in Tibet, I think. I need to know where he served, what his duties were. And there’s something else.” He leaned forward, speaking close to Gao’s ear. The scientist’s frown grew deeper.
There was movement behind them. Hostene stood on the steps.
“I came here to offer to take you back to my house in the helicopter,” Gao said to the Navajo. “There is plenty of room. You are in no condition to climb the mountain.”
“Even if Shan wasn’t going, I would go back. I won’t let my niece die.”
“When Shan finds her, he will let us know.”
“He’s right, Hostene,” Shan interjected. “We’re aware of your sickness. Don’t make things worse.”
Hostene, confused, searched their faces. “You mean my cough?
I smoked for twenty years. It’s the price I pay. Doctors say my lungs are good enough, for my age.”
“The medicines,” Gao said, “for cancer.”
Hostene sank onto the step. “That’s a private thing,” he said.
“You’ll do your niece no favors by getting sick on the mountain,” Shan said.
Hostene was forced to explain. “An old family doctor put the prescriptions in my name, so no one would suspect that Abigail was ill. What you saw was the extras I was carrying.” He looked up at Shan. “You asked once why completing her work is so urgent for her.”
“What are you saying?” Shan asked, a chill spreading down his spine.
“It isn’t me. It’s Abigail who has cancer. They give her no more than a year to live.”
Chapter Nine
Screams mingled with Shan’s nightmare of Gendun in tamzing again, growing louder and louder, until he became aware that Lokesh was shaking him. The desperate shouts came from outside, spreading from one house to the next as Drango’s inhabitants caught sight of the flames. The barley fields were on fire.
Few things are drier than a field of barley ripe for harvest. The flames swept inward as if famished, gorging on the paper-crisp stalks. Within minutes every man, woman, and child in the village were in the fields, battling with brooms, buckets, and shovels. Soon some collapsed onto their knees, breaking into helpless sobs. The barley was their life, their food supply for the brutal winter ahead. The tsampa, the gruel, the kernel-laden soup, the fodder that would keep them and their animals alive was disappearing in a wind-driven inferno. Chodron shouted furious orders for more buckets, for a trench to be dug from the stream, but no one seemed to hear him. Another voice rose, younger and surprisingly calm. Yangke was wielding a sickle. Soon a dozen men were following his example, cutting a swath to deprive the advancing fire of its fuel, sealing off a small quadrant of the crop with a fire break.
Shan paused at the edge of the field, surveying the grim scene. The fire had started at the top of the field, feeding on the predawn downdraft from higher elevations, ignited at half a dozen places, probably by someone running with a torch. As he gazed at the devastated village he caught snippets of frantic conversations. Someone said it must have been lightning. Someone else said he had seen a flame suspended in the air, magically moving along the top of the fields, faster than any man could run. Someone, pointing, said Chodron had received an invitation from a demon. Shan followed the gesture, walking toward the granaries, stopping in the shadows when he discovered the village headman standing in the circle of pressed earth, staring at a dead sheep. The animal had had its throat cut and was propped on its haunches with sticks so that its lifeless eyes seemed to be watching the house of the headman. Stuffed in its mouth was an ornate silver pen case. A case Shan had seen before. Tashi’s pen case. He watched Chodron hesitantly open the case. It was empty.
Shan spotted Hostene and jogged to his side. The forlorn cries of the villagers rose in volume. They worked beside Yangke, pulling away the stalks as he cut them, stomping out embers as they landed on the cleared swath of earth. Shan watched as Chodron appeared, running upward. A new field caught with a sudden terrible swoosh of hot air as Shan darted behind the nearest structure.
Chodron’s house was empty, the back door open. The office was still padlocked, but using a stone and a heavy nail he had taken from the stable the night before, Shan began working on the hinges. He quickly popped the pins and swung the door aside.
Inside, he lit one of the candles on the desk. Wiping his hands clean of soot on his trouser legs, he began sifting through the papers on top of the compact desk, then searched the drawers and folders stacked on the table along the wall. This is what Shan had done best in his previous incarnation, finding and interpreting the secrets of the corrupt. He had once been feted as a Hero Worker for deciphering the code in a ledger used by a Ministry of Energy deputy minister to send millions to bank accounts in Hong Kong. Chodron’s files held reports about the harvest, medical care, party meetings, expenses for quarters in Tashtul town, everything but what Shan sought. He puzzled over how Chodron had managed to keep the village official for some purposes, like enrolling its children in government boarding schools, but unofficial for others, like keeping out watchful administrators, census takers, and tax collectors. He eyed the books on the high shelf over the table-Party scriptures, a collection of essays on socialist thought for agrarian communities, even a book dealing with the treatment of fungus in barley. Only one book showed any sign of use.
Chodron was not subtle, though Shan had to admire his daring. The headman had removed the contents of a hardcover copy of
It was an impressive volume, Shan had to admit. For over ten years, Chodron had recorded payments from miners, collected in early September as they passed through his makeshift tollgate on the trail above town. Each year’s entry listed miners’, changing slightly year to year, gradually lengthening until the past year showed payments from forty different names. Two names had been scratched out at the end of the past season, another a month earlier.
He leafed back and forth among the most recent annual accounts. Only the current year and the prior one had any names removed. All the previous years’ entries appeared to have been completed on the same day, with the same pen and same ink, listing name and payment as received. But the last two lists were different. The names had been prepared in advance of the payment date, pursuant to a more organized system, utilizing a list of names provided in advance with payments registered on the payment date. Chodron had become Bing’s partner.
Shan remounted the door on its hinges, tapped in the pins, and stepped outside into a swirl of smoke. He went toward Chodron’s generator, unscrewed the gas cap, and dropped a handful of dirt into the tank. The smoke thickened, conveniently concealing his return to the fields. He located Hostene and took up a position beside him, pulling back the stalks as the men in front swung their sickles.
Shan did not notice when Hostene departed. He became aware that Yangke had paused. Shan followed the young Tibetan’s gaze toward the nearest granary, where a smoke-stained figure stood with two packs in his hands. Shan realized the Navajo was right. They could ill afford to be within reach of Chodron’s fury when the flames had run their course.
Yangke put a hand on Shan’s shoulder. “I will try to find you,” he said in a bone-weary voice. “Lha gyal lo.”
By the time they reached the path above the village the sun had risen above the ridge, and they could see the full extent of the devastation. No more than a tenth of the crop survived. It was the end of life as the villagers had known it. They could not survive without appealing to the township authorities. Then the authorities would arrive to assess their plight. The end would come quickly.
“Who would do such a thing?” Hostene asked.
“Someone who wants Chodron to lose,” Shan said.
“The murderer?”
Shan pointed to a set of bicycle tracks that veered off the trail along the top of the fields. The flame that ignited the barley had moved faster than a man could run.
“Murder,” Shan replied, “is only part of the war being waged on this mountain.” But in the short term, he knew murder would be Chodron’s sole obsession. For if Chodron the harvest manager was deprived of his victory, then Chodron the village magistrate would need an even more spectacular success. Shan tightened the straps of his pack and with grim determination headed up the mountain.
