“Who is missing from the village?” Shan asked.
“No one,” Dolma replied, puzzled.
When Shan returned to the stable, Dolma followed with a bucket of water. Neither Gendun nor Lokesh acknowledged him. As he settled to the earthen floor Dolma handed him a moist cloth, and together they began washing the comatose stranger’s arms. Shan let himself be drawn into the silent rhythm of the task, sometimes washing the man himself, sometimes wringing out the cloth for the Tibetan woman, aware that what they were doing was usually done for the dead. He paused only once, to check under the overturned bowl. The beetle was gone.
They worked in silence. Then Dolma, distracted, failed to grasp the cloth Shan extended toward her. He followed her gaze. The stranger’s hand had closed around her arm.
“Lha gyal lo!” Lokesh whispered in joy.
“Lha gyal lo,” the old woman repeated and began stroking the man’s hand. They watched as the man’s other hand was slowly lifted. Its fingers started moving, pointing into the shadows as if through his eyelids he sensed things they could not see, pointing here, pausing, pointing there. No, not pausing, Shan decided. Drawing. He was drawing something in the air. When the hand finally settled back onto his chest, the man sighed deeply. And whispered something.
Shan leaned forward, cradling the man’s head now, desperately trying to understand the words.
The words meant nothing to Shan. They were not Tibetan, not Mandarin, Cantonese, neither English, Russian, nor any of the dozen other languages Shan thought he could recognize.
The words continued, still whispered, though in a stronger, even an urgent tone.
Dolma and Shan exchanged a confused look. Gendun had reminded him that there were obscure ancient dialects still alive in remote areas of the mountains. Dolma cupped her other hand around the man’s, cradling it the way a mother might that of a sleeping child.
The man’s eyes opened. Shan feared he was blind for they seemed dull and unfocused. Then they settled on the worn, kind countenance that hovered above him, mouthing prayers. The stranger’s eyes grew round and he hastened his strange, urgent chant, twisting about to face Gendun, a hand reaching out as if to touch the lama. Then it stopped as if he was afraid to test whether Gendun was flesh and blood.
When Shan turned the man over, his unseeing eyes were filled with tears.
Chapter Three
Shan leafed through the wondrous parchment book the now-conscious man had given him, trying make sense of the stick figures that matched the one on the man’s arm, the ancient poems written in Chinese, the prayers in Tibetan, trying to grasp why it displayed a photograph of a young Shan standing proudly in a tight-collared Mao jacket with his newly graduated class of investigators. Why did his foot itch so terribly? he wondered. The man sat across from him, smiling serenely, counting Tibetan beads in one hand, holding a bloody rock hammer in the other.
“Take the book with you,” the man said in a voice that matched Gendun’s for its quiet gentleness. “You will need it where you are going.”
Shan shook his head. “I am not leaving.”
“It is you they have come for. On this mountain your life will end. Tell me this-do you prefer we leave your corpse for the birds or shall we use fire?” There was snow in the saint’s hair, mixed with yellow powder. Behind him in the shadows, two other men appeared, wearing red robes, waving the stumps of arms without hands. As they advanced he saw their faces-Lokesh and Gendun.
The itching in his foot became a terrible burning. Shan pulled up his trouser leg. There was nothing but bone below the knee. A swarm of golden beetles was devouring his flesh.
He awoke gasping for breath, his heart pounding, not aware he had leaped up from his pallet and dashed outside until he stumbled on a rock in the yard behind Dolma’s house. It took him several minutes to recover from his nightmare. He steadied himself by holding onto the flat stones that formed the top of the rear wall. The sky shimmered with stars, lending an eerie glow to the pale houses. A nightjar called. The bleat of a lonely lamb echoed off the slope. All else was as still as death. Shan retrieved his boots from the doorway, and began walking.
Though it was well after midnight, the gibbous moon and the light of a thousand stars illuminated the path. He paused on a ledge overlooking the slumbering village. Only one structure showed any life-the stable where Lokesh had relit the one hundred eight butter lamps whose light leaked between the wind-withered boards. The old Tibetan would not follow him this time. When Shan had left the stable the night before, the door had been barred from the outside by Chodron, locking in Lokesh, Gendun, and Dolma. And a guard had been posted by the entry as well.
Shan walked through the barley fields, the grain a rustling silver lake in the moonlight. He soon found the compacted trail that traversed the slope and fell into the slow, steady jog that some Tibetans used when traveling long distances in the mountains. When, much later, he reached the clearing where the murders had occurred, he lowered himself onto a flat boulder. Something on four legs, a wild dog or wolf, drank at the stream, then lifted its head in Shan’s direction and bolted. Two small animals scurried along the base of the rocks. One of the little owls that frequented the slopes uttered a short, sharp screech.
Not only wildlife seemed to revisit the campsite. After the killer, the shepherds of Drango had come, then Yangke, then the person who had left the crude warning signs and clumsily sought fingerprints, then someone-the killer again? — had returned for the bodies and obliterated a sandpainting. A miner had staked a claim to the site. Someone, either the killer or the miner, had looted the equipment. Holy men, Yangke had called the dead men. Holy men with modern camping equipment. Holy men with crude wooden effigies. What message had they placed in their sandpainting that required their killer to destroy it?
Shan slowly approached the moonlit campsite, reminding himself that this was the way the killer had approached, before dawn, as the owls called. Smoke had probably been rising from the smoldering fire.
What had the dead men said to one another before falling asleep? As great as the mystery of the killer’s identity was the mystery of the victims’. Lokesh would insist that the spirits of the dead, like those of all murdered men, still lurked nearby. Shan found himself scanning the darkened slope. He would have welcomed a conversation with a ghost. His first question would be the one that had gnawed at him since visiting the death site the first time, when he’d seen the lightning snake and a portion of a little wooden figure. Why were these Tibetan things being done in non-Tibetan ways?
He looked back at the grove of trees where the two men had lain before dying. Had they exchanged pleasantries, spoken of family, exclaimed about the endless night sky? Had they, as some old Tibetans believed, seen a meteor just before their deaths? He entered the grove and almost stumbled on a low mound of dirt. Someone had been digging. He dropped to one knee, studying the moon shadows. At least a dozen small holes had been dug since he had been there-dug, then filled in.
He paced in front of the circle of tall rocks where the bodies had been found, surprised at the fear that kept him from walking into the shadows. He jogged past, on unfamiliar ground now, at each moonlit fork taking whichever path went higher. By dawn he was still far from the summit but had reached the last of the long shelves of land below the high, jagged peak. The windswept, barren place was separated from the far side of the mountain by a forbidding fifty-foot escarpment, the stony spine that divided east and west. While studying the escarpment, he drank from a brook and chewed on a piece of hard dried cheese he had saved from the evening meal Dolma had brought them in the stable. Yangke had been right in saying that the worlds of the two sides were separate. This natural barrier was far more effective than any razor wire the army might use. He could see half a dozen spots where the wall had split apart, though from a distance each appeared to be filled with boulders or great slabs of rock that had fallen.
