Bone Mountain (43 page)

“The soldiers will blame the howlers,” Shan speculated, “and the howlers will blame the soldiers and the knobs.”

Winslow replied with a dry grin. “Ain’t it grand.” The American studied the compound. “Maybe especially the knobs. They’re pulling out.” He handed the glasses to Shan.

He examined the camp in confusion. The knobs from Golmud, from the north, were indeed leaving, and in a hurry, pulling up their tents and throwing them into their trucks, loading equipment under the watchful eye of Director Tuan. Strangely, impossibly, Religious Affairs seemed to be evicting the knobs. As if Tuan was taking over for them, as if Tuan had authority over them. There was something wrong, something confused about who had authority at the camp, just as at Norbu. Perhaps not, he realized a moment later. Perhaps the only confusion was about who had authority over Shan, and Tenzin, and the mysteries that seemed to riddle the valley.

“You will be reported,” Shan said in a leaden voice as he lowered the glasses.

“Maybe not. I’ve been thinking on that. When that Director Tuan saw you, you were alone. And he didn’t see me at the gompa with you.”

“But he was speaking with Lin. That’s why he said it, said I knew about both.”

“Both what?”

Shan thought a moment. “Tuan is interested in Tenzin or someone who looks like Tenzin. Lin is looking for the stone and its thief. His best clue is that a group of Yapchi rongpa was found a hundred miles south of here. Tuan saw me with Tenzin. Lin saw me with the Yapchi caravan. He meant both what Tuan is seeking, and what Lin’s commandos are seeking. As if,” Shan said slowly, “they are seeking different things. Connected but different.”

Winslow winced. “Connected through you.” He studied Shan, then surveyed the camp again with his glasses. “Even if they wanted to complain about me, what could they say? That an American diplomat was disrupting the oil production? That I am interfering with some campaign they have against Tibetans?”

It was Shan’s turn to wince.

“Christ,” Winslow sighed. “In the end it’s always about that, isn’t it,” he said, as if just grasping the meaning of his own words. “It never stops, does it? Like some huge Chinese machine that was turned on so many decades ago, and they don’t know how to turn it off. It just keeps consuming Tibet and Tibetans.”

The drumming began again.

Winslow froze a moment then slowly turned toward the sound, his jaw clenched. “What the hell is that? Some kind of psychological warfare?”

Shan smiled. “A deity drum. I think someone is trying to call in the deity that once lived in the land here.” He explained that it was Lepka’s drum but that no one from the village was using it.

Winslow shifted to better see the slope above them. “Are you saying it’s the one who stole the eye?”

“It could be. But there are lots of Tibetans who might try it, to call that deity back.”

Shan remembered the strange way Jenkins had tilted his head, toward the sound. He listened to the powerful beats. It was someone with a strong arm. With a chill, a vision of a demon with powerful arms flashed through Shan’s mind. Maybe it wasn’t someone who was after the oil company. Maybe it was just the one who was stalking Shan and his friends. Maybe the dobdob had taken the eye and was now calling Shan to be punished, the way Drakte had been punished.

Shan saw that the American’s gaze had shifted back to the chaotic scene in the camp. “Lokesh said you used to be an investigator,” Winslow said after a moment.

“A long time ago.”

“So what the hell is going on here?” the American asked in a hollow voice. “I came looking for a missing woman. And now all this.… What would an investigator say?”

“That investigator interviewed people to discover facts and fit them together to reach a conclusion,” Shan replied quietly. “It never works that way here. In Tibet facts are misleading, hard to connect. The Tibetans don’t think one thing happens because of another thing, they think everything just happens, because it was meant to be.” He saw the confusion on the American’s face and pointed to a bird flying between rocks below them. “That lark isn’t in the air because it leapt off a branch and spread its wings, or because something scared it. It is just in the air, now. And in the now that existed five minutes ago it was in a tree. They don’t see cause and effect, so it can be useless to ask someone why something happened. There is no why of action, there is only action.”

After a moment Winslow spoke again. “But for you and me, and a guy like Lin, it’s more complicated. We believe in cause and effect.” He looked into his hands. “There was a woman in Beijing who loved orphans…”

“Lokesh says I learn things in a contrary fashion, that things should be learned in the heart before reaching the mind. But I must understand things first in the mind, by asking the why of them. Like why someone is hiding on the slope with a drum. Why tools get stolen from Jenkins’s garage the night after the eye gets stolen from us. Why Lin is really in Yapchi Valley. Why that ghost lama is wandering around the mountains. Why Melissa Larkin wanted to lose herself here. If we knew the motivation and sequence, we might know everything.”

“Sequence?”

Shan pulled the newspaper from his shirt, the paper from the week after the theft of the eye in Lhasa. It was full of articles about the Serenity Campaign. But near the bottom of a middle page was a small notice about a security incident at an army office in Lhasa. An area around the headquarters of the 54th Mountain Combat Brigade had been cordoned off and new security procedures had been posted for all citizens to read. Most of its civilian workers had been dismissed. Four pages later, on the back of the paper, was another article which Shan read carefully. The revered abbot of Sangchi, creator of the Serenity Campaign, had not arrived to give a scheduled speech. Anyone who had seen the abbot was to contact Public Security immediately. The paper he had read at Norbu, reporting the flight of the abbot toward India, had been dated several weeks later. Tenzin had said he had been there when the abbot fled.

“Sequence,” Shan repeated. “Looking for connections in the sequence of events.” He pointed to the second article. “Like why the chenyi stone and the abbot of Sangchi disappeared the same night. And motivation, like what we learned from Tuan today.”

“He didn’t—”

“He told us he knows we are connected to the valley, and so is the one he wants, because he came here in his search. But if he was interested in the stone eye he would have been here before, or sent those men in white shirts. I think,” Shan said slowly, “that Lin and Tuan seek the same person but the difference is that Lin is looking for him for what he did, and Tuan is looking for him because of who he is.”

The two men looked at each other, then stared at the valley for several minutes.

“What did that woman at the camp mean—she said we’d ruin everything?” Winslow asked.

Shan had not realized the American had heard Somo’s words but had not forgotten them. Somo was at the oil camp for the purbas, doing something she feared they would ruin. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Nothing is going to stop the oil,” Winslow said grimly, as if he had begun to hate the venture as much as the Tibetans. “It’s going to take a deity to do that.”

They listened to the drumming for nearly a minute before Shan turned to the American again. “It’s not something you should be involved in. You should go. The things that go on here, the things that are going to happen here, you can’t do anything about.” He realized bitterly that what the American said was true. The huge machine that Beijing had unleashed decades earlier was out of control. Or not out of control exactly, just embedded so deeply in the world Beijing had created that it was impossible to stop.

Winslow said nothing. He just gazed at the oil derrick, raised his glasses, and pointed. Several figures in chubas were near the derrick, sitting in a circle. It was the prayer circle, Shan knew. The Tibetans had taken their prayers to the derrick. Perhaps Lepka had told them of the bell hidden there.

Winslow pointed to a second group of figures, a squad of soldiers jogging toward the slope where Gyalo and Jampa had been seen. “I liked that yak,” he said in a distant tone as though they were unlikely to see Jampa and Gyalo again. When he looked at Shan a strange anguish was on his face. “If I know about all this, and do nothing, what does that make me?”

“Smart,” Shan suggested. “Pragmatic. A survivor. A foreigner who does not have to worry about these things.”

Winslow took off his hard hat and examined the number printed on the front and back. “That horse left the stable, partner.” He looked absently toward the opposite ridge where Gyalo and the yak had been. They listened to the drumbeat fading in and out as the wind ebbed and flowed. “I was at home on my father’s ranch years ago when my uncle was killed by the kick of a horse,” he said in a contemplative tone. “I got there just after he was kicked, when my mother was running to call an ambulance, and I knelt beside him, as blood starting trickling out of his mouth. He knew he was dying. He said he didn’t mind at all, and no one was to harm that horse. He said if he had to choose between being a good cowboy and just someone who lived a long time, he’d choose being a cowboy every time.” Winslow slowly returned the hat to his head, stood, and, without looking back, continued at a steady determined pace along the slope. They had another mile before reaching the village.

Shan gazed at the American, then at the distant, quiet village. All the villagers had wanted was the return of their deity. A great sadness settled over him. It was more than premonition he felt, it was a certainty of tragedy to come. No one could save the valley, for the world was in the control of petroleum ventures and Colonel Lins, who believed that everyone belonged to the new order or they belonged not at all. The American could pretend to hope, but Shan had learned not to pretend anymore. Lokesh and Gendun said Shan suffered even more than the Tibetans from men like Colonel Lin and what they did, for the Tibetans could accept it as part of the great wheel of destiny, but Shan always felt he should do something to change it, and therefore Shan would always live in defeat.

Winslow was out of sight by the time Shan began walking again. The rumble of the derrick drifted through the air, and the sounds of more heavy equipment. A new vehicle approached the derrick in a cloud of dust. He paused to watch it stop behind the tall scaffolding and shuddered again. It was a battle tank. It aimed its turret at the prayer circle, then shut off its engine.

Something inside shouted for him to run, but he could not, he could only stare at the very Tibetan stalement, the tank against the prayer circle. His legs seemed as heavy as his heart and he had to will each one to move again. After a quarter hour he was in the north end of the valley, where the wind drowned out the sounds of the machines. He paused for a moment, trying to clear his mind, then dropped to the ground in the lotus fashion, his back against a tree. There was a calming exercise, a meditation practice, which Gendun called ‘scouring the wind.’ Let yourself float with the wind, extend awareness into the natural world as a way of reaching the inner world. He needed to be scoured, he thought, he needed more than anything to reach the emptiness that brought the calm, and the calm that brought the clarity. He absorbed himself in the sound of birds, inhaled the scent of the junipers, watched a tiny bee float among yellow flowers, and saw a blue flower bow its head over an orange blush of lichen. After a few minutes a new sensation came to him; he explored it a moment before he recognized it as the smell of fresh paint.

Five minutes later he discovered the source of the scent, a boulder six feet high and nearly as wide, coated over its front surface with red paint. He paced around the boulder several times. The painted surface faced the valley, or more precisely faced the far end of the valley, the derrick and the oil camp beyond. Judging by the many spots of paint on the earth, the paint had been applied in haste, and there had only been enough paint for the front, facing the valley. He was certain it had not been there the day before, or even that morning. It would have stood out in his mind, not merely because of the bright color, but because he had seen such rocks before, usually with faded paint, old paint being overtaken by lichen. In traditional Tibet such painted rocks indicated the home of a protector deity.

He reached out to touch the painted surface and found it tacky, still not fully dry. He searched the base of the rock on his hands and knees. There was no loose soil where a piece of stone might have been buried. There was nothing on the top except a small pile of owl pellets. Someone could have painted the rock to taunt the Chinese. Someone could have painted it to invite a deity to take notice of what was happening in the valley. Someone could have painted it to try to draw a deity back to its eye.

The grass in front of the rock was pressed smooth. He considered the position, with its long open view to the oil camp, and the way the adjacent rocks were arranged in a V shape, ending with the red boulder. Before painting the rock the drummer had sat here, using the rocks to amplify and direct the sound toward the camp.

He walked the ground around the red rock in increasingly wider circles. There was no sign of a horse, only a few bootprints. It could have been, and probably was, only one person on foot. One person carrying a small pot of red paint, and a drum.

A hand on the back of the rock, he paused and closed his eyes. There seemed to be another sound, or at least the remnants of a sound, an odd rushing, as of wind. But there was no wind in that moment. It was like a groan, or perhaps a distant rumbling, or a muffled roar from somewhere closer. Then, abruptly, the drumming began again on the slope above him. He opened his eyes and ran, desperately seeking the source, until he reached the foot of a high cliff and realized the sound came from still higher, inaccessible without circling far around the face of the rock.

He gazed with foreboding back at the red rock. Perhaps, he thought, no one in the oil camp would understand. The soldiers would probably not recognize the significance of a red stone. But then he recalled the latest arrivals at the camp. The howlers would know. The howlers would despise the rock.