Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

When Shan had tried to warn him of the dangers in the valley, Jamyang had repeated his own words back to him. You don’t always understand how dangerous it is. Only once, just the week before, had Jamyang probed Shan’s background, showing a surprising interest in his years as an investigator. Had that been why Jamyang had wanted Shan there in his last moments? Had he planned the celebration to be certain Shan would be with him? Had he been inviting Shan to unravel the mystery of his own death and those below? Jamyang’s face rose before him, wearing the cryptic, questioning expression he had shown at the pilgrim shrines. For a moment it was so real Shan could have reached out and touched the smudge of dirt where he had prostrated his forehead to the mountain. It has taken us four billion years to get to where we are, the lama had said.

Suddenly the vision was gone and he saw only the pistol. He stared at the gun with a desolate expression, then finally rose, walked a hundred feet from the shrine, and buried it under a flat rock by a clump of heather.

The deities carved on the rock wall seemed to return his gaze as he settled before them, looking at him with melancholy question in their eyes. He recalled the first time he and Lokesh had encountered Jamyang, surprising him as he had been trying to restore a crumbling wall of mani stones along a lonely path in the upper valley. The lama had been as skittish as a wild animal, darting away before they could greet him. Lokesh and Shan had spent an hour working on the wall themselves, hoping he would understand they intended no harm, and had felt his gaze the entire time, but he had not reappeared. A week later when Shan had responded to the screams of a shepherd girl by leaping into a pool of quicksand to save her lamb, Jamyang had suddenly appeared to help Lokesh haul Shan and the lamb out of the pit. He remembered the shy smile on Jamyang’s face and his laughter when Lokesh had quipped that Shan looked like one of the offering figures shaped in mud by the nomad families. They had seen him more often then, on high trails, sometimes waving at them like an old friend, sometime watching them in silence as they cleared ditches, even stopping to meditate near them. Shan had seen it before. Tibetans, especially those of a certain age, sometimes grew to know each other through shared silences. He remembered the contentment on the lama’s face when he had finally taken them to meet the deities he was so reverently restoring, and the greater joy when Lokesh had described how a similar carving had once existed outside a private chapel of the Dalai Lama’s in Lhasa, long ago destroyed.

Lokesh had suggested they might clean the faded, grime-covered paintings on the rock face above the sculpture and the three of them had begun the task together. They had spent many hours there in the following weeks, the air sometimes filling with cries of glee from the two Tibetans as their delicate brushes uncovered images of nearly forgotten gods. The benches used as altars had come later, to hold the offerings brought by shepherds and farmers. So many had been brought that Jamyang had stored some in the rear of the shallow cave, under a piece of canvas.

Shan walked along the offerings, touching several, pausing as one, then another, brought back a memory of Jamyang or Lokesh exclaiming over its workmanship. An old silver pen case inlaid with turquoise. A little jade dragon that looked more Chinese than Tibetan. A bronze figurine of the Compassionate Buddha set with jewels along its base, a purba -the short spikelike dagger of Tibetan ritual, a thick disk of jade with a wide channel cut through its center and flowers carved around its edge that looked strangely familiar, no doubt the base of a missing statue. He picked up the purba. A narrow brown ribbon had been tied around it. The purba had been on the altar for weeks, but not the ribbon. He fingered the ribbon uncertainly, wondering why it looked familiar. He suspected Jamyang had tied it on while he had cleaned the offerings just before dying, had tied it to the implement that was supposed to ritually cut through consciousness. He set it down uneasily, then moved to the canvas-covered pile in the shadows. Eventually the knobs would find the shrine, and the thief surely would return. The treasures would have to be taken away for safekeeping.

He lifted the canvas. On top of the pile were the ribbon-bound printing blocks Jamyang had recovered from the thief. Shan had never seen the boards before. The ribbon. He glanced back at the purba. The ribbon tied to it had been taken from the blocks, as if the lama had wanted to draw Shan’s attention to them. It had been two weeks since his last visit to the shrine, when he and Lokesh had helped clean everything, including the objects in the little cave. The printing blocks had not been there then. He brought them out into the early morning light, laid them on the end of a bench, and untied the ribbons. He turned them over to reveal their inscriptions, then stared in shocked disbelief.

They were not printing blocks. They were indeed old, indeed sacred, but they were not Tibetan. His hand trembled with excitement as he ran a finger along the carved characters. One of the two slabs was inscribed with a single vertical line of Chinese ideograms, of a very old style, the second with the identical characters plus small legends on either side of them. He looked up at the altar, realizing now why the jade disk had seemed familiar, then retrieved the disk. With an action that had been familiar in his youth, he pressed the two boards together, the writing facing outward now, and slid their ends into the channel on the disk. They fit perfectly, held erect by the heavy base. It was, impossibly, a Chinese ancestral tablet. In the distant, lost world of Shan’s childhood he had visited family shrines that had been lined with such tablets, each inscribed with the name of a dead ancestor, each reverently cleaned and prayed over by living relatives on festival days. The tablets, the old Taoist priests had explained, enshrined the souls of the dead. Shan had not seen one for years, for decades. He would never forget the day when the Red Guard had raided the family shrines of his neighborhood and made bonfires of all the tablets. An old widow down the street had been inconsolable, saying the Communists had incinerated the souls of her ancestors.

Yuan Yi, the tablet said, mandarin of the third rank, died this fifty-ninth year of the Kangxi Emperor. The opposite side recorded the site of his burial, in Heilongjiang Province. Shan did a quick calculation. The mandarin, of very high imperial rank, had died in 1721 and been buried in the cold mountains of distant Manchuria. Jamyang had given up his most precious Buddhist artifact for a three-hundred-year-old Chinese spirit tablet. Shan replayed in his mind’s eye the moments on the slope with the thief. The man had held tightly to the tablets, had acted ready to fight for them. Perhaps Shan had misunderstood. Perhaps the limping shepherd had not been intent on luring Jamyang to the police for a bounty but to get the tablets to town. When he had overtaken the thief, Jamyang had been more interested in recovering the tablets than the objects stolen from his altar.

It seemed impossible that the gentle, reverent Tibetan who hid from the Chinese authorities would hide and protect a Chinese artifact. What else had he misunderstood about Jamyang? The unregistered monks lived like a network of spies, each deliberately blind to the whereabouts and background of the others, for fear of being arrested and forced to divulge the information. The knobs had taken to calling such monks traitors. If they did not cooperate with the Chinese government they were by definition splittists-reviled supporters of an independent Tibet. It was always understood that such men kept secrets, but Jamyang’s secrets had led to violence and death.