Bone Mountain (14 page)

At least the other villagers showed no concern about a killer or the dangers of the chenyi stone. Their spirits seemed to lighten as the day progressed, and they sang songs sung by salt trekkers for centuries, sometimes teaching them to Shan and Lokesh. As they sat at midday and ate cold
tsampa,
Lhandro and Nyma described the beautiful valley where they lived. For long miles Shan let himself be absorbed into the simple carefree joy of the others. At nightfall, after they had made camp in the shelter of a large rock outcropping miles beyond the first pass, where the villagers had stockpiled yak dung on their journey to the lake, Lokesh sat facing the south. His old friend chanted his beads, squinting as if searching for something beyond the mountains. Sunrise would mark the third day, when Drakte would arrive at the charnel ground for his sky burial. Perhaps they had already left the hermitage by now, Gendun, Shopo, and Somo, bearing the dead purba up and down the mountains with the help of the dropka.

Shan sat beside Lokesh, facing the same direction, and made a
mudra,
arranging his fingers in one of the traditional forms to invoke a ritual symbol or teaching. He closed the fingers of each hand, with the thumb out, extended up, then put the right hand on top of the left thumb. It was called the Banner of Victory, invoking the triumph of compassion over ignorance and death. As he sat contemplating first the mudra and then the distant mountains where Gendun traveled with Drakte’s remains, the pain he felt over Drakte’s killing surged through him again. Not simply because the purba had been steadfast and brave and selfless but because Shan’s confusion over his death only seemed to grow, and with greater confusion came greater fear for those he traveled with. Gendun would have said Shan’s awareness was being distorted by his emotion, for death never had a reason, only an appointed time, that Drakte was always meant to end this particular incarnation at that particular hour. There was no cause and effect in such a death because, Gendun would say, the world was never so orderly as Shan seemed to imagine. But even the Tibetans accepted that all things in the universe were interrelated, and a stone dropped in a remote lake caused ripples that changed, however subtly, the contour of the world. Something had happened in Lhasa, more than just a simple theft, and its consequences were catching up with those who had the chenyi stone.

Shan looked back toward the sheep, which were settling into sleep for the night. Despite the danger, despite the apparent urgency surrounding the eye, those responsible for taking Shan and Lokesh to the distant valley had chosen the slowest possible course.

“You could just say no.” The words were spoken to him so abruptly, so unexpectedly, Shan turned to see if someone had crept behind him before he realized it was Lokesh who spoke. “Tell them no, that you are not the one,” his old friend sighed, “and go back to that durtro. You can return to Lhadrung with Gendun. Go no further if you have doubt. Go no further if you can only think about killers. There would be no dishonor if you return. I will go on with the salt. I am going north anyway.”

Shan was silent a long time. He realized his fingers had formed a new mudra, hands clasped together, fingers intertwined, the two middle fingers raised, pressing against each other like a small steeple. Diamond of the Mind, it was called, used to help focus awareness. At first he thought his old friend was again helping him focus on his responsibility to the broken deity but then he saw the expectation on Lokesh’s face. “Going north anyway?” Shan asked.

Lokesh nodded solemnly. “Last night those geese helped me find my mother. I told her of the sadness in the land, of how people have lost the way of compassion and how we are taking the chenyi stone home. She said what we are doing is for the broken deities everywhere. She said afterwards I must find the true heart of those who oppressed us and shine a light of compassion on it.”

Shan searched his friend’s face for an explanation.

“I should have thought of this long ago,” Lokesh said with a sense of wonder. “It took my mother. He is flesh and blood, he has a heart like any other man. He has a deity that has been broken, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am going to Beijing,” Lokesh announced, his eyes glistening now. “I will travel north like a pilgrim, to gain merit. And my destination will be the home of the one they call the Chairman, in the capital.”

At first Shan wanted to laugh, but then he saw the determination in the old Tibetan’s eyes, and a chill rose inside him. He clenched his jaw and stared at his mudra again. “You cannot.”

Lokesh shrugged. “I have strong legs. I just go north for perhaps two months, then east for another three or four.”

“I mean you will never be permitted. You could not make it,” Shan said, with a sound like a moan.

“I must go alone, my friend,” Lokesh said, as if Shan had offered to accompany him. “This is a thing for my deity, not yours. And it is too dangerous for you in China.”

“They will never let you within half a mile of him,” Shan said, and for a moment found himself short of breath. His Tibetan uncle wanted to sacrifice himself to the same people who had killed Shan’s father and his blood uncles.

Lokesh put a hand on Shan’s back and held it there, as if trying to get the sense of his heart. “I am not telling you to frighten you. I told my mother I would go and speak with the Chairman, so he understands the truth of things here. I wanted you to understand, for when the time comes for us to separate.” He pointed out a solitary goose flying toward the setting sun. Shan watched him, then the goose, until Nyma called them to eat.

At the camp Lhandro revealed a bladder of fresh yogurt, a gift from the dropka at the lake, and a skin of cream which, having been jostled all day on one of the pack saddles, had become thick, sweet butter. The rongpa rolled the butter with their tsampa into little balls and enthusiastically consumed them with bowls of tea. As the others arranged the heavy felt blankets about the floor of the tent, Shan took his blanket outside and lay studying the night sky, fighting a bleakness inside. Some of the Tibetans believed struggling souls passed through many levels of hell before freeing themselves. In his particular hell he alone could see the torment and suffering approaching those he held closest to his heart, but could do nothing to prevent it.

He awoke suddenly, not aware until that moment that he had been asleep. With a catch in his breath he realized that a meteor had passed overhead, close by. But he had no memory of having seen it. It was not the first time this had happened in recent months. He had told Lokesh about a similar incident during their pilgrimage, and his old friend had seemed to find it cause for celebration, saying it was a sign of new awareness. “If your awareness experienced it within,” Lokesh had said, “is it not as real as if your eyes had seen it from without?” But then, as now, the experience unnerved Shan. Holding on to reality was difficult enough in his world, without having his Tibetan friends try to teach him it came in many different forms.

Wide awake now, he lay watching the moon rise over the mountains and gradually was able to push back the pain that obscured the way he saw Drakte’s death in his mind’s eye, so he could replay it slowly, again and again, searching for a clue, for a hidden meaning. He saw Drakte’s chin rise and his brow tighten as the dobdob had appeared. Though the purba had carried a belt knife his hand had gone not to the knife but to his prayer amulet. Drakte’s reaction had not been that of a warrior defending those he had vowed to protect. But the purba’s other hand had been doing something else. He played the scene again and again. Drakte’s left hand had been pushing his bag back, hiding the drawstring sack with the sling and the ledger book with the innocuous entries about the dropka.

Shan became aware of a strange ebbing and flowing in the gentle breeze, then realized it was a low sound, rising and falling, a moan. He sat up. Not a moan. A chant, even a song.

Slowly, stealthily, he followed the sound over a hillock. A dark shape blocked the path. Lhandro had set a guard, he knew. But he froze as he saw it was one of the mastiffs. The animal simply raised its head toward him and turned toward a rock ten feet down the slope, as if directing Shan’s attention there.

Anya sat on the rocks staring at a brilliant star on the horizon. The sound Shan heard, louder now, was coming from her lips, though he couldn’t say what it was. Not a song exactly, but a sound like some of the old lamas made when using their voices in meditation, a sound that grew out of a mantra but became, at least to the untrained ear, a resonation that communicated not to the ears but some other sense, a folding of sound that could not possibly have come simply from the tongue and vocal cords.

He had heard such a sound before. Shan had asked Lokesh about it once when they had found a hermit making the same low wrenching sound on a high ledge. Lokesh had shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. “It’s what you get, when you strip away the flesh of words,” he had said earnestly. “It’s just the way a spirit sounds when it’s not communicating with humans.”

He sat beside the girl and watched the stars. If she was not communicating with humans, he wondered, who was it she was trying to reach?

At last Anya’s voice drifted off and they sat in silence.

“It’s a long way we have to go,” the girl said.

Although he felt strangely close to the girl, Shan realized it was the first time she had spoken to him. “Nearly a hundred miles to Yapchi,” he observed quietly.

“No, not that,” the girl said slowly, in the patient tone of a teacher, “if you and I are to bring the old eye into focus, there are many shadows to explore first, many knots to untie.”

Shan considered the words for a moment. “You and I?”

“When it said this in me,” the girl said cryptically, “I didn’t understand at first. But I believe it now.”

“I’m sorry,” Shan said with a chill in his belly. “Who said something to you?”

“I was in a barley field turning earth with a hoe when it found me the first time. Nyma found me, shaking on the ground. It’s only happened four times before. They say when I’m older they may need to keep me in a nunnery, if they can find one. They said in the old days I would have been sent to live in the convent after the first time.”

Shan stared at the girl hard, trying to piece together the puzzle she had spoken. Then, he recalled Lhandro’s words, how Anya had been found lying on a rock, reciting strange scriptures. And before, at the lake. She spoke the words of deities, Lhandro had said. “The oracle,” he whispered. “You are the oracle.”

The girl gave a thin laugh. “Not the oracle,” she explained in a patient voice. “Some call me that, but an oracle is not in human form. Oracle deities just use certain humans as vehicles sometimes.”

The words made Shan sad somehow. Maybe it was the hint of helplessness in Anya’s voice. Maybe it was because he remembered stories from the monks about the mediums who had once resided in the large gompas near Lhasa. They had been nervous, often frail creatures, usually shortlived, because when they were taken over by the oracle they suffered terrible fits and spasms, like seizures, that could last for days and exacted a terrible toll on their bodies.

Anya studied the stars, then abruptly turned to him again. “What if the valley was locked for some reason and the eye was its key? What if we opened it without understanding why it was locked?” The words came in an urgent rush, as if she had been contemplating a long time how to ask him.

“All I know,” Shan said after another silence, “is that when I begin a long journey my mind is often plagued with doubt over where it will lead, about what comes after the one thousandth step, or the ten thousandth. So I try to make myself concerned only with the next step, then the next after that, so that eventually the ten thousandth becomes just another next step. By then we will all understand the eye better.” His own words surprised him. He was speaking like the Tibetans, as if the chenyi stone were alive.

The girl nodded vigorously, as if it were exactly the answer she needed. Behind her, the dog stood, then she stood, as though the dog’s movement had been a signal, and she stepped with the animal into the darkness.

Shan looked after her, not sure he had understood any of their conversation. In fact, the more he learned of the people from Yapchi the more it seemed he didn’t know. They seemed to have been cut off from the world for so long a wary, feral spirituality had overtaken them. But in his heart he knew they weren’t that different from many other Tibetans he had met, each of who seemed comprised of many layers of mysteries and perceptions. The land itself was such a rich, vast tapestry of people and beliefs that the term Buddhism often seemed a meager label for the complex ways Tibetans viewed their world.

A low rumble rose over the blackened landscape. Shan searched for thundercaps but saw none in the clear night sky, instead spying a cluster of four red lights soaring across the heavens. Chinese fighter jets on high altitude patrol. As he watched the planes a deep sense of grief welled up within him, and stayed with him long after the planes disappeared over the horizon.

*   *   *

The caravan had been underway for two hours the next day when Shan, leading a packhorse, noticed a flicker of movement on the slope a hundred yards above them. He stopped and stared, finally discerning a man standing with a horse in the shadow of a large boulder.

Lhandro, behind Shan, whistled sharply, halting the caravan. “Damned Golok,” he muttered.

As the figure on the slope stepped into the sunlight Shan saw that it was indeed Dremu, who seemed to search the caravan, then began waving at Shan, gesturing for him to come closer.

“Don’t,” Lhandro warned. “He could have friends hidden in the rocks. A man like that can’t stop being a bandit.”

Shan ignored the advice, but found himself watching the surrounding rocks warily as he jogged toward the Golok. “I didn’t expect to see you again,” he called out when he got within earshot.

“I got paid, didn’t I?” Dremu snapped back. “Paid to get you through to Yapchi. Not to share tea with the likes of them,” he said with a nod toward the caravan. “I go where the eye goes,” he said in an oddly fierce tone.