Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Shan was about to ask where the others were when he froze. Corbett was slumped in his chair, unconscious; Liya carefully lifted the little cup from his hand.

Shan stood in alarm. “Lokesh!” he called, or thought he called, but then he realized his tongue felt thick and heavy. His knees began to buckle. The room swam. He took a step forward, and fell to his knees as he heard the computer drop to the floor beside him and saw the inspector clutch his throat.

Liya stepped close to Shan, taking the cup from his hand. “Lokesh will not be harmed,” she said forlornly, as if she owed Shan one last favor. Then she put out her arms as Shan fell forward. In his last moment of consciousness he saw several figures run into the room, dim shadows of people surrounding him. “Make sure it is quick,” was the last thing he heard Liya say. “I do not want them to suffer.”

The light Shan kept reaching for stayed just out of reach, a tiny brilliant patch in a long black tunnel. A child kept calling to him down the tunnel, crying out that everything was safe, to come back now. A man cursed, in Chinese. A girl prayed, in Tibetan.

Suddenly something like lightning exploded in Shan’s head, and there was nothing but light, glaring, painful light. He threw his arm over his eyes, and heard himself moan.

“Come back,” the girl said in an anxious voice, pulling his arm from his head. “Aku Shan, please come back.” She squeezed his hand repeatedly.

Shan’s eyes finally found their focus. He was lying in a meadow of tall grass, and Dawa was holding his hand. She smiled as his confused gaze settled on her, then helped him sit up. They were on the gentle slope of a long high ridge, much of it carpeted with wildflowers. The sun was perhaps two hours above the horizon. Larks sang nearby.

“You didn’t die,” Dawa offered, then gestured toward the sitting figure of Inspector Yao, as if his presence were proof enough Shan had not reached heaven. “Some people in the village wanted you dead,” the girl reported in a matter-of-fact tone, “but Liya gave you medicine, she said, so you would feel better today.”

Shan studied the girl’s face. Medicine. He stood, filling his lungs with the cool morning air. So he would feel better. So he would remain alive, he realized as he recalled the events of the night before. Some of the villagers had wanted Shan and Yao dead. Liya had drugged her Chinese visitors to save them.

“How did we get here?”

“Tied over the backs of horses. They only had two horses in the village. I rode on Liya’s back.”

“But where’s Lokesh? And the American?”

Dawa shrugged. “They stayed at the village.”

A spring bubbled out of the earth thirty feet away. Shan rubbed the cool water over his face, drank deeply, then gestured for Yao to do the same.

“Kidnapped,” the inspector growled. “Attempted murder of a government official.”

Dawa stared at Yao in confusion. “It was medicine,” she repeated.

“Liya saved us,” Shan said, and explained what the girl had told him. “She let you go even though you said you would destroy Bumpari.”

“She just found a less violent way to kill us,” Yao shot back. “We’re stranded in the wilderness, without food, without a map, without transportation.” Yao paused, patting his pockets, and pulled out his notepad. He leafed through its pages, as if to confirm they were intact, then pushed it deep into his pocket. As he did so he paused, then pulled something from his pocket, a long brown bead with an intricate pattern etched in white.

Shan searched his own pockets and found another of the beads. “Liya,” he said. “She gave them to us for protection.”

Yao frowned but put the bead back in his pocket. “The American,” he said in a worried tone. “A foreigner is in even greater danger than we were. People like that just rob foreigners and dispose of the bodies.”

But Shan did not believe Corbett was in physical danger. Corbett hadn’t been singled out because he was a foreigner, Shan suspected, but because the villagers had decided he had awakened from a rainbow. “Why did they send you away?” he asked Dawa. “They would never hurt you.”

“Liya said people would keep looking for me if I didn’t go back. She said you would know the place to take me.”

“I don’t know any-” Shan began, then stopped as she extracted a piece of paper.

“Iwin how,” she said, struggling with the word, and handed the paper to Shan.

He grinned as he read it. “To Ivanhoe.”

Dawa nodded energetically. “Yes! She said find Ivanhoe, that there we can help each other.”

“Which way?” Shan asked the girl. “Which way did we come last night after leaving the village? Up that long plain? Down the trail we arrived on?” He did not recognize any of the surrounding landscape.

Dawa shrugged. “It was dark. I was sleeping when they carried me.” She pointed to a cloth sack on a rock near the spring. “Liya sent that for you.”

“It’s been twelve, maybe fourteen hours,” Shan calculated as they retrieved the sack. “We could be thirty or forty miles away,” he exaggerated, not wanting to make it easy for Yao to find the village again. He doubted they had come more than ten miles over the rugged terrain. “We came south, closer to the Himalayas.”

Yao upended the sack onto the grass. Six apples and some dried cheese tumbled out. “It just means we die more slowly of starvation,” he groused.

“No,” Shan said as he studied the landscape again. “She picked this place carefully. Water close by. High enough to see the road, far enough from it to avoid onlookers.” He pointed to the southwest, where a plume of dust could be seen in the distance.

Yao stood and stared at the plume. “A truck!” he announced excitedly. “Going north. But we’ll never catch it!”

“There’ll be another,” Shan said, repacking the food. He slung the sack over his shoulder.

There were no vehicles in sight when they reached the rutted gravel track an hour later. But after thirty minutes of walking northward a battered truck with four sheep in its small cargo bay appeared.

“Lhadrung market,” the nearly toothless driver replied when Shan asked his destination. Shan handed him three apples and the man gestured them inside the cab. Shan opened the door for Dawa, handing her another of the apples as she climbed inside.

Yao began to follow the girl but Shan gripped his arm. “We’re riding in back,” he said.

Yao shot him a venomous glare but closed the door and climbed with Shan over the rear gate.

As the truck accelerated with a loud rumbling and a cloud of exhaust smoke, Yao settled against the rear of the cab. The sheep all stared at him. “Maybe you told Liya to do it,” he said with ice in his voice. “You could have staged it all just to get me out of that place.” He raised a hand as though to threaten the sheep. They kept staring at him. “The first time I begin to find answers to my questions I am forced away. Because you know the guilty ones are Tibetans.”

Shan’s only reply was a steady stare, matching that of the sheep.

Yao glared angrily at him, then extracted his notepad and began writing feverishly. Confidence seemed to build on his face as he worked. “An entire village of thieves,” the inspector declared with a satisfied tone. He seemed to regard the sheep as an audience now, and spoke toward them as if testing his theories. “An unprecedented affront to socialism.”

“Yesterday he was admiring their art,” Shan observed quietly, to the sheep.

Yao ignored him. “They can’t stay hidden forever. Colonel Tan can send troops to sweep south from Zhoka. Aerial reconnaissance can find them in two or three days. Border commandos can be deployed. We will conduct a mass trial in Lhasa. This will get national attention.”