Mandarin Gate (10 page)

The hut the old man directed Shan to, the last in the northernmost row, appeared unoccupied. There were no coals in the brazier by the door, none of the carefully tended vegetable shoots that grew along the front walls of other huts. But from a rope fixed to a nail on the rear corner bits of cloth fluttered in the wind. Someone had turned their new sheet into prayer flags.

The flimsy door was ajar. Shan warily pushed it, and when there was no response he stepped inside. He passed through a small cubicle of a kitchen into the room that comprised the rest of the hut. Under the solitary window Jigten lay slumped against the wall, apparently passed out in exhaustion. Before him, an old woman lay on a pallet. Her leathery face spoke of great strength and determination, though it seemed to take great effort for her to move her head toward Shan. Despite her obvious sickness, her smile was welcoming. “We don’t get many visitors to our tent,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Shan offered the traditional greeting.
“Tashi delay.”

“I should make tea.” Her voice was like sandpaper.

“I have had tea, Grandmother,” he replied. “I like your prayer flags.”

“Jigten worked on them all night, asking me to bless each one as he finished. I said that fat goat of a manager will be upset. But my son said once the flags were up the gods would make them invisible to officials.”

Shan reached into his pocket to extract one of the little clay deities he had purchased at the market in Baiyun and pressed it into her hand.

The woman’s grateful smile was broken by a series of hacking coughs. For the first time Shan saw the beads of sweat on her brow. She had a fever. On a stool beside her was a bowl of water and a cloth. He soaked the cloth, wrung it out, and wiped her forehead.

“I was on the changtang once,” Shan said. “I saw herds of antelope. They moved like the wind across the grass. On my last day a big one, an old male, came up to me. He looked at me with an apologetic expression, like he was saying what a poor fool I was to have only two legs, then he sprinted away. I swear his hooves never touched the ground, he was just flying over the grass. I still have dreams about him.”

“A chiru. His spirit mixed with yours. A good sign,” the woman said, then began speaking of her youth, when the herds of antelope numbered in the tens of thousands.

Shan was wringing out the cloth for a third time when suddenly he heard a sharp gasp and Jigten leapt across the room as if to strike at him. His arm was already raised for Shan’s jaw when he froze and looked down. His mother’s bone-thin hand was wrapped around his ankle. “We have a hearth guest,” she said in a chiding tone, as if Shan had just entered their yurt on the prairie.

“He’s a Chinese!” Jigten protested. “An official!”

“No, he’s something different,” his mother insisted. “He saw the prayer flags. The spirit of a chiru dwells in his dreams.”

Jigten sagged. He glanced upward, and for the first time Shan saw a plank laid over two cement blocks, the family altar. Sitting on it was the old bronze dakini Jamyang had given the thief. With a look of great sorrow he straightened and lifted the little statue, extending it to Shan.

“No,” Shan said, refusing the altarpiece. “This is her place, watching over your hearth. A protector demoness.”

“I think he came to speak with you, Son,” the woman said.

The crippled thief gently tucked his mother’s hand inside her blanket. “I could make some porridge,” he said stiffly, for his mother’s sake.

“I would be honored,” Shan said. “On my next visit perhaps. Why did you go to Jamyang’s shrine?”

Jigten’s head snapped back toward his mother, his eyes wide in alarm. He did things the old woman would not approve of. “Sometimes things just appear when you need them,” he said awkwardly.

“Why that day?”

The shepherd glanced at his mother, who stared expectantly at him, then frowned. He was not going to be able to lie in the presence of his dying mother. The shepherd’s words came out in a whisper. “There was an old cairn by the highway. A truck had hit it. I saw him down there, rebuilding it.”

Shan looked back at the old woman. He stole for medicine. If Jamyang had known, he would have given him most of the items on his altar. He gestured Jigten toward the kitchen before asking his next question. “You talked about outsiders buying cans of food and blankets. You were selling things to foreigners. A German man and an American woman. Where did you meet them?”

Jigten frowned. “We were working at the old convent, hauling debris. Two or three times I saw them there. Once on the hills above, taking photographs. There’s a shepherd girl with a scarred face who wants to be a nun. She watches over them.”

“Where were they staying?”

“They always came from the direction of the hermitage, with that girl acting like their guide.”

“What did you sell them?”

“Some ropes and food. Some blankets.”

“Where would you get such things?”

“Mostly from the Jade Crows. I do odd jobs for them. They deliver supplies to the pacification camps. Sometimes I drive or do repair work for them.”

Shan looked at him in surprise. “But the camps are run by the People’s Armed Police. You mean they have a contract with the police?”

“Sure. The green apes. They run the camps, they provide the trucks.”

He considered the shepherd’s words. “The Chinese men who disturb the farms in the hills. It’s the Jade Crows, doing the work of the police.”

Jigten shrugged. “Like I said, they have some kind of arrangement. The police prefer not to go up into the hills. They get bitten by dogs. They hear the phantom horns. They get hounded by ghosts.”

“An arrangement with the Armed Police,” Shan said, thinking out loud. “But not with local Public Security.”

Jigten offered no reply. Shan needed none. Those who had attacked Meng in town held Public Security in contempt. Meng had not only been attacked, she had lied about it as if she feared reporting it. He hesitated a moment, puzzling again over why she had been attacked. Not even the most arrogant gangs would risk assaulting a knob without a good reason.

“Our headman Rapeche made a protection charm for the manager,” Jigten said abruptly, speaking toward the shadows at the back of the room. “That fat one at the gate. He gets frightened sleeping alone in that concrete building. Old Tibetan ghosts rise up in the night to haunt the Chinese in this valley,” he added with an air of satisfaction. “He confided in Rapeche after that, said we won’t stay here forever. More trucks will arrive. They will break us up and take us away to Chinese cities. They say there are entire blocks where nothing green grows, where the wind is full of grease and chemicals. Then we’ll look back at this place as a happy time. At least here we still have most of the clan together.”

He cast a worried glance at Shan, as if remembering who his visitor was.

“
Lha gyal lo,
” Shan whispered in a pained voice.

“You don’t know what’s happening in Tibet. Before long, Tibet will be nothing but camps and the keepers of camps.” Jigten’s voice grew hollow. “They converted an old army base to a pacification camp on the other side of the mountain. The police bring in another truckload of Tibetans almost every week. That don’t call it a prison but that place has razor wire and guards with guns. It’s a cage with no way out. Last month they started a graveyard there.”

As he spoke voices were raised in alarm outside. Jigten shot up and ran out the door, Shan a step behind.

A man on the low ridge above the camp was shouting frantically, pointing down the valley. The Chinese manager was at the front gate now, crying out in his high-pitched voice, ordering everyone to return to their huts. The shepherds ignored him and ran up the ridge.

Shan arrived at the top of the ridge panting, his gaze following the arm of a nearby shepherd as the man pointed first to the line of dense, black clouds rolling off the sacred mountain and then to the red and blue flashes in Baiyun. The town was more than a mile away but the blinking lights of police cars were plainly visible. A line of shadow was moving across the fields. Half the population of the town seemed to be fleeing their homes.

Shan ran to his truck.

He saw more than a dozen police cars as he reached the town, and half a dozen big trucks, all troop carriers of the People’s Armed Police, the green apes who did the heavy lifting for Public Security. He didn’t have to look for Meng. She stepped in front of his truck, then climbed into the passenger seat, as if for protection. Police were swarming in and out of the buildings, herding the few remaining inhabitants into the central square, while other officers stood at the edge of the field, blowing whistles at the retreating residents.

Meng gestured to the chaos. “Welcome to our model Pioneer community,” she said. “If Major Liang had his way he’d probably burn the town down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The bodies. Late yesterday someone stole the bodies.”

Shan considered her words. “Late yesterday,” he pointed out, “someone attacked you. The constables came running, leaving that meat locker unattended.”

“The owner of the store has fled. Only one thing keeps Liang from arresting the whole town.”

“Officially the murders haven’t taken place,” Shan inserted. “Hard to explain arrests for stealing murder victims when no murder has been reported.”

“Exactly.” Meng was watching the dark clouds that were rapidly overtaking the town. “We don’t want to put a blemish on the heroic faces of our Pioneers. We just—”

At first Shan thought Meng was interrupted by someone throwing stones at his truck. Then the sound was more like rifle shots, accelerating into a machine-gun staccato. People began crying out in pain, flinching, clutching at their arms and shoulders as if they were being stung. Some of the immigrants dropped to the ground, curling up with their hands over their heads. Others ran, dashing for the nearest cover.

Hailstorms in Tibet came quickly and left just as quickly but they always brought with them destruction and terror, sometimes even death. Shan looked back toward Clear Water Camp. The ridge was empty. The dropka might ignore the orders of their camp manager but they knew how to read clouds.

Shan pulled his wide-brimmed hat low on his head and leapt out of the truck. He grabbed two of the buckets from the back and ran toward the fields. He pulled up an old man who had fallen to his knees, blood running from the hands that shielded his face, then held a bucket over the man’s head. The man gasped in confusion, then grabbed the bucket and pointed to a woman who had fallen a few feet away.

“I have her!” Shan shouted over the roar of the storm, then pulled the woman to her feet and covered her head with the second bucket. They ran, like most of the people in the fields, toward the open-walled pavilion that had been erected for the market. As Shan pushed the woman inside and turned back toward the field, the hail abruptly stopped.

People were crying. A donkey brayed. Dogs were barking. The police seemed to have forgotten their search and were climbing back into their trucks. Several stared dumbfounded at their cars. Most of their rooftop light fixtures were in pieces. Three windshields had been shattered. Voices, some frantic, crackled on their radios. One constable, a Tibetan, stared somberly toward the huge mountain that hovered over the valley. The angry storm had come from Yangon, home of the deities who protected the valley.

Shan searched the crowd, spotted the grey-haired man with the wire-rimmed glasses he had seen playing checkers and followed him to a small bungalow on the side street behind the town’s modest teahouse.

As the man paused at his front door to speak with a neighbor, Shan quickly circled the house and entered the rear door. He was sitting in the kitchen when the man entered. He did not seem surprised to see a stranger in his house.

“Your men already searched here,” the man said in a level voice. “You can see we have few possessions and even less space to hide anything.” His voice trailed away as he noticed Shan’s muddy boots and tattered work clothes.

Shan did not speak. He reached into his pocket and set the little jade dragon from Jamyang’s altar on the table in front of him. “You can buy these from stalls off Tiananmen Square for forty renminbi. A genuine relic from the Kang Xi emperor, the vendors will say, and the tourists never know any better. But my instinct says this is not a reproduction.”

The man sank into a chair, his gaze fixed on the little dragon. “So you’re here to tell me it belongs to the state,” he declared in a tight voice. His long, thin face seemed to grow weary as he spoke.

Shan studied the man for a long moment, his eyes were deep, uncertain pools. There was great intelligence in them, and also a hint of fear. “My father had a small collection of seals from the imperial times,” Shan explained, “which he cherished. When I was very young he would take me in the closet and show them to me with a candle, exclaiming over the history they must have witnessed. Sometimes he would visit antique stalls in the market, hoping to find a document with a seal print that would match. But by then the Red Guard had burned nearly all the imperial documents. When we were sent for reeducation in the country he buried them in a field and never was able to recover them. Probably long since destroyed by a bulldozer.”

The man stared at Shan. “It was one of a matching pair,” he ventured at last. “I had to trade the other years ago for medicine when my daughter first became ill.”

Shan pushed the intricately worked seal across the table to the man, who stroked it with a gentle hand, gazing at it with a sad smile. He pushed it back to Shan as a police radio barked from the street outside. “It is not safe here. If those goons had found it today they would have stomped it under a heel and laughed. It has a new guardian in the mountains.”

“Jamyang is dead,” Shan stated.

The man’s eyes widened in alarm. “No. Not Jamyang. He knows how to survive.”

“I was with him when he killed himself.”

The man’s face twisted in pain, draining of color. He pressed a fist against his mouth as if to stifle a sob, then dropped his head into his hands. “I think I shall make some tea,” he declared with a sigh.