Bone Mountain (24 page)

“But then those children came” the woman continued, “after they had destroyed Rapjung. The Red Guard,” she said ominously. “Gang’s wife had feared for our father and went with their son to help the family flee into the mountains. But the Guard caught up with them. They held a trial on the spot and condemned the family for being members of the oppressive landowner class.” She glanced at Shan and looked toward the ground. “Those judges pronounced sentence and made my nephew carry it out,” she said in a near whisper.

Shan’s head slumped down. He held it, elbows on his knees, fighting a choking sensation in his throat. The woman meant the Red Guard had forced the young boy to execute his mother and grandfather.

“Then they took that boy away,” she added in a hollow voice.

Such survivors of political undesirables, if not killed immediately, had often been sent back east to special political indoctrination schools, so they could join the Chinese proletariat. “We never saw him again.”

“They say Gang went crazy,” Lhandro continued the story, “that he started ambushing and killing Red Guard. No one knew for certain. But the Red Guard became scared of certain places in the mountains and began pulling back from the area. The sister of his wife returned,” he said with a sad glance at the woman, “and was assigned to the collective that took over their old family estate. Gang came down from the mountains after a couple of years and worked there. Eventually they became husband and wife. When the collective broke up they came here, to be alone and because of the debt Gang felt he still owed the healers who had lived here.” Lhandro cast his look of apology toward Shan again. “I forgot about Gang and his problem with the Chinese. We never…” His voice drifted away.

Nyma completed the sentence for him. “In Yapchi we never had a Chinese friend before.”

*   *   *

By the next morning Padme was alert and talkative, hungry enough to eat two bowls of tsampa.

“You saved my life,” the injured monk said to Shan and Lhandro several times. He sat by the fire, a blanket over his shoulders against the chill morning wind, sometimes intensely studying the reconstructed shrines, making notes in a pad he kept in his belt pouch, sometimes staring at the flock of sheep that grazed by the stream. “But I don’t understand why you bring your herd here,” Padme said to Lhandro. His gaze fell upon Winslow, who was walking along the stream.

“We were going north when we found you,” Lhandro said. “You could not travel so we sought water and shelter.”

“That young girl with you, she said those bags the sheep carry are filled with salt.” Padme kept staring at the American as he spoke.

Lhandro nodded. “From Lamtso.”

The young monk searched Lhandro’s face. “That is a very old thing,” he said in an odd, uncertain tone. It almost sounded like he was chastising Lhandro. “It could be contaminated if you just take it from the soil.”

Lhandro looked at the monk, perplexed, even worried, wondering, Shan knew, if in all their years without monks the Yapchi farmers had forgotten something important. “It is good salt,” the rongpa said. The monk shrugged, and accepted another bowl of tea from Gang’s wife.

“But there are rules about salt. There is a government monopoly on salt,” the monk said in his tentative voice. “I would hate to see you accused of—” he paused, then shrugged and did not complete his sentence. “If there was no caravan I may not have been found for many hours.” He turned and gazed at Shan.

“Why?” Shan asked. “Why were you on the plain? Were you expecting to meet someone?”

Padme explained that he and a group of monks from Norbu sometimes roamed the lands neighboring their gompa looking for religious artifacts. They had not visited this remote plain before and when they arrived upon it they had realized that they would need to split up if they were to explore it all. Padme had walked to the far end of the plain and had just come upon a small cairn and was examining the area when he was attacked by the giant with the staff.

“Did you see who left this?” a deep voice interjected in Mandarin. Winslow appeared in front of them, holding the yellow vest left by the American woman. “Did you see an American?”

“No,” Padme replied slowly. “It was just there. By that little cairn.”

The American sighed and handed it to the monk. “Take it. Might as well do someone some good.”

Padme extended his arm hesitantly, dropped his blanket, and pulled on the vest. “Has this foreigner been gathering salt, too?” he asked Lhandro in Tibetan.

“Just along to enjoy the fresh air,” Winslow quipped in Tibetan, and the monk stared at him, his eyes wide with wonder.

“An American who speaks Tibetan?” he exclaimed, and looked back, with intense curiosity, at Lhandro and Shan, as though the news somehow changed his perspective on the party.

They would stay at the ruins until the next day, Lhandro announced, while the Yapchi men probed the surrounding land by horseback. The next morning the caravan would continue north while some of the party returned Padme safely to his gompa. The monk expressed his gratitude and led the Yapchi villagers to the base of the wall, out of the wind, where he sat to lead them in mantras to the Compassionate Buddha.

A quarter of an hour later the Yapchi riders trotted away, each in a different direction. Nyma stepped to the door of the house, speaking to someone inside, then bent to tighten the laces of her shoes. Gang’s wife appeared and pointed to a worn dirt path that ran along the outside edge of what had been the outer wall of the old gompa. No, not to the path, but to someone on the path: Tenzin, walking at a slow, contemplative pace toward the far end of the ruins.

“A
kora,
” Lokesh said as recognition lit his eyes. It was a pilgrim path. Many old shrines and gompas had such a kora, for circumambulation by pilgrims as a way of acquiring merit and paying homage to those who resided there, or had resided there.

“Past the wall at the north, to an old hermit’s cave,” Gang’s wife explained, gesturing past the reconstructed buildings as if the wall still existed, “then up past the drup-chu shrine,” she said, meaning a shrine by a spring of what the old Tibetans called attainment water, believed to impart blessings and health on those who drank from it. Lokesh bent and tightened his own laces, looking up expectantly at Shan. Shan grinned and stepped away to retrieve a water bottle from the stack of blankets by the wall, where the caravan party, except Dremu, had slept. The Golok, as usual, had chosen to sleep apart, hidden somewhere, but close.

When he returned Lokesh was staring in confusion at Lhandro, Nyma, and Anya. The three Yapchi villagers had begun to walk down the kora path, but to the east, to the right, in a counterclockwise direction. Lokesh twisted his head in curiosity. From behind Shan heard a disappointed sigh and saw Padme in the doorway, bracing himself with an arm on the frame, staring after the trio.

“Why didn’t we know this?” Shan wondered. Only as Lokesh turned to him did he realize he had given voice to his question.

Lokesh smiled. “There are many paths,” he said, with a satisfied tone. Many paths to enlightenment, he meant. Traditional Tibetan Buddhists, no matter which of the major orders of Buddhism they worshiped with, always conducted themselves clockwise along a kora circuit. It was part of the tradition, meaning part of the reverence to be shown.

But there was another faith in Tibet, older than Buddhism, based on animism. The Bon faith, though it had been largely subsumed into Buddhism and followed most of its teachings, still had its distinctive practices; one of which was that kora pilgrims walked counterclockwise.

“We should have known,” Shan said, answering his own question. It might explain much, especially why the farmers of Yapchi clung so fervently to their hopes for the stone eye and their land deity, why they had been so forlorn for four generations over its fate.

As Shan and Lokesh started the clockwise circuit, Lokesh began quietly reciting one of his pilgrim’s verses. Minutes later they heard footfalls behind them and turned to see Winslow running to catch up. He extended the bottle he kept for water, now empty. “I need attainment.” He grinned. “Boy, do I need attainment.”

Two hours later they had completed three-quarters of the path and stood at the drup-chu shrine on the slope above the gompa, Winslow filling the water bottle after each of them knelt and drank deeply from the tiny spring of sacred water. Shan and Lokesh had passed many pleasant hours at such springs in their travels, pursuing Lokesh’s burning interest in understanding the particular reason each of the springs was special. Lokesh was fond of pointing out that just understanding such reasons would tell much of the story of Tibet. Like many, he believed the land was not sacred just because devout Buddhists had inhabited it for so many centuries. The land drew them to such springs, Lokesh often declared, and every spring had a tale not just of the devout Buddhists who had identified it, usually centuries earlier, but of the ancients who had come before. At a spring in central Tibet that had been surrounded by crushed rock and gravel amid what were otherwise slopes of solid granite, Lokesh had decided that thousands of years earlier, when air deities traveled in the form of giants, the giants had favored the spring and crushed the earth by landing beside it so often.

As they rested by the spring Winslow scanned the Plain of Flowers with his lenses.

“Have you decided what they were doing, why oil geologists would be out on the Plain of Flowers?” Shan asked.

Winslow didn’t lower the binoculars, just shook his head slightly. “The oil concession ends at the Qinghai border, at least five miles north of here,” he said and glanced back at Shan. Dremu had found empty cans of American food, on the far side of the plain, even farther from the concession.

“Why would she leave a vest and sleeping bag?” Shan wondered out loud.

“I don’t know,” the American said in a hollow voice. “Maybe the thing that attacked Padme found her, too. Maybe it’s not sure who has the stone eye, and it’s just attacking anyone on the northern trails.” He packed his binoculars and knelt at the spring a moment, dipping in his cupped hand once more. He studied the water in his palm, lifted it and emptied it over his head. He closed his eyes and let the water drip down his head, and when he opened his eyes Shan saw a flash of deep emotion. Desperation, he thought, or profound sadness.

“There was a letter from her, to her mother, in the company files,” Winslow said abruptly, as if the water had freed the memory. “Her manager showed it to me, he hadn’t mailed it because he wasn’t sure if it would be too painful, their not knowing for sure about her. He said the company instructed him to open it, to see if she had been suicidal. Her mother is a professor in Minnesota. They talk about things in their letters, I guess.” Winslow stared into the water, or past it, as if he were speaking to something below, at the underground source of the sacred water.

“I mean big things. She said she wished all of her assignments could be in Tibet, that although the Chinese wouldn’t say so, Qinghai Province was really Tibet, that people in the mountains were teaching her things. She said she loved Tibet but was hating what the company was doing to the land. That Tibetans told her that the most important thing for maintaining the human life force was connection to the land, and that the world had become divided between people whose lives were severed from that life force and people who lived close to the land. That those who lived close to the land had a sacred duty to protect the life force.” Winslow looked up from the water. “And she worked for an oil company.” Something like pain seemed to cross his face again, as though the paradox had been deeply troubling him.

“At the end of the letter she said that some Tibetans had told her that a geologist was really like a special kind of monk who studied the behavior of land deities.” Winslow looked back into the dark patch where the spring emerged from the earth, as if waiting for such a spirit to emerge and explain. “She said her Tibetan friends wanted to take her to hidden lands.” He turned to look at Lokesh. “What did she mean?”

Lokesh needed no time to consider his reply. “A bayal. They meant a bayal. It means hidden land. Some people believe there are hidden portals to special lands, like heavens, where deities roam freely.” He glanced at Shan. Some people. Like the followers of Bon who lived at Yapchi. Lokesh sighed, then stood and stepped with a deliberate pace to a low pile of rocks ten feet from the spring. Although Shan expected him to add a rock to the pile, Lokesh began pulling the pile apart, until he had exposed a square of solid granite, two feet to the side. “There was a little chorten here,” he said in an urgent, awed voice, as if the memory had just washed over him.

“A shrine with a relic underneath, the foot bone of an old hermit who had walked all over Tibet collecting herbs, more than five hundred years ago.” He stared at the square stone and the way it was encrusted with lichens that joined it to the ground. “The Tibetans who did this,” he said excitedly, meaning those who had been forced to destroy the gompa, “didn’t move this base, didn’t move the relic.” Lokesh looked up with a hopeful gleam. “We would sit here for lessons sometimes, and the lamas would explain how the spring was connected to the center of the earth. They would wash herbs in this water and send clay jars of it to healers all over Tibet. I remember listening for hours here while Chigu Rinpoche taught us how the power of plants came from the power of the earth and their power to heal came from the ways they connected humans back to the earth.”

Winslow stepped to the slab, knelt reverently by Lokesh, his eyes wide with wonder. “I read somewhere that doctors say they could heal anything if they just knew how the human animal evolved, how to trace the human body back to where it rose up out of the mud. Because everything we’re made of came from the earth.” When he looked up at Shan his eyes held a strange fervor. “It’s a different way of saying the same thing, isn’t it?” He placed his fingertips near the lichen of the rock, but not on it, as though it were too holy for him to touch. Then he looked up sheepishly and began helping Lokesh to replace the stones, not in a pile, but in a square, like the base of a chorten.