An hour later Shan stood in the evening shadows at the side of a long, low building that was composed of several old stables in a row that had been joined with cement block walls. The air around the carpet factory was filled with the pungent, vinegary scent of freshly dyed wool hanging on lines behind the compound. Brightly colored carpets hung on poles to dry after their final washing.
He leaned against the wall, listening to the town retiring for the night. A dre brayed from a stable, asking to be milked. A dog barked on the slope above town, stirring finches from their roost in the gorse thickets. From somewhere in the darkness came the creak of one of the old barrel-shaped prayer wheels being turned. Closer by, Shan heard a splash, followed by two more in quick succession. He followed the sound to the end of the structure and discovered Ati and Lodi tossing pebbles into a barrel under the gutter that slanted down from the roof. When he tossed a pebble himself, Raj bounded out of the shadows, tail wagging, and the boys turned, smiling as they recognized Shan. He pulled a small sack of candy from his pocket and handed it to the boys before removing his tunic and balancing a flat rock on the lip of the rain barrel. He gathered a handful of pebbles and wondered aloud which of the boys could knock the rock into the water from ten paces away.
Delighted with the new game, the boys threw the pebbles in turn as Shan, kneeling, stroked the back of the big dog. In his prison, despairing monks and lamas had sometimes killed themselves despite the certainty that they would be reincarnated as a four-legged creature. Whenever they encountered a mastiff with a deep, penetrating stare, many of the prisoners were convinced they were seeing a monk who had, in the parlance of prison culture, taken four.
The owner of the little carpet factory favored the off-paper Tibetans who worked for the lowest wages—usually those who just lacked proper domicile papers for the town but sometimes, on the night shift, ferals with no registration at all. Shan heard soft voices singing at the far end of the complex where wool was being carded under freshly lit lanterns. He sat and watched the boys until the workers took a break.
Lhamo, the younger boy’s great-grandmother, appeared and lit a hand-wrapped roll of tobacco. The coarse tobacco from India was a favorite of some of the older Tibetans, who had few vices other than their cigars.
Yara appeared and went to the barrel, washing wool fibers from her arms and then sluicing water over her head. Her grandmother energetically worked her tobacco, exhaling great clouds of smoke. She had exhaled a perfect ring and turned to show her great-grandson when she saw Shan in the shadows. The old woman whistled, and Yara grabbed her son’s arm, as if she were going to flee from the uniform, then she recognized Shan and the fear left her eyes. Yara whispered to her son, sending him to Lhamo, then approached, shaking the water out of her long black hair as she walked.
“Soldiers and knobs will be coming,” Shan announced. “Don’t be in town when they arrive. And don’t go back to Nyima’s cave.”
The young woman’s eyes flickered with surprise, then she slowly nodded and looked back at her grandmother and son. Yara might be willing to take risks on her own, but she worried about her family.
“Nyima will recover,” Shan said. “But she is staying with the old amchi. She’s not going back to her cave, not this week.”
“We’re not frightened of the ghosts. We have lived with them for years.”
Shan hesitated, not certain of her meaning. “I’m sure you’ve nothing to fear from ghosts,” he replied. “Where is the woman with the green eyes? I need to speak with her.”
Yara looked away. “I just mind my family.”
“You came to the jail with Nyima’s bloody mala and fled when you saw the soldiers. But you were there for the woman with the green eyes. Is she part of your family? Was she captured near the Plain of Ghosts? If you came to the jail to warn her, tell me why. Tell me where I can find her. She needs help. If she fled back up into the mountains she needs to know a murderer is loose.”
Yara watched her son as she replied. “I found some bloody beads. I came to the constable’s office with them as was my duty.”
“No. I left you on the slope south of town, climbing toward the mountain. But that messenger on the horse changed that. You galloped to town instead. You never came to my station before. Why would a feral Tibetan risk such a thing? If someone had questioned you, you would have been thrown into a cell yourself.”
“So now I understand,” Yara declared in a defiant voice. “I will never go to your office again.”
The words brought an unexpected pain. At another time, in another age, Yara and her family could have become his close friends. But the tunic he was forced to wear would never permit it. “Please. Think of your son and your grandparents. The longer the knobs are here the greater the danger to you. An American was murdered. The violence isn’t over. Help me stop it. Who found Nyima’s beads? That rider must have come down from the Plain of Ghosts with them. Why did the woman with the green eyes have to see them so urgently?”
She looked up as the moon emerged from behind a cloud. Her uplifted face glowed in the soft light and for a moment she looked more like one of the beautiful dakini goddesses depicted in Tibetan paintings than any woman he had ever met. But through her physical beauty, through her defiant strength, there was something else that he had seen too often, the flaw in her beauty. Her strength was hollow, because there was no hope behind it.
“Leave it alone, constable. It was just something that happened in the hills. Happened again. Storms blow hard, then they pass.”
“Happened again? What do you mean?”
A sad smile crossed Yara’s face. She ran a finger along one of the washed carpets. “My mother’s sister was famed in all the herding camps as a healer of sick animals. The abbess of a great convent heard and asked if she could come visit us, to give a blessing to the herds and drape a holy scarf around my aunt’s shoulders. It was a great honor, and the camp prepared for it as if for a festival. We saw the abbess coming way down the valley, riding on her donkey, and my aunt trotted out on her own donkey to meet her.
“I was very young, but I will never forget. A terrible black cloud slid out of the mountains. It began dropping hail the size of your fist. My aunt’s daughter and I watched from under the rock ledge where we camped. There was nothing we could do. They tried to gallop away, but their donkeys were struck and killed in seconds. They then ran themselves and were hit but got back up on their knees and crawled. They had no chance. They died in front of us. Ten minutes later the sun was shining.”
“I fight back in hail storms,” Shan stated after several silent heartbeats.
“Then you’re a fool. Only an unbalanced soul resists the gods’ wishes.”
“I don’t fight gods, I fight men who steal justice.”
“An even greater fool then, in this land.”
“The dead American was looking for something. Someone didn’t want him to find it. Was it the tomb itself he sought?” Yara looked away as he spoke. He leaned closer to her ear. “A blade was stabbed down into his spine, the way they kill laboratory animals.”
Yara visibly shuddered. “In the old days there were summer pastures in the mountains. For a hundred miles nothing but summer pastures, just rich meadows of sweetgrass and wildflowers. Herds of wild yaks and antelope. There used to be a way station for the herders in the center of it, a beautiful high valley along the northern pilgrim’s trail where the herding clans would meet, not far above what’s now the county line. But you can’t go there anymore. It’s where the new demons live.”
“The new demons?”
“One of those secret bases was built there. They have helicopters. They test the equipment used to detect people who try to cross over the Himalayas to freedom. You know. Automatic machine guns. Laser beams. Trip wires that activate gas bombs. The People’s Liberation Army, they call themselves. Beijing has quite a sense of humor.”
The words twisted Shan’s gut. Someone whistled from the wool shed. Lhamo carefully crushed out the embers of her cigar, preserving it for the next break.
“Just above the house where I live,” he said to Yara’s back as she stepped away. She hesitated. “There’s an old stable by a stream, sheltered by high outcroppings. If you sense trouble, take your family there. You’ll be safe there. In the garden you’ll find onions and cabbages.”
She did not reply. As she disappeared into the shed, Raj stepped in front of Shan as if to block him from following.
* * *
Back at his house, Shan picked at his dinner and then gave up and dumped the plate on a flat stone, knowing the rock mice would have more interest in the meal. For perhaps the hundredth time, he reviewed and refined the list of activities for his son’s visit, then wrote up the report for Mrs. Weng. Finished, he again dragged his pallet outside to find comfort in the heavens.
He slept fitfully, waking before dawn, his heart hammering, out of a nightmare in which Lokesh was being marched in front of a firing squad. Knowing he would find no more rest that night, he pulled out his bike and set off down a moonlit trail. Half an hour later, with a hint of gray in the eastern sky, he reached the old salt caravan trail and stopped by a row of figures carved from salt mined from the deposits in the surrounding hills.
Shan was not certain why he found the eroded, almost shapeless sculptures of the salt shrine so calming. It must be because they were so old, yet seemed to live again, he had suggested to Lokesh when they had walked along the four-foot-high figures.
His old friend, who made a point of whispering into the ear of each eroded saint—or at least into the middle of each amorphous head—had laughed. “Not live again, Shan,” the aged Tibetan had corrected. “It is because they have lived all these years. These were placed before the Buddhist came. They are Bon,” he explained, referring to the animist religion that had preceded, then blended with, Buddhism in the land. “From when all gods were gods of nature and all creatures rejoiced that they were instruments of the gods.” He affectionately stroked a rounded, pinkish head. “They may be asleep but they have not abandoned us, despite our lack of respect.”
The old man with the bright eyes had stroked his wispy white beard, then gestured Shan to bend before one of the weather-beaten figures. “Listen!” he had instructed. “It speaks to you.”
Shan had earnestly tried to hear something as he lowered his ear to where he supposed the mouth should be. “I guess I don’t speak the language,” he had conceded at last. “What does it tell me?”
“Be!” Lokesh had declared with a hearty laugh. “Just be! Exercise the gift of life granted to you! Be joyful, be honest, be true! Be the god that lives within you!”
Shan now stood before the same salt figure and bent, trying in vain to hear its wisdom. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. He had been losing his connection to the god inside ever since he’d been pushed into the constable’s job. He was being forced to be someone he didn’t want to be, forced to be an arm of the government he loathed, forced to be the voice of authority when he had spent years defying authority.
Lokesh had seen the struggle in his eyes. His friend had paced along the line of salt figures and then finally rested his hand on top of one whose only identifiable features were the indentations of his eyes. “Here he is,” Lokesh had announced. “The constable saint.”
Shan had grinned at his friend’s gesture. “Surely there was no constable saint.”
“Surely,” Lokesh replied, “in all the ages, for all the souls, there has had to be. The truth seeker. Your patron. Your protector. Creator of justice where no justice ever existed.” The old Tibetan, himself now one of the ever-threatened ferals, had extended a piece of incense, laid it on a rock before the lumpish column of salt, and lit it with one of the stick matches he always carried for the purpose.
Now Shan walked along the row in the rising light and found the constable saint, marked by the ashes of Lokesh’s incense. He lit one of the small incense cones he often carried in his pocket and sat before his patron. He did not remember when he had felt so inadequate, so adrift. Not only was justice impossible for the crimes he had discovered, the victims themselves were impossible.
“Striving too much is as destructive as not striving at all,” his old friend had often reminded him during their years together. He had spoken the words again there at that very spot. Shan was too logical, too methodical, too committed to solving problems and inequities that were best left to the gods. It was the closest Lokesh would come to suggesting that his new responsibility would become a terrible burden, a shadow across his eternal spirit.
“It’s the only way I can see my son,” Shan had protested.
Lokesh had shrugged. “The gods will have you listen,” he had said, and pointed to the eroded salt face. “Learn to give your problem to the gods, Shan.” Then he had taken Shan’s bicycle and launched himself down the steep trail, coasting at breakneck speed. Shan ran desperately after him, convinced he would crash at the sharp cliff-top curve, but finally halted, out of breath, and just listened as the Tibetan, more than eighty years old, howled with laughter all the way to the bottom of the ridge.
Shan smiled at the memory, then began to softly chant a mantra to the constable god, losing himself in the rhythmic chant, listening to the song the wind made in the rippling grass. When he closed his eyes he kept seeing the golden saint. The gods will have you listen.
* * *
The sun was just venturing over the horizon, casting its early rays on the treetops, as Shan entered the kitchen door of the noodle shop. The little café would not open for another hour, but Ati’s uncle, Marpa, was always happy to make him a bowl of porridge. Big pots of water already boiled on the stove. Marpa, whose deep black eyes were usually lit with a smile, paused in his task of measuring out spices to pour a cup of tea for Shan, then gestured him into the empty dining room.
On his one visit to Yangkar, Lokesh had insisted on joining Shan at the window table every morning at dawn. Shan’s former prison mate enjoyed speaking with Marpa, but most of all he was enchanted by the view of the snow-covered peaks to the north, framed perfectly by the buildings at the end of the square. When the sun first hit them, the summits would glow like diamonds hovering in the sky, then the mountains would gradually emerge out of the grayness.
“It must be the way the world was formed,” Lokesh had exclaimed the first time he witnessed such a sunrise. He had seen the confusion on Shan’s face.
“But Lokesh, that would be upside down,” Shan pointed out.
“Not at all!” Lokesh patiently explained. “Because the gods would start with the pieces closest to heaven!”
Marpa brought Shan’s porridge on a tray with some pickled vegetables, then sat with his own cup of tea.
“You’ve been in Yangkar all your life?” he asked the cook.
“Except for the empty years.”
“I’m sorry?”
“When they dragged people off to one of those big collective farms near Lhasa.” Marpa grinned. “I was just a boy, but they insisted we all work the fields. Some fools in Beijing decided we had to grow cotton and maize. We told them it was too dry and the growing season wasn’t long enough, but that didn’t matter because the Chairman had willed it. Every plant shriveled up and died. At the end of the first year when officials came for inspection, the Chinese in charge brought in a truckload of cotton and ears of maize from Szechuan and put them in our storehouse. Then the inspectors awarded us a medal for best productivity in the county, though they made sure to distribute a truckload of beer first so we would be too drunk to protest.” The men exchanged a long glance. Marpa made it sound like some sort of theater of the absurd, but they both knew that life on the early collectives had been a living hell. The Tibetan tipped his cup to Shan and drank.
“Was there much fighting here when the army arrived?”
Marpa took so long to answer Shan thought he had not heard. “First the Red Guard, the teenagers with guns,” he finally replied in a near whisper. “A few months later the Red Army. If a Tibetan could find a weapon there was fighting.”
“I mean here, in the mountains around Yangkar.”
Marpa pointed toward the range framed by the square. “I heard Mrs. Weng explain to a tourist who asked about the name of the Ghost Mountains. She said they were called that because they look like ghosts in the twilight.”
“But that’s not the reason.”
The Tibetan sipped at his tea. “It was a long time ago, Shan. No concern of yours.”
“The ghosts aren’t a trick of the light,” Shan pressed.
Marpa gazed back out the window. “They called it a clearance, like they’re doing now with the herders from the high plains. Guard posts were set up, maps were handed out. No one allowed within a zone in the mountains to the north, about twenty-five square miles. They trucked a few out, old ones and children mostly. They nailed notices to the buildings here, nailed one to the main gates, nailed another to the knee of the huge carved Buddha that sat where the square is now. Funny thing was that the notices were only in Chinese and not a soul in town could read them. We didn’t understand until the next day when a herding family began taking a flock of sheep into the pastures up there. An army sniper stood on top of the old tower and killed them one by one. I don’t think they understood why their loved ones were suddenly dropping. They had never seen that kind of rifle, only old muskets that shot a hundred yards at most. They just stopped, looking back toward town in confusion as the bullets ripped into them. Wouldn’t even let us go collect the bodies, wouldn’t let us even go into the temple here to pray for them.”
“Temple?” Shan asked. There was no temple in Yangkar.
“Like I said, that was before. Not long after that they hauled us away.”
It was Shan’s turn to stare into his cup. “But it’s not army territory today. When did the restrictions get lifted?”
Marpa shrugged. “People are still scared to go up there. At first, when people were allowed back, a few went up. They found old camps with skeletons. Of dogs, of yaks, of people, just their bones circled around campfires. Killed where they lay in sleep, I guess. No one would go up after that. It was a black place, a soulless place. Then the demons came. Not often, usually on nights of a full moon. But herders still say they see demons dancing on the ridge. Demons of bones, demons with bull and horse heads, shaking bone clubs and rattles. No one dares go up anymore. A black place. A death zone. Might as well be the army’s. This is Lhadrung County,” he added with another shrug.
“What do you mean?”
“How many counties still have a military governor? How many have so many prisons run by the army? That bastard Colonel Tan runs this county like his personal fiefdom. If he wants something the army takes it.”
Shan looked back out toward the snow-covered mountains. The bodies of the murdered men were out there, in a cave below a gilded saint. Once that saint had lived there. It had not been a soulless place then. “Tan is getting old,” he ventured. “He’s been sick.” Shan saw that Marpa was confused by his words, and he flushed at the thought that they may have been taken as an apology for the despised colonel. He lifted his spoon and focused on his porridge.
Marpa rose, then hesitated. “Is it true?” he asked. “That there has been more killing up there?”
“No Tibetans,” was all Shan said.
Marpa gave a satisfied grunt and retreated. He was halfway across the room when he halted, muttering, then hurried back into the kitchen only to reemerge with a small paper sack that he dropped on Shan’s table. “Almost forgot. Baked porridge with raisins,” he explained. “Shiva sent word,” he declared. “Can’t let the furry lama go hungry.”
* * *
The door at the end of the narrow cobbled alley was flanked by painted images of a hare and a moon, a peacock, and half a dozen other astrological signs. As Shan lifted the iron latch of the door the strong scent of incense wafted outside. Shiva, a diminutive Tibetan woman of seventy years, was sought out for her skills of prediction, and when she wasn’t working on a specific commission she made sample horoscopes and sipaho, protective charms hung on doors to fend off demons. Inside the door was painted a tortoise with twelve animals on its shell, the foundation diagram used for Tibetan horoscopes.
The old woman sat cross-legged on a small carpet, working at a low easel with delicate brushes, jars of pigment scattered around her. Her face, wrinkled like a worn leather sack, lit with a smile as Shan appeared and extended the bag. She rose, tossing a cloth over her work, then motioned him toward a glass box, an old aquarium much patched with tape and wooden slats, that sat in the sunlight before the room’s only window.
“My uncle was very hungry last week,” she said and drew up the remnant of carpet that covered the open top of the cage. A small, long-legged, brown rodent squirmed out of the deep layer of sand and looked up with huge, moist eyes. Shiva was convinced that her great-uncle, once a lama, had been reincarnated in the gerbil. She had carefully explained to Shan in one of his first days in the office that in Yangkar there had been a long tradition of having all food for animals blessed by the local abbot in a weekly ceremony. Yangkar had apparently always had a special relationship with its four-legged residents, and there seemed to be quite a few who were identified as reincarnations of holy men and women.
Shan emptied the bag from Marpa onto one palm and placed the other palm over it. “Om mani padme hum,” he murmured self-consciously. There were no more abbots in the township, and Shiva had decided a constable who wore a Buddhist prayer amulet around his neck was the best substitute.
Shiva pressed her hands together in gratitude, then took the baked porridge, broke off a small piece, and dropped it in front of the gerbil. Instead of eating it, the animal stared at Shan with its large nocturnal eyes. He seemed to be accusing Shan of being a fraud. Shan backed away from the intense gaze.
“Birth or death?” he asked, nodding at the easel. Most of the astrologer’s charms were for the families of the newly born or newly dead, either of whom needed special protection as they embarked on new spiritual journeys.
“You forget I also do protective banners,” the woman replied. She hurried to the doorway. “Did you see I painted a peacock? They say it is a favorite of the Green Tara.” Shan considered her nervous gesture toward the new image, then made a quick step to her easel and, ignoring a gasp of protest from Shiva, pulled away the cloth.
It was a death chart, composed with extraordinary skill. He knelt and studied it, confused by the imagery. Such charts reflected the life of the deceased and were meant to set forth the propitious days for disposal of the body and mourning rites. Shiva had provided for a dozen small rectangular panels on the chart, half of which already contained intricate images or elegantly scripted prayers.
Shiva’s red apron touched his shoulder. She had retrieved the cover and meant to return it to the painting. “I get letters sometimes from far away, with money tucked inside and a request for a chart. There’s not many of us left, you know.”
Shan scanned the traditional prayers on the chart, then pointed to a panel containing a bird. “What is this?”
“It’s common enough to put vultures on a chart, indicating the sky burial to follow. Or garudas,” she added, speaking of the sacred bird that protected Tibetans against serpents.
“This is no garuda, Shiva. And vultures don’t have white heads. And what is this?” he asked, pointing to what looked like a semicircular fortress with high poles extending above it.
The astrologer turned away from him. He read the other words on the half-finished death chart. The burial was to be the following week, and the words for comforting disturbed souls were to be spoken for forty-nine days. When he straightened she was standing at the glass cage by the window. Her eyes were filled with moisture.
“I never asked you your uncle’s name,” he observed.
“Kapo. Uncle Kapo.”
Without really knowing why, Shan reached down into the cage. The gerbil jumped onto his palm, and he readily let Shan stroke the back of his head.
Shan lifted Kapo up and held him close to his chest. “How can you trust me to protect your Uncle Kapo’s immortal spirit, Shiva, and not trust me with a few simple explanations?”
As the old woman saw how Shan and Kapo both patiently stared at her, she smiled through her tears. “I’m scared, constable, scared for all of us.”
“Shan. Just Shan.”
“He came from far away. A nice boy. But nothing good ever happens when people from far away arrive in Yangkar.”
“American. It’s why you painted that white-headed eagle.”
Her nod was slow and melancholy.
“What is the fortress?” Shan asked as he lowered Kapo back into his cage.
Shiva stepped to a clay pot and extracted a postcard. Pittsburgh, City of Steel, said the caption across the top of the glossy photograph. It showed a cluster of skyscrapers above a point of land where two great rivers met. On the river bank opposite the towers was a large semicircular stadium that vaguely resembled the image on the chart. “His greatest joys were ships and going to that sports arena. It was like his temple. Now I have to draw a ship. But I’ve never seen a ship. I’ve never even seen the ocean. A world of nothing but water, they say.”
“Ships sail the ocean the way clouds sail the sky,” Shan offered.
The astrologer replied with a solemn shake of her head. “I can’t settle my mind around that. Everyone knows water never stays in one place. Where does it all go?”
“You met the American?” Shan asked after a moment.
“Not for long. There was going to be a feast later, next week, they said, for all of us in … for all of us. He promised he would have much more time to spend with me when we met again. He was in a hurry.”
Shan had no stomach for interrogating the woman. “But someone else came later. Who asked for the chart?”
“Her news made me weep. He was so young. A new kind of Tibetan, the kind we need now…” Her voice drifted away, then she looked up at Shan. “This is not for you, Shan. The gods will deal with it.”
“You wouldn’t write a chart without a name. I would say a prayer if I knew his name.”
“Jag … Jagob.” She struggled with the syllables, then pulled a slip a paper from her apron and handed it to Shan. “I can’t read English, but I said I would make those letter shapes.”
Jacob Taklha, he read in neat Western letters. He stared at the name in confusion. Taklha was Tibetan. “That can’t be,” Shan said. “He was American.”
Shiva kept her eyes on the gerbil. “Just a name for the death chart. Sometimes people use a nickname, even a code name.”
“What did you mean, a new kind of Tibetan?” he pressed.
Shiva was not comfortable lying. She returned to the window and silently stroked her Uncle Kapo’s back.
“When?” Shan asked. “When were you asked to do the death chart?”
Shiva hesitated. “Three days ago.”
Shan’s mind raced. They had opened the tomb of the golden saint two days before. Someone had known the day before, which was likely the very day the American had died. Someone had seen the body before it had gone into the tomb.
“What was your payment?” Shan tried.
The astrologer reached into the jar again and produced a simple gold band, a small elegant ring. “I protested that it was far too much. She said keep it, she didn’t need it anymore. Buy incense, she said. Ransom a goat in his name, build a chorten, she told me.”
Ransoming an animal to save it from slaughter was something Tibetans did to gain spiritual merit. It was not something foreigners would know about. “Where did she come from?” Shan asked. The ring had the look of a wedding band.
“I went out to eat lunch in the stables. The animals keep me calm. When I came back they were here, waiting in the alley, watching the street. She was wiping away tears. I gave her the hem of my apron and said dry them, dear girl, because I wanted to see those beautiful green eyes.”