The White Mirror (23 page)

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Pema smoothed a sheet of paper over a table. He pinned down the corners with heavy bowls to keep them from curling. As he chose a stick of charcoal already scraped and carved to a stylus point, he said, “The painting used to hang just beside the altar.”

“I am surprised you can still remember it,” said Li Du. “Nine years is a long time.”

“I looked at it often,” said Pema. He glanced at the closed door separating them from the room where the Chhöshe prayed. “I missed my brother.”

Pema's slim fingers were steady as he began to draw. “The painting showed the fourth incarnation of the Chhöshe,” he said, “just as Dhamo dreamed it far away in Lhasa.”

Li Du followed the lines as they took the form of jagged mountains across the sheet. He noted the facility with which Pema produced the image. “You cannot see them through the clouds,” said Pema, “but these are the mountains just as they appear around this temple. And here are the stairs. He painted them just as they are even though he had never seen them before.” As Pema continued to sketch, Li Du recognized the stairs that began at the lower right corner of the page and continued up to the top left.

The drawing showed a different season. Pema shaded the stairs the texture of dark rock, and filled the trees with leaves. “And here is the temple,” he said, sketching it at the top left. Li Du leaned closer. The architecture was exactly the same, from the two doors to the row of prayer wheels in front.

Pema's hand slid back down to the lower left and he traced the light outline of a figure. It was a child—a little boy. He wore a hat and a goatskin vest over his tunic. Between his hands he held a round basin.

“What is that?” Li Du asked, pointing to it.

“It is a bowl of milk,” said Pema. “Dhamo's vision said that the Chhöshe would carry a bowl of milk to the temple and make an offering of it there—here—at the altar.”

As Li Du watched, Pema's hand moved up the stairs and he drew the boy again, still holding the bowl. Li Du remembered the painting in the library of the women who turned to mountains. Like that painting, Dhamo's had shown progressing moments in time.

Pema sketched the old tree, cloven and curved as it still was, and a third depiction of the boy. He reached the top and drew the boy again, kneeling, surrounded by sketched villagers with reverent expressions. Above the villagers were divine figures, floating in clouds, watching the scene.

He finished, and together they looked down at the drawing. “They say it was just like that when my brother brought the bowl to the temple,” Pema said. “The villagers were all gathered there, just as Dhamo painted it, just as he saw it in his dream.”

 

Chapter 18

The courtyard was empty, but the manor's daily activities were now mapped in paths through the white drifts. Someone had lit new incense sticks outside the manor shrine. The sweet, woody fragrance mingled with the musky odors of the barn.

Hearing voices from the kitchen, Li Du climbed the steps. Kamala and the children had begun preparations for dinner. Li Du blinked against the sting of hot pepper oil in the hearth smoke that filled the room. The old woman, Mara, slept in a corner, her dark clothes gathered up to her nose and a gentle snore whispering in the air around her. There was no suggestion of panic, which Li Du took to mean that Sera had followed through on her intention not to reveal what had happened at the woodpile.

Close to the fire, Hamza and Sera-tsering sat on stools across from each other at a low wooden table, on which a simple grid was marked in charcoal. Across it, black stones and white stones were positioned at the intersections between lines. They were smooth and polished, with rounded tops.

Sera lifted her right hand and passed it over a line of black pieces, replacing them with white ones. When she came to the end of the line, she held her clenched hand over the board.

Hamza slowly reached out his own hand and opened it, palm up, beneath hers. She opened her fingers, and the collection of black pebbles fell with soft clicks into his palm. He deposited his defeated soldiers into a growing pile beside him. On the table between them, set to one side, were four small silver coins.

Hamza gestured for Li Du to join them. He took a seat at the table, his back to the fire.

“I had not expected to find you playing a game,” he said, mildly.

“It seems the lady traveler likes to gamble,” muttered Hamza. He sounded disgruntled. “But we knew that already.”

Sera did not reply, but Li Du saw a corner of her mouth quirk before her face returned to its set, focused expression.

“I used to play this game,” Li Du said, examining the board. The grid was square, nine lines by nine. Most of the pebbles in its interior were white, while black stones dominated its perimeter.

“It is not the game you think it is,” said Hamza. “Your empire has its own game of encirclement, but this is called the Game of Many Eyes, and it is more ancient than yours.” He placed the tip of an index finger on one of the black pieces and slid it two places to his left.

As Sera leaned forward, silently analyzing the new configuration, Hamza looked up at Li Du. “It will please you to know,” he went on, “that the man who taught me the rules was a librarian like yourself. But his library was underground, a library built for the dead in a stone tomb beneath the desert sands. This man, this librarian, learned it from a book that included, in its first section, the rules of play, and in its second, the spells to reanimate the dead so that they could play it with the living. It was an ancient way, he explained to me, for the living to match wits with their ancestors.”

Sera spoke without taking her eyes from the board. “I have heard the same story,” she said.

“That surprises me,” said Hamza. “It is not commonly known.”

Sera smiled. “Perhaps I, too, have traveled to those ancient tombs where the dead wait to play this game with the living.” Her hand hovered over a white stone, her fingers moving almost imperceptibly, as if they were independently thinking through strategy.

“Move that one,” Hamza said, “and you expose yourself to attack.” He lowered his voice so that it was barely audible. “A habit of yours.”

Sera skimmed her hand across the board to a different piece, and made her move. “I think,” she said, ignoring Hamza's muttering, “that it would be unfortunate to leave good game boards in dusty tombs.”

Hamza lifted his eyebrows. “Who raised you, that you were not taught to respect the resting places of the dead?”

“I think I have told you already that I was born in Lhasa,” Sera said. “As for who raised me, I was taught this game by someone very important, a friend to my family. And I do respect the dead. But when you travel to distant places, sometimes what you learned at home begins to seem less certain. You are exposed to so many other explanations for the world that you find yourself able to believe all of them and none of them.”

Hamza did not appear to have an immediate answer. He lowered his hand to the board and touched a piece to move it. Sera placed her fingers gently over his. “That is my piece you are about to move,” she said, “or did you not see that I conquered that row?” Hamza opened his mouth to protest, then frowned when he saw that she was right. She took her hand away and he resumed his study of the board.

“Then again,” Sera said, looking up and across the room, “sometimes travel strengthens the beliefs we carry from home. When the world is strange and lonely, it can be a comfort to cling to what we think is certain.” Li Du followed her gaze and saw Campo and Andruk emerge from the stairwell and come forward through the smoke.

Campo's eyes rested for a moment on Sera, then shifted to the game board. With a frown, he went to the fire and sat down while Kamala gestured for her daughter to prepare more tea.

Andruk came to the table and stood staring down at it. “You are playing the Game of Many Eyes,” he said. Li Du watched as Andruk assessed the board, then lifted his eyes to look, with intense curiosity, at Sera. Andruk spoke quietly. “She will win in either four moves or seven, depending on what he does next.”

Hamza raised an affronted face to Andruk, then glanced at Sera. She met his gaze without expression. Hamza sat up straighter and lifted his chin. “The outcome of a battle is never certain until it is fought,” he said. He made his move.

Sera smiled. “If you are indeed a storyteller, you know that is not true. Half the epic recitations I hear describe doomed men going to battle even though they know they are doomed.”

Hamza shook his head. “An audience can be told that the fate of a character is determined, and still they wait in anticipation, hoping that fate can be altered.”

Andruk reached down and picked up one of the white pieces clustered at the edge of the board with the other pebbles that were not yet in play. He rolled the stone between his thumb and forefinger. “In the market in Zogong I saw men arrested for playing this game. It is illegal.”

Sera plucked the stone from his fingers and set it down in the place of the piece she had just captured from Hamza. “In the big cities it is outlawed,” she said, “but those small, capricious laws don't apply out here.”

“Why is it outlawed?” Li Du asked.

Andruk appeared to wait for Sera to answer. When she did not, he said, “Do you know of the death of the regent who served the Great Fifth?”

Li Du did. “He was beheaded after a failed attempt to assassinate the khan in Lhasa—Lhazang,” he said.

Andruk nodded. “There is a rumor that Lhazang Khan told the regent that if he could defeat him at the Game of Many Eyes, the regent could keep his life. The regent lost. Now the game has a reputation for being unlucky, and so it is banned.”

“By whom is it banned?” The question came from Hamza. “It was not unlucky for Lhazang.”

Andruk shrugged. “Lhazang Khan's command over this country is not yet accepted by all families. His declaration that the Sixth Dalai Lama was a false incarnation did not convince everyone. And it was a strange alignment of omens that revealed the Khan's own son to be the true incarnation.”

Sera looked at Andruk curiously. “Then you think that the Dalai Lama who now sits in the Potala Palace is not the true Dalai Lama?”

Andruk's expression became shuttered. “I am not the only one who thinks it. I am only reporting what I have heard on the trade routes,” he said.

Hamza had taken a long time over his move. He came to a decision, smiled, and claimed seven of Sera's pieces. Sera watched him to replace white with black. “Rumors, lies, truths, and stories. It becomes difficult to tell them apart. The way I heard it, the regent and Lhazang played the game years before the regent's death, and the wager was a woman they both desired.”

“What is this game?” Campo's voice from the fire was vexed, and he rubbed the scar on his hand as if it irritated him. He stood up to hover uncomfortably over the game.

Andruk, who had not been translating, explained in slow Chinese. “When one player surrounds the pieces of the other, they change color from black to white or from white to black, until the whole board is one or the other and there is a winner.”

“The board is almost white,” Campo said.

“It is possible,” said Hamza, stiffly, “for a player to win with only one piece remaining.”

Campo's gaze went to the silver coins on the table. “When Moses came down from Mount Sinai,” he said, “he saw that while he was gone the people had made a golden calf. In righteous anger he threw the stone tablets to the ground and smashed them, and he destroyed the idol.” Campo raised a hand to his chest. He was becoming agitated. “My own heart is pierced with sadness when I see the infidels bind themselves to the world with jewelry and palaces and silver coins, when a little of that wealth put toward new missions here in these wastelands would slow thousands of souls in their headlong rush to eternal perdition.”

As Campo concluded, the soft echo of Andruk's translation seemed to infuriate him. He strode forward as if he would upend the table and scatter the pieces to the ground. Li Du put a hand gently on the other man's arm, and Campo stopped. He looked down at Li Du's hand, and his demeanor changed, became timid. “I—I am not feeling myself,” he said. “It is only that I am much preoccupied. I will return to my room to rest awhile.”

After casting a final restless glance around the kitchen, Campo retreated to the door. Li Du, after a quick exchange of looks with Hamza, followed.

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Li Du caught up to Campo in the courtyard. Campo seemed relieved to see him, and instead of reiterating his intention to rest, invited Li Du to converse with him for a while.

Once inside his room, Campo performed a brief but adamant genuflection before his makeshift altar, then moved toward the brazier.

“You seemed upset,” Li Du said, watching Campo closely. “I wondered if perhaps you had recalled something more about the night you fell.”

This appeared to confuse Campo. “No,” he said, after a long pause. “I have nothing more to say about that.”

“Then what distressed you?”

Campo's hands shook as he bent down to light the brazier. “A suspicion has been growing in my mind,” he said.

Li Du waited for him to continue.

“I fear,” Campo said gravely, “that we are imprisoned here not by the natural variance of moisture and air, but by sorcery.”

It was not what Li Du had hoped to hear, but he did his best not to show his frustration. “This is an early snowfall,” he said. “It is not an unusual occurrence, and will not keep us here much longer.”

“But what if the snow does not melt,” whispered Campo. “What if we are trapped here in this valley forever. What if we are in—” He stopped. It was as if he could not bear to finish the sentence.

He appeared so genuinely frightened that Li Du, concerned, placed a hand on Campo's arm and guided him gently to the cushioned seat beside the brazier. “Rest here,” he said. Campo sat down obediently, and Li Du took the place opposite him.