Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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He put his hands inside his coat pockets. Something brushed his left hand and he pulled out the sprig of brush he had taken from the burnt patch of earth, and extended it to Lokesh. The old Tibetan took it and placed the sprig under his nose. He looked at Shan with surprise in his eyes. "Thank you," he said with a grateful smile.

Shan studied his friend as Lokesh clasped the sprig inside his cupped hands and pushed his hands against his nose, his eyes closed. "It's medicine?" he asked.

Lokesh nodded, his eyes still closed. "Not ready for picking, but from a healthy plant. Chigu and I would gather this sometimes out on the plain. It's called birds foot, for the way the stem branches out."

Shan pictured the scene as he and the American had found it, where he had plucked the stem. The plant had been growing only in the protection of the shallow bowl. Maybe the dobdob had not tried to burn the plain. Maybe he had only tried to burn the medicine plants. But why? He remembered the salt camp, where the herders were hiding the injured woman from healers. And the woman on the trail, who had rejected Lokesh's offer of healing.

They reached the top of the slope to find a long rolling meadow that extended nearly a half-mile across the crest and at least two miles to the east and west. Above them, only a few miles away now, loomed the huge shape of Yapchi Mountain, standing guard over the Plain of Flowers to the south and Yapchi Valley to the north.

Shan and Winslow stepped aside for Lokesh to lead them into the maze of game trails that crisscrossed the meadow. But his friend shrugged and stepped backwards, gesturing for Shan to continue in the front. It was an odd dance they had done often in their travels. It didn't matter who led, Lokesh was saying, for they would always find what they were meant to find, and eventually arrive where they were meant to be.

Shan felt an unexpected exhilaration as they moved along the rolling meadow. The wind blew steady and cool, but not uncomfortably so. Small pink flowers grew close to the earth. From across the meadow came the trill of a lark.

They walked slowly along the rolling meadow, Shan randomly selecting new paths where the game trails intersected, until they came to a long low ledge of rock that bordered a large meadow, protected on the north by a towering wall of rock. The bowl, nearly three hundred yards across, was filled with a low heather-like plant, and larks– more larks than he had ever seen in one place, fluttering among the growth. As Shan led his friends through a gap in the ledge he heard the hushed, urgent sound of voices and a hand came out of the shadow of the rock to hold his arm.

He pulled back with a shudder, imagining the dobdob had found them again.

"You have to get down," a woman whispered.

Shan bent to see five Tibetans– three middle-aged herders, a slightly younger woman, and a boy– sitting in the shadow made by an overhanging ledge. "If they see you they will run," the woman said. She did not seem surprised to see three strangers, only concerned they might frighten away the objects of their attention. Wild drong, Shan suspected, or maybe some of the rare blue sheep that roamed the mountains.

The Tibetans wore the thick chubas of dropka, heavily patched with swatches of leather and red cloth. Two of the men wore dirty fleece caps, the other the quilted, flapped green cap issued to soldiers for winter wear. The woman clutched a large silver and turquoise gau in one hand, with the other on the arm of the boy, who watched the meadow with round, expectant eyes.

Not even the appearance of the lanky American distracted the dropka for long. They stared quizzically at Winslow for a few seconds, and the boy pulled on the woman's shoulder to make sure she saw the goserpa. But when Lokesh and Winslow settled in beside the herders, as if they, too, had come to see the creature the dropka awaited, the boy's attention shifted back to the meadow.

Shan sat beside Winslow, his back to the rock, covered in shadow, then leaned forward to speak. But no one returned his gaze, nor seemed to even notice him. It was more than expectation in their eyes, Shan saw, it was a deep, even spiritual excitement. They sat, the wind fluting around the rocks, larks calling, brilliant clouds scudding across an azure sky. Two of the men began low mantras, fingering their beads. Suddenly the boy pointed toward the far side of the meadow, near the wall.

Shan saw nothing, though the dropka uttered tiny gleeful cries. The two men increased the pace of their mantras, joined now by Lokesh. He became aware of movement at the edge of the wall's shadow, a great hulking shape standing on four legs near the shadow. From so far away he could not tell whether it was a yak, a large sheep, or even a bear. Then a second shape, a human figure in a red robe, emerged from the shadows, and the first shape rose up on its hind legs. The man's features could not be seen from such a distance, but the stranger walked in short steps, leaning on a tall staff. Shan sensed the man was not merely old, but ancient.

Lokesh had stopped his mantra. His face was as excited as the boy's, tears streaming down his cheeks. "I recognize this place now," he whispered in a very still voice. "We would come here in summers. Pitched a white tent and stayed many days, a week sometimes. Chigu Rinpoche said the larks sang the herbs here."

Sing the herbs. An image of larks offering lullabies to young plants flashed through Shan's mind.

"It's true," a child's voice said. But Shan turned to see that it was the woman speaking, with the tone of a young girl. "It's all true, isn't it?" she said to Lokesh, and a tear rolled down her cheek. "Remember this," she added solemnly to the boy and hugged him. "Remember that it was spoken that this was one of the places where they came in the old days, that today you saw one of them come."

Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty or ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a single true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look.

It was one of those rare true things they were glimpsing now. An ageless medicine lama gathering his herbs, a medicine lama who shouldn't exist, in a field that had been forgotten for half a century, rising up like a ghost to confirm that once there had been wise, joyful old men who gathered plants so they could translate the magic of the earth to its people.

They watched, the sound of the whispered mantras becoming almost indistinguishable from the low sound of the wind on the rocks. The low, bent shape in the shadows did not move, and Shan realized it might be a helper, a protector for the old one, crouching, on guard against the world outside. The medicine lama wandered among the flowering plants, stooping sometimes, sometimes rising with a sprig and looking skyward, as if consulting with the air deities about his find.

Then suddenly, with a low moan, as if struggling mightily to contain himself, the boy burst up with his hands in the air. "Lha gyal lo! Lha gyal lo!" he shouted with joy, just twice before his mother pulled him backwards and clamped a hand over his mouth.

But the sound had carried over the meadow, echoing off the rock face, and the lama and the hulking shape darted toward the deeper shadows. The old man halted for an instant, peering toward the rocks where they sat. Then, like a deer at the edge of a wood, he merged into the shadows and was gone.

They waited a quarter hour for the ghost lama to return, exchanging uncertain glances, as if none were sure now of exactly what they had seen. Then the herders rose and silently filed away from the rock, following one of the game trails that led southward down the wide ridge.

It was impossible, Shan kept telling himself as they slowly walked back to Rapjung. The medicine lamas had all died. The soldiers had cleared out the surrounding hills years earlier. With all the patrols, all the pacification campaigns, it did not seem possible even one could have survived. Lokesh offered no suggestion, no theory of how now, after decades, one of the old lamas could appear in the hills. He just followed Shan, lost in a strange reverie, or perhaps in his memories of Rapjung as it had existed fifty years earlier. Several paces behind Lokesh, came the American, also silent, seemingly numbed by what he had seen.

Again and again Shan replayed the scene in his mind. It wasn't that a lama had survived all these years in the mountains, he realized; the dropka had come because of something new, because they had heard of a miracle. Someone else had seen a ghost lama, he suddenly remembered. The herders by the hermitage the night Drakte had died. One of the old lamas had arrived, had returned. From where? Why? And why now, when the eye was on its journey, when Drakte had died and the army was scouring the land, when a dobdob, protector of the faith, was attacking devout Buddhists, when an American had gone missing?

Shan had no answers. He had only foreboding. Although he knew little, he knew enough to be frightened.

No one asked where they had been when they arrived at the camp. Several of those who had completed the kora had just returned themselves, having meditated at the hermit's cave or the drup-chu shrine. As the Yapchi men went to check on the sheep, Nyma sought Shan out.

"It happened again," the nun said. "The poor girl." Shan looked up from the sheep whose pack he was tightening. "She just fell over on the trail and began shaking, and beating the earth with her hands and feet."

"Anya?" Shan asked, realizing he had seen the girl lying under a blanket by the fire.

"Nothing happened. No words. Sometimes it's like that," Nyma murmured.

The words chilled Shan. She was talking about the oracle.

"I told that monk, hoping he could help," Nyma continued. "But he seemed angry at my words. I think his head is still hurt from that attack."

Shan followed the nun's gaze toward Padme, who sat resting against the ruins of the wall, at a place apart, writing in his small notepad.

They ate in silence and drank tea as the sun set, the company in quiet contemplation after a day on the kora.

Lokesh did not speak until he spread his blanket near Shan to sleep.

"It is a good sign, a wonderful sign, for a medicine lama to appear in the herb meadow," the old Tibetan said, in a tone that said he was still not certain the man had been flesh and blood. "And a monk on the Plain of Flowers. That dobdob will not hurt us. Things will get better, you'll see."

But in the early hours of the morning, a scream woke Shan. He sat up as Lokesh gave an agonized groan. The restored shrines of Rapjung were engulfed in flames.

Chapter Eight

The dry, brittle wood of the elegant little lhakang cracked and spat, burning as hot as a furnace, throwing off sparks that spiraled far into the night sky. No one could get close to the flames, or even close enough to the adjacent assembly hall to keep the fire from spreading to it. Gang's wife held the caretaker back, tears streaming down her face, the young boy holding his father's left wrist out as though trying to show it to someone. The skin on Gang's palm was a mass of welts, the back of the hand scorched red and black. A small soot-stained figurine lay at his feet. He had saved the little Buddha from the altar.

The stream was two hundred yards away, and they had only two small leather buckets and the cooking pots from the house to carry water. They ran back and forth from the stream for a quarter hour, then Lhandro raised his palm and lowered his empty bucket to the ground. They could do nothing but watch as the conflagration, having already destroyed the lhakang, consumed the assembly hall and spread to the small deity chapel beside it.

"Like a giant samkang," Nyma said with a whimper. Incredibly, Gang, through years of effort, had constructed the buildings of cedar and juniper, the kind of fragrant wood burned in samkangs to attract deities.

Suddenly the nun cried out and ran to the other side of the lhakang, Shan at her heels. Winslow was bent over, gasping, hands on his knees, beside a large block of wood. Tenzin sat on the ground nearby, his face smudged with soot. As the flames flared up in a gust of wind Shan saw the block more clearly. The two men had saved the half-completed carving of the protector deity. Beyond them in the shadows another figure sat, Gang's young daughter staring with vacant eyes at an object between her legs. It was the prayer wheel. Her hands lay open on either side of the wheel. The skin was burned away from the palms, exposing raw flesh where she had grasped the searing metal. Nyma gasped and bent over the girl, calling for the last pail of water to wash the terrible wounds.

Shan found Lokesh with his back to the fire, deep pain in his eyes, watching the sparks as they flew into the night. As Shan stepped to the old Tibetan's side, he was unable to find words. It could not have been an accident. There had been no campfire near the cluster of restored buildings, and Gang would never have burned his little samkang, consuming scraps of his precious wood, at night, unattended.

"Someone came from outside," Shan said in a low voice. "That dobdob tried to burn the plain. It must have been-" something cracked into the side of his head and Shan found himself on his knees, blinking, unable to focus his eyes. Something sharp hit his shoulder, then Lokesh cried out and threw himself over Shan.

"Oppressor!" a voice shouted angrily, and a stone bounced off Lokesh's leg. "Tyrant! A Chinese comes and ruin follows!"

There was a struggle behind them. Shan twisted about on his knees to see Lhandro and Nyma pulling Gang backwards, dragging him away from Shan. His injured hand reached out toward Shan like a claw, as the other was pushed downward by his wife, a stone dropping from it. As the others pulled her husband away Gang's wife hesitantly stepped toward Shan, her cheeks stained with tears and soot.

"You must understand," she said in a rush of breath, like a sob. "All these years. Since our first child was born, all that time." Tears streamed down her cheeks. "In the winter waiting for snow so he could drag the wood down from the mountains. In the summer covered with sawdust. Working in the moonlight even, working on festival days. Never even taking time to play with his children." A wall crashed down, sending splinters of smoldering timbers flying in an explosion of sparks. A piece of charred, smoking wood landed at her feet, and she knelt by it, studying it as if she needed to understand where it had belonged in the lhakang.

"Sometimes he had to make his own tools," she said, in a remote tone now, as she lifted the wood and struck it on the ground to shake off the embers. After a moment she stood and carried the fragment to a row of stones, then carefully laid it on the ground. She found another, nearly two feet long, struck away the embers, and silently laid it alongside the first. Tenzin appeared, carrying another fragment to lay beside those collected by the woman. A pile of salvaged wood. The first step in building again.

They spent the rest of the night and much of the next morning combing through the ruins of Gang's buildings, collecting the remnants of wood, gathering up nails and straps of metal from the ashes, many twisted with heat.

As they worked Gang lay on a pallet that had been brought for him, sometimes gazing morosely at the smoldering ruins, muttering something that might have been a prayer, other times glaring toward Shan, throwing pebbles and curses at him whenever he approached. Again, the only person able to restrain him seemed to be his son, who sat holding his father's good hand, gripping it tight when emotion flared inside Gang.

"It's so remote," Winslow said as he gathered nails in one of the cooking pots. "So empty here." A moment later he looked up with a puzzled expression. "It could only have been that man who attacked Padme. He burnt that little meadow."

"Lightning," Lhandro reminded them. "Lightning could have struck the rooftop. It is a way the deities have of speaking," he added, looking back to Gang, as if suggesting that the deities may have perceived that the shrines had been reconstructed perhaps as much out of hate as faith.

They left for Norbu gompa, Padme's home, late in the morning as Gang and his daughter were led to the stream to bathe their scorched hands. The caretaker stared with glazed eyes as the sheep began filing away from the bank of the stream. He hadn't invited the caravaners, hadn't even welcomed them, and now they left with ten years of his life's work destroyed.

"We will pray for you," Nyma said to Gang's wife as she watched Gang. Then she followed Shan onto the trail.

After four miles they reached the junction with the trail to the north, the trail the caravan would take over Yapchi Mountain to Yapchi Valley. It was another ten miles southeast to Norbu, and they had agreed that the sheep would continue with the other Yapchi villagers on the north trail as Lhandro, Shan, Lokesh, Tenzin, and Nyma carried the monk to Norbu on the blanket litter. They should expect to stay at Norbu, Padme insisted, at least long enough to receive the thanks and blessings of his gompa.

"I'm going up," Winslow had said as the two groups began moving along their separate paths. Shan studied the American, puzzled. Winslow was leading one of Lhandro's horses. Then he saw Dremu waiting on the slope above. The American meant he and Dremu were going higher in the mountains to look for the missing woman. The Golok wheeled his horse back and forth, staring at Shan with worry in his eyes. Dremu seemed troubled by the splitting of the party. As the last of the sheep turned onto the northern trail he trotted to Shan's side. "He can walk," the Golok said loudly, within earshot of Padme. "Don't go. Let that one walk home."

Nyma shot Dremu an irritated glare. "We know how to take care of injured holy men," she declared curtly. The monk moaned and held his head, giving no sign of having heard.

Dremu returned her stare. "Ask him to tell you how monks mingle with the sky deities," the Golok barked, then cantered away.

Shan studied the caravan as the dogs pushed the sheep up the trail. Dremu's strange connection with the chenyi stone seemed to have made him resentful of anything, anyone, that caused a delay or detour in its return. But the Golok would soon see that the red bag was staying with the caravan. Shan and the others would be gone just a few hours. After that it would be only another two days to Yapchi.

Shan's worry soon faded, replaced by an unexpected sense of anticipation as they crossed the ridge that walled the plain on the south side, then descended through the low hills that led to the broad rolling plain below. He had been to very few gompas, at least gompas that practiced in the open, legally, with a full complement of teachers and student monks, and he missed the serene voices of lamas. Looking at the faces of his Tibetan companions, he realized that Padme's promise of blessings from the Norbu holy men somehow felt important to the Tibetans as well.

It was midafternoon when they crested the last of the long, low ridges and looked down on a complex of buildings surrounded by a ring of poplar trees in spring bud. Most of the structures appeared to be of stone and pressed earth construction, with neat grey tile roofs, the walls painted a pale cream color, all within a square outer wall of stone painted white, perhaps two hundred yards on each side. Three large buildings lay in the center of the neatly groomed complex, their walls sloping slightly inward at the top, all painted in the same cream color to a point just past the center of the second floor windows, then maroon above, the color of a monk's robe. Lhandro and Nyma, at the front of the litter, gave simultaneous exclamations of joy, and encouraged the weakened Padme to gaze upon his gompa.

"I never thought to see so many buildings!" Lhandro exclaimed. He offered a look of encouragement to Nyma. "The world is changing, you see."

But just as they were about to lift the litter again Nyma pulled a length of yak hair rope from the sack on her shoulder and tied it around her waist, giving her robe the appearance of a dress. Shan stared in puzzlement a moment, until Lhandro looked from Nyma to the gompa and nodded soberly. He took off his vest and handed it to her as she unpinned her long braids. Even though the world was changing, even though it was a gompa, it still meant Nyma was going down into the world, or at least its nearest outpost, where even a casual observer might quickly surmise she was a nun and inquire about her registration.

After half a mile, only a few hundred yards from the gompa, Lhandro looked back with frustration at Lokesh and Shan realized his friend, at the rear of the litter, had slowed, impeding their progress.

"The gompa," the Yapchi headman reminded Lokesh energetically. Lokesh offered a weak smile in reply, then quickened his pace. The old Tibetan's companions had become familiar with his habit of gazing off at some distraction in the landscape. But Shan studied his friend. There was something else about Lokesh his new companions didn't understand, something Shan himself had taken years to recognize. Just as Lokesh occasionally had outbreaks of deep emotion, he also had outbreaks of what, for lack of a better word, Shan could only call intuition. He could be like a horse, innately sensing something approaching on the far side of a hill, or the rock pika jumping out of its hole and screeching for two minutes before an avalanche tumbled down from the mountain above.

Once, three months before, Lokesh had stopped Shan as they began to cross an ice-covered river after they had crossed three such rivers that very day. The old Tibetan had not been able to answer Shan's confused questions, had only stood and made a hoarse croaking noise, even when he looked into Shan's eyes. They had stood there for ten minutes before Shan's spine began to tingle because he realized that the river was croaking, too, echoing Lokesh with a deeper but somehow similar sound. Then abruptly the river ice had split apart and a long wide gap appeared in the center, revealing black, fast-moving frigid water underneath.

Was that what Lokesh was feeling now? Was that what Dremu, the feral Golok, had sensed at the trail turnoff when he had seemed to be asking Shan and the others to leave Padme behind? Shan kept studying his friend as Padme began to stir in the litter. Lokesh was not staring at the gompa now, but beyond it to a thin grey ribbon that led toward the horizon. Toward the northern highway, perhaps thirty miles away. A road meant patrols.

They were only four hundred yards from the gompa when Padme weakly raised his arm for them to stop. "I will not go in like this," he said in a strained, brave voice, and rose from the litter. He zipped up the yellow vest and began to walk, feebly at first, with visible effort, then with longer, more confident strides. A monk on a ladder, adding whitewash to the outer wall, stopped brushing and called out excitedly. Moments later several monks ran out of the gompa to greet Padme.

"Rinpoche! We were going to send out searchers!" the first to reach him called, then cried out in dismay as he saw the injuries on Padme's face and arms.

Men in robes quickly surrounded Padme, supporting him at each shoulder as they escorted him past a small collection of rundown habitations and through the two tall square pillars on either side of the gompa gate. Shan and his friends stared toward the monastery uncertainly, then with a blur of movement a small brown dog was at Tenzin's feet, barking in a shrill, high-pitched frenzy, tugging his pant leg, tearing it. Tenzin bent to put a hand on the dog's head, and the dog bit it. Suddenly a stone flew through the air, hitting the dog on its side. The animal yelped and scurried away around the corner of the gompa wall.

Lhandro stepped to Tenzin, who held up a bleeding finger, and produced a water bottle to wash the wound. Shan surveyed the small buildings by the gate. In front of one crumbling packed-earth house a man with shaggy white hair and leathery skin sat under a crude awning, bent over a foot-powered sewing machine, working on what appeared to be a monastic robe. Another man, nearly as old, his head heavily bandaged, leaned against a rusty metal barrel, asleep. An old woman in a heavily patched chuba, her eyes glazed with cataracts, sat in the doorway of another house, little more than a hut, spinning a small prayer wheel. No one looked up. No one showed a victorious smile after witnessing Padme's return, or even after driving away Tenzin's attacker.

There was a single new construction outside the gate, a long narrow open-faced shelter of cinderblocks with a tin roof and a dirt floor. It was a familiar fixture of Shan's prior incarnation; they were called newspaper huts in Beijing or, by some, Party shithouses. Inside, on the back wall, a long glass-enclosed case displayed a recent copy of the official newspaper published in Lhasa, in Chinese. Shan looked back at the Tibetans scattered around the buildings. He doubted any of them spoke, let alone read, Chinese. Hesitantly stepping into the hut, he gazed down the row of newspaper pages, at the end of which was a board on which local announcements had been pinned. He quickly scanned the pages. A speech on foreign relations from the Chairman in Beijing was reproduced in its entirety, taking up three pages. A company from Shanghai, whose name he recognized as an entity owned by the People's Liberation Army, was building a hotel for tourists at the base of the Potola. Production of timber in eastern Tibet continued to surpass all records. The beloved abbot of Sangchi gompa, one of the largest in Tibet, previously reported to be defecting to India, was now known to have been kidnapped by members of the Dalai Cult– one of Beijing's favorite labels for those who resisted the party line in Tibet. A new hydroelectric facility had been dedicated southeast of Lhasa. A senior leader of the Dalai Cult, the notorious Tiger, was now believed to have killed Chao Yu, the heroic Deputy Director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs in Amdo town. Shan read the story twice. There was no reported evidence, just a statement from Public Security about the Tiger's record of violence and treason. The Tiger, the reviled reactionary puppet of the Dalai Cult, an accompanying article reported, would soon be cornered by Public Security forces and would meet the people's swift justice. A Tibetan school in Qinghai had sent the Chairman a map of China constructed entirely of rice. A Chinese school girl had saved a drowning lamb in Shigatse. There was a photograph of the lamb.

Shan paused at the last panel, half of which was taken up by a single announcement from Norbu gompa and the council that administered the township. A May Day festival would be conducted at Norbu, where the economic progress of the township would be celebrated in coordination with the holiday activities held in Beijing in honor of the global proletariat. Citizens were expected to participate, and a sheet with numbered lines was stapled below the proclamation for families or work units to sign up to display the fruits of their labors. The date was ten days away. Only one line had been filled in. Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje, it said, in the hurried scrawl of a prankster. It was the name of a Tibetan who, over a thousand years before, had killed a king who had almost extinguished Buddhism with campaigns of terror so severe they had not been seen again until the communists arrived. The hero was coming to Norbu, the writing said, and would bring one stale dumpling to honor the Chairman. No one else had subscribed to the May Day celebration. Shan studied the weary Tibetans who sat outside the gate. It was as though some of the local population were trying to embarrass the gompa, and others were scared of it.

"If we left now, we might reach the sheep by dark," Nyma suggested in a near whisper, as though she suddenly had doubts about receiving the blessings of the lamas. But before anyone could reply a middle-aged monk in an elegant gold-fringed robe emerged from the gate, smiling, his arms open in greeting, followed closely by two boyish monks.

Shan froze for a moment, and glanced with worry at Nyma. He recognized the monk, whose nose was long and hooked. It was Khodrak, the one who called himself abbot.

"Forgive us," Khodrak said. "We were so overjoyed at the return of our Padme that we neglected you." Shan looked over the monk's shoulder, past the gate. Over the ornate front door of the central building was a small banner in elegant Chinese script. Serene Prosperity, it proclaimed. "Those who saved our Padme are welcome in Norbu gompa," Khodrak proclaimed in a gracious tone, gesturing them toward the gate.

As Khodrak and his nervous young attendants escorted them across the neatly raked earth of the courtyard it became obvious that the rebuilding effort had been confined to only certain elements of the gompa. The three central buildings appeared to be of sturdy new construction but along both sides, parallel to the outer walls, were several long single-story buildings of wood and pressed earth, most of which were neither new nor well-maintained. They would have been built to house the monks, Shan knew, and for the many meditation cells and minor deity chapels common to traditional gompas. They were all framed in wood, with small, empty porches where rows of prayer wheels would have traditionally hung. The first of these buildings on each side of the main courtyard had been restored to resemble the newer central buildings, giving an elegant atmosphere to the entry courtyard, and each had a long red plank bolted over its doorway, bearing the mani mantra in recessed gold letters.