'At Yapchi. Ask for the manager.'
'Jenkins. I met him.'
'Right,' Zhu agreed in his slow, oily voice. 'Mr. Jenkins was very upset, too. We all liked Miss Larkin. Very pretty. She told jokes. Spoke Tibetan. Not Chinese,' he said pointedly, 'but Tibetan.' The foreman turned away, as if Zhu's words were a cue to leave.
'Stay on the main tracks,' Zhu advised as he took a step backwards. 'Safer for everyone.' He studied the steep slope behind them as though trying to discern how they might have descended. 'Otherwise we can't guarantee your safety.' As he spoke the Special Projects Director stepped past Shan to the rocks behind them, walking warily along the edge of the field as though he suspected others might be hiding. He circled back and stood behind the foreman again. 'You have no dogs,' Zhu said, looking at Shan suspiciously. 'Shepherds have dogs.'
Shan returned his steady gaze. 'Sometimes dogs have to choose when sheep stray. Go to the shepherd or stay with the sheep. This time they must have stayed with the sheep.'
Zhu replied with another narrow smile. 'A Han shepherd with Tibetan sheep. Difficult,' he said, and nothing more. He spun about and the two men marched away to join their crew, back on the far side of the long rock- strewn clearing which now resembled a battlefield. Shan recalled another crater, the one he had seen at Rapjung. The land took long to heal from such wounds.
Shan watched the Special Director until he was out of sight, trying to persuade himself Zhu was only what he had said he was. But he had known too many men like Zhu, as colleagues in Beijing, and later as his handlers in the gulag, for him to dismiss Zhu so easily. Zhu was more than what he had claimed to be. A Party member, almost certainly. The political commissar of the oil project, most likely. Perhaps a special watcher from Public Security.
He weighed Zhu's words, trying to make them fit with what they had seen earlier that day. No oil crew had been authorized to work on the other side of the mountain but the explosions they had heard that morning had been seismic charges, identical to those they had just experienced. The helicopter Chemi had seen had been civilian, and the only civilian helicopters in the region probably belonged to the oil venture. Zhu had said a helicopter had searched for Larkin. But why would it search on the far side of the mountain? And if Zhu had already reported Larkin dead, what was it searching for?
As the oil crew disappeared from sight, Winslow kept staring at his map. 'Jesus,' he said as Shan approached. 'Over a cliff.' He was remembering, Shan suspected, that he had almost fallen the same way the day before.
'I always get a body,' the American said absently, staring at the map.
'Maybe later we could find the river,' Shan suggested, 'and say some words.'
'I didn't know her,' Winslow said, in a tone that sounded like protest.
'A rebellious American,' Shan observed, 'who leaves her normal duties, her normal life, to wander about Tibetan mountains, perhaps to look for something bigger.'
Winslow grunted. The small grin that rose on his face slowly angled downward into a frown. 'You make it sound like she and I have been looking for the same thing.'
Shan did not reply, but kept staring at the American. Winslow returned his gaze for a moment, grimaced and looked away.
The landscape greened as they descended into Qinghai Province. The hills were still largely the same rugged, gravelly slopes they had encountered on the south side of the range, but the gullies where the spring melt ran contained more vegetation. Juniper and poplar trees could be seen in the lower elevations. There even seemed to be more pikas running in and out of the tumbles of rock scree that covered many of the slopes.
Lokesh seemed intensely interested in every stream and rivulet they encountered. Whenever they were within reach he paused to taste the water. Where one came into view in the distance he pulled his hat low to shield his eyes and studied the water. He offered no explanation, but Shan knew Lokesh was thinking of the patch of blood red water they had seen the day before. Shan still did not understand it, but he did understand that the healers Lokesh had trained with believed the health of the land and the health of the people who inhabited it were inextricably linked. To Lokesh and his teachers it was impossible to treat a human illness without addressing the state of harmony in the human's spirit, and it was impossible to address the harmony in a human spirit without also considering the harmony in that part of the earth where the human lived. To Lokesh the crimson patch might have indicated a tear in the fabric that bound them all together.
They followed Chemi down a long steep gully for half an hour before Winslow paused, map in hand, and called out to her. She pointed to their location on the map, then to the narrow gorge they were about to enter. Where the gully opened onto the lower slope of the mountain was her village, she said with a smile of anticipation. Winslow stooped for Anya to climb onto his back. Chemi's pace quickened, and although she usually remained at least fifty feet in front of their small column as they moved down the gully, Shan thought he heard her singing.
The gully ended abruptly and Chemi stood in a pool of sunlight in front of them. The sharp, sudden sound she made seemed to start as a greeting. But then she sank to her knees and held her belly, and the sound became a long painful groan. He ran to her side but she seemed unable to speak.
Her home had been there, Shan saw, less than two hundred feet from a small stream that emerged from the mountain near the mouth of the gully. Between the stream and the site of the tiny village there had been trees, but now these were twisted, smoking stumps. And beyond the stumps were the smoldering remains of four houses.
Chapter Eleven
The sound of engines and clinking metal broke through their stunned silence. Chemi did not hesitate, did not look back, just ran for the cover of the outcroppings that lined the slope beyond the ruined village. Shan grabbed Lokesh and pulled him into the same rocks as Winslow threw Anya onto his back and followed. Only when they had run nearly a hundred yards did Chemi stop. She seemed unable to speak, not because of her exertion but because of the emotion that twisted her face. She bent into the rocks and retched. When she turned back Shan glimpsed the sick woman again, the frail creature they had encountered on the trail.
It wasn't battle tanks, as Shan feared, but two bulldozers that appeared from around the high rock wall that sheltered the southern and eastern sides of the village. One of the machines did not slow, only lowered its blade and began carving a swath through the ruins of the village, sweeping through the remains of the buildings, throwing before it a rolling wave of debris. A chair flew into the air, the shards of a window and a bed, then something swollen and white that could have been the body of a dog.
The second bulldozer pulled a two-axle trailer from which at least a dozen men climbed down. They quickly unhitched the trailer and, as the second earthmover crawled forward, began unloading building materials.
'The petroleum venture,' Anya said in a pained voice. 'Only they have such equipment.'
Her words seemed to say it all, or at least there seemed to be nothing else anyone could say. Anya took Chemi's hand and led them through the rocks. Yapchi Village, Chemi had said, was only an hour's walk past her home.
Shan had never understood the subtleties of traveling by foot, the many ways one could walk, the messages of human stepping, until he had come to Tibet. Lokesh had once reminded Shan that Tibet had known the wheel for many centuries, as long as China and India, but for most of its existence Tibet had used the device not for transportation, but only for prayer wheels. Tibetans liked to walk, Lokesh said, for it kept them connected to the earth and gave them time to contemplate. But there were many ways of walking in Tibet. There were pilgrim's steps, the slow reverent pace of those bound for holy places. There were caravaners, who moved firmly and steadily, eyes fixed on the horizon or their animals. There were prisoners, who moved in short shuffling steps, heads bowed, sometimes even, by habit, long after they were released. Now Chemi assumed another, an uneven stuttering pace that involved frequent steps to look nervously over the shoulder or to simply sigh and let a wave of emotion break and ebb before moving on. It was the walk of the refugee. It pained Shan to see Chemi fall into it so readily.
They walked in silence, until Anya led them to a narrow ledge of rock that opened with views to the north and west. They stood on a saddle of land that rose up to separate the grey rolling hills to the east from a small
