Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

A loose pebble rattled behind Shan. As he turned, a shadow leapt forward and something hard pounded into his skull. He fell forward and drifted toward unconsciousness, quickly, yet still slow enough that before the blackness took him he realized dimly, like observing it from afar, that someone was kicking him in the ribs.

The eye of Yapchi was gone. In a fog of pain Shan squinted into the patch of moonlight where he had set the eye and reached out with one hand, futilely groping for the stone. He braced himself on one arm to peer into the shadows around him, fighting a stab of pain in his ribs. There was a glimmer of movement in the distance. He threw himself onto his feet, took a step- but the world spun about and he found himself on his knees, then on the ground. Blackness overtook him again.

When he awoke he was by the fire, on a blanket beside Anya. The girl, propped against a rock, offered a weak smile. Lokesh was on his other side, dabbing a bloody cloth against Shan's forehead. "It's gone," Shan said in a forlorn gasp. "I lost the eye."

"They're out there," Lokesh said softly. "Our friends are looking." He lifted Shan's hand and pressed it firmly, keeping it in his grip a moment.

As Shan tried to sit up blood roared in his ears. His eyes fluttered closed in another spell of dizziness. He became vaguely aware of people approaching, and urgent words in low voices. He heard hoofbeats, and in the distance, someone calling to the dogs. His mind went somewhere like slumber, but not slumber, and suddenly he was awake.

Hours had passed. The moon was setting. It was perhaps three in the morning. The villagers had used all the spare fuel to make half a dozen fires in a circle around the camp. A rider was dismounting. Lhandro was with the sheep, checking their harnesses. One sheep sat beside Anya, alone, without a pack, the brown ram that had carried the red-circle pack. The girl was stroking its head, as if to comfort it, as though it, too, shared their anguish.

Lokesh brought a bowl of tea and at last Shan was able to sit up. The old Tibetan shook his head grimly.

"There is no sign," Lhandro said when he approached Shan minutes later. "The eye is gone. The pack it was in is gone. We had a guard out but he was on the trail, watching for anyone following. The thief did not come up the trail. We searched the slopes in every direction. The moon was bright enough that we could scan the slopes with field glasses. Nothing," Lhandro concluded wearily. "That thing burns temples and tries to kill monks," he said, as though to explain his hopelessness. His face seemed to have aged many years. The eye was gone. He had failed his people. He looked up the slope, then jogged away into the darkness.

"It is my fault," Shan said, "I took it away from camp." Had it indeed been the dobdob? He tried to remember, but the memory was only of night, and pain. He touched the knot on his head. Something hard had hit him. It could have been the gnarled end of the dobdob's staff.

"No!" Nyma protested. "You probably saved others from injury. A thief like that would just have brought his violence to the rest of us if you hadn't taken the eye aside."

The searchers returned one by one over the next two hours, the last coming by horseback from the trail above. Some shook their heads, others just shrugged. Only Dremu, the last rider, from the slope above, had anything to report. A wild goat had run past him on the trail as though frightened by something above.

"The army," Winslow sighed. "If it was the army…" he began.

"How could it be the army?" Nyma asked. "If it had been the army, if it had been that Colonel Lin, they would not care about stealth, they would have just pounced on us, taken all of us away in chains like he tried to that day."

Some of the villagers murmured agreement. But Winslow and Shan exchanged a glance. Lin might have acted quietly, sending only one of his commandos for an ambush, if he had known the American was present.

"If the army took the eye," Shan said, "then it is gone, out of our reach. But if the army did not take the eye," he said with an expectant look at Lhandro, "then the eye may still be in our grasp." Lhandro shook his head, but seemed to ponder the words and looked up at Shan with interest.

"What would be the other reasons to take it?" another voice asked from the shadows. Gyalo appeared. "Nyma explained things to me," he said in an aside to Shan, before he turned to the others. "Shan is saying we must know the why of this theft."

"To destroy it," Nyma suggested. "So the valley could not be saved. Or to hide it."

"That would mean it could be those who wish to use your valley," Gyalo observed.

Lhandro nodded. "The oil crews. The geologists who work for the petroleum joint venture."

"And if not to destroy it or hide it?" Shan asked. "Perhaps the thief wants it back in Yapchi, too, just in a different way."

"Return it?" Nyma asked, creasing her brow. "Someone else… someone who didn't believe we would make it to Yapchi," she said in a hollow voice. "Maybe someone who didn't understand the oracle," she added with a quick glance toward Shan. "Or someone who just thought they could acquire merit somehow."

"That goat that ran from up the slope, it could have been someone climbing above who spooked it. Someone taking the eye over the mountain," Winslow observed.

"The army wouldn't take it over the mountain," Lhandro said quietly. "They would take it back to Lhasa."

"If the army didn't take the eye," Shan said, "then we must get to the valley, and quickly. Someone attempting to return it to the deity might be conspicuous. Maybe we can find the thief before the army does." It was a slim chance, he knew. But it was the only one they had.

"The oracle," Nyma said with a glimmer of hope, looking at Shan. "It didn't say how the eye would get to the valley, only how it would be returned to its true place."

"There is a secret trail over Yapchi Mountain," a new voice said from the shadows. They turned to see Chemi standing by the big yak. "A high trail, very narrow in spots, very dangerous. I took it once when I was a girl. I've seen old goats on it. Not for horses, not for sheep wearing packs. The caravan will have to go around the base of the mountain to the valley. But on foot, some of us can go over it and be in the valley before dusk tomorrow, if we leave at daybreak." She searched the faces of the villagers. "I know about that eye," she said, looking at Shan. "My grandfather's father was from Yapchi. He was away on a pilgrimage when those Lujun soldiers came. He never went back after that."

"I'll go," Winslow said quickly, then, in response to Shan's worried glance, shrugged and gestured toward his pack. "I'll take my pills. She might be up there."

There was movement at Shan's side. Lokesh was kneeling now, tightening the laces of his tattered boots. Shan put a hand on his shoulder and Lokesh pretended to ignore it. "Old goats," he said. "You heard her. It's for old goats."

The Yapchi villagers laughed.

"The four of us then," Shan declared. "At dawn."

Lhandro surveyed the caravaners. "Someone from the village should go. Shan may need help in understanding the valley before we arrive with the sheep. Only one. We cannot spare more and still drive the sheep."

Nyma seemed about to step forward when a diminutive figure pushed through from the shadows behind her. "It needs to be me," Anya said solemnly. Her voice seemed small and brittle. It was the first Shan had heard her speak since the oracle had visited.

Lhandro's chest pulled in, as if he were about to protest that the girl's twisted leg would make it too dangerous, but the headman only sighed and stared at the girl in silence.

An owl called from somewhere.

In the blur of events since he had been attacked Shan had almost forgotten about the strange words of the oracle. Had the oracle somehow been warning that the eye would be lost? Did Anya somehow feel responsible?