"Stop them!" he said with another of the chilling moans. "They are burning all the lamas!" He fell back, unconscious, the splintered stump of the handle in his hand.
Still on the ground where the man had pushed him, Shan stared in alarm at Dzopa.
"His head," Chemi whispered, looking at Shan. She reached for the cloth to wipe his brow and froze as she saw those around her. All those within earshot had stopped and were staring fearfully at the unconscious man. Several pulled out their rosaries and began mantras.
Anya did not resist when Shan asked her to take him into her village, despite the protests of the older women. He had to understand the valley, the girl insisted, for the eye was destined to be returned to him and he would have to act quickly when that happened. One of those who listened, a big-boned, ungainly woman in a long felt skirt and red apron, nodded grimly. "If that oil starts coming up," she declared in a defiant tone, as if chastising her fellow villagers, "those Chinese will never leave." Shan pulled his field glasses from his sack and followed Anya and the woman back to the village.
The deity had lived on a low knoll near the center of the valley, the woman explained. Nearly three hundred years earlier a lama had found it living in a rock on the knoll, and the villagers had built a mani wall around it. Lamas from the famous Rapjung gompa had come every year to bless the rock and the people who protected it.
A brown dog burst out of the first house, its loud barking quickly shifting into excited yelps as it recognized Anya. A man with a face blackened with soot, nearly toothless, appeared at the door of the second house and called out affectionately to the girl, who promised him fresh Lamtso salt the next day. A middle-aged man in a tattered derby looked from a crumbling pressed-earth wall that surrounded a third house and asked for news of Lhandro. Shan continued along the broad path that served as the only road of the village as Anya ran from one to another of the few inhabitants who showed themselves. One house, the outermost, was made of substantial timbers and had a loft overhead for storing fodder. It was an old, elegant structure, built in the tradition of Kham, the eastern region where wood had once been plentiful. On its wall hung a large wooden drum, nearly two feet wide and a foot deep, a hide stretched across its top, used for attracting the attention of deities. Shan studied the house, remembering Nyma's description of the attack by the Lujun troops. Only one house had survived. A miniature chorten, two feet high, stood near its door, the kind of shrine made for a sacred household relic. Across from it, inside another pressed-earth enclosure, stood a stable, looking more solid than several of the houses, in which half a dozen sheep and as many lambs lay basking in the late afternoon sun.
He wandered past the village toward a long low mound nearly a mile away, a manmade mound that rose a stone's throw from a smaller, lower-knoll. A few grazing sheep looked up as he walked along the wide path that connected the village to the far end of the valley, the rumble of machinery growing louder with each step. The venture's drilling rig was operating less than a hundred yards beyond the mound.
He studied the path before approaching the mound. It ran along the base of the grassy ridge, passing outside the valley through a small gap at the north end of the valley, by the oil camp. From the derrick to the gap leading to the outside world it had been ripped open, widened by a bulldozer. An army had come up that same path once, he reminded himself, a vengeful Chinese army, taking a slight detour in its retreat to Beijing to ravage the beautiful valley. He replayed the tale in his mind as he climbed the small hill. It had happened on such a spring day, perhaps in the same month, for Nyma had explained that the salt caravan had been away at the time. The army had shelled the village with its cannons, and the villagers had retreated, not to the mountain slopes, but to their deity on the small knoll for protection. Then the Chinese officer had sent soldiers to work with swords until none of the villagers survived. He looked back along the encircling slopes of the valley. There were ruins of small structures and the outlines of fields not worked for many years. Once the community had been larger. Entire families had been wiped out that day, the day the deity had been broken by the Lujun soldiers.
A low mani wall surrounded the mound, with two strands of prayer flags affixed to weathered posts at each end. On top of the mound, weighted by small stones, were over twenty khatas, prayer scarves, most in tatters. Shan lifted a mani stone and, not certain why, held it out toward the mound, then toward the oil camp. In the same instant a gust of wind snapped the prayer flags, and one of the old tattered khatas worked loose and blew away across the valley floor toward the western slope.
Lokesh would have said it was no coincidence, that Shan was always going to be there that hour, and that the scarf, after so many years on the mound, was always going to blow away in that same moment. The junction of events was woven into Shan's particular tapestry, Lokesh might say. It was why Lokesh and many other Tibetans Shan knew would stop and stare when a hawk flew low across their path, a dried leaf danced in the air before them, or a peculiar cloud scudded across the moon just as they looked up. Acts of nature might to them seem unexpected, but they would never seem random.
He lowered the mani stone and reverently gazed at the mound, at the mass grave of the Yapchi villagers, then did what Lokesh would have done. He followed the khata.
The scarf tumbled across the valley more than a hundred paces away, dropping to the earth one moment, drifting upward the next as if lifted by some invisible hand. He studied the upper rim of the valley as he walked toward the cloth. It was a rocky, ragged landscape, a place likely to hold caves- a place, Nyma said, full of caves- where men, or deities, might hide. He followed slowly, absorbing the Yapchi land, expecting the khata to settle or be snagged on one of the low shrubs where the meadow ended and the steeper slope began. But when it reached the slope the prayer scarf shot high in the air, soaring, tumbling like some caged dove experiencing newfound freedom, gliding toward the edge of the forest to the north.
As Shan watched it speed away he considered turning back. But there was more than an hour of light left, and even in the dark he could certainly find his way back along the path. He needed to understand the valley. He needed to learn where a deity might be hiding. Or at least where an escaping prayer scarf might flee. Several times he paused to study the drilling tower and the oil camp as he climbed to the cover of the treeline before heading in the direction he had last seen the khata. After ten minutes he saw a patch of white hanging in the low branches of a pine tree where the slope curved toward the east.
The wind brought the rumble of chain saws and Shan paused to study with his field glasses the end of the valley that was being civilized by the oil company. There were more trailers than he had at first thought, two rows each containing five of the rectangular units. Metal boxes, the villagers called them, because he knew, to the rongpa they did not deserve the name house. Beyond the trailers were several tents, and trucks of all sizes and shapes from light cargo vehicles to heavy dump trucks, and a large open tent that appeared to be serving as a garage. Above the camp the wide swath of stumps reached all the way to the cliff that defined the upper rim of the valley. As least two dozen men labored there, felling trees at an alarming rate.
Shan retrieved the khata, folding it into his pocket, then wandered closer, more wary, conscious of each tree and rock he might use for cover. He was only two hundred yards from the edge of the camp when he found a thick log, felled by age and not a saw, and sat to study the camp. At the near end a dozen men kicked a soccer ball around a meadow that appeared to have been grazed by sheep. They played hard, yelling but not cheering. Beyond them, close to the tents rose the smoke of several cooking fires. Shan was familiar with the scene. A tentacle, Drakte had called one such camp they had seen when traveling together, a lumber harvesting complex. One of the tentacles that extended from Beijing, the purba had groused. It was the way Beijing reached out to assert itself in the remotest corners of the land, to show its power, to extract riches.