Jowa honked the horn on the truck. Gendun seemed not to hear. Shan saw that his hands were clutched together, the palms cupped as though cradling something.

The lama extended his hands, and as Shan offered his own hand, palm upward, Gendun dropped something into it. A feather. A two-inch-long feather, delicately patterned in brown and black at the base and snow white along its top half, the end faintly mottled with black spots, as if someone had sprayed it lightly with ink. Gendun watched, fascinated, as it drifted onto Shan's palm, then rose and walked to the truck.

Jowa drove the ancient truck relentlessly, as if being chased, bouncing over washouts, sliding in and out of deep ruts, stopping with an abrupt shudder when small boulders, released from the slope above, appeared before them in the illumination of the parking lights. Jowa refused to use the headlights. Soldiers sometimes patrolled the mountains at night.

Shan had put the feather in the gau he wore around his neck and now, as the truck lurched through the night, he sat with his hand around the gau, thinking. Was it a clue? A bidding of good fortune? As he looked at the dying boy in his mind's eye he realized that no, it may have been just a token of beauty to be carried as he moved closer to the ugliness of murder.

Hours later, as Shan and Lokesh climbed into the rear cargo bay after pushing still another boulder aside, Jowa joined them. He checked the barrels lashed to the metal frame of the bay. Most were filled with salt, a vital trading commodity of the region, taken from the salt beds of the central plateau that had supported trade in the region for centuries. Directly behind the cab, under a pile of oil-stained canvas, were two empty barrels, the barrels where Shan and Gendun would hide if they were stopped by a patrol. This was their third truck, for twice they had had to cross over ranges on horseback, led by guides who would speak only to Jowa. Each of the trucks had contained similar salt barrels and two empty ones, with skillfully made inserts that allowed three inches of salt to rest on top once the barrel was occupied. The cover of salt traders might be sufficient for Lokesh and Jowa, who had their papers, but Shan and Gendun would have no chance unless they hid.

Jowa helped wrap a blanket around Lokesh. Although there was room in front, the old Tibetan had chosen to stay in the cargo bay with Shan for most of the journey. As Lokesh settled with his back against the cab, Jowa moved to the rear of the truck. He stood for a moment before stepping down, his hand braced against one of the ribs of the bay.

"Before sunrise," Jowa announced through the shadows, "someone will meet us."

"Who?" Shan asked.

"Someone to take us there," Jowa replied in the distant, almost resentful tone he always used with Shan.

"Where?"

"Where we have to be."

Shan sighed. "You still don't think I belong here."

"They told me to bring you. I am bringing you."

"Why?"

A shallow, bitter laugh escaped Jowa's lips. "You know them, maybe better than I. There is no why with the old lamas. The woman was destined to be killed. You were destined to go."

"No. I mean, why you? You could have said no."

"I know this region. Years ago, I helped watch the army up here."

"You could have said no," Shan repeated.

It took Jowa longer to answer this time. When he spoke his voice was softer, not friendly, but not resentful. "The lamas grow old. I do not know what Tibet will be without them. In twenty, thirty years, who will go and sit in the hermit cells, who will go to live inside a mountain because the land's soul needs help?"

"Maybe you will."

"No. Not me. Not those like me. The Chinese have taught me new ways. I am contaminated with hate," he said matter-of-factly, as if speaking of a physical handicap. "I have fired a gun." He looked at the moon, and for the first time Shan thought he saw sadness on the purba's face. "How could I go and sit in a mountain if I have fired a gun?" It was a question Jowa had obviously asked himself many times. "And who's left?" He stepped out of the truck but lingered in the moonlight. "When they took my monk's license away, and I began to resist," he said, speaking toward the moon, "I thought then that the whole problem with Tibet was not enough resistance. It's like we talk ourselves out of so many fights that we no longer stand for anything." He shook his head and looked away, toward the darkened peaks. "Now…" He shrugged. "In prison I decided that there weren't enough of us left to fight, that all we could do was see that the lamas would be protected, so Beijing would not kill the old ways. But I didn't stop to think. The old ways are the lamas, and the lamas are as mortal as the rest of us. We can try to stop Beijing but we can't stop time. If the lamas don't survive, if what they do doesn't survive, then what's the point?"

Shan realized that in his own way Jowa was indeed explaining why he was escorting the unlikely trio on their enigmatic mission. Through the moonlight Shan could see him shrug again. "They almost never ask us for anything. It is impossible to say no."

But Shan knew that Jowa understood something else- that nothing the lamas did was random, that they didn't ask Jowa because he could drive a truck or even because he was a purba who knew the region, but because he was Jowa.

"The herdsman and his wife," Shan said as Jowa turned to leave. "How did they know? It's supposed to be a secret. I thought the purbas brought the word to Lhadrung, and only they knew we were coming."

"They did. The purbas know how to keep a secret."

"They said we were coming to save the children. Two boys have already died."

"An old woman died, and a lama disappeared. That's all I was told." Jowa disappeared around the corner of the truck. A moment later the heavy engine roared to life.

Shan retrieved a hat from the floor, a tattered quilted army hat with heavy earflaps. He pulled it over his head and settled against one of the barrels on the side so he could watch the moon. The purbas had brought the secret of the woman's death. But now there was another secret moving south through the dropka, a warning about children and death and about the strangers from Lhadrung coming to help.

They passed by a waterfall that glistened like diamonds falling through the night. A small throaty buzz came from nearby. Lokesh was sleeping. Shan put his hands deep in his jacket pockets, for warmth, and his right hand closed around the small jar Gendun had given him that night when they began their journey, a jar of the consecrated sand taken from the mandala. He gripped it tightly as he gazed into the sky.

The moon that Shan watched was not the same moon he had known in the lands below, in the China of his first life. Like so much else in his second life, his Tibetan reincarnation, the moon was more absolute than the one he had known in Beijing. In Tibet it was so brilliant and pure, so close that one could believe the old tales that drifting souls sometimes got caught in its mountains.

There were nights when he could get lost in such a moon, let himself be absorbed for hours in its beauty. But tonight the dead boy haunted him and kept him from the beauty. You must hurry, the man had said. Death keeps coming. To anyone else the words would have been a warning to flee, to run away from death. But for Shan they had meant hurry, go to meet it. A wave of helplessness swept over him, and he knew that his face wore the same sad confusion the Tibetans sometimes wore. Even some of the lamas had shown it when they had dispatched him seven nights before. They might as well have used the same words as the dropka, for all they had told him, for all Gendun still told him. You must hurry. Death keeps coming. That was all the lamas understood. Murder was an unknown land to them, and Shan was their ambassador.