“If you mean Gendun, I can only aspire to be his dog.”
Chodron muttered something over his shoulder in a low voice. The men behind him laughed. “Where is Yangke?” the headman demanded.
“He is attached to his sheep almost as closely as to his collar.”
Shan saw a flash of nervousness in the headman’s eye and replayed in his mind’s eye his last minutes with Yangke. He had been sitting with the sheep scattered on the slope above. But he had been gazing at a trail that wound through the flock and continued higher.
Chodron glared at Shan a moment, then motioned with his hand. The two men stepped forward, one holding a short stave that looked like an ax handle. They moved behind Shan.
“What is the yellow beetle?” Shan asked Chodron.
“He must declare that it should go back to the mountain god.”
“Where is it now?”
For a moment Chodron studied Shan, then gestured toward an inverted bowl lying on a plank. Shan warily stepped past the two farmers, then kneeled and lifted the bowl.
The two-inch-long object inside was unmistakably an insect, an exquisitely worked image of a long scarab. Its bent legs glittered brightly, and the shifting flames of the lamps gave them an illusion of motion. The head was smooth, the thorax dimpled, its eyes made of polished turquoise. He lifted it, feeling the weight of solid gold. Two jointed antennae folded back along the carapace. It was beautiful. It had a look of great age. It was not Tibetan.
“Why must this leave the village?”
“People are saying it protects the killer. It encourages dangerous speculation.”
Shan glanced at Lokesh, who gazed at the beetle with wonder in his eyes. “You mean you originally found the beetle at the murder site?”
“One of my men tried to move it. Your lama put a hand on his arm to stop him. By protecting it, your lama protects the killer.”
Shan met Chodron’s icy gaze. “Gendun is not your puppet.”
Chodron seemed to welcome the comment. “He is an old man, exhausted from lack of sleep and food. But, more important, he is an outlaw, in need of an active tamzing. Surely one with your experience in the world understands this. We gave him just a taste of the main event.” The headman leaned forward, lowering his voice. “I need to know I have your undivided attention.”
Shan fought down a shudder. Tamzing. Though it sounded like one of the demon names Tibetans are loath to utter, it was entirely a creation of Beijing. It was a ritual of another generation, a favorite tool of the dreaded Red Guard, in which many innocents had died. A tamzing was a struggle session, where correct socialist thought was pounded into the unreformed, usually with words but sometimes, Shan well knew, with batons, boots, hammers, or lead pipes. An unfamiliar fog seemed to envelope him for a moment. He found himself between Gendun and Chodron.
“You were about to say something?” Chodron chided.
Shan gazed forlornly at the floor, gradually becoming aware of the headman and his bullies staring expectantly at him. It had taken his prison commanders months to discover what Lokesh called his flaw, the weakness the officers had learned to use against him. Chodron had grasped it in a day. Shan would not lie, would not let himself be used, would not jump at the bidding of men like Chodron, except to protect the old Tibetans.
“The beetle must be returned to the god of the mountain,” Shan whispered in Chinese.
“I can’t hear. We must all hear what the lama says, so the rest of the villagers can be told by each of us. In Tibetan.”
“The lama says this jewel of the mountain deity does not belong here, that it must be returned.” Shan felt his lips move but the thin hollow voice that spoke the words seemed to come from far away.
“And the lama says this unconscious man may be the killer,” Chodron added.
Shan looked at the dirt floor. “And the lama says this man may be the killer,” he repeated.
Chodron, a victorious gleam in his eyes, flicked his wrist and one of the men grabbed the beetle and dropped it into the bowl, then covered it with the overturned bowl as if it might fly away. Chodron muttered something, his men laughed again, and the trio left the stable.
Shan looked at the empty door, looked at the lamps, looked at the comatose man, looked everywhere but at Gendun’s face. He knelt and extended his fingers into the water bowl again, then quickly withdrew them. They were trembling. When he glanced at Lokesh, his old friend wore an expression Shan had never seen before. He would never openly reprimand Shan but Lokesh could not hide the look of betrayal in his eyes.
Shan left the building, quickly walking beyond the end of the village to the edge of the high cliff. The wind rushed against him as he tried to lose himself in the emptiness that stretched below. Chodron did not begin to fathom the nightmare he was creating for Shan. To stop the headman’s torment of Gendun and the comatose stranger it might be necessary to use outright violence. But if Shan lifted a hand against Chodron to save Gendun, Shan would never be able to sit at the old lama’s side again. Already Shan had been forced to lie in Gendun’s name, in front of him, to save him from Chodron’s cruelty. He had left that morning desperate to find an answer to the murders. Now all he wanted was to save Gendun and Lokesh. Drango village was not the rustic enclave it had first appeared to be. It was a strange gray place in which the worst of both worlds was combined.
When he turned back, he went straight to the granary where Gendun had been imprisoned, then he returned to the cliff, bent under the weight of the heavy battery. It flew in a low arc as he heaved it over the edge, like a small boulder ejected by the quaking of the mountain.
Dolma was standing in the entry of her house when he left the cliff. She beckoned him as she glanced nervously up the street. So as not to be noticed he circled behind the buildings, approaching indirectly. By the time he reached the door she had disappeared. When he climbed up the ladder stair, her quarters were empty. He quickly surveyed the modest room. It was simple and tidy, all of wood, lit only by its solitary window. Feeling like an intruder, he had started to descend when he noticed how uneven the shadows on the far wall were. He hesitantly approached it, finding a large piece of black felt suspended from wooden pegs. He lifted the felt. Behind it was a tangka, a very old painting on cloth of a deity, richly colored, under which was a small incense burner. The widow, who as an elder supported Chodron in his campaign to deny the village its traditions, actively prayed to Tara, the mother protectress of Tibet.
He was about to descend when muffled voices rose from below. The big man, the first guard in the stable, appeared on the stairs, his beefy face apprehensive. He glared at Shan, who backed away. Then two more figures rose behind him: the elder with the wispy white beard and Dolma, who hustled her two companions forward like an impatient shepherd. She positioned herself like a sentry at the head of the stair.
“The investigator desires to know about the bodies,” Dolma declared.
“He’s a convict,” the big man spat. “He deceived us.”
“He’s the answer to our problems,” Dolma replied with strained patience.
The big man looked at the elderly man. Then he uttered a low curse and began speaking, looking at Dolma, not Shan. “We were moving a flock of sheep up the mountain to a new pasture. The dog found the one in the stable first. He was all bloody, with those signs near him. The other two were inside a circle of tall rocks, what was left of them.”
“What was left?” Dolma repeated in a quivering voice.
“Their hands were gone, chopped off. We ran and sent for Chodron.”
A chill settled along Shan’s spine. He had seen the evidence, but having the butchery described aloud was still unsettling. “The camp,” he said after a moment, his tongue dry as tinder. “What did you see in the camp, by the trees?”