Tumkot was not the largest of the hill villages, nor was it the closest to Shogo town. But here the mountain tribesmen were most skilled at high altitude climbing, here the inhabitants were most traditional, here was the one village where people still openly spoke of life before the Chinese arrived. More than once Shan had found time on his village errands for Tsipon to sit in the shadows unnoticed, taking joy in watching the villagers in their simple daily routines, cheerfully hauling water from the well, singing old songs as they carded wool, hauling night soil on their backs in large dogo baskets braced with head traps.
He parked the old Jiefang in the shadow of a stable, its engine still sputtering after he switched off the ignition, then walked slowly along the highest of the streets, looking down on rooftops that were nearly covered with peas and turnips drying for winter stews. He proceeded to the far end of the village, climbed down a flight of stone stairs, cupped from centuries of use, onto the main street, then ventured into the small central square surrounding the hand pump of the village well.
A young girl struggled to fill a battered wooden bucket, the long, heavy pump handle nearly lifting her off her feet on the upward strokes. She gasped in surprise as Shan, reaching from behind her, clasped his hand around the handle and began pumping. Casting a nervous glance up the street, she offered him a shy smile then sat on the granite step beside the bucket.
“Only half,” she whispered. “It’s all I can carry. And don’t go out of the square. Mother says it is dangerous out of the square.”
Shan recognized the house the girl looked toward, not because its appearance was much different from the other squat two-story structures adjoining it, but from the colorful coils of climbing ropes arrayed on pegs in its front wall. “But you and I,” he said, filling the bucket, “are going to the same place.”
The girl placed her hand on the bucket handle as Shan carried it out of the square.
“What dangers does your mother speak of?” Shan asked as they walked past the first of the shuttered houses.
The girl looked up with wide eyes. “Gods are disappearing,” she declared in a solemn tone. “That angry ghost is vengeful. Messengers of the Lord of Death have come,” she said, and pointed to a pole with a crosspiece like a mast that held prayer flags, one of the highest points in the village. Two crows, traditional emissaries to Yama, sat on the wooden crosspiece.
As they passed the next house, a man opened a door, saw Shan and slammed it shut. Since Shan wore a broad-rimmed Tibetan hat low on his head, he and the girl might have been taken for a niece and her uncle out on an afternoon chore. But months earlier, on Shan’s first visit to the village, Tsipon had decided to share what the Tibetans would have called the essential truth about his new employee, to avoid wrong impressions, he explained. The villagers didn’t resent Shan as a Chinese, they merely feared him as a gulag prisoner without papers, an illegal. He was another of the phantoms condemned to roam the sacred mountains.
A bright-eyed handsome woman smelling of cardamom appeared inside the doorway as the girl gleefully called out, her smile fading as she saw Shan. Taking the bucket, she spoke low and fast to her daughter, who skipped out the rear door toward a white goat grazing in the rear courtyard, then turned toward the steep ladder stair that led to the second-floor living quarters. “Kypo!” the woman called in a peevish tone.
Tsipon’s manager appeared on the stair a moment later, pulling a sweater over his shoulders. He offered Shan an expectant nod, muttered something to the woman, and gestured Shan up the stair. Kypo seemed to have no time to observe the usual formality of waiting for tea to be served before taking up the subject of their meeting. “She’ll bring tea,” he started, as if to acknowledge the custom, then leaned forward as soon as Shan joined him at a red-painted table by the front window. “There’s been nothing like this since the invasion,” he said, an odd desperation in his voice. “The younger men are furious. Some got drunk last night and tried to convince people to go raid the Westerners’ base camp and destroy their equipment and supplies to end all climbing for the season. The older ones point to the crows and the empty altars and say Yama has withdrawn his protection of the village after all these centuries. Since before memory, Yama has been the special deity of Tumkot. People say it is why we have survived with so little interference from the government.”
“Empty altars?”
“Nearly every family in the village has always had a little statue of Uncle Shinje,” Kypo said, using another name of the Lord of Death. “They are disappearing. Since the day Tenzin died they have been disappearing. People say it is Tenzin. An old woman said she saw him floating along the street at midnight, with a star following his head.”
A shiver ran down Shan’s spine. “I don’t understand. The killings had nothing to do with the village.” While Shan knew many of the local tribesmen were increasingly frustrated with the outsiders-who paid huge sums of money to the Chinese government for the right to climb their sacred mountain-they also owed their livelihoods to the climbers.
“They say the mountain goddess has a claim on Tenzin, that she must have him back.” Kypo looked up with pleading in his eyes. “We need him back. We need him on a pyre at the burning place above town. They want to say the necessary words to him and release his ashes back to the mother mountain. We need,” Kypo added with a twist of pain in his voice, “proof that he is still dead.” He looked down, avoiding his wife’s gaze as she brought two mugs of buttered tea, then scurried away with a jingling of her silver necklaces.
Shan sipped his tea uneasily, as worried about the hint of fear in the sturdy Tibetan’s face as about his strange words. A brawny man wearing a sheepskin vest, the village smith, appeared on the stairs from below, casting a frown at Shan before slipping off his shoes and disappearing into a bedchamber. Shan had almost forgotten. Some of the mountain tribes still practiced polyandry. Kypo was married to the demure woman who had served them tea. But so was his cousin.
“I carried his body down from the heights, Kypo.”
“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan?”
“Soon it will be seven years.”
“Then you should know better. Death is not so straightforward among our people. Chomolungma took him, people say, but then he was stolen from her. Now the deities fight over him. Yesterday,” the Tibetan added in a lower voice, “people went to my mother to ask about you.”
Shan’s mug stopped in midair at the mention of the stern, forceful woman. The villagers weren’t going to her because she was Kypo’s mother but because she was the village astrologer, the closest they had to a monk.
“Me?”
“They asked her to throw her Mo dice about you again,” Kypo said, referring to the bone dice with Tibetan syllables inscribed on each face that were used by fotunetellers. “They were looking for a way to punish the corpse carrier for failing in his duty.”
“And what did the dice say?”
Kypo shook his head. “She won’t be forced into consulting the fates. She says it makes them angry. Instead I reminded them about you and the dead,” he said with a self-conscious glance at Shan.
“About me and the dead?”
“I’m sorry. Once I was on the trail when you were coming down with a body. I didn’t know what to do. I hid. You were reciting old poems.”
“You told them I scared you?”
“I told them,” Kypo explained, “that you know how to speak with the dead.”
Out of the corner of his eye Shan saw Kypo’s wife lingering at the edge of the hallway. “And what did they do?”
“Some went home. My mother told the rest we had brought this on ourselves, for ignoring the old ways. She sent them to their altars to recite mantras.”