The White Mirror (8 page)

 

Chapter 7

There were no more trees above Li Du, only the suggestion, through the clouds, of bare mountain summits. Ahead of him in the snow, strands of fluttering prayer flags stretched from the top of a pole to the ground, to which they were pinned by rocks. Many of the flags were faded and threadbare. Others glowed like liquid glass against the gray sky. Like the red plumes on the bridle of the lead mule, the flags asserted human presence in an inhospitable landscape.

Beyond them stood a modest temple with a sloping roof. Two sets of stairs led up to two separate doors, one at the far left of the building, the other at the far right. A narrow porch, from which the snow had been swept, extended between the doors. Set into the outer wall was a row of weather-beaten prayer wheels.

Seeing that the leftmost door was ajar, Li Du climbed the corresponding stairs. At the top, he touched the handle of a prayer wheel. He spun it a quarter turn clockwise, and by doing so exposed a section that had been turned toward the wall. It was blackened and traced by an irregular grid of cracks. His gaze moved to the building's columns. Beneath their peeling paint, they too were charred. He went to the door and, without stepping over the lintel, peered inside.

*   *   *

The temple's interior was initially so dark that Li Du could see nothing but flames floating in the blackness. As his vision adjusted, he saw the rims of copper chalices cradling each flame—butter lamps in a row on an altar. The eight identical butter lamps looked duplicated, like a trick of mirrors, differentiated only by the flames that moved independently, intent on their unique conversations with the air.

Prostrated in front of the central altar was a monk. Li Du could make out nothing about his appearance except for his shaved head, broad shoulders, and robes of crimson and saffron.
The Chhöshe,
he thought. Between the huddled monk and the altar was a recumbent figure—a human body—covered by a sheet of rough cloth.

Bending over the monk was another man, who appeared to Li Du as a pale face bobbing atop a black robe. This man was speaking, but just as his eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, Li Du's ears fought to understand the sounds. Slowly the syllables formed sense in his mind. The man was speaking Latin.

“It is a holy and salutary thought to pray for the deceased so that they may be released from their sins.” The man gesticulated like a performing dancer, as if by the extension and movement of his arms he could amplify his speech. He pronounced his syllables slowly and with emphasis. “But the words you speak are whispered by the devil. Cease your false prayers.
Cease
them.”

Li Du stood transfixed as the man raised his hand to his mouth and gestured as if he were pulling an object from between his lips. “Words,” he said to the monk, who showed no sign of response. “Do you understand? I am speaking to you of words, of speech.” He gestured at the shrouded form in front of the altar. “You think that you guide his soul to heaven, but you are leading him instead to the inferno. You condemn him.”

Still there was no answer. The man raised his arms to encompass the wall behind the altar. “Do you venerate these demons?” he asked. Li Du raised his own eyes to the wall. Behind the flickering butter lamps, color coalesced in the darkness. The wall was covered in paintings. Hundreds of faces stared out from within frames of gleaming silk. There were entities seated and standing, their smoke-darkened features outlined in red and blue and green. Tongues emerged from fanged jaws. Heads were crowned in rows of skulls. White eyes stood out like snowflakes against dark earth. Figures in crimson sat on floating clouds.

Li Du stepped carefully over the high wooden threshold into the room. The standing man had begun to repeat his entreaty, as if time had completed a circle. “It is a holy and salutary thought to pray…” He reached out a hand as if to place it on the monk's back, and Li Du saw the crimson-robed shoulders tense.

Li Du coughed. The man looked up, startled. As he took in Li Du's small stature, patched clothes, and tentative demeanor, he relaxed. Li Du walked toward him and introduced himself in quiet, perfunctory Latin.

The other's eyes widened in astonishment. He raised his hands as if in supplication to some presence in the shadowy rafters above them.

“The language of the Church,” he said, “in this, of all places, and from a native.” He took a step toward Li Du. “I am Paolo Campo.”

“Perhaps,” Li Du said, in a whisper, “we might speak together outside?”

The man shook his head. He did not lower his voice to match Li Du's. “I cannot in my conscience allow him to continue. He condemns his own soul, and the soul of the deceased.”

Li Du spoke firmly. “He will not stop his prayers.”

Seeing the foreigner hesitate, Li Du pressed his case. “I see that your translator is not here. I speak the language of these roads. If he pauses in his prayer, then I will translate your words to him.”

Campo relented, and after a final glance at the monk, turned toward the door. As Li Du prepared to follow him, a flash of reflected candlelight caught his eye. It drew his attention to a small collection of objects arranged near the shrouded corpse. Moving closer, Li Du recognized the ornate handle, now clean, that he had seen clutched between bloody fingers the day before. But it was the silver blade, exposed for the first time to Li Du's gaze, that had gleamed.

*   *   *

Outside the building, Li Du had the opportunity to observe Paolo Campo in the light. He gave the impression of a man who had once been round, and was now deflated. There was a mottled, slightly bruised look to his face, as if he had not slept. His hair, interspersed with gray, was pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck. His robe-like coat, Li Du now saw, was not black, as it had appeared in the temple, but brown.

Campo spoke first. “You address me in Latin,” he said. “How is it possible? Can it be that we are in proximity to one of the lost Christian kingdoms?”

Li Du pulled the door of the temple closed and descended the stairs. “The lost kingdoms?”

Like a deer stretching its nose toward food, Campo followed him down. “You are, perhaps, descended from the realm of Prester John?”

Li Du shook his head. “I was not born in these mountains, nor am I of the Christian faith. I learned your language from the Jesuit scholars in the court of the Chinese Emperor.”

“Ah,” said Campo. He looked so crestfallen that Li Du, to his own surprise, was tempted to change his answer, and to assure the man that he
was
a Christian in order to comfort him.

Campo went on. “So you were taught by the Jesuits,” he said. “That explains how you can speak the language of the Church and yet not follow its teachings. For more than a hundred years there have been Jesuits in the Chinese court, but they spend their time building clocks and astronomical observatories instead of saving souls. The ignorant cry out for salvation while the Jesuits enjoy the luxuries of palace life.”

Li Du knew something about the strife between Christian orders competing for influence in China. “Are you, then, a Dominican?”

The question seemed to please Campo. “So you know something of our orders,” he said. “But to answer you, I am not a Dominican. I am a Capuchin, an adherent to the teachings of Saint Francis. I have come to these mountains to promote true belief in the—”

A gust of wind bore down from the encircling cliffs and carried away the rest of Campo's sentence. Li Du felt the chill through the seams and patches of his old coat. He shielded his eyes against the particles of snow that whirled up, filling the air and stinging his cheeks.

Campo's face contorted in a grimace of pain. He tucked his chin and hunched his shoulders as if bracing himself against an attack. “The people who live in these places do not feel the cold as I do,” he said, his voice muffled by the wool and fur of his collar. “I will never become accustomed to it.”

“Then let us go in out of the wind.” Li Du indicated the closed door on the right side of the temple.

Campo lifted his face slowly out from his voluminous scarves. He directed an uncertain look at the door. “That is where the dead man lived,” he said. “It is where he performed his demonic conjurations.”

Li Du hesitated for a moment, then started up the snowy steps. He spoke over his shoulder. “Whatever the history of this place, it is first and last a shelter from the mountain's inhospitality. We offend no one by using it for that purpose.”

He heard Campo's step behind him. The wind blew again. The beams of the temple creaked. Li Du stamped the snow from his boots, took hold of the iron ring of the door, raised it, and allowed it to fall with a sharp clang. He listened, but no sound came from within. He pushed the door open and went inside.

There was an odor in the air at once pleasant and disturbing, oily and leathery. Li Du inhaled deeply, identifying other scents: metal, wood, smoke, juniper. Perceiving movement in the upper periphery of his vision, he tilted his head back to look. Hanging from the ceiling were what appeared to be ribbons. They were flat and pale like skins discarded by snakes, and they swayed gently, caught by currents in the air.

He examined the rest of the room. There were two doors in addition to the one through which he had come. One was to his left, and must, he thought, connect to the chapel. The other was directly across from him. Both were closed.

With the exception of space allotted for doors, the walls of the room were lined from top to bottom with shelves cluttered with bowls and pots and jars and boxes. As his gaze rested on a tall jar of black ink sticks, Li Du recalled the similar jar that used to stand on the desk in his own tranquil copying room in the library.

Campo had gone directly to the hearth in the corner. His boots left wet prints through the fine layer of ash that had been scattered by wind through the ventilation opening in the roof. Campo crouched and lifted a blackened pot from where it rested on an iron frame. He set the pot down on the floor beside several others and held his hands above the little pile of ash and scaly blackened wood. With a disappointed shake of his head, he stood up. He rubbed his hands together, then cupped his fingers and blew on them.

“The hearth is cold,” he said.

Li Du continued to examine the contents of the shelves, marveling at the incongruous brightness of powdered pigments. “Did you meet him?”

Campo sniffed. “I spoke to him.”

“What was he like?”

“The devil held his tongue. He would say nothing to me.”

Li Du glanced at Campo, who was now also examining the shelves. “I understand that he was preoccupied with his work and with his devotions,” Li Du said. “He abjured company and conversation.”

Campo reached out to touch an open wooden box. “He behaved as if he could not see or hear me. He stood where I stand now, arranging and rearranging these vessels. I might have been invisible to him.” Campo sighed. “Perhaps I was. The devil deceives.”

Campo drew something from the box and held it up. It was a thin, circular wafer as red as a poppy petal. “What is this?”

Li Du took the wafer and turned it over in his hands. “It is cotton,” he said, “saturated with dye.” He returned it to Campo. “This is how it is transported and sold at markets. The red color is extracted with heat and water.”

Campo replaced the wafer. “My translator insists that his works were masterful. You have met Andruk? He intended to commission a painting. Of course, there will be no painting now.”

There was a short silence between them as Campo shifted his attention to a bowl filled with gold spheres the size of acorns. He picked one up and rolled it between his fingers. “Precious gilding,” he said, as he watched the light gleam and curve across the surface of the sphere, “wasted on the Deceiver.” He dropped the sphere back in the bowl. “Brother Achille finds beauty even in the most grotesque pagan paintings. He says that they give us hope for the souls of the Tibetan infidels. For, he says, if they are capable of honoring false idols with gilded splendor, then they are capable of honoring the one true deity.”

Li Du raised his eyebrows in question. “Brother Achille?”

“Achille di Spiritu is my companion in travel,” explained Campo. “But we are temporarily on separate errands.”

“You are a great distance from the centers of empires,” Li Du said. “What errands bring you so far?”

Campo cast an assessing look at Li Du. “Our purpose,” he said slowly, “is to find remnants of the Christian kingdoms that ruled here. Achille is in Zogong, where he enjoys the hospitality of the lord of that city, a man eager to be reborn in Jesus Christ through holy baptism.”

“And you have come here.”

Campo nodded. “I make an initial foray in search of ruined Christian churches rumored to exist on one of these remote passes.”

Li Du searched his mind for a memory that would support Campo's words, but found none. “I did not think your faith had ever reached these lands.”

Campo bobbed his chin. “It was long ago. But it is in the devil's interest to isolate the faithful from each other, and so he caused these terrible mountains to divide the devout from the holy Church. They were left here unprotected, and they degenerated into sin. The people of these lands have forgotten their faith, and must be led out of ignorance.” Campo raised fervent eyes to meet Li Du's.

Li Du was curious. “And have you found evidence? I have seen only the temples and monuments of the Buddha in these valleys.”

Campo's shoulders slumped slightly. “As yet I have found no churches, nor have I spoken to any who remember them. The task is easier when Achille is with me. He speaks the language of these roads—it is a hardship to travel without him and to rely on Andruk, who is not even a Christian.”

“Do you and Andruk converse in Latin?”