It was nearly two hours before they reached the amchi’s house, and Lhamo remained unconscious for the entire journey. More than once as he probed for a pulse Shan thought the worst, but as he and Ko laid her on the doctor’s table, she emitted a long moan and her hand rose to the bloody gash along her temple. Dorchen pushed her hand away, and Yara pulled back her grandmother’s hair so the doctor could wash the wound.
“A bad concussion, a broken arm, cracked ribs on the right, torn cartilage, and a ragged flesh wound on the left, but praise Lord Buddha, the shrapnel didn’t penetrate the rib cage,” the amchi explained as he completed his exam. He paused to look up. “Mother Tara give me strength!” he exclaimed in chagrin. Shan followed his gaze out the window and saw Nyima, leaning on Dingri’s arm as she played with his dogs. “He helps her too much,” Dorchen groused. “He may act the surly bully with most he meets, but he has been doting on that woman like she was his long-lost mother.” With a frustrated sigh, the doctor tapped on the window and gestured them inside, then pulled off Lhamo’s shoes to check her lower pulses.
Nyima was entering the room, one hand on Dingri’s shoulder, when Dingri stopped her. He glared at Shan, then stepped away from the nun as if embarrassed to be seen helping her. Nyima pressed a hand to her side and limped a few more steps, then froze as she saw the woman on the table. “Lhamo!” she cried and rushed to the comatose woman.
“There was”—Shan looked toward Jig Bartram as he struggled for an explanation—“an explosion at the old Red Guard camp.” He could offer no other words. He had no idea why Lhamo had darted back into the building as it was being attacked.
“But she would never go there, she knows better than…” Nyima’s words choked away as her gaze fell on the prayer amulet still clutched in the old woman’s hand. With some effort she pried the gau from Lhamo’s fingers, then rushed to the window and held it up to the sunlight. With a deep groan she sank onto the nearest bed, still staring at the worn copper and silver box, and began weeping.
Shan warily approached her and was about to comfort her when he saw the smile on the old nun’s face and realized he was seeing tears of joy.
“It is his!” Nyima declared. “It still lives!”
“I don’t understand,” Shan confessed.
“This gau, it is his! It was hidden away by the curse, don’t you see? That was the key, the secret we didn’t know. But the curse doesn’t bind foreigners! It is his!” she repeated.
“Who?”
“The abbot of Pure Water College! The gau is from the founding of the great medical college! It was given to the first abbot by the Great Fifth Dalai Lama, who blessed it and named it the seed of the sacred teachings. Inside is a relic of an ancient saint given at the consecration of the college. It’s a sign! So long as it exists, the college can be born again!” She held up the gau with the cross-hatched silver and copper pattern for Shan to see. “I told them. They didn’t believe, but I told them!”
“Told whom?” Shan asked.
Nyima held the gau against her forehead a moment, then glanced up. “The old constables. Constable Fen and Constable Bao before him.”
* * *
Shan left Ko with Lodi, asking the Tibetan boy to take him to Marpa’s café for some lunch, then stepped inside the station to make a call to Tan’s office. Jig lingered long enough for Shan to explain his intentions.
Five minutes later, he found his son at the café door. “Jig says we are going to Lhasa,” Ko observed.
The door opened and the American woman appeared holding bags of food.
“No,” Shan declared. “It is too dangerous. Not us. Me.”
“I promise not to knock you unconscious this time,” Jig said with a grin.
“I need you to protect my son.”
“I will. In Lhasa.”
“I thought you were searching for your brother’s trail, what he was investigating.”
“Aunt Nyima says one of the most joyful events in my mother’s life was a visit to the great temple in Lhasa. I want to see it, I want to experience it as my mother did. This is probably my only chance.”
“No.” Shan spoke more firmly now. “He is not allowed to leave the county.”
“You’re the constable.”
“I could tell everyone in the barracks about the temples,” Ko suggested. “It would keep the old ones entranced for a month.”
“No!” Shan insisted.
“I will be there to watch him as well,” a voice said over his shoulder. Shan turned to see Jinhua standing there. “Just give me a moment to get my own bag of dumplings.”
Half an hour later they were on the highway in Tserung’s big old sedan, with Jig and the lieutenant both asleep in the back seat.
“In that building today,” Ko suddenly said, “you held that piece of cloth like it had paralyzed you. I didn’t understand. For a moment I thought something had bit you.”
Shan offered a sad smile and turned back toward the road. “Your grandfather was a learned man,” he began after a minute, “a professor of Western history and literature at one of the big universities in Shanghai. His students adored him. His classrooms were always crowded, often with people standing in the aisles who were not even registered for the course. But when the Red Guard started targeting intellectuals, they first went after anyone with Western connections. He maintained correspondence with professors in America and Germany. That meant his name was one of the first on the lists of enemies. They put him on trial, though in the early days they just called them dialogues about proper Mao Tse-tung thought. He wasn’t worried; he had a kind, gentle heart that always gave everyone the benefit of any doubt. He even invited my mother and me to the session. I think he really thought it was going to be just a robust philosophical debate, which he always relished.
“The Red Guard had taken over the university by then, painting slogans on every wall. Making bonfires for the old paintings, school records, everything that could be stripped out of the classrooms. They put him on a stool in his classroom and demanded whether he knew the university had been started by Western missionaries in the prior century. He said, of course, it was a well-known fact, that there was a plaque on the old administration building that declared to the world as much. They demanded that he confirm that half the books in his school office were in English. He said of course, since many important Western books had not yet been translated. They declared him a puppet of the running dogs of the West and then put a dunce cap on him. That was what I found today. Once of those dunce caps the Red Guard put on those they persecuted. He said that if more of them had done their homework they would recognize that there were great truths in many books, both Chinese and Western, and reminded them that he was also a scholar of Confucius.
“My father didn’t know that Confucius had also been declared an enemy of the motherland. By then they had unearthed the grave of his direct descendant, the great Duke Yanghang, and hanged his corpse. When they reported that to him, he said that they were being very foolish and disrespectful and it was time to return to their studies.
“‘We are mightier than the Shang, the Han, the Tang, and the Chin!’ the student in charge shouted to my father. ‘Shame on you,’ my father replied, ‘mixing up the dynasties like that.’ That’s when they started beating him. They had a basket of willow switches, which they passed out, insisting my mother and I each take one.
“They had a ritual. They would ask a question and then everyone had to hit him once with a switch. By the end of the first round they had knocked off his spectacles and crushed them underfoot. When it came to mother’s turn she refused, so they brought another stool with another dunce’s cap and they hit her too. She scolded me when I refused and insisted I hit them both with the switch. She nodded her approval even as the tears streamed down her face.
“After the first round my father just stared at the wall and repeated the same thing, in English. ‘She Shamefully Chose Chinese Hand Jingles and Sinfully Sweet Tango Songs, You and Me, Chickadee.’”
“I don’t understand,” Ko said.
“It was a memory aid, a mnemonic device he taught in his English language courses to help foreign students learn the dynasties in order. Xia, Shang, Chou, Chin, Han, Jin, and so on.” The scene was seared into Shan’s memory so deeply he could still smell the choking mixture of chalk dust, blood, the smoke of the endless Red Guard cigarettes, and the stolen beer that fueled many of the interrogators. His words tore at the scab over the old wound.
He did not know how long he had lapsed into silence. “We got sent away,” he said at last. “We were part of the Stinking Ninth—that’s what Mao called the intellectuals—and all the Ninth that weren’t killed outright were sent away for reeducation.” He looked over at his son, who was staring at him. “I’m sorry. It was a long time ago.”
“In that building with all those gaus,” Ko answered. “It was just yesterday.”
* * *
Shan walked past the little shop in Lhasa twice before stepping inside. GENUINE TIBETAN MEMORIES, said the sign over the door, in English, Chinese, German, French, and, in much smaller letters, Tibetan. In the window were plastic nesting dolls garishly painted like a laughing Buddha, framed photos of the Potala, a painting of a giant yak standing beside Mount Everest, and, incongruously, a series of deities painstakingly carved out of walnut shells. He glanced uneasily in the direction of the Jokhang Temple. Jig Bartram had assured him she would not let Ko leave her sight, and Jinhua had vowed to watch over both. “Let the boy be a tourist for a while,” the American had cajoled and assured Shan that his son was safer there than in Yangkar as she led him toward the temple complex. Shan pulled his windbreaker tighter over his tunic and stepped inside the shop.
He feigned interest in a rack of postcards as a cheerful, elderly man waited on a Western tourist. The proprietor seemed a weary but patient man, whose balding head held patches of gray hair along the temples. Shan had been surprised that the address given to him over the phone by Amah Jiejie had been in the commercial district, but then he had realized that the meager pension of a constable would never by itself support living in the city.
When the tourist left, Shan chose four postcards of Lhasa’s shrines and stepped to the counter. He exchanged small talk with the owner about the weather—the sun was welcome, but the wind was, as ever, too strong. As Shan extended a handful of coins, the shopkeeper hesitated a moment, then quickly glanced outside as if expecting Shan to have a companion.
“Have you come far, then?” the man asked in a level voice.
“From the north,” Shan ventured. “The land of buried treasures.”
The owner moved around the counter and paced along the front window, studying the street before turning to Shan. “Are you here to arrest me or just interrogate me?” he asked. “If it’s arrest then I would like to feed my cat first.”
Shan cocked his head, and the shopkeeper pointed to his wrist, where his windbreaker had slipped up his arm, revealing his tunic. “I’m the one who sewed up that tear on the sleeve. I seem to recall it was made by one of those overzealous hounds of the amchi.” The old man stared at him expectantly.
“I’m sorry,” Shan said. “My name is Shan and you must be Constable Bao. I just have a few questions on a matter of mutual interest.”
“Not an official visit, then?” the retired constable asked.
“You were the constable of Yangkar for two decades until you retired four years ago. I became constable less than four months ago. The last constable should have lasted much longer.”
Sadness grew in the old man’s eyes. Bao studied him in silence, then stepped to the door, inserted a CLOSED sign into a slot by the handle, and gestured Shan toward the curtain behind the counter. “Business is, as ever, slow. I can’t afford a place on the busy shopping streets. Most of my customers are tourists who have lost their way. Let’s have tea.”
Shan followed Bao into a sparsely furnished chamber that was a combined sitting room and kitchen. Through a gap in a narrow curtained doorway, he glimpsed a bed with a large cat sleeping on it. He sat at the small table and answered Bao’s questions about mutual acquaintances in Yangkar as his host prepared tea. Was Mr. Hui still trying to grow poppies in his garden, was the carpet factory still spinning its own wool, and did the Mao statue in the square still anonymously acquire a blindfold of prayer scarves every few weeks?
Bao had an easygoing, unguarded nature, and Shan liked him at once. They laughed over the clumsy efforts of the Committee of Leading Citizens to assert authority and the way Chinese language signs often went missing along the roads. As he poured a second cup of tea, Bao saw the way Shan gazed at a little Buddhist altar near the bedroom entry.
“My parents’ marriage was arranged by the government,” Bao volunteered. “My father was a soldier from Manchuria who signed on to the pioneer program to get land in Tibet if he agreed to settle here. When he went to sign the papers, there was a line of former soldiers and a line of Tibetan women. As each man signed, he got the next woman in line.” Bao shrugged. “They learned to love each other, in their own way. When I was ten, my father dismantled the altar my mother always kept in the kitchen, saying it was a bad influence on me. My mother said the gods would punish him, and he said the Tibetan gods had been defeated by the motherland’s army. She said he obviously didn’t understand the way of the gods in our house, and she went to sleep with the sheep in the stable. Every night for a month she slept with the sheep, then that altar magically reappeared. She came back to his bed, and there was never a word spoken about it. Later on she began taking me to shrines every few months.” He tipped his cup to Shan. “Lha gyal lo.”
“Lha gyal lo,” Shan echoed with a grin.
Bao put his cup down, crossed his hands, and waited.
“Constable Fen had been your deputy,” Shan began.
“For a dozen years, yes. Colonel Tan wasn’t sure about my recommendation that he succeed me, said he was too Tibetan. But I assured Tan that Fen was loyal enough to get the job done.” Bao paused and fixed Shan with a meaningful gaze. “It wasn’t in his nature to work hard, but he was always an honest policeman. The people felt comfortable with him.”
“Tan criticizes me as well. He loathes what he calls my overactive imagination.”
“Which you came here to demonstrate.”
Shan sipped at his tea. “What if we imagined Constable Fen didn’t die in a road accident?”
Bao’s face remained impassive. “What if we imagined that a miserable hard-labor prisoner could be redeemed and established as a constable, if only in forgotten Yangkar?”
Shan had been a fool to think Bao would no longer have friends in Lhadrung. “Colonel Tan never stops finding new ways to punish me.”
“So you are here to pay him back.” A grin slowly formed on Bao’s face. “A noble cause!” He rose and retrieved two small glasses and a bottle of cheap bai jin whiskey from a cabinet. He did not speak until he had served out the liquor and downed a swallow. “But because I like you, Comrade Shan, I tell you that matter is closed. Public Security investigated and recorded it as a traffic accident. Public Security’s word is final. That is our truth, as they would say whenever I tried to argue with them.”
“It is not officially possible to murder a constable,” Shan agreed.
Bao looked into his glass. “I had a debate once with Marpa at the noodle shop,” the shopkeeper declared. “He said he was struggling to understand this strange Chinese notion of murder. He said when someone was destined by the gods to die, they died, that one cause of death is much the same as another.”
“Maybe it depends on which gods.”
“Sorry?”
“Did Constable Fen die because he offended the gods of Tibet? Or was it the gods of Beijing?”
Bao slowly shook his head and sighed. “You must have balls the size of Everest.”
“Do you know Nyima?”
“The hermit nun who lives up in the Ghost Mountains?”
“She was beaten nearly to death. Nearby we found a murdered American hidden in a tomb with a Chinese soldier who died fifty years ago.”
Bao’s breath caught. He lowered his glass. “That’s quite a mouthful, comrade. You do have an impressive imagination.”
“I think they died because of the same secret that killed Constable Fen.”
Bao stared into his glass for several breaths before looking up. “Drop this, Shan, I beg you. There is no possible good that can come to you or to Yangkar.”
Shan returned his level gaze. “But you wouldn’t have dropped it.”
Bao sighed. He lifted the bottle as if to fill his glass again, then reconsidered and screwed the cap back on before rising to lock the back door. “Talk to me.”
Half an hour later Shan had finished his story and Bao was making a fresh pot of tea. He filled Shan’s cup, but before sitting he retrieved an envelope from his bedroom. “Fen came to me a week before he died,” Bao began. His voice was a near whisper. “He was always excitable, but I never saw him so worked up. He had grown very fond of the people of Yangkar, would talk about what they called the empty years, even drew sketches of how he imagined the old gompa to look, though the townspeople and I discouraged it. No one in Yangkar talks about the old times, the old places. People sealed their memories up in a vault in their minds and threw away the key, just as Chinese refuse to remember the years of famine caused by Mao. It was like Fen wanted to rip open old scars.
“But he wouldn’t stop. An aged Tibetan came to him one night, a stranger who had signs of hard travel and was anxious to move on. He just said he had made a promise to a friend and handed these papers to Fen, then walked back into the night.” Bao wrapped his hand around the neck of the bai jin bottle, looking at it longingly, then rose and returned it to the cabinet.
“Fen said what he had would change everything. He said he couldn’t stay, but wanted me to have a copy of the papers. He turned to go and said the spirits of the Ghost Mountains had been asleep too long. I was alarmed. I asked him to stay the night. He wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It’s a miracle,’ he said, over and over. ‘It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle.’ Just as he opened the door to leave he stopped, then ran back and traded, gave me the originals and took the copies. ‘It’s a miracle,’ he whispered one last time, and I detected fear in his voice. I never saw him again.”
Shan opened the envelope and withdrew five sheets of paper, arranging them side by side starting with the topmost on the left. The papers seemed heavily used, even worn thin in places, but the penciled drawings were neat and clear. The first was of a large complex of elegant buildings, surrounded by an oval of chortens, each on a large slab of squared stone. The largest structure was not in the center but at the northern side of the compound, and although it reminded him of a traditional temple, its windows and balconies indicated it was more likely a building of classrooms or sleeping quarters. It stood at the head of a courtyard with walkways around carefully tended plantings, in the center of which was a row of large prayer wheels on a wooden frame. All the other buildings were smaller, traditional structures with inwardly slanted walls and hash marks sketched on the roofs that seemed to indicate tiles.
The artist had drawn tiny images on the walls, apparently representing the traditional symbols often painted on the walls of treasured buildings. Shan made out an eye, a half moon, and what may have been a lotus. There were smudged words along the bottom of each page, and smudged images along the sides. He made out clouds and birds and what may have been a turtle with a snake in its mouth. Over the largest building a rectangle had been drawn with a tree inside it. It reminded Shan of the trees of medicine used by medical instructors.
His heart raced with realization. He was looking at the phantom medical school, Pure Water College.
The next sheet showed the large building missing, as well as the six northernmost chortens. In the lower left corner was inscribed the Arabic numbers 239. The remaining structures had been sketched in, though without the fastidious detail of the first drawing. The third page showed half the remaining buildings and chortens gone, with the number 249 in the corner. The fourth, with the number 259, showed only one building left, a squat structure near the southern end of the compound, and only empty slabs where the chortens had stood. Over it was an unfamiliar symbol that looked like two crossed feathers. The last drawing was markedly different and seemed to have no connection to the others. It simply showed three rows of dancing figures, depicted top to bottom, the first of humans wearing robes with arms outstretched, the second of horses with their legs extended, the third of what looked like crows. Shan stared at the drawings a long time. The crows weren’t dancing, he decided, but struggling to fly. “Do you know exactly when the Red Guard and army were in the Ghost Mountains? It would have been sometime in 1966.”
Bao gestured to the papers. “I think I know when they left. Late September. Say after the twenty-fifth.”
Shan looked back at the sets of three digits. 259 could indeed be the twenty-fifth day of the ninth month.
“And these?” Shan asked, pointing to very small pairs of numbers he discovered at the bottom right corner of each page. 29 on the first, 45 on the second, then 37, 78, 94.
“No idea. It looks like they were added later, as an afterthought, perhaps by the messenger.” Bao reached across the table and gathered up the papers. “Leave it, Shan,” the old man said as he returned the sheets to the envelope. “The Tibetans believe the Plain of Ghosts is a powerful spiritual place. Some spirit places reach out to humans with signs. There is a place in the north that is said to speak to humans with rainbows of different colors and sizes. There is one to the west that expresses itself with sounds, moans from the center of the earth, though I suspect it’s just a trick of the winds. The Plain of Ghosts expresses itself in death, that’s how it sends its messages.”
“But that leaves the essential question,” Shan said.
“What question?”
“Are the messages for the dead or the living?”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Do we just accept the deaths and ignore their message? Surely the mountain doesn’t simply want to teach us how to mourn.”
“Over a million have died in Tibet of unnatural causes these past decades, Comrade Shan. Tell me why any of them died.”
“I am not talking about statistics. I am talking about one man. Fen was a friend of yours. And you know why he died. He discovered that a witness to the atrocities at the Plain of Ghosts was still alive.”
* * *
To Shan’s great relief he found Jig Bartram and Ko drinking tea with Jinhua in the Barkhor Square café they had selected as their rendezvous. The smile on his son’s face burned away the foreboding that had gripped Shan since visiting Bao, and he gladly accepted their offer for him to join them for another pot before the long drive back to Yangkar. Ko spoke enthusiastically of playing the tourist with the American in the Jokhang Temple complex, and Shan nodded gratefully to Jig for allowing his son a couple hours of normalcy. Perhaps, he considered, the American too needed the escape, for he knew she was still deeply shaken by her brother’s death.
As Jinhua turned to signal for the check, he froze, then grabbed Shan’s arm. “He’s from Yintai’s squad!”
Shan’s heart sank as he followed Jinhua’s gaze toward a table at the far side of the café, where one of the men he had seen in the general’s escort sat. His gaze was not on their table, but on the street from which Shan had just entered the square.
“Bao!” Shan gasped. He pulled the envelope Bao had given him from his tunic, pushed it against Jinhua’s chest then tossed him the car keys. “Get to the car! Keep this safe. If I am not there in half an hour leave without me!” he ordered, then slipped around the end of the café.
He ran hard, loathing himself for the danger he had thrust onto Bao. As he rounded a corner and the shop came into view, he halted, his chest heaving. The street seemed as quiet as before. Down the block, tourists were taking photographs of a building painted with traditional symbols. Three boys rode by on bicycles. He slipped into the shadows along the side of a construction site and reached the alley that ran behind the shop. The back door was open. He could hear the sound of breaking glassware inside. Inching up the steps he saw a man in a dark sweatshirt violently searching the chamber where he and Bao had sat thirty minutes earlier, scattering dishes off the shelves, slamming framed photos against the wall above Bao, who sat on the floor, looking dazed, blood streaming from his nose.
Shan slipped off his windbreaker and stepped into the chamber.
Yintai stopped and eyed Shan with amusement. “Perfect. All of our questions can now be answered.”
Shan darted to Bao’s side. The old man gave a weak grin then coughed and winced, holding his side.
“Your turn, constable,” Yintai said to Shan. The large kitchen knife in his hand cut a circle in the air.
“You’re good with knives, I see,” Shan observed. The scar on Yintai’s neck seemed to be turning darker. “Did you pick that skill up before or after someone slashed your throat?”
“He died. I didn’t.”
“Do you know there are more police per capita in Lhasa than any other Chinese city?” Shan asked as he maneuvered in front of Bao. “The government is constantly on alert for protests. I called them before I came inside.”
Yintai frowned. “Pathetic. You don’t even have a phone, comrade.” He took a step closer, still carving the air with the knife. “Did he give them to you? Please tell me you ate them so I can gut you to confirm.” Yintai thrust the knife forward but hesitated at the sound of porcelain breaking underfoot. He spun about in time to glimpse the piece of lumber that Ko slammed into his head.
* * *
Shan had destroyed his son’s life. It was all he could think about on the endless drive north. The envelope from Bao was safe, and Bao himself, shaken but steadfast, had agreed to go visit a brother in Gansu for a few weeks to be out of the reach of Lau’s henchmen. But Ko, now silently staring out a rear window, had committed a crime to protect his father. Shan had not only permitted him to break his parole, meaning it would be years before he was trusted out of prison again, but he could be charged with an assault that could add another fifteen years to his sentence. Shan’s plans, the hopes that allowed him to persevere through each day were like the shards that had covered Bao’s floor. Ko was the gravity that had kept Shan’s feet on the earth for years. Without him, Shan was not sure he could hold on.
Jig and Jinhua had arrived moments after Ko and carried the unconscious Yintai as close to the construction site as they dared before dumping him in the shadows. Jinhua had run to buy a bottle of cheap sorghum whiskey, then poured half the contents over the man’s clothes and put the bottle in his hand. Jig had even rubbed some of the blood from the man’s temple onto a brick by his head. They had quickly cleaned Bao’s home as he packed, stacked crates to block the back door, and driven the constable and his cat to the Norbulingka bus station before heading north. Shan feared for Bao, but the sturdy old man, more angry than frightened, insisted he would be safe and would call Shan’s office in three weeks for an indication of whether he could return to his shop.
* * *
It was late evening by the time Shan had dropped Jinhua behind the station and returned Ko to his house, where Yara and Jig began making dinner. He reminded them that he had to return the car to the garage and told them not to wait for him. Now, an hour later, he eased his truck onto the shoulder of the road outside town and extinguished its lights, then climbed into the cargo bay where Lodi and his dog Raj sat on a blanket. Shan settled beside the Tibetan boy and the mastiff squeezed in beside them, resting his head on the boy’s leg and a paw on Shan’s. Shan pointed out a fast-moving satellite and Lodi listened attentively to his explanation of how it orbited the planet.
“It’s good that you have strong beliefs from the world you come from,” the boy said in an earnest voice when Shan finished.
“Beliefs?” Shan asked.
“In the world I live in, when something is thrown up into the sky it always comes down. Moving stars can’t just fall forever. Nothing falls forever,” the adolescent said, suddenly sounding like a lama. It was the way of many orphans in Tibet, Shan had learned, for they had to grow up too quickly. “There is always a reckoning with the earth.”
Before Shan could find an answer, the boy pointed toward a solitary headlight that suddenly appeared in the darkened fields. “There … It was easy after Gyatso told me he repairs a Japanese motorcycle sometimes at the garage. It’s painted orange, because it is quick as flame.”
“When you saw it that night on the square you called him the moonrider.”
“He rides when the moonlight is good. Mostly stays off the roads, and can’t see the trails without moonlight.”
“But he has a headlight,” Shan pointed out.
“Not usually. Watch.”
Moments later the headlight was extinguished. The sound of the engine trailed off to the south.
“He keeps it in an old shed below the ridge, not far from the amchi’s house. He can go down into the dry river bed and ride for miles. I bet he has a girlfriend, a secret he keeps from the amchi.”
“You’re sure it is Dingri?”
“Only two people live there, and the amchi would never leave when he has patients.”
Shan gazed for several breaths in the direction the motorcycle had disappeared. There wasn’t much to the south except a few farms, the inn ten miles away, and the road to Lhadrung. He stood and climbed out of the truck, then helped Lodi down. “I trust you,” he reminded the boy.
“You don’t have to trust me, just trust Raj. Don’t you know? He’s the lord of all the four-leggeds in Yangkar.”
They were only thirty or forty steps from the house when the bushes along the path came alive with angry, growling animals. Shan could make out at least four of the big guard dogs and was considering whether the door would open in time if he tried to run through them when Lodi spoke out. “Walu, Gosi, Wosar, Duba! You’re being silly. It’s just us.” Raj pushed close to Shan’s leg, and at his bark the growls instantly turned into lower rumbles. The mastiffs approached, sniffing the boy, wagging their tails, then pressed tentative noses toward Shan and let him pass.
To his surprise it wasn’t Dorchen who answered his knock. Rikyu cracked the door, then bowed her head to him and gestured Shan inside. Lodi faded into the darkness, off to watch the motorcycle shed.
Downstairs, Nyima was at Lhamo’s bedside, feeding the old woman spoonfuls of porridge. Dorchen was sitting on another bed, his head against the wall with a book on his lap, asleep. He jerked up at Rikyu’s touch, then greeted Shan with an amiable nod before stretching and rubbing his eyes.
As they made tea, the amchi confirmed that although Lhamo seemed to be responding to his treatment, she slept very restlessly, talking in her sleep to long-dead family members and waking long before dawn in screeching nightmares that kept her sleepless the rest of the night.
“Is there a place we can talk?” Shan asked as Dorchen poured his tea. The amchi led him through a door at the end of the ward into a dim chamber. As Dorchen began lighting candles, Shan saw that two walls were lined with more old medical thangkas and the other two with shelves of books, equally divided between long, loose-leaf Tibetan peche and Western-style bound books. The old Tibetan motioned Shan to a table in the center and began clearing the books that covered it, the topmost of which was a well-used volume with color plates titled Botanical Medicines of the World. Dorchen, to Shan’s surprise, read English.
“Speaking with dead people, you said. How do you know they’re dead?” Shan asked.
“There was her mother, who died in a lightning strike when Lhamo was a teenager. The abbot of the medical college and his deputy Kolsang, who was her cousin.”
Shan hesitated. “Lhamo is of the Taklha clan?”
Dorchen nodded. “They haven’t used the family name for years. The Red Guard didn’t just execute the older members fifty years ago, they outlawed the name as well. Lhamo’s family used to manage the herds that fed the gompa, just as Pema’s branch of the family managed the grain supply. She and Pema were close friends and often did chores for the monks, sometimes with Nyima,” Dorchen continued. “On festival days they always helped with the ceremonies. I remember young Pema holding a parasol for the abbot as he read scripture to the monks gathered in the courtyard.” Dorchen looked expectantly at the envelope now in Shan’s hand. Shan silently laid out the drawings on the table, lining them up in front of the doctor just as Bao had presented them to Shan.
The amchi stopped breathing. He was so still, for so long, that Shan was about to reach out to touch him when he finally spoke.
“I was a young boy of six years when I first went up the mountain to the Pure Water school. We traveled for five days, with my sick mother bent over in the saddle. She couldn’t even stand up because of the agony in her belly, but my father insisted that the legendary doctors on the mountain would cure her. We stopped at every pilgrim’s station to pray, always climbing higher. The last day we were in thick fog for hours, then suddenly we found ourselves in a patch of brilliant sunlight with the buildings and chortens before us, glowing like they had halos, a serene island in the sea of fog. I truly thought we had reached some way station to the heavens.”
Dorchen wiped at an eye. “The Hall of Abundant Life, that was the main building. They called it a temple but it was really a big hospital. The old lamas who were the senior doctors seemed so wise, so compassionate, that I was convinced they were all tulkus, the perfected souls who chose to stay on earth to help mere mortals. It was only much later that I learned that many tulkus had indeed taught there over the centuries and were buried under the chortens.” The old man looked up at a thangka on the wall, on which a god rode a white yak.
“To express his gratitude for their healing my mother—they never demanded payment—my father offered to leave me with them, to act as a servant. But they always treated me as a student, from the very first day. As I grew older and realized they were just highly educated humans, all I ever aspired to be was one of them, a Pure Water doctor, serving in the Hall of Abundant Life.” For a few moments, Shan saw a distant contentment in the old man’s eyes. “I always thought that was the perfect name, as if handed down by the gods. The college was all about life, even the lowest forms. They were famed not just as healers of humans but of animals as well.” He sighed and pointed to the words written along the bottom of the fourth drawing, as if to demonstrate his point.
“The writing is so small and smudged along the edges I cannot make much out,” Shan said.
Dorchen ran a finger along the writing. “‘Faithful hooves, faithful hearts,’” he read. “Legends say the college started centuries ago as a rest stop for the caravans. There were healing mineral springs down at the salt shrine, but there were special springs said to be the gift of the mountain god above them, on the plain that became Pure Water. The plain became a long-term encampment for convalescence where sick herders and sick animals stayed to recover. Some of the songs sung in college assemblies were just old caravan songs. This was one of those songs, in praise of the mules who made all things possible in construction of the college by bringing heavy loads up the mountain, year after year. Beam by beam, stone by stone. The most steadfast of all our monks have four legs, that was the first verse. The refrain was Faithful hooves, faithful hearts.”
Dorchen sipped at his tea. “You had to succeed as a novice at the gompa in Yangkar before the final years of training as a doctor, and after two years they sent me down the mountain to the gompa. It was the happiest day of my life years later when I made that long walk back up with the sack of my meager worldly belongings and entered the gates as a medical student. Did you know that they had a tame snow leopard that freely walked the grounds? He was like a guardian spirit. When it purred the sound echoed through the courtyard. The old ones said it was a heart sound that came from the earth god, using the leopard as its messenger.” The sad smile faded. “That was the first thing the Chinese did when they arrived. They shot the leopard.”
Dorchen gathered up the drawings and handed them to Shan. Shan returned the second, third, and fourth to the table in front of the amchi. Dorchen would not look at them.
“Whether or not you believe in the tale that demons curse even memories of the old college, Shan,” the amchi stated, “surely you can understand the agony and hate such memories stir. We are taught that the pure of heart can forgive anything. But there are none so pure in Yangkar.”
“People are still dying because of what happened there,” Shan replied. “Help me stop it.” The doctor still did not look at the drawings, but he returned Shan’s gaze. “How did you survive?” Shan asked.
“Survive? I would hardly call it that. Survival implies healing, and moving on. The best parts of me died up on that plain. For fifty years it has been a raw wound in my soul. It will never heal.”
“But it’s the only soul you have.”
Dorchen’s eyes flared for a moment, then he sank his face in his hands. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to look at the drawings. Really look at them.”
The amchi grimaced but complied. “Fine. Someone drew a memorial of the lost medical college. It could have been anyone. Hundreds went in and out of Pure Water every year. Probably someone who lost a loved one there drew something in honor of the dead. Shove it in the pages of some history book for posterity.”
“Where were you, doctor?” Shan pressed. “How did you survive?” he repeated.
“I was still two years away from completing my studies. I needed more work on diagnosis. I could read the first six pulses quite well but not the others. I had been sent to study with a specialist at Chokpori,” the old man explained, referring to the famed medical college in Lhasa, which eventually had also been reduced to rubble.
“And if you were to draw a memorial what would it be? Why draw it like this, in three phases?”
“Maybe it’s a drawing of the sequence in which it was built. It seems quite likely that the first building would have been a stable. The numbers that look like dates could just be the dates they were drawn.”
“That’s the solitary building, a stable?” Shan hesitated, looking at the drawing with the single building. “But the buildings were constructed centuries ago,” he added. “No one alive would have known the sequence of construction.”
“Who could know what this person intended? No one thinks clearly about the old place anymore.”
“I think someone does. Someone who has the original perspective.”
Dorchen slowly raised his head to meet Shan’s gaze. “I don’t follow.”
“This isn’t a memorial. This is a chronicle of what happened. From an eyewitness. It is not some fanciful drawing about construction, it is about destruction.”
Dorchen straightened, then finally looked down at the drawings again. “Impossible. The army scoured those mountains. Not a soul was left alive, on two legs or four.”
“Constable Fen had copies of these and was taking them to someone in the mountains the night he died.” Shan pointed to the images penciled along the left margin of the first page. “I can make out an alms bowl, a lotus, a fish, and other sacred symbols. But there are more.” He pointed to the center of the column. “That reminds me of a pistol, though surely that can’t be. And the next seems like a pick ax. Then what looks like three inverted skulls.”
Dorchen pushed the drawing closer to the light. “Skulls, yes. The drinking skulls used by wrathful protector gods, followed by some tiny images of what we used to call the sleeping gods.” He looked up. “The artist had some experience with illuminated manuscripts.”
“I don’t think any image on these pages is meant to be decorative,” Shan said.
Dorchen rummaged around the books at the side of the table and found a magnifying glass, then bent over the row of little symbols on the right margin of the first drawing. Slowly the skepticism in his eyes was replaced with an expression of intense curiosity. His brow wrinkled and he leaned still closer, the lens close to his eye.
“This isn’t just anyone…” he began, then faltered, his eyes widening. He abruptly shot up and hurried out the door.
Moments later he returned with Nyima, directing her to the chair he had been sitting in. He spoke to the old nun in excited whispers, too low for Shan to make out.
The two old Tibetans huddled over the table for several minutes, exchanging urgent comments. “I know of only two people alive who know these symbols,” Dorchen finally explained. He gestured to the old nun. “Nyima had begun training as a nurse and had gone up to attend to some sick herders when the trouble started. She never went back.”
“Two people know these, you said,” Shan observed. “The two of you.”
Nyima nodded as Dorchen explained. “I have heard that in the West doctors once communicated between themselves in Latin, their own secret language in a way. These signs were similar, used by advanced students and their teachers at Pure Water to focus for diagnosis of a specific ailment. These symbols are a diagnosis for a heart troubled with grief and confusion. Heartwind, they used to call it.”
“They were included to authenticate the one who drew,” Shan suggested. “You thought there were only two alive who knew how to read them. Now we know there are three. Someone else survived.”
* * *
Before he parked his truck on the empty square, Shan dropped off Lodi, who had not seen the orange motorcycle return, at the stable on the edge of town. The light was on in his office. He found Jengtse sitting at the little desk opposite Shan’s staring at a blank sheet of paper. He tossed down his pen as he saw Shan.
“I’m sorry,” Shan’s deputy said. “At least you’re here. I didn’t know how to write the message.”
“Who called?”
“It was a bad idea, constable, to take him out of Lhadrung County.”
“Who called?” Shan demanded.
“Captain Yintai, General Lau’s aide. He says your son attacked him, that he had to seek treatment in a hospital. He mentioned something about a phosphorus prison, whatever that is. He says they are coming at noon tomorrow to take custody of your son.”