Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"You are looking for someone?" Shan asked.

Winslow nodded. "An American woman. Missing for several weeks. Presumed dead."

"We saw no Americans," Lhandro interjected from Shan's side. The rongpa cast a glance of warning at Shan. "We thank you for your help," he added hurriedly. "We will watch for her." Lhandro pressed Shan's arm, as though to push him way.

The American paused and studied the two men. "Your route is to the north," he said with a speculative look in that direction. "But you turned onto the road to the east."

Lhandro stepped away and gestured for Shan to follow. "Thank you," the Tibetan said again.

Winslow grinned, held up his hands as though in surrender and backed away. He climbed into the truck and the nervous little man behind the wheel put it into gear and sped down the road, away from the village and toward the northern highway that would take them to Lhasa.

As Shan watched the truck an animal brushed his knees, and he looked down. The ram with the red-spotted pouch was at his side, looking up at him with frightened eyes.

Every creature in the caravan, from the silent Tenzin to Anya to the sheep and dogs seemed to sense an urgency that afternoon. They moved at a half-walk, half-trot, not pausing for food or drink. After an hour Lhandro stopped and unloaded one of the horses, redistributing its cargo among the other four horses as he nervously watched the road. His eyes heavy with worry, he gave the horse to one of the Yapchi men, who trotted away to scout ahead, and in the adjacent hills. Dremu had not appeared since their encounter with the army.

When they had covered the ten miles of road two hours of daylight remained. Lhandro pushed them on, up the trail to the north until it curved, blocking the road from view. As the others rested Shan and Lhandro studied the steep, rough track that led north, looking for any sign of soldiers. Lin sent the man on the horse into the hills ahead. Everything seemed to have changed since the village. Colonel Lin, from whom the eye of Yapchi had been stolen, now knew about a band of travelers from Yapchi. He knew Lokesh was from a lao gai camp. He had lost them as prisoners only because of the American's intervention. But Lin would not give up, and his soldiers were trained for setting traps in the rough mountain terrain. Such men could easily elude the caravan scout, or trick him into thinking the path was safe.

"The colonel doesn't know our path," Shan said to Lhandro. "And he doesn't know about the sheep." In the hours on the road Lhandro had seemed to transform from the spirited, energetic rongpa to a man carrying a heavy burden of fear. The colonel had taken his papers and kept them, had discovered he was from Yapchi. He had felt Lin's manacles and for a few terrible minutes Lhandro had no doubt believed that he would spend his remaining years in a Chinese prison, losing everything, even, or perhaps especially, losing the chenyi stone.

"I didn't have to bring Anya on the caravan," the farmer said. "It should have just been me and the older men. And we shouldn't have involved Nyma. She wants to be a nun so bad… She needs to be anun… This is not a nun's work. Some of us would gladly…"

"Somehow," Shan said, "I don't think Anya or Nyma would have let you deny them the opportunity."

Lhandro offered a weak smile, then whistled sharply and began moving up the track with long, determined strides. At first only the dogs followed him, but he did not call out, he did not turn, he did not gesture for the others. The largest of the mastiffs paused when Lhandro had gone a hundred feet, then turned and barked once. The sheep raised their weary heads and began to follow. Anya stood and extended her hand to Lokesh. The two walked by the sheep, hand in hand, and Anya began to sing one of her songs. Slowly, groaning as they lifted their exhausted limbs, the others of the caravan silently rose and followed.

After a mile Lhandro gestured Shan to his side and pointed up the trail. Shan raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw their scout, two hundred yards away, unmounted, facing them with his hands raised above his waist, open, as if in an expression of chagrin. Lhandro and Shan jogged toward the man.

As they approached the scout disappeared behind a large outcropping. Lhandro halted and led Shan off the trail, around the backside of the outcropping. They edged around the rock to see the back of a large man in a bright red nylon coat and black cap sitting before a tiny metal frame that hissed and produced a small blue flame. Their scout squatted beside the man, drinking from a steaming metal cup. As Shan ventured forward the man in the red coat turned.

"Only have two cups in my kitchen," Winslow declared, extending a second mug toward Shan. "You're welcome to share. No butter, no salt. Just good Chinese green." Shan accepted the mug, savoring the aroma of the green leaves for a moment. He saw the others staring at him, then self-consciously extended the mug to Lhandro. He blinked for a second, something blurred in his mind's eye, and he saw his mother, sitting with him, patiently watching a steaming porcelain pot as green leaves infused the water. The pot had a picture of a boat on a river by willow trees. It was the way his memory sometimes worked now, after the knobs had used electricity and chemicals on him. His early years lay down a long dark corridor, where doors sometimes, but rarely, were unlatched by a random, unexpected event. Not events as such, but smells, or other sensations, even the inflection in someone's voice.

"Wasn't hard to figure," he heard Winslow saying. "You were going north from the lake and suddenly veered east, to the road. If you had been intending all along to go east you would have taken the road from the lake to the east. So you were blocked unexpectedly from going further north. The pass you intended to take got blocked by a snow avalanche or rock slide, I figure. If you were on the road it was just to get to the next pass." He gestured toward the high northern peaks. "Up there. The Tangula Mountains they call them, a spur from the Kunlun."

"I don't understand," Shan said.

"My government will pay a transportation fee if you want," Winslow said, and grinned as he saw Shan's confusion. "I'm going with you."

Lhandro stared woodenly at the American, then quietly asked the scout to make sure the caravan kept moving.

"You don't know where we're going," Shan pointed out.

"Sure I do. North. Same direction I'm going."

"To look for the missing woman," Shan said.

"They say she's dead," Winslow said, and left the words hanging like an unfinished sentence.

The announcement silenced Shan and his friends. Shan took a step back, as though to better see the American. He glanced at Lhandro, who shrugged, as if to say he knew nothing of dead Americans.

"He saved us from that colonel," Lhandro observed to Shan after a long silence.

"With a piece of paper," Shan recalled. "Could I see it again?"

The American stared at Shan coolly for a moment, unzipped the breast pocket of his nylon coat and produced the passport. Shan studied the document, not knowing what he was looking for. Benjamin Shane Winslow, it said, with a home address in the state of Oklahoma. It had over twenty entry stamps for the People's Republic of China, and many more for countries in South America and Africa.

Winslow took the mug, now empty, from Lhandro and refilled it from a pot on his tiny stove. "Just how would you go about identifying a fake diplomatic passport, tangzhou?"

Tangzhou. It meant comrade. It was the American's way of taunting Shan, he suspected, or perhaps any Chinese he met.

Shan handed the passport back to the American. "I've met several diplomats in my life, Mr. Winslow. None were remotely like you. And my name is Shan, not comrade."