Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Shan sank onto a rock at the top of the cliff, fighting the dark thing that seemed to be clenching his heart. He watched the sun disappear over the distant changtang, losing himself in the dark, threatening swirls of shadow on the horizon.

Suddenly someone touched him and his head jerked up off his chest. He had been asleep. The colors were gone from the horizon. It was nearly dark. Nyma knelt beside him, crying.

"Lokesh?" he asked in alarm.

She nodded, scrubbing away tears with the back of her hand. "He found him. He went into the mountains and found him. Lepka saw them coming, and said we must be near a portal to one of the hidden lands. We didn't understand, but then Winslow saw the two of them on a goat path above. It was Lokesh, walking ahead of him, and turning all the time, as if always trying to coax him forward a few more steps, like a wild animal being tamed." She looked back toward the hidden chambers.

Shan climbed to his feet, confused.

"It's a spirit creature," Nyma said. "It has to be a spirit creature come to save us."

He ran, and stumbled, falling to a knee, picked himself up and ran again. Inside, the main chamber was like a temple, filled with a reverent silence, the air sluiced with incense smoke. Lhandro and his parents sat near the wall, eyes round and excited. The headman's mother rocked back and forth, as Lhandro and Lepka silently mouthed their beads. Winslow sat in the furthest shadows, his countenance lit with an odd, puzzled joy.

At the foot of the pallet sat Lokesh, and at one side Anya still held Lin's hand. Opposite the girl, one hand stroking Lin's forehead, the other reading his wrist pulse, was an ancient Tibetan, older even than Lhandro's father. He appeared frail and strong at once, thin as a reed yet vibrant and serene in his countenance. He wore a tattered quilted worker's jacket over an equally tattered maroon robe, and on his feet were old black athletic shoes that were on the verge of disintegration. A sturdy staff leaned on the wall beside him.

Lokesh gave a small croaking sound as he saw Shan, then he reached out and grabbed Shan's hand in both of his own. Lokesh squeezed it hard, again and again. His friend seemed to be in the grip of some strange rapture. "It's Jokar Rinpoche!" Lokesh said when he was finally able to speak. "From Rapjung," he added, as if the ruined monastery was still routinely sending out old healers. "From before. The same Jokar," he whispered, as though someone might think it was a different incarnation of the lama.

It was the medicine lama, the apparition they had seen in the herb meadow, the lama, Shan knew, who had healed Chemi. He had convinced himself that the lama had to be real, that such a man, despite all odds, was walking the mountains, a flesh-and-blood vestige of another world, not a deity or demon or spirit creature. But in that moment, as the lama turned and lifted his hand toward Shan, for some reason Shan could not comprehend, it seemed his father was reaching out to touch him, and when the lama grasped his hand Shan gasped, and felt his breath rush out.

"Lha gyal lo," the lama said softy, with a small, familiar smile, then turned back to his patient.

They sat in silence as the lama worked, incense filling the room, wind fluting around the rocks overhead. Lepka broke into a low song. The purbas stood in the shadows with wary, bewildered expressions.

Shan rose and stepped backwards into the shadows. In the flickering light he saw Winslow in the corner, still grinning. In the nearest of the meditation cells Tenzin sat alone, and apart, in deep meditation. Shan sat at the edge of the light and studied the lama, and Lokesh- whose face still glowed in wonder, reverence mixed with the eagerness of a young student.

Shan sensed that everyone in the room felt the same detached, otherworldly nature of the moment. It was indeed as though Jokar had come from another world, had been spirited there because he was needed, and was only visiting before ascending again to the deities. The lama was unlike any man Shan had ever seen, ancient yet ageless. When he had touched Shan, in the moment he had sensed his father nearby, something like a surge of electricity had shot up Shan's arm. Sometimes deities visit, Anya had said, and change people's lives forever.

Oddly, the lama was missing the little finger on his left hand. Only a tiny stump remained where one had been. Shan remembered Lokesh speaking of how the medicine makers in Rapjung had sometimes wielded huge cleavers to chop herbs and how young students, before understanding the rhythm of the cleavers, sometimes lost fingers to the blades. It must have happened decades ago.

Shan let his awareness drift and in his mind's eye he was on Rapjung plain, nearly sixty years before, and a young Lokesh was with his old teacher Chigu and with Jokar, as a young healer monk then, perhaps still in training. Behind them in the distance the graceful buildings of Rapjung rose up the slope. Geese flew overhead, and Jokar was exclaiming over a rare herb he had found. A lark flew and landed close by, and it became a boot, and Shan saw four stubby fingers pushed in his face by a man in dark glasses. Realization swept over him like a wave of sickness, and he was suddenly back in the chamber, breathing hard and very cold. He rose unsteadily and stepped outside.

Moments later Nyma caught up with him as he sat with his back against the mountain wall, looking at the sky. "What is it? Are you ill?"

"Not sick," he muttered.

She stared at him then took a hesitant step backwards as though she saw something that frightened her.

"You remember, Nyma, that morning at Norbu when we thought the knobs were going to take us?"

"I will never forget that terrible morning," she answered, and sat beside him.

"The knob doctor was impatient, he was unhappy with Khodrak and the committee, as if they were wasting his time. He had come for a purpose, from far away, not from local Public Security."

"A special squad of doctors," Nyma said, "probably from Lhasa."

"But not just arrived from Lhasa. Gyalo said they had been traveling hard, a long time, from the Indian border." Shan sighed and gazed back at the stars. "The doctor looked at that officer and held up his fingers. Four fingers. I thought he was mocking Khodrak, saying that there were only four of us when there was supposed to be five."

"But they wanted Tenzin."

"Someone wanted Tenzin." Shan nodded. "Khodrak I think, and Tuan. But that knob officer was there for something else. There was a reason that special medical team had been traveling with the knobs. For weeks, coming from near the Indian border. At Norbu Tuan said the doctors were there because of an agitator from India. I thought he meant the resistance, even the Tiger. But he meant Jokar."

"I don't understand."

"His fingers. He pushed his little finger back and held up the other four. A strange way. Most would just push the thumb down and show four fingers. But he used his thumb and three fingers."

"Like Jokar," Nyma said in a slow whisper.

"Not like Jokar," Shan said. "It was Jokar he was indicating. He was looking for the medicine healer with four fingers, tracking him with a team that could lure the sick from him with offers of Chinese clinics and hospitals, and find evidence through those who use traditional healers. The government thinks he has stirred up a path of reactionary practices all the way from India."

"If that's true," a voice said out of the darkness, "it would explain why the medicine fields are being burned." Winslow stepped beside them.

"But why?" Nyma protested. "The rumors, the reports. They make it sound like the government is seeking some terrible criminal. He is a healer. He is so important to Tibetans." She looked at Shan and her eyes dropped to the ground. She had answered her own question.