Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Gendun turned and looked toward Shan expectantly. Nyma had finished her tree on the sand wheel. Shan returned to the lama's side and accepted the chakpa, refilled with white sand. He closed his eyes a moment, leaned forward and began tapping the funnel, this time to make three curving mountains. Shan worked in silence, Nyma and the lamas contemplating the nearly completed wheel, the wind moaning over the rooftop, the butter lamps flickering, Lokesh's whispered mantra rising and ebbing like the wind. He focused his entire being on the grains of sand falling from the chakpa. They seemed to glow; white like fresh snow, white like the deities who lived in the clouds. Finally, finished with the mountains, Shan pushed himself away and stepped back to sit beside Lokesh and Tenzin as Shopo raised a chakpa of blue sand to paint a monk sitting in Shan's mountains.

Shan labored to keep his focus on the mandala. But the Golok moved restlessly about the rear of the chamber now, looking at the jagged eye one moment, then leaning forward, staring at Shan. Shan knew what the man was thinking. Shan had shared the same question for weeks now. Why Shan? "Because you know the ways of the demons that wish to keep the deity from seeing again," Nyma had declared when he had asked her, meaning, Shan sadly realized, that he knew the ways of the Chinese government. "It is your reward," she had added. "People know how you have restored the balance when violence has taken it away. You find that which has been lost."

But surely the local people must know where the eye belonged, Shan had suggested to the nun one morning when they had gone for water together. No, Nyma had replied, with round, sad eyes. Once the deity had been blinded it had retreated deep into the mountains. Yapchi Valley, where it had resided for centuries, was over two miles long and a mile wide with great ridges surrounding it on three sides, ridges riddled with chasms and caves. The deity could be waiting anywhere.

Four more times Shan took the chakpa of white sand, four more times he added images of clouds and mountains, then watched as the others worked on the wheel. Time passed without measure. Tenzin silently relit sticks of incense. For a brief moment hail rattled on the tin roof. Lokesh kept up his mantra, without ceasing, until it seemed just one more tone of the wind. The Golok settled cross-legged before the altar, his head constantly in motion, twisting and turning as if trying to see the eye better.

But Shan refused to let the Golok's strange behavior disturb him. He felt an unexpected warmth and tried to remember the last time he had felt such contentment. It would have been before his years of lao gai imprisonment, before he had been made Inspector General of the Ministry of Economy, before he had married a senior party member and started working for those who ran the government in Beijing. This was an important night, he realized, an initiation of sorts, a night of discovery. A night, Lokesh would say, when they were all living close to their inner deities. A night when he could tell himself with confidence that in all the universe, here was where he was meant to be, here among the lamas who could forget that a million Tibetans had been killed by his Chinese countrymen, could forget that nearly all their treasured monasteries had been crushed under Beijing's boot, could forget that still- after fifty years- they lived in an occupied land, could forget all the suffering because here, in this lonely, forgotten, wind-battered hermitage, a few reverent souls endured to complete a mandala dedicated to compassion and wisdom. And now, as they began the final round of painting with the chakpa, they had entered the perfect hour of this perfect night.

As he looked up into Gendun's eyes, a grin tugged at Shan's face. Perhaps he had been reading too much into their strange quest to return the eye, perhaps this was all it was about, keeping such moments alive, protecting the lamas and the traditions, preserving the seeds. Suddenly he couldn't imagine anything more important in all the world than returning the eye to its deity.

Gendun's head twisted and the lama bent an ear toward the outer wall. The wind had turned sharper, rising into a long hollow tone that had a strangely metallic quality. Shan sensed sudden movement and glanced away from the mandala to see the Golok rise on his haunches, looking warily toward the door. The long hollow sound came again, pitched lower this time. Shan heard a scramble of feet in the corridor. The old herder who was guarding the lhakang was running outside.

The herdsman and his sister alternated shifts, one in the hermitage, the other on the ridge to the west, overlooking the valley that led to the outside world, armed not with a gun but with an ancient, dented dungchen, one of the long telescoping horns used in temples. The new sound wasn't the wind, Shan realized, but the dungchen, sounded in warning. The Golok stood and shot out the door, his hand on the hilt of his long knife. Shan rose and took an uncertain step in the same direction. Lokesh paused in his mantra and tilted his head as though to listen, then cast a weary glance toward Shan and continued his prayers, at a slightly faster rate. The horn sounded again, more urgently, but the lamas gave no sign of having heard. The knobs could come. They could bring machine guns. They could bring truncheons and the electric cattle prods they used to subdue Tibetan crowds. They could bring manacles for a lao gai prison, where Gendun and Shopo, as unlicensed monks, would be certain to serve at least five years. Nothing would rob the lamas of their joyful moment. Their mandala was almost complete.

The Golok reappeared, breathing hard, and grabbed Shopo by the shoulder, trying to pull him away. But the lama seemed immovable, as though he had taken root in the stone flags of the lhakang floor. The Golok muttered angrily, and tried Gendun, likewise without effect. Shan took a step toward the door, listening for the metallic rumble of a helicopter, even the pounding of knob boots. Shan would not be arrested as an illegal monk but as a lao gai fugitive, for his release from his Lhadrung prison had been unofficial, a favor from the local commander. The knobs would only have to check the number tattooed on his arm to discover that while Beijing had condemned him to lao gai, it had not approved his release.

As the horn stopped sounding, Shan stared at the alarmed Golok, who cursed now, confusion and fright in his eyes, his hand still on his knife hilt. He paused for a moment, wondering why the Golok did not simply flee, then stepped beside Lokesh and slowly sat down, cross-legged, forcing himself to gaze upon the painting. The lamas continued to work on the mandala. It would be time for Shan's white sand soon.

Suddenly the herder who had been in the corridor reappeared, panting, but wearing a pleased expression. The Golok quieted, and stepped toward the shadow by the wall, his hand still on his knife. The sturdy woman who had been stationed on the ridge stepped in behind her brother, followed a moment later by a tall thin man who crept around the door-frame, holding it, leaning against the wall as he stepped inside.

The man's face was clenched tight as he gazed about the chamber. Shan recognized the ruin of the man's forehead, the looping slash of scar tissue above his eyes. It was Drakte, the purba who had delivered Lokesh and Shan to the dropka with the promise that he would return. Drakte, who had been missing. But it was a pale, hollow Drakte, without the hard, proud glint that Shan had always seen on his features before.

"That one is coming," Drakte declared in a hoarse, strained voice. "There's no time." The young Tibetan seemed overcome with fatigue. He pressed his right hand against his abdomen and stepped toward the circle on the floor, turning his head back and forth as though searching for someone in particular. He looked into the shadows where Tenzin sat and paused for a moment, before he settled his gaze on Shan. "Take the eye," he said with a rush of breath. "Take the eye and run."