Bone Mountain (45 page)

The soldiers leapt forward as Lin roared out furious orders. The man in the green jacket pulled a portable radio from his pocket and began yelling into it. A moment later the air horn sounded in the distance.

One of the soldiers by Lhandro slammed a baton into his belly, and the headman fell against the low wall, then sprawled on top of it, clutching his abdomen.

Lokesh pushed forward to help Lepka up the steep terrain as other villagers pushed past. Shan stared at them forlornly. They had no hope now. The soldiers would easily overtake them on the trail and turn them over to the knobs. They had destroyed what had become state property. They had interfered with a priority project for the economy.

A woman paused, the large woman who had taken Shan into the village the first day. “Thank you,” she said softly. “We’ll have to find our deity somewhere else.”

The words tore at Shan. They had given up their village, their valley. They were openly defying the army. And the woman had stopped to thank Shan. His eyes welled with moisture. “Your deity is still here,” he said hoarsely, but no one heard.

For a moment a mad thought seized him, that he would climb the cliffs and stay, he would search every rock and he would find a way to bring the wrath of the deity down on the soldiers. But then he looked at Lokesh and the others struggling up the slope. They needed his help.

More trucks sped up the valley. Most of the villagers had already left, Shan realized, thinking back on the circle by the fire. The only old ones had been Lhandro’s parents, who had doubtlessly insisted on staying. They had all known. They all planned it. They had lovingly cleaned their houses, the way a body would be cleansed for the death rites. The talk at the fire and the singing had been a way of saying farewell to their beautiful village. Someone rushed by to help Lokesh with the old man. Nyma, in the dress of rongpa woman, a tattered red scarf on her shoulders. A soft bellow came from nearby. Shan turned to see Gyalo and Jampa. Lepka laughed as Nyma helped him onto the broad back of the animal, and the yak and monk moved up the trail at a surprisingly brisk pace, the old Tibetan lifting his hand high in glee. “Lha gyal lo!” Lepka called out and Lokesh, a step behind, echoed the cry.

There was still no chance, he thought bitterly. But Nyma waited, and hurried him through a gap in the high ledge that would have been wide enough for one of the utility vehicles used by the troops. She waved a hand when they were through and two figures rose from the top of the ledge. Shan saw the flicker of a knife blade, and suddenly a rope sprang free and logs and rocks tumbled into the opening, filling it to a depth of several feet. Nyma tossed in a small rock, turned with a satisfied gleam, gathered her robe in her hand, and trotted up the trail. Twice more in the next half mile, where the trail narrowed into tight defiles, figures appeared above them and tossed down rocks and logs to block the path. At the last one Winslow was on top, urgently stacking logs and rocks that were being handed up by a chain of villagers.

Below, no more than a few hundred yards behind, they heard whistles and angry shouts. Winslow hesitated, looking in the direction of the approaching soldiers, then began filling the defile, making the wild hooting sounds Shan had first heard when the American had ridden the wild yak.

“If they know we’re on the trail, they will know they can intercept us at Chemi’s old village,” Shan pointed out. It made no sense. They had nowhere to flee to, no sanctuary to hope for.

“The purbas said it would probably be only Lin and his men. They said they think the howlers and the oil workers will not help,” Nyma told him. “Gyalo and Jampa are far ahead by now. The old ones will be safe once they reach the gorge above Chemi’s old village. It’s like a maze above there, full of caves. The people are splitting up. The purbas said the army won’t be that interested in pursuit, that the priority for them would be keeping the oil crews working.”

But the purbas hadn’t looked into Colonel Lin’s icy eyes. They hadn’t seen the way he had looked at Lokesh and Lhandro when they had first met, or witnessed his furious explosion when the houses had begun to burn.

He waited as Winslow climbed down from the rocks. “You should go. Run ahead. Help Lokesh if you can.”

Winslow frowned, then cursed and nodded slowly. “Adios, partner.” He set off at a quick pace up the mountain, leaving Shan alone with Nyma. Shan looked after the strange American. Not only did he not understand the man’s last words, he wasn’t even sure why the American was there. Melissa Larkin was dead, and Winslow was due back at his embassy.

Someone called out from the rocks below. To his amazement Lhandro emerged, wearing one of the company’s green jackets and a safety helmet. It was the jacket Somo had given Shan, the village headman quickly explained as he nervously scanned the slope below. He had hidden it on the other side of the wall, with the hat. In the confusion after the fires started he had rolled over the wall, on top of the jacket, and lain as if unconscious. Minutes later, when the trucks of workers arrived to fight the fires, he slipped on the jacket and hat and mingled with the workers.

They jogged slowly on, the last of the fugitives. Lhandro pulled ahead of them, telling them to stay in the gorge as he set off to find the other villagers. Thirty minutes later they paused at the clearing that opened toward Chemi’s ruined village. There was no sign of activity. But there was a sound in the wind, the sound of clinking metal. Shan and Nyma ran, hard, across the clearing and into the upper gorge as the metallic rumble increased and they heard the sound of voices on a radio. A rifle shot rang out. A bullet ricocheted high above them. The army would not want them dead, only in custody. They caught glimpses of figures ahead of them in the gorge, disappearing as the trail twisted out of sight. Then the high rock that towered overhead exploded a hundred feet above them. The tank was shooting into the gorge.

Shan paused for a moment to glance behind. Lin was there, in the gorge, his pistol in his hand, with four soldiers behind him. Only four. But four soldiers with automatic weapons would be more than enough. The soldiers would not shoot to kill, but one of their bullets could easily maim for life. A shot rang out, again over their heads, and another. Shan could keep running but a hundred feet ahead he saw Lokesh and the American, and between them Anya, frequently looking back, terror in her eyes.

The gorge narrowed and turned. They were out of Lin’s line of sight, but they had no chance of hiding, no chance of climbing the high, nearly vertical walls to distract or evade the colonel. They reached Lokesh and Winslow, both of whom appeared near exhaustion. Shan put Lokesh’s arm around his neck and kept moving, half-carrying the old Tibetan up the trail. Nyma swept up Anya and put the child on her back. They reached a long straight chute of rock and scrambled desperately for the far end. But halfway down it a rifle shot rang out again, then another, and another. Shan saw the shots hit the rock wall, each lower than the one before, each closer. The last one hit a rock a few feet in front of Nyma. With a groan of defeat she stopped and slowly turned.

“Treason!” Lin shouted as he jogged toward them. “Destruction of state property! Sabotage! You will never—” His words were drowned out by a violent explosion above them, then two more in rapid succession. The tank was shooting at the rockface. A hundred feet above them the wall burst apart, shattering violently with each impact. Huge slabs of rock sloughed off the face of rock above the soldiers, who did not look up but stared confidently at their prisoners, their guns leveled.

Lin glanced upward at the last instant. “Fool!” he shouted, and reached for a radio on his belt as he desperately leapt forward. But the debris was on him the next instant. The biggest slabs slammed onto the four soldiers, who had no time to flee or even cry out. There was a muffled scream and a spurt of blood, then the soldiers disappeared. The rock kept falling, groaning, shifting, and falling some more, raising great clouds of dust as it slammed into the gorge. Small, sharp pieces like shrapnel landed at Shan’s feet.

Suddenly there was silence. The dust cleared and the soldiers were gone, buried under ten feet of stone. There was no sign except for one arm extending out of the debris at the front, its hand clutching a pistol. Finally the pistol dropped, and the fingers hung in the air, trembling.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

A cloud enveloped them, a dry, choking cloud that swirled about them as if to warn that their world was changing. No one spoke. No one moved. Then the wind began pushing the rock dust away until it was like an eerie midday fog, thin enough for Shan to see the hand again. The fingers extended from the debris, shook and seemed to reach for something in the air, then gradually stilled.

Anya took a hesitant step forward, and another, slowly walking toward the hand as Shan and the others stood frozen.

“Run,” Winslow said in a distant voice. “We should run.” But the American did not move.

As the girl reached the hand she gently opened the fingers and clasped her own around the hand. The fingers remained limp at first but then, as if gradually sensing her touch, they returned the clasp, squeezing the girl’s hand tightly. Anya fell to her knees and began a mantra.

Shan, still in a daze, found himself stepping toward the girl, lowering himself beside her. A moment later he sensed someone towering behind him, and looked up into the American’s grim face. Winslow’s eyes were fixed on Anya’s hand, and Lin’s fingers, desperately trying to hold on, as though he were falling. Shan and Lokesh began pulling away the rocks.

It was more than a quarter hour before they had Lin’s body uncovered. Anya had not stopped her mantra, had even entwined her rosary through her own fingers and Lin’s. The colonel’s face was nearly covered in blood from a long gash that ran from his crown to his left temple. Otherwise he seemed unharmed, except for his right arm, pinned under a long slab of rock. Shan and Winslow tried in vain to pry the slab up, then Nyma began digging underneath it. In a few minutes they were able to slide Lin out, his right wrist bent at an unnatural angle, his hand purple.

Nyma rose and sighed. “A few minutes up the trail are some small trees. I’ll get splints.” As she turned and jogged away, Winslow picked up Lin’s pistol. Without looking at Shan he emptied the small oblong leather case on Lin’s belt that contained extra magazines, stowing them with the pistol in his rucksack. Shan stared at the American, who looked up as he retightened the strings on his pack and turned away with clenched jaw to tear his bandana into long narrow strips.

With her free hand Anya wiped the blood from Lin’s face with the bottom of her skirt as Lokesh searched in vain for the other soldiers. Nyma returned in ten minutes, and in another ten they had the splints tied around Lin’s wrist.

“He shouldn’t be moved,” Nyma warned. “It’s a terrible concussion.”

Winslow stood. “All we can do is move him,” he stated in a flat voice, meaning no one could stay with Lin, and with the path blocked it was unlikely his soldiers would find him before dark. The American handed Shan his pack and bent, his hands on his knees.

Nyma nodded reluctantly, and helped Shan lift Lin onto Winslow’s back.

Shan and the American alternated carrying Lin on their back, until at last they rounded a boulder and Lhandro appeared with two men from his village. Nyma quickly explained. The Yapchi men called their headman out of earshot, gesturing angrily at Lin and the mountains above them. Shan watched as Nyma approached them and spoke quietly. With hanging heads the Yapchi men seemed to apologize to her. They fashioned a rough litter by tying two of their heavy chubas together and began carrying Lin up the steep slope, not on a trail, but over the grassy mountainside toward a gap in the mountain that opened to the south. In an hour of heavy climbing, led by Nyma, they had crossed the gap and were looking out over the long Plain of Flowers where the ruins of Rapjung lay.

Lhandro paused, only for a moment, looking back toward his valley with desolation in his eyes. The village headman did not acknowledge Shan when he stopped beside him. “Our deity is truly blind. We proved that today,” Lhandro said in a near whisper, and stepped over the crest.

Nyma and the men from Yapchi plodded on without explanation, taking a goat trail toward a tiny plateau a thousand feet below. Their eyes seemed glazed, their expressions frozen into masks of grief and fear. They had lost their serene village. They had lost their valley. Several of the soldiers who had caused it were dead, and the army would never believe its men had died by accident. Now they were carrying into their midst, to whatever hiding place Nyma was leading them, the demon who had brought all their afflictions.

It had once been a hermitage, Shan decided as they reached the plateau, but a rockslide had destroyed the little retreat. The front wall of a stone hut remained, with empty frames for a door and a window that had looked out over the abyss that began a few feet away—a thousand-foot drop into the labyrinth of gorges at the southern base of Yapchi Mountain. The remainder of the structure was lost in a huge tumble of loose rocks that rose halfway up the back of the wall and continued in a long sweep to meet the steep slope above. On the opposite side of the wedge-shaped plateau was a single gnarled juniper tree, its trunk over a foot wide but no more than eight feet in height. Its branches all pointed southward, toward Rapjung.

“I think they meant for us to go to this place,” Nyma announced in a weary, uncertain tone. “They said the place on the south slope once used by lamas. I have never been here but—” Her voice choked off as a man appeared beyond the hut, as though materializing out of the shadows by the rock wall. It was one of the purbas from the canyon at Yapchi, the man with the tattered green sweater. He gestured them toward him with an urgent motion, as though he were fearful of them lingering in the open. He melted just as suddenly back into the rocks.

At the rear of the plateau, its narrowest point, the rockslide had nearly reached the sheer rock face of the mountain. But the catastrophe that had destroyed the hut had not annihilated the rest of the small complex, only buried it. A sturdy door frame stood in the rock debris, like an entrance to a tunnel. Beside it, facing the plateau, a wall of rocks had been skillfully constructed to appear as a continuation of the avalanche, hiding the entrance from all but those who stepped to within a few feet of the rock face. Shan watched the men carrying the litter enter the darkened entrance, then followed them into a low chamber with thick, closely set logs for roof beams, capped by sturdy planks and supported by thick wooden posts, as though its builders had anticipated the rock fall.