Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Halfway up the ridge Shan paused. “It would be safer if I went ahead,” he warned his companions.

Corbett seemed to be looking for a place to sit among the boulders when Yao stepped in front of Shan. “Not a chance. If you say ‘stay’ I know I must go. You will wait here. I will not have you warning them, laying a trap for us.”

Four wispy columns of smoke could be seen from the far side of the ridge, beyond the birds, a sign of habitation. Yao motioned Corbett forward, and set off up the trail toward the crest.

Shan leaned against a rock wall, wiping his brow as he watched the two men advance toward the crest. They had gone less than three hundred yards when he saw the American jump back. Four small figures, mere children, materialized out of the rocks, waving clubs, leaping at the two men, hitting them.

By the time Shan reached them Corbett was curled up against a boulder, hands clasped around his neck, taking blows from two young girls, cursing each time one of the clubs hit him but offering no resistance. Yao was futilely trying to fight back as two boys pinned him against a ledge. The inspector wrenched one of the clubs from a young boy’s hand, then abruptly stopped, stared at the thing in his hand, then threw it onto the ground in revulsion. The weapon was a human thigh bone, and not one of the old yellowed ones they had seen at Zhoka.

Shan leapt to Yao’s side as the children closed around him. The inspector’s discovery of the bone had seemed to paralyze him. Fear entered his eyes. Shan stepped in front of him, muscles tensing, ready to take a blow himself. But one of the children, a boy of no more than eight, called out and pointed to Shan’s chest, then lowered his club. The others, eyes round, did likewise. As a group they retreated a few feet then spun about and ran up the trail.

Shan looked down. The boy had pointed to his gau, the silver Tibetan amulet box that hung from his neck. In his frantic run up the slope the gau had slipped out of Shan’s shirt. When he looked up the children had disappeared.

“Like phantoms,” Corbett said as he straightened, rubbing his arm where he had been hit. “They were just there, out of thin air. Who-why would they…” His words drifted away as he watched the children appear near the crest and run toward the nest of rocks.

“What these people do, they prefer to do in secret,” Shan said. “Even among Tibetans the ragyapa are a people apart. For centuries it has been like this. In a way they are outcasts, but they accept it because they are performing a sacred duty. It is not for outsiders, not for tourists. Even Tibetans just deliver the body to the village and leave a payment.”

Corbett looked at the birds that flew over the circular outcropping. “Christ. I’ve read about it,” he said in a haunted tone. “I never thought … this is the twenty-first century. It’s from another time.”

“It’s called a durtro, ” Shan said, pointing to the outcropping, the charnel ground where the ragyapa dismembered the dead, stripping away the flesh, even pulverizing the bones so the vultures could eat them.

“If someone wanted to kill someone this is how the evidence would be destroyed,” Yao said, anger in his voice now. “Which makes Tibet a murderer’s paradise,” he added. He was holding his radio again.

“A durtro is a place of great reverence,” Shan warned. “No helicopters.”

“Crushing bones to feed to birds,” Yao shot back with a sour tone. “Butchery. Tan said the people up here had one foot in the Stone Age.”

“They are returning bodies to the earth,” Shan said as he watched figures running from the circle of rocks over the crest, away from them. The people of the village were fleeing.

The cluster of houses on the far side of the durtro appeared to be abandoned when they reached it. They silently walked past the stone and wood structures toward the ring of rocks where the birds waited above several lines of prayer flags. Yao stepped past Shan and was the first to enter into the ring of huge boulders. He stood speechless as Shan and the American reached him.

“Bloody Christ,” Corbett muttered, then turned, his face pale, his hand over his nostrils and mouth as he retreated outside the ring.

A lean boney man squatted in the center of the small clearing, staring angrily at them, a long heavy blade in one hand, an intact human arm in the other. Beyond him, atop the tallest rock on the opposite side of the clearing, three vultures gazed at them with the same expression as the man. Shan struggled to keep his eyes fixed on the squatting man but his gaze kept drifting, snaring images of the gruesome scene. A human knee, the femur and tibia still attached. A hand, flesh on the palm but not on the fingers. A column of vertebrae, bloody tissue clinging between the discs.

“Who has come from Zhoka?” Yao called out. “We demand the body from Zhoka!”

The man’s only response was to lower the arm to his cutting block and swing his blade, splitting the arm at the elbow.

“I doubt he speaks Chinese,” Shan said.

“Then you ask,” Yao snapped.

Shan fixed his gaze above the man, on the vultures. “I knew a ragyapa in prison. He had killed a Chinese tourist who came to take photographs of his father cutting bodies.”

“You brought us here,” Yao growled. “You’re not going to scare us away now.”

“The man said that for many of his people cutting bodies was like a meditation. He said sometimes he could sense a deity in the hand that stripped the flesh, that even if a Tibetan had walked away from Buddhism in life, that visiting the durtro in death was a return to it, that sometimes when he cut flesh his father spoke with Buddha himself.”

Yao winced. “These people are no priests.”

“I don’t know,” Shan said after watching the ragyapa for a long moment. “There are old stories, even in China, of people who would collect the pain and sorrow of others, to bear it so others could live in peace.” Shan looked back at the squatting man with the cleaver. “These people are like that. Like the priests who sit with the dying. But they do this all day, with reverence, every day of their lives. How could any man bear such a burden?”

Yao cursed as Shan left him alone, joining Corbett outside the rocks. A moment later Yao was beside him, glancing back nervously toward the clearing.

“These people did nothing. They just stay here and do the job they have always done,” Shan said, although he could not understand how the village could sustain itself on the offerings of the slim population of the southern hills. He gazed back at the durtro. There may have been two bodies brought from Zhoka. The Tibetans had not told where they were taking old Atso.

“Barbarians,” Yao said. “How can we allow such a thing in China?”

“Let me ask you something, Inspector,” Shan said after a moment. “Of all the things you know in the world, how many have stayed unchanged for a thousand years? I think to do what they do, all their lives, all their generations, takes something that is probably very different from barbaric.”

Yao gave an impatient snort and moved back toward the village.

Corbett lingered, staring at Shan with a new intensity. “Prayer,” the American said in a low, uncertain voice. He surveyed the village with a respectful, inquiring gaze. “Like on that rock today. That never changes, does it?”

Shan found himself looking at Corbett with the same curiosity, as if they were just meeting. “Like art maybe,” Shan said. The mysteries of Zhoka were still weighing on him. “The act of translating your deity onto cloth or paper.”

Strangely, Corbett smiled and nodded, as if it were exactly what he had expected Shan to say.