Water Touching Stone is-2

by Eliot Pattison

  "The Americans have to leave," the Uighur said. "Nikki can still go. Give her something to hope for, to live for. We can watch out for Jakli, find out what prison she was sent to. We can get news to her then. That's what will keep her alive."

  Marco was silent a long time. "Right," he said at last. "Day after the full moon it starts. There's time."

  Shan followed Marco into the house and watched him go down the back hallway, not to his room but to Nikki's. He took an envelope out of his pocket and laid it by the samovar. It was what Jakli had dropped when the knobs came. A letter from Nikki he was certain, that she read whenever she was lonely, a letter she would never allow the knobs to see. He heard Gendun ask Jowa to come with him, and the two Tibetans went outside. He watched from the doorway as they wandered over the meadow, pausing, bending to pick up things. And then, because he realized what Gendun was doing, he went to the pool at the waterfall and brought back a clay pot full of water.

  Shan sat with the three Tibetans in front of the cabin in the last rays of the sun with the pile of stones collected by Jowa and the lama. Gendun picked a rock from the pile, gazed upon it, and passed it around their small circle. It was a small, ugly thing, crusted with dirt and what may have been camel dung. Jowa watched uncertainly, but accepted the rock from Shan and looked it over before returning it to Gendun. With the rock in one hand, the lama took a dipper of water and poured it over the rock. The dirt fell away, and the rock became brilliant, with a swirl of oranges and browns, and a tiny seam of something green. The lama handed the rock around the circle, and Shan and Lokesh studied its complex beauty. When Jowa took it he passed it quickly on to Gendun. But the lama handed it back to the purba. Jowa looked at it a few seconds, turning it over, and passed it to Gendun. The lama handed it back to him and Jowa accepted it back, more uncertainly, then began to study the rock in earnest.

  It was an exercise Shan had seen often in the gulag. The crust of life, one of the imprisoned monks had called it. They would just sit sometimes on their brief eating breaks, and wash rocks, sometimes using their only water ration for the day, wash away the crust that accumulated from living in the world, to reach the true nature of the rock.

  They ate a vegetable stew in silence, and Jowa and Fat Mao left to speak in hushed tones outside the front door. The cold, clear night fell quickly. Lokesh and Gendun stayed in the kitchen, on the floor, saying their beads.

  Shan leaned against a tree outside and watched the stars for a long time, letting the chill wind wash away his crust. He had the paper with the abbreviations in his hand and stared at it even though he could not read it in the darkness.

  The house was quiet when he went inside and found his way to the tower. Marco was there, in a dark, brooding silence.

  Shan offered small talk, about the sky and the sound of an animal far away. Marco joined with quiet, terse words.

  "They are hollow, empty things," the Eluosi said suddenly, "the bastards that would put Jakli in prison. Their world is a desert far crueler and more heartless than the Taklamakan. And you," he said to Shan in an accusing tone, "you think you are like the old monks who lived at Sand Mountain, trying to take water to the desert. But whatever is planted in the soil where such men live just shrivels and dies."

  "So we keep alive the seeds," Shan said after a moment. "Sometimes, when a drought goes on for years, all you can do is preserve the seeds. That's what Jakli does. Preserve the seeds. She will survive. The drought won't last forever."

  "You mean the government can't last forever."

  Shan did not reply.

  "My boy, he reads many things. Once he read that a group of Western writers in the spirit of revolution, claimed that the best form of government was no form of government, where people could be free. He laughed when he told me this, he said we had found the highest form of government, here on our mountain."

  After a long silence Marco spoke again. "Try it, Johnny. We can wait here while Nikki goes to university in America. He will have to go. She will want him to go, go and make a place for her when it is time. He will send us a telescope. We will stand here and look at the stars."

  "No," Shan said, his voice cracking with pain.

  "The choice is yours."

  "No. I mean, he will not send a telescope." In the moonlight Shan could see the fear in the big man's eyes.

  Marco buried it with a snort. "You will see. I will name a star after him. He speaks English like the president."

  Shan did see. He saw with excruciating clarity, excruciating empathy, the worry that had been building in Marco. It wasn't the danger of the caravan, of the chase. These were realities he had lived with for years. It was something alien to his huge, ebullient spirit. Like a worm with an insatiable appetite, it had been gnawing away within him, trying to reach his soul. As Shan searched for words, Marco fled down the stairs.

  He found him in Nikki's room. "It's a mess," Marco said distractedly, and began arranging the books on the shelf. "He likes things neat. Didn't get it from me. Must be his mother." His voice was hollow and small.

  In that moment Shan would have preferred to be at the bottom of a cell in the gulag under a life sentence, than to be standing there searching for the words he knew he must say.

  "I know where your Nikki is."

  Marco paused in his work only for a moment. He did not look at Shan. "He is on caravan. Back soon," he said in his thin voice. "You saw the silver bridle."

  "He was taken by the knobs."

  "No!" Marco picked up a stack of books from the floor, then dropped them. He lowered himself to his knees to retrieve them.

  "I saw Nikki."

  Marco seemed to move in slow motion, lowering the book in his hand, as if it had grown too heavy to hold. "You never said this before," he said, looking up with a wooden face.

  "I did not understand before. It was the baseball at the nadam camp that finally made me see. Then I began to realize. I had seen Nikki. I saw him shoveling coal at Glory Camp."

  "I don't think so…" Marco said in a voice spiked with fear. Shan realized that somewhere, deep inside, Marco knew.

  "They captured him and took him to Glory Camp. There was a white horse there. Nikki had brought a white horse for Jakli from Ladakh. It was the horse that Wangtu brought."

  The worm that had been gnawing inside was nearing the surface. Agony began to twist Marco's face.

  "Then I saw him later," Shan said in a very quiet voice. "There was a scar on his right shoulder."

  "A border patrol rifle, during his first caravan," Marco said in a whisper. "I told him not to move during daylight, so close to the border."

  "The second time I saw him…" Shan clenched his jaw until it hurt. "He had a piece of paper in his pocket, with English letters. I thought it was code. I thought he was American, he spoke English to me so well. But the paper was just about baseball. First base, second base, third base, written in abbreviation so he could remember all the places." The baseball game at the nadam had broken the code for him. Shan had been reading the abbreviations wrong- it wasn't rows of letters, it was clusters of one-and two-letter abbreviations in columns. FB was first base, SB was second base, SS stood for shortstop. He reached into his pocket for the slip of paper and unfolded it.

  "In America," Marco said in his tiny voice, "he thinks he will be asked about baseball on his citizenship test. He tries to play all the time, so he will know."

  "The second time," Shan continued, "it was that night at Glory Camp. I wiped off his hair. There was black boot polish in it. It was blond. I saw a birthmark, at his hip. He was dead, Marco." He dropped the paper beside the Eluosi.

  "No," Marco insisted, with a flash of anger. "You can't know that. He's coming back. He's going to America to make babies with Jakli…" His voice trailed off.

  Jakli had known too, Shan was certain. Her parting words had haunted him during the long ride to Marco's cabin. Nikki and I, that was like a dream she had said. It will have to wait for another time, she had said, and it so
unded like she meant another life, another incarnation. And her eyes, before she had gone to surrender to Bao. It had not been fear he had seen there, or hatred, he realized later. It had only been emptiness, for she had already discovered in her heart what Shan could only prove later. In a way he had shown the terrible truth to her, when they had gone to the Tadjik camp. She had not responded, only ridden away later to her special place of mourning, when Hoof had admitted to Shan that his brother who rode with Nikki worked for the knobs.

  "Bao killed him. I was sure he was an American. Blond hair and blue eyes. I never understood." Shan seemed able to speak only in short bursts. But it was his heart, not his lungs, that was gasping. "They had been closing in. Bao had the scent of the Americans. He was desperate to catch them, it would mean promotion for certain. He hatched a plan to catch them when they were leaving, a trap for the caravan that took them out. He captured Nikki, when Nikki was bringing in the white horse and silver bridle. He had to be sure only one caravan would go out with the subversives, yours, so he could track it and capture it with his helicopters. He paid one of Nikki's men to help, the Tadjik who brought the bridle to town, to make sure you didn't grow suspicious of Nikki's absence."

  "No! Damn your eyes, no!" Marco shouted. His face seemed to collapse. "No!" Marco cried. There was no anger left. "He'll be here soon." The tiny voice returned. "I love my boy."

  "It has been a season for losing boys," Shan said in a faltering voice. He pulled the steel ring from his pocket, where he had kept it since that night at Glory Camp, and placed it on the log table beside Marco, then left the room.

  He climbed the tower, into the night. Five minutes later came an enormous, wretched sound that Shan hoped never to hear again in his life. It was the sound of the worm eating through the thin shell, burrowing into the man's soul. It was fury. It was misery. It was confusion and despair, all in one long inhuman howl. It was the sound of complete desolation.

  Shan found himself trying to see the stars through the moisture in his eyes, desperately hoping for a distraction. The horrible sound seemed to echo through his mind, making his flesh crawl. For a moment he longed to be able to howl the same way, to give release to the agony in his own heart.

  He stayed on the tower past midnight, trying not to think or feel. In the small hours of the morning he found Marco sitting in a corner of Nikki's room. The big man looked as if he had been fighting all night, as though he had been beaten, and broken, for the first time in his life. He let Shan help him into his bed, as feeble as an old woman.

  The others were awake, in the kitchen, on the floor by the stove. A pile of dirty rocks sat in the middle of their circle, and a pot of water was beside Gendun. But they appeared to have stopped the exercise long before. They had heard and understood. Gendun and Lokesh were saying prayers. Jowa sat with a confused expression, looking into his empty hands.

  Fat Mao was angry. "It's just this thing, this ugly cloud that gets bigger every day," the Uighur said suddenly, and looked at Shan. "And you know it can't be stopped. What do you do about it? You just make it more painful."

  "The Yakde Lama. We came to help the Yakde Lama," Shan said quietly, looking at the rocks.

  "To hell with the Yakde Lama!" Fat Mao snapped. "One little boy, is that all you care about? Nikki was a friend of mine, and Jakli. What about the clans that have to disband? The big investigator, you don't do anything! You didn't save the Yakde Lama, he's dead. The wizard from Lhadrung, come to solve it all. Four boys dead. You didn't save them. All you do is get involved. All you do is discover bad news." There was something close to rage in the Uighur's voice. "You have no logic! You have no rules!" The Uighur glared at Shan, who sat across from him in the circle, leaning forward, tensing his muscles as if he might attack Shan. Then he grew silent as he seemed to remember the others.

  Shan returned Fat Mao's smoldering gaze for a moment, then looked into his own hands as the great tide of sadness surged through him again.

  They sat without speaking, in the cabin, on the distant mountain, the wind moaning around the rock walls of the tower, the fire cracking. After a long time the lama moved. He raised a ladle and slowly poured water over the pile of stones. "These are Shan's rules," Gendun said somberly as the dirt washed away. "The properties of water."

  They left when there was enough light to see the trail, with no words to Marco. Nearly an hour later Shan saw the smoke. He called to the others and began to urge his mount back, but Lokesh raised his hand. Marco was burning his cabin. There was no time to save it, no time to save him if he had gone into the flames. Shan dismounted and watched helplessly as the flames rose over the ridge, silhouetting the stone tower. Even from their distance he could hear the cracking of the big logs as they fed the inferno, and Shan thought he saw a figure on the top parapet. Then the wind shifted and fire and smoke engulfed the ancient tower and Marco was gone.

  ***

  At the restaurant in town the stout woman was cooking a sheep's head while Fat Mao hit the keys of his computer at the kitchen table and yelled at Swallow Mao for not having the latest admission records for Glory Camp. It didn't matter, she said, Jakli had been seen twice on the road to Kashgar. The boot squad took her to the special processing center they operated in Kashgar. It was lao gai after that, the young Kazakh woman said, as if to deliberately goad Fat Mao. Glory Camp was like a hotel compared to where they would take Jakli, she added.

  Fat Mao stared with venom in his eyes until suddenly a hard rap on the door sent the Maos scrambling for their cellar chamber. The woman admitted Ox Mao and another man, who pulled in a third man roughly, a burlap sack tied over his head.

  They silently led the man down the cellar steps, past Gendun and Lokesh, who sat meditating in a pool of light by the front window. Shan quietly followed as Jowa rose from the table and disappeared down the stairs. The Maos sat the man in a chair at the table and wrenched the sack away. Their prisoner's face was badly bruised along one side, and a trickle of blood ran from his nose into his moustache and down his chin. It was Wangtu.

  Fat Mao paced around the table in silence.

  "I was released," Wangtu said quickly, in a voice full of fear as he searched each of their faces. "The prosecutor questioned me about Lau and I was released from Glory Camp. I didn't have a way to town. I knew they were rounding up horses. I said, Let me ride that horse to the sheds, I'll leave it there."

  "No," Fat Mao growled. "They gave it to you for something. You paid for it. Told them something."

  Wangtu looked at the floor. "I hate them," he said in a hollow voice. "They are my enemy. I was going to look for you, for the lung ma. I can help you. I hear things when I drive the cars."

  Shan felt the Uighur's stare and expected Fat Mao to order him to leave or have the others take him away. But the Uighur turned back to Wangtu.

  "Which is the lie?" he barked. "That you didn't cooperate with them or that you want to help?"

  Shan rose, took a towel from a pile in the corner and wiped the blood from Wangtu's face. No one, not even Wangtu, seemed to notice.

  The blank stare remained on Wangtu's face. "Sometimes I know when people are coming on the highway. Important people," he said weakly. "Sometimes I could make cars break down." He looked up at Fat Mao. "That horse was magnificent. Jakli loved that horse. I just wanted her to have it. In the old days, when I was a boy, friends would bring horses to weddings. Don't you understand?" he croaked. "It was the last nadam." He looked into the Uighur's grim face, then turned to Shan. "Did you see her face when I brought it? Like the old days…" His lips curled up as if he was trying to smile, but the effort ended in a grimace of pain. "He gives it to me, then he shoots it," he said in a desolate voice, staring at the floor.

  "I don't think you told him anything," Shan said. "Because you didn't know anything. I think you agreed to do something for him."

  "A stupid thing. A small thing. A lie to the prosecutor. Bao acted like it would be a good joke." Wangtu tried to smile again and grimaced once
more.

  "What kind of lie?" Fat Mao demanded.

  Wangtu looked at Shan as he spoke. "About the boys. See that Xu got word tonight that another boy has been killed, high in the mountains."

  "What boy?" Jowa gasped.

  "Any boy. Not a real boy. Just say it, make her go to the mountains."

  "An ambush against Xu?" Fat Mao suggested.

  "Did Bao tell you where to say it happened?" Shan asked.

  "No. Just a place in the Kunlun, on one of the bad roads where you have to drive slow. A place two or three hours away. Bao didn't care where."

  "Not an ambush," Jowa concluded. "A distraction."

  "Because," Shan said with a chill, "Bao doesn't want her anywhere near Stone Lake."

  ***

  The Brigade compound on the south side of Yoktian was like a private club compared to the rest of the town. Its stuccoed walls wore a fresh coat of white paint, and its courtyard was covered with that peculiarly Western convention, a grass lawn. Red vehicles abounded, sedans, utility vehicles, and heavy trucks, all bearing the gold emblem of prosperity.

  Fat Mao had refused to go, refused to risk any Maos in such a foolhardy venture. "Go home," he told Shan in a taut voice. "You found your old men. You're all still alive. You've done better than the rest of us. Quit before the knobs reach out again." It wasn't simply that Fat Mao was angry over Jakli's arrest, Shan realized as the Uighur watched Jowa and Lokesh join Shan. He was humiliated.

  The compound seemed deserted. Shan stepped past the empty gatehouse. It had the feeling of a trap, but he could not stop. He quickly turned to Lokesh and told him to wait with Jowa across the street. The old Tibetan nodded agreement, but as Shan put his hand on one of the double doors leading into the office building, someone reached out and held it open for him. Lokesh was standing at his shoulder.

  There was an unexpected noise from nearby. Shouts. Cheers. The sound of a crowd, but still there was no one in sight. They ventured into the lobby and saw an elderly Chinese woman sitting stiffly at a reception desk. As they walked by her she smiled and nodded repeatedly, and Shan saw she was wearing blue work clothes. A mop and bucket of water sat behind her.