Bone Mountain (42 page)

Shan nodded, pulled out the paper dated the week after the stone eye was stolen, folded it, placed it inside his shirt, and returned the stack to the shelf.

As they approached the cleared patch of earth five minutes later the two figures in aprons kept at their work, one now lifting a plastic bucket to fill a round tray with dirt as the second slowly shook the tray. The dirt sifted out the bottom of the tray in fine grains, until there was a small mound under it. Then the man with the bucket shuffled back to the cleared patch and began refilling the bucket. He had nearly completed the task when he looked up and acknowledged Shan and Winslow. He was a Chinese, in his sixties, with thick black-rimmed spectacles and long thick snow-white hair under a broad-rimmed hat. His apron, apparently tailored for the task, had four rows of small pockets. From his belt hung a small nylon pouch, and a holster bearing a small hammer and two thick brushes. He cast what looked like a grimace toward them and returned to the bucket.

Shan wandered to the far side of the patch, where the man’s assistant waited with the soil sieve beside what looked like a pile of coats. She was also Chinese, much younger, with very short hair, wearing a tee shirt that said, in English, Bones Are Us.

“Some Tibetans,” Shan observed quietly, “think there are things buried in the earth that, once discovered, have the power to change the world.”

The young woman cocked her head at him. “Mostly,” she replied after studying him for a moment, “the things we find have the power to make your back ache and your hands blister.” She accepted another bucket of earth, bending over the sieve with a business-like manner. A blue pottery shard appeared, which the man lifted and inserted into one of his pockets.

“The manager says you found something with writing,” Winslow said.

The man looked up in surprise. “Your Mandarin is very good. Most of the foreigners don’t even try.”

“If you asked,” Shan suggested, “some of the villagers might help you. It is a lot of work for only the two of you.”

The man looked at Shan with the same curiosity the woman had shown. “They don’t like us digging in their valley. The first day we opened the ground, they drove some of their animals over our dig.”

“Surely not on purpose,” Shan said in surprise. It didn’t seem possible that the peaceful villagers of Yapchi would try to damage the professor’s work.

The man shrugged. “No one is too welcoming.” He lowered the bucket. “I am sorry. I thought you were more of the oil workers. They come and make fun of us sometimes, say we seem to be taking a long time to plant our garden. Or how they could move this dirt out in five minutes, when it takes us five days.”

“But you don’t work for the venture?”

The elderly Han shook his head. “Our university has a contract with the development bank. The cost will be deducted from the funds advanced to the venture. It is how the banks make sure the proper study is conducted before production ruins the site.” He removed his hat and wiped his brow. “I am Professor Ma from Chengdu. This is my assistant Miss Ming.”

As Shan and Winslow introduced themselves the professor stepped to the pile of coats and lifted them, revealing a wooden box that had the appearance of an old tool chest. He inserted a key in the padlock that held the box shut, opened it, and extended an object wrapped in black felt toward Shan. It was a heavy piece of bronze, two inches wide, slightly curved, with two rows of writing. The top row was Tibetan script, the bottom Chinese ideograms. Both scripts were heavily ornate, the Tibetan in the special ornate form traditionally used for recording scriptures and sutras. The fragments gave little sense of the original message. Until the communist government had abandoned the tradition fifty years before, Chinese ideograms had been written vertically, from top to bottom, so that the few Chinese characters that appeared on the bronze shard were not connected in meaning. The first character was
lao,
the word for old. The second said
yu.
Jade. The third, broken at the center, was impossible to identify. The ornate Tibetan script eluded him. He thought he saw the word treasure, but could not be certain.

“A samkang,” Shan suggested. The bronze shard could have come from a large bronze temple burner.

The professor nodded. “As good a guess as any.”

Shan tried to visualize a little Tibetan temple at the head of the valley, trying to translate its teachings into Chinese. The lessons, he thought sadly, had not stuck. He watched as the professor filled another bucket and Winslow carried it to the sieve. “Have you dated the site?” he asked.

“Two or three centuries old at most. There is a layer of char three inches under the surface. A wooden temple, once it burns, leaves so little behind.”

“How large a complex?” Shan asked. Those who lived in the temple surely would have known how to find the valley’s deity.

“Small,” the professor said, pointing to a pattern of holes that radiated out from the cleared rectangle, which he must have used to gauge the extent of the char layer. “One central building, with a small walled yard.”

“What happens to your findings?” Shan asked.

“We are allowed one more week,” the professor sighed. “Then we write a report and send it to the bank. They have a form we complete, certifying that a comprehensive analysis was performed and that no unique artifacts of importance were discovered. Then someone puts it in a file and forgets it.”

Shan studied the rigid set of the professor’s jaw. “You’ve done this before.”

“All over the Tibetan regions. Amdo. Kham. Tsang.” He was using the old Tibetan names for the lands, not Beijing’s. “Good summer projects for my graduate students.”

The sound of a heavy truck interrupted the professor. They turned to see Lin’s troop trucks driving rapidly along the western side of the valley, abreast of each other, deliberately destroying the spring barley.

Winslow cursed. “I could get on the radio telephone,” he said, “tell the embassy that the army is interfering with an American investment project.”

“Not,” Shan said, “if Mr. Jenkins did not agree.”

The professor studied the truck with a grim expression, settled his hat back over his head, and resumed working, as though the appearance of the soldiers meant they could no longer speak.

Suddenly Shan became aware of the drumming again, from high on the slopes, though it seemed farther south and higher than before. Ma paused, not looking up, just staring at the ground with worry in his eyes. Shan recalled Jenkins’s strange reaction to the drumbeats. The sound seemed to tug at something inside Ma as well.

“Back to the village,” Winslow said. “Right away.”

But Shan hesitated, following the American’s gaze toward two new vehicles that had appeared at the camp. A white utility vehicle with two men in business suits standing beside it, and a nearly identical black truck parked behind it. “Senior managers from the venture,” he suggested. “You could make an official request, ask them to help in locating Larkin’s work crew.”

“Too risky if they don’t—” Winslow began. But Shan was already walking back toward the camp. He heard a curse behind his back, and the American jogged to his side.

Two minutes later they were among the sterile metal trailers, Winslow looking for the new arrivals, while Shan wandered about the camp trying to determine where the Yapchi workers were housed. He inched along the side of a huge dump truck, until he was only forty feet from the white vehicle and the men in suits. The men were Chinese, and they were not talking with Jenkins or anyone else from the venture. They were speaking with the knobs who were camped near the army tents. With a chill Shan recognized one of the men. Director Tuan from Religious Affairs, whom they had left at the stable in Norbu. He leaned forward to inspect the small, elegant lettering on the door of the white truck. Bureau of Religious Affairs, it said, in Chinese only. And with Tuan were four of the men in white shirts who looked like guards.

Suddenly, out of the shadows by the army trucks, Colonel Lin emerged, striding purposefully toward the new arrivals. An instant later the engine of the dump truck that concealed Shan roared and the vehicle pulled away, leaving him in plain sight of the howlers from Norbu. He turned, but out of the corner of his eye saw Tuan dart to Colonel Lin’s side. As the two officers conferred in low, urgent tones Tuan and his men began studying the faces in the camp. Shan walked as fast he dared without appearing conspicuous, desperately looking for Winslow, or at least a place to hide. He was just about to round the corner of the first trailer when Director Tuan called out in a shrill voice, “There! That’s the one! The one who knows about both! Arrest that man!” One of the white-shirted guards began blowing a whistle. Tuan was pointing at Shan.

Part Three

S
TONE

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

There are moments, Lokesh sometimes told him, when the wheel of life spins at double speed, when the predestined lines of so many people converge with events important to each one that life itself seems to explode in a confusion of actions and sensations. Lokesh called such moments karma storms.

Shan was at the center of such a storm now. The howler kept blowing his whistle. Colonel Lin barked furious orders. Workers from both ends of the camp called out in alarm, some shouting that there must be an accident, others that saboteurs were in the camp. Shan bolted around the corner of the office trailer, desperately looking for Winslow. A horn blew, much louder than the howler’s whistle, an air horn as loud as that of a locomotive. Workers everywhere stopped and began converging on the compound. The big flatbed truck began coasting away, spilling its cargo of pipes as it moved. The sound of the drum mingled with the noise, beating faster than before. And on the slope above, where the timber crews labored, a huge tree slammed into the earth.

Shan ran, weaving in and out of the trailers, wondering if he dared flee toward Yapchi Village. No, he would be in the open, easily spotted, easily outrun by one of the trucks.

Workers urgently shouted, warning others from the runaway truck, some dodging the rolling pipe, some trying to retrieve the pipe. Shan stumbled to one knee, but workers sped past him, racing after the truck. They seemed to believe the alarm had been sounded because of the truck.

Then, as abruptly as it had started, the horn stopped. The whistle stuttered and slowly quieted. A man called out in an oddly awed tone, in Tibetan, then another in Mandarin, and most of the workers halted and began pointing. On the slope above the camp, at the top of the eastern ridge where the road cut through, two figures stood in a pool of brilliant sunlight, staring down at the camp. A solitary monk and, at his side, a huge yak. The Tibetans whispered excitedly. Shan heard rapid, whispered mantras. Even many Chinese workers stopped and stared, some in confusion no doubt, but some perhaps in reverence, for in Chinese tradition few images were more hallowed than that of the old Taoist monk Lao Tzu walking with his ox.

The voices died away. Everyone seemed to be staring at the unexpected, inexplicable sight on the ridge. Only the distant drumming broke the silence, seeming more than ever like the heartbeat of the valley’s deity.

Shan hesitated too long. Suddenly hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him roughly back against the wall in the narrow alley between two trailers.

“Here!” a woman’s voice commanded, and shoved something onto his head. She pulled his arm into the sleeve of a green jacket. He stared numbly into the face of the young Tibetan woman, thinking he had seen her before, then Winslow was beside him and with the same angry look the woman thrust another jacket at the American. She tossed them each a hard hat. “Go! You’ll ruin everything!” she cried, and pointed urgently toward the wooded slope behind the camp, then sped away, shouting to the furious howlers that she had seen the man running down the road past the runaway truck.

Winslow helped Shan into the jacket and pulled him away at a fast walk. The swarm of workers seemed to part for them as they walked into the open, past the troop trucks. Between them and the shelter of the slope were three army tents. But only two soldiers lingered there, tending a large pot on a cook fire. As Winslow led him forward Shan saw that the American’s coat had a word on the back in big English and Chinese letters. Manager. On the helmet he was wearing was stenciled a large numeral one. On Shan’s own head was a hard hat identical to those used by the venture workers. They passed the soldiers, who gave them quick nods, then rapidly moved up the slope.

After a quarter hour Winslow finally paused. He took off his helmet and studied it a second, cursed, then laughed. “Who was that masked man?” he said in English.

“I’m sorry?” Shan asked. He was busily scanning the opposite side of the valley. Gyalo and Jampa, for he knew it could only have been them, had vanished.

“A joke. I mean who was that woman who helped us?”

“A lot of Tibetans don’t like knobs,” Shan said. But he did know who it was. He had finally placed her face while they had trotted along the slope. He had last seen her at the hermitage, the day he had left Gendun performing the death rites for Drakte. The purba runner, Somo.

Perhaps it hadn’t just been Somo who had saved them, they realized as they walked around the upper slope toward Yapchi speaking about what had happened. Somo might have released the brakes on the truck, but the air horn had been the signal used for emergencies, or for important announcements by the manager. The horn had confused everyone enough for them to escape. Winslow had been present when Jenkins had used it to summon workers to announce that they would be operating the drilling rig night and day, with double wages for all if they struck oil before May first. “There’s a little box with a key lock,” Winslow explained as he studied the compound and slowly grinned. “I saw Jenkins open it that day. I thought only Jenkins had a key.”

They stopped at an opening in the trees and sat on a rock to let Winslow scan the camp with his binoculars. “Soldiers have the workers lined up,” he said. “Probably checking every identity card.”