Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Tuan shrugged and leaned toward the smoke. "Do they? They take one of us, we take one of them," the Director said in a disinterested tone, then smiled icily. "There will always be more of us than of them."

Shan studied Tuan as the Director smoothed the long hair on the side of his head. Was Tuan so disinterested because he had already taken one Tibetan to balance his equation, because he knew he had already fatally wounded Drakte?

"There will be an accounting soon," Tuan said. "In less than two weeks. But meanwhile someone like you, a Han among them, will be in constant danger. Let me help you."

"I am not afraid of them." But Shan was scared of Tuan and the strange game he was playing. Tuan was going to account for Chao's murder in two weeks. He made it sound like one more item on his busy schedule.

Tuan leaned forward. "Things are changing in this district. A Han who knows how to deal with these Tibetans could have a bright future. We can use a man like you. We'll be looking for someone to manage all the other teachers. You will need to decide soon. Glory is coming, and there will be enough to share."

Shan almost asked him to repeat himself. Glory is coming? "Other teachers?"

"Special knowledge is coming to Norbu. A new world is coming for the people here," Tuan said.

Shan stared at the piece of lace. He usually recognized the special language of senior officials, but Tuan seemed to have developed a code all his own. "But for now all those doctors," Shan said tentatively. "They are frightening the people. Surely you do not need them to catch the killer."

Tuan offered an appreciative smile. "They have orders from Lhasa. National security is at stake. A senior Cult leader has infiltrated from India."

"We're more than four hundred miles from India."

"He's giving them a good chase."

"But why doctors? Why would disrupting the local people help the effort?"

"National security," Tuan repeated.

The Director glanced at his watch and stood. He reached into his pocket and produced a business card, extended it to Shan. "I know things. When we win, after May Day, give me a call." He tossed the cigarettes on Shan's lap and left the room without looking back.

Shan stared after him. I know things. The words probably meant nothing, just the idle words of an arrogant bureaucrat. But they made Shan recall the terrible night at the hermitage again. He doesn't care who has to die, Drakte had said, with nearly his last breath. He kills prayer. He kills the thing he is. Tuan was the senior official responsible for religion, and he killed religion.

Shan dropped the cigarettes on the arm of the chair, and found his friends outside waiting with the young monk under the fluttering flags.

"What was it?" Nyma whispered nervously.

Shan shrugged. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "He wanted to give me some cigarettes."

The monk led them into the adjacent structure and a large whitewashed chamber, where twenty monks waited at two long plank tables. Some acknowledged their visitors with polite but restrained greetings, others looked away nervously. Gyalo was not present. An old monk, the oldest present, rose and recited the opening text from one of the early teachings, what the Tibetans called the Heart Sutra. His words, or perhaps his deep, resonant voice, had a calming effect on the assembly. But Shan could not relax. He fought the temptation to grab Lokesh and run. He could make nothing of his strange audience with Tuan. Tuan and Khodrak were going to win something, and glory would follow.

At last Khodrak, holding his mendicant's staff like a scepter, arrived with Tuan a step behind, each of them adorned in a fox-fur hat. The two sat at a smaller table at the head of the long ones, and moments later two young monks appeared with a huge steaming pot of thugpa, noodle soup cooked with vegetables. The attendants quickly served out the soup, then distributed bowls of steaming white rice. They ate quickly, with little conversation, the monks restlessly watching both their visitors and the two men at the head table. At the end of the meal, as Chinese green tea was served, Khodrak stood to explain how Comrade Shan and his companions had saved Padme. Comrade Shan. Khodrak had turned Padme's rescue into a political parable of the selfless Han saving a troubled Tibetan.

When they had finished, a monk led them first to retrieve their belongings, then to the gompa's guest quarters, a dormitory-style room with eight beds in one of the low single-story structures, gesturing Nyma toward a similar room on the opposite side of the hall.

"We saw an old stable," Shan said. "We would prefer to sleep there." His friends said nothing. Lokesh moved his head in a small, tight nod.

"They said here," the monk protested. "Surely the beds would be more comfortable."

"Not for us," Shan said firmly. "Our bones are accustomed to sleeping on the ground."

With a reluctant sigh the monk turned and led them to the abandoned stable, only a few paces from the cart Shan had helped fill. Beyond the cart in the deep shadows of the wall he sensed, more than saw, the big yak watching them.

The monk pulled open the heavy timber bar laid across the door on iron straps, and handed Shan the candle lantern he had been using. They stepped into a small musty chamber with half a dozen stalls, straw covering half the floor. Above the stalls was a low, half loft, where fodder had once been stored, with a small loft door for loading the hay.

Lokesh and Lhandro were already pulling straw together for bedding as the monk bid them a good night and pushed the door shut. In a few minutes Shan was listening to the slow, relaxed breathing of his companions, and he quickly followed them into slumber.

He awoke just before dawn, invigorated by the night's sleep, surprised at how sound it had been. He quickly brushed the straw from his clothes and stepped to the door. Hearing what sounded like a heavy truck outside, he paused for a moment, then pushed lightly on the door for a glance into the compound. The door would not move. The truck seemed to stop and he heard the sound of heavy boots on the earth outside. He pressed his eye to a narrow slit in the door. One of the medical trucks was there, its lights flashing as if for an emergency. A whistle blew, followed by an order. Shan could not make out faces in the dim light, but with a sinking heart he saw a line of white shirts.

There was movement behind him and Lhandro appeared. The Tibetan tried his luck with the door, to no avail. They pushed together. It did not move. The bar had been lowered into place. Someone had imprisoned them, and the guards were surrounding the stable.

Shan quickly woke the others, explaining in urgent whispers that they were prisoners. Nyma rushed to the door and pushed it, without effect, and turned with fear clenching her face. Lokesh sat on his pallet and offered a mantra to Tara, protectress of the devout, as orders were barked outside.

Lhandro leaned his ear against the wall as Nyma used the tine of a pitchfork to pry splinters from a small crack in the old wood, trying to see outside better. "That ambulance," Nyma reported as she bent to the crack. "Maybe the doctors just wanted-" she turned back and saw Shan's confusion as he stood in the rear shadows where Tenzin had slept.

"They took Tenzin!" Nyma cried in dismay as she rushed to his side.

They quickly searched for any sign of the silent Tibetan, or evidence of his departure. Shan and Lhandro paced along the walls of the stable. There were no loose boards, no other doors, no ladder to the loft where the small door opened to the outside.

"He's just a…" Nyma began forlornly, and her voice drifted off.

A what, Shan wondered. A dung collector? None of them really knew who Tenzin was. Just a fugitive, like so many others. Sometimes, if you were not to be taken in by what Beijing was doing to Tibet, all you could do was be a fugitive, always moving, always shying away from settlements and crowds. Shan recalled the strange exchange between Khodrak and Tenzin the day before. Had Tuan and Khodrak truly known something about the man or had it just been Tuan's instincts, honed by twenty years in Public Security? Tenzin was guilty of something, and by the political accounting that governed them, Tuan and Khodrak would get credit for taking him.