The country at the roof of the world has always been steeped in legend and mystery and no place was more unknown than the western borderlands.
To keep their valley’s secret, the Order had a strict protocol for reaching Rinpoche-La. The trek from the Nepalese frontier never followed the same route twice and never took less than two weeks, and even this pushed the threat of detection. That time frame didn’t include the days spent in Katmandu evading the Chinese informants that infested Nepal’s capital city, each eager to make a few yuan by reporting suspicious parties.
Moving hard and ignoring the safety protocols, Luc Nguyen forced the group carrying his sister from Nepal to Rinpoche-La in a mere eight days. They risked using trucks on open roads and took minimum shelter when specially modified helicopters that could fly in the rarified atmosphere of the Himalayas thundered through mountain passes. The choppers often patrolled the area searching for people trying to flee the worker’s paradise that the Chinese had imposed on the people of Tibet.
At twelve thousand feet, the wind was a constant presence. Whether a soft summer zephyr or the shrieking gales of winter, the wind never stopped moving through the valley, funneled by peaks that rose a further eight thousand feet above the valley floor. The mountains were jagged and barren, scoured clean of snow and soil except in protected pockets and veins. While much of Tibet is renowned for its rugged beauty, the land around Rinpoche-La was particularly harsh and ugly. Isolated in an isolated country, the nearest town was sixty miles east and there were no connecting roads, just a barely marked footpath that only the heartiest could attempt.
Construction on the monastery at Rinpoche-La began in 1052 under the guidance of the Indian scholar Atisha and was added on to in fits and starts until its abandonment in 1254 to protest how Godan Khan, Ghenghis’s grandson, had made the Lama of the Sakya Buddhists regent of all Tibet. Because Rinpoche-La was at the outskirts of the Tibetan kingdom, it remained completely forgotten save for the handful of self-sufficient villagers who eked out a living in the shadow of the huge building. That was until Zhu Zhanji, the Confucian who defied the emperor, cached the knowledge of Admiral Zheng He’s historic sea voyages. There were no records in the Order’s archive describing how Zhu Zhanji knew of the valley’s existence. It remained one more of the legends that surround Rinpoche-La.
The nearly six hundred years since saw countless invasions of Tibet from the south and the east and the north, culminating in the totalitarian occupation by the Chinese. Even as they slaughtered an estimated one million Tibetans and doubled the country’s population by the forced migration of ethnic Han Chinese, Rinpoche-La remained nestled in its valley, unknown beyond rumors and the whispered tales of nomads who rarely ventured close to the intimidating mountains. Beyond its geography, the valley was further isolated by a river that was barely negotiable in winter and seemingly impossible to cross in summer.
The monastery dominated the end of the valley, a five-story central structure surrounded by various out-buildings and a thirty-foot-tall, ten-foot-thick wall of mortared stone. Behind the hermitage, the valley dropped away in a sheer hundred-foot cliff, hemmed on each side by towering stone ramparts. The village lay at the monastery’s feet, clutches of stone buildings that seemed to grow out of the living rock. Because the valley was little more than an ax stroke cut into the mountains, little light filtered to the floor and this was diffused by the steam escaping through countless geothermal fissures.
It was the steam that provided the village shelter and also its means of survival. The microbes that flourished in the scalding waters of the hot springs were the basis of a bizarre food chain similar to that found in the deep-sea thermal vents called black smokers. In the absence of sunlight, creatures depended on chemosynthesis, the transformation of chemical, rather than light, energy into life. Around the black smokers, microbes fed off the exotic plumes of chemicals belched from the earth’s interior and in turn fed a myriad of odd creatures: tube worms that grew to six feet or more, mussels and crab species found nowhere else and fish able to withstand the tremendous heat. The difference at Rinpoche-La was at the top of this food chain were goats and yaks that ate nutrient-rich aquatic weeds and provided meat and wool and milk for the villagers. A further advantage to those living amid the geothermal vents was that heat was provided for them. There was no need to gather wood to warm their homes or cook their meals, a time-consuming necessity that handicapped the rest of Tibet’s rural population. Over the generations, the valley had become its own self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem.
On an upper story of the monastery a window sash rattled as a fresh gust of wind blew by. The candle on the table flickered and shadows jumped along the stone walls of the cell. Tisa barely looked up from where she sat, a cup of pungent butter tea cooling at her elbow. She was physically and spiritually drained, but she knew the bed in the corner would provide no succor. In sleep lay the nightmares that had plagued her for so long.
Added to them were her fears for Philip Mercer.
She was sure he had survived. When she’d left him on the floating tanker truck and struck out for Luc’s boat, she’d tried to convince her half brother that she alone had escaped from the sinking ferry. He hadn’t believed her, but the crush of survivors trying to board the speedboat nearly capsized the vessel and forced him to motor away before mounting a search. Mercer would have surely been rescued when word reached Santorini that the ferry had gone down.
No, her fears were based on what she knew was coming. She wondered if she should have bothered giving him the warning about La Palma now that she couldn’t be with him. Mercer would doubtlessly figure out that the volcano was going to erupt and she was just as certain he would try to minimize the devastation. He’d go to La Palma and be one of the first to die. Her interference had sealed his fate. She’d only just discovered that in their short time together he’d evoked emotions she’d thought she was incapable of. She’d fallen in love with him. Now he was gone forever.
She knew now that whoever said it was better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all had no idea what they were talking about. She looked at her wrist where for a few hours she’d worn the watch he’d given her. It was the sweetest gesture she’d ever seen. He couldn’t possibly understand why she wouldn’t wear one, couldn’t know the fear she had of time itself, how finite it was and how she couldn’t stand the constant reminder.
She wished now she’d kept it.
The monastery was so solidly built that it seemed to absorb all sound. Tisa didn’t hear the footsteps outside her door, didn’t know anyone was coming for her until the heavy iron lock slid back against its stop.
She remained bowed, not needing to look up to see that it was her brother who had come for her. “Leave me, Luc.”
“You know I would never do that,” he whispered. When they were together at Rinpoche-La, they spoke Tibetan. For some unknown reason, when they were on the outside they conversed in either French or English.