Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

"Lha gyal lo!" a cracking voice cried behind him. He turned to see Nyma trying to put her hand over Lokesh's mouth.

They carried Lokesh out into the corridor, where Winslow was waiting, bent at the waist, his elbows on his thighs. Somo and Nyma positioned Lokesh onto the American's back then tied him in place with loops of heavy twine around Winslow's chest and waist. Lokesh began to laugh hoarsely. "My spirit horse has arrived," he exclaimed.

As the American stood, Somo draped a blanket around them, covering Winslow up to his chest, fastening the blanket with pins, then suddenly the dancers were there, six of them. Two in costumes of skeleton creatures, the others with headdresses of protector demons. Two of the costumes were made for two men, customarily with one on the other's shoulders, with four arms ending with hands with long claws. The dancers pressed about the doorway and paused as though resting, then slowly continued. But as they did one of the big creatures stopped in front of the door and Lhandro and Somo pulled off the headdress, revealing two of the dropka Shan had seen at the purbas' truck the day before. In less than a minute they had the costume sleeves over Winslow's and Lokesh's arms, the headdress itself balanced on Lokesh's shoulders. Winslow toppled forward out of the building, then found his legs and began dancing down the street. They could hear Lokesh call out his praises for the gods as they walked. Shan turned to see Tenzin being fitted into one of the skeleton costumes just as someone pulled the mask of an angry yak over his own head. Nyma picked up a long narrow bundle wrapped in the jacket she had been wearing. It was one of the peche she and Lokesh had been studying, Shan realized. She cast a knowing look toward Shan, then closed the secret door. They would leave the other peche inside, in the shelter of the fragrant closet.

He could barely see where he was going as he took a step forward, and discovered gratefully that someone was leading him outside, toward the other dancers. In a moment Shan was mimicking the jig of the others, moving three steps forward and one back then one sideways, slowly proceeding toward the gate

Sheep bleated behind him, and the normally moribund monks of Norbu began calling out encouragement for the children in the procession. When they reached the benches by the gate Shan saw that Winslow was slowing. If he fell and the mask dislodged all would be lost.

But they were nearly out, nearly at the gate. Shan stepped closed to Winslow to support him if necessary.

"Again." Padme's voice called over the speaker. "Our distinguished visitors have asked for the dancers again!" Much of the assembly cheered. Shan's heart sank.

He watched Winslow turn, the skull face seeming to stare directly at Shan. Then, following the lead of the Tibetans, as several monks snapped photographs, Shan, Winslow, and the abbot of Sangchi danced for the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

Thirty minutes later they pulled off the masks in the shelter of the tent by the purbas' truck. Winslow, sweat pouring from his face, looked numb with exhaustion but Lokesh could not stop grinning. He kept waving his arms as he had in the costume, laughing, as Somo and Nyma helped him off the American's back.

Only when Winslow straightened did he seem to notice that his clothes had been torn in the scuffle with the doctor. He lifted the remnants of his shirt pocket, which hung loose, ripped along both sides and examined them with a puzzled expression. "Did I have a card in there?" he asked in a hollow voice.

Shan replied with a slow shrug.

Winslow shrugged back. "To hell with them. We showed the bastards." He made a twirling gesture with his hand at his shoulder, like throwing a rope.

The purbas moved in urgent silence as the final element of the plan unfolded. The decorated yaks milled about the gate. The children played among the benches with the dogs. The dropka with the drums and damyen sat near the podium and played more music while the purbas wrapped Lokesh in a blanket and carried him into the truck, followed closely by Tenzin and Shan. Five minutes later they were pulling onto the road out of Norbu.

Abruptly, behind them a truck in the compound began honking its horn as if it were urgently trying to part the crowd and leave the gompa. Their own truck accelerated.

"They wouldn't chase the army in a truck, not across the ridges," Lhandro said in a despairing voice as the sound of the horn grew closer. "They must be coming for us."

"Somo! Where's Somo!" one of the purbas cried out.

As one of the white howler trucks sped out of the gompa yard Shan's heart sank. He threw a blanket over Tenzin and Lokesh, and watched as the truck overtook them.

But the vehicle did not stop. Five of Tuan's howlers sat inside, impatiently waving them aside as the white truck sped past.

As their old truck slowly rumbled back onto the road a hand appeared on the back gate and Somo swung inside, her face a strange mask of pride and fear.

"I didn't understand why they gave up so easy, why they didn't at least chase after those soldiers," she said anxiously. "So I stayed close to the speaker's platform. Padme ran out with a facsimile, stood by as the officials read it with Khodrak. At first Khodrak just stood there, saying words that no one wearing a robe should ever say. Then he changed, and smiled; said the army would learn now, that perhaps the abbot of Sangchi had been a prisoner they had stole from the army, but now the army had a prisoner who was his by right. He had proof from the old Tibetan books. It would be a grander victory even than discovering the fugitive abbot, he said. There is no one else in all of Tibet who better represents the old oppressive ways, he said." Somo cast a sorrowful look at Shan, then Tenzin. "What a lesson we can make at Yapchi, Khodrak said. What a victory will be ours."

It could mean only one thing. They had left the ancient medicine lama on the mountain with Lin. But Lin's soldiers had finally found their colonel, and now Lin had made good on his vow. He had arrested Jokar.

Chapter Seventeen

The mixing ledge was deserted when they reached it the next morning.

"The soldiers," Somo said forlornly as she walked through the empty chambers with a butter lamp. "They were searching with helicopters. Lin must have signaled them. It's how they must have found Jokar Rinpoche."

Lhandro's parents and Anya as well, Shan thought bitterly. They were all gone. "It means we can't stay," he said. "We need to go back to the water cave." Winslow, Tenzin, and the other purbas had carried Lokesh on a litter to Larkin's cave. Shan, Somo, and Nyma had pushed on with Lhandro to the little plateau.

The meager possessions of those who had been hiding at the mixing ledge were spread around the chambers, undisturbed, as though they had been forced out with no time to pack. The Yapchi headman knelt by his father's empty pallet with a mournful expression. His parents would not survive imprisonment for long. He had left them in a joyful state, communing with the medicine lama, but they had been wrenched away, into a violent, soulless world, a world they would never comprehend. Lhandro touched the corner of the framed photograph, sitting at the head of the pallet, and a small choking sound escaped his throat. His fingers trembled. "Some of the dropka," he said, "call helicopters 'sky demons.'" A sky demon had landed and consumed his parents. It happened that way sometimes. Helicopters came without warning and snatched away someone, who would never be seen again. In ancient days, a dropka once told Shan, sky demons did the same thing, but with lightning.

Lhandro stared at the photograph and opened his mouth, as if to ask why. It wasn't that his parents might be dead that hurt the most, Shan knew, but that it was so incomplete. Lhandro would never know whether to offer death rites, would not know when or where to mourn, or whether to seek them in some prison.

"All we wanted was our deity," Lhandro whispered to the photograph. He collapsed onto his knees beside the pallet, before the Dalai Lama, and began a mantra to the Compassionate Buddha.

Shan studied the room and the pallet. "Why," he asked slowly, "would soldiers leave the photograph like that?"

Somo looked at him, and then back at the image of the Dalai Lama. It was the kind of thing the soldiers hated, the kind of thing they would have thrown against a wall or ground into the earth with a boot heel.

Lhandro looked up in confusion. Somo knelt, studying the contents of the chamber with wary eyes, then shot up as Nyma called in alarm from the doorway.

Two figures approached along the western slope, walking slowly, stopping sometimes to survey the landscape below. Somo gestured the others back behind the rocks until it was clear the approaching figures were Tibetans, both clad in dropka chubas, one, the taller of the two, wearing a derby. With his binoculars Shan saw they were holding hands. Then the strangers stopped and sat on a flat rock two hundred yards away.

Somo sighed. "We can ask those herders if they saw something. But now we have to pack up anything that was left behind. No evidence should be left. If they come back, if they decide this is a purba hiding place, they will destroy it with explosives," she declared grimly, and stepped back inside, Shan and the others following closely.

Five minutes later Shan froze. Strangely, he thought he heard laughter. He looked at Somo, who had stopped, too. They rose from the bundles of blankets they were tying and warily moved outside.

Anya was there, wearing an oversized chuba, kicking an apple like a soccer ball as someone with their back to them tried to block her. It was the man in the chuba and derby who had been walking with her. Kicking the apple, Anya gave a surprised grin and waved at Shan as he stepped forward, then the man turned. Somo gasped. It was Lin.

The colonel froze. The apple rolled past him. Impossible as it seemed, for a moment Shan thought he saw playfulness on Lin's face. But his features instantly hardened and the fragment of a smile left on his face chilled into a scowl.

"Still on the run," Lin said gruffly as Anya ran to Nyma and embraced her. "I knew you wouldn't get far."

"I have a teacher," Shan explained in an even voice, "who says one of my problems is that I never run away." He studied Lin. The heavy chuba, which he now recognized as belonging to Lhandro's father, hung over his army pants. His army shirt had been replaced with a red one, like many of the dropka wore. His eyes were clear, his legs obviously steady. "But sometimes in Tibet," Shan added, "it can be hard to understand what running away means."

"I showed Aku Lin where the pink flowers called lamb's nose were blooming," Anya said, and she stepped in front of Lin as though to protect him. "We found some greens we can cook."

Aku Lin. She had called him Uncle Lin. Shan stared at the girl, and back at Lin, then at Somo. Their presence meant a helicopter had not come. "How long have you been here?" he asked. "Alone like this?"

"Three days," the girl said as she stepped closer to Shan. "The medicine lama said stay with Lin. He said it was how we needed to be," she added in a low tone. She seemed to search Shan's face for something, then Somo's, until, with an expression of doubt, she gazed back toward the brilliant white top of the mountain, as if something was happening she didn't understand.

Shan remembered the joyful expression on the girl's face as she had played with Lin, and the deep laugh he had heard. It could only have been from Lin. It was how Jokar had said they should be. "But they were arrested. Jokar and the others. Where were they taken?"

"Arrested?" Anya cried. "No. They said they would be back soon. They just went to Yapchi," Anya said. "They talked all night about it, first. Once when I woke up, Lepka-" she looked over Shan's shoulder at Lhandro, who had just appeared, and stopped.

"What?" Lhandro demanded. "What was my father doing?"

Anya's gaze became apologetic. "He was crying."

Lhandro looked at Lin, accusation filling his eyes. Lin glared back, his fingers curling, as though he were bracing for a fight.

"No– it was about the valley healing. I didn't understand all of it. It was about old things, when he and Jokar were boys."

"The valley healing?" Somo said. "You mean the people of Yapchi healing."

Anya shook her head slowly. "It was what they said," she explained, and looked at Shan. "The valley. I think they meant our deity. After they spoke, they seemed to have an idea where the deity went." She shrugged. "The next morning they left at dawn." The girl searched Lhandro's eyes as though for an answer. "Stickmen. Jokar said the stickmen would need a blessing."

"Medicine," Lhandro said to Shan, glancing with unmasked anger at Lin. "They must have gone for that medicine. The herbs Lokesh sought."

But Lin looked like he was no longer in need of herbs. He had clearly recovered from his concussion. The splint was off his wrist, which was now wrapped in a strip of cloth.

They stood in silence. Lin glanced at Shan, stepped to the apple and gave it a fierce kick that sent it over the edge of the cliff.

"They have your letter," Shan said to the colonel. "They know you're still alive."

"I will rejoin my men," Lin shot back, as if someone were arguing he would not, then he walked away and sat on a rock beyond the gnarled tree.

Anya looked after him, worry in her eyes. "He had a sister, much younger, but she died. The Red Guard. Then all those years in the army," she said. "Once he spent a year living inside a mountain near India." She looked at Shan and Nyma. "He never learned to honor his inner deity. I think," she said in a sorrowful, but insistent tone, "he never even learned how to find it." She somehow made it sound as though it was why he had been hit by the rocks.

"You must take him below," Somo said in a tight voice. "He is too dangerous. He will cause us great harm if he stays."

Anya looked out over the plain. Shan wasn't sure she had heard.

"My grandfather, before he died, used to take me to the little orchard he had on the slopes." The girl's voice was barely discernible above the wind. "He showed me how some trees grew stunted and bore no fruit when they were not sheltered from the cold. He made little rock shelters for most of them but he always kept one or two without shelter, to remind himself," she said. "Those trees that had to use all their life force to survive the cold never bore fruit."

"Take him down," Nyma said in an insistent voice. She saw moisture in the girl's eyes and she put an arm around Anya, pressing the girl's head against her shoulder. "There is that old chorten on the slope below Chemi's village. We will meet you there at midday tomorrow. It will give us time to go together to Yapchi afterwards. Some of the villagers may have gone back to the little canyon. Maybe we can find what happened to Lepka and Jokar. Maybe if we just speak to those Chinese from our hearts, they will understand," she added, but her voice was full of doubt.

Anya bit her lower lip as she studied Nyma's cool expression.

"They took Jokar Rinpoche," Nyma said, as if to be sure Anya understood.

The girl's gaze drifted toward the ground and she gave a slow absent nod.

As the others continued packing in the hidden chambers Shan found a rock near Lin and sat, watching a hawk soar below them. A wave of helplessness surged through him, leaving him in a sad, hollow place, and he found he could not speak for several minutes.

"When I was very young," Shan said at last, "whenever it snowed, a long line of women with brooms of rushes would march down the street, sweeping it into the gutters. It was never much snow, just a powder, and they would usually come before dawn, when I was lying in bed between my mother and father. We would always wake up and listen, for it was a beautiful sound. The swishing of the brooms was like a waterfall, my mother said, and it made her feel like we were in the mountains. My father called it the passing of the caterpillar, because that was how the line of sweepers looked, a long grey creature with many legs, churning up powder as it walked. Sometimes they sang– not political songs, just simple children's songs about snowflakes and the wind. Sometimes my mother would sing along in the dark, just a whisper. Now I have dreams sometimes, but it's only the sounds, no images, because it was always dark when this happened. I just hear the caterpillar, and it makes me feel peaceful. Sometimes weeks have gone by and the only time I am peaceful, is in those dreams."

Lin looked at him with big round eyes and gave a silent nod, as if they had been conversing about sweeper women all along. They sat in silence again. Shan pointed out a line of white birds flying in the distance. Lin kept his eyes on them until they were lost in a cloud.

"She asked me not to shoot any more birds," Lin said in a thin voice and searched Shan's face as if for an explanation.

Shan just nodded.

The colonel turned back to the cloud as if he could still follow the birds. "You can see a long way in Tibet."

Shan nodded again. "All the way back around, a lama told me once."

Lin searched his face again.

"He meant sometimes you see yourself, and your past, differently, after spending time here."

Lin clenched his jaw. "She's never been to a school, you know. Not one day of her life. There are tests she could take. I could get her in a good school. A girl like that, she could have a future." He looked back at Shan. "What kind of life would she have here? These people have been displaced," he added in an uncertain voice, as if he knew nothing of how it had happened, and looked into his hands. "I could get her leg looked at by real doctors."

"Your soldiers," Shan said. "They took Jokar. The medicine lama."

"No," Lin said as if to correct Shan. "Just an old man. He didn't hurt anyone."

Shan looked at him in confusion. It almost sounded as though Lin were defending the medicine lama. "I think it was because those howlers took the abbot of Sangchi."

Lin looked back toward the horizon. "It isn't proper work for soldiers, all this. Our job is guarding the frontiers." He looked at the old tree. "The abbot, he shouldn't have taken that file. I only wanted the file."

"Was it really so important?" Shan asked, watching Lin closely, remembering how the purbas had refused to discuss it.

Lin cut his eyes at Shan and looked away. "Military secrets," he muttered.

"Then why isn't it Public Security that's after him? I think maybe Public Security doesn't know about a stolen file. I think it was about the 54th Brigade," Shan suggested. "Maybe the honor of the 54th."

"Classified," Lin muttered. "Four of my soldiers have died for that secret."

"It was the Bureau of Religious Affairs who took Tenzin," Shan declared, watching Lin for a reaction. "And a monk named Khodrak. Khodrak saw Tenzin in Lhasa, before the stone was taken. He saw him with a former monk named Drakte. I think he saw Drakte again last month, near here, and he started looking for Tenzin."

"A lie," Lin said in a stronger voice. "There was no such report. Or else the search would have come here, instead of along the Indian border."

"Not a lie," Shan said. "Khodrak and the howlers, certain howlers, didn't want anyone else to know. Just like you didn't tell anyone your real reason for coming to Yapchi. There seem to be a lot of officials working unofficially."

Lin scowled and his eyelids slipped downward. It could have been pain, or fatigue, or he could have just been trying to end the conversation.

"The howlers want to take Jokar from your men. Jokar helped to heal you," Shan reminded Lin. "Would you really give him to the howlers?" He stood when Lin did not reply. "You have to go back," he said again. "Tomorrow."

Lin opened the old chuba and stared at his red shirt as Shan walked away. "I can't find my tunic," he said with a frown.

But inside, on Lin's pallet, his tunic lay neatly folded. Shan and Somo exchanged a knowing glance. Somo had worn the colonel's tunic at Norbu. "We have to send people to take him away from here," she said as they stepped back to the doorway.

Purbas, Shan realized. She meant purbas should come and forcibly remove Lin. "No," Shan said. "That would be the worse thing. We must…" He searched for the words.

"Trust?" Somo asked. "You want us to trust Lin?"

"Not Lin," Shan said, looking toward the peak of Yapchi Mountain. "Lokesh said this place has powerful healing properties. I think we have to trust the healing."

Somo frowned, then spun about and left the chamber.

A quarter hour later they said goodbye to the little plateau, leaving Lin and Anya with food for only two more meals. Shan nodded a farewell to the colonel, who still sat at the stunted tree. Lin scowled back. Anya stood apart as they left. She had begun one of her songs that had the sound of mourning, and for a moment he tried in vain to read her face, to understand what truth she had glimpsed this time. When Shan looked back she was standing at the very edge of the rim, looking down into the abyss.

The Green Tara seemed to be running a dormitory. Chemi was there, with her Uncle Dzopa, still nearly comatose, and more than a dozen of the Tibetans Shan had first seen at the camp behind Yapchi village. The rongpa were speaking in excited tones of the spring festival and the miraculous escape of the abbot of Sangchi, sitting beside Tenzin, asking for his blessing. People were coming from many miles away, they said, gathering on the mountain, saying what happened at Norbu was a portent of what would happen when the seat of Siddhi was at last occupied.

Shan listened with foreboding, which only increased as he saw Lokesh and Winslow talking in urgent tones with several purbas who arrived carrying packs of supplies. Jokar was still at Yapchi, they confirmed, and even allowed to walk about, although one of Lin's soldiers was always at his side. The camp manager had asked for a doctor to come and examine the frail old lama, but Jokar had refused to be examined. Lhandro's parents were with him, or near him– not prisoners, but refusing to leave him. "They just stay at that dig with that Chinese professor," Larkin reported.

"You were there?" Shan asked. He surveyed the cave again. The laboratory equipment, and the older Tibetan men who had looked like professors were gone.

"On the ridge above," the American woman replied. "Yesterday. Taking measurements. We had binoculars. Many more soldiers are in the camp. They put up a checkpoint, at the entrance to the valley. They want to stop anyone from coming in on the road. They have patrols deployed on the slopes above the camp."

"Measurements?" Shan asked, looking from Larkin to Winslow. "But you're not still looking for oil."

Larkin ignored him. Winslow put his palms up as though to disavow any knowledge. But Shan saw a new map on the rock slab, a map bearing the name of the petroleum venture, a detailed relief map of Yapchi Valley and the route leading from the main highway. He stepped over to it. Along the southern slope of the valley were several new dotted lines, each in different colors. Larkin stepped past him and covered it with a large-scale map of Qinghai Province.

Nyma walked from the group of purbas to Shan. "At the camp everyone says they expect oil tomorrow or the next day," she reported in a tone of resignation.

The words had the sound of an epitaph. It would be over when Jenkins's crews struck oil. The fate of the valley would be sealed. The slopes would be completely stripped of their timber. The fields of barley would be ruined by the venture's machines. The songs of the lark would be replaced with the sound of engines, the fragrance of the spring flowers with acrid fumes.

"Less than twenty-four hours," Larkin nodded grimly. "There is a convoy coming in, of high officials. People from Lhasa, and Golmud, for the big celebration."

Nyma looked back at the purba who lay on the pallet. "Who took the bullet out?" she asked.

"I did," Larkin said. "There wasn't anyone else. He bit a piece of leather rope as I worked. Just in the muscle. Lokesh says his blood is still strong."

Shan looked at the wounded purba in alarm. A bullet. With a sinking heart he noticed one of the army's automatic rifles on the ledge above the man.

He studied Larkin again, remembering how frustrated she had been when they had had to leave the explosives behind. "You can't," he heard himself say with sudden despair. "All these people," he said, gesturing toward the refugees in the cave. "They have suffered enough."

Larkin met his stare. "Cowboy has their names and registration numbers. He's going to make sure they get relocated properly. Next time he's in Tibet, he's going to report back to me."

Winslow looked up, grinning at Shan. Cowboy.

There was a murmur of surprise from across the room. Shan looked up to see six large Tibetan men enter in pairs, each pair carrying a heavy wooden box slung from a stout pole. Larkin stood and stepped forward to help the men stack the boxes at the rear of the cave.

"There was an accident," Somo said at his side, in an uncertain, worried tone. "They were laughing because they said a company truck slid off the road."

Shan stepped away and circled back, away from Larkin, to get closer to the boxes. They were marked in Chinese. Qinghai Petroleum Venture, they said. High Explosives. He wandered outside, fighting the sense of defeat that seemed to have overtaken Nyma and Lhandro, then found Winslow at the mouth of the cave, standing over the churning water of the buried river.

"Some of the Tibetans are very superstitious about this place," the American said. "They say it is a connecting place."

"Connecting?"

"I don't understand all the words I heard. One of them said it was a gate. I think they mean to another universe, one of the hidden lands. The bayal. Melissa said Tibetans believe there are many worlds inhabited by humans, some not visible to most of us, and many different types of heavens and hells. Nyma said years ago, before she was born, an old nun who lived nearby brought her students here and announced she had been called to speak with a deity that lived in the hidden land past this gate. Then she just jumped in."

Shan followed Winslow's gaze toward the maelstrom below. Larkin's secret river. Somehow, he thought, it wouldn't be the same when the geologists put a name to it and fixed it on their maps. In a wild and largely untamed land this was one of its wildest and most untamed parts. It was like a whirlpool, he thought, a dark whirlpool that had sprung up on dry land. He imagined the water rushing down, roiling through its hidden course. Perhaps they were looking at the top of a waterfall that dropped through a vast underground cavern into a lake where nagas lived. Perhaps there was indeed a hidden land beyond, and a hermit in that land was sitting on a rock looking up at the waterfall, wondering about the world that lay above it. Perhaps this was where the chenyi stone belonged. Perhaps in that world deities were not so hard to find.

"Larkin will be in grave danger," he said suddenly, pulling his gaze from the mesmerizing waters, "if she lets her camp become the base for saboteurs."

"She's not just a geologist," Winslow said absently, still watching the water.

"There are only two things they can do with those explosives," Shan pointed out. "Try to attack the camp, maybe ruin it with an avalanche. Or put them on the road into the camp, when that convoy of dignitaries comes. Either way it won't solve anything."

"It's the road. It must be," Winslow said, his eyes heavy with worry. "But they wouldn't deliberately kill all those people. Just block it."

"It will just bring more soldiers," Shan said. "More arrests. Zhu hasn't given up looking for Larkin. When he has soldiers to help he will find this place. When soldiers come the people here won't just be refugees, they'll be treated like enemies of the state. They will come to make arrests, they will come to attack."

Winslow grimaced. He looked back into the cave.

"Some people say that when you save someone's life you become their guardian forever," Shan observed quietly. But he knew the connection between Winslow and Larkin had grown more complex than that.

Winslow sighed. "If my wife had been a geologist," he said toward the cave, in a distant tone, "that's who she'd be." He glanced at Shan with surprise, as though the words had come out unexpectedly. "I don't mean…" He stared at the wild water and for a moment Shan thought he saw a longing in the American's face, as if he were thinking of jumping in to explore the hidden land. "I mean…"

"It's all right," Shan said quietly. He backed away from the edge and stepped inside, approaching Lokesh's pallet, where his old friend spoke in low tones with Somo. The purba runner was drawing on a paper which Lokesh leaned over excitedly. But when Lokesh saw Shan he pulled the paper away and quickly folded it.

"Lokesh wanted a map of Beijing," Somo explained. "I was there for running competitions. And he's been writing a letter to the Chairman," she added enthusiastically, then paused, seeing the strained look that passed between the two men.

"Shan does not want me to go," Lokesh observed in a matter-of-fact tone. "But not for any good reason," the old man said as he pushed the paper inside his shirt pocket. "Only because it could be dangerous." Once the pocket was buttoned closed, his expression brightened. "We saw many flocks of geese coming here," he announced to Shan, then gave an exaggerated yawn and rubbed the skin above his cast. Shan sighed and lowered himself to the edge of the pallet, leaning against the rock wall.

Falling in and out of wakefulness, he watched the Tibetans in despair. Strangers came and quickly departed after exchanging messages with the purbas. Somo and Winslow sat with some of those from Yapchi and reviewed Drakte's ledger book. One of the farmers laughed as she explained what Tuan and Khodrak had done, and said they must have compiled their data in some bayal.