Not fear but a deep melancholy grew within Shan, punctuated by waking visions of Gendun being tortured, being beaten in tamzing sessions to utter words he would never understand for reasons he could never comprehend. Shan had become the worm in the wood of Gendun’s safe hermitage, the parasite that had edged into the lama’s life. Through his own blind stupidity, through his naive assumption that he could become one of them, he had brought the horrors of the modern world to them.
He found another perch that offered a view of the summit and the quarter moon that illuminated it. His stomach growled, left unsatisfied by their sparse meal. He remembered that Dolma had given him a little pouch of rice. He reached into his pocket and held it in his palm.
It was an old prisoner’s trick. Grains of rice would fall from the sacks inmates were forced to haul into the guards’ mess hall. A single grain on the tongue would swell up into a digestible morsel after several minutes, so that half a dozen grains almost seemed to be a meal. He measured out half the bag onto his palm, returned the pouch with Hostene’s share to his pocket, then stared at the small mound in his hand as it glowed in the moonlight. His stomach growled again. It was the last of his food.
As he looked up at the moon, an owl hooted. He let the grains fall through his fingers onto the rock below, then swept them into a pile in front of him. Placing a single grain on his tongue, he counted out those that remained. Only sixty-three. He quickly, guiltily, pulled the grain from his mouth and placed it on the pile, then separated the grains into three smaller, uneven piles and began counting each of the piles. It was one of the ways he and his father had adapted the old stick-counting method for meditation on the Tao te Ching, one of the ways used by the devout in reeducation camps, where it was deemed a serious moral lapse to have traditional Tao throwing sticks.
Each round of counting yielded one of the lines of a tetragram, which he drew with a finger in the dusty soil at his side. When he had finished he had compiled a solid line over three lines of two segments each. It denoted Chapter Fourteen in a table his father had taught him. When they had first studied it together, his father had told him it was about the geometry of living correctly. Shan whispered the resulting verse to the moon:
The world is a mysterious instrument Not made to be handled Those who act on it, spoil it Those who seize it, lose it
He sat motionless, sensing that a door was opening to a carefully guarded chamber in his mind. He heard the distant voice of his father, a whisper down a long corridor. He forgot his fear, forgot his helplessness, and listened with his heart. Eventually, he became aware of a faint smell, the scent of the ginger his father always carried in his pocket.
He did not know how long he immersed himself in his memories, but the moon was high in the sky before the hoot of another owl brought him back. Abruptly, he lost the sensation of his father’s presence and the dim figures accompanying it who were the monks they had sat with when Shan was a child. He was alone again in the night on a cold, windswept perch, remembering the dangers that waited on either side of the mountain.
His stomach whined again, and he picked up several grains, ready to eat them, then looked at the moon and lowered his hand. He could not eat without reducing the number needed to cast. He tossed them down again to produce another tetragram. This time the pattern was a line broken in thirds over one broken in half, the pair repeated. It indicated Chapter Seventy-One, the verse that had seemed to come up more frequently than any other during his years in Tibet:
To know that you do not know is best To not know of knowing is a disease To be sick of the disease Is the way to be free of the disease
The lives of everyone on the mountain who meant something to him, including the Navajo woman he had never met, hung in perilous balance, and it was impossible that all would escape unscathed unless Shan could solve the terrible riddles of the mountain. But all he knew now was that he did not know. And soon they had to choose between going west, to those who wanted to kill Hostene, or east, to those who wanted to kill Shan. The owl, Hostene’s harbinger of death, landed thirty feet away and cocked its head, as if to remind Shan that he had known the answer to that particular riddle even before he had tallied the rice grains.
Even wolves halt to lick their paws. Well after midnight, as Shan watched from the rim again, figures appeared against the light of the bonfire, weary men who settled onto the rocks near the flames. He pushed back and found his way to the bottom of the chasm again and awakened Hostene with a brief touch on his leg. Without questioning Shan, the Navajo rolled up his blanket and followed. Shan handed him the full pouch of rice. “Keep this,” Shan said. “Put a few grains on your tongue as you walk.” He had returned his own sixty-four grains to the pouch. His hunger had disappeared during his final vigil with the owl.
When they stepped into the moonlight Shan explained his plan.
“But this side is where Abigail is,” Hostene protested. “You say there are soldiers on the east side,” he added in a plaintive tone. “If they arrest me they will deport me. I will never see her again.”
“We are doing this for two reasons. First, the miners are in a frenzy. They will execute you and march back to their camp, singing. Second, the key to finding Abigail is the hermit, who has fled from his cave.”
“Rapaki? He doesn’t even know her.”
“There are two people on this mountain trying to unlock the mystery left by the old monks. The hermit knows more about the pilgrim stations than anyone else. I think Abigail and he do know each other. It seems impossible that they never encountered one another.” Shan extracted the empty tin from his pocket. “I found this in Rapaki’s cave.”
The Navajo took the container, turning it over in his hand, holding it up to the moonlight. “Lemon Freshies,” he said in a bewildered tone. “She brought three or four of these from home.”
A bird flew up in the darkness overhead. Hostene put his hands up, palms out, to shield his face. The hands. It was, Shan abruptly realized, how Rapaki would have seen Shan the previous morning. As he walked, he replayed the encounter with the hermit in his mind. Rapaki’s jumble of mantras had had a theme. Honored by the waking dead was part of the most common prayer to Tara. Face like the circle of the autumn moon was part of a ceremony for invoking the presence of Tara. Even the cheating-death mantra the hermit had used was one that invoked Tara. And though Shan had raised his hands to protect himself from the flying stones, he had not understood until now Rapaki’s reaction. Shan’s thumbs had been touching, palms flattened, turned outward. He had unconsciously made a mudra, one that was a special offering to the goddess, invoking the Laughing Tara. Shan and Hostene had been looking for Abigail. Rapaki had been looking for Tara.
Shan said, “In one of her photos, Abigail wore a short necklace with a large turquoise pendant. Did she wear it often?”
“It’s one of her favorites. It was her mother’s. Why?”
“We have to find Rapaki,” Shan said urgently. “And the key to finding Rapaki is Thomas.”
“That boy from the other side?”
“There were other things in Rapaki’s cave-new pencils, a panda-printed quilt, clean paper. He didn’t get them from the miners, he didn’t get them from Yangke, and he certainly didn’t get them all from Abigail.”
Shan led them down the dark, treacherous path in short stages, stopping frequently to mentally revisit the terrain ahead, painfully aware of the jagged shards of stone, remnants of the earlier explosions, that waited below to impale them if they fell from the slippery rocks. Twice he lost his way and they had to backtrack. When they reached the makeshift ladder bridge Hostene balked. Shan waited for the moon to emerge from behind a cloud and, steeling himself, walked back and forth across it to reassure the old Navajo.