Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

"He has bad dreams," Anya said to Tenzin in an oddly apologetic tone.

Tenzin looked at the girl, expressionless, and began wiping Lin's brow again. A minute later, as Anya rose for fresh water, Shan knelt at the pallet and slipped his fingers into the pockets of Lin's tunic. There was no sign of Lhandro's identity papers. But he pulled out a folded photograph from a breast pocket, which he carried to the doorway to examine in the sunlight.

It was a grainy blurred black-and-white image, probably captured from a security camera. It showed two men in an office hallway, wearing the long work tunics of janitors and carrying buckets and mops. They were facing the opposite direction, but the taller, older of the men had his head slightly turned to look over his shoulder. The first man could have been Drakte. But there was no mistake about the second man in janitor's garb. It was Tenzin. In one of the buckets, Shan suspected, was the eye of Yapchi.

"You need to know something," Winslow said from behind him, with warning in his voice. He was pulling his binoculars from their case as Nyma appeared behind him.

"It's Lokesh," Nyma blurted out, stepping around the American. "Lokesh disappeared." He had left soon after Shan and Winslow had departed, Nyma explained, going down the narrow goat trail that led below, carrying only some cold tsampa and a water bottle, talking, seemingly speaking to people no one else could see. Shan darted out onto the ledge, pulling out his battered field glasses. He could see half a dozen trails as well as several long, gradual slopes where a man could climb without a trail. For the next hour he and Winslow scanned every trail, every flat rock where someone might sit to meditate. Shan ran down the trail where Lokesh had last been seen, stopping often to call his name. Nowhere was there sign of his old friend. Lin's soldiers knew Lokesh's face. If the colonel's men found him they would have no patience, no incentive even to give him to the knobs. They would work on him, frantically, as long as it took, with any tool they could find, to discover what had happened to their colonel.

Shan sank onto a rock at the top of the cliff, fighting the dark thing that seemed to be clenching his heart. He watched the sun disappear over the distant changtang, losing himself in the dark, threatening swirls of shadow on the horizon.

Suddenly someone touched him and his head jerked up off his chest. He had been asleep. The colors were gone from the horizon. It was nearly dark. Nyma knelt beside him, crying.

"Lokesh?" he asked in alarm.

She nodded, scrubbing away tears with the back of her hand. "He found him. He went into the mountains and found him. Lepka saw them coming, and said we must be near a portal to one of the hidden lands. We didn't understand, but then Winslow saw the two of them on a goat path above. It was Lokesh, walking ahead of him, and turning all the time, as if always trying to coax him forward a few more steps, like a wild animal being tamed." She looked back toward the hidden chambers.

Shan climbed to his feet, confused.

"It's a spirit creature," Nyma said. "It has to be a spirit creature come to save us."

He ran, and stumbled, falling to a knee, picked himself up and ran again. Inside, the main chamber was like a temple, filled with a reverent silence, the air sluiced with incense smoke. Lhandro and his parents sat near the wall, eyes round and excited. The headman's mother rocked back and forth, as Lhandro and Lepka silently mouthed their beads. Winslow sat in the furthest shadows, his countenance lit with an odd, puzzled joy.

At the foot of the pallet sat Lokesh, and at one side Anya still held Lin's hand. Opposite the girl, one hand stroking Lin's forehead, the other reading his wrist pulse, was an ancient Tibetan, older even than Lhandro's father. He appeared frail and strong at once, thin as a reed yet vibrant and serene in his countenance. He wore a tattered quilted worker's jacket over an equally tattered maroon robe, and on his feet were old black athletic shoes that were on the verge of disintegration. A sturdy staff leaned on the wall beside him.

Lokesh gave a small croaking sound as he saw Shan, then he reached out and grabbed Shan's hand in both of his own. Lokesh squeezed it hard, again and again. His friend seemed to be in the grip of some strange rapture. "It's Jokar Rinpoche!" Lokesh said when he was finally able to speak. "From Rapjung," he added, as if the ruined monastery was still routinely sending out old healers. "From before. The same Jokar," he whispered, as though someone might think it was a different incarnation of the lama.

It was the medicine lama, the apparition they had seen in the herb meadow, the lama, Shan knew, who had healed Chemi. He had convinced himself that the lama had to be real, that such a man, despite all odds, was walking the mountains, a flesh-and-blood vestige of another world, not a deity or demon or spirit creature. But in that moment, as the lama turned and lifted his hand toward Shan, for some reason Shan could not comprehend, it seemed his father was reaching out to touch him, and when the lama grasped his hand Shan gasped, and felt his breath rush out.

"Lha gyal lo," the lama said softy, with a small, familiar smile, then turned back to his patient.

They sat in silence as the lama worked, incense filling the room, wind fluting around the rocks overhead. Lepka broke into a low song. The purbas stood in the shadows with wary, bewildered expressions.

Shan rose and stepped backwards into the shadows. In the flickering light he saw Winslow in the corner, still grinning. In the nearest of the meditation cells Tenzin sat alone, and apart, in deep meditation. Shan sat at the edge of the light and studied the lama, and Lokesh– whose face still glowed in wonder, reverence mixed with the eagerness of a young student.

Shan sensed that everyone in the room felt the same detached, otherworldly nature of the moment. It was indeed as though Jokar had come from another world, had been spirited there because he was needed, and was only visiting before ascending again to the deities. The lama was unlike any man Shan had ever seen, ancient yet ageless. When he had touched Shan, in the moment he had sensed his father nearby, something like a surge of electricity had shot up Shan's arm. Sometimes deities visit, Anya had said, and change people's lives forever.

Oddly, the lama was missing the little finger on his left hand. Only a tiny stump remained where one had been. Shan remembered Lokesh speaking of how the medicine makers in Rapjung had sometimes wielded huge cleavers to chop herbs and how young students, before understanding the rhythm of the cleavers, sometimes lost fingers to the blades. It must have happened decades ago.

Shan let his awareness drift and in his mind's eye he was on Rapjung plain, nearly sixty years before, and a young Lokesh was with his old teacher Chigu and with Jokar, as a young healer monk then, perhaps still in training. Behind them in the distance the graceful buildings of Rapjung rose up the slope. Geese flew overhead, and Jokar was exclaiming over a rare herb he had found. A lark flew and landed close by, and it became a boot, and Shan saw four stubby fingers pushed in his face by a man in dark glasses. Realization swept over him like a wave of sickness, and he was suddenly back in the chamber, breathing hard and very cold. He rose unsteadily and stepped outside.

Moments later Nyma caught up with him as he sat with his back against the mountain wall, looking at the sky. "What is it? Are you ill?"

"Not sick," he muttered.

She stared at him then took a hesitant step backwards as though she saw something that frightened her.

"You remember, Nyma, that morning at Norbu when we thought the knobs were going to take us?"

"I will never forget that terrible morning," she answered, and sat beside him.

"The knob doctor was impatient, he was unhappy with Khodrak and the committee, as if they were wasting his time. He had come for a purpose, from far away, not from local Public Security."

"A special squad of doctors," Nyma said, "probably from Lhasa."

"But not just arrived from Lhasa. Gyalo said they had been traveling hard, a long time, from the Indian border." Shan sighed and gazed back at the stars. "The doctor looked at that officer and held up his fingers. Four fingers. I thought he was mocking Khodrak, saying that there were only four of us when there was supposed to be five."

"But they wanted Tenzin."

"Someone wanted Tenzin." Shan nodded. "Khodrak I think, and Tuan. But that knob officer was there for something else. There was a reason that special medical team had been traveling with the knobs. For weeks, coming from near the Indian border. At Norbu Tuan said the doctors were there because of an agitator from India. I thought he meant the resistance, even the Tiger. But he meant Jokar."

"I don't understand."

"His fingers. He pushed his little finger back and held up the other four. A strange way. Most would just push the thumb down and show four fingers. But he used his thumb and three fingers."

"Like Jokar," Nyma said in a slow whisper.

"Not like Jokar," Shan said. "It was Jokar he was indicating. He was looking for the medicine healer with four fingers, tracking him with a team that could lure the sick from him with offers of Chinese clinics and hospitals, and find evidence through those who use traditional healers. The government thinks he has stirred up a path of reactionary practices all the way from India."

"If that's true," a voice said out of the darkness, "it would explain why the medicine fields are being burned." Winslow stepped beside them.

"But why?" Nyma protested. "The rumors, the reports. They make it sound like the government is seeking some terrible criminal. He is a healer. He is so important to Tibetans." She looked at Shan and her eyes dropped to the ground. She had answered her own question.

Winslow dropped to a rock and they sat in silence. A new vision rose in Shan's mind: Jokar in a lao gai camp, being flogged by guards as he tried to push a barrow of rocks up a hill.

"He only wanted to teach us again, to bring the healing home," Nyma said finally, in a mournful whisper.

In the morning, Lin was sitting up, leaning against the wall. He seemed incapable of speech, or at least not inclined to speak, but his eyes restlessly watched the Tibetans and his good hand restlessly searched his pockets, making a small pile of their contents. Cigarettes, matches, a whistle, a small key for manacles, and a tiny pouch of ochre cloth tied with a thread. Whenever Tenzin appeared in the circle of light cast by the butter lamps, the colonel pointed at him, sometimes making small grabbing motions like an angry crab, sometimes rubbing his eyes as if to see Tenzin better. Anya still did not leave his side, and she held a bowl of tea from which he sometimes sipped, though he winced whenever he lifted his head to swallow.

Jokar was gone. No one had seen him leave. Lhandro's mother said it was the way of such creatures, that they would just spirit away. Winslow thought he had seen someone walking on the western trail in the grey light of early dawn. Lokesh looked exhausted. He had stayed up nearly all night with Jokar, long after Shan himself had collapsed of fatigue onto a blanket. Shan watched as he tightened the strips of cloth binding Lin's wrist, then, deeply focused, as if unaware of anyone else in the room, pulled a bowl of brilliant white salt from the shadows. Lokesh placed Lin's hand, the hand with the broken wrist, over the bowl, and began rubbing the salt over the hand. It was Lamtso salt, the empowered salt of the sacred lake, and Lokesh was washing Lin's hand in it.

Lin did not react, but simply watched with the same rapt attention as Lokesh while the old Tibetan applied the salt with a kneading motion, then gently wiped the skin clean with a scrap of cloth. When he was done he folded what looked like a prayer scarf around the wrist, tied the arm into a sling around Lin's neck, pushed himself to his knees, and rose. Lin watched him expectantly, and raised his eyebrows, as if he were going to ask Lokesh to stay, but just watched uncertainly as he stepped away. Shan followed him outside to where Lhandro's mother was churning butter tea. The two men took their bowls of tea and walked to the rim of the plateau. Neither seemed to know what to say about what had happened the night before.

"So many times we have climbed up mountains because you thought you saw a giant turtle or a deity with ten arms," Shan finally observed. He had lost count of the number of times, in fact, but he never said no when his friend insisted they climb. "Last night, it was like the turtle was finally there."

Lokesh offered his crooked grin to Shan and nodded. "Those are the words."

"Is it true that you knew him? At Rapjung?"

"I was only a low initiate. But he remembers. We spoke for hours last night about Rapjung and Yapchi Valley, until Jokar wandered away and sat with Tenzin by that old tree. He remembers how I was always with Chigu Rinpoche, how Rinpoche had hoped I would stay to live at Rapjung for training."

No one stayed at Rapjung to live, Shan thought bitterly. "But he escaped before the army came."

"He had been called away by the Dalai Lama's personal physician. In a secret message, when the Dalai Lama fled to India. Jokar was one of the youngest instructors and they wanted him to help establish a new Tibetan medical college in India. All these years that is where he had been, building for a new future in India."

"It's such a long way to come. Hundreds of miles. He appears to have no money." Shan remembered the tattered robe and shoes. "Knobs have been chasing him." But he knew that meant little to Jokar. Once he was on the course intended for him he would be as likely to change it because of knobs as Gendun, or Lokesh. The Beijing Shan would have laughed when told deities protected such men. But there were times it seemed the only explanation.

"He said it is a pilgrimage of sorts," Lokesh continued. "He said if he had money he might be tempted to ride buses and go into towns. He has traveled on foot, always on foot, close to the earth. Eight months now, staying with rongpa here and there, sometimes traveling with dropka and their herds. Healing where he can. Uncovering old roots he said, as though the old ways were still in the land and in the heart of the people and simply had to be discovered again. He makes the old medicines when he can. Sometimes entire villages have sat with him through a night, to hear of the Dalai Lama and of the old days in Tibet and he reminds them of ways of healing they thought they had forgotten."

"But why come here?"

"This is where he spent nearly fifty years of his life, at Rapjung. He was sent there as a young boy while the thirteenth Dalai Lama still lived. In India, he was senior lama of the new school for many years. It was time to finish there, he said. I think now he wants the old school to be born again."

"Rapjung?"

Lokesh nodded. "He says he met other healers while walking from India, that they all know of Rapjung and many asked if medicine herbs still grow there. He said he saw the ruins, but he also saw new buildings." They exchanged a meaningful glance. Jokar did not know about the fire. "He said Tibetans must learn how to stay the same by practicing change." Lokesh paused and nodded again, slowly, as if contemplating the words. "The rumors must be true. Jokar must have come to take the seat of Siddhi, the defiant leader from the ancient tales."

"The knobs have spies in India," Shan said. "They would have learned about such a prominent lama embarking for Tibet to gather the people and restore an institution of the old order. They would consider it the gravest of sins against the government. It is so dangerous for him."

Lokesh nodded. "Duties," he said sadly. There was no need for more words. It had become their own shorthand. Shan had had the same conversation with Lokesh, and other Tibetans, often. Soldiers would do what they had to do, Lokesh meant, and the Tibetans would do what they had to do.

"He would have been safe staying here, for a few days."

"Who could presume to tell him to change his plans? He is visiting all the old places. The herb meadows. The mixing places. While he does so he will look for medicine for the sick colonel."

Shan considered Lokesh's words. "What does he say of Lin?"

"The bone at the top of his head was cracked. But there was something else, worse, from before the rocks fell."

"He was already ill?"

Lokesh nodded heavily. "Heart wind." The tantric medical system Lokesh and Jokar practiced believed that the heart-center was the intersection between the physical and spiritual beings. Not the physical, beating heart as such, but the center of the awareness and life energy. Heart wind meant stress on the heart center brought on by intense anger, fear, or other mental imbalances. Jokar would not address one of Lin's maladies without addressing them all. "There are medicines that could help perhaps, but in such cases all the imbalances are related," Lokesh said.

"Jokar says that heart wind seems to be the most common ailment in Tibet today." Lokesh's gaze drifted toward the trails. He, too, seemed to be looking for Jokar. "He said something else. He said that bringing Lin from the rocks to here, that was part of the healing, too. For everyone."

Shan weighed the words. Jokar meant that it wasn't just Lin who suffered an imbalance, that perhaps they all shared an imbalance, and that for Tibetans to bring a hated colonel from what would have surely been his grave may have begun another healing as well.

"Jokar says there was a small grey plant with heart-shaped leaves that grew on the slopes near Yapchi that would be helpful. He asked me if I remembered the ways of harvesting and mixing."

"I think you should find him, Lokesh," Shan said after they watched a flight of birds leave the mountain, soaring toward the Plain of Flowers. "You should take him to hide, stop him from moving around so much while soldiers are in the mountains. Take him and hide him. For weeks. Speak with him of the old ways. Write them down. For months, if necessary. Until the soldiers leave Yapchi. The purbas would help you."

His old friend seemed to consider the words a long time. "I would not know how to," he said at last.

Shan stared at him. Lokesh not only meant he would not know how to find Jokar, but that he would not know how to ask such a holy man anything. Shan thought of the night before. No one had questioned the ancient lama, no one had asked where he had come from, or why he was there. Because, in the language of Shan's teachers, his deity had become him. It was as if Jokar was indeed a spirit creature, a true Bodhisattva, a Buddha who remained on earth to help others find enlightenment.

"I have to go back to that valley," Shan said. "I have to find the path of that eye if it is there. Because," he said slowly, "I am bound."

Lokesh fixed him with a searching stare. "Sometimes deities are created in the seeking. And the seeking itself may create the path."

Shan returned Lokesh's stare. "You make it sound like I just follow acts of compassion and they will eventually connect me to a deity."

Lokesh answered with his crooked grin.

Shan sighed. "You will be safe staying on the mountain. Someone needs to help Tenzin," he suggested. It would be a way of keeping Lokesh with Tenzin, who was perhaps his safest guardian if Shan could not be with the old man.

"You forget, Xiao Shan. I am bound also." Lokesh looked over the plain. "You should know something else," he said with a strange spark in his eye, excited yet solemn. "Tenzin was speaking. I saw Jokar touch him, and Tenzin's tongue grew back. They spoke a long time at that tree, and when the moon was bright Jokar and Tenzin began working at something, like lamas mixing medicine in the moonlight. After a while I went to investigate. They had a sack of Lamtso salt, and Jokar had ripped off the bottom of his robe and made little squares of it. I helped them, creating little pouches from the squares, filling them with salt and tying them at the top. True earth, Jokar called the salt. Tenzin repeated the words, again and again, smiling like a young boy."

Lokesh stared out at a high cloud. "Tenzin has a strong voice, a voice that would be good for temples. His new tongue knew prayers. Jokar told him of a teaching, from the first lama at Rapjung, the founder, the one called Siddhi. He said all healing was about the same thing, about connecting the earth to the earth inside us all. We took all the pouches to one of the meditation cells. While Lin was sleeping Jokar put one in his pocket. He said everyone in the mixing place should leave with one." Lokesh reached into his shirt and produced one of the small bags for Shan.

"Lin was studying the room this morning," Shan observed as he accepted the pouch. "As if planning something."

"I don't know the state of his awareness," Lokesh said forlornly, as though finishing the thought for Shan. Lin was such a dangerous man. He could still inflict great harm on them all. "Those falling rocks may have done something to the soldier in him." Lokesh was fond of telling Shan stories of cruel people who had experienced close calls with death only to become dramatically different, better people.

As if on cue a cracked, but fierce voice boomed out from the back of the plateau. "Surrender! You are my prisoners! Only if you surrender will we show mercy!" Lin was standing unsteadily, his good hand on the rock wall, his knees about to buckle. He seemed to be shouting at Shan and Lokesh. Not really shouting, Shan realized, for the rock wall amplified his voice. But trying to shout.

"Perhaps," Shan said dryly, "just one more rock."

Lokesh groaned and leapt up. Lin staggered and dropped to his knees as Lokesh reached him. A thin trickle of blood came from the wound on his scalp.

As Shan reached the two men a small figure darted forth from the shadows, rushing between Lokesh and Lin. "Everyone was sleeping," Anya said in an anguished voice.

Nyma appeared behind the girl. "That old thankga." She seemed close to tears. "The colonel ripped it to pieces."

"Submit! You are my prisoners!" Lin called again in an angry voice, though he had so little strength the words came out in barely a whisper.

"No one," Anya said to Lin in the tone of an impatient midwife, "no one is going to surrender. And no one is going to attack."

Lin looked with an odd, confused expression at the girl, then he fell forward, his good arm clutching at Anya, trapping the girl, so that when he fell she was beneath him, cushioning the fall.

When they had carried Lin's unconscious form back to his pallet, Anya looked up with a determined glint. "You will have to go tell them," the girl declared. "Tell the army we have their colonel. He is important to them I think. They will miss him."

"Little girl," a voice said from behind them. The youngest of the purbas who had come with Tenzin was awake. "Tell them that and they will assume he is a hostage. Tell them anything about him and they will assume it is a trick, or he is a hostage. It will become like war in these mountains. They have so many soldiers they would be like ants on a mound. It is treason to kidnap an officer."

"We kidnapped no one. Ours was simply the way of compassion," the girl said in the soft tone of a lama.

The purba stepped out of the shadows and fixed Anya with an angry stare. "You're old enough to know better. Old enough to go to one of their coal mine camps," the young Tibetan said with fire in his voice. "I'll tell you what we do with your colonel. We carry him to the edge and drop him over, like they have done with so many Tibetans before. Sky burial," he added with a grin.

Suddenly a hand appeared from behind and clasped the man's shoulder. The angry purba seemed to deflate. He frowned, shook the hand off, and turned away. It was Tenzin. The man whom the colonel wanted so desperately to imprison knelt at Lin's side, opposite Anya, and helped her pull the blanket over his unconscious form.

The sun had been up two hours the next morning when Winslow and Shan neared the narrow gap that led back over the range into Qinghai Province. The lanky American stopped, warning Shan with an upraised hand, and pointed. A solitary figure was hiking along the ridge, a small Tibetan man wearing a derby-like hat with a drawstring pouch slung over his shoulder. They crested the ridge and waited for the man, who smiled cheerfully as he approached.

"You are the ones helping Yapchi," he observed. "The distant ones who came to help." Distant ones. The man meant foreigners. "People all over the mountains are speaking about you, about how you are going to restore the balance," he said in a bright, confident tone. "My grandfather knew distant ones who helped him see things," the man added enigmatically.

Shan paused. Foreigners? The grandfather of a man who lived in the mountains knew foreigners? "There could be soldiers below," he warned.

"I'm not going below," the man said, "I am just bringing water."

Shan studied the small pouch. "Not much more than would fill a kettle." In his pocket, his hand clenched around another pouch, one of the little ochre bags of true earth Jokar had prepared.

"Not even," the man said. He opened the pouch and produced a one-liter plastic bottle. The label it once bore had been torn away. Tibetan script ran along the side, made with a bold black marker. Sum, it said, the number three, and below that chu, river. "It's going to the sky birthing, for the Green Tara," he said, still in his bright tone, then he returned the bottle to the sack and started down the trail again.

"What did he mean?" Winslow asked as he followed the man with a confused gaze.

"Offerings," Shan suggested. "Perhaps they have decided to invoke the protectress deity called the Green Tara. She is believed to be very powerful."

"A protector deity," Winslow sighed. "Where do I sign up?"

Workers were stretched across the valley as Shan and Winslow surveyed it two hours later. The logging crews had cut a swath nearly three hundred yards wide above the camp. Through their binoculars, tiny figures could be seen scrambling over the tower of the derrick as it kept cutting into the earth below. And at the near end, the south end, by the ruins of Yapchi Village, crews unloaded a truck trailer stacked with freshly sawn lumber.

Each time the American had paused to study his map, Shan had looked back, hesitating. He had been to the oil camp before, and the howlers had tried to take him. Would Somo still be there? Had the intrepid woman been discovered and arrested for helping him? Increasingly, he sensed that helping Winslow find what had happened to Larkin was also somehow helping to find the deity.

They climbed past the little canyon, now empty, where the villagers had hidden, planning to circle the valley along the edge of the band of trees. They were above the derrick when Winslow stopped and looked at Shan.

"Stay up here," the American said. "I'll go in, talk with Jenkins about Zhu's crew, maybe his secretary can help locate them. I'll find them and talk to them without Zhu knowing-" he was interrupted by a sudden sound, the slow beat of a deep drum. It seemed to be coming from directly above them on the slope, no more than a hundred yards away. The two men stared at each other, then Shan took a step toward the sound and Winslow grinned, offering a wave of his hand.

Shan ran. Whoever was beating the drum would not likely hear a few broken twigs or sliding rocks. The pounding grew louder, in a rhythm of two rapid beats and a pause, even more like a heartbeat than before. He was close, he was certain, no more than a hundred paces away, searching the clusters of boulders that dotted the slope.

Suddenly something leapt on his back. A leopard, a voice screamed in his mind, and he was down, claws in his back, his struggling hands batted away violently, his head pressed into the earth. He groaned in fear, his breath rushing out of him, his arms flailing, connecting only with the earth. Then, strangely, his attacker seized his arms behind him and rolled him over.

It was a man, Shan saw through a haze of pain. Was the drum still pounding or was it his own heart he heard? A man he seemed to recognize, who surely recognized him, for as soon as their eyes met the man gasped and released him.

No, it was a bear, the distant voice in his head said. The fog lifted from his eyes and Shan saw it was the Golok bear, Dremu. But not the Dremu Shan had known, for this one was torn and gaunt, a shadow of the prideful Golok Shan had last seen the night the eye was stolen.

Dremu pulled Shan upright, his legs still on the ground, and for a moment his hands lingered, clenching Shan's shoulders in something like an embrace.

"They said you had fled," Shan ventured.

Dremu put his finger over his lips. "Damned soldiers took me," he whispered. "I was riding near the oil camp, in the trees and I didn't know they had soldiers hiding." Shan saw heavy bruises around the Golok's eyes. "They beat me and put me on that work crew, took my horse even, to haul their logs." Dremu looked toward the drumming sound, which continued, louder than ever, very close. "They didn't know who they had caught," he said in a defiant tone. "Thought I was just some rongpa, like those others who just take their orders. I ran away. But first I told those rongpa that their eye was back in the valley, that the eye was watching again."

"Why would you say that?" Shan asked, studying the forlorn Golok. Had Dremu taken the eye, as Lhandro suspected?

"Because the valley's heart is beating again." Dremu, too, stared toward the drumming. "I'm going to get that stone for you, Chinese. So you can make it like the old days." He pointed in the direction of the heartbeat, bent and moved forward, like a predator stalking prey, Shan a few paces behind.