Bone Mountain (13 page)

As they left the next morning Shan remembered the words of the lama, for the earth was indeed expressing itself in powerful ways. A small but violent squall raced over the peaks to the north, one moment enveloping them in the white curtain that meant swirling snow, the next breaking to let the sun brilliantly illuminate a patch of slope. To the south clouds were scudding over another range, washing peaks with swaths of shadow that shifted so rapidly that the mountains themselves seemed to be in motion. And in between, the air over the great lake was clear and crisp under a cobalt sky. During the night the geese had gathered close to the salt camp, and Lokesh was standing close to the shore, speaking with them, or perhaps his mother, as he waved a farewell. The night before, his old friend had decided not to sleep. As the moon had risen over the holy waters, he had announced that he felt closer to his mother than he had in years, and he wanted to experience the sensation as long as possible. It was the geese, Lokesh had decided, and he wanted to stay near them all night.

As Shan had watched his friend settling onto a rock at the darkened shoreline he, too, decided to begin a vigil of sorts, atop a small hill, hoping for one of the rare moments when he connected with his father, when he would suddenly sense the smell of ginger and hear a hoarse, throaty laugh down some long empty corridor in his mind. But after an hour he had given up, realizing his father would never approach when the vision of Drakte’s death lingered so close to Shan’s consciousness.

Nyma, too, had been moved by the moonlight on the lake, for he found the nun sitting on a white rock, the water lapping against it. Fearful of disturbing her, he had been about to move on when she spoke.

“Once,” she said in hollow voice, “the village would have visitors from gompas several times a year. Now no one comes. No monks. No nuns. Maybe that’s all it is, maybe we have drifted so far away that no deity is interested in helping.”

Shan wasn’t even certain she was speaking to him until she paused and turned to stare at him. “They have you,” he offered awkwardly, stepping closer. He saw that for the first time since he had known her, she had let her hair down. It was long, nearly to her waist, and she absently ran her fingers through it.

“A real nun, I mean. I’m not a real nun,” Nyma said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Somehow the words seemed to hurt him more than her. “I think you’re a real nun,” Shan said.

In the moonlight he could see the trace of a sad smile on her face. “No,” Nyma sighed. “They closed the convent where I was training and sent away all the real nuns. I had nowhere to go but to my village.” She raised her face to the moon. “When I go to towns, I wear the clothes of a poor farmer. I do not have the courage to wear a robe in towns,” she confessed to the moon. “I don’t even cut my hair short like a nun. Lhandro says it could be too dangerous if howlers came.”

“And what good would you do for Yapchi in prison?” Shan asked, for that was where she would go if plucked off the street in an illegal robe.

Nyma did not answer, or did not hear. A solitary goose called out.

“I remember someone sitting waiting for ice to melt for days, to get some sand,” Shan said after studying the moonlit water a long time. “That woman was a nun.”

“It was me acting like a nun. I can act like a shepherd, or a farmer, too.”

Shan sat on a nearby rock. “Why are you so hard on yourself?” he whispered, feeling an unexpected helplessness. There were thousands of Nymas all over Tibet, men and women who had aspired to be monks and nuns and been denied the opportunity. Some just gave up, resigned to the notion that such a life would have to wait for a future incarnation. Others struggled on, trying to learn how to be a nun or monk without the benefit of regular teachers or role models. You must carry your gompa on your back, Shan had heard Gendun say to a despairing former monk.

“It feels like a lie, what we’ve done to you,” Nyma blurted out. “A nun who understands the path of compassion would have done different, I am sure. You didn’t know about the soldiers and the chenyi stone. We didn’t tell you about the Chinese and Americans drilling for oil at Yapchi. I could have told you at the hermitage about the oil but I didn’t, for fear of scaring you away. Now a killer is following us and that crazy Golok is watching the eye and all I feel is guilt over what we have done to you. And fear. When Drakte said that demon kills prayers he was right. I have been unable to pray, not truly pray in my heart, since that thing walked into the chapel. All day I have felt such fear. Terrible things are going to happen, I can feel it. You must think we have betrayed you. You must think we are so foolish, so reckless. Letting the oracle’s words bring us to this.”

“I would have come,” Shan said. “Even if you had told me it all, I would not have understood, but I still would have come. If the lamas asked me to go to the moon I would tie a hundred geese together and give it a try.”

In the moonlight Nyma’s sad smile reminded him of an old Buddha statue in ivory.

“Do you still have family at Yapchi?” Shan asked after another long silence. The woman had never spoken of her connection to the village.

“I call Lhandro uncle sometimes, but he is only a cousin. I have no close family left. He has only his parents. He was going to be married many years ago, but the woman who was intended for him was sent away for reeducation and never came back. My mother’s house is there. I have a home.”

Home. For a moment Shan was shamed because of the envy he felt for the Yapchi villagers, despite all the trouble in their valley. They had a home and a bond among them, roots in the land. He had no one, except Lokesh and Gendun, and a son who had disowned him and no doubt thought his father dead.

Shan had awakened to find Lhandro, Nyma, and Anya with two of the sturdy men from Yapchi arranging the small tandem salt sacks on a blanket. As Lhandro finished counting forty sets of pouches, Anya led a sheep forward and Nyma, her cheeks now smeared with red doja cream, quickly arranged the sacks on the back of the animal, tying the loose cords around the sheep’s belly so that each animal appeared to be wearing a woven saddle. The men from Yapchi worked quickly, some bringing the animals one at a time, others waiting in turns with the bulging sacks. When all the sheep were loaded, except a sturdy brown ram, Nyma called Shan to the ram’s side and opened one of the pouches, the only one that seemed to be empty. As Lhandro appeared with a leather bucket of salt, the nun pointed at the saddlebag which Shan carried in his hand, the bag he had brought from the hermitage. Shan hesitated, then opened the bag and extended it to the nun. But Nyma shook her head, as if still afraid of the bag’s contents, and gestured toward the pouch as Lhandro poured a handful of salt into it. Shan pulled out the cedar box and lowered it into the pouch, watching it with an unexpected sense of foreboding as Lhandro covered it with salt, produced a long needle, and began sewing the bag shut. The pouch was woven in a multicolored pattern with a round red circle in its center surrounded with white. Like an angry, watchful eye.

As the red-eyed pouch was loaded on the brown ram, Lhandro began watching the lake trail to the south, the trail Shan and his friends had arrived on the day before. A solitary figure, jogging along the trail, appeared on the crest of the nearest hill and waved to Lhandro. Shan saw that it was one of the Yapchi men he had met the day before, looking exhausted, an old muzzleloading rifle in his hand. He had been watching over them, guarding the trail in the night, Shan realized.

The other inhabitants of the salt camp gathered by the trail that opened to the north, watching with strangely solemn faces as Lhandro surveyed the line of loaded sheep and his companions, then nodded toward Anya, in the lead. The girl settled her chuba on her shoulders, whistled to the dogs, and began walking with her crooked gait, singing one of her eerie songs, the sheep and dogs following the girl as if under a spell.

“Lha gyal lo!” a woman by one of the dropka tents cried out, and the call was taken up by others, to Lokesh’s obvious delight. The old Tibetan echoed the words back to the camp as the caravan left the salt gatherers behind, Tenzin and the Yapchi men leading horses laden with equipment.

Yapchi had been sending salt caravans to the lake for as long as people remembered, Lhandro explained to Shan as they walked together—meaning not simply as long as the farmer and his family remembered, but for centuries, even before Buddha and the dharma path came to Tibet. More than twelve centuries. For much of the morning Lhandro walked beside Shan and spoke of those older caravans, recalling names and events from fifty, a hundred, even five hundred years earlier as if they had just happened. A Yapchi farmer named Saga had once found a dying Western priest, a Jesuit, near the lake, and had stopped for a week to carve one of his god’s crosses out of rock for his grave, since no wood could be found. Once, when there had been terrible sickness during the winter, the entire village had come to bathe in the healing waters of the lake. Another time a wild yak, white as snow, had followed a caravan all the way home and settled on the mountain above Yapchi where, for twenty years afterwards, it would be seen every year on Buddha’s birthday.

The tales echoed in Shan’s mind throughout the morning as the long empty miles of grassland seemed to put their dangers behind them. A sense of timelessness settled into Shan as they led the sheep along the eastern shoreline then into a long grassy valley that rose toward a pass over the first range of mountains. What had changed? he wondered. The Tibetans had taught him many ways to look at the world. One of them was to perceive the strange way that most humans viewed progress, even the very thing called civilization. He had evolved more as a person in four years in prison, enslaved, than he had in all the previous three decades he had spent in Beijing, accumulating the meager belongings by which most people judged a life’s progress. And now, carrying salt to Yapchi, walking by the sheep with the serene, joyful Tibetans under a cobalt sky rimmed with snowcapped peaks, a simple drawstring bag holding all his earthly possessions, Shan felt he had perhaps reached the pinnacle of civilization.

Had anything really changed since those first caravans, he wondered. The herdsmen still ventured by foot over the rough, rocky landscape, still broke the salt crust with their wooden pestles, slept in tents made of yak hair and packed their salt on their sheep in bags woven from wool taken from the same animals, still rejoiced over the sweet taste of milk from animals that grazed on the spring blossoms. Nothing had changed. Or everything, he thought sadly as he glanced at the short, sturdy ram carrying the bag with the red circle. For this time one of the sheep bore the eye of a deity, stolen by those who had massacred a village. And a killer was stalking the eye. A killer and a platoon of mountain troops. And perhaps even someone else. The more he replayed Drakte’s last moments in his mind the more he wondered whether Drakte had been warning about someone else, not the dobdob. If he had known the dobdob intended them harm, or if it had been a knob or soldier standing there, the Drakte Shan knew would have flung himself at the intruder to defend the lamas. But Drakte had just stood there when the dobdob arrived, frozen with the same confusion Shan and the others had felt.

He paused and waited for Lokesh, who had been walking at the rear of the caravan. “If you saw that dobdob in your mind again,” Shan asked his old friend, “would you see a real dobdob or someone dressed to look like one?” It was possible, Shan knew from his own experience, for a killer to don the old costumes to intimidate and confuse his victims.

Lokesh gazed toward a juniper tree that grew at the top of a nearby hill, the only tree visible anywhere in the landscape. “I see him. I see him when I try to sleep at night. I see him when I wake in the morning,” he said heavily and turned back to Shan. “It was not a pretend thing. It was a real monk policeman.”

“But you said they hadn’t been seen for decades.”

“Not by me. And I think not by anyone else. Almost anyone else.”

“To a dobdob, a Religious Affairs official would be an enemy,” Shan suggested. The coincidence still troubled him. Drakte and the man Chao had probably been attacked the same night.

“To a howler, a dobdob would be an enemy,” Lokesh said, correcting Shan. He stepped away as if to discourage further questions. A monk, Lokesh was saying, a true monk, would not perceive enemies at Religious Affairs, only people whose awareness had been stunted.

But a real dobdob would take orders only from a lama or senior monk. Had Drakte infuriated a lama?

Shan became aware of a robed figure walking far to one side of the caravan, gaze on the ground, almost as if wandering, unaware, of the caravan. When he saw Lhandro watching the figure with a worried expression he stepped to the village headman’s side.

“When she was with you,” Lhandro began, “did she always…” He struggled to find words, then turned with inquiry on his face. “She was going to run away to India last year, to find a convent there. I convinced her not to go. But now I think I was wrong.”

“She has always been a great help,” Shan offered, uncertain what Lhandro was asking.

The rongpa seemed relieved. “She was only fifteen when the government closed that convent of hers. She had gone away two years before. Not long after, her mother died. She had no hope of finding another convent so she took her robe off and tended the village sheep. But then one day three years later she found Anya lying on a rock, shaking, reciting old scriptures none of us had even heard before. It disturbed Nyma more than it did Anya herself. She said the fabric of our deity was being unraveled, and she put her robe back on. She and Anya made a little chapel in a small canyon behind the village and would stay there meditating for hours, for entire days. She asks me, how would a nun do this, what would a nun do about that, what was it like when monks used to come to the valley.”

He sighed and took a step forward as Anya called out to Nyma, and the nun began walking toward the head of the column. Then he paused and looked back at Shan. “But it has been many, many years since monks came to us. My father said to her once, you need not worry about studying the Compassionate Buddha, just study the Compassionate Nyma.” He offered a strained smile then stepped on a boulder to look behind the column, his face clouded with worry again.