After a moment he scanned the slopes above them. They were
empty. There had been families with small herds of sheep and yaks
when he had passed through on the way to the Chomolungma
base camp the day before. After fifty years of living with the
Chinese army, many Tibetans seemed to be able to sense soldiers
from miles away.
"I don’t understand why they do it," Jin said in a more conversational
tone. "How many does it make this season?"
Shan turned and saw that the constable was gazing at the body
on the mule. "This will be three I’ve taken down." Although trucks
and utility vehicles could make it to base camp, Tumkot, the village
that provided most of the porters, was very traditional. It had no
monks, but it had an astrologer who often played that role, and she
had told the villagers the deities wanted them to keep their dead out
of Chinese trucks. Later, for reasons Shan still did not understand,
she had foretold that he was the one who would convey the bodies.
"They say the mother mountain is angry this year."
"Angry?" Jin smirked, streaming two jets of smoke out his nostrils.
"I’d say she’s become a bitch with a feud against the world."
He gestured toward the dead man. "Damned fools. They must
have a death wish going up there. Acting like they’re gods, thinking
they have the right to be at the top of the planet."
Shan laid his hand on the back of the dead man. He had not
known the other dead sherpas he retrieved from Everest and had
only briefly worked with the ever-cheerful Tenzin, but he had
developed a strange affinity for all of them. The old Tibetans
would say their ghosts were befriending him. "They just carry
the bags of those who would be gods," Shan quietly corrected,
"so they can feed their families." His gaze drifted down the trail
as the mule nudged him again. "How soon are they coming?"
he asked. Not far below, the trail passed within fifty yards of the
road. He could ill afford to be stopped by Public Security with an
unexplained body.
The constable’s expression hardened at Shan’s reference to the
knobs. He tossed his cigarette into the rocks with a peeved glance,
as if Shan had ruined its enjoyment, then rose to mount the horse.
"Soon enough," he complained.
"Don’t play music when you ride," Shan suggested as the policeman
awkwardly tried to mount with the rifle over his shoulder. "It
frightens the horse. And don’t always stay on his back. Tibetans
walk beside their horses half the time, speaking with them."
Jin sneered at Shan and reached for the power switch on his
tape player.
"It’s a long walk home," Shan observed. The constable frowned
again but did not touch the switch. He straightened, dug his heels
into the horse and disappeared at a slow, stiff trot.
Twenty minutes later Shan stood in the shadow of a boulder
and watched the cloud of dust that marked the passage of the bus,
his gut tightening. He too had developed an instinct about Public
Security. He found himself leaning forward, the way the small
mountain animals did when they were about to leap away from
an approaching predator. Forcing himself to keep watching as
the cloud passed a tower of rock a quarter mile away, he glanced
down as he realized his hand had clamped around his wrist, over
his prison registration tattoo. He picked up the lead rope for the
mule and had begun to slowly retreat when he felt an odd shaking
at his feet, like a small earthquake. Then came a screech of metal,
the sound of a tire bursting, followed by angry shouts, the flat
crack of a pistol, and the frantic blowing of a whistle. He glanced
at the mule, which had begun to graze on a clump of grass, then
leaped down the trail toward the road.
Moments later he crouched at an outcropping, gazing down
on a scene of chaos. A small military bus, designed to hold perhaps
twenty prisoners, was wedged sideways in the narrow road,
jammed between rock ledges on either side. The windshield was
smashed. The front right wheel was flat, the bumper and fender
above it crumpled where they had struck a column of rock that
had fallen across the road. Other rocks from the apparent avalanche
had smashed against the side of the bus, knocking in two
of the wire-bound windows. A young Public Security soldier,
probably the driver of the bus, sat against a rock, dazed, his head
bleeding from where it had smashed the windshield. Only one
other knob could be seen, racing into the rocks at the far side of
the road, desperately sounding his whistle. The monks who had
been imprisoned on the bus were escaping, except for one old man
in a red robe who was bent over the injured driver.
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