The tales echoed in Shan's mind throughout the morning as the long empty miles of grassland seemed to put their dangers behind them. A sense of timelessness settled into Shan as they led the sheep along the eastern shoreline then into a long grassy valley that rose toward a pass over the first range of mountains. What had changed? he wondered. The Tibetans had taught him many ways to look at the world. One of them was to perceive the strange way that most humans viewed progress, even the very thing called civilization. He had evolved more as a person in four years in prison, enslaved, than he had in all the previous three decades he had spent in Beijing, accumulating the meager belongings by which most people judged a life's progress. And now, carrying salt to Yapchi, walking by the sheep with the serene, joyful Tibetans under a cobalt sky rimmed with snowcapped peaks, a simple drawstring bag holding all his earthly possessions, Shan felt he had perhaps reached the pinnacle of civilization.
Had anything really changed since those first caravans, he wondered. The herdsmen still ventured by foot over the rough, rocky landscape, still broke the salt crust with their wooden pestles, slept in tents made of yak hair and packed their salt on their sheep in bags woven from wool taken from the same animals, still rejoiced over the sweet taste of milk from animals that grazed on the spring blossoms. Nothing had changed. Or everything, he thought sadly as he glanced at the short, sturdy ram carrying the bag with the red circle. For this time one of the sheep bore the eye of a deity, stolen by those who had massacred a village. And a killer was stalking the eye. A killer and a platoon of mountain troops. And perhaps even someone else. The more he replayed Drakte's last moments in his mind the more he wondered whether Drakte had been warning about someone else, not the dobdob. If he had known the dobdob intended them harm, or if it had been a knob or soldier standing there, the Drakte Shan knew would have flung himself at the intruder to defend the lamas. But Drakte had just stood there when the dobdob arrived, frozen with the same confusion Shan and the others had felt.
He paused and waited for Lokesh, who had been walking at the rear of the caravan. "If you saw that dobdob in your mind again," Shan asked his old friend, "would you see a real dobdob or someone dressed to look like one?" It was possible, Shan knew from his own experience, for a killer to don the old costumes to intimidate and confuse his victims.
Lokesh gazed toward a juniper tree that grew at the top of a nearby hill, the only tree visible anywhere in the landscape. "I see him. I see him when I try to sleep at night. I see him when I wake in the morning," he said heavily and turned back to Shan. "It was not a pretend thing. It was a real monk policeman."
"But you said they hadn't been seen for decades."
"Not by me. And I think not by anyone else. Almost anyone else."
"To a dobdob, a Religious Affairs official would be an enemy," Shan suggested. The coincidence still troubled him. Drakte and the man Chao had probably been attacked the same night.
"To a howler, a dobdob would be an enemy," Lokesh said, correcting Shan. He stepped away as if to discourage further questions. A monk, Lokesh was saying, a true monk, would not perceive enemies at Religious Affairs, only people whose awareness had been stunted.
But a real dobdob would take orders only from a lama or senior monk. Had Drakte infuriated a lama?
Shan became aware of a robed figure walking far to one side of the caravan, gaze on the ground, almost as if wandering, unaware, of the caravan. When he saw Lhandro watching the figure with a worried expression he stepped to the village headman's side.
"When she was with you," Lhandro began, "did she always…" He struggled to find words, then turned with inquiry on his face. "She was going to run away to India last year, to find a convent there. I convinced her not to go. But now I think I was wrong."
"She has always been a great help," Shan offered, uncertain what Lhandro was asking.
The rongpa seemed relieved. "She was only fifteen when the government closed that convent of hers. She had gone away two years before. Not long after, her mother died. She had no hope of finding another convent so she took her robe off and tended the village sheep. But then one day three years later she found Anya lying on a rock, shaking, reciting old scriptures none of us had even heard before. It disturbed Nyma more than it did Anya herself. She said the fabric of our deity was being unraveled, and she put her robe back on. She and Anya made a little chapel in a small canyon behind the village and would stay there meditating for hours, for entire days. She asks me, how would a nun do this, what would a nun do about that, what was it like when monks used to come to the valley."
He sighed and took a step forward as Anya called out to Nyma, and the nun began walking toward the head of the column. Then he paused and looked back at Shan. "But it has been many, many years since monks came to us. My father said to her once, you need not worry about studying the Compassionate Buddha, just study the Compassionate Nyma." He offered a strained smile then stepped on a boulder to look behind the column, his face clouded with worry again.
At least the other villagers showed no concern about a killer or the dangers of the chenyi stone. Their spirits seemed to lighten as the day progressed, and they sang songs sung by salt trekkers for centuries, sometimes teaching them to Shan and Lokesh. As they sat at midday and ate cold tsampa, Lhandro and Nyma described the beautiful valley where they lived. For long miles Shan let himself be absorbed into the simple carefree joy of the others. At nightfall, after they had made camp in the shelter of a large rock outcropping miles beyond the first pass, where the villagers had stockpiled yak dung on their journey to the lake, Lokesh sat facing the south. His old friend chanted his beads, squinting as if searching for something beyond the mountains. Sunrise would mark the third day, when Drakte would arrive at the charnel ground for his sky burial. Perhaps they had already left the hermitage by now, Gendun, Shopo, and Somo, bearing the dead purba up and down the mountains with the help of the dropka.
Shan sat beside Lokesh, facing the same direction, and made a mudra, arranging his fingers in one of the traditional forms to invoke a ritual symbol or teaching. He closed the fingers of each hand, with the thumb out, extended up, then put the right hand on top of the left thumb. It was called the Banner of Victory, invoking the triumph of compassion over ignorance and death. As he sat contemplating first the mudra and then the distant mountains where Gendun traveled with Drakte's remains, the pain he felt over Drakte's killing surged through him again. Not simply because the purba had been steadfast and brave and selfless but because Shan's confusion over his death only seemed to grow, and with greater confusion came greater fear for those he traveled with. Gendun would have said Shan's awareness was being distorted by his emotion, for death never had a reason, only an appointed time, that Drakte was always meant to end this particular incarnation at that particular hour. There was no cause and effect in such a death because, Gendun would say, the world was never so orderly as Shan seemed to imagine. But even the Tibetans accepted that all things in the universe were interrelated, and a stone dropped in a remote lake caused ripples that changed, however subtly, the contour of the world. Something had happened in Lhasa, more than just a simple theft, and its consequences were catching up with those who had the chenyi stone.