Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Three hours later Dremu waited for them at the crest of the lowest ridge in the second range, their mounts following a winding goat trail through patches of snow. The air beyond still shimmered, as Shan had seen from a distance, and as they reached the crest he discovered the reason.

"Lha gyal lo!" Lokesh called out with a boyish glee as he rode up behind Shan, pointing to the vast flat expanse of turquoise that dominated the landscape below them. "Lamtso!"

Shan stared at the distant water. It looked like a long jewel inlaid between the mountains. Lamtso was one of Tibet's holy lakes, its waters known as the home of important nagas, its shores a favorite grazing ground for the dropka herds.

From a bag tied to his horse the Golok produced a large plastic water bottle filled not with water but with amber chang, Tibetan barley beer. He did not open it, but quickly surveyed the faces of his companions. "We sleep there tonight," he announced with a gesture toward the water. "If we move fast enough," he added with a frown toward Lokesh. The Golok paused and squinted toward the horizon behind them. Shan followed his gaze toward the valley they had just traversed. A small band of horsemen was pursuing them. Or perhaps not pursuing them, he realized, for they had stopped as well and had spread out, watching behind them.

"Those dropka," Dremu said. "They are worried about you, Chinese. They think they can try to guard your back but they don't know the kind of trouble that follows. How many Tibetans are you worth, comrade?" he asked, aiming a bitter glance at Shan, then kicked his horse into a gallop and disappeared around a bend in the trail.

They caught up with him a quarter hour later, waiting at a huge outcropping of rock, a leg draped over his horse's neck, nearly half the bottle gone. As Nyma and Tenzin began to ease their mounts around him, the Golok raised a hand in warning. "Wouldn't if I were you."

"I think we can find the lake from here," Nyma declared impatiently.

Dremu pointed toward a small dust cloud on the rough track in the low rolling hills that led toward the lake. Shan reached into the drawstring sack tied to his saddle and produced his battered pair of field glasses. He focused on the cloud a moment and sighed, then handed the glasses to the nun.

"Army!" Nyma gasped.

"One truck," the Golok grunted. "No more than five or ten soldiers."

With a sudden tightening in his stomach Shan studied the approaching vehicle. It was still over two miles away, speeding not toward them but toward the lake. As he watched, however, the truck stopped. The nun cried out and bent down as though to hide behind his horse's neck. "I saw a glint of something. I think they're searching the mountains with binoculars!"

The Golok scowled at the nun. "That's what soldiers do. Could mean a hundred things. Could be escorting a birth inspector," he said, referring to the hated bureaucrats who enforced China's birth quotas. "Could be out hunting wild goats. Could be searching for something stolen from them," he added with a meaningful gaze at Shan, then reached for the glasses. "The way that truck is painted in shades of grey, could be mountain troops," he added in a tone like a curse. "I'd rather go against the damned knobs."

Shan looked back down the trail. Lokesh had lingered behind again, stopping his horse to stare down at a pattern of lichen on a rock face. Since their pilgrimage his old friend had particularly sought out self-actuated symbols of the Buddha- meaning elements of nature that had assumed the shape of a sacred object. More than once he had abandoned a piece of clothing or some food from his own drawstring sack in order to make room for a rock with lichen in the shape of a sacred emblem, or a weathered bone shaped like a ritual offering.

The Golok pointed with his bottle toward a shadow below an outcropping a hundred feet away. Nyma sighed with relief and pushed her mount toward the opening.

Shan doubted there was any land on the planet with more natural caves than Tibet. Certainly there was no land where caves were so integrated into the story of its people. There were cave hermitages, cave shrines, even entire gompas built around caves. Centuries before, Guru Rinpoche, the most revered of the ancient teaching lamas, was believed to have deposited sacred objects and scriptures in caves throughout Tibet. Tibetans still kept watch for forgotten caves that might harbor some of the Guru's sacred treasures. And many of the local protector deities that watched over valleys and mountains were said to make their homes in caves.

Although the cave was low and wide at its mouth, it quickly narrowed into a small tunnel. The horses seemed to understand what was expected of them, and as soon as their riders dismounted the animals scurried to the back of the entrance chamber. Lokesh arrived and began helping Tenzin loosen the saddle girths, speaking in comforting tones to the animals as the Golok and Nyma settled onto rocks at opposite sides of the entrance. Dremu lifted his bottle and gulped noisily, not offering it to anyone else.

"You knew about the army having the eye," Shan said to Dremu and Nyma. "Both of you knew."

"I told you," the Golok said with a wide grin that exposed several of his yellow-brown teeth. The only thing Dremu had told Shan was that he could die a hundred ways.

"Why would the army want an old stone eye?" he asked Nyma.

"Most people in the northern changtang know about the army and the eye."

"I don't. I'm not sure Gendun did."

"It was a long time ago. From an invasion," Nyma offered in a reluctant voice.

"You mean the stone was taken as some kind of trophy fifty years ago," Shan said, referring to the arrival of the People's Liberation Army.

"Not that invasion," Nyma sighed.

Shan sensed movement behind him and saw Lokesh standing at his shoulder now.

"It was when a Chinese army came to drive the Thirteenth out of Tibet in the Year of the Female Water Hare," Nyma explained. She meant the invasion early in the twentieth century. When, Shan recalled, imperial troops had marched into Lhasa, leaving a bloody swath across eastern and northern Tibet in an effort to unseat the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.

"Terrible things happened," the nun continued in a brittle voice. "Chinese soldiers under a General named Feng razed gompas and buried the monks alive, hundreds of monks. Butcher Feng, they called the General. After several years the Tibetan army finally organized a defense and pushed Feng back. There was a terrible fight at the Turquoise Bridge in Lhasa, where the Lujun Combat Division was driven into retreat by Tibetan soldiers. The Lujun were the crack troops of the Chinese army. They were humiliated and wanted to avenge themselves. But the generals ordered the Lujun home because their Empress Dowager had died and more soldiers were needed to keep order in Beijing. The troops marched up the old northern route- the Changlam, it was called- annihilating gompas, killing all monks and nuns they encountered on the way." Nyma hesitated a moment, studying a dark black cloud that had appeared on the horizon. "They were on the Changlam, two hundred miles north of Lhasa when they learned that the home of the senior officer of the troops that defeated the Lujun in Lhasa was a village only twenty miles to the west. They marched on the village and when they found the villagers treating wounded soldiers, they set up cannon and destroyed it. Only one house survived."

The nun stood, staring more intensely at the black cloud, which was rapidly approaching. Suddenly she bent and darted to the edge of the outcropping. The Golok belched toward the nun, then raised his bottle in salute.

After a moment Nyma walked back to the cave. "They haven't moved," she announced. "That's good, right?"

When no one replied, she continued her story. "That village, or the valley where the village was, was the home of the Yapchi deity. For centuries that deity had lived in a self-actuated statue, a rock shaped like a sitting Buddha. Two eyes had been painted on it in ancient times, so it could better see the world and to remind those who lived in the valley that it was always watching."