Looking back up to the timber crew, he noticed men stationed at intervals along the work area. What were they guarding against? he wondered. Surely there were not enough predators left to threaten the crew. Then with a shudder he remembered that Yapchi villagers had been conscripted. The men at the edge were not protecting the workers, they were preventing them from escaping. What a cruel torture, he thought, not simply to make the rongpa prisoners in their own valley but to make them destroy the wealth of their own land.
As the sun began to fall below the valley wall he ventured closer to the meadow, hoping to catch a scrap of dialogue, an accent, anything to help him understand more about the Qinghai Petroleum Venture. But as he grew closer he slowed, and a chill crept down his back. Although the soccer players wore tee shirts or undershirts they all seemed to have the same sturdy, trim pants- one side wearing green, the other grey- and all wore the same heavy high black boots, had the same lean muscular build. At the far end of the meadow was a large grey truck with something painted on its door. He raised his glasses, expecting to see the derrick logo of the venture. But it was not a derrick on the door, it was a snow leopard. Beyond the truck were sleek utility vehicles in gunmetal grey. His gut tightened. The soccer players were not oil workers. They were two groups of competing soldiers. Lin's mountain troops were at the oil camp, playing soccer with the knobs.
At dawn the next morning a small band of Tibetans arrived at the camp behind Yapchi Village. Anya ran at the sound of their footsteps, thinking, Shan knew, that the caravan had arrived, but she stopped at the mouth of the little canyon. A woman hobbled forward on a crutch, followed by a little boy who shuffled awkwardly, his feet bent inward, a line of drool hanging from his mouth. There were four others, a woman with eyes clouded with cataracts led by a teenage boy and a sturdy man in a tattered chuba carrying a frail-looking woman, asleep in his arms like a child.
They stood in silence, looking about the sleeping forms on the blankets.
"He's not here," Chemi said softly, apologetically, and suddenly Shan understood. The sick were coming to Yapchi. They must have walked through the night to find the medicine lama. The herder carrying the woman lowered her to a blanket and rubbed his eyes. Shan thought he saw tears.
"But I met him," Chemi added in a hopeful tone. "He healed me."
The crippled woman looked up in disbelief. "The one we seek is from the old days. There were stories from the mountains. But all those… they died a long time ago. Sometimes all we can do is follow the stories…"Her voice drifted away and she stared at the ground. "Some people are saying he came to take the chair of Siddhi. Some say he came from a bayal, just to ease our suffering."
"I met him," Chemi repeated, more urgently. "He healed me."
The woman on the crutch stared at Chemi as if just hearing her, her mouth open. "Lha gyal lo," the woman said in a dry, croaking voice, then she began to sway. Chemi leapt forward as the woman collapsed into her arms.
Shan stepped to the small fire at the rear of the canyon and brought Chemi a bowl of tea for the woman. "What did she mean the chair of Siddhi?" he asked as he handed her the bowl.
"It's an old thing," Chemi said in a worried voice, cutting her eyes at him, then looking away.
"Resistance," Lokesh whispered as he suddenly appeared to kneel beside the sick woman. "I heard the purbas talking about it, very excited. They say in this region centuries ago a lama named Siddhi organized resistance against Mongol invaders. He rallied the people like no one ever had and made sure the Mongols never came back to their lands."
"There was a place he stayed in the mountains," Chemi continued, "a small meadow high on the upper slope of the mountain. There is a rock like a chair where he would sit and speak to the people. People have been going there for years to pray. Some say he was a fighter. Some say he was a healer who just gave hope and strength to the people."
Lokesh seemed to recognize the disbelief on Shan's face. "They want to believe in such things," the old Tibetan said, and nodded to another group of new arrivals who sat speaking with the older purba. "They say everyone is talking about Yapchi, for many miles. They say if a real lama would take the chair of Siddhi they could make the Chinese leave Yapchi, could make the Chinese leave the whole region."
Shan returned alone to the village heavy with a strange sense of guilt that had crept upon him during the night, unable to look at the haggard faces that searched his own for explanations. The faces of the sick Tibetans haunted him. He was wrong to have come, for to come had meant giving the people of Yapchi hope, and there was no hope. Beijing had discovered the beautiful valley, and given it to the petroleum company and their American partners. It may as well have been seized by the army for a new missile base, for such a venture would never be dissolved, never be moved. There was only one thing in China more inexorable than the march of the army, and that was the march of economic development. When the venture found oil it would seize the entire valley, drain it of its life force, strip it of everything of value and leave it, years later, soiled and barren. Shan had spent his four years in prison building roads for the economic forces deployed by Beijing, roads to penetrate the remote valleys that had been overlooked in the first wave of Chinese immigration. One of the worst cruelties inflicted on the prisoners had not been forcing them to pound the rocks of high mountain passes into shards, so trucks could traverse the high slopes, but to be forced to watch, from another new road site, as every tree in a newly opened valley was cut down, every seam of coal blasted open.
Yapchi Village was even emptier than the day before. The only sign of life seemed to be the lambs which pranced about in their earthen-walled pen, as though wildly excited that the sun had risen. Then he noticed faces in some of the windows watching him, and watching the path up the valley. The rumble of the drilling rig echoed off the valley walls in the still air, accompanied by the distant whine of chain saws. At the door of the last house, the simple timber house he had admired the day before, an old woman appeared. She offered Shan a quick bow of her head, then slowly, shyly, still standing in the doorway, extended a bowl of tea toward him. He stepped hesitantly through the open gate of the low wall that surrounded the house and nodded, accepting the bowl. The woman retreated silently into the shadow of her house, beckoning him inside.
The house consisted of one large room with a sleeping platform built into the north end and an alcove for preparing and eating food on the opposite side. The finely worked planks that made up the walls and floor bore a rich patina of age. A small wooden altar stood against the rear wall, near the sleeping platform, bearing the seven traditional offering bowls, and a framed photograph of the Dalai Lama, a single smoking stick of incense beside it. The carpet at the center of the room, though worn almost threadbare near the altar, depicted the endless knot, symbol of the unity of all things, and the other eight sacred emblems in rich reds and browns. Everything in the room seemed to be made of wood, or clay, or wool. The chamber was like a clearing in an ancient forest, radiating a natural, soothing tranquility.
The woman smiled awkwardly and sat on a squat stool near the sleeping platform, assuming a somber expression. Shan followed her uncertainly, and saw a figure in the shadows, leaning against the wall, on one of the two pallets unrolled on the platform. The figure turned, rising very slowly, his hand on the wall for support. The aged man moved with obvious effort toward Shan, one hand still on the wall. He sat on the edge of the platform, near the woman, and studied Shan as he smacked his cracked, dried lips together. Silence, Shan suspected, prevailed in the room, a fixture as real as the little altar and the simple benches that lined the wall. In the stillness he became aware of quick, shallow breathing and his eyes fell upon a small shape lying on a blanket in the corner of the platform. A lamb.