Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Shan stared at the girl hard, trying to piece together the puzzle she had spoken. Then, he recalled Lhandro's words, how Anya had been found lying on a rock, reciting strange scriptures. And before, at the lake. She spoke the words of deities, Lhandro had said. "The oracle," he whispered. "You are the oracle."

The girl gave a thin laugh. "Not the oracle," she explained in a patient voice. "Some call me that, but an oracle is not in human form. Oracle deities just use certain humans as vehicles sometimes."

The words made Shan sad somehow. Maybe it was the hint of helplessness in Anya's voice. Maybe it was because he remembered stories from the monks about the mediums who had once resided in the large gompas near Lhasa. They had been nervous, often frail creatures, usually short-lived, because when they were taken over by the oracle they suffered terrible fits and spasms, like seizures, that could last for days and exacted a terrible toll on their bodies.

Anya studied the stars, then abruptly turned to him again. "What if the valley was locked for some reason and the eye was its key? What if we opened it without understanding why it was locked?" The words came in an urgent rush, as if she had been contemplating a long time how to ask him.

"All I know," Shan said after another silence, "is that when I begin a long journey my mind is often plagued with doubt over where it will lead, about what comes after the one thousandth step, or the ten thousandth. So I try to make myself concerned only with the next step, then the next after that, so that eventually the ten thousandth becomes just another next step. By then we will all understand the eye better." His own words surprised him. He was speaking like the Tibetans, as if the chenyi stone were alive.

The girl nodded vigorously, as if it were exactly the answer she needed. Behind her, the dog stood, then she stood, as though the dog's movement had been a signal, and she stepped with the animal into the darkness.

Shan looked after her, not sure he had understood any of their conversation. In fact, the more he learned of the people from Yapchi the more it seemed he didn't know. They seemed to have been cut off from the world for so long a wary, feral spirituality had overtaken them. But in his heart he knew they weren't that different from many other Tibetans he had met, each of who seemed comprised of many layers of mysteries and perceptions. The land itself was such a rich, vast tapestry of people and beliefs that the term Buddhism often seemed a meager label for the complex ways Tibetans viewed their world.

A low rumble rose over the blackened landscape. Shan searched for thundercaps but saw none in the clear night sky, instead spying a cluster of four red lights soaring across the heavens. Chinese fighter jets on high altitude patrol. As he watched the planes a deep sense of grief welled up within him, and stayed with him long after the planes disappeared over the horizon.

The caravan had been underway for two hours the next day when Shan, leading a packhorse, noticed a flicker of movement on the slope a hundred yards above them. He stopped and stared, finally discerning a man standing with a horse in the shadow of a large boulder.

Lhandro, behind Shan, whistled sharply, halting the caravan. "Damned Golok," he muttered.

As the figure on the slope stepped into the sunlight Shan saw that it was indeed Dremu, who seemed to search the caravan, then began waving at Shan, gesturing for him to come closer.

"Don't," Lhandro warned. "He could have friends hidden in the rocks. A man like that can't stop being a bandit."

Shan ignored the advice, but found himself watching the surrounding rocks warily as he jogged toward the Golok. "I didn't expect to see you again," he called out when he got within earshot.

"I got paid, didn't I?" Dremu snapped back. "Paid to get you through to Yapchi. Not to share tea with the likes of them," he said with a nod toward the caravan. "I go where the eye goes," he said in an oddly fierce tone.

"They're good people," Shan said.

Dremu frowned. "There's something," he said, "someone-" He glanced over his shoulder. "I don't know what to do with her," he said in a low voice, as though he did not want the rongpa to hear. He pulled his horse about and stepped behind the boulder onto a game trail that led toward the top of the low ridge. Shan turned to see Lokesh climbing the slope toward him, then slowly followed Dremu up the trail. He caught up with him just beyond the crest, where Dremu was kneeling beside a short, stunted juniper growing in the lee of a boulder.

Shan stepped past Dremu and discovered a small, frail-looking woman sitting against the rock. Perhaps fifty years of age, she wore a ragged grey wool scarf on her shoulders, over which hung several necklaces of coral and turquoise. Two small, tough hands extended from her heavily patched chuba, one clutching a mala, a rosary, the other a prayer scarf. On the ground beside her, resting on a piece of cloth, was a small copper prayer wheel.

Shan bent over the woman. "Ku su depo yinbay?" he asked in Tibetan. How are you?

"La yin, la yin," she replied with a weak smile. I'm fine.

But she wasn't fine. Her eyes had a sickly yellow cast, and Shan saw now that the hand with the khata, the prayer scarf, was pressed against her side, as if trying to touch the scarf to a pain in her abdomen. The woman gazed past Shan with a determined glint, as if trying to will him away.

"She was sitting here when I rode by," Dremu said. "Didn't even seem to notice me. She just kept staring down the trail," he said, gesturing toward the trail that climbed along the far side of the ridge, coming from the south.

Shan looked down the trail. "As if she's expecting someone." It was a remote, inhospitable landscape. Weeks could pass without a human entering the small, high valley the woman was looking into. He sensed movement behind him, and Lokesh appeared, his face creased with worry, his palm extended to touch the woman's head. He lifted her hand with the beads and placed three fingers, spread apart, inside the wrist. Once Shan had heard Lokesh bemoan how little he knew about healing despite his years with medicine lamas, but Gendun had rejoined that the most important aspect of healing was the moral quality of the healer, and in that aspect Lokesh was an adept.

After listening to the woman's pulses at both wrists Lokesh straightened and placed his fingertips on her cheek. "We must restore you," he said quietly.

The woman stared a long time at Lokesh, studying him, as if perhaps trying to recognize him, then she offered her weak smile again. Her hand with the mala reached out and touched the prayer wheel.

"Come with us," Lokesh said. "We can make you comfortable."

"Are you truly one of the old ones?" she asked, still studying Lokesh intently.

Lokesh rubbed the white stubble of whisker on his chin and looked at Shan as though uncertain how to reply. "We have horses," he said. "You could ride a horse."

The woman shielded her eyes with one hand and stared at Lokesh's face. She offered another strained smile, then settled her gaze on the trail again. It was as if she were expecting a healer, but had decided that Lokesh was not the healer she was waiting for.

"How long have you been here?" Shan asked.

The woman shrugged, without moving her gaze from the slope. "Two days I think." She slowly turned and searched Shan's face a moment as though she were about to ask him what day it was.

"Can you walk?"

"Of course," she said with a slightly impatient tone, then was seized by a fit of coughing. "I got here," she added hoarsely when the coughing had passed.

Shan sighed and exchanged a frustrated glance with Lokesh. "You should have a hat for the sun. What happened to your hat?"

"It blew away," she stated flatly and watched the trail again. Some Tibetans clung steadfastly to the old belief that once a hat blew off it was bad luck to retrieve it.