"They said we were coming to save the children. Two boys have already died."
"An old woman died, and a lama disappeared. That's all I was told." Jowa disappeared around the corner of the truck. A moment later the heavy engine roared to life.
Shan retrieved a hat from the floor, a tattered quilted army hat with heavy earflaps. He pulled it over his head and settled against one of the barrels on the side so he could watch the moon. The purbas had brought the secret of the woman's death. But now there was another secret moving south through the dropka, a warning about children and death and about the strangers from Lhadrung coming to help.
They passed by a waterfall that glistened like diamonds falling through the night. A small throaty buzz came from nearby. Lokesh was sleeping. Shan put his hands deep in his jacket pockets, for warmth, and his right hand closed around the small jar Gendun had given him that night when they began their journey, a jar of the consecrated sand taken from the mandala. He gripped it tightly as he gazed into the sky.
The moon that Shan watched was not the same moon he had known in the lands below, in the China of his first life. Like so much else in his second life, his Tibetan reincarnation, the moon was more absolute than the one he had known in Beijing. In Tibet it was so brilliant and pure, so close that one could believe the old tales that drifting souls sometimes got caught in its mountains.
There were nights when he could get lost in such a moon, let himself be absorbed for hours in its beauty. But tonight the dead boy haunted him and kept him from the beauty.
You must hurry
, the man had said.
Death keeps coming.
To anyone else the words would have been a warning to flee, to run away from death. But for Shan they had meant hurry, go to meet it. A wave of helplessness swept over him, and he knew that his face wore the same sad confusion the Tibetans sometimes wore. Even some of the lamas had shown it when they had dispatched him seven nights before. They might as well have used the same words as the dropka, for all they had told him, for all Gendun still told him.
You must hurry. Death keeps coming.
That was all the lamas understood. Murder was an unknown land to them, and Shan was their ambassador.
Chapter Two
After midnight, as they stopped once again to move rocks from the road, Shan thought he heard something. A metallic rattle, a machine noise, coming from far ahead of them. He heard only a snippet of sound, then it was gone, so quickly he wasn't sure he had heard it at all. Sound traveled unpredictably in the high, rarified atmosphere. It could have been a truck on the lonely road ahead of them. It could have been a helicopter behind them. It could have been a plane in the far distance. No one spoke about the noise, but when they finished Jowa checked the two empty barrels with his hand lantern and insisted that Gendun switch places with Lokesh. If he slammed the brakes hard three times, it was the signal for Gendun and Shan to hide.
But when the need arose there was no time for a signal. Shan woke from a deep slumber as the truck lurched to a stop, then heard Jowa calling out in anger to someone on the road.
He quickly helped Gendun into one of the barrels and covered it, then peered over the top of the truck cab as Jowa switched on their headlights. Half a dozen men stood by a heavy red truck, the size of their own, though much newer. The engine hood of the truck was braced open, and strewn across the road were a spare tire and metallic objects that could have been engine parts.
They were not Public Security, Shan saw with relief, nor the army. He could see Jowa speaking with one of the men, a big, broad-shouldered Han Chinese wearing a white shirt. Jowa was pointing at the red truck and at the road, which was blocked by the tire and parts.
Two of the men, in light brown shirts and pants of matching color, bent over the tire in the road, glancing frequently toward the man in the white shirt. Another stood with a foot on the bumper of the red truck, watching the sky. And a pair stood just behind the man who spoke with Jowa. They were all Han, and though they did not carry themselves as stiffly as soldiers, they had the quick, hunting eyes of soldiers. Shan looked back at the truck. An emblem was on the driver's door, what appeared in the dim light to be two outstretched arms, joined at the top.
Shan silently climbed down in the shadows and inched his way along the far side of their own truck, out of the strangers' view, until he reached the passenger door, where he ventured another look over the hood. What was it, he thought, what was so peculiar about these men? They were well dressed. They all wore the same trim brown clothing, except for the white-shirted man speaking with Jowa. They had no visible weapons, but three had large wrenches extending out of their pockets, and one held a ball-peen hammer. Two had heavy wooden sticks like truncheons hanging from their belts. Inside the cab of the truck he saw a figure in the passenger seat, the face lost in the night. A bright orange ember moved to and from the face. A plume of smoke rose from the window. Shan looked back at the man who watched the sky. The demon had been called away by lightning, the woman had said. Demons used lightning to speak with each other.
They needed a few more minutes to complete repairs, Shan heard the white-shirted man explain to Jowa. But no one seemed to be working on the engine. The man asked where Jowa was heading. North, was Jowa's reply, north to sell salt. The two men behind the speaker began to move away, distancing themselves from Jowa as though wary of his reach, then circling about, toward the Tibetans' truck.
"Can we help you?" Jowa asked loudly, watching the two men as they approached his open door.
"Nothing up north," the stranger in the white shirt observed in an accusing tone, still the only one of his company to speak. "Nothing but bandits."
Lokesh climbed out of the truck and stepped to Jowa's side. The man in the white shirt stared at him intently, surveying him from head to toe.
Shan realized he could be mistaken. Public Security didn't always wear uniforms. But Public Security carried submachine guns, not wrenches.
"You a bandit, old man?" the big-shouldered Han asked with a lightless grin. His deep voice echoed off the rockface. "Where you going, sneaking about like this in the middle of the night?"
"Salt," Lokesh replied in a dry, croaking voice, and Shan saw him do something he had often seen him do in prison. He began shaking his head, and then his arm, as if he could not control it, as if he suffered from a disease of the aged. "Good Tibetan salt. Going as far as it takes to sell our salt," Lokesh said. Still shaking, he stepped toward the man, who retreated a step as if scared of him. "You should buy it so we can turn around and go home. This old truck hurts my bones," Lokesh groaned. "I want to go home."
The Han walked a complete circle around Lokesh, studying him again, then gave a shallow laugh. "Takes papers to sell things, old man. Bet you don't have papers. That's why you travel at night."
Shan's mind raced. If the strangers were bandits, what did the Tibetans have of value that might appease them? An old pair of binoculars. A week's supply of food. Perhaps the truck itself, and its barrels of salt. He had a nightmarish vision of the strangers driving away with Gendun still in his barrel.
The two men continued to circle the truck, aiming hand lanterns into the cargo bay. The man in white glanced back at the cab of his truck, toward the glowing cigarette that hung in the shadow.
Suddenly Shan was in the beams of the two brilliant lanterns held behind him. He stood like a dumb animal trapped by the light and let himself be led, one man pulling each elbow, to the man in the white shirt.
The man circled Shan as he had Lokesh, then stood in front of him, disappointment obvious on his face. He leaned close to Shan's ear. "Don't turn your back on the damned locusts," he said in a low voice. "They'll hit you with a stone and call it an avalanche." Locusts. The term was an epithet used by the Chinese for Tibetans, for the sound they made when chanting their mantras. The man looked back with a broad smile, apparently pleased with his suggestion, then stood in front of the three men.
"Don't think we can let you go north tonight," he announced. The men who had pretended to work on the tire rose, as if the words were a cue.
Shan glanced at Jowa, whose body was tightening like a coiled spring.
Shan put his hands in his pockets and shuffled forward, standing in front of Jowa. "You'll have to," he said in a good-natured tone.
The man in the white shirt seemed amused by Shan's announcement. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. "Why so, comrade?" He turned his body sideways, as if to make sure Shan saw the men assembled behind him.
"Because the People's Liberation Army is chasing us," Shan said matter-of-factly.
The man's smile broadened. "The three of you and an antique truck," he said with a skeptical air.
"You know the army," Shan shot back. "Sometimes they just do it for practice."
As Shan returned the man's steady gaze his smile began to fade. He nodded at one of the men beside him, who bolted toward the truck, disappearing into the shadows by the passenger's door. He surveyed Shan, Lokesh, and Jowa once more, as if being sure he could remember their faces, then looked at the cab a moment and snapped his fingers.
His men leapt into action. In less than a minute the road was cleared.
"Be careful, comrades," the man warned in an icy voice. "Bandits are around every corner."
Jowa stepped toward the cab with a sideways motion, his eyes jumping from man to man. Shan pulled Lokesh back to the truck, and seconds later they were in the cab and driving away.
They drove up switchbacks over a high ridge for a quarter hour, then stopped just past the top to help Gendun out of his barrel. As Lokesh slid out of the cab, Jowa touched Shan's arm. "I don't know who they were," he said. "I thought soldiers at first."
Shan realized Jowa was asking him to explain. "We're close to India and the road to Pakistan. There are smugglers. Maybe they were waiting for a shipment." Jowa pulled out his map and climbed out to study it in the parking lights. Shan turned to look through the rear window. No one was in the cargo bay. He looked in the side mirror. In the moonlight he saw Lokesh, sitting alone on the ground. Shan jumped out and jogged to the back of the truck.
Lokesh was holding his beads near his chest, counting them quickly. Shan climbed into the cargo bay. The hiding barrels were empty. Gendun was gone.
Shan stood with his hands clenched on the side of the barrel they had hidden Gendun in, his heart pounding wildly. A small white square of cloth was tied to the board above Gendun's barrel. A khata, a prayer scarf. Shan untied it and stared at it in confusion.
"Where is he?" Shan called out in alarm and darted to Lokesh, shaking his shoulder.
Lokesh looked up to the sky, slowly surveying the stars, as if they might show sign of Gendun. "He is gone now," he observed in a tiny voice.
Shan ran up the road a hundred feet and called Gendun's name, twisting the khata around his fingers. The sound flushed a bird from its roost and it flew across the face of the moon. He turned and saw that Jowa was in the bay now, staring at the empty barrels. Shan jogged back and squatted at Lokesh's side. "Where is Rinpoche?" he repeated desperately. "Was he taken by those men?"
"Lokesh, you must understand—" Jowa called out from behind Shan, "he's our—" His voice drifted off as he looked at the dark horizon. The wind seemed to rise, a cold wind that hinted of snow.
"He could be lost," Shan said in a brittle tone. "He could have fallen out of the truck on the steep slopes."
"He must have been taken," Jowa declared. "The bastards in the red truck. And we just drove away."
"Sometimes," Lokesh said with a long sigh, "a lama just gets called away." His voice was calm, but his eyes were forlorn. He saw the khata in Shan's hand, its end fluttering in the wind, and reached for it. Shan let it go. The old Tibetan laid it on his thigh and stroked it with a small, grateful smile, as though he needed reassurance that the Gendun who had traveled with them had been the flesh and blood Gendun. Shan dropped to the ground beside Lokesh, but his heart felt too heavy to pray.
Gendun was with the strange men in the red truck, the ones who acted like Public Security, who could chew up and digest a man like Gendun in hours if they chose. At best, Gendun was alone in the wilderness of mountains. Gendun, who had hardly known the outside world until seven days before. With a pang he remembered the first time he had met Gendun, hidden away in his hermitage. He had marveled over the watch on Shan's wrist. When Shan had let him examine it, he had listened to it, and shook his head, not just for the wonder of its workings but that people would think they needed such things. "You Chinese," he had said with a grin and a shake of his head.
Jowa turned the truck around and drove slowly in the direction they had come as Shan stood on the sideboard and held onto the mirror mount, calling out Gendun's name. Jowa turned on the headlights. They drove for a mile, then Jowa stopped and turned off the engine. Jowa sat at the wheel, gripping it tightly, torment twisting his face. Shan looked at him a moment. Did Jowa's pain come because he was a warrior who could find no enemy or because of what he had said before, that if the lamas didn't survive, there was no point in continuing?
