Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  The guards stared at Shan and his friends as they filed out of the stable, several glancing back at Tuan, whose eyes found, and stayed on, Shan. They watched Shan intensely, not accusing but calculating. When Tuan saw Shan return his stare Tuan nodded pointedly. You will have to decide soon, Tuan had told Shan. An accounting was coming.

  "These are confusing times," Padme observed as they approached the gate ten minutes later, Lhandro holding a paper sack of dumplings and apples from the kitchen.

  "May the Compassionate Buddha protect you," Lokesh called tentatively as they walked out of the gate.

  Padme's head jerked back and he nodded. "Exactly," he said, in an odd, offhanded tone. "And you." Then he straightened and spoke more loudly, as though for an audience. "May the Compassionate Buddha protect you," he called out, and smiled toward the ragged group of Tibetans who sat among the houses outside the gate.

  They walked for an hour without speaking, Lhandro in the lead, walking so rapidly Nyma had to trot sometimes to keep up. Finally, when the gompa was far out of sight behind the hills they stopped at a small stream.

  "Who is that Tuan?" Lhandro blurted out in a low, urgent whisper, as if the question had burned his tongue since leaving the gate, and he still feared being overheard. "Why did they- what have they done to poor Tenzin? He never hurt anyone."

  "Chao's murder," Nyma said slowly. "A murder like that would have everyone acting strange. They must have thought Tenzin could have information. They confused him with someone. The fools. All that time he was with us at the mandala."

  Shan looked up from where he drank but he found no words to reply. Tenzin had not been at the mandala all the time. And there was something else he had almost forgotten. When Drakte had entered the lhakang, moments before dying, the first person he had looked to had been Tenzin.

  Shan sighed, and watched as Nyma shifted her gaze to Lokesh, who had removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves nearly to his shoulders. He was vigorously rubbing his arms with the white sand of the streambed. Lhandro began to do the same. Lokesh rubbed his face. Shan and Nyma stripped off their coats, too. No one had words to explain anything that had happened at the strange gompa but they all felt the need to be cleansed. Nyma held some of the sand cupped in her hand for a moment, and glanced at Shan. They had seen such sand before, had seen it sanctified by the lamas and later washed with blood.

  Lokesh lit a stick of incense and sat.

  "We have no time," Nyma protested, but then hesitantly followed Shan and Lhandro as they folded their legs and watched the wisps of fragrant smoke. They had to calm themselves, to brace themselves against the frightening, confusing forces that seemed to be against them.

  When the stick burned out, Lhandro rose with a deliberate air and reached into his sack. He produced the small scrap of cloth he sometimes used as a towel and laid it flat on a rock, setting his red plastic dorje pen on it. "It isn't a real thing," he said as he stepped to Shan with the cloth spread between his hands. Shan quickly dropped his own pen onto the cloth. None of them wanted the tokens of the gompa, he knew, but Lhandro's words referred to the plastic the dorjes were made of. He had known other Tibetans who reacted the same way with any implement made of plastic. It wasn't wood, or cloth, or stone, or bone- not of the earth- and somehow they didn't trust the plastic, as if it were one more of the tricks the Chinese played on them. They were just shadow things, a herder had told him once, you could tell just by feeling them. He had known a dropka who kept in a leather sack whatever plastic items he was given or found by roads, and left them in a small pile whenever he visited a town. The man wasn't sure what they were exactly, but he knew they belonged down below, which was how dropka often referred to towns.

  An hour later they stopped suddenly as Lhandro, about to lead them over the crest of a ridge, raised his hand. "It's one of them," he said with a weary tone. "We'll have to wait."

  Shan followed the rongpa to the crest of the ridge to see a loaded cart moving slowly along the trail ahead of them pulled by a sturdy black yak. A stocky man in a robe walked alongside the yak, his hands moving as if he were conversing, trying to make a point to the animal.

  "He's so slow," Nyma said, now at Shan's side. "We will waste half the day waiting."

  "I have no fear of a man who speaks with his yak," Lokesh announced from behind them and pushed past, continuing down the path.

  In a quarter hour they were close enough to see that the cart's cargo was yak dung and moments later the yak halted and twisted its massive head in their direction.

  "It's a long way to go, to dispose of all this fuel," Shan observed as he reached Gyalo.

  "No one said how far to take it," Gyalo observed. He surveyed Shan and his friends and studied the trail behind them.

  Shan introduced the others, and Lokesh offered some of the food from the gompa. The monk ate two momo dumplings, then offered an apple to the yak.

  "Where are you bound?" Shan asked.

  The monk shrugged and gestured to the sky. "It's a good day in the mountains," he said, and began to massage the yak between the ears. "Jampa here will let me know when we get there."

  Jampa. One of the names of the Future Buddha.

  Shan studied the man a moment as Gyalo took a long swallow from Lokesh's water bottle, then walked around the cart. The old wooden shovel Shan had used lay on top of the load. He turned the shovel and saw that the wooden blade covered a depression in the pile, a hole.

  "No one is following," he said quietly.

  "What's that?" Gyalo called out, cupping his ear toward Shan.

  "Just speaking to our friend," Shan said and, as Nyma gasped in surprise, a hand emerged from the pile of dried dung. Shan took the hand and steadied the figure that rose up in the cart.

  "Tenzin!" Lhandro cried, as the tall man stood and cast an anxious smile toward his friends before he climbed down.

  "Where did you-" Nyma blurted out, then ran to embrace the mute Tibetan. "How did you- How could you have known? Why did they-" the questions rushed out as she held Tenzin at arm's length. Tenzin looked at Shan as though for help, then the nun grinned and laughed at herself for asking for explanations from the man who could not speak. She began wiping the dirt from his face with one of her sleeves.

  "I was sleeping with Jampa under the moon," Gyalo explained. "I thought if I woke up in the night I would just leave," he said, stroking the shaggy yak again. "We don't mind the night. We talk about the stars. Last night, in the early hours- maybe two, three o'clock- Jampa put his nose in my ear. I cuffed him at first but he pushed harder and I sat up and moaned because there was this ghost by the cart. Jampa and I knew he needed help, though he didn't say a word. Jampa and I knew what needed to be done. We loaded him- Tenzin, you say?" he asked in an aside to Nyma. "We loaded Tenzin in and slipped away. Not a soul moving anywhere. An hour later, as we cleared the first ridge, one of those soldiers' trucks drove in from the highway." He looked at Shan with questions in his eyes.

  Shan studied Tenzin a moment longer, sighed and looked toward the northern mountains. "We will go on, ahead," he said to the monk. "Thank you for helping our friend." He studied the cart a moment. "Near the end of the plain there is an old ruin of a gompa. A family lives there now. They have much to do and little time to look for fuel. This could last them many weeks."

  "Rapjung," Gyalo said with a nod. "I know it. The old First House." He glanced back toward the south, as though to be certain no one else was listening. "Norbu was not just a traveling station in the old days, it was also a hospital where people from far away came to consult the healers who descended from the high plains and mountains. But after Rapjung was destroyed, the hospital was torn down and the new buildings put up," he said sadly, looking at Shan. Shan recalled the old foundations he had seen by the chapel.

  "What is it you are trying to escape?" the monk asked in a slow, measured tone, and studied each of them in turn. He had the sound of an old lama.

  "We don't know," Nyma answered in a haunted whis
per.

  "There are birds up there," Lokesh said in a tentative voice, "that have never seen the world below." He gestured toward the tall peaks, wearing his crooked grin. His tone was earnest, and pointed, almost urgent. "This month they are hatching babies. If things go well their babies will never need to see the rest of world either."

  As if it understood Lokesh, the yak twisted its huge head toward the mountains. It seemed to be looking for birds. Gyalo rubbed the tuft of hair between the animal's ears, following its gaze. After a moment he turned with a troubled smile. "Go with Buddha."

  They reached the trail junction in another hour and Lhandro led them up a steeply ascending path, newly churned with the hooves of sheep. The long Plain of Flowers disappeared behind them and new landscapes to the north and east opened to their view. They sat and ate cold dumplings on a flat rock that commanded a view of miles over a ragged brown and grey landscape of rock and gravel through which ran narrow lines of shrubs, marking the courses of small rivers that wound eastward toward a patchwork of tiny squares in the far distance, fields green with sprouting barley.

  Lokesh pointed out a thin, high waterfall that cascaded over a steep rock face more than two miles away. He was tracing the course of the narrow river it fed as it tumbled down a gorge when Lhandro gasped.

  "Tara protect us!" the rongpa moaned, and motioned to a point farther down the river, where it flowed out of the gorge. "The deities are truly angry!" He paled and clenched his gau.

  As Shan followed Lhandro's arm in confusion, first Lokesh, then Nyma groaned. The water in the river was red. Not the entire river, but a long patch of the water was bright crimson. Shan quickly calculated the distance and size of the patch. It was sixty or seventy yards in length and covered the entire breadth of the stream.

  Nyma turned to Shan with fear in her eyes. "What is it?"

  But Shan had no explanation. "Sometimes," he said weakly, "there are algae that make the ocean look red."

  Lokesh and Lhandro nodded, not because any of them thought it could be algae, Shan knew, but because it offered the suggestion that there could be a natural explanation.

  They watched the red patch in silence until it disappeared behind a bend in the river.

  Lokesh raised his finger again and traced the course of the river from the waterfall to where it had disappeared. With a hollow expression, he turned and followed a frightened Lhandro, who had begun jogging up the trail. The rongpa, Shan knew, had taken it as an omen of something terrible to come.

  Nyma lingered beside Shan as Lokesh moved on, watching the river with a grimace of pain. "The mountains are bleeding," she said, then turned and followed Lokesh. Shan took a step toward the trail, where he saw Tenzin kneeling at the overhang, near the edge. He had constructed a small cairn of stones and as Shan watched in silence the Tibetan poured water onto a patch of earth. He stirred the little pool and used the mud to write on the rock face beside the cairn. Om amtra kundali hana hana hum phat, he wrote. It was known as one of the fierce mantras, a powerful invocation of cleansing.

  Tenzin stared at the words, then gazed out over the low ranges to the east. He seemed to have forgotten Shan was there.

  "It was a mistake," Shan said quietly, "going to that gompa." It occurred to him that perhaps Khodrak and the howlers knew more about Tenzin than he did. He knew the reticent Tibetan would not answer.

  But suddenly Tenzin drew in a breath. "When the soul suffocates," he said in a deep, melodic voice, "and only revives on the last gasp, it is never the same soul again." He did not break his gaze from the distant ranges and spoke the words so quickly that Shan thought he had imagined them. The Tibetan turned to Shan and searched his face. "Your lama Gendun said sometimes it is possible to be reincarnated in the same body, in the same lifetime. He said you know about that."

  Shan stared. Tenzin had grown his new tongue.

  "I am not the man they think they are looking for," Tenzin added. There was torment in his voice.

  Shan studied Tenzin's tormented face, trying to understand the strange words. "What is it?" Shan asked. "Why do they seek you? Did you kill someone?"

  But Tenzin had receded into his silence again. He stared out at the river that had been bleeding. "Once I did things I hate myself for," he said after a long time, "then I did things they hate me for."

  "In Lhasa?" Shan asked. "Were you in Lhasa?"

  "That abbot who is missing. I was there."

  "The abbot of Sangchi? You saw him when you escaped from prison? Drakte was with him?"

  But Tenzin touched his fingertips to his lips with a confused expression, as if just realizing he had been speaking, and fell silent.

  Suddenly Shan remembered the awful night again, and the sound of the voices in the death hut. "It was you with Gendun and Drakte," he said. "I heard your voice. You were chanting the Bardo with Gendun." It was not a rasping voice, not one with a broken voice box.

  Tenzin only sighed in reply, and melancholy settled over his face.

  It was late afternoon when they saw the first sheep, grazing in the distance on the sparse grass that grew in the shelter of boulders, all wearing their brightly colored packs. A high, lilting sound caused Lhandro to stop and hold up a hand. After a moment he relaxed, then led them around a bend in the trail, and halted again with a smile. A small campfire could be seen two hundred feet up the trail, in the lee of a huge slab of rock that had sloughed off the cliff above. Three of the Yapchi villagers stood at the fire. But Anya sat closer to Lhandro, her back to the trail, singing to half a dozen sheep. The animals seemed to listen to the girl with rapt attention, as if about to join in her song at any moment.

  "She's communicating with them," Nyma said in an awed tone. The travelers stood in silence, listening, not daring to move an inch- perhaps, Shan thought, under the same spell as the sheep. Then one of the villagers saw them and called out. Anya turned and the magic was broken.

  The caravaners were full of questions, and Shan and Lokesh let Lhandro and Nyma give all the answers. Yes, Padme had recovered and was walking about the gompa when they departed. Yes, he lived at a reconstructed gompa, the old Second House gompa. Yes, the monks had given them blessings. Yes, there were even novices there, learning to be monks like the old days. The villagers were pleased with the answers, and though Lhandro looked to Shan and Nyma for help, no one volunteered anything else about what happened at Norbu. The headman squatted by a pile of blankets on which someone had placed the red-circle pouch, the pouch with the eye inside. Lhandro silently rubbed the pouch, as if the chenyi stone somehow needed comforting.

  It was nearly sunset when one of the dogs began barking. Two of the Yapchi men shot into the rocks above the trail. Lhandro jumped up on a boulder that provided a view down the side of the mountain, and a moment later motioned for Shan to join him.

  A man and a yak were coming up the mountain. As Shan watched they stepped into a pool of light from the setting sun. The man was wearing a robe.

  "You'll be expected back at Norbu tonight," Shan observed in a tentative tone as Gyalo led the big, broad-backed animal toward the fire.

  "It's an odd place, that gompa," the monk said in a distant voice. "The Committee says only thirty-five monks can be there, though there's room for three times that number. The Chairman stopped our class on the teachings of the Rapjung medicine lamas and started a class on the integration of socialist thought into the teachings of Buddha." He scratched the broad shoulders of the black yak as he spoke. "We have to sign a paper pledging not to criticize the government and recognizing the authority of the Bureau of Religious Affairs over all we do. If you don't sign, you can't be a monk anymore, they told us," he said, shaking his head as if in disbelief. "Some of the monks said we were lucky, that at some gompas monks had to sign statements renouncing the Dalai Lama, or be sent to a Chinese jail."

  Lhandro stepped forward, his face heavy with worry. "You have to be at your gompa. They will send people to look, after what happened to Padme."

  "Fo
r the last month I have slept only every second night. The other nights I have gone out by that dung pile," Gyalo said with a glance at Shan, "and recited my beads." He was saying he had been in spiritual crisis, Shan realized. He was saying he had been trying to make an important decision. "When I left to live at Norbu my uncle said to pay attention to the lamas who ran the gompa, because the senior lamas could be emanations of the true Buddha. But there were no Buddhas, there were only committeemen. They get paid by the government," Gyalo said, his brow creasing, "but Jampa and I, we don't think you can be a lama and be paid by Beijing. The closest thing to Buddha at that place was right here," he said, and placed his hands on either side of the yak's head. There seemed to be deep meaning in the stare exchanged by the monk and the animal, and everyone stood perfectly still as they watched. The yak seemed to look at each of them in turn, then it breathed heavily, like a sigh.

  A murmur spread through the Yapchi villagers, and several of them nodded solemnly, as if they knew about Buddha yaks.

  "Jampa was at that place, too," Gyalo said, as though he couldn't bear to say Norbu's name now. "The committee was going to get rid of him, as soon as all the dung was hauled away. He was deciding to leave all these past months. Now," Gyalo said with a shy smile, "they still have all that dung, but they don't have us."

  "We can find you clothes," Lhandro said, and bent toward one of the horse packs.

  "No," Gyalo replied quickly, then spoke in a slow, deliberate voice. "No. I am a monk. I am just a monk between teachers." He knew, as did all of those present, the significance of his words. He would be an unregistered monk, an illegal monk. If the knobs found him he would have no defense, and would be shown no leniency. He would be sent to a lao gai prison for many years. And after release he would be forever banned from serving in a gompa.