Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison

He climbed toward the daylight above, backwards, watching the darkness.
    Outside, the ruins were empty. The only thing that moved in the central courtyard was the thin column of smoke drifting from the old samkang. Shan jogged to the foregate by the gorge and its ruined bridge. There was no sign of the festival except a few white smudges on the rocks underfoot. He stepped to the lip of the gorge. Somewhere, hundreds of feet below, lay his hermitage bag and the bamboo case of lacquered yarrow sticks for practicing the Tao te Ching that had been passed through so many generations of his family. They had survived war and famine, had survived the death of his uncles and father at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, had even survived his own gulag imprisonment. But they had not survived the terror of a ten-year-old girl.
    He walked slowly through the ruins, calling for Lokesh and Liya, then found himself facing the chorten shrine. He absently lifted the paintbrush from his pocket, staring at it a moment before he suddenly remembered the soldiers, turned and ran.
    *   *   *
    In a quarter hour Shan was at the top of the ridge above Zhoka. Half a mile to the northwest over a dozen bent figures moved along the crest. He paused and studied the landscape. The deep chasm cut Zhoka off from the north. The south, where steep, jagged peaks seemed to warn travelers away, was said to be a barren, forbidding land. The soldiers had last been seen to the northwest, between Zhoka and Lhadrung Valley. As he looked in that direction, toward the ruined stone tower that hovered over the northwestern end of the ridge, he thought he saw a flash of maroon, the color of a robe.
    In another ten minutes Shan had caught up with the slowest of the fleeing Tibetans, who glanced at him resentfully then looked away. As he passed them he asked each one where the monks had gone. At last one of the old women who had prayed with Surya fixed him with an anguished gaze and pointed forward.
    He found Lokesh standing on a ledge near the ruined tower that overlooked the narrow valley beyond. His old friend was staring toward the shadows inside the tower, feverishly working his beads. As Shan reached his side, Lokesh grabbed his arm as if to restrain Shan from venturing closer to the tower.
    It was the first time Shan had been at the tower, and he saw now it wasn’t totally destroyed. Only one scorched wall remained of the top section, reaching nearly twenty feet from the ground, with pieces of iron still holding fragments of what once had been a ladder secured to the outer wall. But the small chamber beneath, formed of a natural rock formation, was intact, a snug open-fronted alcove where travelers or sentries might have taken shelter from the elements. A solitary figure knelt on the floor of the chamber, facing the rear wall. Surya.
    “Why would he come this way?” Shan asked Lokesh. “Toward Lhadrung, the soldiers—he could be arrested. The people are terrified. They will admit he is an unlicensed monk if asked. They are as scared of him now as of the soldiers.” He looked into Lokesh’s face and saw a deep, painful confusion. “We have to take him back home, to safety, then we can ask him about what happened, then we can help him.” If Colonel Tan learned of unregistered monks, or a man professing murder, he would send troops to scour the mountains, and no one arrested could be expected to stay silent. While Yerpa had evaded detection for decades, under the influence of interrogators Surya would eventually divulge the location. If Surya were arrested, Yerpa would be destroyed as thoroughly as Zhoka, and Gendun and all the other monks arrested.
    “He’s not going to town,” Lokesh declared, though his voice was uncertain. “He came here. In the courtyard he would not speak, not to anyone, nothing but those terrible words you heard. Suddenly he just stood, looked toward the tower, and started running. When I reached him he was just cleaning the walls