In the silence that followed, the wind surged for a moment, fanning the flames, tossing open the back door of Chodron’s house. Shan saw a blush of color in the dim light, red with dabs of yellow. An altar? The pattern of color coalesced. Chodron had hung the flag of Beijing at the rear entry.

Shan studied the elders for a moment. “Where are the children?” he asked abruptly.

“Children?” Chodron shot a wary glance toward the elders. The old woman cupped her hands and stared into them. The oldest-a frail man with a white, wispy beard-cast an empty, longing look at Shan. The genpo rose and stood between Shan and the elders.

“I have seen none between the ages of perhaps five and eighteen,” Shan continued. “Tell us where you’ve sent them.”

“Away,” Chodron muttered.

“Chinese school,” Lokesh said, grasping Shan’s meaning. “Where they lose their Tibetan names. Where they are forced to speak only Chinese and sing the songs of Beijing. Where they are taught the Dalai Lama is a criminal.”

Chodron offered no denial.

“How many times have you gone to school, Chodron?” Shan asked. At schools for municipal leaders, the curriculum was established by senior Party members. Chodron spoke and dressed like a farmer but at his temple the lamas were Party bosses.

“Who are you?” Chodron snarled. “Why were you in prison?”

Shan ignored his question. “What bargains have you made in order to keep Drango the way it is?”

Lokesh extracted a cone of incense from a pocket and dropped it into the embers at the edge of the fire. The man with the white beard stared at the thin plume of smoke, absently extending his fingers into it.

Chodron’s countenance grew rigid. “You shall give the village the affirmation it needs,” he declared. “The headman always carried out severe punishments with a lama at his side. Your lama will stand with me when the sentence is executed, to give me his blessing. Meanwhile, we keep your lama. If he does not restore order by joining me at the appointed time, then I will speak to Public Security about outlaws in robes. Our herders now know where you hide.”

The gray-haired woman set her bowl down and turned her face away.

Chodron added as he took a step toward his house, “But if the deities are truly on your side, they will take the killer into their embrace and never let him wake.”

“So the way he proves his innocence,” Shan said, “is by dying?”

Chodron rejoined in a mocking tone, “Death is but a reward to the virtuous, isn’t that what you teach? But if he awakes. . We will deal with him after the harvest. Before our festival. You have seven days.”

“Please understand,” came a voice as dry as straw. The gray-haired woman finally spoke. “Look at our village. We live on a diet of promises and fear. Chodron has preserved our ways the best he knows how. All we want for Drango is justice, our own justice. You must give us justice.”

Lokesh and Shan exchanged a melancholy glance. Justice. It was a topic they had long ago worn out, a word that had acquired a strange, alien ring to Shan’s ears. He had once thought he could obtain justice for Tibetans. But Lokesh had taught him better, shown him that the government cared little about crimes committed among such remote people. For such Tibetans there was only truth, and the terrible consequences of truth.

Chapter Two

Shan left in the gray light before dawn after glancing through the cracked stable door and over the shoulder of a guard slumped against the inside wall, to confirm that Gendun still maintained his vigil. It was the kind of morning when he and his friends would often slip away to greet the sun, sometimes sprinkling a few kernels of barley for the birds. But the feeling of foreboding that gripped Shan made him wonder if he would ever find such peace of mind again.

A pebble bounced onto the bare earth in front of him, then another. He paused, expecting to spot a sheep on the shadowed slope above, but he saw nothing. Another pebble flew over his shoulder. He heard soft, hurried footfalls on the trail behind him before he could make out the figure hurrying toward him.

“You are not the only one who needs a morning blessing,” Lokesh said when he reached Shan’s side. The first rays of the sun were considered by some of the old Tibetans to be a special gift of the earth deities.

“At the end of this particular trail will be no blessing,” Shan warned.

“The only answer we have found so far is that there are no answers to be found in the village,” Lokesh replied and raced ahead, disappearing around a high rock outcropping.

By the time Shan reached him, Lokesh, who was more than half again Shan’s age, was seated on a high, flat ledge, legs folded into each other, staring at the ragged silhouettes of the eastern ranges as he told his beads in a whisper. Nearby, half a dozen sheep stared at the horizon as intently as did Lokesh himself.

Shan lowered himself onto a slab of rock ten feet away, not wishing to disturb his friend. He knew what to expect, having seen Lokesh in the predawn light with the same joyful expectation on his countenance scores of times before, and though his anxiety at the events of the day before robbed him of his own tranquillity, he drew strength from watching his friend and waiting for the inevitable moment to come.

Lokesh would recite his mantra as the darkness faded, then just before the first rays of light he would abruptly cease, catch his breath and hold it, not inhaling again until the sun appeared. Shan had never seen him fail, never seen him have to draw in another quick breath before the brilliant rays of light appeared. At first he had tried to decipher the strange calculation that Lokesh surely must be doing, then eventually decided there was no calculation, that Lokesh was connected to the natural world in a way he would never experience. Once, coming from a twenty-four-hour meditation, deprived of sleep, Shan had found himself watching Lokesh, not the sun, and for a moment had been overcome with panic that Lokesh would forget to inhale, and the sun would not come up.

Shan was close enough to see Lokesh’s chest freeze and found that he too was holding his breath, watching until a blinding seed of energy materialized on the rim of the mountains. Lokesh acknowledged Shan with his uneven smile, made crooked by the boot of a prison guard years before, then finished his rosary before rising and continuing up the trail. It was one of the many little rituals that defined the lives of the old Tibetans.

They had walked perhaps a mile when they saw a second group of sheep, a dozen rugged, long-haired creatures that sat in the lee of an outcropping above a stream, all intently watching something below. Shan saw the familiar brown mastiff first, on the slope a hundred feet away, as curious as the sheep at the strange sight on the bank of the stream. The figure at the water’s edge was readily recognizable, though the actions of the man in the canque were not.

Yangke was performing what appeared to be a dance, jumping in the air, then kicking out with one foot. His hands were no longer bound by the fittings of the canque, though he was forced to keep a grip on it with one hand to maintain his balance. As they watched, he kicked several times, the last so violently the weight of the collar threw him backward onto the ground. Rising, he made a long sweeping arc with the end of the beam, seeming to scrape the earth, then moved fifty feet downstream and repeated the motions.

“I do not know this ritual,” Lokesh declared in a puzzled tone.

This time Yangke executed a more delicate step, using his toes to separate rocks in a small pile at his feet and coax them along the bank before swatting them into the fast water.

“He practices one of those games people play with sticks and balls,” Lokesh suggested.


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