Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

But the soldiers had not just learned of the place, Shan knew. They had come here, to the stone tower, not to Zhoka, not to the illegal birthday festival. They had behaved as though the tower were their destination. As if someone had ordered the troops in the hills away so they could come to the tower. And if they knew of it already why hadn’t they destroyed it? Patrols in the area often carried black spray paint to eradicate any such painted artifacts they discovered, or explosives to collapse such structures. Shan remembered the way the lead soldier from the helicopter squad had hesitated, hand to his ear, just before they had closed around Surya. The soldier had been taking instructions by radio, probably from someone in the cockpit of the helicopter, someone, impossibly, looking for the monk.

“We must go deep into the mountains,” Liya said. “Zhoka is too dangerous now. And you can’t go to town, Shan. The valley is too dangerous.”

In the valley, Shan knew, patrols would be aggressively checking identity papers. Shan had no papers, had no right to be anywhere but in a gulag prison, had a bounty on his head. Lokesh stood and looked toward the sun, an hour above the horizon, then toward the southern mountains. Jara was on the next ridge, limping on his injured foot. Lokesh glanced at Shan, who nodded, struggling to keep the worry from his face.

“The girl,” Lokesh said. Without another word he set off along the southern trail, in the direction Dawa had last been seen.

Gendun looked at Liya. “Would it be possible to get two blankets? And a little food and water?”

“We will take you to where there are supplies. Close by,” Liya said. “You can sleep there.”

“Not for me. They are for Shan. He is going on retreat.”

Liya offered a forced smile, as if Gendun had told a bad joke.

“Rinpoche,” Shan said in a plaintive tone.

There was never tension, never a wall between Shan and Gendun except the one that was there now. He had experienced it many times, each time more painful than the one before. To Gendun nothing should interfere with Shan’s planned retreat, nothing was worth Shan neglecting his deity. But for Shan there was something vastly more important, no matter how adamantly Gendun rejected the notion. No matter how endangered the health of Shan’s own deity might be, for Shan, protecting the old lamas would always be more important.

“Do not let this thing separate you, Shan,” Gendun said. He was not referring to the day’s events, Shan knew, but to the thing that separated Shan from his deity. To Gendun the shadow of Shan’s prior incarnation as a senior Beijing investigator hung about him like a jealous ghost, encouraging him to become involved in unimportant events, drawn to the workings of logic and cause and effect that Gendun considered traps for the spiritually aware.

“Rinpoche, Liya must take you to the trail to the hermitage in the morning,” Shan said. He regretted the words even as they left his tongue. They sounded too much like a demand.

“At dawn I will be at the new chorten,” Gendun said. “And the next dawn after that. There are words to be spoken. All these years no one has paid the reverence that is owed.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said, gazing into the old face, weathered as a river stone.

“Surya was to stay. Now I will.”

“In the ruins?”

“In the gompa,” Gendun said, as if the monastery still existed.

“Someone died there.”

“Hundreds died there.”

“Surely it can wait.”

“It cannot. Nor can your retreat.”

Shan looked in the direction of Zhoka. Miracles were going to happen there, Lokesh had said. But all Shan knew for certain was that death had happened there, that death lingered there, and the dark secrets that had caused the death.

“Promise me, Shan,” the lama said, and there it was again, stabbing Shan like a blade, the torment in Gendun’s eyes.

“If I could have seen all this,” Shan said with a wrench in his heart, “if I had only known, I would have stayed in prison.” He felt responsible. When he closed his eyes he saw a fateful path, a door that had been locked until Shan had arrived at Yerpa. He was the one who had introduced Gendun to the outside world, who had helped Gendun travel into modern Tibet, who had introduced him, and through him Surya, to the gulag camps and the soldiers.

Gendun began tightening the laces of the tattered workboots he wore under his robes. “If I had known all this,” the lama said with a calm smile, “I would have come years ago.” He straightened and began walking toward Zhoka.

“Please, Shan, they’ll arrest you,” Liya said in a knowing voice. “Don’t do it. If you go to town we’ll never see you again, I know it.” When Shan returned her steady stare without speaking, she sighed, then fell in behind the lama.

As he stood alone on the windswept crest, desperately trying to grasp the events of the day, Shan’s fingers suddenly closed around the bloodstained disc he had found in the tunnel. He pulled it from his pocket, wiped it with grass, and held it up in the last light of the day. It was heavy, as if made of metal, though coated with red vinyl, with bands of green spaced evenly along its raised outer rim. In its center was the image of a savage yellow eye. He stared at it a long time before he could make sense of the English words around the eye. Lone Wolf Casino. Reno, Nevada.

Nights in Tibet were battlefields for the soul. Shan had seen brave young men stare into the dark endless sky and burst into tears. Lamas tested novices by having them sit for hours under the stars, often by the charnel grounds where the dead lay offered for sky burial. Of all the lands on earth only here, the highest of all, were the skies so black, the stars so dense, the frailty of the human so apparent each night.

In prison, his cellmates had pried up a piece of the tin roof over their barracks. They had moved a bunk under the hole and taken turns lying under the hole, staring out at the stars. A bitter young Tibetan, a drug dealer from Lhasa, had mocked the old men for doing so, saying he understood risking beating and extended sentences for trying to escape past the wire but not just for an escape to the stars. After a few months he had begun waiting his turn for the bunk. Even now Shan associated the stars with freedom and when troubled he would sit, sometimes for hours, watching them, sometimes speaking to them, sometimes watching for the souls of his dead parents perhaps flickering among them.

But tonight the sky tore at him. More than once he thought he heard screams coming from the sky, and every few minutes a shiver ran down his spine. There seemed to be something new about the dark this night, as if the terrible blackness of the tunnels had slipped the bounds of earth and was stalking him.

By midnight clouds filled the sky. It grew so dim he dared not continue down the treacherous slopes. He sat against a rock and fell into a fitful sleep, woke cold and shaking after a nightmare vision of Gendun lying bleeding and broken in the tunnels of Zhoka.

By the time the sky cleared, a half moon had risen and he quickly found his way over the steep ridges, reaching the crest of the final ridge that sloped down into the valley just as the eastern sky began to glow with a hint of dawn. In the distance, still miles away, was the orange shimmer of the streetlights of Lhadrung. He was about to begin the final descent when he halted. A faint scent of wood smoke wafted along the ridge.

Shan ventured warily along the crest for a hundred yards, then heard a lamb bleat. Below him in a gentle swale was the dim outline of a house and two small structures, one with a mound of hay stacked against one wall. He stepped closer and was a hundred feet away when a dog began barking. No one came out, though he saw a dim light, probably from a single butter lamp, past the door of the house, which stood ajar. The lamb bleated again, then another. The dog, invisible in the darkness, snarled now, but did not show itself. Shan backed slowly away, over the ridge, on to Lhadrung.