Bone Mountain (15 page)

“They’re good people,” Shan said.

Dremu frowned. “There’s something,” he said, “someone—” He glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t know what to do with her,” he said in a low voice, as though he did not want the rongpa to hear. He pulled his horse about and stepped behind the boulder onto a game trail that led toward the top of the low ridge. Shan turned to see Lokesh climbing the slope toward him, then slowly followed Dremu up the trail. He caught up with him just beyond the crest, where Dremu was kneeling beside a short, stunted juniper growing in the lee of a boulder.

Shan stepped past Dremu and discovered a small, frail-looking woman sitting against the rock. Perhaps fifty years of age, she wore a ragged grey wool scarf on her shoulders, over which hung several necklaces of coral and turquoise. Two small, tough hands extended from her heavily patched chuba, one clutching a mala, a rosary, the other a prayer scarf. On the ground beside her, resting on a piece of cloth, was a small copper prayer wheel.

Shan bent over the woman.
“Ku su depo yinbay?”
he asked in Tibetan. How are you?

“La yin, la yin,”
she replied with a weak smile. I’m fine.

But she wasn’t fine. Her eyes had a sickly yellow cast, and Shan saw now that the hand with the khata, the prayer scarf, was pressed against her side, as if trying to touch the scarf to a pain in her abdomen. The woman gazed past Shan with a determined glint, as if trying to will him away.

“She was sitting here when I rode by,” Dremu said. “Didn’t even seem to notice me. She just kept staring down the trail,” he said, gesturing toward the trail that climbed along the far side of the ridge, coming from the south.

Shan looked down the trail. “As if she’s expecting someone.” It was a remote, inhospitable landscape. Weeks could pass without a human entering the small, high valley the woman was looking into. He sensed movement behind him, and Lokesh appeared, his face creased with worry, his palm extended to touch the woman’s head. He lifted her hand with the beads and placed three fingers, spread apart, inside the wrist. Once Shan had heard Lokesh bemoan how little he knew about healing despite his years with medicine lamas, but Gendun had rejoined that the most important aspect of healing was the moral quality of the healer, and in that aspect Lokesh was an adept.

After listening to the woman’s pulses at both wrists Lokesh straightened and placed his fingertips on her cheek. “We must restore you,” he said quietly.

The woman stared a long time at Lokesh, studying him, as if perhaps trying to recognize him, then she offered her weak smile again. Her hand with the mala reached out and touched the prayer wheel.

“Come with us,” Lokesh said. “We can make you comfortable.”

“Are you truly one of the old ones?” she asked, still studying Lokesh intently.

Lokesh rubbed the white stubble of whisker on his chin and looked at Shan as though uncertain how to reply. “We have horses,” he said. “You could ride a horse.”

The woman shielded her eyes with one hand and stared at Lokesh’s face. She offered another strained smile, then settled her gaze on the trail again. It was as if she were expecting a healer, but had decided that Lokesh was not the healer she was waiting for.

“How long have you been here?” Shan asked.

The woman shrugged, without moving her gaze from the slope. “Two days I think.” She slowly turned and searched Shan’s face a moment as though she were about to ask him what day it was.

“Can you walk?”

“Of course,” she said with a slightly impatient tone, then was seized by a fit of coughing. “I got here,” she added hoarsely when the coughing had passed.

Shan sighed and exchanged a frustrated glance with Lokesh. “You should have a hat for the sun. What happened to your hat?”

“It blew away,” she stated flatly and watched the trail again. Some Tibetans clung steadfastly to the old belief that once a hat blew off it was bad luck to retrieve it.

Shan removed the brown, broad-rimmed hat he had been wearing for the past three months and placed it on the woman’s head, tugging it down for a tight fit. The woman slowly lifted her hand and touched the brim, as though about to pull it off.

“A monk gave me that hat,” Shan said, “near the sacred mountain, Kailas. He said I looked cold. I’m not cold anymore.”

The woman’s yellow eyes blinked at him, as if to express gratitude, and the hand dropped into her lap.

Shan left her with Lokesh, passing Dremu, who still hung back watching nervously, and retrieved a bag of tsampa and a water bottle from the caravan. When he returned no one seemed to have moved, except Lokesh was holding his own beads now, reciting a mantra.

“Who is coming here?” Shan asked as he stuffed the food and water between the woman and the rock. “Who do you expect?”

“The one who understands it all,” she said in a new, serene voice. Her gaze still did not leave the trail.

Shan touched Lokesh on the shoulder and the old man reluctantly rose, fumbled in his pocket, then placed the fossil rock in the woman’s lap. “It’s a powerful tonde,” he said, “from Lamtso.”

But she did not seem to hear, did not acknowledge the gesture, or shift her gaze from the trail as they stepped back over the crest of the ridge.

“Right,” Dremu said. “The one who knows it all. Uncle Yama, that’s who she expects, he’s the one who knows.” Dremu meant the Lord of Death, Yamantaka. “Waste of food and water,” he groused. “Just her way of ending things. Hell, with the leopards and wolves in these hills, she won’t even need to be taken to the body cutters.” He mounted his horse and trotted away to the north, still keeping the caravan at a distance.

*   *   *

The image of the feeble woman alone on the side of the mountain haunted Shan most of the day as they wound their way toward the pass over the second of the four ranges of mountains that separated them from Yapchi. The woman had been waiting for someone coming from the south, coming along the difficult, unlikely trail that followed the crest of the ridges. But the ones most likely to come from the south were not healers.

As they stopped for lunch, Lhandro unfolded his tattered map on a flat stone and with his finger traced the course they would take for the seventy miles remaining to Yapchi Valley. It was not the most direct route, but a remote path that kept them far from the north-south highway and even away from the few low valleys at the edge of the changtang that held farming settlements. It would take two or three days longer than the traditional route of the salt caravans, Lhandro explained, but it would almost guarantee they would not be observed. Shan had seen Nyma speaking with Lhandro on several occasions, pointing south, scanning the horizon. As Lhandro folded his map Shan saw a solitary figure on a ledge, also looking south. Lokesh joked sometimes that Tenzin must be worried about leaving behind all the yak droppings they were passing in their travels. But Shan saw the worry etched on the mute Tibetan’s face, and remembered the anguish he had evidenced over Drakte’s death.

Tenzin turned at Shan’s approach and began to step off the ledge, but Shan stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Did Drakte help you escape from your prison?” Shan asked. Tenzin tried to pull away with a resentful glance but Shan would not let him go, fixing him with a level stare until the emotion left the Tibetan’s face. Tenzin nodded soberly, then pulled from Shan’s grip.

After another hour on the trail they rounded a bend to find Dremu squarely in the path, sitting in his saddle with his left leg on his horse’s neck, lazily cutting an apple with the elaborate knife the purba runner Somo had given to him.

Shan hurried to the front of the column.

“Pass is blocked!” the Golok called out loudly, as if he preferred that they keep their distance. “Snow avalanche.”

“Not likely,” Lhandro called back, just as loudly. “It was clear when we came through. Supplies are hidden there. Food for the sheep. There is no grass that high in the mountains.”

“Spring melt shifted the slopes. That pass is under twenty feet of snow now,” Dremu declared, and pointed toward the pass, still miles away. Its outline was visible, but its details obscured under the shadows of low clouds. But when Shan handed Lhandro his field glasses the rongpa studied not the pass but the alternative trail that could be seen leading toward the east, circumventing the tallest of the peaks. He suspected the Golok’s motives, Shan realized, and was studying the trail for signs of unwelcome strangers. After a long moment the village headman gazed at the Golok with a sour frown, then motioned for the caravan to continue north.

Dremu pulled his horse to the side of the trail, watching with a sullen expression as the column of animals passed him, then wheeled his horse and galloped to the top of a small hill that overlooked the junction with the eastern trail, where he dismounted and made a conspicuous show of throwing his blanket onto the grass, languidly stretching upon it.

An hour later the sky cleared over the mountains and Lhandro examined the range once more with Shan’s glasses. He stared hard, constantly shifting the focus, then handed the glasses to Shan, pointing between two peaks. The pass was gone, replaced by a large wall of brilliant white, at the top of which were great ragged blocks of snow that indicated an avalanche.

“The bastard,” Lhandro growled, as if Dremu had caused the avalanche. He called for the caravan to reverse its course.

Shan studied the pass and the steep forbidding mountains that flanked it. “You came through there on the way to the lake?”

“Supplies were hidden there.”

Shan examined Lhandro’s face. “Are you saying someone else put supplies there?”

The rongpa did not reply.

“Purbas,” Shan ventured.

“He liked climbing the high lands,” Lhandro said after a moment. “He said he had a friend he would bring back and they would run up the mountain together.”

“Drakte? Drakte was there?”

“He said everything was secret, that it was dangerous to speak about him or anything he did.” Lhandro looked back into Shan’s eyes. “But I guess now the danger for him is over. He was at Yapchi over two months ago. He said lamas were preparing for the return of the eye, but he had to find a safe way to get it north, a way no one would suspect. When we agreed on the salt caravan Nyma went away with him.”

Drakte had been here, or near here. Shan began surveying the landscape. It was as though Shan was retracing the last days of Drakte’s life, in reverse. “Did he travel with you and the sheep?”

“No. But he came to our village three times. Once, just after it was recovered in Lhasa, after Nyma told about the oracle’s words. Then that time two months ago, and again last month, when he asked about details of the salt caravan, and he gave me his map so we would know the places where he left supplies, so we could avoid going near any settlements. He said when you came you would be on horses. He said we could keep the horses.” Horses were prized possessions, beyond the reach of many herders and farmers.

“At the lake the herder spoke about the purba general the knobs are hunting. The Tiger. Did he help? Is he involved with the stone?” It might explain much. Perhaps the army and knobs were not after them at all. The scent of such a senior resistance leader would make the soldiers ravenous.

“I don’t know. Maybe. One night Drakte met someone in the rocks above our village. I followed, to help keep guard. Drakte would not let me close. But I could hear a voice like I have never known. Deep like a growl but not exactly. Like someone roaring in a whisper. Drakte wouldn’t say who it was, but later I found out that this Tiger had something broken in his voice box once, by a knob baton.”

Dremu was sitting on his blanket as they approached the eastern trail. He did not greet them, did not pause to gloat, but simply tied his blanket to his saddle and trotted toward the east, ahead of the caravan.

It was midafternoon when a cluster of houses, animal sheds, and ragged fields came into view, a small rongpa village at the head of the narrow gravel road that the caravan would need to follow for several miles to reach the next pass to the north. Both the Tibetans and the animals seemed to quicken their pace as they approached the village, as if in anticipation of a warm meal and perhaps shelter from the steady, chill wind that had begun to blow.

But the village was abandoned. Tables in front of two houses held bowls of cold tea and tsampa. A blanket was spread on the dirt track in front of another, littered with the remnants of walnut shells. A small fire smoldered by the door of another of the decrepit buildings, its sheep dung fuel left to smolder when someone had dropped the crude leather bellows at its side. A large mastiff tied to a post barked loudly, not at the strangers arriving in the village but toward the eastbound road.

Lhandro halted the caravan, his eyes filled with alarm, then quickly ordered them back up the trail, behind the cover of the hillock they had just crossed, until he and Shan explored the empty village. At the first house, Lhandro stopped and called out a greeting, then stepped into its open door when no one answered. He moved into its shadows and reappeared a moment later wearing a grim expression, staring at a frame of sticks, ten inches square, that hung from the doorframe. Yarns of many colors had been stretched across the sticks, and it twisted in the wind. It was a spirit catcher, meant to trap evil spirits that wandered too near the house.

“No one,” Lhandro said, as he scanned the remaining houses, then the surrounding hills. “Not even that damned Dremu,” he added, as if now he blamed the Golok for emptying the village. “Bandits could do this, take the people until they ransom themselves.”

The sudden sound of footsteps from behind caused Lhandro to spin about, crouching as if to meet an attack. Lokesh emerged from between two houses, followed a moment later by Nyma. Lokesh walked past them silently, his head cocked in curiosity.

“Not bandits! Don’t you recognize it?” the young nun cried. “It’s what the knobs do sometimes,” she added in a tormented tone. “If they suspect someone of subversive activity, they just round up all his neighbors and question them, keep them locked up while their animals are starving and crops are dying. Eventually someone remembers something to implicate the suspect, true or otherwise.”