Soul of the Fire (27 page)

“Then I began having actuating dreams,” Lokesh continued, “like the old lamas used to speak of. You dream something, and it comes true. First I dreamed that the mouse of my cell was sleeping in my pocket, and when I woke up, there he was.”

“But, Lokesh, surely after you tamed him, it wouldn't be so strange for him to seek out the warmth of your pocket.”

The old Tibetan seemed not to hear. “Then the next day, I dreamed I was at the gates of that sacred land. There were three smoky fires blazing on big flat rocks on either side of the gate. I asked the lama who was the gatekeeper about the fires, and he said the false gods were burning.”

Tuan muttered a low curse. Lokesh turned with a smile to the young Religious Affairs officer. “It is a blessing to travel with you, my new friend Tuan. You have drifted all your life, but a harbor is in sight. Something inside you recognizes it.”

Tuan glanced at Shan and smiled uneasily. “What you see is my indigestion—my breakfast is not happy about all the bouncing around in this damned truck.”

They drove another five miles before the road faded into a narrow footpath that divided halfway up the slope before them—one fork climbing sharply upward before disappearing between two huge shear-faced outcroppings, the other following rolling hills toward a lake that shimmered in the distance. As Lokesh climbed out, he cocked his head toward the peaks and his eyes went round as if he'd heard something his companions were deaf to.

Shan retrieved the packs with food and blankets they had brought from Zhongje. “Which way?” he called, thinking the nuns were behind the truck.

“It's been decided,” Tuan replied in a peevish tone. “The old fool must have had another dream.”

Shan turned. Lokesh was already climbing up the more forbidding of the two trails, traversing the steep rocky slope with the agility of a mountain goat. Yosen and Pema were having difficulty keeping up.

His old friend waited with a boyish grin on his face as Shan and Tuan arrived, winded, at the passage between the outcroppings. “
Chakje!
Do you see them?” he asked as he pointed to the rock walls.

As Shan and Tuan turned to the flat stone faces, Yosen pulled a water bottle from a pack and sprayed water over the stone. The moisture revealed four sets of subtle indentations in the rock, all in the same spidery pattern.

A laugh escaped Lokesh's throat as he raised a hand and fit it into the first pattern. “Four
chakje
!” he exclaimed. “Four different saints! Where else in all of Tibet are there four together?”

Yosen saw the confusion on Tuan's face. Shan at last understood, but clearly Tuan did not. “
Chakje
are the prints left by ancient saints as they travel through the mountains,” the young nun explained. “The rock gave way at their touch.”

Tuan gave a skeptical shake of his head. “All I see is the scratchings of some ancient glacier.”

Lokesh turned to Tuan with disappointment in his eyes, “Only when you learn to nurture the saint inside you will you be able to sense their presence.” He was not put off by Tuan's laugh. “I am sorry if you look about and see only rock and grass. This land is alive with spirits. If you go farther, they will reach out to you. Whether they deal with you harshly depends entirely on you.”

Tuan's laugh became low and hesitant. He paused, again looking about with an uncertain expression. The nuns had vanished. Lokesh pointed to the passage, into which they had disappeared. Tuan shrugged, produced small earbuds on wires, touched the little box in his shirt pocket and impatiently pushed past Lokesh, murmuring his own rock and roll mantra.

Minutes later, they left the narrow stone passage and stepped out onto a huge grassy slope. Yaks grazed before them. Half a mile away, a small flock of
chiru
antelope frolicked by a stream. Tuan made a pantomime of aiming and shooting a rifle at them.

They climbed the path into a second passage between two rock faces, each painted with a giant human eye that gazed upon on all who entered. After several minutes of finding their way through the dense shadows, they emerged at the top of a mile-long uninhabited valley. There was no sign of the nuns.

Magnificent snowcapped peaks could be seen in every direction. Huge misshapen outcroppings, bearded with lichen, rose up along their path like a file of frozen demons. The vast untamed landscape seemed to enfold them, protecting them, and Shan felt a lightness of spirit he had not known in months.

Suddenly Tuan, impatiently leading, seemed to falter, then stopped. He removed his earbuds and stared in mute surprise. A hundred yards ahead of them on an outcropping that loomed over the trail was a huge yak bull. It was snow white.

Lokesh's hand shot to his
gau.
A serene smile lit his face.

A white yak was a form taken by fierce protector spirits, a creature of ancient myths told at campfires. In prison, Shan had listened to stories of aged relatives who glimpsed one, of villages blessed with a sighting generations earlier that brought bountiful harvests for decades. When working in the high mountains, their prison road crews had always been watchful for a sighting of such a pure yak and would sing with joy at merely finding white hair on a bush, always convincing themselves it could not be from a goat or sheep. Many prisoners complained that the creatures had abandoned Tibet, that such blessings had been denied modern Tibetans. But Lokesh and the oldest lamas had always smiled and replied that it was all in how you looked for them.

It was Shan who stepped forward past his hesitant companions. The yak watched him, cocking its head but showing no signs of flight. After several steps, he heard movement behind him, and the yak snorted loudly. Shan turned to see Tuan a few feet away, gazing nervously at the animal, which seemed wary of his advance.

Lokesh arrived at Tuan's side. He bowed his head for a moment toward the yak, then circled Tuan, studying him. With a slow, deliberate motion he pulled the music player from Tuan's pocket and pulled the buds out of his ears. Tuan, staring transfixed at the creature, seemed not to notice until Lokesh knelt and placed the device on a flat rock by the trail and began stacking smaller rocks around it. After a moment, Tuan knelt too and helped him finish the small cairn.

“In the dirt, with your fingers,” Lokesh suggested, “make the
mani
mantra.”

Tuan seemed reluctant. “I didn't sign up for a pilgrimage,” he murmured. He looked up into Lokesh's serene smile, then at the yak, and shrugged, extending a finger to draw the mantra.

When Tuan rose, Lokesh took a small
tsa tsa
from his own pocket and dropped it in the young man's palm, then motioned him forward. The Religious Affairs officer held the little clay deity in front of him like a talisman and followed Lokesh up the trail with small, worried steps. The yak continued to cock its head at them but offered no further protest.

They walked within ten paces of the magnificent animal, but it did not move other than to turn its shaggy head to keep its steady gaze on them. Lokesh pointed to a clump of white hair on some heather, and Tuan bent to retrieve it, stuffing it in his pocket.

What they had taken to be another cleft leading to one more chasm proved to be the entrance to a chiseled tunnel. Long ago, its walls had been plastered. Shafts of light entering through cracks in the rocks overhead illuminated faded paintings of demons on the crumbling surface.

Tuan hesitated once again as they passed the first protector demons, a vicious-looking cat creature holding a human skin and an ogre wearing a necklace of severed heads. He took a step backwards and seemed about to retreat. Lokesh placed a hand on his shoulder. “The only ones who need worry about them are those who hide their true selves,” the old Tibetan said. Tuan glanced nervously at Shan. His entire life was dedicated to hiding his true self.

“You have Tibetan blood—I can see that,” Lokesh continued. “It is not your fault you were given only Chinese things to study when you were young. But as a man, it is your fault if you ignore your blood. You were made for better things, young Tuan. I can see it behind your eyes. The gods have a destiny for you.”

Tuan grimaced. But then his gaze dropped to the leathery hand on his shoulder, which seemed to puzzle him further. “There are people where we are going who will probably want me dead,” he said.

Lokesh somberly shook his head. “Only worry about the gods. Then what people want won't matter.”

Tuan noticed now that Lokesh's hand had moved, and was extended to his. Tuan lifted his hand, and Lokesh covered it in both of his, squeezing it tightly.
“Lha gyal lo,”
the old man murmured.

“Lya gyal lo,”
Tuan mumbled.

Lokesh took Tuan's right hand and raised it to his chest, then with his own hand showed how to slightly cup it with his thumb over his heart.
“Abhaya,”
the old Tibetan explained. “The
mudra
for dispelling fear.”

Tuan said nothing, but did not lower his cupped hand as Lokesh gestured him forward.

Shan could not suppress a satisfied grin as he watched the two progress along the passage before him, stopping at each faded painting as Lokesh described its image. At last, for the first time in weeks, he was seeing the Lokesh he had come to cherish, a gentle old lama guiding a novice monk.

Tuan paused at an unsettling painting near the end of the passage of two men staring with empty eyes at a lama teacher. “Zombies,” he whispered in surprise.

“I do not know that term,” Lokesh said. “Perhaps you refer to some Chinese god. But these are not gods. They are very old, from before the time of Buddha.
Rolang,
they are called. Standing corpses cursed with black enchantment. Their bodies walk even after the spirit has left the flesh.”

“Zombies,” Tuan repeated.

Lokesh shrugged and pulled Tuan past the hideous images. “When I was a boy, I was taught the secret of stopping them, and since then I have never feared them.”

Tuan turned with new interest. “A mantra?”

“No, no,” Lokesh said, distracted now by another indentation in the stone. “You just throw a shoe at them.” He kept walking, then stopped, speechless, in a pool of sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

They found themselves in a landscape like none Shan had ever experienced. A path lined by a score of
terchen,
the tall poles with narrow prayer flags fixed vertically along their length, led to a small white
chorten
on a high cliff that offered a view of an extraordinary valley.

They seemed to be in an inverted bowl, with massive mountains leaning sharply inward on all sides like crouching giants, so that much of the landscape would be invisible from above. Shan saw the smile on Lokesh's face as he gazed at the towering, inverted walls and knew what his friend was thinking. The earth gods had protected this place.

A deep, narrow canyon emptied halfway up the wall at the far end of the valley, offering a glimpse of snowcapped peaks beyond. It was the reason, Shan realized, for the fierce winds that protected the valley from aircraft.

Below, each gleaming brilliant ivory, at least a dozen
chortens,
much larger than the man-sized shrine beside them, were scattered across the valley. Sheep and yak grazed along a meandering stream that wandered through the valley bottom. The only other structures were tucked deep under the lip of the overhanging escarpments, tidy traditional farmhouses and what looked like small chapels constructed near groves of trees and along waterfalls, places where the earth deities would gather.

The joyful smile on Lokesh's face seemed to spread from ear to ear. “We are here,” the old man whispered. “The fabled paradise.”

The harmony was abruptly broken as Tuan, turning, cursed and sprang away. Shan spun about to see him sprawled on the ground, gasping and clutching his belly. Six wiry figures, all dressed in black and brown, stood in a semicircle, trapping them at the edge of the cliff. Five had old bolt-action rifles strapped to their shoulders. The sixth, a man with a deep scar slashed across his cheek, tapped a treacherous-looking club on his palm.

“Chinese!” he spat at Shan, then pointed to Tuan. “And mostly Chinese. We have never allowed Chinese in our valley.” He stepped forward and knocked off Shan's hat with his club, which was carved with Buddhist motifs. “No, not true,” the man corrected with a cold grin, addressing his own men now, “we have never allowed Chinese to leave our valley.”

As the men laughed, Shan saw the red yarn tied in their long black hair. They were
khampas,
warriors of Tibet's old province of Kham, whose leaders had died in battle shouting that
khampas
would never surrender to the Chinese. He stooped and helped Tuan to his feet.

“It is Commissioner Shan!” Tuan tried, pointing to Shan. “He stands in for Xie! The knobs beat him when he tried to stop them at the funeral!”

The leader of the
khampa
patrol moved closer, deliberately stepping on Shan's hat, and paused in front of each of the intruders, studying them intensely. He tapped his club in his hand again as he lingered in front of Shan, then his gaze drifted toward the edge of the cliff, as if considering whether to just throw them off.

Suddenly Lokesh wedged himself between Shan and the
khampa
leader. He lifted Shan's wrist to extend his prison tattoo then laid his own forearm along it to expose his own tattoo.

The
khampa
's eyes narrowed as he recognized the gulag markings. He seemed almost disappointed.

“You must know our friends Yosen and Pema,” Lokesh added.

The
khampa
frowned and spat an order. His men sprang forward to tie the hands of their prisoners.

The trail across the valley was marked with carved
mani
stones every few feet, many of them so old, they were nearly covered with lichen. Their escort did not utter a word, only impatiently prodded them on when they stopped to admire a magnificent pine tree, then a grouse that sat in the middle of the trail, undisturbed by their passage. They had just crossed the stream on a bridge made of huge logs when their destination came into view. A temple, no doubt centuries old, had been carved out of a section of living rock that rose straight up for a hundred feet before angling outward like a cresting wave frozen in time. Painted on the lower wall were over a dozen large Buddhist symbols, and above them were half a dozen saints—so faded, they looked like ghosts. Small chimney holes, stained by smoke, and rectangular windows were scattered across the rock face in three levels. In the topmost window Shan saw robed figures watching them.