Bone Mountain (33 page)

“Christ almighty,” Winslow whispered in frustration. He stared uncertainly at the Tibetans, who gathered around the girl with butter lamps. “Jesus, Shan, you can’t believe…” His voice drifted off and he stepped closer to the convulsing girl, as though he still might intervene to protect her from injuring herself.

Shan didn’t know what to believe, except that he knew what the Tibetans believed about the girl. All he and the American could do was watch.

Gyalo sat near Anya’s head. “My grandmother was visited, too,” he declared in a soft voice. “We should make a welcoming place,” he said, and began a quiet mantra. The others joined in immediately. Shan found that his hand was clasping his own gau.

“In my mountains,” Anya suddenly said, “in my heart, in my blood.” It sounded like Anya, Shan told himself, though a weary, distracted Anya. It could be a dream of some kind. Perhaps the girl had simply been exhausted from the trail, perhaps she had collapsed in slumber and was singing one of her spirit songs in her sleep.

Anya stopped trembling and seemed to stiffen, then grew very still as she spoke again. “Deep is the eye, brilliant blue eye, the nagas will hold it true.” A chill crept down Shan’s spine. Winslow gasped and stepped back. This wasn’t Anya’s voice. It was a cracked, dry voice, an old person’s voice. It sounded hollow, like it was coming down a long tube.

There was movement at Shan’s side. Lhandro was busily recording the words of the oracle. The voice echoed in Shan’s mind. The eye, the oracle said. But the eye was not blue.

“Bind them, bind them, bind them, you have to wash it to bind them!” the voice croaked on. “So many dead. So many to die,” it said in a mournful tone. A chilled silence hung over the camp and Lhandro, his face ghastly pale, looked up from his writing.

“Who will give voice when the songbird is gone?” the voice said, then spoke no more. With these final words Anya, though lying flat, somehow seemed to collapse. They waited in silence, no one moving, as though the words had somehow paralyzed them. Nyma stared into Anya’s eyes, as though searching for the girl. Lokesh kept slowly nodding, and Nyma began rocking back and forth on her knees. Gyalo washed the girl’s face from a bowl of water. No one spoke. Lokesh began his mantra again. Lhandro stared at the words he had written, then handed the paper to Shan as if Shan would know what to do about them. Shan stared uncertainly at the hurried scrawl, unable to read the handwriting. But he had watched, and knew Lhandro had not written the final words of the oracle. Who will give voice when the songbird is gone? the oracle had asked.

They sat for almost an hour, until Anya revived, rubbing her eyes as though coming out of a deep sleep, then suddenly pointing upward. A brilliant meteor shot through the sky, so close they heard it.

“The deity of Yapchi, the one whose eye you have, and that oracle,” Winslow said in a small voice, still shaken by what he had witnessed, “they are the same? I mean I know there can’t really be…” The American’s words drifted away. There can’t be a deity in the valley, he was about to say, just as, a few minutes earlier, he had been about to say there could be no oracle.

“I don’t know,” Shan replied hesitantly. “I don’t think so.”

Neither man seemed able to put their feelings into words. Because what they mostly felt, Shan suspected, was confusion.

After a long time Shan borrowed the American’s light and went out with the red-circle pack among the sheep. He found a flat rock and salt in a pool of moonlight, cutting the threads away, reaching in for the chenyi stone. It was the first time he had looked at the stone since the day it had been sewn into the salt pack at Lamtso. He sat with the eye in front of him and stared at the dim outline in the rock, not knowing why. At least it might help him focus, might help him reach into his awareness in the way Gendun had taught him.

A loose pebble rattled behind Shan. As he turned, a shadow leapt forward and something hard pounded into his skull. He fell forward and drifted toward unconsciousness, quickly, yet still slow enough that before the blackness took him he realized dimly, like observing it from afar, that someone was kicking him in the ribs.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

The eye of Yapchi was gone. In a fog of pain Shan squinted into the patch of moonlight where he had set the eye and reached out with one hand, futilely groping for the stone. He braced himself on one arm to peer into the shadows around him, fighting a stab of pain in his ribs. There was a glimmer of movement in the distance. He threw himself onto his feet, took a step—but the world spun about and he found himself on his knees, then on the ground. Blackness overtook him again.

When he awoke he was by the fire, on a blanket beside Anya. The girl, propped against a rock, offered a weak smile. Lokesh was on his other side, dabbing a bloody cloth against Shan’s forehead. “It’s gone,” Shan said in a forlorn gasp. “I lost the eye.”

“They’re out there,” Lokesh said softly. “Our friends are looking.” He lifted Shan’s hand and pressed it firmly, keeping it in his grip a moment.

As Shan tried to sit up blood roared in his ears. His eyes fluttered closed in another spell of dizziness. He became vaguely aware of people approaching, and urgent words in low voices. He heard hoofbeats, and in the distance, someone calling to the dogs. His mind went somewhere like slumber, but not slumber, and suddenly he was awake.

Hours had passed. The moon was setting. It was perhaps three in the morning. The villagers had used all the spare fuel to make half a dozen fires in a circle around the camp. A rider was dismounting. Lhandro was with the sheep, checking their harnesses. One sheep sat beside Anya, alone, without a pack, the brown ram that had carried the red-circle pack. The girl was stroking its head, as if to comfort it, as though it, too, shared their anguish.

Lokesh brought a bowl of tea and at last Shan was able to sit up. The old Tibetan shook his head grimly.

“There is no sign,” Lhandro said when he approached Shan minutes later. “The eye is gone. The pack it was in is gone. We had a guard out but he was on the trail, watching for anyone following. The thief did not come up the trail. We searched the slopes in every direction. The moon was bright enough that we could scan the slopes with field glasses. Nothing,” Lhandro concluded wearily. “That thing burns temples and tries to kill monks,” he said, as though to explain his hopelessness. His face seemed to have aged many years. The eye was gone. He had failed his people. He looked up the slope, then jogged away into the darkness.

“It is my fault,” Shan said, “I took it away from camp.” Had it indeed been the dobdob? He tried to remember, but the memory was only of night, and pain. He touched the knot on his head. Something hard had hit him. It could have been the gnarled end of the dobdob’s staff.

“No!” Nyma protested. “You probably saved others from injury. A thief like that would just have brought his violence to the rest of us if you hadn’t taken the eye aside.”

The searchers returned one by one over the next two hours, the last coming by horseback from the trail above. Some shook their heads, others just shrugged. Only Dremu, the last rider, from the slope above, had anything to report. A wild goat had run past him on the trail as though frightened by something above.

“The army,” Winslow sighed. “If it was the army…” he began.

“How could it be the army?” Nyma asked. “If it had been the army, if it had been that Colonel Lin, they would not care about stealth, they would have just pounced on us, taken all of us away in chains like he tried to that day.”

Some of the villagers murmured agreement. But Winslow and Shan exchanged a glance. Lin might have acted quietly, sending only one of his commandos for an ambush, if he had known the American was present.

“If the army took the eye,” Shan said, “then it is gone, out of our reach. But if the army did not take the eye,” he said with an expectant look at Lhandro, “then the eye may still be in our grasp.” Lhandro shook his head, but seemed to ponder the words and looked up at Shan with interest.

“What would be the other reasons to take it?” another voice asked from the shadows. Gyalo appeared. “Nyma explained things to me,” he said in an aside to Shan, before he turned to the others. “Shan is saying we must know the why of this theft.”

“To destroy it,” Nyma suggested. “So the valley could not be saved. Or to hide it.”

“That would mean it could be those who wish to use your valley,” Gyalo observed.

Lhandro nodded. “The oil crews. The geologists who work for the petroleum joint venture.”

“And if not to destroy it or hide it?” Shan asked. “Perhaps the thief wants it back in Yapchi, too, just in a different way.”

“Return it?” Nyma asked, creasing her brow. “Someone else … someone who didn’t believe we would make it to Yapchi,” she said in a hollow voice. “Maybe someone who didn’t understand the oracle,” she added with a quick glance toward Shan. “Or someone who just thought they could acquire merit somehow.”

“That goat that ran from up the slope, it could have been someone climbing above who spooked it. Someone taking the eye over the mountain,” Winslow observed.

“The army wouldn’t take it over the mountain,” Lhandro said quietly. “They would take it back to Lhasa.”

“If the army didn’t take the eye,” Shan said, “then we must get to the valley, and quickly. Someone attempting to return it to the deity might be conspicuous. Maybe we can find the thief before the army does.” It was a slim chance, he knew. But it was the only one they had.

“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.”