"Something that taught him to speak Tibetan?" Shan asked. "Something that made him recite Buddhist prayers?"
"He could still have killed the boy."
"The man we found up there is no killer."
"But he lied to us. He's no Kazakh."
"Did he lie? Or just not tell all the truth? You said it before. Some secrets are too dangerous to tell," Shan reminded her.
"He didn't kill the boy," Lokesh said confidently. "He didn't kill Auntie Lau."
"You think they are the same? I mean, one killer?" Jakli asked, looking from Lokesh to Shan. "He has to speak to us, tell us what happened."
"He might not know," Shan said. "Maybe it was seeing the dead boy that did this to him. He had built something around his Tibetan self. A Kazakh shell. And the shell was shattered, lost forever, when he saw the dead boy."
"An old shaman told me once of souls getting confused when death was close," Jakli said. "Getting mixed up, being lifted out, then going back to the wrong body."
"And whose soul does he have now? The killer's?"
"I don't know. I just know that he's not Bajys but he has the body of Bajys." Jakli sighed, then looked up into Shan's eyes. "And they will still kill him. You don't know the old clans. They have their own justice. The government won't help, even if someone asked. If the clans are convinced Bajys is the killer, they will punish him. When I was young two horse thieves were caught near our camp. They were hung from two limbs of the same tree. I went out looking for lambs and saw them. All purple and bloated." A visible shudder moved through her body.
"Who among Lau's friends were Tibetan?" Shan asked.
"No one," Jakli said. "Me, I'm the closest to being Tibetan. I've known her all these years and I've never seen her with a Tibetan except the dropka who watched the children, and they usually stayed away, bringing the children and then hiding until Lau was done."
"She was Kazakh," Shan said with a hint of skepticism, "with friends who were Han Chinese and Uighur. But she had no Tibetan friends. Even with the Tibetan herders wandering the hills below the Kunlun."
"Tibetans aren't given papers for Xinjiang. Very few are classified as natives here. They're treated—" She shrugged as if it was painful to finish the sentence and busied herself with the tea.
"Badly," Shan said, finishing the sentence for her.
Jakli nodded. "Speeches are given by the prosecutor, by Public Security officers. Tibetans are always the example of the uncooperative minority, of the reason why assimilation of the country has taken so long. In Yoktian, a friend showed me something on a computer, an image taken from phone lines. It was from somewhere outside China, and it was a film of a Chinese flag being burned. A Tibetan child appeared and lit it on fire. When it was ashes, the film repeated. Again and again."
"You mean Tibetan friends would have been politically dangerous to Lau."
She nodded again.
"Then why did she learn Tibetan?"
"I don't know. She knew lots of languages. Tadjik. The people's Mandarin. The Party's Mandarin. English."
"English? Why English?"
Jakli looked up as if surprised by the question. "This is China," she said with a small, chastizing smile. "People sit in closets and learn things." She looked up the mountainside. "Lau taught people what they needed. She sometimes taught about Buddha. But she also taught about Mohammed. If she had Han children in her zheli she would have taught them about Confucius and Lao Tze. That's what she did."
"No. In the cave, it was different."
"I don't think so. Why would you believe—"
"Because," Shan suggested, "she never took you there." His words brought a small, nearly silent moan from Jakli. He had seen many things in Jakli's eyes when she had entered the cave chamber and sat, stunned, on the student's cushion. Wonder. Confusion. Reverence. Sadness. But also pain. "You were a friend, and a student too. She taught you about Tibet and Buddhism. But she hid this place even from you."
"But you said there was someone else. Another teacher."
Shan nodded. "A friend who was Tibetan, who does not appear Tibetan. Who else came to this place?" The chamber had not been just for talking about Buddhism. It had been for teaching the Tibetan language and other things Tibetan. The things lost, or nearly lost, to the two generations born since the Chinese invasion.
Jakli looked for a long time into the fire. "There were herders sometimes, passing through. A crazy Xibo who watches the water. In his fifties maybe. They say he's a lunatic." The Xibo were a Manchurian people, uprooted from their homelands nearly three centuries before and sent west to fight the Muslims on behalf of the emperor.
"The water?"
"The Agricultural Council gives a small stipend to make sure key streams are kept open and not contaminated. Many of our streams only flow in the spring. Only a few are constant. So they have people, usually retired herders, who watch the water, keep dead animals out, clear fallen trees from it."
"Who else?"
"Her drivers. And people at the school in Yoktian may have visited here sometimes. Others from the Agricultural Council, maybe."
"Drivers?"
"Sometimes. She couldn't drive a car. So when she was on business for the Council, she used the vehicle pools."
"But not since then, not since she left the council?"
"Sometimes one of the drivers still helped. A Kazakh from the motor pool."
"Would he have known where she was the day she died or who she had been traveling with?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Do you know where he lives?"
"In town, probably. But now at Glory Camp."
"Glory Camp?"
"You heard Fat Mao. Prosecutor Xu stopped at the motor pool in Yoktian."
Shan studied Jakli. "She didn't pick you up. Even though you're a friend of Lau's. Because," he suggested, "the prosecutor knew exactly where you had been when Lau died." He paused and studied Jakli, who seemed to have little concern about being absent from her probation job. "Were you there, at your factory?"
Jakli grimaced and nodded, still staring at the fire. "I left for a day when we brought Lau to the cave. Then I left when I heard you were coming. It's mostly Kazakhs and Uighurs who work there. I have friends there. They cover for me. It's not strict. Not usually, as long as enough hats are being made."
"Prosecutor Xu saw you today. Does she know your face?"
She looked up at him with a frown, but before she could reply Jowa called from the trail. Bajys was emerging into the meadow, supported by Lokesh and Jowa. He seemed barely to have the strength to stand.
"Bajys will have to be protected," Shan said.
"There's a place deep in the Kunlun," Jakli said readily, as though she had been thinking the same thing. "A Tibetan place. Jowa must know about it."
Shan studied her. "You mean, a place where purbas hide?"
"A secret place."
"Are you one of them?" Shan asked abruptly, before the three men were in earshot.
"A purba? Tibet is their cause."
"But not yours?"
"I struggle for my people," Jakli said with a sigh. "For Kazakhs. For Tibet, when I can." She darted forward to help Bajys onto the porch, then took control with a matronly air, sending Shan for water, Jowa for firewood, and Lokesh for dried grass to make a pallet for the ragged, wasted little man.
Bajys sat limply, his eyes unfocused, as she pulled off his shirt, wiping his body with the cold river water. He seemed not to notice any of them.
They drank tea, sharing the two cups from the cabin, and waited until Bajys began to look about, as if finally recognizing where he was.
"It's me, Bajys," Jakli said in Tibetan. "From Akzu's camp."
He looked at her without expression.
"What happened, that night in the rocks?" Her voice was slow and tentative, as if it were not anger but fear she now felt. "Were you with the boys? We need to understand. Do you know that it wasn't Khitai?" Jakli asked.
"Where would he go?" Lokesh interjected. "Where would Khitai run to?" Bajys twisted his head one way, then the other, as he stared first at Jakli, then Lokesh. "I heard the shot. I saw him lying there, with his red cap, and ran. He's dead." The little Tibetan stared toward the door of the cabin, as if seeing someone there invisible to the others. "That was the one I loved," he said in a hollow voice. "That was the one I was to keep safe. He'll be dead again. But that was the one I knew."
Shan stared at him, trying to make sense of his strange words. "Why did you come here?" he asked. "When the boy died, you fled to Lau. Why?"
Bajys's gaze roamed around the campsite before he spoke again. "Sometimes it comes like this, like a dark cloud. And people just die. It can't be stopped." A rattling noise came from his lap. His hand with the beads was shaking.
"Wangtu knows," he said suddenly in a small, quivering voice. "Wangtu told me. Lau was being stalked, he said."
Jakli greeted the words with a frown. "Wangtu doesn't know," she said with abrupt annoyance. "He just talks."
Bajys looked at her and shook his head. "Wangtu knows," he said mournfully. "The world is ending." He seemed to be shrinking before their eyes, growing smaller, hollowing out. Shan had seen it before, even in brave men, and he shuddered to think of the ugliness that caused it. Bajys had gone from the horror of finding the dead boy to see the wise, gentle Lau and instead found human limbs scattered about, a place of terror and death.
"You know this Wangtu?" Shan asked Jakli.
Her frown returned. "I told you about him. Lau's driver. I knew him when I was young."
"That one at Glory Camp?"
"Not for long. She'll question him, he'll offer something unrelated, he'll be released."
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you understand? That's her game. Throw as many as she can in the camp, let them sweat. They can always think of somebody's sin."
"But for how long?" Shan asked. "When will he be released, so I can speak with him?" The prosecutor, he realized, may have deprived him of the only witnesses who could make sense of Lau's death.
"A week, maybe two."
"Too long."
She looked at him and sighed. "You want to get into Glory Camp? Go to town. Burn a copy of the Chairman's speeches in the square."
"I don't want a one-way ticket."
"No way to see him that doesn't involve going into the prison."
A tremor crept along Shan's arm. His right hand clamped over his left forearm, over the number he wore there, the number tattooed on his skin by his prisonkeepers in Tibet. Talk of a prison, even a low security lao jiao camp, seemed to cast a chill over the group. Shan moved closer to the fire.
A hawk screeched overhead. Red and gold leaves danced across the ground, scattered by the late afternoon wind.
"It wasn't supposed to be me at all," Bajys said suddenly, barely above a whisper. "The oldest son goes, that's the way it always was."
Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. There had been a Tibetan tradition of centuries, now shattered, like so much else touched by Beijing, that the oldest son of each family would be sent to train as a monk.
"I was just a dropka, I just wanted to stay with the herds. But my brother was back from a month at the gompa," Bajys said, his voice weak but steadier. "He was getting ready to return for six years of study. We were celebrating Losar, the new year festival, and saying goodbye by playing in the snow one last time. There was a place on the mountainside with a creek that became a long ice slide in the winter. We would sit with a sheepskin on the ice and slide, a hundred, two hundred yards, down to the flat ice where the river was. My brother slid down as I watched and laughed. But when he got to the bottom a black hole in the ice opened up. He shot into the hole and was gone. We never saw him again. No struggle. No body. Hardly a splash. At first I thought it was a good trick and I laughed. But it wasn't a trick. He was gone, laughing with me one second and gone the next. Like he never existed. Even before the Bardo, before the death rites were done, they cut my hair and sent me to the gompa in his place."
His face contorted with pain, Bajys looked into each of their faces, as though inviting any of them to explain it to him. But no one spoke. They sat silently watching the fire.
Shan studied his companions. He knew without asking that they had reached a common understanding. A killer had to be stopped. Khitai and the rest of the zheli had to be saved. The missing lama had to be found. But first Bajys would have to be taken to shelter by Lokesh, who could protect his soul, and by Jowa, who could protect his body. They would go deep into the mountains. And Shan would stay, because Shan had to go back to prison.
