The Breath of God (9 page)

“A speaking phobia,” she said, as if turning over in her mind what this said about him.

“Oh, it's not a phobia, I mean, I'm not even that bad at it. I just prefer one-on-one discussions where I can delve into the issues deeper with a person.”

She smiled at him like she wasn't totally buying it.

He decided to change the subject. “So, Kris, how did you end up here?”

“I'd prefer you not call me that. Only my sister called me Kris.”

“Sorry, Kristin,” Grant said, taken aback. He noted the use of the past tense but decided not to pry.

She tossed her hair from her face and toyed with one of the silver elephant earrings that dangled from ears that, to Grant's surprise, only contained a single piercing each. “Travel writer.”

“Professionally?”

“Freelance for several magazines.”

A writer
. So, he was correct. The artsy type. “Must be a tough life, never in one place for long.”

She shook her head. “Don't have to answer to anyone, and I can pick up and go at a moment's notice.”

“Isn't it lonely?”

“Never needed someone to take care of me.” She winked at him. “Plus, I meet interesting people everywhere.”

“Sounds liberating.” Actually, Grant couldn't imagine a life so unstructured.

“We have something in common.” She touched his forearm. “Before coming here, I was in India too. I'm doing an article for
Vanity Fair
on Eastern religious rituals and celebrations.” She moved her hand to his cast, where she tweaked a bit of the torn plaster. “Late as usual for my deadline, though.”

Grant found the final piece of information unsurprising—attractive and creative, but disorganized. Then he remembered the state of his own work.

“Here, take a look,” she said. “Photos of my travels.” After fiddling with a few buttons on the back of the Nikon, she handed it to him. “Hit the right arrow to scroll.”

Grant stared at the three-inch LCD screen. Although the image was small, the rawness of the emotion grabbed him. An Indian girl in her early teens gazed at him. Her face was feminine, beautiful but smudged with dirt. The expression in her eyes, however, affected him most—a melancholy resignation, the result, no doubt, of having grown up in conditions he couldn't even comprehend. The subsequent photos all featured girls and young women—some introspective portraits and others just details: a hand with dirty nails but intricate henna designs painted on it, the back of a woman whose sari was flowing in the wind like a colorful sail while she bent over to wash her laundry on the banks of a river. He and Kristin had both just traveled in the same country, but she had seen a completely different side of it than he had.

Grant was unexpectedly moved. When he handed the camera back, their fingers touched. Her skin was smooth and warm. “You could be a photographer,” he said.

“Just a hobby. I take some shots for my articles when the magazines don't send a professional along.”

“So after India, you came to Bhutan?”

“I traveled here to report on the annual Thimpu Tsechu.” She brushed her hair from her eyes again. “Heard of it?” She continued without pausing for a breath or an answer. “A festival of elaborate costumes, masks, and dances in Bhutan's capital city. Then I hooked up with a tour group to come here to check out the dzong; it's the country's largest, you know.”

As he observed her speak with her hands as animatedly as with her mouth, a realization struck him. This attractive woman and her expensive digital SLR camera could be the answer to one of his conundrums: documenting the discovery that he couldn't take with him.

But he immediately questioned whether he could trust sharing such an important archaeological find with a woman he'd just met. And a journalist, no less. Then he realized that he didn't have to trust her fully, or even confide in her, to get her help. He took a chance. “When you were in India, ever hear of an ancient saint named Issa?”

She shook her head. “Even in my writing, it's difficult to keep straight the bewildering array of Hindu gods and goddesses. Part of your dissertation research?”

“Related to it. The library here may have some manuscripts helpful to me.” He didn't need to reveal the true importance of Issa to enroll her in this project. “Want to meet a friend of mine? The monk who runs this place is in one of the temples right now.”

“Sure.” Kristin surveyed the courtyard. “Looks like my tour group abandoned me anyway.”

Grant saw that the only other people in the courtyard were local villagers. He recalled Kinley mentioning that some Bhutanese holy man was visiting the monastery to give blessings in the main temple that day. Kinley had invited Grant to watch, but Grant had thought a breath of fresh air would do him more good than participating in the superstitious ritual.

Kristin zipped her camera into the small daypack slung over her shoulder and jumped to the ground. “Here, give me your hand.”

“No, I've got it.” Grant attempted to stand, but the weight of his cast swinging off the wall caused him to stumble. He would have fallen to the ground, but she caught him without flinching.

“Sorry about that.” His face flushed red. As she straightened him onto his good leg and handed him his crutches, he caught the scent of her hair.

She put her hand on his upper arm. “Might as well earn some good karma by helping out a cripple.”

Her teasing felt comfortable to him, as if they'd known each other much longer. Enjoying her touch, Grant led her to the perimeter of the courtyard,
which was enclosed on all sides with the two-story dzong building. The top floor contained dorm rooms like his, while the elaborately painted woodwork and large decorative doors on the first floor led to the various temples in which the monks worshipped. Now that the time was upon him, he felt his stomach twist.

With his crutches clicking against the stone pavers, Grant fell behind three elderly ladies with sun-weathered faces. The women walked hunched over from decades of tilling fields. Each carried items of food—bags of rice, fruits, even soup cans—in one hand and Buddhist prayer necklaces made of sandalwood beads in the other. Grant noticed that each woman's lips moved silently as she walked.

“Like praying over rosaries.” Kristin nodded toward the ladies.

“You Catholic?” he asked.

“Raised that way.”

“But no longer?”

“Not since my sister's death.”

“I'm so sorry,” Grant said quietly. He contemplated sharing the story of his father's death, but then he quickly shut off that idea. He never discussed that event with anyone.

They followed the women, climbing five stone steps at the end of the courtyard. A pair of ten-foot-tall carved doors, finished in a metallic gold, flanked exterior walls that depicted a mural done in luminous primary colors: an epic battle raged between sword-wielding gods and fiery demons. The women removed their shoes and disappeared inside the temple. Kristin stooped to unlace her hiking boots, while Grant kicked the single sandal off his left foot.

Kristin tilted her head. “What's that?” A rhythmic beating of drums and chanting spilled out of the open doors.

She walked inside the temple, and he followed. Inside, the pungent smell of incense wafted across the room to greet them.

“It's the Mantra of Compassion,” he said a little louder than he intended. The harmonic chant of twenty young monks dressed in crimson robes echoed throughout the cavernous two-story hall. Grant had heard the same chant drifting up to his room many times over the past weeks:
“Om mani padme hum.”

She put her finger to her lips, so he leaned into her. “It's Sanskrit. Originated in India, but it migrated to Tibet. A form of meditation for the monks.” He couldn't believe how intoxicating it felt to be close to someone he'd only just met.

“What's it mean?” she whispered in his ear.

“My friend Kinley translated it as ‘the jewel in the lotus of the heart.' I think it has to do with the idea that the light of the divine burns inside each of us.”

“Beautiful.”

“I guess so.” His eyes lingered on her face, then followed her gaze around the temple. The rectangular hall was supported by twenty-foot-tall bronze-coated wooden columns around the perimeter of the room. Above them, a balcony circled three of the four sides of the hall. Above the balcony, an elaborately carved and painted wooden ceiling mirrored the decorations on the wood trim on the exterior of the building. On the right end of the room where the balcony ended, six monumental statues rose from behind a stone altar. Grant recognized the one in the middle, the tallest at two stories in height, as the Buddha. The only light came from windows placed high in the second story and from the candles along the altar.

The chanting rose from the monks seated on reed mats in a rectangular formation in the center of the room. With the exception of the young boy, Ummon, whose shy smiles Grant had become fond of whenever the boy brought his morning tea, the monks were mostly in their teens or early twenties, like Jigme, who also sat among them. Every other monk held a drum attached to a twenty-four-inch stick. They beat the drums in unison with a second padded stick while they chanted with their eyes closed. Two elderly monks sat at one end of the rectangle, blowing into long wooden wind instruments that reminded Grant of Swiss alphorns.

Grant could feel the bass reverberation of the drums within his core, and the harmonic voices of the monks filled the air with a weight almost as heavy as the atmosphere of candle smoke and incense. If Grant hadn't had something more important on his mind at that moment, he might almost have found the effect calming.

“That's him.” Grant nodded to the only monk in the center group dressed in orange robes. Kinley had explained that orange designated his position of honor as the senior monk present at the monastery. Kinley paced around the group holding a string of prayer beads, which he would periodically shake in front of any of the young monks who drummed out of rhythm from the others.

Grant had to restrain himself from hobbling over to Kinley and begging to be taken to the library. Over the past week, he'd offered to help the monk strategize how to sneak him in, but Kinley had only changed the subject. Then a troubling thought occurred to Grant.
Would Kinley use the villagers' activity in the monastery as an excuse to delay the unveiling of the manuscripts again?

Grant watched the stream of villagers pass by the seated monks and head to the far left end of the temple, the opposite end from the giant statues. The locals lined up in front of an oversized throne, upholstered in a luxurious purple velvet and perched on a platform six inches above four simple wooden chairs that flanked it. They stacked the food they brought next to a small altar on the side of the platform. Then Grant saw the figure sitting on the throne.

E
NGLISH LIT PROFESSOR MARTHA SIMPSON pulled her pashmina tighter around her neck. A brisk wind had picked up since she'd left Harold Billingsly's house. Fortunately, the parking deck was just around the corner. She glanced over her shoulder, checking that the maple-lined sidewalk behind her was still empty. She might have been more cautious about walking alone on the city street if it had been midnight, but at five AM the streets were deserted. The only vehicle to be seen was a white van parked across the street by the CDC buildings.
Probably the cleaning crew
, she thought.

Picking up her pace, she recalled the lecture she and Harold had attended the previous evening. She'd found Professor Browning's comments on Leonardo's use of chiaroscuro in
The Virgin of the Rocks
particularly interesting, but she guessed that Harold had gone just to be nice to her. Art history wasn't his passion like it was hers. He'd attended the lectures and museum trips because they excited her. She was lucky to have found a man who was as caring as Harold was. Sure, he was ten years her senior, but at her age that no longer mattered.

Although they had only been on four formal dates, they had known each other for years through various faculty functions. She'd even sat in on some of his lectures. He was an engaging speaker and a first-rate theologian. Lately he'd been excited about a new project that had piqued her curiosity when he told her he couldn't reveal any details about it yet. For some reason, it had to remain secret, but he'd promised she'd be the first to know. Martha wasn't religious herself, but she respected Harold's passion and his views. She was
also looking forward to the following weekend, when they had plans to go to his cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina. The fall leaves would be at their peak then, and she was excited to spend some time lounging by the fireplace with him.

She opened her purse, a colorful Vera Bradley, and removed the round tin of Altoids. Trying to pry the lid open, her fingers slipped, and the container of mints tumbled to the sidewalk.

“Darn it!”

The can rolled across the pavement and stopped at the edge of the grass.
At least it didn't open
. The last thing she wanted to do at this hour was to collect a hundred little candies from the sidewalk. She bent over and reached for the tin.

The wall of heat hit her as unexpectedly as if she'd stepped onto the street and was struck by a speeding truck. The invisible force picked Martha up off her feet, sucking the breath from her lungs. The thunder of the explosion rang through her head. Then the dark night around her erupted into an orange inferno, engulfing her world.

Strangely, she didn't experience any pain.