They left before dawn so they could not be tracked from the air, Shan and Jinhua in the front of the truck, Jengtse stretched out among the tools in the back. The sun was edging over the eastern peaks as they reached the empty plain where the golden saint slept. The tomb was now surrounded by khatas, white prayer scarves fixed to the low bushes and heather in homage to the saint. The gap where the stone slab had been slid open was covered by a heavy felt blanket. On the crest of the next ridge above them a solitary man on horseback watched them. Jinhua and Shan exchanged a reluctant glance.
“Give me your flashlight,” Jinhua said. “I’ll go in.”
“No,” Shan replied, looking at the sentinel on the ridge. “I have to do it. Stay close,” he added, then stepped to the end of the tomb.
Jengtse pulled away enough of the blanket to allow Shan to lower himself against the rear wall. To his relief the face of the gilded saint had been covered by a khata. He straightened the thin carpet over the saint’s shrouded feet, then touched his gau and whispered a prayer before beginning his inspection.
Along the right side, where the American’s body had been laid, he found a few clay offering pots, their contents long ago turned to dust. Near the stone wall was an American quarter, dropped from Bartram’s pocket. Shan held it in his palm a moment, then leaned it upright on the wall so that George Washington stared at the dead saint.
He inched his way around the tomb, his back to the wall, to reach the other side, where Sergeant Ma had lain for fifty years. There were more clay pots, all smashed. The soldier had been dumped into the grave, whereas the American’s body had been carefully laid out. Whoever had done it had pushed Bartram’s cell phone into the saint’s desiccated hands. Had that simply been an act of glibness by a callous murderer, or had there been a message in that placement? Surely the killers had never expected that the tomb would be reopened. It was, he had come to realize, the perfect hiding place for a body, since only Tibetans knew about it. The devout Tibetans of Yangkar would never open the sacred tomb, and certainly would never tell Shan or any other Chinese about it. At the head of the tomb Shan spied a lump of dirty canvas he had not seen before. He knelt by the shoulders of the saint and reached for it. The rotting fabric began to disintegrate at his touch, though he was able to pull away a large piece. It held the stenciled initials PLA. People’s Liberation Army. It was a small backpack, and its meager contents lay in a dusty pile on the stone floor of the tomb now. He made out a small tin bowl with a pair of bamboo chopsticks that must have constituted the sergeant’s mess kit and, leaning against the bowl, a compact wire-bound notebook. Flakes of rust fell away from the wire binding as he opened it. Inside the thin cardboard cover was written SERGEANT MA CHU, TUNXI, ANHUI PROVINCE.
The first several pages had congealed into a single mass, but the rest were readable enough for Shan to realize it was a running letter to Ma’s family back home in Anhui. He glanced up, hearing Jengtse and Jinhua speaking at a distance, then propped his light between his arm and body and turned the pages. The sergeant missed his parents terribly and hoped to see them in a year or two. He prayed they had been able to make their long-delayed pilgrimage to the famed sacred peaks of the province, and he looked forward to making offerings of gratitude on one of the summits when he returned. Tibet, Ma observed, was a difficult land, and its people much more resentful of the Chinese than he had been told to expect.
Shan skipped to the last few pages. Ma complained of how his commander had asked him to do the impossible, to build a twenty-mile-long road at over ten thousand feet along a long ridge in less than two weeks, which was when the Bureau of Religious Affairs was to arrive to take over administration of Yangkar, then use his bulldozer for a special project at the terminus of the road. Later, the ridge was flat, the progress from the northern base faster than expected, except we lost a tread and had to stop for repairs. There was a gap of ten days before the final entry. I want to come home, Ma wrote. I am sorry for the wise ravens. I wish they could have just taken wing. Tomorrow we will be gone from this accursed place, not a day too soon. I cannot live with the ghosts.
When Shan pulled himself up from the tomb, Jinhua was fastening crime scene tape to metal pins that Jengtse was driving into the soil around the slab. On the ridge above, the sentinel had been joined by another figure on horseback, and three women in the black felt dresses favored by the herding women.
“No!” Shan stated.
“This is an official crime scene,” Jengtse protested. “They should stay away. No contamination of the evidence. I will put up signs on the slope above.”
“No,” Shan repeated and lifted a pin out of the ground. “We will satisfy our curiosity and leave.” He nodded toward the Tibetan watchers. “This is more their place than ours.”
As Jinhua pulled the blanket back over the tomb Shan collected the pins and tape, then motioned Jengtse toward an outcropping by the brush near the western edge of the plain. “Watch from up there,” he instructed his deputy, then tossed one of the pins to Jinhua and lifted another for himself. With his back to the tomb he began walking in an arc, stopping to tap the ground with the pin every five paces. Jinhua took up a parallel path a few feet away.
After a dozen steps Jinhua paused to consult the map sketched in his notebook. “No way of knowing the scale,” he pointed out. “Even if there is a ring of buried structures, we don’t know its dimensions.”
Shan jumped onto the tall rocks where Jengtse kept watch and studied the wide shelf before him. He had watched for traces of paths from the helicopter before they landed back in Yangkar and now had his own map, in his mind, of the pilgrim paths that climbed up from the valleys below. He had passed an hour in his office the night before, studying the lines he had already sketched on his big wall map, then adding those he had seen from above and transposing all the lines onto the military map he had furtively taken from the helicopter. Only the military maps had reliable topography marks. Paths never ran straight in the mountains, they followed the land. When one of the paths ran into a compressed set of lines that meant a cliff face, he had extended it along the base, then more tentatively up the most gradual slope toward the ridgeline. But the wise men who had laid out such paths centuries earlier would also have taken pilgrims past spiritual places of power, often where springs emerged within pockets of trees, which were not marked on such maps. He longed for Lokesh as he worked, for the old Tibetan always had an instinct for how pilgrims moved through the Tibetan landscape.
One of his lines descended from the high ice passes to the north, leading from the rugged lands of the old Kham Province in the north to loop the peaks above, along a long, flat ridge that would have been the likely route of Sergeant Ma’s road. The other paths came from east, west, and south, from every direction. He was convinced this was their convergence, the destination of ancient pilgrims. Pilgrims had been coming here for centuries. It had not always been the Plain of Ghosts.
The northern edge of the little plain, half a mile long, ended with a sheer drop into a chasm that extended hundreds of feet before disappearing into black shadow. When he climbed down from the rocks, he led Jinhua across the grassy plain to the chasm. The lieutenant took one look into the abyss below and backed away. “It’s the kind of meditation site many monks would prefer, sitting by a shrine at the edge of emptiness,” Shan explained. He counted five steps from the cliff face and tapped the ground again with his pin. After two more steps he halted and repeated the motion, raising a hollow echoing sound from below.
He knelt, scratching with the metal rod enough to expose a stone slab, then loosened soil along its side to reveal its chiseled edge. The slab of granite seemed identical to that which had entombed the gilded saint, and all but confirmed that they had found the mysterious site of circled chortens that had been drawn by a Red Guard cadre decades before and the building complex they had enclosed. The chortens had been built over tombs. If this was the boundary on the north and that of the saint on the west, then the ring of shrines was much bigger than he or Jinhua had expected.
Jengtse whistled to Shan and pointed toward the slope. The Tibetans were approaching the plain. He could not hear what they were shouting, but their anger was unmistakable.
Pushing the soil back into place, he erected a small cairn of stones to mark the slab, then continued his probing, walking an imagined arc that connected the two known tombs. Jinhua soon joined him, tapping the ground on a parallel path. Within a quarter hour they had discovered two more slabs, marking each with small cairns. Shan could see that the tombs were arranged in an oval that extended at least six or seven hundred paces at its longest axis.
He watched Jinhua continue, feeling a sudden emptiness. He desperately wished that Lokesh were with him. The old Tibetan had warned him again and again not to be deceived by appearances. This was not just some barren, empty cemetery lost in the vastness of the mountains. There was an essence here that Shan could only glimpse, a power that he could not name, and that the old Tibetans watching him would never share with him. He felt inadequate to the homage he sensed the site deserved. More than anything he wished he could sit with Lokesh at his side and meditate, perhaps recite mantras, and touch the ancient spirits of the place. But all he had was a resentful deputy and a nervous Public Security officer.
After Jinhua had located two more slabs, Shan called him back, concerned about giving too much away and even more about the onlooking Tibetans. He was not certain Jinhua had even recognized their resentment. Certainly he had not noticed the stones landing twenty feet away, thrown by an angry old woman.
* * *
He dropped Jinhua and Jengtse at the station, then, saying he had forgotten that he promised Mrs. Weng to patrol the southern roads, sped back out of town. He headed north, stopping at the base of the first high ridge that defined the forbidden zone. Demons were striding those hills, the Tibetans believed. The American had drawn a map that, without his knowledge, led directly into the heart of their lair.
Shan sat in his truck, studying the yellowed finger bone he had found where Nyima had been attacked. It seemed so genuine that he had first taken it to be an actual bone but later, under a lens in his office, he had seen that it was an intricately carved wooden replica of a bone. He had seen such fingers, such hands, even entire wooden skeletons before, usually sewn onto backing of black fabric. They had been designed for the elaborate demon dancers that had once featured prominently in Buddhist festivals.
Beside the wooden bone in the rocks where Nyima had been attacked had been a broken column of pink salt, like the one he had seen left as an offering with the dead men in the cave and on Nyima’s altar. He knew of only one place locally where pink salt was found. He stepped out of the truck and began climbing. At the top he took out his compass and the map he had found in the dead American’s room, the line-of-sight map for the cell tower. Shan penciled in the two sites he already knew, the mountain pass and the Plain of Ghosts, then surveyed the landscape and set out toward the northwest, to intersect the line.
After half an hour he reached an old trail and, minutes later, rounded an outcropping and froze in alarm. The construction before him was built like an archway between two of the highest rock formations, made from thin limbs bound with leather straps. From it hung a human skull, several human arm and leg bones, and over a dozen pieces of cloth. He grabbed one of the windblown cloths. It was a crudely drawn image of an angry leopard god, a curse. All of the tattered pieces of cloth held similar curses. He was standing at the entry to the forbidden land, on the most likely trail from Yangkar.
The taboo wasn’t a mere legend or rumor. The bones and curses made it real, or at least made it clear the taboo was being enforced by flesh-and-blood humans. To either side of the arch were more charms, inscribed in paint on the flat faces of rocks. He bent over each, trying to understand. The charms on the stones were different. They were demon destroyers. Someone was actively opposing the demons. He hesitated over the last of the countercharms, positioned so it would only be seen by someone who had walked through the gate. The silk prayer scarf on which the charm was written was tied through the eye sockets of a sheep skull, which was nodding in the wind, balanced on a Chinese bayonet.
Minutes later he found what he had been looking for, a recently made cairn that lined up with other marks on his map. Under the flat rock at the top of the cairn was a paper torn from a notebook with three numbers: 700, 1300, and 1900. Jacob Bartram had left a reminder at the cairn. Along the bottom of the paper was a short note. See you soon, Jig girl. Underneath, in a different hand, was a penciled note. OK, it said. 700.
Jacob Bartram had waited there, and while waiting had cleared a small circle around the cairn, even dragged a flat rock to the edge as a seat. Shan sat on it, studying the circle, then investigated a glint under a small heather bush. A pack of chewing gum with an English label had fallen underneath. A foot away he found an elongated wooden bulb. It was another carved finger bone, a bigger one than that he had found where Nyima had been attacked, as if from further down the same finger. Did the demon even know one of its fingers was separating? Once the tip of a finger on one of the old suits was removed, the others, held on by knotted threads, would be easily loosened.
On the opposite side of the circle he found several clumps of broken heather. Underneath one he discovered three unused cigarettes, of cheap, acrid tobacco.
He paced the circle and let the pieces fall into place. The Jig girl Jacob had expected had arrived and had written a confirmation for a call the next morning. But then she had been attacked. Had she successfully defended herself? The demon had lost a finger bone and three Chinese cigarettes.
On the cairn he discovered a pinkish smudge. He wet a finger and tasted it. Salt. Once salt in Tibet had been the most valuable commodity in trade, the reason for months-long caravans, a source of wealth and a source of offerings. Now, somehow, it had become a link between murders and demons.
He reached the salt shrines after another steady climb and looked down on the curving cliff-side trail he used to reach it on his bicycle. He walked along the line of eroded salt saints, pausing to give a mantra to the one Lokesh had dubbed the constable saint, then followed the line formed by the row of saints, for the first time exploring the terrain above the shrine. He quickly discovered a fallen statue, which had been lying on the ground so long its salt was leaching into the soil, killing the plants around it. He searched for similar circles of dead plants and found three more. When standing, the figures would have defined a slow arc pointing toward a cliff face with a dark shadow in the center of its base, a cavern.
The entrance in the cliff was flanked by two more of the salt sculptures, eroded so severely he could only discern the vague suggestion of heads and arms. Inside the entry chamber were dozens of the small salt offerings and the wooden molds used to make the cylinders. To his surprise two butter lamps burned inside, making the pink walls glow with warm, soft light. He lifted one and ran a finger along a wall. It was salt.
Extending the lamp, Shan followed a passage, its air growing strangely warmer as he walked, then emerged into a huge cavern. Thangkas hung from the wall, old paintings of the Tara goddess in her many forms, their edges encrusted with salt. More lamps illuminated the center of the chamber, and to his great surprise he saw a large pool from which wisps of steam rose. Oddly, he smelled tobacco.
“I don’t think a Chinese has ever been in here,” a woman said.
The words echoed off the walls, and it took a moment for Shan to realize they had come from the pool. Only Lhamo’s head was visible above the surface of the thermal water.
“It’s the ancient healing spring,” she explained with a grin, “used by the caravans.”
“I have read,” came another voice from the shadows at the end of the pool, “that they brought sick sheep in too, the sheep that carried their bags of salt. The warm mineral water is a restorative.” The voice grew louder, and Trinle appeared, his head gliding above the shimmering surface.
“We are in the forbidden zone,” Shan observed.
“We’ve been coming here since long before that taboo,” Trinle replied with a grin that showed his missing teeth. “We have an understanding with these gods.”
Shan walked along the edge of the pool. “You are the ones who put the countercharms at that gate,” he suggested. The two old Tibetans offered silent, serene smiles. “The skull of a sheep on a Chinese bayonet. I am not sure what demon you meant that for.”
Trinle began rubbing a block of pink salt on his wife’s shoulder.
“If you think it is mere mortals scaring people, why don’t you tell the town? Why keep the fear alive?” Trinle grinned again and Shan answered his own question. “Because you are ferals. You oppose the men who pretend to be gods but you don’t fight the taboo.”
“A forbidden land is a sanctuary to us,” Lhamo confirmed.
Shan turned back to the wall and paced along the old thangkas. “A forbidden land is also a sanctuary for old secrets,” he suggested. He paused at a hanging that presented a depiction of the local geography, centered around the cavern and salt shrine. He could clearly see the line of salt saints, painted oversized to emphasize their importance. They all actually had faces. To the southeast he saw something that seemed to be a fortress that must have been the gompa at Yangkar, to the northwest a small flat plateau. He pointed to it. “The Plain of Ghosts?” he asked.
“No, no,” came Lhamo’s voice. He heard the water dripping, and the aged woman was beside him, pointing to another plateau, slightly more distant, with a solitary temple painted blue. “When this was done it was only the Temple of the Pure Water, where a different type of healing was being done. Later it became the famed college.”
Shan heard a wheezing laugh from Trinle. He turned and recoiled, backing away from Lhamo as she faced him. “Did you see where I put my cigar, constable?” she asked. The old woman was naked.
* * *
When he arrived back at the town square, the aged Red Flag sedan was in front of the clerk’s office, the motor running. Inside the office he found the mechanic’s son, Gyatso, with a piece of thin paper over the framed map of central Tibet, tracing a route from Yangkar.
Wu, the town clerk, nervously looked up from his desk. “Gyatso says he has to visit a sick aunt near Lhasa.”
The young Tibetan spun about and stuffed the paper in his pocket. “Good maps are hard to find,” the youth said in an uneasy voice. He seemed to always wear a guilty expression in Shan’s presence.
“Have you been here the entire time?” Shan asked Wu.
“Yes, yes,” Wu said, then hesitated. “Except when he asked for a tax form from the back office.” The clerk saw Shan’s frown. “His family does own a business, constable,” Wu reminded Shan.
Shan just turned and left the building, quickening his pace as he heard the mechanic’s son hurrying behind him. He reached the car just in time to pull a piece of paper from the dashboard. It was a hand-drawn map of back roads just north of Lhasa, leading to a cluster of barracks-like buildings enclosed in a large square. Shan looked up in surprise at Tserung’s son, who carefully avoided eye contact, then stepped aside to pace around the car. He opened the rear door.
“I have heard of old monks and nuns with charms that could make them invisible,” Shan said to the figure trying to crouch low on the floor, “but I’m afraid you haven’t mastered the art, Shiva.”
“She didn’t understand,” the astrologer blurted out as Shan helped her from the car.
Shan waved the paper at her. “This is the big internment camp by the Kyichu River. I’ve been there. It’s crawling with Public Security and Religious Affairs officers. If they catch you trying to interfere with a detainee they’ll grab you. They can put you behind wire for a year without even asking a magistrate.”
Shiva stared at Shan’s prayer amulet as she replied. “I did a chart. There are bad times coming to that camp. We can’t let a young nun just throw herself away.…” Shan followed her eyes as they shifted toward the pile of blankets on the backseat. He pulled away the top blanket to reveal Nyima curled up on the seat. Her bandages were soaked with blood and her gaze was clouded with pain. She had escaped her doctor’s care.
Shan approached Tserung’s son, backing him against the sedan, and extracted a piece of carefully folded paper that extended from his pocket. It was a blank piece of official stationary from the clerk’s office.
“What were you going to write?” Shan demanded.
“Not me,” Gyatso mumbled, not looking at Shan. “Shiva. She knows Chinese.”
Shan turned to the astrologer. “Nyima said she was going to ride her donkey to Lhasa,” Shiva explained. “It would have killed her. She said she didn’t care, that there always had to be a young robe to take over for the old robe or all is lost.”
Shan stared at the astrologer as realization struck. Someone had been substituted for the green-eyed woman in the detainee truck. Rikyu had been missing since that day. He waved the empty sheet in front of Shiva.
“Mr. Wu does tax records,” she explained. “Just a note to say tax records have been located for prisoner twelve. If she paid taxes she can’t be unregistered, right?”
It was, Shan had to admit, an imaginative ploy. He stuffed the letterhead into his pocket. “The first thing they would do is call Mr. Wu for confirmation. It wouldn’t just mean a year’s administrative detention for you, it would be forgery of state records. Five years hard labor at least. And you,” he stated to Nyima, “an unregistered nun committing conspiracy against the government. You would never survive the sentence they gave you.”
He gazed at the frightened Tibetan women, so wise in the ways of the spirit and so innocent in the ways of the world, but always so relentless in their hope. “Gyatso,” he said without looking at the young Tibetan, “you will drive Nyima back to the amchi’s house. Nowhere else.” He turned to Jengtse, who was watching with amusement from the steps. “Did you say my predecessor had a dress uniform?” he asked his deputy.
“Constable Fen? Sure, he kept it in the back closet in the guesthouse.”
“Brush it off. I’m going to Lhasa in the morning.”
* * *
He waited until two hours after nightfall before knocking on the back door of the garage. Jinhua waited outside as Shan spoke with Tserung, listening as the mechanic argued, then silently followed as the Tibetan, muttering his disapproval of a knob entering his vault and cursing his stone-brained son for ever letting Jengtse know about its secrets, led them through his junkyard. The compound, surrounded by high stucco walls, extended farther than Shan expected, and as they reached the back the junk changed. Old car parts and rusty truck bodies gave way to appendages. Shan stepped over a graceful six-foot-long bronze leg, passed a heavily dented statue of a seated Buddha, then found Tserung waiting at the rear wall beside a pair of bronzed hands pressed together. The hands were nearly three feet long, meaning the statue of the deity they had belonged to must have been massive. Tserung disappeared into the shadow behind the hands and Shan followed, discovering a narrow set of stairs that led to a crude, rough-hewn door set in a narrow, irregular opening that seemed to have been chiseled through a stone wall. Inside the door he found himself on a landing at the top of a second flight of stone stairs, cupped from centuries of use, that to the left led back under the junkyard. To the right stones and earth had collapsed into a passage, cutting off what must have been a connection with the old gompa.
He recognized the smell of long-neglected chapels, the dust and musty air mixed with faint scents of the jasmine, aloe, and cardamom used in incense, cut by the slightly acrid smell of butter lamps. Tserung pulled the door shut behind their small party and joined Shan at the bottom of the stairs. Jinhua turned up the flame in the lantern he carried, revealing a long corridor whose walls and vaulted ceiling had once been adorned with colorful images. Although faded and cracked, with several sections of plaster fallen to the floor, there were enough claws, talons, fierce eyes, and flaming bodies to tell them they were passing along ranks of protector demons. The underground complex had not always been an archive. It had been a labyrinth of gonkangs, small chapels where the most savage of the demon deities were worshiped, where, the devout had believed, the fierce deities actually resided. In the old gompas novices were never allowed near such gonkangs, for they were not trained sufficiently to deal with the terror. In many, graduation to the higher orders required spending a night alone in such a chapel.
Tserung guided them to the end of the hundred-foot corridor, which ended not in more sacred images but a wall of debris. Shan turned. They had passed six separate chapels, three on each side, and a quick glance inside each had shown them to be lined with makeshift shelves, each jammed with records. The chapels had been urgently turned into a secret archive, which had then been sealed by the collapse of its passages into the gompa. At the entry to each chapel the stubs of unlit candles sat jammed into heavy iron lug nuts.
“The only records in Mandarin are in the first chapel, nearest the stairs,” the Tibetan explained. “Everything else is older, in Tibetan.”
Shan looked at the oil-stained mechanic in surprise. He spoke like a curator. “How are they organized?” Shan asked.
In answer Tserung led him into the nearest of the chapels. The shelves, constructed in front of elaborately painted walls, held scores of peche, Tibetan loose-leaf books, each in a long wooden box or wrapped in its own silken cover.
“The ones in blue and red cloth, or in boxes, are the usual scriptures or teachings of the lamas,” the Tibetan said. “But the ones in brown wrappers seem to be administrative records. Anything that’s been read has gone right back where it was found on the shelves.”
“You’ve studied them then?”
Tserung seemed embarrassed. “I was the firstborn son. For as far back as memory goes my family always sent the firstborn to be a monk.” He shrugged. “I come down sometimes with a thermos of tea and some candles when the wind howls at night. It’s quiet here. I read what I can. My mother would like that,” he added self-consciously. He put a hand on one of the covers, raising a cloud of dust. “Time for them to go, I guess.”
“Go?” Shan asked.
“Religious Affairs will come for them now, with one of their clean-up crews. I don’t blame you, constable, I understand. It’s your job. It was only a matter of time.”
Shan hesitated, hurt by Tserung’s conclusion. “Religious Affairs will only come if someone reports these,” Shan observed, and turned to Jinhua, who had followed them. “Are you going to report this discovery, lieutenant?”
Jinhua stared hard at Shan, then shrugged. “Report what? A bunch of scrap paper buried under a yard full of scrap? What’s the point? They are already in a junkyard.”
Surprised delight rose on the mechanic’s face.
“When we leave tonight,” Shan said, “pile more debris over the stairwell.” Tserung’s grin blossomed into a wide smile. “Meanwhile,” Shan said, “let’s see if the books can make the past live for us.” He pulled a small flashlight from his pocket as Jinhua began lighting candles. “Room by room. Jinhua in the first, with the Chinese records. I’ll go to the last. Take an hour, and we’ll meet by the stairs.”
“What are we looking for?” Tserung asked.
Shan and Jinhua exchanged a glance. “Records of particularly valuable artifacts,” Shan ventured. “Inventories of the gompa’s property. Evidence of what the gompa was like in, say, 1960. And evidence of who was here in 1966.”
As Shan probed the manuscripts, he felt Lokesh at his shoulder, urging Shan to slow down, to study the elegant little birds painted in one margin, the gold-leafed lotus blossoms worked into the title page of another. The old Tibetan would spend weeks in such a place, studying this archive of the spirit, as he called collections of old peche. He found himself whispering an apology as he quickly scanned another book, whether to the old scribes who had labored over it or to Lokesh he was not sure. After opening several aged sutras he tested Tserung’s theory, confirming that the brown shrouds covered records related to the business of the gompa. He studied the stacks and lifted out the book on the bottom shelf, from the farthest corner.
He stared at the date recorded at the bottom of the parchment page. 1959. It seemed much older. Suddenly he realized it would have been stated in the Buddhist calendar. He did a quick calculation and with a thrill realized the book had been written six hundred years earlier. He lowered himself onto a three-legged stool, the only furniture in the chamber, and eagerly began to read. The writer interspersed Buddhist poems and proverbs between reports on construction of buildings. A train of four hundred mules laden with squared building stones and timbers had departed for the Pure Water monks, he read, then an account of payments, usually made in measures of barley. The passage was followed by verses from Milarepa, the poet saint, then an account of artists arriving from Lhasa who were waiting for the blessing of the abbot before proceeding up the trail. A list of villages that had sent laborers came next, and a description of the huge camp set up to accommodate them. There were calculations in the margin, then the text continued with a description of how thirty strong men were assigned to each of the huge beams that had arrived from the forests of Kham. It was, he gradually realized, a report by one of the engineer monks who had been responsible for construction of the thousands of shrines, temples, and gompas that had once dotted the Tibetan landscape.
He rewrapped the journal in its cover and lifted another volume wrapped in dirty silk. It was dated sixty years earlier than the prior volume. The construction of the main gompa, described as one of the most beautiful in Tibet, was still under way. A sculptor from India had arrived in Yangkar and was carving stone dakinis that would grace the corners of the main sanctuary, teaching Tibetan apprentices as he did so. Shan lingered over a sketch of a chorten surrounded by seated monks with a lama laying a hand on the rounded dome, as if blessing it.
Three more manuscripts related to the early years of the great gompa of Yangkar and the construction of structures in the mountains called the Temple of Abundant Life, the Healing Shrine, and later the Pure Water Sanctuary.
By the time he joined the others, Shan had reviewed another dozen volumes, all of which were similar construction chronicles spanning three hundred years. Jinhua had found reports from the eighteenth century about great caravans of the sick arriving in Yangkar, several bringing scores of the sick and one bringing the Dalai Lama with his ailing dog. Yangkar, and the Pure Water complex in the mountains, had become a center for healing all creatures.
Jinhua had made some sense of the most recent records. “All Religious Affairs and the army,” he reported, pointing to notebooks inscribed in Mandarin. He had made two stacks, one of the Chinese records, one of what Tserung had told him were the most recent Tibetan records. Shan pointed in query to the solitary peche between the two stacks. “That’s exactly how it was in the stacks, between the Tibetan and Chinese,” the lieutenant explained.
Shan opened the brown cover. “From more than a hundred years ago,” he said, then made another silent calculation of the exact date. 1897. “Why would that be here?” He paused, looking at the Chinese notebooks. “And who brought the Chinese records into this vault?”
Tserung spoke from the doorway. “I did. Years ago, when the town clerk had thrown them in the trash.” The mechanic motioned them into the corridor, where he had brought two wooden chests, each twice as long as the usual peche container. From the first he produced a manuscript cover carved with intricate images of gods and goddesses. From the second the mechanic pulled a large square of silk over six feet on each side. In its center dragons had been embroidered, surrounding two crossed dorje, the thunderbolt symbol used in Tibetan ritual, done in golden thread.
“A throne cover,” Shan declared in an awed tone. “Very old. It could have been used when the Dalai Lama was—” His words died away as a piece of plaster fell out of the ceiling. With a terrible ripping sound three long cracks suddenly appeared in the walls. Tserung tossed the cloth to Shan and bolted up the stairway. Shan dropped the cloth into the chest and quickly followed the mechanic up into the cool night air, spying Tserung as he ran toward the street. The rumbling of heavy engines and metallic screeching filled the night. From somewhere a woman screamed. Shan abruptly halted, his chest tightening as he saw Tserung freeze at the head of the alley, then collapse onto his knees. An army tank rolled past his garage.
* * *
Shan walked the streets in the cold gray dawn. The army was gone, leaving cracked roads and quaking Tibetans in its wake. In the night one of the nameless couriers who carried letters to Lokesh’s secret home had stopped at his house. With a stab of pain, Shan had handed him a message telling his friend to forget about coming during his son’s visit and to stay away until he wrote again.
He kicked a piece of loose asphalt to the side of the street and turned toward the sound of weeping. In an alleyway a man was trying to console an old woman, who was sobbing into his shoulder. The tank had run the length of the main street, to the far end of town, turned, and rumbled back again, leading a parade of two turreted assault vehicles and two troop carriers. Yintai, General Lau’s brutish aide, had stood in a smaller open vehicle, surveying the town with a sneer on his face, holding the roll bar in one hand and a pistol in the other, raising it against his forehead in salute as he spied Shan watching. The Tibetans of Yangkar still showed panic on their faces. Shan had tried in vain to convince a family there was no need to flee, then watched forlornly as they finished tying their possessions onto a donkey and hurried toward the mountains.
Mrs. Weng was sweeping debris away from the front of her shop. She looked up with a furious expression as he approached. “You did this! I told the Tibetans to stop building that shrine on the square!” she declared in a simmering voice. “It was too reactionary, I told them. And you did nothing! How can we have a proper town when you let people behave the way they do? We need seminars, constable, we need some of those firm teachers from Religious Affairs who can explain the new world. The Committee of Leading Citizens is writing to Lhasa today! We shall offer the town’s formal apology and petition for the instructors!”
Shan saw that the big plate glass window of her shop was broken, and bricks had fallen from the top of the front wall. She leaned on her broom and sighed, her anger burned away. “Sometimes I think I should just go live with my sister in Nanjing. But they make you pay back the pioneer bounty if you leave early. And I spent all that on my shop.”
Down the street Tibetans were futilely trying to fit pieces of macadam back into the holes chewed up by heavy treads. A tree listed precariously over a building, one of its roots snapped by the tank. Another tree in the square had fallen, crushing one of the gaming tables.
Shan avoided the station, going straight to the guesthouse where, feeling strangely numb, he put on the dress uniform. He felt a melancholy detachment, as if preparing for a funeral. He had survived by living on the fringe, out of the jaws of the machine that chewed up the souls of China. But now that machine was here, in Yangkar, and it was impossible for him to flee.
He paused outside the building. The vibration of the equipment had shaken loose some of the stucco on the converted stable. Underneath, some of the original paintwork from the days of the old monastery could be seen. A large, solitary eye stared at him, the watchful eye of Buddha that had once adorned many Tibetan buildings. His hand trembled as he touched the ancient image with a finger. He would flee, he had to flee to save his soul. He would go into hiding with Lokesh, become another feral Tibetan. He began unbuttoning his tunic.
“They should have called,” came a frightened voice over his shoulder. Jengtse was standing in the back door of the station. “He’s never done this before. The tank was just to soften us for his teeth. He’s going to chew us up and swallow us bit by bit.”
Shan pushed past his alarmed deputy, straight through the station. As he stepped out the front door, two big blocky sedans pulled up to the curb. An aide rushed to open the rear door of the first and a thin, almost gaunt figure emerged. He paced angrily along the street, studying the ruin in the square before turning toward Shan.
“Your town is a disgrace, constable,” Colonel Tan observed in a brittle voice.
Shan found himself refastening the buttons of his tunic. An older Chinese woman climbed out of the second car. It was Amah Jiejie, Tan’s steadfast assistant and closest confidant.
“The army came,” Shan replied as Amah Jiejie, leaning into the car, coaxed someone to join her. A lean, nervous figure climbed out. “A battle tank sent by…” Shan’s words choked away. Standing there in ill-fitting civilian clothes, without manacles, was his son Ko.