Shan looked back to the lama, his heart rising in his throat. “The old ones in prison just consider themselves on a long hermitage. The best thing you can do for him is to flee, save yourself so you can keep being a monk. Spare him the pain of knowing he cost you your freedom.”
The monk mouthed a silent prayer toward the lama, touched his empty wrist where his beads had been before the knobs tore them away, then sprinted up the slope.
Metallic whistles screeched from farther down the road, followed by sharp commands and a long anguished moan. Shan, fighting the panic rising within, surveyed the scene, spotting arcs of color among the debris of rocks on the slope above. A thick red climbing rope, a sling of black and yellow rope. He had found the stolen climbing equipment. Something rattled by his foot and he bent to retrieve a steel snaplink carabiner used with climbing ropes. He was looking up at the debris again, trying to decipher how the ropes had been used, when three loud cracks erupted from the ridge above him. Gunshots. He ran.
There would be wounded monks, he told himself, there would be furious knobs. As he ran he made a mental note of what he had on him that he might turn into bandages. But when he emerged onto the small, flat plain at the top of the ridge it was not monks he saw but a traffic accident. A large dark gray sedan had veered off the narrow road. He reached the car gasping, leaning on the fender by the open driver’s door to catch his breath, realizing the car had not hit anything, had been pulled onto the shoulder by a grove of short, gnarled juniper trees. Watching for soldiers, he walked warily around the car and froze.
The two women leaning against boulders appeared at first to be having a quiet conversation, the middle-aged Chinese woman in a white silk blouse gazing inquisitively at the younger woman with close-cropped blond hair, her hands on her belly as if she had indigestion. But the older woman’s hands were covered with blood. Shan knelt, his fingers on her neck, finding no pulse. She was dead, though her flesh was still warm.
The blond woman gazed toward the horizon with a lifeless expression. But then he saw the fingers of one hand move, trembling, as if gesturing for him. She had been shot twice, in the chest. Blood stained her red nylon windbreaker and the pale blue shirt underneath, blood bubbled at one corner of her mouth. His heart wrenched as she turned to him, her eyes confused and pleading. He sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulder, wiping away a bloodstain on her temple.
“Stay still,” he whispered in Chinese, then repeated himself in English, stroking her crown. Run! a frantic voice inside shouted. He had to flee, had to help the monks if he could. But he could not leave the dying woman.
“Who did this?” he whispered.
The woman’s lips opened and shut. “The raven,” she whispered in English, and her hand found his, gripping hard as she looked back at the sky. Not the sky, Shan realized, not a bird, but the tall, fierce mountain to the south. She was gazing at Everest. She glanced at him with an apologetic, lopsided grin. “Is it me. .” she began in the thinnest of voices, then more blood flowed out of her mouth, choking her words. She raised her hand, touching the blood at her mouth, smearing it on her cheek as she coughed.
“Help will come,” he said, his own voice hoarse now. “You will be fine.” When the soldiers came he would ask them to run back to the bus, where there would be a first-aid kit and a radio to call an ambulance.
Her weak grin returned, as if she had caught him in a joke, then she lowered her head onto his shoulder like an old friend resting a moment. With what seemed to be great effort she raised her free hand and touched an ornate box that hung from her neck, pulled out from under her shirt. A gau, a traditional Tibetan prayer box. She pushed it toward him, as if to show him, then her hand fell away. He stroked the dirty blond hair on her crown and whispered more words of comfort as the strength ebbed from the hand that held his and her frail, labored breathing gradually ceased.
He watched as if from a distance as his hand kept stroking her head, her lifeless eyes still aimed at the mother mountain, hearing his voice whispering desolate, useless assurance as he pushed the gau back inside her shirt. Too late he saw the shadow beside him, too late he noticed the gray uniformed leg at his side. The electric prod touched his hand, his neck, his spine, and he watched from an even greater distance as his body convulsed, pulling the dead Westerner on top of him, her blood smearing onto his face and chest. Then something slammed into his skull and he knew no more.
Chapter Two
With his one good eye Shan watched the dead prisoner’s hand twitch, disturbing the flies that fed on its oozing wound. He had seen this before, the reflex of a laboratory frog, in those who had recently died after torture from electric shock. The sinewy fingers kept grabbing at thin air, as if frantically seeking the rainbow rope that pulled good Buddhists to heaven. With a stab of pain he raised his head from his pallet high enough to follow the dead arm, in search of its owner. Then a deep, shuddering moan escaped his throat. It was his own.
With agonizing effort he pushed himself upright against the painted cinder-block wall, ignoring the numbness in his legs, exploring his blind eye with his fingers to confirm it was only swollen shut. The pain that erupted as he lifted his head was like none he had known for years. His head swirled as he tried to study his cell, noticing pools of fresh blood and vomit on the concrete floor below a filthy porcelain sink. The last thing he saw as he slid down the wall, losing consciousness again, was a faded political poster on the wall outside the cell, an image of workers with radiant smiles over the caption REJOICE IN THE WORK OF THE PEOPLE.
When he woke again it was night, the only light a single dim bulb hanging in the middle of the corridor of cells, over a metal table with a blackboard easel beside it. He rose onto unsteady legs by pushing against the wall and took a step forward. The cell floor heaved upward and his knees collapsed. Again he struggled to his feet and took another step, using the lessons of his Tibetan teachers to fight the agony of each movement, until at last he crumpled onto the floor in a front corner. He gripped the bars of the door to pull himself into the light to examine the work of his captors. His left arm was mottled with blood, the skin scraped away in several places. His lips were bloody and swollen, several upper teeth loose and bleeding. The prisoner instincts that had lurked within him ever since leaving the gulag took over, taking inventory of the instruments used on him. A baton to his jaw and shoulders. A club covered with coarse sandpaper to his arm, which lifted patches of skin wherever it touched, a favorite of rural garrisons. Steel boot toes to his shins. Boot heels on the top of his feet. He closed his eyes, collecting himself, then explored the inside of his cheek with his tongue. There was no lingering taste, no metallic tinge. They had not begun to use chemicals on him.
He pulled his legs under him, in the meditation position, clenching his teeth against the pain, and stared at a little oblong window with wire-reinforced glass near the top of the back wall. Stars made their transit across the window. He dipped his finger into the nearest pool of blood and drew a circle on the wall, then a circle within a circle, then patterns within the circles. As he worked on the mandala, his mind clearing, the hairs on his neck began to rise. He turned to see the glow of a cigarette from an open cell at the end of the dark corridor. Someone was sitting on a cot, watching him.
Shan twisted, grabbed another bar, and with an effort that sent stabs of pain through his shoulders pulled himself around to squarely face the corridor. He stared back at the moving ember of the man who watched, until a new tide of pain surged within, lighting a fire at the back of his head that left him writhing on the floor. He faded in and out of consciousness, his mind churning with memories and visions, his body rioting in pain, leaving him unable to discern what was real and what was not. The bodies of the escaped monks were stacked like firewood, with a knob officer pouring gas on them. His father, the professor, recited Shakespeare in short, gasping syllables as he was tortured with burning sticks. Shan stood at the summit of Mount Chomolungma with Tenzin and the blond woman, then the wind seized them and threw all three into a shaft where they floated with the bodies of dead climbers.