Bone Mountain (17 page)

They were prisoners again.

Part Two

A
SHES

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

More than twenty villagers were lined up against the rock, all wearing expressions of defeat, hands at their sides, waiting as two soldiers checked their identity papers. Their faces told Shan the villagers had been through such checks often. Some suppressed anger, some fear. All suppressed indignation at being treated like outsiders in their own land. “Where’s
your
papers?” Shan had heard a Tibetan boy shout out at a knob at a Public Security checkpoint just three months before. The knob had shackled the boy and in an hour’s time the youth had been on the way to a year’s imprisonment.

The villagers moved slowly when asked to reach inside their clothing to produce their papers, and watched not the sergeant who barked orders at them but a second soldier, behind the first, who held a semiautomatic rifle, an AK-47, barrel pointed down, hand on the trigger guard. It was impossible to predict what would happen when Public Security or the army came to such a place. More often than not any Tibetans who had their registration papers would be released. But if the patrol had a mission beyond merely sweeping for illegals, even those with perfect papers might be detained. In slow seasons some enforcement officials were known to pick up innocent Tibetans and detain them until they offered up an accusation. “Everyone is guilty of something,” an interrogation officer had once declared to Shan, “we just don’t have time to investigate them all.”

Nyma pulled Lhandro into a sitting position. Blood trickled down his left temple, where he had obviously been struck, probably by the butt of a rifle. The nun put her arms around him, like a protecting mother, and glanced at Shan with moist eyes. She knew about such patrols, too. The villagers might be left alone, but Nyma, who had insisted she was not a real nun, could still be sentenced to prison for wearing the robe of a nun without a license from the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

“That yak, it ran like an antelope,” Lokesh said quietly, toward the sky. The nearest soldier made a growling sound and raised the butt of his gun, warning Lokesh to be silent.

Shan looked at his old friend. At least they had been able to see the American with the yak, Lokesh meant. It was a prisoner’s game Shan and Lokesh had often played during their years in the gulag. Fix an image in your mind and let it fill your awareness, blocking out the pain and hunger and fear. Shan remembered once coming back in a prison truck from a road construction site where several old monks had collapsed in weakness and been beaten and dragged away by the guards, too weak to do their work because their breakfast and lunch had consisted of a thin gruel made of ground corncobs and water. “I saw a snowflake land on a butterfly today,” one of the battered lamas suddenly said, and earned a blow to his skull from a guard’s baton for breaking the rule of silence. But by the time they had reached the prison every man in the truck had been smiling serenely, their minds filled with the image of the butterfly.

They would be taken to an army prison first, Shan suspected, then he would be separated from Lokesh. Lokesh’s only crime was not having papers to travel outside Lhadrung, where he had been released from prison. But once they focused on Shan they would quickly discover the tattoo on his arm, and check it with Public Security computers. They would treat Shan as a fugitive from the gulag, and to such men a fugitive was like fresh meat thrown to starved dogs. He fought the temptation to look back toward the hills beyond the village, where another fugitive, without a tongue, hid.

The man in the chair tossed his cigarette to the ground, stood, and stepped toward the team checking papers. He impatiently ordered the soldiers to stop, then surveyed the expanding line of villagers. After he rose he strutted along the line with an imperious air, pausing to light another cigarette with an elegant gold lighter, and tapped the shoulders of several of those in line, ordering them away with a gesture of his index finger. A middle-aged woman a few feet down the line suddenly stepped forward and pointed to Shan and his three companions.

“They aren’t from our village,” she shouted, “just remember that, we never saw them before. We never helped them!”

Shan sighed. He didn’t resent the woman’s words. No doubt she had been before security squads before, had learned from the Chinese that the best way to protect herself and her family was to deflect official attention to others. But he felt sorry for the way she would feel later, and the way her neighbors would look at her.

The officer paused and stared at Shan, as if noticing him for the first time, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and blowing a stream of smoke in Shan’s direction before he turned back to the line. He was finished in another minute, having dismissed all the women and children, and all the younger men. Every man remaining in the line was at least thirty years old, Shan guessed. The officer walked along the line again and dismissed two more men. They were older but short, less than five and a half feet tall, the shortest in the line.

At a snap of the officer’s fingers the two soldiers who had been checking papers sprang back into action, scrutinizing the papers of the six men remaining with louder voices and rougher actions than they had used before. The officer paced impatiently as they worked, finishing his cigarette in three long inhalations, then lighting another from its butt. They were at the fifth man in the line when he lost interest and stepped inside the two lines of soldiers that still guarded the boulders. They weren’t a patrol, Shan realized. They were what the purbas called a snatch team. They were looking for someone in particular.

“She said you’re outsiders,” the officer observed in a thin, slow voice, blowing smoke into Shan’s face.

Shan and Lokesh looked at the ground. He felt strangely removed from the scene, as if he observed himself from afar. A part of him had never doubted he would one day return to the gulag. The yak ran like an antelope. He thought of the joyful American wanderer, hoping the man had escaped. It had been an impossible task, foolish to think Shan could help save their valley. Maybe in another hundred years the Tibetans could find a truly virtuous Chinese.

The sergeant held something up for the officer to see, the torn half of the Dalai Lama photograph. He flipped the card in his fingers when he caught the officer’s attention. It was part of what soldiers did when they saw such photos, one of the thousand mannerisms of oppression ingrained in soldiers and knobs. Sometimes on the reverse of such photos a Tibetan flag was printed, which would guarantee arrest, and worse. This photo was blank on the reverse.

“My name,” the officer announced abruptly, “is Colonel Lin of the 54th Mountain Combat Brigade.” He spoke slowly, a strange anticipation in his voice. He surveyed the line of villagers before turning to Shan and his companions. “I will ask questions. You will give answers.”

Shan looked into the Colonel’s face, hard and gnarled as a fist. The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade had caught up with them. He fought the temptation to look toward the village again. Surely someone in the caravan had seen, surely they would all be fleeing into the mountains by now. He glanced at his companions. Nyma looked at the ground, the color gone from her face. Lokesh looked at the sky. Lhandro, still on the ground, blood trickling down his face, glared at the colonel with a mix of fear and loathing. He was looking at the Lujun Division, the soldiers who had massacred his ancestors.

Colonel Lin reached out suddenly and pulled a baton from the belt of the nearest soldier. He stepped to Shan, who had fixed his gaze on the little pool of blood beneath Lhandro, then silently placed the end of the baton under Shan’s chin and lifted his head with it. Their eyes met and Lin studied him for a moment.

“Han,” Lin observed under his breath, like a curse. Lin was Shan’s age, slightly shorter than Shan, with a metallic cast to his eyes. The officer hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether he saw challenge in Shan’s face, frowned, dropped the baton, gesturing his sergeant forward as he turned to Lokesh. Lin examined the old Tibetan much more intensely than he had studied Shan. Shan barely noticed as the sergeant padded his pockets. He was watching the end of the baton, tensing his legs to leap and take the blow if Lin raised it to strike Lokesh. But the colonel took Lokesh’s free hand by the wrist and turned it over to study the palm.

“Nothing,” the sergeant spat.

Lin’s eyes lit with an icy gleam as he looked back at Shan. “You have no papers?” he asked quietly.

“Just a brochure to teach me serenity,” Shan said.

Lin seemed to welcome his defiance. A thin smile creased his face, and he pointed the sergeant toward the clipboard on the chair. “You will give me your name.”

Shan looked back at the pool of blood.

Lin dropped Lokesh’s hand and presented his raised palm toward the old Tibetan.

“Do you have papers, comrade?” Lin asked in Chinese.

What had he been looking for in Lokesh’s palm? Lin was not looking for a piece of stone. He was looking for a specific person, a person with what on his palm: The calluses of a hard labor fugitive perhaps? Or not calluses? Scars? Did it mean Lin knew who had stolen his stone?

Instead of presenting his Lhadrung registration paper, Lokesh offered his lopsided grin, which seemed to amuse Lin. The colonel studied Shan again, then bent his head to gaze with interest at Lokesh’s grizzled jaw, which obviously had been broken, as though he were a connoisseur of fractured jaws. He looked into Lokesh’s eyes, then lifted up the old man’s arm and pushed up his sleeve. Six inches up the arm, on the inside, was a tattooed line of numbers.

“Lao gai,” Lin announced with a tone of satisfaction, and called out the number to the sergeant, now standing at his shoulder with the clipboard. “We asked his name,” the colonel said to his sergeant, for Shan’s sake, then sighed and lifted Lokesh’s hat from his head, handing it carefully to the nearest soldier. He studied the crown of Lokesh’s head and tapped the baton in his palm.

“My name is Shan,” Shan said, watching the tip of the baton.

“A Han traveling with a Tibetan criminal,” Lin observed in an accusing tone.

Lokesh’s head shifted upward. Shan followed his gaze toward a line of birds flying low, approaching the village. A dozen bar-headed geese, bound, Shan suspected, for Lamtso.

As the colonel twisted his head and saw the birds his eyes lit with a new hunger and he snapped out a sharp syllable. A soldier ran to the first truck, opened the door painted with a fierce, leaping snow leopard, and retrieved a heavy gun, a long semiautomatic rifle. Lin grabbed the weapon, waited a moment, and when the line of birds was fifty yards away, no more than thirty high, he jerked the rifle to his shoulder and fired half a dozen rounds. Nyma cried out. Lokesh gave a small, disbelieving groan. Two of the big geese tumbled to the earth, a third somersaulted in the air, dropping low to the ground, but kept flying. Several of the soldiers cheered, and one darted away to fetch the dead birds. Lin returned the gun to the soldier who had retrieved it for him and turned back to his prisoners, his icy expression unchanged.

Lhandro was on his knees now, blood trickling down his cheek. As Nyma began to help him to his feet the soldier beside her pulled her away. When she resisted the soldier slapped her hard across the cheek. Shan watched in horror as the nun recoiled, then pushed back as though to strike the soldier, who lashed out with his hand again, grabbing her necklace, twisting it until it choked her, until it broke and the large gau it supported dropped free into his hand. He glanced at the amulet then slammed it against the rock wall. Nyma groaned and seemed about to jump for the prayer box, but froze as if she realized she should not draw the soldier’s attention to it. She had once opened her gau to show Shan the treasure inside, covering her prayer. A photo of the Dalai Lama, with the Tibetan flag on the reverse.

Lhandro struggled to his feet, reached into his shirt pocket and with a shaking hand pulled out his papers.

Lin seized them before the sergeant reached Lhandro. “Yapchi,” he read with sudden interest. “Yapchi,” he repeated in a meaningful tone. His eyes flared, first with anger, then satisfaction. A murmur spread through his soldiers, several of whom raised the barrels of their weapons toward Lhandro. “Over fifty miles from your fields, farmer,” the colonel observed, then surveyed Nyma, Shan, and Lokesh. “All of you from Yapchi?” He growled, his fingers clenching, the knuckles white. “Why here? Why so far away?” His lips curled to reveal a row of teeth stained with tobacco and Lin paused, as if relishing the moment. His eyelids seemed to droop. It was an expression Shan had seen in many such officials, a casual, patient cruelty hidden in a languid face.

“It’s too early to weed our barley,” Lhandro ventured weakly.

Lin gestured to the sergeant, who trotted to the cab of the first truck and marched back with an expectant gaze, holding a foot-long metal object in both hands.

“Have you been to Lhasa?” the colonel asked, gripping Lhandro’s arm tightly. “Where’s your bags? Your packs? I must see them!” The sergeant snapped his heels together and extended the object to Lin. Something frigid seized Shan’s stomach. It was Public Security’s favorite import from America, an electric cattle prod.

Nyma also recognized the instrument. She gave a high-pitched moan and stepped in front of Lhandro. Shan stared at the colonel in confusion. The prod was something the knobs used, seldom the army. It was for interrogation cells, not a remote roadside at the edge of the changtang. The colonel was desperate to extract information from his prisoners.

As Lin shot an amused glance toward Nyma and accepted the prod from the soldier a loud, bold voice rang out from the rocks.

“Yo, General, your majesty! My friends and I were having a peaceful picnic. No one invited the Boy Scouts.” Shan turned to see the American at the split in the rocks. He spoke in Mandarin. His mouth was turned up in a grin but his eyes were cool, and fixed on the colonel.