Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Shan read the message twice. The embassy seemed to be disowning Winslow. If he were not given the cover of his diplomatic immunity, he would be subject to criminal charges before the knobs. Shan looked up to return the paper to Winslow, but the American seemed to have lost interest in it, and was with Jokar now, holding the lama's bucket of soil.

Shan stared at the others in the dig, as confused as ever. They all seemed to see things Shan could not understand, all except Lhandro, who paused every few moments and looked at the others with the same confusion Shan himself felt.

It made no sense. Had Jokar come to the valley to dig? Had he really surrendered himself to do this? He had come back to Yapchi to restore balance. Jokar and Lepka had come together to heal the valley, just as the derrick was about to strike oil, just as the officials were to arrive for the ceremony that marked the end of the valley.

Shan stepped back to Professor Ma. "I don't see your assistant."

"She is finishing the report, in the office," Ma said, with a nod toward the trailer complex. As if, Shan realized, whatever the lama was doing, or finding, did not belong in the report.

"So you didn't find anything important enough to stop the project?" Shan asked in a futile tone.

Ma looked at him as if Shan had told him a joke. "You mean did I find the missing link that explains evolution? Or the tomb of a Chinese emperor?" He gave a thin laugh. "No." He gazed at the open patch of soil. "Not so old really." His eyes drifted toward the small chest where he kept the bronze shard with the Chinese and Tibetan writing.

A loudspeaker in the camp started playing a martial anthem: The East is Red. A line of vehicles appeared over the low saddle of land and descended into the camp.

Suddenly Lhandro grunted loudly and called for the professor. Ma seemed reluctant to go. He looked at Shan with a strange plea in his eyes. Lhandro called out. His fingers were scratching at the soil covering what appeared to be a cylinder, perhaps twelve inches long.

"A piece of pipe," Lhandro speculated. "Sometimes they brought in bamboo to carry water."

It was indeed bamboo, Shan saw as he knelt beside the rongpa, a sturdy piece over two inches in diameter. Shan dug a finger around the end of the cylinder, then abruptly pulled his hand away and looked at Ma, who returned his steady gaze. Lhandro finished the digging and raised his find. It was not a water pipe. It was capped at both ends, and made a rattling sound when he shook it. Shan looked from Ma to Jokar, who solemnly nodded as though to confirm Shan's suspicions. Lhandro saw the exchange, and looked from face to face, searching for an answer to the mystery. His gaze settled on his father.

"He's a good man, that professor," Lepka said. "We have told him things about what has happened to you, and to Shan."

Lhandro took the cylinder to the professor, expectation in his eyes, but Ma simply placed it beside the other artifacts on the bench, without comment. Shan stood, and stepped to the wooden chest beyond the professor and opened it. Inside, beside the felt that covered the bronze shard he had seen before, was another piece of felt. He lifted the top layer. It covered a human skull, with a jagged hole in its temple.

"I don't understand," Winslow said over his shoulder. Shan looked up and followed the American's gaze to Lhandro's father, who rose slowly and sat on the ground at the edge of the dig, rocking slowly back and forth. The American picked up the bamboo canister and shook it as Shan lifted the bronze shard and studied its markings again. He ran his fingers along the Chinese characters.

Shan took the cylinder from the American. He had one of his own, probably older than this one, handed down from his great-grandfather, left for safekeeping with the lamas in Lhadrung. He twisted the top of the cylinder and it loosened, then pulled free in his hand. He dumped the contents onto the bench. Lacquered sticks of yarrow wood, yellow with age.

"Sixty-four," he said in a voice tight with emotion. "There will be sixty-four sticks." He looked up into the confused faces of those around him. "Throwing sticks, for the Taoist verses." He looked back at Lepka. Stickmen, he had said. Lepka had had nightmares about the stickmen. Shan turned to Winslow and quickly explained how the sticks were used to ritually build a chapter number by throwing them and separating them into groups of three, using the grouping remaining after the count to create solid or broken lines that in turn built one of the tetragrams which, in the tables memorized by students of the Tao referred to a specific chapter of the Tao te Ching. Like the tetragramLepka had unexpectedly drawn at the mixing ledge. "I would throw sticks like these for hours with my father when I was young," Shan said quietly, "and we would take turns reciting the Tao."

He fingered the shard again. Now that he knew what to look for, deciphering was simple. "It is Chapter Seventy," he explained, "in Tibetan and Chinese." He pointed to the characters. "The verse ends here with these characters," he said, and looked to Lepka.

"Evolved individuals wear a coarse covering with precious jade at the center," the old Tibetan recited as he stared at the pile of sticks. Jade. The leg of jade was of an ox. It had been a statue of Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage, with his ox.

Shan continued to search Lepka's face. "When the soldiers came, the Lujun troops, there weren't just Tibetans living in this valley," he said.

The old man shook his head. "My father explained the secret to me before he died," he said, looking at Lhandro with apology in his eyes. "Some Chinese had come, twenty or thirty years before the Lujun soldiers came, to build a small Taoist temple. They were scholars he said, who lived like hermits, trying to explain the similarities between the teachings of the Tao and the teachings of Buddha. To bridge the gaps between our peoples. Monks came from Rapjung sometimes and they would have debates or throw the sticks and recite verses for us. The village would come and listen."

He looked at Jokar, who offered a nod of encouragement. "They weren't any problem, they were peaceful, and built gardens for the herbs that the Rapjung monks used. They spoke of how wonderful it would be if Chinese and Tibetans could work together to study the mysteries of healing, and they themselves took lessons from the lamas." Lepka looked toward the army tents for a moment, then turned his gaze back to the freshly turned soil. "My father was away in the Tibetan army when it happened. He said those monks would probably have tried to stop the Chinese soldiers, too, that they would not have wanted bloodshed. But there was no one left from Yapchi when the soldiers left, no one to defend those Chinese monks. When people came from the villages nearby and found all the bodies, they went crazy."

He looked only at Shan now as he spoke, as if he were confessing, as if it were a story he had to tell to a Han. "My father said probably those Chinese monks were trying to bury the bodies, trying to help. But the people were too angry."

Too angry at Chinese, he meant. People came and became crazed with rage and the lust for revenge. Not soldiers, but the farmers and herders. He looked at the skull in the still-open bench. A hoe could have killed that monk, or a pick.

"They couldn't tell anyone afterwards," Lepka said forlornly, wringing his hands. His wife stood beside him, holding his shoulder tightly. "If word got out about the Chinese monks, the Chinese army would return. So our families burnt the Tao temple and covered it with a barley field." Tears streamed down the old man's face. "Afterwards, the monks from Rapjung heard. They came and said words for the Chinese, for all those who had died. They made the people reopen the grave that had been dug for the Yapchi villagers and bury whatever remains they could find of the monks with the villagers. Made the people who had killed the monks promise to send their first sons to become dobdobs at the gompa, so such a thing could not happen again." He looked at the yak-like Dzopa. Enforcers of virtue, Chemi had called the monk policemen. "My brother went," Lepka said, "but he died at Rapjung when Mao's children came."