A log had been wedged into a crack in one wall, and hanging from it was a painting on cloth, a Tibetan thangka, so worn it was threadbare in spots. Shan studied the painting, holding the light close. The central image was a fierce woman mounted on a horse, robes swirling about her as if blown by a wind. It was a rendering of an obscure figure seldom seen in temples. But in the prison barracks, when the winter storms had kept the prisoners from work, the old lamas had taught about such figures and the lost gompas that had revered them. It was a protective goddess, in the form known as Magic Weapon Army.
Another light flickered behind him. Jakli appeared, carrying her torch. She stood in a numbed silence, in apparent disbelief at Shan's discovery, then her eyes filled with wonder as she stepped tentatively toward the small Buddha. She studied the room for a long time before she spoke. "I have visited the cabin more than a score of times with Lau," she said at last, confusion in her voice again. "Once we even came to the cave, to see the ice. But I never…" Her voice drifted off. She sat on the student's cushion and picked up a piece of chalk lying beside it, rolling it in her fingers as she gazed around the room.
Shan cast his light along the rear wall. There was a stack of folded blankets on a straw pallet and several ceramic pots beside a small pile of split wood for the brazier. Above them, where the wall presented a flat, even surface, were marks in chalk, words in the graceful Tibetan alphabet. Although he was still being taught the written language of Tibet, Shan recognized several simple figures in a row along one side.
Chig, nhi, soom, shi, nga, trook, doon, gyay, gu, ju,
he read. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
"When I was young," he said to Jakli, surprised at how the secret chamber moved him, "my father would take me into the closet of our apartment whenever the Chairman gave speeches. My mother played the radio as loudly as possible, and he took out secret books, old textbooks, and he would teach me things. English. The history of America and Europe. The Declaration of Independence. He made me memorize the American Declaration of Independence."
"He could have gone to prison."
"He already had. He had been a professor of Western history. A Stinking Ninth," Shan said, referring to the lowest rank of the Nine Bad Elements identified as enemies of the people by Chairman Mao. "The very worst kind, since he had American friends. This was after prison, after his release. Even after our family had been sent for reeducation at an agricultural collective." He sighed and looked around the chamber again. Lau taught here. Bajys knew about it. Which meant Khitai knew about it. Maybe others of the orphans. It was an illegal place. A Buddhist place.
"How many Tibetans are there," he asked, "among the zheli?" He looked at the cushions. One for a teacher, one for a student, only one student at a time.
"Several of the shadow clans that help are Tibetan, dropka families. But among the children, two or three at most. The zheli are Kazakh and Uighur. Maybe one or two Tadjiks."
"Kazakh like Bajys?"
Jakli's only answer was a confused frown. She walked around the room, touching things with the tips of her fingers. "A secret room," she said. "For secret Buddhists."
"For children," Shan said, looking back at the simple numbers written on the wall. Or one child.
"She taught me Buddhist ways," Jakli said. "Quietly, at private places. But not here." Her face was clouded with emotion.
"I think this was different. I think someone else came here," Shan said. "Not Bajys. Maybe not just Lau. Maybe another teacher. A Buddhist. I think it's why Lau asked to be taken back here. For a final meeting."
"But she was dead," Jakli said in confusion.
Shan walked around the room. He stood in front of the Buddha, placing his palms down on the makeshift altar, then stepped back to the chalk writing. He recognized several other words. He saw the six syllable mantra,
Om mani padme hum
, invoking the Compassionate Buddha, and below it the twelve syllable mantra,
Om ah hum vajra guru peme siddhi hum
, invoking the blessing of the holy teacher Guru Rinpoche. The top rows had been written very high, several inches higher than he could reach. He stretched his arm overhead to prove it to himself, then surveyed the chamber once more. "Nothing to stand on," he observed. "No stool, no bench."
"What do you mean?" Jakli inquired.
"Lau was no taller than me. I don't think she wrote this."
Jakli studied the writing for a moment. "She didn't. I know her hand. She is teaching me— she was teaching me to write Tibetan." She looked back at Shan, wide-eyed, as if just realizing the meaning of her words. "Someone else was here," she whispered. "Someone else was the teacher here."
Shan nodded. He had not found the missing lama, but he had found the lama's home. He stepped to a cluster of simple, familiar drawings on the adjacent wall. From over his shoulder Jakli pointed to the first image on the left side, a vertical line with something like a bloated figure eight at the top. "A monk's stick," she said.
"A staff." Shan nodded. "A mendicant's staff," he added and explained that grouping depicted the prescribed possessions of an ordained monk. He pointed each out. The staff for walking and shaking in a prescribed fashion when asking for alms. A water pot and a water sieve, to prevent the drowning of innocent insects, then an alms bowl, a blanket, three outer robes, two underrobes, a sitting mat, and sandals.
He stared at the drawings, then back at the numbers on the wall and the thangka. The chamber was for a child and not a child. And it was Tibetan but very old Tibetan, from a teacher rooted in one of the oldest of the Buddhist sects. He stepped to the pallet and found a perfectly folded maroon robe. He carefully lifted it. It was a monk's robe. It was clean. He looked back at the tunnel leading to the chamber. The robe had no marks from the clay. It was for use inside the chamber only. Beside where it had lain on the pallet was a large pair of sandals, larger than Shan would wear, larger than Lau would wear.
Jakli stepped back and sat again on the student's cushion, and he knelt beside her, realizing after a moment that they were both staring at the empty cushion by the altar. The missing teacher. They were waiting to be taught, but there was no one to take the cushion.
"Messages," he said at last, giving voice to his speculation. "The trail lies in all the messages." He felt Jakli's gaze but did not look away from the cushion. "Lau's coming here in her death was a message, her way of sending a warning to someone unknown to anyone else. If she were killed she wanted the teacher who used this room warned away from the danger. But she couldn't risk divulging his or her name, not even to you. Even if she took such a risk, who should she tell? It was too unpredictable, where and when she might die."
"But she knew," Jakli said slowly, studying the piece of chalk intensely, as if hoping it might begin writing answers for her. "She knew that she was in danger, didn't she? She knew months ago that she was in danger. I never thought of it."
"And she knew that, no matter what, no matter how or where she died, certain friends would honor her last request," Shan suggested, and Jakli offered a sad smile in reply.
"There were other messages," he continued. "It was the purbas who brought word to the lamas about Lau. The Maos knew of her, or someone connected to her knew the Maos. The Buddhist who taught in this room perhaps. But why?" He turned toward her with a sudden thought. "Or was it you? You know the purbas. You know the lung ma."
"No. I was in town, making hats. Fat Mao sent for me."
Shan nodded. Fat Mao knew. Because the lung ma sent the message to the purbas. "But why?" Shan repeated. "It's not just that what went on in this room was Tibetan, or even that it was secret. There was something else, so important that word went to Lhadrung." Why Lhadrung? Why Gendun and Lokesh? he asked himself silently. It wasn't just that Gendun had been born in the region but that Gendun was involved in the mystery, part of the greater secret.
"Lau," Jakli said. "Lau was the secret."
"No. Part of it, yes. But the killing didn't stop with her. There is something else, an evil still unfolding that we have to stop. Something connected with the children."
Jakli bent forward, plucked something from the edge of the cushion, and held it up in her fingers. A small clump of brown fibers. "Wool," she said, rubbing it between her fingers. "Full of lanolin. Unwashed. Like from a herder's vest. Or a sheepskin blanket." It told them little but set the image, that of a student on the cushion, huddled in a sheepskin against the cold air, facing the teacher who sat before him in his robe.
"The teacher," Jakli said. "Maybe it's the teacher who the killer wants. From Lau the killer learned where the students were. The zheli. So he attacks the students to find the Tibetan teacher who uses this room."
Shan slowly nodded. The Muslim boy Suwan had been killed first. But the next boy killed had been Alta, the Kazakh boy being raised by Tibetans, a boy being taught the Buddhist way, a boy whose rosary had been stolen by the killer. Then there was Khitai, whose name Lokesh somehow knew yet didn't know. He rose and walked along the wall again, then stopped and faced the long mantra on the wall, written by the secret teacher.
"There was another message," he said. "Not so secret. After the killing at the Red Stone camp, warnings went out. And about us coming. The dropka on the road knew."
"Many people would have heard about that killing," Jakli confirmed. "The clans have their own ways of spreading news. Herders meet in remote places. Notes are left on trees. Some old clans send dogs with letters on their collars. People were told to watch for the killer."
"But not just a general warning." He told her what the dropka had said, on the high road entering the Kunlun.
You are going there, to save the children.
"Lau died, then Suwan died, and someone decided the children were in danger. The teacher who used this chamber. Perhaps he warned one of the herders. That would have been enough to start the warnings, to cause the dropka to flee."
"Many people knew about Lau, about the zheli," Jakli said. "When a mother ewe dies, the lambs are always in jeopardy. And some said the zheli was always a dangerous thing, that there were those in the government who opposed it."
"Is that why she was forced from the council?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. You heard Ko today. People became accustomed to it. People support the zheli program now."
People, Shan thought. Meaning the Han who were quietly building a little kingdom in Yoktian.
Jakli stood and stepped toward the tunnel. "Did they ever find your father out?" she asked, as she bent to her knees by the tunnel. "In his secret classroom."
Shan stopped and looked at the writing on the wall. What kind of world was it where in order to be enlightened you had to hide? "No," he said in a wooden voice, still looking at the wall. "They would have eventually, but the Red Guard came one day, just because he had been a professor. They beat him and broke things in his body. My mother and I were held and forced to watch. He didn't die then, but when he breathed little bubbles of blood came to his lips. The next day they came back and made a bonfire of all his books in the street. He watched from the window because he was in too much pain to move. He watched them in horror and I watched him and slowly he just stopped breathing."
He stood in silence, looking at the secret writing on the wall.
"But the books from the closet," Jakli asked softly. "Did they get those too?"
Shan looked back with a sad grin. He shook his head slowly. "Afterward, I just went in alone, with a candle."
As she disappeared down the tunnel Shan hesitated, then picked up the chalk she had left on the bench. Quickly, in small Chinese ideograms, he wrote near the entrance.
The way that is told is not the constant way
, he wrote. His message for Gendun, who had ways of finding secret treasures. As he looked at his words a realization swept through him. Perhaps the room was no secret to Gendun. The hermitage in Lhadrung was populated by secret teachers. This chamber was home to a secret teacher. No one knew about the teacher who used the room. But Gendun had told Shan that Lau had been killed and a lama was missing. The purbas had only known that Lau was dead. The fact that the message had come that way had been a message in itself, meaning that the lama who used the chamber was gone, unable to communicate with Lhadrung directly. So Gendun had inferred the second part of the mystery, that someone had taken the lama.
They walked past the clearing without speaking to Jowa or Lokesh, who still sat with Bajys as he swayed back and forth, reciting mantras with the two Tibetans. At the cabin they lit a fire in a circle of stones.
"No one will believe it about Bajys," Jakli said as she made tea in a dented pan she had retrieved from under the porch. "I don't know if I believe it. It doesn't make sense."
"You mean they will still hunt him as a killer?"
She nodded. "Maybe he is. I know people who say it is possible to be possessed," she said, remembering Malik's words. "Maybe in killing the boy, something possessed him, then left him afterwards."
