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

While Shan knew many of the local tribesmen were increasingly frustrated with the outsiders—who paid huge sums of money to the Chinese government for the right to climb their sacred mountain—they also owed their livelihoods to the climbers.
    “They say the mountain goddess has a claim on Tenzin, that she must have him back.” Kypo looked up with pleading in his eyes. “We need him back. We need him on a pyre at the burning place above town. They want to say the necessary words to him and release his ashes back to the mother mountain. We need,” Kypo added with a twist of pain in his voice, “proof that he is still dead.” He looked down, avoiding his wife’s gaze as she brought two mugs of buttered tea, then scurried away with a jingling of her silver necklaces.
    Shan sipped his tea uneasily, as worried about the hint of fear in the sturdy Tibetan’s face as about his strange words. A brawny man wearing a sheepskin vest, the village smith, appeared on the stairs from below, casting a frown at Shan before slipping off his shoes and disappearing into a bedchamber. Shan had almost forgotten. Some of the mountain tribes still practiced polyandry. Kypo was married to the demure woman who had served them tea. But so was his cousin.
    “I carried his body down from the heights, Kypo.”
    “How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan?”
    “Soon it will be seven years.”
    “Then you should know better. Death is not so straightforward among our people. Chomolungma took him, people say, but then he was stolen from her. Now the deities fight over him. Yesterday,” the Tibetan added in a lower voice, “people went to my mother to ask about you.”
    Shan’s mug stopped in midair at the mention of the stern, forceful woman. The villagers weren’t going to her because she was Kypo’s mother but because she was the village astrologer, the closest they had to a monk.
    “Me?”
    “They asked her to throw her Mo dice about you again,” Kypo said, referring to the bone dice with Tibetan syllables inscribed on each face that were used by fotunetellers. “They were looking for a way to punish the corpse carrier for failing in his duty.”
    “And what did the dice say?”
    Kypo shook his head. “She won’t be forced into consulting the fates. She says it makes them angry. Instead I reminded them about you and the dead,” he said with a self-conscious glance at Shan.
    “About me and the dead?”
    “I’m sorry. Once I was on the trail when you were coming down with a body. I didn’t know what to do. I hid. You were reciting old poems.”
    “You told them I scared you?”
    “I told them,” Kypo explained, “that you know how to speak with the dead.”
    Out of the corner of his eye Shan saw Kypo’s wife lingering at the edge of the hallway. “And what did they do?”
    “Some went home. My mother told the rest we had brought this on ourselves, for ignoring the old ways. She sent them to their altars to recite mantras.”
    Shan drank his tea, desperately trying to understand what was happening in the village. “Has Public Security come?”
    “So far only some bully from Religious Affairs, late yesterday. The fox, people are calling him already, because he wears a fox-fur hat.” Kypo’s face tightened. “He had four men with him, plus Constable Jin. They searched for the escaped monks in every house, made sure everyone knew they would be imprisoned if they lifted a finger to help the monks. There were problems.”
    “Problems?”
    “The monks weren’t here, of course, but that wheelsmasher wasn’t convinced we were telling him everything. He tried to change the minds of some of the older villagers, put them in chairs in the square like a tamzing .” Kypo sighed. “He tried for a couple of hours, then went away.”
    Shan fought a shudder. Tamzing was a term from a painful past, the name for the public struggle sessions when the Red Guard had tried, figuratively and literally, to beat correct political thought