Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  "I am going to Beijing," Lokesh announced, his eyes glistening now. "I will travel north like a pilgrim, to gain merit. And my destination will be the home of the one they call the Chairman, in the capital."

  At first Shan wanted to laugh, but then he saw the determination in the old Tibetan's eyes, and a chill rose inside him. He clenched his jaw and stared at his mudra again. "You cannot."

  Lokesh shrugged. "I have strong legs. I just go north for perhaps two months, then east for another three or four."

  "I mean you will never be permitted. You could not make it," Shan said, with a sound like a moan.

  "I must go alone, my friend," Lokesh said, as if Shan had offered to accompany him. "This is a thing for my deity, not yours. And it is too dangerous for you in China."

  "They will never let you within half a mile of him," Shan said, and for a moment found himself short of breath. His Tibetan uncle wanted to sacrifice himself to the same people who had killed Shan's father and his blood uncles.

  Lokesh put a hand on Shan's back and held it there, as if trying to get the sense of his heart. "I am not telling you to frighten you. I told my mother I would go and speak with the Chairman, so he understands the truth of things here. I wanted you to understand, for when the time comes for us to separate." He pointed out a solitary goose flying toward the setting sun. Shan watched him, then the goose, until Nyma called them to eat.

  At the camp Lhandro revealed a bladder of fresh yogurt, a gift from the dropka at the lake, and a skin of cream which, having been jostled all day on one of the pack saddles, had become thick, sweet butter. The rongpa rolled the butter with their tsampa into little balls and enthusiastically consumed them with bowls of tea. As the others arranged the heavy felt blankets about the floor of the tent, Shan took his blanket outside and lay studying the night sky, fighting a bleakness inside. Some of the Tibetans believed struggling souls passed through many levels of hell before freeing themselves. In his particular hell he alone could see the torment and suffering approaching those he held closest to his heart, but could do nothing to prevent it.

  He awoke suddenly, not aware until that moment that he had been asleep. With a catch in his breath he realized that a meteor had passed overhead, close by. But he had no memory of having seen it. It was not the first time this had happened in recent months. He had told Lokesh about a similar incident during their pilgrimage, and his old friend had seemed to find it cause for celebration, saying it was a sign of new awareness. "If your awareness experienced it within," Lokesh had said, "is it not as real as if your eyes had seen it from without?" But then, as now, the experience unnerved Shan. Holding on to reality was difficult enough in his world, without having his Tibetan friends try to teach him it came in many different forms.

  Wide awake now, he lay watching the moon rise over the mountains and gradually was able to push back the pain that obscured the way he saw Drakte's death in his mind's eye, so he could replay it slowly, again and again, searching for a clue, for a hidden meaning. He saw Drakte's chin rise and his brow tighten as the dobdob had appeared. Though the purba had carried a belt knife his hand had gone not to the knife but to his prayer amulet. Drakte's reaction had not been that of a warrior defending those he had vowed to protect. But the purba's other hand had been doing something else. He played the scene again and again. Drakte's left hand had been pushing his bag back, hiding the drawstring sack with the sling and the ledger book with the innocuous entries about the dropka.

  Shan became aware of a strange ebbing and flowing in the gentle breeze, then realized it was a low sound, rising and falling, a moan. He sat up. Not a moan. A chant, even a song.

  Slowly, stealthily, he followed the sound over a hillock. A dark shape blocked the path. Lhandro had set a guard, he knew. But he froze as he saw it was one of the mastiffs. The animal simply raised its head toward him and turned toward a rock ten feet down the slope, as if directing Shan's attention there.

  Anya sat on the rocks staring at a brilliant star on the horizon. The sound Shan heard, louder now, was coming from her lips, though he couldn't say what it was. Not a song exactly, but a sound like some of the old lamas made when using their voices in meditation, a sound that grew out of a mantra but became, at least to the untrained ear, a resonation that communicated not to the ears but some other sense, a folding of sound that could not possibly have come simply from the tongue and vocal cords.

  He had heard such a sound before. Shan had asked Lokesh about it once when they had found a hermit making the same low wrenching sound on a high ledge. Lokesh had shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. "It's what you get, when you strip away the flesh of words," he had said earnestly. "It's just the way a spirit sounds when it's not communicating with humans."

  He sat beside the girl and watched the stars. If she was not communicating with humans, he wondered, who was it she was trying to reach?

  At last Anya's voice drifted off and they sat in silence.

  "It's a long way we have to go," the girl said.

  Although he felt strangely close to the girl, Shan realized it was the first time she had spoken to him. "Nearly a hundred miles to Yapchi," he observed quietly.

  "No, not that," the girl said slowly, in the patient tone of a teacher, "if you and I are to bring the old eye into focus, there are many shadows to explore first, many knots to untie."

  Shan considered the words for a moment. "You and I?"

  "When it said this in me," the girl said cryptically, "I didn't understand at first. But I believe it now."

  "I'm sorry," Shan said with a chill in his belly. "Who said something to you?"

  "I was in a barley field turning earth with a hoe when it found me the first time. Nyma found me, shaking on the ground. It's only happened four times before. They say when I'm older they may need to keep me in a nunnery, if they can find one. They said in the old days I would have been sent to live in the convent after the first time."

  Shan stared at the girl hard, trying to piece together the puzzle she had spoken. Then, he recalled Lhandro's words, how Anya had been found lying on a rock, reciting strange scriptures. And before, at the lake. She spoke the words of deities, Lhandro had said. "The oracle," he whispered. "You are the oracle."

  The girl gave a thin laugh. "Not the oracle," she explained in a patient voice. "Some call me that, but an oracle is not in human form. Oracle deities just use certain humans as vehicles sometimes."

  The words made Shan sad somehow. Maybe it was the hint of helplessness in Anya's voice. Maybe it was because he remembered stories from the monks about the mediums who had once resided in the large gompas near Lhasa. They had been nervous, often frail creatures, usually short-lived, because when they were taken over by the oracle they suffered terrible fits and spasms, like seizures, that could last for days and exacted a terrible toll on their bodies.

  Anya studied the stars, then abruptly turned to him again. "What if the valley was locked for some reason and the eye was its key? What if we opened it without understanding why it was locked?" The words came in an urgent rush, as if she had been contemplating a long time how to ask him.

  "All I know," Shan said after another silence, "is that when I begin a long journey my mind is often plagued with doubt over where it will lead, about what comes after the one thousandth step, or the ten thousandth. So I try to make myself concerned only with the next step, then the next after that, so that eventually the ten thousandth becomes just another next step. By then we will all understand the eye better." His own words surprised him. He was speaking like the Tibetans, as if the chenyi stone were alive.

  The girl nodded vigorously, as if it were exactly the answer she needed. Behind her, the dog stood, then she stood, as though the dog's movement had been a signal, and she stepped with the animal into the darkness.

  Shan looked after her, not sure he had understood any of their conversation. In fact, the more he learned of the people from Yapchi the more it seemed he didn't know. They seemed to have bee
n cut off from the world for so long a wary, feral spirituality had overtaken them. But in his heart he knew they weren't that different from many other Tibetans he had met, each of who seemed comprised of many layers of mysteries and perceptions. The land itself was such a rich, vast tapestry of people and beliefs that the term Buddhism often seemed a meager label for the complex ways Tibetans viewed their world.

  A low rumble rose over the blackened landscape. Shan searched for thundercaps but saw none in the clear night sky, instead spying a cluster of four red lights soaring across the heavens. Chinese fighter jets on high altitude patrol. As he watched the planes a deep sense of grief welled up within him, and stayed with him long after the planes disappeared over the horizon.

  The caravan had been underway for two hours the next day when Shan, leading a packhorse, noticed a flicker of movement on the slope a hundred yards above them. He stopped and stared, finally discerning a man standing with a horse in the shadow of a large boulder.

  Lhandro, behind Shan, whistled sharply, halting the caravan. "Damned Golok," he muttered.

  As the figure on the slope stepped into the sunlight Shan saw that it was indeed Dremu, who seemed to search the caravan, then began waving at Shan, gesturing for him to come closer.

  "Don't," Lhandro warned. "He could have friends hidden in the rocks. A man like that can't stop being a bandit."

  Shan ignored the advice, but found himself watching the surrounding rocks warily as he jogged toward the Golok. "I didn't expect to see you again," he called out when he got within earshot.

  "I got paid, didn't I?" Dremu snapped back. "Paid to get you through to Yapchi. Not to share tea with the likes of them," he said with a nod toward the caravan. "I go where the eye goes," he said in an oddly fierce tone.

  "They're good people," Shan said.

  Dremu frowned. "There's something," he said, "someone-" He glanced over his shoulder. "I don't know what to do with her," he said in a low voice, as though he did not want the rongpa to hear. He pulled his horse about and stepped behind the boulder onto a game trail that led toward the top of the low ridge. Shan turned to see Lokesh climbing the slope toward him, then slowly followed Dremu up the trail. He caught up with him just beyond the crest, where Dremu was kneeling beside a short, stunted juniper growing in the lee of a boulder.

  Shan stepped past Dremu and discovered a small, frail-looking woman sitting against the rock. Perhaps fifty years of age, she wore a ragged grey wool scarf on her shoulders, over which hung several necklaces of coral and turquoise. Two small, tough hands extended from her heavily patched chuba, one clutching a mala, a rosary, the other a prayer scarf. On the ground beside her, resting on a piece of cloth, was a small copper prayer wheel.

  Shan bent over the woman. "Ku su depo yinbay?" he asked in Tibetan. How are you?

  "La yin, la yin," she replied with a weak smile. I'm fine.

  But she wasn't fine. Her eyes had a sickly yellow cast, and Shan saw now that the hand with the khata, the prayer scarf, was pressed against her side, as if trying to touch the scarf to a pain in her abdomen. The woman gazed past Shan with a determined glint, as if trying to will him away.

  "She was sitting here when I rode by," Dremu said. "Didn't even seem to notice me. She just kept staring down the trail," he said, gesturing toward the trail that climbed along the far side of the ridge, coming from the south.

  Shan looked down the trail. "As if she's expecting someone." It was a remote, inhospitable landscape. Weeks could pass without a human entering the small, high valley the woman was looking into. He sensed movement behind him, and Lokesh appeared, his face creased with worry, his palm extended to touch the woman's head. He lifted her hand with the beads and placed three fingers, spread apart, inside the wrist. Once Shan had heard Lokesh bemoan how little he knew about healing despite his years with medicine lamas, but Gendun had rejoined that the most important aspect of healing was the moral quality of the healer, and in that aspect Lokesh was an adept.

  After listening to the woman's pulses at both wrists Lokesh straightened and placed his fingertips on her cheek. "We must restore you," he said quietly.

  The woman stared a long time at Lokesh, studying him, as if perhaps trying to recognize him, then she offered her weak smile again. Her hand with the mala reached out and touched the prayer wheel.

  "Come with us," Lokesh said. "We can make you comfortable."

  "Are you truly one of the old ones?" she asked, still studying Lokesh intently.

  Lokesh rubbed the white stubble of whisker on his chin and looked at Shan as though uncertain how to reply. "We have horses," he said. "You could ride a horse."

  The woman shielded her eyes with one hand and stared at Lokesh's face. She offered another strained smile, then settled her gaze on the trail again. It was as if she were expecting a healer, but had decided that Lokesh was not the healer she was waiting for.

  "How long have you been here?" Shan asked.

  The woman shrugged, without moving her gaze from the slope. "Two days I think." She slowly turned and searched Shan's face a moment as though she were about to ask him what day it was.

  "Can you walk?"

  "Of course," she said with a slightly impatient tone, then was seized by a fit of coughing. "I got here," she added hoarsely when the coughing had passed.

  Shan sighed and exchanged a frustrated glance with Lokesh. "You should have a hat for the sun. What happened to your hat?"

  "It blew away," she stated flatly and watched the trail again. Some Tibetans clung steadfastly to the old belief that once a hat blew off it was bad luck to retrieve it.

  Shan removed the brown, broad-rimmed hat he had been wearing for the past three months and placed it on the woman's head, tugging it down for a tight fit. The woman slowly lifted her hand and touched the brim, as though about to pull it off.

  "A monk gave me that hat," Shan said, "near the sacred mountain, Kailas. He said I looked cold. I'm not cold anymore."

  The woman's yellow eyes blinked at him, as if to express gratitude, and the hand dropped into her lap.

  Shan left her with Lokesh, passing Dremu, who still hung back watching nervously, and retrieved a bag of tsampa and a water bottle from the caravan. When he returned no one seemed to have moved, except Lokesh was holding his own beads now, reciting a mantra.

  "Who is coming here?" Shan asked as he stuffed the food and water between the woman and the rock. "Who do you expect?"

  "The one who understands it all," she said in a new, serene voice. Her gaze still did not leave the trail.

  Shan touched Lokesh on the shoulder and the old man reluctantly rose, fumbled in his pocket, then placed the fossil rock in the woman's lap. "It's a powerful tonde," he said, "from Lamtso."

  But she did not seem to hear, did not acknowledge the gesture, or shift her gaze from the trail as they stepped back over the crest of the ridge.

  "Right," Dremu said. "The one who knows it all. Uncle Yama, that's who she expects, he's the one who knows." Dremu meant the Lord of Death, Yamantaka. "Waste of food and water," he groused. "Just her way of ending things. Hell, with the leopards and wolves in these hills, she won't even need to be taken to the body cutters." He mounted his horse and trotted away to the north, still keeping the caravan at a distance.

  The image of the feeble woman alone on the side of the mountain haunted Shan most of the day as they wound their way toward the pass over the second of the four ranges of mountains that separated them from Yapchi. The woman had been waiting for someone coming from the south, coming along the difficult, unlikely trail that followed the crest of the ridges. But the ones most likely to come from the south were not healers.

  As they stopped for lunch, Lhandro unfolded his tattered map on a flat stone and with his finger traced the course they would take for the seventy miles remaining to Yapchi Valley. It was not the most direct route, but a remote path that kept them far from the north-south highway and even away from the few low valleys at the edge of the changtang that he
ld farming settlements. It would take two or three days longer than the traditional route of the salt caravans, Lhandro explained, but it would almost guarantee they would not be observed. Shan had seen Nyma speaking with Lhandro on several occasions, pointing south, scanning the horizon. As Lhandro folded his map Shan saw a solitary figure on a ledge, also looking south. Lokesh joked sometimes that Tenzin must be worried about leaving behind all the yak droppings they were passing in their travels. But Shan saw the worry etched on the mute Tibetan's face, and remembered the anguish he had evidenced over Drakte's death.

  Tenzin turned at Shan's approach and began to step off the ledge, but Shan stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Did Drakte help you escape from your prison?" Shan asked. Tenzin tried to pull away with a resentful glance but Shan would not let him go, fixing him with a level stare until the emotion left the Tibetan's face. Tenzin nodded soberly, then pulled from Shan's grip.

  After another hour on the trail they rounded a bend to find Dremu squarely in the path, sitting in his saddle with his left leg on his horse's neck, lazily cutting an apple with the elaborate knife the purba runner Somo had given to him.

  Shan hurried to the front of the column.

  "Pass is blocked!" the Golok called out loudly, as if he preferred that they keep their distance. "Snow avalanche."

  "Not likely," Lhandro called back, just as loudly. "It was clear when we came through. Supplies are hidden there. Food for the sheep. There is no grass that high in the mountains."

  "Spring melt shifted the slopes. That pass is under twenty feet of snow now," Dremu declared, and pointed toward the pass, still miles away. Its outline was visible, but its details obscured under the shadows of low clouds. But when Shan handed Lhandro his field glasses the rongpa studied not the pass but the alternative trail that could be seen leading toward the east, circumventing the tallest of the peaks. He suspected the Golok's motives, Shan realized, and was studying the trail for signs of unwelcome strangers. After a long moment the village headman gazed at the Golok with a sour frown, then motioned for the caravan to continue north.