fluttered open. He gazed dreamily at Shan, then lifted his fingers and touched Shan's cheek, as if to determine if he were real.
Suddenly Gyalo was pulling him away. 'The guard is finishing. If he begins to pay attention to us, my friend, we will be in much trouble,' he said in a desperate tone.
Lokesh's eyes fluttered shut again.
Tenzin grabbed Shan's arm. 'You must understand something. They could come any second,' he said urgently, and looked into Shan's eyes with deep despair. 'Someone must know this in case we disappear. He went there for me. He died because of me.'
Shan and Gyalo froze. The abbot of Sangchi suddenly seemed very old. 'Some nights I can't sleep because I see him standing, dying, on that mandala.'
Shan swallowed hard. 'You mean Drakte. You mean you sent Drakte to Amdo town.'
Tenzin nodded. 'He was going anyway, but I had asked him to find me one of those Lotus Books, to bring it to me. He went there and the knobs killed him for it. He lost the book. He lost his life, because of me,' Tenzin said in a desolate voice.
Gyalo pulled on Shan's shoulder but Shan would not move. He looked from Tenzin's tortured face to Lokesh, then to the paper on the table, and slowly pulled the pouch with the ivory rosary from his pocket. 'Drakte was supposed to use all your things to leave a trail in the south. But he kept one thing back.' He handed the pouch to Tenzin, who opened it and stared inside.
He heard Tenzin's breath catch, and watched the man's face sag. 'My grandfather gave these to me,' the Tibetan whispered. 'He said they are the only valuable thing a monk should have, because they are his connection to his god.'
Shan watched as Tenzin twined the beads around his fingers. 'You have to tell them,' he said slowly, 'tell them you'll make your speech. Tomorrow. You have to play the abbot again,' he said apologetically, 'for a few minutes more.' Then he leaned into Tenzin's ear to explain.
Night had fallen when Shan drifted toward the rear of the encampment, to walk among the stars. But as he passed the dropka tents by the yak herd he was distracted by a strange sound.
'Humm, humm en da rengg,' a dropka youth recited in a singsong voice. It had the sound of a mantra, but unlike any Shan had ever heard. He rounded the tent to see a group of dropka, young and old, sitting by a huge yak-dung fire, beside which Winslow was standing. Shan spun about, alarmed that the American would be so careless as to come down from the hiding place on the ridge after they had all agreed it was too dangerous for him to do so. But then he saw two lean men standing at the edge of the circle, facing the gompa. One was close enough to recognize, one of the stoney-faced purbas who had been with Tenzin at Yapchi.
Winslow acknowledged Shan with a grin. For a moment Shan thought he was waving at him, then he realized the American was leading the dropka in song.
'Whur da deaar end nat'lope ply- yy,' the dropka continued. It was an American song, in a rough approximation of the English, one of the Western songs approved for the public address systems of Chinese trains: Home, Home on the Range.
As Shan sat near the fire, trying to join in the spirit of the circle, his concern for the American increased. It was too dangerous for him to come to the encampment, even with purbas protecting him. He would be an illegal now, without the protection of his passport, without any identity as far as the authorities would be concerned. Like Shan, Winslow didn't exist now, and if captured he might be made to disappear.
In the dim light on the far side of the fire Shan became aware of another figure, seated on the back of a horse cart, a dour Tibetan man, Shan's age, flanked by two of the purbas he had seen on the ridge. Shan rose and edged around the ring. But when he got close to the cart the nearest purba stepped in front of him. The man on the cart stared at Shan with hooded eyes, showing no greeting, no emotion of any kind. In the firelight Shan could see two deep gutters of scar tissue along the man's cheek, and the flame in his eyes. He saw much that he recognized in those eyes. They were prisoner's eyes, filled with a weary, sad intelligence, but they were also extraordinarily fierce eyes, lit with fury and righteousness alike. Shan had seen the same eyes on thangkas of wrathful protector demons.
Shan took another step forward and the purba's hand closed around his arm like a cold vise, and pressed it against something near his chest. A pistol butt, in a shoulder holster. Shan froze, then stepped back out of the purba's grip, studying the lines of scar tissue on the man's cheeks. It was the one they called the Tiger, he somehow knew, the legendary purba leader with the stripes on his face. The two most wanted men in all Tibet were at Khodrak's gompa.
Shan retreated to the far side of the circle. He wandered out onto the plain, into the comfort of the night, trying to fight the new fear that the Tiger's presence had ignited. An owl called. The mountains on the horizon glistened in the moonlight. The appearance of the purba leader unsettled Shan as much as if knobs had risen out of the fire. The Tiger was not there to help Shan. The Tiger was famed as a man of action. It was said that his mother had been Moslem. Moslems believed in retribution. The Tiger was so hunted, so prominently marked for destruction he could easily have an army of knobs on his trail at that moment. The words Anya had spoken their first night on Yapchi mountain came back to him. So many have died, the oracle had said, so many still to die.
Shan found himself sitting, staring at the sky, beseeching the stars. If only he could just take Lokesh and go. He had no more hope to give the Tibetans, he had no way of seeing through the mysteries that shrouded the gompa and Yapchi Valley. All he could see was the danger.
Time passed, perhaps an hour. Something moved in the darkness, ahead of him. A man, sitting on a rock a hundred feet away, was holding something that glinted in the moonlight, looking not at Shan but out onto the plain.
'The lamas have no patience for me,' a deep voice suddenly said behind him. 'They say I shouldn't expect to achieve so much in one lifetime.' It was an extraordinary voice, hoarse and powerful, like a growl but not exactly. How had Lhandro described it? Like someone roaring in a whisper, because the knobs had broken his voicebox.
As Shan turned toward the man with the ravaged face he saw a second guard sitting on a rock, fifty feet away.
'I told them when I was young I had teachers from the tantric schools who taught that with the right practice you could achieve Buddhahood in one lifetime.'
Strangely, Shan realized, he had never heard another name for the Tiger. He shifted uneasily, wondering how many more men with guns lurked in the shadows. And how often the Tiger spoke with Chinese in the night.
'I tell them compared with that, what I seek seems so little.' The man sat beside Shan and watched the sky a moment. 'When you're always on the run, always moving after sunset, the night sky becomes your home,' he said, and for a moment sounded very tired. 'You have a man who wrote a letter. Colonel Lin is no friend of Tibet. He has been written, more than once.'
Written. The Tiger meant written in the Lotus Book, the purbas' compendium of atrocities against Tibetans.
'I would like to spend time with that Colonel,' the purba leader said in a businesslike tone. 'Take him somewhere. Valuable things could be learned.'
Shan felt his belly clench. 'Lin is injured,' he said weakly. 'Why?' he asked, looking into the man's ravaged face. 'Why would you bother to speak to me about this? The purbas know where Lin is.'
The man said nothing. Something moved in the distance, and one of the purbas with the guns leapt up. After a moment Shan heard the clatter of small hooves, those of a wild goat or gazelle, and the man returned to his post. Shan studied the Tiger. He seemed like another rock in the night, a lonely statue whose face was slowly being etched away by the wind. Shan realized that the Tiger might have answers to many of the questions that had been plaguing him.
'Why are there no knobs here?' he asked suddenly. 'Why didn't the knobs take the abbot of Sangchi?'
The Tiger sighed. 'The ones who have him are knobs and not knobs. Things are adrift in this district. Even those knob doctors aren't sure who to report to. We intercepted a request they sent to Lhasa, asking for instructions. They want to go up onto the Plain of Flowers to find the medicine lama. But Tuan and that abbot Khodrak want them here.'
'But if monks become the political enforcers,' Shan said. 'What can the people do to…' his voice trailed off.
