"Have you visited Xinjiang before?" Jakli asked, as if recognizing something in his face.
"I don't know Xinjiang," Shan said quickly and urged his mount forward, fighting an unreasonable fear that the men who had tortured him in the desert prison would reappear at any moment. Shan had had a cellmate for a few days while he had been with the knobs, an escapee from one of Xinjiang's infamous lao gai coal mine prisons, caught fleeing through the desert. The man had no papers, and they hadn't bothered to track down his genealogy, meaning, in the knobs' parlance, to cross-check the tattoo that was his lao gai registration number to its source, to the history of his political infidelities and the gulag camp he belonged to. One of the knob officers had called the man a "free one" for the new recruits. The last time Shan had seen him he had been crouched in the corner of his cell, naked, covered in his own filth, drumming his head against the wall.
Two hours after the Mushroom Bowl, their mounts found a new energy, quickening their pace as they descended into a small green valley lined at its edges with pines and poplars. A dog barked in the distance. The horses and camels began to trot. As they cleared a bend in the trail, the Red Stone encampment came into view.
Three round tents of heavy felt lay in a clearing at the bottom of the fertile valley. Beyond them, against a steep slope, were ruins of two stone structures that had been spanned by canvas tops to shelter livestock. They were not the ruins Shan was accustomed to seeing in central Tibet, not the scorched rocks and bricks pockmarked from the bombs and shells of the People's Liberation Army. These were the remains of ancient buildings, overtaken only by time and nature.
Their small caravan was seen first by a lamb frolicking up the trail, then by the adolescent girl who was chasing it. Both lamb and girl gave a bleat of surprise, then turned and scurried back toward the tents. Four large dogs, one of them a big black Tibetan mastiff, barked in warning, then ran to greet the riders as they emerged from the trail.
Akzu and Jowa had already disappeared inside the center tent by the time Shan and Lokesh dismounted. The girl reappeared, her eyes round with excitement. Three women, one with grey hair tied in a red checked scarf, and two others a few years younger, looked up from blankets spread on the ground, where they were crumbling pieces of soft cheese to dry in the sun. The older woman called out excitedly to Jakli, as one of the others leapt up, grabbed a white dress hanging from a tree branch, and darted inside the center yurt. Two men with strong, leathery faces and thick black moustaches appeared at the flap of the center tent, smiling at Jakli, then casting suspicious glances at Shan. Akzu's sons, Jakli explained after she had greeted each of them.
"Jakli!" a youth of perhaps twelve or thirteen years exclaimed from the nearest of the stables as the woman entered the clearing, walking her horse. A tiny goat lay draped across his shoulders. He gently deposited it beside an older goat, then ran to Jakli's side and embraced her.
"My youngest cousin," Jakli explained to Shan. "Malik. He stays with the animals so much we call him Seksek Ata sometimes. The protective spirit for goats," she added.
The boy's smile faded and tension crossed his face as he hugged her again. This time it was not for joy, Shan saw, but for solace, for comfort.
Jakli held him tightly against her shoulder, planting a light kiss on the top of his head. "Khitai was your friend," she said in a melancholy tone.
An angry shout rose from the tent on the left. A disheveled, wild-eyed woman stood in the entrance, pointing at Shan and yelling in her Turkic tongue. Jakli stepped in front of Shan as though to shield him from the shrill woman, then pushed him away, toward the stables. The woman took a step into the sunlight, still shouting at Shan.
"She's crazy," Jakli said in a low voice when Shan asked her what the words meant. "Something about children." Jakli frowned as she saw that Shan would not turn away. "She says you always want the children. She says you killed the children." Jakli pushed his arm but Shan did not move. "Years ago she was pregnant. They told her she had to go to a government clinic to give birth. When she went, they gave her a needle that made her sleep. When she woke up the baby was out of her, and it was dead. Later she found out that she had been sterilized."
The angry woman picked up pebbles and began throwing them at Shan. "She changed after that," Jakli continued. "In winter, she sits with a rolled blanket and sings a besik zhyry to it."
"Besik zhyry?" Lokesh asked as he watched the woman.
"Kazakhs have songs for everything. Weddings, births, horses races, the death of a friend, the death of a horse," Jakli explained, and thought a moment. "She sings cradle songs. The songs that Kazakh women sing to babies."
They stood in silence. Several pebbles hit Shan in the leg.
"Every time a child dies," Jakli added quietly, "she thinks it was hers."
In the light Shan saw the woman's clothing was covered with dirt. Bits of dried leaves clung to her shoulder-length braids.
Shan let Jakli pull him away as a larger stone hit his knee. But a moment later Jakli stopped. Malik was waiting for them on a path on the slope above the stables. She looked back at the crazed woman, as if maybe she preferred to face the woman than to follow Malik, then sighed and gestured Shan toward the path. As they approached the boy, Shan saw that he had a sprig of heather in his hand. Jakli bent and picked a sprig for herself, then Shan did the same.
As they followed Malik, a dark form rushed past them. The woman's anger seemed to have disappeared, replaced by sobs that sounded almost like the bleating of one of the animals.
They made a silent procession up the path: the dark, wild-eyed woman, then Malik, followed by Shan and Jakli. After perhaps a hundred paces they entered a small hollow near the top of the hill, a sheltered place closed to the north by a huge slab of rock, open with a view for miles to the south, into the Kunlun, toward Tibet. At the back, in the shadow below the rock slab, was a five-foot-long mound of earth.
To the left of the grave was an indentation of packed earth. The wild-eyed woman, he realized, had been sleeping by the grave. Strips of bark lay at the head of the grave, bearing offerings of food. Two large feathers and twigs of heather had been pushed into the earth at the foot of the mound of earth. Shan and Jakli followed Malik's example and offered their sprigs in the same manner.
The woman sat at the head of the grave, rocking back and forth, her face now twisted with grief, singing a soft song, giving no acknowledgment of Shan.
Feeling helpless, not knowing what to do, Shan knelt at the foot of the grave. A moment later Jakli silently knelt beside him and began murmuring under her breath in the Kazakh tongue. Malik stood behind Jakli, his hand on her shoulder. Shan became aware of movement behind him and turned to see Lokesh, Jowa, and Akzu approaching the grave.
Lokesh sat and placed a palm on the grave. "Khitai," he said in a low, doleful voice, and stared at the freshly turned earth, his jaw open. As the others watched in silence, the old Tibetan's other hand found his rosary and, leaning back, he began a low mantra. Jowa sat beside him, then hesitantly produced his own rosary and joined the mantra.
The woman at the head of the grave blinked several times and rubbed her eyes as though awakening from a trance. She looked uncertainly about the circle, as if wondering how so many had joined her, or perhaps who was mortal and who was visiting from another world. Her eyes fixed on the rosary beads, first Jowa's, then Lokesh's, and light seemed to return to her face. She spoke to Akzu in their native tongue. The Kazakh headman looked at the two Tibetans and replied to her, then turned to the visitors. "She said it is good to have a mullah at last. I said you are not mullahs, you are Buddhists, but you are holy men nonetheless."
The woman was nodding vigorously, then patted the dirt the way she might a sleeping child.
"Who did he belong to, this boy?" Shan asked. "He was an orphan, but where was the rest of his clan?"
"Gone. Extinct, probably. We do not know the details of his birthing. Nor did he. He was from the zheli," Akzu said, as if it explained much.
Shan watched the haggard woman in silence, then pushed back from the pile of earth to stand beside Akzu. "You mean he lived here, but Lau was his teacher."
Akzu nodded. "Lived here for a short while. Some children have to be taken care of by everyone. He wasn't any trouble," Akzu said. "One of the zheli often comes and stays a month or two. Lau didn't like them staying in the town all the time. In the warm weather she arranged for them to go to the clans."
"But Khitai, he was new?"
"New to us. He had not stayed with the Red Stone before. But sometimes, when we took one of the orphans to Lau's meeting place, we would see him. Always smiling. He was luckier than most, because he at least had his companion, this man Bajys." He winced as he spoke, as if understanding the irony of his words.
"So Bajys was an orphan too?" Shan asked.
"Yes. But older, so he didn't go to school. They said the two of them had discovered years earlier they were from the same clan in the north and had promised to watch over each other. Bajys taught Khitai things."
"What happened to their clan?" Shan asked, remembering Akzu's words at the trailhead. Maybe the demon was finishing something started years before.
Akzu shrugged and stepped away from the grave as if leaving, then stopped in the center of the clearing and stared out over the hills to the south, toward the high plateau of Tibet. Shan followed him. "All the clans have been troubled since it began," Akzu said.
"The murders, you mean."
Akzu did not look away from the hills. He offered a sour smile, as if Shan had made a joke. "Sure, the murders. All the murders. All the arrests. Since I was a boy, when all the green shirts arrived."
Akzu was speaking of the People's Liberation Army and their invasion of the western lands fifty years before, when the region had been absorbed into the People's Republic. The story had been spoken of so often by some of Shan's former cellmates, the captured warriors, that it had been turned into a song which they whistled sometimes in front of their guards. The PLA had taken Xinjiang; then, after training on the Muslims, they had started on Tibet. Xinjiang had taken a year to subjugate, Tibet nearly a decade.
"Many old clans disappeared entirely," Akzu said, "lost forever. Others were broken up, separated by lines on Chinese maps." He looked back to Shan. "Emperors from Beijing had come to Xinjiang many times. They wanted to buy our horses. They wanted to guard their own frontiers with advance garrisons. Their armies stayed a few years and went home. It didn't affect the Kazakhs or the Uighurs who lived here. But Emperor Mao was different." He shook his head. "We have always been nomads. The greenshirts sent by Mao drew boxes on maps and gave us papers that permitted us to live only in those boxes. We laughed. Obviously the Chinese didn't understand the way of the herds, or of our people. But when we traveled outside their boxes they sent us to prison. Or worse."
"You're saying the boy was displaced somehow."
"Displaced," Akzu spat. "You sound like Beijing." He sighed and looked toward Jakli, as if reminding himself that he had to get along with Shan. "The restrictions are not being enforced as much today," the headman offered. "We get visitors now, people roaming in search of family they haven't seen for twenty, thirty years because they were assigned to live in different boxes on the Chinese maps. Lau was like that at first, but she decided to stay in Yoktian County to help all the others that wandered through."
"Khitai and Bajys came like that, looking for family?"
"Mostly, now, the orphans just try to find places to fit in, try to make a new life. Auntie Lau said maybe we should get to know Khitai. She said he was better suited for the smaller clans, the ones that stay in the higher pastures away from town. We said of course he and Bajys could come. Many such people never find their home hearths. Things have changed so much. The children are not permitted to learn the old ways." He shook his head slowly. "I got a letter last year from a cousin who married into a clan in the north. She said things were so much better that Chinese come to their camp and pay to sleep in their yurts and eat food from a wood fire. Tourists. I wrote a letter to say that doesn't mean it's better, that if it feels good to have them come and treat us like their pets, like a circus show, then you have lost the why of it, you have forgotten what being Kazakh is supposed to feel like." Akzu shrugged. "I didn't mail it. Sometimes Public Security stills reads letters.
"But when travelers like Khitai come, we must make room for them. We lost many from our own clan in the struggles. Maybe some are still alive, in the north perhaps, or even in Kazakhstan," he said, referring to the independent Kazakh nation to the west of China. "Sometimes broken clans go to a town to start a new life, like Lau. But some just wander. Maybe we have family wandering too. We would want them to find friends along the way." Shan looked to Jakli. Her father had disappeared, she said. Akzu's brother. The headman sighed heavily. "We will know ourselves what it is like soon enough, what it is to be orphans."
