Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

As Ko turned in the opposite direction, Yao stepped in front of him, blocking the trail down the slope. “Like he said, you’re my problem now,” he said, and pointed to the party moving above them. “I saved you because of your father,” he said, indicating Shan. “Only once. Run from us and I’ll not stop them from shooting.”

Confusion passed over Ko’s face. He studied Shan silently with squinting eyes. “Bastards,” he snapped, then turned up the trail.

An hour later, just after they passed a trail that led to the south, Yao cried out in pain and Shan looked up to see him sprawled on a rock, holding his ankle as the soldier jogged back to investigate. Shan darted forward to reach the inspector’s side before the soldier. He lifted Yao’s pant leg and quickly began wrapping it with his rolled up handkerchief.

“Sprained,” he explained to the soldier as he tied the makeshift binding in a tight knot. “Won’t be walking much more today.”

Yao quickly ordered the party on, saying he and Shan would meet them at the cave the next day.

“We’ll need help,” Shan called out as the soldier pulled away. “He may need to be carried.”

Without hesitating the soldier jerked his thumb toward Ko, ordering him to help rearrange supplies for the three into the packs Shan and Yao had been carrying. In ten minutes the main party was over a ridge and out of sight. Yao was bending to untie Shan’s handkerchief when Ko dropped one of the packs at Shan’s feet.

“You lied to them.” There was a glimmer of curiosity in his voice.

“We decided to take a different route,” Shan said.

Yao picked up the pack and shoved it toward Ko. “Here’s how it is. You run and I won’t trouble over you. I’ll just call in troops. Not prison guards, mountain troops. They’ll use helicopters with infrared. If you’re lucky a snow leopard will get you first. If the soldiers find you they will put you in a helicopter. Then they will throw a party. Do you know what that means?”

From the grim way Ko studied the barren, rocky landscape Shan knew he understood. Ko shouldered the pack and, his face taut with anger, gave a mock bow then gestured for Shan to lead the way.

They reached Zhoka an hour before dusk, approaching in a wary silence. The ruins seemed unusually cold. A steady wind moaned through the broken walls. Ko hung back, uncertainty on his face. He removed the pack and held it in front of him, as though he would need to defend himself.

“It’s an old prison,” Ko said when they stopped at the edge of the ruins. “I can tell, I can feel it. Just look at it,” he said in a voice that had suddenly gone cold and hollow. His words stopped Shan. Shan studied the ruins again, looking as if for the first time at the maze of rock walls, the dust that swirled in the chill wind, making shifting, foreboding shadows, the patches of blackness that marked entrances into the subterranean passages. “They’ve always had prisons, always killed thousands,” Ko said. “You can feel it.” He wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular. When he looked and saw that Shan was listening, his sneering expression returned. He shouldered the pack and pushed past Shan.

“Not a prison,” Shan said to his back. “A monastery. A place of lamas.”

He did not think his son had heard. But Ko called back. “You’re a fool, not to know it’s a place of death,” he muttered, then kept walking.

They circled through the outer rim of the ruins, watching, pausing often to listen. They walked through eerie pools of silence, where old walls blocked the wind. When a pika scurried along a wall Shan looked up to see Ko crouching, one hand clenched in a fist, nervously watching the walls. Ko seemed to sense Shan’s stare and he cut his eyes resentfully, straightened, then pushed on to the lead. “There!” he warned when he reached the next wall. “People are waiting in the shadows. An ambush!” There was a new sound, faint but regular, a quiet murmuring.

Shan stepped ahead, staying in the shadows, until two figures came into view, hovering by a dim yak dung fire: a big man in a brown felt hat and dirty fleece coat, holding a girl on his lap, comforting her, patting her back. As Shan approached he realized the man wasn’t speaking or crying but humming.

“Do you need help,” Shan called softly, in Tibetan.

“If you’re asking if I’m okay,” came the reply in English as Shan stepped forward, “I could do with a pizza and a beer.” It was Corbett, holding Dawa.

Yao darted to the American, handed him one of their water bottles.

Dawa seemed in a state of exhaustion. She murmured a greeting, then rolled over in Corbett’s arms, her head on his shoulder. As he drank Corbett seemed to notice how Shan’s eyes searched the shadows. “I had to come back here, to understand why Lodi died here. Lokesh said he understood, but he said I was wrong about why, that I came for the same reason he was coming, because of the sleeping deities. He said imagine a house full of slumbering saints, and people trying to kill them in their beds.”

For a moment, as Corbett looked at Shan there was helplessness in his eyes. “Lokesh isn’t here,” he said. “I mean he’s here but not with us. The three of us arrived yesterday. He said he had to find an old lama here. When Lokesh couldn’t find him in any of the surface ruins he said he had to find the way underground. It’s been over ten hours,” he added in a worried whisper.

“Into the place with the blood,” a small muffled voice said from the American’s shoulder, “into the blackness where death waits.”

“Fiona,” Shan said, “is she-”

“She is safe,” Dawa said, lifting her head. “But when she learned I had not had time to understand Zhoka she sent me back with Uncle Jara. She said if I have only a limited time in the mountains this is where I should be. But as soon as we arrived Liya appeared and took Aku Jara away. When I asked him why, he just said it was the Mountain Buddha.”

“You mean he was frightened of it?” Shan asked.

“Yes. I don’t know. What is it, Uncle Shan? What is the Mountain Buddha?”

“I don’t know, Dawa,” Shan admitted uneasily.

As they made camp around a small fire in the sheltering corner of two crumbling walls, Corbett explained that when he had regained consciousness he had found his clothes stripped off, replaced with Tibetan homespun. They had taken his passport, wallet, notes, and put a prayer box around his neck. He spoke of the events without rancor, in a strange, distant tone. “They wanted me to think you were dead. I think some of them thought you were dead. But Liya came back by the next afternoon and confided in me, said you would be safe. She said she knew I would have to leave, but that I should please try to understand the importance of the words spoken about me, about the rainbow, because they were one of the true things about my life. She said even if I didn’t believe them everyone in the village did, and it had given them great hope. She said she was sorry, that they must seem like barbarians, that she kept my things in a sack. She gave it to me, asking only that I wear the clothes of Bumpari until I left, she begged me, to let the people there keep believing. I could go anytime and just think of my time there as a little Tibetan vacation.”

“You’re still wearing the clothes,” Shan observed.

The American offered an uncertain grin. “They’re just getting comfortable.” Corbett abruptly turned at the sound of running feet behind them. Ko appeared, back from looking for firewood with Yao, walking now, trying, but not succeeding, to hide his alarm. “There is blood,” he announced, turning to point in the direction he had come.

Ko led them to an intersection of two ruined alleyways, where Yao waited, studying the bright crimson drops that stained a flat rock. “Boots here,” the inspector said, pointing to imprints in the dry soil. “Soft shoes here,” he said, pointing to nearby indentations. “The boots waited for the soft shoes, and leapt out. There was a struggle then the one in shoes broke away,” he concluded, and pointed over the wall, at the top of which were more drops of blood. “Impossible to follow.”