“Half the oxygen at Camp One for now, and half there,” he said, pointing to a mark indicating Camp Two. As he did so, Ama Apte gasped, dropping one of the dishes she was clearing. She stared with a stricken expression at Yates’s hand. He was absently holding the rolled-up peche page from his pocket, using it as a pointer. The Tibetan woman abruptly sprang forward, seized the rolled page, and slapped Yates on the cheek.
The stunned American reeled backward. Tears welled in Ama Apte’s eyes. She collapsed onto a stool, her head in her hands, sobbing. Kypo, Shan and Yates exchanged dumbfounded looks. Kypo knelt at his mother’s side, his hand on her shoulder. As Shan took a step forward, Kypo warned him off with a shake of his head and pointed to the street. Ama Apte began weeping. She seemed unconsolable.
Shan and Yates stood at the American’s truck minutes later, the two men gazing back uncertainly toward the fortuneteller’s house. “It’s like she’s having some sort of breakdown,” Yates said forlornly. “All the stress. She’s going to get herself arrested. She has to stay away from them.”
Shan realized the American was talking about the monks, that Yates had reached the same conclusion as Shan. Ama Apte had taken the monks from the base camp, and was hiding them somewhere on the forbidden mountain above the village.
“The fugitive monks are now considered assassins and traitors,” Shan said. “Those caught helping them will be treated the same way.”
“You’re saying it would be the firing squad?”
“And if they try to cross the border there are snipers positioned in the passes. Two years ago nuns trying to flee across to Nepal were killed with high-powered rifles.”
“Someone has to tell her.”
“She won’t listen. I think the astrologer sees her own fate and has decided it cannot be altered.”
Yates leaned on the hood of his truck, buried his head in his hands. “I’m finished.” He seemed strangely weary, as if he had just returned from an oxygen-deprived climb. “I’m sorry about her. I’m sorry about Megan. I am sorry about your son. But I am done. I won’t be involved with more killings. Stay away from me. You and I are on different paths. Stop dragging me onto yours. I’m taking my climbers up the mountain as fast as I can, then going home. It’s like she said. It’s a killing season.”
“Then it is I who apologize to you,” Shan replied. He stepped to the window on the driver’s door and with his finger began drawing in the caked-on dust.
“What the hell are you talking-” As Yates lifted his head his words died away. He stared without breathing at the sign Shan had drawn. “How could you possibly-” his words drifted away again as his finger traced Shan’s crude but accurate drawing of a crossed hammer and lightning bolt.
“I’ve been trying to make you understand, Yates. You and I are after the same thing. It is all about something that happened decades ago.”
Yates cast an uncertain glance at Shan, then his gaze went back to the symbol on the glass. “Kypo says you’re like a magnet to knobs. I can’t afford any more trouble.”
“Just take a walk with me.”
“Where?”
“Up to see your father.”
The two men did not speak as they climbed toward the top of the high ridge that curled around Tumkot. Yates, like Shan, no doubt recalled the last time they had been on the trail, assaulting each other in the moonlight as Yates carried his sack of little gods down the mountain.
The American slowed as they approached the ruined shrine, lingering behind. More than once Shan paused to look back and see Yates stopped, gazingly longingly toward the peak of Everest, visible in the distance. As he reached the shrine Shan halted, kneeling at a crumbling wall of lichen-covered mani stones, restacking and straightening the wall as the American approached with hesitant steps. Yates’s countenance held caution, perhaps even fear, but there was also a hint of shame as he glanced at the altar where he had removed the ancient figurines. “I will bring them back,” he said of the little gods he had taken. “I was always going to bring them back.”
He knelt beside Shan and silently assisted him with the stones, cleaning the faces inscribed with prayers, handing them to Shan for restacking.
After several minutes Shan stood. “I know some Tibetans who have a different way of speaking when they are at these shrines. There are words for addressing old gods that most younger Tibetans don’t even know, special prayers, special prostrations. I felt uncomfortable coming to such places at first, like an outsider or worse, like one of those who had caused the destruction. Then a monk took me to a patch of flowers that were bent beneath some stones fallen from a crumbling altar. He told me to remove the stones and replace them in the altar. When the flowers had straightened he said ‘Now your reverence is mingled with all the reverence that came before, which makes the shrine as much yours as mine.’” Yates searched Shan’s face as if trying to understand, then knelt and restacked a few more mani stones as Shan stepped to the altar under the overhanging ledge.
“This place has nothing to do with my father,” Yates declared, challenge in his voice. “If you think you can trick me into-” His complaint faded as he followed the finger Shan pointed toward the end of the altar. The crucifix was still there, in the dust of the altar, where Shan had left it days earlier.
The American’s hand shot out to grab the silver cross, then hesitated, lingering in the air. There was no question in Yates’s eyes, only a torrent of emotion. When he finally lifted the cross, he cupped it in both hands, as though it might crumble. He brought it out into the sunlight, studying it in silence as he dropped onto the remnants of a stone bench.
“I’ve seen it in a photograph,” he explained in a stunned voice.
“That last year he was at home, when I was two years old, there was a photo taken of me in his arms with my hand wrapped around the chain that held this.” He looked up with an intense gaze, searching the clearing. “I don’t know what it means, finding it here. This could have just been planted here last week.”
“No,” Shan said. “It’s been there for decades. You can see its shape imprinted in the layers of dust. It was there before most of the Yama statues.”
“Impossible,” Yates muttered. But he was arguing with himself, not Shan. He kept turning the cross over and over in his hand, examining every surface, as if expecting it to somehow divulge its secret. And it did speak to him, for after a moment he pointed to a small set of letters inscribed on the reverse of the cross. “SRY,” he declared in a voice that cracked with emotion, pointing the letters out to Shan. “My father’s initials. Samuel was his name.” He fell silent for a long moment. “Tuchaychay,” he said, expressing his gratitude in Tibetan. “I owe you.”
“What you owe me is the truth.”
When Yates did not reply, Shan rose and gestured to the figurines remaining on the altar. “You owe it to them as well. You need to explain to these gods the real reason you came to them as a thief in the night, why one of them was lost over this cliff.” He extended his hand toward Yates, palm open. “Only the truth can be spoken in front of them.”
The American understood. He dropped the crucifix into Shan’s hand, glanced uneasily toward the altar and paced around the clearing in silence, pausing to clean and stack half a dozen more mani stones as Shan waited at the old bench. At last Yates rose and sat before the altar, looking at each of the gods in turn, as if silently greeting them.
“I used to do jigsaw puzzles of medieval paintings with my aunt and uncle who raised me,” Yates began. “Hundreds of pieces with shades of gray and brown, with a few patches of brilliant color. They made sense only if you kept the complete picture in mind as you worked. My father was always like that to me. I had only fragments to work with, and never had an image of the man as a whole. My aunt and uncle would speak of him with the same sound bites, never changing. A good, honest man. A great athlete. A lover of freedom. A fantastic aviator.”