The Skull Mantra (31 page)

“The one?” Yeshe asked awkwardly.

“I left a prayer in the temple. For the devils to be driven off. Someone will come. It can be done. There were priests in the old days who could do it. With one sound they could do it. If you make a groan that vibrates into the next world, you can fix everything.”

Yeshe looked in confusion at the woman. “Why would you think it could be me?”

“Because you came. The only believer who came.”

Yeshe glanced uneasily at Shan. “Do you know where the
khampa
is?” he asked the woman.

“He always said they would take him. He paid us to watch out. The nights when he brought it home, we would watch the stairs, my husband and me. Sleep all day so we could watch at night.”

“Brought what with him?” asked Yeshe.

“The case. The little suitcase. For papers. He would keep it some nights for his boss. Big secrets. First he's proud to have it. Later he's scared. Even with the place he made, he would be scared.”

“What kind of papers? Did you see them?” Yeshe asked.

“Of course not. I don't work for the government, do I? Dangerous secrets. Words of power. Government secrets.”

“He made a place, you said,” Shan interjected. “You mean a hiding place?”

She paid him no attention. She seemed interested only in Yeshe now, as if she saw in him something no one else, including Yeshe himself, could see.

“Who would take him? What was he scared of?” Yeshe pressed on. “Prosecutor Jao?”

“Not Jao. Jao was good to him. Gave him extra ration cards sometimes. Let him wear his clothes sometimes.”

“Then who?”

She wrinkled her brow and studied Yeshe. “Your powers are not destroyed,” she said. “You think they are. But they are just hidden.”

Yeshe retreated a step, as though frightened. “Where is Balti?” he asked. A pleading tone had entered his voice.

“A boy like that, he goes up. Or he goes down.” She chuckled as she considered her words, and looked at the herdsman. “Up or down,” she repeated to him with another laugh. She turned back to Yeshe. “If they took him, he'll still come back. As a lion he'll come back. That's what happens to the meek ones. He will return as a lion and rip us all to shreds for failing him.”

Shan knelt in front of the woman. “Show us the hiding place,” he whispered.

She did not seem to hear. “Show us,” Yeshe asked. She fidgeted with her wares, confused.

“We need to see it,” Shan pressed. “Balti needs us to see it.”

“He was so scared,” she said.

“I think he was brave.”

She acknowledged him at last. “He cried at night.”

“Even a brave man can have reasons to cry.”

She kept her eyes from him. “What if you are the ones he feared?”

“Look at us. Is that what you think? Would they come and talk to you this way?” He pressed her arm. She slowly looked up, as if it were painful to see Shan's eyes.

“Not him,” she said, nodding to Yeshe. “He isn't one of them.”

“Then do it for him,” Shan said.

She moved quickly now, as if eager to be rid of them. The herdsman with the staff came also, following them into the garage. They moved into the shadows at the back of the structure, past their truck. Feng was snoring loudly.

A rough wooden rack had been built to hold large parts salvaged from vehicles. On the bottom was a row of long, narrow gas tanks removed from cars and trucks.

She put her hand on the third tank. “He was small enough to go behind,” she said. Shan and Yeshe manhandled the tank from the rack. The rear had been neatly cut away, the edges bent so it could be pushed back into place. A ribbon of grease covered the seam. Shan found a screwdriver and pried it open.

Inside there was no briefcase, only a soiled envelope with several sheets of onionskin paper.

The woman helped them return the tank to the rack, then turned to Yeshe once more. “Your powers are not destroyed,” she said again. “They have only lost their focus.”

Yeshe seemed paralyzed by the words. As Shan pulled him to the truck, calling for Feng to wake up, Yeshe was unable to take his eyes from the woman. He held his rosary as they drove to the opposite side of town. He did not count
the beads, but only looked at it. “In Sichuan,” he said suddenly. “I could have my own apartment.”

Sitting behind Feng, Shan studied the papers from the tank. They had been ripped out of an investigation file, the file on the murder of Jin San, manager of Long Wall agricultural collective, the crime for which Dza Namkhai of the Lhadrung Five had been executed. At the bottom of the last sheet was a long series of Arabic numbers, five groups of five digits each.

“Powers,” Yeshe said in a haunted tone. “What a woman. Great powers. The world bears witness to my great powers.”

Shan looked up. “Don't be so quick to condemn yourself. The greatest power, I think, is the power to tell right from wrong.”

Yeshe considered Shan's words. “But it never feels like right or wrong,” he said at last. “It seems more like deciding which devil is least destructive.”

“What did she mean,” Shan asked, “when she said a groan that could reach the next world?”

“Sound is like a thought with legs, some of the old gompas taught. If you can put the right focus in your thought you can see beyond this world. If you put the right focus in a sound you can actually reach and touch the other world.”

“Touch it?”

“It is supposed to create a rift between worlds. Like a lightning bolt. The rift has incredible energy. Some call it the thunder ritual. It can destroy things.”

Shan looked back at the papers. The woman had said someone would come for him, meaning someone other than Jao. Balti had trusted Jao, as Jao had trusted him. An old file, a closed file, yet so secret Jao could not trust it in his own office. Or perhaps especially in his office.

“She said Balti would go up or go down,” Shan recalled distractedly. “She thought it was a good line.”

Yeshe still spoke in his haunted voice. “Go back to the Kham plateau, which is so high everywhere there is up compared to the rest of the world. Or stay and go down the chain of life forms.”

Shan nodded slowly, trying to connect the words to the file. The scent was so strong it felt almost tangible. Who
wanted the file? Someone would come, Balti had said. It wasn't the
purbas.
They hadn't known who he was. Even if they did, they wouldn't terrify Balti. Who would? The knobs? A criminal gang? Soldiers? Criminal soldiers? Whoever it was would not fret over killing Balti. They would have taken him that night, and would have made him talk, made him sing out every last detail of every secret, every hiding place. If the tank still held at least some of its secrets, Shan suddenly realized, then Balti was alive, and free.

The road to the
ragyapa
village had been deliberately built to terminate two hundred feet short of the village, culminating in a large clearing where flat rocks were arranged as unloading platforms. As Sergeant Feng edged into the clearing, a small flatbed truck pulled out with unnecessary speed. Shan glimpsed a woman at the window. She was weeping.

Along the path to the village a donkey pulled a cart with a long thick bundle wrapped in canvas.

Yeshe, to Shan's surprise, was the first out. From the back he pulled a burlap sack of old apples and with a look of somber resolution began moving up the trail. As Shan stepped out, Feng took one look at the long bundle on the cart, then immediately locked the doors and raised the windows. As his last defense, he lit a cigarette and began filling the interior with smoke.

Shan was an alien to the
ragyapa.
They weren't accustomed to Han, dead or alive. They weren't accustomed to anyone but each other. Even other Tibetans seldom ventured near, except to leave the body of a loved one and a pouch of money or basket of goods in payment. In a cutter's village near Lhasa two soldiers had been killed for trying to film their work. Near Shigatse Japanese tourists had been beaten with leg bones when they got too close.

Shan quickly caught up and stayed one step behind Yeshe. “You look like you have a plan,” he observed.

“Sure. To get out as quickly as possible,” Yeshe said in a low voice.

An unwashed boy with long ragged hair sat on the earth near the first hut, stacking pebbles. He looked up at the visitors and shouted, not a warning cry but a cry of abrupt pain, as though he had been kicked. The sound brought a woman
from the inside of the hut. With one hand she carried a dented teapot and with the other balanced a baby on her hip. She glanced at Shan, not looking into his eyes, but slowly surveying his body, as though measuring him for something.

Beyond the hut was the central yard of the camp, around which several structures were arrayed. Some were makeshift huts of sticks, planks, even cardboard. Several, to his surprise, were small but substantial stone buildings. A knot of men worked in front of one, sharpening an assortment of axes and knives.

They had an apelike quality, short men with thick arms and small eyes. One of them detached himself and took a step toward Shan, brandishing a light axe. He had a disturbingly vacant stare, as if borrowed from the dead. Noticing the sack in Yeshe's arms, his face softened. Two other men stepped toward Yeshe, and solemnly extended their arms. As Yeshe handed the sack to them, they gave a nod of sympathy, then confusion appeared on their faces. One of the men looked inside the bag and laughed as he displayed an apple from inside. The others joined in the joke as he tossed the apple to the circle of men. It was not the kind of small burlap package the
ragyapa
usually received, Shan suddenly realized, not one of the small bundles of death that even the flesh cutters must hate to receive.

Yeshe's action broke the tension. More apples were thrown, and the men produced pocketknives—their longer blades being reserved for their sacred duties—and began distributing pieces of the fruit. Shan looked at the tools. Small knives whose blades ended with hooks. Long flaying knives. Rough handaxes that could have been forged two centuries earlier. Half the blades could easily have severed a man's head.

Children appeared, eager for the fruit. They stayed apart from Shan, but circled Yeshe, wide-eyed and happy.

“We came from the bookstore in town,” Shan announced.

The words had no effect on the children, but the men instantly sobered. Words were muttered among them, and one man split away and ran up the hill behind the village.

The children began to poke at Yeshe, and suddenly he seemed very interested in them. He knelt to tie one of their
shoes, studying the youth's clothing, then they leapt on top of him, knocking him to the ground. Some of the older boys produced toy blades of wood and, laughing hysterically, made sawing motions over his joints.

Shan watched the melee for only a moment, then his gaze fixed on the running man. It quickly became clear that his destination was a rock outcropping at the top of the low ridge above the camp. Shan began walking up the trail, then stopped as he noticed the birds. Over a dozen, mostly vultures, were circling high in the sky. Others, birds of prey both large and small, sat perched along the path on stunted trees. They seemed strangely tame, as though the village belonged to them as much as the
ragyapa.
They watched the runner pass by with idle curiosity.

It was called sky burial. The quickest remove from the physical bounds of one's existence. In some parts of Tibet bodies were set adrift in rivers, which was why it was taboo to eat fish. Shan had heard that in regions still closely tied to India immolation was practiced. But for the devout Buddhist in most of Tibet there was only one way to dispose of the flesh left when an incarnation was extinguished. Tibetans couldn't live without the
ragyapa.
But they couldn't live with them.

Another man appeared at the top as the runner approached, holding a long handle like a staff with a wide blade at its end. He was middle-aged, and wore a winter military cap with its quilted side flaps hanging out at the sides like small wings. Shan, wary of the birds, sat on a boulder and waited.

The man evaluated Shan with suspicion as he neared the boulder. “No tourists,” he barked in a high voice. “You should go.”

“This girl in the bookstore. She is from this village,” Shan said abruptly.

The man stared at Shan with a grim countenance, then lowered his blade. He produced a cloth and began wiping off gobbets of wet, pink matter, watching Shan, not the blade, as he worked. “She is my daughter,” he admitted. “I am not ashamed.” It was a serious admission, and a brave one.

“There is no need for shame. But it was surprising, to find one of your people working in town.” He knew he did not need to mention the work papers. The realization that Shan had discovered the lie was, he expected, the only reason the man was talking to him.

The challenge in the man's eyes dissipated to a glint of stubborn resolve. “My daughter is a good worker. She deserves a chance.”

“I am not here about your daughter. I am here about your family's business with the old sorcerer.”

“We don't need sorcerers.”

“Khorda has been supplying her with charms. I think she brings them here.”

The man pressed a fist against his temple, as though suddenly in pain. “It is not illegal to ask for charms. Not anymore.”

“But still, you are trying to hide it, by having your daughter buy them.”

The
ragyapa
considered this carefully. “I help her out. One day she will have her own shop.”

“A shop can be very expensive.”

“Another five years. I have it worked out.
Ragyapa
have the steadiest job in Tibet.” It had the sound of an old joke.

“Has Tamdin been here? Is that why you need the charms?” Shan asked. Or does Tamdin live here? perhaps he should ask. Could it really be so simple? The bitter, forgotten
ragyapa
must hate the world, especially its officials. And who more qualified to conduct the butchery on Prosecutor Jao? Or to cut out the heart of Xong De of the Ministry of Geology?