Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Half an hour later Shan stood with the colonel, surveying the 404 work site with a puzzled expression. The prisoners were back in the lower valley, clearing and leveling fields at the base of the high cliffs.

“I thought you would have kept them in camp,” Shan observed. As he studied the landscape something tugged at his memory.

“We are not going to be cowed by rumors,” Tan said, and lit a cigarette. “They were already at work when I discovered Ming’s report.” Shan followed his gaze toward a silver car parked between two army trucks. Ming’s car.

“You mean he didn’t tell you himself.”

“Apparently he was not planning to share his insights with me.”

As if, Shan knew, Ming was hoping the escape would be successful. Ming’s desperation had not affected his political prowess. Tan would be discredited. Ming would deflect any investigation into his own activity, and his political acumen proven to Beijing. If the golden Buddha were located by Ming without witnesses, it would make him a rich man. And if the golden Buddha were revealed publicly Ming could simply seize it for his museum amid national headlines. The political gold Ming was harvesting in Lhadrung was worth more than the amban’s treasure to him.

Tan did not object when Shan moved toward Ming’s car. The doors were locked but in the backseat was a cardboard box, with several hammers and chisels inside. A hundred feet down the road was a small sturdy truck with three men sitting in the back, waiting. Ming had planned for every contingency.

The prisoners labored in the field at the base of the high cliff, carrying rocks, breaking the earth, pushing barrows of dirt to fill in low swales. But the only guards were the handful of soldiers who maintained the two-hundred-yard zone between the prisoners’ field and the Tibetan farmers scattered over the adjoining plots. He followed Tan, still chained to him, along the back of the work site, toward the grey trucks that would take the prisoners back to the barracks at the end of the day. Tan seemed careful not only to avoid any opportunity for Shan to reach speaking distance from any prisoner, but even to make eye contact. He pulled Shan along at a near trot, studying the landscape with a predator’s eyes.

“Perhaps it is indeed only a rumor,” Shan suggested in a weak voice as they reached the trucks.

“Every house, every camp in the hills is abandoned,” Tan announced in a terse voice. “Herds have been left in canyons, guarded only by dogs. We can find no trace of the people.” When he stared at Shan his eyes held a cold fury, but also something else, something that almost looked like pain. “Don’t make me do this,” he said. “If you want to stop it, do it now.”

Shan did not reply.

Tan studied Shan in silence, clenching his jaw repeatedly, then pulled back the canvas cover on the truck behind them. Half a dozen soldiers sat inside, alert, an unsettling hunger in their eyes. In front of them was a machine gun mounted on a tripod.

“There’re two more squads,” Tan explained. “Hidden in the rocks and the thicket at the base of the cliff. Procedures are dictated.” He gestured toward an aide standing in the shadows nearby. “Lieutenant. The protocol.”

The young officer stepped forward and straightened. “If there is sign of mutiny among the prison population one warning will be given, sir, and those who cooperate will be allowed to escape the fire by lying on the ground below the bullets.”

It wasn’t possible, Shan told himself. Surely they had not struggled so long to find the truth about Zhoka and the robberies, paying such a terrible price already, only to be led to this catastrophe. Surely Liya and the hill people would never be so foolish as to try, Tan would never be so foolish as to respond with such violence. But Shan looked into Tan’s eyes and knew otherwise. There was no cruelty left in Tan’s eyes, only a hint of sadness. He wouldn’t order the guns to fire because of cruelness. He would do so because of policy, because of standing orders that gave him no discretion on how to quell prison revolts.

Shan studied the scene again, desperate to understand, hating himself for telling Tashi to tell Ming the Mountain Buddha was moving, that Dolan was trying to find it. All Shan had wanted was to separate Ming from Dolan. But now Ming’s greed could destroy the 404th prison brigade. Ming was going to stage an uprising, or cause an uprising. If he had been satisfied with a false tomb surely a false uprising would be adequate for his purposes. “The man named Lu left with Ming from the mountains,” Shan said.

“He’s not been seen.” Tan blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. “We have no reason to look for him. You have yet to prove any of them to be criminals.”

“Yao proved it.”

“Yao’s report disappeared in Beijing.”

As they spoke, the museum director appeared at the edge of the field, wearing an army jacket over his white shirt. Someone walked beside him, draped in a long army coat, moving with small, uncertain steps, a broad-brimmed hat on his head. The figure was too tall for Lu, but Ming seemed to know him well, pausing with a hand on his shoulder, leaning toward the man to speak in his ear. Ming, too, was uncertain, Shan sensed, he only knew that the treasure was close now.

Tan’s impatience was becoming obvious. He lit another cigarette, then a third, one-handed, tapping the pack, extracting a cigarette with his lips, pulling Shan along the perimeter, pointing when he saw movement in the rocks at the edge of the cliff, cursing when he saw first a scurrying pika, then a large ground bird.

As Shan’s gaze moved back toward Ming the coat suddenly fell from the shoulder of Ming’s companion, though the man kept moving as if not noticing it was gone.

Shan’s arm shot forward of its own will, only to be abruptly stopped by the manacle. It was Surya. Ming had brought Surya to the prison brigade. It could be his way of inviting an incident, for eventually Surya would not be able to hold back, would be drawn to the old lama prisoners, and when it happened he would be deaf to the protests of the guards, would break the security line without regard to his own safety. Or it could be Ming’s way of assuring that Shan would not interfere.

“Ming acts like a damned political officer,” Tan groused. “Strutting along-” Tan stopped midsentence. There was a new sound. The distant bellowing of an animal, Shan thought at first, but then, after faltering, the sound became stronger, steady, a strange grinding vibration in the air. Most of the prisoners halted, staring with wonder at the cliff, where the sound seemed to originate, its power amplified by the rock face.

“Dungchen!” Shan heard Ming exclaim from nearly forty paces away.

Smiles appeared on the worn faces of the old men in rags, who had all ceased work now, dropping their tools and barrows. It was one of the long telescoping horns that he had last heard at Bumpari village, one of the horns that summoned the faithful, a sound most of the prisoners had not heard for decades.

“Dungchen!” Ming repeated loudly, as if hoping to incite the prisoners.

Tan’s aides began scanning the wall with binoculars. There was no visible sign of the horn, but the top of the cliff held many clefts, covered in shadow, where the horn could be hidden.

Whistles began to blow. Half the guards along the perimeter began moving among the prisoners, yelling at them, cursing, lifting their batons in threat.

But the more the horn blew, the less the prisoners seemed to notice the guards.

“Buddha’s breath!” one of the old men called, and Shan remembered how the phrase had been used in the prison tales, to describe the deep resonation of the horns. But to Shan it sounded like a booming throat chant, as if the mountain itself was throat chanting, rattling its soul. As if the Mountain Buddha were coming.