Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Someone grabbed his hand roughly and Shan suddenly realized he had been bound to Lokesh, his left wrist fastened to Lokesh's right wrist, not by manacles but by a thin piece of wire, its ends twisted tightly together so that any movement was painful.

They were prisoners again.

More than twenty villagers were lined up against the rock, all wearing expressions of defeat, hands at their sides, waiting as two soldiers checked their identity papers. Their faces told Shan the villagers had been through such checks often. Some suppressed anger, some fear. All suppressed indignation at being treated like outsiders in their own land. "Where's your papers?" Shan had heard a Tibetan boy shout out at a knob at a Public Security checkpoint just three months before. The knob had shackled the boy and in an hour's time the youth had been on the way to a year's imprisonment.

The villagers moved slowly when asked to reach inside their clothing to produce their papers, and watched not the sergeant who barked orders at them but a second soldier, behind the first, who held a semiautomatic rifle, an AK-47, barrel pointed down, hand on the trigger guard. It was impossible to predict what would happen when Public Security or the army came to such a place. More often than not any Tibetans who had their registration papers would be released. But if the patrol had a mission beyond merely sweeping for illegals, even those with perfect papers might be detained. In slow seasons some enforcement officials were known to pick up innocent Tibetans and detain them until they offered up an accusation. "Everyone is guilty of something," an interrogation officer had once declared to Shan, "we just don't have time to investigate them all."

Nyma pulled Lhandro into a sitting position. Blood trickled down his left temple, where he had obviously been struck, probably by the butt of a rifle. The nun put her arms around him, like a protecting mother, and glanced at Shan with moist eyes. She knew about such patrols, too. The villagers might be left alone, but Nyma, who had insisted she was not a real nun, could still be sentenced to prison for wearing the robe of a nun without a license from the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

"That yak, it ran like an antelope," Lokesh said quietly, toward the sky. The nearest soldier made a growling sound and raised the butt of his gun, warning Lokesh to be silent.

Shan looked at his old friend. At least they had been able to see the American with the yak, Lokesh meant. It was a prisoner's game Shan and Lokesh had often played during their years in the gulag. Fix an image in your mind and let it fill your awareness, blocking out the pain and hunger and fear. Shan remembered once coming back in a prison truck from a road construction site where several old monks had collapsed in weakness and been beaten and dragged away by the guards, too weak to do their work because their breakfast and lunch had consisted of a thin gruel made of ground corncobs and water. "I saw a snowflake land on a butterfly today," one of the battered lamas suddenly said, and earned a blow to his skull from a guard's baton for breaking the rule of silence. But by the time they had reached the prison every man in the truck had been smiling serenely, their minds filled with the image of the butterfly.

They would be taken to an army prison first, Shan suspected, then he would be separated from Lokesh. Lokesh's only crime was not having papers to travel outside Lhadrung, where he had been released from prison. But once they focused on Shan they would quickly discover the tattoo on his arm, and check it with Public Security computers. They would treat Shan as a fugitive from the gulag, and to such men a fugitive was like fresh meat thrown to starved dogs. He fought the temptation to look back toward the hills beyond the village, where another fugitive, without a tongue, hid.

The man in the chair tossed his cigarette to the ground, stood, and stepped toward the team checking papers. He impatiently ordered the soldiers to stop, then surveyed the expanding line of villagers. After he rose he strutted along the line with an imperious air, pausing to light another cigarette with an elegant gold lighter, and tapped the shoulders of several of those in line, ordering them away with a gesture of his index finger. A middle-aged woman a few feet down the line suddenly stepped forward and pointed to Shan and his three companions.

"They aren't from our village," she shouted, "just remember that, we never saw them before. We never helped them!"

Shan sighed. He didn't resent the woman's words. No doubt she had been before security squads before, had learned from the Chinese that the best way to protect herself and her family was to deflect official attention to others. But he felt sorry for the way she would feel later, and the way her neighbors would look at her.

The officer paused and stared at Shan, as if noticing him for the first time, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and blowing a stream of smoke in Shan's direction before he turned back to the line. He was finished in another minute, having dismissed all the women and children, and all the younger men. Every man remaining in the line was at least thirty years old, Shan guessed. The officer walked along the line again and dismissed two more men. They were older but short, less than five and a half feet tall, the shortest in the line.

At a snap of the officer's fingers the two soldiers who had been checking papers sprang back into action, scrutinizing the papers of the six men remaining with louder voices and rougher actions than they had used before. The officer paced impatiently as they worked, finishing his cigarette in three long inhalations, then lighting another from its butt. They were at the fifth man in the line when he lost interest and stepped inside the two lines of soldiers that still guarded the boulders. They weren't a patrol, Shan realized. They were what the purbas called a snatch team. They were looking for someone in particular.

"She said you're outsiders," the officer observed in a thin, slow voice, blowing smoke into Shan's face.

Shan and Lokesh looked at the ground. He felt strangely removed from the scene, as if he observed himself from afar. A part of him had never doubted he would one day return to the gulag. The yak ran like an antelope. He thought of the joyful American wanderer, hoping the man had escaped. It had been an impossible task, foolish to think Shan could help save their valley. Maybe in another hundred years the Tibetans could find a truly virtuous Chinese.

The sergeant held something up for the officer to see, the torn half of the Dalai Lama photograph. He flipped the card in his fingers when he caught the officer's attention. It was part of what soldiers did when they saw such photos, one of the thousand mannerisms of oppression ingrained in soldiers and knobs. Sometimes on the reverse of such photos a Tibetan flag was printed, which would guarantee arrest, and worse. This photo was blank on the reverse.

"My name," the officer announced abruptly, "is Colonel Lin of the 54th Mountain Combat Brigade." He spoke slowly, a strange anticipation in his voice. He surveyed the line of villagers before turning to Shan and his companions. "I will ask questions. You will give answers."

Shan looked into the Colonel's face, hard and gnarled as a fist. The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade had caught up with them. He fought the temptation to look toward the village again. Surely someone in the caravan had seen, surely they would all be fleeing into the mountains by now. He glanced at his companions. Nyma looked at the ground, the color gone from her face. Lokesh looked at the sky. Lhandro, still on the ground, blood trickling down his face, glared at the colonel with a mix of fear and loathing. He was looking at the Lujun Division, the soldiers who had massacred his ancestors.