Текст книги "Bone Mountain"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Lokesh stepped outside without reply, still clutching the box. The Golok was near the door, tightening the saddle on his sturdy mountain horse. He was leaving, and Shan had never understood why the man had come. But then, to Shan's dismay, the Golok stepped to a brown horse that now stood beside his own, opened its saddlebag and extended his hand toward Lokesh just as Tenzin and one of the herders rounded the corner of the farthest hut, leading more horses.

"We should have left at dawn," the Golok said with an impatient gesture for Lokesh to hand him the box. "Didn't you listen? The killer is out there, he's coming for the stone, that purba said so. And you wait around like old women."

Shan looked pleadingly at Lokesh as the Golok set the box in the open saddlebag.

"I do not understand much of this," his old friend said with a despairing shrug. "But I do understand we must go."

"But Gendun," Shan protested. "He must come with us."

Lokesh shook his head sadly. "What he must do now is stay with Drakte. He will go to the durtro, then if the deities permit, he will join us." He turned and pulled something from the saddle of one of the horses, extending it to Shan. It was a broad-rimmed felt hat, Shan's traveling hat.

"I am staying with Drakte also," Somo announced, her tone strangely defiant. "I will see that your lama is safe. The herders from that camp above are making piles of yak dung in a ring around the hermitage. Tonight they will surround us with fires."

As the dropka extended the reins of the brown horse to Shan, the Golok stepped away from his own horse and, arms crossed over his chest, fixed them with a pointed stare as if they had forgotten something. "I was going to be paid," he said sourly. "A guide has to be paid. That boy who died said I would be paid. So far I haven't received a fen."

Shan stared at the man with a sinking feeling. The Golok had finally explained why he had come to the hermitage.

"I have nothing," Nyma said in alarm. "Drakte had nothing, nothing but an old account book and a shepherd's sling." They had found the battered ledger in a pouch hanging from his belt, with entries that had the appearance of accounting reports. "It must mean those at your destination will-"

"I told that Drakte," interrupted the Golok. "I don't face patrols unless there's profit."

Somo reached into her small belt pouch and produced an object wrapped in felt, extended it toward the Golok. "Here," she said in a reluctant voice. She shook the cover away to reveal a finely worked silver bracelet set with lapis. "Drakte gave this to me last month," she added. Her gaze shifted to Nyma, then Shan. "He would want your journey to continue. That was why…" She looked back toward the death hut without finishing the sentence.

The Golok grabbed the bracelet and studied it with a frown. "Hard to convert this to cash without going to a damned city," he complained, even as he stuffed the bracelet into his pocket. "I'm not going to a city again for a long time."

The purba runner reached into her pouch again and produced a complicated pocketknife with many blades, even a spoon folded into one side. "I got this for Drakte," she said in a tight voice and extended the knife toward the man.

The Golok snatched the knife and the reins of his horse almost in one motion.

"We don't even know your name," Shan ventured in a hesitant voice. He saw that something else had appeared in Somo's hand, out of her pocket: a small turquoise stone which she began kneading with her fingers. Something else given her by Drakte, Shan suspected, something she would not part with.

"Dremu." The Golok fixed Shan with another frown. "My mother called me Dremu," he said, as if he had been called many names in his life. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a worried glance. Dremu was the name of the great brown bear that had once freely roamed the Tibetan ranges. Hunted to near extinction by the Chinese, it was a symbol in Tibetan folklore of one who harms himself through excessive greed, for the animal would tear into the burrows of its main prey, marmots, pulling out stunned animals and piling them behind it until the burrow was destroyed. More often than not, the marmots would recover their senses and flee while the bear still dug, leaving it still hungry and angrier than ever. Sometimes the Tibetans used the term for the Chinese.

As Tenzin and Nyma led their horses toward the trail, Shan poured a bowl of tea and stepped inside the hut where Gendun sat with the dead man. He stood for a moment in silence until the lama looked up and acknowledged him with a small nod. After another minute's recitation, Gendun rose and stepped back from the body.

The lama accepted the bowl and drank deeply before speaking. "It wasn't anguish he felt at the end," Gendun declared, looking at the body. Shan had never known a voice like Gendun's. The lama's words often came in a whisper, but his whispers were as clear and powerful as a great bell. "It was only sadness at leaving important things uncompleted. It is very difficult for him to give up." The Tibetans believed that there was a period after death, sometimes lasting days, when a spirit was confused and would not accept that its incarnation was extinguished, when it might struggle to reanimate the lost body, to continue unfinished work.

"Rinpoche," Shan said, "the stone eye is packed on a horse." His gaze lingered upon the dead man. "But I cannot do this thing without you."

"Drakte will learn to leave his body behind, my friend. So must you."

"Drakte lost his life. That thing, that dobdob, could come back." Shan looked away, into one of the small flames, and felt a sudden sense of desolation. Only hours before he had decided there could be nothing more important than returning the stone, for he, like the Tibetans, had come to see it as one of the seeds to be planted to keep the wisdom and compassion alive. But everything had changed when Drakte had arrived at the lhakang. Although Gendun and Lokesh would resist, would say Shan was denying his own deity, he had to solve the mystery of Drakte's death. Because as important as returning the eye may be, there was something else, something he would sacrifice even his inner deity for, and that was keeping the old Tibetans safe.

"And a valley of people lost their deity," his teacher replied. He let the words hang in the air a moment, until Shan looked back into his eyes. "It will be your greatest test. Look forward. Look inside. Not behind you. You must stop being the seeker you were and become the seeker you want to be."

It was a topic of many conversations between them. Shan's biggest spiritual handicap was his obsession with the workings of what Gendun called the fleeting, unimportant mysteries of the surface world when he should be looking to the mystery of his soul.

"You must stop being a seeker of fact and become a seeker of truth," Gendun said. "That is how deities are repaired."

"Rinpoche, after the durtro, don't try to find us," Shan said abruptly. Gendun looked at him, and Shan's face flushed. The words sounded like Shan was bargaining, as if he were asking Gendun to at least acknowledge the danger that he always ignored. "You must go back to Yerpa," Shan said, referring to the secret hermitage inside a mountain above Lhadrung, where Gendun was the principal teacher to a handful of monks. "Please."

"My boots." Gendun nodded toward to his feet, where the soles of his old work boots had split open at the toe. "My boots are tired," he said, as though agreeing. "But first I must deliver the earth part of Drakte back to the earth," he said quietly, looking at the dead man a moment before turning back to Shan. "May the Compassionate Buddha watch over you," he whispered.

A single dried, brown leaf blew into the doorway. They watched in silence as the wind carried it out again, past the cluster of buildings and up into the air, until it soared out of sight. They both stared at the empty place it had been; then, as if the leaf had been a signal, Gendun turned toward Drakte, pausing to fix Shan with a brief gaze that somehow expressed worry and hope at the same time. "Beware of the dust and air," he said with a note of finality, then sat and began reciting the Bardo again.

Beware of the dust and air. It was one of Gendun's customary farewells, a way of saying pay attention only to the essence of what you encounter.

But something made Shan turn back as he reached the door. Gendun paused and slowly brought his eyes back to Shan's. There was an exquisite silence between them for a moment, and Shan fought the urge to go to Gendun's side and not move until the Bardo was done.

"The deity you find, Shan, will be the one you take with you," Gendun said quietly, punctuating the words with another long stare before he turned back to Drakte.

As Shan stepped outside he realized the hairs on his arms were standing on end. He stood perfectly still a moment, looking at his hands, which trembled. Slowly, stumbling over his own boots, he stepped toward his horse, ignoring the Golok's impatient gestures for him to mount. As he lifted the reins he looked back at Somo, who stood at the door to the lhakang now. "You never did tell us what it was, the message you were carrying for Drakte," he said.

The woman frowned. "It was a purba message."

"It was about the eye," Shan said, "if you were coming here."

"The lamas. The government is sweeping the mountains for unregistered lamas."

"No. We knew that already."

She glanced back toward the death hut, then hesitantly stepped to Shan's side. "All right. We didn't think Drakte knew. He had to be warned before he started for that valley with you. They're moving north, a headquarters unit from Lhasa," Somo declared cryptically. "That was my message. A small unit." She bit her lower lip. "Platoon strength, that's what I was to say to Drakte."

"I'm sorry," Shan said, his throat suddenly bone dry. "I don't understand."

"I guess it means you must move quickly now. This Golok must know secret trails." She saw the confusion in Shan's eyes and glanced at Nyma. "No one told you about the struggle over that old stone eye? Someone else thinks they own it. It was taken from them in Lhasa. They want it back."

"Who?" Shan asked with a sinking heart.

Somo bit her lip again, then answered slowly, in a chill tone. "The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade of the People's Liberation Army."

Chapter Three

They rode not north, as Shan expected, but west, climbing the high ridge on the far side of the long valley, then descending toward the second snowcapped range of mountains beyond it. As he rode over the crest and out of the valley that led to the hermitage, Shan reined in his horse and watched Dremu trot off to scout ahead. He looked back to the ridge where the dropka had stacked rocks to protect the lamas, toward the hermitage. Gendun had been sheltered inside his own secret hermitage above Lhadrung until Shan had discovered it. Gendun might never have been exposed to the outside world except for Shan.

"When we arrived there, before the mandala began, I talked with Shopo," said Lokesh, at his side. The old man had an uncanny ability to read Shan's emotions. "They didn't know Gendun. He just arrived and sat in the lhakang for hours contemplating the stone eye. Then he drank tea with Shopo and said he knew that eye now, and he knew who would return the eye, as certain as if he had read it in a book where the future is written. Shopo said he hadn't been sure himself, but Gendun would not be swayed. He knew it had to be you. He said not only did you have a pure heart, you had a big heart, so big it was a burden to you."

So big its pain almost overpowered Shan. If the killer was stalking the eye he had no choice but to take it away from the lamas. And going with it was the only way he would find the killer. He could only protect the lamas by leaving the lamas.

Shan cast an awkward glance at Lokesh, who grinned back, leaned over like a mischievous uncle and pulled Shan's hat brim down over his eyes, then trotted away toward a clump of flowers. It was how Lokesh always traveled, not in a straight line but from flower to flower, or rock to rock, stopping to examine the shapes of nature in whatever form might capture his curiosity. He turned toward the Golok, who was moving so quickly away he seemed to be fleeing them. He did not trust the man. But Drakte had, or at least Dremu wanted Shan and the others to believe he had. Dremu knew about the eye but none of the others left alive knew about him. Drakte had apparently known him, but from where? The only logical answer seemed to be from prison. Shan checked the binding on his saddlebag, then reluctantly urged his horse forward.

Three hours later Dremu waited for them at the crest of the lowest ridge in the second range, their mounts following a winding goat trail through patches of snow. The air beyond still shimmered, as Shan had seen from a distance, and as they reached the crest he discovered the reason.

"Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called out with a boyish glee as he rode up behind Shan, pointing to the vast flat expanse of turquoise that dominated the landscape below them. "Lamtso!"

Shan stared at the distant water. It looked like a long jewel inlaid between the mountains. Lamtso was one of Tibet's holy lakes, its waters known as the home of important nagas, its shores a favorite grazing ground for the dropka herds.

From a bag tied to his horse the Golok produced a large plastic water bottle filled not with water but with amber chang, Tibetan barley beer. He did not open it, but quickly surveyed the faces of his companions. "We sleep there tonight," he announced with a gesture toward the water. "If we move fast enough," he added with a frown toward Lokesh. The Golok paused and squinted toward the horizon behind them. Shan followed his gaze toward the valley they had just traversed. A small band of horsemen was pursuing them. Or perhaps not pursuing them, he realized, for they had stopped as well and had spread out, watching behind them.

"Those dropka," Dremu said. "They are worried about you, Chinese. They think they can try to guard your back but they don't know the kind of trouble that follows. How many Tibetans are you worth, comrade?" he asked, aiming a bitter glance at Shan, then kicked his horse into a gallop and disappeared around a bend in the trail.

They caught up with him a quarter hour later, waiting at a huge outcropping of rock, a leg draped over his horse's neck, nearly half the bottle gone. As Nyma and Tenzin began to ease their mounts around him, the Golok raised a hand in warning. "Wouldn't if I were you."

"I think we can find the lake from here," Nyma declared impatiently.

Dremu pointed toward a small dust cloud on the rough track in the low rolling hills that led toward the lake. Shan reached into the drawstring sack tied to his saddle and produced his battered pair of field glasses. He focused on the cloud a moment and sighed, then handed the glasses to the nun.

"Army!" Nyma gasped.

"One truck," the Golok grunted. "No more than five or ten soldiers."

With a sudden tightening in his stomach Shan studied the approaching vehicle. It was still over two miles away, speeding not toward them but toward the lake. As he watched, however, the truck stopped. The nun cried out and bent down as though to hide behind his horse's neck. "I saw a glint of something. I think they're searching the mountains with binoculars!"

The Golok scowled at the nun. "That's what soldiers do. Could mean a hundred things. Could be escorting a birth inspector," he said, referring to the hated bureaucrats who enforced China's birth quotas. "Could be out hunting wild goats. Could be searching for something stolen from them," he added with a meaningful gaze at Shan, then reached for the glasses. "The way that truck is painted in shades of grey, could be mountain troops," he added in a tone like a curse. "I'd rather go against the damned knobs."

Shan looked back down the trail. Lokesh had lingered behind again, stopping his horse to stare down at a pattern of lichen on a rock face. Since their pilgrimage his old friend had particularly sought out self-actuated symbols of the Buddha– meaning elements of nature that had assumed the shape of a sacred object. More than once he had abandoned a piece of clothing or some food from his own drawstring sack in order to make room for a rock with lichen in the shape of a sacred emblem, or a weathered bone shaped like a ritual offering.

The Golok pointed with his bottle toward a shadow below an outcropping a hundred feet away. Nyma sighed with relief and pushed her mount toward the opening.

Shan doubted there was any land on the planet with more natural caves than Tibet. Certainly there was no land where caves were so integrated into the story of its people. There were cave hermitages, cave shrines, even entire gompas built around caves. Centuries before, Guru Rinpoche, the most revered of the ancient teaching lamas, was believed to have deposited sacred objects and scriptures in caves throughout Tibet. Tibetans still kept watch for forgotten caves that might harbor some of the Guru's sacred treasures. And many of the local protector deities that watched over valleys and mountains were said to make their homes in caves.

Although the cave was low and wide at its mouth, it quickly narrowed into a small tunnel. The horses seemed to understand what was expected of them, and as soon as their riders dismounted the animals scurried to the back of the entrance chamber. Lokesh arrived and began helping Tenzin loosen the saddle girths, speaking in comforting tones to the animals as the Golok and Nyma settled onto rocks at opposite sides of the entrance. Dremu lifted his bottle and gulped noisily, not offering it to anyone else.

"You knew about the army having the eye," Shan said to Dremu and Nyma. "Both of you knew."

"I told you," the Golok said with a wide grin that exposed several of his yellow-brown teeth. The only thing Dremu had told Shan was that he could die a hundred ways.

"Why would the army want an old stone eye?" he asked Nyma.

"Most people in the northern changtang know about the army and the eye."

"I don't. I'm not sure Gendun did."

"It was a long time ago. From an invasion," Nyma offered in a reluctant voice.

"You mean the stone was taken as some kind of trophy fifty years ago," Shan said, referring to the arrival of the People's Liberation Army.

"Not that invasion," Nyma sighed.

Shan sensed movement behind him and saw Lokesh standing at his shoulder now.

"It was when a Chinese army came to drive the Thirteenth out of Tibet in the Year of the Female Water Hare," Nyma explained. She meant the invasion early in the twentieth century. When, Shan recalled, imperial troops had marched into Lhasa, leaving a bloody swath across eastern and northern Tibet in an effort to unseat the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.

"Terrible things happened," the nun continued in a brittle voice. "Chinese soldiers under a General named Feng razed gompas and buried the monks alive, hundreds of monks. Butcher Feng, they called the General. After several years the Tibetan army finally organized a defense and pushed Feng back. There was a terrible fight at the Turquoise Bridge in Lhasa, where the Lujun Combat Division was driven into retreat by Tibetan soldiers. The Lujun were the crack troops of the Chinese army. They were humiliated and wanted to avenge themselves. But the generals ordered the Lujun home because their Empress Dowager had died and more soldiers were needed to keep order in Beijing. The troops marched up the old northern route– the Changlam, it was called– annihilating gompas, killing all monks and nuns they encountered on the way." Nyma hesitated a moment, studying a dark black cloud that had appeared on the horizon. "They were on the Changlam, two hundred miles north of Lhasa when they learned that the home of the senior officer of the troops that defeated the Lujun in Lhasa was a village only twenty miles to the west. They marched on the village and when they found the villagers treating wounded soldiers, they set up cannon and destroyed it. Only one house survived."

The nun stood, staring more intensely at the black cloud, which was rapidly approaching. Suddenly she bent and darted to the edge of the outcropping. The Golok belched toward the nun, then raised his bottle in salute.

After a moment Nyma walked back to the cave. "They haven't moved," she announced. "That's good, right?"

When no one replied, she continued her story. "That village, or the valley where the village was, was the home of the Yapchi deity. For centuries that deity had lived in a self-actuated statue, a rock shaped like a sitting Buddha. Two eyes had been painted on it in ancient times, so it could better see the world and to remind those who lived in the valley that it was always watching."

"And the soldiers took the statue?" Shan asked.

"Not exactly," Nyma said in a melancholy tone. "When they finished shelling, the Tibetan soldiers were dead, for they had been too weak to flee. The surviving villagers ran to the deity in the center of the valley, about fifty of them, mostly women and children and old men. The Chinese officer of the Lujun laughed and called for them to surrender. If they agreed to be their porters, to carry the soldiers' equipment to the Chinese border, he would let them live. When they refused he selected ten soldiers and sent them with swords among the villagers. They slaughtered the people like goats, cut them into pieces, laughing like it was great sport. No one from that Tibetan officer's family survived."

She turned suddenly and stared at the blackness at the back of the chamber, as if she felt she were being watched from inside the mountain. "Only those few who happened to be away from the village survived. A caravan from the village was away at the holy lake. And there was a girl with sheep up on the slopes who watched it all. But the soldiers found the girl trying to reach the bodies. The officer made her watch as he smashed the deity into tiny pieces with a hammer. Then he took the only piece big enough to recognize, the single eye, the chenyi," she said, meaning the right eye. "The officer said the eye had witnessed the vindication of the Lujun and he would give it to his general as a trophy."

Nyma's voice drifted off and she looked toward the menacing cloud again. "They ordered the girl to find her mother among the bodies, then bound her to her mother's dead body, face to face, and left her there. Monks from the gompa on the other side of Yapchi Mountain found her there after three days."

There was a long silence as Shan studied first Nyma, then the dark cloud.

"And your people recorded the story," Lokesh said over Shan's shoulder-

"That little girl, she was my grandmother. She helped to bury them. Our people don't give the dead to the birds. We give them back to the soil. She helped put them in a big grave. When I was young she used to sit at the grave and recite all the names of the dead to me."

The Golok had his chang bottle in midair as Nyma made the announcement. He lowered the bottle, stared at it for a moment. "The bastards," he offered, as though to comfort the nun, then packed the bottle away.

"Afterwards," Nyma added, "people kept watch for the chenyi stone. It was kept in an army museum near Beijing for many decades and a man from Yapchi obtained special charms from lamas and traveled there to bring it back. But the Chinese shot him as a spy. The eye disappeared after the communists came. But we found out that parts of the Lujun were reconstituted into the People's Liberation Army."

"The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade," Shan suggested.

Nyma nodded. "After they were assigned to duty in Tibet, people kept a close watch on them. Another man from the village went to speak with the army but he was arrested and went to lao gai, where he died. A secretary saw the chenyi stone on the desk of the colonel of the brigade in Lhasa and sent word. After a few months a letter was sent to Lhasa, signed by all our villagers, asking that it be returned. But the only thing that happened was that the township council sent back the letter and demanded extra taxes from us. Then last year when the Chinese celebrated August First in Lhasa that colonel had it taped to the turret of a tank in the parade." August First was the day reserved for celebrating the People's Liberation Army. "The soldiers laughed and pointed at it to taunt the Tibetans. Someone took a photograph and brought it to us."

"Purbas," Shan said, not expecting an answer. "Drakte stole it back."

"Someone else, I think. I don't know for certain. Purbas know how dangerous it can be to share secrets. We don't want to know. People get captured. The Chinese use drugs that unbind their tongues."

"But you were in Lhasa and brought the chenyi stone to the hermitage," Shan suggested.

Nyma shook her head. "I was working in our valley," she said enigmatically. "One day our oracle spoke about a Chinese returning the eye. I thought she meant the army would bring it back one day. Only afterwards, when I went to speak about it with some purbas, did I know the eye had already been recovered from those who had stolen it from us."

Our oracle. The nun spoke as if every community still had its oracle. But until arriving at the hermitage, Shan could not recall ever having heard a Tibetan speak of an active oracle. Even Lokesh, who clung so steadfastly to tradition, spoke of oracles as part of some distant past.

The nun looked inquiringly toward the black cloud, which was nearly over them now. Dremu watched it too, with suspicious, worried eyes, and retreated deeper into the cave. "I spoke about what the oracle said, and later Drakte sought me out and asked me many questions, all about the eye and the village. Later people came and took me to the hermitage."

Shan studied Tenzin, who had stepped forward to study the strange cloud, then turned back to Nyma. "Why would the purbas be so interested in returning the eye?"

The nun shrugged again and cast a small frown toward Shan. She was speaking of things that seldom were spoken out loud. "The purbas want justice," she ventured. "It is the right thing to do."

There was a rumble of wind– not thunder, but a roaring rush of air that brought an abrupt darkening, as if night had fallen. Hail began to drop, small kernels at first, but soon balls nearly half an inch in diameter. The nun nodded toward the sky, as though she understood some secret about the hailstorm. Lokesh stared back at the tunnel that extended toward the heart of the mountain, where the local earth deity might live.

Sometimes in Tibet hailstorms came with such violence and such large stones that crops were destroyed in seconds, people even killed. The Tibetans treated such deaths with particular reverence, as if the victim had been summoned by a sky deity for a special purpose. Shan extended his hand out into the storm. The hail stung his palm but he kept it extended, collecting the stones.

At his side he sensed Nyma moving, and turned to see her trying to pull Tenzin back from outside the cave. The tall Tibetan had removed his coat and stepped into the open, bending his back to the storm, protected only by his thin shirt, letting the stones lash at him. A sudden gust whipped stones into Shan's face, stinging his cheeks. He dropped the hail in his hand and retreated into the cave. Sometimes it was difficult not to believe in the earth deities.

But, incredibly, Tenzin pulled away as the nun reached for him, stepping further into the storm and kneeling, curling his head into his knees, his hands wrapped around his neck. It was as though he were being flogged, as though he were inviting the deities to punish him. Tenzin seemed to understand something about the storm as well, but it was different than what Nyma sensed. Or perhaps the secret Tenzin understood, Shan thought, was just about himself.

As she pulled at Tenzin's shoulder, Shan ran toward the nun and grabbed Tenzin's other shoulder. Together they dragged him inside. He did not seem to notice their grip at first, then looked at them with wild, surprised eyes. His shirt was torn, and there were several tiny red spots where the stones had pierced his skin.

As Nyma wrapped Tenzin's chuba around his shoulders, Dremu gasped in fright and pointed into the storm. An unearthly wail rolled down the slope, and a wraith-like shape emerged through the greyness, a figure mounted on a small black horse. The rider was hunched over in the saddle, the horse galloping, futilely trying to escape the hail. The sound was the crying of the horse as the stones pummeled its flesh. Shan sensed Nyma shudder, then retreat deeper into the cave, followed quickly by the other Tibetans. But Shan took a step forward, watching in fear. The animal, its rider limp in the saddle, could run off a ledge in such a frenzy. He pulled his hat low and darted into the storm. The horse whinnied louder as it saw him, then slowed as Shan extended a hand. A moment later, one hand on the bridle, Shan was running back to cover with the frantic creature.

The rider was a woman, although the cuts and welts on her face made it difficult to discern her features. Blood mixed with rain streaked down her face. She was not unconscious, but her wild, unblinking eyes were little different than those of the inconsolable horse, who paced back and forth among the other mounts, its flanks quivering, unwilling to be touched.

Then the woman glimpsed Shan and she clamped her hand around his arm. "I found them, those herders you needed to know about." Shan recognized the weary voice, and the braided red cloth she wore around her head. It was the dropka woman from the ridge, the guard who had blamed herself for letting the dobdob through to Drakte. Lokesh gently wiped the blood from her cheeks. "They had a terrible fright," the woman gasped. "There was just an old man and woman, with a small herd and dogs," she said. "They never saw Drakte, they said, but an old lama was with them, just for the night, and he was attacked." Tears mixed with the blood that still trickled down her face. She forced a smile for Lokesh as he wiped her cheek again, then continued. "The knobs want that lama. They have been chasing him, those herders say."