“He raised a hand and spoke words I could not understand,” the lama said hoarsely as Shan knelt behind him, untying the ropes.
“Did the man on the pallet strike you?”
Gendun cast a perplexed glance at Shan. It was as if he was unaware that he had been beaten. “His words had the sound of a prayer. I think he spoke one of the old tongues.” There were dialects in parts of Tibet that were nearly lost, that dated back to the centuries before history.
Shan’s heart leaped into his throat as he saw the bent fingers of Gendun’s left hand. They were twitching, curled like claws. “Noooo!” he gasped, and quickly pushed up the lama’s sleeve. A terrible dark panic swept over him as the saw the twin sets of bruises and burns. “Who did this? Why?”
“That one is confused about the way of things. He seemed to think he could inflict pain to show me a new truth.”
They were no longer talking of the man on the pallet. “Chodron? But why? What did he want?”
“He said I must tell the people the beetle had to be returned to the mountain deity.”
“What beetle?”
“A yellow beetle. I said it belongs to no deity I know. He laughed and had men put me in here, and they did those things to me. He said no food and water for a day and night would change my mind.” Gendun stood and stretched, rubbing his discolored wrists, staggered, then nodded vaguely. “The one in the stable is not ready to be alone,” the lama declared, and without another word he left the granary.
Shan quickly found what he was looking for, in a corner behind the door. His hand had closed around his own upper arm without his knowledge. That was where a similar device had been used on him years earlier. A heavy truck battery, with spring clamp cables. In the doorway Shan almost collided with the old widow. Dolma’s eyes welled with tears as she watched Gendun hobble toward the stable. Concealed by the blanket she had thrown over her shoulders was a small wooden pail, holding a jar of water and several cold dumplings. “Lha gyal lo,” she whispered to Gendun’s back.
“Why is Chodron so concerned about a yellow beetle?” Shan demanded.
“It wasn’t always like this,” Dolma said. “The Drango I grew up in would never have permitted harm to befall a lama.”
Shan realized he had asked the wrong question of the woman. “What happened to Drango?”
“What happened to Tibet?” the woman rejoined warily.
“Terrible things happened to Tibet,” Shan admitted. “But what happened here is different. The things done to Tibetans here are done by Tibetans.”
Dolma stepped inside the stone granary and set down her pail. She began smoothing the dirt around the center post, as if to eliminate all signs Gendun had been there. “It was done to save us,” she asserted. “We heard stories of villages that disappeared in clouds of smoke, or had their people relocated to cities. A village on the far side of the mountain was wiped away by big machines. In another village all the men and boys were lined up and shot because one had thrown a stone at a soldier. Our headman was very clever to have saved us.”
“Chodron?”
“His father.”
“How?”
“Gold.” The woman spoke with a strange mix of pride and melancholy. “Our gold has always been our great protector.”
The words hung in the air. It was like a village prayer. Drango sat on a gold mountain watched over by a golden deity. It had been preserved not because of the virtue of its inhabitants but, he was beginning to suspect, because of greed.
Shan found Gendun seated in the stable as if he had never left, his legs crossed under him, his eyes focused on the stranger’s face, his fingers on the prayer beads in his hand, Lokesh on the other side of the man. As Shan lowered himself to the floor beside Lokesh, he saw the discolored flesh on Gendun’s arm again. His mouth went dry. The wave of emotion that surged through him almost made him physically sick. He clamped his hands together, staring into them, forcing himself to focus, to find the calm within, as Gendun would want. Anything to keep his mind away from the catastrophe ahead.
Gendun did not seem to notice when Shan lifted the stranger’s wrist. The man’s pulse seemed stronger. Shan immersed his fingers in a bowl of water beside Lokesh, then held them over the man’s mouth, letting the water drop onto his open lips. The man’s tongue slowly reacted, seeking the liquid. Shan immersed his fingers again. He continued the process for some time, pausing when he caught himself staring at the marks on the lama’s arm.
A voice abruptly spoke behind him, “Yangke is being punished. You may not use him as your servant.”
“My servant?” Shan asked Chodron “You forced him to guide you to the scene of the crime.”
Shan faced the angry headman. “I envy Yangke. It must be a relief to know so exactly the dimension of one’s burdens.”
“You are closer to that luxury than you think, Prisoner Shan.” Two sturdy farmers stood in the shadows behind Chodron, one holding a length of rope similar to that which had bound Gendun.
“Have you ever visited a hard-labor prison camp?” Shan asked.
“I had the honor once of attending a camp for May Day events,” Chodron replied. “I remember a banner. KNEEL TO THE ALL-POWERFUL PARTY.”
“You date yourself,” Shan said, shuddering. He recalled sitting under such a banner, many years earlier, as one of the privileged guests watching a prison parade outside Beijing. “The verses are more subtle today. Think of advertising slogans for some global enterprise. PERSIST FOR PROGRESS. BILLIONS SERVED.”
Chodron’s eyes narrowed. “Yangke defies me. You are making matters worse.”
“You don’t understand Gendun.”
“I understand he is made of flesh and bone.”
“There’s your mistake. After my first year in prison with Tibetan lamas,” Shan related, “I realized many of them did not really see their guards. It was as if they were undergoing a long meditation in which constant suffering was a method for focusing the mind. What they expected of a man like you was little different from what they expected from the natural elements. A beating was like sitting in a hailstorm. A bullet in the head,” he said, trying to keep the sorrow out of his voice, “like a bolt of lighting.”
“What a pathetic creature you are, Shan. Enslaved by worthless old men who live in the past. A trained dog for a crew of scarecrows.”
“If you mean Gendun, I can only aspire to be his dog.”
Chodron muttered something over his shoulder in a low voice. The men behind him laughed. “Where is Yangke?” the headman demanded.
“He is attached to his sheep almost as closely as to his collar.”
Shan saw a flash of nervousness in the headman’s eye and replayed in his mind’s eye his last minutes with Yangke. He had been sitting with the sheep scattered on the slope above. But he had been gazing at a trail that wound through the flock and continued higher.
Chodron glared at Shan a moment, then motioned with his hand. The two men stepped forward, one holding a short stave that looked like an ax handle. They moved behind Shan.
“What is the yellow beetle?” Shan asked Chodron.
“He must declare that it should go back to the mountain god.”
“Where is it now?”
For a moment Chodron studied Shan, then gestured toward an inverted bowl lying on a plank. Shan warily stepped past the two farmers, then kneeled and lifted the bowl.
The two-inch-long object inside was unmistakably an insect, an exquisitely worked image of a long scarab. Its bent legs glittered brightly, and the shifting flames of the lamps gave them an illusion of motion. The head was smooth, the thorax dimpled, its eyes made of polished turquoise. He lifted it, feeling the weight of solid gold. Two jointed antennae folded back along the carapace. It was beautiful. It had a look of great age. It was not Tibetan.
“Why must this leave the village?”
“People are saying it protects the killer. It encourages dangerous speculation.”
Shan glanced at Lokesh, who gazed at the beetle with wonder in his eyes. “You mean you originally found the beetle at the murder site?”
