Bones of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  Shan nodded. “A gompa, a monastery. The tower was part of the gatehouse.”

  Pike weighed Shan’s words. “A major gompa. One of the big regional ones,” he suggested.

  Shan nodded again. “Hundreds of monks, and a medical college in the hills above town. The army left only the tower, because it was a convenient watch post.”

  “More of the forgotten landscape.”

  “The Tibetans haven’t forgotten it. Sometimes I think they believe the old gompa is still here, invisible to all but the devout. On still nights when the wind isn’t blowing people say they can hear the old horns that called monks to prayer. Some of the old ones walk around the square in a crooked path because they say they are avoiding the sacred chortens that stood there for centuries, as if they could still see them. More and more of the devout are coming back because of those stories. Sometimes I see them sitting and praying in front of the empty spaces. On Buddha’s birthday last year flowers and boughs of juniper appeared in the night, laid out in squares where the old chortens were.”

  Pike gazed at the empty space with a strange longing. “My daughter Natalie found something special in Tibet, Shan,” he confided. “She wrote me about it. She said she now understood that her job was to bring old ghosts to life. She said that what people didn’t understand was that the ghosts are us.”

  The words sent a chill down Shan’s back. It sounded like something Lokesh would say. He wished he had been able to meet such a wise woman.

  They sat in silence, watching a ball of dried weeds blow down the square.

  “You didn’t come all the way from Lhasa to philosophize about Tibet,” Shan said.

  “I came because I know not to trust email or cell phones in this country,” the American stated, and produced a thick envelope from inside his sweatshirt and handed it to Shan. It contained copies of emails from the Five Claws.

  Pike provided a commentary as Shan leafed through them. “The deputy director demands that the director put a halt to a visit by the Bureau of Religious Affairs, stating that they have no jurisdiction in the valley. Next the director is urgently requesting the public works office in Sichuan Province to send more Chinese workers but is told none would be available for several months.” Pike pointed to another message Shan was scanning. “The director asks Jiao where he is and Jiao says he had important meetings of his working group in Lhasa. The director asks what working group and Jiao just replies the one engaged in vital work for the motherland, that’s all you need to know. Then comes a series of messages about shifting funds from bridge and highway sites all over Tibet to the Five Claws project, which were odd enough to make me pause but probably just typical bureaucratic exchanges in China.”

  Finally came a long exchange that Shan had to read in detail to fully grasp. Jiao was asking Huan to check on known associates of a troublemaking professor from Larung Gar, suggesting that Public Security review his colleagues at the university in Tientsen where he had once taught. Jiao reminded Huan that the professor had demanded a halt to the construction at the Five Claws pending further study, claiming the site might be too unstable geologically to support the dam. Jiao was worried that the professor may have sewn dissident seeds at his old university and that other associates might try to oppose the Five Claws.

  Shan asked if Pike could search the name he had heard from Ko.

  Pike laughed when he heard the name. “That’s the very man, Shan, the professor Jiao was complaining about! Professor Lin Fochow. Jiao told Huan to remind his colleagues in Tientsen that the professor had been such a problem at Larung Gar that he and five other hotheads had been sent directly to the 404th hard labor prison, on the grounds that they were a threat to national security.”

  Shan stared at the last email, trying to understand. The dissident professor had become the prisoner who couldn’t remember his own name, the professor who had arrived at prison wearing a monk’s robe. Had he been beaten so badly he had suffered brain damage? Shan’s foreboding began to descend on him again. Every time he thought he had found one answer, two more questions seemed to rise. He wasn’t confronting a murder, he was tumbling into a black hole of violent intrigue and politics.

  “You should go home, Pike,” Shan said. “If you stay, you’ll become another ghost.”

  Pike seemed not to hear. “She was just getting a foothold on life,” he said in a distant voice. “She stumbled early on, raised by her mother. I was never there for her. Mostly sent to boarding schools. Then when her mother remarried, she suddenly had stepsisters who seemed determined to drive her out of their family. We only grew close later, when she moved to a college near my home. I started declining trips so I could spend more time with her. Then I introduced her to the son of an old army buddy, an officer in the Army Rangers, and months later they were engaged. When he was deployed to Afghanistan, he made her promise to finish her college work while he was away, and she made him promise they would get married as soon as he returned. But he didn’t return. Killed by an explosive device when driving some Afghan girls to a school on his day off. It took her over a year to recover. This trip to Tibet was her way of starting over, making a clean break. She was enrolled in graduate school, ready to start when she returned.” Pike clenched his jaw, as if choking down emotion.

  “Before she left I told her she was the miracle of my life, my anchor that let me withstand all the storms that raged around me. She smiled and said then we had given each other a miracle and promised to write me every week. She did for the first month and wrote that she had discovered the importance of committing to something bigger than yourself.”

  “You should go home,” Shan said again. “It’s what she would want. Stay alive.”

  The American looked down into his hands with a weary expression then extracted a tattered envelope from inside his sweatshirt. “Her last letter. I must have read it a hundred times.” He handed it to Shan.

  Dear Papa, Shan read. Professor Gangfen says I am learning to adeptly straddle the centuries as we dig, which I think he means as a compliment. This week I unearthed a nearly intact bridle with a bronze bit all on my own! The letter went on to describe how she had made new friends and spent the weekend in Lhasa, where she had gone to the magnificent Potala and the ancient temple complex.

  “The last paragraph,” Pike said. “She added it later.”

  Shan skipped to the bottom of the second page. I have seen something terrible, which I may not write about. It felt like a dagger in my heart at first, but I am learning Tibetan ways to resolve things. There’s no better place to learn that you can fight monsters without becoming one yourself. If you want to have a soul here, every man must be a monk and every woman a nun, and all must be outlaws. Lha gyal lo, Nat.

  “Lha gyal lo,” Pike said.“I hear Tibetans say it.”

  “It means victory to the gods,” Shan said as he handed the letter back.

  “Is that a prayer or a war cry?” the American asked.

  The letter had only increased Shan’s foreboding. “You need to go home,” he tried for a third time.

  Pike gave a bitter grin. “You don’t understand, Shan. Natalie was one of the only people I ever cared about in all this big world, in recent years. She’s been the only thing in my life that has meant anything to me. And she died in an ancient cave trying to save gods. The bastards killed her. They murdered her. Did you really think I was just going to take some photos and fly home?”

  “You can’t do anything by yourself,” Shan said.

  “You can’t do anything by yourself,” Pike shot back.

  The words hurt, not so much because they were from a foreigner, but because they were true.

  “You and I aren’t much different, Shan,” the American said. “We hate what our worlds have become and the only way we can stay true to ourselves is to push back against those worlds. The only difference is that I push back more physically than you do.”

  “What you did to that man in the crematorium was cruel,” Shan said.


  Pike shrugged. “I didn’t light the oven.”

  They silently watched a donkey cart filled with cabbages traverse the square. “A witness was killed in Lhadrung yesterday,” Shan said at last, and began explaining what had happened to the unlucky janitor.

  “You don’t know for certain who did it,” Pike said. It sounded almost like an accusation.

  “No,” Shan admitted. “It was not Lieutenant Huan. It was someone close to the colonel who is allied with Huan in Lhasa. Someone who knew about Jampa delivering Metok’s message, even though we thought only the colonel, Amah Jiejie and myself knew about it. They knew that Jampa could be a witness against them.”

  “If you want to catch a fox, you have to set a trap,” Pike suggested. “But first you have to find the bait that will attract it.”

  “I’m sorry?” Shan replied, with an eye on Cao, who had returned to the square. To Shan’s great surprise he was walking in the same patterns as the old Tibetans, as if the Chinese scholar also saw the phantom shrines. He knelt at one of the invisible stopping places, unfolded a pocketknife, and used its blade to dig. After a few moments he nodded, as if confirming a discovery.

  Cao gave a self-conscious grin as Shan and Pike approached him at the third such stop. “An earth-taming temple,” the Chinese student declared, and gestured at a stone foundation he had uncovered six inches below the surface. “The gompa here must have been an earth-taming temple,” he said, referring to the ancient sites that had been constructed to subdue the demons under the earth.

  “I don’t know,” Shan admitted.

  “No, no, I am telling you. This was an earth-taming temple site, a very important one.” He pointed to smudges on the wall of the tower, then took out a small notepad and drew a series of symbols stacked one on top of the other. “A sun, a moon, an empty lotus throne to welcome the god, hovering over mountains. And a garuda bird, I think, though it is mostly a smudge. Earth-taming signs,” he explained.

  Shan stared in disbelief. He had taken the patches of discoloration on the crumbling stucco of the wall to be nothing more than water stains, but now as Cao held up his drawing so he could compare it to the stains, he could see that indeed the faded patterns corresponded with the symbols in shape and placement.

  Cao bent and scooped away more of the dirt, revealing cobblestones around the foundation. “There was a great paved courtyard, and the small foundations mark the pattern used for the old dances, the ritual cham dances done to honor the good earth spirits and discourage the evil ones. This was the courtyard of a great temple,” he said, pointing to the exposed cobbles. “The professor and I have seen this before. Religious Affairs and the army were in a great hurry to obliterate everything fifty years ago, so they just dumped a few inches of soil on top and called it a park.”

  Shan recalled complaints from those who tried to plant in the square about the many stones they encountered. He extracted the paper he had taken from the mess hall bulletin board at the Five Claws project, the satellite photo embellished with new lines. It had some of the same signs drawn across the top.

  “Exactly,” Cao said.

  Shan stared at him, not comprehending. “It’s an aerial photo of the dam site with some lines drawn to suggest some kind of body.”

  “No,” Cao said. “It’s more like the sketch of a thangka, a devotional painting. The ancient ones saw it as clearly as if they were flying overhead on garudas. It’s probably why the valley is so sacred, why your town had an earth-taming temple.” Cao saw Shan’s lingering confusion, so took out a pencil, laid the paper on a bench, and with a few quick strokes, embellished and extended the lines drawn on the photo, making the upper lake look more like a head, the cupping ridges at the top like arms, and the bottom ridges like legs. “Don’t you see?” he soberly said as he held it up. A chill went down Shan’s spine as he recognized the image from the drawings he had seen in the archives. “It’s the most terrible of the earth demons,” the Chinese scholar continued. “The grandfather warrior, they call him, those who are awakening him now to protect the earth. It’s Gekho the Wrathful Destroyer.”

  * * *

  While Cao continued his exploration of the square, Shan and Pike sat in the station, eating a meal Marpa had delivered as Shan explained what happened in Lhadrung.

  “You say this started with an execution that was a murder,” Pike said. The slow fire of anger that always seemed to burn in his eyes had crept into his voice. “But it really started with the murder of my daughter and the professor.” Shan nodded his agreement. “And now we have the murder of a witness in Lhadrung and a suggestion that all this may really have started at this school, this Larung Gar place. You have an annoying habit, Shan, of identifying more crimes but never the faces of the criminals. It’s the story of modern China,” the American observed. “Feed the outrage but never aim at the cause unless the Party bosses so direct.”

  “I know Huan’s face, and that of Jiao, at least. And if I were in the habit of kowtowing to Party bosses, I never would have gone to prison.”

  “Still, you haven’t a shred of evidence against Huan or Jiao, against anyone.”

  “I am open to suggestion.”

  “Already told you. When you find the right bait, you can always trap a fox. We’re going to create an urgent problem that Huan’s contact in Lhadrung has to respond to. We’ll smoke him out. If it’s someone close to Colonel Tan it shouldn’t be so difficult,” the American suggested, and his eyes lit with a new excitement.

  * * *

  As usual, Amah Jiejie responded with cunning efficiency once Shan explained their plan. The memo he had just transmitted to Colonel Tan on the old fax machine, which he knew was safer than email, was only two short paragraphs, although he and Pike had taken an hour to compose it. The first paragraph reported that Shan had discovered a secret report prepared by Metok sewn inside the old janitor’s shirt. The engineer had reported that he was in touch with the Bureau of Religious Affairs in Lhasa about the astounding artifacts in the Valley of the Gods, and he believed the agency would soon declare the valley a major heritage site. Metok, Shan explained, knew that while Religious Affairs for the most part just collected and destroyed artifacts on the grounds that they belonged to the state and were counter to socialist imperatives, the agency was practical enough to understand the enormous economic benefit from the tourists who flocked to significant sites. Just as the Dalai Lama’s restored Potala Palace in Lhasa brought in millions in revenue, so too could the sacred valley. Metok had therefore taken several cartons of the valley’s best artifacts to the Religious Affairs processing center on Kunming Road on the outskirts of Lhasa, along with a file he had compiled with the help of a renowned archaeologist.

  In the second paragraph Shan simply asked permission to go to the Kunming Road facility to interview Religious Affairs about their contact with Metok, which might reveal that the engineer had not been driven by corruption but simply by an inconvenient belief that the dam was being placed in the wrong valley. While doing so, Shan wrote, he would examine and memorialize the unique artifacts that might provide the basis for stopping the dam project. If he could verify Metok’s assertions, then Colonel Tan could contact the Commissar to address what was rapidly developing into a conflict between different arms of the government.

  Shan had to admit that Pike’s plan was a clever ploy. Tan’s entire staff knew that in some more remote regions of Tibet, Religious Affairs had become the dominant government agency, with direct lines to Beijing. Adding a reference to the Commissar had been Shan’s idea. No one in Tibet needed an explanation, or a name added to the title, and nearly everyone shuddered at the mention of his name. Commissar Yang Chouzi had been in Tibet since the original occupation, and though he had had many titles, the one that had stuck was the one used for the Party counselors who shadowed high officials and often were the real decision makers. After decades of ruthless manipulation, the aged, retired Yang lived in a compound outside Lhasa and was still the unofficial
Party boss of central Tibet.

  Shan had asked Amah Jiejie to place a copy of the memo on the colonel’s desk.

  “No, no,” Tan’s assistant said. “On the corner of my desk. His aides are always lingering at my desk with an eye for the colonel’s mail.”

  Shan had listed the aides for Pike before dispatching their bait to Amah Jiejie. The quartermaster, the wardens, the administrative officer, Major Xun, and Lieutenant Zhu all reported to Colonel Tan. The quartermaster, Shan had explained, would have authority to order the drone that was delivered to the Five Claws. The administrative officer could have changed Tan’s recommendation on Huan’s discipline to assure the lieutenant went to a powerful position in Lhasa. And Xun as chief of staff touched every aspect of Tan’s operations.

  “Which of them are in Lhadrung now?” Shan asked Amah Jiejie, wondering how they might narrow their list of suspected conspirators.

  “Only Major Xun, Captain Chi the quartermaster, and Captain Bing of the administrative office. The colonel sent Zhu to Hong Kong and the others are at a conference in Chengdu. But I can guarantee you that if I leave it in plain sight, it will be seen before the end of the day.”

  As they finished their plotting with Amah Jiejie, she volunteered that Metok’s poor widow, Lekshay, had called to ask if the government had any personal effects of her late husband. “She seemed so melancholy. I told her I had a brother who died in prison and I knew it would do her good if we could just get together and talk. She said it still felt too soon for her to put her pain into words but maybe in a few days. Poor girl, she suffers so, even though she did no wrong.”