Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (12 page)

“What do you mean the statues were changed?”

“When an old man down the road had his statue returned, he told her something inside had been released, said no one should insult Uncle Shinje this way,” Kypo said. “She was upset when he showed her. I found her in her house crying,” he added, confusion entering his voice. “She is the strongest woman I know, and she was crying over someone’s little god.”

Shan lifted the statue, testing the weight. As with most such figures, the base was hollow, for the small slips of prayers and charms that were traditionally sealed inside when the statue was consecrated. He turned it over. In the center of the bronze plate on the bottom was a neat half-inch hole, recently drilled.

“They all come back like this,” Kypo whispered in a haunted tone. “I thought I could repair it before my mother saw. Like the others, the sacred papers are left inside but the same hole is made in each. People say something inside has been incubating, waiting all these years to hatch. People say Yama is sending out worms of death.”

THE TWO-LEGGED DEMON of Shogo town was communing with his gods, sitting on the altar he had built against the wall of an old shed that overlooked the trash pit. Gyalo was so drunk he did not seem to notice Shan as he lowered himself to sit before him. The former lama, perched on his altar beside a candle, swayed back and forth, gazing without focus into the darkness of the gully below, into which the remains of the old town gompa, once the largest in the county, had been bulldozed decades earlier.

At first Shan thought the low murmur arising from his lips might be a mantra, but then Gyalo belched and he recognized it as a bawdy drinking song favored by herdsmen.

Shan had returned to his stable home and searched in his second, hidden workshop to find another Yama statue, which he now placed in the circle of light cast by the candle by the altar. “Where is the home of the Lord of Death, grandfather?”

Gyalo started, then grew very still as he gazed at the pool of light. He had, Shan suspected, thought the deity that had materialized before him was speaking. With an oddly solemn air he filled one of his little altar bowls from a white porcelain jug and tossed it in the little god’s face. Gyalo had hung an old chart in his tavern the month before, doubtlessly from some long-extinct monastery school, with images, in descending order, of the hierarchy of existence, with
bodhisattvas
, living saints, at the top and something resembling a worm at the bottom. He had written his name under the worm. Devout monks strived to leap from human form to sainthood in one lifetime. Gyalo’s sacred goal, he had solemnly declared that night during a drinking bout, was to leap to the bottom of the chart in one lifetime.

Shan leaned into the light and repeated his question. Gyalo looked up, carefully poured some more of his
baijui
, the foul-smelling sorghum whiskey that was the staple hard liquor of China, drank half, then tossed the rest into Shan’s face. Shan, accustomed to such baptisms, wiped his cheeks and spoke in a level voice. “Nowhere in Tibet have I seen so many statues of Yama as here. There must have been a temple devoted to him.”

“The army has a missile base up the road. They say it can destroy all of India in half an hour. That’s our temple of death.”

“A temple of Yama, Gyalo. Uncle Shinje’s retreat.”

“I once dug out twenty fresh skulls after an explosion on Tumkot mountain. I have learned to eat flesh three times a week. I saw a cat eating a butterfly today. Everything in the shadow of the mother mountain is dedicated to the Lord of Death.” Gyalo turned the jug upside down, draining its last few drops into his bowl. “To the glorious chairman of the glorious republic,” he toasted with the raised cup. “You Chinese have taught us what life is really about.”

“When the Yama statues started disappearing, people started dying.”

“What kind of people?”

“A Chinese, an American, a Nepali.”

Gyalo shrugged, as if it were to be expected.

“A Tibetan was murdered too, near Tumkot village.”

Gyalo’s head slowly shifted upward, from the jug to Shan.

“Perhaps you knew Ama Apte’s uncle.” Shan did not miss the way Gyalo shuddered at the mention of the astrologer. “He took a bullet between the eyes.”

Gyalo suddenly grew very sober. “Two legs or four?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Four.”

The news disturbed the tavern keeper, as if he had known, and feared, the mule. “It’s something of a habit in that family,” he said dismissively. But Shan saw the worried glance he shot over his shoulder, into the night, toward Tumkot. “No one should worry about that one. He knows how to throw off a face.” But Gyalo
was
worried. Of all the people who had died, of all the hardships that had come to the town, and his life, the only thing Shan had ever seen worry him was a dead mule.

“No,” Shan said quietly, “Ama Apte and I burned juniper and spoke to him. He is a hungry ghost. He will be in pain, unable to move on, until he reconciles his death, which means understanding the other deaths.”

Shan recalled Jomo’s report that Gyalo wanted to know about the murders.

Gyalo leaned forward, exposing a steel incisor, so close Shan could smell his rancid breath. “What do you know of dead people?”

“Most of my friends,” Shan explained, “and all my family but one are dead people.”

Gyalo’s laughter came so abruptly it seemed he had exploded. Bits of rice and sputum shot onto Shan’s shirt. But as quickly as it came it was gone, replaced by more worry, as Gyalo searched the shadows, his gaze lingering for a moment on the door to the shed behind him. Shan had seen inside that door only once, had glimpsed stacks of old tools and rusted artifacts.

“Why would the town’s living demon be scared of a dead mule’s ghost?” Shan asked.

“You don’t know ghosts like I do,” Gyalo said in a near whisper. “Make light of him and you make light of Yama.”

“I am going to stop him,” Shan declared.

“Yama?”

“Yes.”

Gyalo’s grin returned. His drunken cackle was like that of an old rooster. “The Lord of Death never loses. I will look forward to his victory. I will carry your body to the next valley where there are some old
ragyapa
, and personally help to cut up your flesh for the birds.”

“Of all the people in town, you are the only one I can rely on, because I know your hate is genuine, and it is like a pure thing between us. An old lama taught me that only pure things are real. You will not contaminate it with a lie.”

Gyalo cast a crooked smile at Shan. “You are such a joy to hate, I admit it. A Chinese demon sent to torment me. The perfect neighbor.”

“But this time you have a problem, Rinpoche,” Shan said, using the term for revered teacher. “You can hate the gods or you can hate me. People say the old gods have let loose the worms of death. I am going to fight the gods. That makes us allies.”

Gyalo belched. “If it’s you versus the worms I’ll chose the worms every time.”

“Tell me where the old Yama temple was.”

Shan had seen the light that grew on Gyalo’s face before, in the eyes of demons painted on the walls of old temples. “You’ll never get past the flagpole,” the old Tibetan said.

Shan’s brow creased in confusion. Ama Apte had spoken of a flagpole, one of the places her mule liked to visit. “Then let me try and fail,” he ventured, still not grasping the warning in Gyalo’s words.

“The price for that particular information has already been set,” Gyalo spat. “One jug of sorghum.”

Shan gazed at him a moment as he pieced together the puzzle of his words, then with a small bow rose and slipped away toward the center of town.

Half an hour later, Gyalo’s information bought and paid for, he faded back into the darkness, pausing at the entrance to the rundown old farmhouse Gyalo called home. It had once been a sturdy structure, well kept for generations until abandoned when the gompa was destroyed. It was a stone’s throw away from the shed and Gyalo’s altar, where the former lama was now loudly singing one of his drinking songs to the ruins below.

A solitary butter lamp sputtered in one corner. The floor was littered with pots and dirt and kernels of dried cheese too hard even to interest the two stray dogs that slept on a soiled pallet in the corner. Though the tavern was one of the most successful businesses in Shogo, Gyalo still lived in poverty, because Tsipon owned the business, and the salary he paid the old Tibetan mostly went for alcohol. He glanced back in the direction of the shed where he had left Gyalo, then grabbed the ragged broom of barley straw by the door, herded the dogs outside and began sweeping. \\He worked quickly, refilling the
chomay
, the butter lamp by the pallet, folding the tattered blankets. He had almost finished when a peeved voice interrupted from the doorway.

“I don’t know why you do this,” Jomo groused. “He thinks I am the phantom who comes to clean. If he knew it was you he would write curses on the doorway, to keep you away.”

Shan leaned on the broom a moment. “My experience in Tibet has taught me that helping my enemies is usually less painful than helping my friends.”

“So what does that make that colonel rotting away in Cao’s jail?”

Shan began sweeping the floor again, without reply.

Jomo muttered a curse then lifted the pallet for Shan to sweep under.

“Who has come to see your father recently?” Shan asked after several minutes of silent work.

“Everyone comes. He’s the town mascot. He sits on that throne of his and they want to touch him for good luck, leave a cigarette or a candy bar and touch him. I used to try to stop them, tell them he was the opposite of a saint. But they act like it’s some form of worship. He spits a curse at them and they treat it like a prayer. They’ve been starved so long they don’t even know what food is.”

“Someone different came,” Shan said, “and brought a jug of baijiu whiskey.”

“Half of those who come bring him drinks. The old goat sometimes tells them he only performs for alcohol. The drunken poet saint.”

“For
chang
usually,” Shan said, referring to Tibetan barley beer. “The locals can’t afford a whole jug of whiskey.”

An odd sadness passed over Jomo’s face. Before replying he gathered up bits of debris in a rug and emptied it out the open window. “In Shigatse I was in a bar with a tiger on a chain. There’s a tavern on the border, by Nepal, that has a tame monkey trained to fill glasses. My father is a tourist attraction. I’m thinking of applying for a Ministry of Tourism grant to buy him a cage.”

“He has so much anger inside, Jomo, it’s burned away everything else.”

Gyalo’s son ignored him. “Tourists come, Chinese and Westerners, usually with one of those government guides to translate for them. They give my father gifts and ask him to write a prayer in Tibetan. I overhear them sometimes. They say they will take the prayer home and frame it. I read one. It said,
I am
a reincarnate demon. I hereby summon ten thousand scorpions to crawl
up your ass.

”

Not for the first time Shan saw Jomo close to tears. “When was the last time someone came?”

“Yesterday someone came, alone. I saw his back as he was leaving. It was dark. All I could see was that he was tall, wearing a red wool cap and one of those windbreakers that say North Base Camp. A Tibetan or Chinese, since there was no translator. Afterward, my father was singing one of his old songs and swigging from a fresh jug.”

“The flagpole in the mountains,” Shan said. “Is it high enough to see from a distance?”

“Flagpole?”

“The one above Tumkot.”

“Only people from Tumkot go in those hills. They’re haunted. And the flagpoles in the mountain tribes have legs.”

“Legs?”

“
Tarchok
,” Jomo said, using the Tibetan word for flagpole. When he saw Shan’s confusion he placed his hand behind his head and extended a finger upward. “Tarchok,” he repeated. “They say there used to be scores in the mountains.”

Shan closed his eyes for a moment, chiding himself. He had forgotten a hurried explanation from Kypo, weeks earlier, when he had seen a man walking near the village with his hair bundled into a three-inch topknot at his crown. It was a holdover from much older days, more common among the border tribes of Nepal. The topknots, and the hermits who wore them, were called
tarchoks
, flagpoles.

“No one goes near the mountain above Tumkot because of the tarchok. They say he’s like a wild animal living in the ice world up there, going backward to the origins of hermits, turning into a yeti.”

Shan cocked his head, not certain he had heard correctly. “A hermit becoming a yeti?”

Jomo glanced over his shoulder as if wary of being overheard. “We have had Tibet for maybe a thousand years, that was all we could hope for.” He referred, Shan realized, to the period of the Tibetan Buddhist state. “Before our time, long before our time, the only mountain tribe was that of the yetis. They tried to fit into the rest of the world but eventually they gave up on people and they all became hermits.”

Chapter Six

TRADITIONAL TIBETANS WOULD have called it a power place. The tiny hanging valley opened to the south toward the mother mountain, its spring and grove of junipers helping to focus spiritual energy. It had been only an hour’s walk on the trail up the ridge that curled around and above Tumkot, but the ruins of the old shrine felt a world away. Shan lowered his small backpack to the ground and studied the site from the narrow trail before descending to the ruins. Below, visible in the distance, was the village. He was, he realized, at the shrine Ama Apte had mentioned, where she and her uncle had visited. He considered how the foundations of the ruined buildings were set back from the high cliff to the south, against an overhanging ledge, making the site invisible from below. The army probably had sent a bomber to destroy it, but never would have been able to locate it without local help.

There was little left but a few charred beams and piles of stone. Bits of plaster, some bearing signs of weathered paint, lay strewn about the landscape. A singled tattered prayer flag fluttered from a frayed yak-hair rope anchored to a cairn of stones. He set another stone on the cairn and positioned himself in the center of the ruins, pacing in an ever-widening circle as he tried to imagine the structure as it had been built, and how many monks had lived there. Once on Tumkot mountain, Gyalo had said, I dug out twenty fresh skulls.

The Lord of Death was indeed there, at least the shards of Yama. Shattered bits of bronze statuary and shards of ceramic lay around the clearing, heads and arms of the deity of death, mixed with those of protector demons. He shuddered as, too late, he spotted the clay torso of a tiny god under his descending boot and crushed it into a dozen pieces.

Shan found the altar in deep shadow, against the wall of the living mountain at the rear of the overhanging ledge. At the back of the little sheltered alcove were traces of paintings, now so faded as to be barely discernible. They were probably centuries old, dating to when the first emissaries of Buddhism had begun to cross the Himalayas.

Irregular slabs of rock, some scorched from fire, leaned against boulders on either side of the alcove to form makeshift walls. Along the back wall an old beam had been balanced on square stones for an altar, on which stood the surviving gods, a Compassionate Buddha in the center flanked by a score of bronze Yamas and lesser deities along with several less elegant plaster figures, crudely painted, the kind sold as souvenirs to tourists. The altar and nearly all the bronzes were encrusted with dust, each exposing an outline of naked wood underneath when he lifted it. The last Yama had scant dust on its surface, but dust underneath. It had been brought to the altar recently. None yet had holes in their base plates. He paused over a low, anomalous shadow at the back, and lit the hand light he had brought from the warehouse to investigate.

The shape was so alien that at first it did not register. Once it did he stared in mute confusion. It was a two-inch long, dirt-encrusted cross, with a small bearded figure entwined on it. With trepidation he lifted it. The back of the cross was clean, exposing tarnished silver, its shape pressed into the film of dust that had fallen from the rocks above.

He searched for the word, one he had learned from his father in their secret, illegal lessons during the reign of the Red Guard so many years earlier:
crucifix
. He stared at the image in wonder, then with even greater wonder at the deep outline it had left in the crust on the altar. It had been put there many, many years earlier, probably one of the first things deposited on the makeshift altar, never touched since. With unexpected guilt, he set the cross back exactly where it had been, pausing only to wipe the dirt from the Christ figure’s eyes.

He retreated, pacing uneasily around the ruins again, wary of the precipitous drop at the edge of the cliff, then retrieved his backpack, settled onto a flat boulder, and began scanning the mountain with binoculars he had borrowed from Tsipon’s depot. The shrine was on the long ridge that cradled Tumkot, curling out from the south, allowing him to look out over the sheer drop in front of him to the adjacent slopes, though still not high enough for him to be able to see the ice field that lay atop the imposing escarpment of the main mountain.

A family of goats walked single file up the far rock face, past a patch of blooming heather. A large bird of prey landed on a spine of rock over a grassy ledge. Far below, at the foot of the mountain, shepherds with dogs pressed a herd of sheep into the little hidden valley where he and Ama Apte had mourned with the dead mule. He looked back up at the top of the ridge and began systematically sweeping downward with his eyes, nursing his growing conviction that there must be a hidden trail over the top that the mule had descended, either with or closely followed by the murderer. He saw the patch of grass above where the mule had fallen, on a shelf less than a third of the way up the steep rock wall. No matter how sweet the grass, surely the affectionate old creature had not gone up from the valley after the long strenuous day, passing the village, passing the woman who so tenderly cared for him.

He watched a coasting raven, then the family of goats for a moment, comforted that the pace of natural life in the mountains continued despite the chaos below. Then he froze. The patch of heather the goats had passed was gone. He urgently searched the slope behind them, trying to follow the thread of shadow that marked their trail along the near vertical wall, then saw there were several threads, multiple trails, some leading up, some stretching along the flank of the escarpment, coursing around the ridge toward the Yama shrine.

When at last he found the speck of color it seemed to be impossibly distant from where he had first seen it. But then he realized the patch of color was running. For a frantic instant he thought that he might be watching a yeti, that the creature had seen him, was coming to attack him. Then the figure stopped and stepped onto a formation that jutted out from the wall and spread his arms. He stood there, motionless in the updraft, his red robe fluttering around him like some hovering bird, then he spun about and bounded cat-like to the next jutting rock, where he repeated the performance. The man wasn’t running to Shan, he was running for joy.

Shan glanced back at the shrine, knowing he risked missing the thief if he left, then trained his glasses on the trails in front of the monk, calculating that the man was making a circuit on the ridge, out to the end of the trails then back to the massif. Shan selected a prominent ledge half a mile away where the trails converged, then he too began to run.

When the man in the red robe reached him Shan was sitting at the outer edge of the shelf of rock that marked the intersection of the two main goat paths, his legs folded under him in the meditation position, gazing out over the valley below. He did not turn, did not move except to fold his hands into a ritual gesture, the earth-touching
mudra,
as he began a quiet mantra. The man approached, so close Shan feared he might try to shove him off the cliff, then stepped to his other side, touching him tentatively with the toe of a tattered high top boot before retreating to pace back and forth behind Shan.

As his movements slowed, Shan turned and extracted two objects, offering them on his palm to the man. The leathery, weatherbeaten face that looked back at him had deep, moist eyes that softened as they saw Shan’s offerings: a small cone of incense and a box of matches. Wordlessly the man lifted them from Shan’s palm, lit the incense, and set it on a little black patch of soot Shan had noticed when he sat down. Incense had been used there before.

As the Tibetan sat on the opposite side of the fragrant cone, he too extracted something, not the prayer beads Shan half expected, but a
chillum
, one of the deeply curved wooden smoking pipes traditional in the mountain tribes. He lit the pipe, returning the matches to Shan with a nod of thanks.

After several puffs on the pipe, the man opened and shut his mouth, then made a low rumbling sound in his throat. It was the way of many hermits Shan had encountered in Tibet. They often had to remember how to speak with other humans.

“You made a mudra,” the hermit finally said in a raspy voice. It was not an accusation but an expression of curiosity. “You spoke the mani mantra.” He puffed again on his pipe. “Do you think you are heard?”

Shan looked back over the mountains. “The way I reach the Buddha,” he said, “is the way the Buddha reaches me.” The words had been part of his first lesson with his old lama friend Gendun.

The hermit nodded, as if Shan had passed his first test, and Shan turned and dared to examine the man tarchok as he cupped his hands around his chillum and puffed repeatedly to encourage the embers to burn in the thin air. He was a compact, sturdy man, perhaps ten years older than Shan, his robe patched in several places, his ankles naked under his heavy boots, his topknot tightly braided and doubled over, fastened with red thread.

“When I visit the shrines near Chomolungma, people who are not Tibetans come sometimes,” the hermit observed. “But they always have better clothes than you,” he added whimsically.

Shan could not resist a grin.

“They ask me many questions.” Now that the hermit had found his voice it was slow and melodious. “Though in the end they are all asking the same thing. They want to know how to find peace.” He worked on his chillum again, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth. “I tell them the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you.”

For a moment Shan wanted to forget everything, to bask in the wisdom of the old hermit, who was so much like his friends in Lhadrung. But then the hermit spoke again.

“On this mountain, though, there is no room for strangers. Strangers just die. When the incense burns down you must leave.”

Shan’s throat went dry. The man was no longer speaking like a hermit, but like a sentinel, a protector demon. “My name is Shan,” he said. “I seek a ghost, and one who makes ghosts.”

“I am called Dakpo. I speak for the mountain. When she wakes she will shake you off like a flea.”

“I am no intruder,” Shan ventured. “I am the corpse carrier, named by the astrologer of Tumkot.”

It sounded like a line from a fairy tale, but the words gave the hermit pause. He puffed on his pipe, studying Shan intently. “I saw you on the road burying your first corpse under rocks.”

Shan looked up in surprise. On his first visit to the base camp he had stopped to remove the corpse of a dog from the road. He had given it a quick burial under a mound of stones, whispering a prayer to send the dog on its way.

“I said to myself, there is a man who appreciates death.”

Shan hesitated, biting down the questions that leaped to his tongue. Dakpo had not been on the road itself, and the slope on the far side of Tumkot mountain was said to be impassable. He replayed the words in his mind. Had the hermit just told Shan why he had been selected as corpse carrier?

Shan pointed to the valley below. “There, against the wall, you can still see the soot of the pyre. When we burned her uncle, only Ama Apte and I were there but I sensed someone else close by. He was a friend of yours too. If I had not lost the corpse our mule friend would still be alive. It is a heavy debt I owe, Dakpo. To the corpse, to your old friend, to the mountain. I must be allowed to pay it.”

The hermit’s brow furrowed. He cast a mournful gaze toward the barely discernible smudge on the distant cliff face and puffed again on his chillum. “His name was Kundu. I knew him all my life,” he said at last. “It is a rare honor, when a friend comes back the way he did.”

“But he came back on four legs.”

Dakpo offered a strangely sad smile, then swept his hand across the horizon. “For as far as you can see there will be none of us coming back on two legs.”

It was the most remarkable statement of a remarkable conversation. Shan dared not ask what terrible sin the inhabitants of the region had committed to all be reborn as lower life forms. “Do you live in a cave, Rinpoche?” he asked instead.

The hermit’s mood had darkened. He only nodded.

“Above the cliff where the mule was killed?”

He nodded again.

“I don’t think he was going up the trail for grass. I think he was coming down. Did you see him?”

“He was not anywhere above,” Dakpo shot back, too insistent. “There is nowhere above.”

“He would not have been alone,” Shan continued. “He would have been with his killer, or closely followed by his killer.”

“He went to get grass. He fell. Someone shot him in an act of mercy.”

“No. He was first shot above.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. That wound was on the far side of his body, against the wall. His killer could not have done it after he fell.”

Dakpo fell silent.

“How long have you lived in your cave, Dakpo?”

“As long as I care to remember.”

“But you are from the village?”

“A long time ago.”

“Then you must know the secrets that Ama Apte’s uncle died for.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The mule took a secret trail home. The minister’s killer was on the same trail, eluding his pursuers. But I can’t find the truth, can’t release the soul of your friend without knowing that secret. There are probably helpful signs on the trail, clues I could use. What is so important that it keeps you from helping him?”