Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

They passed fields lush with barley. Near the river there was enough water for irrigation. "Why do you do it?" Shan asked. "Why did you start helping them, looking for the artifacts? Just running the mine, wouldn't that be enough?"

"Because it has to be done," Fowler said without hesitation.

"There're others who could do it."

"But we're the ones who are here."

"It's one of the things that scares me," Shan said quietly. "I fear you don't understand the danger."

Fowler took offense. "You think we do it for a lark?" Her voice grew louder than Shan had ever heard it. "What, so we can brag about it when we get home? That's not it, dammit!" She looked down, as though taken aback by her own outburst. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "It's just that Tibet gets inside you. It's real here. More real than anything back home."

She had used the word before, Shan remembered, to describe the moment when she had returned Tamdin's hand and the beast had howled. Real.

"It's important here," Fowler concluded.

"Important?" asked Shan.

She twisted in her seat and looked back at him, her eyes moving as though searching for the right words, but she did not speak.

"We make a difference here," Kincaid continued, as if he and Fowler had discussed the topic many times before. "Back home the world sits and watches MTV. Buys cars. Buys houses. Has one-point-eight kids."

"MTV?" Shan asked.

"Never mind. Life is wasted back there. There, they just live on the world. Here, you can live in the world. The Buddhists, they have eight hot and eight cold hells. But there's a whole new level in America. The worst one. The one where everyone's tricked into ignoring their souls by being told they're already in heaven."

"But you must have important things at home. Family."

"Not much," Kincaid quipped brightly, as though he were proud of it.

Not much, Shan considered. What was it Fowler had told him? That Kincaid would be running the company, that he would become one of the wealthiest men in America.

"My parents and I don't speak much."

"No brothers or sisters?"

"Had a dog," Kincaid said whimsically. Shan envied the American his ability to be so carefree. "The dog died," Kincaid concluded with a wide grin.

"But you're rich at home," Shan offered clumsily.

Kincaid shot Fowler an exaggerated frown, as though to chastise her for talking too much. "Not anymore. Gave it up. My father's rich. Guess I'll be rich again. I try not to let it upset me. Rich doesn't make a home. Rich doesn't give you peace of mind." He cast a sideways, hopeful glance toward Rebecca Fowler. "Hell, in Lhadrung, I feel more at home than I ever did in the United States."

Fowler gave him a weak smile. "The poor lost soul finally finds a roost."

"Don't make it sound like I'm the only one," Kincaid chided, still grinning.

Shan saw Fowler stiffen, then hesitantly turn toward him, as though she owed Shan an explanation. "My parents divorced fifteen years ago. I lived with my mother, who now has Alzheimer's disease. Destroys the memory. She hasn't recognized me for over four years. And I haven't seen or heard from my father in eight years." She looked out the window. "I guess I needed a new world, too."

It didn't explain anything for Shan. It just made him sad. Maybe in the spirit realm Lhadrung was another kind of catching place, where lost souls collected and were battered about until, worn and hard as old stones, they were safe in the world again.

Shan closed his eyes, and his mind drifted toward what he had seen in Colonel Tan's service record. Service in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Fujian. But nothing in Tibet before 1985. He stared out the window at the desolate landscape. Everything was wrong. Everything he had assumed had been mistaken. He had thought the key had been Director Hu, but he had been wrong. He had thought it had been about the skull cave, but then he found Yerpa. He had hoped it had merely been a battle between looters, but a looter didn't kill over one shrine to protect another. He had thought perhaps it had been only Li, then Li and the major, but neither had any connection to Tamdin. He had thought it could never be Sungpo, yet who but a monk would have reverently arranged the dislocated skull in the cave? He had thought the Lotus Book provided the answers, the motives, but the Lotus Book was wrong. They were all pieces of the puzzle, but the shape of the puzzle eluded him, and he had no idea how many more pieces he needed before they began to make sense.

To know of not knowing is best, Tsomo had reminded him. He had to begin again, erasing it all, assuming he knew only of not knowing. There was so much he did not know. He did not know who had the Tamdin costume. He did not know who had given the ragyapa the stolen military supplies. He did not know why the purbas would have recorded lies in the Lotus Book. He did not know why Jao was interested in water rights on a remote mountainside. He felt no closer to an answer than he had the day they found Jao's head. If he did not find answers in Lhasa, he would have no hope of finding the true killer, no hope of saving Sungpo. No hope of saving himself, or the 404th, when he refused to write the report condemning an innocent monk.

They drove to a warehouse at the far end of the airport, where a sleepy customs officer waved them through and two freight handlers waited for Fowler to hand them each a ten renminbi note before unloading the crates and wheeling a dolly bearing a rack of empty cannisters to the truck. In less than fifteen minutes they were on the road to Lhasa.

An hour later they passed the familiar blocks of low, slate-colored barracks that Beijing built for urban workers all over China. The paths along the highway began to fill with figures in gray and brown clothing. Carts pulled by haggard ponies hauled plastic barrels of night soil out of the city. Farmers carried cabbages and onions in huge net bags. Chickens and small pigs were trussed on sticks balanced on bicycles. Grandparents walked to market with children. The streets seemed more Chinese than Tibetan, and with a pang of sorrow as sharp as a blade Shan remembered why. Beijing had "naturalized" the city by shipping in a hundred thousand Chinese to join the fifty thousand Tibetans already living there. As far as he could see, Lhasa, which in Tibetan meant the dwelling place of God, had been converted into one more of the gray, smokey urban tracts that comprised modern China.

"There should be something more we can do," Fowler said as Kincaid eased the truck to a stop in front of the drab two-story building that housed Jansen's office. "You want the water permit records. But they won't let you see them. Not without identification."

"I may find a way. I know how the bureacrats speak." Shan stepped out and turned away from the truck, facing the old city for the first time.

"No. Tyler will go. It's perfectly normal. They won't say no to him, asking to see his own permits."

But Shan could not reply. For there it was, on top of the small mountain that dominated the city. Or rather, it was the mountain that dominated the city. Its huge lower walls, brilliant white and sloping steeply upward, gave the main structure the appearance of a vast, golden-roofed temple floating above Himalayan snows. The precipice of existence, Trinle had once called the walls in a winter tale, so high, so rigid, so alluring that they recalled for him the path to Buddhahood.

Never before in his life had Shan been afraid to look at something. He felt unworthy to stare at the building. He had been wrong. Something did survive of the dwelling place of God. He gazed down at his feet a moment, wondering at his sudden flood of emotion, then, unable to stop himself, his gaze moved back to the Potala.

"What are you doing?" Kincaid asked suddenly, his hand reaching out as though to catch Shan.