"Go," the dropka woman pleaded. Threads of blood still streaked her cheek. "I will watch Shopo and the Pure Water Lama."
Tenzin dumped a small mound of yak dung beside her and ignited it. As she gestured for them to hurry, they reluctantly climbed onto their horses.
Shan paused as the others rode away. "Tell those riders behind us to go back," he said. "Tell them to help protect the lamas."
When Shan emerged around the outcropping the truck was moving back in the direction it had come, toward the south. "Was it the 54th Mountain Brigade?" he wondered out loud.
Dremu grunted but offered no answer. Nyma stared at the ground, her lower lip between her teeth. The Golok circled his horse about them, looking not toward the lake but behind them, before setting off down the western slope. Shan settled his horse into a slow walk at the back of the column, keeping Lokesh before him. The army was in front of them but there was no turning back, for behind were the knobs and the furious dobdob.
In another hour they crested the last of the low hills that surrounded the lake and gained an unobstructed view of the vast turquoise waters. The twenty-five-mile-long lake seemed alive as the waters shivered in the wind and sun. Nyma pointed out several low dark shapes scattered along the distant shoreline, mere dots on the horizon, the heavy felt yurts of the dropka clans who had brought their sheep to the rich spring pastures.
They rode through meadows dense with spring growth, splashing through countless rivulets of runoff from the mountains, until they reached the lake and dismounted near a huge raft of black and white geese that floated offshore, their white crowns gleaming in the sun. Bar-headed geese the Tibetans called them. The wind ebbed and their chattering filled the air.
Suddenly Lokesh leapt past him, arms extended, and ran into the cold waters of the lake, laughing like a child, pushing through the water until it reached his knees. "Aw! Aw! Aw!" he cried toward the birds, then turned toward Shan with a huge grin. "It's a sound my mother used to make to geese. It's good luck, she always said, to see so many geese resting on water. It means the spirits of the air are in harmony with the spirits of the water."
His mother. Lokesh almost never spoke of his mother, who occupied a special, sacred place in his heart, much as Shan's father did in his. Lokesh's mother had died in 1940, the year that the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama had arrived in Lhasa, a year of great celebration and affirmation of the old ways. She had led a perfect life, Lokesh once said, and died at the perfect time, for afterwards came the decades of darkness and destruction.
The old Tibetan bent and splashed water on his face, then gestured for Shan to join him. Shan hesitated only a moment, then stepped into the lake beside his friend. "Aw! Aw! Aw!" Shan cried toward the geese, hands upraised.
Lokesh laughed heartily. "Lha gyal lo!" he called out joyfully toward the birds.
Shan washed his face in the frigid water, then cupped some in his hand to drink.
"No," Lokesh warned, touching Shan's arm. "Too salty. Drink from the streams."
Shan tasted a drop on his finger and confirmed Lokesh's words, then surveyed the landscape again. Lamtso was one of the great basin lakes that were spread across the eastern changtang, lakes that had no outlets and therefore concentrated the salts and other minerals that washed off the surrounding mountains.
The Golok found a boulder and sat, drinking his chang as Nyma and Tenzin collected rocks for a small cairn to honor the nagas before moving on. "Auspicious start," Nyma observed repeatedly as she worked, then paused to watch Tenzin. The mute Tibetan, whom she had stayed beside since the hailstorm, put a frantic energy into building the cairn. Her face clouded with concern, Nyma stepped to her horse pack, reached in, and extracted a mala, her spare rosary, which she extended toward Tenzin.
Tenzin looked at the beads but his eyes seemed unable to focus on them. His jaw worked up and down as if something inside was trying to speak, perhaps trying to remember the mouthing of a mantra. Ever since Drakte's death he had been more distant than ever, more withdrawn into his strange personal anguish. Shan knew survivors of the gulag often lived this way. An event would trigger a door inside and some nightmare from his imprisonment would be relived. Nyma pressed the beads into his hands and led Tenzin to his horse as Dremu trotted away.
They had followed the lakeside trail for only twenty minutes when Dremu halted at the top of a hill and dismounted, staring down the far side with a worried expression.
Shan dismounted and followed the Golok's gaze toward a white vehicle, a heavy compact minibus of the type sometimes used to convey passengers between Tibet's cities. It had apparently arrived from the southeast by means of a narrow dirt road, and had just turned onto the rough track that paralleled the shores of the lake. Two men sat on a large flat rock in front of the vehicle, one in the maroon robe of a monk, the other dressed like a businessman in a white shirt and tie, while three men in monks' robes struggled to free the left rear wheel, which was mired in mud.
"Better to go around," Dremu warned.
But Shan was already striding down the hill as the Golok spoke.
The men on the rock watched Shan with disinterested expressions as he approached. With his broad-rimmed hat and tattered coat, he looked like just another dropka. The man in the tie was a middle-aged Han, bald on the top of his head, his remaining hair thin and long on the sides, combed back. The small black eyes that looked out of his wide, fleshy face seemed as brightly polished as his shoes. A cigarette dangled from the man's lips. The Tibetan he sat with had thick, neatly trimmed hair, and wore a robe unlike any Shan had ever seen, for it was fringed with gold and appeared, implausibly, to have a monogram embroidered over its left breast. Between them on the rock was a bottle of orange drink and what seemed to be a plastic bag of sunflower seeds.
The Han exhaled a long plume of smoke toward Shan as he approached the rock, as though to warn him away. Shan offered a hesitant nod and stepped around the two men, slowing to read the six-inch-high Tibetan and Chinese characters painted on the side of the bus. New Beliefs for the New Century, they said, and below them in smaller letters an adaptation of a familiar slogan: Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism.
He looked back toward his companions. Lokesh and Nyma followed, but Dremu and Tenzin had retreated, so that only their heads were visible above the crest of the hill. Nyma approached the rock with the two men, then froze and cast a nervous glance up the hill as if thinking of fleeing. Shan saw a small legend stenciled on the driver's door: Bureau of Religious Affairs.
"Howlers!" Nyma whispered in alarm as she reached him. It was what many of the purbas called the members of the Bureau, for the strident way they often addressed Tibetans. At first the howlers had screamed at tamzing, the criticism sessions that had long been the Party's favorite tool for political correction. Now, with tamzing losing favor in Party circles, they continued to be howlers, just in subtler ways, fervently preaching to Tibetans about the socialist sins of traditional Buddhism.
Shan's throat went bone dry as he glanced back at the Han in the tie. These were the men who granted, and revoked, the licenses of nuns and monks; the ones who anointed gompas based on the political correctness of their inhabitants; the ones who opened or shut monasteries with the stroke of a pen and granted the right to practice spirituality as though they were courtiers granting political favors.