Текст книги "The Lord of Death"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Chapter Four

The arrival of one of Tsipon’s trucks in one of the high villages was usually a cause for celebration. Shan had often watched as children climbed over the visiting trucks while Kypo negotiated for porters and guides, exclaiming as candy and fruit were handed out by Tsipon or Kypo, the matrons of the village just as excited over handouts of household wares. But as Shan eased the old truck toward the edge of Tumkot village, he might as well have been Public Security. In the hills above, a flock of long-haired sheep was being hurried into the maze of rocks at the foot of the high escarpment that curled around to the south. Children were being pulled into the stone and timber houses, several women even jerked closed the shutters of their houses as if one of the violent Himalayan storms had arrived.

Tumkot was not the largest of the hill villages, nor was it the closest to Shogo town. But here the mountain tribesmen were most skilled at high altitude climbing, here the inhabitants were most traditional, here was the one village where people still openly spoke of life before the Chinese arrived. More than once Shan had found time on his village errands for Tsipon to sit in the shadows unnoticed, taking joy in watching the villagers in their simple daily routines, cheerfully hauling water from the well, singing old songs as they carded wool, hauling night soil on their backs in large dogobaskets braced with head traps.

He parked the old Jiefang in the shadow of a stable, its engine still sputtering after he switched off the ignition, then walked slowly along the highest of the streets, looking down on rooftops that were nearly covered with peas and turnips drying for winter stews. He proceeded to the far end of the village, climbed down a flight of stone stairs, cupped from centuries of use, onto the main street, then ventured into the small central square surrounding the hand pump of the village well.

A young girl struggled to fill a battered wooden bucket, the long, heavy pump handle nearly lifting her off her feet on the upward strokes. She gasped in surprise as Shan, reaching from behind her, clasped his hand around the handle and began pumping. Casting a nervous glance up the street, she offered him a shy smile then sat on the granite step beside the bucket.

“Only half,” she whispered. “It’s all I can carry. And don’t go out of the square. Mother says it is dangerous out of the square.”

Shan recognized the house the girl looked toward, not because its appearance was much different from the other squat two-story structures adjoining it, but from the colorful coils of climbing ropes arrayed on pegs in its front wall. “But you and I,” he said, filling the bucket, “are going to the same place.”

The girl placed her hand on the bucket handle as Shan carried it out of the square.

“What dangers does your mother speak of?” Shan asked as they walked past the first of the shuttered houses.

The girl looked up with wide eyes. “Gods are disappearing,” she declared in a solemn tone. “That angry ghost is vengeful. Messengers of the Lord of Death have come,” she said, and pointed to a pole with a crosspiece like a mast that held prayer flags, one of the highest points in the village. Two crows, traditional emissaries to Yama, sat on the wooden crosspiece.

As they passed the next house, a man opened a door, saw Shan and slammed it shut. Since Shan wore a broad-rimmed Tibetan hat low on his head, he and the girl might have been taken for a niece and her uncle out on an afternoon chore. But months earlier, on Shan’s first visit to the village, Tsipon had decided to share what the Tibetans would have called the essential truth about his new employee, to avoid wrong impressions, he explained. The villagers didn’t resent Shan as a Chinese, they merely feared him as a gulag prisoner without papers, an illegal. He was another of the phantoms condemned to roam the sacred mountains.

A bright-eyed handsome woman smelling of cardamom appeared inside the doorway as the girl gleefully called out, her smile fading as she saw Shan. Taking the bucket, she spoke low and fast to her daughter, who skipped out the rear door toward a white goat grazing in the rear courtyard, then turned toward the steep ladder stair that led to the second-floor living quarters. “Kypo!” the woman called in a peevish tone.

Tsipon’s manager appeared on the stair a moment later, pulling a sweater over his shoulders. He offered Shan an expectant nod, muttered something to the woman, and gestured Shan up the stair. Kypo seemed to have no time to observe the usual formality of waiting for tea to be served before taking up the subject of their meeting. “She’ll bring tea,” he started, as if to acknowledge the custom, then leaned forward as soon as Shan joined him at a red-painted table by the front window. “There’s been nothing like this since the invasion,” he said, an odd desperation in his voice. “The younger men are furious. Some got drunk last night and tried to convince people to go raid the Westerners’ base camp and destroy their equipment and supplies to end all climbing for the season. The older ones point to the crows and the empty altars and say Yama has withdrawn his protection of the village after all these centuries. Since before memory, Yama has been the special deity of Tumkot. People say it is why we have survived with so little interference from the government.”

“Empty altars?”

“Nearly every family in the village has always had a little statue of Uncle Shinje,” Kypo said, using another name of the Lord of Death. “They are disappearing. Since the day Tenzin died they have been disappearing. People say it is Tenzin. An old woman said she saw him floating along the street at midnight, with a star following his head.”

A shiver ran down Shan’s spine. “I don’t understand. The killings had nothing to do with the village.” While Shan knew many of the local tribesmen were increasingly frustrated with the outsiders-who paid huge sums of money to the Chinese government for the right to climb their sacred mountain-they also owed their livelihoods to the climbers.

“They say the mountain goddess has a claim on Tenzin, that she must have him back.” Kypo looked up with pleading in his eyes. “We need him back. We need him on a pyre at the burning place above town. They want to say the necessary words to him and release his ashes back to the mother mountain. We need,” Kypo added with a twist of pain in his voice, “proof that he is still dead.” He looked down, avoiding his wife’s gaze as she brought two mugs of buttered tea, then scurried away with a jingling of her silver necklaces.

Shan sipped his tea uneasily, as worried about the hint of fear in the sturdy Tibetan’s face as about his strange words. A brawny man wearing a sheepskin vest, the village smith, appeared on the stairs from below, casting a frown at Shan before slipping off his shoes and disappearing into a bedchamber. Shan had almost forgotten. Some of the mountain tribes still practiced polyandry. Kypo was married to the demure woman who had served them tea. But so was his cousin.

“I carried his body down from the heights, Kypo.”

“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan?”

“Soon it will be seven years.”

“Then you should know better. Death is not so straightforward among our people. Chomolungma took him, people say, but then he was stolen from her. Now the deities fight over him. Yesterday,” the Tibetan added in a lower voice, “people went to my mother to ask about you.”

Shan’s mug stopped in midair at the mention of the stern, forceful woman. The villagers weren’t going to her because she was Kypo’s mother but because she was the village astrologer, the closest they had to a monk.

“Me?”

“They asked her to throw her Modice about you again,” Kypo said, referring to the bone dice with Tibetan syllables inscribed on each face that were used by fotunetellers. “They were looking for a way to punish the corpse carrier for failing in his duty.”

“And what did the dice say?”

Kypo shook his head. “She won’t be forced into consulting the fates. She says it makes them angry. Instead I reminded them about you and the dead,” he said with a self-conscious glance at Shan.

“About me and the dead?”

“I’m sorry. Once I was on the trail when you were coming down with a body. I didn’t know what to do. I hid. You were reciting old poems.”

“You told them I scared you?”

“I told them,” Kypo explained, “that you know how to speak with the dead.”

Out of the corner of his eye Shan saw Kypo’s wife lingering at the edge of the hallway. “And what did they do?”

“Some went home. My mother told the rest we had brought this on ourselves, for ignoring the old ways. She sent them to their altars to recite mantras.”

Shan drank his tea, desperately trying to understand what was happening in the village. “Has Public Security come?”

“So far only some bully from Religious Affairs, late yesterday. The fox, people are calling him already, because he wears a fox-fur hat.” Kypo’s face tightened. “He had four men with him, plus Constable Jin. They searched for the escaped monks in every house, made sure everyone knew they would be imprisoned if they lifted a finger to help the monks. There were problems.”

“Problems?”

“The monks weren’t here, of course, but that wheelsmasher wasn’t convinced we were telling him everything. He tried to change the minds of some of the older villagers, put them in chairs in the square like a tamzing.” Kypo sighed. “He tried for a couple of hours, then went away.”

Shan fought a shudder. Tamzing was a term from a painful past, the name for the public struggle sessions when the Red Guard had tried, figuratively and literally, to beat correct political thought into wayward citizens.

“What do they say in the village about the trap set for that bus?”

“Nothing. The only thing we know for certain is that it was set by someone who doesn’t understand what the knobs are capable of doing to us.”

“Those monks must have been from local farms and villages,” Shan suggested. Like in the old days, he almost added. Once, Tibetan families had always sent their oldest son to the local monastery. “That’s where they would search first.”

“Funny thing,” Kypo replied. “The government doesn’t know who they were, don’t have any names for those monks. The only files the knobs had about those monks were on that bus. They disappeared in the confusion.”

“How would you know that?”

“There aren’t many qualified mechanics in these mountains. Jomo sometimes gets asked to help at the government garage, where they towed the bus. Tsipon sent me to pick him up when he was finished. I asked to see inside the bus. Those prison buses have a little lock box bolted under the dashboard for records being transported with the prisoners. This one had been pried open.”

Shan felt a stir of excitement. With the records gone, the missing monks had a real chance of freedom. “Why did you ask him to look?”

“Like you said,” Kypo replied in a taut voice, “the monks had families.”

Shan looked up in surprise, with a surge of fear. Was Kypo saying he had meant to steal the files himself? The offense would have guaranteed him years in prison had he been caught. “If things don’t go well in Cao’s investigation, Kypo, he will have to cover himself with a politically foolproof explanation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He will say that the ambush and the assassination were one and the same act, that it would have taken many people to coordinate, that what happened that day was an act of organized rebellion by the mountain people. He will have martial law declared, call in hundreds of troops-”

A frightened gasp, a shattering of pottery interrupted Shan. Kypo’s wife, listening in the shadows, had dropped the dishes she’d held. Shan did not complete his sentence, did not mention that the very existence of a village like Tumkot would stick in the craw of any military commander trying to subdue the region.

“And have you decided what to say when the knobs finally come to ask you about the ropes?” Shan continued.

Kypo feigned a look of confusion then, as if to hide his true reaction, rubbed his eye. He was one of the only Tibetans Shan knew who wore contact lenses.

“It’s only Religious Affairs for now because Public Security is obsessed with the assassination. But they can’t ignore the coincidence much longer.”

“Coincidence?”

“Between the ambush on the bus and the murder of Minister Wu.”

Kypo buried his head in his hands a moment. “Cao already came to the warehouse, asking about the stolen equipment.”

Shan pressed his hand over his arm. The patch on his bicep where the knobs had connected the electrodes had begun to quiver. “What did he ask?”

“Not much. I explained we are a climbing support company owned by the leading Tibetan in the local Party organization. We have strict inventory controls. The rope had been ours, yes, but was ordered by a foreign expedition, put on a truck going up to the base camp, and delivered days before the killing.”

“What expedition?”

“The Americans. Yates and that woman who works with him.”

Shan’s head shot up. “What woman?”

“I don’t really know her. Ross is her name, a famous female climber apparently. His climb boss, Yates calls her.”

Shan drank his tea in silence, trying again to piece together the puzzle of the Western woman who had died in his arms. No one had mentioned her disappearance. If she was Yates’s partner, why hadn’t he reported her missing? “Where is this woman now?”

Kypo shrugged. “Sometimes she sleeps in the bungalow behind the depot, sometimes at the base camp. But usually she’s out climbing. She’s a relentless climber.”

“Surely Cao inquired about the day of the killing?” Shan asked.

Kypo rose and stepped to the rear window, gazing into the yard where the girl played with the goat. He absently kneaded a patch of discolored skin on the back of his hand, a remnant of frostbite. “Technically most of our work is done under license from the Ministry of Tourism, which also contracts with us for special projects. He already knew the minister had accounted for all of us that day.”

Shan moved to his side before speaking again. “What are you saying?”

“Minister Wu called it an exhibition. We had ropes set up to demonstrate rappelling and other techniques. She wanted a full mobilization, as she called it, a demonstration to her important visitors of all the resources available to support increased utilization. That’s how people from Beijing speak of the mountain. Utilization rates of equipment. Base loading of camps. Capacity of the slopes. She gave a speech at Tsiipon’s new guest house when she arrived, for a gathering of local businessmen. She accused us of wasting the people’s resources, urged us to work harder. You know the speech. All of us Tibetan children need to mind our aunts and uncles from Beijing. Afterward she handed out ballpoint pens with red flags on them.”

“Where did she arrange these demonstrations?”

“A few miles up the road, near Rongphu gompa,” he said, referring to the restored monastery that was the last habitation before the base camp. “That’s where she was going, to inspect everything before the important visitors arrived that afternoon. Nearly everyone was up there. You know how it goes when groups come from Beijing. They use Rongphu like a bus stop. She had a film crew there and at the base camp for days before, shooting footage for a film she was going to show in Beijing. A big outdoor lunch was planned on the grounds of the monastery. It was the minister herself who ordered that section of road closed that day, so she could enjoy her mountain.”

“Who would have known about the minister’s orders?”

“Only every villager, farmer, and herder for twenty miles.”

“But not in advance.”

“Of course not in advance,” Kypo agreed. “It would have been a state secret.”

From the window Shan could see up the slope above the town. Boys and dogs were returning to the open pastures, tending small flocks of sheep. Women in dark wool dresses toiled in fields of barley. Above them, on a trail that led toward the high peaks was another woman, leading a donkey piled high with boughs of juniper. Juniper was the sacred wood, its smoke used to attract deities. Such large quantities would once have been regularly carried to temples and gompas. But in this region, long ago scoured of its temples, such an amount was used for another purpose.

“Did someone else die?”

Shan did not miss Kypo’s wince. The Tibetan gestured toward the woman leading the donkey, now approaching a long cleft in the high rock wall above the village. “It’s the village diviner,” he said in a tight voice.

“You mean your mother,” Shan said, trying to grasp the mix of frustration, anger, and regret in Kypo’s eyes.

“The last one to see Tenzin’s body was her uncle. Except,” Kypo added in a hollow tone, “our old uncle, that friend of yours, has been murdered.”

Moving at the slow jog used by the mountain people to cover distances, Shan soon reached the cleft in the rock face where Kypo’s mother had disappeared. He paused before stepping into the shadows to glance back at the village, still trying to make sense of Kypo’s announcement. He had never heard Kypo speak of an uncle or great-uncle, could not think of an old villager who was a friend of Shan’s, could not fathom why there would not be a greater disturbance in the village if one of their elders had been killed.

Emerging from the long, dark passage after fifty yards, he found himself in a small wind-beaten valley populated only by a couple dozen of sheep and, at the base of the cliff at the far side, a solitary woman unloading a donkey. Shan had met Ama Apte, the astrologer, weeks earlier at Kypo’s house when he had come to retrieve equipment that Kypo and the blacksmith had repaired. He had accepted her abrupt invitation-more like a command– to return to her house with her so she could divine his fortune by casting her pair of bone Mo dice. She was not the oldest person in the village, but she was the most respected, and the villagers spoke of her with awe. She lived, like many of the older Tibetans, in more than one world at the same time. They all endured twenty-first century Chinese Tibet, but did their best to live in a second world, the traditional Tibet that had existed prior to the Chinese occupation. And Ama Apte walked in one more world, a much older one, from the mists of early Tibet, in which sorcerers and demon gods were as alive as the longhaired sheep he now walked past.

Shan halted before he reached the woman, lowering himself into the meditation position beside a large boulder, one hand draped downward over his leg, in what Tibetan Buddhists called the earth-touching gesture. He watched her work, half expecting to be chased away. The fortuneteller had little patience for outsiders. He had known several astrologers and oracles in Tibet, nearly all of whom were intense, inwardly troubled people who, even in towns, lived their lives apart.

Ama Apte paused momentarily when she spotted him several minutes later, then touched the gau, the prayer box, that hung from her neck and continued unloading the boughs of juniper. When she finished, she slapped the donkey on its flank to send it off to graze, then she ventured out onto the valley floor to gather scraps of dried wood from the gnarled shrubs scattered across the landscape. As he watched he recalled the fortune she had told him at their first meeting. He had not asked for the divination, but she had insisted, as if she had her own secret reason. The dice had come up with the symbols Pa Tsa, meaning the Demon of Affliction in the charts used by astrologers. She had seemed strangely pleased, and when he asked its meaning she had said it depended on the question that was being asked. If, for example, he was worried about his inability to find inner harmony, then the dice foretold that his unrest would continue, that he would even break his own vows in search of it, that he would never find it again without doing great and painful penance. Only afterward, on his pallet that night, had he understood he had missed the entire point. Shan should have asked what question shehad been asking about him.

The uneasiness of that day returned as he watched Ama Apte. She was like no other Tibetan woman he had known, strong yet somehow seeming as vulnerable as a child, handsome but with a face that was always lined with worry. She had the eyes of an old lama but the quickness and energy of a young woman. She had, he realized, cast the dice about Shan more than once before, for Ama Apte had been the one to declare Shan must be the carrier of corpses made by the mother mountain. He had accepted the duty without questioning her, for he knew she would have resented the query, as if he were challenging the fates.

Shan warily approached her as she worked, following her lead in stacking wood beside the green boughs. After a quarter hour he stepped over to a flat boulder, covered it with his jacket, and set upon it several walnuts and pieces of dried fruit from the pouch that hung from his belt. He made a sign of offering, then lowered his head. Moments later the woman stood over him. She silently selected seven morsels, the traditional number for offerings to the deities, and disappeared around a high outcropping thirty feet away. Quickly returning, she settled at the makeshift table opposite Shan.

“In all my life my uncle Kundu has been with me,” the diviner suddenly said, with something like a sob, “except for that short time between faces. This time I will not find him again, not the way he was taken. He was not prepared for what happened. He will be an angry ghost, roaming alone, confused, battered about by the winds.”

At death, traditional Tibetans believed, someone who was adequately prepared, who had the right prayers in his mind at the moment of passing, and spoken over him after death, could make a quick, peaceful progression to a new incarnation. But the souls of murder victims could wander aimlessly, without hope, even without comprehension, for years.

“There are things we can do to help,” Shan suggested. “Speak to his spirit. Reconcile his death.”

Ama Apte had begun to whisper an old song toward the sky, a song used by pilgrims. Shan did not think she had heard until she abruptly turned her head toward him. “How?”

“Identify his killer. Explain the circumstances of his death. It is something I have helped with before. Truth is a powerful force, in this world and the next.”

“You’re Chinese,” she observed. It was a statement of fact, without rancor.

“I began my life in China, spent more than forty years there,” Shan confessed.

A grin flickered across her face, then the diviner searched the distant clouds as if looking for explanation. “But you started a new one in Tibet, to atone for the first.” She looked down at his arm, as if in afterthought. “People say you are one of those convicts.”

Shan rolled up his sleeve and showed her his prisoner tattoo. “My reincarnation began at government expense.”

The woman’s fingers were on his arm, rubbing the numbers the way she sometimes rubbed the figures on her fortune-telling dice before casting them. She grew sober and stared intensely at the numbers as if they contained some hidden message. Two cubes of bone appeared in her palm, her Mo dice, which she tossed onto Shan’s open jacket. She gazed at the dice in silence, then abruptly scooped them up, took his hand, and led him around the outcropping

Shan was prepared for many possibilities, perhaps every possibility but the one he encountered. His gaze shifted back and forth, searching the rough ground along the bottom of the cliff face, bracing himself for more tragedy. There were more spindly shrubs, a smaller pile of firewood, a pika that squealed and fled as they appeared. And a dead mule.

As if to resolve any doubt, Ama Apte sat beside the body, put the mule’s head in her lap, and stroked it.

Her uncle had been murdered, Kypo had said, a friend of yours. Shan knelt uncertainly, studying the corpse, seeing the large hole in the mule’s forehead and realizing as he saw the jagged white blaze that it was indeed a friend. It was the mule the villagers always brought for him to carry the dead down the mountain. In the cold, dry atmosphere flesh decomposed very slowly, and the mule still wore the harness Shan had used to carry Tenzin’s body the day of the murders.

He gazed at the animal numbly, confounded by the strange discovery, then paced along the body as Ama Apte murmured a prayer. Finally he knelt again and stroked the mule’s nose as he often had on the trail.

“I knew him,” he said, struggling to find words that would offend neither the human uncle nor the mule. “He had the surest feet I have ever seen,” he offered. “He and the mountain deity had a special relationship.”

Ama Apte offered a grateful nod as a tear rolled down her weathered cheek. Shan thought back on his visit to her house, near Kypo’s in the village. On the ground floor, used by traditional Tibetans to shelter their livestock, there had been a sleeping pallet by the biggest stall.

“Tell me about it,” Shan said after a moment.

“When he didn’t come back that night I went looking in his favorite places, little meadows with sweet grass protected from the wind. He wasn’t in any of them. The next afternoon I finally found him here, his packsaddle empty. The first thing in my mind was that they had taken him to this wall and executed him.” She stared at the dead animal’s head. Her voice had become that of a young girl. “It happened to my mother and father, not far from this very spot. Those Chinese just dragged them out of their house because they were landowners.” She grew very quiet. “I don’t know what happened here. I see the future, not the past. I hear that’s what you do. Tell us about the past.” When she finally looked up her face was like one of the haunting hollow masks Tibetans wore at religious festivals.

Strangely embarrassed by her words, Shan rose. He walked along the cliff face, considering the barren ground, the cliff above, the undisturbed soil between the trail below and the spot where the body lay.

“I spent much of his last day with him,” Shan said. Increasingly it felt as if he were attending the funeral of an old friend.

“My uncle was a monk last time, one of those who kept the Yama shrine on the mountain above the village. He told me often that he would pay in the next life for letting it be destroyed,” Ama Apta said. Her words were taking on the thin, ethereal quality of a lama’s prayer. “When he came looking for a new place to live I said I would never let them drag him away the way they had my parents, that I would protect him, if he would take off his robe and become a shepherd with us. He agreed, because he knew someone had to watch over me and Kypo. He was with us more than twenty years. Six months after he died this young mule appeared while I was tending sheep. I offered him some barley in a bowl but the mule wouldn’t touch it. He kept looking at me like he had something to say, then he followed me home. I put more grain out, in four different bowls, including an old cracked wooden one used only by my uncle. He went right to the wooden bowl and ate all the grain. I understood then. As a mule,” she added after a moment, “he was always a good uncle.”

It must have been Ama Apte, Shan realized, who had arranged for the mule to be used for carrying the dead. It had always been waiting with Kypo at the side of the road, without an explanation. She had been sending her sturdy uncle, the mule. Shan remembered the attentive way the mule had always listened to his poetry.

“I need to examine his body,” Shan declared.

When the Tibetan woman did not reply, Shan reached into his pocket for his notepad. Ripping off a blank page, he wrote, in Tibetan. Thou were dust and now a spirit, thou were ignorant and now wise.It was a traditional expression of mourning. Ama Apte studied Shan as he set the prayer under a stone by the body, then she gestured him toward the animal. He removed the harness, stretched out the bent legs of the animal, then systematically ran his hands over its body, pausing over a lump here, a patch of dried blood there. Nearly a quarter hour later he wiped his hands on a tuft of grass and stood.

“This wasn’t one of his favorite places,” he ventured. “No water, not much grazing.”

“No,” Ama Apte agreed. “But here is where he must be burned. He is too big to move.”

“But above,” Shan suggested, “there is a place he favored.” He pointed to the top of the cliff high above them, then paused a moment, surveying the nearby outcroppings. He had a vague sense of being watched.

The Tibetan woman cocked her head. “He had favorite places, with grass and sun. There was an old shrine we would visit, now lost to the world. He liked the flagpole. There’s a trail from below that winds up toward a little grove of juniper and grass above. He would go with me there sometimes, in both his faces.”

Shan nodded. “He was shot at the top of the wall, here-” he pulled at the animal’s right front shoulder to reveal a wound that been pressed against the rock-“and he fell to the bottom of the cliff. Then someone came to put a bullet in his head with a pistol held between his eyes.”

A tear rolled down Ama Apte’s cheek. “How can you know that?”

“There are no hoofprints anywhere near here, except for a few from sheep. He has several broken bones, from the fall. If you look closely at his head you will see burned hairs around the wound, from the discharge of a large pistol pressed to his skull. There are prints from a heavy boot, a military boot, from someone walking close along the cliff face.”

“He hated soldiers. He would have avoided soldiers,” Ama Apte said in a distant voice. “But why? Why go to the trouble? What did they have to fear from him?”

“I don’t know. I left him near the road the day of the assassination, carrying Tenzin, a few hours before he was shot.” Shan turned and surveyed the little bowl-shaped valley defined by the ridge that curled into the massive Tumkot mountain. The trail that went upward led to a glacier that was said to be impassable. But on the other side of the mountain would be the road to the base camp. “He died because he was a witness to something.” Shan looked back at the seated woman, realizing only afterwards that he had given voice to the unlikely thought that had entered his head.