Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"Three days," the girl said as she stepped closer to Shan. "The medicine lama said stay with Lin. He said it was how we needed to be," she added in a low tone. She seemed to search Shan's face for something, then Somo's, until, with an expression of doubt, she gazed back toward the brilliant white top of the mountain, as if something was happening she didn't understand.

Shan remembered the joyful expression on the girl's face as she had played with Lin, and the deep laugh he had heard. It could only have been from Lin. It was how Jokar had said they should be. "But they were arrested. Jokar and the others. Where were they taken?"

"Arrested?" Anya cried. "No. They said they would be back soon. They just went to Yapchi," Anya said. "They talked all night about it, first. Once when I woke up, Lepka-" she looked over Shan's shoulder at Lhandro, who had just appeared, and stopped.

"What?" Lhandro demanded. "What was my father doing?"

Anya's gaze became apologetic. "He was crying."

Lhandro looked at Lin, accusation filling his eyes. Lin glared back, his fingers curling, as though he were bracing for a fight.

"No- it was about the valley healing. I didn't understand all of it. It was about old things, when he and Jokar were boys."

"The valley healing?" Somo said. "You mean the people of Yapchi healing."

Anya shook her head slowly. "It was what they said," she explained, and looked at Shan. "The valley. I think they meant our deity. After they spoke, they seemed to have an idea where the deity went." She shrugged. "The next morning they left at dawn." The girl searched Lhandro's eyes as though for an answer. "Stickmen. Jokar said the stickmen would need a blessing."

"Medicine," Lhandro said to Shan, glancing with unmasked anger at Lin. "They must have gone for that medicine. The herbs Lokesh sought."

But Lin looked like he was no longer in need of herbs. He had clearly recovered from his concussion. The splint was off his wrist, which was now wrapped in a strip of cloth.

They stood in silence. Lin glanced at Shan, stepped to the apple and gave it a fierce kick that sent it over the edge of the cliff.

"They have your letter," Shan said to the colonel. "They know you're still alive."

"I will rejoin my men," Lin shot back, as if someone were arguing he would not, then he walked away and sat on a rock beyond the gnarled tree.

Anya looked after him, worry in her eyes. "He had a sister, much younger, but she died. The Red Guard. Then all those years in the army," she said. "Once he spent a year living inside a mountain near India." She looked at Shan and Nyma. "He never learned to honor his inner deity. I think," she said in a sorrowful, but insistent tone, "he never even learned how to find it." She somehow made it sound as though it was why he had been hit by the rocks.

"You must take him below," Somo said in a tight voice. "He is too dangerous. He will cause us great harm if he stays."

Anya looked out over the plain. Shan wasn't sure she had heard.

"My grandfather, before he died, used to take me to the little orchard he had on the slopes." The girl's voice was barely discernible above the wind. "He showed me how some trees grew stunted and bore no fruit when they were not sheltered from the cold. He made little rock shelters for most of them but he always kept one or two without shelter, to remind himself," she said. "Those trees that had to use all their life force to survive the cold never bore fruit."

"Take him down," Nyma said in an insistent voice. She saw moisture in the girl's eyes and she put an arm around Anya, pressing the girl's head against her shoulder. "There is that old chorten on the slope below Chemi's village. We will meet you there at midday tomorrow. It will give us time to go together to Yapchi afterwards. Some of the villagers may have gone back to the little canyon. Maybe we can find what happened to Lepka and Jokar. Maybe if we just speak to those Chinese from our hearts, they will understand," she added, but her voice was full of doubt.

Anya bit her lower lip as she studied Nyma's cool expression.

"They took Jokar Rinpoche," Nyma said, as if to be sure Anya understood.

The girl's gaze drifted toward the ground and she gave a slow absent nod.

As the others continued packing in the hidden chambers Shan found a rock near Lin and sat, watching a hawk soar below them. A wave of helplessness surged through him, leaving him in a sad, hollow place, and he found he could not speak for several minutes.

"When I was very young," Shan said at last, "whenever it snowed, a long line of women with brooms of rushes would march down the street, sweeping it into the gutters. It was never much snow, just a powder, and they would usually come before dawn, when I was lying in bed between my mother and father. We would always wake up and listen, for it was a beautiful sound. The swishing of the brooms was like a waterfall, my mother said, and it made her feel like we were in the mountains. My father called it the passing of the caterpillar, because that was how the line of sweepers looked, a long grey creature with many legs, churning up powder as it walked. Sometimes they sang- not political songs, just simple children's songs about snowflakes and the wind. Sometimes my mother would sing along in the dark, just a whisper. Now I have dreams sometimes, but it's only the sounds, no images, because it was always dark when this happened. I just hear the caterpillar, and it makes me feel peaceful. Sometimes weeks have gone by and the only time I am peaceful, is in those dreams."

Lin looked at him with big round eyes and gave a silent nod, as if they had been conversing about sweeper women all along. They sat in silence again. Shan pointed out a line of white birds flying in the distance. Lin kept his eyes on them until they were lost in a cloud.

"She asked me not to shoot any more birds," Lin said in a thin voice and searched Shan's face as if for an explanation.

Shan just nodded.

The colonel turned back to the cloud as if he could still follow the birds. "You can see a long way in Tibet."

Shan nodded again. "All the way back around, a lama told me once."

Lin searched his face again.

"He meant sometimes you see yourself, and your past, differently, after spending time here."

Lin clenched his jaw. "She's never been to a school, you know. Not one day of her life. There are tests she could take. I could get her in a good school. A girl like that, she could have a future." He looked back at Shan. "What kind of life would she have here? These people have been displaced," he added in an uncertain voice, as if he knew nothing of how it had happened, and looked into his hands. "I could get her leg looked at by real doctors."

"Your soldiers," Shan said. "They took Jokar. The medicine lama."

"No," Lin said as if to correct Shan. "Just an old man. He didn't hurt anyone."

Shan looked at him in confusion. It almost sounded as though Lin were defending the medicine lama. "I think it was because those howlers took the abbot of Sangchi."

Lin looked back toward the horizon. "It isn't proper work for soldiers, all this. Our job is guarding the frontiers." He looked at the old tree. "The abbot, he shouldn't have taken that file. I only wanted the file."

"Was it really so important?" Shan asked, watching Lin closely, remembering how the purbas had refused to discuss it.

Lin cut his eyes at Shan and looked away. "Military secrets," he muttered.

"Then why isn't it Public Security that's after him? I think maybe Public Security doesn't know about a stolen file. I think it was about the 54th Brigade," Shan suggested. "Maybe the honor of the 54th."

"Classified," Lin muttered. "Four of my soldiers have died for that secret."

"It was the Bureau of Religious Affairs who took Tenzin," Shan declared, watching Lin for a reaction. "And a monk named Khodrak. Khodrak saw Tenzin in Lhasa, before the stone was taken. He saw him with a former monk named Drakte. I think he saw Drakte again last month, near here, and he started looking for Tenzin."