Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  * * *

  Half an hour later Shan parked behind a boulder just below the highest point on the access road, then pulled out his binoculars and began walking. He found a flat ledge overlooking the valley, then sat in the wind-shielded place between two boulders and began scanning the slopes, looking for where the god cave had been. He paused to focus on unusual piles of rocks and loose earth then finally discovered a line of tall lhatse, rock cairns, a third of the way down the tall ridge near the mouth of the valley where the dam was being constructed. Tibetans built such cairns as markers but often also to hold mani, stones inscribed with prayers along pilgrim routes or paths to temples. He could see eight cairns, four at an equal distance from each other, then a large gap in the line followed by four more that were evenly spaced.

  When Shan was young, Shan’s father and uncle had taught him the verses of the Tao te Ching, and he still sometimes threw the old yarrow sticks that were used in Taoist meditation rituals to randomly select a verse for contemplation. He knelt for a moment, bypassing the ritual, and with a stick drew a tetragram in the dirt near his feet, a solid line over a broken line of two segments, a solid line and another broken line of two parts. It signified Chapter Eleven, one of his favorites. Using the emptiness, his uncle called it. Clay is shaped to form a vessel, one verse said. What is not there gives it meaning. He had long ago discovered its use as an investigation technique. The cairns were guideposts on either side of a destination. The shadowed gap was what gave them meaning. It was the mouth of the god’s hole. Was that where the American woman and the Chinese professor had died? Workers had heard screaming from inside.

  If two archaeologists had come to the valley, it would have been to that cave that held old rusty artifacts and strange markings on the walls. They might even have been caught inside inadvertently in the explosion. Except Metok’s message had stated “They knew.” He could only have meant that the ones who had detonated the explosives had known the archaeologists were inside, meaning two more murders had been committed.

  At the corner of his vision a flock of birds fluttered, frightened no doubt by one of the blasts that regularly rocked the valley. But then he glanced upward and saw the brilliant colors. It was not birds but a long line of prayer flags, quickly gaining elevation as they soared toward the center of the construction. Lifting his binoculars, he discovered that the flags were arranged as the tail of a kite, a kite that was nearly invisible because its color matched that of the sky. He rose and began hurrying toward the anchor of the long line.

  Ten minutes later he steadied himself on a huge boulder, gasping for breath, knowing he never should have run so hard in the high elevation. The kite flyer was a young woman clad in a gray chuba that matched the color of the ledge rocks around her. She was laughing as she played out the line, then cocked her head as if gauging the wind and cut the line.

  Shan was strangely entranced as he watched the flags drift downward, and he remembered now how he had seen one of the red-helmeted foremen directing bulldozers toward trees with colored cloth caught in the branches. This was not the first string of prayer flags launched over the valley. Prayers drift down out of the clouds, Shan’s messmate had said.

  Suddenly Shan looked back at the woman, realizing he had seen her before. She was already hurrying toward a field of tall outcroppings when he began running after her. By the time he reached the spot where she had been standing she had disappeared into the rocks. He bent to retrieve the short length of kite string she had left behind, and then gazed in the direction of the rock outcroppings. He had seen the woman at the gate of the Shoe Factory, waiting for the hail chaser.

  When Shan reached the gap in the rocks where she had disappeared, his head was throbbing and he knew he had to rest. He spotted what he thought was the woman’s gray chuba on the ground in the shadows and stepped into the gap, then dropped to his knees in surprised exhaustion.

  It wasn’t a sheepskin coat he had seen. A different young Tibetan female was lying in the rocks. Shan would have recognized the deep, inquisitive eyes anywhere. Tara the goat cocked her head at him, then rose and gave a short bleat before butting Shan onto his back and disappearing into the shadows.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when Shan arrived back in Yangkar. At the school he found Yara sitting with a young Tibetan student, helping with his homework. Shan handed her a one-word note, “Garage,” and drove on to park behind the station. Entering the rear door, he discovered Choden sleeping on a cell cot. He shoved the cell door shut with a loud clang and continued into the office.

  With his usual diligence, Choden had left his report on Shan’s desk. His deputy had frequently reminded him that auditors would come some day and demand to see proof of the station’s efficiency. He constantly suggested ways that would assure they would receive passing marks in an audit. Today he had created a new form, titled Yangkar Station Complaint, Incidents, and Action Log. Listed under the column for Incidents was a brief description of how a customer of the astrologer Shiva had grown angry with her for advising that he must delay his trip planned for the first of the month and threw mud on her door. Shiva had laughed but Mrs. Lu, ever vigilant for antisocial behavior, had brought the news to the station. Action: Choden and the customer had scrubbed away the mud, the man had profusely apologized to Shiva, accepting Choden’s warning that it was perilous to offend an astrologer, and Shiva had given him a charm for protection against lightning, at no charge.

  Next the new Chinese barber had complained that someone had stolen his cherished poster of the Chairman right off his front door. Action: Deputy Choden had explained that the wind had ripped off the poster and closed the case by pointing out the shreds that were stuck in the top of a tree in the square.

  Incident Three: a young Chinese girl of perhaps five years, traveling with a middle-aged Chinese woman, had tipped over the trash cans in the square then run up the stairs of the old gate tower and laughed as the woman picked up the litter. Choden had gone out to help. The deputy had explained to the child that he would not lock her up for this first offense.

  Shan’s grin faded as he read the final report. A Public Security officer had come looking for Shan. When told the constable was away on duties, she indicated she had to return to Lhasa but she would be back.

  Choden understood the cause for Shan’s frown. “A frigid one. She was most unhappy when I told her you were gone for the day. A tough character, a real ballbuster.”

  “From Lhasa,” Shan said. “The one who called.”

  “Must be.”

  Shan heard the question in Choden’s tone. He extracted the leather folder from his pocket and dropped it in front of his deputy. “I will have more reason to go to the city now,” he announced.

  Choden’s eyes went round as he opened the folder. “You?” he blurted in disbelief, then reconsidered. “I mean congratulations.” He hesitated. “But you want to work with Colonel Tan? You know the stories. The hellhound, the iron fist, the tormentor, they call him.”

  “Colonel Tan wants to work with me,” Shan said.

  Choden offered a grim, sympathetic nod. “So, you are moving to Lhadrung?” he asked, unable to keep the hope out of his voice.

  “No. I will work out of this station, and I will remain the constable here. I will only work on special cases.” Shan did not miss the disappointment in Choden’s eyes. It wasn’t that his deputy yearned for a promotion, he simply wanted a superior with more spit and polish. “But I will be away more often,” Shan offered in consolation. “You’ll be in charge when I am gone and you’ll have full use of the old truck.”

  Choden brightened. “Can I use it to haul sheep for my cousin?”

  Shan rolled his eyes. “Just clean out the back afterward and don’t let the Committee of Leading Citizens spot you with livestock in the constable’s truck.”

  Yara awaited him at the back of the town’s only garage, sitting on an old car seat. Surprisingly, she greeted him with a quick embrace. “I can ma
ke the trip this weekend,” she said with a smile that lifted her dimples. “My grandmother’s coming to watch my son.”

  “I have a new car,” Shan announced, returning the smile. “A better heater and no smell of tobacco.” She laughed, and he warmed at the prospect of another long drive with Yara for a visitors’ day at Ko’s prison. They would share stories of their very different childhoods. Sometimes, after silently gazing up at the high mountain pastures, she would break out in one of the old herder’s songs.

  “I’ll try to keep my grandmother and her cigars away from it,” Yara said with a grin, and led him into the junkyard.

  The entrance to the path they took was concealed between two overlapping truck wrecks, and when they entered the junkyard Shan had to take out his flashlight to guide them through the many twists and turns that the owner had designed to throw off anyone trying to follow. Finally, they reached a deep shadow between the five-foot-high copper head of a Buddha and a pair of giant clasped hands, both salvaged from old temple statues. Shan followed Yara down the set of narrow stairs.

  The librarian’s clothes were invariably soiled from his days spent in his garage, but Tserung always fastidiously washed his hands before arriving at his second job. He sat at a table between two bright lanterns in the first of a half dozen stone-walled chambers. Every room was lined with shelves, and every shelf was filled with peche, the loose-leafed books of Tibetan tradition that had, at mortal risk, been secretly hidden in the former subterranean chapels while the army and the Red Guard had been demolishing the huge monastery that had sat above.

  Tserung had a small bottled gas burner with a pot of tea on it that he now shared with Shan and Yara. “Nearly two rooms done,” the mechanic reported with a proud grin, showing two missing teeth. He had been the firstborn son of a traditional Tibetan family and as such had been destined to become a monk at the monastery. But Beijing had crushed the hopes of such traditions. The mechanic had told Shan that down here, serving as the guardian and librarian for the clandestine, illegal collection, was the closest he would ever come to feeling like a real monk. He had enthusiastically embraced Shan’s suggestion that he catalog every one of the thousands of peche on the shelves. Tibetan books were all hand-printed, their carved wooden printing plates carefully guarded and treasured by generations of monks. Religious Affairs had not only destroyed millions of such books but also scores of thousands of printing plates, making bonfires of the often centuries-old carvings, which meant that there were probably books on Tserung’s shelves that were the only one of their kind surviving, never to be printed again. Scattered among them, moreover, were hand-scribed chronicles and journals kept by the administrators of the big monastery, which had been the economic, cultural, and religious center in the region for centuries.

  “There’s a large valley to the northeast, just outside the township,” Shan said. “I think some call it Gekho’s Roost.”

  “You mean where the Chinese are reshaping the earth,” Tserung said in a tight voice. “The Five Claws.”

  “Yes, the hydro project. But there was something else there, from a long time ago.”

  “Gekho’s Roost, yes. But the old ones also called it the Valley of the Gods, because it’s where the land gods first came out of the earth.”

  “Yangkar was the main monastery of the region. Families living in the valley would have sent their sons to Yangkar. Have you come across mention of it?”

  Tserung fixed Shan with a contemplative gaze, looking more like a monk than Shan had ever seen him. “No one was living there,” he said, correcting Shan. “Only hermit monks. It was the holiest of ground. People went there to pray, as pilgrims, since before time itself. My grandfather always just called it the original valley, like it was there before everything else. I remember once my grandmother argued when he said that, and he told her don’t be silly, there had to be a first place, from which all creation flowed. He said it was the foundation place, that all the bones of the earth were anchored there. If that anchor were broken, then those bones would disconnect.”

  Strangely, the words shook Shan. After a moment he nodded. “A place of great spiritual power. I was hoping to find references to it here, to help me understand it better.”

  Tserung kept staring at Shan. “Are you going to stop what they are doing?” he asked in a hopeful tone.

  “I want to understand it,” Shan said again. “No one can stop it.”

  “Because the gods of Beijing are more powerful than the gods of Tibet,” Yara inserted.

  Tserung weighed her words and cocked his head. “Or the gods of Tibet are just sleeping so soundly they haven’t awakened yet to what Beijing is doing.” He shrugged and ran his fingers through his long black hair. “I’ve seen passages about monks going to the valley to collect medicinal herbs, and monks going on summer retreat there, two or three hundred years ago. And many references to pilgrims traveling to the sanctuary of Gekho’s Roost. It was very important for pilgrims. They would stop in Yangkar to rest up for the long trek into the high mountains. Left handers, mostly, because the chronicles mention that they camped around the little chapel outside the walls.”

  Shan chewed on the mechanic’s words. “You mean they were Bonpo pilgrims,” he said, referring to the practitioners of the old animistic religion that had prevailed in Tibet for millenia prior to the arrival of Buddhism from India. Bon and Buddhist practices had blended to create Tibet’s unique form of Buddhism, but some embraced the old traditions more than the new. Among those practices was the walking of pilgrim circuits, or koras, in a counterclockwise or left-handed direction, instead of the clockwise path of Buddhist pilgrims. Bon pilgrims would have been welcomed at the monastery, but they often had their own priests and their own chapels.

  “I can look in earlier volumes,” Tserung volunteered.

  “Yara and I can help for an hour or two,” Shan said. Tserung lifted a lantern and guided them back to the farthest chamber, where the oldest books lay.

  As was often the case, Shan got lost in the reports of daily life from centuries earlier. He became quickly absorbed in an account of sculptors who had arrived from India to begin work on new statues of dancing dakini goddesses that would adorn the walls of the main sanctuary. Then he lingered over a three-hundred-year-old passage describing a trek into the northern mountains to pay homage to a white yak that had been spotted by herders.

  Yara and Tserung were so immersed in their own reading that they took little notice when, stifling a yawn, he bid them good night so he could return to his quarters for a predawn departure in the morning. If Public Security from Lhasa was looking for him, the best place to avoid them would be Lhasa itself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Shan had just descended the mountains and turned onto the north-south highway when a bell began chiming in the glove box. He pulled over and discovered a cell phone under the maps in the box. The call was from a number in Lhadrung.

  “You finally found it,” came Tan’s gruff voice. “You never answered yesterday.”

  “I think you are aware, Colonel, that outside of Lhadrung town there is no cell coverage in most of your county.”

  “Yet we are talking.”

  “Because I am on the highway to Lhasa,” Shan said. He then explained that after visiting the Five Claws project, he suspected the archaeologists had been deliberately killed by the implosion of the cavern they were studying. He chose not to speak of earth deities, Tara the goat, or the hail chaser and his companion.

  Tan asked him what his business was in Lhasa. “The American Cato Pike is in Lhasa,” Shan explained. “Unlikely he has friends there. All he knows is what the public reports say. I will search hotels and guesthouses. I want to speak to Metok’s family, if Amah Jiejie can send that address from the file.”

  “Watch for a message and watch your back,” Tan said and hung up.

  By the time Shan reached the outskirts of the capital city, there were two messages on his phone: one listing an apartment address, t
he second simply stating Lotus Garden Hotel. He approached the hotel warily, parking blocks away and watching for the tall American, who would have a hard time blending into any crowd in the city. In the lobby he stayed behind a row of potted plants and watched Western tourists come and go.

  “There you are,” came a loud voice behind Shan. He turned to face Tan’s youngest staff officer.

  “Lieutenant Zhu,” Shan said in surprise.

  The lieutenant gave an uncertain grin. “Inspector.”

  “I’m working. And please keep your voice down.”

  “Yes. The records going back six months show that no one named Pike has stayed here.” Zhu saw the confusion on Shan’s face. “It’s my assignment. I am to assist you until the colonel says otherwise. He told me the first task.” Zhu produced a slip of paper with a list of hotels. “I checked half a dozen already. I can cover the rest by 1500.”

  Shan frowned. Tan’s message had just been intended for Zhu to connect with Shan. He looked away for a moment, fighting the temptation to order Zhu back to Lhadrung. Tan knew Shan worked alone.

  “This isn’t a military operation, Lieutenant.”

  The young officer weighed his words then brightened. “I have civilian clothes in my car. I can change in the hotel washroom.”

  “What exactly did the colonel say about your assignment?”

  “He said you were an insubordinate son of a bitch,” Zhu said, then hastily added, “Sir. An insubordinate son of a bitch, sir. And to do whatever you said, unless I might go to jail for it.”

  “Those were his words?”

  Zhu thought a moment. “His exact words were unless Public Security might catch me at it.”

  Shan tried to suppress a smile. “What do you do for the colonel?”

  “I left college to go to officers’ school. I was trained to lead missions in the mountains,” Zhu explained, meaning he was trained as a mountain commando, the toughest of Tan’s troops. “But right now, I mostly write reports that sit on some clerk’s desk and summarize reports that come in from other clerks. Sometimes I drive the colonel when the sergeant isn’t on duty.”