“What does it matter now?” Jomo shot back. He was growing more nervous, casting worried glances toward the street. “If Public Security comes back it will just infuriate them more to find these.”
“Because it could be why he was attacked,” Shan quickly explained what he had learned about the barley hook at the bus ambush.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gyalo’s son replied, lifting the sack with the hooks. “We just know it won’t happen again.” He began to swing it, to throw it deep into the darkness below.
Shan touched his arm. “No. I have a better place.”
“There is no better place,” the Tibetan said in a bitter tone.
“For your father’s sake. He wanted them preserved.”
“So I should trust you?” Jomo snapped. “It was your kind who did this to him.”
Shan did not reply but hoisted one of the bags to his shoulder and turned to the short trail to the stable.
At first the two Tibetans did not want to enter the old stable at the mouth of the gully. They had climbed down the trail in silence, each carrying one of the heavy sacks over his shoulder but Kypo and Jomo set theirs down at the door when Shan stepped inside to light a lamp. Though they had both been there before, it had never been at night.
“They say this place is haunted,” Kypo said hesitantly. “They never did recover all the bodies from the old gompa.”
“One thing I can tell you for certain, Kypo,” Shan said as he began to drag the sacks inside. “All the dead are on our side.”
Kypo muttered something that sounded like a prayer and picked up one of the sacks, followed by Jomo. Shan lifted his lamp and led them past the stall with his sleeping pallet, through the decrepit stable into the adjoining storage room, its roof hanging by only a few beams, roof tiles littering the ground where they had fallen through. He handed the lamp to a confused Kypo, then knelt, running his fingers through the layer of loose earth on the floor until he found what he was looking for, the buried edge of a canvas sheet. He gripped one edge of the sheet, hands on two corners, and slowly flipped it, exposing a hatch of wooden planks bound with heavy iron straps, a recessed iron ring near one edge.
A gasp of surprise escaped Jomo’s throat. Kypo silently bent to help Shan lift the hatch. “The gompa was here for centuries,” Shan explained, “giving them lots of time to construct tunnels and secret escape routes and passages to secret shrines.” He carried the lamp down the steep stone steps, set it on the workbench built along the wall, then reached up to help the Tibetans lower the sacks into the chamber.
“Ai yi!” Kypo exclaimed as he stepped down the stairs. The demons painted on the facing wall centuries earlier were still vivid enough even through the layers of soot to have their intended effect.
“They thought they had pushed all of the gompa into the gully,” Shan explained as he lit another lamp. “This was just an old stable, and the bulldozers couldn’t get down the steep slope to touch it. The stable was used as a granary when the army had a garrison here, then abandoned when they moved on. I wouldn’t have even known about this chamber if I hadn’t dropped a piece of firewood on the floor one night and heard the hollow sound of the hatch.”
Shan held the lamp near the wall, exposing a savage head with horns and fangs. “Like many of the old gompas, its first chambers were underground, built into the wall of the gully. This was a gonkhang, a chapel for protector demons. They often built them in hidden places, using them only for special rituals or for testing the fortitude of novices.”
When he turned Gyalo’s son had the second sack in his hand and was staring at the workbench, which held artifacts in various states of repair. “You’re digging these up,” he said in a spiteful voice. “Every Tibetan for fifty miles is scared to go into the gully so you just go in and help yourself.” He lifted a figure of a deity mounted on a tiger. “These make a big profit on the international market, I hear.” He lifted one of the sacks over his shoulder as if to take it back outside. “You must think us such fools, bringing you more inventory to get rich on. You Chinese always want to just have your way with us!” He took a step toward the stairs, then paused, looking at Kypo, who was stroking the head of the Buddha Shan had been working on when he was not cleaning the printing blocks in the stable above.
“These things don’t belong to Western collectors, just as they don’t belong to the government,” Shan declared. “They belong to the reverent.” He lifted one of the bags from the floor and stuffed it onto one of the storage shelves carved out of the living rock at the back of the chamber. Kypo watched him without expression, then placed his hand on the bag Jomo had thrown over his shoulder.
“You’re a fool to trust him,” Jomo spat, but did not resist when Kypo took the bag from him.
“What he is doing he could be arrested for,” Kypo observed. “The restoration and distribution of such artifacts is regulated by the Bureau of Religious Affairs.”
“So what?” Jomo shot back, “he is already a criminal, already an illegal.”
Kypo stuffed the bag beside the first one then turned to Gyalo’s son with an impatient frown. “So now he has shown us his secret. He has put himself at risk of arrest in order to save the old things.”
Jomo’s protests began to fade away as he examined the work Shan had been doing. When they finished stowing the sacks, Kypo stood in front of a dirt encrusted painting of a ferocious deity with a horse head. “There could have been other hiding places,” he said. “Why show us this one?”
“Because it is the best of the hiding places I know. I don’t want it forgotten for another fifty years.”
“You sound like you are going away.”
Shan too gazed for a moment at the deity before replying. “I am always going away,” he replied. It was, he had realized years earlier, the only way he could survive, by not lingering anywhere too long, by living on the fringes, out of sight of the government.
Kypo reached into one of the sacks and pulled out a corroded sickle. “It is a symbol from the war,” he explained as he pointed to the marks on the blade. “The resistance didn’t have many weapons. They used farm tools when they had to. The army of Tibetan fighters had a name. Four Rivers, Six Ranges, it was called. The soldiers liked to scratch the name on their weapons. Some of the units had modern weapons but still carried the blades as symbols, like badges of honor.” He looked at the deity on the wall. “It’s just a sickle. Tools are in short supply. It was a just a blade they used to cut the ropes. Finding it at the ambush doesn’t signify anything,” he said to the horse-headed god on the wall, as if trying to convince it.
But it did signify something, Shan knew, and it was why the porter had been frightened when Yates described it. The sign on the sickle had been used by resistance fighters decades earlier, and the ambush on the Public Security bus had been an act of resistance.
Half an hour later, as Shan walked along the street outside Gyalo’s compound, weighing his growing suspicion that it could not have been Public Security who attacked Gyalo, a familiar red vehicle rolled to a halt beside him. Nathan Yates stepped out, wearing a haunted expression, and blocked Shan’s path.
“It was poetry,” the American declared in a hollow voice. “She carried a book of Buddhist poetry in her pack and would read it by candlelight up on the mountainside, because it is a Buddhist mountain. She would write out the poems sometimes and hide them under stones. It was one of her favorites, a death poem by a Japanese poet.” As he looked up toward the stars his voice dropped to a whisper. “Is it me the raven calls,” he recited, “from the world of shades this frosty morning?”