Free Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison Page A

prayer.
    Shan heard a tiny gasp and turned to see Lokesh was sitting behind them. He had never seen his old friend so pale. The old Tibetan had seen the tear too, and was watching it with a strange despairing awe as it reached Gendun’s jaw and hung there.
    “For over forty years Surya and I prayed together,” Gendun said. “When we were novices our task was to rise together two hours before dawn and light lamps throughout the hermitage, and all these years we never stopped doing it, never asked the new novices to take over. Now I am to pray to keep him away from us. Before him I had never known someone who could take a piece of cloth and pigment and…” Gendun looked back toward the tower, with its vibrant paintings and closed his eyes for a moment. “In one writing Surya found, a lama of three hundred years ago said that the artists of Zhoka spread spirit fire.”
    “They could come back,” a worried voice interjected from behind them. Liya was standing at their backs, scanning the hills with her binoculars again. “The soldiers know of this place now.”
    But the soldiers had not just learned of the place, Shan knew. They had come here, to the stone tower, not to Zhoka, not to the illegal birthday festival. They had behaved as though the tower were their destination. As if someone had ordered the troops in the hills away so they could come to the tower. And if they knew of it already why hadn’t they destroyed it? Patrols in the area often carried black spray paint to eradicate any such painted artifacts they discovered, or explosives to collapse such structures. Shan remembered the way the lead soldier from the helicopter squad had hesitated, hand to his ear, just before they had closed around Surya. The soldier had been taking instructions by radio, probably from someone in the cockpit of the helicopter, someone, impossibly, looking for the monk.
    “We must go deep into the mountains,” Liya said. “Zhoka is too dangerous now. And you can’t go to town, Shan. The valley is too dangerous.”
    In the valley, Shan knew, patrols would be aggressively checking identity papers. Shan had no papers, had no right to be anywhere but in a gulag prison, had a bounty on his head. Lokesh stood and looked toward the sun, an hour above the horizon, then toward the southern mountains. Jara was on the next ridge, limping on his injured foot. Lokesh glanced at Shan, who nodded, struggling to keep the worry from his face.
    “The girl,” Lokesh said. Without another word he set off along the southern trail, in the direction Dawa had last been seen.
    Gendun looked at Liya. “Would it be possible to get two blankets? And a little food and water?”
    “We will take you to where there are supplies. Close by,” Liya said. “You can sleep there.”
    “Not for me. They are for Shan. He is going on retreat.”
    Liya offered a forced smile, as if Gendun had told a bad joke.
    “Rinpoche,” Shan said in a plaintive tone.
    There was never tension, never a wall between Shan and Gendun except the one that was there now. He had experienced it many times, each time more painful than the one before. To Gendun nothing should interfere with Shan’s planned retreat, nothing was worth Shan neglecting his deity. But for Shan there was something vastly more important, no matter how adamantly Gendun rejected the notion. No matter how endangered the health of Shan’s own deity might be, for Shan, protecting the old lamas would always be more important.
    “Do not let this thing separate you, Shan,” Gendun said. He was not referring to the day’s events, Shan knew, but to the thing that separated Shan from his deity. To Gendun the shadow of Shan’s prior incarnation as a senior Beijing investigator hung about him like a jealous ghost, encouraging him to become involved in unimportant events, drawn to the workings of logic and cause and effect that Gendun considered traps for the spiritually aware.
    “Rinpoche, Liya must take you to the