Eliot Pattison - Water Touching Stone

Shan looked back at the solitary, unblinking eye that stared at him from the ruin of the boy's face, but found no words to say. He gazed at his hands. They were covered with the boy's blood. Overcome for a moment with helplessness, he just watched the blood drip from his fingertips onto the blades of brown grass.

Lokesh appeared at Shan's side, carrying one of the drawstring sacks that contained their supplies. Producing a plastic water bottle from the bag, the old Tibetan held the water to the boy's lips and began to utter a low, singsong chant in syllables unfamiliar to Shan. Before he had been plucked from his gompa, his monastery, to serve the Dalai Lama, Lokesh had intended to take up medicine. He had apprenticed himself to a lama healer before being called to Lhasa, then continued his training during his decades in prison by ministering to prisoners, learning from the old healers who were sometimes thrown behind wire for encouraging citizens to cling to the traditional ways.

The old Tibetan nodded to the woman as he chanted, and gradually the words seemed to bring her back to awareness. When her eyes found their focus and she returned his gaze with a pained smile, Lokesh leaned toward Shan. "Her wrist is broken," he said in his quiet monk's voice. "She needs tea."

As Lokesh sat with the boy, Jowa settled Gendun into the grass by the truck, then brought a soot-covered pot and a piece of canvas stuffed with yak dung for a fire. When the pot was on the low blue flames, Lokesh looked up expectantly and Jowa motioned for Shan to help with the larger blanket. They untangled it from the woman, and Shan, following Jowa's example, secured the blanket with his feet so that, with both men holding the top corners of the long rectangle of felt, they created a windbreak. Lokesh needed still air for his diagnosis. As soon as the blanket was up he stopped his healing mantra and raised the boy's left hand in his own. He spread the three center fingers of his long boney hand along the wrist and closed his eyes, listening for more than a minute, then lowering the arm and repeating the process with the right arm as he tried to locate the twelve pulses on which diagnosis was based in Tibetan medicine. He finished by clasping the boy's earlobe with his fingers, closing his eyes again, and slowly nodding his head.

The boy just watched, without blinking, without speaking, without giving voice to the pain that surely wracked his body. The herdsman knelt silently beside him, his hands still tightly grasping his gau, tears rolling down his dark, leathery cheeks.

Lokesh finished and stared at the boy with a desolate expression. As if the motion were an afterthought, he slowly, stiffly raised the torn fabric of the boy's pants leg and looked at the skin underneath. The swing of the blade that had apparently slashed the fabric had not touched the skin.

"We can't stay in the open," Jowa warned, with nervous glances along the road.

"We could all have been killed," the dropka said in a hollow voice. "It was death on legs."

"You saw it?" Shan asked.

"I was bringing sheep down from the pasture. She was making camp. When I got to camp the dogs were barking on a ledge below. I followed the sound, with a torch. One of the dogs was dead, its brains scattered across a rock. Then I found the two of them. I thought they were dead too."

The woman's eyes opened as Jowa held a mug of tea in front of her. She raised her right hand with a grimace of pain. Jowa held the mug as she drank.

"Tujaychay," the woman said in a hoarse voice. Thank you. She took the mug with her good hand and drained its contents.

"The boy was bringing water from a spring down by the road," she said, her voice now stronger than her husband's. "He was late. I heard the sheep coming down the mountain. I needed to begin the cooking. Then the dogs started, the way they shout at a wolf." Jowa began fashioning a sling for her arm out of the canvas. "I ran. I saw it first from a ledge above, as it was attacking Alta. It was standing on its two rear legs. It had the skin of a leopard. I ran faster. I tripped and hit my head. I ran again. It turned as I came. Its front legs had paws like a man's hands, and one held a man's knife. But it dropped the knife and picked up a shiny stick, like a man's arm. It picked up the stick in both paws and hit me as I raised my hand. I fell and my hand hurt like it was in a fire. I crawled to the boy and covered him with my body. The thing came at us, waving the stick, but lightning called it back."

"Lightning?"

"In the north. A single lightning bolt. A message. It is the way that demons speak to each other," the woman said in a voice full of fear. "The thing looked at the lightning bolt and began backing away. Then I remember only blackness. When I awoke I thought we had both died and gone to one of the dark hells, but my husband was there and said it was just that the sun was gone."

"You saw its face?" asked Shan.

The woman's eyes were locked on the boy she had called Alta. She shook her head. "The thing had no face."

The announcement brought a low moan from Lokesh. Shan turned. The old Tibetan was holding the boy's wrist but gazing forlornly up the road, as if expecting the faceless demon to appear at any moment.

Shan bent over the boy. "Alta, did it speak to you?" he asked. "Did you know who it was? It was a man. It must have been a man."

The boy kept staring, his eye like a hard black pebble. He gave no sign of having heard Shan.

"It was in leopard shape," the dropka woman said. "If it needs a man shape," she added in a haunting tone, "it becomes a man shape."

"There is a demon from the old days," the herdsman said in his distant voice. "Hariti the child eater. Sometimes," he added, his voice fading as if he were losing all his strength, "it just gets hungry. After the first kill, it can't stop itself." Hariti was a demon of old Tibet, Shan knew, for whom monks once set aside a small portion of their daily food to slack her hunger for children.

His eyes rested on Lokesh, who stared at the boy. Lokesh laid his hand on the boy's scalp for a moment, then reached into his sack and produced a leather pouch, inside which were several smaller pouches. He opened three of the small pouches, placed a pinch of powder from each into his hand, and emptied his hand into the steaming pot. "For the pain," Lokesh said. "He is in great pain."

"What can we do?" the woman asked.

Lokesh looked forlornly at Shan, then turned slowly back to the woman. "There are words that must be spoken," he said in a cracking voice.

The announcement seemed to strike the two dropka like a physical blow. The woman groaned and bent over, holding her abdomen. The herdsman's head sank into his hands. There are words that must be spoken. Lokesh meant the rites for the transition of a soul. The boy just kept staring at Shan with his confused, fading eye.

Suddenly the woman gave a frightened gasp. Shan looked up to see her staring over his shoulder. Gendun was there, wearing his Buddha smile. The herdsman called out in surprise and knelt with his forehead on the grass at Gendun's feet.

Shan realized that neither the herder nor his wife had noticed Gendun before. They might have thought that he was an apparition or that he had been spirited there by Lokesh. The lama put his hand on the herdsman's head and offered a prayer to the compassionate Buddha, then did the same with the woman, whose eyes, though still forlorn, grew calmer. We had a real priest once, the man had said. But the Chinese took him.

Gendun knelt by the boy and held his hand. Then Lokesh sat beside him, and Gendun put his free hand on Lokesh's head in a blessing for the healer. The lama gazed at the boy in silence for a long time as Shan began to wash the wounds.

"I have no prayers for this boy's god," he said to the woman in a soft, apologetic tone.