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'These are torture wounds, Abe. He got these in a Chinese prison.'
'Impossible.'
'Why?'
Abe glared at him. 'Impossible.'
'You hear stories over here. What the Hans are doing to the Tibetans. But it
always sounds too much. Like, you know, a million dead? And the torture
stories, what they do to these people. Raping nuns with cattle prods, flogging
monks to death with iron bars...'
Abe had no idea what Daniel was telling him. He had no idea what to think. He
had come to climb a mountain. That was all he knew.
'Nima,' Daniel demanded. 'Tell what you know.'
The Sherpa spoke haltingly, with reluctance. 'This man, you know, they put him
in the prison. They making very bad things happen to him. He run from there.
Now he is going to Nepal side.'
'He's escaping?' Abe asked.
'He's trying to,' Daniel said. 'But the passes are high. He's trapped. He
wouldn't stand a chance in his condition. Look at him. No wonder he had to
crawl to get this far.'
Through his paramedic work, Abe had seen terrible things, things worse than
this, bodies torn in two, skinned by windshields, ruptured like soft
grapes, ripped and shredded. But in all of that the suffering had never had
a purpose, a reasoned cause, never anything like this. What made this
unthinkable was that another human being had written the suffering into the
boy's flesh, one wound at a time. It was beyond belief. Abe's teeth
were gritted and he felt tears of frustration forming in his eyes.
This wasn't supposed to be part of the deal. He'd come to see beauty and
strength and
Utopia. He blinked his tears away.
'The yakkies got him as far as Base,' Daniel went on, and Abe could tell that
Daniel was extrapolating much of this even as he spoke. 'And the Sherpas, they
don't know what to do with the poor kid except keep it quiet. If the Chinese
get wind of this...'
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'What did he do to them?' Abe asked. He was fighting to accept what lay before
him, the proof of evil. He needed more time. Or a good reason. One or the
other.
Nima asked the monk, and the monk crossed his wrists, made two fists, thrust
them down and lowered his head. Abe needed no help translating. Defiance.
Resistance.
'He maked this at the Jokhang,' Nima explained.
'The big temple in Lhasa,' Daniel added for Abe's benefit.
'Now what?' Abe asked.
'Keep it quiet,' Daniel counselled, inventing by the moment. 'We've got to
keep the
L.O. in the dark. As far as he knows, this is just one more yakherder. I think
the rest of the members should know what's going on. But Li can't find out.'
'Everyone?'
'Everyone. Informed consent. If they don't know, they might say
something by accident. And besides, we're all part of it now, and the others
have a right to know.'
'Even Jorgens?' Abe asked. 'He'll kick if he knows we're part of some
underground railroad.'
'He doesn't have to like it,' Daniel decided. 'He's part of us, though. We owe
him the truth.'
'Okay then,' Abe said. 'Tell them.'
'And all you have to do is fix him. He's got to get his strength up or he'll
never make it over the pass. If he can't make it over the pass, things will go
badly. In these parts, Tibetan families have to buy the bodies back
from the Chinese. Going rate is five yuan, the price of a bullet. And I
don't think this poor guy's got a family to bury him.'
'I'll do what I can.'
Daniel placed one hand on Abe's shoulder. 'Do your best, Abe. Save the ones
you can save. I learned that from you.'
But before Abe could add to it, Daniel had lurched out through the dome
entrance to go and instruct the others.
Abe suddenly found himself wishing that the boy were unconscious
again.
Unconscious he had been mute, and mute he had been merely the canvas on which
these bruises and cuts and burns had been painted. But the boy was conscious
now and his story was no longer a fiction. Abe set himself to changing what
dressings had not fallen off and to cleaning the monk's sores and lacerations.
Next morning they had their puja.
The Sherpas made little towers of flour paste and put Oreo cookies and hard
candy on a platter and brought out a few precious bottles of Star
beer packed in from
Kathmandu. They started a fire with cedar branches and pine needles that had
come from nowhere within a hundred miles. The sweet white smoke lay
over ABC as a center post was erected. From this post, four fifty-foot-long
streamers of prayer flags were stretched out and anchored in four different
directions.
The flags were thin cotton, each dyed a different color and printed with
prayers in square Tibetan script. Despite her irreverence about tulkas
yesterday, even Gus looked pleased and comforted to see the prayer
flags get unfurled. While Abe watched, Kelly stood beside him and
explained things. She held one of the cotton squares still and showed
him a crude horse block-printed among the fresh script.
'They call that a lung ta
. A wind horse. Every time the wind flaps a flag, the horse carries a prayer
to heaven,' she told Abe. 'They'll keep us safe and sound. All of us.'
The Tibetan boy sat on a small carpet by the center post with white smoke
wafting through the prayer flags overhead. One of the younger Sherpas, Ang
Rita, was a lama initiate back in his home in the Solu Khumbu. He'd either
smuggled in the carpet and the prayer flags for his own use, or else bought
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them from a yakherder. Kelly didn't know which.
The tulku chanted and murmured while he turned the narrow pages of an old
book.
The puja had the gravity of a mass but the air of a carnival. Through the
entire two
hours, the Sherpas and climbers came and went, talking loudly and
laughing and taking pictures.
The ceremony had become more than a puja, Abe knew. It was a binding together.
When Daniel had laid out the monk's sorry tale last night, the climbers had
reacted with Abe's same disbelief, then personalized it. Kelly had
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