He stared at them a long time, then scooped out two small holes and reverently returned the bird and the splinter of wood to the grave.

The cricket chirped again. Crickets were supposed to bring good luck. But they had brought none to Khitai. And none to Red Stone clan.

He rose and paced about the darkening clearing, considering it not as a graveyard but as a killing place. Bajys could have come up from the encampment or climbed along the ridge, over the rocks, into the clearing. He had come near the end of day, the end of a day when Khitai had been playing with Alta, the boy with the dropka. He had shot, but no one had heard a gun.

He realized the wind that coursed over the rocks could mask such a sound. As he paused to listen to its low moan, Shan felt something black and icy surge within him. It came like this sometimes, a dark coldness welling within, and when it did he had to stop and fight it. Sometimes it came on him with a spell of shaking, other times as a burning spot on his arm where he wore his lao gai tattoo, or along his spine where the knobs had used cattle prods. It was black and shapeless, and he had no name for it. It wasn't fear, or hate, it was just the thing that lingered from his years in the gulag, especially from the first weeks when all he could remember was a miasma of pain and people shouting at him. He closed his eyes and remembered the first time he had met one of the lamas, when the old Tibetan had pulled Shan's face out of the mud as he lay beneath a raging guard, about to suffocate. The lama had straddled Shan's body to take the baton blows meant for Shan. He remembered the serene smile on the lama's face as the guard beat him, and his weakness passed. He put a hand against the rock wall for a moment to steady himself, then continued around the clearing.

As he walked he found a place in the wall opposite the entry path where a thick slab of rock had tumbled from above, creating a small sheltered alcove. He stepped into its shadows and struck a match. A white cylindrical object lay at the base of the rock, partially covered with sand. He reached for it and found that it was a candle, which he lit just as the match flickered out.

Protected as it was from the wind, the sandy floor of the little enclosure still showed shallow indentations where two people had sat, facing the flat rear wall. On the wall, inscribed in chalk, was a circle eighteen inches wide. Only a circle. It could be a drawing game played by children. Shan's mind drifted to other circles he had seen on walls, those drawn on prison walls to symbolize a mandala, which always began with a circle to focus the mind into awareness of inner space and emptiness. Some circles were drawn to help focus meditation. But that was in Tibet, not in a Kazakh herding camp.

He held the flame higher and saw more writing on the adjacent wall. Two horizontal lines intersected by two perpendicular lines, with two Xs and two Os in four of the boxes formed by the lines. A drawing game popular in the West, played by Shan with his father when Shan had been Khitai's age. He looked back at the circle. No doubt it too had been part of a game, perhaps simply a target for boys throwing stones. He turned to the line game. It had been interrupted. He shuddered as he saw in his mind the young boy playing his innocent game, only to be dragged away by someone intent on killing him. Did it mean Alta had been a witness, left sitting in the alcove? Or did it mean the murderer himself had been playing the game with Khitai? A murderer so heartless as to kill a child would be capable of anything, even luring a child to his death by an act of playfulness. What kind was it, Lokesh would have asked, what kind of demon had taken over Bajys? Hariti, the dropka had said. The child-eating demon.

As Shan descended the hill, Malik was sitting in the evening greyness at a small fire by the animal pens, the big mastiff laying beside him. He was studying the sky and seemed not to notice when Shan sat beside him.

The sky was still and vast, dominated by a brilliant half moon. From a distance an animal howled. On the far side of the fire Shan saw a large peg in the ground from which a rope extended into the darkness. Tethered to the rope were several young horses.

When he had been released from prison, he had spent many nights like this, under the stars in secret meditation places shown him by the old lamas. Sometimes one of them, usually Gendun, had sat with him, trying, he eventually realized, to draw out the torment that resided in his soul. They had reconstructed his life year by year, sometimes month by month, having him speak over an old ceramic urn decorated with a simple line drawing of the Compassionate Buddha.

"The pot is now full," Gendun had said when they had finished, and he had capped the vessel with a ceramic lid. He had handed Shan a rock and one of the small, melodic bells used in the temple, then left Shan under the stars without further explanation.

Shan had been on an open ledge, so high that the sky had been almost as broad below him as above him. Once he had tried to move the urn and it had seemed incomprehensibly heavy. After several hours, in the darkest of the night, Shan had shattered the urn with the rock and picked up the bell. He had rung the small bell, making a sound like a brilliant vibrating crystal, until the sun rose.

He fingered the tiny shard of the urn that he still carried in his pocket. He had returned days later to retrieve it, for there was one piece of his prior life he could not leave behind. His son.

When Malik reached over to nudge his leg, the touch was so unexpected that Shan jumped. "Do you think he went there?" the boy asked quietly. "Last year, when a baby died, my uncle said they go to a beautiful valley on the moon."

Shan followed his gaze toward the moon. It made his heart ache, that the boy was so familiar with death. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe. It is very beautiful."

"It's so white," Malik whispered. "It must be the color of their sand." He was silent a moment, then asked another question. "Where would they get water?"

"Perhaps," Shan suggested, "they need no water."

The comment seemed to confuse the boy. He looked into the flames. "Water is life," he said, sounding very wise. "Is that how you know you're dead? You have no more thirst?" When Shan didn't answer he slowly bent and lifted something lying at his feet. A knife. And a thin piece of wood that widened into an oval at the end. He began slicing away slivers of the wood, aiming the cuttings into the embers where they curled in the heat, then flashed into a quick, hot flame.

"A spoon," Malik volunteered. "A present for Jakli and-" he paused. "A present, for the horse festival."

Shan watched him work the wood with firm expert strokes. "I saw the bird you gave him," he ventured quietly.

The boy showed no surprise. "My mother asked me to carve one when the baby died last year. To help guide him through the sky, she said. This time no one asked but-" Malik shrugged. "The zheli are younger than me. It made me sad, to know they had grown up always running. Khitai, he had no ashamai saddle, no sundet horse."

"I don't understand."

"Those orphans, they never have a real home. Khitai said when he was young people passed him around, to protect him. Sometimes he was in the mountains, sometimes in a city. Once he spent a year living in a cave. He said it was better with Bajys and Lau, but growing up like that, it meant he didn't know the old Kazakh ways. I was sorry he had no saddle." Malik paused and glanced at Shan. "When a boy is five years old he can ride alone," he explained, "and is given a special soft saddle, an ashamai saddle, decorated with feathers and red paint. Later, when a mullah pronounces him ready to start the road to manhood, there are ceremonies and a feast and he gets a sundet horse, his first horse. But Khitai never had any. Not a saddle, not a horse. He said it was all right, that he loved all the animals, and they taught him things. He climbed a tree to see baby birds once. He followed butterflies."