Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

He cast a worried glance at Shan, as if remembering who his visitor was.

“ Lha gyal lo, ” Shan whispered in a pained voice.

“You don’t know what’s happening in Tibet. Before long, Tibet will be nothing but camps and the keepers of camps.” Jigten’s voice grew hollow. “They converted an old army base to a pacification camp on the other side of the mountain. The police bring in another truckload of Tibetans almost every week. That don’t call it a prison but that place has razor wire and guards with guns. It’s a cage with no way out. Last month they started a graveyard there.”

As he spoke voices were raised in alarm outside. Jigten shot up and ran out the door, Shan a step behind.

A man on the low ridge above the camp was shouting frantically, pointing down the valley. The Chinese manager was at the front gate now, crying out in his high-pitched voice, ordering everyone to return to their huts. The shepherds ignored him and ran up the ridge.

Shan arrived at the top of the ridge panting, his gaze following the arm of a nearby shepherd as the man pointed first to the line of dense, black clouds rolling off the sacred mountain and then to the red and blue flashes in Baiyun. The town was more than a mile away but the blinking lights of police cars were plainly visible. A line of shadow was moving across the fields. Half the population of the town seemed to be fleeing their homes.

Shan ran to his truck.

He saw more than a dozen police cars as he reached the town, and half a dozen big trucks, all troop carriers of the People’s Armed Police, the green apes who did the heavy lifting for Public Security. He didn’t have to look for Meng. She stepped in front of his truck, then climbed into the passenger seat, as if for protection. Police were swarming in and out of the buildings, herding the few remaining inhabitants into the central square, while other officers stood at the edge of the field, blowing whistles at the retreating residents.

Meng gestured to the chaos. “Welcome to our model Pioneer community,” she said. “If Major Liang had his way he’d probably burn the town down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The bodies. Late yesterday someone stole the bodies.”

Shan considered her words. “Late yesterday,” he pointed out, “someone attacked you. The constables came running, leaving that meat locker unattended.”

“The owner of the store has fled. Only one thing keeps Liang from arresting the whole town.”

“Officially the murders haven’t taken place,” Shan inserted. “Hard to explain arrests for stealing murder victims when no murder has been reported.”

“Exactly.” Meng was watching the dark clouds that were rapidly overtaking the town. “We don’t want to put a blemish on the heroic faces of our Pioneers. We just-”

At first Shan thought Meng was interrupted by someone throwing stones at his truck. Then the sound was more like rifle shots, accelerating into a machine-gun staccato. People began crying out in pain, flinching, clutching at their arms and shoulders as if they were being stung. Some of the immigrants dropped to the ground, curling up with their hands over their heads. Others ran, dashing for the nearest cover.

Hailstorms in Tibet came quickly and left just as quickly but they always brought with them destruction and terror, sometimes even death. Shan looked back toward Clear Water Camp. The ridge was empty. The dropka might ignore the orders of their camp manager but they knew how to read clouds.

Shan pulled his wide-brimmed hat low on his head and leapt out of the truck. He grabbed two of the buckets from the back and ran toward the fields. He pulled up an old man who had fallen to his knees, blood running from the hands that shielded his face, then held a bucket over the man’s head. The man gasped in confusion, then grabbed the bucket and pointed to a woman who had fallen a few feet away.

“I have her!” Shan shouted over the roar of the storm, then pulled the woman to her feet and covered her head with the second bucket. They ran, like most of the people in the fields, toward the open-walled pavilion that had been erected for the market. As Shan pushed the woman inside and turned back toward the field, the hail abruptly stopped.

People were crying. A donkey brayed. Dogs were barking. The police seemed to have forgotten their search and were climbing back into their trucks. Several stared dumbfounded at their cars. Most of their rooftop light fixtures were in pieces. Three windshields had been shattered. Voices, some frantic, crackled on their radios. One constable, a Tibetan, stared somberly toward the huge mountain that hovered over the valley. The angry storm had come from Yangon, home of the deities who protected the valley.

Shan searched the crowd, spotted the grey-haired man with the wire-rimmed glasses he had seen playing checkers and followed him to a small bungalow on the side street behind the town’s modest teahouse.

As the man paused at his front door to speak with a neighbor, Shan quickly circled the house and entered the rear door. He was sitting in the kitchen when the man entered. He did not seem surprised to see a stranger in his house.

“Your men already searched here,” the man said in a level voice. “You can see we have few possessions and even less space to hide anything.” His voice trailed away as he noticed Shan’s muddy boots and tattered work clothes.

Shan did not speak. He reached into his pocket and set the little jade dragon from Jamyang’s altar on the table in front of him. “You can buy these from stalls off Tiananmen Square for forty renminbi. A genuine relic from the Kang Xi emperor, the vendors will say, and the tourists never know any better. But my instinct says this is not a reproduction.”

The man sank into a chair, his gaze fixed on the little dragon. “So you’re here to tell me it belongs to the state,” he declared in a tight voice. His long, thin face seemed to grow weary as he spoke.

Shan studied the man for a long moment, his eyes were deep, uncertain pools. There was great intelligence in them, and also a hint of fear. “My father had a small collection of seals from the imperial times,” Shan explained, “which he cherished. When I was very young he would take me in the closet and show them to me with a candle, exclaiming over the history they must have witnessed. Sometimes he would visit antique stalls in the market, hoping to find a document with a seal print that would match. But by then the Red Guard had burned nearly all the imperial documents. When we were sent for reeducation in the country he buried them in a field and never was able to recover them. Probably long since destroyed by a bulldozer.”

The man stared at Shan. “It was one of a matching pair,” he ventured at last. “I had to trade the other years ago for medicine when my daughter first became ill.”

Shan pushed the intricately worked seal across the table to the man, who stroked it with a gentle hand, gazing at it with a sad smile. He pushed it back to Shan as a police radio barked from the street outside. “It is not safe here. If those goons had found it today they would have stomped it under a heel and laughed. It has a new guardian in the mountains.”

“Jamyang is dead,” Shan stated.

The man’s eyes widened in alarm. “No. Not Jamyang. He knows how to survive.”

“I was with him when he killed himself.”

The man’s face twisted in pain, draining of color. He pressed a fist against his mouth as if to stifle a sob, then dropped his head into his hands. “I think I shall make some tea,” he declared with a sigh.

“I am called Yuan Guo,” the stranger explained as he waited for his hot plate to boil water. “I raise goats.”

Shan paused a moment. There had been another Yuan, on the tablet in the mountains. “I am called Shan Tao Yun,” Shan replied. “I inspect ditches, which means mostly I dig mud and manure. I didn’t always inspect ditches. You didn’t always raise goats.”