Eliot Pattison - Water Touching Stone

The object of their fear dominated the landscape beyond the ridge, a compound that, although at least two miles away, was clearly of huge dimensions. A long line of high wire fence, punctuated at intervals by guard towers, surrounded a complex of low, gleaming white buildings and cement bunkers.

"When I was young," a soft voice said behind Shan, "there was a nest of scorpions on the next hill from ours at our summer pasture camp. My brothers always wanted to kill them."

Shan looked at Jakli in confusion, then back at the complex. He knew what a Chinese prison looked like, and this was no prison. It had many guard towers but was too new and clean; too much of Beijing's money had been spent on the facility for it to be simply part of the gulag. But it also wasn't like any army base he had ever seen. Everything seemed to be made of cement. He saw nothing that looked like barracks. There were small buildings, the size of toolsheds, at regular intervals inside the wire.

"No, my father said," Jakli continued. "Let them live. I would not have you walk the land without fear."

As he shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun, now high in the sky, Shan could see a large radar antenna sweeping the sky from the center of the compound. Brilliant white domes were arrayed beyond the antenna. Satellite communications links. The small buildings were not sheds, he realized, but entrances to an underground complex.

"We call it the Mushroom Bowl. One night I saw them do a test," Jakli said. "It went far into the sky, like a shooting star going back to its home."

A shiver swept down Shan's spine, and he could bear to look no longer. "I'm sorry," he said, without knowing why.

Jakli returned his gaze with a small, wise smile. "It is just our nest of scorpions."

The main purpose of Tibet and western China was to act as a buffer, Shan had once heard a top general opine at a Beijing banquet, a staging area and shield against the next wave of aggression. Which meant, more than anything, that the vast wilderness was the hiding place for the country's most important weapons. Many politicians boasted in the capital that Tibet received the equivalent of billions of dollars from Beijing. All but a fraction of that money went to hollowing out mountains for troop garrisons and building secret nuclear missile installations like the one Shan had just seen. The Mushroom Bowl. Named for the white domes that had sprouted there after Beijing's invasion and perhaps also for the specter of the warheads inside its missiles.

The wilderness had been tamed after all, he thought. Maybe the old priest was right. When a sacred land got harnessed this way, it could mean the end of the world. The People's Liberation Army had its secret, buried ways to protect the world, or at least Beijing's world. For some reason he remembered the low rumble that was always present at their Lhadrung hermitage, the sound of the giant prayer wheel, kept moving by two monks at all hours, in a small chamber carved into a nameless mountain in remote Tibet. The lamas' secret, buried way to protect the world.

Now he understood the vacant grassland. Such bases were surrounded by military zones that would be patrolled by PLA commandos. In the imperial days there had been many places reserved exclusively for the emperor's family and high officials. To enter into them, sometimes to even look into them, meant instant death for any commoner. China still had its Forbidden Cities. There would be no excuses for a civilian caught in such a zone.

Another shudder moved down his spine. He wished he had not seen the base, wished he had not looked. It made a cold, hard, black place in his heart beside the many scars already there. After building installations like this, how could Beijing ever leave Tibet?

As he pulled his eyes away he saw that a large rock on the slope by the cleft had been painted red, and then saw another on the slope at the end of the bowl. It was a traditional way to mark the homes of the protective deities that lived inside mountains, the local land gods. At great risk Tibetans had painted the rocks, as if to fence in the base with watchful deities.

"Such danger," Shan said to Jakli, "just to save us time." His words were barely above a whisper, as if the Mushroom Bowl cast its shadow from miles away.

"You heard Akzu," Jakli said soberly. "We will take as many shortcuts as we need to, until the treachery stops." She gazed back toward the bowl. "The patrols are lazy. This time of year, they are mostly interested in animals."

"Animals?"

"With no herders here, it is like a giant game preserve. Generals come from Beijing, to shoot ibex and antelope. Snow leopards, sometimes."

"But still, if you are discovered-"

"Then we become the game," she said with a forced grin, and placed her open hands around her neck to give the impression of a head on a wall. "Mounted in some general's tearoom in Beijing. Rare counterrevolutionaries bagged in the wilderness."

Shan looked at Jakli, trying to understand how she fit into the complex puzzle of the group led by Akzu. "Akzu is your uncle," he said. "But you don't live with your clan."

"Sometimes. Right now I live in town. In Yoktian. I have a job in a factory. Making hats."

He asked her about the clan and Akzu. The question seemed to make her sad. After a moment she explained that the leathery old Kazakh was their headman, the elder of what was left of the Red Stone clan. Once the Red Stone had been a mighty clan with vast pastures in the north. But it had lost all those pastures to the government, and its people had been dispossessed. Akzu and Jakli's father had come thirty years before with a hundred surviving members to the borderland along the Kunlun, where the land and climate were so harsh that the population was sparse and nearly forgotten. They thought they could live without interference, out of sight in such a place. Now all that was left of the clan was one camp, and three families, coaxing a subsistence living out of the lands at the edge of the desert. And Auntie Lau, Jakli explained was no one's aunt, not a part of the clan, but a Kazakh woman who had brought the zheli under her wing, a kind, wise, soul loved by everyone.

Almost everyone, Shan nearly added. "I thought you were from Tibet at first," he said.

"It's a border land, has been for thousands of years. Many bloods get mixed here. My father was Kazakh. His brother was Akzu. My mother was Tibetan. She died when I was a baby. My father disappeared ten years ago," she said with a slight shrug. "I ride with my father's clan when I can. In the spring I like to go to the oasis in the desert to train the camels."

"You speak Tibetan very well."

"My father loved my mother very much. He encouraged me to keep her ways alive. Auntie Lau helped, when she learned about my mother."

"She gave you Buddhist teachings?" Shan asked.

"Not really. She said discovering my personal god, that was for me to do privately. But she knew Tibetan things, like she knew Kazakh and Uighur things. She said it was important to understand what the government said about new ways but that the old ways should not be forgotten."

Shan studied the woman, wondering whether the words had been Lau's or were simply Jakli's. Understanding what the government said was not the same as heeding it. "I did not know that Kazakhs lived in Tibet."

Jakli smiled and flashed her green eyes at him. "Some do, I suppose." She shifted in her saddle and pointed to the line of mountains they were leaving, the wall that separated them from the missile base. "But that last ridge is the border. We are now in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region."

Shan halted his horse and surveyed the dry, rugged landscape. The sky was a brilliant cobalt. Behind him the majestic snow-covered central peaks of the Kunlun connected the eastern and western horizons. In a gap between the peaks he had earlier glimpsed the vast Karakorum mountains that, rising out of the northern end of the Himalayas, created a nearly impassable border with India and Pakistan. To the north lay a brown haze that he now recognized as the beginning of the vast desert, the Taklamakan, that dominated the geography of southern Xinjiang.