Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"Jokar Rinpoche said it was from the time of the Sixth, when they came for him," Shan said, stepping past Nyma to the rear cells. He was still struggling to see through Jokar's words, still trying to separate those words meant for this world and those meant for another.

"Lhabzang Khan," Nyma said in a distracted tone as she stepped into one of the rear cells. She raised a finger and tentatively touched the old cedar, as if it might crumble. "Lhabzang Khan from Mongolia invaded Tibet and kidnapped the Sixth Dalai Lama. His army came through Amdo on the northern road."

It had been three hundred years earlier, Shan remembered, when the young Sixth had been kidnapped by the Mongolians, with the notion of presenting him as a gift to the Manchu emperor in Beijing. But the Mongols and the Chinese had been cheated when the Sixth had died en route to China.

"Places like Norbu, near the northern road, would have been looted," Shan said, and stepped into the second cell. He began pushing the rear wall along its edges. Nothing moved. He pressed his finger along the length of each seam in the planks. Nothing. No gap in the finely crafted construction. He stepped out of the cell and saw Nyma was doing the same in the first cell. "Someone could come," she said, nervously glancing over her shoulder.

He stepped into the cell with the nun. "Jokar," she sighed, "could just have been speaking about something he saw when meditating, a vision."

Shan nodded in disappointment. There was a little ledge made of two narrow planks built into the side of the cell, where a monk might place a butter lamp and incense burner. He ran his hands along the planks and under them. There was no lever, no switch hidden underneath, no place to hide anything. Finally he ran a finger along the top of the planks, lightly at first, then harder. As his hand approached the rear corner, the end of the back plank dropped half an inch, and the rear wall swung open.

It was a narrow space, no more than three feet wide. As they stepped inside Nyma lit a match. They had no candle, no butter lamp, no electric light. But they also had no time to linger. Nyma extended the match in one direction, then the other. The musty closet ran for twenty feet. At one end was a bench, on which cushions were stacked, at the other shelves.

They had no time to look further. Nyma blew out the match and stepped back into the cell with Shan. He pushed the opposite, raised end of the trigger plank and the rear wall groaned softly and settled back into place, the plank snapping back into position.

Outside, several dropka were turning the huge prayer wheel. An excited dropka asked a passing monk if they could keep turning it past the posted hours, in honor of the holiday. The monk nervously replied he would relay the request to the Committee.

As he walked back around the compound Shan realized there was no sign of the Committee, no sign of Khodrak or Padme. No sign of Tuan. Despite the glimmer of hope he had felt when Lin's letter had been delivered, it now seemed impossible that Tenzin and Lokesh could be there, that the presence of an important prisoner like Tenzin would not be evidenced somewhere in the gompa. There could be other places, he realized in despair, secret places the purbas did not know. The guard at the gate could be there simply because of all the Tibetans camped outside the gompa.

He leaned against one of the old wooden dormitory buildings and slid down the wall to settle onto the earth. Other Tibetans were scattered around the grounds, some saying their beads, others just basking in the sun, perhaps taking a rest from prayers in the lhakang. He watched the windows of the two large buildings. In the center of the floor above the dining hall a man in a white shirt appeared periodically, sometimes looking outside, usually standing a few minutes with his back to the glass. Two pairs of men in white shirts patrolled the grounds, talking energetically, like monks engaged in religious debate. A man in an apron sat on the steps that led to the kitchen, holding a broom upright. Shan studied him. He was younger, more athletic-looking, than the other kitchen workers. His apron was unstained and he seemed little interested in helping with the kitchen labors.

A line of monks streamed out of the rear of the first building, each carrying a small notebook. The wind caught a piece of paper extending from one of the notebooks, sending it tumbling down to the ground. Without thinking Shan rose and grabbed it for the monk. It was a piece of lined paper. Imprinted at the top were the words Feudalism is Regression, and below were handwritten notes, in Chinese. He extended the paper to the monk, who took it from him with an awkward smile.

Out of the corner of his eye Shan spotted a similar piece of paper, crushed and trodden, half-buried in the earth. Something about the peculiar way it was folded drew him to it, and as he bent to lift it from the ground his heart leapt. It was a spirit horse.

He stuffed the paper into his shirt and ventured closer to the kitchen. A worker appeared at the door with a mug of tea for the man sitting outside, who stood and shouldered the broomstick like a rifle. The Tibetan with the tea cowered, and scurried away as the man laughed and took the tea.

Shan wandered the grounds, trying to keep an eye on the central building without appearing conspicuous. In front of him a middle-aged dropka woman gave an exclamation of joy and bent to retrieve another of the paper horses where it had blown against the building. She held the horse in the wind, laughing as it fluttered like a tiny banner.

At the center window on the top, the howler peered out again. Fearing he would be noticed, Shan bent his head and joined a group of dropka, trying to will them to move slower as they passed the building. He chanced another look at the second floor, as they passed the end of the building, studying the distance to the ground. A young man might be able to lower himself from a window at the top and run away. But Lokesh would probably break a bone.

In the front courtyard preparations for the next day's festival began in earnest. A huge flag of the People's Republic had been hung on the front of the administrative building, suspended by ropes from two upper windows. The ropes were not secured inside but on a series of small hooks he had not noticed before, small iron hooks that ran along the sills of all the windows. On traditional Tibetan holidays special thangkas would have been hung from such hooks. At some large gompas special towers had been built solely for the purpose of displaying holy paintings on such occasions. But Chairman Khodrak had chosen a banner of a different kind.

"Special guests," Gyalo reported excitedly when Shan reached the purba truck. "One of the workers in the kitchen was at the archery range. An old man, a carpenter, knew him, and he learned that they have been preparing meals for two special guests who are confined in one of the rooms upstairs." Shan held out the paper horse for Nyma and the others to see, and explained how the military men in white shirts were watching over the second building.

"Who takes the meals?" Shan asked.

"The guards," the monk said in a disappointed voice. "But the guards won't go in to take out the night soil. They want Tibetans to carry it."

They joined in the preparations that afternoon, Shan with his hat pulled low, helping to raise ropes with paper streamers from the administrative building to the wall, then carrying juniper wood to the large samkangs that flanked the gate inside the wall. A loudspeaker announced that the chairman had graciously suspended the rules for the prayer wheel and furthermore the chairman had decided to allow the visiting families to take as much of the yak dung as they might carry, even to the extent of taking loads to their home hearths. Shan greeted the news with a grin, and spent most of the afternoon carrying baskets of the dung with the Tibetans, his face covered in its dark dust, the guards moving away from him as he approached. He passed the kitchen building half a dozen times before he found the guard at the steps bent in slumber, and he paused, futilely watching for movement at the upstairs corner windows. When Shan reported that the guard was napping, Gyalo, who had not dared to enter the gompa since deserting it, picked up a handful of the dung from Shan's basket and powdered his own face with it, then joined Shan with an empty basket. He wore a heavily patched vest, and a necklace of the blue beads favored by many of the dropka, with a broad-brimmed hat that kept his face in shadow.