The Ghost Moths Read online

  For in that very soil, a powdery bane lay waiting to attach itself to the wriggling worm. An infection that would slowly consume its moist life until, finally sensing the arrival of a new spring above, the parasite split open the ill-fated caterpillar’s mummified head to send up a black shoot alongside the new blades of grass to spore on the coming summer air.

  “And thus the cycle starts all over again . . . Summer grass, winter worm. As always, in every end, a new beginning . . .” While his suede-headed novices digested this tale of a cruel samsara, Geshe Lhalu’s free hand would silently rise again into a clenched fist like the head-splitting stroma. With a cheeky, toothy smile he would then chuckle and say that Chinese wives had found another most important use for yartsa gunbu that had made Hao Ping rich. That said, the old monk would suddenly flick his crooked index finger up in an instant erection that set the young monks giggling and Dolma, Lhalu’s ever-faithful, ever-present sister monk, blushing.

  “Chinamen travel far for the caterpillar fungus of Amling! We need little. They would take it all if they could!”

  For the two hundred or so people that inhabited the squat community below the monastery, time and experience rather than literacy had converted the sign’s dagger-like symbols into its own story, wider in interpretation than Geshe Lhalu’s perhaps, but no less accurate. To them, the board’s springtime appearance indicated that Hao Ping, that tiny Chinaman who had lived amongst them for as long as anyone could remember, had put away his opium pipe—his own preferred manner of sitting out the winter—and was ready to do business. The high passes would soon be open to permit the trade caravans to arrive.

  Originally the sign, when it was new, said to them in Hao’s spiky birdlike writing, “Bring me all the yartsa gunbu you can find. I will trade for it.” But now, so many years later, that battered plank also silently asked for fox fur, yak tail, musk, wool, deer horn, quartz, even those tiny flecks of gold the villagers sometimes found in the wide river. Hao Ping, like seasoned middlemen the world over, had diversified, and those great doors had been built for good reason: to protect the huge courtyard that received the caravans, the silk-lined salon where business was transacted and celebrated, and those dark storerooms that, every year, became crammed with precious goods for barter: cigarettes, fabrics, cottons, silver, jewels, coral beads, tools, pots, pans, and most important, tea. Amling needed few staples. Barley, the villagers grew in the walled fields beyond the river. Butter, they churned from the milk of their yak that roamed the hillsides. Salt, they found large pink crystals of in a cave a week to the south. However, tea—strong, black tea—had to come from Hao Ping. It arrived at his doors in dense five-pound blocks, embossed with symbols the villagers couldn’t read, to be chiseled and shaved into amounts they understood to the very last grain. Winter in that place lingered long and the tea supplies dwindled, so the painted plank’s reappearance was always a relief. The children of Amling particularly welcomed its arrival. For them, that sign was just one more to accompany the heavy rattle of snowmelt in the river, the green furring of seedlings in the mud of the paddocks, and the honking of newly arrived geese from beyond the mountains that announced winter was over for another year. Their excitement was equally noisy and joyous, even if it also meant long days ahead on the sides of the cold, shadowy flanks of the higher hills, watching sheep and yak and searching on numb hands and knees for those tiny black sticks that poked up through the snow-burned grass. At least, successfully digging that dirty dead worm from the ground offered praise and reward, instead of the heavy hand of punishment that was never more than a few feet away during the cramped confines of winter.

  When not on the hill, the kids would wait outside the old Chinaman’s house, wrestling, shooting one another with wooden arrows, racing on imaginary ponies, or teasing the village idiot, Mad Namgi, until he would fly into a rage, to their delight, becoming a screaming whirlwind of dust in the center of the street. All the while they would remain attentive to the comings and goings of their fathers and the traders, listening for the slap of hands and shouts that signaled a deal had been done, awaiting the shower of candies and small toys, fabric animals and rag dolls that would be flung out soon after to encourage the “searchers” further. Whenever a new caravan arrived, the children would study it eagerly to see if those strangely costumed traveling players were with it. They lived for the town’s annual performance of the Warrior Song of King Gesar. It was the event of their summer, and that old wooden sign also announced it was on its way, sooner or later.

  Hao Ping’s sign may indeed have been small and simple, old and worn, but it said so many things to so many people. However, that year, its appearance said one more thing that no one could be expected to understand. Life for the monks, the villagers, the children, even old Hao Ping himself, was about to change forever and not even his mighty doors were going to be able to hold that back.

  2

  A DISCOVERY

  The tea chest was dust bare.

  “You can go,” a gruff voice consented.

  Eight-year-old Pema Chöje didn’t need telling twice. In an instant the boy’s arms were forced into his sheepskin chuba, fast fingers quickly cinching the heavy jacket’s cord belt and pushing inside his sheaved knife and some cloth-wrapped tsampa cakes from his mother. He darted out of the door before anyone could change their mind, hearing only half of the demands that tried to follow him into the street.

  It didn’t matter.

  Pema knew the rules because he had broken them so often.

  “Stay with the others. Watch the weather. If the cloud goes dark from the south, come down immediately. Beware the river. The water is high from the melting snows. Do not walk on the paddocks. The barley seedlings are shooting. Do not throw stones at the idiot or the dogs or the Rinpoche’s novices—particularly your brother. Do not go beyond the slopes to the holy lake. Return with at least twenty pieces or else . . .”

  Outside, his three friends, Temba, Dorje, and Lobsang, stopped their dusty push-and-shove to immediately race him down the street, their imaginary steeds galloping as fast as the invisible hooves could go. The four young knights of King Gesar waved and cheered as the quartet passed old Hao Ping, standing in his open doorway sizing up the new day overhead. The skies were open, the mountainsides clear, the air crisp and still: the first traders would be arriving soon. He raised his long clay pipe in return, his smile at the boys’ exuberance hitching up the long wisp of white hair that hung from his chin.

  At the end of the single thoroughfare, the gang kicked left in an impossibly tight turn and galloped on, keeping just beyond the reach of the mastiffs that guarded the town’s perimeters. The furious dogs jumped and roared at their passing, wrenching their iron chains so hard they threatened to separate the links. The boys howled back at them only to abandon the cacophony of barking and snarling they had incited by jumping the stepping-stones that studded the wide river.

  On the far bank, they cantered the raised earth walkway that ran between the barley paddocks to reach the foot of the steep hillside that walled the eastern side of their valley. Only there did the four of them slow to an intuitive, even pace that permitted air enough to banter but without the need to stop and rest; not even the knights of Gesar could race uphill in Amling.

  With every step the boys’ known world shrank beneath them. The village became a cluster of grubby white boxes scabbed with flat brown roofs. The wide road that ran down its middle tightened into an old scar. The river, so broad and furious when they crossed it, stretched white and thin like Hao Ping’s beard. The paddocks interlocked into a single tortoiseshell of green and brown. Even that barren stand-alone hill that bore the monastery dwindled to little more than a distant mound of barley flour topped with a single white molar.

  The boys joked and laughed, telling stories as tall as the valley sides until, beyond its ridge, they stepped onto the wide alpine pasture that ended in the forbidding ring of jagged hills that surrounded the Holy Lake of Palden Lhamo. Immediately they spread out and began the hunt. Huddled close to the ground, backs turned against the chill wind that always whipped that place, they searched and searched for tiny black stalks amidst the stunted new shoots of spring grass.

  It took nearly an hour before Pema’s shout told the others he had found a piece. The first of the year always merited special attention, so the boys quickly gathered around their friend as he took out his knife to prize the brittle worm from the earth. They watched with bated breath as the long blade slid down into the barely defrosted ground aside the small stalk. Gently, Pema levered the knife, first from side to side, then in a circular motion to make a hole big enough to insert a finger. With a fingernail he began to carefully scratch at the dirt until he could feel the side of the dead worm.

  “Be careful. Don’t break it,” his best friend, Temba, whispered as if fearful that even the sound of his voice might cause the brittle worm to disintegrate.

  Pema gave the gentlest of tugs, but the stalk didn’t move.

  Instantly releasing so that the piece didn’t snap, he slid his index finger back in until it stopped at something hard, cold to the touch. “A stone . . . trapping the tail,” the boy said, returning his knife blade to the hole and pushing straight down in an attempt to dislodge the rock.

  The sharp tip held for a moment then slid off the surface to stab deeper into the earth. The boy cursed like a man and instead squeezed his bare hand back into the hole to claw at the earth again.

  His fingertips began to trace an oval hole in the rock through which the worm emerged. Digging out still more dirt, he felt another crater form. Pema pushed his face to the cold ground to better see the obstruction.

  From the bottom
of the hole two eye sockets stared back at him. Shocked, the boy quickly pulled his face from the earth’s black gaze.

  “What is it?” Lobsang asked.

  “A skull.”

  “Yak? Fox?” Temba asked.

  “No. Man.”

  Together all the boys began to furiously dig until, with both hands, Pema finally pulled his find free.

  The human skull came out in one piece, a brown muddy ball, the only white, two complete rows of long-rooted teeth held within jaws tightly clamped together with rusty screws.

  Pushing the earth away and freeing the forgotten shoot of yartsa, Pema saw that the entire surface had been cut and engraved. Symbols, figures, and signs covered every piece of exposed bone. On the forehead was carved an inverted triangle.

  The boys looked at the skull in wonder and awe until Temba finally broke the silence.

  “Pema has found the head of King Gesar!”

  The boys began to shout and cheer as Pema slowly and theatrically offered the skull up to the blue sky with both hands. At that exact moment, a loud thump like thunder sounded, not from beyond the boy’s offering to the heavens but from below, down in the valley.

  There was another, then three more.

  A plume of dust and smoke began to rise.

  Temba, Dorje, and Lobsang immediately raced to the ridge to see what was happening below.

  Pema, deserted, pushed the skull down into the front of his chuba, gathered up his knife and his single piece of yartsa, and chased after them, the heavy skull pounding against his chest as he ran from its shallow grave.

  3

  REDS

  The gang of four encountered the first villagers hiding behind the drystone walls that bounded the barley paddocks. Mostly women and small children, they were huddled tightly against the rocks, the smallest almost squirming their way into the cracks as they cowered and shook. One of them was Temba Chering’s aunt. She was on her knees, rocking backward and forward, chanting the same mantra carved into many of the stones around her.

  When the handsome woman saw the boys, she immediately straightened herself into a defiant anger. A group of soldiers, she said, had appeared at the northern end of the village. Without word or warning, they had set up a single green cannon and fired five shells, one after the other, into the side of the monastery’s hill. The explosions had shaken the old gompa so violently they had all feared it might crumble and fall.

  Temba asked his aunt who the soldiers were.

  She spat back her simple answer, “Reds.” Everyone in Amling had heard of the “Reds,” those soldiers who fought for control of the faraway land of China. The boys, just as boys do everywhere, also knew that it was a violent and bloody war, and that the Reds were the victors. They immediately wanted to see such famed warriors for themselves.

  Despite the warnings of the villagers around them and the insistence of Temba’s aunt that they stay, the four ran on. At the river the boys passed Mad Namgi, sitting on a rock, stripped naked, tearing at his long, matted hair, and howling at the spiral of vultures overhead, certain that something below was dying. For once, the boys ignored him to jump the stepping-stones as a dull groan from the heavens began to accompany the wails of the madman.

  The new sound grew, separating into loud blasts that filled the valley and echoed like brass waves breaking on the distant hillsides. Pema recognized the long horns of the monastery being blown from the high tower, calling for the dharma, the way of the Buddha, to defeat the ignorance of those who would fire cannons at them, to reinforce the spirit of Palden Lhamo, the goddess that protected them and those walls of stone that protected her—a Jericho in reverse.

  The boys pressed on to reach the small crowd of men that had assembled opposite Hao Ping’s great doors. Before them, standing at attention in three ranks, were thirty heavily laden khaki soldiers, without insignia beyond a single red star on the fur front of their caps and red collar tabs. Despite machine guns and bayoneted rifles, full bandoliers of ammunition and stuffed packs of equipment, the Reds did not resemble mighty warriors. The men within the bulky quilted jackets and trousers were small and sallow, dusty and dirty. Many struggled just to breathe, panting although at a standstill. The heavy eyelids of others slipped shut without control, betraying the exhaustion of the journey that had led them there.

  The soldiers’ captain, wiry thin, was no bigger than Hao Ping, with whom he was talking in an animated fashion. He thrust a rolled document at the old Chinaman then pushed him forward to address the small crowd.

  Hao Ping reached inside his round collared jacket for a pair of tiny spectacles, letting the document unroll from his hand as he did so. All the spectators clearly saw the crimson Chinese characters at the top and the dense black orders that cascaded below but only Hao Ping could understand them. He began to read the proclamation, translating each phrase aloud as he went.

  “The Advance Guard Twelve of the Eighteenth Corps of the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China greets you, the people!

  “On behalf of the great helmsman, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and the victorious Central People’s Government, we bring you long-awaited freedom.

  “We arrive, at last, to drive out the Kuomintang’s nationalist bandit regime . . .

  “To end the barbarous feudalism of your own lords and priests . . .

  “To destroy all landlords and merchants, those running dogs of capitalism, that rob you daily!”

  Hao Ping stopped for a moment and swallowed, taking in the personal significance of what he was reading only as he said it. A prod in the back from the captain’s swagger stick forced him to continue.

  “Captain Xi and Advance Guard Twelve apologize ten thousand times for such a clamorous arrival, but only thus can you understand the awesome power of democratic reform that has arrived at your doors. Together we, the people, will construct with you, the people, the glorious society for which you have been yearning . . .”

  The speech went on and on.

  The crowd listened, trying to make sense of what they were hearing, understanding the words but not the context. Only Hao Ping got the message, the already small Chinaman visibly dwindling with every word he uttered. The boys, expecting more action, grew bored, fidgeting and looking around.

  Pema noticed that many of the monks from the monastery had joined the crowd. Even the Rinpoche, the monastery’s abbot, was there now and listening intently to every word.

  Pema’s older brother suddenly pushed in alongside him. Without even turning to look, the young monk’s arm reached across to pat his sibling’s swollen chest.

  “What have you got in there, brother? Some yartsa I can take to Geshe Lhalu?” he asked under his breath, nudging him a little and gesturing to the monastery’s great scholar, who was also standing amongst the crowd.

  “Nothing,” Pema whispered in reply, suddenly remembering the skull he was bearing, momentarily forgotten in all the pandemonium and performance. Surreptitiously he tried to push his brother’s prying hand away.

  “Your jacket seems very full for nothing,” his brother hissed.

  “Leave me alone.”

  Gritting his teeth, desperately trying not to make a disturbance, Pema twisted away but his brother grabbed at the thick sheepskin of his coat to hold him still. Pema tried again to wrench himself free, but his older brother didn’t let go. Locked together they twisted and fell forward into the street.

  Hao Ping, concentrating on his reading, jumped with fright at the unexpected disturbance.

  The tired soldiers’ eyes snapped open, the bayoneted barrels of the front rank instantly dropping to point at the boys who froze in the dirt.

  A command issued by the captain ordered two men from the rear rank to approach the pair. They did so warily, looking down at them through the sights of their rifles until their razor-sharp bayonet tips were an inch from each boy’s face.