cannot block her tongue.'
Shan pulled Winslow away and tried to explain to the American what the Tibetans thought was happening.
'An oracle!' Winslow cried out, anger in his voice now. 'Dammit, she's a little girl. You can't believe-' His words choked off as he studied the Tibetans, half a dozen now, sitting around the girl with grave, even scared expressions, not trying to help Anya despite their affection for her, only waiting. Lhandro darted to the packs and returned with a pencil and paper.
'Christ almighty,' Winslow whispered in frustration. He stared uncertainly at the Tibetans, who gathered around the girl with butter lamps. 'Jesus, Shan, you can't believe…' His voice drifted off and he stepped closer to the convulsing girl, as though he still might intervene to protect her from injuring herself.
Shan didn't know what to believe, except that he knew what the Tibetans believed about the girl. All he and the American could do was watch.
Gyalo sat near Anya's head. 'My grandmother was visited, too,' he declared in a soft voice. 'We should make a welcoming place,' he said, and began a quiet mantra. The others joined in immediately. Shan found that his hand was clasping his own gau.
'In my mountains,' Anya suddenly said, 'in my heart, in my blood.' It sounded like Anya, Shan told himself, though a weary, distracted Anya. It could be a dream of some kind. Perhaps the girl had simply been exhausted from the trail, perhaps she had collapsed in slumber and was singing one of her spirit songs in her sleep.
Anya stopped trembling and seemed to stiffen, then grew very still as she spoke again. 'Deep is the eye, brilliant blue eye, the nagas will hold it true.' A chill crept down Shan's spine. Winslow gasped and stepped back. This wasn't Anya's voice. It was a cracked, dry voice, an old person's voice. It sounded hollow, like it was coming down a long tube.
There was movement at Shan's side. Lhandro was busily recording the words of the oracle. The voice echoed in Shan's mind. The eye, the oracle said. But the eye was not blue.
'Bind them, bind them, bind them, you have to wash it to bind them!' the voice croaked on. 'So many dead. So many to die,' it said in a mournful tone. A chilled silence hung over the camp and Lhandro, his face ghastly pale, looked up from his writing.
'Who will give voice when the songbird is gone?' the voice said, then spoke no more. With these final words Anya, though lying flat, somehow seemed to collapse. They waited in silence, no one moving, as though the words had somehow paralyzed them. Nyma stared into Anya's eyes, as though searching for the girl. Lokesh kept slowly nodding, and Nyma began rocking back and forth on her knees. Gyalo washed the girl's face from a bowl of water. No one spoke. Lokesh began his mantra again. Lhandro stared at the words he had written, then handed the paper to Shan as if Shan would know what to do about them. Shan stared uncertainly at the hurried scrawl, unable to read the handwriting. But he had watched, and knew Lhandro had not written the final words of the oracle. Who will give voice when the songbird is gone? the oracle had asked.
They sat for almost an hour, until Anya revived, rubbing her eyes as though coming out of a deep sleep, then suddenly pointing upward. A brilliant meteor shot through the sky, so close they heard it.
'The deity of Yapchi, the one whose eye you have, and that oracle,' Winslow said in a small voice, still shaken by what he had witnessed, 'they are the same? I mean I know there can't really be…' The American's words drifted away. There can't be a deity in the valley, he was about to say, just as, a few minutes earlier, he had been about to say there could be no oracle.
'I don't know,' Shan replied hesitantly. 'I don't think so.'
Neither man seemed able to put their feelings into words. Because what they mostly felt, Shan suspected, was confusion.
After a long time Shan borrowed the American's light and went out with the red-circle pack among the sheep. He found a flat rock and salt in a pool of moonlight, cutting the threads away, reaching in for the chenyi stone. It was the first time he had looked at the stone since the day it had been sewn into the salt pack at Lamtso. He sat with the eye in front of him and stared at the dim outline in the rock, not knowing why. At least it might help him focus, might help him reach into his awareness in the way Gendun had taught him.
A loose pebble rattled behind Shan. As he turned, a shadow leapt forward and something hard pounded into his skull. He fell forward and drifted toward unconsciousness, quickly, yet still slow enough that before the blackness took him he realized dimly, like observing it from afar, that someone was kicking him in the ribs.
Chapter Ten
The eye of Yapchi was gone. In a fog of pain Shan squinted into the patch of moonlight where he had set the eye and reached out with one hand, futilely groping for the stone. He braced himself on one arm to peer into the shadows around him, fighting a stab of pain in his ribs. There was a glimmer of movement in the distance. He threw himself onto his feet, took a step- but the world spun about and he found himself on his knees, then on the ground. Blackness overtook him again.
When he awoke he was by the fire, on a blanket beside Anya. The girl, propped against a rock, offered a weak smile. Lokesh was on his other side, dabbing a bloody cloth against Shan's forehead. 'It's gone,' Shan said in a forlorn gasp. 'I lost the eye.'
'They're out there,' Lokesh said softly. 'Our friends are looking.' He lifted Shan's hand and pressed it firmly, keeping it in his grip a moment.
As Shan tried to sit up blood roared in his ears. His eyes fluttered closed in another spell of dizziness. He became vaguely aware of people approaching, and urgent words in low voices. He heard hoofbeats, and in the distance, someone calling to the dogs. His mind went somewhere like slumber, but not slumber, and suddenly he was awake.
Hours had passed. The moon was setting. It was perhaps three in the morning. The villagers had used all the spare fuel to make half a dozen fires in a circle around the camp. A rider was dismounting. Lhandro was with the sheep, checking their harnesses. One sheep sat beside Anya, alone, without a pack, the brown ram that had carried the red-circle pack. The girl was stroking its head, as if to comfort it, as though it, too, shared their anguish.
Lokesh brought a bowl of tea and at last Shan was able to sit up. The old Tibetan shook his head grimly.
'There is no sign,' Lhandro said when he approached Shan minutes later. 'The eye is gone. The pack it was in is gone. We had a guard out but he was on the trail, watching for anyone following. The thief did not come up the trail. We searched the slopes in every direction. The moon was bright enough that we could scan the slopes with field glasses. Nothing,' Lhandro concluded wearily. 'That thing burns temples and tries to kill monks,' he said, as though to explain his hopelessness. His face seemed to have aged many years. The eye was gone. He had failed his people. He looked up the slope, then jogged away into the darkness.
'It is my fault,' Shan said, 'I took it away from camp.' Had it indeed been the dobdob? He tried to remember, but the memory was only of night, and pain. He touched the knot on his head. Something hard had hit him. It could have been the gnarled end of the dobdob's staff.
'No!' Nyma protested. 'You probably saved others from injury. A thief like that would just have brought his violence to the rest of us if you hadn't taken the eye aside.'
The searchers returned one by one over the next two hours, the last coming by horseback from the trail above. Some shook their heads, others just shrugged. Only Dremu, the last rider, from the slope above, had anything to report. A wild goat had run past him on the trail as though frightened by something above.
'The army,' Winslow sighed. 'If it was the army…' he began.
'How could it be the army?' Nyma asked. 'If it had been the army, if it had been that Colonel Lin, they would not care about stealth, they would have just pounced on us, taken all of us away in chains like he tried to that day.'
Some of the villagers murmured agreement. But Winslow and Shan exchanged a glance. Lin might have acted quietly, sending only one of his commandos for an ambush, if he had known the American was present.
'If the army took the eye,' Shan said, 'then it is gone, out of our reach. But if the army did not take the eye,' he said with an expectant look at Lhandro, 'then the eye may still be in our grasp.' Lhandro shook his head, but seemed to ponder the words and looked up at Shan with interest.
