Eliot Pattison - Water Touching Stone

"He will watch for Gendun," Jowa said to Shan in a hollow tone. "If he sees Tibetans on the road, he will ask them to watch also."

As the truck disappeared, Shan fought a wave of emotion. The truck was his last connection to Gendun, the last link to the new life he had built in the high ranges of central Tibet, to the monks who had become the only real family he had known since the Red Guard had killed his father more than thirty years before. It was time for Shan to leave the mountains, one of the monks had told him that night at the mandala. Not forever, perhaps, but for a while, to gain distance. To understand who he was, the monk had meant. Shan wasn't a monk, though he lived with monks. But he also wasn't Chinese anymore, not a Beijing Chinese. Consider it a pilgrimage, another monk had said. But Buddhists were sent to the sacred peak of Mount Kalais or other holy sites where the spirits of deities resided. Shan's pilgrimage was to death and confusion, to places where perhaps only sorrow and distrust resided.

They had meant to honor him with their trust, he knew. But in that moment he felt no honor. He felt only fatigue and fear. Fear for Gendun. Fear for the boys who had been killed for reasons no one knew. Fear that he would be stopped before he fulfilled the trust. Imagine you are in a spirit palace, one of his Buddhist teachers had once said, with a hundred doors before you. Only one door is yours, but how long will it take to find it? He sensed the hundred doors today, and all but one led to failure. He fought the tempation to run for the truck, to catch it and climb back into his barrel.

The two strangers stepped forward, then froze at the sound of hooves rushing on the gravel slope below. A rider wearing a tattered felt coat and red wool cap appeared on a brown and white horse, dismounting in a fluid vaulting action before the horse had stopped. The rider stood silently in front of the front of the older man, offering a respectful nod, then pulled off the cap. It was a young woman, with black hair tied in two short braids behind her ears. The camel brayed, then bolted toward her, pushing past Shan and Lokesh so abruptly that Lokesh was knocked to the ground. The woman gave the camel a brief but affectionate stroke on its head, then trotted to Lokesh, extending a hand to help him to his feet.

"Grandfather," she said softly in Tibetan, using the term in the old style, as a form of respect for elders. "Please forgive her, she is but a bata, a yearling, and still has much to learn." Her voice was filled with a quiet strength.

The high pitched wheezing laughter seemed to overtake Lokesh again. "I saw one in a painting once," he said, still sitting in the dirt, shaking the woman's proffered hand as if she had intended to introduce herself. "I said it was one of the mythical creatures, a shape some deity had taken in someone's vision." His grin seemed to encompass his entire face. "My wife said no, it was just a horse with a broken back."

"Oh no, grandfather," the woman said, with twinkling eyes. She was young, Shan saw, no more than twenty-five, and where the rising sun hit her hair there seemed to be red in it. "She's just a donkey who ate two turtles."

The woman gently lifted Lokesh by his shoulder, brushing away the gravel from his back. The two remaining men began moving quickly, retrieving another camel and several small, sturdy horses from behind the rocks. The older man checked the saddles of two of the horses, then led the animals toward Shan and Lokesh, but stopped as he reached the woman's side. "You can't be here, Jakli," he said sternly. "It is too dangerous for you."

The woman he had called Jakli took one step toward him. "She was my friend, Akzu," she said soberly. "She was my teacher."

The words brought a wince to the man's face. "You owe that woman nothing," he said. "Look at what she did to you."

"I still owe her much, despite things," the woman called Jakli said, with a strange combination of defiance and pain in her voice.

The man called Akzu gazed at her for a long time, then a sad smile grew on his face. "Come here, girl," he said, and opened his arms. "Damn them all for keeping you from us. It's been too long."

As the woman embraced him, Akzu still smiled, but his face clouded, as if her presence reminded him of something he had hoped to forget.

Shan studied their new guides as Akzu began to load their bags onto the young camel. The animal had been a shock to Shan, not because he had never seen one, but because he had not appreciated how far they had traveled. This land was different. The people were different. Neither of the two men had the features of Tibetans. They had gone north, Shan reminded himself, so deep into the Kunlun mountains that they had reached a new people. As if in confirmation, the man at the camel called to the man with the bent nose in a language unintelligible to Shan. It was a dialect of the Turkic tongue spoken by the Muslims of China's far west. They were Uighur, Shan thought, or perhaps Kazakh, like the boys who had died.

The man with the bent nose stepped closer, his hand on the neck of the camel. "You're the one," he said in Mandarin to Jowa. "The one who knows about Public Security?"

Jowa glanced at Shan, discomfort obvious in his eyes.

"They told us-" the man pressed, "they said that you know the secrets of the Public Security Bureau."

Jowa frowned. "The last time I was in prison," he said in a reluctant voice, "my cell mate had worked for Public Security. In Lhasa- part of an experiment in bringing Tibetans into their ranks. The experiment failed, and they had to put him somewhere. He knew it would be years before he was freed, and he decided to share his knowledge so his time as a knob wouldn't be wasted."

The man laughed, as if it was a good joke. "They say you destroyed a convoy of Public Security trucks."

"They happened to be parked in the wrong place. An avalanche started."

"But you did it."

"It was the rocks and snow that did the damage," Jowa said soberly. "Sometimes the mountain spirits get angry." The man laughed again. Jowa cast another awkward glance at Shan. The purbas had painfully learned not to ambush the Chinese overtly or commit obvious sabotage. There was always severe retaliation, and almost always it was against the innocent.

"They say you can beat Public Security checkpoints," the man continued, stepping to Jowa's side, helping to lift his bag onto the camel. "Even electronic checkpoints."

The words seemed to surprise Jowa as much as Shan. The man was traveling in the style of the seventeenth century and speaking of computer software security systems from the twenty-first century.

"Invisible checkpoints are not much different from physical ones," Jowa replied, still with his hesitant tone. "You just need to know how to find them." Shan watched in confusion from the shadow by the truck. Only Jowa and the Tibetan who had driven away were purbas, but the others knew purba secrets.

The camel shook its head, pulling the reins from its neck.

"Good for you," the man said, slapping Jowa on the back. "Good for us."

As the man with the crooked nose bent to retrieve the reins from the ground a paper fell from his pocket. A map.

The wind tossed the map into the air, then dropped it into the circle of sunlight at the center of the clearing a few feet from Shan. He stepped into the light and picked it up.

As he did so a brittle silence descended over the two Muslim men, who seemed to notice his features for the first time. He extended the map to the man with the crooked nose, who merely stared at him with anger in his eyes. Akzu muttered a curse under his breath. Shan stuffed the map under a harness strap on the camel and stepped back toward his bag. He had taken only two steps when the man with the bent nose blocked his path.