Beautiful Ghosts (6 page)

Shan studied by the debris. The slab of wood was deeply cracked, but it had been carved with an intricate pattern of deer leaping through trees. It was the cover of a
peche,
he realized, one of the unbound books traditionally used in Tibet. He leaned the wooden cover against the wall and lifted the cloth, revealing more shards of pottery and a small unbroken clay image of the compassionate Buddha. Beyond it, lying against the wall, was a long piece of parchment, a leaf from a peche. He gently lifted the long narrow paper and read it, then looked up, staring into the darkness a moment. He read it again, turning it over, examining it with the lamp drawn closer. It was impossible, like so much else that had happened that day. The text was old, though not from a wood block, the traditional method of printing a peche. It was in blue ink, as if from a quill or pen, in a bold ornate hand that at first glance had the appearance of the elegant Tibetan script used for scriptures. But it was not in Tibetan, it was in English.
Death is how deities are renewed,
the parchment said.
Know, then let go. Lift the brush a thousand thousand times then let it sink to the stone. Holy Mother, Holy Buddha, Holy Ghost. Death is how deities are renewed.

Along the bottom of the leaf were painted more deer in the traditional Tibetan style, as well as small intricate figures of yak. He read it, stared at the bloody bone, and shivered. The peche leaf spoke of death like a poem, or a eulogy. It was decades old, perhaps a century or more. It had been dropped exactly where somebody, this day, had died. A coincidence, he would have said years earlier. But if Lokesh were with him the old Tibetan would have solemnly clapped his hands together and exclaimed how fortunate they were to be present when the movement of two wheels of destiny, however briefly, meshed together.

Shan raised his lamp again. There were no more pages, nothing but more shards of pottery, shreds of sackcloth, and what may have been a shriveled apple. He examined the parchment once more, read its strange, haunting English words again, then rolled the leaf and placed it in his pocket. As he straightened he spied one last object, something small and dark in the corner of the little alcove. He pressed the lamp close to it. A cigar, the end of a narrow cigar. He picked it up with his fingertips and held it under his nostrils. The tobacco had a cloying, sweet odor, unlike any tobacco he had ever known. It was not a Tibetan thing, not even a Chinese thing. He wrapped it in one of the shreds of cloth. As he did so, something cold seemed to breath down his back. He turned and turned again, then quickly stepped back over the pool of blood into the chamber, noticing for the first time a subtle contour in the center of the pool, a small round shape, the relief of a disc perhaps an inch and a half wide, not much thicker than a coin. Using a chip of plaster he pushed it out of the blood, wrapped it in the corner of his handkerchief, and placed it in his pocket.

Suddenly he was trembling. The strange events, and perhaps even stranger words, of the day swirled through his mind. Once—had it been only an hour ago?—Gendun had said the day was one of the most joyful of his long life. Today everything was going to end, Surya had said. Godkillers were in the mountains. This was a day when the world was changed. Zhoka held secrets that were dangerous to misunderstand.

A low hollow moan abruptly rose from the darkness behind him, from the descending tunnel past the blood pool. He told himself it was the wind playing on some rock formation or a hole in the debris, but he found himself against the wall again, his skin crawling. Whoever, or whatever, had taken the body had done so in the last twenty or thirty minutes, and could still be lingering nearby. Shan extended the light toward the sound, but as he did so the lamp began to sputter, its fuel nearly exhausted. He darted through the doorway. By the time he reached the stair passage the flame was out. He climbed toward the daylight above, backwards, watching the darkness.

Outside, the ruins were empty. The only thing that moved in the central courtyard was the thin column of smoke drifting from the old samkang. Shan jogged to the foregate by the gorge and its ruined bridge. There was no sign of the festival except a few white smudges on the rocks underfoot. He stepped to the lip of the gorge. Somewhere, hundreds of feet below, lay his hermitage bag and the bamboo case of lacquered yarrow sticks for practicing the Tao te Ching that had been passed through so many generations of his family. They had survived war and famine, had survived the death of his uncles and father at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, had even survived his own gulag imprisonment. But they had not survived the terror of a ten-year-old girl.

He walked slowly through the ruins, calling for Lokesh and Liya, then found himself facing the chorten shrine. He absently lifted the paintbrush from his pocket, staring at it a moment before he suddenly remembered the soldiers, turned and ran.

*   *   *

In a quarter hour Shan was at the top of the ridge above Zhoka. Half a mile to the northwest over a dozen bent figures moved along the crest. He paused and studied the landscape. The deep chasm cut Zhoka off from the north. The south, where steep, jagged peaks seemed to warn travelers away, was said to be a barren, forbidding land. The soldiers had last been seen to the northwest, between Zhoka and Lhadrung Valley. As he looked in that direction, toward the ruined stone tower that hovered over the northwestern end of the ridge, he thought he saw a flash of maroon, the color of a robe.

In another ten minutes Shan had caught up with the slowest of the fleeing Tibetans, who glanced at him resentfully then looked away. As he passed them he asked each one where the monks had gone. At last one of the old women who had prayed with Surya fixed him with an anguished gaze and pointed forward.

He found Lokesh standing on a ledge near the ruined tower that overlooked the narrow valley beyond. His old friend was staring toward the shadows inside the tower, feverishly working his beads. As Shan reached his side, Lokesh grabbed his arm as if to restrain Shan from venturing closer to the tower.

It was the first time Shan had been at the tower, and he saw now it wasn’t totally destroyed. Only one scorched wall remained of the top section, reaching nearly twenty feet from the ground, with pieces of iron still holding fragments of what once had been a ladder secured to the outer wall. But the small chamber beneath, formed of a natural rock formation, was intact, a snug open-fronted alcove where travelers or sentries might have taken shelter from the elements. A solitary figure knelt on the floor of the chamber, facing the rear wall. Surya.

“Why would he come this way?” Shan asked Lokesh. “Toward Lhadrung, the soldiers—he could be arrested. The people are terrified. They will admit he is an unlicensed monk if asked. They are as scared of him now as of the soldiers.” He looked into Lokesh’s face and saw a deep, painful confusion. “We have to take him back home, to safety, then we can ask him about what happened, then we can help him.” If Colonel Tan learned of unregistered monks, or a man professing murder, he would send troops to scour the mountains, and no one arrested could be expected to stay silent. While Yerpa had evaded detection for decades, under the influence of interrogators Surya would eventually divulge the location. If Surya were arrested, Yerpa would be destroyed as thoroughly as Zhoka, and Gendun and all the other monks arrested.

“He’s not going to town,” Lokesh declared, though his voice was uncertain. “He came here. In the courtyard he would not speak, not to anyone, nothing but those terrible words you heard. Suddenly he just stood, looked toward the tower, and started running. When I reached him he was just cleaning the walls inside, brushing away the old dirt. Then the girl came, with Gendun following,” he added, gesturing toward a rock a hundred feet away where the lama sat watching Dawa, who sat at a spring, washing the blood from her dress, her aunt and uncle watching her forlornly fifty paces beyond, sitting with the other children. “She won’t let Gendun or anyone get close to her. She says she wants to go home to her Chinese factory town. She says she hates monks. She says she hates all of us for tricking her.”

Images of Dawa’s day in the ruins flashed through Shan’s mind. She had felt confusion and fear at first, then awe and joy, finally horror and grief. “She came to learn about life in Tibet,” Shan said in a tight voice.

Lokesh nodded soberly. “We must take Surya back to Yerpa. He wants much healing.”

Shan had never heard his friend’s voice sound so frail. He watched Lokesh gaze with a strange, sad longing toward Zhoka. “What happened to Surya also happened to the girl. What did we misunderstand?” the old Tibetan asked Shan. Shan could only shake his head slowly.

After a moment Shan approached Dawa and sat on the grass beside her. She did not acknowledge him, just kept washing, pushing at the blood on her dress.

“I know you saw something terrible under the ground,” he began. “I went down there. I saw the blood, and the bones. It was so dark. There were sounds. I was frightened, too. But there was no body. Did you see a body?”

The girl made a sound like a whimper. Not a whimper, he realized. She was humming. With a chill he recognized the song. “The East Is Red,” one of the standard hymns of political officers, a favorite anthem for the public address systems in Chinese schools. Shan sat in silence, looking back at Lokesh and Gendun, trying to understand why they would not approach Surya. “Dawa,” he pressed. “I need to know what you saw. I will help.”

The girl stopped her frantic washing, catching the bloody water that dripped from her dress in one hand, staring at it with a terrible fascination. Just as he was about to rise she looked up. “He had an eye in his hand,” she said in a tiny voice. “And a nail through his body.” She began her chilling song again.

As he rose and moved back toward the tower a figure rushed past, stopping so abruptly at the entrance to the tower that she almost stumbled inside. It was Liya, panting, steadying herself with a hand on the rocks. “Quickly!” she called to Surya, then stepped into the shadows. “He has to leave,” she gasped as Shan joined her. “We must carry him if there is no other way.” Her voice drifted away as she stared at the monk.

Surya was urgently working at the wall at the rear of the little chamber, rubbing it with a strip of cloth torn from his grey underrobe, muttering something under his breath. It was a painting. Surya was frantically cleaning a painting, a mural that could have been painted a century or more earlier. To the left of the old painting were the characters of the mani mantra, invoking compassion, each faded letter ten inches high. On the wall to the right was a recent work, a complex painting of deities that would have taken many days to complete. Shan studied the rich, vibrant style of the second painting then turned to see Lokesh beside him, his eyes reflecting Shan’s own surprise. The style of the painting was unmistakable, familiar to them. It was Surya’s work.

But Surya was ignoring his own painting.

“Which is it?” Liya asked in a whisper as she stared at the image on the back wall that Surya was cleaning. Shan, too, was not certain of the central deity. It was Tara, the protectress, in one of the fierce emanations meant to combat specific demons and fears, but each major deity had multiple forms and he did not recognize this one.

Shan turned, as had Liya, to Lokesh, but his old friend just stared at the painting, his mouth open. “A terrible thing,” Lokesh whispered and gazed back toward Zhoka with a worried expression. He did not mean the art, Shan knew, but the evil it was meant to protect against. Shan recognized the words Surya was now speaking in his low, desperate tone. It was a mantra:
Om Ah Hum,
a special empowering mantra, the last of a series of prayers used to animate deities.

“There is no time for this,” Liya said to Surya. “You must flee.” She stepped to his side and made a pulling motion with her arms, though her hands were empty, as though she were frightened of touching the monk, his arms still streaked with dried blood. “No time,” she repeated, despair in her voice now.

But Shan sensed that for Surya there was time only for this, that despite their own fears, the monk had seen much more to fear, seemed alone to understand the true depths of their desperation, had decided their only possible defense lay with the deity in the painting. For the first time Shan saw that something had been painted below the old painting: a mantra perhaps. The words were obliterated with dark red streaks. Something inscribed there had just been obscured by red pigment, one of the colors Surya carried in little wooden tubes that hung on a leather strap around his neck, inside his underrobe. He saw that the monk’s hands held fresh red stains over the drying blood. Surya had fled to the little shelter not only to clean the old painting but to also rub pigment over what had been written below it.

“Om hum tram huih ah,”
Surya cried out in a strangely fierce voice. It was a mantra to bind guardians. Surya said no more but stared into the eyes of the deity. It was as if he had just concluded a pact with Tara.

Liya stopped her strange pantomime of struggle to stare at the monk, then pushed past Shan, her eyes full of tears. He watched as she searched the landscape beyond Zhoka, as though looking for someone in particular, then began urging the fleeing Tibetans toward the trail below the crest, down the steep switchback beyond the outcropping, toward their camps and houses in the hills above the valley. She ran back fifty yards along the crest and swept a stumbling child onto her back, forcing a lighthearted air as she carried the boy past the outcropping, handing him to his weary parents at the edge of the ledge, calling out a blessing as they disappeared over the crest. Shan stepped a few feet down the grassy slope, calling Jara, gesturing for the herder to bring his family.

Only half a dozen Tibetans remained in sight when Liya halted, looking back with a puzzled expression. Shan followed her gaze to see Surya, out on the ledge now, facing the steep valley beyond, his arms stretched outward at his side. Lokesh took a step toward the monk then halted, cocking one ear upward. Shan heard it, too, as he stepped closer, a deep thunder that came from the cloudless sky. Suddenly, running, stumbling figures appeared at the crest, crying out, racing back up the trail they had just descended, discarding the baskets and packs they carried.