“I knew him,” he said, struggling to find words that would offend neither the human uncle nor the mule. “He had the surest feet I have ever seen,” he offered. “He and the mountain deity had a special relationship.”
Ama Apte offered a grateful nod as a tear rolled down her weathered cheek. Shan thought back on his visit to her house, near Kypo’s in the village. On the ground floor, used by traditional Tibetans to shelter their livestock, there had been a sleeping pallet by the biggest stall.
“Tell me about it,” Shan said after a moment.
“When he didn’t come back that night I went looking in his favorite places, little meadows with sweet grass protected from the wind. He wasn’t in any of them. The next afternoon I finally found him here, his packsaddle empty. The first thing in my mind was that they had taken him to this wall and executed him.” She stared at the dead animal’s head. Her voice had become that of a young girl. “It happened to my mother and father, not far from this very spot. Those Chinese just dragged them out of their house because they were landowners.” She grew very quiet. “I don’t know what happened here. I see the future, not the past. I hear that’s what you do. Tell us about the past.” When she finally looked up her face was like one of the haunting hollow masks Tibetans wore at religious festivals.
Strangely embarrassed by her words, Shan rose. He walked along the cliff face, considering the barren ground, the cliff above, the undisturbed soil between the trail below and the spot where the body lay.
“I spent much of his last day with him,” Shan said. Increasingly it felt as if he were attending the funeral of an old friend.
“My uncle was a monk last time, one of those who kept the Yama shrine on the mountain above the village. He told me often that he would pay in the next life for letting it be destroyed,” Ama Apta said. Her words were taking on the thin, ethereal quality of a lama’s prayer. “When he came looking for a new place to live I said I would never let them drag him away the way they had my parents, that I would protect him, if he would take off his robe and become a shepherd with us. He agreed, because he knew someone had to watch over me and Kypo. He was with us more than twenty years. Six months after he died this young mule appeared while I was tending sheep. I offered him some barley in a bowl but the mule wouldn’t touch it. He kept looking at me like he had something to say, then he followed me home. I put more grain out, in four different bowls, including an old cracked wooden one used only by my uncle. He went right to the wooden bowl and ate all the grain. I understood then. As a mule,” she added after a moment, “he was always a good uncle.”
It must have been Ama Apte, Shan realized, who had arranged for the mule to be used for carrying the dead. It had always been waiting with Kypo at the side of the road, without an explanation. She had been sending her sturdy uncle, the mule. Shan remembered the attentive way the mule had always listened to his poetry.
“I need to examine his body,” Shan declared.
When the Tibetan woman did not reply, Shan reached into his pocket for his notepad. Ripping off a blank page, he wrote, in Tibetan. Thou were dust and now a spirit, thou were ignorant and now wise. It was a traditional expression of mourning. Ama Apte studied Shan as he set the prayer under a stone by the body, then she gestured him toward the animal. He removed the harness, stretched out the bent legs of the animal, then systematically ran his hands over its body, pausing over a lump here, a patch of dried blood there. Nearly a quarter hour later he wiped his hands on a tuft of grass and stood.
“This wasn’t one of his favorite places,” he ventured. “No water, not much grazing.”
“No,” Ama Apte agreed. “But here is where he must be burned. He is too big to move.”
“But above,” Shan suggested, “there is a place he favored.” He pointed to the top of the cliff high above them, then paused a moment, surveying the nearby outcroppings. He had a vague sense of being watched.
The Tibetan woman cocked her head. “He had favorite places, with grass and sun. There was an old shrine we would visit, now lost to the world. He liked the flagpole. There’s a trail from below that winds up toward a little grove of juniper and grass above. He would go with me there sometimes, in both his faces.”
Shan nodded. “He was shot at the top of the wall, here-” he pulled at the animal’s right front shoulder to reveal a wound that been pressed against the rock-“and he fell to the bottom of the cliff. Then someone came to put a bullet in his head with a pistol held between his eyes.”
A tear rolled down Ama Apte’s cheek. “How can you know that?”
“There are no hoofprints anywhere near here, except for a few from sheep. He has several broken bones, from the fall. If you look closely at his head you will see burned hairs around the wound, from the discharge of a large pistol pressed to his skull. There are prints from a heavy boot, a military boot, from someone walking close along the cliff face.”
“He hated soldiers. He would have avoided soldiers,” Ama Apte said in a distant voice. “But why? Why go to the trouble? What did they have to fear from him?”
“I don’t know. I left him near the road the day of the assassination, carrying Tenzin, a few hours before he was shot.” Shan turned and surveyed the little bowl-shaped valley defined by the ridge that curled into the massive Tumkot mountain. The trail that went upward led to a glacier that was said to be impassable. But on the other side of the mountain would be the road to the base camp. “He died because he was a witness to something.” Shan looked back at the seated woman, realizing only afterwards that he had given voice to the unlikely thought that had entered his head.
But the old diviner only nodded, as if the explanation made perfect sense to her. “Are you strong enough to find the rest of it for him, so he can move on?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“The truth. The truth about my uncle will be a heavy, dangerous thing. It will not want to be found.”
Shan nodded. The truth about the dead mule would also be the truth that would protect Tan, and therefore could be the truth that kept Shan’s son alive. Someone, on the same day, had assassinated the minister, a Western woman, and a mule.
“But I was casting the bones last night,” she declared in an apologetic tone. “And again just here. They said the same thing each time. A very strong portent. On the path of death lies more death.”
Shan closed his eyes a moment then gazed at the snowcapped peaks beyond the little valley. He extended his hand to the woman to help her up as he spoke again. “We’re going to need more wood.”
Chapter Five
Onward and onward! It was the shining light of the Party and Chairman Mao Tse-tung who gave us boundless strength and wisdom! read the dusty banner on the wall behind Tsipon’s desk. The quote was famous in the region, the fervent declaration from the journal of the first Chinese team to have ascended Chomolungma, emblazoned on tourist brochures and regional histories. On the adjoining wall was a new banner, almost as big, announcing the opening of the Snow Leopard Guesthouse, the most luxurious accommodation in the Himalayan region.
It was an hour after dawn, far too early for Tsipon to have stirred from his comfortable house on the slope above town, but with enough light cast through the windows for Shan to see without switching on a telltale bulb. He headed straight for the table under the window, where Tsipon’s secretary maintained an informal archive dedicated to local mountaineering: photos of early climbers, year-by-year statistics on expeditions, annals of the Chinese Mountain Institute, and copies of the regional newspaper.
With the battering of his mind and body, his memories of the murder scene had become so blurred he could almost believe everyone’s denial that any Westerner had been there. But he believed his dreams. Her face had haunted his sleep ever since that terrible day. In a nightmare the previous night, Shan had been lying broken and bleeding on a cell floor when the blood-soaked blond woman had appeared and carried Shan away from his cell, telling him in a comforting tone that the mountain was calling him for his final climb, that he shouldn’t think of it as death, just a cold, windy passage to a loftier existence.