Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

"What kind of things?" Shan asked softly.

"Not about my sickness. Not at first. What time of year was I born. Had I ever taken a pilgrimage to Mount Kalais. He asked if I had ever flown a kite as a child, and did I know how to make a whistle out of a stick. How my family fared in the great struggles with the Chinese. Whether I still felt the Buddha within me. He gave me some little round brown pills and told me to drink from his bottle of drup-chu water. Then he lit some incense that he said was made of aloe wood and we talked a long time." She raised her hand as though to touch the thangka of the blue Medicine Buddha but instead she paused with her hand hanging in the air as if she were greeting the ancient image. "He wanted to know about places, about Rapjung and the plain, even about Yapchi." She slowly turned to Shan and Lokesh, as if she expected them to ask a question. "We talked about how you could smell the spring flowers at night now, and he asked why I carried a dark spot in my spirit."

Chemi's voice grew even fainter. "That's when I told him about an old woman who had lived in our village who always yelled at me for having loud dogs and how when some soldiers came long ago I told them how she kept a photograph of the Dalai Lama and prayed for his return. They took her away and no one ever saw her again. I told him I could not sleep at night, that she always appeared to me, the sight of her being dragged away by the soldiers." She paused to look in each of their faces. "He said the soldiers would have found the photo anyway and not to blame myself anymore. He said it was time to surrender the guilt, that a woman who loved the Dalai Lama would hold no blame for me. Then he put his hand on my belly and my skin burned, and my belly contracted and I think he drew something black out of my abdomen. Something changed inside me. I fell asleep and when I awoke the sun was dawning and no one was there except a little pika that just kept staring at me. I felt different; light and strong again. But there was no sign anyone had been there, and at first I thought it was a dream. But I could remember every word that lama had spoken and my weakness was gone. I stood, and I jumped in the air. That pika should have run, but it didn't move, not until I began to walk away. Then it ran to a rock and chattered, like it had to tell the world that I had lived. That maybe it had seen a miracle," Chemi added in a low voice, staring at the outstretched hand of the blue Buddha, and pushing her fingertips close to the blue fingers, just above the surface of the old cloth.

"But even now, today, I was wondering if maybe it had been a dream after all. Because I think the medicine lamas were from one of the other worlds." Other worlds. Chemi meant one of the bayal, the hidden worlds, thought to be accessed through secret portals in the earth. "They can't exist here, I was telling myself, they don't exist. They are like some of the spirit creatures in another age that were hunted down and killed by demons. I must have been carried to some bayal. But look-" She swept her hand toward the line of thangkas. They had found a place of the medicine lamas. In this world.

Each of them, even the American, wandered about the chamber in silent reverence. Lokesh kept returning to the small row of dorjes on the ledge. Nearly all were double ended, with symmetrical scepters at each end, but two consisted of a scepter at one end and at the other end a purba, the ritual knife for which the resistance was named.

"It's been so long," Lokesh said as he touched an unusually long dorje made of sandalwood. "But this one, it seems like I know it." He ran his fingers along its worn, burnished top but seemed reluctant to lift it. "My teacher, Chigu Rinpoche, had one like this," he declared in a puzzled tone. "The only one I ever saw."

"Sometimes they put treasures away," Chemi explained, "when they knew the breakers were coming."

Shan looked at the woman. Breakers. Some villages, some clans, had their own vocabulary about what had happened during the past fifty years.

"They stored treasures," Shan agreed, but looked uncertainly at Lokesh. Tenzin bent to the base of one wall where there was a long low mound of dust. He probed it with his fingers and pulled out an end of fabric with threads of bright color. Above it, over their heads, was a gnarled limb with two pieces of yak-hair twine frayed at the end. A thangka had hung there, and fallen away. He looked at Shan, then reverently lowered the cloth. Tenzin understood, too. This was not simply a cache of treasure hastily secreted when the army came to destroy Rapjung. This was an ancient retreat cave of some kind, perhaps a place for a special, secret ritual whose purpose had been lost to time.

Finally, Chemi reminded them of their destination and they followed her quietly outside. Shan lingered at the stone pillar for a moment to look toward the shadow that marked the cave entrance. "How could they survive? How could any lama endure," he wondered. "The army would have searched the mountains."

"Survived?" Chemi said bitterly. "They sterilized the mountains. For a while they even had patrols with rifles that had telescopes. They killed anything that moved. They put up posters that warned all of us to stay out of the mountains for three months. Every goat, every wild yak was shot, because when he was dying a monk had said all the Tibetans killed by the Chinese would come back as mountain animals until they could live as humans again. Nothing survived up here."

"Then how would one of the old medicine lamas be here?" a voice asked over Shan's shoulder. The American had been listening.

Chemi shrugged. "Sometimes things grow back," she said, as if someone had planted seeds and a crop of old lamas had emerged. "Sometimes they find a way to step between worlds." As she turned into the cleft that led to the trail outside Shan studied the sturdy woman. She hadn't explained everything, hadn't explained why she had gone south, days away from her home, to reach the healer, waiting on a particular trail. How had she known where to find him, how had the dropka known to watch the herb meadow? A medicine lama was in the mountains but so was the dobdob who was attacking Tibetans, even monks.

Outside, on the side of the mountain, there was no sign of the helicopter, no evidence of activity on the ledges below. They hurried along the exposed trail into a series of deep gorges, walking sometimes in chasms so narrow that they moved through water a few inches deep, the runoff from the rocks above. They navigated along a row of rock pinnacles that towered like sentinels along the Qinghai border until they reached an open ledge that commanded a view of many miles to the north and east.

Chemi pointed to the next high mountain to the east in the long line of snowcapped peaks that defined the border. "Geladaintong," she explained. "Where the Yangtze River begins. And there," she said, turning west to point to a long flat-topped ridge that lay to the west. "Three miles past there, that's my village." She said it with an air of satisfaction. "We will have hot tea and tsampa. And noodle soup. My sister always has a kettle of noodle soup."

Shan lingered a moment looking at the rugged peak Chemi had pointed out. He had forgotten that the source of the Yangtze was in Amdo. For a moment he pictured the mighty river flowing through Chinese cities and farmland, powering so much commerce, feeding millions of Chinese, emptying into the East China Sea near Shanghai. It all began with one Tibetan mountain.

They circled a massive outrider of the mountain, like a huge granite rib, and found themselves hovering at the edge of a cliff over a patch of greyness below, a cloud along the base of the rib. It seemed as though a piece of the sky had fallen and been trapped in the rocks.

"Always like that," Chemi explained as Lokesh stared in wonder at the strange fallen cloud. "They say a demon lives there; when there is no wind you can hear it roar. Hermits used to come to this ledge to meditate, I've heard, because it was a connected place."

"Connected?" Winslow asked.

"For humans to connect with something deep in the earth. Where land deities were connected to sky deities." Chemi leaned out from the overhang, so far Shan stepped forward in fear that she would fall. "My uncles used to walk over this ridge to come visit us. They said it was the place where clouds are made," she added, then stepped back with a triumphant smile as a small grey wisp drifted up the gorge and floated toward the southern ridges.

They descended on a narrow switchback trail and in an hour began to cross the ridge under an afternoon sky so clear it shimmered. When the wind ebbed birds could be heard in the distance. Lokesh, for the first time in many days, began to sing one of his traveling songs, a song that pilgrims sang when they rested at night.

Coming down the high mountain onto the ridge underscored the sense of arrival into the land of the Yapchi villagers. The landscape was largely comprised of lichen-covered rocks, with long steep gravel slopes, and deep gorges falling between fingers of the mountain, full of the stark beauty that Shan had grown accustomed to in Tibet. He was in Qinghai now, a new land. He recalled hearing from a prisoner that there was more tolerance in Qinghai, that the destruction of traditional Tibetan institutions had not been so complete in what had once been Amdo, because there had been no real centers of population in the land, no obvious targets for the army.

As they emerged into a broad open field of gravel and low heather, Lokesh called out softly and pointed at a small flock of grouse-like birds, dappled with the white remnants of their winter plumage, that were browsing on the field two hundred feet away. "Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called softly.

Then the birds exploded.

Gravel, plants, and birds burst into the air with a deafening blast. Chemi shouted and dropped to the ground. Tenzin grabbed Anya and pulled her behind a boulder as Shan pushed Lokesh in the same direction. The American did not move, but stood, cursing loudly in English as the rubble tumbled to the ground. As Winslow took a step forward, pulling out his binoculars, another patch of ground fifty feet beyond the first erupted with the same violence, blasting stones far into the sky. Winslow retreated to the rocks beside Shan, still cursing, and a third explosion ripped through the still afternoon air.

Abruptly, there was silence. Tiny bits of soil began to shower down on them, and three small columns of smoke drifted upward from small craters in the meadow. Three explosions, in a line, evenly spaced. Like the ones they had witnessed from the heights of the mountain that morning.

Chemi rose, terror in her eyes. Tenzin stepped to her side, his eyes upward, watching something white drift down toward them. It was a feather, and they all watched it in silence until it touched the ground in front of them. Lokesh began a mantra in a low, sorrowful tone.

"What would the army…" Chemi began, and rubbed her ears.

Shan realized his own ears were ringing. "Not the army," he heard Winslow say, as if from a distance, and the American pointed toward the far end of the clearing.

Several figures were emerging from the outcropping at the far end of the field. They wore helmets, but not the helmets of soldiers. Their helmets were red and silver, the kind construction workers sometimes wore. Shan motioned the others back into the rocks. He stepped hesitantly into the clearing and waited.

The fury of the man in the lead was evident. Even though he was still out of earshot they could tell he was shouting and pointing at them, pointing at the small craters, even turning to wave his fist at the small party that followed him. As he reached the crater nearest them the man halted and examined Shan, then removed his silver helmet and marched quickly forward, his hands clenched, his mouth curled in anger. For a moment Shan thought the man was going to throw the helmet at him.

"Just walking across the ground could have ruined the test!" he shouted as he advanced.

The stranger replaced his helmet as he reached Shan, as though to say he was prepared for violence. He was a Han, slightly taller than Shan, square-shouldered, with knuckles that bore the scars of having been laid open many times. He wore a green nylon coat that bore the emblem of a golden oil derrick on the left breast.

"We could have been killed," Shan said quietly.

"You could have ruined our test and been killed," the man shot back loudly, his eyes still blazing.

"You did kill some birds." Anya appeared a few feet behind Shan.

The words, or perhaps just the soft, disappointed way Anya spoke them, seemed to deflate the man. He frowned. "Walking in the test quadrant, so close to the charges, can distort the results," he growled, his anger seeming to ebb into frustration.

"How could we know?" Shan asked.

"Know? All you need to know is that the whole area was off-limits. Don't you read? Posters in every village below, with dates for testing in each quadrant. Only a fool would-"

As he spoke another man approached, a short man wearing dark glasses. His heavy cheeks and compact features had the look of a Mongolian. A number of instruments hung from his neck. A small, expensive camera. Binoculars. A compass, and a small black-cased device that may have been an altimeter. He wore a red nylon vest and, rather than a helmet, a red American-style cap with a broad front visor, that also bore the image of a golden derrick. The hair exposed below the cap was long, but trimmed and oiled. He looked surprisingly well-groomed for climbing the mountain trails.

"We didn't come that way," Anya announced.

Again her words seemed to take the strangers by surprise. The man in the sunglasses studied Anya, then Shan, and looked behind them. Chemi stood there, and Tenzin stepped out of the shadows. The man in sunglasses turned to the first man, who cocked his head as if suddenly very curious. He pulled a map from his pocket and studied it intensely.

"Which way then?" the man in the helmet asked.

"Sometimes sheep get lost in the hills," Shan interjected, taking another step forward.

"You have no sheep," the man observed.

"I said they were lost," Shan shot back.

There was a sudden mechanical clicking. The second man, with the sunglasses, was shooting photographs of them, rapidly pressing the shutter and winding as he aimed the device at each of them. An instant later a similar clicking and whirling answered the first, and Shan turned to see Winslow photographing the oil crew, answering each of the man's shots with one of his own. The man with the dark glasses lowered his camera and glared at Winslow; Winslow lowered his camera and the man saw the American's face. He straightened and stepped closer, then twisted about and ordered the rest of the work crew back, leaving only the man in the green jacket by his side.

"I am the foreman," the man in green hesitantly announced, looking to the second man as though for a cue. "Team leader for this field study. For the Qinghai Petroleum Venture." He looked from Shan to Winslow and back again, obviously uncertain which to address. "There must have been a misunderstanding." He studied Shan's frayed clothes and decided to look at Winslow as he spoke. "You should have been warned about the blasting zone."

"Why would you look for oil so high in the mountains?" Winslow asked in an offhand tone, taking off his hat and pushing back his hair.

"Not oil, not here. The blasting is monitored by seismometers positioned in the mountains and in the valley where the exploration is focused. These are very complex geologic formations. We need to record the way the vibrations travel through the rock to define the geologic structure, so we can understand how large the deposit of oil is, how economic it would be to extract."

"And?" Winslow asked, still in his disinterested tone.

"So far the results are inconclusive. It will depend on what the drilling strikes in the valley," the geologist said with a thin smile. "Our models suggest a strike big enough to justify at least a ten-year project here."

"Were you blasting three days ago, on the south side of the mountain? Or this morning?" Winslow demanded. "Have you been on the ridge on the far side of that big plain?"

The foreman glanced at his companion again. "No. We do not operate outside our concession area."

Winslow studied the two men. "Qinghai Petroleum," he observed, "has American partners."

"Italian," the foreman replied, "French, British. And American. We work with Americans on this project."

"So you know Melissa Larkin."

The geologist's expression froze, and he threw a pleading glance toward the man in the sunglasses.

"A horrible thing," the short man observed in an earnest tone. "Tragic, so far from home. So sudden." He removed his glasses and fixed Winslow with a steady gaze. There was sympathy in his words, but not in his eyes.

"You knew her?" the American asked. "I was at Yapchi. I didn't see you."

"Zhu Ji is Director of Special Projects for the entire company," the foreman said. "He works with the foreign experts."

The short, sleek man called Zhu nodded slowly. "But I haven't met you before," he said pointedly. "You are not with the venture. I would know."

Winslow sighed, then pulled out his wallet and handed a business card to Zhu.

It was printed in Chinese on one side and English on the other. Shan saw the image of an American eagle, in blue ink, and gold stars. Zhu stared at it a long time, before handing it to the geologist, who repeatedly turned the card over in his hand, seeming to read it each time, as though the lettering might change when he turned it. "I heard someone from your government came," Zhu said dryly.

"Are you suggesting Miss Larkin suffered an accident?" Winslow asked.

"Miss Larkin is dead," Zhu said abruptly. "She fell off the mountain into a river. I saw it happen."

Shan heard a sharp intake of breath from Winslow. "You were there?"

"I saw it, but not close. You know she had stayed out in the field without properly clearing it– supposed to be on a three day mission but never returned. We had been watching for her, because her superiors were quite angry about it. Her team had expensive equipment and was gathering important data. Only two of her team came back, only the Chinese, who said they had become lost. The others with her were Tibetans," he observed in an accusing tone. "I said maybe she was just lost as well. It is so easy to become disoriented in these ranges. We watched for her when we were traveling in the mountains, and saw her through binoculars on a ledge high above us. I think she was delirious from hunger. Or maybe the altitude. Foreigners often have trouble with the altitude."

"Why wasn't I told this when I visited the camp?"

"I was in the mountains. When I returned I reported it. Forms have been sent to Beijing. And to her American employer."

It was Winslow's turn to fall silent. He sat on a flat rock and surveyed the barren landscape. "Is her body at the camp?" he asked after a long moment. "I need to take the body."

"No body," Zhu said soberly. "Into the river, washed away. It happens. Sometimes people are found floating hundreds of miles away."

"You mean the Yangtze?"

"No. We were on the crest of the long ridge, on the provincial border. She fell on the southern side. The Tibetan side."

"I have to have a body," Winslow declared quietly, to a cloud over the northern horizon. "It's my job. The U.S. government must account for all of its taxpayers." He sighed and unfolded his map. "Show me where."

Zhu pulled a pencil from his pocket, studied the American's map for a long time, then pointed to an area of rugged terrain nearly fifteen miles to the west, where the topographical map showed the sharply compressed lines of a steep wall. Below was a thin blue line that drifted south on the map, into Tibet. Zhu followed the blue line with his pencil tip to a larger blue spot over a hundred miles away. "To a lake," he said in a victorious tone, as if it proved his point. "Probably one of those sacred places."

Winslow's gaze moved slowly up and down the man. "I'll need those papers you filed," he said in a cool voice.

"At Yapchi. Ask for the manager."

"Jenkins. I met him."

"Right," Zhu agreed in his slow, oily voice. "Mr. Jenkins was very upset, too. We all liked Miss Larkin. Very pretty. She told jokes. Spoke Tibetan. Not Chinese," he said pointedly, "but Tibetan." The foreman turned away, as if Zhu's words were a cue to leave.

"Stay on the main tracks," Zhu advised as he took a step backwards. "Safer for everyone." He studied the steep slope behind them as though trying to discern how they might have descended. "Otherwise we can't guarantee your safety." As he spoke the Special Projects Director stepped past Shan to the rocks behind them, walking warily along the edge of the field as though he suspected others might be hiding. He circled back and stood behind the foreman again. "You have no dogs," Zhu said, looking at Shan suspiciously. "Shepherds have dogs."

Shan returned his steady gaze. "Sometimes dogs have to choose when sheep stray. Go to the shepherd or stay with the sheep. This time they must have stayed with the sheep."

Zhu replied with another narrow smile. "A Han shepherd with Tibetan sheep. Difficult," he said, and nothing more. He spun about and the two men marched away to join their crew, back on the far side of the long rock-strewn clearing which now resembled a battlefield. Shan recalled another crater, the one he had seen at Rapjung. The land took long to heal from such wounds.

Shan watched the Special Director until he was out of sight, trying to persuade himself Zhu was only what he had said he was. But he had known too many men like Zhu, as colleagues in Beijing, and later as his handlers in the gulag, for him to dismiss Zhu so easily. Zhu was more than what he had claimed to be. A Party member, almost certainly. The political commissar of the oil project, most likely. Perhaps a special watcher from Public Security.

He weighed Zhu's words, trying to make them fit with what they had seen earlier that day. No oil crew had been authorized to work on the other side of the mountain but the explosions they had heard that morning had been seismic charges, identical to those they had just experienced. The helicopter Chemi had seen had been civilian, and the only civilian helicopters in the region probably belonged to the oil venture. Zhu had said a helicopter had searched for Larkin. But why would it search on the far side of the mountain? And if Zhu had already reported Larkin dead, what was it searching for?

As the oil crew disappeared from sight, Winslow kept staring at his map. "Jesus," he said as Shan approached. "Over a cliff." He was remembering, Shan suspected, that he had almost fallen the same way the day before.

"I always get a body," the American said absently, staring at the map.

"Maybe later we could find the river," Shan suggested, "and say some words."

"I didn't know her," Winslow said, in a tone that sounded like protest.

"A rebellious American," Shan observed, "who leaves her normal duties, her normal life, to wander about Tibetan mountains, perhaps to look for something bigger."

Winslow grunted. The small grin that rose on his face slowly angled downward into a frown. "You make it sound like she and I have been looking for the same thing."

Shan did not reply, but kept staring at the American. Winslow returned his gaze for a moment, grimaced and looked away.

The landscape greened as they descended into Qinghai Province. The hills were still largely the same rugged, gravelly slopes they had encountered on the south side of the range, but the gullies where the spring melt ran contained more vegetation. Juniper and poplar trees could be seen in the lower elevations. There even seemed to be more pikas running in and out of the tumbles of rock scree that covered many of the slopes.

Lokesh seemed intensely interested in every stream and rivulet they encountered. Whenever they were within reach he paused to taste the water. Where one came into view in the distance he pulled his hat low to shield his eyes and studied the water. He offered no explanation, but Shan knew Lokesh was thinking of the patch of blood red water they had seen the day before. Shan still did not understand it, but he did understand that the healers Lokesh had trained with believed the health of the land and the health of the people who inhabited it were inextricably linked. To Lokesh and his teachers it was impossible to treat a human illness without addressing the state of harmony in the human's spirit, and it was impossible to address the harmony in a human spirit without also considering the harmony in that part of the earth where the human lived. To Lokesh the crimson patch might have indicated a tear in the fabric that bound them all together.

They followed Chemi down a long steep gully for half an hour before Winslow paused, map in hand, and called out to her. She pointed to their location on the map, then to the narrow gorge they were about to enter. Where the gully opened onto the lower slope of the mountain was her village, she said with a smile of anticipation. Winslow stooped for Anya to climb onto his back. Chemi's pace quickened, and although she usually remained at least fifty feet in front of their small column as they moved down the gully, Shan thought he heard her singing.

The gully ended abruptly and Chemi stood in a pool of sunlight in front of them. The sharp, sudden sound she made seemed to start as a greeting. But then she sank to her knees and held her belly, and the sound became a long painful groan. He ran to her side but she seemed unable to speak.

Her home had been there, Shan saw, less than two hundred feet from a small stream that emerged from the mountain near the mouth of the gully. Between the stream and the site of the tiny village there had been trees, but now these were twisted, smoking stumps. And beyond the stumps were the smoldering remains of four houses.