Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  "The oracle," Nyma said with a glimmer of hope, looking at Shan. "It didn't say how the eye would get to the valley, only how it would be returned to its true place."

  "There is a secret trail over Yapchi Mountain," a new voice said from the shadows. They turned to see Chemi standing by the big yak. "A high trail, very narrow in spots, very dangerous. I took it once when I was a girl. I've seen old goats on it. Not for horses, not for sheep wearing packs. The caravan will have to go around the base of the mountain to the valley. But on foot, some of us can go over it and be in the valley before dusk tomorrow, if we leave at daybreak." She searched the faces of the villagers. "I know about that eye," she said, looking at Shan. "My grandfather's father was from Yapchi. He was away on a pilgrimage when those Lujun soldiers came. He never went back after that."

  "I'll go," Winslow said quickly, then, in response to Shan's worried glance, shrugged and gestured toward his pack. "I'll take my pills. She might be up there."

  There was movement at Shan's side. Lokesh was kneeling now, tightening the laces of his tattered boots. Shan put a hand on his shoulder and Lokesh pretended to ignore it. "Old goats," he said. "You heard her. It's for old goats."

  The Yapchi villagers laughed.

  "The four of us then," Shan declared. "At dawn."

  Lhandro surveyed the caravaners. "Someone from the village should go. Shan may need help in understanding the valley before we arrive with the sheep. Only one. We cannot spare more and still drive the sheep."

  Nyma seemed about to step forward when a diminutive figure pushed through from the shadows behind her. "It needs to be me," Anya said solemnly. Her voice seemed small and brittle. It was the first Shan had heard her speak since the oracle had visited.

  Lhandro's chest pulled in, as if he were about to protest that the girl's twisted leg would make it too dangerous, but the headman only sighed and stared at the girl in silence.

  An owl called from somewhere.

  In the blur of events since he had been attacked Shan had almost forgotten about the strange words of the oracle. Had the oracle somehow been warning that the eye would be lost? Did Anya somehow feel responsible?

  Gyalo, squatting by the fire, raised his wrist to his mouth as if biting something on it, then stood, extracting a grey strand from his hand and extending it to Anya. "It's a yak-hair bracelet," he said. "From Jampa. My mother always made me wear one in the high mountains. She said a yak-hair bracelet would make you as surefooted as a yak. Good for high places."

  Anya studied the bracelet of woven hair. She seemed reluctant to take it.

  "We are going to help with the sheep, Jampa and I. We want to see this Yapchi Valley. You can return it to me there."

  They started when the eastern sky was the color of juniper smoke, the high peaks above them lost in purple and grey shadow. A cry of a bird echoed from above and Winslow cocked his head, listening. A moment later, a sheep bleated toward them, as though in reply to the bird. Another sheep called, and another, until a dozen or more were calling at once. It sounded as if they were mourning the loss of the jagged eye.

  Chemi led the way, not on a trail at first, but up a series of ledges and steep gravel slopes that would reach the trail in an hour, she promised. After a few minutes she turned and pointed to a rider urging his horse along the lower trail, the caravan route. Dremu was riding out ahead of the rongpa. Shan stared at the Golok as he disappeared around an outcropping. Dremu was on Yapchi Mountain now, the mountain he hated.

  It was rough going. More than once Lokesh slipped and fell to his knees on the loose rough slopes. The American stopped several times and held his head but each time continued, matching Chemi's hurried pace. It seemed as if they were fleeing from something. More than once he studied the line of figures in front of him. Winslow, who had almost died the day before of altitude sickness. Anya who had been seized by the oracle. Chemi who had seemed more dead than alive when they had seen her on the trail the week before. Some of the older Buddhists would have said the wheel of their karma was moving quickly.

  After an hour, as they followed Chemi around a sharp turn up a steep switchback trail a movement below caught Shan's eye. Another figure was climbing behind them. Tenzin. Somehow Shan wasn't surprised. Of all of them, perhaps Tenzin had the most urgent reason to flee.

  They reached the main trail and climbed for another hour before Chemi paused to rest, on a ledge that overlooked several high, broad ridges to the south that led to the Plain of Flowers in the distance. Chemi pointed between two of the northern peaks to a brown swath of land in the north. "Amdo Province," she said with a flash of defiance in her eyes. "Our people never call it Qinghai, that's only for Chinese maps. On the far side of the mountain," she said, looking at the massive rock wall that towered before them, the pinnacle of Yapchi Mountain, "there is a long twisting path down a gully that opens on a shelf of land where my family lives. An hour beyond that, over the next ridge, is Yapchi Valley."

  Shan stared at the monolithic face of stone towering above them, recalling how the huge mountain had dominated the horizon even from the far side of the plain, how Dremu had cursed it from afar. The entire mountain, with its series of outrider ridges reaching toward the main Kunlun range, was nearly twenty miles long. On the north side it reached into Amdo and cradled the valley of the rongpa.

  Winslow produced his binoculars and swept the ridges below. Anya stood close to the American, fingering her yak-hair bracelet.

  "There is a goat path along the rock face," Chemi said, pointing to the massive rock wall, a seemingly impassable barrier. "It is a difficult path to find-" She was interrupted by a distant sound. The shot of a heavy rifle, Shan thought at first, but then as he heard a second identical sound he knew it was something bigger. Explosions, like an artillery barrage or grenades. Again the sound echoed and Winslow pointed toward three puffs of smoke on one of the ridges below, perhaps a mile away. Instantly Shan and the Tibetans dropped to the ground, fearful of being seen. Whether artillery or grenades, explosions meant the army. Anya reached out and tugged on Winslow's pant leg. The American was frantically working his binoculars, adjusting the focus knob, sweeping the lenses back and forth across the ridge where they had seen the smoke.

  "Three people, maybe four," Winslow reported, as Shan sat up and pulled his own field glasses from his bag.

  He quickly found the distant figures, jogging toward the deep shadow cast by an adjoining ridge. He saw no vehicle, no helicopter, no troop carrier. But even stranger, he saw no burning building, no old chorten, no shrine that might have attracted a demolition crew. He glanced back at Anya, who had edged up so she could see the ridge below.

  "Sometimes the army still finds resisters," Chemi declared in a remote voice. "Sometimes they refuse to be taken alive. And there are bandits," she added, in a tone that almost sounded hopeful. Did she mean Dremu? Had she somehow recognized Dremu? Shan had not dared give voice to his first suspicion after his attack. Could it have been the Golok, riding somewhere below them, who had stirred up the troops, the Golok who had his own interest in the eye, and his own strange war with the mountain?

  At Shan's side, Tenzin grimaced. He looked at Shan with pain in his eyes. Tenzin was being aided by the purbas, which probably meant that somewhere on the way to Yapchi purbas would be waiting for him, maybe traveling to meet him now. Tenzin looked past Shan in puzzlement and Shan turned to see Lokesh beside him, his finger raised in the air again. The old Tibetan appeared to be tracing an imaginary line through the landscape. Shan watched as he pointed toward the long grey line of mountains on the horizon that defined the provincial border, then downward toward Rapjung and a closer landscape, to the high broadtopped ridge that flanked Rapjung's northeast side, then to the series of ridges that ended in the deep gorge below them.

  Shan's old friend reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, one of the Serenity Campaign pamphlets. As the others watched in silence he began working the paper in a series of folds. After nearly a
minute he held the paper up, not toward his companions, but toward the mountain, toward the very top of the mountain. It was a horse, a paper horse, and Shan had helped Lokesh make many such horses during their travels. As Chemi and Anya nodded knowingly, the old Tibetan spoke to the horse in a whisper and released it into the wind.

  As they watched the paper shoot out over the abyss below and slowly drift toward the ridges, Shan turned to Winslow, who was watching in confusion. "A spirit horse," he explained. "There is a tradition that such a horse, if released with a prayer, will reach a traveler in need, and when it touches the earth it will become a real horse."

  Shan studied Lokesh again, and with a new surge of alarm he understood what his old friend was thinking. There may not be purbas in the mountains below them, but Shan and Lokesh knew of someone who was. The medicine lama was out there. Not a ghost, for Chemi had met a real healer, the old one she had expected. He looked at the small sturdy woman who was their guide. She had offered no explanation of what had happened to her on the trail that day, but pain was in her eyes now, and for a moment her face seemed to take on the frail appearance Shan had seen that day on the trail. Suddenly Tenzin pointed upward, and they looked up to see a bharal, one of the rare blue mountain sheep that roamed the mountains, seemingly suspended two-thirds up the face of the vast rock wall before them.

  A calm strength filled Chemi's face. "It's showing us the way," she said in a reverent tone, and continued up the trail without looking back. Long after the others were out of sight, Shan lingered with his field glasses, scouring the ridges below. A raven flew over the gorge. A large dark animal, probably a wild yak, ran across the top of another ridge. But there was no sight of a medicine lama and no sign of soldiers.

  They walked ever upward. Snowflakes swirled about them sometimes, even though the sky overhead was bright blue. Twice Anya's crooked gait caused her to slip, and pebbles spilled over the edge of the narrow trail, dropping downward for what seemed an impossibly long time.

  The trail constantly changed in width and direction, sometimes dwindling to little more than a gap between walls where a wild sheep might just squeeze through. Now it disappeared altogether at a nearly vertical wall of rock. Chemi continued, pulling herself upward with meager hand-holds, jumping from one outcropping to the next, guided by nothing more than an occasional worn spot in the rocks that may have been caused by sheep leaping at the same point, over the course of centuries. Winslow stopped often, drinking, twice taking his pills. They passed fields of snow, and once a brilliant white bird burst out of a crevasse.

  "Christ," Winslow repeated often, sometimes when he was pausing to press his palms against his temples, at other times when he stopped to consult his map. "Fifteen damned thousand feet," he reported in disbelief, but did not complain when Chemi took them still higher. Every five minutes he had to stop, panting heavily, to catch his breath. He answered Shan's anxious glances by grinning and shaking his head, then moving on with a spurt of energy as though to prove his vigor. They were on the long unprotected trail where they had seen the bharal, a path no more than thirty inches wide, above a thousand-foot drop, when the American stopped and leaned against the wall of rock. Anya, closest to him, turned back and put her hand in Winslow's as Shan inched closer.

  "It's all right," he heard the girl say, softly, in the voice she used with the sheep, "hold my hand and the yak bracelet will protect us both." The American turned toward Shan, his head sagging, his eyes rolling as if he were dizzy. Anya squeezed his hand hard, as though to remind him she was with him, and the American straightened. With a sober expression he let the girl lead him onward.

  They were two-thirds of the way along the treacherous, unprotected goat trail when Chemi moaned and threw up a hand. They all froze as she cupped her ears toward the north and slowly began backing up. Moments later they heard it, too, a harsh metallic thumping that was rapidly growing louder.

  "Helicopter!" Winslow shouted, and suddenly Anya was pulling him toward a shadow in the rock face. Not a shadow, Shan saw, as first the girl and then the American turned sideways and stepped inside it. It was a narrow cleft in the rock, perhaps big enough to hide them all until the helicopter passed. It was why Chemi was backing up, he realized, because she, too, had seen the cleft. The thumping grew much louder, and Chemi turned and began running along the narrow trail. Tenzin paused at the cleft, helping Lokesh inside, then disappeared himself as Shan approached the shadow.

  Shan waited a moment, until Chemi was only thirty feet away, then the noise of the machine drove him inside. He could see none of his companions, even though they had entered the cleft only moments before. His eyes adjusting to the dim light, he saw that the gap was more than a split in the rock- it was a narrow winding passage that led steeply upward. He followed a small trail, worn from the hooves of mountain creatures. After fifteen feet he discovered that he was inside a narrow fissure in the cap of the mountain, with walls that opened near the peak hundreds of feet overhead.

  "It wasn't military," a voice said behind him. Chemi was there, looking out into the daylight as she spoke. "And it was low, below the trail, like it was searching the ridges where the bombs went off."

  Shan took another step forward. There was still no sign of his friends.

  "Did they fall?" Chemi asked in alarm. "They can't just disappear."

  A shaft of sunlight lit the ground thirty feet in front of them. He stepped toward it uneasily as Chemi called out Anya's name. There was no reply. There was no sound at all. No wind blew in the chasm. No bird flew. No water fell. Chemi pulled his sleeve and pointed with alarm toward the pool of light which lit a wide crack in the floor. They stepped to the edge of the crack. It seemed to have no bottom. He kicked a pebble over the side and heard nothing.

  "One of them could have slipped in and the others fell trying to help," Chemi said in a tight voice. "A place like that, they would just fall," she added, as though the chasm would have no bottom.

  Shan stepped back without thinking, as though recoiling from the thought.

  "They're gone," Chemi moaned, and she looked up mournfully toward the patch of sky at the top of the chasm.

  Shan steadied himself by holding onto a pillar of rock. After a moment he realized his fingers were touching striations in the rock. He bent and blew into the tiny cracks, packed with dust, then pulled out his water bottle and poured some of the liquid over the pillar. Instantly the cracks took on definition, darker lines against the grey surface. They were Tibetan script, intricately carved into the pillar. Remember this, he read, we are made of nothing but light. It was a version of an ancient teaching, that the essence of life is luminosity, meaning awareness.

  He looked up from the pillar in confusion. Beyond the pool of light the trail curved away toward a darker patch of shadow. He heard a small sound, the murmur of an animal, and ventured along the curve toward the darkness, following the trail up a short embankment beside which lay a row of small rocks on the ground. They were strangely smooth and flat, appearing as if they had been melted and folded. He knelt beside one and touched it. It wasn't rock, but dust he touched, dust the color of the rock. He lifted the object, still puzzled, and froze as he saw that it was a dust encrusted piece of cloth. It was a lungta, a prayer flag, made of silk, once red, painted with the mani mantra and a small horse. The dust fell away in flakes under his fingers, like a layer of ice, and he wondered, awed, how many decades it might have taken in the windless chasm for such a crust to accumulate. Not decades, more likely centuries. The flag had been sewn onto a strand of yak-hair rope, expertly woven, that had rotted away at each end. He looked at the line of tiny mounds, each another encrusted lungta. They pointed to the pillar with the writing. They had been tied to the pillar, he suspected, and affixed to the wall beyond him, in the darkest part of the shadow; not to flap conspicuously in the sky, but perhaps, in another age, to guide visitors. He turned and stepped further into the shadow, toward the wall where the line of flags would have ended. The darkest p
oint was where two walls came together. There was something like a shadow inside the shadow. And the animal sound again.

  He stepped into the blackest part of the shadow and found himself in the narrow entrance of a cave, which he followed, Chemi a step behind, feeling with his hands for eight feet as it curved sharply. Dim light appeared ahead of him, and suddenly he stumbled, nearly falling over Anya, who sat on the stone floor, murmuring softly in the detached voice he had heard her use for her animal songs. Beyond her stood the American, his electric lantern in his hand, shaking his head as he stared at the wall in front of him. Only Lokesh moved. The old Tibetan was circling the chamber they had discovered, uttering syllables of glee, his eyes shining with excitement. On a rock ledge that ran along the far end of the cavern, twenty feet from Shan, sat over two dozen elongated objects, in four stacks, each capped top and bottom with wooden slabs and bound together with cloth and strips of silk. The caps on those on top of each stack were made of rosewood, and carved with intricate patterns, some of flowers and leaves, others of wild animals.

  As he stepped to Lokesh's side his old friend lifted the top of one of the box-like objects and with shaking hands pulled back the straps and cloth that covered its contents. It was a peche, a Tibetan book, in the traditional form of long unbound leaves of paper printed with wood blocks. "The Gyuzhi," he read in a whisper, then looked at his companions and explained that the Gyuzhi, or Four Tantras, was the most renowned of the ancient medical texts, written a thousand years earlier. He lifted the first leaf and read in silence for a moment, then pointed to the lines in the center of the page. "Possession of Elemental Spirits is caused by performing repeated sins, opposing thinking worthy of honor, failure to control the torment of sorrow." He looked up and grinned. "The causes of insanity, it means."

  The excitement on his face was slowly replaced with solemn reverence as he replaced the leaf and the cover and repeated the process at the next peche, then two more. Winslow stepped forward and silently held the light at Lokesh's shoulder as the old man described the contents. "A teaching on medicinal stones," he said of the first, then explained that another was on medicines from fire elements, and the third about the use of stars to determine the most effective dates for mixing pills, written the year that the construction of Rapjung had begun.