THE BEGINNING

A small boy ran across the wooden bridge, over the stream, and up the slope toward a grassy knoll that faced the mouth of a cave.

“Careful, Francis!” his mother called after him, laughing. “Now come here. Let’s meditate together.”

They sat facing each other at the top of the knoll and crossed their legs into full lotus, the boy copying his mother with great seriousness. Behind them, the snowy peak of Mount Shasta caught the morning sun and blazed with color. The air was clean and cold and very still.

They closed their eyes.

A few minutes later, Claire opened hers.

Her son was no longer sitting in front of her.

For one terrible instant, her heart stopped.

Then she heard him laughing.

Behind her.

She turned. He was standing there in the sunlight, delighted with himself. She scooped up her seven-year-old son and held him close, and he locked his arms around her neck until his feet swung high above the grass.

And in that instant, a radiant warmth passed from the child into his mother.

She knew it at once. She had felt it before.

Claire closed her eyes, smiled, and whispered into his ear.

“Heavenly.”

From the veranda of the abbot’s quarters, Xu Yun watched them come down the hill hand in hand, the young woman and the boy, and felt what he felt every morning: gratitude, and underneath it, like a stone in a shoe, fear.

He had done what he could. The week after Boston, he had carried fourteen years of notebooks behind the woodshop and burned them, every tracing, every page. He had taken a splitting maul to the helmet in its glass case. There was no longer a single sheet of paper on the mountain that said what Francis Xavier Armand had been able to do, or how.

There was only a seven-year-old who had begun, last winter, to complain of a tickling above his ears.

A sound made him turn.

An engine, on the switchbacks below the plateau, climbing in low gear. It was not the supply truck; that came on Saturdays. He waited. A dark gray sedan rolled out of the trees and stopped outside the gate, and two men got out. They wore suits, not uniforms. One of them carried a slim metal case.

Yun knew the case. He had designed its foam lining himself, in another life, under another mountain.

The older of the two men looked up at the wall, found him on the veranda, and raised a hand, pleasantly, like a neighbor.

On the hill path, Francis laughed at something his mother had said.

Even what you treasure most must be surrendered.

Not this, thought the abbot of Dharma Mountain. Not this one.

He straightened his robe and went down to meet them at the gate.

THE END