Free Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation by Eliot Pattison Page B

wooden bucket, the long, heavy pump handle nearly lifting her off her feet on the upward strokes. She gasped in surprise as Shan, reaching from behind her, clasped his hand around the handle and began pumping. Casting a nervous glance up the street, she offered him a shy smile then sat on the granite step beside the bucket.
    “Only half,” she whispered. “It’s all I can carry. And don’t go out of the square. Mother says it is dangerous out of the square.”
    Shan recognized the house the girl looked toward, not because its appearance was much different from the other squat two-story structures adjoining it, but from the colorful coils of climbing ropes arrayed on pegs in its front wall. “But you and I,” he said, filling the bucket, “are going to the same place.”
    The girl placed her hand on the bucket handle as Shan carried it out of the square.
    “What dangers does your mother speak of?” Shan asked as they walked past the first of the shuttered houses.
    The girl looked up with wide eyes. “Gods are disappearing,” she declared in a solemn tone. “That angry ghost is vengeful. Messengers of the Lord of Death have come,” she said, and pointed to a pole with a crosspiece like a mast that held prayer flags, one of the highest points in the village. Two crows, traditional emissaries to Yama, sat on the wooden crosspiece.
    As they passed the next house, a man opened a door, saw Shan and slammed it shut. Since Shan wore a broad-rimmed Tibetan hat low on his head, he and the girl might have been taken for a niece and her uncle out on an afternoon chore. But months earlier, on Shan’s first visit to the village, Tsipon had decided to share what the Tibetans would have called the essential truth about his new employee, to avoid wrong impressions, he explained. The villagers didn’t resent Shan as a Chinese, they merely feared him as a gulag prisoner without papers, an illegal. He was another of the phantoms condemned to roam the sacred mountains.
    A bright-eyed handsome woman smelling of cardamom appeared inside the doorway as the girl gleefully called out, her smile fading as she saw Shan. Taking the bucket, she spoke low and fast to her daughter, who skipped out the rear door toward a white goat grazing in the rear courtyard, then turned toward the steep ladder stair that led to the second-floor living quarters. “Kypo!” the woman called in a peevish tone.
    Tsipon’s manager appeared on the stair a moment later, pulling a sweater over his shoulders. He offered Shan an expectant nod, muttered something to the woman, and gestured Shan up the stair. Kypo seemed to have no time to observe the usual formality of waiting for tea to be served before taking up the subject of their meeting. “She’ll bring tea,” he started, as if to acknowledge the custom, then leaned forward as soon as Shan joined him at a red-painted table by the front window. “There’s been nothing like this since the invasion,” he said, an odd desperation in his voice. “The younger men are furious. Some got drunk last night and tried to convince people to go raid the Westerners’ base camp and destroy their equipment and supplies to end all climbing for the season. The older ones point to the crows and the empty altars and say Yama has withdrawn his protection of the village after all these centuries. Since before memory, Yama has been the special deity of Tumkot. People say it is why we have survived with so little interference from the government.”
    “Empty altars?”
    “Nearly every family in the village has always had a little statue of Uncle Shinje,” Kypo said, using another name of the Lord of Death. “They are disappearing. Since the day Tenzin died they have been disappearing. People say it is Tenzin. An old woman said she saw him floating along the street at midnight, with a star following his head.”
    A shiver ran down Shan’s spine. “I don’t understand. The killings had nothing to do with the village.”