Authors: Eliot Pattison
Anya looked after him, worry in her eyes. “He had a sister, much younger, but she died. The Red Guard. Then all those years in the army,” she said. “Once he spent a year living inside a mountain near India.” She looked at Shan and Nyma. “He never learned to honor his inner deity. I think,” she said in a sorrowful, but insistent tone, “he never even learned how to find it.” She somehow made it sound as though it was why he had been hit by the rocks.
“You must take him below,” Somo said in a tight voice. “He is too dangerous. He will cause us great harm if he stays.”
Anya looked out over the plain. Shan wasn’t sure she had heard.
“My grandfather, before he died, used to take me to the little orchard he had on the slopes.” The girl’s voice was barely discernible above the wind. “He showed me how some trees grew stunted and bore no fruit when they were not sheltered from the cold. He made little rock shelters for most of them but he always kept one or two without shelter, to remind himself,” she said. “Those trees that had to use all their life force to survive the cold never bore fruit.”
“Take him down,” Nyma said in an insistent voice. She saw moisture in the girl’s eyes and she put an arm around Anya, pressing the girl’s head against her shoulder. “There is that old chorten on the slope below Chemi’s village. We will meet you there at midday tomorrow. It will give us time to go together to Yapchi afterwards. Some of the villagers may have gone back to the little canyon. Maybe we can find what happened to Lepka and Jokar. Maybe if we just speak to those Chinese from our hearts, they will understand,” she added, but her voice was full of doubt.
Anya bit her lower lip as she studied Nyma’s cool expression.
“They took Jokar Rinpoche,” Nyma said, as if to be sure Anya understood.
The girl’s gaze drifted toward the ground and she gave a slow absent nod.
As the others continued packing in the hidden chambers Shan found a rock near Lin and sat, watching a hawk soar below them. A wave of helplessness surged through him, leaving him in a sad, hollow place, and he found he could not speak for several minutes.
“When I was very young,” Shan said at last, “whenever it snowed, a long line of women with brooms of rushes would march down the street, sweeping it into the gutters. It was never much snow, just a powder, and they would usually come before dawn, when I was lying in bed between my mother and father. We would always wake up and listen, for it was a beautiful sound. The swishing of the brooms was like a waterfall, my mother said, and it made her feel like we were in the mountains. My father called it the passing of the caterpillar, because that was how the line of sweepers looked, a long grey creature with many legs, churning up powder as it walked. Sometimes they sang—not political songs, just simple children’s songs about snowflakes and the wind. Sometimes my mother would sing along in the dark, just a whisper. Now I have dreams sometimes, but it’s only the sounds, no images, because it was always dark when this happened. I just hear the caterpillar, and it makes me feel peaceful. Sometimes weeks have gone by and the only time I am peaceful, is in those dreams.”
Lin looked at him with big round eyes and gave a silent nod, as if they had been conversing about sweeper women all along. They sat in silence again. Shan pointed out a line of white birds flying in the distance. Lin kept his eyes on them until they were lost in a cloud.
“She asked me not to shoot any more birds,” Lin said in a thin voice and searched Shan’s face as if for an explanation.
Shan just nodded.
The colonel turned back to the cloud as if he could still follow the birds. “You can see a long way in Tibet.”
Shan nodded again. “All the way back around, a lama told me once.”
Lin searched his face again.
“He meant sometimes you see yourself, and your past, differently, after spending time here.”
Lin clenched his jaw. “She’s never been to a school, you know. Not one day of her life. There are tests she could take. I could get her in a good school. A girl like that, she could have a future.” He looked back at Shan. “What kind of life would she have here? These people have been displaced,” he added in an uncertain voice, as if he knew nothing of how it had happened, and looked into his hands. “I could get her leg looked at by real doctors.”
“Your soldiers,” Shan said. “They took Jokar. The medicine lama.”
“No,” Lin said as if to correct Shan. “Just an old man. He didn’t hurt anyone.”
Shan looked at him in confusion. It almost sounded as though Lin were defending the medicine lama. “I think it was because those howlers took the abbot of Sangchi.”
Lin looked back toward the horizon. “It isn’t proper work for soldiers, all this. Our job is guarding the frontiers.” He looked at the old tree. “The abbot, he shouldn’t have taken that file. I only wanted the file.”
“Was it really so important?” Shan asked, watching Lin closely, remembering how the purbas had refused to discuss it.
Lin cut his eyes at Shan and looked away. “Military secrets,” he muttered.
“Then why isn’t it Public Security that’s after him? I think maybe Public Security doesn’t know about a stolen file. I think it was about the 54th Brigade,” Shan suggested. “Maybe the honor of the 54th.”
“Classified,” Lin muttered. “Four of my soldiers have died for that secret.”
“It was the Bureau of Religious Affairs who took Tenzin,” Shan declared, watching Lin for a reaction. “And a monk named Khodrak. Khodrak saw Tenzin in Lhasa, before the stone was taken. He saw him with a former monk named Drakte. I think he saw Drakte again last month, near here, and he started looking for Tenzin.”
“A lie,” Lin said in a stronger voice. “There was no such report. Or else the search would have come here, instead of along the Indian border.”
“Not a lie,” Shan said. “Khodrak and the howlers, certain howlers, didn’t want anyone else to know. Just like you didn’t tell anyone your real reason for coming to Yapchi. There seem to be a lot of officials working unofficially.”
Lin scowled and his eyelids slipped downward. It could have been pain, or fatigue, or he could have just been trying to end the conversation.
“The howlers want to take Jokar from your men. Jokar helped to heal you,” Shan reminded Lin. “Would you really give him to the howlers?” He stood when Lin did not reply. “You have to go back,” he said again. “Tomorrow.”
Lin opened the old chuba and stared at his red shirt as Shan walked away. “I can’t find my tunic,” he said with a frown.
But inside, on Lin’s pallet, his tunic lay neatly folded. Shan and Somo exchanged a knowing glance. Somo had worn the colonel’s tunic at Norbu. “We have to send people to take him away from here,” she said as they stepped back to the doorway.
Purbas, Shan realized. She meant purbas should come and forcibly remove Lin. “No,” Shan said. “That would be the worse thing. We must…” He searched for the words.
“Trust?” Somo asked. “You want us to trust Lin?”
“Not Lin,” Shan said, looking toward the peak of Yapchi Mountain. “Lokesh said this place has powerful healing properties. I think we have to trust the healing.”
Somo frowned, then spun about and left the chamber.
A quarter hour later they said goodbye to the little plateau, leaving Lin and Anya with food for only two more meals. Shan nodded a farewell to the colonel, who still sat at the stunted tree. Lin scowled back. Anya stood apart as they left. She had begun one of her songs that had the sound of mourning, and for a moment he tried in vain to read her face, to understand what truth she had glimpsed this time. When Shan looked back she was standing at the very edge of the rim, looking down into the abyss.
* * *
The Green Tara seemed to be running a dormitory. Chemi was there, with her Uncle Dzopa, still nearly comatose, and more than a dozen of the Tibetans Shan had first seen at the camp behind Yapchi village. The rongpa were speaking in excited tones of the spring festival and the miraculous escape of the abbot of Sangchi, sitting beside Tenzin, asking for his blessing. People were coming from many miles away, they said, gathering on the mountain, saying what happened at Norbu was a portent of what would happen when the seat of Siddhi was at last occupied.
Shan listened with foreboding, which only increased as he saw Lokesh and Winslow talking in urgent tones with several purbas who arrived carrying packs of supplies. Jokar was still at Yapchi, they confirmed, and even allowed to walk about, although one of Lin’s soldiers was always at his side. The camp manager had asked for a doctor to come and examine the frail old lama, but Jokar had refused to be examined. Lhandro’s parents were with him, or near him—not prisoners, but refusing to leave him. “They just stay at that dig with that Chinese professor,” Larkin reported.
“You were there?” Shan asked. He surveyed the cave again. The laboratory equipment, and the older Tibetan men who had looked like professors were gone.
“On the ridge above,” the American woman replied. “Yesterday. Taking measurements. We had binoculars. Many more soldiers are in the camp. They put up a checkpoint, at the entrance to the valley. They want to stop anyone from coming in on the road. They have patrols deployed on the slopes above the camp.”
“Measurements?” Shan asked, looking from Larkin to Winslow. “But you’re not still looking for oil.”
Larkin ignored him. Winslow put his palms up as though to disavow any knowledge. But Shan saw a new map on the rock slab, a map bearing the name of the petroleum venture, a detailed relief map of Yapchi Valley and the route leading from the main highway. He stepped over to it. Along the southern slope of the valley were several new dotted lines, each in different colors. Larkin stepped past him and covered it with a large-scale map of Qinghai Province.
Nyma walked from the group of purbas to Shan. “At the camp everyone says they expect oil tomorrow or the next day,” she reported in a tone of resignation.
The words had the sound of an epitaph. It would be over when Jenkins’s crews struck oil. The fate of the valley would be sealed. The slopes would be completely stripped of their timber. The fields of barley would be ruined by the venture’s machines. The songs of the lark would be replaced with the sound of engines, the fragrance of the spring flowers with acrid fumes.
“Less than twenty-four hours,” Larkin nodded grimly. “There is a convoy coming in, of high officials. People from Lhasa, and Golmud, for the big celebration.”
Nyma looked back at the purba who lay on the pallet. “Who took the bullet out?” she asked.
“I did,” Larkin said. “There wasn’t anyone else. He bit a piece of leather rope as I worked. Just in the muscle. Lokesh says his blood is still strong.”
Shan looked at the wounded purba in alarm. A bullet. With a sinking heart he noticed one of the army’s automatic rifles on the ledge above the man.
He studied Larkin again, remembering how frustrated she had been when they had had to leave the explosives behind. “You can’t,” he heard himself say with sudden despair. “All these people,” he said, gesturing toward the refugees in the cave. “They have suffered enough.”
Larkin met his stare. “Cowboy has their names and registration numbers. He’s going to make sure they get relocated properly. Next time he’s in Tibet, he’s going to report back to me.”
Winslow looked up, grinning at Shan. Cowboy.
There was a murmur of surprise from across the room. Shan looked up to see six large Tibetan men enter in pairs, each pair carrying a heavy wooden box slung from a stout pole. Larkin stood and stepped forward to help the men stack the boxes at the rear of the cave.
“There was an accident,” Somo said at his side, in an uncertain, worried tone. “They were laughing because they said a company truck slid off the road.”
Shan stepped away and circled back, away from Larkin, to get closer to the boxes. They were marked in Chinese. Qinghai Petroleum Venture, they said. High Explosives. He wandered outside, fighting the sense of defeat that seemed to have overtaken Nyma and Lhandro, then found Winslow at the mouth of the cave, standing over the churning water of the buried river.
“Some of the Tibetans are very superstitious about this place,” the American said. “They say it is a connecting place.”
“Connecting?”
“I don’t understand all the words I heard. One of them said it was a gate. I think they mean to another universe, one of the hidden lands. The bayal. Melissa said Tibetans believe there are many worlds inhabited by humans, some not visible to most of us, and many different types of heavens and hells. Nyma said years ago, before she was born, an old nun who lived nearby brought her students here and announced she had been called to speak with a deity that lived in the hidden land past this gate. Then she just jumped in.”
Shan followed Winslow’s gaze toward the maelstrom below. Larkin’s secret river. Somehow, he thought, it wouldn’t be the same when the geologists put a name to it and fixed it on their maps. In a wild and largely untamed land this was one of its wildest and most untamed parts. It was like a whirlpool, he thought, a dark whirlpool that had sprung up on dry land. He imagined the water rushing down, roiling through its hidden course. Perhaps they were looking at the top of a waterfall that dropped through a vast underground cavern into a lake where nagas lived. Perhaps there was indeed a hidden land beyond, and a hermit in that land was sitting on a rock looking up at the waterfall, wondering about the world that lay above it. Perhaps this was where the chenyi stone belonged. Perhaps in that world deities were not so hard to find.
“Larkin will be in grave danger,” he said suddenly, pulling his gaze from the mesmerizing waters, “if she lets her camp become the base for saboteurs.”
“She’s not just a geologist,” Winslow said absently, still watching the water.
“There are only two things they can do with those explosives,” Shan pointed out. “Try to attack the camp, maybe ruin it with an avalanche. Or put them on the road into the camp, when that convoy of dignitaries comes. Either way it won’t solve anything.”
“It’s the road. It must be,” Winslow said, his eyes heavy with worry. “But they wouldn’t deliberately kill all those people. Just block it.”