Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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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 whisper.

"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."

"For 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.

Nyma stepped forward, her beads held conspicuously in her raised hand. "There are mantras to be said," she suggested. Gyalo replied with a pleased nod and Lokesh stepped forward, beads in hand, followed by two of the villagers.

The monk followed Nyma toward a large flat rock near the fire. He paused and surveyed the others in the camp. "My name is Gyalo," he said. "This is Jampa. And the other's name is Chemi," he added with a gesture down the trail. "She wanted to sit and watch some clouds for a while."

Shan looked up to see a woman emerging out of the shadows, one of the mastiffs at her side, wagging its tail.

"She was at that ruined gompa, helping them sift through those ashes," Gyalo explained. "But she said she was on her way north, too, to her home."

The woman smiled shyly as she approached the fire, and Nyma handed her a bowl of tea. She leaned back against a boulder and explained to Lhandro she was returning to her family in the hills above Yapchi Valley. Nyma and Lhandro welcomed her warmly, explaining to Shan they knew her family, who lived in a compound of five small houses only four miles from their own village. Lokesh sat beside her and began speaking with her in low tones as if he knew her, and then suddenly a wind blew and she put on the hat she had been carrying in her hand.

Shan stared in disbelief. It was his hat, or had been his hat. She was the woman Dremu had found on the trail, sick and too weak to stand. He knelt beside Lokesh. "That tonde," she was saying to the old Tibetan. "It was a good one, I think." Shan remembered the fossil Lokesh had given her, and the confused way she had looked at Lokesh when he had first placed it in her hand. He saw now that there was still weakness in her face, but her color was back and her eyes bright.

Shan stepped to her side. "What happened? Who came that day?"

The woman offered a thin smile. "I am better now," she said, and her hand moved to the mala at her yak-hair belt. She began a mantra, her way of avoiding Shan's questions.

He stared at her, then at Lokesh. She had been waiting for someone that day on the trail, alone and sick but so confident the one she awaited was coming she had resisted their offer of help. A healer had come to her in the mountains, and Shan and Lokesh had seen a healer, at least the ghost of a healer, in the mountains two days later.

They ate their meal in the twilight, Lokesh and Shan sitting with Lhandro in the shelter of a rock with a candle, studying the rongpa's tattered map. They would be out of the high mountains in a day, and in Yapchi the day after. Shan stared at the map in silence, as in a trance, thinking absently that it might show him where a deity might reside if only he knew how to read it.

Chemi fell asleep beside the fire under a heavy felt blanket. Lokesh and Gyalo sat watching the moon. Tenzin settled onto a flat rock nearby, silhouetted against the night sky, saying his silent rosary, seeming to have lost his tongue again. When the wind ebbed Lokesh and Shan sometimes gazed at the mute Tibetan and shared a meaningful glance. They had been used to such scenes in the gulag, where monks learned to do their rosaries in their bunks without violating the strict curfew rules against speaking. After years of living in such barracks Shan had begun to discern something like a sound from the monks. At first he had thought it was simply the sound of their lips touching, but later he had begun to hear more: a strange low noise like a rolling, constant moan, as if his ears had become attuned to a different range of sound that the monks were using to reach out to their deities.

Suddenly a dog barked. Lhandro was up at once, one of the heavy staffs in his hand. "Someone's coming from above," he warned, and motioned Shan to take cover in the rocks.

"Is it you, Yapchi?" a strained voice called out from the darkness. Lhandro dropped more fuel on the fire and stepped to the trail as two horses came into view. There were two men, but both were mounted on the lead horse.

"The Golok," Lhandro announced quietly, then called out to Dremu. "What did you do to our horse?"

"The horse is fine," Dremu said wearily. "It's the American."

Shan shot forward to help ease Winslow's limp form out of Dremu's saddle, where he had been riding in front of the Golok, as though he needed support.

"Something in his head," the Golok reported. "I knew he had to come down, fast. He kept asking to go higher. He thought he saw someone higher. But it was too high for him. He's from America."

Altitude sickness, Dremu meant. As they lay Winslow on a blanket by the fire the Golok explained that in the late afternoon the American had seen something, a reflection of bright light, as though from a piece of metal, from equipment, but when they had stopped on a ledge to study it in the binoculars, the American had acted drunk, staggering about the ledge, almost tumbling off the edge.

It was a common problem for visitors to Tibet and could strike even seasoned mountain climbers without warning. Winslow himself had told Shan about the American tourists who died every year of the sickness. It could be an embolism, or edema in the lungs or the brain. Usually the only treatment was significant and immediate descent.

Winslow's eyes fluttered open. "Pills. I have pills," he said in ragged gasps. "I left them with the pack horses."

Shan quickly found the American's rucksack among the caravan packs and located a small glass bottle labeled Diamox. He gave two of the white tablets to the American with some tea, and a few minutes later Winslow opened his eyes and raised his thumb and index finger in a circle, the American okay sign.

Shan and Lokesh sat with him as he gulped down a bowl of tea. "Sorry," Winslow said. "It happens. No big deal really. Except I was at a five-hundred-foot drop off when it hit me. This guy," he said, pointing to Dremu. "He saved my life."

The words seemed to confuse Lhandro, who had never lost his distrust of the Golok. The rongpa stood hesitantly, poured a bowl of tea and handed it to Dremu. The Golok slowly extended his hand and accepted the tea with an uncertain expression.

As if he had to prove his point, Winslow reached for his pack and ceremoniously unpacked his little metal stove. He called Dremu to his side and handed the device to him. "I've only got the one extra fuel tank," the American said apologetically, and handed the Golok the little blue tank Shan had seen in the pack.

Dremu gazed wide-eyed at the stove, smiling one instant, then looking solemnly at the American, then smiling again. "You saved my life," the American said again, loudly, as if he wanted to be certain everyone in the camp heard. "I was looking out over the cliff and suddenly everything was spinning. Next thing I know I'm leaning over the abyss and Dremu has me by the belt, pulling like a yak. He saved me for certain."

Unexpectedly, a sense of contentment fell over the camp. The American had recovered from near death. Chemi, a new friend, was healed and heading home. The brave monk Gyalo had chosen to spend the first night of his new life with them. Shan, Lokesh, Winslow, Lhandro, and Gyalo sat huddled in their blankets, watching the moon again, exclaiming every few minutes over shooting stars.

Suddenly a low agonized groan resonated through the darkness. Winslow pulled his electric lamp from his pocket. Lhandro grabbed his staff. Lokesh grabbed his mala.

Shan darted toward the sound. It was Nyma. She was rapidly uttering a mantra, with the sound of crying, bent over Anya.

"She was feeling strange all afternoon, she told me, said she stopped once by the trail, shaking all over, then it passed. She said it was okay now, that sometimes it didn't mean anything, that he might not be waking up, that sometimes it was like this, and nothing happened, as if he had dreamed something, or had a nightmare, but was still asleep."

A chill crept down Shan's spine. Nyma meant the oracle, the deity that spoke through the young girl.

"But look at her…" Anya was shaking visibly, convulsing, her arms and legs jerking off the blanket she lay on. One of the girl's hands was clenched around one of Nyma's. A trickle of blood ran down the back of Nyma's hand. The girl's fingernails were digging into the nun's flesh.

"Christ!" Winslow cried with a helpless glance at Shan. "She must be epileptic. It's a seizure. Grand mal they call it. Put something in her mouth," he gasped, "to protect her tongue."

"Above all," Lhandro said in a solemn tone with a hand raised as though ready to deflect the American, "you cannot block her tongue."

Shan pulled Winslow away and tried to explain to the American what the Tibetans thought was happening.

"An oracle!" Winslow cried out, anger in his voice now. "Dammit, she's a little girl. You can't believe-" His words choked off as he studied the Tibetans, half a dozen now, sitting around the girl with grave, even scared expressions, not trying to help Anya despite their affection for her, only waiting. Lhandro darted to the packs and returned with a pencil and paper.

"Christ almighty," Winslow whispered in frustration. He stared uncertainly at the Tibetans, who gathered around the girl with butter lamps. "Jesus, Shan, you can't believe…" His voice drifted off and he stepped closer to the convulsing girl, as though he still might intervene to protect her from injuring herself.

Shan didn't know what to believe, except that he knew what the Tibetans believed about the girl. All he and the American could do was watch.

Gyalo sat near Anya's head. "My grandmother was visited, too," he declared in a soft voice. "We should make a welcoming place," he said, and began a quiet mantra. The others joined in immediately. Shan found that his hand was clasping his own gau.

"In my mountains," Anya suddenly said, "in my heart, in my blood." It sounded like Anya, Shan told himself, though a weary, distracted Anya. It could be a dream of some kind. Perhaps the girl had simply been exhausted from the trail, perhaps she had collapsed in slumber and was singing one of her spirit songs in her sleep.

Anya stopped trembling and seemed to stiffen, then grew very still as she spoke again. "Deep is the eye, brilliant blue eye, the nagas will hold it true." A chill crept down Shan's spine. Winslow gasped and stepped back. This wasn't Anya's voice. It was a cracked, dry voice, an old person's voice. It sounded hollow, like it was coming down a long tube.

There was movement at Shan's side. Lhandro was busily recording the words of the oracle. The voice echoed in Shan's mind. The eye, the oracle said. But the eye was not blue.

"Bind them, bind them, bind them, you have to wash it to bind them!" the voice croaked on. "So many dead. So many to die," it said in a mournful tone. A chilled silence hung over the camp and Lhandro, his face ghastly pale, looked up from his writing.

"Who will give voice when the songbird is gone?" the voice said, then spoke no more. With these final words Anya, though lying flat, somehow seemed to collapse. They waited in silence, no one moving, as though the words had somehow paralyzed them. Nyma stared into Anya's eyes, as though searching for the girl. Lokesh kept slowly nodding, and Nyma began rocking back and forth on her knees. Gyalo washed the girl's face from a bowl of water. No one spoke. Lokesh began his mantra again. Lhandro stared at the words he had written, then handed the paper to Shan as if Shan would know what to do about them. Shan stared uncertainly at the hurried scrawl, unable to read the handwriting. But he had watched, and knew Lhandro had not written the final words of the oracle. Who will give voice when the songbird is gone? the oracle had asked.

They sat for almost an hour, until Anya revived, rubbing her eyes as though coming out of a deep sleep, then suddenly pointing upward. A brilliant meteor shot through the sky, so close they heard it.

"The deity of Yapchi, the one whose eye you have, and that oracle," Winslow said in a small voice, still shaken by what he had witnessed, "they are the same? I mean I know there can't really be…" The American's words drifted away. There can't be a deity in the valley, he was about to say, just as, a few minutes earlier, he had been about to say there could be no oracle.

"I don't know," Shan replied hesitantly. "I don't think so."

Neither man seemed able to put their feelings into words. Because what they mostly felt, Shan suspected, was confusion.

After a long time Shan borrowed the American's light and went out with the red-circle pack among the sheep. He found a flat rock and salt in a pool of moonlight, cutting the threads away, reaching in for the chenyi stone. It was the first time he had looked at the stone since the day it had been sewn into the salt pack at Lamtso. He sat with the eye in front of him and stared at the dim outline in the rock, not knowing why. At least it might help him focus, might help him reach into his awareness in the way Gendun had taught him.

A loose pebble rattled behind Shan. As he turned, a shadow leapt forward and something hard pounded into his skull. He fell forward and drifted toward unconsciousness, quickly, yet still slow enough that before the blackness took him he realized dimly, like observing it from afar, that someone was kicking him in the ribs.