Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  Shan quietly scanned his own brochure before folding it into his pocket. It was a polemic about the economic disadvantages of devoting resources to religious reconstructions, complete with tiny graphs. He glanced back at the words at the top of the paper: Serene Prosperity. Below them was the full official title of the campaign: Religious Serenity Must Be Built on Economic Serenity. A perennial gripe of political officers was that Tibetans undermined the economy by giving a disproportionate share of their meager incomes to the reconstruction of gompas. Where contributions were limited to no more than two percent of income, one chart purported to demonstrate, prosperity soon followed.

  Shan stared back in the direction the minibus had taken. Have you come to understand, the strange monk with the gold fringed robe had asked him. Shan understood nothing. The stocky monk seemed to be warning Shan, suggesting that Tuan and Khodrak were engaged in a subterfuge, that they were actually looking for a man with a fish. In all his years in Tibet Shan had never even seen a fish.

  By mid-afternoon the five riders crested a small knoll to see a long rolling plain that gleamed white from salt encrusted on its surface, at the center of which lay a busy camp containing four white tents and three black ones. Dremu told them to wait as he rode toward the camp. They watched as a man in a derby emerged from one of the white tents, shouted at the Golok, then picked up stones and threw them at him. Dremu wheeled his horse and trotted back.

  "This is the place," he declared with a satisfied tone, and gestured for Shan to lead the way toward the yurts.

  It was a salt camp, Lokesh explained excitedly, as they dismounted amid several small children who darted among the horses, rubbing their noses and helping Tenzin loosen the saddles. Shan untied his saddle bag and relinquished his mount to a beaming girl whose cheeks were smeared with red doja cream, one of the dropka's defenses against high altitude sunlight. As he took a tentative step into the camp a sweet pungent scent wafted by, the smell of yak butter being churned.

  Several men and women worked at the shoreline, using short wooden pestles to break the rough crust of salt into coarse pieces, then pushing the salt into piles with crude rakes. Others were packing the salt into small colorful woven pouches which were fastened together in pairs with stout cords. Like saddlebags, Shan thought as he noticed a woman sewing the bags shut, though too small for horses.

  The man in the derby who had yelled at Dremu stood at the flap of a white tent near the center of the camp, a brown and white mastiff at his side, motioning them toward the fire that lay smoldering in a ring of stones by his feet. Shan and Lokesh passed a stern grey-haired man in a tattered chuba sitting at the entrance to one of the tents, a heavy staff across his legs. A dropka woman wearing a bright rainbow-pattern apron sat by a solitary yak, tethered to a stake, working a long wooden cylinder with a handle protruding from its open top, a dongma, one of the churns used to mix the tea, butter, and salt for the traditional Tibetan beverage. Her hair was arrayed in dozens of braids, each ending with a bead, a style that had been worn for centuries by devout women, always using one hundred eight braids, one for every bead of the Buddhist rosary. She acknowledged them with a casual, disinterested nod. Shan surveyed the little village and realized it was actually a series of camps, separate fires and separate tents brought together by the salt.

  The man at the white tent eagerly searched the line of new arrivals as they walked toward his fire, his brown eyes gleaming with anticipation as he lifted his hat, revealing a head of shaggy black hair streaked with grey. A birthmark in the shape of an inverted, slanted U was conspicuous on his neck above a necklace of small turquoise stones that supported a large silver gau. Suddenly his face lit with a smile. "Nyma!" he exclaimed as the nun dismounted and darted to him. "Blessed Buddha, it is true!" They embraced tightly before Nyma gestured toward Shan. The man straightened, suddenly very sober, and silently inspected Shan.

  Shan removed his own hat and returned the man's steady gaze.

  "You are the virtuous Chinese," the man observed skeptically. He abruptly raised his hand and gripped Shan's chin in his calloused thumb and forefinger, turning his head from left to right as though measuring Shan for something.

  "Just a Chinese who was asked to help," Shan replied impassively. He was accustomed to being greeted with taunts by unfamiliar Tibetans.

  The man frowned in apparent disappointment. "I was expecting someone taller."

  Shan found a grin tugging at his face.

  "His back used to be straighter," Lokesh offered in the same dry tone used by the stranger, "before they forced him to build lao gai roads."

  The man acknowledged Lokesh with a solemn nod, then called out, cupping his hands toward one of the salt teams, to announce their arrival. "I am called Lhandro," he said, smiling now, and gestured toward the small knot of men approaching the white tent. "We from the Yapchi Valley offer you welcome."

  "Yapchi?" Shan asked in surprise, and found himself glancing toward the saddlebag that contained the chenyi stone. "But it's more than a hundred miles to the north."

  Lhandro just kept smiling, letting Nyma introduce her companions as another man emerged from the tent, holding a dongma of fresh tea. Shan studied the tents as the Tibetans exchanged greetings. They were all of the traditional yurt style, but only the heavy black felt ones were for dropka, those who lived year-round on the plains. The white tents were of canvas, of the kind used by those who lived in settlements but occasionally camped in the mountains or high plains. Lhandro and his companions were not herders. They must be rongpa, Shan realized, farmers who tended crops in the Yapchi Valley.

  As bowls of frothy tea were distributed Lhandro pointed toward the white, crusted plain. "Our people have been coming here for centuries. The government gave us little boxes of Chinese salt, with pictures of pandas on them, and said we were slaves to feudalism for coming here." He shrugged. "But Chinese salt makes you weak. We said we like the taste of Lamtso salt." He squatted with Nyma and began speaking in low, confiding tones. Lhandro was not giving her good news, Shan saw. Nyma stared at the farmer in dismay, uttered something that had the cadence of a prayer, and hung her head in her hands. The nun seemed to remember something and it was her turn to speak in a grim tone to Lhandro. The rongpa's face sagged and he glanced back in alarm at Shan. She had, he knew, explained about Drakte's death, and the purba's strange warning before he died. At last, as Nyma began speaking with the others from her village, Lhandro stepped back to the fire, his face clouded with worry. The nun spoke loud enough now for Shan to hear snippets of her conversation. She was speaking of their encounter with the white bus. One of the men hurried away, apparently spreading a warning among the other tents. Howlers might come. Several of the salt breakers stopped and darted into their tents. The dropka sometimes kept things on their altars the howlers did not approve of. A woman ran to the man who sat like a guard with his staff, and he stepped inside his tent momentarily, then reappeared, standing, staff at his side like a sentry.

  An adolescent girl wearing her hair in two braids, her eyes nearly as bright as her red doja-smeared cheeks, approached the ring of stones with a small drawstring bag. She had a conspicuous limp, and her left leg seemed to twist below the knee. For a moment she and Nyma exchanged huge smiles, then silently, fiercely embraced. When they finally separated, the girl dropped her bag by the fire and opened its top. Tenzin stepped over and prodded the load with an approving nod. It was dung for the fire, and the mute Tibetan held up a piece with the air of connoisseur, as if to confirm it was yak dung, the best of the fuels typically used on the high plateau. Unlike sheep or goat dung it did not need the constant work of a bellows to keep a flame. Tenzin emptied the girl's bag, silently raised his own leather sack, carried from his saddle like a treasured possession, and walked out toward the pastures. Shan watched the enigmatic man. It was as if collecting dung had become the escapee's calling in life, as if the Tibetan with the aristocratic bearing had decided that his role in society would be to keep other people
's fires burning.

  Shan saw that the red-cheeked girl with the braids was watching Tenzin, too. She finally turned and cast a shy, sidelong glance toward Shan, then limped toward a man in a ragged fox-fur hat who was digging with a shovel fifty yards from camp. The man was surrounded by several small piles of earth.

  "I thought the salt was taken from the surface," Shan said in a perplexed tone. As soon as the girl arrived at his side, the man handed her something and she turned in excitement to run with a crooked, shambling gait to the tent where the old herder stood guard.

  Lhandro followed his gaze, then gestured in the opposite direction. Shan turned to see an old woman sitting on a hill above the camp.

  "Tonde," Lhandro said, referring to the sacred objects that Tibetans sometimes retrieved from the earth. They could be arrowheads or shards of pottery or carvings in the shape of ritual objects. Once a prisoner in Shan's camp had found a corroded bronze buckle he had proclaimed to have belonged to Guru Rinpoche, the ancient teacher, and built an altar for it out of cardboard.

  "Holy men have been coming to this place for a thousand years. That old dropka woman, she found a piece of turquoise carved into a lotus flower which she says has great power. Yesterday she said a Chinese airplane came and she used the tonde to scare it away," he said solemnly, then shrugged. "But she's nearly blind with cataracts."

  "Our Anya," Lhandro continued after a moment, nodding toward the limping girl, "Anya saw her waving her fist at the sky and said it was just a goose that had lost its way from the flock. Now the old woman says if the soldiers come close she'll call another hailstorm against them."

  Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. The army patrol they had seen had been many miles from the camp. The people of the changtang always seemed to have their secret ways of knowing things.

  "Don't underestimate the tonde," a voice interjected from behind them. They turned to see the woman in the rainbow-colored apron carrying a leather bucket past their tent. "Some are just pieces of pretty stone, perhaps. But others," she studied Shan a moment then stepped closer. "They say it was a tonde in the hands of a monk that destroyed that Chinese mountain."

  "Destroyed a mountain?" Shan asked.

  "In the far south, near Bhutan," the woman said with a nod. "One of the army mountains. Their slaves had dug it out, and soldiers had arrived with their machines." The woman meant one of the massive military installations that gulag prisoners were often forced to construct for the People's Liberation Army, carving out vast networks of tunnels inside mountains, mostly along the southern border. Some had become barracks for entire divisions of Chinese troops, some depots for equipment, others sophisticated listening and command posts.

  "That mountain, they filled it with computer machines and radios and army commanders. But they didn't know one of the prisoners was an old monk with a tonde that had belonged to that mountain deity. He could talk to that deity and explain what had happened. When that deity finally understood, the mountain fought back," the woman declared with a satisfied air.

  Shan gazed at her expectantly, but she spoke no more.

  "There was some kind of collapse," Lhandro said, glancing uncomfortably at the woman. "The newspapers said nothing, but people talk about it everywhere. The tunnels fell in, the machines were destroyed. Some soldiers were trapped and killed, and many Tibetan workers. Afterwards the army went on alert, rounded up local citizens for questioning. But experts from Beijing came and said it was just the wrong mountain to use. The Himalayas are unstable, they said, and something inside shifted."

  "The wrong mountain," the woman repeated with a knowing nod.

  At his side Lokesh grunted. "What do they expect, when they have soldiers for combating mountains?"

  Shan looked at his old friend. Lokesh had strangely misunderstood what a mountain combat brigade was; he had taken the words too literally. Shan opened his mouth to explain, but then realized that maybe Lokesh wasn't far from wrong. Some said Beijing's ultimate campaign in Tibet was against nature, for all the mountains it gutted, the wooded slopes it deforested, the valleys laid waste with open pit mines.

  Shan pressed Lhandro and the woman in the apron for more news, asking them if they knew of Public Security or military crackdowns between Lamtso and Lhasa. They shrugged. "Only the usual," Lhandro said. "That Serenity campaign. Howlers are appearing everywhere, more often than ever, all over the district." He shrugged. "It's just more words for the same thing, like always, another way of saying it." The campaign, he meant, was just another political initiative for eroding the influence of the Buddhists.

  The woman, however, sometimes took wool to Amdo town, the nearest settlement of any size, and read newspapers there. A famous abbot was fleeing south to India, with Public Security and howlers racing to catch him. A manhunt was underway for two terrorists, one a recent Dalai Cult infiltrator from across the border, the other the notorious resistance leader called Tiger, a general of the purbas, who had been sighted in the region. The troops were telling people they would be imprisoned for helping him, she announced, and in the next breath offered a quick prayer for the man. Heroes of the army and model workers were being assembled in Lhasa for the biggest May Day parade in years. Shan listened closely to the woman, who seemed bursting with news and rumors. But she made no mention of a stolen stone eye or killers of purbas.

  "Has there been word of the murdered Religious Affairs official?" Shan asked. The question silenced everyone within earshot. Alarmed faces stared at Shan. "His name was Chao, from Amdo town."

  Nyma appeared from inside Lhandro's tent. "I knew of Chao," she said with a worried expression. "Those howlers from Amdo come over our mountain into Yapchi sometimes. He was the only one who did not examine private altars when he visited homes, never ordered people to open their gaus. He was Tibetan, but had taken a Chinese name." It was a practice the Chinese encouraged among young Tibetan students.

  "That monk spoke to you about the murder?" Shan asked. He remembered the ride from their encounter with the minibus. Nyma had been unusually quiet, sharing none of Lokesh's excitement over seeing more flocks of geese.

  "Only briefly." Nyma kept her eyes on the ground as she spoke. "It was very violent, very bloody. Chao was stabbed in the back. It happened in a garage that used to be a stable, at the edge of town, just two nights ago."

  Shan stared at her.

  "Is that important?"

  "Two nights ago was probably when Drakte was attacked," Shan explained. "The wound that killed him was inflicted many hours before we saw him."

  Nyma's eyes welled with moisture and she turned away for a moment, looking at the lake. "You don't know that for certain," she said.

  "No," Shan admitted. But he was almost certain. He had seen many stab wounds in his Beijing incarnation.

  "Drakte? Drakte!" a woman gasped behind Shan. He turned to see the woman in the brightly colored apron, her hands at her mouth. "Our Drakte!" she cried, and the other dropka in earshot pressed closer as she told them the news in low, despairing tones.

  Shan patiently answered their questions about the purba's death, then asked his own.

  "He was here only last week," the woman explained, "talking with us, asking us questions, playing with the children. One afternoon he took all the children and made a new cairn on a hill." Shan followed her gaze toward a tall grass mound half a mile away crowned by a small tower of stones. The woman slowly sank upon a boulder by the fire.

  "What questions? What did Drakte ask?" Shan inquired, squatting beside the woman.

  "The number of sheep and goats we have," the woman said woodenly. "Who has yak and who has goats. Where the nearest fields of barley might be. How much fodder we cut for the winter."

  Barley. Shan stared at the woman, then at Lhandro and Nyma. The abbot and the Director of Religious Affairs had been counting fields of barley. Counting them on the changtang pastureland, where no barley grew. He darted to his blanket and unrolled it to find the pouch the dropka woman had brought through t
he storm. They leafed through Drakte's book together until they found a page near the end captioned Lamtso Gar- Lamtso Camp- dated the week before. There was a column for barley, marked none, and others for sheep, yak, and goats.

  "This camp is our home for much of the year," the woman explained. "Everyone else just visits for the salt." She pointed to the columns with obvious pride. One yak, eighteen sheep, five goats read the entry for Lamtso Gar. And two dogs.

  If it made no sense that the abbot and a senior howler were collecting such data, it made even less sense Drakte would be. But Drakte had not only collected the data, he had certified it. At the bottom of the page were signatures, and beneath the signatures a note Shan suspected was added later. Last year, Drakte had written, a two-year-old girl died of starvation here.

  Shan leafed through the following pages and pointed to entries that had no signatures, only circles or X's.

  "Even those who could not write had to sign," the woman explained. "He insisted there be an entry for every family, every home. He said bad things until they made their marks," she added in a low, perplexed voice.

  "Bad things?"

  The woman hung her head, as if embarrassed. "He was tired, and worried. He was a good boy."

  "What things?" Shan asked again.

  The woman stared at the ground and whispered so low Shan had to lean toward her to hear. "He said sign or else all your children will grow up to hate you." She shivered and folded her arms over her breast.

  Shan stared at the woman, then at the ledger.

  Suddenly a loud curse echoed through the camp. Dremu was yelling at a middle-aged woman who was throwing pebbles at him and encouraging the children to do likewise. The Golok raised his fist threateningly, but turned and broke into a fast stride toward the fire. When he reached the ring of stones he paused, looked at Lhandro, then stepped behind Shan. Lhandro, the soft-spoken rongpa, had thrown stones, too.