They waited a quarter hour for the ghost lama to return, exchanging uncertain glances, as if none were sure now of exactly what they had seen. Then the herders rose and silently filed away from the rock, following one of the game trails that led southward down the wide ridge.

It was impossible, Shan kept telling himself as they slowly walked back to Rapjung. The medicine lamas had all died. The soldiers had cleared out the surrounding hills years earlier. With all the patrols, all the pacification campaigns, it did not seem possible even one could have survived. Lokesh offered no suggestion, no theory of how now, after decades, one of the old lamas could appear in the hills. He just followed Shan, lost in a strange reverie, or perhaps in his memories of Rapjung as it had existed fifty years earlier. Several paces behind Lokesh, came the American, also silent, seemingly numbed by what he had seen.

Again and again Shan replayed the scene in his mind. It wasn't that a lama had survived all these years in the mountains, he realized; the dropka had come because of something new, because they had heard of a miracle. Someone else had seen a ghost lama, he suddenly remembered. The herders by the hermitage the night Drakte had died. One of the old lamas had arrived, had returned. From where? Why? And why now, when the eye was on its journey, when Drakte had died and the army was scouring the land, when a dobdob, protector of the faith, was attacking devout Buddhists, when an American had gone missing?

Shan had no answers. He had only foreboding. Although he knew little, he knew enough to be frightened.

No one asked where they had been when they arrived at the camp. Several of those who had completed the kora had just returned themselves, having meditated at the hermit's cave or the drup-chu shrine. As the Yapchi men went to check on the sheep, Nyma sought Shan out.

"It happened again," the nun said. "The poor girl." Shan looked up from the sheep whose pack he was tightening. "She just fell over on the trail and began shaking, and beating the earth with her hands and feet."

"Anya?" Shan asked, realizing he had seen the girl lying under a blanket by the fire.

"Nothing happened. No words. Sometimes it's like that," Nyma murmured.

The words chilled Shan. She was talking about the oracle.

"I told that monk, hoping he could help," Nyma continued. "But he seemed angry at my words. I think his head is still hurt from that attack."

Shan followed the nun's gaze toward Padme, who sat resting against the ruins of the wall, at a place apart, writing in his small notepad.

They ate in silence and drank tea as the sun set, the company in quiet contemplation after a day on the kora.

Lokesh did not speak until he spread his blanket near Shan to sleep.

"It is a good sign, a wonderful sign, for a medicine lama to appear in the herb meadow," the old Tibetan said, in a tone that said he was still not certain the man had been flesh and blood. "And a monk on the Plain of Flowers. That dobdob will not hurt us. Things will get better, you'll see."

But in the early hours of the morning, a scream woke Shan. He sat up as Lokesh gave an agonized groan. The restored shrines of Rapjung were engulfed in flames.

Chapter Eight

The dry, brittle wood of the elegant little lhakang cracked and spat, burning as hot as a furnace, throwing off sparks that spiraled far into the night sky. No one could get close to the flames, or even close enough to the adjacent assembly hall to keep the fire from spreading to it. Gang's wife held the caretaker back, tears streaming down her face, the young boy holding his father's left wrist out as though trying to show it to someone. The skin on Gang's palm was a mass of welts, the back of the hand scorched red and black. A small soot-stained figurine lay at his feet. He had saved the little Buddha from the altar.

The stream was two hundred yards away, and they had only two small leather buckets and the cooking pots from the house to carry water. They ran back and forth from the stream for a quarter hour, then Lhandro raised his palm and lowered his empty bucket to the ground. They could do nothing but watch as the conflagration, having already destroyed the lhakang, consumed the assembly hall and spread to the small deity chapel beside it.

"Like a giant samkang," Nyma said with a whimper. Incredibly, Gang, through years of effort, had constructed the buildings of cedar and juniper, the kind of fragrant wood burned in samkangs to attract deities.

Suddenly the nun cried out and ran to the other side of the lhakang, Shan at her heels. Winslow was bent over, gasping, hands on his knees, beside a large block of wood. Tenzin sat on the ground nearby, his face smudged with soot. As the flames flared up in a gust of wind Shan saw the block more clearly. The two men had saved the half-completed carving of the protector deity. Beyond them in the shadows another figure sat, Gang's young daughter staring with vacant eyes at an object between her legs. It was the prayer wheel. Her hands lay open on either side of the wheel. The skin was burned away from the palms, exposing raw flesh where she had grasped the searing metal. Nyma gasped and bent over the girl, calling for the last pail of water to wash the terrible wounds.

Shan found Lokesh with his back to the fire, deep pain in his eyes, watching the sparks as they flew into the night. As Shan stepped to the old Tibetan's side, he was unable to find words. It could not have been an accident. There had been no campfire near the cluster of restored buildings, and Gang would never have burned his little samkang, consuming scraps of his precious wood, at night, unattended.

"Someone came from outside," Shan said in a low voice. "That dobdob tried to burn the plain. It must have been-" something cracked into the side of his head and Shan found himself on his knees, blinking, unable to focus his eyes. Something sharp hit his shoulder, then Lokesh cried out and threw himself over Shan.

"Oppressor!" a voice shouted angrily, and a stone bounced off Lokesh's leg. "Tyrant! A Chinese comes and ruin follows!"

There was a struggle behind them. Shan twisted about on his knees to see Lhandro and Nyma pulling Gang backwards, dragging him away from Shan. His injured hand reached out toward Shan like a claw, as the other was pushed downward by his wife, a stone dropping from it. As the others pulled her husband away Gang's wife hesitantly stepped toward Shan, her cheeks stained with tears and soot.

"You must understand," she said in a rush of breath, like a sob. "All these years. Since our first child was born, all that time." Tears streamed down her cheeks. "In the winter waiting for snow so he could drag the wood down from the mountains. In the summer covered with sawdust. Working in the moonlight even, working on festival days. Never even taking time to play with his children." A wall crashed down, sending splinters of smoldering timbers flying in an explosion of sparks. A piece of charred, smoking wood landed at her feet, and she knelt by it, studying it as if she needed to understand where it had belonged in the lhakang.

"Sometimes he had to make his own tools," she said, in a remote tone now, as she lifted the wood and struck it on the ground to shake off the embers. After a moment she stood and carried the fragment to a row of stones, then carefully laid it on the ground. She found another, nearly two feet long, struck away the embers, and silently laid it alongside the first. Tenzin appeared, carrying another fragment to lay beside those collected by the woman. A pile of salvaged wood. The first step in building again.