Shan slowly rewrapped the shroud, then stood, took two steps, and clutched his chest as the helplessness surged through him once more. He darted outside, moving to the rear of the small building, where he leaned against the wall in his weakness, gulping the fresh night air, trying to purge himself of the smell of death. As he sank to his knees he heard the haunting voice again, as clearly as if the forlorn dropka had been standing behind him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming.
Chapter Six
The turtle truck lurched across the desert like a small boat on a rough sea, rocking and pitching as it broke across the waves of sand. Jakli worked hard at the wheel, frequently adjusting the angle against the dunes, dodging patches of light-colored sand, always warping back in a northeasterly direction, toward the heart of the desert. She had stopped as she had left the road, looking at Shan with a grave expression. "The Taklamakan," she said, gesturing toward the endless expanse of sand. "It's an old word, from before the time of writing. Because so many people have died out here. It means once you go in, you never come out."
But Shan already felt mired in a place with no escape. The American was not his responsibility, he kept telling himself as he gazed at the desolate landscape, not his mystery to solve. He had Lau and Gendun and the dead boys and now the waterkeeper, and he had no room on his back for the dead American. It was only by some grim chance that he had stumbled upon the body. The American had nothing to do with Lau and Khitai. Perhaps his death was part of the strange game between the knobs and the prosecutor or even connected to Ko Yonghong, who had boasted about his American consultants. More likely, it was the work of the boot squads, who brought subversives from all over China to a place like Glory Camp. But still the death of the American hovered near like a dark shadow. He had begun to accept what the natives of the region kept telling him, that it was a shadow land, a forgotten place, a land between worlds, where people lived like ghosts in shadows and life was very cheap.
"You seem to see things I do not," Shan observed, uncertain whether it was anger or just a hard-edged alertness that had settled into Jakli's eyes. Even after she had agreed to take Shan to the place where Lau died, Fat Mao had argued against it, complaining that she had to return to the hat factory, that the place called Karachuk would be too dangerous for Shan. Fat Mao had returned them to the garage by then, where Akzu had been waiting, sharing a skin of kumiss with the surly mechanic. Akzu had pointed toward the high ranges and raised his voice. Finally, when Jakli had promised to return to the factory after delivering Shan to Karachuk, he had embraced his niece and knelt to pray facing west, toward the Muslim holy city.
"By rights, we should not be in the desert in a truck," she said after a moment. "Only with camels is it safe, and even then the inexperienced often die. But we have only a short distance, and this close to the mountains we can drive most of the way on the old river bed," she said as she guided the vehicle down a short bank of sand onto a wide, level channel of packed sand. "The key is to avoid the soft spots."
"If we don't?"
"The desert can swallow a truck as easily as a man or a camel." As if on cue a pile of white bleached bones appeared on the bank of the dead river. It contained a long skull and heavy ribs and was pointed in the direction of the snowcapped mountains. "It's always been this way, since the early Silk Road. Some people got wealthy from the passage. Some people just died."
After almost an hour Shan discerned a line of shadows on the horizon. Irregular and large, they seemed like misshaped buildings one moment, eroded rock formations the next. For a moment, from a distance, Shan believed that they were creatures bent under heavy loads.
At a curve in the riverbed Jakli accelerated and shot straight across the bank, directly toward the formations, then, half a mile away, turned ninety degrees to drive parallel to them toward the south. "The Silk Road," she said abruptly. "Do you know much of it?"
"The school texts," Shan said with a shrug.
His words brought a grimace to her face. "They will tell you it was a region of terrible class struggle, of great oppression, of temples for the worship of wealth built on the backs of slaves," she said, slowing the vehicle to steal a glance at the mysterious shapes. "Our history texts," she said, slowly shaking her head, "they are like studying beautiful paintings from the back of the canvas." She gestured toward the shapes. "The glorious Karachuk. Ignored by our teachers because it was not Chinese. But it is because of places like this that I have learned not to curse the Taklamakan. The very elements that make the desert so treacherous have preserved its treasures."
Jakli's expression grew lighter as she eased the truck toward a low, flat ridge. Following her gaze Shan saw an ancient wall. "Karachuk was an oasis on the southern arm of the Silk Road," she explained, "when the ice fields in the mountains still fed the river enough to keep it flowing all year. A major city once, praised for its fertility and hospitality in the ancient texts. Uighurs lived here, and Kazakhs and Tibetans. Life was so pleasant that many travelers lingered for months or years, even for the rest of their lives. The old writings spoke of it, but it was lost centuries ago in a grandfather sandstorm, a karaburan. Then ten years ago another storm came and the top of it was swept clean."
Shan could clearly see now that the shapes were the remains of man-made structures. A pressed earth wall the color of the sand rose in spots to a flat top and elsewhere had crumbled, revealing in its gaps small sand hummocks whose orderly placement suggested buildings. As Jakli crested the dune that extended south of the wall like a giant drift of snow, a huge form of distinctly human features greeted them. It was a statue of a reclining Buddha, twenty feet high at the shoulder, leaning on an elbow to face the southern mountains, toward Tibet. Most of its head was gone. Only the mouth, curved in a serene smile, remained above the neck.
"I had forgotten that the Buddhists were here," Shan said slowly. Buddhists. Perhaps he had begun to find a trail after all, a trail of hidden Buddhists. The Muslim boy who wore a rosary. The secret Tibetan classroom in Lau's cave. The waterkeeper in the rice camp. A headless Buddha in the desert.
"It was all Buddhist, for hundreds of miles north and east. Then Muslims came from the west and Chinese came from the east," Jakli explained. "I have read the journals of a traveler from the east," she continued after a moment. "Xuan Zang, his name was. He passed through the kingdom of Karachuk on a pilgrimage to India, as an envoy from your emperor. Twelve hundred years ago. The kingdom's census showed five thousand souls living here, in a luxury and peacefulness unknown in what was then China. Grapes hung from arbors above every doorway. Households had peach and pomegranate trees near the street, and the king ordered that a passerby had the right to pluck a ripe fruit for refreshment, but only one." Jakli looked in his direction with a wry smile. "Now that was enlightened communism."
She pointed toward the south, where the tops of the high ranges could be seen on the horizon. "But they owed everything to the ice fields in the mountains, which fed the rivers and irrigation channels that flowed here. Then the ice fields began to shrink. People began to move closer to the mountains as the water disappeared. By the time the sand storms came it was already mostly deserted. I remember when the the storm uncovered the city. People said it was the work of God, to remind us of who we are. Others said it was the work of the desert spirits, who were inviting us back."
There was one more dune, smaller, that ran diagonally along the southern end of the ruins, in front of a gap in the old walls near the Buddha. Jakli accelerated over the low mound. The front wheels of their vehicle left the sand, and with a heavy lurch they landed in the ghost city of Karachuk.
The ruins cast a spell over Shan the instant he climbed out of the truck. They were in a small courtyard surrounded by vague shapes of buildings constructed of baked mud bricks, their color and texture so much like the sand that the entire landscape was a patchwork of browns and grays. The twisted, desiccated remains of trees climbed out of the sand here and there. The top of an arch protruded from
the desert thirty feet away.
Jakli began to walk toward an opening between the outer wall and the largest, most intact of the structures, a roofless rectangular building of stone blocks with high narrow window openings almost as high as the wall. A barracks perhaps, Shan thought. Short stumps as thick as his arm, baked rock-hard from the centuries of dry heat, poked out of the sand at regular intervals beside lower walls that might have been the ruins of personal dwellings. There once had been free peaches for the thirsty traveler.
As they passed the large stone structure Shan saw the remains of wood beams protruding in a row from the outer wall, supports for roofs long gone. At one of the ruins the walls remained high enough to hold the beams in their original position, giving an idea of how the street would have looked eight or nine centuries before. Shan cautiously stepped into the doorway. He started and leapt back at the sight of two large eyes staring at him. Jakli laughed, and he peered back inside to study the life-sized mural painted on the interior wall. Although cracked and disjointed where plaster had fallen away, he could plainly see the figure of a leopard feeding on a small brown animal. The colors had bleached away to mere tinted shadows, but the savage emotion of the cat's eyes seemed as vivid as the day when they had been painted centuries earlier.
As he backed away a sound came from nearby, the braying of an animal or perhaps just the wind playing with the ruins. After another hundred paces their path opened into a courtyard with several misshapen stone columns arranged in a circle. Jakli stopped and pointed at the columns. As he approached them he saw features in the wasted stone, a hand here, a graceful leg there. It had been a garden of statuary.
They climbed half a dozen stone steps from the ruined garden to the top of a small knoll, the highest point within the walls. The reclining Buddha dominated the scene behind them. The figure appeared so relaxed, so natural a part of the rolling landscape that it seemed at any moment the statue might stand and start walking toward the Kunlun. At the far end of the ruins, to the north, at least three hundred yards away, more ruined statuary stood in a line in the sand.
"Sentinels," Jakli explained as she pointed to them, "covering the northern approach. Stationed at the top of the city wall." She turned and gestured toward a shape closer to them, on the long, low dune that covered the western wall. The helmeted head of a warrior emerged from the sand. Beside it the top half of a hand protruded, held up as if in warning.
The sight brought an unexpected grin to Shan's face. He felt an odd peace in the presence of such ancient beauty and mystery. He had seen statues like these at other ruins in China and Tibet. But always before they had been pockmarked with bullets or scorched from explosives. The army had been fond of using such statues for target practice. Most ancient fortress walls had been brought down because they symbolized imperialism or could be used by rebels. The huge national libraries, some filled with manuscripts dating back over two thousand years, had been destroyed by the revolutionaries. Temples, not only in Tibet, had suffered the same fate. As a student Shan had been bused to one of the old imperial tombs to watch the Red Guard conduct a criminal trial for an ancient Ming emperor, disinterred from his tomb. The emperor had been convicted of a lengthy list of crimes against the people, and his body burned with the artifacts from the tomb.
But Karachuk had evaded the hand of Beijing by sleeping under the sands. Shan could have contemplated the scene for hours. He saw the same grin on Jakli's face and knew she felt it too. He realized that the things he enjoyed the most in life seemed to be those which had been forgotten, overlooked by modern Chinese society. The hidden monks of Tibet. The old Taoist texts taught by his father. The hand of an ancient warrior rising out of the sand.
They continued down the path, away from the wall, descending gradually toward a large bowl below a long, high outcropping of rock that defined the eastern boundary of the town. Shan paused to study the collection of buildings below the center of the outcropping, a dozen small structures which were in far better repair than the others. They were constructed of the same pressed earth and mud brick walls as the other structures, but their walls, though cracked, were still intact, and they had roofs, capped by grey, sun-baked tiles that had been covered with sand and pieces of rotten wood. Beyond the huts was a larger building consisting of a square end joined to a round domed structure, which also appeared to have survived the centuries without serious decay. Or perhaps, Shan considered, as he studied the structure, it and the smaller buildings had been artfully reconstructed to appear as ruins to the casual, or distant observer. Behind the domed building, in a corral consisting of three stone walls abutting the face of the outcropping, stood several long-haired horses of the short, sturdy breed that had once conveyed the soldiers of the khans across two continents. In front of the large structure Shan noticed a small ring of stone above which hung a tripod of weathered beams. A well.
Shan became aware of Jakli standing apart, gazing at him uncertainly. "I don't know what they will do. It's dangerous place, like Akzu said."
"But Lau died while visiting here?"
Jakli nodded.
"Meaning she had friends here. Like Wangtu said, people she trusted."
Jakli nodded again.
"If Lau had friends here, then I am not afraid," he said, hoping his voice did not betray his uncertainty.
She seemed about to answer when her head snapped up.
A man was walking away from the large building in an erratic, weaving motion toward the corral, as if drunk. They watched from the shadows as he quickly saddled one of the horses and trotted down a path that led through the north end of the ruins.
Jakli was still watching the man as Shan moved down the trail, past the huts to the plank door of the large building. The horses silently watched him. A faint scent of smoke hung in the air. He paused at the door, glancing at Jakli, who lingered on the hill, surveying the little village nervously, as if she had decided after all that it had indeed been a mistake to bring him here.
Suddenly the door exploded outward, propelled by the weight of a man who collided with Shan. The two men landed in a heap in the sand and the stranger seized Shan's throat in both hands and began to squeeze. Shan gasped feebly and tried to buck the man off. His assailant responded by releasing his throat and pounding Shan's chest with his small, hard fists as Shan twisted and turned, trying to escape.
"Thief!" the man shouted at Shan in a shrill voice.
Two more hands appeared, grabbing the man's shoulders as Shan slid away. Jakli held the man for only a moment, then he squirmed from her grip and crawled toward Shan, his eyes wild and murderous.
"Hoof!" Jakli screamed. "You have to stop!" She kicked the man's back, without effect, then kicked again, harder, knocking him prostrate on the sand.
The action brought the man to his senses. He pushed himself up on his hands, looked around with a blank expression, then slowly rolled over and sat up, gazing at Shan and Jakli in confusion.
"Ah, it's you," the man called Hoof said dully to Jakli, and his gaze drifted toward the door. "I didn't see you," he muttered. His confusion seeemed to fade, replaced by something that Shan thought might be disappointment.
Shan felt moisture on his hand where he had tried to push the man away. "You're bleeding," he gasped, suddenly afraid he might have injured the man.
The expression on the man's face as he looked at his wounded right shoulder was not alarm, but disgust. "Robbed, and stuck in the bargain," he groused in a high voice. "Nothing but bad joss here." He had a huge nose and pale skin, with spots on his cheeks that might have been freckles. His small features came to life as he sat and studied Shan. "No one wants you here," he said with an odd hint of hope in his voice.
"You should clean that cut," Shan said, exploring his pockets for something to help the man.
"You'll have to go before-" The man's warning was cut off by the appearance of a figure in the doorway, a tall man wearing a embroidered skullcap and a brilliant green shirt from which the sleeves
had been torn. He held a glass, which he was wiping with a scrap of cloth.
"Damn you, Osman!" Hoof squealed. "Some dog's whore stole my pouch." As if having an afterthought he raised a hand, which was red with his blood. "And stabbed me. A man isn't safe!"
The man he had called Osman grunted, and his eyes lit as he saw Jakli. He raised his head with a broad smile, then noticed Shan. The smile disappeared. He threw the rag at Hoof and stepped back into the shadows.
"Sons of pigs!" Hoof cursed and threw the rag back at the door.
Shan tore a strip from his undershirt and tied it around the man's wound. As he did so the man's expression softened. "You'll need to leave. I could help you," the man said in a new, confiding tone. "I am called Hoof. I'm a good Tadjik. I know the desert. I have Chinese friends. I'll take you to town. You'll be safe in a town."
"He's safe where he is," Jakli said, stepping forward so that she towered over Hoof, who was still sprawled in the sand.
"Sure he is, sure he is, if he's with you." Hoof scuttled backward on all fours, crablike, out of Jakli's shadow, then leapt up and darted back into the building.
Shan looked after him. "His name is Hoof?" he asked Jakli.
She sighed, watching the doorway with worry in her eyes. "It's a way of some of the old herding clans. A baby is named after the first thing the mother sees on the morning after the birth." She motioned him toward her, as if to lead him away from the building.
But Shan followed Hoof inside.
At first it seemed he was entering a cavern. He stepped into an unlit corridor five paces long, with deeper shadows that hinted of alcoves on either side. In the dim light he studied the sand floor of the corridor as he moved down it, trying to understand what had just happened to the Tadjik. A stone wall faced him at the end of the hallway. A ghost wall. The hands that had constructed the structure had been guided by a geomancer, one of the shamans who were more important than any architect or carpenter in building even the simplest stable in the traditional kingdoms of northern Asia. Practicing his art of feng shui, a geomancer had long ago directed the placement of a wall facing the door, because evil spirits only flew in straight lines. The main entrance itself, Shan realized, opened to the south because those same spirits lived in the north.
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