Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Shan studied his teacher. Gendun knew something about the melancholy man that Shan did not, or at least sensed something that Shan had not seen. Tenzin had never helped with the mandala, but watched its creation with a child-like fascination, steadfastly attending Gendun and Shopo with tea and replenishing all the lamps when the dropka brought skins of butter. Although Shan had never seen him meditate, never seen him show interest in what the Tibetans might call the Buddha within him, he remembered the single sack of dung brought back each day. The sack could be filled in two or three hours time. Did Tenzin spend the rest of his day sitting on the high ridges in meditation? Once, Shan remembered, after Shopo had carefully described how to commune with the river nagas, Tenzin had come back with black sand for the mandala and reverently presented it to Gendun. Another time Shan had discovered him alone, in the middle of the night, hovering at the edge of the mandala with his eyes full of tears, his hand cupped in the air over the image of a hermit monk.

"When he grows his tongue," the lama said, "it will be better. A few more months perhaps."

It was how Gendun described the silence of such broken men, how Gendun had referred to Shan's own dark silence in the weeks after he left the gulag. When the man finally found the spark that had been Tenzin before imprisonment, before the torture of the gulag, the fire of his spirit would reach his tongue and he would be ready to speak with the world. Perhaps, Shan thought, it was why Gendun was asking him to watch over Tenzin, because before he met the lamas Shan, too, had once consisted only of mute, confused fragments.

Sift the sand to find the seeds of the universe. The words echoed in Shan's mind as he sat by the mandala four hours later with the pot of white sand by his feet. The sun had set, their last night of work on the mandala begun. A fingertip touched his arm, light as a feather.

"It is time," Gendun said, and from a sleeve of his red robe he produced a chakpa, extending it toward Shan.

Shan hesitated. From the darkened corridor that led to the chamber he heard the moan of the wind as it played with the crumbling stonework of the hermitage, creating an eerie harmony with the mantra murmured by Lokesh, who sat beside Tenzin at the wall behind them. He slowly raised his hand to accept the narrow chakpa from Gendun, filled with the white sand. The lama handed him a second, empty chakpa, to be used to tap the sand out of the first. Shan's gaze drifted toward the small wooden altar, toward the jagged eye, then he glanced back at Gendun with a fleeting sense of guilt. The eye was there, always watching. But part of the discipline Gendun had imposed on Shan was not to think about the mysterious eye, to immerse himself instead in the mandala. Not since the first day at the hermitage had anyone spoken about the eye, except Lokesh, who had soberly whispered to him one night that Shan need not worry, because wherever Gendun and the stone traveled, that place would be a sanctuary. Lokesh seemed to think of the upcoming journey as a pilgrimage, in which holy men would return a holy stone, and that the world would part to offer a peaceful path for such pilgrims.

Shan watched Nyma finish a flame shape along the outer ring, then he leaned forward to begin outlining the image of a cloud with a tiny line of white sand. He lowered first the sand-filled chakpa, then the empty funnel, but quickly lifted them away. His hands were trembling. No one spoke. He collected his awareness for a moment by gazing upon the palace at the center of the circle, where wisdom and compassion reigned. His hands steadier, he began to tap the white sand chakpa, loosing a white thread onto the outer rim of the mandala. The tapping of his metal funnels became a tiny muffled bell, a sound that had become part of the nightly ritual, each ring announcing the planting of a few more seeds into the little universe the lamas had created.

As Shan finished the image, he nodded to Nyma, who would continue the pattern by applying vermilion sand in the shape of a tree, then stood and stepped away from the circle, wary of breathing deeply across the delicate sand images. As he turned he saw a stranger squatting by Lokesh, arguing in a low voice. The man wore a heavily stained fleece hat and a chuba, the heavy sheepskin coat favored by the nomads who inhabited the sparse landscape, but he was not one of those from the dropka encampment above the hermitage.

The man's eyes widened as he stood and stabbed an accusing finger toward Shan. His chuba opened with the movement, revealing a long knife at his belt. Lokesh, marking his rosary in the tight grip of two fingers, rose and used his free hand to push down the man's arm as Shan approached.

"You're crazy," the stranger muttered, and as he twisted away from Lokesh his fleece cap fell away, revealing a head shaved completely bald. Shan was wrong, he realized, as he studied the man's strong, boney features, his smooth scalp and long thin moustache. The stranger was not one of the local herders, he was a Golok, from the far northeast of Tibet, perhaps the most untamed of all the Tibetan peoples. "He's Chinese!" the Golok barked loudly.

Shan glanced uneasily toward the mandala. Nyma and the lamas were ignoring the man.

"It's Shan," Lokesh countered, still holding the man's arm as if he thought the Golok would attack Shan. "He's the one."

The intruder cut his eyes toward Lokesh, then examined Shan. His anger faded, replaced by scorn. "I don't think so. The one that's going to patch the god? He's a criminal. Hard as nails they say. All the other Chinese hate him."

Lokesh glanced apologetically at Shan. "Not a criminal, a prisoner. Four years lao gai," he added, referring to the hard labor gulag camps run by Beijing. Until the year before, Shan and Lokesh had both served in the 404th People's Construction Brigade, one of the most notorious camps in China's slave system.

"This one," the Golok said as he surveyed Shan's heavily patched coat, his tattered work boots and the cracked, frayed end of the vinyl belt that jutted from his waist, "he looks like a shopkeeper. A failed shopkeeper," he added, fixing Shan with a sneer, then surveying the others in the chamber with a frown. "There are supposed to be purbas, supposed to be warriors. No chance you'll make it. You have no idea," he said haughtily, turning back to Shan. "You could die a hundred ways. Better men than you have tried and died."

Shan silently returned the Golok's stare. If the Golok, who was certainly no purba, knew about their secret plans, he wondered, how many others knew that they were going to return the jagged eye? Why did he seem to know more than Shan? And why, when he so obviously didn't belong at the hermitage, had the dropka who guarded the buildings let him in?

Lokesh sighed. "Yes," he said, as if he had heard such warnings before. He took the man's hand and pulled him forward. "You need to study the sacred circle," he advised in a patient tone. The words had the sound of a healer's advice, and Shan decided the man must be one of those bitter, angry Tibetans who were brought to the hermitage by the older herders to witness the mandala and reflect on the power that compassion could exercise over hate and fear.

The Golok cocked his head at an odd angle toward the mandala, as if seeing the lamas and the circle of sand for the first time. He frowned, then bent to his knees, briefly lowering his forehead toward the floor in reluctant homage. As he rose he muttered in surprise, his gaze having fallen on the altar. He quickly stepped past the mandala to stand in front of the stone, staring at the jagged eye, crouching in front of it. He was far more interested in the stone fragment than in the lamas or the mandala.

Shan had known Goloks during his years in prison. No, not known them, for they had refused to speak with him, always just stared with the silent malevolence reserved for their enemies. Even many of the Tibetans avoided them, for the Golok tribes had been known for centuries as a wild and brutal people notorious for their banditry. The Goloks would have tried to kill Shan had he not been protected by the monks who shared his lao gai barracks. He knew of two Chinese prisoners who had been attacked by Goloks, one found in his bunk with a screwdriver driven into his brain, the other castrated with a sharpened spoon. During his early days in the slave labor camp, Shan would have welcomed death by such men. But that had been a different Shan, a different incarnation- the Beijing Shan who had entered the gulag had wanted nothing more than to be released from the constant pain and fear that had seized him after weeks of Public Security interrogation.