you to frighten you. I told my mother I would go and speak with the Chairman, so he understands the truth of things here. I wanted you to understand, for when the time comes for us to separate.' He pointed out a solitary goose flying toward the setting sun. Shan watched him, then the goose, until Nyma called them to eat.
At the camp Lhandro revealed a bladder of fresh yogurt, a gift from the dropka at the lake, and a skin of cream which, having been jostled all day on one of the pack saddles, had become thick, sweet butter. The rongpa rolled the butter with their tsampa into little balls and enthusiastically consumed them with bowls of tea. As the others arranged the heavy felt blankets about the floor of the tent, Shan took his blanket outside and lay studying the night sky, fighting a bleakness inside. Some of the Tibetans believed struggling souls passed through many levels of hell before freeing themselves. In his particular hell he alone could see the torment and suffering approaching those he held closest to his heart, but could do nothing to prevent it.
He awoke suddenly, not aware until that moment that he had been asleep. With a catch in his breath he realized that a meteor had passed overhead, close by. But he had no memory of having seen it. It was not the first time this had happened in recent months. He had told Lokesh about a similar incident during their pilgrimage, and his old friend had seemed to find it cause for celebration, saying it was a sign of new awareness. 'If your awareness experienced it within,' Lokesh had said, 'is it not as real as if your eyes had seen it from without?' But then, as now, the experience unnerved Shan. Holding on to reality was difficult enough in his world, without having his Tibetan friends try to teach him it came in many different forms.
Wide awake now, he lay watching the moon rise over the mountains and gradually was able to push back the pain that obscured the way he saw Drakte's death in his mind's eye, so he could replay it slowly, again and again, searching for a clue, for a hidden meaning. He saw Drakte's chin rise and his brow tighten as the dobdob had appeared. Though the purba had carried a belt knife his hand had gone not to the knife but to his prayer amulet. Drakte's reaction had not been that of a warrior defending those he had vowed to protect. But the purba's other hand had been doing something else. He played the scene again and again. Drakte's left hand had been pushing his bag back, hiding the drawstring sack with the sling and the ledger book with the innocuous entries about the dropka.
Shan became aware of a strange ebbing and flowing in the gentle breeze, then realized it was a low sound, rising and falling, a moan. He sat up. Not a moan. A chant, even a song.
Slowly, stealthily, he followed the sound over a hillock. A dark shape blocked the path. Lhandro had set a guard, he knew. But he froze as he saw it was one of the mastiffs. The animal simply raised its head toward him and turned toward a rock ten feet down the slope, as if directing Shan's attention there.
Anya sat on the rocks staring at a brilliant star on the horizon. The sound Shan heard, louder now, was coming from her lips, though he couldn't say what it was. Not a song exactly, but a sound like some of the old lamas made when using their voices in meditation, a sound that grew out of a mantra but became, at least to the untrained ear, a resonation that communicated not to the ears but some other sense, a folding of sound that could not possibly have come simply from the tongue and vocal cords.
He had heard such a sound before. Shan had asked Lokesh about it once when they had found a hermit making the same low wrenching sound on a high ledge. Lokesh had shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. 'It's what you get, when you strip away the flesh of words,' he had said earnestly. 'It's just the way a spirit sounds when it's not communicating with humans.'
He sat beside the girl and watched the stars. If she was not communicating with humans, he wondered, who was it she was trying to reach?
At last Anya's voice drifted off and they sat in silence.
'It's a long way we have to go,' the girl said.
Although he felt strangely close to the girl, Shan realized it was the first time she had spoken to him. 'Nearly a hundred miles to Yapchi,' he observed quietly.
'No, not that,' the girl said slowly, in the patient tone of a teacher, 'if you and I are to bring the old eye into focus, there are many shadows to explore first, many knots to untie.'
Shan considered the words for a moment. 'You and I?'
'When it said this in me,' the girl said cryptically, 'I didn't understand at first. But I believe it now.'
'I'm sorry,' Shan said with a chill in his belly. 'Who said something to you?'
'I was in a barley field turning earth with a hoe when it found me the first time. Nyma found me, shaking on the ground. It's only happened four times before. They say when I'm older they may need to keep me in a nunnery, if they can find one. They said in the old days I would have been sent to live in the convent after the first time.'
Shan stared at the girl hard, trying to piece together the puzzle she had spoken. Then, he recalled Lhandro's words, how Anya had been found lying on a rock, reciting strange scriptures. And before, at the lake. She spoke the words of deities, Lhandro had said. 'The oracle,' he whispered. 'You are the oracle.'
The girl gave a thin laugh. 'Not the oracle,' she explained in a patient voice. 'Some call me that, but an oracle is not in human form. Oracle deities just use certain humans as vehicles sometimes.'
The words made Shan sad somehow. Maybe it was the hint of helplessness in Anya's voice. Maybe it was because he remembered stories from the monks about the mediums who had once resided in the large gompas near Lhasa. They had been nervous, often frail creatures, usually short-lived, because when they were taken over by the oracle they suffered terrible fits and spasms, like seizures, that could last for days and exacted a terrible toll on their bodies.
Anya studied the stars, then abruptly turned to him again. 'What if the valley was locked for some reason and the eye was its key? What if we opened it without understanding why it was locked?' The words came in an urgent rush, as if she had been contemplating a long time how to ask him.
'All I know,' Shan said after another silence, 'is that when I begin a long journey my mind is often plagued with doubt over where it will lead, about what comes after the one thousandth step, or the ten thousandth. So I try to make myself concerned only with the next step, then the next after that, so that eventually the ten thousandth becomes just another next step. By then we will all understand the eye better.' His own words surprised him. He was speaking like the Tibetans, as if the chenyi stone were alive.
The girl nodded vigorously, as if it were exactly the answer she needed. Behind her, the dog stood, then she stood, as though the dog's movement had been a signal, and she stepped with the animal into the darkness.
Shan looked after her, not sure he had understood any of their conversation. In fact, the more he learned of the people from Yapchi the more it seemed he didn't know. They seemed to have been cut off from the world for so long a wary, feral spirituality had overtaken them. But in his heart he knew they weren't that different from many other Tibetans he had met, each of who seemed comprised of many layers of mysteries and perceptions. The land itself was such a rich, vast tapestry of people and beliefs that the term Buddhism often seemed a meager label for the complex ways Tibetans viewed their world.
A low rumble rose over the blackened landscape. Shan searched for thundercaps but saw none in the clear night sky, instead spying a cluster of four red lights soaring across the heavens. Chinese fighter jets on high altitude patrol. As he watched the planes a deep sense of grief welled up within him, and stayed with him long after the planes disappeared over the horizon.
The caravan had been underway for two hours the next day when Shan, leading a packhorse, noticed a flicker of movement on the slope a hundred yards above them. He stopped and stared, finally discerning a man standing with a horse in the shadow of a large boulder.
Lhandro, behind Shan, whistled sharply, halting the caravan. 'Damned Golok,' he muttered.
As the figure on the slope stepped into the sunlight Shan saw that it was indeed Dremu, who seemed to search the caravan, then began waving at Shan, gesturing for him to come closer.
'Don't,' Lhandro warned. 'He could have friends hidden in the rocks. A man like that can't stop being a bandit.'
Shan ignored the advice, but found himself watching the surrounding rocks warily as he jogged toward the Golok. 'I didn't expect to see you again,' he called out when he got within earshot.
'I got paid, didn't I?' Dremu snapped back. 'Paid to get you through to Yapchi. Not to share tea with the likes of them,' he said with a nod toward the caravan. 'I go where the eye goes,' he said in an oddly fierce tone.
'They're good people,' Shan said.
Dremu frowned. 'There's something,' he said, 'someone-' He glanced over his shoulder. 'I don't know what to
