The White Mirror (9 page)

“No—in the Chinese language, which I speak when I must. But if you will continue speaking with me in the language of the Church, I would be grateful. It is a comfort. Andruk talks so rapidly that I sometimes cannot understand him. He is a tiresome man. And now this man's death has thrown him—thrown us both—into distraction.”

“It was a terrible death,” said Li Du, quietly.

Campo repeated the word. “Terrible? Yes. But this is a barbaric land, full of horrors.” Something, perhaps uncertainty, flickered across Campo's face. “You saw him in the snow?”

Li Du nodded. “It is a sight I will not forget.”

“And he—he inflicted the wound upon himself?”

“It appears that he did.”

Campo murmured a brief string of words that sounded to Li Du like a prayer. He began to pace the room. “We must not listen to enchantments,” he said. “The painter listened, and now he is dead.” Campo's gaze moved to the door that separated them from the chapel. The low intonations of the monk were faintly audible through it. Campo began to pick at the skin of his knuckles. Li Du saw that they were raw and scabbed.

“Do you know something of Dhamo's death?”

“I? Of course I do not. I cannot know what evil he brought upon himself.”

Li Du waited for him to continue, but Campo seemed to have drifted into his own thoughts. When he spoke again, it was on a different subject. “The snow fell so quickly,” he said. “I did not expect to be trapped here. I am afraid.”

“What frightens you?”

Campo did not answer.

Li Du tried again. “Do you perceive some threat?”

“No.” Campo shook his head as if to clear it. “It is nothing. I am only tired and upset. And I am very cold. I cannot remain still here where there is no warmth. You will return with me to the manor?”

Li Du shook his head. “I will stay here awhile. I came to find a library.”

Campo rubbed his hands and blew again on his fingers. “Be careful of the books you find here. Their words are corrupted. They will poison you.”

*   *   *

When Campo had gone, Li Du stood listening to the prayers through the wall. He had not observed any shelves containing scrolls or bound books in the chapel. To return and search for them seemed inappropriate. A draft spun down from the eaves and spread another trail of ash across the floor. He looked at the hearth and imagined the room warm and lit.

A tea churn, a kettle, and two pots rested on the floor. One pot was coated in layers of old grease, to which blackened morsels of pepper and millet adhered. The other was filled with a smooth, almost translucent substance. Li Du bent to touch its surface. It was cold and hard as glass. He looked up at the dangling ribbons above, realizing that they were thin sheets of glue. Melted in the pot, the glue strips would be used to bind pigments.
Would have been,
Li Du corrected himself.

He pictured the solitary monk alternating pots on the fire: judging from what he had been told, Li Du guessed that Dhamo had considered one as essential to his subsistence as the other. Who had Dhamo been? How had he lived? The closed door at the back of the room beckoned. Li Du crossed the room and pushed it open.

While the workroom was a tumble of supplies and tools, this room was free of clutter. One corner held a small cot covered in blankets of brown fur and unembroidered brown wool. The walls were bare. In the center of the room was an easel, in front of which was a cushion that retained the indentation of knees that had recently pressed into it. On the floor beside the cushion was a single wooden bowl that held the crusted remnants of azure blue paint. Three brushes dangled from an unadorned brush stand.

Suspended in the easel was a rectangle of heavy cloth pulled taut by string sewn through its folded edges and tied to the surrounding frame. Its surface had been smoothed by a wash of white paint, on top of which faint charcoal outlines had been applied. Li Du had to bend down to discern the image. The closer he looked, the more intricate it became.

A figure dominated the center. It had seven faces, each of which wore a different expression. Its body was draped with chains of human heads and beaded garlands. Numerous arms fanned out from its torso; the topmost set of hands wielded scarves decorated with eyes. Details had been drawn with equal precision at the borders, which were crowded with animals and clouds, each one unique.

While the subject of the thangka had been meticulously sketched out, its creator had added only two pigments before abandoning the work. A background of sky and mountains was depicted in rich hues of blue and green.

Li Du stepped back. He could almost see the painter kneeling before the easel, right hand lifted, muscles subservient to the mind that commanded them.

“This was Dhamo's room,” came a voice behind Li Du.

He turned, startled. In the doorway stood the young man from the manor house, whose name, Li Du remembered, was Pema. He was stooping from the weight of a basket on his back, from which protruded three rolls of thick white cloth. He lowered the basket to the floor.

“I am sorry,” Li Du said. “I should not have intruded.” He backed away from the easel and joined Pema in the other room. Pema closed the door to Dhamo's studio, his expression blank.

“Were you his assistant?”

The question appeared to disconcert Pema. “I helped him sometimes,” he said.

An awkward silence followed. “Does your family live in the village?” Li Du asked.

Pema's mouth quirked in a humorless smile. “I am the eldest son of the manor house.”

Li Du tried to conceal his surprise. “I apologize. I misunderstood.”

Pema moved to one of the shelves and began to fiddle with a bowl that contained rough rocks. He picked one up. It was veined with bright green and pale quartz and sprinkled with a glitter of gold dust. “I was adopted when I was an infant.” Pema replaced the rock.

Li Du considered this for a moment. “I learned this morning that the Chhöshe also was born into this family. Then you and he are brothers?”

Pema's hand went still. “We were,” he said. “When we were very small.”

Seeing Pema's shoulders slump, Li Du searched for a more welcome subject. “I am surprised to see these rare pigments and minerals in such a remote place,” he said. “How were they acquired?”

Pema brightened. “I bought them for him,” he said, “at the markets of Dajianlu.”

“A long journey from here?”

“A week, or a little more.”

“Dhamo never accompanied you?”

Pema shook his head. “He gave me lists of what he needed. Dhamo never traveled.” Pema moved to a rack of brushes and selected one. He pressed his thumb to one end, absently testing the give of its bristles. “I liked the journey,” he said. “It is the farthest from this valley I have ever been, or will ever go.”

“There are scholars,” said Li Du, “who claim it is possible to experience all the epiphanies of travel within the mind, to move through distant landscapes without leaving home.”

Pema's mouth quirked. “I would not want to be transported into one of Dhamo's paintings.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” said Pema, “they were like the wildflowers in the fields where I take the goats in the summer. They are beautiful, but every year they are the same flowers, only in different places. I would rather see what I have never seen before. You are a traveler—is that not the reason you travel?”

Li Du hesitated. “Not at first,” he said, “but perhaps it is now.”

Pema sighed, and returned the brush to the brush stand. Then he crossed the room, removed the rolls of white cloth from his basket, and, with a nervous look at the closed door of the chapel, set the cloth down on the floor. “I must return to the manor,” he said. “There is more to carry.”

He was about to leave, then paused. “There is something I cannot stop thinking,” he said. “Perhaps it is not important.”

Li Du looked at Pema's wan, scarred face. “If you are thinking it, then it is important to you.”

“It is about Dhamo,” Pema said. “It is only that all my life I watched him paint. They are not uncommon. I have seen them in thangkas in Dajianlu. But—”

Li Du's voice was gentle. “What is it that is bothering you?”

Pema kept his gaze on the floor. “In all the years I knew him, I never once saw him paint a mirror.”

*   *   *

Alone again, Li Du gave the shelves a final perusal. He would not have noticed the empty bowl except that it was set a little apart from the others, poised precariously at the edge of a shelf as if it had been set down in a hurry. He pushed it to a more secure location.

As he drew his hand away from it, however, he saw that several dark grains had transferred themselves from the bowl to his fingers. He was about to brush them away when he stopped. He lifted his hand and looked. Tiny red shards gleamed against his skin.

He frowned, and cast his mind back to the bridge the day before. He saw again the snow beginning to cover the dead man, recalled the wooden beads bobbing and pulling away from the stiff, hooked fingers that could no longer clutch them. He remembered the red shards that he had found in the snow by the body. The ones that now clung to his hand were identical.

There had been a time in Li Du's life when he had been able to find the answers to all of his questions on the shelves of the library in Beijing. Now he closed his eyes and searched the duplicate library housed in his memory. He saw a room in the southeast wing. A lacquered screen in one corner depicted the story, in gold and green, of the sisters who abandoned a god only to be summoned back and turned into mountains.

Deep in the memory, Li Du paused to look at the painting. He thought about how time was spread across it, the future mapped across the same surface as their past. Someone who did not know the tale might see a painting of nine women and three mountains, when in fact it was a painting of three women at four moments in time. At the top of left of the screen, the three mountains that had been women rose into the clouds, each the same color as the silk robes of the woman it had been, the clouds around them like sashes blowing in the wind.

Li Du scanned the shelves to the right of the screen until he found the text that he sought.
The Making of Pigments.
The neat columns came into focus in front of his eyes.
Vermilion,
the text read,
comes from cinnabar, an ore of mercury, and can be recognized by its color and heavy weight. The mineral is ground in mortar and pestle and cleansed of impurities with water. Care must be taken in grinding it. A circular motion will turn it unpleasing white. A pounding motion will turn it useless black. Proper grinding alternates these motions and uses only the minimum of water …
Li Du skimmed to the section below:
On Locating Sources of Cinnabar …

 

Chapter 8

Li Du had almost reached the base of the stairs when he saw three people below him through the trees. He recognized Rinzen immediately; the yellow silk of his coat was an incongruous blossom amid the dark wood and faded green lichen. Beside Rinzen was a tall man with a basket strapped to his back—Doso, Li Du guessed. The third person was speaking in loud, slow Chinese.

“Souls lost,” Campo was saying, “as if abandoned by God.”

“We share your concern.” The speaker was indeed Doso. “But we must defer to the Chhöshe in matters of burial, and to the astrologer who will come from the village when the path is clear.”

“But I do not trust—” Campo stopped at the sound of Li Du's approach and swung around to see who had come.

Doso greeted Li Du in Chinese. He sounded relieved. “You have come from the temple,” he said. “We are going there now.”

Rinzen gave a small bow. “Does the Chhöshe continue his prayers there?”

“He does,” replied Li Du.

Doso shifted his ursine shoulders to redistribute the weight of the basket, which was so heavy that its straps had pressed deep grooves into his coat. Li Du saw that it contained iron tools and twine. “I will not keep you here in the snow,” said Doso, addressing both Campo and Li Du. “Please go down to the kitchen, where food and drink await you at the hearth.”

Campo looked as if he could not decide whether to resume his pontification or continue toward the promise of warmth.

Li Du hesitated. The idea that had occurred to him in the studio fluttered in his mind, uncertain yet insistent. “I do have one question,” he said. “It is only the idle curiosity of a traveler. I carry with me a journal written by a scholar who once passed through this part of the world. He writes that in the mountains above Bathang, which I know is not far from here, he encountered pools of water heated by the earth. Even in winter, he writes, they steam like a pot over flame. I hope to encounter this marvel, and wonder if there are any such pools on your land.”

Doso's eyebrows lifted in surprise. “There are.”

“Well,” Li Du said, as casually as he could, “then I am glad I thought to inquire.”

Doso's face became serious. “But we do not visit them. The villagers consider it an unlucky place.”

“Even so,” Li Du said. “Unusual phenomena are always of interest to a traveler. Can you direct me to them?”

“They are not far,” said Doso. “You might have perceived their odor from the path when you arrived yesterday. But are you certain you wish to visit them now? Such springs are not uncommon in these mountains.”

Li Du nodded. “I would regret missing the opportunity.”

Doso relented. “Then I will tell you the easiest way. Return to the bridge and retrace your steps on the path along which your caravan traveled. When you see a boulder with trees growing on top of it, leave the path. There is an old stone wall. Follow it, and you will come to the pools.”

Campo coughed and, with a visible shiver, stamped his feet to warm them. “It is very cold,” he said. “I will go to the hearth, as you suggested.” He resumed his progress down the stairs, his breath clouding the air around him.