Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  “He killed two soldiers.”

  Shan stared at the colonel in disbelief. A Tibetan who killed two soldiers would not even be alive a year later, let alone be walking out of a light duty education camp.

  Tan frowned. “There were complications,” he added.

  But Shan only half-listened, for he was now watching the strange motions of the Tibetan. Thirty paces from the gate he paused and pulled from his bag a bundle of dried sticks. He extended the bundle to each of the four directions then dragged his heel in the dirt, inscribing first a six-foot-wide circle then a series of short lines like tangents along its edge, before continuing on. The warden cursed under his breath and leaned toward a subordinate, pointing toward the circle in the earth and sending him to erase it. But at a sharp command from Colonel Tan, the young officer halted.

  Every man in the compound watched in silence as the gate opened and Yankay climbed onto one of the horses as the young woman mounted the other. No one moved until they began trotting away.

  “Return to assigned duties,” the warden said with obvious relief, and the young officer conveyed the order through the megaphone. The prisoners had begun to file back behind the inner wire when several shouted and pointed. Some were indicating the released prisoner, who had dismounted on a nearby hill and was doing a strange dance along its summit, again waving the bundle of twigs over his head. Others were pointing to the tall wooden flagpole in the center of the wide yard. The pole had started to sway.

  As Shan watched in confusion, the pole snapped and the Chinese flag fell into the dirt. Then the ground itself swayed.

  It was not a large earthquake, only one of the minor tremblers that struck parts of Tibet every few weeks, but prison staff began running in panic out of the administration building. One of the junior officers gasped and ran frantically toward a guard tower. Two soldiers leapt off the tower stairs as the support struts split with a loud crack. The tower toppled onto its side, followed by another loud crack behind the stand. Shan turned to see that the posts holding up the short roof over the entranceway to the administration building had snapped, slamming the stubby roof into the door, blocking the entry. Then the earthquake ended as abruptly as it began.

  The prisoners, filing back toward their barracks, began to sing. The song had the rhythm of one of the work songs used when prisoners were digging ditches or breaking rocks in roadbeds. But after a few verses Shan realized it had been adapted to sound like such a chant to please the guards. The words were those of an old song that gave thanks to protector demons.

  He became aware that the warden, standing in front of them now, was speaking. Tan was still staring in the direction of the now-empty hill where the released prisoner had danced. “Sir?” the warden repeated.

  Shan touched Tan’s elbow and the colonel turned toward the warden, then looked past him at the toppled guard tower. To Shan’s surprise, the look on his gaunt face was not anger but rather fascination. “Carry on, Major,” he said to the worried warden, then added, “Have the flag back up before nightfall.”

  Tan had the driver stop his car a hundred yards past the gate. Without a word he opened his door and began climbing up the hill where the prisoner had danced. Shan paused as he opened his own door. “Who was that prisoner who was released?” he asked the driver, an old sergeant who had served Tan for most of his career.

  The sergeant gestured to the fallen tower. “A sorcerer,” he replied in a worried voice. Shan remembered how when they had first met years earlier, the driver had always spoken of Tibetans in dismissive, deprecating tones, as Tan himself had. Neither did anymore.

  Shan caught up with the colonel at the summit of the hill, where he was sitting on a large flat boulder, smoking another cigarette. There was no sign of the Tibetan sorcerer other than a dust cloud in the direction of the northern mountains.

  Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette then emitted twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. “There’s going to be trouble,” he declared.

  Shan sat beside him. “What kind of trouble?” he asked, gazing at the cloud of dust. To the north lay his own remote jurisdiction, the town of Yangkar and its surrounding township, and he saw with relief that the track of the horses was veering east, out of his domain, toward the tallest of the distant snowcapped peaks.

  “Your kind of trouble.”

  Shan watched the dust cloud for several breaths. “You forget, Colonel,” he said. “These days I specialize in finding stray yaks and settling disputes in the farmers’ market. Last week I had to decide whether a chicken was worth ten heads of cabbage or fifteen.”

  Tan gave a grunt that may have been a laugh. Then he set his own eyes on the receding dust cloud and sobered. “A small convoy was coming through to Lhadrung from Sichuan Province, just two army trucks and two Public Security vehicles in escort.”

  “You mean some very special prisoners were being transferred to one of your establishments.” In all of China, Tan was reputed to have the best prisons for making inmates disappear forever. It had been the reason Shan had been sentenced to the 404th People’s Construction Brigade years earlier.

  Tan didn’t disagree. “Only six prisoners, three in each truck, with two guards in the back of each, Public Security cars in front and back. The Public Security officer in charge, who had just been assigned to Lhadrung, decided to take one of the old roads through the high mountains, though damned if I know why. If they had bothered to ask, I would have told them those roads are too unreliable, subject to landslides and worse.” He drew on his cigarette again. “An old man appeared on the road as they rounded a curve, waving and doing a strange dance. He stopped every few moments and shook his bundle of twigs toward the sky, which rapidly grew darker.

  “The Public Security officers in the front car and two of the escorting soldiers got out, shouting at the man to move, but he seemed not to hear them. They fired pistols in the air, but his only reaction was to laugh and point toward the sky. As they approached him hail began to fall. Not little pea-sized balls, but huge balls of ice, the size of apples. Windows shattered. The escorts ran. The two Public Security men made it back into their vehicle, one with a broken collarbone. But the two soldiers had farther to run to get into their trucks. Too far. They only wore soft fatigue caps and their skulls were quickly shattered. They died instantly. By the time it stopped their bodies looked as if they had been pounded with hammers.”

  “And the old man?”

  “You just saw him ride away on a horse. One of the escorts said he disappeared as the hail began but was back on the road as soon as it stopped, then went to the dead and began chanting something before he was arrested.”

  “Arrested?”

  “Lieutenant Huan, the chief Public Security officer, insisted the man had directed the hail onto them and charged the man with murder. But not even the tame judges used by Public Security would buy that story. How could the government formally acknowledge that there are Tibetan sorcerers, the judge asked the officer. I was there, Huan replied, and Yankay Namdol killed them as surely as if he had aimed a gun at them. The judge cited a report that said the road Huan had taken was so well known for hail that the local people called it Ice Ball Alley. He dismissed the case, and the officer was deemed responsible for negligently causing the deaths. I saw to it that he was taken off the promotion lists for three years and transferred out of Lhadrung before he even settled into a job here. Before he left he had the last word, by assigning the old Tibetan to administrative detention. One year at the Shoe Factory.”

  “Which expired today.”

  Tan turned and looked back at the camp, where prisoners were hauling away the wreckage of the tower. “Expired rather dramatically.” He pulled out another cigarette. His doctor, resigned to Tan’s stubbornness, had insisted that he at least buy filtered cigarettes. Tan broke the filter off and threw it into the brush before lighting the cigarette. “How the hell could he cause an earthquake?” he growled.

  In his mind’s eye, Shan replayed t
he scene of the prisoner marching to the warden and receiving his belongings. His old chuba had been tattered, its fleece lining soiled. On the back and sleeves there had been faded images, some of them complex geometric designs and others depictions of deities, too small and too faint for Shan to recognize. On his march to the gate Yankay had drawn another design. Shan bent and in the sandy soil in front of him he drew a smaller version with his finger, a circle with four equally spaced short tangent lines. “He’s a hail chaser,” Shan said.

  “A hail assassin, according to Public Security,” Tan said.

  “In old Tibet there were such men,” Shan explained, “usually senior monks who had moved on from their monasteries to roam the countryside and tap the power of the earth deities, the ones who control land and sky. They were paid by farmers to influence the weather. Mostly it was to chase away hail, which could destroy a year’s crop in minutes, but the best ones were said to be able to call in hail as well. Some were even said to be able to summon the deities in the earth as readily as those in the sky.”

  “The earth gods who make earthquakes,” Tan suggested.

  Shan looked at him in surprise. “They’re only old tales, Colonel. Folklore, really.”

  “Of course they are, damn it!” Tan’s temper could instantly flare and cool just as quickly. “It doesn’t matter what I think. The man has a following. It’s like they found a loophole in the law.”

  “By using gods?”

  Tan’s face tightened again. “Don’t play the fool with me! It doesn’t matter if the gods aren’t real to you or me. What matters is that so many believe they are!”

  “I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” Shan confessed.

  Tan motioned with his cigarette toward the fading cloud of dust. “He’s on a line toward the project.”

  “The project?”

  “That damned hydroelectric project. The Five Claws Dam, they call it. Biggest investment the government has ever made in this region. Two more years to complete and they already have its dedication on the Chairman’s schedule. Five miles farther north and it would have been out of my county,” he spat. “They’re following a new model. Fast track, where national strategic interests are involved. Keep the approval process quiet, start construction before the public even knows about it. Which means they started without even talking with me, let alone asking my permission.” Shan glanced at Tan. Corruption was a minor sin compared to slighting the colonel’s authority.

  “Started. Meaning what?” Shan asked.

  “Reshaping the valley. Leveling some old ruins.”

  Suddenly the earlier events of the morning came back to Shan. He had watched the execution of a man who worked at the hydroelectric project. “A few miles farther west and it would be in my township,” Shan whispered, relieved that the strange Tibetan was not riding into his little piece of the county. But why had Tan even invited him that morning? Why had he been made to get up in the middle of the night and drive the long hours to Lhadrung town?

  He inwardly shuddered at the thin smile that appeared on Tan’s face. “Right,” Tan said. “As the constable of Yangkar you need not worry. But—” he reached into his tunic and extracted an envelope, extending it to Shan.

  The letter was simply addressed to Shan Tao Yun, Yangkar Township. Shan accepted it with a knot in his stomach. As he read Tan produced a small black leather folder and set it on the rock beside him. Shan stared intensely at the letter, as if he could will the words to disappear.

  “You’ll still be constable, still have your station, but I’m bumping your pay by fifty percent.”

  Shan read the title Tan was bestowing on him. “Special Inspector for the County Governor’s Office. There’s no such thing.”

  “There is if I say so.”

  “I would have no authority.”

  “Amah Jiejie composed a decree for the file. The governor has the same police powers as Public Security within the scope of his jurisdiction. And my own jurisdiction has been expanded to matters related to supply of army materiel, consistent with Lhadrung becoming the regional depot for the military.” He pushed the wallet toward Shan. “Open it. It was her idea. She said it would help you.”

  The leather folder contained a brass badge mounted on one side and a laminated card on the other. The card, signed by Tan, said Shan Tao Yun, Special Inspector then, underneath, By Appointment of the Governor, Lhadrung County.

  “I don’t accept,” Shan said.

  “You have no choice.”

  “Why?” The question was unnecessary. They both knew the reasons why. Shan, the disgraced renegade investigator from Beijing, had been released years earlier from the gulag prison where he had been sent to die. His sentence had been indeterminate, which for those in disfavor with the State Council meant life in prison, preferably a sharply curtailed life. But five years into his sentence he had done Tan a favor and the colonel had released him, on his own authority, without the approval of any official in Beijing. Shan also had no permission to live outside Tan’s county, and no employment except that which Tan gave him. But the most important reason was his son Ko, who was an inmate in Shan’s former prison. The warden and guards had hated Shan, and Ko would be in grave danger without the protection of Tan and Amah Jiejie, who visited Ko so regularly the staff referred to her as Ko’s aunt.

  But Tan surprised Shan. “I need you, Shan,” he said for the second time that day. Theirs had been a complex relationship through the years, starting as bitter enemies then slowly evolving toward a grudging mutual respect. Shan had saved Tan more than once from disgrace, and once from execution for a crime he had not committed. Tan had protected Shan from the merciless, often ruthless hand of Beijing. In the last year, after he had learned from Shan that a revered general, a godlike Hero of the People, was a corrupt murderer, Tan had begun showing signs that he, like Shan, no longer trusted his government. He had killed the general in front of Shan, creating a new bond between them.

  “The Five Claws Dam is a national project, run by Beijing. Metok was prosecuted out of Lhasa,” Shan reminded Tan.

  “It’s my county, damn it!” There was a reason why some people referred to Tan as the warlord of Lhadrung. He had been the governor of the huge county, larger than some eastern provinces, for so long, ruling with an iron fist, that it had become more like his personal kingdom.

  They sat in silence. The clouds cleared over the distant mountains and the sun lit their white snowcaps. On the lower slopes of the nearest peaks Shan could make out several points of white, as brilliant as the snow above. They were chortens, structures consisting of a dome on a block with a spire on top, ancient shrines that the local Tibetans had been secretly restoring. The line of chortens stood like sentinels against the prison camps in the valley. There were still very old, very hidden secrets in the mountains.

  Tan gestured toward the diminishing cloud of dust and spoke in the grim, knowing tone of an old warrior. “Metok’s execution was not an ending, it was a beginning. There’s a reason the hail chaser is riding toward the Five Claws.”

  Shan realized that Tan had expected the Tibetan to go north. “I don’t quite understand, Colonel,” he said. “Are you asking me to start investigating crimes that have not yet been committed?”

  He expected an angry reply, but Tan considered his words for several long breaths. “Tibet is a land of broken places and broken people,” he said in a contemplative voice. “And you, Shan, are better at fitting those pieces together than any person I know.” Without another word the colonel rose and began walking back to his car.

  A young officer from the camp awaited them. “The warden said you should be aware. The earthquake ruptured our cisterns,” he reported to Tan. “We have no water. We’ll need tankers. And the new mural of the Chairman on the wall of the instruction hall has cracked, split down his face.”

  Tan cast another pointed glance at Shan. Camp New Awakening had become one more broken place.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sh
an pulled onto the shoulder of the road as Yangkar came into view at the far side of the valley before him. When he had been forced by Tan to move there he had considered the dusty wind-battered town to be little more than a forlorn exile, but it had come to feel more like home to him than any place he had known since childhood. He had grown fond of many of its Tibetan residents, who greeted him with tired smiles and did what they could to shield him from those few who would always hate any Chinese constable. The town harbored deep secrets, and bitter memories, like Shan himself, but it endured as a scarred, weary survivor, also like Shan. Perhaps the reason he treasured it the most was his discovery that beneath its surface, Tibetan traditions still ran deep because its remoteness and inhospitable weather meant that it had been largely ignored by the zealots who ran Beijing’s Bureau of Religious Affairs, the agency dedicated to eliminating religion in the People’s Paradise. Since the Bureau had helped annihilate the ancient monastery of Yangkar decades earlier, it had almost never been seen in the town again.

  As three sheep bounded out of the late-day shadows to cross the road in front of him, Shan groaned with sudden recollection, then put the truck in gear and sped toward town. Ten minutes later he skidded to a stop on the gravel drive of the schoolhouse, and the young Tibetan woman sitting on the steps stood and slung a backpack onto her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Yara,” Shan said as he climbed out. “I had to drive to Lhadrung. I should have called you from there.” He extended the keys to the Tibetan teacher, whose forgiving smile burnt away his guilt.

  “Just as well,” Yara replied as she tossed her pack onto the seat and climbed behind the wheel. “The headmistress gives me suspicious looks whenever I get a call from the constable.” She glanced up at the steep slopes above the town, which had begun to show the long shadows of sunset. “It’s just that my grandmother won’t want to sit in the back in the dark.” Yara was taking the old woman up to her grandfather’s camp, where he was watching over their tiny herd of sheep and yaks, waiting for the passes below the summer pastures to clear of snow.