“In the name of the People’s Republic, I arrest you,” came a ragged voice behind them. Jin stood ten feet away, his pistol leveled at them.
Yates lowered the monk to a boulder in a standing patch of gravel.
The shreds of Shan’s last hope blew away in the chill wind. Here was the end. With the monks in custody, Cao would create the confessions he needed to execute Tan. Shan had a shuddering vision of himself standing with his hands on the wire fence of the yeti factory, shouting his son’s name as Ko gazed blankly out his window.
“A drink,” Jin gasped to Yates. “Give me your water.” He was shivering from the cold, his heavy uniform coat torn in several places.
Instead the American extracted a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. He braced a leg against another boulder and wrote, then extended the paper to Jin. “What you need is this,” he declared. “Give me your gun and you can have it.”
“You don’t think I’ll shoot them?” Jin demanded. He was half delirious with fatigue.
“They do have those charms,” Yates observed in a conversational tone. Shan stared at him, beginning to suspect that the American also suffered the effects of the high altitude.
Jin swung the gun toward the monks, wildly firing a shot. A shard exploded off the rock on which the injured monk sat.
“See?” the American said with a shrug. He held the paper up. “I’m offering you a different kind of charm, and I’ll throw in my coat. For the gun and your coat.”
“My coat?” Jin rubbed his temple, staring at the American in confusion.
“I know them. With my note they will help you. But wearing the uniform of the Chinese government will mean a cold welcome. And by the time you get below these monks better be your best friends.”
Jin turned to follow the American’s gaze past his shoulder. His jaw dropped. He glanced from the American back to the valley below, to a compound of colorful tents sprouting lines of prayer flags half a mile below them. His face contorted with emotion, then lit with excitement and he began to peel off his coat. They were above the Nepali base camp. They had crossed the Chinese border.
The American’s instructions to the monks were quickly preempted by loud cries from the youngest monk, who hurriedly explained where they were, that he knew many of the sherpas, how there was a monastery only a day’s walk from where they stood. A moment later Jin had exchanged coats with Yates and handed him the gun, which the American tossed away.
Jin paused by Shan after he had helped the injured monk to his feet. “On the trail that day, I saw the Manchurians twice. They came back up the trail after I passed them, demanded that I ride on and find the mule with the body and bring it back, said if I didn’t forget what I saw, they would find me and kill me.” He glanced at the monks and lowered his voice. “They were the ones who killed the monk that day. He appeared out of the rocks and tried to stop them from taking the body on the mule. I was already moving down the trail by then, there was nothing I could do.” The constable offered an apologetic shrug, then marched away to his new life.
“We should go with them,” Yates said in a worried voice as they watched the others descend toward the narrow concealed goat trail that would take them down to the Nepali base camp. Jin was bracing the injured monk on his shoulder. “If we cross now we’ll be on the ice in the dark.” He studied Shan a moment. “Go down, Shan,” Yates urged. “It will mean freedom for you, a chance to start over.”
Shan silently tightened the laces of his boots and began jogging back up the treacherous trail.
An hour after sunrise the next morning they reached Jomo, waiting in another of Tsipon’s trucks. A grim determination had settled onto their faces. They had passed an uneasy night on pallets in the hermit’s cave, having reached it after sundown. Neither man gave voice to their increasing certainty that Tan would have been already tried, that Ama Apte and Kypo would have been seized by the knobs as accomplices and transported to the gulag before they could reach the town.
Yates watched the high ridge as they pulled out onto the road. They had been bone weary by the time they had reached the cave, barely able to stand, but Dakpo had fixed them roasted barley and tea, waking them after they had collapsed onto pallets to make them eat. Then he had presented Yates with a small drawstring pouch.
“When I heard about the Yamas being stolen and returned after being opened up,” the hermit said in a hesitant tone, “I knew it had something to do with Samuel. I had been apprenticed to an artisan at the gompa when I was a boy and knew about such statues.” The old Tibetan seemed strangely nervous, and poured himself more tea before continuing. “Samuel and I spent many hours sitting on ledges above the highway counting army trucks. He spoke about the problem of getting letters home. That’s when we came upon the idea. We had sent one of the statues and had enough letters for another when. . when the world ended.
“I kept them for a year, then sealed them in an old Yama statue and kept it with me all these years. Then after the murders I took it to the Yama shrine, in case the soldiers searching the mountains found me here. Yesterday I went back for it, and opened up the bottom.”
“I am sorry, Dakpo,” Yates said, “for what I did to the Yamas.”
The hermit smiled. “I have been saying prayers with them. They will heal.”
Yates, choked with emotion, upended the pouch. Letters from forty years before tumbled out, thirty or more rolled and folded pages.
Shan watched in silence as the American, wide-eyed, began unrolling letters and reading them. But soon, unable to fight his fatigue, he leaned back on a pallet and accepted the hermit’s offer of a thick felt blanket. In his fitful sleep he awakened more than once to hear snippets of conversation between the two men sitting at the brazier. The reticent hermit had been full of words that night, and in the languid warmth of the pallet Shan listened from the shadows to tales of an energetic American teaching Tibetans to dance and sing, of Samuel Yates leading secret missions to recover artifacts from several gompas on the eve of their destruction by the Youth Brigade, of a week during a lull in the fighting when Samuel, Ama Apte, and several others tried to track yetis, of the intense affection between Samuel and Ama Apte that had somehow sustained their little band when they were living on half rations.
As the embers were dying, their faces lit only by a dim butter lamp, the hermit had leaned toward Yates, his voice now that of a wise old uncle. “We sat up all night once guarding a pass as a long line of monks moved past, fleeing to the south with artifacts from their temples, fleeing to freedom. I will never forget it. The moon was full, the ground covered with snow, monks cradling bronze deities in their arms like babies, yaks carrying bigger statues, a long single file of red robes and yaks that stretched across the snow. As the last one disappeared the mother mountain began to glow from the distant sunrise, even though the stars were still overhead. Samuel spoke some words toward her, like a vow to the mountain. He said when it was over, when things were right again in the world, he would bring back his son, because he wanted his son’s soul to be filled with the power of this place.”
Chapter Seventeen
A somber air had settled over Shogo. The residents walked down the newly swept streets with solemn, nervous expressions, staring straight ahead. Three shiny black limousines were parked by the municipal building, a sober reminder of the dignitaries who had come for the trial.
Shan slipped into the hall in the center of the building among the workers who moved tables and chairs inside. A table draped in black with three large wooden chairs behind it sat on a raised platform at one end of the room, with another chair for witnesses at one side, an easel bearing a map of the region at the other. A large portable portrait of Mao on heavy canvas had been unrolled and hung behind the judges’ table. As several workers fussed with weights at the bottom to stretch it straight, others brushed it clean. Less than three dozen chairs were arranged in two sections in front of the table. The pageant, as Shan expected, was to be a private affair.