Eliot Pattison - Water Touching Stone

"It was a Kazakh boy," Akzu said with a confused look at Lokesh.

Lokesh seemed not to have heard. He made a small moaning noise and drifted away.

"I will take you to Lau," Jakli said to Shan once more. "Akzu will take your friend Jowa to the Red Stone camp."

Shan turned toward Lokesh, who knelt on a rock now, facing the snow-capped peaks, surveying the skyline. Shan knew somehow that he was searching for Gendun, that suddenly Lokesh needed Gendun. It had already begun, Gendun had said. He must have meant the killing of children, as if he had expected it, or as if he had hoped for Shan to stop it by explaining Auntie Lau's death.

As he approached his old friend he saw that Lokesh had his hands together, and he thought at first it was a mudra offering. But it wasn't a mudra, he saw as he knelt beside Lokesh. The Tibetan was simply twisting his fingers in some silent agony that Shan could not understand. Shan put his hand on the old man's back and spoke comforting words. But Lokesh seemed not to hear him.

"This boy," Shan said, turning back to Jakli. "He was one of the zheli?"

She looked at him in puzzlement. "Yes. He was one of the orphans, part of the zheli class Lau organized from the school in Yoktian. They're more than orphans; not only do they have no family, they have no clan left. But the zheli is not officially part of the school. More like a substitute clan, in place of the ones they lost."

Shan turned to his old friend. "Did you know this boy? Did Gendun know this boy?"

Lokesh slowly shook his head from side to side, still looking to the mountains with a desperate expression.

Jakli looked from Shan to Lokesh, her face clouded with confusion.

"Khitai," Lokesh blurted out in a despondent tone, but this time it was not just another expression of pain. It seemed he was trying to call the dead boy, with the anguish of a father calling a lost son.

"Why a child?" Shan asked in an anguished voice. "The children are just-" His tongue failed him.

When he looked into Jakli's face he saw anger growing on it. "They are all that's left," she said- meaning, Shan knew, all that was left after the torment and persecution that had destroyed their clans.

"I never believed in demons," a brittle voice said over his shoulder. It was Akzu. He was looking at Lokesh with a sad, knowing expression, as if he recognized something in the old Tibetan's countenance. "My grandfather told me demons slept in the earth, that sometimes they awoke with a blood hunger that could not be stopped, that there were seasons for demons and destruction, just as there are seasons for flowers and creation, and when their time came they could not be stopped any more than the rising sun could be stopped, that all you could do was suffer and wait for them to satisfy their appetite. I told him I didn't believe in demons, that it was just the myths of the old ones.

"But then when my grandfather wouldn't move his herds from the pastures our clan had used for five centuries, so that Chinese farmers could come with machines and rip up the land, I learned differently. A demon came and threw grenades in his tent while he and my grandmother slept, and it machine-gunned all the herd, killing everything, even the lambs." Shan looked about and saw Jowa and Fat Mao standing close now, listening with grim expressions. "I was the one who found the bodies, when I rode to sing songs with my grandfather. Their valley ran with blood. Since that day I believe in demons," Akzu said, in a calm, matter-of-fact way that chilled Shan. "The demon is released and it wants the orphans. I think it wants to finish what it started with their parents. Twenty-three orphans Lau had" he announced with foreboding in his voice, and looked toward the northern horizon. "Only twenty-one now," he added with a whisper.

He wasn't simply speaking of the traitor Bajys, because a man like Akzu understood that it was never just one man. The demons of modern China were the irrational, unpredictable political fevers that struck and infected some with hate and others with such fear that it drove them to betrayal and murder. Maybe Shan had been sent to track the demon that had killed Lau, but it could be the same demon that was now killing her children. He put his hand on Lokesh's shoulder and looked to Jowa, then Akzu. "We must go with you to this camp," Shan told the old Kazakh. "We must go to where this boy Khitai died."

Akzu stared hard at Shan, then turned to Jakli. "It may be that this demon is going to kill them all. I will not put our clan in its path," he said to her with a fierce glint in his eye, then turned back to Shan. "And if you get in its way," he warned, "it will kill you too."

It comforted Shan that there were places on earth like the terrain they now rode through, places that could never be tamed. Some said such places were good for the planet, others that they were good for the soul. But Shan had met an old priest of a tiny, nearly extinct Tibetan sect who had insisted that such distinctions were misleading, that souls could not thrive unless the land thrived and that where the land deities had been shackled souls became grey, hollow things. The lama had lived all his life in the high ranges, but said that he had seen how Chinese made roads of asphalt and concrete. He had professed quite confidently that man, without knowing it, was making shackles of asphalt around the entire planet. When the last link of asphalt completed the last connection across the continents, he said, the world would end.

They rode for three hours in the shadows of rock walls, dashing over low passes where the sunlight exposed them, circuiting the perimeter of a vast grassland bowl because, Shan realized, there was no cover for riders who moved across it.

As they rode Shan asked Jakli about Auntie Lau. A teacher, she said, and until recently a member of the local Agricultural Council, a body which advised the local government on agricultural policy, elected by the local agricultural enterprises. Lau had been perhaps fifty-five years old, an orphan herself, without a family "but a mother to everyone," Jakli said, pushing her horse forward as Akzu turned with a chastizing frown. Sound carried far off the faces of the rock, and Shan had not missed the anxious way the old Kazakh studied the landscape.

A grim silence had descended over Akzu and Fat Mao as they trotted down the trail. At first Shan had thought it was still resentment over his presence, but then at a fork in the trail where Akzu led them down the least used of the two paths, he had seen that it was skittishness, even fear. Even the horses seemed reluctant to take the path and had to be reined tightly, before the riders could pull them between the two boulders that marked the trailhead. Akzu had dismounted to cut the bells from the harness of the camel.

Jakli rode in front of Shan. "A shortcut," she called back. But Shan saw the skittishness in her eyes too.

As they rode in the shadow of another rock wall he studied the five-mile-long valley it surrounded. It was not as fertile as the valleys in central Tibet but still held enough vegetation and water to support the small flocks of the dropka. There should have been herds, he knew. There should have been sheep or goats or yak, even the low-slung felt tents of a shepherd's camp. But it was empty, barren of life, as if somehow it had been sterilized.

The trail rose toward the crest of the ridge that defined the south end of the valley, and a small cleft in the rocks at the top appeared. Akzu signaled for the column to stop, then dismounted and led his horse to the opening. He pressed himself against the side of the cleft and peered through it. A moment later, visibly relaxed, he stepped quickly past the cleft and signaled for them to dismount and proceed. Shan awkwardly slid off his mount and followed their lead, but paused as he moved past the opening.