Nyma, too, had been moved by the moonlight on the lake, for he found the nun sitting on a white rock, the water lapping against it. Fearful of disturbing her, he had been about to move on when she spoke.
"Once," she said in hollow voice, "the village would have visitors from gompas several times a year. Now no one comes. No monks. No nuns. Maybe that's all it is, maybe we have drifted so far away that no deity is interested in helping."
Shan wasn't even certain she was speaking to him until she paused and turned to stare at him. "They have you," he offered awkwardly, stepping closer. He saw that for the first time since he had known her, she had let her hair down. It was long, nearly to her waist, and she absently ran her fingers through it.
"A real nun, I mean. I'm not a real nun," Nyma said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Somehow the words seemed to hurt him more than her. "I think you're a real nun," Shan said.
In the moonlight he could see the trace of a sad smile on her face. "No," Nyma sighed. "They closed the convent where I was training and sent away all the real nuns. I had nowhere to go but to my village." She raised her face to the moon. "When I go to towns, I wear the clothes of a poor farmer. I do not have the courage to wear a robe in towns," she confessed to the moon. "I don't even cut my hair short like a nun. Lhandro says it could be too dangerous if howlers came."
"And what good would you do for Yapchi in prison?" Shan asked, for that was where she would go if plucked off the street in an illegal robe.
Nyma did not answer, or did not hear. A solitary goose called out.
"I remember someone sitting waiting for ice to melt for days, to get some sand," Shan said after studying the moonlit water a long time. "That woman was a nun."
"It was me acting like a nun. I can act like a shepherd, or a farmer, too."
Shan sat on a nearby rock. "Why are you so hard on yourself?" he whispered, feeling an unexpected helplessness. There were thousands of Nymas all over Tibet, men and women who had aspired to be monks and nuns and been denied the opportunity. Some just gave up, resigned to the notion that such a life would have to wait for a future incarnation. Others struggled on, trying to learn how to be a nun or monk without the benefit of regular teachers or role models. You must carry your gompa on your back, Shan had heard Gendun say to a despairing former monk.
"It feels like a lie, what we've done to you," Nyma blurted out. "A nun who understands the path of compassion would have done different, I am sure. You didn't know about the soldiers and the chenyi stone. We didn't tell you about the Chinese and Americans drilling for oil at Yapchi. I could have told you at the hermitage about the oil but I didn't, for fear of scaring you away. Now a killer is following us and that crazy Golok is watching the eye and all I feel is guilt over what we have done to you. And fear. When Drakte said that demon kills prayers he was right. I have been unable to pray, not truly pray in my heart, since that thing walked into the chapel. All day I have felt such fear. Terrible things are going to happen, I can feel it. You must think we have betrayed you. You must think we are so foolish, so reckless. Letting the oracle's words bring us to this."
"I would have come," Shan said. "Even if you had told me it all, I would not have understood, but I still would have come. If the lamas asked me to go to the moon I would tie a hundred geese together and give it a try."
In the moonlight Nyma's sad smile reminded him of an old Buddha statue in ivory.
"Do you still have family at Yapchi?" Shan asked after another long silence. The woman had never spoken of her connection to the village.
"I call Lhandro uncle sometimes, but he is only a cousin. I have no close family left. He has only his parents. He was going to be married many years ago, but the woman who was intended for him was sent away for reeducation and never came back. My mother's house is there. I have a home."
Home. For a moment Shan was shamed because of the envy he felt for the Yapchi villagers, despite all the trouble in their valley. They had a home and a bond among them, roots in the land. He had no one, except Lokesh and Gendun, and a son who had disowned him and no doubt thought his father dead.
Shan had awakened to find Lhandro, Nyma, and Anya with two of the sturdy men from Yapchi arranging the small tandem salt sacks on a blanket. As Lhandro finished counting forty sets of pouches, Anya led a sheep forward and Nyma, her cheeks now smeared with red doja cream, quickly arranged the sacks on the back of the animal, tying the loose cords around the sheep's belly so that each animal appeared to be wearing a woven saddle. The men from Yapchi worked quickly, some bringing the animals one at a time, others waiting in turns with the bulging sacks. When all the sheep were loaded, except a sturdy brown ram, Nyma called Shan to the ram's side and opened one of the pouches, the only one that seemed to be empty. As Lhandro appeared with a leather bucket of salt, the nun pointed at the saddlebag which Shan carried in his hand, the bag he had brought from the hermitage. Shan hesitated, then opened the bag and extended it to the nun. But Nyma shook her head, as if still afraid of the bag's contents, and gestured toward the pouch as Lhandro poured a handful of salt into it. Shan pulled out the cedar box and lowered it into the pouch, watching it with an unexpected sense of foreboding as Lhandro covered it with salt, produced a long needle, and began sewing the bag shut. The pouch was woven in a multicolored pattern with a round red circle in its center surrounded with white. Like an angry, watchful eye.
As the red-eyed pouch was loaded on the brown ram, Lhandro began watching the lake trail to the south, the trail Shan and his friends had arrived on the day before. A solitary figure, jogging along the trail, appeared on the crest of the nearest hill and waved to Lhandro. Shan saw that it was one of the Yapchi men he had met the day before, looking exhausted, an old muzzleloading rifle in his hand. He had been watching over them, guarding the trail in the night, Shan realized.
The other inhabitants of the salt camp gathered by the trail that opened to the north, watching with strangely solemn faces as Lhandro surveyed the line of loaded sheep and his companions, then nodded toward Anya, in the lead. The girl settled her chuba on her shoulders, whistled to the dogs, and began walking with her crooked gait, singing one of her eerie songs, the sheep and dogs following the girl as if under a spell.
"Lha gyal lo!" a woman by one of the dropka tents cried out, and the call was taken up by others, to Lokesh's obvious delight. The old Tibetan echoed the words back to the camp as the caravan left the salt gatherers behind, Tenzin and the Yapchi men leading horses laden with equipment.
Yapchi had been sending salt caravans to the lake for as long as people remembered, Lhandro explained to Shan as they walked together- meaning not simply as long as the farmer and his family remembered, but for centuries, even before Buddha and the dharma path came to Tibet. More than twelve centuries. For much of the morning Lhandro walked beside Shan and spoke of those older caravans, recalling names and events from fifty, a hundred, even five hundred years earlier as if they had just happened. A Yapchi farmer named Saga had once found a dying Western priest, a Jesuit, near the lake, and had stopped for a week to carve one of his god's crosses out of rock for his grave, since no wood could be found. Once, when there had been terrible sickness during the winter, the entire village had come to bathe in the healing waters of the lake. Another time a wild yak, white as snow, had followed a caravan all the way home and settled on the mountain above Yapchi where, for twenty years afterwards, it would be seen every year on Buddha's birthday.