Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"They were going to make a miracle," Tenzin said in an awed voice. "It was what Lokesh said in Larkin's cave."

Shan studied the contours of the valley. It was indeed being made again. When the lake reached the northern end of the camp the road would become its outlet and the road itself would be washed out, converted to a stream, cutting the valley off from any access by trucks or tanks, or any other vehicle. At its southern end the water would reach to a few hundred yards of the village ruins. It had already turned the small knoll with the burial mound into a little island. At the rapid rate the water was accumulating, in a few more hours it would entirely cover the mound and reach the digging, the site of the Taoist temple. The wound that had lain open for a century would at last be sealed. Wash it, bind it, bind the valley, the oracle had said with their beloved Anya's tongue.

Shan discovered that Tenzin had folded his legs under him and was sitting with his head cocked, mouth half open, his eyes full of wonder.

There were others gripped by the same spell farther down the slope, sitting on a ledge overlooking the oil camp. Shan found Jenkins there, with Larkin and a dozen others who had the look of venture managers, including two wearing the suits of the visiting dignitaries. Tibetans, too, slowly drifted toward the ledge, all looking at the camp with the same confused expression.

When Melissa Larkin saw him she stood and approached him on unsteady legs. Shan sat and waited for her.

"They said you had gone to look for Winslow, and Jokar," Larkin said. "I was worried. Cowboy had such a strange look in his eyes last night. Like he was being pulled apart, or pulled away."

"I found him," Shan said quietly. "He had run out of his pills. He's not coming back. There was a place he had to go to with Jokar."

Somehow Larkin understood. Her legs gave way and she sat heavily beside him. Her hand went to her mouth and she bit a knuckle. Tears welled in her eyes. Her head sagged and she buried it in her arm, braced against her knees.

"He wanted you to know, only you," Shan said when she finally looked

Larkin smiled through her tears. "I thought he was just some lunatic bureaucrat when I first heard about him. Then when we met, it was…" Her voice drifted off and she stared at the birthing lake. "There was this connection between us. That night up in the mixing ledge, he said that maybe we had known each other in another incarnation. I thought he was joking. But lately I don't know what's a joke and what is…" She looked away a moment and rubbed her tears away on her sleeve. "He told me about his wife. I told him how my fiance had died in an avalanche. I warned him, I didn't think I could ever again…" Tears streamed down her cheeks. Jenkins, sitting thirty feet away, stared at her absently. "He came to collect my body but in the end… because of me," she sobbed.

"No," Shan said. "It was where he was meant to be," he added, and told her of Winslow's note. This is where I belong, this time, the American up. had said. "He would have come," Shan ventured, "to see you at that sacred lake."

Larkin nodded, gave a forlorn smile, then stared back at the lake. "Nothing happened the way I expected," she said toward the water. "Even this," she said, nodding toward the water. "We never expected so much water."

"Once, when I was young, I had a teacher," a frail voice said.

They turned to see Lepka standing close, gazing at them with sad, moist eyes. "He said there were places on earth where souls are magnified, ripening places he called them, because souls ripen faster there. He said when many people gather in such places it feeds the power of the ripening place, so that great events can happen, and the lives of many people get settled. He said this was such a place, and it was why the lamas never called it Yapchi Mountain, why they had their own name for it, an old name that has been lost. No one has used it for many years."

Lepka looked back toward the snowcapped peak, then squatted by them, lowering his voice. "But my father knew it. It was a long name in an old lama's dialect that meant the Place Where the Spine of the Earth Protrudes. My father just called it Bone Mountain," he whispered. "Sometimes when old lamas finished ripening," he added, "that's where they would go to sleep."

Shan returned Lepka's sad smile, and invited him to sit beside them, watching the valley as it changed before their eyes. "I think that Winslow," Lepka said to the American woman, "he and Jokar Rinpoche are in some bayal, laughing together right now." Larkin put her hand in the old man's, and squeezed it tight.

"What will you do?" Shan asked the American woman.

Larkin looked out over the water. "I was going to try to get back to him, to Cowboy. I guess I'll just go home. Zhu doesn't really want me dead, just out of Tibet." She turned and gazed back at the top of the mountain for a long while, squeezing Lepka's hand the whole time.

"I never would have believed it if I hadn't been here," a deep voice said over their shoulders after several minutes. Jenkins had risen and was standing behind them, staring at the lost derrick. "It's finished. Lost nearly all the heavy equipment when the levee broke. Lucky to get the trailers out in time." It seemed he had decided he owed Shan a report. "I had a furious call from the States, they wanted to know what happened." He gazed at Shan as if about to ask him what had happened, then shrugged. "I said it was just unstable geology."

"No," another voice interjected. Somo had appeared, her feet and pant legs streaked with mud, but her face lit with a serene expression. "I think it is the opposite of that."

Strangely, they all seemed to understand. Jenkins gave a sound like a snort and offered a melancholy smile to the purba. She was suggesting it was the way the geology was supposed to be, the way the mountain could be expected to act once it understood what the humans were trying to do to it.

"It's a loss, the entire damned project," Jenkins said. "All that mud, all that water. Hell, we hadn't even hit the oil yet. Economics will never support a project here now," he said with an inquiring glance at Larkin. "Jesus," he added, staring over his ruined work. "Jesus." He looked back at Shan. "The Tibetans from that village say that deity spoke. They say they are sorry it was so inconvenient for us, but he just spoke." Jenkins shook his head. "It's not my job to speak with deities," he added wearily. "I keep hearing that drum in my head. I'm tired of taking things out of the earth. I'm going home. But first I have to write a report." He shook his head and sighed. "I'll call it an act of god."

"There was someone looking for you, Shan," Larkin suddenly remembered. "I think all those Tibetans who were fleeing, or going to that meadow. I think they just came here when the news spread." She pointed toward the opposite slope, where a makeshift camp of Tibetans had appeared.

Shan stood on uncertain legs and began jogging down the slope. He found Lokesh sitting at the shore of the rising lake, washing stones. "Touch the water," he said excitedly. "It is different water." It was his tonde. Lokesh was washing his charm stones in the water.

Shan bent to the water and touched it, cupped it in his hands and washed his face. The liquid seemed to tingle his skin somehow. Perhaps there was carbonation in the water, from its being pushed deep into the rock. "Already people are saying these waters have great powers," Lokesh added.

Shan handed his friend the staff he had brought from the cave. The old Tibetan stared at it, then slowly, as if it might be painful to touch, he laid his fingertips on it, the way he might take a pulse. "I hope they had time to settle in," his old friend whispered, and Shan saw the sudden sadness in his eyes.