The Lord of Death is-6

by Eliot Pattison

  “They seem to know,” Shan replied, “a lot about surviving. They have to go now. More will come for them.”

  Ama Apte spoke from her seat on a rock, obviously struggling against the pain of her wound. “The mother mountain watches. She will protect you.”

  Yates stared at the Tibetan woman for a long silent moment then stepped to her, cradled her in both of his arms before turning to Shan. “The mother mountain will protect us,” he repeated, then pulled out his map. “But I don’t know how far it is. And it’s nearly twenty thousand feet at that pass. We have no oxygen.”

  “I came across that way,” the youngest monk declared, “years ago. I was born in Nepal. From here it is maybe four hours, no more.”

  Shan studied the towering glacier with foreboding. It was a killing field, with crevasses covered with brittle windblown crusts, jagged spires of ice, expanses of treacherous, loose scree. We should rest first, he was about to say, when he spotted Jin standing on one of the flat outcroppings near the edge of the little plateau. He had taken out his much reviled radio, and was speaking into it. Jin might not get a bounty for turning in the monks to Public Security, but he would gain enough glory for the promotion and transfer he so desperately wanted.

  “Go!” Shan shouted to the monks, pulling the youngest to his feet and pointing toward the distant pass. “He’s calling in soldiers!”

  By the time Yates and Shan had hurried Kypo and Ama Apte to the passageway and gathered up their equipment the monks were already past the winding gravel path that led to the ice and were on the glacier itself. Shan cast a worried glance at Kypo and his mother, then ran desperately to catch up with the monks, fearful that one would fall and break a bone, ending all chance of escape. He had reached them and was explaining how they must use ropes to connect themselves when the crack of a gunshot split the thin, chill air.

  They turned to see Jin at the trailhead, shouting something that was lost in the distance. But there was no mistaking the threatening way he shook his fist at them, or the object he held in his other hand. He had retrieved his pistol and found more ammunition in his pack. As they watched, Jin took off at breakneck speed in pursuit of their little party.

  They moved at a brutal pace, jogging when they could find purchase in the swales of gravel that sometimes defined the trail, slowing to creep around crevasses that opened unpredictably beside them, pausing to study Yates’s map and compass when the young monk, their only guide, hesitated in selecting the route.

  Steadily upward they climbed, one foot in front of the other, squinting against the glare, fighting gusts so abrupt they were sometimes caught off balance and pushed backward. The rising spring temperatures had brought a treacherous softening to the ice in spots, exposed swaths of bare gravel elsewhere. For the first hour the monks softly chanted a barely perceptible mantra as they walked. But eventually the lack of oxygen took its toll, and they conserved their breath.

  Tiny, sudden snow squalls drove crystals of ice and snow against their unprotected faces. Shan and Yates exchanged agonized glances as the two older monks began to audibly wheeze, knowing that at any moment one of them might clutch his head and burst into the moans of pain that signaled cerebral edema. They stopped often, watching for Jin, consulting Yates’ map after the young monk fearfully announced he no longer knew where they were.

  Three hours later they stopped, spent, gasping in the thin air, passing around Yates’s water bottle, the only one left, scooping handfuls of raisins from a bag the American had stuffed into his pack at the warehouse. Shan’s heart thundered as they moved, not only from the altitude but also from the knowledge that they had reached their limit, that they were demanding that their bodies perform beyond endurance, the condition when death took many climbers. They had two pairs of gloves among them, which they alternated wearing, and Shan’s fingers were growing stiff from the cold. The hardest, highest part of the climb was still ahead.

  They did not speak as they kept ascending, sometimes slipping until a hand reached out to assist, never able to maintain the same gait for more than a few steps, sometimes creeping along the side of ice crevasses with no way of knowing if the lip would crumble under their weight.

  As the wind ebbed and the clouds cleared, each man’s eyes lingered on the summit of the mother mountain Chomolungma, so close it seemed they could reach out and touch it. They had grown so used to the groaning and cracking of the glacier that only Shan looked back toward a particularly sharp retort to their rear.

  Impossibly, Constable Jin was there, less than half a mile away, waving his arms again, not at them but toward the mother mountain, as if he had something to say to her. Then Shan heard the low, metallic ululation that brought terror to so many Tibetans.

  “Down!” he shouted reflexively, then he realized the helicopter, rising along the north col of Everest, was too far away to see them. He turned to borrow the American’s binoculars but Yates already had them trained on Jin.

  “He’s lost his pack,” Yates reported. “He doesn’t have his radio.”

  “We must go!” Shan urged the monks, “quicker than ever!” When the helicopter crew gave up the wider search they would likely fly to the head of the pass and work a pattern down the glacier. The bright parkas of the monks would be like beacons on the white surface.

  They ran, slipping, sliding, falling and scrambling up again. Jin came on relentlessly, jumping recklessly over jagged shards of ice, skidding down low slopes, increasing his speed whenever he saw them pause. Shan stopped looking back, stopped listening for the helicopter, willing himself and the others on, trying with increasing despondency to understand if the next dip in the ice field marked the end of the pass or just another undulation in the glacier.

  Suddenly it was over. The oldest of the monks stumbled, then slipped on a patch of ice, wrenching his ankle, crying out in pain. Shan and Yates bent over him, examining the sprain, then Yates handed Shan his pack so he could carry the monk on his back.

  “In the name of the People’s Republic, I arrest you,” came a ragged voice behind them. Jin stood ten feet away, his pistol leveled at them.

  Yates lowered the monk to a boulder in a standing patch of gravel.

  The shreds of Shan’s last hope blew away in the chill wind. Here was the end. With the monks in custody, Cao would create the confessions he needed to execute Tan. Shan had a shuddering vision of himself standing with his hands on the wire fence of the yeti factory, shouting his son’s name as Ko gazed blankly out his window.

  “A drink,” Jin gasped to Yates. “Give me your water.” He was shivering from the cold, his heavy uniform coat torn in several places.

  Instead the American extracted a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. He braced a leg against another boulder and wrote, then extended the paper to Jin. “What you need is this,” he declared. “Give me your gun and you can have it.”

  “You don’t think I’ll shoot them?” Jin demanded. He was half delirious with fatigue.

  “They do have those charms,” Yates observed in a conversational tone. Shan stared at him, beginning to suspect that the American also suffered the effects of the high altitude.

  Jin swung the gun toward the monks, wildly firing a shot. A shard exploded off the rock on which the injured monk sat.

  “See?” the American said with a shrug. He held the paper up. “I’m offering you a different kind of charm, and I’ll throw in my coat. For the gun and your coat.”

  “My coat?” Jin rubbed his temple, staring at the American in confusion.

  “I know them. With my note they will help you. But wearing the uniform of the Chinese government will mean a cold welcome. And by the time you get below these monks better be your best friends.”

  Jin turned to follow the American’s gaze past his shoulder. His jaw dropped. He glanced from the American back to the valley below, to a compound of colorful tents sprouting lines of prayer flags half a mile below them. His face contorted with emotion, then lit with excitement and he began
to peel off his coat. They were above the Nepali base camp. They had crossed the Chinese border.

  The American’s instructions to the monks were quickly preempted by loud cries from the youngest monk, who hurriedly explained where they were, that he knew many of the sherpas, how there was a monastery only a day’s walk from where they stood. A moment later Jin had exchanged coats with Yates and handed him the gun, which the American tossed away.

  Jin paused by Shan after he had helped the injured monk to his feet. “On the trail that day, I saw the Manchurians twice. They came back up the trail after I passed them, demanded that I ride on and find the mule with the body and bring it back, said if I didn’t forget what I saw, they would find me and kill me.” He glanced at the monks and lowered his voice. “They were the ones who killed the monk that day. He appeared out of the rocks and tried to stop them from taking the body on the mule. I was already moving down the trail by then, there was nothing I could do.” The constable offered an apologetic shrug, then marched away to his new life.

  “We should go with them,” Yates said in a worried voice as they watched the others descend toward the narrow concealed goat trail that would take them down to the Nepali base camp. Jin was bracing the injured monk on his shoulder. “If we cross now we’ll be on the ice in the dark.” He studied Shan a moment. “Go down, Shan,” Yates urged. “It will mean freedom for you, a chance to start over.”

  Shan silently tightened the laces of his boots and began jogging back up the treacherous trail.

  An hour after sunrise the next morning they reached Jomo, waiting in another of Tsipon’s trucks. A grim determination had settled onto their faces. They had passed an uneasy night on pallets in the hermit’s cave, having reached it after sundown. Neither man gave voice to their increasing certainty that Tan would have been already tried, that Ama Apte and Kypo would have been seized by the knobs as accomplices and transported to the gulag before they could reach the town.

  Yates watched the high ridge as they pulled out onto the road. They had been bone weary by the time they had reached the cave, barely able to stand, but Dakpo had fixed them roasted barley and tea, waking them after they had collapsed onto pallets to make them eat. Then he had presented Yates with a small drawstring pouch.

  “When I heard about the Yamas being stolen and returned after being opened up,” the hermit said in a hesitant tone, “I knew it had something to do with Samuel. I had been apprenticed to an artisan at the gompa when I was a boy and knew about such statues.” The old Tibetan seemed strangely nervous, and poured himself more tea before continuing. “Samuel and I spent many hours sitting on ledges above the highway counting army trucks. He spoke about the problem of getting letters home. That’s when we came upon the idea. We had sent one of the statues and had enough letters for another when. . when the world ended.

  “I kept them for a year, then sealed them in an old Yama statue and kept it with me all these years. Then after the murders I took it to the Yama shrine, in case the soldiers searching the mountains found me here. Yesterday I went back for it, and opened up the bottom.”

  “I am sorry, Dakpo,” Yates said, “for what I did to the Yamas.”

  The hermit smiled. “I have been saying prayers with them. They will heal.”

  Yates, choked with emotion, upended the pouch. Letters from forty years before tumbled out, thirty or more rolled and folded pages.

  Shan watched in silence as the American, wide-eyed, began unrolling letters and reading them. But soon, unable to fight his fatigue, he leaned back on a pallet and accepted the hermit’s offer of a thick felt blanket. In his fitful sleep he awakened more than once to hear snippets of conversation between the two men sitting at the brazier. The reticent hermit had been full of words that night, and in the languid warmth of the pallet Shan listened from the shadows to tales of an energetic American teaching Tibetans to dance and sing, of Samuel Yates leading secret missions to recover artifacts from several gompas on the eve of their destruction by the Youth Brigade, of a week during a lull in the fighting when Samuel, Ama Apte, and several others tried to track yetis, of the intense affection between Samuel and Ama Apte that had somehow sustained their little band when they were living on half rations.

  As the embers were dying, their faces lit only by a dim butter lamp, the hermit had leaned toward Yates, his voice now that of a wise old uncle. “We sat up all night once guarding a pass as a long line of monks moved past, fleeing to the south with artifacts from their temples, fleeing to freedom. I will never forget it. The moon was full, the ground covered with snow, monks cradling bronze deities in their arms like babies, yaks carrying bigger statues, a long single file of red robes and yaks that stretched across the snow. As the last one disappeared the mother mountain began to glow from the distant sunrise, even though the stars were still overhead. Samuel spoke some words toward her, like a vow to the mountain. He said when it was over, when things were right again in the world, he would bring back his son, because he wanted his son’s soul to be filled with the power of this place.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A somber air had settled over Shogo. The residents walked down the newly swept streets with solemn, nervous expressions, staring straight ahead. Three shiny black limousines were parked by the municipal building, a sober reminder of the dignitaries who had come for the trial.

  Shan slipped into the hall in the center of the building among the workers who moved tables and chairs inside. A table draped in black with three large wooden chairs behind it sat on a raised platform at one end of the room, with another chair for witnesses at one side, an easel bearing a map of the region at the other. A large portable portrait of Mao on heavy canvas had been unrolled and hung behind the judges’ table. As several workers fussed with weights at the bottom to stretch it straight, others brushed it clean. Less than three dozen chairs were arranged in two sections in front of the table. The pageant, as Shan expected, was to be a private affair.

  A door opened at the side, admitting several well-dressed officials, led by a strutting Major Cao, who gestured and pointed, playing guide to the visitors. He stopped in midsentence as he saw Shan standing there in his tattered, soiled clothes, his face bearing the grime of hard travel. Shan did not move, did not change expression, though he could feel the heat of Cao’s fury from across the room.

  The major turned to a lieutenant and was no doubt about to order Shan ejected when a small dapper figure in a plain black suit broke away from the group of dignitaries. Madame Zheng said nothing as she approached, but followed Shan when he turned and stepped out into the corridor.

  The three figures quietly entered the clinic, not waking the receptionist, asleep again at the door. Shan went straight to the bed at the rear of the patient ward, where the driver of the bus still lingered, his layers of gauze now replaced with adhesive plasters, playing his electronic games. Jomo found a broom and swept the floor near the bed of the only other patient, a sleeping middle-aged woman wearing an oxygen mask. Madame Zheng, as Shan had previously cued her, picked up a tray of bandages and medicines by the entry and carried it to a table by the rear wall, then lifted the medical chart on the soldier’s bed.

  The patient’s expression grew uneasy as Shan approached. He stuffed his electronic game under his blanket and pressed back in his pillow as if expecting to be struck.

  “About time to be released,” Shan observed.

  “Tomorrow, or the next day,” the corporal eagerly replied. “My barracks knows I’m here. I called them a couple of days ago.”

  “We were thinking some exercise would do you good. A little ride, a little walk, a little talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “About the dead bodies you saw that day.”

  “That minister?”

  “The other.”

  “You mean the blond one,” the soldier said.

  Zheng leaned forward, her head cocked toward the man.

  “The Westerner,” Shan nodded.

  “The one
who disappeared. The ghost.”

  “We are,” Shan declared as he handed him the clothes that hung on a peg by his bed, “great believers in ghosts.”

  A quarter hour later Shan and Madame Zheng stood in the shadows of the garage bay at the rear of Tsipon’s warehouse as Jomo eased the long green sedan into the bay and shut the door. It took less then two minutes before an angry figure in a business suit and tie burst through the side door.

  “Idiot!” Tsipon raged. “I need that car! The trial is starting!”

  Jomo dangled the keys in his hand, then retreated to the opposite side of the car, the keys dangling in his hand. “You sent men to kill my father.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Get in the car. You can drive me.”

  “They were two truck drivers, outsiders. You paid them to do things, illegal things.” Jomo stopped at the trunk of the sedan.

  Tsipon looked at his watch. “You’re talking nonsense, Jomo. I am your employer. I am your father’s landlord.”

  As Jomo opened the trunk Tsipon’s expression darkened. He darted toward his mechanic with a snarl, then halted abruptly when Jomo threw a bulky object at him, hitting him in the chest. A large yellow bucket.

  Shan shifted forward in the shadows. Jomo was only supposed to have told Tsipon he knew about the yellow bucket.

  “I wondered about the bounties offered for the monks, how they would be paid. The drivers I asked said the manager of the truck stop was to be shown the gaus. The manager and I had a chat late last night, locked in the workshop. I persuaded him to tell me that when he saw the gaus he was supposed to leave a note in a yellow bucket by the road. I didn’t have to ask who owned the bucket. My father, then the monks. Trying to kill holy men must be habit forming.”

  “Your father has been trying to get killed for years,” Tsipon said in a brittle voice. “He’s unstable. The only reason he stays out of the yeti factory is because I protect him.”