Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“You did right,” Shan said, and shot up as footsteps rose behind him. Yao emerged from the shadows, gesturing to Shan, silently taking the statue from him. He sighed heavily at the sight of the wanton destruction, then set the twisted metal on the rock beside the cairn, studying it intensely in the first rays of sunlight.

“If there are words that must be said for a dead man,” Dawa said quietly, “what must be done for a dead god?”

The question hung in the air.

“It is only the image of a god,” Yao said after a moment. Shan looked at the inspector in surprise.

“In the hut,” Dawa said, “it is only the image of a man.”

The words seemed to confuse Yao. He just turned and gazed toward the south.

“We need to pack,” Shan said.

“I’ll wait here,” Yao offered, reaching for his pad. “I’m not going back to that place.”

For an hour they walked southward in silence, as they had left in silence. The villagers had kept apart as Shan and Corbett had gathered their packs, watching no longer with resentment, but with something like worry, as if they feared for Shan and his companions. Corbett had silently gathered flowers and set them in the blind woman’s hands. “Give you joy,” she had whispered.

Shan saw that Lokesh had strayed off the trail, up the slope of a small ridge with a long flat top. He urged the others on, promising to rejoin them with Lokesh soon. The old Tibetan sat at the crest of the ridge facing a small half-mile-wide plain at the top. A familiar expression had settled over Lokesh, the odd, sad joy he showed when walking through the ruins of gompas or watching aged herders labor over their beads with arthritic fingers.

“It’s taken a long time,” Lokesh said as Shan approached, sweeping his hand toward the plain.

The plain was filled with rock cairns, hundreds of cairns, some covered with lichen so thick it bound their stones together. Shan slowly stepped among the cairns at the edge of the field. The ones with the thickest lichen were all tall, over six feet high. Where the lichen had not covered them he could see carvings, not just of the mani mantra but of elaborate images of Buddhist teachers and deities. The oldest and tallest were arranged in a circle around a small chorten of white stone, eight feet high, that itself was beautifully carved with the faces of protector deities.

But the vast majority of the cairns were smaller, more recent, though none less than decades old.

“The battlefield,” Shan said. “They spoke of a terrible battle in the mountains.”

“Living so close to the dead,” Lokesh said with a reverent whisper as he gazed back in the direction of the ragyapa village, “you would be brushed by many spirits. It would be like a wound.” He stood and stroked the top of a cairn. “Maybe you would have to keep the wound open, always, because of the scar that would grow over your spirit.”

Shan remembered the hollow but wise expressions of the ragyapa, even the children. They had chosen to keep the wound open, for the honor of being brushed by many spirits.

Shan saw that Lokesh had found something new. Tucked into a cleft in a ledge wall was a statue, a finely detailed image of the Future Buddha, serenely gazing over the battlefield. No, Shan saw, it had not been inserted into the cleft, it had been carved from the living stone. The workmanship was masterful, the inscription of the mantra carved into the base so fine it seemed as though it had been left with a brush.

“Zhoka,” Lokesh said.

They stared at the beautiful Buddha a long time. It was a work that belonged in a temple, or a museum, not in such a high, lonely place where living eyes almost never saw it. But Shan somehow knew Lokesh was right. It was not for the living. The monks of Zhoka had given it to the dead.

“I don’t understand what they are doing, those two policemen,” Lokesh said after a long silence.

“Trying to find the thieves,” Shan said, confused.

“Surely taking such things of beauty is a sin,” Lokesh said, “but I don’t see how the government can help. Policemen are supposed to be concerned about crime. It is far easier to punish a crime than to resolve the sin.”

For the first time Shan realized that Lokesh, too, was investigating in his own way. The battered statue with Atso, the deity paintings in the old tower, the disturbance in the harmony of the durtro, these were the clues he followed. Lokesh was on the track of godkillers, not to punish but to resolve their sin. The old Tibetan pointed to a rock formation at the side and walked toward it. A stick had been jammed into the rocks, and a makeshift prayer flag hung from it, a piece of cloth ripped from a garment, inscribed in soot. Below it, in the shadows of the rocks, were the remains of a recent fire. Shan squatted and studied the ground. Several people had been there recently, wearing the soft-soled boots of Tibetans.

In another hour the southern trail began to sharply ascend, and after two more hours of hard climbing they found themselves on a wide, high plain framed on the south and west by the distant snowcapped Himalayas. The broad, arid plateau was unlike any land Shan had ever seen. It was strewn with high spires of rock and narrow flat-topped buttes, twenty or thirty of the structures, some hundreds of feet tall, scattered across the plain. Like cairns, giant cairns arranged by the gods.

“It’s like the end of the earth,” Corbett said.

The wind suddenly found them, a cold, battering wind that seemed to want to push back down the trail, off the plateau.

“We have no food. There’s no water. We have to go back now,” Yao muttered. “We can’t sleep up here. I must be in Lhadrung, I have to call Beijing.”

“No. There are places that seek people out,” Lokesh said in a level voice, echoing the words of the ragyapa woman. “We are being pushed toward what must be done. It is just stripping us of what holds us back. Your money. Your map. Your radio. Your food.”

“My camera,” Corbett added. “My evidence kit.”

“This is no place for thieves,” Yao snapped.

Shan surveyed the rugged terrain they had crossed. He, too, had reasons to go back. Ming was still searching for a monk. Gendun was still somewhere at Zhoka, while the godkillers stalked the hills.

“No one could live in such a forsaken place.” Yao said, then paused, looking at Lokesh, who was quickly walking toward a long ledge a hundred feet away.

Shan followed his gaze and stared, disbelieving. “Someone did,” he said, and trotted to Lokesh. Words were carved into the rock in front of the old Tibetan, an inscription facing the barren, brutal plateau, not far from where their trail had entered.

“What does it say?” Corbett asked, over Shan’s shoulder.

“Study Only the Absolute,” Shan translated, glancing at Lokesh with a strange thrill of discovery.

The sudden appearance of the words seemed to take all protest out of Yao. They walked slowly along the edge of the plain. After several hundred yards Corbett pointed to an eye, two feet wide, painted on a high rockface. Soon after they passed a long slab of rock with the eight sacred symbols carved along its edge. Suddenly Corbett stopped, hand in the air, pointing. “She looks so lifelike,” he said in a whisper.

Fifty feet away in the deep shadow of a huge pillar of stone was a statue of a woman wrapped in a blanket staring out over the plain. Dawa gazed a moment, uttered a little cry, and bolted forward. As Shan followed the figure slowly moved, opening its arms to embrace the girl.

The woman who sat so still in a grey hat and a grey blanket was Liya and not Liya. She seemed stiff, unwelcoming, and acknowledged them only with a small, reluctant nod. “The brown wind will come soon,” she said impassively. “You cannot be on the plain then.” She took Dawa’s hand and began walking up a worn path that wound around a series of ledges and natural pillars.