Bone Mountain (37 page)

Lokesh seemed intensely interested in every stream and rivulet they encountered. Whenever they were within reach he paused to taste the water. Where one came into view in the distance he pulled his hat low to shield his eyes and studied the water. He offered no explanation, but Shan knew Lokesh was thinking of the patch of blood red water they had seen the day before. Shan still did not understand it, but he did understand that the healers Lokesh had trained with believed the health of the land and the health of the people who inhabited it were inextricably linked. To Lokesh and his teachers it was impossible to treat a human illness without addressing the state of harmony in the human’s spirit, and it was impossible to address the harmony in a human spirit without also considering the harmony in that part of the earth where the human lived. To Lokesh the crimson patch might have indicated a tear in the fabric that bound them all together.

They followed Chemi down a long steep gully for half an hour before Winslow paused, map in hand, and called out to her. She pointed to their location on the map, then to the narrow gorge they were about to enter. Where the gully opened onto the lower slope of the mountain was her village, she said with a smile of anticipation. Winslow stooped for Anya to climb onto his back. Chemi’s pace quickened, and although she usually remained at least fifty feet in front of their small column as they moved down the gully, Shan thought he heard her singing.

The gully ended abruptly and Chemi stood in a pool of sunlight in front of them. The sharp, sudden sound she made seemed to start as a greeting. But then she sank to her knees and held her belly, and the sound became a long painful groan. He ran to her side but she seemed unable to speak.

Her home had been there, Shan saw, less than two hundred feet from a small stream that emerged from the mountain near the mouth of the gully. Between the stream and the site of the tiny village there had been trees, but now these were twisted, smoking stumps. And beyond the stumps were the smoldering remains of four houses.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

The sound of engines and clinking metal broke through their stunned silence. Chemi did not hesitate, did not look back, just ran for the cover of the outcroppings that lined the slope beyond the ruined village. Shan grabbed Lokesh and pulled him into the same rocks as Winslow threw Anya onto his back and followed. Only when they had run nearly a hundred yards did Chemi stop. She seemed unable to speak, not because of her exertion but because of the emotion that twisted her face. She bent into the rocks and retched. When she turned back Shan glimpsed the sick woman again, the frail creature they had encountered on the trail.

It wasn’t battle tanks, as Shan feared, but two bulldozers that appeared from around the high rock wall that sheltered the southern and eastern sides of the village. One of the machines did not slow, only lowered its blade and began carving a swath through the ruins of the village, sweeping through the remains of the buildings, throwing before it a rolling wave of debris. A chair flew into the air, the shards of a window and a bed, then something swollen and white that could have been the body of a dog.

The second bulldozer pulled a two-axle trailer from which at least a dozen men climbed down. They quickly unhitched the trailer and, as the second earthmover crawled forward, began unloading building materials.

“The petroleum venture,” Anya said in a pained voice. “Only they have such equipment.”

Her words seemed to say it all, or at least there seemed to be nothing else anyone could say. Anya took Chemi’s hand and led them through the rocks. Yapchi Village, Chemi had said, was only an hour’s walk past her home.

Shan had never understood the subtleties of traveling by foot, the many ways one could walk, the messages of human stepping, until he had come to Tibet. Lokesh had once reminded Shan that Tibet had known the wheel for many centuries, as long as China and India, but for most of its existence Tibet had used the device not for transportation, but only for prayer wheels. Tibetans liked to walk, Lokesh said, for it kept them connected to the earth and gave them time to contemplate. But there were many ways of walking in Tibet. There were pilgrim’s steps, the slow reverent pace of those bound for holy places. There were caravaners, who moved firmly and steadily, eyes fixed on the horizon or their animals. There were prisoners, who moved in short shuffling steps, heads bowed, sometimes even, by habit, long after they were released. Now Chemi assumed another, an uneven stuttering pace that involved frequent steps to look nervously over the shoulder or to simply sigh and let a wave of emotion break and ebb before moving on. It was the walk of the refugee. It pained Shan to see Chemi fall into it so readily.

They walked in silence, until Anya led them to a narrow ledge of rock that opened with views to the north and west. They stood on a saddle of land that rose up to separate the grey rolling hills to the east from a small fertile valley, bounded on three sides by a long high curving outrider of Yapchi Mountain. The walls gave a symmetrical shape to its curving sides, so that the valley, lush with spring growth, had the appearance of a green oval bowl. Except for the open grass-covered saddle of land they stood on, the sides of the bowl were trimmed with a swath of conifers perhaps a quarter-mile wide. Above the trees were cliffs and towers of rock. Below them were pastures, and fields concentrated at the end nearest them—some crudely terraced, some of them a warm willow green, the color of sprouting barley, others the deeper green of pastures used for sheep.

Anya pointed excitedly to the small cluster of buildings at the south end of the bowl and pressed her rosary to her chin as if in silent prayer. Her village was intact. The girl glanced up at Chemi with an apologetic air and reached for the grim woman’s hand. Chemi seemed to be in shock. Shan was not certain her eyes even saw the valley below them. “You’ll stay with us. You’ll like Yapchi,” the girl said. “Soon we will have Lamtso salt for our tea,” she added, and led them back onto the trail.

Winslow lingered, scanning the far side of the valley with his binoculars. Shan saw his frowning expression and reached for his own field glasses. As he adjusted the focus another village came into view at the far end of the valley, more than two miles away, where a dirt road descended into the valley from a gap at the end of the high saddle of land. A line of heavy trucks were parked beside two rows of box-like structures.

“They bring in offices and quarters on the back of trucks. Long trailers,” the American explained. Shan nodded as he swept the valley with the lenses. He had seen oil convoys in Xinjiang, the vast arid province to the northwest. Once he had encountered one over a mile long, waiting at the edge of the highway, trucks of many sizes, and buses, derricks and laboratory vans, a small city on wheels.

On the slope above the oil camp, crews were leveling the forest. A section a quarter mile wide had been clearcut, and the logs were being rolled down to the oil camp. The swath of stumps looked like an open wound on the side of the mountain.

Winslow pointed again and Shan trained the lenses closer, to a point near the center of the valley where a heavy derrick stood with two trucks parked beside it. “An easy place to work,” Winslow said. “That’s what the manager told me. Very dry. They like dry. Water makes everything more complicated, more costly. Yapchi is so dry they have to bring water in with big tank trucks. No water at the bottom of the valley means they can easily work the center, the lowest point, shortest distance to their target.”

Their target. Shan remembered Lhandro’s words. The company wanted to take the blood from Yapchi’s earth.

Winslow turned to follow the others but saw that Shan still scanned the slopes. “It was a pretty small piece of stone,” the American observed.

Shan lowered the glasses with a weak smile. “It’s not that I expect to see the stolen eye,” he said quietly. “I’m just trying to understand how to look for a blind deity.”

The American studied Shan as if trying to decide if Shan were joking, then looked at the derrick with unmistakable resentment. “Where I come from, we were taught if you did something bad enough, your god would come out of the heavens and find you.”

“You mean I should look for a wrathful deity?” Shan asked.

But the American just turned and walked on.

As they descended the winding trail through several narrow defiles and along game trails in the junipers, the image of the valley stayed with Shan. He began to understand more clearly the villagers’ fierce love of their home. It was such a tiny piece of the world, so isolated it had no electricity, not even anything that could be called a road, a quiet, self-sufficient place that the world had bypassed, where one might be able to forget the outside for weeks, even months. Until the Qinghai Petroleum Venture arrived.

Thirty minutes later they stepped out of a narrow defile under several tall junipers and the village of Yapchi spread out before them, less than a quarter mile away. It was smaller than Shan had expected, no bigger than the little rongpa town where they had first met Winslow. To the right, where a thin growth of trees gave way to the grassy slope, stood an ancient chorten, nearly ten feet high. Shan walked around the shrine, touching the stone. The prayers that had been written around its base had mostly weathered away.

Shan saw Winslow lingering in the shadow of the last tree and realized their companions were not to be seen. He took a tentative step toward the village, then a small stone flew by and landed near his foot. He turned to see Tenzin, behind Winslow, with a somber Tibetan man in a soiled green pullover sweater, beside what once had been a long mani wall, a wall of stones inscribed with mantras. Tenzin gestured for Shan, then moved deeper into the trees with the stranger, behind another of the outcroppings that were scattered about the thin forest. Shan hesitantly followed, but paused at the mani wall, kneeling. He lifted one of the lichen-covered stones. It was centuries old, its carved inscription so embedded with a dark lichen that it appeared that the prayer had been formed by the lichen itself. A self-actuating prayer, Lokesh might have called it.

He leaned the stone against a tree so the prayer faced outward, then followed Winslow, Tenzin, and the stranger down the winding trail toward the sound of voices. The scent of burning juniper floated through the air. They cleared a tall wall of rock and found themselves in a bustling camp. A lean Tibetan youth with a pockmarked face darted forward and grabbed Tenzin’s arm, pulling him toward the back of the small blind canyon, followed closely by the man in the tattered green sweater.

Shan lingered near the narrow canyon entrance, surveying the chaotic scene inside. At least forty people were arrayed on blankets or sitting around fires, some of them with bruised faces, some with arms in slings. On one blanket a young man lay prostrate, tended by a grey-haired woman.

Chemi was at the side of the canyon, speaking rapidly with an older woman as she rubbed the hand of a large man who lay beside the rock face, his face swollen and eyes glazed, blood oozing through a sling on his left arm, a bloody bandage around his forehead.

“Ours was the closest village so her family fled here,” Anya explained as she stepped to Shan’s side. “The company said they had to build a water collection facility at Chemi’s home, to install tanks to take water from the stream for the work camp. They said the houses could not stay because it would foul the water needed for the workers. They said the venture would pay compensation. The venture people didn’t understand, Chemi’s sister told them, they would need to hear from the township council before they could leave their homes. But the company had soldiers to help them.”

“The government was there, not just the army,” interjected the old woman. “He showed us his card. From some Ministry. It said Beijing. We never expected Beijing to take notice of us. My son always wanted to meet someone from Beijing, because in his school they say many heroes live there. But it was only a Mongolian man with dark glasses.”

“Special Projects,” Winslow muttered bitterly over Shan’s shoulder. Zhu, the Special Projects Director, had been there when the village had been destroyed.

Several of the Yapchi villagers were there to help the injured and spoke excitedly with Anya about the return of the caravan. Some of the villagers looked solemnly toward Shan after speaking with the girl, but soon their gaze shifted toward Winslow as the American began moving about the camp. It was impossible to ignore the tall fair-skinned stranger. He stopped at the pallets and spoke in low words to those lying on them, then reached into his pack and emptied it of its food. A bag of raisins, a bag of nuts, and a bag of hard candy. There were not many children in the camp, only four other than Anya, but all four surrounded the American and gleefully shared out the treasure. Anya watched with a strangely detached expression, as though, Shan thought, she had forgotten how to be a child.

The man beside Chemi groaned, closed his glazed eyes and seemed to sink into unconsciousness. She pulled off her coat, lifted his head, and propped it behind him as a pillow.

“It’s my uncle Dzopa,” she whispered. “He’d been gone for ten years. He went to India to live.”

Shan studied the man. He looked at the woman, perplexed. “Why did he return now?”

“I can’t understand him when he speaks,” she said, with pools of moisture in her eyes. She nodded toward a woman sitting nearby, churning tea with a sad, distant expression. “My cousin says he was trying to clear out the village when the tank started shooting. Things exploded and hit his head. He had just returned the day before, looking for me. He had heard I was sick. He has no other family. When he was young he was at a gompa and never married.”

The big Tibetan appeared to be in his late fifties. His arms were like logs, his neck like that of a bull. “He’s a farmer now?” Shan asked.

Chemi nodded. “He sent a letter once. He settled in Dharmasala,” she said, referring to the seat of the exiled Tibetan government.

“What do you think, why would he return?”