Bone Mountain (58 page)

“What it means,” she declared with a dangerous gleam, “is that Lin will demand the howlers give up Tenzin and Lokesh.”

When Shan wandered back outside, another figure had joined Winslow. Jokar, a playful expression in his eyes, stood perfectly erect as the American lassoed him once, twice, then again. Each time the lama nodded his head approvingly, then finally he asked if he could learn the use of the rope. Shan, Anya, and Nyma watched in amusement as the lama fumbled with the rope, slowly twirled it over his head. He missed his target the first three times, then missed no more, finally asking Winslow himself to stand, laughing as he brought the rope down over the American’s shoulders.

“It is like archery,” Jokar smiled with an approving nod, “without the bow.” Then the old lama asked Anya and Nyma to try to lasso him, which they tried lightheartedly for a quarter hour, until the lama suddenly pointed to a rock in the rubble with lichen in the outline, he insisted, of a horse’s head, the sign of Tamdin, the horse-headed protector demon.

Shan and Winslow lingered at the rock wall long after the others were called away by Lepka’s announcement that fresh tea had been churned.

“I’m going with you,” the American declared suddenly. “To Norbu.”

Shan sighed. “It was your passport that protected you. After you gave it up, you have no—”

The American woman stepped out of the door. “For what?” Larkin asked Winslow. “Why would you give someone your State Department passport?”

Winslow grinned at her. “Lost it, that’s all. I always lost my homework in school.”

Larkin stared at him uncertainly. Her face flashed with color and she bit her lower lip. “We’re going to find our friends who were arrested,” Winslow said quietly.

“At Norbu,” Larkin said. “I heard the purbas say they’re at Second House.”

“You know the gompa?” Shan asked.

“Some of the purbas speak of it. They say it’s where the howlers take sick monks to be healed.”

The words sent a chill down Shan’s back.

“Some of us were in the mountains last month and saw a monk from Norbu. A monk, and a doctor in a blue uniform. With men who looked like soldiers, in white shirts, carrying small tanks of kerosene on their backs. I joked with them and told them they’d save a lot of trouble if they just used yak dung. But they didn’t want to joke.”

Shan stared at her and was about to ask what they could possibly have been doing with so much kerosene when someone else emerged from the shadows of the doorway. “We can’t just march into that gompa,” Somo said in a pained voice, as if she had been arguing with them about going to Norbu.

Shan was about to protest. He wanted no one else to go with him, no one else to expose themselves to the near certainty of arrest by the knobs. But Somo had come from Lhasa to help the fugitive lama, had lost Drakte in the struggle to keep Tenzin safe.

“You’ll need people who were there before,” Nyma said over Somo’s shoulder. She was carrying two bowls of tea, which she extended to Shan and Winslow.

He sighed. Nyma, too, could not be refused. “We must make Director Tuan worried,” Shan said. “Make him react somehow,” he added and, as Lepka appeared, sipping from his bowl, he explained the letter he expected Lin to write.

“A start,” Winslow agreed, “but what else is there at this gompa?”

Nyma spoke of the Public Security medical teams they had seen there, and Lhandro spoke of the nervous monks and the frightening, ruthless manner of the chairman.

“What is it that this Chairman Khodrak wants most of all?” Somo asked.

“He’s ambitious,” Nyma ventured. “He wants to win the Serenity Campaign. He wants to join the Bureau, people say, he wants to get attention so he will be promoted into the Bureau of Religious Affairs itself.”

Promoted. Nyma was right, Shan knew, though he’d never before known of a monk who thought in such terms.

“What he wants right now,” Lhandro said in a speculative tone, “is a May Day festival. But no one will go. It’s a Chinese holiday.”

The information seemed useless. They looked at each other, and looked at the sky. Winslow absently traced the pattern of the lichen with his fingertip.

“Your friend Lokesh,” a rasping voice interjected from the shadows, “he told me you teach him the Tao te Ching sometimes.”

Shan looked up at Lepka in surprise. The old farmer was speaking of the ancient text of the Tao, the teaching Shan had memorized as a boy. When he nodded, Lepka extended a finger in the sandy soil and began drawing. He made four simple lines, a line of two parts over a solid line, over two lines of three equal parts. A tetragram, it was called, used for designating chapters of the ancient book. The lines signified Chapter Thirty-six, called Concealing the Advantage. As the words ran through Shan’s head he realized he was whispering them to his companions:

In order to weaken it,

It must be thoroughly strengthened,

In order to reject it,

It must be thoroughly promoted,

In order to take away from it,

It must be thoroughly endowed.

This is named subtle wisdom,

This is how the weak triumphs over the strong.

“A man like Tuan,” Shan said with a nod to Lepka, “must be empowered to be destroyed.”

Winslow looked up with a devious glint. “Beware of Greeks,” he said, “beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

Larkin shared his conspiratorial grin. “A Trojan horse,” she said, then turned to the others in the small circle. “It’s a legend,” she said, and explained.

They sat in silence, letting the words of the Tao te Ching and the Greek legend sink in.

“Perhaps,” Shan ventured, “those who run Norbu must be careful what they ask for.”

“And what the rongpa and dropka in the surrounding valleys want most of all,” Lhandro suggested, “is a spring festival as in the old days.”

They spoke for nearly an hour as the kettle boiled and Nyma churned tea. Somo brought out the other purbas, who listened and nodded excitedly. Somo disappeared through the door, emerging a moment later, strapping on her belt pack. She began running up the trail that led back up the mountain.

“Second House had a beautiful gonkang,” a wisp of a voice said from behind them as Somo disappeared.

Nyma gasped. Jokar had materialized among the rocks ten feet away. “And the stable. We used to store herbs in that old stable.”

Lhandro and his parents stepped out of the door, followed by all the other Tibetans, who sat near Jokar and listened as the lama spoke of life at Norbu gompa sixty years before. It seemed somehow a perfect ending to their planning, like a benediction. Everyone thought the lama had finished when his eyes drifted out over the plateau and the clouds beyond. He leaned forward, as if studying something, as if he saw old Norbu in the clouds. “There is a place,” he said with a slow nod, as if he were walking through the rooms in his mind, “in the cells by the stable, at the rear. A secret place, from when they came for the Sixth.” The old lama seemed to have lost touch with reality again.

But Shan watched the clouds, too, as the others stood and gathered around the tea churn once more. If Jokar could see the gompa in the clouds, perhaps he could see Lokesh. He watched so intensely he was unaware of anyone approaching until a paper, folded tightly into quarters, dropped against Shan’s boot. He blinked and saw Lin, studying the Tibetans with suspicion in his eyes.

“You can’t touch those prisoners,” he growled, rubbing his temple as he spoke. “If you touch them, if you try to take them, Public Security will shoot you.” Lin’s voice was still weak but his tone was vengeful. He raised his hand and looked as if he were going to make a fist out of it, but after a moment dropped it to his side and seemed to stagger, as if dizzy. “And if the damned knobs don’t, I will,” he rasped. “I will arrest everyone here. Arrest you and execute you!”

Part Four

B
ONE

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

When he scoured his mind of fear and laid back with his eyes closed, Shan felt small ripples of contentment coursing around him. Not his own contentment, for he had yet to find and free Lokesh and Tenzin, but that of the Tibetans who had gathered on the flat plain outside Norbu. Children were laughing, horses neighing, men were calling in expressions of wonder, and throughout all was woven the throaty rumblings of yaks. Occasionally, like the seasoning in some exotic dish, he heard the singing rush of arrows.

He had spent an hour that morning sitting near the makeshift archery range a band of dropka had built beyond the tents, sitting on the spring grass, sharpening his awareness on the arrowpoints. The Tibetans had long ago taught him meditation exercises utilizing arrows and bows, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, and he had discovered what Gendun meant when he had told Shan that archery was not a sport but a teaching. It was a perfect vehicle for achieving focus, and when he emptied his mind sufficiently he could hear, as Gendun had taught him, not just the drawing of the string, the release of the string, the flight of the arrow and its impact, but also the perfect instant of quiet just before the string was released, when the archer and his implements become one. Nothing in his own life was ever so straight, or true, or quick.

The inhabitants of the neighboring lands had brought Khodrak and Padme their May Day festival. It had taken three days, with messengers running back and forth among the surrounding villages and dropka camps, but now a small town of tents had arisen on the plain adjacent to Norbu. Some rongpa came in old trucks, against which they tied canvas flies to sleep under. Dropka families erected tents of heavy felt. A few rongpa had settled into their traveling tents, white-fringed with blue patterns. Once, Lhandro explained, Tibetan townspeople had routinely taken their families to the countryside with such small tents, to celebrate religious holidays by reconnecting with the land, or to complete a kora of a gompa or holy mountain. Many of the Tibetans had not seen each other for years, and the air was filled with exclamations of greeting. Away from the gompa, away from the solitary white-shirted guard at its gate, Tibetans threw barley flour in the air, a traditional form of rejoicing. So traditional, Shan knew, the howlers would try to stop them if they saw it.

In the truck they had met in the mountains, Shan had listened to a strange debate among Lhandro and the purbas. What did they need most of all to bring the local people to the festival, Somo had asked the rongpa. Yaks, the Yapchi headman had said, and archery. There could be no festival without yaks and arrows. To his surprise, the yaks had been easier to assemble than the archers, for archery had been another of the traditions suppressed by the government. As Shan had watched on the second day from the hidden post the purbas had established on the ridge above Norbu, a small herd of yaks had arrived, some already festooned with colorful ribbons and strands of yarn. The archery range, outlined with rocks aligned toward a series of hardened mud targets, had waited until dropka from the deepest part of the ranges had arrived, the dropka who lived farther from the reach of the government.

He started from his dreamlike state as someone touched his arm, and opened his eyes into Anya’s smiling face. She had clasped her hand around his own, and he silently let her pull him to his feet, then toward the makeshift pasture.

“Nearly a hundred!” she said excitedly.

Yaks. She meant nearly a hundred yaks, Shan saw as they stepped among the creatures. As he studied the joyful faces of the other Tibetans who gazed upon the animals, he realized that in the impoverished district such an accumulation was rare, representing a significant portion of the inhabitants’ collective wealth.

Anya led him into the center of the herd, patting nearly every animal they passed. Sharing a handful of dried cheese with him, she carefully explained the traditional names for the many color patterns. She pointed to a black creature with white spots. “Yak thabo,” Anya explained with a dreamy expression, pausing to rub the yak’s ears. “Yak dongba,” she said, gesturing toward one with a white star on its forehead. A
kawa
had a white head, a
tsen yak
was golden, and one with asymetrical horns was called
ralden.
Anya finally reached a large, purely black animal which greeted them with a low rumbling in its throat.

“I saw Gyalo arrive last night,” she whispered. “He put on herder’s clothes.” Anya began tying braids in Jampa’s hair, showing Shan how to fold and twist the hair, as she explained that he was the rarest of all, a
lha yak
, a perfect yak in every sense, protected by the deities and never to be used to carry an impure burden.

Suddenly he realized that Anya was staring past his shoulder with fear in her eyes. He turned to see that she watched the gate of the gompa, nearly two hundred yards away.

“It’s time,” she announced, and falling silent once more they walked back to the purba’s truck. As they reached the shadows at the vehicle’s side Nyma appeared and nodded toward the ridge above the gompa. A figure was running at the crest of the ridge, wearing the green uniform of a soldier. Shan watched as the figure ran halfway down the slope, then he climbed into the shadows of the covered cargo bay to sit beside Nyma, who picked up his battered pair of binoculars. The purbas had positioned the truck so the bay faced the front gate and looked into the compound beyond, toward the first of the two-story structures inside, the administrative offices where Shan and Nyma had encountered the Democratic Management Committee of the gompa.

Nyma studied the compound then handed him the glasses. He could see the soldier’s face plainly in the lenses as the figure approached the gate. The rongpa and dropka reflexively hurried away from the figure, as they always did from the People’s Liberation Army. Only those in the purba truck knew it was not a soldier, but even with his binoculars he could not tell it was Somo. Her hair was tightly tucked under an oversized green wool cap, the kind used under helmets by the mountain troops. Her uniform was complete but soiled, her tunic slightly torn at one shoulder. A leather dispatch case dangled from her other shoulder. The image was of a seasoned soldier who had been campaigning in the high ranges.