Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  The American studied Shan as if trying to decide if Shan were joking, then looked at the derrick with unmistakable resentment. "Where I come from, we were taught if you did something bad enough, your god would come out of the heavens and find you."

  "You mean I should look for a wrathful deity?" Shan asked.

  But the American just turned and walked on.

  As they descended the winding trail through several narrow defiles and along game trails in the junipers, the image of the valley stayed with Shan. He began to understand more clearly the villagers' fierce love of their home. It was such a tiny piece of the world, so isolated it had no electricity, not even anything that could be called a road, a quiet, self-sufficient place that the world had bypassed, where one might be able to forget the outside for weeks, even months. Until the Qinghai Petroleum Venture arrived.

  Thirty minutes later they stepped out of a narrow defile under several tall junipers and the village of Yapchi spread out before them, less than a quarter mile away. It was smaller than Shan had expected, no bigger than the little rongpa town where they had first met Winslow. To the right, where a thin growth of trees gave way to the grassy slope, stood an ancient chorten, nearly ten feet high. Shan walked around the shrine, touching the stone. The prayers that had been written around its base had mostly weathered away.

  Shan saw Winslow lingering in the shadow of the last tree and realized their companions were not to be seen. He took a tentative step toward the village, then a small stone flew by and landed near his foot. He turned to see Tenzin, behind Winslow, with a somber Tibetan man in a soiled green pullover sweater, beside what once had been a long mani wall, a wall of stones inscribed with mantras. Tenzin gestured for Shan, then moved deeper into the trees with the stranger, behind another of the outcroppings that were scattered about the thin forest. Shan hesitantly followed, but paused at the mani wall, kneeling. He lifted one of the lichen-covered stones. It was centuries old, its carved inscription so embedded with a dark lichen that it appeared that the prayer had been formed by the lichen itself. A self-actuating prayer, Lokesh might have called it.

  He leaned the stone against a tree so the prayer faced outward, then followed Winslow, Tenzin, and the stranger down the winding trail toward the sound of voices. The scent of burning juniper floated through the air. They cleared a tall wall of rock and found themselves in a bustling camp. A lean Tibetan youth with a pockmarked face darted forward and grabbed Tenzin's arm, pulling him toward the back of the small blind canyon, followed closely by the man in the tattered green sweater.

  Shan lingered near the narrow canyon entrance, surveying the chaotic scene inside. At least forty people were arrayed on blankets or sitting around fires, some of them with bruised faces, some with arms in slings. On one blanket a young man lay prostrate, tended by a grey-haired woman.

  Chemi was at the side of the canyon, speaking rapidly with an older woman as she rubbed the hand of a large man who lay beside the rock face, his face swollen and eyes glazed, blood oozing through a sling on his left arm, a bloody bandage around his forehead.

  "Ours was the closest village so her family fled here," Anya explained as she stepped to Shan's side. "The company said they had to build a water collection facility at Chemi's home, to install tanks to take water from the stream for the work camp. They said the houses could not stay because it would foul the water needed for the workers. They said the venture would pay compensation. The venture people didn't understand, Chemi's sister told them, they would need to hear from the township council before they could leave their homes. But the company had soldiers to help them."

  "The government was there, not just the army," interjected the old woman. "He showed us his card. From some Ministry. It said Beijing. We never expected Beijing to take notice of us. My son always wanted to meet someone from Beijing, because in his school they say many heroes live there. But it was only a Mongolian man with dark glasses."

  "Special Projects," Winslow muttered bitterly over Shan's shoulder. Zhu, the Special Projects Director, had been there when the village had been destroyed.

  Several of the Yapchi villagers were there to help the injured and spoke excitedly with Anya about the return of the caravan. Some of the villagers looked solemnly toward Shan after speaking with the girl, but soon their gaze shifted toward Winslow as the American began moving about the camp. It was impossible to ignore the tall fair-skinned stranger. He stopped at the pallets and spoke in low words to those lying on them, then reached into his pack and emptied it of its food. A bag of raisins, a bag of nuts, and a bag of hard candy. There were not many children in the camp, only four other than Anya, but all four surrounded the American and gleefully shared out the treasure. Anya watched with a strangely detached expression, as though, Shan thought, she had forgotten how to be a child.

  The man beside Chemi groaned, closed his glazed eyes and seemed to sink into unconsciousness. She pulled off her coat, lifted his head, and propped it behind him as a pillow.

  "It's my uncle Dzopa," she whispered. "He'd been gone for ten years. He went to India to live."

  Shan studied the man. He looked at the woman, perplexed. "Why did he return now?"

  "I can't understand him when he speaks," she said, with pools of moisture in her eyes. She nodded toward a woman sitting nearby, churning tea with a sad, distant expression. "My cousin says he was trying to clear out the village when the tank started shooting. Things exploded and hit his head. He had just returned the day before, looking for me. He had heard I was sick. He has no other family. When he was young he was at a gompa and never married."

  The big Tibetan appeared to be in his late fifties. His arms were like logs, his neck like that of a bull. "He's a farmer now?" Shan asked.

  Chemi nodded. "He sent a letter once. He settled in Dharmasala," she said, referring to the seat of the exiled Tibetan government.

  "What do you think, why would he return?"

  "Sometimes the Dalai Lama gives speeches, and says the biggest contribution a refugee from Tibet can make is to return. Because those who have crossed over to India have demonstrated their faith, and their strength, and those are the traits needed to keep Tibet alive."

  Shan studied the battered man again. His injuries looked severe. The fingers on Dzopa's left hand trembled, a sign of possible nerve damage. "Did he bring something from India? A message perhaps? Was he coming to take others to India?" But Shan looked up to see that Chemi had turned away and was walking toward the back of the small canyon. He found her with Lokesh and Anya, who sat with bowls of tea behind a circle of people reciting a mantra.

  "They are not going to stop the mantra until those people leave," Lokesh explained. Beyond the circle was a flat stone with several wooden offering bowls and a charred metal disc where incense had burned. Anya and Nyma had made a chapel in the rocks behind the village, Lhandro had said.

  "You mean the bulldozers in Chemi's village?" Shan asked.

  "No," Anya said. Her tone was excited, and her eyes wide. "Not until the Chinese and foreigners leave our valley. Night and day they say, they have made a vow to Tara. A mantra chain, for as long as it takes. We will all take turns, when we can."

  Shan studied the girl and recognized the fierce light in her eye. There had been an old Khampa warrior in his prison barracks, imprisoned for life for leading ambushes against soldiers, who had always marveled at how the monks resisted by resort to prayer, even when being beaten or electroshocked. "All I could do was shoot guns," the Khampa had often said in a voice that never lost its awe for the holy men. "That's nothing compared to them."

  Shan was tempted to sit in the circle himself. Perhaps that was all any of them could do now, just pray. "Why would Chemi's uncle want to have cleared out his village, why warn them now?" he asked the girl.

  "Probably because he had met others who had lived near Chinese development projects. He thought the venture would take them away."

  "Away?"

  "To work for it. Or move the fam
ilies to a strange place. All the time we have been gone the venture has been torturing our village, harassing it, trying to drive everyone away our people say. The venture took all the young men who were in Yapchi to work cutting trees. They have to stay in that camp, in those metal boxes, that are locked at night. The others are scared to even go ask for them, for fear they will be taken, too." Anya spoke with a defiance Shan had never heard in her voice. But as she returned his stare, confusion crossed her eyes, then fear. "Locked in a metal box," the girl repeated, and she turned away to join the circle.

  Thirty feet away, in a corner of the little canyon, Tenzin sat with the two Tibetans who had brought him into the camp, and another man, older, but who wore the same deep-seated anger that etched the faces of the first two. The youngest of the men suddenly turned, stood, and took a step toward Shan, straightening into the pose of a sentry. They were not men who resisted the Chinese merely by reciting mantras. Shan looked beyond the man toward Tenzin, who leaned forward, listening earnestly to the older man. Beside them was a stack of equipment: braided leather ropes; bottles of water; a compass, hanging from a lanyard; a portable shovel, folded into its handle; nylon sleeping bags.

  Suddenly there was a wrenching moan from the front of the camp. Shan leapt toward the sound, the purbas at his heels, to find Chemi draped over her uncle's shoulders, trying to pull him back. He was sitting up, holding the wooden handle of a tea churn, savagely beating a small stump. The handle was shredding in his hands. Shan tried to grab Dzopa's arm. The man flung him away effortlessly, then Chemi put her hands on his cheeks. "Uncle!" she cried. "You must stop!" Dzopa paused, and his eyes seemed to find her, though they could not focus.

  "Stop them!" he said with another of the chilling moans. "They are burning all the lamas!" He fell back, unconscious, the splintered stump of the handle in his hand.

  Still on the ground where the man had pushed him, Shan stared in alarm at Dzopa.

  "His head," Chemi whispered, looking at Shan. She reached for the cloth to wipe his brow and froze as she saw those around her. All those within earshot had stopped and were staring fearfully at the unconscious man. Several pulled out their rosaries and began mantras.

  Anya did not resist when Shan asked her to take him into her village, despite the protests of the older women. He had to understand the valley, the girl insisted, for the eye was destined to be returned to him and he would have to act quickly when that happened. One of those who listened, a big-boned, ungainly woman in a long felt skirt and red apron, nodded grimly. "If that oil starts coming up," she declared in a defiant tone, as if chastising her fellow villagers, "those Chinese will never leave." Shan pulled his field glasses from his sack and followed Anya and the woman back to the village.

  The deity had lived on a low knoll near the center of the valley, the woman explained. Nearly three hundred years earlier a lama had found it living in a rock on the knoll, and the villagers had built a mani wall around it. Lamas from the famous Rapjung gompa had come every year to bless the rock and the people who protected it.

  A brown dog burst out of the first house, its loud barking quickly shifting into excited yelps as it recognized Anya. A man with a face blackened with soot, nearly toothless, appeared at the door of the second house and called out affectionately to the girl, who promised him fresh Lamtso salt the next day. A middle-aged man in a tattered derby looked from a crumbling pressed-earth wall that surrounded a third house and asked for news of Lhandro. Shan continued along the broad path that served as the only road of the village as Anya ran from one to another of the few inhabitants who showed themselves. One house, the outermost, was made of substantial timbers and had a loft overhead for storing fodder. It was an old, elegant structure, built in the tradition of Kham, the eastern region where wood had once been plentiful. On its wall hung a large wooden drum, nearly two feet wide and a foot deep, a hide stretched across its top, used for attracting the attention of deities. Shan studied the house, remembering Nyma's description of the attack by the Lujun troops. Only one house had survived. A miniature chorten, two feet high, stood near its door, the kind of shrine made for a sacred household relic. Across from it, inside another pressed-earth enclosure, stood a stable, looking more solid than several of the houses, in which half a dozen sheep and as many lambs lay basking in the late afternoon sun.

  He wandered past the village toward a long low mound nearly a mile away, a manmade mound that rose a stone's throw from a smaller, lower-knoll. A few grazing sheep looked up as he walked along the wide path that connected the village to the far end of the valley, the rumble of machinery growing louder with each step. The venture's drilling rig was operating less than a hundred yards beyond the mound.

  He studied the path before approaching the mound. It ran along the base of the grassy ridge, passing outside the valley through a small gap at the north end of the valley, by the oil camp. From the derrick to the gap leading to the outside world it had been ripped open, widened by a bulldozer. An army had come up that same path once, he reminded himself, a vengeful Chinese army, taking a slight detour in its retreat to Beijing to ravage the beautiful valley. He replayed the tale in his mind as he climbed the small hill. It had happened on such a spring day, perhaps in the same month, for Nyma had explained that the salt caravan had been away at the time. The army had shelled the village with its cannons, and the villagers had retreated, not to the mountain slopes, but to their deity on the small knoll for protection. Then the Chinese officer had sent soldiers to work with swords until none of the villagers survived. He looked back along the encircling slopes of the valley. There were ruins of small structures and the outlines of fields not worked for many years. Once the community had been larger. Entire families had been wiped out that day, the day the deity had been broken by the Lujun soldiers.

  A low mani wall surrounded the mound, with two strands of prayer flags affixed to weathered posts at each end. On top of the mound, weighted by small stones, were over twenty khatas, prayer scarves, most in tatters. Shan lifted a mani stone and, not certain why, held it out toward the mound, then toward the oil camp. In the same instant a gust of wind snapped the prayer flags, and one of the old tattered khatas worked loose and blew away across the valley floor toward the western slope.

  Lokesh would have said it was no coincidence, that Shan was always going to be there that hour, and that the scarf, after so many years on the mound, was always going to blow away in that same moment. The junction of events was woven into Shan's particular tapestry, Lokesh might say. It was why Lokesh and many other Tibetans Shan knew would stop and stare when a hawk flew low across their path, a dried leaf danced in the air before them, or a peculiar cloud scudded across the moon just as they looked up. Acts of nature might to them seem unexpected, but they would never seem random.

  He lowered the mani stone and reverently gazed at the mound, at the mass grave of the Yapchi villagers, then did what Lokesh would have done. He followed the khata.

  The scarf tumbled across the valley more than a hundred paces away, dropping to the earth one moment, drifting upward the next as if lifted by some invisible hand. He studied the upper rim of the valley as he walked toward the cloth. It was a rocky, ragged landscape, a place likely to hold caves- a place, Nyma said, full of caves- where men, or deities, might hide. He followed slowly, absorbing the Yapchi land, expecting the khata to settle or be snagged on one of the low shrubs where the meadow ended and the steeper slope began. But when it reached the slope the prayer scarf shot high in the air, soaring, tumbling like some caged dove experiencing newfound freedom, gliding toward the edge of the forest to the north.

  As Shan watched it speed away he considered turning back. But there was more than an hour of light left, and even in the dark he could certainly find his way back along the path. He needed to understand the valley. He needed to learn where a deity might be hiding. Or at least where an escaping prayer scarf might flee. Several times he paused to study the drilling tower and the oil camp as he cl
imbed to the cover of the treeline before heading in the direction he had last seen the khata. After ten minutes he saw a patch of white hanging in the low branches of a pine tree where the slope curved toward the east.

  The wind brought the rumble of chain saws and Shan paused to study with his field glasses the end of the valley that was being civilized by the oil company. There were more trailers than he had at first thought, two rows each containing five of the rectangular units. Metal boxes, the villagers called them, because he knew, to the rongpa they did not deserve the name house. Beyond the trailers were several tents, and trucks of all sizes and shapes from light cargo vehicles to heavy dump trucks, and a large open tent that appeared to be serving as a garage. Above the camp the wide swath of stumps reached all the way to the cliff that defined the upper rim of the valley. As least two dozen men labored there, felling trees at an alarming rate.

  Shan retrieved the khata, folding it into his pocket, then wandered closer, more wary, conscious of each tree and rock he might use for cover. He was only two hundred yards from the edge of the camp when he found a thick log, felled by age and not a saw, and sat to study the camp. At the near end a dozen men kicked a soccer ball around a meadow that appeared to have been grazed by sheep. They played hard, yelling but not cheering. Beyond them, close to the tents rose the smoke of several cooking fires. Shan was familiar with the scene. A tentacle, Drakte had called one such camp they had seen when traveling together, a lumber harvesting complex. One of the tentacles that extended from Beijing, the purba had groused. It was the way Beijing reached out to assert itself in the remotest corners of the land, to show its power, to extract riches.

  Looking back up to the timber crew, he noticed men stationed at intervals along the work area. What were they guarding against? he wondered. Surely there were not enough predators left to threaten the crew. Then with a shudder he remembered that Yapchi villagers had been conscripted. The men at the edge were not protecting the workers, they were preventing them from escaping. What a cruel torture, he thought, not simply to make the rongpa prisoners in their own valley but to make them destroy the wealth of their own land.