Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Tuan stood in front of a white utility vehicle beside half a dozen men in white shirts. Shan studied the seasoned faces of the men. But for their shirts he would have said they were a special Public Security squad- a boot squad, the purbas called them- one of the squads reserved for use against particularly stubborn political threats, which, to those responsible for public security in Tibet, typically meant purbas and other troublesome Buddhists.

The guards stared at Shan and his friends as they filed out of the stable, several glancing back at Tuan, whose eyes found, and stayed on, Shan. They watched Shan intensely, not accusing but calculating. When Tuan saw Shan return his stare Tuan nodded pointedly. You will have to decide soon, Tuan had told Shan. An accounting was coming.

"These are confusing times," Padme observed as they approached the gate ten minutes later, Lhandro holding a paper sack of dumplings and apples from the kitchen.

"May the Compassionate Buddha protect you," Lokesh called tentatively as they walked out of the gate.

Padme's head jerked back and he nodded. "Exactly," he said, in an odd, offhanded tone. "And you." Then he straightened and spoke more loudly, as though for an audience. "May the Compassionate Buddha protect you," he called out, and smiled toward the ragged group of Tibetans who sat among the houses outside the gate.

They walked for an hour without speaking, Lhandro in the lead, walking so rapidly Nyma had to trot sometimes to keep up. Finally, when the gompa was far out of sight behind the hills they stopped at a small stream.

"Who is that Tuan?" Lhandro blurted out in a low, urgent whisper, as if the question had burned his tongue since leaving the gate, and he still feared being overheard. "Why did they- what have they done to poor Tenzin? He never hurt anyone."

"Chao's murder," Nyma said slowly. "A murder like that would have everyone acting strange. They must have thought Tenzin could have information. They confused him with someone. The fools. All that time he was with us at the mandala."

Shan looked up from where he drank but he found no words to reply. Tenzin had not been at the mandala all the time. And there was something else he had almost forgotten. When Drakte had entered the lhakang, moments before dying, the first person he had looked to had been Tenzin.

Shan sighed, and watched as Nyma shifted her gaze to Lokesh, who had removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves nearly to his shoulders. He was vigorously rubbing his arms with the white sand of the streambed. Lhandro began to do the same. Lokesh rubbed his face. Shan and Nyma stripped off their coats, too. No one had words to explain anything that had happened at the strange gompa but they all felt the need to be cleansed. Nyma held some of the sand cupped in her hand for a moment, and glanced at Shan. They had seen such sand before, had seen it sanctified by the lamas and later washed with blood.

Lokesh lit a stick of incense and sat.

"We have no time," Nyma protested, but then hesitantly followed Shan and Lhandro as they folded their legs and watched the wisps of fragrant smoke. They had to calm themselves, to brace themselves against the frightening, confusing forces that seemed to be against them.

When the stick burned out, Lhandro rose with a deliberate air and reached into his sack. He produced the small scrap of cloth he sometimes used as a towel and laid it flat on a rock, setting his red plastic dorje pen on it. "It isn't a real thing," he said as he stepped to Shan with the cloth spread between his hands. Shan quickly dropped his own pen onto the cloth. None of them wanted the tokens of the gompa, he knew, but Lhandro's words referred to the plastic the dorjes were made of. He had known other Tibetans who reacted the same way with any implement made of plastic. It wasn't wood, or cloth, or stone, or bone- not of the earth- and somehow they didn't trust the plastic, as if it were one more of the tricks the Chinese played on them. They were just shadow things, a herder had told him once, you could tell just by feeling them. He had known a dropka who kept in a leather sack whatever plastic items he was given or found by roads, and left them in a small pile whenever he visited a town. The man wasn't sure what they were exactly, but he knew they belonged down below, which was how dropka often referred to towns.

An hour later they stopped suddenly as Lhandro, about to lead them over the crest of a ridge, raised his hand. "It's one of them," he said with a weary tone. "We'll have to wait."

Shan followed the rongpa to the crest of the ridge to see a loaded cart moving slowly along the trail ahead of them pulled by a sturdy black yak. A stocky man in a robe walked alongside the yak, his hands moving as if he were conversing, trying to make a point to the animal.

"He's so slow," Nyma said, now at Shan's side. "We will waste half the day waiting."

"I have no fear of a man who speaks with his yak," Lokesh announced from behind them and pushed past, continuing down the path.

In a quarter hour they were close enough to see that the cart's cargo was yak dung and moments later the yak halted and twisted its massive head in their direction.

"It's a long way to go, to dispose of all this fuel," Shan observed as he reached Gyalo.

"No one said how far to take it," Gyalo observed. He surveyed Shan and his friends and studied the trail behind them.

Shan introduced the others, and Lokesh offered some of the food from the gompa. The monk ate two momo dumplings, then offered an apple to the yak.

"Where are you bound?" Shan asked.

The monk shrugged and gestured to the sky. "It's a good day in the mountains," he said, and began to massage the yak between the ears. "Jampa here will let me know when we get there."

Jampa. One of the names of the Future Buddha.

Shan studied the man a moment as Gyalo took a long swallow from Lokesh's water bottle, then walked around the cart. The old wooden shovel Shan had used lay on top of the load. He turned the shovel and saw that the wooden blade covered a depression in the pile, a hole.

"No one is following," he said quietly.

"What's that?" Gyalo called out, cupping his ear toward Shan.

"Just speaking to our friend," Shan said and, as Nyma gasped in surprise, a hand emerged from the pile of dried dung. Shan took the hand and steadied the figure that rose up in the cart.

"Tenzin!" Lhandro cried, as the tall man stood and cast an anxious smile toward his friends before he climbed down.

"Where did you-" Nyma blurted out, then ran to embrace the mute Tibetan. "How did you- How could you have known? Why did they-" the questions rushed out as she held Tenzin at arm's length. Tenzin looked at Shan as though for help, then the nun grinned and laughed at herself for asking for explanations from the man who could not speak. She began wiping the dirt from his face with one of her sleeves.

"I was sleeping with Jampa under the moon," Gyalo explained. "I thought if I woke up in the night I would just leave," he said, stroking the shaggy yak again. "We don't mind the night. We talk about the stars. Last night, in the early hours- maybe two, three o'clock- Jampa put his nose in my ear. I cuffed him at first but he pushed harder and I sat up and moaned because there was this ghost by the cart. Jampa and I knew he needed help, though he didn't say a word. Jampa and I knew what needed to be done. We loaded him- Tenzin, you say?" he asked in an aside to Nyma. "We loaded Tenzin in and slipped away. Not a soul moving anywhere. An hour later, as we cleared the first ridge, one of those soldiers' trucks drove in from the highway." He looked at Shan with questions in his eyes.

Shan studied Tenzin a moment longer, sighed and looked toward the northern mountains. "We will go on, ahead," he said to the monk. "Thank you for helping our friend." He studied the cart a moment. "Near the end of the plain there is an old ruin of a gompa. A family lives there now. They have much to do and little time to look for fuel. This could last them many weeks."