Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Shan looked at Nyma, then the sturdy farmer. "You planned this with the purbas? The salt caravan?"

Lhandro smiled. "My village has always done a caravan to Lamtso, every spring. The purbas learned about it," he said with a glance toward Nyma. "They said it would be a way of making you and the stone inconspicuous." He stepped away to help sew the salt bags shut.

Nyma began to move among the other tents, speaking in gentle, reverent tones, straightening prayer flags that had been strung from tent lines. She sat by the old dropka woman with cataracts and began reciting her beads. Dremu stared warily at the people walking about the camp, who either refused to acknowledge him or glared at him with obvious resentment. He cursed, then stepped toward his horse. Shan assumed the Golok was going to groom the animal, but suddenly he was mounted. He ran his horse out of camp and disappeared into the hills. The man had been paid already. Shan doubted they would see Dremu again.

Shan and Lokesh wandered about the camp, Shan watching for any sign of a man with a fish, or anything to explain the monk's cryptic warning. They lingered by a fire where a woman was frying sweet dough for the dropka children until Lokesh decided he should join the search for tonde. His old friend was always seeking the little treasures and, like many older dropka they had met, he tried to keep nine in his possession at any one time, a number that was said to bring powerful luck.

Shan watched as Lokesh walked toward the slope where the man in the fox hat dug, then he circled behind the tents, intending to approach the back of the tent where the old man stood guard with his staff.

But Tenzin stood at the water's edge, looking forlornly across Lamtso, his new beads dangling from his fingers. Shan paused, stepped to his side, and sat on a boulder. The grief the mute Tibetan had shown in Drakte's death hut seemed to have returned to his face.

"When I was in prison," Shan said after a long silence, "there was a man in my barracks for hitting a Public Security officer. His spirit was so troubled he could barely speak and everyone feared he would take his own life. Finally the lamas were able to get him to speak about the burden he carried inside. He confessed that he had killed a Chinese whom he had caught stealing sheep. The Chinese had beaten his wife unconscious and drawn a pistol on the man. No one, not even his wife, knew that they had struggled and that the Chinese had been killed. He had hidden the body and it was later that he hit the knob, when the man refused to give a ride to his injured wife."

The only sign that Tenzin heard him was a lowering of his gaze to the ground by Shan's feet.

"A lama gave the man a pebble and had him focus on it." Shan lifted a large pebble in his palm. "He told the man to push his guilt into it. Then he had the man throw the pebble into a river. The man was healed after that."

Tenzin looked at the stone, fixed Shan with a brittle gaze, then stepped several feet away to retrieve a heavy rock nearly a foot in diameter. He paused, looked pointedly at Shan, threw the rock into the water, and turned back to stare at him.

Shan returned the stare for a moment. Shaken, he turned away. What had it been, to cause such anguish? Something had been pulling at his memory. The dropka woman said that Tenzin had been away the night before Drakte died. The night Chao had been murdered. He looked at the ripples where the heavy rock had fallen. A pebble had been enough for a single killing.

Shan backed away from Tenzin and turned toward the yurt. The old herder squinted at him as he approached the entrance, then raised the staff threateningly.

"The girl brought you a tonde," Shan said tentatively.

"Not me. Go away. This is my family's tent. People are sleeping."

"You guard them when they sleep?"

From the corner of his eye Shan saw several more figures approaching in haste.

"There is fresh tea!" the woman in the bright apron called from a hundred feet away, gesturing Shan toward her fire. But Shan quickly put his hand on the man's staff to deflect it and stepped inside.

An old woman with no teeth, the sole occupant of the tent, groaned as he appeared. "No!" she cried and rose, lowering the prayer wheel she had been spinning. "Chinese!"

Shan sensed figures moving behind him. He tensed, expecting to be dragged away, until a soft voice called out from the shadows at the back of the tent. "He is a friend of the lamas," a woman said, and the man behind Shan halted, lowering his raised staff.

"Nyma?" Shan asked, stepping toward the shadows, where two felt blankets had been strung to create dressing chambers inside the tent. A hand appeared between the blankets, pushing one aside, and Shan bent to enter the dark, cramped space.

Nyma sat in the dim light of a single butter lamp beside a pallet, holding the hand of a woman of perhaps thirty years. The woman's face was beaded with sweat, her breathing labored. She seemed to be trying to smile through a mask of pain.

"Lokesh," Shan said, "he studied with medicine lamas."

"She fell from a ledge three days ago, running from a patrol in the night. I think she broke ribs," Nyma said.

"Then she needs a doctor," Shan said urgently. Arranged along the pallet was a dirt-encrusted bell and several dirty beads.

"No doctor!" shouted the old woman, now standing over them, her hands holding back the blankets.

"Some herders from the east of here rode in last week and told everyone to beware of new doctors, to hide the sick, and not speak of any Tibetan doctors to any Chinese." Nyma raised her eyebrows toward Shan as though to express her frustration. "I don't know why. No one really does."

"But you can't hide someone injured so badly," Shan said. "What if her organs are bleeding? A hospital…"

"We don't need those doctors. They aren't real," the woman said, then bent and wrapped the injured woman's fingers around the little bell.

The woman on the pallet stared up at Shan, pain and confusion in her eyes. Shan sighed. "Lokesh knows medicine teas," he said and turned away, striding past the old woman and four grim-faced herders.

He found his old friend near a freshly turned pile of earth, explained about the injured woman, and watched as Lokesh rose and hurried to the tent. Then Shan turned and studied a grassy hill half a mile away. Ten minutes later he stood at the five-foot-high cairn Drakte had made with the children. Shan walked around the stack of rocks several times, then sat before it. Drakte had been on urgent business, in the middle of making final arrangements for the chenyi stone, but he had taken the time to build a cairn for the local deities. And he had planned to return to the salt camp with Shan and the stone. Shan stood and studied the wide, flat stone that covered the top. He lifted it and lowered it to the ground. The narrow openings between the stones underneath were so dark he almost missed the piece of brown yarn wedged between two of them. He pulled on the yarn and a small felt pouch rose out of the shadows. Inside was a mala, a rosary of exquisite ivory beads carved in the shapes of animal heads. It was a valuable antique worthy of a museum. Why, he wondered, as he slipped the rosary back into the pouch, would Drakte have wanted it hidden? Because it was too dangerous to carry the week between his visits to the camp? Or because he had meant for someone else to retrieve it? Shan pocketed the pouch.

"This is how Chinese help the deities?" a flat voice called out from behind him.

Shan slowly turned to see Dremu, sitting on his grey horse thirty feet down the slope, on the side opposite the camp. There was no surprise on the Golok's face, only a sinister amusement. He lifted a leg and rested it on his horse's neck.

Shan silently replaced the capstone. "I want to ask you something. Where did you meet Drakte? Where did he hire you?" he asked.