"Of course not, we could not permit it. But I told the old ones," the monk said with a generous smile toward Shan, "I explained that it is a new time, we don't have to be afraid of all the Chinese anymore."
"Why could you not permit them to construct something?"
"We hold the valley and the gompa in trust. We await the return of the Yakde Lama. Maybe in ten years, maybe twenty, I told him."
"I don't understand."
"Only the Yakde Lama could give such permission."
Suddenly the ravens on the ledge shot into the sky, flying in a straight line toward those who circled the lake. They began to chatter, so loudly Shan could hear the echo down the valley.
The monk studied the birds silently for a moment, then nodded and turned to Shan, excitement mounting on his face. "You have luck," he said brightly, "the cloud riders are returning."
Chapter Sixteen
Shan and Jowa jogged along the valley floor toward the trail the monks had described as the route of the herders. There was time if their visitors had to flee, the assistant abbot had confirmed, for the ravens always sensed the approach of the cloud riders from a great distance, in enough time for some of the monks to walk to the lake to meet the machine when it arrived. But there was nothing to fear from the men in the machine, he had insisted. What's more, there was no place to go. They had no more than two hours of light left and in the autumn night of the high Kunlun they would be blind, they would freeze. Sometimes travelers just shriveled in the cold, dry wind and blew away.
But Jowa and Shan knew there was danger. The Brigade knew their faces, and if the two of them were captured at the Raven's Nest the monks too would be in jeopardy. The assistant abbot had reluctantly shown his three visitors the ancient stairway cut in the rock face that was the only path to the valley floor and at the last minute had handed Jowa a battered old candle lantern, a small tin box with a handle of wire and a small glass window on one side.
When they had descended the stairs Bajys had collapsed on the last step with a forlorn expression. Jowa had impatiently urged him on but Shan had motioned for the purba to continue down the path, then turned to Bajys.
"It's a long climb back," Shan said after a moment, looking at the steep, narrow stairs that led up to the Nest. The Brigade knew Shan and Jowa, but they had never seen Bajys. One more unlicensed Tibetan in the gompa would make little difference to Managing Director Ko.
When Bajys looked up, the confusion had left his face. There was something new, a glimmer of gratitude in his eyes. "When we came out of that snowstorm," Bajys said, "it felt like my world had changed."
Shan sighed and looked up at the monks. They had gathered on the lower terrace. They were all wearing red nylon jackets over their robes and waving. Shan offered his hand. "I'd like to come back some day," he said, "and help you fix that window."
Bajys took his hand and smiled again, then began climbing back to the old monks.
Shan caught up with Jowa at the lake, which was as brilliant blue seen from its shores as from the gompa perched in the rocks above. But he paused as Jowa disappeared around the front edge of the ridge. He stepped to the shoreline, dropped to the water, and drank, then cupped both hands and washed his face. It was strangely sweet and caused a tingling sensation on his tongue. The holy water of the Yakde.
For a quarter hour they jogged down the face of the massive escarpment on which the Raven's Nest perched, then suddenly the sound of rotor blades filled the air. Shan lay beside Jowa on the path, the blanket thrown over them as the helicopter sped by and disappeared into the hanging valley above them. Then they sprang up and dashed recklessly along the narrow goat path, risking a plunge of five hundred feet with any misstep, until they reached a fork in the trail. Without hesitating Jowa chose the one that led to the south. Minutes later they crossed a narrow pass. Jowa paused to study the peaks once more, then, with the setting sun in front of them, cut a path to the crest of a long low ridge that descended to the west of the pass.
Jowa did not speak but jogged on, never once glancing back to see if Shan was there. After an hour, with the sun lost in a pink blush to the west, he stopped and stared at the terrain ahead, memorizing it in the last light. In another quarter hour he paused and lit the lantern. They could travel at no more than a fast walk in the dim light it threw, and finally Jowa stopped and said they would wait for the moon. They sat silently against a rock, huddling against the cold, each eating a handful of tsampa, until after nearly an hour the moon blinked over the eastern peaks. Jowa stood and studied the nearby hills, then moved briskly away.
Jowa extinguished the light as they began climbing down into a narrow valley, seeming more confident as he led Shan along the rugged terrain. He left Shan in the shadow of a large boulder by the bottom wall of the valley, handing him the blanket and instructing him in a grave tone not to move, not to leave with anyone but Jowa, as if danger lurked near.
Shan sat in the dark, clutching the blanket to his neck, watching the stars, shifting his view to the north, where Gendun and Lokesh roamed. Did they have shelter from the wind? he wondered. Had they found someone to give them light in the black of the night?
He had not heard the helicopter leave from the Raven's Nest, though it easily could have gone in the opposite direction without detection, back to Ko's home in Yoktian. What was it Ko was doing at the Nest? The question raged in his mind, it defied him, it filled him with a foreboding nearly as great as that he felt over the fate of Gendun and Lokesh. Ko had no authority in Tibet, no sponsor. In Tibet he would be as illegal as the monks at the Nest. But Ko was not like others Shan had known in authority. He was part of the new China. He did not yearn for higher government office, which had always been the source of power in the People's Republic. He wasn't interested in killing boys. He was interested in business, had perhaps been in the Kunlun that night in the truck, on some Brigade business Shan still did not comprehend. Ko saw gain elsewhere. He saw gain from a handful of old, illegal monks in a forgotten wilderness gompa.
He became aware of a noise and of movements in the shadows. He heard Jowa's voice through the darkness. "This way."
Two dark shapes, Jowa and a figure wearing a hooded cloak, emerged from the night and led him through a maze of rocks, wary of the moonlight, as if even in this high wilderness, in the black night, they feared being seen. They entered a cave, where Jowa's companion lit a butter lamp, and they walked for thirty feet in its dim light before the lamp was abruptly extinguished. There was the sound of a knock on a door and creaking hinges, a hastily blurted syllable that Shan could not understand— a password, perhaps— then a hand was on his back, pushing him through.
The door closed with a metallic groan, and Shan sensed that they had entered a new place. There were unexpected smells of metal and incense and damp fleece and onions. The lamp was lit once more, and to his great surprise Shan saw walls of concrete. Jowa and their guide moved rapidly away, and as Shan followed at a brisk walk he saw that the floor too was constructed of concrete. They passed sleeping forms on pallets of dried grass, then silent men and women sitting alone, bolt upright, at the intersections where other tunnels met their own, as if they were sentinels in some vast labyrinth. Several of the silent figures nodded to Jowa, then looked uncertainly at Shan as he passed.
It was an impossible place. It was a purba place, but it could never have been built by the purbas. As they passed through a central room that had wires hanging from the ceiling and cold, lifeless electric lamp fixtures on the walls, he saw dogs and children and several tables with small statues of Buddha and other teachers.
They went down a long stairway, not carved of the mountain rock but made of metal grating with rusty piping for railings, then followed a corridor that seemed to reverse their direction, as if they were now traveling under the valley floor. Jowa's face was fixed in a grim expression. Then, just as Shan was about to stop and insist on an explanation, they moved through a heavy metal door, spotted with rust. Old rubber seals, dried and cracked, hung from the door frame. They entered a circular chamber twenty feet in diameter, which Jowa walked through quickly, as if anxious to be away from it.
In the chamber was a ring of iron railing around a ten-foot-wide circle of deep shadow. Shan took a hesitant step forward and put a hand on the railing. A cold, hard thing grew in his belly, and he understood the essence of the place. It was not just a hole inside the ring. It was a concrete-lined silo.
"How is it possible?" he gasped, both hands on the rusty pipe as he stared down into the darkness.
"The first generation of missile bases," Jowa said in a low, unsettled voice. "Now the missiles are much bigger. Multiple warheads. Huge bases, like the Mushroom Bowl. But thirty years ago they built smaller facilities, as close to India as possible, half a dozen silos apiece. A small crew. Some, in the bigger valleys, were expanded for the new systems. Others like this were abandoned. They sealed the tops. They blew up the entrances to fill them with rubble. But a herder was watching here. He cut the fuse to the explosives in the one tunnel, so he could use it for his sheep in the winter. But later the Chinese made him surrender his herd to a collective."
"So he told the purbas."
"He became a purba. Not because of the sheep. Because they put his brother in prison on flour charges. Some July sixth, years ago."
Shan grimaced. For centuries throwing roasted barley flour into the air had been a traditional Tibetan expression of rejoicing. But July 6, the Dalai Lama's birthday, had been outlawed as a holiday, and those caught celebrating it with flour, even sometimes those caught carrying bags of flour on the day, were subject to criminal charges.
"But all these people," Shan said. "Not just purbas use it."
Jowa opened another heavy door and gestured Shan through it. "I was one of those who opened it years ago. It is one of the few safe places we have in the region. It became something of a sanctuary, for people in transit. They come usually at night, with a purba guide. Few know exactly where they are. Most stay only a few days and move on."
"Transit?" Shan asked as they started down the corridor.
"Sometimes people have to leave quickly," Jowa explained, "cross the mountains before they are arrested. Sometimes they can't take their families. But their families are known to Public Security, so their families must be protected." Public Security would use the families, Jowa meant, would take them as hostages for the return of the fugitive or just punish them in retribution.
"So, all these people— they are waiting to cross the border?"
"Some are. Some just come to help. Some come to rest or recover from injuries that can't be taken to a Chinese hospital. Others come for the quiet, to make plans."
As they walked past another group of reclining figures, a woman sat up and called to Jowa. "Thank you, thank you again," she said in a soft, shy voice, then looked at Shan with a tentative expression, as if she recognized him. As she raised her bandaged wrist, Shan realized who she was and halted.
"They were still very frightened when our people found them," Jowa explained. "Just sitting at the boy's grave, waving that charm. I said, at least give her time here, in safety, to heal her wrist. We sent people to watch their sheep."
It was the dropka woman, the foster mother of the dead boy Alta.
Shan stepped across a collection of sleeping forms to squat by the woman's side. "I hope your hand is better," he offered.
"Soon I will be able to use it, the healer here says," the woman said, bracing her broken wrist on her knee. She placed her uninjured hand flat onto something beside her as she spoke, as if she needed support. Shan glanced down. She was leaning on the charm, the sacred writing left by Gendun the day Alta had died.
"I wanted to ask you something important," Shan said. "I am sorry if the memory is still painful. But we are still trying to understand. The day when you found the killer, was the killer speaking to the boy? Asking him questions?"
The woman's brow knitted as she struggled to remember. She shook her head gradually. "Nothing. No words. Just noises."
"You said he was called away by lightning. Are you sure? Lightning is rare in the mountains this time of year."
"Of course. He saw the lightning and ran away with the boy's shoe."
"Did you recognize the noises he made?" Jowa asked her over Shan's shoulder. He spoke in Mandarin.
The woman looked at Jowa with a blank stare.
Shan glanced at Jowa and nodded. She didn't understand Mandarin.
"He did not speak," the woman said again. "Not in any language. Just noises, like an animal, when he saw the lightning."
"Can you remember the exact sound the killer made?" Shan asked.
The woman grimaced and hung her head. "I will always remember. I hear it in my nightmares now. One of the barking noises that demons make. Kow ni," she said, looking into the shadows now. "Kow ni ma swee. Like that."
