Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"I am called Shan."

She nodded. "I heard about you even when you were in prison."

"Were you with Drakte in Lhadrung?" Shan asked.

Somo shook her head. "Usually in Lhasa. He spent much of his time there, and the lands north of here, where he was born."

"When were you last in Lhasa with him?"

"Nearly three months ago, the last time," the woman said warily. It had been more than two months ago when the eye had been brought to the hermitage, and weeks before that it had been stolen in Lhasa. "Drakte said you did things in prison to help the old lamas there. There was an old official from the Fourteenth's government you got released."

Lokesh gave one of his hoarse laughs and looked at Shan with amusement.

Somo studied the two men a moment. "You?" she asked Lokesh in disbelief.

The old man nodded. "I was going to die in that prison," he said, still grinning, "but Xiao Shan found a different path for me." Xiao Shan. Little Shan. It was Chinese, but Lokesh sometimes used the term of affection from Shan's childhood, one used traditionally by an older person addressing a younger one, as Shan's long-dead uncles once had done.

Shan stared into his bowl. "I was already dead, and they brought me back to life," he said, and gazed back at the hut where Gendun still sat with Drakte. The Bardo had to be recited for twenty-four hours after the purba's death. In their lao gai prison, when an inmate died the oldest lamas took shifts of four hours each, even while breaking rocks on their road crews, reciting the words from memory. Always the oldest, because the younger monks had had their education cut short by the Chinese and did not know all the words.

"There is no one else," Lokesh said, as if reading Shan's mind. "I only know the first hour of the ritual. We have no text to recite from."

"I heard someone else, last night," Shan said. "We can't wait a day."

"There is no one else," Lokesh repeated.

Shan looked toward the death hut in confusion. It was true. He had seen no one else. Had it been some strange echo, or Drakte trying to reach out to Gendun?

"But you can't stay," Somo protested. "Whatever Drakte was trying to warn us about-" she glanced at Shan, "it's too dangerous. That's what he was telling you last night."

As if in answer, Lokesh rose and walked into the small lhakang. Shan followed him inside. Nyma was there, praying by the altar in a low, nervous voice. It sounded almost as though she were arguing with the eye, which had been pushed to the front edge of the altar toward a small wooden box, lined with a felt cloth, which lay open on the floor below.

When the nun saw Shan her eyes brightened and she rose to stand by the altar, gazing expectantly at him. When Shan did nothing she gestured at the box.

"Are you scared to touch it?" Shan asked.

"Yes," the nun said readily. "I pushed it with a chakpa to the edge," she explained, as if that was the most she could be expected to do.

Lokesh sighed and bent to pick up the box. Shan stepped forward, glancing uncertainly at the nun, and set the jagged piece of stone in the box. Lokesh folded the felt to cover it and closed the lid.

"But we have time," Shan said. "Rinpoche will not be done until late tonight."

Lokesh stepped outside without reply, still clutching the box. The Golok was near the door, tightening the saddle on his sturdy mountain horse. He was leaving, and Shan had never understood why the man had come. But then, to Shan's dismay, the Golok stepped to a brown horse that now stood beside his own, opened its saddlebag and extended his hand toward Lokesh just as Tenzin and one of the herders rounded the corner of the farthest hut, leading more horses.

"We should have left at dawn," the Golok said with an impatient gesture for Lokesh to hand him the box. "Didn't you listen? The killer is out there, he's coming for the stone, that purba said so. And you wait around like old women."

Shan looked pleadingly at Lokesh as the Golok set the box in the open saddlebag.

"I do not understand much of this," his old friend said with a despairing shrug. "But I do understand we must go."

"But Gendun," Shan protested. "He must come with us."

Lokesh shook his head sadly. "What he must do now is stay with Drakte. He will go to the durtro, then if the deities permit, he will join us." He turned and pulled something from the saddle of one of the horses, extending it to Shan. It was a broad-rimmed felt hat, Shan's traveling hat.

"I am staying with Drakte also," Somo announced, her tone strangely defiant. "I will see that your lama is safe. The herders from that camp above are making piles of yak dung in a ring around the hermitage. Tonight they will surround us with fires."

As the dropka extended the reins of the brown horse to Shan, the Golok stepped away from his own horse and, arms crossed over his chest, fixed them with a pointed stare as if they had forgotten something. "I was going to be paid," he said sourly. "A guide has to be paid. That boy who died said I would be paid. So far I haven't received a fen."

Shan stared at the man with a sinking feeling. The Golok had finally explained why he had come to the hermitage.

"I have nothing," Nyma said in alarm. "Drakte had nothing, nothing but an old account book and a shepherd's sling." They had found the battered ledger in a pouch hanging from his belt, with entries that had the appearance of accounting reports. "It must mean those at your destination will-"

"I told that Drakte," interrupted the Golok. "I don't face patrols unless there's profit."

Somo reached into her small belt pouch and produced an object wrapped in felt, extended it toward the Golok. "Here," she said in a reluctant voice. She shook the cover away to reveal a finely worked silver bracelet set with lapis. "Drakte gave this to me last month," she added. Her gaze shifted to Nyma, then Shan. "He would want your journey to continue. That was why…" She looked back toward the death hut without finishing the sentence.

The Golok grabbed the bracelet and studied it with a frown. "Hard to convert this to cash without going to a damned city," he complained, even as he stuffed the bracelet into his pocket. "I'm not going to a city again for a long time."

The purba runner reached into her pouch again and produced a complicated pocketknife with many blades, even a spoon folded into one side. "I got this for Drakte," she said in a tight voice and extended the knife toward the man.

The Golok snatched the knife and the reins of his horse almost in one motion.

"We don't even know your name," Shan ventured in a hesitant voice. He saw that something else had appeared in Somo's hand, out of her pocket: a small turquoise stone which she began kneading with her fingers. Something else given her by Drakte, Shan suspected, something she would not part with.

"Dremu." The Golok fixed Shan with another frown. "My mother called me Dremu," he said, as if he had been called many names in his life. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a worried glance. Dremu was the name of the great brown bear that had once freely roamed the Tibetan ranges. Hunted to near extinction by the Chinese, it was a symbol in Tibetan folklore of one who harms himself through excessive greed, for the animal would tear into the burrows of its main prey, marmots, pulling out stunned animals and piling them behind it until the burrow was destroyed. More often than not, the marmots would recover their senses and flee while the bear still dug, leaving it still hungry and angrier than ever. Sometimes the Tibetans used the term for the Chinese.

As Tenzin and Nyma led their horses toward the trail, Shan poured a bowl of tea and stepped inside the hut where Gendun sat with the dead man. He stood for a moment in silence until the lama looked up and acknowledged him with a small nod. After another minute's recitation, Gendun rose and stepped back from the body.