"What do you mean?" Jakli inquired.
"Lau was no taller than me. I don't think she wrote this."
Jakli studied the writing for a moment. "She didn't. I know her hand. She is teaching me- she was teaching me to write Tibetan." She looked back at Shan, wide-eyed, as if just realizing the meaning of her words. "Someone else was here," she whispered. "Someone else was the teacher here."
Shan nodded. He had not found the missing lama, but he had found the lama's home. He stepped to a cluster of simple, familiar drawings on the adjacent wall. From over his shoulder Jakli pointed to the first image on the left side, a vertical line with something like a bloated figure eight at the top. "A monk's stick," she said.
"A staff." Shan nodded. "A mendicant's staff," he added and explained that grouping depicted the prescribed possessions of an ordained monk. He pointed each out. The staff for walking and shaking in a prescribed fashion when asking for alms. A water pot and a water sieve, to prevent the drowning of innocent insects, then an alms bowl, a blanket, three outer robes, two underrobes, a sitting mat, and sandals.
He stared at the drawings, then back at the numbers on the wall and the thangka. The chamber was for a child and not a child. And it was Tibetan but very old Tibetan, from a teacher rooted in one of the oldest of the Buddhist sects. He stepped to the pallet and found a perfectly folded maroon robe. He carefully lifted it. It was a monk's robe. It was clean. He looked back at the tunnel leading to the chamber. The robe had no marks from the clay. It was for use inside the chamber only. Beside where it had lain on the pallet was a large pair of sandals, larger than Shan would wear, larger than Lau would wear.
Jakli stepped back and sat again on the student's cushion, and he knelt beside her, realizing after a moment that they were both staring at the empty cushion by the altar. The missing teacher. They were waiting to be taught, but there was no one to take the cushion.
"Messages," he said at last, giving voice to his speculation. "The trail lies in all the messages." He felt Jakli's gaze but did not look away from the cushion. "Lau's coming here in her death was a message, her way of sending a warning to someone unknown to anyone else. If she were killed she wanted the teacher who used this room warned away from the danger. But she couldn't risk divulging his or her name, not even to you. Even if she took such a risk, who should she tell? It was too unpredictable, where and when she might die."
"But she knew," Jakli said slowly, studying the piece of chalk intensely, as if hoping it might begin writing answers for her. "She knew that she was in danger, didn't she? She knew months ago that she was in danger. I never thought of it."
"And she knew that, no matter what, no matter how or where she died, certain friends would honor her last request," Shan suggested, and Jakli offered a sad smile in reply.
"There were other messages," he continued. "It was the purbas who brought word to the lamas about Lau. The Maos knew of her, or someone connected to her knew the Maos. The Buddhist who taught in this room perhaps. But why?" He turned toward her with a sudden thought. "Or was it you? You know the purbas. You know the lung ma."
"No. I was in town, making hats. Fat Mao sent for me."
Shan nodded. Fat Mao knew. Because the lung ma sent the message to the purbas. "But why?" Shan repeated. "It's not just that what went on in this room was Tibetan, or even that it was secret. There was something else, so important that word went to Lhadrung." Why Lhadrung? Why Gendun and Lokesh? he asked himself silently. It wasn't just that Gendun had been born in the region but that Gendun was involved in the mystery, part of the greater secret.
"Lau," Jakli said. "Lau was the secret."
"No. Part of it, yes. But the killing didn't stop with her. There is something else, an evil still unfolding that we have to stop. Something connected with the children."
Jakli bent forward, plucked something from the edge of the cushion, and held it up in her fingers. A small clump of brown fibers. "Wool," she said, rubbing it between her fingers. "Full of lanolin. Unwashed. Like from a herder's vest. Or a sheepskin blanket." It told them little but set the image, that of a student on the cushion, huddled in a sheepskin against the cold air, facing the teacher who sat before him in his robe.
"The teacher," Jakli said. "Maybe it's the teacher who the killer wants. From Lau the killer learned where the students were. The zheli. So he attacks the students to find the Tibetan teacher who uses this room."
Shan slowly nodded. The Muslim boy Suwan had been killed first. But the next boy killed had been Alta, the Kazakh boy being raised by Tibetans, a boy being taught the Buddhist way, a boy whose rosary had been stolen by the killer. Then there was Khitai, whose name Lokesh somehow knew yet didn't know. He rose and walked along the wall again, then stopped and faced the long mantra on the wall, written by the secret teacher.
"There was another message," he said. "Not so secret. After the killing at the Red Stone camp, warnings went out. And about us coming. The dropka on the road knew."
"Many people would have heard about that killing," Jakli confirmed. "The clans have their own ways of spreading news. Herders meet in remote places. Notes are left on trees. Some old clans send dogs with letters on their collars. People were told to watch for the killer."
"But not just a general warning." He told her what the dropka had said, on the high road entering the Kunlun. You are going there, to save the children. "Lau died, then Suwan died, and someone decided the children were in danger. The teacher who used this chamber. Perhaps he warned one of the herders. That would have been enough to start the warnings, to cause the dropka to flee."
"Many people knew about Lau, about the zheli," Jakli said. "When a mother ewe dies, the lambs are always in jeopardy. And some said the zheli was always a dangerous thing, that there were those in the government who opposed it."
"Is that why she was forced from the council?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. You heard Ko today. People became accustomed to it. People support the zheli program now."
People, Shan thought. Meaning the Han who were quietly building a little kingdom in Yoktian.
Jakli stood and stepped toward the tunnel. "Did they ever find your father out?" she asked, as she bent to her knees by the tunnel. "In his secret classroom."
Shan stopped and looked at the writing on the wall. What kind of world was it where in order to be enlightened you had to hide? "No," he said in a wooden voice, still looking at the wall. "They would have eventually, but the Red Guard came one day, just because he had been a professor. They beat him and broke things in his body. My mother and I were held and forced to watch. He didn't die then, but when he breathed little bubbles of blood came to his lips. The next day they came back and made a bonfire of all his books in the street. He watched from the window because he was in too much pain to move. He watched them in horror and I watched him and slowly he just stopped breathing."
He stood in silence, looking at the secret writing on the wall.
"But the books from the closet," Jakli asked softly. "Did they get those too?"
Shan looked back with a sad grin. He shook his head slowly. "Afterward, I just went in alone, with a candle."
As she disappeared down the tunnel Shan hesitated, then picked up the chalk she had left on the bench. Quickly, in small Chinese ideograms, he wrote near the entrance. The way that is told is not the constant way, he wrote. His message for Gendun, who had ways of finding secret treasures. As he looked at his words a realization swept through him. Perhaps the room was no secret to Gendun. The hermitage in Lhadrung was populated by secret teachers. This chamber was home to a secret teacher. No one knew about the teacher who used the room. But Gendun had told Shan that Lau had been killed and a lama was missing. The purbas had only known that Lau was dead. The fact that the message had come that way had been a message in itself, meaning that the lama who used the chamber was gone, unable to communicate with Lhadrung directly. So Gendun had inferred the second part of the mystery, that someone had taken the lama
.
They walked past the clearing without speaking to Jowa or Lokesh, who still sat with Bajys as he swayed back and forth, reciting mantras with the two Tibetans. At the cabin they lit a fire in a circle of stones.
"No one will believe it about Bajys," Jakli said as she made tea in a dented pan she had retrieved from under the porch. "I don't know if I believe it. It doesn't make sense."
"You mean they will still hunt him as a killer?"
She nodded. "Maybe he is. I know people who say it is possible to be possessed," she said, remembering Malik's words. "Maybe in killing the boy, something possessed him, then left him afterwards."
"Something that taught him to speak Tibetan?" Shan asked. "Something that made him recite Buddhist prayers?"
"He could still have killed the boy."
"The man we found up there is no killer."
"But he lied to us. He's no Kazakh."
"Did he lie? Or just not tell all the truth? You said it before. Some secrets are too dangerous to tell," Shan reminded her.
"He didn't kill the boy," Lokesh said confidently. "He didn't kill Auntie Lau."
"You think they are the same? I mean, one killer?" Jakli asked, looking from Lokesh to Shan. "He has to speak to us, tell us what happened."
"He might not know," Shan said. "Maybe it was seeing the dead boy that did this to him. He had built something around his Tibetan self. A Kazakh shell. And the shell was shattered, lost forever, when he saw the dead boy."
"An old shaman told me once of souls getting confused when death was close," Jakli said. "Getting mixed up, being lifted out, then going back to the wrong body."
"And whose soul does he have now? The killer's?"
"I don't know. I just know that he's not Bajys but he has the body of Bajys." Jakli sighed, then looked up into Shan's eyes. "And they will still kill him. You don't know the old clans. They have their own justice. The government won't help, even if someone asked. If the clans are convinced Bajys is the killer, they will punish him. When I was young two horse thieves were caught near our camp. They were hung from two limbs of the same tree. I went out looking for lambs and saw them. All purple and bloated." A visible shudder moved through her body.
"Who among Lau's friends were Tibetan?" Shan asked.
"No one," Jakli said. "Me, I'm the closest to being Tibetan. I've known her all these years and I've never seen her with a Tibetan except the dropka who watched the children, and they usually stayed away, bringing the children and then hiding until Lau was done."
"She was Kazakh," Shan said with a hint of skepticism, "with friends who were Han Chinese and Uighur. But she had no Tibetan friends. Even with the Tibetan herders wandering the hills below the Kunlun."
"Tibetans aren't given papers for Xinjiang. Very few are classified as natives here. They're treated-" She shrugged as if it was painful to finish the sentence and busied herself with the tea.
"Badly," Shan said, finishing the sentence for her.
Jakli nodded. "Speeches are given by the prosecutor, by Public Security officers. Tibetans are always the example of the uncooperative minority, of the reason why assimilation of the country has taken so long. In Yoktian, a friend showed me something on a computer, an image taken from phone lines. It was from somewhere outside China, and it was a film of a Chinese flag being burned. A Tibetan child appeared and lit it on fire. When it was ashes, the film repeated. Again and again."
"You mean Tibetan friends would have been politically dangerous to Lau."
She nodded again.
"Then why did she learn Tibetan?"
"I don't know. She knew lots of languages. Tadjik. The people's Mandarin. The Party's Mandarin. English."
"English? Why English?"
Jakli looked up as if surprised by the question. "This is China," she said with a small, chastizing smile. "People sit in closets and learn things." She looked up the mountainside. "Lau taught people what they needed. She sometimes taught about Buddha. But she also taught about Mohammed. If she had Han children in her zheli she would have taught them about Confucius and Lao Tze. That's what she did."
"No. In the cave, it was different."
"I don't think so. Why would you believe-"
"Because," Shan suggested, "she never took you there." His words brought a small, nearly silent moan from Jakli. He had seen many things in Jakli's eyes when she had entered the cave chamber and sat, stunned, on the student's cushion. Wonder. Confusion. Reverence. Sadness. But also pain. "You were a friend, and a student too. She taught you about Tibet and Buddhism. But she hid this place even from you."
"But you said there was someone else. Another teacher."
Shan nodded. "A friend who was Tibetan, who does not appear Tibetan. Who else came to this place?" The chamber had not been just for talking about Buddhism. It had been for teaching the Tibetan language and other things Tibetan. The things lost, or nearly lost, to the two generations born since the Chinese invasion.
Jakli looked for a long time into the fire. "There were herders sometimes, passing through. A crazy Xibo who watches the water. In his fifties maybe. They say he's a lunatic." The Xibo were a Manchurian people, uprooted from their homelands nearly three centuries before and sent west to fight the Muslims on behalf of the emperor.
"The water?"
"The Agricultural Council gives a small stipend to make sure key streams are kept open and not contaminated. Many of our streams only flow in the spring. Only a few are constant. So they have people, usually retired herders, who watch the water, keep dead animals out, clear fallen trees from it."
"Who else?"
"Her drivers. And people at the school in Yoktian may have visited here sometimes. Others from the Agricultural Council, maybe."
"Drivers?"
"Sometimes. She couldn't drive a car. So when she was on business for the Council, she used the vehicle pools."
"But not since then, not since she left the council?"
"Sometimes one of the drivers still helped. A Kazakh from the motor pool."
"Would he have known where she was the day she died or who she had been traveling with?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Do you know where he lives?"
"In town, probably. But now at Glory Camp."
"Glory Camp?"
"You heard Fat Mao. Prosecutor Xu stopped at the motor pool in Yoktian."
Shan studied Jakli. "She didn't pick you up. Even though you're a friend of Lau's. Because," he suggested, "the prosecutor knew exactly where you had been when Lau died." He paused and studied Jakli, who seemed to have little concern about being absent from her probation job. "Were you there, at your factory?"
Jakli grimaced and nodded, still staring at the fire. "I left for a day when we brought Lau to the cave. Then I left when I heard you were coming. It's mostly Kazakhs and Uighurs who work there. I have friends there. They cover for me. It's not strict. Not usually, as long as enough hats are being made."
"Prosecutor Xu saw you today. Does she know your face?"
She looked up at him with a frown, but before she could reply Jowa called from the trail. Bajys was emerging into the meadow, supported by Lokesh and Jowa. He seemed barely to have the strength to stand.
"Bajys will have to be protected," Shan said.
"There's a place deep in the Kunlun," Jakli said readily, as though she had been thinking the same thing. "A Tibetan place. Jowa must know about it."
Shan studied her. "You mean, a place where purbas hide?"
"A secret place."
"Are you one of them?" Shan asked abruptly, before the three men were in earshot.
"A purba? Tibet is their cause."
"But not yours?"
"I struggle for my people," Jakli said with a sigh. "For Kazakhs. For Tibet, when I can." She darted forward to help Bajys onto the porch, then took control with a matronly air, sending Shan for water, Jowa for firewood, and Lokesh for dried grass to make a pallet for the ragged, wasted little man.
Ba
jys sat limply, his eyes unfocused, as she pulled off his shirt, wiping his body with the cold river water. He seemed not to notice any of them.
They drank tea, sharing the two cups from the cabin, and waited until Bajys began to look about, as if finally recognizing where he was.
"It's me, Bajys," Jakli said in Tibetan. "From Akzu's camp."
He looked at her without expression.
"What happened, that night in the rocks?" Her voice was slow and tentative, as if it were not anger but fear she now felt. "Were you with the boys? We need to understand. Do you know that it wasn't Khitai?" Jakli asked.
"Where would he go?" Lokesh interjected. "Where would Khitai run to?" Bajys twisted his head one way, then the other, as he stared first at Jakli, then Lokesh. "I heard the shot. I saw him lying there, with his red cap, and ran. He's dead." The little Tibetan stared toward the door of the cabin, as if seeing someone there invisible to the others. "That was the one I loved," he said in a hollow voice. "That was the one I was to keep safe. He'll be dead again. But that was the one I knew."
Shan stared at him, trying to make sense of his strange words. "Why did you come here?" he asked. "When the boy died, you fled to Lau. Why?"
Bajys's gaze roamed around the campsite before he spoke again. "Sometimes it comes like this, like a dark cloud. And people just die. It can't be stopped." A rattling noise came from his lap. His hand with the beads was shaking.
"Wangtu knows," he said suddenly in a small, quivering voice. "Wangtu told me. Lau was being stalked, he said."
Jakli greeted the words with a frown. "Wangtu doesn't know," she said with abrupt annoyance. "He just talks."
Bajys looked at her and shook his head. "Wangtu knows," he said mournfully. "The world is ending." He seemed to be shrinking before their eyes, growing smaller, hollowing out. Shan had seen it before, even in brave men, and he shuddered to think of the ugliness that caused it. Bajys had gone from the horror of finding the dead boy to see the wise, gentle Lau and instead found human limbs scattered about, a place of terror and death.
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