The hermit nodded, as if Shan had passed his first test, and Shan turned and dared to examine the man tarchok as he cupped his hands around his chillum and puffed repeatedly to encourage the embers to burn in the thin air. He was a compact, sturdy man, perhaps ten years older than Shan, his robe patched in several places, his ankles naked under his heavy boots, his topknot tightly braided and doubled over, fastened with red thread.
“When I visit the shrines near Chomolungma, people who are not Tibetans come sometimes,” the hermit observed. “But they always have better clothes than you,” he added whimsically.
Shan could not resist a grin.
“They ask me many questions.” Now that the hermit had found his voice it was slow and melodious. “Though in the end they are all asking the same thing. They want to know how to find peace.” He worked on his chillum again, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth. “I tell them the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you.”
For a moment Shan wanted to forget everything, to bask in the wisdom of the old hermit, who was so much like his friends in Lhadrung. But then the hermit spoke again.
“On this mountain, though, there is no room for strangers. Strangers just die. When the incense burns down you must leave.”
Shan’s throat went dry. The man was no longer speaking like a hermit, but like a sentinel, a protector demon. “My name is Shan,” he said. “I seek a ghost, and one who makes ghosts.”
“I am called Dakpo. I speak for the mountain. When she wakes she will shake you off like a flea.”
“I am no intruder,” Shan ventured. “I am the corpse carrier, named by the astrologer of Tumkot.”
It sounded like a line from a fairy tale, but the words gave the hermit pause. He puffed on his pipe, studying Shan intently. “I saw you on the road burying your first corpse under rocks.”
Shan looked up in surprise. On his first visit to the base camp he had stopped to remove the corpse of a dog from the road. He had given it a quick burial under a mound of stones, whispering a prayer to send the dog on its way.
“I said to myself, there is a man who appreciates death.”
Shan hesitated, biting down the questions that leaped to his tongue. Dakpo had not been on the road itself, and the slope on the far side of Tumkot mountain was said to be impassable. He replayed the words in his mind. Had the hermit just told Shan why he had been selected as corpse carrier?
Shan pointed to the valley below. “There, against the wall, you can still see the soot of the pyre. When we burned her uncle, only Ama Apte and I were there but I sensed someone else close by. He was a friend of yours too. If I had not lost the corpse our mule friend would still be alive. It is a heavy debt I owe, Dakpo. To the corpse, to your old friend, to the mountain. I must be allowed to pay it.”
The hermit’s brow furrowed. He cast a mournful gaze toward the barely discernible smudge on the distant cliff face and puffed again on his chillum. “His name was Kundu. I knew him all my life,” he said at last. “It is a rare honor, when a friend comes back the way he did.”
“But he came back on four legs.”
Dakpo offered a strangely sad smile, then swept his hand across the horizon. “For as far as you can see there will be none of us coming back on two legs.”
It was the most remarkable statement of a remarkable conversation. Shan dared not ask what terrible sin the inhabitants of the region had committed to all be reborn as lower life forms. “Do you live in a cave, Rinpoche?” he asked instead.
The hermit’s mood had darkened. He only nodded.
“Above the cliff where the mule was killed?”
He nodded again.
“I don’t think he was going up the trail for grass. I think he was coming down. Did you see him?”
“He was not anywhere above,” Dakpo shot back, too insistent. “There is nowhere above.”
“He would not have been alone,” Shan continued. “He would have been with his killer, or closely followed by his killer.”
“He went to get grass. He fell. Someone shot him in an act of mercy.”
“No. He was first shot above.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. That wound was on the far side of his body, against the wall. His killer could not have done it after he fell.”
Dakpo fell silent.
“How long have you lived in your cave, Dakpo?”
“As long as I care to remember.”
“But you are from the village?”
“A long time ago.”
“Then you must know the secrets that Ama Apte’s uncle died for.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mule took a secret trail home. The minister’s killer was on the same trail, eluding his pursuers. But I can’t find the truth, can’t release the soul of your friend without knowing that secret. There are probably helpful signs on the trail, clues I could use. What is so important that it keeps you from helping him?”
“There is no such trail. And we have our own ways of dealing with death, Shan. The mountain will work it out.” Dakpo stood, stowed his pipe in the pouch at his waist and without another word walked away. Shan watched a long time, watched as the patch of red against the massive stonewall grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared, then he turned back to the shrine.
Thirty minutes later he had settled into the shadows of a small ledge from which he could watch both the path from below and the sheltered altar where the deities, both Eastern and Western, patiently waited.
Purple and gold fingers stretched out in the sky above the snowcapped western peaks. He relaxed, wondering absently if his son was watching the same sunset, constructing dragons and fish out of the clouds as Shan and his father often had done. Then, as so often happened, a whisper of reality crushed his dream. It had been his particular psychosis during his years in prison, one for which he still had found no cure. He would dream of his son Ko as a happy, innocent youth, had laid on his own dark prison bunk for hours imagining his son studying the old poets, flying kites, folding paper hats. But all the time, unknown to Shan, his son had been a criminal, a gang leader, a drug dealer, a drug user. And just as Ko had begun to transform, to heal in the hands of the prisoner lamas of Shan’s own former camp, he had been transported for being a chronic disciplinary problem to the knobs’ infamous prison hospital. Ko, the only person on the planet who shared blood with Shan, lingered on a slow but certain path to death. With one of the silent, wracking sobs that sometimes woke Shan from a dead sleep, he had a vision of Ko emptied out, cauterized by chemicals and electrodes.
He steadied himself, forming a calming mudra with his hands, pushing himself into the present, remembering that he too had a path to follow that might, with the slenderest reed of a chance, allow him to alter Ko’s fate. His lips began to move in a silent mantra. Stars twinkled to life above the mother mountain, around which a silvery moonlit plume of wind-driven snow hung like a prayer scarf. A tide of fatigue surged through Shan’s limbs. He leaned against the rock behind him.
He awoke with a terrible sense of falling, so vivid he clutched at the stone beside him, his heart pounding. Above, the stars had shifted hours to the west. And below, someone stalked the gods.
Shan rose silently to his feet. The dark figure held a flashlight near his head as he surveyed the makeshift altar. No, Shan saw as he advanced, the man had a light strapped to his head, leaving both his hands free to handle the figurines. The intruder worked quickly, hefting each little statue, shaking it, stuffing two, then three, into a bag hanging from his shoulder. A light on his head. What had the old woman in the village seen? A ghost with a star over its head. Shan rose and stealthily descended into the ruins.
He felt the pressure of the ceramic shard under his boot an instant too late to prevent it from snapping. Twenty feet away, the thief spun about at the crunching sound, instantly switching off the light, crouching so that he was just another low, dark shadow among the moonlit rocks.