"What if it just ends like this?" Jowa asked in a near whisper. "The last of the old ones just disappears. And the world stumbles on, a body without a soul." He looked out at a tall precipice that rose toward the heavens, a vast, darker shadow in a landscape of shadow. "What if he were the last one?" he asked the mountains, so low Shan barely heard.
"They said a lama was missing," Shan reminded Jowa. "Lau was killed and a lama was missing."
Jowa gave a small, stiff nod. "So your demon's appetite just gets bigger and bigger," he said in a hollow voice. "Three killings now, and two lamas gone."
They drove slowly back to Lokesh, who still prayed at the roadside. Jowa got out and sat with him in the moonlight, lighting a stick of incense as Shan climbed into the cargo bay.
"What is it?" the purba called out when he saw Shan emerge with the tattered canvas bag that carried his meager belongings.
"I will go back," Shan said. "I will go no further until I am sure he is safe."
"You can't," Jowa said.
"I have to." Shan squatted by Lokesh, who looked at him with pain in his eyes.
"You can't because they sent you," Jowa protested. "Because Gendun said you're needed in the north."
"That woman and the boys are dead," Shan said. "They are dead, and Gendun is not. Not yet."
Lokesh, his eyes now locked on the ember at the tip of the incense, slowly shook his head. "Those evil men were meant to be on the road tonight," he said. "And Gendun was meant to disappear tonight."
"And maybe I too was meant to disappear," Shan suggested.
"No," Lokesh said. "You are meant to go on." The certainty in his voice rang like a bell.
"Lokesh, my friend," Shan said, and he knelt now, putting his hand on Lokesh's shoulder. "I have been torn apart and patched back together so many times I am like a ragged old quilt. There are still so many pieces of me that don't fit together that sometimes I wonder my soul doesn't burst apart." He sensed the anguish in his voice, but he could not hide it.
"And you think Gendun has to put them together, Xiao Shan?" Lokesh asked.
"I don't know." He looked at Jowa, who stared at him, his face seeming to swirl with emotion. "But I know that of all the world I have seen, the lamas are the best part of it."
Shan stood, holding the straps of his bag, which still sat at his feet. He looked over the mountains, the snowcaps glowing in the moonlight. The wind blew steady and cold, reminding him that Gendun had nothing but his robe and a thin piece of canvas against the elements. An animal howled in the distance.
"We will wait here for Xiao Shan," Lokesh said to Jowa, as though Shan had already left, and raised the stick of incense in his hand as if it were a torch. "Xiao Shan will come back." He spoke as though Shan had already gone. "Because somewhere, on a high mountain, he will realize something. We are not responsible for Gendun. Gendun is responsible for us."
Shan realized that his fingers had closed around his gau, the box that carried his prayer and his feather. Gendun had sensed something that afternoon when he had given him the token, when he had emphasized to Shan that their trip could end in unexpected ways. Slowly, almost unconsciously, he sat down with his companions.
They prayed until the stick burned out, then they climbed back into the truck. Shan stood in the back, fiercely gripping one of the ribs of the bay, watching the blackened mountains as they moved on into the night.
* * *
He slept fitfully, often awakened with nightmarish visions of Gendun in peril, Gendun lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, Gendun in the hands of Public Security, interrogators standing by with electric cattle prods. He was roused when the truck made a sudden, wide turn onto a rough gravel track, then drifted off again, the eastern sky already grey with the hint of dawn.
It wasn't the morning light that broke the deep slumber that finally came, nor the stopping of the truck, but the braying of a large animal at the side of the vehicle, a sound so explosive that Shan sprang out of his sleep and slammed his head into one of the opposite barrels.
"End of the road," Jowa called out from behind the truck, where he stood with Shan's canvas bag. Shan stumbled to the open tailgate, holding his throbbing head, and nearly stumbled onto Lokesh as he stepped down. The old Tibetan was bent over at the rear of the truck, peering around the corner with a glint in his eye. He acknowledged Shan with an anxious nod and looked back around the truck.
As he surveyed the new landscape, Shan touched his forehead, absently noting that the fingers came away with a trace of blood. In the dim dawn light he could see that they were in what seemed to be a maze of huge boulders and outcroppings. Pockets of snow lay scattered among the rocks. No, not snow, he realized as he stared at one of the bright patches. It was sand.
He stepped around the truck and froze. Standing eight feet away was a tall brown creature with a long face and two large humps on its back, wearing a leather harness. A Bactrian camel. Lokesh ventured forward, shielding himself behind Shan as he peered over Shan's shoulder. The camel looked up at them, snorted, emitted another loud bray, then shook itself, creating an unexpected jingle. Small bells were fastened to the ends of the harness.
Lokesh burst into a low, wheezing laughter. Shan turned and stared in confusion at his old friend. The laughter could mean that Lokesh was scared, or confused, or even, on rare occasions, that he was filled with joy.
An angry syllable shot out from the shadows behind them. The camel seemed to recognize the voice or the word, and took two steps forward with an expectant look. Shan looked back for the source of the voice. He could see past the boulders more clearly now, into a gravel wash that descended slowly through the maze of outcroppings toward a series of smaller rocky ridges and long, low mountains covered with gravel and clumps of grey-green vegetation.
"Ai yi!" Lokesh exclaimed in a loud whisper, and stepped closer to Shan as though for protection. The smaller boulders were coming to life. The rising sun had given shape to several of the patches of darkness Shan had seen by the rocks. They were flesh, not stone, silent figures huddled under cloaks of gray and brown. They began to rise slowly, hesitantly, as if the sun's warmth had stirred them from hibernation. But as the faces drew up Shan could see they were not sluggish, only wary.
"Jowa!" one called, and stood up straight, throwing off his cloak. It was a Tibetan, a man several years younger than Jowa, wearing a strip of maroon cloth tied around his sleeve. It was a mark of defiance for monks broken by the government, a swath of color marking the robe that only those with a certificate from the Bureau of Religious Affairs were legally permitted to wear. The Tibetan looked from Jowa back toward a tall man in a fleece vest whose thick black hair was speckled with grey and partially covered with a brimless brown cap. Lingering in the shadows at the tall man's side was a third figure, thin as a post, a man with a stern face and restless eyes, who was wearing denim jeans and canvas running shoes. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken.
The young Tibetan sprang forward and embraced Jowa, who quickly turned and pointed over the mountaintops, toward the direction they had come. Jowa produced a stub of a pencil from his pocket and began marking on a crude map the youth pulled from his pocket. The youth nodded when Jowa was done and climbed into the driver's seat of the truck. A moment later the engine sputtered to life, and with a reluctant groan the old Jiefang edged forward, then gained speed as it maneuvered up the twisting track that led back over the mountains.
"He will watch for Gendun," Jowa said to Shan in a hollow tone. "If he sees Tibetans on the road, he will ask them to watch also."
As the truck disappeared, Shan fought a wave of emotion. The truck was his last connection to Gendun, the last link to the new life he had built in the high ranges of central Tibet, to the monks who had become the only real family he had known since the Red Guard had killed his father more than thirty years before. It was time for Shan to leave the mountains, one of the monks had told him that night at the mandala. Not forever, perhaps, but for a while, to gain distance. To understand who he was, the monk had meant. Shan wasn't a monk, though he lived with monks. But he also wasn't Chinese anymore, not a Beijing Chinese. Consider it a pilgrimage, another monk had said. But Buddhists were sent to the sacred peak of Mount Kalais or other holy sites where the spirits of deities resided. Shan's pilgrimage was to death and confusion, to places where perhaps only sorrow and distrust resided.
They had meant to honor him with their trust, he knew. But in that moment he felt no honor. He felt only fatigue and fear. Fear for Gendun. Fear for the boys who had been killed for reasons no one knew. Fear that he would be stopped before he fulfilled the trust. Imagine you are in a spirit palace, one of his Buddhist teachers had once said, with a hundred doors before you. Only one door is yours, but how long will it take to find it? He sensed the hundred doors today, and all but one led to failure. He fought the tempation to run for the truck, to catch it and climb back into his barrel.
The two strangers stepped forward, then froze at the sound of hooves rushing on the gravel slope below. A rider wearing a tattered felt coat and red wool cap appeared on a brown and white horse, dismounting in a fluid vaulting action before the horse had stopped. The rider stood silently in front of the front of the older man, offering a respectful nod, then pulled off the cap. It was a young woman, with black hair tied in two short braids behind her ears. The camel brayed, then bolted toward her, pushing past Shan and Lokesh so abruptly that Lokesh was knocked to the ground. The woman gave the camel a brief but affectionate stroke on its head, then trotted to Lokesh, extending a hand to help him to his feet.
"Grandfather," she said softly in Tibetan, using the term in the old style, as a form of respect for elders. "Please forgive her, she is but a bata, a yearling, and still has much to learn." Her voice was filled with a quiet strength.
The high pitched wheezing laughter seemed to overtake Lokesh again. "I saw one in a painting once," he said, still sitting in the dirt, shaking the woman's proffered hand as if she had intended to introduce herself. "I said it was one of the mythical creatures, a shape some deity had taken in someone's vision." His grin seemed to encompass his entire face. "My wife said no, it was just a horse with a broken back."
"Oh no, grandfather," the woman said, with twinkling eyes. She was young, Shan saw, no more than twenty-five, and where the rising sun hit her hair there seemed to be red in it. "She's just a donkey who ate two turtles."
The woman gently lifted Lokesh by his shoulder, brushing away the gravel from his back. The two remaining men began moving quickly, retrieving another camel and several small, sturdy horses from behind the rocks. The older man checked the saddles of two of the horses, then led the animals toward Shan and Lokesh, but stopped as he reached the woman's side. "You can't be here, Jakli," he said sternly. "It is too dangerous for you."
The woman he had called Jakli took one step toward him. "She was my friend, Akzu," she said soberly. "She was my teacher."
The words brought a wince to the man's face. "You owe that woman nothing," he said. "Look at what she did to you."
"I still owe her much, despite things," the woman called Jakli said, with a strange combination of defiance and pain in her voice.
The man called Akzu gazed at her for a long time, then a sad smile grew on his face. "Come here, girl," he said, and opened his arms. "Damn them all for keeping you from us. It's been too long."
As the woman embraced him, Akzu still smiled, but his face clouded, as if her presence reminded him of something he had hoped to forget.
Shan studied their new guides as Akzu began to load their bags onto the young camel. The animal had been a shock to Shan, not because he had never seen one, but because he had not appreciated how far they had traveled. This land was different. The people were different. Neither of the two men had the features of Tibetans. They had gone north, Shan reminded himself, so deep into the Kunlun mountains that they had reached a new people. As if in confirmation, the man at the camel called to the man with the bent nose in a language unintelligible to Shan. It was a dialect of the Turkic tongue spoken by the Muslims of China's far west. They were Uighur, Shan thought, or perhaps Kazakh, like the boys who had died.
The man with the bent nose stepped closer, his hand on the neck of the camel. "You're the one," he said in Mandarin to Jowa. "The one who knows about Public Security?"
Jowa glanced at Shan, discomfort obvious in his eyes.
"They told us—" the man pressed, "they said that you know the secrets of the Public Security Bureau."
Jowa frowned. "The last time I was in prison," he said in a reluctant voice, "my cell mate had worked for Public Security. In Lhasa— part of an experiment in bringing Tibetans into their ranks. The experiment failed, and they had to put him somewhere. He knew it would be years before he was freed, and he decided to share his knowledge so his time as a knob wouldn't be wasted."