Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Lokesh had stopped his mantra. His face was as excited as the boy's, tears streaming down his cheeks. "I recognize this place now," he whispered in a very still voice. "We would come here in summers. Pitched a white tent and stayed many days, a week sometimes. Chigu Rinpoche said the larks sang the herbs here."

Sing the herbs. An image of larks offering lullabies to young plants flashed through Shan's mind.

"It's true," a child's voice said. But Shan turned to see that it was the woman speaking, with the tone of a young girl. "It's all true, isn't it?" she said to Lokesh, and a tear rolled down her cheek. "Remember this," she added solemnly to the boy and hugged him. "Remember that it was spoken that this was one of the places where they came in the old days, that today you saw one of them come."

Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty or ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a single true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look.

It was one of those rare true things they were glimpsing now. An ageless medicine lama gathering his herbs, a medicine lama who shouldn't exist, in a field that had been forgotten for half a century, rising up like a ghost to confirm that once there had been wise, joyful old men who gathered plants so they could translate the magic of the earth to its people.

They watched, the sound of the whispered mantras becoming almost indistinguishable from the low sound of the wind on the rocks. The low, bent shape in the shadows did not move, and Shan realized it might be a helper, a protector for the old one, crouching, on guard against the world outside. The medicine lama wandered among the flowering plants, stooping sometimes, sometimes rising with a sprig and looking skyward, as if consulting with the air deities about his find.

Then suddenly, with a low moan, as if struggling mightily to contain himself, the boy burst up with his hands in the air. "Lha gyal lo! Lha gyal lo!" he shouted with joy, just twice before his mother pulled him backwards and clamped a hand over his mouth.

But the sound had carried over the meadow, echoing off the rock face, and the lama and the hulking shape darted toward the deeper shadows. The old man halted for an instant, peering toward the rocks where they sat. Then, like a deer at the edge of a wood, he merged into the shadows and was gone.

They waited a quarter hour for the ghost lama to return, exchanging uncertain glances, as if none were sure now of exactly what they had seen. Then the herders rose and silently filed away from the rock, following one of the game trails that led southward down the wide ridge.

It was impossible, Shan kept telling himself as they slowly walked back to Rapjung. The medicine lamas had all died. The soldiers had cleared out the surrounding hills years earlier. With all the patrols, all the pacification campaigns, it did not seem possible even one could have survived. Lokesh offered no suggestion, no theory of how now, after decades, one of the old lamas could appear in the hills. He just followed Shan, lost in a strange reverie, or perhaps in his memories of Rapjung as it had existed fifty years earlier. Several paces behind Lokesh, came the American, also silent, seemingly numbed by what he had seen.

Again and again Shan replayed the scene in his mind. It wasn't that a lama had survived all these years in the mountains, he realized; the dropka had come because of something new, because they had heard of a miracle. Someone else had seen a ghost lama, he suddenly remembered. The herders by the hermitage the night Drakte had died. One of the old lamas had arrived, had returned. From where? Why? And why now, when the eye was on its journey, when Drakte had died and the army was scouring the land, when a dobdob, protector of the faith, was attacking devout Buddhists, when an American had gone missing?

Shan had no answers. He had only foreboding. Although he knew little, he knew enough to be frightened.

No one asked where they had been when they arrived at the camp. Several of those who had completed the kora had just returned themselves, having meditated at the hermit's cave or the drup-chu shrine. As the Yapchi men went to check on the sheep, Nyma sought Shan out.

"It happened again," the nun said. "The poor girl." Shan looked up from the sheep whose pack he was tightening. "She just fell over on the trail and began shaking, and beating the earth with her hands and feet."

"Anya?" Shan asked, realizing he had seen the girl lying under a blanket by the fire.

"Nothing happened. No words. Sometimes it's like that," Nyma murmured.

The words chilled Shan. She was talking about the oracle.

"I told that monk, hoping he could help," Nyma continued. "But he seemed angry at my words. I think his head is still hurt from that attack."

Shan followed the nun's gaze toward Padme, who sat resting against the ruins of the wall, at a place apart, writing in his small notepad.

They ate in silence and drank tea as the sun set, the company in quiet contemplation after a day on the kora.

Lokesh did not speak until he spread his blanket near Shan to sleep.

"It is a good sign, a wonderful sign, for a medicine lama to appear in the herb meadow," the old Tibetan said, in a tone that said he was still not certain the man had been flesh and blood. "And a monk on the Plain of Flowers. That dobdob will not hurt us. Things will get better, you'll see."

But in the early hours of the morning, a scream woke Shan. He sat up as Lokesh gave an agonized groan. The restored shrines of Rapjung were engulfed in flames.

The dry, brittle wood of the elegant little lhakang cracked and spat, burning as hot as a furnace, throwing off sparks that spiraled far into the night sky. No one could get close to the flames, or even close enough to the adjacent assembly hall to keep the fire from spreading to it. Gang's wife held the caretaker back, tears streaming down her face, the young boy holding his father's left wrist out as though trying to show it to someone. The skin on Gang's palm was a mass of welts, the back of the hand scorched red and black. A small soot-stained figurine lay at his feet. He had saved the little Buddha from the altar.

The stream was two hundred yards away, and they had only two small leather buckets and the cooking pots from the house to carry water. They ran back and forth from the stream for a quarter hour, then Lhandro raised his palm and lowered his empty bucket to the ground. They could do nothing but watch as the conflagration, having already destroyed the lhakang, consumed the assembly hall and spread to the small deity chapel beside it.

"Like a giant samkang," Nyma said with a whimper. Incredibly, Gang, through years of effort, had constructed the buildings of cedar and juniper, the kind of fragrant wood burned in samkangs to attract deities.

Suddenly the nun cried out and ran to the other side of the lhakang, Shan at her heels. Winslow was bent over, gasping, hands on his knees, beside a large block of wood. Tenzin sat on the ground nearby, his face smudged with soot. As the flames flared up in a gust of wind Shan saw the block more clearly. The two men had saved the half-completed carving of the protector deity. Beyond them in the shadows another figure sat, Gang's young daughter staring with vacant eyes at an object between her legs. It was the prayer wheel. Her hands lay open on either side of the wheel. The skin was burned away from the palms, exposing raw flesh where she had grasped the searing metal. Nyma gasped and bent over the girl, calling for the last pail of water to wash the terrible wounds.