The White Mirror (19 page)

Pema's forehead creased beneath his matted hair. “Why do you think so?”

“I happened to notice that he had none left in his studio,” said Li Du. “I found a bowl that contained only a few shards of it.”

Pema shook his head. “That cannot be. The bowl in his studio was full of vermilion. I am certain that it was because he asked me very recently to make sure of it.”

Li Du looked up. “What did he say?”

“He said that he needed red paint for the thangka he was painting—the one the pilgrim commissioned. He asked me to tell him if the bowl of vermilion was full. I checked, and it was.”

Li Du set his bowl down on the stone beside him. “Are you speaking of the thangka that we saw tied to Dhamo's easel yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the pilgrim who commissioned it?”

“He left nine days ago—maybe ten.”

“Did he intend to return for the completed painting?”

“No—it was not for him. It was for his monastery. He was going on a pilgrimage to the holy mountain. I was going to take the painting to Dajianlu and send it with one of the merchant caravans. That is the usual way it is done.”

Li Du nodded his understanding. A caravan could carry items from this remote location to a more central one, where they could be handed to couriers. “I assume,” he said, “since the thangka is no longer in the easel, that you have packed it to be sent to the monastery in its unfinished state?”

Pema's confusion appeared genuine. “I did not take the thangka from the easel,” he said.

“Do you know who did take it?”

“No. I—I do not understand how it can be gone. No one spoke of taking away the thangka.” A look of fear crossed Pema's face. “Could it have been taken by—by a demon? If a demon drove Dhamo to—to do what he did, could the painting have been the source of the curse?”

“I suspect there is another explanation,” said Li Du. “What makes you think the painting drove Dhamo to kill himself?”

Pema was looking increasingly uneasy. “I—I do not know. I do not know how other thangka painters complete their work, but Dhamo used to recite strange prayers while he painted. I could hear him through the door sometimes. ‘I seal the mountain,' he would say. ‘I seal the mountain against demons. The sword on fire, the three jewels, the skull-cup, the triple pennant…'” Pema stopped and looked up.

Sonam was coming down the exterior staircase into the courtyard. He wore a bright red sash around his coat, and had cleaned his boots. He greeted them both as he led his horse out from the stable.

“Where are you going, Uncle?” Pema's voice was polite and strained.

Sonam gestured vaguely up over the manor wall. “I am tired of sitting at the hearth.” He patted his horse's neck. “And my horse is tired of the barn.”

Pema lowered his gaze. “The caravan leader was looking for you,” he said quietly.

Sonam glanced in the direction of the camp. “He wants advice on navigating the trails on the other side of the pass,” he said, with a shrug.

Pema stood up and shouldered his woven basket. “I am to bring more wood for the hearth,” he said. “May I walk out with you?”

A slight frown crossed Sonam's features, but he acquiesced. Li Du watched them go. Pema seemed like a frightened, lonely boy, but as he followed after his uncle, Li Du detected new resolution to the set of his shoulders. He wondered what it meant.

After they had gone, Li Du stayed watching the flames, listening to them hiss and crack. Blue and red tongues lapped the wood. A log had broken and formed a hollow in the fire, which now breathed heat too intensely on his face. He shifted his bench backward.
Fire is a source of comfort,
he thought,
and at the same time the inspiration for the worst torture imaginable in the afterlife.
He looked at the dark door of the family shrine across the courtyard, then up to Paolo Campo's window. For Campo, hell was an inferno. For the Chhöshe, a ground and sky made of copper glowing with the heat of a forge.

There had been no fire pits permitted near the imperial library in Beijing. The nearest one had been in a garden separated from the library by a high stone wall, a pond, and an expanse of tiled courtyard. No spark could survive long enough to float through one of the latticed windows and touch parchment.

Li Du's mind traveled to a day he had spent reordering the library's medicinal volumes. It had taken longer than it should have, because he had stopped so often to read the books. The authors of what he'd expected to be dry medical texts had expressed themselves with surprising personality.
The physician who cannot analyze a pulse is like a spy who is ignorant in the writing and sending of dispatches. He cannot pronounce a problem hot or cold.

That day, Li Du had left the library, crossed the tile courtyard, skirted the pond, and passed through the keyhole door in the wall to join Shu at the fire pit. Shu had been waiting for him at the low stone table. When he saw Li Du, he began to slide chess pieces into place on the board that was etched into the stone surface.

“You know,” Shu said without preamble, “that when the foreigners play their version of this game, they call this piece the king. What a dangerous idea, to let subjects entertain themselves with phrases like
The king is dead
or
I will use my queen to capture your king.
I am surprised any ruler would allow it. What ideas people would get!”

Li Du looked across the table at his teacher. “Or one might say that a king who does not allow his title to be used in a game reveals that he feels insecure of his power.”

Shu gave him a chastising look. “A king must make his subjects respect him.”

“Yes—by ruling well. Not by punishing them for playing games.” Li Du pushed a piece halfheartedly into place.

Shu raised his eyebrows. “Something has distressed you?”

“The writer Tai Ming-shih has been arrested, and they say he will be put to death.”

“Ah,” said Shu. “But he has had many opportunities to change his ways, and he has behaved very unwisely. His decision to print the names of Ming claimants to the throne had nothing to do with his poetry. The Ming Dynasty is over and its princes are no longer princes. Tai Ming-shih brought about his own death.”

“If all the poets are arrested except those who write on topics that please the Emperor, then our empire's poetry will be lifeless. No one who is afraid to put the right word into place can write good poetry.”

“The Emperor will be merciful. He has always been merciful to scholars.”

“Merciful. So it will be a beheading instead of a lingering death?”

Shu sighed. “Our Emperor is no tyrant. You are too young to remember when he came to power, but I can tell you from my own memory that he takes more care with life and death than any Emperor since Song Taizu. He reformed the Board of Punishments, and himself personally reviews lists of men condemned to death in the empire. He checks for administrative errors, a task that has always belonged to the lowest secretary. Last year when he put down the rebellion of his general in the south, he had every household in the rebel areas questioned so that he could spare those who were pressured into supporting the traitors against their will.”

Li Du sighed and slid a piece absently across the board. Shu placed a finger on it to stop its movement and looked very seriously at his student. “The trouble with you young scholars is that you criticize everything without imagining what it would be like to have the power to make decisions about life and death. You
think
you have opinions, but in truth you lack conviction. Now, cheer up and let us find out if today will be the day that you finally start to understand the rules of this game.”

And the writings of Tai Ming-shih were all burned,
Li Du thought.

Then, as if the burnt writings of Tai Ming-shih had blown into the present, Li Du noticed a charred piece of paper caught in a crack in the wall of Doso's barn. He stood up and went over to it. Carefully, he pinched the brittle fragment between his thumb and forefinger and drew it out from where it had been trapped. It was blackened at the edges, but when he held it to the light, he could make out faint lines still visible on its surface.

It looked like a sketch of a flower. A lotus, he thought. Its petals opened upward, as they would to cradle a seated saint. Beside it, a line curved upward into a shape that was now lost. After a moment's consideration, he dismissed the possibility that the fragment had come from the missing thangka. This was certainly paper, whereas the thangka was being painted on fabric.

His librarian's mind moved through the possible uses of paper: a letter, a report, a note of permission, a receipt, a book, a drawing, a map … He frowned. Whatever it was, it had been destroyed recently. The scrap would not have remained in the wall for long before being dislodged by the wind or by the shifting flank of an animal. Further inspection yielded no more information. With a furrowed brow, the paper still pinched between his fingers, Li Du climbed the courtyard stairs and went inside.

*   *   *

Once he was back in his room, Li Du went to the table by his bed and opened one of his bound books. He placed the paper between its pages, and closed the cover. As he did so, his eyes fell on the traveler's writing set that rested beside the pile of books. It was new. He had purchased it for himself at the market shortly before the caravan had left Gyalthang. He smiled slightly.
Of course,
he thought,
I bought ink instead of a new coat.

There had been only one ink seller in Gyalthang. Li Du had walked into the shop to find its owner absorbed in the careful chiseling of a circular jade seal. The yellow jade was so pale it was almost translucent, like river water clouded with white sand in the sunshine. On thin shelves along one wall were more seals, some cylindrical, others with flat planes and edges. They were carved from jades and marbles of all colors.

Li Du had picked up a brush. The seller had indicated a sheet of stone and a bowl of water. Li Du had dipped the brush in the water and drawn a character onto the stone, watching the wet bristles spread and narrow as he pressed and lifted, observing the personality of the word produced. One brush had given him a confident hand, another a feminine one, another the neat precision of a scribe concealing his own unique temperament behind clipped, repetitive accuracy.

While Li Du had shopped for ink, the muleteers had spread through the market to purchase supplies. Once he had bought the modest travel case containing three brushes, ink sticks, an ink stone, and a sheaf of paper, he had set out in search of the others. Carrying his new possession under one arm, he had walked through the merchant stalls, enjoying the smells of broth and spice and savory steam and looking forward to dinner at the inn. He had stopped at the sound of Kalden's voice.

Kalden had been standing in an alley. Overhead, copper pots were silhouetted by the brilliant setting sun behind them. Li Du had squinted, unable to see. Kalden had been speaking to someone, a merchant or a traveler. Li Du had seen a glint of silver beads in long hair. He had heard a voice—heard it drawing out its syllables, pronouncing words with a confident, persuasive rhythm.

Li Du froze. The voice had been Sonam's.

*   *   *

The muleteers were playing a game of dice around the cabin fire. Bowls of butter tea were balanced on rocks and saddlebags and between them on benches. Norbu was finishing an account Li Du had heard him give several times of a violent company of bandits who had harassed travelers near his village for months.

“No respect for any authority,” Norbu was saying, “not even the Dalai Lama. I heard they met a monk on the road and asked him to perform a miracle. When he could not, they killed him. And it was worse when they punished any of their own—slow deaths, those were.”

Kalden took his turn to roll the dice. They scattered across the ash and dirt. Li Du reached down and picked up one that had stopped close to him. Kalden put out a hand to receive it, but Li Du did not offer it back. “I do not know,” he said to Kalden, “whether your secret is yours alone, or whether you are all aware of something that I am not.”

Kalden's close-set eyes revealed no emotion, but his jaw tensed. “What are you talking about?”

“You have not been straightforward about your reasons for coming to this place.”

Hamza showed his support with an imperious nod. “As a guest of this caravan who has provided you entertainment and diplomatic services, I demand a description of the spider into whose web you have clearly led us. What are we doing in this valley, and how likely are we to die here?” The dramatic force of the statement was undercut by the unworried tone in which Hamza delivered it.

“We are in no danger,” said Kalden. “I have no obligation to explain my decisions to either of you, but in this case, I already have. All the caravans go through Dajianlu. We are finding a new way. The clever trader explores paths unknown to others.”

Li Du looked down at the rough die, turning it over in his fingers. “Does the clever trader usually conduct these explorations so late in the season? When the snows have already begun to fall, does the clever trader still choose a route that is unfamiliar and indirect?”

Kalden's face was like stone. “There are no straight paths through the mountains,” he said. “Every route has its risks.”

As the muleteers murmured their agreement, Li Du slowly curled the fingers of one hand around the die until it disappeared into his closed fist. He looked up and met Kalden's gaze. “You came here to meet the man called Sonam. Why?”

A muscle twitched beside Kalden's eye. “I don't know what you are talking about,” he said.

“I recognize him,” said Li Du. “I saw you together in the Gyalthang market.”

Kalden raised a hand and rubbed his jaw, delaying his answer.