“Yama?”
“Yes.”
Gyalo’s grin returned. His drunken cackle was like that of an old rooster. “The Lord of Death never loses. I will look forward to his victory. I will carry your body to the next valley where there are some old ragyapa, and personally help to cut up your flesh for the birds.”
“Of all the people in town, you are the only one I can rely on, because I know your hate is genuine, and it is like a pure thing between us. An old lama taught me that only pure things are real. You will not contaminate it with a lie.”
Gyalo cast a crooked smile at Shan. “You are such a joy to hate, I admit it. A Chinese demon sent to torment me. The perfect neighbor.”
“But this time you have a problem, Rinpoche,” Shan said, using the term for revered teacher. “You can hate the gods or you can hate me. People say the old gods have let loose the worms of death. I am going to fight the gods. That makes us allies.”
Gyalo belched. “If it’s you versus the worms I’ll chose the worms every time.”
“Tell me where the old Yama temple was.”
Shan had seen the light that grew on Gyalo’s face before, in the eyes of demons painted on the walls of old temples. “You’ll never get past the flagpole,” the old Tibetan said.
Shan’s brow creased in confusion. Ama Apte had spoken of a flagpole, one of the places her mule liked to visit. “Then let me try and fail,” he ventured, still not grasping the warning in Gyalo’s words.
“The price for that particular information has already been set,” Gyalo spat. “One jug of sorghum.”
Shan gazed at him a moment as he pieced together the puzzle of his words, then with a small bow rose and slipped away toward the center of town.
Half an hour later, Gyalo’s information bought and paid for, he faded back into the darkness, pausing at the entrance to the rundown old farmhouse Gyalo called home. It had once been a sturdy structure, well kept for generations until abandoned when the gompa was destroyed. It was a stone’s throw away from the shed and Gyalo’s altar, where the former lama was now loudly singing one of his drinking songs to the ruins below.
A solitary butter lamp sputtered in one corner. The floor was littered with pots and dirt and kernels of dried cheese too hard even to interest the two stray dogs that slept on a soiled pallet in the corner. Though the tavern was one of the most successful businesses in Shogo, Gyalo still lived in poverty, because Tsipon owned the business, and the salary he paid the old Tibetan mostly went for alcohol. He glanced back in the direction of the shed where he had left Gyalo, then grabbed the ragged broom of barley straw by the door, herded the dogs outside and began sweeping. \\He worked quickly, refilling the chomay, the butter lamp by the pallet, folding the tattered blankets. He had almost finished when a peeved voice interrupted from the doorway.
“I don’t know why you do this,” Jomo groused. “He thinks I am the phantom who comes to clean. If he knew it was you he would write curses on the doorway, to keep you away.”
Shan leaned on the broom a moment. “My experience in Tibet has taught me that helping my enemies is usually less painful than helping my friends.”
“So what does that make that colonel rotting away in Cao’s jail?”
Shan began sweeping the floor again, without reply.
Jomo muttered a curse then lifted the pallet for Shan to sweep under.
“Who has come to see your father recently?” Shan asked after several minutes of silent work.
“Everyone comes. He’s the town mascot. He sits on that throne of his and they want to touch him for good luck, leave a cigarette or a candy bar and touch him. I used to try to stop them, tell them he was the opposite of a saint. But they act like it’s some form of worship. He spits a curse at them and they treat it like a prayer. They’ve been starved so long they don’t even know what food is.”
“Someone different came,” Shan said, “and brought a jug of baijiu whiskey.”
“Half of those who come bring him drinks. The old goat sometimes tells them he only performs for alcohol. The drunken poet saint.”
“For chang usually,” Shan said, referring to Tibetan barley beer. “The locals can’t afford a whole jug of whiskey.”
An odd sadness passed over Jomo’s face. Before replying he gathered up bits of debris in a rug and emptied it out the open window. “In Shigatse I was in a bar with a tiger on a chain. There’s a tavern on the border, by Nepal, that has a tame monkey trained to fill glasses. My father is a tourist attraction. I’m thinking of applying for a Ministry of Tourism grant to buy him a cage.”
“He has so much anger inside, Jomo, it’s burned away everything else.”
Gyalo’s son ignored him. “Tourists come, Chinese and Westerners, usually with one of those government guides to translate for them. They give my father gifts and ask him to write a prayer in Tibetan. I overhear them sometimes. They say they will take the prayer home and frame it. I read one. It said, I am a reincarnate demon. I hereby summon ten thousand scorpions to crawl up your ass.
”
Not for the first time Shan saw Jomo close to tears. “When was the last time someone came?”
“Yesterday someone came, alone. I saw his back as he was leaving. It was dark. All I could see was that he was tall, wearing a red wool cap and one of those windbreakers that say North Base Camp. A Tibetan or Chinese, since there was no translator. Afterward, my father was singing one of his old songs and swigging from a fresh jug.”
“The flagpole in the mountains,” Shan said. “Is it high enough to see from a distance?”
“Flagpole?”
“The one above Tumkot.”
“Only people from Tumkot go in those hills. They’re haunted. And the flagpoles in the mountain tribes have legs.”
“Legs?”
“Tarchok,” Jomo said, using the Tibetan word for flagpole. When he saw Shan’s confusion he placed his hand behind his head and extended a finger upward. “Tarchok,” he repeated. “They say there used to be scores in the mountains.”
Shan closed his eyes for a moment, chiding himself. He had forgotten a hurried explanation from Kypo, weeks earlier, when he had seen a man walking near the village with his hair bundled into a three-inch topknot at his crown. It was a holdover from much older days, more common among the border tribes of Nepal. The topknots, and the hermits who wore them, were called tarchoks, flagpoles.
“No one goes near the mountain above Tumkot because of the tarchok. They say he’s like a wild animal living in the ice world up there, going backward to the origins of hermits, turning into a yeti.”
Shan cocked his head, not certain he had heard correctly. “A hermit becoming a yeti?”
Jomo glanced over his shoulder as if wary of being overheard. “We have had Tibet for maybe a thousand years, that was all we could hope for.” He referred, Shan realized, to the period of the Tibetan Buddhist state. “Before our time, long before our time, the only mountain tribe was that of the yetis. They tried to fit into the rest of the world but eventually they gave up on people and they all became hermits.”
Chapter Six
Traditional Tibetans would have called it a power place. The tiny hanging valley opened to the south toward the mother mountain, its spring and grove of junipers helping to focus spiritual energy. It had been only an hour’s walk on the trail up the ridge that curled around and above Tumkot, but the ruins of the old shrine felt a world away. Shan lowered his small backpack to the ground and studied the site from the narrow trail before descending to the ruins. Below, visible in the distance, was the village. He was, he realized, at the shrine Ama Apte had mentioned, where she and her uncle had visited. He considered how the foundations of the ruined buildings were set back from the high cliff to the south, against an overhanging ledge, making the site invisible from below. The army probably had sent a bomber to destroy it, but never would have been able to locate it without local help.