"A lot of good people are out here," Jakli said in a hollow voice, still wearing her small smile. "Warrior monks. Merchants from the Silk Road. Pilgrims. I never thought…." Her voice drifted away, and she settled back into her seat, watching a small stream of sand particles that had begun to blow in through a crack in the rubber that sealed the windshield. She began singing a song in Tibetan. Shan had heard it before, a very old song called a spirit wedding song. It was for loved ones separated by death.
A distant feeling seemed to settle over him as he looked toward the maw of the storm, as if he were somewhere else, just watching. He opened the pad to an empty page in the back.
Spilled ink in the sky
, he saw himself write.
Coming to drown me.
He watched his hand take the slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Then he, Shan, was back. "No!" he shouted to the storm, putting aside the part of him that was ready to die. He was not going to spend eternity in the Well of Tears. His door was in the lee of the wind. He tied the string of his bag to his arm, then opened the door and stepped out. The sand was nearly over the wheel wells now. He tried to read the compass but could not hold it steady, so decided to walk in the general direction the truck was facing. The wind beat him back after two steps. It clawed at his face, the sand stinging like hornets. There were storms, he had heard, in which the sand blew so hard that it etched the skin and flesh from the faces of living men. He remembered the statues at Karachuk. Maybe he would end like that, gnawed to ruin by wind and sand, a mere suggestion of a human.
Something was forcing its way into his mouth and nose. It was gritty and tasted of salt. He realized, from a strange distance, as though he were watching someone else, that he had fallen. He lifted his hand to his head, which was against the bumper of the truck and throbbed with pain, and his hand came away wet and red. Then he discovered with mild surprise that his legs were gone. No, not gone, he decided, just buried in the wave of sand that was rapidly moving up the body of the truck. Half a grave. Is there such a thing as half a grave? he considered dully. A sound like the croak of a dying frog escaped his throat, then he shook his head violently. "No!" he shouted. "Gendun!"
He dragged himself along the truck until he found the door and with great effort pulled it open far enough to slip inside.
Lokesh was singing with Jakli now, not a mantra, but the spirit wedding song, and Shan lay in his seat, gasping for air, listening. Then the others grew strangely silent.
"The old ones," Lokesh said in a whisper not of fear, but of awe. "They are coming for us, to take us to the Well." He started singing again, his voice calmer.
The rubber sealing began to crumble, eaten by the wind, and sand began churning through the truck. But Shan no longer heard the wind. There was a chorus of soft voices and he recognized each one of them, the lamas who had saved his soul. He wasn't going to have a new life. He was reliving old lives. An image flashed through his mind like a dream. He was on the Silk Road, and he was losing the emperor's treasures. He smelled ginger. His father was close.
Then he heard a strange sound, like a laugh, from behind him. He blinked the sand from his eyes and saw an exuberant smile on Lokesh's face. "I had always hoped it would be like this," his old friend said, "to be able to see them when they came for me."
And indeed, out of the maw of the storm two phantoms appeared, shrouded in black, faceless, arms extended toward the truck to receive them. The old ones had come for their souls.
* * *
There were many kinds of hells, the old Tibetans taught, but the atmosphere in all was the deepest of black. The tiny dull hint of consciousness, all that remained of Shan, clung to that thought. There were many kinds of hells, as there were many kinds of sin, but the worst were the cold hells, and the one Shan had gone to was surely the coldest and the blackest. There was nothing, only the cold and the black, and the silence to let him agonize over all his failures. He had abandoned the children, who would now die. He had abandoned Gendun, who would be captured and devoured by the knobs. He had lost the waterkeeper, who would just fade away among the political priests who had captured him.
His agony ebbed and flowed with his consciousness. Whenever he was aware, he was aware of pain. And when he tried to conjure faces, they were always the faces of dead children.
Once something soft touched his head. His eyes fluttered open and saw a blurred flame, and for an instant he seemed to see a woman with wise green eyes leaning over him. Her face, lit by the flame, seemed to be made of fine porcelain. He knew her skin would squeak if he touched it. Then the light went out and he was back in his cold hell.
After some time— hours, days, years, he could not tell— the visions sometimes became beautiful, with faces of sacred figures, sometimes one of the many Buddhas he had met in Tibet, sometimes Lao Tzu, the sage of the Tao, who centuries earlier had himself disappeared into the western desert. Sometimes he seemed to be in a great warehouse of the Silk Road and heard the braying of camels and excited voices in many tongues calling out, then he was being condemned for losing the emperor's caravan and was being tied to a post for the death by a thousand slices.
Once in his visions a man with light skin sat before him with a brilliant lantern, reading from a large book in a rich, deep voice, and the words he read were in English.
"The tent," the voice said, "the tent in which the Great Khan holds court is grand enough to accomodate one thousand princes. Each hall of the tent is supported by columns of spicewood skillfully carved, and the outside is hung with lion skins. Inside the walls are all of ermine and sable…" The words were strange, yet familiar— as though he had heard them before, but in a different language, and in another lifetime.
What were the stages, he tried to recall, the stages of Bardo, when the spirit drifted until it saw the path to rebirth? Ignorance at first, clinging to the illusion that the body still lived, then realization that death has occurred— the Glimpsing Reality stage, the lamas called it, when uncertainty and hallucinations of the past lives might pull the dead back, delaying the final realization that there was no path possible but rebirth.
He fell back into the dark, silent hell, then smelled ginger in his hallucination. His father was walking in the shadows ahead of him, excited because they were going to watch the sun rise from an old Taoist temple. They met a kind old Englishman whom his father introduced as a professor of Chinese history, who joined their journey. Later his father stopped and asked if he were tired. He rubbed Shan's cheek with his hand. His hand was wet. It was rough. It smelled foul.
Shan opened his eyes and cried out. The tongue of a silver camel was licking his face. Then he sat up, awake in his old body, and the animal twisted its head and looked at him with an expression of disbelief. With a gasp of unexpected pleasure, Shan realized that somehow he knew the animal's name: Sophie.
A figure appeared at the entrance to his chamber, then stopped and ran away, calling out excitedly.
A moment later Jakli ran in, Lokesh two steps behind her. His old friend knelt and clasped his frail hand over Shan's own, a huge smile on his face. Jakli held a large dipper to Shan's lips and insisted he drink again and again.
"How?" he asked, and found his throat was rough and gravelly, unprepared for speech.
Both his friends explained at once, and gradually he understood that it had not been the old ones they had seen but Marco and Deacon, wrapped in heavy felt blankets, tied to Sophie, who lay like an anchor on top of the nearest dune. It was an old trick of the desert clans. The anchor had to stay on top, where the wind hurt the most, because below, out of the strongest wind, was where the sand filled, where everything was buried. Marco and the American had pulled them inside the shelter of their blankets, then followed their ropes to Sophie, where they had waited for three hours, using Sophie as their windbreak, all five rolled in the blankets like a giant cocoon. When the howl of the wind had stopped, they had looked out to find themselves on a flat expanse of sand, the nearest dune a quarter mile away. The truck had vanished.
"Thank your god," Marco said, "that it was only a little one, just a small storm."
Jakli poured water on a cloth and wiped Shan's head. "You hit your skull on the truck," she explained. "A concussion, against the bumper."
"How long?" he asked in confusion.
She sighed and shook her head. "Almost two days. I'm so sorry," she said with pain in her eyes.
He wondered about her apology a moment, then realized she meant it was a day too late. He gazed at her dumbly, his mouth open. He would not be going to Nepal and a new life, he would not meet the old professor after all. "And this place?" he finally asked.
"Sand Mountain. Marco was already here. Osman called him on the radio and said to watch for us because of the storm."
"The radio?" Shan croaked. His throat still felt parched despite all the water.
But no one seemed to hear. They were looking up at the entrance to the chamber, where Marco stood with a lean sandy-haired man. Jacob Deacon.
"Is the great investigator ready to talk?" the Eluosi barked out from thirty feet away.
"He's too tired," Jakli protested.
"It's all right," Shan said and extended his hand to Lokesh. But as he started to rise dizziness overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees.
Marco walked to his pallet and stood over him, stroking Sophie's neck.
"A few more hours' rest," Jakli said. "This afternoon."
Marco nodded reluctantly. "If Sophie and Jakli say wait, I wait. But a few more hours only." He moved back into the shadows.
"This afternoon?" Shan asked. "But it is night."
"This is a cavern," Jakli explained. "A water station. A monastery even, long ago."
"A water station?"
"The aqueducts under the sand. The
karez—
they brought water from the mountains when there were still huge ice fields. The textbooks from Beijing say that engineers from Nanjing and Sian built them but the old stories and the walls say otherwise. Men from Persia came to build them during your Tang dynasty, in exchange for the precious stones and fruit from our land. The walls have paintings of them."
A thick, worn book lay beside his pallet. "Someone was reading to me," he said. He picked it up.
The Travels of Marco Polo
, in English.
"I was," Deacon said. "Warp's idea, she says it helps bring an injured brain back."
"Warp?"
Jakli put a finger to his lips. "There will be time later for explanations." She handed him the ladle again.
Shan drank. His thirst seemed unslakable. "The water still flows from the mountains?"
"A trickle, enough to keep Sand Mountain alive."
"But it must have been a thousand years."
Jakli nodded and pushed him gently back down on his pallet. "Now sleep again. We will be near."
But when he awoke the chamber was empty. Carefully, wary of summoning the pain that came with sudden movement, he picked up the clay lamp by his pallet and began to explore.
The chamber was roughly forty feet on each side. Two of the walls had been plastered and held life-sized paintings of stern men with blue eyes and long reddish hair and beards that were squared at the bottom. Their faces somehow reminded him of the woman in the poster, Niya. They were offering gifts to other figures who stood in front of horses, scores of tiny horses painted out of scale. Down the tunnel that led out of the room he saw half a dozen meditation cells. He looked in one and stepped back quickly. Two figures lay asleep under blankets of rough sacking.
The tunnel parted. To the right he saw lights and heard several voices. He stepped to the left and soon emerged into another large chamber. Sophie stood there with two other camels. On the sand floor beyond was a bright patch, reflected from a passage at the end of the chamber. Sophie greeted him with a soft wickering sound, and he rubbed her neck a moment, then followed the curving passage for twenty feet and emerged into brilliant sunlight.
Shielding his eyes, he stepped into the desert. The sky was a brilliant cobalt, devoid of clouds. He quickly discovered that the Sand Mountain was a long outcropping of sandstone, much bigger than the one that held the temple at Karachuk, perhaps two hundred feet high and over half a mile long. There was a ruin near the top, an old sentinel tower of cut stone. He walked halfway up the path that led to the tower and sat on a rock, then stretched and filled his lungs. The air was pure and clear, with no scent of the death it had carried two days earlier. In the far south a long line of white hovered on the horizon. Not a cloud, he knew, but the high Kunlun, where Gendun sat inside the mountain, waiting.
Two days, he thought. In two days the killer could have found another boy.
When he went back inside, through the small fissure hidden in shadow, Jakli was sitting at the entrance, bent over a wooden bowl, rubbing something with a brush of brass wire. She did not notice him until he knelt beside her.
