Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  “The lama died?”

  “It was a holiday, National Day. We were assembled that morning to hear a speech from the warden when suddenly the old man cried out as if in great agony. He staggered out of the ranks and raised his arms toward the north. He stumbled toward the northern fence, crying in alarm, seeming deaf to the warnings of the guards, even to the guns they shot in the air. The five others who had arrived with him cried out and ran to him until they were beaten back by the guards. They started a mantra that was quickly taken up by the other prisoners. The warden was furious. He seemed to take the old man’s actions like a personal affront. ‘Not again, you bastard!’ the warden shouted, though there had never been a prior incident with the old lama. The warden yelled for the guards to shoot him, for he had reached the kill zone line painted on the ground. But they just stared. The old man was shouting by then, what sounded like a furious mantra, a curse maybe, then a long terrible groan came from deep in his throat. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard. It was as if his life was being sucked out of him. Then he dropped dead.”

  In the outer chamber Zhu’s voice was rising, as if warning them to hurry.

  “Then the warden ordered the administration buildings evacuated, though no one knew why.”

  “As if he expected an earthquake,” Shan said. Ko nodded. “But none came. Afterward none of the guards would touch the lama’s body. One of his friends was allowed to phone and the next day some people came down from the hills with a horse cart and took him away. Until then his friends kept a vigil over him. Right there by his body, not just prayers in the barracks.”

  “Surely the warden didn’t allow prisoners to keep a vigil.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it if I had not been there. He was scared for some reason. One of them was allowed to stay beside him to recite the Bardo, the death rites. Two hours at a time, then a new man would come, always escorted by a guard.”

  “The warden,” Shan said, trying to make sense of what had happened. “He’s new too.”

  “Captain Wenlu? Been here a year or so. Arrived not long after those six prisoners came from Larung Gar. I had a sense that he had known at least some of those prisoners before.”

  The latch on the inner door rattled. Zhu was telling them to finish.

  “See what you can find about those men from Larung Gar,” Shan told his son, then gave him a quick embrace, wishing he could part from him the way other family visitors parted, with the number of months and years left before their loved one’s release. But Ko’s sentence had become indeterminate. He could be out in two or three years, or twenty. “Strength,” he said instead. It had become his usual parting word.

  * * *

  Shan tried to recall what he had been told by his Tibetan friends about the destruction at Larung Gar as he drove back to Yangkar. Thousands of monks and nuns had been relocated from what essentially had become a huge Tibetan seminary, forced to sign pledges that they would never return, under threat of imprisonment. Many were also forced to swear they would remove their robes and never pursue religious activities again. They had been herded onto buses then driven hundreds of miles away and dumped into city depots, strangers in a very strange land. But he had not heard of any being imprisoned. He had also never heard of a warden allowing Tibetans to keep a vigil over a dead prisoner.

  Yangkar seemed quiet as he drove in. Spotting Yara standing by the fence as students played in the schoolyard, he stopped to let her know he had seen Ko, and his son eagerly anticipated their coming visit.

  As he turned to leave she spoke in an uncertain voice. “There’s been complaints from the Committee of Leading Citizens,” she reported. “I tried to help, to keep her here since that woman with her, her aunt or nanny, I guess, asked if the girl could experience a Tibetan country school, but she ran away and I couldn’t leave to retrieve her. She stomped on Mrs. Lu’s sprouting vegetables, kicked a cabbage off the barber’s front step. Choden brought her back here but she bit his hand and ran away again.”

  “You’re speaking of the girl who ravaged the town square?” Shan asked, not sure why the girl would have returned to Yangkar.

  “The same little demon.” Yara shrugged. “I’m sure they’ll be gone soon. Visitors don’t find much to keep them in Yangkar.”

  When Shan arrived at the station Choden was bandaging his hand. “She saw some yaks on the slopes,” his deputy reported when Shan asked about the girl, “so now that woman with her took her up one of those paths above town, praise Buddha. What a brat. Reminds me of one of those cartoon characters who spin around like a cyclone and have jets of steam coming out their ears.” He gestured to a printout of a bulletin. “You must have just missed the excitement in Lhasa. Makes you want to laugh, though I’m sure that poor bastard wasn’t laughing.”

  Shan picked up the law enforcement bulletin as Choden continued. “Public Security is on it, but they ask that the news not be given to the public.”

  “The crematorium in Lhasa?” Shan asked as he read the first line.

  “Yeah, someone tied the manager to one of the cremation racks and locked him in an oven. He was stuck in there all night.”

  Shan stared at the bulletin, stunned at Pike’s audacity. The American had looked like a hungry predator when Shan had left him and had asked about the crematorium that had sent him a box of animal ashes. He looked up, realizing that Choden was still speaking to him. “You said something about Public Security?”

  “I said if you slip out the back door and go up to your house in the hills maybe she’ll give up. She is damned persistent, that lieutenant. She started yelling at the girl herself, almost like she knew her. And there was only one unfamiliar car on the square, as if they all came together, but that wouldn’t make any sense. A knob would probably just knock a kid like that unconscious and toss her in the trunk.”

  “Where is this knob officer?”

  “Mrs. Lu saw her in the square and ran over and invited her into her house, no doubt to give her an earful about the sorry state of law enforcement in Yangkar. The old bitch probably called an emergency meeting of her committee and is reviewing her hundredth complaint by now. Maybe it’s that underwear you never recovered when it blew off her clothesline. Or perhaps it’s the wild yak that wouldn’t stop doing mating bellows at the edge of town last fall, waking her up every night.”

  At least, Shan decided, Mrs. Lu had given him time for a quick meal before retreating to his farmhouse. Marpa was cleaning up from his midday business when Shan walked in the back door. The Tibetan handed Shan a bowl of steaming soup. “I think Shiva can give you a charm against angry wolves,” he said as Shan headed into the dining room.

  He didn’t understand the words were a warning until, having set his bowl on a back table, he stepped to the counter to pour himself a cup of tea. He froze with the thermos in his hand. A woman in her forties wearing a gray uniform was speaking with Marpa’s young assistant, who had tossed a rag over his shoulder before sitting, probably to practice his Chinese. The woman glanced at Shan.

  He took a step backward, upsetting his tea, and fled out the back door.

  She found him sitting on a bench in the square.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as she sat beside him.

  “My fault,” the woman replied in a small, tentative voice. “I thought about giving your deputy my name but was worried it might scare you away.”

  Shan was ready to face imprisonment by Huan, Tan’s bullying, Ko’s suffering, and the murders of Metok, Gangfen and Natalie Pike, but he had not been prepared to encounter the woman who had briefly been his lover years earlier. Meng Limei had been the Public Security officer in the town of Baiyun, where Shan had been unofficially investigating several brutal killings. Their relationship had been shattered when she had killed a clandestine Public Security agent who had been about to infiltrate the exiled Tibetan government in India. The man had been responsible for the murders, but Shan had been arranging a nonviolent resolution so as not to upset the Tibetans
. Afterward he had come to realize that she had been right, and her bullet had saved Shan and several Tibetans from disaster. She had killed the murdering spy, then anticipating his reaction, got in her car and drove away to a new assignment in Inner Mongolia. He had not heard from her since.

  “Your town is out of one of those American Western movies,” Meng said. “Horses tied up outside stores, tumbleweeds blowing down the streets.”

  Shan had no idea what to say. “The wind seldom stops here,” he tried. “I thought of writing you last year but didn’t know where you were.”

  “No problem,” Meng replied with an awkward smile. “An awful place at the edge of the Gobi. The wind blew there too. There was always sand in the food.” She gestured to a battered bust of Mao at one end of the square. It was made of fiberglass and losing its color in blotches. He seemed diseased. She jerked a thumb toward the statue by the chorten at the opposite end, the old Buddha made of stone. “That one seems to be healthier.”

  “The Chinese citizens were removing him every few weeks, but he always makes it back. Then the town astrologer told them they were upsetting the local spirits and they must stop harassing him or all their rice would be infested with weevils and their vegetables rot.”

  “Ah, Mrs. Lu and her committee. Onions, underwear, and a cabbage. She has a long list of unresolved crimes, Constable.”

  “A goat and the wind are prime suspects in the first two. I still have an open file on the cabbage.”

  A wider smile lifted the lines on Meng’s face. She had always had the most compassionate countenance of any knob he had ever known, with a deep intelligence behind her dark eyes. Her face, however, had grown thinner, tinged with sadness.

  Somehow he knew she was not on duty. “I doubt many officers stationed in the Gobi Desert would choose Yangkar as a vacation destination. Although Marpa’s soup is becoming famous.”

  “Come back inside and finish your lunch, Shan.”

  “My deputy thinks you are here to arrest me.”

  “I left my handcuffs in the car.”

  Shan rose with her. “I’m sorry, Meng. I don’t have a lot of time. Maybe if you had let me know in advance.”

  “Limei. You used to call me Limei,” she said and pushed him toward the café.

  * * *

  Snowflakes were drifting down from a solitary cloud over Yangkar as Shan reached the garage, the crystals glistening in the moonlight. It was what his old friend Lokesh called an ice blessing, when the flakes tumbled down without a wind to gently kiss the creatures of earth, reminding them of the power and beauty of the earth gods. He paused to look to the northwest, where the beloved old Tibetan labored over the task of preserving ancient texts in an illegal outpost of the purbas, the resistance, and wondered if he had received the letter Shan had dispatched in the purba’s secret network

  The garage was dark, except for the back room where Tserung’s teenage son lived, from which Chinese rock-and-roll music could be heard. Shan cautiously worked his way through the labyrinth of the junkyard, pausing halfway down the path to watch behind him.

  Shan had an irrational premonition that the rowdy little girl traveling with Meng’s companion might have followed him. He and Meng had actually been enjoying a quiet lunch, speaking of small things like the weather and her life by the Gobi, but after a quarter-hour the pair had burst in to join Shan and Meng as they ate. He had quickly come to view the girl as one of the monkey imps that plagued unharmonious households in old Confucian tales. She had broken a plate and a mug by willfully flinging them at the wall, squealing with delight, then scared away an old Tibetan couple by making faces at them, a sign of bad luck for the town’s traditional residents. Through the window he had watched them go straight to Shiva, no doubt for the astrologer to provide them with a protective charm. Not once had Meng offered an explanation of why she had brought such unlikely companions, but Shan had recalled that she had been raised in a rural area where the one-child policy would not have been strictly enforced and decided that they must be her sister and her unruly niece.

  Although Shan rejoined Meng in late afternoon after spending hours at his computer searching for details of the Five Claws and Larung Gar, there had been no more quiet time. They had spent much of the time picking up the child’s detritus, including shreds of notices she had ripped from the town bulletin board and shards of another smashed mug, this one thrown against the wall of a cell. He had surrendered his quarters in the building behind the station to them, telling them he would take a room at the little inn off the town square, then gone to sleep for an hour on a jail cot.

  Finally convinced he had not been followed by the female imp, Shan hurried on to the concealed door and descended into the clandestine library. He paused as he reached the bottom of the stairs, resolving not to breathe a word about Jiao’s plan to take over Yangkar. Tserung and Yara were at the table in the first chamber, looking bleary-eyed as they studied old manuscripts. Tserung brewed a fresh pot of tea as Yara guided Shan through a stack of old peche marked with slips of paper.

  “The journals kept in the old gompa go back over five hundred years,” Yara reminded Shan, “and even in the earliest there is mention of the Valley of the Gods. When the foundations of the Yangkar gompa were laid, an old hermit who had meditated in the valley for fifty years came to bless it. There are frequent references to Bonpo pilgrims en route to pay homage to the fierce old god who lived there, and to an annual ceremony in which representatives from the medical school up in the mountains asked the abbot’s permission to gather medicinal herbs there. The records mention that healers had been gathering sacred herbs there for centuries.” The young teacher looked up. “That means before Buddhist teachers arrived.”

  “There was a stone field there,” Shan explained, “a cemetery or perhaps a shrine that was probably thousands of years old. Was,” he repeated.

  A flicker of pain twisted Yara’s face. “There are similar references through all the decades we’ve sampled, though our page-by-page review is just reaching the eighteenth century tonight.”

  “There are other records about Bonpo pilgrims that refer to it as both the Valley of the Gods and Gekho’s Roost,” Tserung added. The mechanic had taken to carrying an old silver pen case on his belt, in the traditional style of novice monks.

  “Gekho was a mountain deity for the local people then?” Shan asked.

  “No, not just any earth deity,” Tserung corrected. “For the Bonpo he was the primary earth deity, Wolchen Gekho, the Wrathful Demon Destroyer, maker of lightning, thunder, and hail. Gekho the Blue some called him, for his skin was the color of the sky. When he got angry he would shake the ground humans walked on. Twice I found very old references to the place as Gekho’s Cradle, as if the valley was where he was born, when the earth was still young.”

  Shan sat and went through the laborious process of opening each of the long, loose-leafed peche on the table, reading the marked passages himself, getting lost for an hour in the aged, fading ink of the one-of-a-kind books, pausing over a delightful passage about a yak cow who would only yield milk when mantras were sung to her.

  He gave his eyes a rest by walking up and down the corridor, marveling as always at the vastness of the collection and the labor of the dedicated monks who had written, then carved plates and printed, the books. Pausing at the end of the corridor, Shan bent over a pile of little brown pellets in a shadowed corner, then plucked a tuft of coarse white hairs from where they had rubbed off on the stonewall above them. He contemplated his finding for several long breaths then returned to his friends, freshening their tea before taking a seat at their work table.

  “I couldn’t really understand why Lhakpa came to Yangkar,” he started. “A snow monk usually has friends somewhere who would gladly put him up when the weather is bitter. He lived in a village only a few day’s journey from here. But only Yangkar has an archive of the region, although its existence is supposed to be known by only a handful of us.”

  Bot
h Yara and Tserung suddenly seemed to take great interest in their mugs of tea.

  “Lhakpa was at Gekho’s Roost, just days ago. I saw his goat there and she wouldn’t be there without him. He fled when that team from the Institute came here and went straight there from Yangkar. He left abruptly but wanted me to go there as well, because he left me a map.”

  His friends remained silent.

  “You’ve spent hard hours here, I know, but I was thinking it was nothing short of a miracle that you had already gone through hundreds of books. He had already been looking at them. He had already marked many.”

  “He said to say nothing to you, Shan,” Tserung confessed in a worried voice. “But we would never lie to you.”

  “So he swore you to secrecy,” Shan said, and held his weary head in his hands for a moment, then went to the shelf where Tserung kept supplies and retrieved a stick of incense, lit it, and set it in its wooden block holder in the middle of the table. It was a way of calling the gods to witness.

  “Then I will tell you some of my secrets,” he declared, “and you can decide if I should know yours.” He explained the terrible morning when he had watched the execution of Metok, the false charges against the Tibetan engineer, and the deaths of the American woman and the professor in the ancient cavern shrine.

  “The cavern was not just a shrine,” Tserung said in a whisper. “For all of time the great earth deity, the grandfather of mountains, lived there.” He paused and pulled a book from the pile at the end of the table, then opened it to a page marked with a tattered silk ribbon. The image on the page was of a fierce, sixteen-armed demon protector whose skin was cobalt blue and whose hands were filled with weapons and tools. Tserung pointed to each object and identified it. “A sword, a sledgehammer maul, a bow and arrow,” he began then looked up when he had finished. “All used for battle or for shaping the earth. Lhakpa thought that was important. He was trying to learn all he could about this Gekho, to see if he could find a new way to reach the earth god, he said. If he had gone earlier, he would have been killed too with that Chinese professor and the American. But he was here,” the monk mechanic said, and gestured to the stacked peche. “The old books saved him.”