Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"Yapchi?" Shan asked in surprise, and found himself glancing toward the saddlebag that contained the chenyi stone. "But it's more than a hundred miles to the north."

Lhandro just kept smiling, letting Nyma introduce her companions as another man emerged from the tent, holding a dongma of fresh tea. Shan studied the tents as the Tibetans exchanged greetings. They were all of the traditional yurt style, but only the heavy black felt ones were for dropka, those who lived year-round on the plains. The white tents were of canvas, of the kind used by those who lived in settlements but occasionally camped in the mountains or high plains. Lhandro and his companions were not herders. They must be rongpa, Shan realized, farmers who tended crops in the Yapchi Valley.

As bowls of frothy tea were distributed Lhandro pointed toward the white, crusted plain. "Our people have been coming here for centuries. The government gave us little boxes of Chinese salt, with pictures of pandas on them, and said we were slaves to feudalism for coming here." He shrugged. "But Chinese salt makes you weak. We said we like the taste of Lamtso salt." He squatted with Nyma and began speaking in low, confiding tones. Lhandro was not giving her good news, Shan saw. Nyma stared at the farmer in dismay, uttered something that had the cadence of a prayer, and hung her head in her hands. The nun seemed to remember something and it was her turn to speak in a grim tone to Lhandro. The rongpa's face sagged and he glanced back in alarm at Shan. She had, he knew, explained about Drakte's death, and the purba's strange warning before he died. At last, as Nyma began speaking with the others from her village, Lhandro stepped back to the fire, his face clouded with worry. The nun spoke loud enough now for Shan to hear snippets of her conversation. She was speaking of their encounter with the white bus. One of the men hurried away, apparently spreading a warning among the other tents. Howlers might come. Several of the salt breakers stopped and darted into their tents. The dropka sometimes kept things on their altars the howlers did not approve of. A woman ran to the man who sat like a guard with his staff, and he stepped inside his tent momentarily, then reappeared, standing, staff at his side like a sentry.

An adolescent girl wearing her hair in two braids, her eyes nearly as bright as her red doja-smeared cheeks, approached the ring of stones with a small drawstring bag. She had a conspicuous limp, and her left leg seemed to twist below the knee. For a moment she and Nyma exchanged huge smiles, then silently, fiercely embraced. When they finally separated, the girl dropped her bag by the fire and opened its top. Tenzin stepped over and prodded the load with an approving nod. It was dung for the fire, and the mute Tibetan held up a piece with the air of connoisseur, as if to confirm it was yak dung, the best of the fuels typically used on the high plateau. Unlike sheep or goat dung it did not need the constant work of a bellows to keep a flame. Tenzin emptied the girl's bag, silently raised his own leather sack, carried from his saddle like a treasured possession, and walked out toward the pastures. Shan watched the enigmatic man. It was as if collecting dung had become the escapee's calling in life, as if the Tibetan with the aristocratic bearing had decided that his role in society would be to keep other people's fires burning.

Shan saw that the red-cheeked girl with the braids was watching Tenzin, too. She finally turned and cast a shy, sidelong glance toward Shan, then limped toward a man in a ragged fox-fur hat who was digging with a shovel fifty yards from camp. The man was surrounded by several small piles of earth.

"I thought the salt was taken from the surface," Shan said in a perplexed tone. As soon as the girl arrived at his side, the man handed her something and she turned in excitement to run with a crooked, shambling gait to the tent where the old herder stood guard.

Lhandro followed his gaze, then gestured in the opposite direction. Shan turned to see an old woman sitting on a hill above the camp.

"Tonde," Lhandro said, referring to the sacred objects that Tibetans sometimes retrieved from the earth. They could be arrowheads or shards of pottery or carvings in the shape of ritual objects. Once a prisoner in Shan's camp had found a corroded bronze buckle he had proclaimed to have belonged to Guru Rinpoche, the ancient teacher, and built an altar for it out of cardboard.

"Holy men have been coming to this place for a thousand years. That old dropka woman, she found a piece of turquoise carved into a lotus flower which she says has great power. Yesterday she said a Chinese airplane came and she used the tonde to scare it away," he said solemnly, then shrugged. "But she's nearly blind with cataracts."

"Our Anya," Lhandro continued after a moment, nodding toward the limping girl, "Anya saw her waving her fist at the sky and said it was just a goose that had lost its way from the flock. Now the old woman says if the soldiers come close she'll call another hailstorm against them."

Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. The army patrol they had seen had been many miles from the camp. The people of the changtang always seemed to have their secret ways of knowing things.

"Don't underestimate the tonde," a voice interjected from behind them. They turned to see the woman in the rainbow-colored apron carrying a leather bucket past their tent. "Some are just pieces of pretty stone, perhaps. But others," she studied Shan a moment then stepped closer. "They say it was a tonde in the hands of a monk that destroyed that Chinese mountain."

"Destroyed a mountain?" Shan asked.

"In the far south, near Bhutan," the woman said with a nod. "One of the army mountains. Their slaves had dug it out, and soldiers had arrived with their machines." The woman meant one of the massive military installations that gulag prisoners were often forced to construct for the People's Liberation Army, carving out vast networks of tunnels inside mountains, mostly along the southern border. Some had become barracks for entire divisions of Chinese troops, some depots for equipment, others sophisticated listening and command posts.

"That mountain, they filled it with computer machines and radios and army commanders. But they didn't know one of the prisoners was an old monk with a tonde that had belonged to that mountain deity. He could talk to that deity and explain what had happened. When that deity finally understood, the mountain fought back," the woman declared with a satisfied air.

Shan gazed at her expectantly, but she spoke no more.

"There was some kind of collapse," Lhandro said, glancing uncomfortably at the woman. "The newspapers said nothing, but people talk about it everywhere. The tunnels fell in, the machines were destroyed. Some soldiers were trapped and killed, and many Tibetan workers. Afterwards the army went on alert, rounded up local citizens for questioning. But experts from Beijing came and said it was just the wrong mountain to use. The Himalayas are unstable, they said, and something inside shifted."

"The wrong mountain," the woman repeated with a knowing nod.

At his side Lokesh grunted. "What do they expect, when they have soldiers for combating mountains?"

Shan looked at his old friend. Lokesh had strangely misunderstood what a mountain combat brigade was; he had taken the words too literally. Shan opened his mouth to explain, but then realized that maybe Lokesh wasn't far from wrong. Some said Beijing's ultimate campaign in Tibet was against nature, for all the mountains it gutted, the wooded slopes it deforested, the valleys laid waste with open pit mines.

Shan pressed Lhandro and the woman in the apron for more news, asking them if they knew of Public Security or military crackdowns between Lamtso and Lhasa. They shrugged. "Only the usual," Lhandro said. "That Serenity campaign. Howlers are appearing everywhere, more often than ever, all over the district." He shrugged. "It's just more words for the same thing, like always, another way of saying it." The campaign, he meant, was just another political initiative for eroding the influence of the Buddhists.