Part 16 (1/2)

”Thank you, Viv. You may go now,” the doctor said, and bent over Wu as if to comfort her.

A WEEK? WEEK AND A HALF? MAYBE TWO WEEKS AFTER LAKE.

We've been using hand pumps to clear the buildings. Tea works as hard as anyone on his turn at the pump. He actually seems to enjoy it. The harder and grubbier the job is the better as far as he's concerned. When I'm not pumping, I continue collating, cataloging and putting things back in order, working in the garden as if nothing has changed.

For a while I expected to be locked up again or even shot but no further mention was made of Danielson's escape or my nocturnal visit to the Commandant's office. The nights remain fairly pleasant, the garden producing at an even more fantastic rate then usual thanks to all of the readily available water, the weather warm despite the wind which howls all night around us and yet never seems to come inside the canopy. Its noise and the grumbling of the avalanches is the only manifestation we've had since the lake's emergence of the restlessness of the surrounding range.

I know firsthand about how the weather is all day and all night because since the flooding, we've continued to sleep outside, guards and prisoners alike. Taring insists that until his repairs are complete we are in danger of being buried alive if we sleep below. I don't find his cautions awfully rea.s.suring, when I have to work below during the day.

The repairs are progressing, however, and a group of the Chinese prisoners built a kiln from a plan in one of the Foxfire Books and began shaping replacement pipe to Tea's specifications.

The relief guard sleeps in the dining room during the day, but otherwise the guards and prisoners are working together now. Needless to say, discipline has become so lax it's pretty much a thing of the past, at least for the time being.

One of the guards, a young fellow, didn't see why we shouldn't use the books to sop up the water, and since he was illiterate n.o.body could make him understand and I had to physically wrestle with him to keep him from destroying the Agatha Christies. The doctor was pa.s.sing by just then and gave him a gentle but thorough chewing out. He helped me shelve for three days and I ended up promising to let him study Tibetan with me as I learn to read it.

Marsh and a crew of other prisoners and guards have been digging shallow irrigation ditches and channeling the flood waters from below into them as Tea's crew pumps the water to the surface. The barley crop is knee-high.

The present sleeping arrangements relieve me of the necessity of discussing anything with Merridew or the others. Even though we don't sleep too far apart, they never try to talk to me. Ears are everywhere, the Colonel told me once when I tried to tell him about the interrogation, and even if noguards are nearby after so many years of incarceration, some of the others prisoners identify more with their jailers than with each other.

I'm sure he's absolutely appalled at how the rules have been relaxed, and must be highly suspicious of the way the doctor and even Wu are encouraging the guards and prisoners to talk together. I confess, I'd dearly love to talk to Tea again. Somehow everything that's happened since I confessed to finding the seeds has sort of diminished his little deception to relative insignificance and I miss him. Though I see him several times a day, he's always much too busy to do more than nod in a distracted sort of way. I'd hate to think that if what I think I saw, actually occurred something might happen to the compound and or to one or both of us and I wouldn't get to tell him that I understand he was only trying to make peace, to give me a contribution to make of my own volition. Although there is a great deal I don't understand about this place, I really never believed that Tea was glorying in manipulating me. I hope I get the chance to say so soon.

TEN DAYS LATER.

The work load has lightened, the flood is contained, the pipes are installed, but still we sleep aboveground until, Tea says, the rooms below have a chance to dry out properly. This will take most of the summer, I gather, since the buried pa.s.sages are difficult to ventilate properly. Then too there are the little tremors, shaking the slope beneath us as if a large truck had just driven past, though of course there are no large trucks.

These days we do not automatically fall into bed after spending the day working. Sometimes we socialize, strolling by the lake or playing cards, gambling for those few bits of treasure so many of us had secreted that no one, not even Terton or Tea, took offense that some of the things were kept as personal property. Sometimes the gambling is for an extra onion from the next day's ration, or a portion of someone's personal yield from their garden plot. At first, people were rusty as they tried to simply relax together. On the other hand, prisoners become very good at hiding their anger, out of fear, and after a while it became apparent that this was all in fun, that there was no need for anger, since there was plenty of food to share and we could all see each of the treasures and it wasn't as if they were worth anything here, where there was no economy, not even in cigarettes, since there were none. So the games progressed with a great deal of giggling and laughter that had only a slightly hysterical edge to it.

Although no one refers to the night the lake reappeared, not even Samdup, who has said very little to us since then, every once in a while when I have settled down for the night, I'll see one of the sleepers or the gamblers rise to his or her feet, stroll over to the cliff edge, and look out at the mountains and down onto the lake, as if waiting.

The pack train has been gone for a very long time. As I count the entries in my diary and try to figure the days between events, it seems to me that the trains take about two months to go and return.

NIGHT OF TORCHES.

Tonight I was playing cards with Thibideaux, Merridew, and Tsering's daughter when the child lay down her hand and walked to the edge of the cliff. I did the same. I felt twitchy. Though the crops have been as abundant as ever, the night air has gone from springy and soft to almost too warm and now is almost too cold for the brocade hangings to be adequate protection. Tania noticed the hangings among our artifacts and suggested their use as blankets, rinsing them out in clear water, which took two days alone. The fabric is silk brocade, double and triple thick and fairly warm. Wu surprised everyone bydonating half of her personal soap supply to wash the hangings. After that we had rather elegant blankets, though lately these have not been quite warm enough.

This is not really a long-term problem. The flood was not from the lake, as we supposed, but from a hot spring which was apparently also unplugged by the subterranean activity-I try not to think of it as an earthquake-that freed the lake. Soon Tea will have a new valve made and will be able to channel the hot water through the new pipe to form a heating system similar to the original one. But I don't much like the thought of going below again. The distinctions between guards and prisoners and between prisoners of one cellblock and prisoners of another will spring up once more, I'm afraid. And I'm also afraid that we all, very badly, for whatever time remains, need to stand together.

So I stood behind Pema, looking out across the valley, my gaze craning upward to follow hers around the ghostly white peaks looming over us, as overpowering to me as I must have looked to an ant.

A phantom of snow trailed its sheet as it leapt from a cleft in the ridge opposite our guardian mountain.

”Did you ever hear what they call that mountain?” I asked the girl in Tibetan.

”Karakal,” she said, and suddenly gave a childish hop and pointed. ”Look.”

As the veil of snow swept away on the wind, spots of light appeared within the darkness, one, two, three, four, stretching out longer and longer until it seemed a ribbon.

”It's the pack train!” I told Pema, totally unnecessarily since she simultaneously let out a screech and yelled to everyone that she had been the first to spot the train returning from the outside world with all the things we wanted.

And everybody left their games or their hammocks and came to line the cliff edge, watching the light spots bounce down the distant mountainside.

”There's too many,” Pema said, counting with her raised finger. ”Eighteen, nineteen, twenty-there were only nine people in the train, Dolma, Norbu, Kunga, Trungpa, Jamyang, Pema Jamyang...”

”Hush, we know,” her mother said, holding her by her shoulders and stroking her hair as the girl continued counting.

There were many more than nine lights, many more than nineteen or twenty. Hundreds of the spots formed a serpentine ribbon of light dancing from the top of the ridge, winding in a circle along the cliff sides, spiraling down until, as its tip reached halfway down the mountain, we started moving en ma.s.se down the trail to greet it.

Behind each brave and beautiful light was a foot-weary, soul-sick traveler. Many new faces, and only a few of the old ones were among them, some reached the edge of the canopy while the rest brought up the rear, still high in the pa.s.s.

How would we feed them all, how would there be enough blankets? Where did they all come from?

I was relieved when I saw that each of them was carrying, besides a torch, as many personal belongings as they could carry, including animals in baskets and cages, clothing, children-these were refugees, then, rather than more prisoners.

And then I recognized, or thought I recognized, a coat I hadn't seen for months, since it had walked out of camp on the back of one of the youngest guards, one of the ones who had stayed behind when the rest of the pack train returned. He was one of the ones who would have walked out to the guerrilla campto learn what had become of the supply helicopter. He had returned with this party, or at least his parka, bordered with distinctive rainbow-stripped ribbon, had returned. I definitely remembered that the parka belonged to a very young guard, just beyond boyhood, but now the parka was on the back of a middle-aged man who resembled the boy enough to be his father.

I had not seen Dolma until I spotted this man, but she was right behind him, bearing one end of a litter.

The chest of the body on the stretcher still rose and fell, although the head was covered for warmth with one of those reflecting synthetic blankets.

Dolma hefted her end of the stretcher more securely and filed past me, unseeing without her thick gla.s.ses. Behind her shuffled more civilians, lugging everything from cooking pots to chickens, driving some of the more surefooted animals, chiefly goats, before them. Everyone looked like a sleepwalker.

LATER.

I suppose ignorance really was bliss in this case. We saw the missiles fired and we saw them explode in return, in the distance. We knew d.a.m.n good and well what it meant. But it is still stunning to hear about the obliteration from the lips of these few survivors, led through the mountains to the rendezvous point by the team who had walked back in to investigate.

The newcomers spilled out from under the canopy, sitting numbed and quiet while we pa.s.sed among them with soup and extra coverings, and helped them shed their packs.

Sometime later, after the bathtub soup kettle bore nothing but a greasy film where the soup had been, after the hangings had been torn in half to cover more children and infants, after the chickens and pigs and goats had been penned and the night of torches had turned to day and then into afternoon, I found Dolma, sitting beside the litter, tears streaming on her cheeks. I sat down beside her, my bones creaking wearily. A full soup bowl with a spoon in it sat at the head of the litter. The occupant's face was turned away, with only a straggle of fine white hair on an age-speckled bald scalp showing clearly.

Tea threaded his way through the crowd to join us and looked down at Dolma's red-rimmed eyes, much magnified by her salt-stained gla.s.ses.

”So,” he said to her. ”So, just how bad is it?”

”It's over,” she said. Her voice quavered. Her hair was matted to her head from wearing a cap and a hood for so long and she absently brushed it out of the frames of her gla.s.ses. Tea watched her intently the whole time. They both knew what they were talking about, another part of a longstanding secret. I could only guess at that point. ”We are alone,” Dolma said. ”Only these few were saved, and they found their way only because Rinchen Norbu and his companions met them when they walked out to try to find the helicopter. You can see from Rinchen's face what it cost him.” She nodded to the middle-aged man wearing the youth's rainbow-trimmed parka. He sat looking over the heads of squalling children and the stony-faced adults who mechanically went about the business of settling in. He was staring at the lake as if by drinking it in with his eyes he was somehow healed. ”These people lived in the settlements and camps near our border. When they saw the flash, they were far enough from ground zero to have time to begin walking in, with the guidance of Rinchen and the others. Three villagers, plus Sonam and Phurbu from Rinchen's party, were lost in an avalanche and later, the wind blew two people from the top of a cliffside pa.s.s.””Little Sonam?” Tea asked. ”She is gone? And Phurbu?”

”The world is gone, Lobsang. Save for these few. Their fate was to be there for the arrival of our people and to follow them here. At first many were reluctant to come, since they could never leave, as a few of them had heard in tales of this place from their great-grandparents and grandparents, who remembered us from days when trade was easier. Within five days of our border, Rinchen spotted this one.” She indicated the person on the stretcher. ”He recognized the parka,” she said sadly.

I followed her gaze to the mottled scalp and the ragged motion of the chest as it labored to breathe and couldn't believe someone so ancient had been wandering out in the mountains alone. Perhaps, as I had heard the Eskimos once exposed their elders, someone had left the poor old thing to die?

Dolma started to glance up at me once and lowered her eyes to the stretcher again.

”So tell me,” I said. ”Why did all these people spend their last few days mountain climbing to come here?”

The doctor had been moving, stepping over each person to reach another, her bag in her hand, Thibideaux behind her carrying an a.s.sortment of bandages and ointments, Pema tagging behind to run errands. Terton bent slowly over the figure on the stretcher, pulling the blanket down to reach for the wrist.

n.o.body answered me. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as Terton examined the man.

Thibideaux stood well away from her and her body sheltered that of her patient.