed her son a sack that had been tied to her saddle, then showed Ko how to fasten the reins over the saddles. She whispered into the ear of each horse, turned their heads, and playfully slapped them on their haunches. The horses shot off at a trot, back to their stable.
“There’s a pilgrim trail Yara showed me,” Ko reported, “with a prayer station by a waterfall. If you drop a white pebble in the pool you get a wish.”
“I was going to take you,” Shan said, his voice strangely tight.
Ati squealed with laughter as Ko swung him onto his back. “What’s that?” his son asked Shan.
“Never mind. I have food. If we can just find your grandparents,” Shan said to Yara.
“Not here.” She didn’t look Shan in the eyes. “Up with the herds.” In the mountains, Yara meant. Shiva too was in the mountains, and he expected Nyima had joined them. The Taklha clan was secretly meeting as their tormentors from 1966 roamed the same mountains. Ko was already in the house. “There’s chicken!” he called out. “Real chicken!” He was already eating out of a container as Shan stepped inside. Yara seemed to recognize the disappointment on Shan’s face and playfully chastised Ko, telling him to set the table.
“It’s a feast! We need a bigger table!” his son laughed.
“I wanted you to eat well on your … vacation,” Shan clumsily offered.
“Parole.” Ko gestured to Yara and Ati. “They know. Vacation from the 404th People’s Construction Brigade, where I am the meanest rock smasher in the camp.”
Ati laughed. Ko threw a noodle at him.
They passed their dinner with lighthearted talk of horses and the old festivals where horse races could last for hours. Ati fell asleep at the table, and Ko carried him to his own pallet in the adjoining room. As Shan cleaned up, the boy cried out and Yara sat at his side, stroking his head as she sang an old Tibetan lullaby. When he finished with the dishes, Shan turned to see Ko sitting against the frame of the door to the bedroom, where he had been watching the boy and his mother, who now lay beside her son. All three were asleep.
Shan opened the book of poetry and read by candlelight, but his heart wasn’t in it. He set the book by the pens and paper they had also not used. At the table he sat so he could see the sleeping figures. He doubted Ko knew there were bounty hunters who looked for ferals like Yara and Ati. He had warned them to stay hidden. Had he been a fool also not to tell his son that Lau had been bent on destroying him? After what Shan had done that morning to protect his son, the general was likely now to try to crush Shan as well. The calm of their little remote house was a delusion. None of them were safe. They had no happy future. They might have no future at all.
It was the most Tibetan of scenes. They had to live in the contentment of the moment, wearing this hour’s peace of mind like a cloak, for the world could erupt in new pain and disorder at any moment.
He rose and took a long walk in the cool night air, then, still restless, settled back at the table with one of the bronze dakinis, coaxing away its dirt with a small brush. He found himself whispering to the little goddess as he worked, a habit he had picked up from Lokesh. He was liberating the deity within the crust of dirt, Lokesh would insist, and soon it would be gleefully dancing in the air around him.
Do I just make it worse by releasing you? he wondered to the goddess, looking into her lapis eyes. Or would it have been more merciful to keep you in the cave where we had found you, blind and half buried, so you might wait to be released into a better world?
Suddenly he saw his son was sitting at the table, studying him with a quizzical expression. Shan realized he had spoken the questions aloud.
Ko picked up a second, smaller figurine on the table and began working on it with a little wooden pick from Shan’s tool kit.
“They will want to know everything about my days here,” his son said after several minutes.
Shan hesitated. Was his son worried about interrogation by his prison guards?
“Every little thing. What people are eating, whether they seem healthy, whether people still have altars inside their houses. Some haven’t been outside for thirty years or more. And no one has been released for only a few days, not from the 404th, which everyone knows is the dumping ground for all the hopeless cases. They asked me about television and most can’t understand how it is possible. Some think I am touched in the head when I speak of things like television and cell phones. I wish I could take them one of these deities back for the secret altar in our barracks. But it would just be confiscated.”
“Then you will have to give it to them in words,” Shan suggested. “The first years I was there, a couple times a week after lights out someone would ask me to describe some aspect of life in Beijing. I remember one night talking about fast food. One of the monks was confused. Was it called that because you had to travel fast to get to the restaurant, or because it consisted of animals that had been fast on their feet, he asked.”
A melancholy grin rose on his son’s face. Shan motioned to the figurine in Ko’s hand. “That one is Kalika, one of the sixteen elders, the first disciples who went out into the world to teach the word of Buddha. They are venerated even in China, where they are called arhats. You can still see them in temples in the east.”
“Kalika,” his son repeated. “Proof that not all Chinese run prisons.”
Shan nodded. “I’m sorry, Ko,” he said after they had silently worked on their gods for several more minutes. “I had intended to spend more time with you. I got you home at last and then I just leave you here.”
“People need your help. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that. It is what you do. They still talk about you in the 404th. The Chinese Rock, they call you, because Public Security and the guards kept inflicting pain on you and you just let it bounce off. There’s a place where you had a top bunk, where you whittled Lha gyal lo in the ceiling a dozen times. The oldest of the lamas covered it with a piece of canvas, as if to stop a leak, and takes it off on holy days. Lha gyal lo, Xiao Shan, he recites, all twelve times.”
Shan felt his throat tightening. Xiao was the old form of address for the younger generation, as an uncle might call a favored nephew.
“One of the old monks began calling me the Chinese Pebble last year when I was released from solitary. It was weeks before I realized it was a term of honor.”
Shan felt his eyes fill with moisture. He felt somehow shamed. He was free, wearing the uniform of the government the prisoners loathed, while most of the wise, gentle Tibetans in the 404th would never be out in the world again.
Not knowing why, he set his dakini down and extracted the drawings they had brought from Lhasa, then explained to his son everything he knew about the murders and the old medical college. “There is something important here,” he said, “something my predecessor died for.”
Ko pointed to the solitary building on the last drawing of the complex. “Why that one, why is that left standing?”
“I don’t know. I think it was a stable.”
Ko pointed to the blurred image above the building. “What is the symbol above it? Looks like feathers.”
“I don’t know.”
“And the words below it?” Ko asked. “I can’t make them out.”
“It’s a song, a kind of blessing for mules. An old thing, from the days of the trade caravans.”
“Stables were used as storehouses for caravan goods. One of the old lamas talks about going on caravans as a boy.”
Caravans. Shan saw the excited way Ko studied the drawings. “You can’t sleep?” he asked.
“There will be time enough for sleep when I am back inside.”
“Then put on your shoes. I will give you a story our friends in the 404th will treasure.”
* * *
Tserung had hidden the entrance to the underground archives behind a new labyrinth of broken statuary, tires, and vehicle bodies, and Shan was obliged to use his hand lantern to find the way. They found Jinhua in the first chamber of the sublevel, studying the most recent of the records. Ledgers and peche were strewn about the table where he worked under the light of half a dozen candles.
Shan gestured to the ledgers with a look of inquiry.
“Very disorganized in the early months of the Chinese arrival,” Jinhua explained. “But then the bureaucrats arrived. Director Yen Fu of Religious Affairs was fastidious. I can tell you how many sacks of rice were ordered for the Bureau of Religious Affairs officials here, and the size of the temporary dormitory built for truck drivers and demolition crews here. They left the one gate tower up as an observation post. Not a word about the medical college. Then in late 1966 Director Yen disappears. All references to him stop. Except a month later there is a note that someone should write to the family of Yen Fu, as if he had died.”
Shan realized Ko was not listening. He was pacing along the racks of peche, wide-eyed. “Forgive me,” he said to his son. “Let me give you a proper introduction to the centuries.”
They left Jinhua working at his table and ventured into the other chambers, sampling manuscripts in each. Ko grinned with pleasure as Shan uncovered a two-hundred-year-old peche and read of the summer horse festival, where horses raced around obstacle courses or over the mountains on courses that sometimes took hours to complete, and archery contests were held every day, some reserved for lamas over seventy years of age and some for adolescent girls or novice nuns, who were awarded prayer beads blessed by the Dalai Lama. When Shan finished, Ko found a volume containing nothing but prayers for injured animals and a three-hundred-year-old treatise on the shapes of clouds, written by a monk who insisted clouds never changed or faded away, that all clouds that ever lived still floated, just in different parts of the sky.
By the time they returned, Jinhua had organized his findings. He had three books in front of him. He put a hand on the first, a Tibetan peche. “Tserung says no entries after April 1966.” He touched the last of the books, a ledger all in Chinese. “Last entry December 1967.” He indicated a pile of paper bound with a length of twisted wire that pierced the top left corner of each page. Shan sat and leafed through the mismatched pages. Half the makeshift book seemed to consist of pages torn from Chinese ledgers, half were peche leaves that had been torn in half or in some cases folded.
“I discovered it hidden on the top shelf, out of sight,” Jinhua reported. “Someone has been doing the same thing we are, though with a lot less respect for the records. Someone who reads both Chinese and Tibetan.” He saw the uncertainty on Shan’s face. “Looking for evidence of shipments, inventories of anything that might be called treasure. They seemed convinced something was hidden. Some of these report how a special team of Lau’s soldiers tore out walls in chapels. And there’s this one,” Jinhua said, resting a hand on the brown-wrapped older book that had been in the middle of the 1966 records. “The mysterious out-of-place 1897 volume. I asked Tserung to look it over. It’s mostly about the huge earthquake that happened that year. There’s a page annotated.” Jinhua rummaged through his notes, then lifted a slip of paper on which he had recorded the passage in Chinese and recited, “The earth deities woke briefly last week. We lost a temple wall, three chorten steeples, and the well. We bid good slumber to the beloved gods.”
The words faintly resonated in Shan’s mind, and then he remembered that Dorchen had revealed that several of the images on the margin of one of the drawings had been of sleeping gods.
Jinhua motioned to one of the Chinese notebooks. “Notes of interrogations,” Jinhua explained and turned to a page of Chinese script. “The abbot of Yangkar gompa. ‘My treasure is my eternal spirit,’ he kept saying. He was beaten and lay unconscious for two days. They tried again. ‘My treasure is my eternal spirit,’ he repeated, never anything else until he died.” Jinhua ran his finger down a list of names, each with a short paragraph of text under it. “The deputies to the abbot, then senior lamas.”
“The interrogators seem to have been furious. Same thing, every one of them. ‘My treasure is my eternal spirit.’ They had rehearsed it. Two pages of names. Not one of the monks or lamas broke, only the layman who ran the stables for the gompa here in town. And all he said was that the treasure of the gods was not meant to be the treasure of men. It convinced the soldiers there was something of great value still hidden.” Jinhua turned to another page. “They drew up architectural diagrams, did measurements, and identified what they thought might be false walls. They smashed open statues and found a few rods of silver and old bones.
“Then in June Lau put Yintai in charge and the team started studying caravan records. Something was discovered—perhaps a piece of intelligence from Lhasa, where other interrogations were being conducted. They began making lists of yak trains, mule trains, even trains of sheep carrying packs full of salt.”
“Salt caravans would have come from the west and north.”
“Right. After the first week they only focused on caravans from the south. Yangkar gompa was home to nearly five hundred monks and lamas, with another hundred or so up in the medical college. Caravans came and went all the time, often two or three a week.” He lifted a folded peche leaf, with several distinct paragraphs written in Tibetan but with Chinese notes on the margins. “Tserung says each Tibetan passage describes a caravan. The Chinese counterpart accounts for the contents of each. Storehouse number one, for example, for a caravan of barley flour, or direct to the kitchens for one of fresh vegetables. Like an audit. Yintai suspected a subterfuge for some reason. There was a lot of effort to this, with references to senior officials in Religious Affairs and the military. No names given except that of Yintai. He’s been Lau’s front man all these years.”
“Where was the Red Guard in all this?” Shan asked.
“There are early references to meetings at the Red Guard compound in the mountains, but not a word about the Hammer of Freedom after September 1966. Gone completely. No more requisitions for food for them, no record of their transport elsewhere. And there’s three caravans that puzzled them, or at least three unaccounted for when everything stopped.”
“Stopped?” Shan asked.
“Suddenly in October there’s nothing but a report on movement of operations southward, including construction of the first roads into Yangkar and arrangements for convoys to ship inventories of religious artifacts and idolatry to Religious Affairs warehouses.” Jinhua turned to the next page in the stack. “It says an order came in. Complete Rationalization of Reactionary Assets in Yangkar, it was captioned, whatever that means.”
“Complete Rationalization?” Ko asked.
Shan closed his eyes a moment. “It meant total annihilation,” he explained. “It was the order to destroy the gompa.” He turned to Jinhua. “And the medical college?”
“Not a word. I think … it was gone by then.”
“Tell us about the three caravans suspected by the government.”
Jinhua pulled out a single peche sheet. “Tserung helped translate, like I said, but he wasn’t clear on some of the old writing and usages. There was a caravan of thirty-five mules, bearing bolts of Indian cloth for robes, bundles of prayer scarves, and bows and arrows for the summer festival. The Chinese note says the army insisted the entire caravan was contraband since it included weapons. The teamsters were executed. The next is a caravan of ten yaks accompanied by three teamsters and two monks. The Tibetan report says it carried silk bags of sand from somewhere south of Lhasa. The Chinese auditors concluded this had to be a lie since no one transports sand so far and certainly not in silk bags. When they couldn’t find anything, they assumed contraband must have been hidden in the bags and removed them for inspection.”
“No,” Shan countered. “It was special colored sand, gathered from carefully guarded deposits and blessed by senior lamas.” He saw the question on his companions’ faces. “For mandalas. Sand paintings of sacred images. The monks rode with it to ensure it was not contaminated.”
“They executed those monks and the teamsters too. It was a pattern. Interrogate every teamster, then execute them. They were searching for a secret they wanted no one else to know.”
Shan tried not to think of the carnage. “The third caravan?” he asked in a whisper.
Jinhua shrugged. “Fifty mules, twenty riders. Carrying medicines, incense, spices, and ink. The auditor said no one could find a record of the goods actually being entered into inventory at the gompa.”
“Twenty riders? Seems like a lot.”
“Tserung couldn’t understand the wording. Ten teamsters for sure, and ten others. What he wrote was ‘ten black feathers.’”
“Feathers,” Ko said, “like that sign over the stable in the drawing.”
“Suddenly there were questions about the Dalai Lama’s gold,” Jinhua continued. “Missing treasure from Lhasa. As if they suspected those fifty mules carried gold. Urgent messages were sent to Lau.”
“When? September of 1966?”
Jinhua shrugged. “About that time, yes. There’s another book Tserung hasn’t examined,” he added, pointing to another peche.
“I can read it,” Ko offered.
Shan nodded. “See what you can discover. Look for—” A sharp series of taps from the hall interrupted him.
“Tserung,” Jinhua explained. “Four taps to let us know it is him.”
The mechanic waited on the landing. “Marpa is looking for you!” he said to Shan. “Never seen him so upset.”
Shan found Marpa sitting by the door of his living quarters at the rear of the noodle shop. “Praise the Lord Buddha,” the Tibetan muttered when he saw Shan, then rose and rapped on the door to his room. “He won’t come out, he says only for you.” Marpa futilely tried the doorknob. “Constable’s here, lad.”
Shan heard a click of the latch and the door slowly swung open. By the time Shan was inside, Lodi was at the back wall of the room, kneeling beside Raj. A bloody rag and bowl of water sat beside the big dog. The hair on his head was matted with blood.
“Who did this?” Shan asked as he knelt beside Lodi.
“The one I told you about! The one you said I shouldn’t fear!” the boy explained. It wasn’t anger Shan heard in his voice, it was despair. “The skeleton god! I thought I could discover something to help you. The moon isn’t full for another day or two, so I thought we would be safe. But there he was, jumping from behind a rock on the path to the old shed above the abandoned farmhouse. He shook his rattle at me but I didn’t run, because you said I need not be scared. I said my name and he rolled his huge eyes and shook the rattle again. Then Raj wagged his tail. That really made the demon angry. He roared then picked up a stone and threw it at Raj. Raj fell senseless. I dropped to his side to see if he was still breathing, and when I looked up the demon was on a big boulder spitting fire!”
“Fire?” Shan asked. “Surely not, Lodi.”
“I swear it! Streams of fire that ended in explosions of little stars! He made this terrible laugh and started aiming the fire at us. I’ve heard about demons that roast you alive and eat your flesh. I begged Raj to wake. I dragged him as best I could, and the demon kept belching fire toward us. I fell again and again, pulling Raj, then slipped and fell backward, and before I got up Raj was on me, licking me.”
“Lodi, there is no fire-spitting god on the mountain,” Shan said.
The boy looked to his uncle. “I saw it, Shan,” Marpa whispered. “I went to look for the boy and saw the thing spitting fire into the sky.”
“Show me where.”
Marpa shook his head. “No. We are not going up there. No one should.”
“Tell me where.”
“I think it’s always the same ridge, the one that runs from the salt shrine over to above the Demon’s Den. Above the old farm. The devils stalk the hills there to make sure no one goes farther.”
“Above the Taklha farm, you mean.”
“No one calls it that anymore.”
“An American came and spoke the name again. The Taklha farm.”
“He spoke it and died.”
“He spoke it,” Shan said, as if correcting Marpa, “and people began to glimpse the truth about the Plain of Ghosts.”
* * *
Shan had already opened the door to the cellars when he remembered the signal and rapped on the door. He rushed down the stairs, eager to hear of any new discovery, then slowed as he smelled smoke. Only one candle remained lit in the chamber where he had left Jinhua and his son. The pages that had been on the table were scattered on the stone flags, with several in a pile, smoldering where someone had tried to burn them. He stepped to the table for the candle and tripped on an outstretched leg.
Jinhua lay on the floor. The pages scattered around him were soaked with blood. He had been beaten so severely that Shan was not even certain he would find a pulse when he lifted the young officer’s wrist. Jinhua groaned. A tooth lay on the floor by his bleeding mouth. A long gout of tissue lay open on his forehead. “Ko! Ko!” Shan shouted and found himself running to the rear chambers. No one was there. They had attacked and taken his son. He darted back to Jinhua and forced himself into action, lighting more candles, then gently pulling him upright against the table. As he did so the lieutenant’s hand unfolded, revealing an embroidered patch of cloth. It appeared to be an image of two black feathers and had been ripped from a maroon piece of cloth, a monastic robe. Shan stuffed it into his pocket and was probing Jinhua’s wounds, desperately calling his son’s name, when a clamor rose from the stairway. Tserung, a bloody rag tied around his own head, darted down the stairs, followed a moment later by Ko and Jengtse.
Shan grabbed his son’s arm. “Are you hurt?”
“No, no. When we heard someone at the door without the warning knocks, Jinhua made me run to the back like you said. It happened so fast. I heard him ask who was there, then there was just scuffling. After a few minutes I smelled smoke. I found him here with those burning pages. I stomped out the fire and ran outside. Tserung was knocked out by the door. I ran to the station. I wasn’t sure where you were.”
“Why would they do this?” Shan asked. “Is something missing?”
Jinhua studied the clutter of the room. “I don’t see that wire-bound book, the book made of pages from others.” His hand shot to his temple. He groaned in pain and slumped down, unconscious.
“We have to get Jinhua to the amchi,” Shan said to his deputy.
“He’s Chinese!” Jengtse protested. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Over two hours to get here and two hours back,” Shan said. “He could be dead by then. Get the truck!” he ordered his deputy. “Now!”
As Jengtse darted away, Shan saw that Jinhua’s hand was burnt where he had smothered the flames on the page in his hand. Much of the Chinese writing had been lost to the flames. He could only make out the last sentence. Not one screech from the raven, the old chronicle said.
* * *
An hour later Dorchen emerged from the back door of his makeshift clinic and approached the bench where Shan sat. “Jengtse has reminded me half a dozen times he is Public Security,” the doctor declared to Shan. “I don’t know if he means it to scare me or encourage me.” The amchi shrugged, then noticed the dogs who sat staring at Shan and dispersed them with a wave of his blood-stained hand. “I have stabilized him. He can’t stay. He needs X-rays, intravenous fluids, possibly surgery. He must get to a hospital.”
“Which is your way of saying you won’t keep a knob here.”
Dorchen bent over the bucket by the hand pump and washed his face, then his hands, before replying. “Surely you understand, Shan. Assaulting a Public Security officer is a serious crime. They may even call it an attempted murder. People are executed for such things. They will flood the town with their agents. I will have to go into the mountains with my patients. You know I have no license to run a clinic. It will be the end of all we do here.”
“Public Security will know nothing about this. He is on leave. A private citizen. He will have as much difficulty as we will if he has to report to a hospital.”
“Shan, I cannot. My other patients. They know who he is. They know he brought in that truck of detainees.”
Shan looked inside, through the window. Nyima, whose list of Religious Affairs violations could probably fill a book, sat on the bed of Lhamo, the feral grandmother. They were already staring suspiciously at the unconscious man in the bed beside them. They might be frightened of him, but to Shan, Jinhua was seeming less and less like a knob and more like a lost boy who had wandered so far from his world he could not find his way back.
“He was in the old chapels, the archives, trying to solve the mystery of what happened here fifty years ago.”
Dorchen slowly shook his head. “What mystery? The Chinese came. They took everything and destroyed our town. The Mongols once did the same. It’s the cycle of history. No matter how severe the storm passing overhead, Tibet endures.”
The warning in the amchi’s voice hurt Shan. “You saw the drawings. Constable Fen died because of them,” Shan said. “It isn’t history. Because it isn’t over. A gang took treasure fifty years ago and they are back, looking for something they failed to find before.”
The old doctor gazed at the moon. “The Chinese came,” Dorchen repeated. “They took everything and destroyed our town. That is the past, dead to us now. The wheel turns. Only a fool stands in the way of destiny.” He turned to Shan. “Focus your life on where you can make a difference, don’t throw it away. Don’t endanger all of us because of your foolish ambitions to change the world.”
Shan extracted the little embroidered emblem he had removed from Jinhua’s hand. The amchi stiffened when Shan dropped it into his hand. “Jinhua was holding this. He found it there pressed in the pages he was reading, among the secrets.”
Dorchen seemed no longer aware of Shan’s presence. He stepped to the cairn at the back of the little yard, where Shan had seen incense burning. He laid the patch on the cairn, stirred the smoldering incense pot to life, and dropped to his knees. Shan inched closer. Dorchen was whispering an old death prayer. The past wasn’t dead for Dorchen, despite his gruff denials.
The old doctor broke into a low mournful song as Shan sat beside him, then stayed silent for several minutes. “There were always guards for the Dalai Lama, for centuries,” the amchi finally explained. “I used to see them on visits to Lhasa as a boy. The ones in the palace wore old uniforms from the nineteenth century and had swords in their belts. Some carried pikes. They marched in ceremonies and performed acts of daring at festivals. But there were others most never saw. Only a couple dozen at most. They were young monks who had volunteered, always monks bound by their vows because the Dalai Lama did not want them committing undue violence. They worked in the shadows, even in disguise if need be, sometimes on tasks that took them far from Lhasa. They were a secret order, a mystical order, with a long name from the old days, that meant the Sacred Messengers Who Fly in the Night, but those who knew them just called them the ravens.”
Shan weighed his words. “But the Dalai Lama had gone into exile long before the Chinese came to Yangkar.”
Dorchen nodded. “Several ravens went with him for the flight across the Himalayas, but not all. Things were confused in Lhasa. There were those who said the Chinese were just there to ensure India did not invade across the mountains, that they would go home when things on the border grew more settled. Then the Dalai Lama would return and all would go back to normal.”
“Meanwhile,” Shan suggested, “there would be things to be safeguarded. Hidden in remote places, perhaps.”
“There were treasures the Chinese did not even understand.” Dorchen sighed, then stood and stirred the incense pot again.
“When I was young,” Shan said, “I had an old uncle who was a great follower of Confucius. He said the great sage taught us not to get too wedded to the world. Whenever my uncle took his leave of us, he would bend and put his hands on my shoulders. Don’t trust the world, he would say, trust yourself.”
“He would have made a good Buddhist,” Dorchen observed.
“He was a merchant, taken away later for reeducation at some distant collective where many of the workers slowly starved to death. We didn’t hear from him for two years, then I received a letter from him. Inside was a drawing of a small bird clutching a bamboo branch in a storm and a slip of charred paper that looked like it had been torn from the front of a burned book. Don’t trust the world, it said. Trust yourself. That was all. A few months later word arrived that he had died.”
Dorchen sighed. “The few ravens who stayed behind tried to keep up a subterfuge that the Dalai Lama was still in Tibet, to fool the Chinese, but that did not last long. Then they did what they could for the government in exile. Spirit away a beloved abbot in the middle of the night. Carry a message from one gompa to another, on fleet horses riding little-known trails. The army kept pouring in, and then the Red Guards, but the ravens knew the old trails, far from the roads the Chinese used. Some stayed in Lhasa, posing as street sweepers or beggars so they could watch the army and compile reports for Dharamsala, where the exiles lived.” Dorchen glanced at Shan. “It was noble work. Hopeless but noble.”
“At least one raven was in Yangkar, in 1966,” Shan said.
“The Red Guard were conducting their so-called trials then. And interrogations.”
A chill crept down Shan’s spine. Not one screech from the raven, the passage in Jinhua’s hand had reported. He now understood Dorchen’s mourning song.
A low metallic rumble broke the silence. The beam of a solitary headlight sliced the darkness as it turned from the dry riverbed into the little shed.
“Dingri has been out tonight?” Shan asked.
“He has errands,” came Dorchen’s curt reply. “I think there may be some of that oolong left,” he said and gestured Shan back inside.