Although it was only an hour after sunrise when Shan reached her house, Ama Apte was not at home. He settled against the frame of the doorless front entry, pushing to one side the copper pot of milk someone had left beside a worn butter churn, then shifted to pull his shirt away from the blood matted on his ribs. The only thing he knew for certain about the thief was what he wore on his feet. Where the stranger had kicked him his skin had been torn and bruised in the clear pattern of a cleated climbing boot. Pulling his hat low over his face, he watched the villagers go by for several minutes, glancing at the women who sat at several doorways working their own churns before exploring the chamber that comprised the first floor of the astrologer’s house. A pallet with a folded blanket still lay on the packed earth by a stall, as if she waited for her mule in the night. Two buckets, one of water and one of fresh grain, stood by the pallet. Ama Apte was conducting the traditional Bardo death rites for the lost mule, during which food and drink were left for the departed.

At a small bench by the solitary window at the rear, squares of yellow cloth lay under a spool of red thread beside the sheets of handmade paper on which fortunes were recorded. He opened the door of a small wooden cabinet above the bench, finding more spools of thread and old nibbed pens with a bottle of ink. On the inside of the door, yellowed tape held a photo of a young Dalai Lama on a horse, with armed men escorting him. Leaning on the back of the cabinet was a tattered book of Mo divination tables and several worn pairs of the astrologer’s dice.

His gaze drifted back to the photo. Though they were considered contraband and were regularly burned by the Bureau of Religious Affairs, images of the Dalai Lama were secretly kept by many, probably most, Tibetans. But he had never seen one like this. He studied it closely, swinging the door into the sunlight, considering the teenaged countenance of the reincarnate leader, the fur-capped soldiers with old British Enfield rifles. All the faces were tired and travel worn. One soldier could be seen on a slope in the distance, watching the trail behind them. He suspected it had been taken during the Dalai Lama’s secret flight across the border, while the Chinese army had been trying to kill him by shelling his living compound in Lhasa.

He returned to the entryway, watched the women at their chores, then bent and poured the milk into the fortuneteller’s churn and began to work the plunger. It was a daily ritual performed for centuries by millions of Tibetans, still very much part of life for nomads and remote villagers.

When Ama Apte finally arrived, leading a goat, she offered neither complaint nor greeting, but uttered a grunt of satisfaction as she lifted the lid to the churn and saw that the morning chore was almost complete. Dropping in a palmful of salt from a small crock near the door, she disappeared into a neighbor’s house and returned moments later with a steaming kettle, two tin cups, and one of the tall, narrow churns used for mixing buttered tea. Whether he was invited or not Shan was a guest and she would serve him buttered tea.

She did not speak as she prepared the tea, nor as she arranged two low milking stools just inside the house and finally handed him his steaming cup, straightening her colorful apron before sitting down.

“What happened here?” Shan asked. “I mean before, when the Yama temple was still used. Were there priests from far away?” He knew no Tibetan word for missionaries.

“People used to say we were the most faraway of any place in all the world,” the woman replied. “We were proud of that. The Himalayas protected us. What I remember most of all was the peacefulness. Villagers sang songs at the well. There was a village loom where everyone worked on rugs to sell to the caravans that came across from Nepal. Monks were always in the square, prayerflags on every house. ”

“From the Yama temple?”

“They say before that temple there was another, to earth deities and the mountain spirits. Before that, the gods played there.”

“I was thinking more of the past century.”

“In 1924 Westerners began driving nails into our mountain,” Ama Apte declared, her voice growing distant as she referred to the first expedition to climb Everest.

Shan sipped his tea in silence. “Kypo said his grandfather took climbers up. You knew some early climbers?”

“None of us called it climbing. Monks had gone up the mountains for centuries, not to reach new heights but to visit the gods. We called it paying homage, or said we were going to speak with the goddess. The Westerners mostly climb her because she happens to be a few feet taller than other mountains. Put a pole on the peak and they would climb that too.”

Shan struggled to understand, not what she was saying but what she was not saying. He replayed her words in his mind several times, then abruptly understood the question he had to ask. “Climbers come to the village sometimes, to talk with Kypo, mostly the expedition leaders. You give them blessings.”

“Do I look like a monk?”

“Forgive me. You provide them with propitious dates and words to say at the top. I’ve seen the climbers carry charms in little yellow bags sewn shut with red thread.”

When she did not reply Shan pressed on. “Did Megan Ross first come to you last year or was it earlier?”

The astrologer went very still.

“I read she was working with Tibetans and sherpas to spread the word that the mountain was sacred,” Shan explained. “She was working with someone to learn the old ways of going up mountains.”

Ama Apte began to stroke the back of the goat.

“Did she learn to drink your buttered tea?” he tried, hoping to get her to admit she at least knew the American.

“She carried a little bottle of mint extract,” Ama Apte said in a strained voice. “With a few drops of that Megan said she could swallow the strongest Tibetan tea.”

“Surely she couldn’t speak Tibetan.”

“She spoke some Chinese.”

“Why would she go see the minister? She could never have expected to persuade Wu to stop the climbing tours.”

“You will have to ask her yourself.”

Shan watched the woman carefully as he spoke. “Megan Ross is dead.”

Ama Apte cocked her head at Shan. There was no grief in her eyes, no surprise. “She plays tricks, that American girl. She goes places the government doesn’t want her to, so she lets stories be spread to divert their interest. She may seem dead to you. She would pretend to be dead if it helped preserve one of her secrets.”

“She isn’t on one of her secret climbs. I found her, Ama Apte. Shot twice, lying beside the murdered minister. She died in my arms.”

It was not grief that came now but anger. “No,” Ama Apte said in a simmering voice.

“I was a good friend of your uncle’s,” he ventured. “You and I said prayers for him. When speaking of the dead the truth must be spoken.”

“She is not dead,” Ama Apte insisted. “I would know it.”

“Are you saying that as her friend,” Shan said, “or as her fortuneteller?”

The Tibetan woman turned back to the goat. “She is on some high peak, laughing into the wind. And Tenzin will not be found until he is ready. The dead of the mountain will keep coming back if they have unfinished business,” she declared to the animal. “That has always been the way of the mountain.”

Reality is nothing but a shared perception, a lama had once told him. It didn’t seem to matter that Shan had been stained with the blood of the dead woman, for the reality that everyone perceived was that she had not died. Shan had never encountered a murder where the dead kept moving, where the dead were still players in events even after they stopped breathing.

“Tell me how you met her,” he said softly.

“It was up high,” she said after a long silence. “Two years ago. There are secret places, little shrines only my people know about, shrines where words must be spoken every spring. I was hiding because some climbers were passing close by. I waited a long time before I emerged, but there she was, waiting for me at the shrine. She asked me why I was afraid of climbers.”