Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"Rapjung," Gyalo said with a nod. "I know it. The old First House." He glanced back toward the south, as though to be certain no one else was listening. "Norbu was not just a traveling station in the old days, it was also a hospital where people from far away came to consult the healers who descended from the high plains and mountains. But after Rapjung was destroyed, the hospital was torn down and the new buildings put up," he said sadly, looking at Shan. Shan recalled the old foundations he had seen by the chapel.

"What is it you are trying to escape?" the monk asked in a slow, measured tone, and studied each of them in turn. He had the sound of an old lama.

"We don't know," Nyma answered in a haunted whisper.

"There are birds up there," Lokesh said in a tentative voice, "that have never seen the world below." He gestured toward the tall peaks, wearing his crooked grin. His tone was earnest, and pointed, almost urgent. "This month they are hatching babies. If things go well their babies will never need to see the rest of world either."

As if it understood Lokesh, the yak twisted its huge head toward the mountains. It seemed to be looking for birds. Gyalo rubbed the tuft of hair between the animal's ears, following its gaze. After a moment he turned with a troubled smile. "Go with Buddha."

They reached the trail junction in another hour and Lhandro led them up a steeply ascending path, newly churned with the hooves of sheep. The long Plain of Flowers disappeared behind them and new landscapes to the north and east opened to their view. They sat and ate cold dumplings on a flat rock that commanded a view of miles over a ragged brown and grey landscape of rock and gravel through which ran narrow lines of shrubs, marking the courses of small rivers that wound eastward toward a patchwork of tiny squares in the far distance, fields green with sprouting barley.

Lokesh pointed out a thin, high waterfall that cascaded over a steep rock face more than two miles away. He was tracing the course of the narrow river it fed as it tumbled down a gorge when Lhandro gasped.

"Tara protect us!" the rongpa moaned, and motioned to a point farther down the river, where it flowed out of the gorge. "The deities are truly angry!" He paled and clenched his gau.

As Shan followed Lhandro's arm in confusion, first Lokesh, then Nyma groaned. The water in the river was red. Not the entire river, but a long patch of the water was bright crimson. Shan quickly calculated the distance and size of the patch. It was sixty or seventy yards in length and covered the entire breadth of the stream.

Nyma turned to Shan with fear in her eyes. "What is it?"

But Shan had no explanation. "Sometimes," he said weakly, "there are algae that make the ocean look red."

Lokesh and Lhandro nodded, not because any of them thought it could be algae, Shan knew, but because it offered the suggestion that there could be a natural explanation.

They watched the red patch in silence until it disappeared behind a bend in the river.

Lokesh raised his finger again and traced the course of the river from the waterfall to where it had disappeared. With a hollow expression, he turned and followed a frightened Lhandro, who had begun jogging up the trail. The rongpa, Shan knew, had taken it as an omen of something terrible to come.

Nyma lingered beside Shan as Lokesh moved on, watching the river with a grimace of pain. "The mountains are bleeding," she said, then turned and followed Lokesh. Shan took a step toward the trail, where he saw Tenzin kneeling at the overhang, near the edge. He had constructed a small cairn of stones and as Shan watched in silence the Tibetan poured water onto a patch of earth. He stirred the little pool and used the mud to write on the rock face beside the cairn. Om amtra kundali hana hana hum phat, he wrote. It was known as one of the fierce mantras, a powerful invocation of cleansing.

Tenzin stared at the words, then gazed out over the low ranges to the east. He seemed to have forgotten Shan was there.

"It was a mistake," Shan said quietly, "going to that gompa." It occurred to him that perhaps Khodrak and the howlers knew more about Tenzin than he did. He knew the reticent Tibetan would not answer.

But suddenly Tenzin drew in a breath. "When the soul suffocates," he said in a deep, melodic voice, "and only revives on the last gasp, it is never the same soul again." He did not break his gaze from the distant ranges and spoke the words so quickly that Shan thought he had imagined them. The Tibetan turned to Shan and searched his face. "Your lama Gendun said sometimes it is possible to be reincarnated in the same body, in the same lifetime. He said you know about that."

Shan stared. Tenzin had grown his new tongue.

"I am not the man they think they are looking for," Tenzin added. There was torment in his voice.

Shan studied Tenzin's tormented face, trying to understand the strange words. "What is it?" Shan asked. "Why do they seek you? Did you kill someone?"

But Tenzin had receded into his silence again. He stared out at the river that had been bleeding. "Once I did things I hate myself for," he said after a long time, "then I did things they hate me for."

"In Lhasa?" Shan asked. "Were you in Lhasa?"

"That abbot who is missing. I was there."

"The abbot of Sangchi? You saw him when you escaped from prison? Drakte was with him?"

But Tenzin touched his fingertips to his lips with a confused expression, as if just realizing he had been speaking, and fell silent.

Suddenly Shan remembered the awful night again, and the sound of the voices in the death hut. "It was you with Gendun and Drakte," he said. "I heard your voice. You were chanting the Bardo with Gendun." It was not a rasping voice, not one with a broken voice box.

Tenzin only sighed in reply, and melancholy settled over his face.

It was late afternoon when they saw the first sheep, grazing in the distance on the sparse grass that grew in the shelter of boulders, all wearing their brightly colored packs. A high, lilting sound caused Lhandro to stop and hold up a hand. After a moment he relaxed, then led them around a bend in the trail, and halted again with a smile. A small campfire could be seen two hundred feet up the trail, in the lee of a huge slab of rock that had sloughed off the cliff above. Three of the Yapchi villagers stood at the fire. But Anya sat closer to Lhandro, her back to the trail, singing to half a dozen sheep. The animals seemed to listen to the girl with rapt attention, as if about to join in her song at any moment.

"She's communicating with them," Nyma said in an awed tone. The travelers stood in silence, listening, not daring to move an inch- perhaps, Shan thought, under the same spell as the sheep. Then one of the villagers saw them and called out. Anya turned and the magic was broken.

The caravaners were full of questions, and Shan and Lokesh let Lhandro and Nyma give all the answers. Yes, Padme had recovered and was walking about the gompa when they departed. Yes, he lived at a reconstructed gompa, the old Second House gompa. Yes, the monks had given them blessings. Yes, there were even novices there, learning to be monks like the old days. The villagers were pleased with the answers, and though Lhandro looked to Shan and Nyma for help, no one volunteered anything else about what happened at Norbu. The headman squatted by a pile of blankets on which someone had placed the red-circle pouch, the pouch with the eye inside. Lhandro silently rubbed the pouch, as if the chenyi stone somehow needed comforting.

It was nearly sunset when one of the dogs began barking. Two of the Yapchi men shot into the rocks above the trail. Lhandro jumped up on a boulder that provided a view down the side of the mountain, and a moment later motioned for Shan to join him.