“I don’t know why you do this,” Jomo groused. “He thinks I am the phantom who comes to clean. If he knew it was you he would write curses on the doorway, to keep you away.”
Shan leaned on the broom a moment. “My experience in Tibet has taught me that helping my enemies is usually less painful than helping my friends.”
“So what does that make that colonel rotting away in Cao’s jail?”
Shan began sweeping the floor again, without reply.
Jomo muttered a curse then lifted the pallet for Shan to sweep under.
“Who has come to see your father recently?” Shan asked after several minutes of silent work.
“Everyone comes. He’s the town mascot. He sits on that throne of his and they want to touch him for good luck, leave a cigarette or a candy bar and touch him. I used to try to stop them, tell them he was the opposite of a saint. But they act like it’s some form of worship. He spits a curse at them and they treat it like a prayer. They’ve been starved so long they don’t even know what food is.”
“Someone different came,” Shan said, “and brought a jug of baijiu whiskey.”
“Half of those who come bring him drinks. The old goat sometimes tells them he only performs for alcohol. The drunken poet saint.”
“For chang usually,” Shan said, referring to Tibetan barley beer. “The locals can’t afford a whole jug of whiskey.”
An odd sadness passed over Jomo’s face. Before replying he gathered up bits of debris in a rug and emptied it out the open window. “In Shigatse I was in a bar with a tiger on a chain. There’s a tavern on the border, by Nepal, that has a tame monkey trained to fill glasses. My father is a tourist attraction. I’m thinking of applying for a Ministry of Tourism grant to buy him a cage.”
“He has so much anger inside, Jomo, it’s burned away everything else.”
Gyalo’s son ignored him. “Tourists come, Chinese and Westerners, usually with one of those government guides to translate for them. They give my father gifts and ask him to write a prayer in Tibetan. I overhear them sometimes. They say they will take the prayer home and frame it. I read one. It said, I am a reincarnate demon. I hereby summon ten thousand scorpions to crawl up your ass.
”
Not for the first time Shan saw Jomo close to tears. “When was the last time someone came?”
“Yesterday someone came, alone. I saw his back as he was leaving. It was dark. All I could see was that he was tall, wearing a red wool cap and one of those windbreakers that say North Base Camp. A Tibetan or Chinese, since there was no translator. Afterward, my father was singing one of his old songs and swigging from a fresh jug.”
“The flagpole in the mountains,” Shan said. “Is it high enough to see from a distance?”
“Flagpole?”
“The one above Tumkot.”
“Only people from Tumkot go in those hills. They’re haunted. And the flagpoles in the mountain tribes have legs.”
“Legs?”
“Tarchok,” Jomo said, using the Tibetan word for flagpole. When he saw Shan’s confusion he placed his hand behind his head and extended a finger upward. “Tarchok,” he repeated. “They say there used to be scores in the mountains.”
Shan closed his eyes for a moment, chiding himself. He had forgotten a hurried explanation from Kypo, weeks earlier, when he had seen a man walking near the village with his hair bundled into a three-inch topknot at his crown. It was a holdover from much older days, more common among the border tribes of Nepal. The topknots, and the hermits who wore them, were called tarchoks, flagpoles.
“No one goes near the mountain above Tumkot because of the tarchok. They say he’s like a wild animal living in the ice world up there, going backward to the origins of hermits, turning into a yeti.”
Shan cocked his head, not certain he had heard correctly. “A hermit becoming a yeti?”
Jomo glanced over his shoulder as if wary of being overheard. “We have had Tibet for maybe a thousand years, that was all we could hope for.” He referred, Shan realized, to the period of the Tibetan Buddhist state. “Before our time, long before our time, the only mountain tribe was that of the yetis. They tried to fit into the rest of the world but eventually they gave up on people and they all became hermits.”
Chapter Six
Traditional Tibetans would have called it a power place. The tiny hanging valley opened to the south toward the mother mountain, its spring and grove of junipers helping to focus spiritual energy. It had been only an hour’s walk on the trail up the ridge that curled around and above Tumkot, but the ruins of the old shrine felt a world away. Shan lowered his small backpack to the ground and studied the site from the narrow trail before descending to the ruins. Below, visible in the distance, was the village. He was, he realized, at the shrine Ama Apte had mentioned, where she and her uncle had visited. He considered how the foundations of the ruined buildings were set back from the high cliff to the south, against an overhanging ledge, making the site invisible from below. The army probably had sent a bomber to destroy it, but never would have been able to locate it without local help.
There was little left but a few charred beams and piles of stone. Bits of plaster, some bearing signs of weathered paint, lay strewn about the landscape. A singled tattered prayer flag fluttered from a frayed yak-hair rope anchored to a cairn of stones. He set another stone on the cairn and positioned himself in the center of the ruins, pacing in an ever-widening circle as he tried to imagine the structure as it had been built, and how many monks had lived there. Once on Tumkot mountain, Gyalo had said, I dug out twenty fresh skulls.
The Lord of Death was indeed there, at least the shards of Yama. Shattered bits of bronze statuary and shards of ceramic lay around the clearing, heads and arms of the deity of death, mixed with those of protector demons. He shuddered as, too late, he spotted the clay torso of a tiny god under his descending boot and crushed it into a dozen pieces.
Shan found the altar in deep shadow, against the wall of the living mountain at the rear of the overhanging ledge. At the back of the little sheltered alcove were traces of paintings, now so faded as to be barely discernible. They were probably centuries old, dating to when the first emissaries of Buddhism had begun to cross the Himalayas.
Irregular slabs of rock, some scorched from fire, leaned against boulders on either side of the alcove to form makeshift walls. Along the back wall an old beam had been balanced on square stones for an altar, on which stood the surviving gods, a Compassionate Buddha in the center flanked by a score of bronze Yamas and lesser deities along with several less elegant plaster figures, crudely painted, the kind sold as souvenirs to tourists. The altar and nearly all the bronzes were encrusted with dust, each exposing an outline of naked wood underneath when he lifted it. The last Yama had scant dust on its surface, but dust underneath. It had been brought to the altar recently. None yet had holes in their base plates. He paused over a low, anomalous shadow at the back, and lit the hand light he had brought from the warehouse to investigate.
The shape was so alien that at first it did not register. Once it did he stared in mute confusion. It was a two-inch long, dirt-encrusted cross, with a small bearded figure entwined on it. With trepidation he lifted it. The back of the cross was clean, exposing tarnished silver, its shape pressed into the film of dust that had fallen from the rocks above.
He searched for the word, one he had learned from his father in their secret, illegal lessons during the reign of the Red Guard so many years earlier: crucifix. He stared at the image in wonder, then with even greater wonder at the deep outline it had left in the crust on the altar. It had been put there many, many years earlier, probably one of the first things deposited on the makeshift altar, never touched since. With unexpected guilt, he set the cross back exactly where it had been, pausing only to wipe the dirt from the Christ figure’s eyes.