'But why?'
'They were scared.'
Abe persisted. 'I don't see why.'
'See those holes on his chest?'
'Parasites? Maybe some kind of disease.' Abe shrugged. He knew Daniel was setting
him up to expose his naivete or simpleness, and that didn't improve his mood. He had
done the best he could in that smoky hut at three in the morning.
'Tell him about those holes,' Daniel said to Nima.
Nima frowned at Abe. The mistrust stood heavy and black in his face. Finally Daniel
gave the answer. 'Red Pagoda Mountain,' he said.
'Pardon me?'
'It's a Chinese cigarette. The army officers like to smoke them.'
Abe gaped stupidly. What was being said here?
'These didn't happen on the trail. They're cigarette burns.'
'Come on.' Abe shut it out.
'And these bruises? And the dog bites?'
Dog bites, Abe thought. That's what the punctures and lacerations were. He kept it
simple and organized and manageable.
'Abe, listen to me. These aren't camp wounds. Think about it.'
He knew what Daniel was going to say. Daniel said it.
'These are torture wounds, Abe. He got these in a Chinese prison.'
'Impossible.'
'Why?'
Abe glared at him. 'Impossible.'
'You hear stories over here. What the Hans are doing to the Tibetans. But it always
sounds too much. Like, you know, a million dead? And the torture stories, what they
do to these people. Raping nuns with cattle prods, flogging monks to death with iron
bars...'
Abe had no idea what Daniel was telling him. He had no idea what to think. He had
come to climb a mountain. That was all he knew.
'Nima,' Daniel demanded. 'Tell what you know.'
The Sherpa spoke haltingly, with reluctance. 'This man, you know, they put him in
the prison. They making very bad things happen to him. He run from there. Now he is
going to Nepal side.'
'He's escaping?' Abe asked.
'He's trying to,' Daniel said. 'But the passes are high. He's trapped. He wouldn't stand
a chance in his condition. Look at him. No wonder he had to crawl to get this far.'
Through his paramedic work, Abe had seen terrible things, things worse than this,
bodies torn in two, skinned by windshields, ruptured like soft grapes, ripped and
shredded. But in all of that the suffering had never had a purpose, a reasoned cause,
never anything like this. What made this unthinkable was that another human being
had written the suffering into the boy's flesh, one wound at a time. It was beyond
belief. Abe's teeth were gritted and he felt tears of frustration forming in his eyes.
This wasn't supposed to be part of the deal. He'd come to see beauty and strength and
Utopia. He blinked his tears away.
'The yakkies got him as far as Base,' Daniel went on, and Abe could tell that Daniel
was extrapolating much of this even as he spoke. 'And the Sherpas, they don't know
what to do with the poor kid except keep it quiet. If the Chinese get wind of this...'
'What did he do to them?' Abe asked. He was fighting to accept what lay before him,
the proof of evil. He needed more time. Or a good reason. One or the other.
Nima asked the monk, and the monk crossed his wrists, made two fists, thrust them
down and lowered his head. Abe needed no help translating. Defiance. Resistance.
'He maked this at the Jokhang,' Nima explained.
'The big temple in Lhasa,' Daniel added for Abe's benefit.
'Now what?' Abe asked.
'Keep it quiet,' Daniel counselled, inventing by the moment. 'We've got to keep the
L.O. in the dark. As far as he knows, this is just one more yakherder. I think the rest
of the members should know what's going on. But Li can't find out.'
'Everyone?'
'Everyone. Informed consent. If they don't know, they might say something by
accident. And besides, we're all part of it now, and the others have a right to know.'
'Even Jorgens?' Abe asked. 'He'll kick if he knows we're part of some underground
railroad.'
'He doesn't have to like it,' Daniel decided. 'He's part of us, though. We owe him the
truth.'
'Okay then,' Abe said. 'Tell them.'
'And all you have to do is fix him. He's got to get his strength up or he'll never make
it over the pass. If he can't make it over the pass, things will go badly. In these parts,
Tibetan families have to buy the bodies back from the Chinese. Going rate is five
yuan, the price of a bullet. And I don't think this poor guy's got a family to bury him.'
'I'll do what I can.'
Daniel placed one hand on Abe's shoulder. 'Do your best, Abe. Save the ones you can
save. I learned that from you.'
But before Abe could add to it, Daniel had lurched out through the dome entrance to
go and instruct the others.
Abe suddenly found himself wishing that the boy were unconscious again.
Unconscious he had been mute, and mute he had been merely the canvas on which
these bruises and cuts and burns had been painted. But the boy was conscious now
and his story was no longer a fiction. Abe set himself to changing what dressings had
not fallen off and to cleaning the monk's sores and lacerations.
Next morning they had their
The Sherpas made little towers of flour paste and put Oreo cookies and hard candy
on a platter and brought out a few precious bottles of Star beer packed in from
Kathmandu. They started a fire with cedar branches and pine needles that had come
from nowhere within a hundred miles. The sweet white smoke lay over ABC as a
center post was erected. From this post, four fifty-foot-long streamers of prayer flags
were stretched out and anchored in four different directions.
The flags were thin cotton, each dyed a different color and printed with prayers in
square Tibetan script. Despite her irreverence about
looked pleased and comforted to see the prayer flags get unfurled. While Abe
watched, Kelly stood beside him and explained things. She held one of the cotton
squares still and showed him a crude horse block-printed among the fresh script.
'They call that a
carries a prayer to heaven,' she told Abe. 'They'll keep us safe and sound. All of us.'
The Tibetan boy sat on a small carpet by the center post with white smoke wafting
through the prayer flags overhead. One of the younger Sherpas, Ang Rita, was a lama
initiate back in his home in the Solu Khumbu. He'd either smuggled in the carpet and
