"No, not one of us," Jowa replied curtly. "Not like that," he added enigmatically. "If it's soldiers I will go to the truck," he said in a low, urgent tone. "I will lead them away on a chase to the south. Gendun and Lokesh cannot move fast enough. Just climb higher and hide."
"No," Shan said, watching the rider. "We stay together."
Lokesh sat near the edge of the ledge and stretched, as if the approaching threat somehow relaxed him. He pulled his
mala
, his rosary, from his belt, and his fingers began reflexively to work the beads. "The two of you have strength," the old man said. "Gendun needs you, both of you. I will stay with the truck. I will tell the soldiers I am a smuggler and surrender."
"No," Shan repeated. "We stay together." As much as he needed Jowa for his wisdom of the real world, the world of knob checkpoints and army patrols, he needed Lokesh for his wisdom of the other world, the world the lamas lived in, for while they had to traverse Jowa's world to get to the place of death, once they arrived Shan knew he would be seeking answers in the lamas' world. Lokesh would have been a lama himself except that long ago, before the Chinese had invaded, he had been taken from his monastery as a novice to serve in the government of the Dalai Lama.
Shan watched Jowa remove the canvas bag that hung over his shoulder and his thick woolen vest, then wrap his hand around the pommel of the short blade that hung at his waist. Jowa would not speak about the priest within him, but at their campfires he sometimes spoke proudly about his bloodline that traced back to the
khampas
, the nomadic clans that tended herds in eastern Tibet, a people known for centuries as fearless warriors. Jowa no longer watched the rider but the cloud of dust behind him. Soldiers would have machine guns, but, like thousands of Tibetans before him, Jowa would rush them with only his blade if that was what it took to remain true.
"But the road," Shan said suddenly. "Why is he staying on the road?"
Jowa stepped to his side and slowly nodded his head. "You're right," he replied in a puzzled tone. "If someone chased one of the nomads, first thing he'd do, he'd get off the road." As he spoke, he swept his hand toward the wilderness that lay beyond the rough dirt track. They were in the wild, windblown changtang, the vast empty plateau that ranged for hundreds of miles across central and western Tibet, a land where the dropka had hidden themselves for centuries.
Lokesh cocked his head, then looked toward the opposite end of the valley, to the south. "He's not running from someone. He is running
to
someone."
They watched as the rider sped past the outcropping that hid their truck, reappeared, then abruptly reined in his horse. As the horse spun about in a slow circle, the dropka studied the road.
"I thought you hid the tire tracks," Shan said to Jowa.
"I did, for Chinese eyes."
The rider dismounted and led his mount toward the outcropping. Moments later he stood by their empty truck. After tying his horse to the bumper, he warily circled the vehicle, then climbed to the edge of the open cargo bay, his hand on one of the metal ribs designed to support a canvas cover over the bay. He stepped inside and lifted the lids of the barrels that stood there, then jumped out and studied the slope above him. Most of the slope was covered with loose scree, fragments of rock broken from the ledge above. Winding through it was the solitary goat path which they had climbed after leaving the truck at dawn.
"Sometimes the soldiers have Tibetan scouts," Jowa reminded Shan.
He touched Shan on the shoulder, motioning him into the deep shadow of the overhanging rock.
The dropka began climbing the path at a fast trot. Shan fought the temptation to pull Gendun to his feet, to scale the ridge and disappear with him. The others could explain themselves, they had identity papers. But no one could explain Shan or Gendun. Gendun, who had lived so hidden from the rest of the world that Shan had been the first Chinese he ever met, had no official identity. Shan, on the other hand, had suffered from too much official scrutiny. A former government investigator who had been exiled to slave labor in Tibet, his release from the gulag had been unofficial. If captured outside Lhadrung, he would be considered an escapee. Jowa pushed Shan against the rock in the darkest part of the shadow, beside Gendun, and waited in front of them, his hand on his blade again.
The man reached the ledge where they hid, took a few steps in the opposite direction, then turned and came straight toward them. When he reached the rock, he stepped toward the shadow and shielded his eyes to peer inside. "Are you there?" he called loudly, in a voice edged with fear. The man was of slight build, wearing a dirty fleece hat over a mop of black hair and a faded red shirt under his chuba. He twisted his head and squinted, as though still uncertain of what lurked within. Predators made lairs in such places, and so did the demons that lurked in mountains. He looked back toward the northern reach of the road, as if searching for something, then pressed his palms together in supplication and stepped into the darkness.
"We say prayers for you," he called out, still in his loud, frightened voice, then halted with a sigh of relief as Lokesh took a step forward. His mouth moved into a crooked shape that Shan thought at first was a smile, then he saw that the man was choking off a sob. "For your safe journey."
Lokesh was the most emotional Tibetan Shan had ever met, and he wore his emotions like other people wore clothes, in plain view, never trying to obscure them. In the prison barracks Shan had shared with Lokesh, one of the lamas had said Lokesh carried embers inside him, embers that flared up unexpectedly, fanned by a rush of emotion or sudden realization. When the embers flared, snippets of sound, in croaks and groans and even squeals, escaped him. The sound he made now was a long high-pitched moan, as if he had seen something in the man that scared him. As the sound came out he shook his hand in front of his chest, as though to deny something.
Jowa stepped beside Lokesh. "What do you want?" he demanded loudly, not bothering to hide his suspicion of the man. No one was to have known about their journey.
The man looked at the purba uncertainly, then took another step toward them. But as he did so Lokesh shifted to the side and the dropka was suddenly face to face with Shan, who stood in front of Gendun, hiding him from the man's view.
"Chinese!" he gasped in alarm.
"What do you want?" Jowa repeated, then stepped out into the sunlight, looking warily up and down the valley.
The herder followed Shan and Lokesh out of the shadows, then circled Shan once and looked back at Jowa. "You bring a Chinese to help our people?" he asked accusingly.
Lokesh put his hand on Shan's shoulder. "Shan Tao Yun was in prison," he said brightly, as if it were Shan's crowning achievement.
The anger in the man's eyes faded into despair. "Someone was coming, they said." His voice was nearly a whisper. "Someone to save us."
"But that's what our Shan does," Lokesh blurted out. "He saves people."
The man shrugged, not trying to conceal his disappointment. He looked up the valley, his right hand grasping a string of plastic beads hanging from his red waist sash. "It used to be, when trouble came," he said in a distant voice, as if no longer speaking to the three men, "we knew how to find a priest." He picked out a brilliant white cloud on the horizon and decided to address it. "We had a real priest once," he said to the cloud, "but the Chinese took him."
His expression was one Shan had seen on many faces since arriving in Tibet, a sad confusion about what outsiders had done to their world, a helplessness for which the proud, independent Tibetan spirit was ill-prepared. Shan followed the man's eyes as they turned back up the valley.
Someone was emerging from the dust cloud, a rider on a horse that appeared to be near collapse. The animal moved at a wobbling, uneven pace, as if dizzy with fatigue.
"When I was young," the man said, turning to Lokesh now, with a new, urgent tone, "there was a shaman who could take the life force of one to save another. Old people would do it sometimes, to save a sick child." He looked back forlornly at the approaching rider. "I would give mine, give it gladly, to save him. Can you do that?" he asked, stepping closer to study Lokesh's face. "You have the eyes of a priest."
"Why did you come?" Jowa asked again, but this time the harshness had left his voice.
The man reached inside his shirt and produced a yak-hair cord from which hung a silver
gau
, one of the small boxes used to carry a prayer close to the heart. He clamped both hands around the gau and looked back up the valley, not at the rider now but at the far ranges capped with snow. "They took my father to prison and he died. They put my mother in a town but gave her no food coupons to live on, and she starved to death." He spoke slowly, his eyes drifting from the mountains to the ground at his feet. "They said no medical help would be given to our children unless we took them to their clinic. So I take my daughter with a fever but they said the medicine was for sick Chinese children first, and she died. Then we found a boy and he had no one and we had no one, so we called him our son." A tear rolled down his cheek.
"We only wanted to live in peace with our son," he said, his voice barely audible above the wind. "But our old priest, he used to say it was a sin, to want something too much." He looked back toward the second rider, his face long and barren. "They said you were coming, to save the children."
A chill crept down Shan's spine as he heard the words. He looked at Lokesh, who seemed even more shaken by the man's announcement. The color was draining from the old man's face.
"We are going because of a woman named Lau," Shan replied softly.
"No," the dropka said with an unsettling certainty. "It is because of the children, to keep all the children from dying."
On the road below them, a hundred yards before the outcropping, the second horse staggered forward, then stopped. Its rider, wrapped in a heavy felt blanket, slumped in the saddle, then slowly fell to the ground.
The herder let out a sound that wasn't just a moan, nor just a cry of fear. It was a sound of raw, animal agony.
Shan began to run.
He ran in the shortest line toward the fallen rider, darting to where the path met the ledge, then leaping and stumbling down the loose scree of the slope, twice falling painfully on his knees among the rocks, then finally landing on all fours in the coarse grass where the valley floor began. As he rose he glanced over his shoulder. No one followed.
The exhausted horse stood quivering, its nose, edged with a froth of blood, nearly touching the ground beside a mound of black yak-hair felt. Shan slowly lifted an edge of the blanket and saw dozens of hair braids, a bead woven into the end of each. It was an old style for devout women, one hundred eight braids, one hundred eight beads, the number of beads in a mala. The woman was breathing shallowly. Her face was stained with dirt and tears. Her eyes, like those of the horse, were so overcome with exhaustion that they seemed not to notice Shan. Inside the blanket she had used as a cloak was another blanket, around a long bundle that lay across her legs.
He looked back. Jowa and Lokesh were slowly working their way down the path, Jowa leading the herdsman by hand, Lokesh thirty paces behind leading Gendun, as though both men were blind.
Shan raised the second blanket and froze. It was a boy, his face so battered and bruised that one eye was swollen shut. He slowly pulled the blanket away and gasped. Blood was everywhere, saturating the boy's shirt and pants, soaking the inside of the heavy felt.
He tried to lift the boy with the blanket, to take the weight from the woman, but the blanket was twisted in the reins. He tried to pull the reins away and found they were connected to the woman, tied around her forearm above her wrist, because her hand was useless. The wrist was an ugly purple color, and the hand hung at an unnatural angle.
As Shan lifted the boy out of the blanket and laid him on the dried grass, the boy's mouth contorted, but he made no sound. The boy, no more than ten years old, had been savagely mauled and slashed across the shoulder, through his shirt. He was conscious, and though he had to be in great pain, he lay still and silent, his one good eye watching as Shan examined him. The eye showed no fear, no anger, no pain. It was only sad— and confused, like the look on the herdsman's face.
The boy had fought back. His hands were cut deeply in the palms, wounds that could only have been made if the boy had grabbed at the thing that had slashed him. His shirt had been ripped open at the neck, the buttons torn away. Shan clenched his jaw so tightly it hurt. The boy had been stabbed lower on his body, a blow that had penetrated the ribs and left a long open gout of tissue that oozed dark blood. His pants too had been ripped in the fight, a long tear below the left knee. He was missing a shoe.
Shan looked back at the solitary, unblinking eye that stared at him from the ruin of the boy's face, but found no words to say. He gazed at his hands. They were covered with the boy's blood. Overcome for a moment with helplessness, he just watched the blood drip from his fingertips onto the blades of brown grass.
