The Skull Mantra (11 page)

“I have no appetite.”

“Twenty rosaries for lying,” Choje said good-naturedly and laid the
momo
on the floor, between the altar marks. The
khampa
sprang forward, knelt, and touched his head to the floor. Choje seemed surprised. He nodded, and the
khampa
stuffed the dumpling into his mouth. He rose and bowed to Choje, then squatted by the door. The catlike
khampa
was the new watcher.

Suddenly Shan realized the other prisoners were not doing their rosaries. They were bent over their bunks, writing on the backs of tally sheets or in the margins of the rare newspapers that were sometimes brought by the Friends Association.
A few wrote with the stubs of pencils. Most used pieces of charcoal.

“Rinpoche,” Shan said. “They have arrived. By morning they will have taken over from the guards.”

Choje nodded slowly. “These men—I am sorry, what is the word I hear for the Public Security troops?”

“Knobs.”

Choje smiled with amusement. “These knobs,” Choje continued, “they are not our problem. They are the problem of the warden.”

“They have identified the dead man,” Shan announced. Several of the priests looked up. He looked around as he spoke. “His name was Jao Xengding.”

A sudden, silent chill fell over the hut.

Choje's hands made a
mudra.
It was an invocation of the Buddha of Compassion. “I fear for his soul.”

From the shadows a voice called out. “Let him stay in hell.”

Choje looked up in censure, then turned back with a sigh. “He will have a difficult passage.”

Trinle suddenly spoke. “He will be in struggle for his deeds. And for the violence of his death. He could not have been prepared properly.”

“He sent many to prison,” Shan observed.

Trinle turned to Shan. “We have to get him off the mountain.”

Shan opened his mouth to correct his friend, then realized he was not speaking of Jao's body.

“We will pray for him,” Choje said. “Until his soul has passed we must pray.”

Until his soul has passed, Shan reflected, he will continue to punish the 404th.

A monk brought one of the tally sheets for Choje to examine. He studied it, then spoke in low tones to the man, who took the scrap back to his bunk and began working on it again.

Choje looked at Shan. “What is it they are doing to you?” He spoke very quietly, so no one heard but Shan.

In that moment Shan saw Choje as in their first meeting: Shan kneeling in mud, Choje striding across the compound,
oblivious to the guards, as serenely as if he were strolling across a meadow to retrieve an injured bird.

Shan had been in fragments when his jailers first released him into the 404th compound, shattered physically and mentally from three months of interrogation and twenty-four-hour political therapy. Public Security had intercepted him at the end of his last investigation, just as he was about to dispatch a very special report to the State Council instead of his official superior, the Minister of Economy. At first they had simply beaten him, until a Public Security doctor had expressed concern about brain damage. Then they used bamboo splints, but that had built such an inferno of pain he could not hear their questions. So they had progressed to subtler means, eventually shifting from hardware to chemicals, which were far worse because they made it so difficult to remember what he had already told them.

He had sat in his cell in Moslem China—once, in a room with a window, he had seen the endless expanse of desert that could only mean western China—and recited the Taoist verses of his youth to keep his mind alive. They had constantly reminded Shan of his crimes, sometimes reading like professors from blackboards in
tamzing,
or shouting from statements of witnesses he had never heard of. Treason. Corruption. Theft of state property, in the form of files he had borrowed. He had smiled dreamily, for they had never understood the nature of his guilt. He had been guilty of forgetting that certain anointed members of the government were incapable of crime. He had been guilty of mistrusting the Party, because he had refused to reveal all his evidence—not only to protect those who had given it to him but also, and this shamed him, to protect himself, for his life would be worthless once they thought they had everything. In the end, the only lesson of those months of endless, shredding pain, the one resolute truth Shan had learned about himself, and the great handicap that kept the pain alive, was that he was incapable of giving up.

Perhaps that was what Choje had seen that first hour when Shan had stumbled from a Public Security van into the compound, dazed, wondering if they had decided to risk shooting him after all.

The prisoners had at first seemed just as dazed, staring at him as if he were a dangerous new species. Then they seemed to decide he was just another Chinese. The
khampas
spat on him. The others mostly shunned him, some making a
mudra
of cleansing as though to spurn the new devil in their midst.

Shan had stood unsteadily in the center of the compound, knees shaking, considering what sort of new hell his handlers had found for him, when one of the guards shoved him. He fell into a cold puddle face first, and splattered mud on the guard's boots. As Shan struggled to his knees, the furious guard ordered Shan to lick his boots clean.

“Without a people's army the people have nothing,” Shan had said with a doleful smile. A direct quote from the Inestimable Chairman, from the little red book itself.

The guard had knocked Shan back into the mud and was slamming Shan's shoulders with his baton when one of the older Tibetan prisoners walked toward them. “This man is too weak,” the prisoner had said quietly. When the guard laughed, the prisoner bent over Shan's prostrate body and took the blows on his own back. The guard administered the punishment intended for Shan with great relish, then called for help to drag the unconscious man to the stable.

The moment had changed everything. In one blinding instant Shan forgot his pain, even forgot his past, as he realized he had entered a remarkable new world, and that world was Tibet. A tall monk who introduced himself as Trinle helped Shan to his feet and led him into the hut. There had been no more spitting, no more angry
mudras
cast against him. Only eight days later, when the stable released Choje, did Shan meet him. “The soup,” Choje had said with a crooked smile on seeing Shan, referring to the 404th's thin barley gruel, “always tastes better after a week away.”

Shan looked up as he heard Choje's question again.

“What is it they are doing to you?”

He knew Choje did not expect an answer. It was simply the question he wanted to leave with Shan. The 404th would never be the same after the knobs took over. With a sudden aching in his heart, he realized Choje would probably be taken from them. He stared at a new
mudra
formed by the
lama's hands. It was the sign of the mandala, the circle of life.

“Rinpoche. This demon called Tamdin—”

“It is a wonderful thing, is it not?”

“Wonderful?”

“That the guardian would appear now.”

Shan wrinkled his brow in confusion.

“Nothing that happens in life is random,” Choje explained.

True, Shan thought bitterly. Jao was killed for a reason. The killer wanted to be perceived as a Buddhist demon, for a reason. The knobs were there, prepared to destroy the 404th, for a reason. But Shan understood none of it. “Rinpoche, how would I recognize Tamdin if I find him?”

“He has many shapes, many sizes,” Choje replied. “Hayagriva, they call him in Nepal and the south. In the older gompas they call him the Red Tiger Devil. Or the horse-head demon. He wears a rosary of skulls around his neck. He has yellow hair. His skin is red. His head is huge. Four fangs come from his mouth. On top is another head, much smaller, a horse's head, sometimes painted green. He is fat with the weight of the world. His belly hangs down. I have seen him in the festival dances many years ago.” The
mudra
collapsed as Choje clasped his hands together. “But Tamdin will not be found unless he desires it. He will not be controlled unless he is empowered.”

Shan considered the words in silence. “He carries weapons?”

“If he needs it, it will be in his hand,” Choje said enigmatically. “Speak to one of the Black Hat sect. There was once an old Black Hat
ngagspa
in the town. A sorcerer. Khorda, he was called. Practiced the old rites. Frightened the young monks with his spells. From a Nyingmapa gompa.”

The Black Hats comprised the most traditional of the Tibetan Buddhist sects, of which the Nyingmapa was the oldest line, the one most closely linked to the shamans who once ruled Tibet.

“He could no longer be alive,” Choje said. “When I was a boy he was already old. But he had apprentices. Ask who
does Black Hat charms, who studied with Khorda.”

Choje stared deeply at Shan, the way a father might contemplate a son departing on a long and dangerous journey. He gestured with his fingers. “Come closer.”

As Shan moved within his reach Choje placed a hand on the back of Shan's head and pushed it down. He whispered to Trinle, who handed him a pair of rusty scissors, then snipped a lock of Shan's inch-long hair from just above his neck. It was what they did in initiation rites, for students being admitted to monasteries, to remind them of how Buddha had sacrificed to attain virtue.

The action, inexplicably, made Shan's heart race. “I am not worthy,” Shan said as he looked up.

“Of course you are. You are part of us.”

A deep sadness welled up within him. “What is happening, Rinpoche?”

But Choje only sighed, suddenly looking very tired. The old lama rose and moved to his bunk. As he did so, Trinle handed Shan a stained piece of paper on which an ideogram had been inscribed. “This is for you,” Trinle said.

Shan futilely studied the paper. The characters were in the old style, like those on the medallion. Drawn on it was a series of concentric circles, encompassing a central lotus flower, each petal bearing secret symbols. “Is it a prayer?”

“Yes. No. Not exactly. A charm. A protector. Blessed by Rinpoche. Written on a fragment of an old holy book. Very powerful.” Trinle grasped the lower corners. “Here,” he explained, “you must fold it and roll it into a small roll. Wear it around your neck. We should find an amulet for it, on a chain. But there are none.”

“Everyone is writing protection charms?”

“Not like this. Not so powerful. There was only this one fragment. And the invocation of the symbols. These are not words made by the hands or the lips. They are never spoken. Rinpoche had to reach up and capture them. It takes several hours to empower it. He worked all day. It has exhausted him. It is one that will be recognized by Tamdin, one that can be detected from this demon's world, so he knows you are coming. It is not simply protection. It is more like an
introduction, so you can commune with him. Choje says you are walking the path of protector demons.”

Meaning they are about to attack me, Shan was tempted to ask, when another question occured to him. How had Choje obtained a fragment of an ancient manuscript?

Some monks placed their charms on the altar, looking expectantly toward Choje. Others carried theirs to a bunk at the rear. Shan stepped toward it. One of the old monks sat in the bed with a strange patchwork of charms. He was joining the tally sheets into a larger charm, deftly tying them together with tiny braids of human hair.

Shan realized Trinle was staring at the thick pad of paper in his pocket. He ripped off a dozen blank pages and handed them to Trinle, with his pencil.

“The others. What are the other charms?”

“Each of us does what he can. Some are trying to prepare Bardo rites for the
jungpo.
Others are just protection charms. I do not know if Rinpoche will bless them. Without the blessing from one of power, they will be useless.”

“He will not bless the protection charms? He does not want them protected from the
jungpo?”

“Not the
jungpo.
These are for the evils of this world.
Tsonsung
charms. For protection from batons. From bayonets. From bullets.”

A sleek young man in a white shirt and a blue suit was waiting outside Tan's office the next morning. Pacing in front of the window, he paused to scornfully examine Sergeant Feng, then noticed Shan and threw him a knowing nod, as if they shared in some secret.

Shan moved to the window, desperate to discern activity on the slopes of the South Claw. The stranger mistook his movement for an invitation to converse.

“Three out of five,” the man said. “Sixty percent request to go home before their tour is up. Did you know that, Comrade?” He had Beijing written all over him.

“Most of those I know serve their full terms,” Shan said quietly. He leaned forward, touching the glass. The 404th should be on the slope by now. Would the warden even bother to take them out today?

“They can't take the cold,” the man continued, giving no evidence he had heard Shan. “Can't take the air. Can't take the drought. Can't take the dust. Can't take the stares on the street. Can't take the two-legged locusts.”

The stranger sprang to Madame Ko's side as she moved through the waiting room. “There is nothing more important!” he insisted, speaking slowly and loudly as if she were somehow incapacitated. “I must see him now!” She smiled coolly at him and pointed to the chairs along the wall.

But the man continued pacing, repeatedly glancing back at Tan's door. “I've been here two years. Love it. Could do ten. How about you?”

Shan looked up, slowly, hoping the man was not speaking to him. But his eyes were like two gun barrels, aimed directly at Shan. “Three so far.”

“A man of my own heart!” the stranger exclaimed. “I love it here,” he repeated. “The challenges of a lifetime.
Opportunity at every crossroad,” he said, looking at Shan for confirmation.