Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  “I have experienced the dead far too often,” Shan admitted.

  The ragged old man gave a sympathetic nod, then pushed the end of one of his bundles of juniper into the embers. “We all know the Bardo, the words for the truly dead. But how do you deal with the half-dead? How do you raise them from in-between?”

  “I don’t understand,” Shan confessed.

  “When the body and soul change their mind. I keep thinking if I let the gods take me, I might see enough to—”

  “There you are, Constable!” a female voice interrupted. Jaya appeared out of the shadows. “The worker who came to visit wants to thank you in person for helping Yeshe in the infirmary. He wrote a prayer he wants you to keep in your pocket.” She pulled Shan to his feet with an insistent gleam in her eyes. As they left the little clearing Shan looked back at the old man, then paused until Jaya yanked his arm. Yankay was shaking his staff with one hand and waving the bundle of smoldering juniper with the other as he murmured beseechingly to the heavens. He was trying to raise the half-dead.

  * * *

  The next morning Jaya insisted Shan ride a horse back to his truck and she accompanied him so she could lead the mount back to their mountain camp. They left under the harsh gaze of four rough-looking Tibetan men, who had arrived in the night, all of whom wore red yarn in their long shaggy hair, marking them as khampa, the fierce, defiant people of the Kham highlands who would probably still be fighting the Chinese if the Dalai Lama hadn’t implored them to stop years earlier. The khampa were filling the packs of half a dozen yaks with artifacts from the hidden cache, assisted by Lhakpa, who packed the more fragile pieces in layers of dried grass. The khampa did not acknowledge either Jaya or Shan as they rode past, other than to pull scarves up to cover half their faces, which suited Shan. He did not want to know who they were or where they were going with the treasures. As he watched them he recalled how Shiva had painted a line of yaks with Buddhas on their backs. How could she have known about the convoys carrying Buddhist treasures?

  As they rode, Jaya frequently looked up at the sky. A storm had passed through in the night, but the sky had cleared. He knew she was skittish about the aerial drone, which could reveal their secrets to Public Security. Her worries faded as they began to descend the southern slope of the huge mountain and she spoke to her horse in admiring tones, sometimes even singing old songs from Tibetan horse festivals. She even asked Shan wary questions about Lhasa and asked him to explain what the Olympics were. She reminded him a lot of Yara, another bright, inquisitive woman who had been denied a broader engagement with the world.

  “I was honored to meet Yankay last night,” Shan said.

  “He seemed…” Jaya tried to find a word, “comfortable with you.”

  “I sensed he was somehow sad about being a hail chaser.”

  Jaya nodded. “He says his soul is always itching, and he does not know how to scratch it. Sometimes Uncle Yankay says he is just the edge of a sword that can never be sharpened.”

  Shan looked at her in surprise. “Your uncle? Yankay and Lhakpa are brothers?” He had not understood the connection between the two men, just as he had not understood Lhakpa’s bitter statement uttered when Shan had described the death of the old lama at the 404th. It should have been me, he had said, as if Lhakpa had wanted to die.

  “Yes. Yankay is many years older and as the first son had gone to a monastery. He was still a novice when the Chinese army came. He had always felt he would be a hail chaser, for even as a boy something inside him stirred at the coming of storms and earthquakes. His gompa had two of the most celebrated hail chasers in all of Tibet, who had begun to teach him. But they died when the Chinese came, and he fled into a cave with some of their books. Once when I was seven or eight I saw a demon dancing above our barley field, dressed in twigs and grass, with a long white horse tail fixed to a staff. My mother said, ‘That’s no demon, that’s your uncle Yankay.’ He would come like that every few months, and my mother would have me take a sack of barley and leave it at the edge of the field for him.

  “Then after my parents died, I lived with neighbors and he would still come, though my new family had little to spare. I would save half the barley I was supposed to eat and give it to him. Once there was a letter on the rock where I left his food. It simply said, Jaya, I will try to be near, but I cannot be at your side, for your own safety. After that, he would leave letters each time he came, and when I was twelve he wrote that I must go to school and bloom into the flower I was meant to be.” She grew melancholy for a moment, then brightened. “He didn’t know I was going to be a prickly rose,” she said and urged her horse down the trail.

  When they reached his truck, he expected her to quickly ride back up the mountain, but instead she dismounted and tied the horses to a gnarled pine. At first, she walked cautiously toward the truck, watching the surrounding outcroppings, but then she abruptly gasped and ran past him.

  Shan stared in some chagrin as she excitedly pointed to half a dozen pockmarks on the hood and roof of his truck. The storm from the night had brought hail to Ice Ball Alley.

  “Look!” Jaya exclaimed, pointing in turn to each of the dents, which looked like they had been made by hail the size of ping-pong balls.

  “I should have parked lower on the slope,” Shan said.

  “No, no! You don’t understand! The water from the melted hail is in each of the dents! The old ones claim such water is very powerful, straight from the hands of the earth gods. They soak charms in it. We must save it!”

  In an energetic search of Shan’s truck, the Tibetan woman found an old drinking straw and an empty soda bottle left by the soldier who had followed Zhu in Shan’s vehicle the night they had driven to Lhadrung from Lhasa. Jaya cleansed both in the spring at the nearby pilgrims’ rest, then, clamping a thumb over one end of the straw, used it to suction up the water. She collected less than two inches in the bottle but pressed the sacred water to her breast for a quick prayer, then made Shan hold it while she carved a plug from a piece of the old pine. She carefully secured the bottle in the bag behind her saddle but hesitated before mounting. “Do you need that old newspaper on the seat?” she asked, then quickly snatched it up when Shan gestured to it with a nod. “Do you have any tape? String?”

  Despite his confusion, Shan let her search the truck more thoroughly, and soon she added to her saddlebag a roll of adhesive tape from his small medical kit and a length of thin wire from his glove box. She looked longingly at Shan’s high boots, and with a grin he gave up his laces. Then she put her hand on the canvas medical kit, emitting a joyful cry when he nodded again. To his surprise she gave him a quick embrace before darting to the horses. He watched, amused and still confused, as she trotted up the slope, then he filled his water bottle at the pilgrim spring and climbed back into his truck.

  He had driven almost an hour before he noticed that in searching the glove box Jaya had left his new satellite phone on the seat, under his maps. He switched it on. Five minutes later it rang.

  Amah Jiejie spoke in a peeved tone. “The colonel gave you the phone for communication, not as a paperweight. He’s been trying to reach you since yesterday afternoon.”

  “I’ve been in the mountains,” Shan said, before he realized it was no excuse for a satellite phone.

  He could hear her sigh. “I’ll tell him you had battery problems. Hold on.”

  Tan was never one for the niceties of conversation. “My janitor was attacked,” the colonel declared. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Jampa, the one who smuggled out the message from Metok. Thieves assaulted him. How soon can you get to the hospital?”

  * * *

  Lhadrung’s small infirmary had grown as the army had expanded its presence in the town, so that it now sat not at the edge of town but at the edge of the sprawling military compound that adjoined the town, with a new wing that provided a door for civilians at the front and one for military patients at the r
ear. The hospital’s handful of doctors were all army officers.

  Major Xun was waiting at the front steps and escorted Shan around the building to the military entrance. Tan was pacing, very impatiently, outside a patient room on the first floor, next to the small emergency center. Jampa, the old Tibetan Shan had met at Tan’s office, lay in the solitary bed inside, his face and hands swollen and bandaged. His eyes were fixed so blankly on the ceiling that Shan thought he was dead. Tan motioned Shan inside and shut the door, leaving Xun in the corridor.

  “I don’t care about Metok or Huan right now,” the colonel snapped. “I want the bastards who did this!”

  “What happened?”

  “He was set upon in an alley last night. In my town! Took what little money he had and fled, the cowards! I want you to find whoever did this and I will personally inflict blows to match what they did to him!”

  Shan lifted the chart from the bedstand then looked again at the man’s arms, one of which was broken, held up in a sling, exposing its tattooed number. Jampa had been a prisoner, one of the many who found menial jobs in Lhadrung after release because travel papers were denied them. He gazed for a moment at the man, wondering what he had been before imprisonment.

  Tan followed his gaze. “Yes, a convict. But he was a good man. He had been a scribe in the old days, you know, making those manuscripts the Tibetans use.” The colonel caught himself. “He was tainted by his reactionary ways but was cured of them. We never talked about all that. He paid his price and learned very passable Chinese during his time. Reformed his ways,” Tan added uneasily.

  Years earlier it would have been unheard of for the tyrant of Lhadrung to engage in conversation with a former prisoner, let alone befriend and defend one. Was the colonel just finding compromise, or growing weak? Probably, Shan decided, Tan would consider them the same thing.

  He read the rest of the chart, then studied the old Tibetan more closely. Broken arm, broken ankle, and a skull fracture. His assailants had used a metal bar on him, probably a reinforcing rod from one of the construction sites, judging by the ridges Shan saw along the fracture of his skull. But none of these would kill him. What was killing him was his ruptured kidney.

  “Jampa!” Tan said, barking the name like an order. The old man stirred slowly, painfully turning his head toward Tan to smile. His chest rattled as he breathed. His body seemed to shake and he nodded. Then he looked at Shan with pleading eyes and the rattling stopped.

  “Jampa!” Tan shook the man’s shoulder.

  Shan lifted the Tibetan’s wrist, searching for a pulse. “He’s gone, Colonel.”

  Tan seemed not to hear. “Jampa!” he repeated, then turned to Shan. “Get a doctor!”

  “He’s dead.”

  Tan collapsed onto the bedside chair. “He wasn’t so old really, only seventy-four, he told me last week. He said he knew a place where we could go fishing, up in the hills.” He looked up with despair. “Find those damned thieves!”

  “It wasn’t thieves,” Shan said, still feeling the shock of those beseeching eyes. “Somehow the killers found out that he had delivered the message from Metok. They had to silence him. What else did he know?”

  “He never said anything more to me. I only saw him once since the day he delivered Metok’s message. He was terrified. He said he had stopped sleeping so he could spend his free time praying.”

  “Lieutenant Huan,” Shan said. “You need to find out if he was in Lhadrung last night.”

  Tan cursed, then nodded. He lifted the dead man’s gnarled, withered hand and clasped it between his own hands. After several breaths he turned away to summon an army doctor, who bent over Jampa for a moment, glanced at his watch, and made a note on the dead man’s chart. “Dr. Anwei,” Tan muttered in introduction to Shan, then threw an unwelcoming glance at Xun, who had followed the doctor into the room.

  “The other one has to go now,” Anwei declared.

  “Other one?” Shan asked.

  The doctor gestured with his pen toward the door adjoining the room. “The old man in the bathroom. He said he could make any place an altar.” The doctor suddenly saw Colonel Tan’s withering glance. “They were friends. It seemed to calm the patient,” he added.

  The scent of incense wafted from the darkened bathroom as Shan opened the door. He could hear a whispered mantra and the rattle of rosary beads. Major Xun pushed past Shan and switched on the light. Suddenly the painful visit to the hospital became a nightmare.

  Sitting on the floor before a smoky cone of incense was Shan’s old friend Lokesh. The aged Tibetan looked up, blinking from the harsh, sudden light. “You can join me!” he said as he recognized Shan. Lokesh, who had once worked in the Dalai Lama’s government, had spent most of his life behind the wire of prison camps. Shan had been nearly dead, in body and soul, when he had first collapsed onto a bunk in the 404th People’s Construction Brigade. More than anyone else, Lokesh had been responsible for reviving him, first nursing him to health and then nurturing his spirit. The gentle old Tibetan, long suffering from guilt over being a citizen of the government that had destroyed Tibet, had absolved it by destroying his identity card and now lived in a secret outpost helping the resistance preserve old manuscripts.

  “Whatever are you doing here?” Shan demanded. Tan’s anger was visibly rising. Xun pushed forward to see Lokesh.

  “Helping Jampa recover!” Lokesh explained in Tibetan. “He had written to me, said terrible things were happening in Lhadrung, and that he and I should take some days together to build a mandala in the old style, so the gods would pay better attention to events here.” He was referring to the sand paintings of intricate symbols and patterns that once had been one of the most sacred elements of Buddhist ritual.

  Shan helped the old man to his feet. Xun had fixed Tan with an expectant look, waiting for the signal to detain Lokesh. If arrested, he would spend the rest of his life in prison, assuming he would survive his interrogation. “It’s too late,” Shan said as Lokesh rose. With a wrenching groan Lokesh stumbled to the dead man’s bed. Low sounds of despair escaped his throat, and he bent over Jampa, urgently whispering the first words of the Bardo, the death ceremony that was needed to ease the old man’s passage into the next life.

  Surprisingly no one uttered a word, and no one tried to stop Lokesh. After two or three minutes he straightened and spoke to Shan, but switched to Mandarin as if to taunt Tan and Xun. “In the letter Jampa sent me he said a man named Metok was being falsely condemned to death, that Metok was being executed because he knew certain things about that new project on the sacred mountain.”

  A tight knot formed in Shan’s belly. “You need to go,” he said, pulling on Lokesh’s arm. “My truck is outside.”

  “No, not possible. I will have to stay here, to help Jampa. Someone has to say the death rites.”

  Xun laughed. Tan glared at Shan, who desperately looked about the chamber as if it might reveal a solution. He spied a bag of clothing on a chair in the corner.

  “You don’t have to be beside his body,” Shan reminded Lokesh. “You just have to be in touch with his spirit.”

  “It’s better to be with the body for the first day or two of the rites,” Lokesh replied.

  “Not possible,” Shan pushed back as he retrieved the bag of clothing. “This is an army base.”

  “He was one of my closest friends in prison during my first twenty years. I knew him as a boy even, Shan, before I was…” Lokesh had the sense not to announce his old role in the Dalai Lama’s government. “I knew him before.”

  Shan lifted the bag. “We will take his mala and his gau. We will take his belongings. His spirit will follow. We will arrange them somewhere in Yangkar, and you can sit with them and continue the Bardo.”

  “But I need to confront the evil men here with the truth,” Lokesh protested, still speaking in Mandarin. “I promised Jampa. They need cleansing, or more evil will follow.”

  Tan looked like he was close to erupting. Xun watched wi
th a ravenous expression.

  “Look to Jampa’s spirit first,” Shan said. Lokesh contemplated Shan’s words then slowly nodded his agreement and removed Jampa’s gau and mala. The old man shook them over Jampa’s head, as if to get the dead man’s attention, then slowly backed out of the room, the rosary and prayer amulet raised in the air as he continued the words of the death ritual.

  Shan had loaded Lokesh into his vehicle under the watchful eye of Major Xun when he realized he had forgotten Jampa’s shoes, which Lokesh would want for his ritual. As he lifted them from under the dead man’s bed he heard a quiet sob and looked up to see Amah Jiejie sitting on a chair in the shadowed corner.

  “He never hurt anyone,” she said with a sob as Shan approached. “He never deserved this.” The matronly Chinese woman dabbed at her cheek, then fixed her eyes on Jampa. “He was softening the colonel, helping us understand things.”

  “Us?” Shan asked.

  She nodded. “I was frightened for my life and Jampa took away my fear.”

  Shan pulled up a chair beside her. “Please, I want to hear about it.”

  The gray-haired woman spoke in a whisper, watching the door. “Last month something terrible happened. Jampa helped me. It was a piece of paper rolled up and inserted into the eye sockets of a little animal skull, left in my lunch bag. The paper had words in Tibetan and terrible drawings. A big scorpion. A fox or a wolf, rows of human skulls, and above them a sketch of a larger skull, with three eye holes. It was a death threat, what else could it be? Jampa found me staring at it, pale as a ghost. But Jampa took it and said not to worry. He threw the skull out the window and said the paper was more like someone’s bad joke.”

  “Why would he call it a joke?” Shan asked.

  Amah Jiejie reached down and extracted a wad of paper from the bottom of the big bag she used as a purse. “I wasn’t sure how to destroy it. I was going to ask Jampa.”