Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  The three men halted half a dozen paces from the mound. It was covered in black nylon cloth, and beside it was a yellow nylon vest. A red wool cap nearby was singed black by the fire. Shan and Winslow exchanged a grim glance. The black mound was in the shape of a body.

  Dremu tossed a pebble onto the black cloth, with no effect. Then the Golok spun about and studied the slope intensely. His hand closed around the hilt of his knife.

  Shan stepped forward reluctantly and lifted one end of the black nylon. It was a sack of some kind, a long bulky sack, and extremely light. He lifted the end to his waist with a sigh of relief. There was no body, only the sack, stuffed like a quilt.

  "Sleeping bag," Winslow said with a confused tone, and bent to pull the yellow vest from the ground. It was large enough to fit Shan and looked new. Under it, in a pile at the head of the bag, was a pair of blue denim pants with an American label. In a small nylon pouch were a black metal compass with a red cross and a dozen bars of something called high energy protein, labeled in English and Chinese.

  "There's no campfire." Shan gestured toward the scorched bowl. There was no ring of rocks, no cleared circle, no stones stacked for cooking. No campfire that had gone out of control. "And if lightning struck there would be a gash in the earth, some sign of a violent burst of heat."

  Winslow nodded slowly. The brush had been set on fire deliberately. "To burn the whole damn plain, you think? To keep someone away, maybe scare off pursuers? But air doesn't circulate in the bowl. The flames crept down and smoldered away."

  Shan bent and broke off one of the grey-green plants from a patch at the edge of the bowl and held it to his nose, detecting the same smell that hung in the air. As he pushed the sprig into his pocket Winslow bent over the bag and vest. "Expensive stuff," the American observed. "And all the labels are American, not just the jeans."

  "Your geologist?"

  "That's what I'm thinking," Winslow said as he examined the pockets of the jeans and vest. In the vest pocket was a government issued map of the region. The jeans yielded a plastic cigarette lighter, a pencil stub, a metal whistle on a lanyard- a device field teams might use to stay in contact when radios were not available. The American stuffed the vest, jeans, and singed hat into the sleeping bag, rolled it all into a tight bundle and tied it to his horse.

  They rode halfway up the slope, along a trail that arced along the ridge into a maze of huge boulders that soon became impassable for the horses. Dremu produced short lengths of rope and hobbled their mounts, letting them forage in the thin growth, then pointed out a goat path leading up the mountainside he would scout while Shan and Winslow explored the field of rocks.

  They searched futilely for half an hour, then climbed onto one of the boulders to scan the long plain again with their glasses. In the middle of the rolling green landscape was a blurred line of color. The caravan was moving northeast, as Lhandro had suggested, toward the grove of trees on the opposite side of the plain.

  "Sometimes in Tibet," Winslow said, "when it gets really quiet, in a place like this, I hear things. Like a groan or a shudder. Only bigger. My grandfather would have said it was giants talking in the mountains."

  Shan said nothing, but studied the landscape; first the plain again, then the slope around them. He couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.

  After a long silence the American sighed. "You don't trust me, do you, Shan?"

  "I don't believe you are what you say."

  "Call the embassy. Call Washington. I'll loan you my passport for verification."

  "I know something about working for governments. The Foreign Service is a career job. You should be halfway through your career."

  "Right."

  "And you are sent to collect the bodies of dead Americans? It's the job of a very junior officer at best."

  Winslow offered no reply.

  "And looking for the missing woman, that's a law enforcement job. Your government would ask the authorities in Beijing to find her. You say you came for that woman's body, but there is no body."

  Winslow silently stared over the plain. "I guess you could say I've been reincarnated into a lower life form by Foreign Service standards." He lifted a pebble and tossed it from one hand to the other, then glanced back at Shan with a frown. "Two years ago I was Deputy Commercial Attachein Beijing, engaged to be married to another Foreign Service officer, a cultural attache in Beijing. I had always been a high achiever, collected languages like some people collect coins. Marked for fast advancement because I was the only one who spoke all the major languages of China. I had an apartment outside the embassy compound.

  "There was a Chinese woman who did my cleaning. Over sixty years old, a real delight. Like the gentle old grandmother I never had. My fiancee and I started going to her home after we knew her a year, took her family out of the city for picnics at the Ming Tombs and the Summer Palace. After a while we noticed she wouldn't eat much of the food we brought for her and she always asked if we minded if she would take her share away. Eventually we found out she was giving it to orphans at a school run by one of those religious groups the government hates so much. The government support for the school had been dropped because the group had publicly demonstrated for freedom of religion. So the children were living on two bowls of rice a day. One day she didn't come to work and I found out that she had been arrested, along with all the teachers at the school. It took me a week before I could find her in a jail. They had beat her and ruptured her spleen, trying to get her to disavow her belief in her religion." When he looked at Shan there was pain on the American's face. "I never had much religion, but like my fiancee said, people have a right to find their god, and worship it in their own way," he said quietly, looking into his hands now.

  Shan nodded. In the end it was all that the Tibetans wanted to do.

  "I used my diplomatic credentials to go to the Ministry of Justice and make inquiries about her, ask for her release. The Ministry told the ambassador and the ambassador ripped off my stripes and broke my sword."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Did everything but fire me, because I had no authority to make such inquiries, because the U.S. keeps its hands off the way China treats her citizens. Said I'd be cleaning embassy bathrooms for the rest of my career. So my fiancee and I decided to quit. She left and got a teaching job in Colorado, and I went back on leave to get married and buy a house with her. Two months later I returned to interview for a job at the same university."

  "But you didn't quit," Shan pointed out.

  "No," Winslow said heavily, and looked out over the plain again before speaking. "It was winter when I flew back, in a bad snowstorm. The house was up in the mountains. On the way to the airport to pick me up she slid off the highway and into a river. Took them two days to recover her body. The morgue called me to ask if I knew she was two months pregnant." Winslow watched a hawk fly overhead. "I hadn't, but by then I had gone to the house. She had bought a set of baby furniture and had tied balloons all over it, to surprise me."

  Shan studied the American's face. Winslow didn't seem the same ebullient man he had seen riding the yak the day before.

  "I had nowhere to go, no roots anywhere, no family left alive. So I came back. Started volunteering for every shit job nobody wanted. Just to get away. Recover all the bodies for shipment home. Clean up after the ambassador's poodles."

  Shan felt an emptiness welling within. Somehow the American's words made him remember his father, who had been taken from him by the Red Guard, after stripping him of his beloved job as a professor because he taught Western history and had friends in Europe and America.

  "They shouldn't have arrested that old woman for helping orphans," Winslow said in a voice grown hoarse.

  "What happened to her?"

  "Died. She died in that jail and they sent her family a bill for cremating her."

  Shan stared at the American's hollow face. Winslow's woes had started with government service in Beijing. Everything that happened in life was co
nnected, Lokesh was fond of saying.

  "But still," Shan said. "You came here without a body to collect."

  Winslow offered a melancholy grin. "I lied to them, to my boss. The oil company had sent a copy of their personnel file on Larkin when she went missing. We figured there would be a body later, just not yet. I read the file. Same age as my wife. Marked by the company as a high achiever. Had been engaged to another company geologist, but he died in an avalanche in the Andes four years ago. After that she asked for the most remote assignments possible."

  "So you felt"- Shan searched for words. "Lokesh might say you were on similar awareness paths."

  Winslow's sad smile reappeared. "I told them I had a call, that her body had been sighted in the mountains. Only a little lie really. I'd be the one they would send eventually anyway."

  They sat watching the wind wash the spring growth on the plateau. Finally Shan sighed and stood. "I've heard that noise, too, when the land speaks like a groan. A lama told me it happens sometimes, when the earth senses its impermanence. It just groans." Strangely, Shan remembered sifting grains of white sand in his hand. He felt an intense longing to be with Gendun, or at least to know he was safe.

  As if on cue the land rumbled. The thunder came in three overlapping peals from the far distance. It seemed to be coming from the huge snowcapped mountain on the far side of the plain, the mountain that separated them from Yapchi Valley. But there were no clouds in the sky.

  As the sound faded a shrill shouting replaced it, a torrent of furious Tibetan. Winslow pointed to a figure two hundred feet below on a rock spur that overlooked the plain. It was Dremu, his knife raised over his head, brandishing it toward the far side of the plain as if he were answering the strange rumbling.

  The distance was too great for Shan to make out individual words but the anger in the Golok's voice was unmistakable. Anger at first, then a hint of fear, and finally what may have been desperation. Shan eased himself over the ledge they stood on and began climbing down.

  Dremu was squatting when they reached him, throwing stones in the direction of the northern mountains. He spun about at their approach, then sheepishly looked in the direction of the horses. "All right, we can ride. Lhandro is taking that monk to the water by the trees," he said, and tossed a stone toward a pile of cans in the shadow of the boulder. "I found those up the slope at a campsite," the Golok said. "With a lot of bootprints, new boots. Expensive boots. Nothing else. It was a week old."

  There were three empty cans, one of peaches, one of canned pork, and one of corn. Not Tibetan fare. The labels on the pork and corn were in English, the peaches in Chinese. Stuffed into one can was an empty wrapper for one of the protein bars they had seen below.

  "How far are we from Yapchi Valley?" Shan asked.

  "Maybe fifteen miles," Dremu replied.

  "But why would the Americans be so far away from their oil project?" Shan wondered out loud, surveying the high ridge above them that defined the northern end of the plain. "What's beyond this? On the other side?"

  "Nothing. A river. Steep ravines. Places only goats can walk."

  Shan studied the Golok. "Who were you so angry with? Was it because of that sound?" He still knew very little about the fiery, bitter man, other than that the purbas had asked him to help.

  "You wouldn't understand," the Golok said after a long silence.

  "I think that sound made you angry. That sound like thunder."

  "Thunder?" Dremu snapped. "You think it was thunder? Without a cloud in the sky? It was that damned Yapchi Mountain." He stood and raised his knife again, stabbing it toward the snowcapped peak. "It's the damndest mountain in the world. There's no mountain like it anywhere. Some say there's treasure buried in it, but I say it's full of demons." He had the air of a warrior about to do battle.

  Shan looked back toward the horizon. The mountain, and the valley beyond, was their destination, the home of the chenyi deity.

  "You speak like it was alive," Winslow said uneasily.

  Dremu winced and rolled his eyes at Shan, as though asking to be saved from foreigners who were ignorant about mountain deities, then turned and started down the trail.

  "The man you made a bargain with is dead," Shan said to his back. "You've been paid. It's not far now. Lhandro and Nyma can take me the rest of the way."

  The Golok slowly turned, anger back in his face. But an odd melancholy quickly replaced it.

  "I have little of value," Shan said, fighting the temptation to touch the ivory rosary in his pocket. "These old binoculars are the most valuable thing I own. But you can have them, and ride on, leave us. Just tell me one thing. Why are you angry at that mountain?"

  Dremu walked to the edge of the ledge they stood on, facing the mountain that dominated the northern horizon. "I spent a month there once with my father."

  Shan stepped to his side.

  "Those Lujun troops," Dremu said with a much quieter voice, "after what they did in Yapchi Valley they passed through my family's lands. In those days Goloks were to be feared. The Chinese knew they had to show respect or they would lose men. So like everyone else they paid their respect and moved on. They had orders to hurry home."

  "You mean they paid tribute," Shan suggested.

  Dremu nodded. "It was a tax everyone paid. So Goloks wouldn't shoot from the top of gorges, and would make sure others didn't. It was just a business. But my people didn't know what those Chinese had done in Yapchi. A week later when we learned of the massacre, my family was shamed. We wouldn't have taken that gold if we had known," he said, speaking as if it had just happened. "So my grandfather's father rode out to find those Chinese, to get the eye back or return the gold piece he had taken from the Chinese." He fixed Shan with a sour expression. "To claim his honor back," he added in a defiant tone, and began fingering a small leather pouch that hung beside his prayer gau.

  "It was very brave," Shan replied solemnly.

  "They shot him. The general did it himself. They had Tibetans helping with horses who saw. Shot him in the head and laughed. Then they hired a dropka to take the body back to us. They had sewed the gold into his pocket. Later monks came and made my family go to Yapchi and apologize to the survivors, and help them build new houses. Even other Goloks hated my family afterwards. There were stories about how old monks came in the summer to Yapchi, and sick Goloks once would go there to be healed. But all the healing stopped after that because the people there hated the Goloks so much." He gazed toward the horizon again. "Of course we rode with bandits after that." He kicked a stone off the ledge.

  "Those Lujun soldiers destroyed my family," he said. "My uncles rode away with bandits, or disappeared in cities. My father took me to that mountain one summer, looking for a monk, any monk who could help our family out of the blackness that had come over it. But by then there were no monks to be found anymore, so he meditated for days and days, trying to reach that Yapchi deity. But it only made him more sad. He knew the mountain was punishing him. He died not long after and my mother went to work in a city scrubbing Chinese floors. I was fourteen and had my own horse," Dremu added, as if it explained why he had stayed behind.

  The three men stood with the cool wind washing over them. It was mingled with the vaguest hint of flowers, like a subtle incense wafting over the plain. The Tibetans used incense to attract deities. Perhaps it was simply something in the air, Shan thought, that had caused first Winslow, then Dremu to speak of their tragedies. Shan was certain the Yapchi rongpa knew nothing of Dremu's story- and he had no idea of how they would react if they did know. He suspected that Winslow seldom shared his tale with anyone, even other Americans.

  "What do you mean the eye?" Winslow asked Dremu. "You said something about an eye. And the Lujun?"

  The Golok gestured at Shan, who winced. He began to explain about the eye and the valley. But it seemed the closer he got to Yapchi the less he understood about the eye.

  The story brought the sadness back to Winslow's face. He gazed at each of h
is companions in turn, and seemed about to speak, to ask something, but finally he turned and began slowly walking down the slope toward the horses.

  "How did the purbas find you?" Shan asked Dremu as they began following the American. "They chose you not just as a guide, but because you know about the eye."

  "Find me? I found them," Dremu said in a low voice, leaning close to Shan as if wary of the rocks overhearing. "Others knew the fifty-fourth had it, but I was the one who discovered exactly where. I found the Tibetan worker the soldiers paid to clean their damned toilets and sometimes he loaned me his identity card. I found it on that colonel's desk. That bastard Lin. I made plans, careful plans, but one night some purbas caught me outside the army headquarters and asked me what I was doing. When I told them I was going to steal the stone they laughed, but kept me in a house for two days. That Drakte came and said no, don't steal it, not if you really want to hurt the Chinese. Just tell us how to get inside Lin's office then meet the eye at that hermitage and help get it to Yapchi. Drakte said they would pay me for what Goloks always did best, watching in the mountains and avoiding troops. They didn't want me in Lhasa. Because they had someone else who had to steal it."

  As if it had been listening, Yapchi Mountain replied with another of its ominous rumbles.

  Chapter Seven

  They rode at a brisk trot over the high plain, their horses seeming eager to catch up with the caravan. Perhaps, Shan thought, the animals were unsettled by the plain, experiencing the same sensations he did, a vague presence, an expectation in the air. He could find no words to describe the feeling. It wasn't fear, although Dremu frequently rose in his stirrups to look about as if wary of pursuit. There were moments when Shan even felt an unexpected exhilaration as they loped across the wild, remote plain. The high ridges that bounded it on three sides gave it a remote, secret air, a sense of being a world untouched and apart.

  As they closed with the caravan he slowed his horse and dismounted, letting Dremu and Winslow catch up with the others as he walked behind. He studied the column of animals and people stretched out over the windblown plain and realized how, during the more peaceful moments of the past few days, he had come to think of their journey as a pilgrimage. He considered the odd assembly. The young girl who spoke for the deities. Nyma the uncertain, illegal nun. The rongpa who thought a jagged piece of stone would protect them from the Chinese. Dremu the bitter warrior, who searched for a way to restore dignity to his family. Perhaps they were more like fugitives than pilgrims. Tenzin the escapee. The American, fleeing from a life and career of disappointment. Perhaps even the Yapchi villagers themselves, now that Colonel Lin had glimpsed Lhandro and Nyma and confiscated Lhandro's papers.