Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Shan stepped inside, followed by the others, and turned to follow Yao’s gaze. For a moment Shan thought his knees were about to buckle.

“Ai yi!” Lokesh cried.

“It’s him!” Punji gasped.

“It’s who?” Corbett asked in confusion, staring at the two magnificent Chinese scroll portraits on the wall.

Shan instantly recognized the elegant middle-aged man in a fur hat who stared down from the throne in the painting on the right. It was the Qian Long emperor.

“He brought a picture of his uncle from Beijing,” Punji whispered.

“And of himself,” Shan said. On the opposite side of the door was a matching painting, of the same size, with the same silk brocade border, of another man in a fur cap, seated on a bench, his kind intelligent face a younger version of the emperor’s own.

“The saints we didn’t know,” Lokesh said. Shan suddenly realized why one of the men in the murals had seemed familiar.

“It was the emperor,” Punji said in an awed voice, “painted as a lama. And the other was his nephew.”

“Not the amban,” Shan corrected. “By then he had become the other.”

“The other?” the British woman asked.

“The reincarnate abbot.” Shan gestured to the dragon statue on the trunk. “The Stone Dragon Lama.”

“Killed by order of the Stone Dragon,” Punji uttered in a surprised whisper, and looked up at Lokesh and Shan. “The lama Kwan Li ordered the death of the amban Kwan Li.” The handwriting on the bounty poster had been something like a joke, a taunt, written by members of the lama’s own flock.

“He signed his work,” Lokesh whispered, his voice still full of wonder. His finger rested on one of the stone dragon’s outstretched feet.

McDowell, opening the trunk by the bed, looked up from a neat work tray of brushes and dried pigments that sat inside. “What do you mean?”

“The paintings with the marks. They were his,” Shan said. He realized none of them were speaking above a whisper. “The five marks. It’s the footprint of the imperial dragon. Five claws.”

In the shadows by the altar a match flared. Lokesh was lighting a stick of incense, setting it in a stone holder on a low table Shan had not noticed before. Beside the holder was a large wooden tray, holding an odd assortment of objects: Several little tsa-tsas, the traditional clay images of deities, painted in brilliant colors. Over twenty rolls of paper, tightly bound with silk threads. What may have been a piece of bone. And a round piece of brass in a small dome shape, with a short shaft on its back. The collection appeared to be another makeshift altar.

Another soft gasp came over Shan’s shoulder. Punji pushed the brass object with a finger, turning it over, her hand hanging over it. It was a button, an ornate military button, with two cannon barrels, crossed, on its front surface.

McDowell’s face seemed to swirl with emotion, then she folded her arms across her chest and turned to face the picture of the amban, approached it as if about to ask him a question, then slowly stepped back into the hall, and walked into the darkness.

When Shan followed, a light was shining into the next doorway, thirty feet away. Corbett stood in the opening. Shan watched as the British woman reached the American, stared into the chamber a moment, then darted inside as Corbett laughed.

The only thing about the chamber that matched the others was the fragrant wood walls. The bed was higher, elevated on wooden blocks, and three trunks were arranged along the wall straddling the door. The wall opposite the bed consisted of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Shan stepped to the shelves. Most of their contents were unbound peche, but one shelf was packed with Western books. On a finely worked table beside the bed were several candle stubs, pieces of paper, and two images in matching frames. Shan stepped closer to examine them. One was of the Dalai Lama, as a boy of perhaps ten. The other was a photograph of a large Western woman, in a dark dress with a lace collar buttoned tightly at the neck, sitting in an ornate chair. Shan recalled seeing her face in another photo, at the cottage in the village. As Corbett lit the candles another laugh escaped his lips. Punji appeared and lifted the frame with the woman.

“It’s his queen,” she said, still in her tone of awe. “The queen of his boyhood. Queen Victoria.”

On the wall along the side of the bed was a peg holding a wooden tube suspended on a leather thong, open at the top end. Inside was a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. Above the peg was a space on the wall where something large and rectangular had hung, its shape made visible by a lighter layer of dust within the five-foot-long rectangle.

Yao appeared and began opening the trunks. The first had robes and underrobes, incense, and socks-heavily darned woolen socks. There were paintings hung along the entry wall, above the trunks, paintings like Shan had never seen before. They were skilled works, painted as thangkas but without the formal structure used by the Tibetans.

The first was the future Buddha riding a magnificent white horse, bearing a lance like a warrior, facing dim shapes on horseback at the edge of a forest. There was a monk standing on the ramparts of a British-looking castle, the wind whipping his robe. Shan looked back at the first painting and smiled. The figure on the white charger was Buddha, as Ivanhoe.

In the corner was a huge painting that looked like a European battle scene, with Western soldiers in tan helmets, some urging hordes that pulled cannon, some wearing bandages over bloody wounds, a group of officers apart, on a hill, their faces very detailed, as if based on actual men the artist had known. But all of the soldiers, including the officers, wore the maroon robes of monks.

Corbett called out and lifted a long object from one of the trunks. It was a violin, worn from heavy use.

Shan sat on the stool, staring at a peche leaf, blank except for a sketch of a flower on the margin. It had been waiting under Brother Bertram’s pen, about to capture a thought that was now lost forever.

Corbett opened another trunk and pulled out a pair of red trousers with gold trim, part of an officer’s dress uniform. Shan stepped to the bound books. There was a Bible, several British novels, a guide to the birds of Asia, and a thick untitled leather-bound book. He opened it and discovered that it was a journal, written in English in a careful, elegant hand.

December 10, 1903, read the first entry.

We have redefined the word chaos today by taking four thousand mules over the snows of the Jelap La mountain pass, altitude 14,000 feet, with three hundred handlers speaking four different languages.

It was a description of the progress of the Younghusband expedition over the Himalayas. He leafed through the pages. The entries were weekly for the first year, the early ones short factual descriptions of the work of soldiers, the later entries speaking of Tibetan art and monk artists. The major had been posted at Gyanste, established by treaty as one of the British trading centers. A long period passed without entries, over a year, until there was an entry marked Lhasa 1906, then more entries about a magical secret place his teacher had taken him, from which he wanted never to leave. Shan paused, and read a joyous passage about the birth of a daughter.

Then, after an entry in 1934, there was a blank page, with a single word. Zhoka, followed by the first entry by Brother Bertram.

My dear friends and teachers have insisted I occupy honored quarters adjoining those of the Twelfth Stone Dragon, whom they speak of as they might a cherished grandfather, and revere now as a protector deity. They say he, too, was a traveler from another part of the world who came to translate things for the spirits of men. They have let me read his correspondence. I never knew the emperor read Tibetan.