As he passed a sharp curve in the passage, he reached a pool of surprisingly bright light and stepped into a long, wide chamber with a twenty-foot-high ceiling whose plaster walls, more intact, were painted with much more complex and vivid images of the gods. Modern gas lanterns hung from iron brackets in the walls that had been fashioned to hold butter lamps. Supplies were stacked in makeshift half-walls to create a small living space at the near end, where a camp stove was heating a kettle, and also a corridor along a wall painted with prominent Buddhist dieties.
Two figures at the far end stood staring down at a pile of blankets. One turned then approached along the wall painted with gods, his limp accentuated by his hurried gait. “Constable,” the hail chaser said in a soft, welcoming tone. “You have come to the mountain. You do indeed never stop investigating.” Shan did not miss the hint of caution in his tone.
“It is my burden,” Shan replied, studying the next tunnel that led deeper into the mountain at the back of the long chamber.
Yankay gestured to the kettle. “Sit. We will have tea and see if you can finally hear the mountain speak.”
Shan complied, looking now at a stone-built shelf full of artifacts nearby. Sitting beside it, his back against the wall of the cave, was Lhakpa, writing in a notebook. The snow monk was archiving the artifacts.
“These are new,” Shan said as he approached Lhakpa.
“No, several hundred years old,” the snow monk said, misunderstanding.
“Newly recovered,” Shan said as he accepted a steaming mug. The two brothers had no reply. His gaze shifted to the black shadow that marked the next tunnel. “Which means,” he suggested, “that Gekho’s cave is not sealed off. When I was in the valley talking with the workers about the tragedy of the cave’s destruction, one said ‘if the cave is truly gone,’ as if having the entrance closed didn’t necessarily mean it was gone. There’s a back entrance,” he said and pointed to the next tunnel.
The old hail chaser sighed. “We are at your mercy then, Constable. If the government knew, it would come with more explosives and destroy this end as well. More would die, because some of us would not abandon the old god. We have already failed him too often.”
“But Shan is not the government,” Lhakpa said as he lowered his notebook. He rose and poured himself a mug. “He is the protector of the Yangkar gompa.” The snow monk’s gaze seemed to challenge Shan. “And the Yangkar gompa has always been the protector of Gekho.”
“Yangkar’s gompa has been gone for decades,” Shan said. As he sipped his tea he saw a large aluminum case in the shadows by the wall. On its side were the words in large black figures. For Emergency Medical Use. A medical kit had been stolen from the highway ambulance after all.
Lhakpa saw Shan’s gaze and stepped to block his view of the case. But Shan was not interested in pressing him about the theft on the highway, for he now saw that the remaining figure at the end of the chamber was the nurse. “Someone died and didn’t die,” he said as he recalled his first conversation with Yankay. “Those women are chanting the Bardo for the dead but also invoking mother Tara, who protects the living.” He looked toward the nurse. “Impossible!” he whispered as realization struck him. Yankay moved as if to stop him as Shan took a step toward the far end of the cave but Lhakpa put a restraining hand on his brother’s shoulder.
The nurse was sitting as Shan approached, singing in a low voice. It wasn’t a pile of blankets beside her, it was a pallet. She was holding the hand of her patient. Although much of the prostrate woman’s head, including her right eye, was covered with bandages, her long blond hair spilled out over the pallet.
“She has never regained consciousness,” the healer said. “I fear her eye is ruined. She seems unable to speak. But most days she accepts the broth we feed her. Her skull was badly fractured. The journey down the mountain would have killed her.”
Shan sank to his knees. Yankay had asked Shan about what happened when a soul and body changed their mind after dying. Natalie Pike lay before him, alive and not alive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lhakpa ignored Shan’s queries, making only light conversation as they returned down the treacherous path along the side of the mountain. The nurse too had declined to answer any of his questions, only explaining that they had found Natalie on the day after the explosion, under the debris of a half-collapsed chapel. When they reached the safety of the forested trail Lhakpa finally turned and answered the first of Shan’s questions. “How could we tell anyone?” the snow monk asked. “As soon as they learned she was alive those who intended to kill her would come to finish the job, along with all who helped her.”
“It’s why you and Jaya reacted so strangely when I said her father had come to the valley.”
Lhakpa eyed Shan as if searching for something hidden in his choice of words. A heavy weight seemed to descend on the Tibetan. “What could we do for her father, Shan? The hope we might give him would probably be false.”
“Surely you know what must be done. Get her to a hospital.”
“Some of the old ones say her spirit was separated from her body in the explosion, that it is wandering in the dark and will never find her body if she is moved from that cave. Once I was confident I had learned so much, but now I know how hollow that knowledge is. What if they are right? Yankay insists the best healing place for her is right where she is. And the nurse knows many of the old ways. She rubs Natalie’s pulse points and sings to her, saying if she can just ignite a tiny spark inside her, it will kindle her life fire again. And some of the old women have been summoning the Mother Protector, never stopping no matter what the hour.” He shrugged. There was anguish in his voice. “Who are we to say a hospital will be better?”
“But isn’t it a lie to keep acting like she died?” Shan asked.
“You saw her. Which is the lie? That she is dead, or that she is alive? Does it change anything you are doing?”
When Shan had no reply, Lhakpa turned back to the trail and led him into the gathering shadows.
They were already walking along the empty shelves where the artifacts had been stored when Lhakpa held up his hand in alarm. There were strange sounds coming from the campsite by the Talons. It took them a few moments to realize it was laughter.
As they reached the little flat, Jaya was speaking excitedly with two Tibetan men, some of the herders who were helping her, and pointed to Zhu, who sat by the fire with a cup of tea.
“Did you find all the devices?” Shan asked as he reached the young lieutenant.
“I had some devices of my own,” Zhu reminded him with a mischievous smile.
“They may never come back!” Jaya said with another laugh.
“You used your own devices?” Shan asked.
It was Jaya who responded. “We found all their listening machines and moved them to the top of rock spires or down animal burrows. One went inside an old pilgrim’s cairn. We placed one of Zhu’s boxes with each of the listening devices, rigged with a loop, a recording that will just repeat until the batteries run down in a few days.”
“A loop?” Lhakpa asked.
“We got one of the old shepherds to record for us. Whenever Public Security listens to their sentry devices they will hear nothing but the mani mantra! Lord Gekho will be speaking to them!”
* * *
The Chinese soldier had unexpectedly lifted the spirits of the camp, and as the stars rose, they shared stories of adventures in the mountains. When Zhu began speaking of serving in the Himalayas, Shan feared his tale would relate to intercepting refugees leaving from Tibet, but instead he spoke of encountering a snow leopard with two cubs, which deeply impressed the Tibetans, who considered such encounters good luck. Yankay then offered his own story from his boyhood about an old man who could change shape into a snow leopard. Jaya countered with a tale of a woman who could turn into a mouse, and the Tibetans began a bemused dialogue about the advantages of mousehood versus leopardhood. As Zhu good-naturedly defended the leop
ard—not because of its claws, but because of its grace and stealth in movement—Shan slipped down the path that led through the labyrinth of the rock outcroppings. He emerged onto a ledge and sat, looking down on the moonlit Valley of the Gods.
Rows of lights marked the workers compound. Here and there twin shafts of light indicated the trucks that worked around the clock. At the far end, a silvery column shimmered where the moonlight touched the tall waterfall. The blanket of night brought a deceiving peacefulness to the valley. How could it be possible that such a placid place, where simple people had touched their gods for centuries, could have attracted so much greed, so many lies, and so many murders? He tried to push the crimes out of his mind and imagine how it had once been. Bold but devout tribesmen had come before history, to erect rows of standing stones. Bonpo pilgrims had arrived in later centuries, to pray and paint the faces of their gods on the walls of the cave. Later Buddhists had come with their own gods, not to attack the older deities, but to find ways to harmonize them, for the sake of the Tibetan soul.
He patted his pockets, looking for incense, then recalled he had given his last piece to Zhu. Instead, he steepled his fingers in a mudra, the Diamond of the Mind sign, and stared at the glistening waterfall in the distance as he tried to fit together the ever-shifting pieces of his puzzle. Despite all he had learned, he could not find the lever, the handle he needed to get inside the conspiracy so he could break it apart. It was as if there were a shadow in its center he could not penetrate. The valley may be a vortex that was causing lives to violently collide, but something else had started events in motion.
But that piece of the puzzle was invisible to him and without it, he was powerless. He had no angle, no explosive piece of evidence, no leverage point he could push to pivot the disastrous events of recent weeks. The forces against him were too powerful. Public Security was against him, the ruthless Amban Council was against him, the governments in Lhasa and Beijing were against him. He was wise enough to know he had lost this time. They would have to claim the miraculous survival of Natalie Pike as their victory and move on. The dam would never be stopped. The Amban Council could not be stopped. Lhadrung County would be swept clean in a few months. He and Tan would be pushed aside, debris of an earlier age. Yangkar would get a new Chinese constable, who would inevitably discover the precious, illegal archives under its streets. Ko would lose Tan’s protection at the 404th.
He was about to rise and return to the camp, his heart heavy, when a match flared beside him. Lhakpa lit a cone of incense and set it between them, as if he too needed the gods close.
“An old lama once told me that Tibet is ripe with lives,” Lhakpa said after a long silence. “The words nagged at me, and when I later confessed to him that I didn’t understand, he said Tibet today forces people to juggle more than one life. Everyone’s forced to appear as a loyal citizen who would never publicly acknowledge their faith. But many are also devout followers of the Dalai Lama, who hide illegal images of him in their homes. We can’t be faithful without being liars. And then we have lives as productive workers, though seldom in the job we would have chosen for ourselves. We’re all actors, with different audiences for each mask we wear, each life we lead.”
Shan weighed Lhakpa’s words as he gazed out over the moonlit valley. “It is an age of troubled souls,” he agreed. “A renowned scientist,” Shan observed after another silence. “A professor at a famed Buddist school. A dissident. A prisoner. A snow monk. That’s a soul ripe with lives.”
Lhakpa went very still. “I’m not sure I follow, Constable.”
“My son was nearly beaten to death at the 404th labor brigade because he started asking questions about prisoners who arrived from Larung Gar last year.”
“I’m sorry. I will pray for him.”
“He’ll live. Funny thing, he found out that one of the prisoners who arrived in that convoy didn’t seem to know the others, even sometimes didn’t seem to recognize his own name.” Shan paused, watching the headlights of a patrol car drive along the perimeter road below them. “Understandable, of course, since he had no time to train to become you, Professor Lin. Or Lhakpa. How many other names have you used?”
Lhakpa took a long time to reply. His voice cracked when he finally spoke. “It wasn’t my idea. I argued against it, saying I could not subject another man to the suffering of imprisonment intended for me. But they said he had volunteered to switch, to take my place in that prison, that he had no family, that he had been in prison before and could endure it. He was about my age, about my build, so he could pass with those who didn’t know me well. They said I was needed on the mountain, that I understand mountains in ways no one else did.”
“Meaning the science of mountains,” Shan suggested. “Geology. Engineering. Who were they?”
“Those ones who call themselves purba, the resistance. They were here earlier but the old ones sent them away, because they began to suggest violence. Some of them went below, getting hired as workers, and stayed in touch with Jaya.” Lhakpa reached into a pocket. “Do you mind?” he asked and produced a pack of cigarettes. Shan had never seen him smoke. “The snow monk doesn’t smoke,” Lhakpa said with a sheepish tone, “but the professor often did, a habit from university days. I thought I had quit but the last few days of evading Public Security has been nerve-wracking.” He lit a cigarette with a book of matches before speaking again. “Yes. Geology and engineering. When I was seventeen, they sent me before what the school called academic commissioners. They were just young Party members who had graduated with degrees in socialist philosophy and such. They never asked me if I wanted to go to university myself, never asked me what I wanted to study. If I had stayed,” he shrugged. “If things had been as before, I would have gone to a monastery.”
“You would have made a wise lama,” Shan said.
Lhakpa gave a grunt that hinted at bitter amusement. “Geology and engineering. They said they were the sciences of progress, for so many mines had to be opened, so many mountains had to be leveled, so many fortifications and dams had to be built.
“Our parents were gone by then and my brother had disappeared with some old unregistered Bonpo monk, so I assumed the worst. I became an engineer then later a professor. They would call me into government service for especially challenging projects. The last one was a dam designed to flood a valley up in Heilongjiang Province by the Russian border. I went out with a survey team and discovered a village of the Oroqen people there, an ancient tribe of which there were only a few thousand left. I went back and told the truth, that there were better dam sites in the region and this one would destroy a village of indigenous people who had lived there for centuries. I was told no, this will be the valley because those people needed to enter the twenty-first century. They were using the dam as cover for their political goals, as a way to justify the destruction of those people. I left the next day. Left the project, left the university, and without a word to anyone, I went to Larung Gar, the school colony, because I had heard people could start over there, could learn to live the life of a monk or nun no matter how old they were, or what their prior life had been.”
“You honored your Tibetan roots,” Shan said.
“My soul had become a dried, shriveled thing. I honored it for the first time in my life. I had never forgotten a passage an old lama showed me when I was young, written by another lama centuries ago. The man wrote that he was leaving to be a snow monk, that he was going to go up and sit with the mountain for a few years, until only the mountain remained. For a while it seemed there was nothing better in all the world for me to do.”
“But you couldn’t entirely leave that old life behind,” Shan suggested.
Lhakpa nodded. “After a few months my teachers at Larung Gar discovered my background. They said that I had an obligation to share my knowledge, that Larung Gar was about understanding the spiritual and natural world. There were Bonpo lamas there who were excited by my published teachings on earth science because, they
said, I was demonstrating the magic of the earth. I had never thought of it that way but came to realize they were right. The huge anchor mountains they considered sacred were sacred for scientific reasons as well, because they were the source of so many ecosystems and of the headwaters for all the great rivers of Asia. The environmental experts with college degrees were just engaged in a form of worshipful penance, the lamas said, required because so many for so long had forgotten how to respect the earth. One of them declared that the earth has ways of speaking we don’t always understand, and my science was one of the languages of earth magic. I was a bridge, he said, standing in the middle, connecting those who worshipped the earth in these different ways. Then one day a year and a half ago, that lama came to me in the night and began whispering of a place called Gekho’s Roost.”
“So putting on the clothes of a snow monk was an act,” Shan said.
“Not at all. I told you, that was my intention when I went to Larung Gar. Even in Yangkar I was clinging to that dream for a while, before the business here arose. But that lama Tsomo Rabten changed my mind with his stories of Gekho’s home.”
Shan cocked his head. He had heard the name elsewhere. “Tsomo was the lama who died on October 1.”
Lhakpa nodded. “The hour the standing stones came down. His soul was connected to them, Shan, I am convinced of it. He was of the prior generation, who touched wonders that are lost to us now.”
“Was your other niece, Tara, at Larung Gar? Is everything you told me about her a lie?”
Lhakpa drew on his cigarette and blew out a long silvery plume of smoke toward the heavens. “I’m sorry, Shan. Jaya says the goat was sent by the gods to keep me honest. Tara was my niece, yes, but she didn’t die coming back from her school. She did leave her school but had gone to Larung Gar to seek me out and began attending our secret meetings about the Valley of the Gods. She was fiery, a leader who wasn’t shy about declaring that those at Larung Gar owed a broader duty to Tibet.”
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