“Are you certain you’ll make it back?”
She sat on a weathered wooden bench outside the cafe at the street corner. Even after all this time, remembering the expression on her own face when she asked him that question still tightened something in her chest.
She took a small mirror from her folded shoulder bag, checked her face, pressed her lips together, then set the bag down beside her and lifted the tea bowl with both hands for a careful sip.
The bowl was rimmed with gold, painted with coiling dragons and a Buddha, a style unmistakably shaped by both Han and Tibetan hands.
If one ignored the soldiers and military trucks moving north and south through the town, the place was almost peaceful, especially in the slanting light of mid-afternoon.
The sun was already low. Its light filtered through the streamers above the temple roof across the street, staining everything with an uncanny color and making it impossible to see clearly the schizonepeta leaves floating in the tea.
When he left, the situation had not been this tense. Holding her hand, he had promised that the war would spread no farther than Western Tibet and would never cross the Tanggula Pass. Yet now Huangnan, this tiny town, had become the target of converging forces.
Two files of black-hatted monks strode through the center of the street, all young, all belonging to the Black Hat order. The leading monk wore a yellow sash, the mark of a great geshe. Blue-and-red tassels shaped like snow lions hung from their ritual implements, and the pole of the Five-Star Red Flag carried by the standard-bearer had been wrapped in bright yellow silk and covered in consecration scripture.
She checked her watch. It was still early. The contact would only just be reaching the cliffside by now. She was about to order a bowl of yogurt when the horn sounded:
Wooooo.
The cry of that thing was so immense that the tea bowl on the table jumped. It was the sound unique to the Indian division. Those metal beasts with their eighteen fire-spitting tubes could not be more than a few miles away. The whole street erupted at once. Alarms screamed. Civilians fled back into their shops. Military police and monk-soldiers raised their guns and surged toward the fortifications beyond the town.
The situation looked dangerous, but few were truly afraid. Everyone knew that this Indian force had advanced too far and violated every military taboo. Its attack on Jianzha was already the last thrust of an exhausted army. Even so, no one dared underestimate the metal elephants the Brahmins had brought up from South Asia.
She rose and walked straight toward the temple opposite the cafe.
She knew that the real threat was not the army outside the town, but the uninvited guest expected to arrive inside the temple itself. She had waited here for four days for this single moment.
The main hall was silent. The monks had gathered in the courtyard outside. Vairocana Buddha looked down with serene compassion on the traveler kneeling before him. She knew one should not brandish a weapon before the Buddha, but there was no alternative now. She drew the Beretta from inside her coat, the pistol he had given her before he left, pressed it against the man’s waist, and said in a low voice:
“Hands up. Slowly. Slowly. Turn around.”
He obeyed, raising both arms and turning his face toward her with a smile still on his lips.
She froze.
You?
Yes, it’s me, he said. I came back. I promised I would.
He opened his arms and embraced her. She held him just as tightly. If he was here, nothing else mattered.
At their feet, the leather bag he had brought with him gave a faint, living stir.