Read Online Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison - Free Book Online Page B

her, still watching Gendun. The lama had withdrawn into himself, the way he acted when meditating, but Shan knew it was not a place of serenity he had gone to this time. “She learned how to celebrate with flour. She learned how to listen to the throat chanting.”
    Liya winced. “She learned how to run from soldiers,” she added in a hollow voice. “And now one of our throat chanters is lost. You know how few are left, trained in the old ways of the chanting, who learned directly from the lamas who lived a hundred years ago? They’re nearly extinct. There’s more snow leopards in Tibet than such men. They will all be gone when the soldiers finish.”
    “The girl asked about souls and was answered by fear,” Lokesh said. “She fled like a frightened antelope.” He gazed southward, toward the endless mountains, range after trackless range rolling to the horizon, then turned back toward Shan. “He didn’t just speak to Tara. For a moment I heard a prayer, asking the guardians for forgiveness.” Shan suddenly recalled the nine-headed deity in the room with the blood, whose eyes had been put out. Surya had asked for forgiveness, as if he had been responsible for the blinding.
    “Surya couldn’t kill,” Liya said in a voice like a whimper. “I spoke with him, two nights ago. He gave me prayers to keep me safe when riding my horse at night. He could have gone into the tunnels and hit his head. He could have imagined … but the blood, all the blood. It can’t be, he is our monk.”
    Her strange soliloquy had broken Gendun out of his contemplation. He was looking at Liya with an expression Shan had never before seen on the lama’s face. A sad, tormented confusion. Before Shan could react, Gendun stepped away to stand on a ledge that overlooked Zhoka.
    He looked back at Liya. None of them could explain the blood. And Dawa had seen a man with a nail through his body, an hour after Surya’s strange words. Here you must be nailed to the earth, the monk had proclaimed.
    “Two nights ago Surya did not come to the chorten,” Shan said. “Where did you see him?” Liya turned away, toward Gendun. “Who else was in the hills?” Shan pressed. “You saw foreigners last night. Who did you see the night before?” Shan stepped close to her back. “Jara said there are people who will kill for a word. He would not speak it. What word?”
    Liya spun about to face him, her jaw clenched, as if afraid to speak, and backed away.
    As Gendun settled onto the ledge Shan approached him, sitting three feet away. He watched the clouds scud westward. He found himself looking not at Zhoka but beyond it, toward Yerpa. There was a small cell in the old hermitage where he had been made comfortable, given cushions and blankets from the ancient storerooms, where he had spent the most peaceful months of his entire life. He wondered if he would ever see it again.
    They sat in silence for a quarter hour as Liya and Lokesh gathered some of the belongings the hill people had left scattered across the slope. Gendun did not move, did not offer a mantra, did not touch his mala, his prayer beads, only folded his hands together, palms down, middle fingers raised against each other. It was the diamond of the mind mudra, for focus, for trying to find the center of things. A small blue butterfly landed on the rock between them. Shan watched as Gendun’s eyelids fluttered. His eyes found the butterfly, then Shan.
    “You are going to ask what he gave me,” the lama said in a near whisper, then handed Shan a crumbled strip of cloth, torn from the grey muslin of an underrobe. “He told me to repeat it ten thousand times, to keep him from coming back.”
    Shan read the words scrawled on the cloth. Om Amrta Hum Phat. It was a mantra for expelling what the Tibetans called hindering demons.
    “Keep who from coming back?” he asked.
    “Himself,” Gendun sighed. “Surya.” The lama searched Shan’s face, his eyes filled with a mournful confusion.