Tenzin stared at the words, then gazed out over the low ranges to the east. He seemed to have forgotten Shan was there.

"It was a mistake," Shan said quietly, "going to that gompa." It occurred to him that perhaps Khodrak and the howlers knew more about Tenzin than he did. He knew the reticent Tibetan would not answer.

But suddenly Tenzin drew in a breath. "When the soul suffocates," he said in a deep, melodic voice, "and only revives on the last gasp, it is never the same soul again." He did not break his gaze from the distant ranges and spoke the words so quickly that Shan thought he had imagined them. The Tibetan turned to Shan and searched his face. "Your lama Gendun said sometimes it is possible to be reincarnated in the same body, in the same lifetime. He said you know about that."

Shan stared. Tenzin had grown his new tongue.

"I am not the man they think they are looking for," Tenzin added. There was torment in his voice.

Shan studied Tenzin's tormented face, trying to understand the strange words. "What is it?" Shan asked. "Why do they seek you? Did you kill someone?"

But Tenzin had receded into his silence again. He stared out at the river that had been bleeding. "Once I did things I hate myself for," he said after a long time, "then I did things they hate me for."

"In Lhasa?" Shan asked. "Were you in Lhasa?"

"That abbot who is missing. I was there."

"The abbot of Sangchi? You saw him when you escaped from prison? Drakte was with him?"

But Tenzin touched his fingertips to his lips with a confused expression, as if just realizing he had been speaking, and fell silent.

Suddenly Shan remembered the awful night again, and the sound of the voices in the death hut. "It was you with Gendun and Drakte," he said. "I heard your voice. You were chanting the Bardo with Gendun." It was not a rasping voice, not one with a broken voice box.

Tenzin only sighed in reply, and melancholy settled over his face.

It was late afternoon when they saw the first sheep, grazing in the distance on the sparse grass that grew in the shelter of boulders, all wearing their brightly colored packs. A high, lilting sound caused Lhandro to stop and hold up a hand. After a moment he relaxed, then led them around a bend in the trail, and halted again with a smile. A small campfire could be seen two hundred feet up the trail, in the lee of a huge slab of rock that had sloughed off the cliff above. Three of the Yapchi villagers stood at the fire. But Anya sat closer to Lhandro, her back to the trail, singing to half a dozen sheep. The animals seemed to listen to the girl with rapt attention, as if about to join in her song at any moment.

"She's communicating with them," Nyma said in an awed tone. The travelers stood in silence, listening, not daring to move an inch- perhaps, Shan thought, under the same spell as the sheep. Then one of the villagers saw them and called out. Anya turned and the magic was broken.

The caravaners were full of questions, and Shan and Lokesh let Lhandro and Nyma give all the answers. Yes, Padme had recovered and was walking about the gompa when they departed. Yes, he lived at a reconstructed gompa, the old Second House gompa. Yes, the monks had given them blessings. Yes, there were even novices there, learning to be monks like the old days. The villagers were pleased with the answers, and though Lhandro looked to Shan and Nyma for help, no one volunteered anything else about what happened at Norbu. The headman squatted by a pile of blankets on which someone had placed the red-circle pouch, the pouch with the eye inside. Lhandro silently rubbed the pouch, as if the chenyi stone somehow needed comforting.

It was nearly sunset when one of the dogs began barking. Two of the Yapchi men shot into the rocks above the trail. Lhandro jumped up on a boulder that provided a view down the side of the mountain, and a moment later motioned for Shan to join him.

A man and a yak were coming up the mountain. As Shan watched they stepped into a pool of light from the setting sun. The man was wearing a robe.

"You'll be expected back at Norbu tonight," Shan observed in a tentative tone as Gyalo led the big, broad-backed animal toward the fire.

"It's an odd place, that gompa," the monk said in a distant voice. "The Committee says only thirty-five monks can be there, though there's room for three times that number. The Chairman stopped our class on the teachings of the Rapjung medicine lamas and started a class on the integration of socialist thought into the teachings of Buddha." He scratched the broad shoulders of the black yak as he spoke. "We have to sign a paper pledging not to criticize the government and recognizing the authority of the Bureau of Religious Affairs over all we do. If you don't sign, you can't be a monk anymore, they told us," he said, shaking his head as if in disbelief. "Some of the monks said we were lucky, that at some gompas monks had to sign statements renouncing the Dalai Lama, or be sent to a Chinese jail."

Lhandro stepped forward, his face heavy with worry. "You have to be at your gompa. They will send people to look, after what happened to Padme."

"For the last month I have slept only every second night. The other nights I have gone out by that dung pile," Gyalo said with a glance at Shan, "and recited my beads." He was saying he had been in spiritual crisis, Shan realized. He was saying he had been trying to make an important decision. "When I left to live at Norbu my uncle said to pay attention to the lamas who ran the gompa, because the senior lamas could be emanations of the true Buddha. But there were no Buddhas, there were only committeemen. They get paid by the government," Gyalo said, his brow creasing, "but Jampa and I, we don't think you can be a lama and be paid by Beijing. The closest thing to Buddha at that place was right here," he said, and placed his hands on either side of the yak's head. There seemed to be deep meaning in the stare exchanged by the monk and the animal, and everyone stood perfectly still as they watched. The yak seemed to look at each of them in turn, then it breathed heavily, like a sigh.

A murmur spread through the Yapchi villagers, and several of them nodded solemnly, as if they knew about Buddha yaks.

"Jampa was at that place, too," Gyalo said, as though he couldn't bear to say Norbu's name now. "The committee was going to get rid of him, as soon as all the dung was hauled away. He was deciding to leave all these past months. Now," Gyalo said with a shy smile, "they still have all that dung, but they don't have us."

"We can find you clothes," Lhandro said, and bent toward one of the horse packs.

"No," Gyalo replied quickly, then spoke in a slow, deliberate voice. "No. I am a monk. I am just a monk between teachers." He knew, as did all of those present, the significance of his words. He would be an unregistered monk, an illegal monk. If the knobs found him he would have no defense, and would be shown no leniency. He would be sent to a lao gai prison for many years. And after release he would be forever banned from serving in a gompa.

Nyma stepped forward, her beads held conspicuously in her raised hand. "There are mantras to be said," she suggested. Gyalo replied with a pleased nod and Lokesh stepped forward, beads in hand, followed by two of the villagers.

The monk followed Nyma toward a large flat rock near the fire. He paused and surveyed the others in the camp. "My name is Gyalo," he said. "This is Jampa. And the other's name is Chemi," he added with a gesture down the trail. "She wanted to sit and watch some clouds for a while."