Bone Mountain (35 page)

The purbas maintained a chronicle of Chinese atrocities they called the Lotus Book, which they had shared with Shan more than once. It listed details of lost gompas, lost lamas, lost treasures, and of those Chinese who had been known to commit the acts which had annihilated so much of traditional Tibet. Tibetan peche were listed too, sometimes, for the texts were always hand printed, and therefore never in wide circulation. Some texts were unique to the gompas which had produced them, and such texts and the wood blocks they were printed from were often among such gompas’ most revered treasures. When the People’s Liberation Army and the Red Guard had destroyed Tibet’s gompas they had destroyed the peche within, destroying not only the texts but those who knew the contents of the texts. The Lotus Book recorded that huge bonfires had been made consisting only of the wooden printing blocks of ancient texts, and how the peche themselves had often been transported for use in the soldiers’ latrines. Those peche known to be lost were listed in the Lotus Book as dead, with a summary like an obituary, often the last mention of the last work of a scholar who may have lived centuries before.

On the wall beside the peche hung a row of four more thangka, suspended from a plank jammed into a crack in the cave wall. Lokesh sighed again, and explained each one to the American in a reverent whisper. “The King of Lapis,” he said of the first one, explaining that it was another emanation of the Medicine Buddha, who was often called the King of Lapis Lazuli, a gem highly valued in traditional Tibet as a healing stone. Tsepame was the next, the Buddha of Immortal Life. There was an astrological chart, of the kind used to diagram and treat disease; an anatomical chart of a human back, with vertebrae marked; one of the medicine trees used to describe the interrelationship of diseases. The last was an image of a simplistic mandala circle with claws extending from it, a head of flame at the top, and a curled tail of beads at its bottom. Shan had seen such images before, drawn by lamas in prison when no medicine was available for the sick. It was a scorpion charm, a token to drive out the demons that caused illness. Or perhaps, he thought as he saw the empty space where he knew the name of the sick was to be inscribed, a chart for teaching scorpion charms.

As Lokesh gazed upon the hangings, Winslow stepped around the chamber to each of the walls. There was another thangka—much larger than the others, hanging to the floor on one wall—another image of the King of Lapis. Beside it on another small ledge was a row of small dorjes, the scepter-like ritual objects used to symbolize the indestructible reality of Buddhahood. There were over a dozen dorjes, and though most were encrusted with dust they all seemed to be different. Some were of wood, some of iron, one had the gleam of gold. One seemed carved of lapis stone.

Shan sensed movement behind him and turned to see Chemi and Anya. The girl was standing by the woman. But Chemi wasn’t trying to comfort the girl. It seemed Chemi was using the girl for support, as if the woman had grown unsteady on her legs.

Lokesh and Winslow noticed, too. They stopped, Winslow lowering the light so it made a white pool on the floor, like a small fire. They stood in silence, none of them seeming able to speak, until suddenly a woman’s voice broke the spell.

“It wasn’t day when he came,” the voice whispered, “but not night either.” Shan looked up in surprise, searching the chamber, before he realized it was Chemi. She stared wide-eyed at the thangkas, speaking to the Medicine Buddha. “It was the time just between, when the sun is gone but the night has not come. I wanted so much to believe he was coming. I had to believe it. I was so sick that believing it was all I had left. But it seemed so impossible.” Her voice trembled. “I had an uncle. Before he left for India I promised him I would trust in the old ways, stay out of a Chinese hospital if I got sick. Sometimes Tibetan women go to sleep in Chinese hospitals and when they wake up terrible things have happened.” She glanced at Shan, then her eyes dropped to the floor. “Part of me never expected him to come. Then he was just there. I had closed my eyes because my belly hurt so much. When I looked up all I saw was his smile. He was such a frail old thing, it seemed he might blow away if the wind grew. I was so tired, I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming. This couldn’t be the great healer, I thought, for he looks so frail himself. But when he touched the top of my head I felt such energy. The wind wasn’t cold anymore and I just smiled and he listened to my pulses. When he asked me things I just smiled and told him, but it wasn’t my voice, it was the voice of a little girl.” Chemi took a step toward the thangkas, twisting her head as though trying to see them better.

“What kind of things?” Shan asked softly.

“Not about my sickness. Not at first. What time of year was I born. Had I ever taken a pilgrimage to Mount Kalais. He asked if I had ever flown a kite as a child, and did I know how to make a whistle out of a stick. How my family fared in the great struggles with the Chinese. Whether I still felt the Buddha within me. He gave me some little round brown pills and told me to drink from his bottle of drup-chu water. Then he lit some incense that he said was made of aloe wood and we talked a long time.” She raised her hand as though to touch the thangka of the blue Medicine Buddha but instead she paused with her hand hanging in the air as if she were greeting the ancient image. “He wanted to know about places, about Rapjung and the plain, even about Yapchi.” She slowly turned to Shan and Lokesh, as if she expected them to ask a question. “We talked about how you could smell the spring flowers at night now, and he asked why I carried a dark spot in my spirit.”

Chemi’s voice grew even fainter. “That’s when I told him about an old woman who had lived in our village who always yelled at me for having loud dogs and how when some soldiers came long ago I told them how she kept a photograph of the Dalai Lama and prayed for his return. They took her away and no one ever saw her again. I told him I could not sleep at night, that she always appeared to me, the sight of her being dragged away by the soldiers.” She paused to look in each of their faces. “He said the soldiers would have found the photo anyway and not to blame myself anymore. He said it was time to surrender the guilt, that a woman who loved the Dalai Lama would hold no blame for me. Then he put his hand on my belly and my skin burned, and my belly contracted and I think he drew something black out of my abdomen. Something changed inside me. I fell asleep and when I awoke the sun was dawning and no one was there except a little pika that just kept staring at me. I felt different; light and strong again. But there was no sign anyone had been there, and at first I thought it was a dream. But I could remember every word that lama had spoken and my weakness was gone. I stood, and I jumped in the air. That pika should have run, but it didn’t move, not until I began to walk away. Then it ran to a rock and chattered, like it had to tell the world that I had lived. That maybe it had seen a miracle,” Chemi added in a low voice, staring at the outstretched hand of the blue Buddha, and pushing her fingertips close to the blue fingers, just above the surface of the old cloth.

“But even now, today, I was wondering if maybe it had been a dream after all. Because I think the medicine lamas were from one of the other worlds.” Other worlds. Chemi meant one of the bayal, the hidden worlds, thought to be accessed through secret portals in the earth. “They can’t exist here, I was telling myself, they don’t exist. They are like some of the spirit creatures in another age that were hunted down and killed by demons. I must have been carried to some bayal. But look—” She swept her hand toward the line of thangkas. They had found a place of the medicine lamas. In this world.

Each of them, even the American, wandered about the chamber in silent reverence. Lokesh kept returning to the small row of dorjes on the ledge. Nearly all were double ended, with symmetrical scepters at each end, but two consisted of a scepter at one end and at the other end a purba, the ritual knife for which the resistance was named.

“It’s been so long,” Lokesh said as he touched an unusually long dorje made of sandalwood. “But this one, it seems like I know it.” He ran his fingers along its worn, burnished top but seemed reluctant to lift it. “My teacher, Chigu Rinpoche, had one like this,” he declared in a puzzled tone. “The only one I ever saw.”

“Sometimes they put treasures away,” Chemi explained, “when they knew the breakers were coming.”

Shan looked at the woman. Breakers. Some villages, some clans, had their own vocabulary about what had happened during the past fifty years.

“They stored treasures,” Shan agreed, but looked uncertainly at Lokesh. Tenzin bent to the base of one wall where there was a long low mound of dust. He probed it with his fingers and pulled out an end of fabric with threads of bright color. Above it, over their heads, was a gnarled limb with two pieces of yak-hair twine frayed at the end. A thangka had hung there, and fallen away. He looked at Shan, then reverently lowered the cloth. Tenzin understood, too. This was not simply a cache of treasure hastily secreted when the army came to destroy Rapjung. This was an ancient retreat cave of some kind, perhaps a place for a special, secret ritual whose purpose had been lost to time.

Finally, Chemi reminded them of their destination and they followed her quietly outside. Shan lingered at the stone pillar for a moment to look toward the shadow that marked the cave entrance. “How could they survive? How could any lama endure,” he wondered. “The army would have searched the mountains.”

“Survived?” Chemi said bitterly. “They sterilized the mountains. For a while they even had patrols with rifles that had telescopes. They killed anything that moved. They put up posters that warned all of us to stay out of the mountains for three months. Every goat, every wild yak was shot, because when he was dying a monk had said all the Tibetans killed by the Chinese would come back as mountain animals until they could live as humans again. Nothing survived up here.”

“Then how would one of the old medicine lamas be here?” a voice asked over Shan’s shoulder. The American had been listening.

Chemi shrugged. “Sometimes things grow back,” she said, as if someone had planted seeds and a crop of old lamas had emerged. “Sometimes they find a way to step between worlds.” As she turned into the cleft that led to the trail outside Shan studied the sturdy woman. She hadn’t explained everything, hadn’t explained why she had gone south, days away from her home, to reach the healer, waiting on a particular trail. How had she known where to find him, how had the dropka known to watch the herb meadow? A medicine lama was in the mountains but so was the dobdob who was attacking Tibetans, even monks.

Outside, on the side of the mountain, there was no sign of the helicopter, no evidence of activity on the ledges below. They hurried along the exposed trail into a series of deep gorges, walking sometimes in chasms so narrow that they moved through water a few inches deep, the runoff from the rocks above. They navigated along a row of rock pinnacles that towered like sentinels along the Qinghai border until they reached an open ledge that commanded a view of many miles to the north and east.

Chemi pointed to the next high mountain to the east in the long line of snowcapped peaks that defined the border. “Geladaintong,” she explained. “Where the Yangtze River begins. And there,” she said, turning west to point to a long flat-topped ridge that lay to the west. “Three miles past there, that’s my village.” She said it with an air of satisfaction. “We will have hot tea and tsampa. And noodle soup. My sister always has a kettle of noodle soup.”

Shan lingered a moment looking at the rugged peak Chemi had pointed out. He had forgotten that the source of the Yangtze was in Amdo. For a moment he pictured the mighty river flowing through Chinese cities and farmland, powering so much commerce, feeding millions of Chinese, emptying into the East China Sea near Shanghai. It all began with one Tibetan mountain.

They circled a massive outrider of the mountain, like a huge granite rib, and found themselves hovering at the edge of a cliff over a patch of greyness below, a cloud along the base of the rib. It seemed as though a piece of the sky had fallen and been trapped in the rocks.

“Always like that,” Chemi explained as Lokesh stared in wonder at the strange fallen cloud. “They say a demon lives there; when there is no wind you can hear it roar. Hermits used to come to this ledge to meditate, I’ve heard, because it was a connected place.”

“Connected?” Winslow asked.

“For humans to connect with something deep in the earth. Where land deities were connected to sky deities.” Chemi leaned out from the overhang, so far Shan stepped forward in fear that she would fall. “My uncles used to walk over this ridge to come visit us. They said it was the place where clouds are made,” she added, then stepped back with a triumphant smile as a small grey wisp drifted up the gorge and floated toward the southern ridges.

They descended on a narrow switchback trail and in an hour began to cross the ridge under an afternoon sky so clear it shimmered. When the wind ebbed birds could be heard in the distance. Lokesh, for the first time in many days, began to sing one of his traveling songs, a song that pilgrims sang when they rested at night.

Coming down the high mountain onto the ridge underscored the sense of arrival into the land of the Yapchi villagers. The landscape was largely comprised of lichen-covered rocks, with long steep gravel slopes, and deep gorges falling between fingers of the mountain, full of the stark beauty that Shan had grown accustomed to in Tibet. He was in Qinghai now, a new land. He recalled hearing from a prisoner that there was more tolerance in Qinghai, that the destruction of traditional Tibetan institutions had not been so complete in what had once been Amdo, because there had been no real centers of population in the land, no obvious targets for the army.

As they emerged into a broad open field of gravel and low heather, Lokesh called out softly and pointed at a small flock of grouse-like birds, dappled with the white remnants of their winter plumage, that were browsing on the field two hundred feet away. “Lha gyal lo!” Lokesh called softly.