Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"I hope you didn't get stuck again that day," Shan ventured.

The monk turned and grunted as he studied, first Shan, then the empty grounds beyond him. He offered an uncertain nod. "Twice more," he replied. "They canceled the schedule and came back here." The words caused Shan to turn and study the gompa grounds himself. "The Bureau of Religious Affairs is here?"

"Everywhere," the monk replied in a reluctant tone, shoveling more dung into the cart. People didn't talk about the howlers, just as they didn't talk about knobs or other demons.

"Someone worked hard to bring all that fuel here," Shan observed.

"Someone did," the monk agreed once more, eyeing Shan warily. He turned away and continued shoveling. "Local farmers, and herders. Sometimes it is all they can afford to give. Once they would go without their hearthfires to bring fuel to the gompa."

"You said you came from Khang-nyi gompa," Shan recalled.

"Right. Second House, it's the old name, the original name for this place. There was a big gompa, the First House, up on the high plain to the north. This was a station for those traveling there, or those waiting for lamas to come down."

Shan found a shovel leaning against the stable, an old handmade implement with a wooden blade, and began helping the monk. "I did this once before, only wet," he said after a few minutes.

The man paused with his shovel still in the pile. "Wet?"

"Rice paddies," Shan said. "In Liaoning Province. I wasn't given any choice."

The man nodded and kept working. "You mean they forced you?"

Shan threw another shovelful on the cart. "Soldiers," he confirmed. "They mostly stayed away because of the smell. Just came close to beat us with bamboo canes when we stopped working."

They labored on in silence. From somewhere came music, the singsong strains of Chinese opera.

"The smell?" the monk asked, after he seemed to have considered Shan's words for several minutes.

"The soldiers were from the city," Shan said with a sigh.

The monk contemplated Shan, resting his shovel, one hand stroking the back of the big black animal. "Yak dung doesn't smell bad."

"This was human. Night soil, from the cities, too."

The man worked a moment and stopped again. He slowly put his hand on the handle of Shan's shovel and pushed it down. "I am called Gyalo. I am just a rongpa at heart. They wanted some monks from the local farm laborer class two years ago, and my grandmother had always wanted me to be a monk. They gave me a license. They like to take me to see other laborers now." He looked at Shan expectantly. It was Shan's turn to explain.

"It was an agricultural reform camp, when I was only a child. My family was sent because my father was a professor. A small army of workers brought the night soil in big clay jars on bicycle racks. Usually we just poured it into the rice fields. But there would be times when the jars stood in the sun and dried, so they would dump it in long piles, or make us scrape it out with our hands. What I remember most of all was how, when it rained, everything turned wet and smelly and too soft to put on a shovel."

The monk contemplated Shan a long time. "This isn't like that at all," he said, very seriously. Shan stared back, and the man's stern expression slowly warmed to a grin.

"Is the gompa delivering this to the villagers?"

"The gompa is just getting rid of its stockpile. Too old-fashioned they say, reminds them of the olds. Doesn't set the right example. We must show the people what prosperity means," he said in the tone of a political officer. Gyalo gestured toward the shadows where the stables abutted the outer wall. Several large metal gas cylinders were lined up along the wall.

"The medicals brought you in?" he asked Shan after throwing a few more shovelfuls on the cart. He made it sound as if the doctors were arresting their patients.

Shan shook his head. "I was still in the mountains with my friends. We found a monk named Padme on the Plain of Flowers. He had been attacked by someone and needed our help."

Gyalo studied Shan carefully again and seemed about to ask him something. "May the blessed Buddha watch over Padme Rinpoche," he said instead, quickly, in his stiff tone. "Prayers were offered for him in the chapel." Shan looked at the monk, and wondered why he, and he alone, was shoveling the dung. Was it a punishment? Gyalo didn't say he had offered prayers for Padme, only that prayers were offered. And why did he and the monks at the gate call the young monk Rinpoche, a term usually reserved for older, venerated teachers?

"Do those doctors come often?" Shan asked.

The monk frowned. "Not these, these are special," he said, and leaned on his shovel, studying Shan again. "Where did you learn to speak Tibetan so well? Only Chinese I've known who spoke Tibetan worked for the government."

"I did work for the government. Building roads. I carried one of those," Shan said with a gesture toward the stack of baskets.

The monk winced then pointed toward the clinic at the opposite corner of the compound. "This region was once full of medicine lamas. Famous for healers. It meant people were slow to change their ways, slow to retreat from religion, slow to embrace the Chinese doctors. The government wants to be sure people don't get sick."

"You mean don't get healed the wrong way."

Gyalo fixed Shan with a pointed gaze.

Shan considered the monk's words again. "So you mean those people waiting aren't sick?" He had seen sick people, he recalled; one hiding from doctors in the salt camp, the other waiting on the trail- the woman who had refused Lokesh's offer of help.

"They were told to come down from the mountains to be checked. For innoculations. For papers."

"Papers?"

"Those doctors arrived two weeks ago, and just stayed. Mostly they have meetings in the offices. Sometimes a knob officer with a pockmarked face comes, a man with dirty ice for eyes. And they all have radios like soldiers. Not everyone wearing one of those blue suits is a doctor," Gyalo warned in a low voice. "And even the real doctors are issuing new health cards, like identity cards. Everyone has to record exactly what doctors they have seen in the past five years, including Tibetan healers. And they have to sign papers that come from the office. When that knob comes he makes people read."

"Read? Read what?"

"Anything. A paragraph from a Serenity Campaign pamphlet. A line from the medical forms." Gyalo frowned toward the far corner, where several of the Han in blue could still be seen. "Some people came willingly at first. But now, most don't come on their own. Soldiers provide trucks. Or men like soldiers, wearing white shirts," he said, with a meaningful glance at Shan.

Shan stared at the monk. Howlers wore white shirts sometimes, but howlers were not soldiers, howlers were the political officers of modern Tibet. "You mean there are Public Security soldiers posing as howlers? As doctors?"

"Norbu gompa is like a border post, at the edge of the wilderness, hidden from the rest of the world. A place for experiments."

Shan eyed the monk closely. "You mean this county is experimenting somehow? With politics?"

"The authority that controls us is the Bureau of Religious Affairs. The county council ignores us. Norbu District of the Bureau, that's who we are, a district bigger than the county, running north across the mountains even, into Qinghai Province. All run by Religious Affairs in Amdo town and by those who sit in those offices," he said, nodding toward the first of the two-story buildings.

Shan worked in silence for several minutes. "If those doctors came two weeks ago, then they're not here because the Deputy Director was killed."

Gyalo nodded, rubbing the yak's head. "That Tuan, most people just know him as head of Religious Affairs. But he spent twenty years in Public Security first. The perfect credential for running Religious Affairs in such a tradition-bound district," Gyalo said bitterly, then looked up at Shan. "Not all the people they want to bring here will come. Some just hide and wait. I used to go and help the herders and the farmers when I could. Now they seldom give me permission to leave without an escort."