When the alarm finally came it was not a claxon in the hallway but a chicken from the beds. One of the sleeping men had awakened, was pointing at Shan and crowing like a rooster.
Shan was on the man in an instant, injecting the syringe into his thigh, apologizing as he did so, straightening his blankets as the man slumped back into his pillow. When he looked back, Ko was staring at the horizon again. Shan stroked his cheek for a moment, took a step toward the door then paused. He moved quickly to the window and wiped a pane with his sleeve, so Ko could see the mountains more clearly, then lifted one of the sheets of paper covered with triangles and grabbed the pencil from his son’s crate. On the reverse of the paper he quickly wrote the ancient poem then, before slipping out into the hall, he left it in the pocket of Ko’s shirt. Something inside Ko had heard, he was certain, and Shan was leaving him a little shard of reality.
Chapter Eight
After five falls you die. The warning about fatigue in climbing ropes had been the first of the many warnings he had received during his first visit to the base camp. Kypo had offered no greeting before tossing the length of rope Shan now held. He had simply appeared as Shan sipped his morning tea by his front door and thrown the rope at him with a resentful expression. One end of the rope had been cut; the other, stretched and frayed, had been snapped by a heavy load. The thick kernmantle ropes took amazing abuse on the high summits, but they were retired to serve as base camp laundry lines after taking the stress of five falls.
“I was at the first advance camp yesterday,” Kypo explained. “I asked a porter why this piece of junk was there. He said he thought he should keep it because it was Tenzin’s rope, the one he was using when he died.”
“But he would never-”
“Right,” Kypo interrupted. They both knew a seasoned sherpa would have checked his rope before climbing. “Tenzin was just setting a practice wall, for customers to use while acclimatizing for the final climb.”
Shan looked at the crushed, frayed end of the rope. He recalled Tenzin yelling at a porter for stepping on a rope in camp. A careless step could press mineral particles into the rope, which would gradually cut the fibers.
“We don’t know where this has been for certain. I wasn’t there when it was cut off him.”
“No,” Shan agreed. “I thought he was free climbing and slipped.” Tenzin had been renowned for his unassisted climbs up sheer rock faces.
“It looked like he was just taking some equipment to the bottom of the wall, a quick up and down.” Kypo was silent a moment, clearly disturbed by the thought that his friend Tenzin, who had climbed the summit with him, had died from such an obvious mistake. “It was written that the mountain would call him,” he murmured. It sounded like he had been speaking with his mother.
“The rope came from the Americans’ supplies,” Shan observed. “It’s their advance camp.”
“Tsipon wanted Tenzin and me to take the Americans on the final leg to the top. I told Tsipon I would think about it.”
Shan considered the edge of emotion in the Tibetan’s voice. “You don’t trust Yates?”
“He plays with the truth. I was in Tsipon’s office when Yates first came in to speak about moving his spring climbs from Nepal to here. Tsipon said Yates should come with him to apply for the permits the next day, since foreigners always get sent to the front of the line. Yates declined, saying he had to go to Shigatse on business. But the next day I saw him in the opposite direction of Shigatse, standing in a field of barley.”
Shan cocked his head, not sure he had heard correctly. “Standing in a field doing what?”
“All by himself, tramping down some poor farmer’s crop, tearing apart an old cairn in the center, the bastard.”
“He lied?”
“He lied, then paid the farmer twenty dollars when the man discovered what he’d done. Told him to keep quiet about it.”
“But you spoke with the farmer,” Shan surmised.
“When I passed on my return. The farmer said Yates had gotten out of his car and kept looking at the sky, as if expecting something to come down and meet him.”
“He must have had a satellite phone and was trying to get reception.”
“No. Everyone here knows what those big phones look like, because every other foreigner has one.”
“And the farmer spoke with you, after taking money to keep quiet.”
“In Tibet, comrade, keeping something secret means keeping it quiet from the Chinese.”
A loud horn from the road broke the silence that followed. They looked up to see Jomo with his beloved old blue truck, his battle junk. Kypo faded into the shadows.
By the time Shan reached the truck the wiry mechanic was standing at the curb, gazing at Shan with an apologetic expression.
“Tsipon says Director Xie needs you. I am supposed to take you to him and help you.”
Shan pushed back the dark thing within him that rose at the mention of the wheelsmasher’s name. “Help me?” As Shan spoke, several Tibetans appeared from an alley on the opposite side of the street and began climbing into the cargo bay of the truck.
“The engine is unpredictable. He doesn’t want you stranded,” Jomo said plaintively, then gestured toward the half dozen Tibetans settling into the bay. “They heard we were going up the mountain.”
“Are we? Going up the mountain?”
“Xie is up there,” Jomo replied. He climbed in and with a loud cough and a cloud of smoke the old truck began to move.
It was not unusual for trucks to give rides to Tibetans, who seldom had their own vehicles, but when Jomo halted for four anxious older women near the truck stop where the road to Chomolungma left the highway, Shan turned to the mechanic. “Don’t you think I should know at least as much as they do?”
“What they know is that Religious Affairs is in the mountains,” Jomo replied in a tight voice, leaning forward as if needing all his concentration to negotiate the winding curves.
“Then tell me this,” Shan tried. “What happened between Ama Apte and your father? What prevents him from going into the mountains?”
“Before my time,” Jomo shot back.
“They avoid each other.”
“They hate each other. If my father sees me speaking with Kypo, he berates me and throws things at me like when I was a little boy. He calls her the false prophet, says everything she does is a lie, says all of Tumkot hangs on the thread of a lie.”
“Surely, Jomo, you have wondered what that lie is.”
“Before my time,” Jomo replied again, and would say no more.
Shan studied the Tibetan, doing some rough calculations.
Jomo’s time would have begun, he decided, sometime in the late 1960s.
Director Xie had his fox-fur hat pulled low against the chill wind as he waited for them at a crossroads that connected to one of the valleys defined by the long, high ridges that jutted out from the Himalayas.
“Excellent!” Xie exclaimed to Shan. “You brought laborers! Such foresight!”
Shan nodded uncertainly, then with rising foreboding complied with Xie’s gesture and climbed into the back of his government sedan.
He did not recognize their destination until they were within half a mile of it. The only other time he had seen Sarma gompa, the small monastery, had been weeks earlier, from the ridge above when he had been hiking on a pilgrim’s path. The compound of centuries-old stone and timber buildings nestled against a high, flat rock face. Sheltered to the west by tall junipers and rhododendron, it had seemed a serene oasis in the dry, windblown valley.
“We are closing in, comrade,” Xie declared. “This is the landscape of our victory,” he added with the tone of a field commander, and was rewarded with a vigorous nod from the young deputy who sat in the front seat.