setting traps in the rough mountain terrain. Such men could easily elude the caravan scout, or trick him into thinking the path was safe.
'The colonel doesn't know our path,' Shan said to Lhandro. 'And he doesn't know about the sheep.' In the hours on the road Lhandro had seemed to transform from the spirited, energetic rongpa to a man carrying a heavy burden of fear. The colonel had taken his papers and kept them, had discovered he was from Yapchi. He had felt Lin's manacles and for a few terrible minutes Lhandro had no doubt believed that he would spend his remaining years in a Chinese prison, losing everything, even, or perhaps especially, losing the chenyi stone.
'I didn't have to bring Anya on the caravan,' the farmer said. 'It should have just been me and the older men. And we shouldn't have involved Nyma. She wants to be a nun so bad… She needs to be anun… This is not a nun's work. Some of us would gladly…'
'Somehow,' Shan said, 'I don't think Anya or Nyma would have let you deny them the opportunity.'
Lhandro offered a weak smile, then whistled sharply and began moving up the track with long, determined strides. At first only the dogs followed him, but he did not call out, he did not turn, he did not gesture for the others. The largest of the mastiffs paused when Lhandro had gone a hundred feet, then turned and barked once. The sheep raised their weary heads and began to follow. Anya stood and extended her hand to Lokesh. The two walked by the sheep, hand in hand, and Anya began to sing one of her songs. Slowly, groaning as they lifted their exhausted limbs, the others of the caravan silently rose and followed.
After a mile Lhandro gestured Shan to his side and pointed up the trail. Shan raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw their scout, two hundred yards away, unmounted, facing them with his hands raised above his waist, open, as if in an expression of chagrin. Lhandro and Shan jogged toward the man.
As they approached the scout disappeared behind a large outcropping. Lhandro halted and led Shan off the trail, around the backside of the outcropping. They edged around the rock to see the back of a large man in a bright red nylon coat and black cap sitting before a tiny metal frame that hissed and produced a small blue flame. Their scout squatted beside the man, drinking from a steaming metal cup. As Shan ventured forward the man in the red coat turned.
'Only have two cups in my kitchen,' Winslow declared, extending a second mug toward Shan. 'You're welcome to share. No butter, no salt. Just good Chinese green.' Shan accepted the mug, savoring the aroma of the green leaves for a moment. He saw the others staring at him, then self-consciously extended the mug to Lhandro. He blinked for a second, something blurred in his mind's eye, and he saw his mother, sitting with him, patiently watching a steaming porcelain pot as green leaves infused the water. The pot had a picture of a boat on a river by willow trees. It was the way his memory sometimes worked now, after the knobs had used electricity and chemicals on him. His early years lay down a long dark corridor, where doors sometimes, but rarely, were unlatched by a random, unexpected event. Not events as such, but smells, or other sensations, even the inflection in someone's voice.
'Wasn't hard to figure,' he heard Winslow saying. 'You were going north from the lake and suddenly veered east, to the road. If you had been intending all along to go east you would have taken the road from the lake to the east. So you were blocked unexpectedly from going further north. The pass you intended to take got blocked by a snow avalanche or rock slide, I figure. If you were on the road it was just to get to the next pass.' He gestured toward the high northern peaks. 'Up there. The Tangula Mountains they call them, a spur from the Kunlun.'
'I don't understand,' Shan said.
'My government will pay a transportation fee if you want,' Winslow said, and grinned as he saw Shan's confusion. 'I'm going with you.'
Lhandro stared woodenly at the American, then quietly asked the scout to make sure the caravan kept moving.
'You don't know where we're going,' Shan pointed out.
'Sure I do. North. Same direction I'm going.'
'To look for the missing woman,' Shan said.
'They say she's dead,' Winslow said, and left the words hanging like an unfinished sentence.
The announcement silenced Shan and his friends. Shan took a step back, as though to better see the American. He glanced at Lhandro, who shrugged, as if to say he knew nothing of dead Americans.
'He saved us from that colonel,' Lhandro observed to Shan after a long silence.
'With a piece of paper,' Shan recalled. 'Could I see it again?'
The American stared at Shan coolly for a moment, unzipped the breast pocket of his nylon coat and produced the passport. Shan studied the document, not knowing what he was looking for. Benjamin Shane Winslow, it said, with a home address in the state of Oklahoma. It had over twenty entry stamps for the People's Republic of China, and many more for countries in South America and Africa.
Winslow took the mug, now empty, from Lhandro and refilled it from a pot on his tiny stove. 'Just how would you go about identifying a fake diplomatic passport, tangzhou?'
Tangzhou. It meant comrade. It was the American's way of taunting Shan, he suspected, or perhaps any Chinese he met.
Shan handed the passport back to the American. 'I've met several diplomats in my life, Mr. Winslow. None were remotely like you. And my name is Shan, not comrade.'
Winslow made a great show of looking into his pack and rummaging through its contents, then looked up. 'Damn. Forgot my black tie and patent leather shoes,' he declared with exaggerated chagrin.
'Perhaps you would share with us what's in the bag,' Shan said.
'You want my dirty underwear? Sure, welcome to it. Light on the starch please.' Then Winslow studied Shan's stern countenance and his face hardened. 'I've taken enough shit off Chinese today,' he said. 'You don't even have a uniform.'
'You're the only one claiming to work for a government.' As Shan spoke the herd of sheep appeared around the outcropping and the caravan began marching past the rocks. Moments later Lokesh appeared, then Nyma and Anya. They stepped toward the American with uncertain expressions, sensing the tension in the air.
'You had a driver and a truck. Where are they?' Shan asked.
'Sent them back to Lhasa. I didn't like him. When the embassy asks the Chinese government for drivers you can be sure they work for Public Security.'
Shan considered the American's words and realized he was right, which meant the knobs would soon know all about the confrontation at the village, and the caravan.
'This man saved us at the village,' Nyma said to Shan in a low voice that had a hint of pleading. 'You especially should know what it would have meant if that colonel had taken us back with him.'
The nun's words caused Winslow to look at Shan with a sudden intense curiosity.
'I only asked him to show us what he is carrying in his bag,' Shan declared quietly.
'He's American,' Lokesh said.
'He works for the American government. The government in Washington cultivates relations with Beijing, not with Tibetans.'
The American seemed pained by Shan's words, but he offered no argument. He raised his open palms to his shoulder, then extracted an expensive-looking camera and a compact set of binoculars before turning his rucksack upside down, spilling its contents onto the ground. Shan squatted to study the items. A large plastic bag of raisins. A grey sweatshirt rolled into a ball. A box of sweet biscuits. A small blue metal cylinder that matched the one fueling the stove. Two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks, knotted together. Half a dozen bars of chocolate. A one liter bottle of water. A tattered guide book on Tibet, in English. A tiny first-aid kit. And a small black two-way radio.
'You could call your driver on that?' Shan asked, pointing to the radio.
'The driver, or the office he is assigned to. It's how I get back.'
'You said the driver works for the knobs.'
Winslow grimaced.
Shan realized that Nyma had stepped behind him now, with Lhandro. They were frightened of the little black box.
'It's my lifeline for Christ's sake,' the American protested. 'You think I'm trying to interfere with your caravan, maybe steal your animals?' he said impatiently, then studied Shan and the others for a long moment. His eyes widened. 'Christ. You're illegal. That's why you were so scared about Colonel Lin. You have no papers or-' the
