The youngest monk paused, lifting the solitary candle closer to Shan’s face. “You’re the one!” he exclaimed, then turned and whispered urgently to his companions..
“The one?” Yates asked suspiciously.
“He was there,” the young monk explained. “Just after the rocks hit the bus. He made me understand we had to flee. He pointed out the safe way to go. Without him we would have been taken by those soldiers again.”
Shan glimpsed the confusion on the American’s face before leaning forward toward the monks, taking the candle, and holding it close to each of them in turn. They were bruised and scratched, their robes in tatters. A hollow desolation had begun to settle on their faces. It was an expression he knew all too well. The three Tibetans had probably spent their entire lives since boyhood in their remote, sheltered gompa. It was entirely possible they had never seen a gun, had never been inside a motor vehicle, that the only outsiders they had ever experienced had been the occasional bureaucrats from the Bureau of Religious Affairs who had tried to tame them for Beijing, until they had been herded at gunpoint into a prison bus.
Now here they were, hidden by an American, surrounded by cartons of strange supplies in a camp of Western climbers bundled in gaudy nylon and down, raucously speaking half a dozen languages. They had been stripped of their prayer beads, stripped of the peaceful, prayerful existence they had carried on in the high ranges, cast out into an alien world.
Shan bent, silently lifted a large, flat pebble from the ground, then turned to Yates and extracted the felt-tip pen extending from the American’s shirt pocket. He quickly wrote on the stone and handed it to the young monk.
“A mani stone!” Yates exclaimed.
Shan had written a mantra on the stone, the mani prayer to the Compassionate Buddha that could be found on stones of all sizes, all over Tibet, left at shrines, stacked in walls leading along pilgrims’ paths. He held the pen up in silent query toward Yates, who offered a nod, then handed it to the young monk, who enthusiastically began scooping more pebbles from the ground.
“I had a mule that day with a dead man on it,” Shan stated after the monk had made two more stones. “Did you see it?”
The monk nodded. “There was a mule on the trail we cut across above the road. It was wandering up the mountain, eating grass along the way.”
“Was its burden intact?”
“With its burden,” the monk replied with a nod. As he made another prayer stone his brow wrinkled. “Later, when we had climbed for an hour, I looked down and saw it like a little toy creature far below. A toy horse was coming up behind it with a toy man chasing the horse. But the man stopped when he reached the mule.”
“What happened?” Shan asked.
“We kept climbing, faster than before. Some of the soldiers had begun shooting into the rocks, as if we were wild game.” One of the two older monks leaned toward the novice, whispering. “We must find our friends, the other members of our gompa,” the novice announced.
Shan and Yates exchanged an uneasy glance.
“Ten of you were on that bus,” Shan said. “Six of the others have been recaptured. Another was killed.”
Small moans of despair came from the monks. They clutched their gaus again.
“The old one, at the side of the road?” the young monk asked, his voice cracking.
“They took him away. He’ll be in a prison somewhere by now, far from here.”
The novice sank back against the wall of cartons. One of the other monks, the oldest, placed a hand on the young one’s shoulder. “We will begin anew at our gompa, when things have quieted down,” the monk offered in a consoling tone, then explained to Shan and Yates. “We are in a line of caretakers who have kept the old shrines there for more than four hundred years. The books Sarma gompa makes have been used all over Tibet for centuries.”
Shan’s mouth opened but he had no words. “Your gompa,” He stated at last, his voice gone hoarse, “has passed on.” He could not bear to meet the puzzled gazes of the three monks.
“Passed on?” asked the oldest.
“The government went back with machinery,” was all Shan could say.
The silence was that of a death rite. Yates cursed. Another anguished cry escaped the throat of the youngest monk, and he squeezed one of his new mani stones until his knuckles were white. With trembling hands, one of the older monks formed a mudra, an invocation of the protector goddess.
Yates stared intensely at the ground, his eyes filled with pain. Shan could see in his eyes that, like Shan, he felt a share of the guilt for the gompa’s destruction.
“That old Buddha,” the older monk said at last. “Does he still live?”
Shan recalled the painting on the rock face at the rear of the gompa. “The last time I saw, he was untouched.”
The monk nodded gratefully and spoke in a serene tone. “Now he will be able to see the mother mountain without any obstruction.”
The American’s face flooded with emotion. He looked at Shan with a mournful, pleading expression.
“I need buttons,” Shan said to him in English.
“Buttons?”
“I need three hundred twenty-four buttons. And some of the thread used to repair canvas tents.”
Yates stood warily, shaking his head but gesturing Shan to lead the way out of the chamber. They searched together in the big chest of tools, then in several smaller plastic chests that contained miscellaneous supplies. When they found the heavy thread but no buttons, Shan asked for washers, but they could only find two dozen, all in the tool chest. He studied the stack of cartons, then pointed to one near the top.
“You want rolls of candy?” the American asked incredulously.
“And a tin plate,” Shan said.
When he returned to the hidden chamber, Yates a step behind, Shan carried the spool of heavy thread and twenty rolls of candy rings. He broke three rolls open, dumping their contents onto the plate. The oldest monk, understanding immediately, reached out with a grin and started tying a red candy circle to one end of the thread.
“Malas,” Shan explained to Yates. “They need to have prayer beads. One hundred eight to the string. In my prison,” he added, “the old Tibetans sometimes made them out of fingernail cuttings.”
They left the monks, working on their makeshift malas, Yates leading Shan in silence back to his makeshift quarters. The American lit his little stove, produced two metal mugs, two black tea bags, and brewed each of them a cup of tea before speaking.
“What the hell do you want, Shan?”
“An innocent man is being held for those murders. I mean to find the truth.”
“That man Tan is a colonel in the army, head of some gulag county, one of those that goes around destroying monasteries. They say dozens of monks have died in his prison. No one would call a man like that innocent.”
“I mean to find the truth,” Shan repeated.
“And you want me to help free a monster like that? Not likely. You were a prisoner yourself once they say.”
“I was his prisoner.”
“My God. Then why would you want him freed?”
Perhaps it was the soothing warmth of the tea, or just his exhaustion, that caught him off guard. The words were out of his mouth as if of their own accord. “My son is in the Public Security mental hospital twenty miles from here. The only chance he has of survival is for me to get him out of there, get him transferred back to the camp he came from. It was my old prison. There I could see that he was looked after. Colonel Tan is in charge of the prison.”
“Christ!” Yates stared into his mug. “China!” he groaned, as if it explained everything, shaking his head back and forth. The American searched Shan’s face for a moment, drank deeply, then gazed back toward the hiding place inside the cartons. “Those monks have to be saved,” he declared.