Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Along the bottom of the leaf were painted more deer in the traditional Tibetan style, as well as small intricate figures of yak. He read it, stared at the bloody bone, and shivered. The peche leaf spoke of death like a poem, or a eulogy. It was decades old, perhaps a century or more. It had been dropped exactly where somebody, this day, had died. A coincidence, he would have said years earlier. But if Lokesh were with him the old Tibetan would have solemnly clapped his hands together and exclaimed how fortunate they were to be present when the movement of two wheels of destiny, however briefly, meshed together.

Shan raised his lamp again. There were no more pages, nothing but more shards of pottery, shreds of sackcloth, and what may have been a shriveled apple. He examined the parchment once more, read its strange, haunting English words again, then rolled the leaf and placed it in his pocket. As he straightened he spied one last object, something small and dark in the corner of the little alcove. He pressed the lamp close to it. A cigar, the end of a narrow cigar. He picked it up with his fingertips and held it under his nostrils. The tobacco had a cloying, sweet odor, unlike any tobacco he had ever known. It was not a Tibetan thing, not even a Chinese thing. He wrapped it in one of the shreds of cloth. As he did so, something cold seemed to breath down his back. He turned and turned again, then quickly stepped back over the pool of blood into the chamber, noticing for the first time a subtle contour in the center of the pool, a small round shape, the relief of a disc perhaps an inch and a half wide, not much thicker than a coin. Using a chip of plaster he pushed it out of the blood, wrapped it in the corner of his handkerchief, and placed it in his pocket.

Suddenly he was trembling. The strange events, and perhaps even stranger words, of the day swirled through his mind. Once-had it been only an hour ago? — Gendun had said the day was one of the most joyful of his long life. Today everything was going to end, Surya had said. Godkillers were in the mountains. This was a day when the world was changed. Zhoka held secrets that were dangerous to misunderstand.

A low hollow moan abruptly rose from the darkness behind him, from the descending tunnel past the blood pool. He told himself it was the wind playing on some rock formation or a hole in the debris, but he found himself against the wall again, his skin crawling. Whoever, or whatever, had taken the body had done so in the last twenty or thirty minutes, and could still be lingering nearby. Shan extended the light toward the sound, but as he did so the lamp began to sputter, its fuel nearly exhausted. He darted through the doorway. By the time he reached the stair passage the flame was out. He climbed toward the daylight above, backwards, watching the darkness.

Outside, the ruins were empty. The only thing that moved in the central courtyard was the thin column of smoke drifting from the old samkang. Shan jogged to the foregate by the gorge and its ruined bridge. There was no sign of the festival except a few white smudges on the rocks underfoot. He stepped to the lip of the gorge. Somewhere, hundreds of feet below, lay his hermitage bag and the bamboo case of lacquered yarrow sticks for practicing the Tao te Ching that had been passed through so many generations of his family. They had survived war and famine, had survived the death of his uncles and father at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, had even survived his own gulag imprisonment. But they had not survived the terror of a ten-year-old girl.

He walked slowly through the ruins, calling for Lokesh and Liya, then found himself facing the chorten shrine. He absently lifted the paintbrush from his pocket, staring at it a moment before he suddenly remembered the soldiers, turned and ran.

* * *

In a quarter hour Shan was at the top of the ridge above Zhoka. Half a mile to the northwest over a dozen bent figures moved along the crest. He paused and studied the landscape. The deep chasm cut Zhoka off from the north. The south, where steep, jagged peaks seemed to warn travelers away, was said to be a barren, forbidding land. The soldiers had last been seen to the northwest, between Zhoka and Lhadrung Valley. As he looked in that direction, toward the ruined stone tower that hovered over the northwestern end of the ridge, he thought he saw a flash of maroon, the color of a robe.

In another ten minutes Shan had caught up with the slowest of the fleeing Tibetans, who glanced at him resentfully then looked away. As he passed them he asked each one where the monks had gone. At last one of the old women who had prayed with Surya fixed him with an anguished gaze and pointed forward.

He found Lokesh standing on a ledge near the ruined tower that overlooked the narrow valley beyond. His old friend was staring toward the shadows inside the tower, feverishly working his beads. As Shan reached his side, Lokesh grabbed his arm as if to restrain Shan from venturing closer to the tower.

It was the first time Shan had been at the tower, and he saw now it wasn’t totally destroyed. Only one scorched wall remained of the top section, reaching nearly twenty feet from the ground, with pieces of iron still holding fragments of what once had been a ladder secured to the outer wall. But the small chamber beneath, formed of a natural rock formation, was intact, a snug open-fronted alcove where travelers or sentries might have taken shelter from the elements. A solitary figure knelt on the floor of the chamber, facing the rear wall. Surya.

“Why would he come this way?” Shan asked Lokesh. “Toward Lhadrung, the soldiers-he could be arrested. The people are terrified. They will admit he is an unlicensed monk if asked. They are as scared of him now as of the soldiers.” He looked into Lokesh’s face and saw a deep, painful confusion. “We have to take him back home, to safety, then we can ask him about what happened, then we can help him.” If Colonel Tan learned of unregistered monks, or a man professing murder, he would send troops to scour the mountains, and no one arrested could be expected to stay silent. While Yerpa had evaded detection for decades, under the influence of interrogators Surya would eventually divulge the location. If Surya were arrested, Yerpa would be destroyed as thoroughly as Zhoka, and Gendun and all the other monks arrested.

“He’s not going to town,” Lokesh declared, though his voice was uncertain. “He came here. In the courtyard he would not speak, not to anyone, nothing but those terrible words you heard. Suddenly he just stood, looked toward the tower, and started running. When I reached him he was just cleaning the walls inside, brushing away the old dirt. Then the girl came, with Gendun following,” he added, gesturing toward a rock a hundred feet away where the lama sat watching Dawa, who sat at a spring, washing the blood from her dress, her aunt and uncle watching her forlornly fifty paces beyond, sitting with the other children. “She won’t let Gendun or anyone get close to her. She says she wants to go home to her Chinese factory town. She says she hates monks. She says she hates all of us for tricking her.”

Images of Dawa’s day in the ruins flashed through Shan’s mind. She had felt confusion and fear at first, then awe and joy, finally horror and grief. “She came to learn about life in Tibet,” Shan said in a tight voice.

Lokesh nodded soberly. “We must take Surya back to Yerpa. He wants much healing.”

Shan had never heard his friend’s voice sound so frail. He watched Lokesh gaze with a strange, sad longing toward Zhoka. “What happened to Surya also happened to the girl. What did we misunderstand?” the old Tibetan asked Shan. Shan could only shake his head slowly.

After a moment Shan approached Dawa and sat on the grass beside her. She did not acknowledge him, just kept washing, pushing at the blood on her dress.