Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"I think you should find him, Lokesh," Shan said after they watched a flight of birds leave the mountain, soaring toward the Plain of Flowers. "You should take him to hide, stop him from moving around so much while soldiers are in the mountains. Take him and hide him. For weeks. Speak with him of the old ways. Write them down. For months, if necessary. Until the soldiers leave Yapchi. The purbas would help you."

His old friend seemed to consider the words a long time. "I would not know how to," he said at last.

Shan stared at him. Lokesh not only meant he would not know how to find Jokar, but that he would not know how to ask such a holy man anything. Shan thought of the night before. No one had questioned the ancient lama, no one had asked where he had come from, or why he was there. Because, in the language of Shan's teachers, his deity had become him. It was as if Jokar was indeed a spirit creature, a true Bodhisattva, a Buddha who remained on earth to help others find enlightenment.

"I have to go back to that valley," Shan said. "I have to find the path of that eye if it is there. Because," he said slowly, "I am bound."

Lokesh fixed him with a searching stare. "Sometimes deities are created in the seeking. And the seeking itself may create the path."

Shan returned Lokesh's stare. "You make it sound like I just follow acts of compassion and they will eventually connect me to a deity."

Lokesh answered with his crooked grin.

Shan sighed. "You will be safe staying on the mountain. Someone needs to help Tenzin," he suggested. It would be a way of keeping Lokesh with Tenzin, who was perhaps his safest guardian if Shan could not be with the old man.

"You forget, Xiao Shan. I am bound also." Lokesh looked over the plain. "You should know something else," he said with a strange spark in his eye, excited yet solemn. "Tenzin was speaking. I saw Jokar touch him, and Tenzin's tongue grew back. They spoke a long time at that tree, and when the moon was bright Jokar and Tenzin began working at something, like lamas mixing medicine in the moonlight. After a while I went to investigate. They had a sack of Lamtso salt, and Jokar had ripped off the bottom of his robe and made little squares of it. I helped them, creating little pouches from the squares, filling them with salt and tying them at the top. True earth, Jokar called the salt. Tenzin repeated the words, again and again, smiling like a young boy."

Lokesh stared out at a high cloud. "Tenzin has a strong voice, a voice that would be good for temples. His new tongue knew prayers. Jokar told him of a teaching, from the first lama at Rapjung, the founder, the one called Siddhi. He said all healing was about the same thing, about connecting the earth to the earth inside us all. We took all the pouches to one of the meditation cells. While Lin was sleeping Jokar put one in his pocket. He said everyone in the mixing place should leave with one." Lokesh reached into his shirt and produced one of the small bags for Shan.

"Lin was studying the room this morning," Shan observed as he accepted the pouch. "As if planning something."

"I don't know the state of his awareness," Lokesh said forlornly, as though finishing the thought for Shan. Lin was such a dangerous man. He could still inflict great harm on them all. "Those falling rocks may have done something to the soldier in him." Lokesh was fond of telling Shan stories of cruel people who had experienced close calls with death only to become dramatically different, better people.

As if on cue a cracked, but fierce voice boomed out from the back of the plateau. "Surrender! You are my prisoners! Only if you surrender will we show mercy!" Lin was standing unsteadily, his good hand on the rock wall, his knees about to buckle. He seemed to be shouting at Shan and Lokesh. Not really shouting, Shan realized, for the rock wall amplified his voice. But trying to shout.

"Perhaps," Shan said dryly, "just one more rock."

Lokesh groaned and leapt up. Lin staggered and dropped to his knees as Lokesh reached him. A thin trickle of blood came from the wound on his scalp.

As Shan reached the two men a small figure darted forth from the shadows, rushing between Lokesh and Lin. "Everyone was sleeping," Anya said in an anguished voice.

Nyma appeared behind the girl. "That old thankga." She seemed close to tears. "The colonel ripped it to pieces."

"Submit! You are my prisoners!" Lin called again in an angry voice, though he had so little strength the words came out in barely a whisper.

"No one," Anya said to Lin in the tone of an impatient midwife, "no one is going to surrender. And no one is going to attack."

Lin looked with an odd, confused expression at the girl, then he fell forward, his good arm clutching at Anya, trapping the girl, so that when he fell she was beneath him, cushioning the fall.

When they had carried Lin's unconscious form back to his pallet, Anya looked up with a determined glint. "You will have to go tell them," the girl declared. "Tell the army we have their colonel. He is important to them I think. They will miss him."

"Little girl," a voice said from behind them. The youngest of the purbas who had come with Tenzin was awake. "Tell them that and they will assume he is a hostage. Tell them anything about him and they will assume it is a trick, or he is a hostage. It will become like war in these mountains. They have so many soldiers they would be like ants on a mound. It is treason to kidnap an officer."

"We kidnapped no one. Ours was simply the way of compassion," the girl said in the soft tone of a lama.

The purba stepped out of the shadows and fixed Anya with an angry stare. "You're old enough to know better. Old enough to go to one of their coal mine camps," the young Tibetan said with fire in his voice. "I'll tell you what we do with your colonel. We carry him to the edge and drop him over, like they have done with so many Tibetans before. Sky burial," he added with a grin.

Suddenly a hand appeared from behind and clasped the man's shoulder. The angry purba seemed to deflate. He frowned, shook the hand off, and turned away. It was Tenzin. The man whom the colonel wanted so desperately to imprison knelt at Lin's side, opposite Anya, and helped her pull the blanket over his unconscious form.

The sun had been up two hours the next morning when Winslow and Shan neared the narrow gap that led back over the range into Qinghai Province. The lanky American stopped, warning Shan with an upraised hand, and pointed. A solitary figure was hiking along the ridge, a small Tibetan man wearing a derby-like hat with a drawstring pouch slung over his shoulder. They crested the ridge and waited for the man, who smiled cheerfully as he approached.

"You are the ones helping Yapchi," he observed. "The distant ones who came to help." Distant ones. The man meant foreigners. "People all over the mountains are speaking about you, about how you are going to restore the balance," he said in a bright, confident tone. "My grandfather knew distant ones who helped him see things," the man added enigmatically.

Shan paused. Foreigners? The grandfather of a man who lived in the mountains knew foreigners? "There could be soldiers below," he warned.

"I'm not going below," the man said, "I am just bringing water."

Shan studied the small pouch. "Not much more than would fill a kettle." In his pocket, his hand clenched around another pouch, one of the little ochre bags of true earth Jokar had prepared.

"Not even," the man said. He opened the pouch and produced a one-liter plastic bottle. The label it once bore had been torn away. Tibetan script ran along the side, made with a bold black marker. Sum, it said, the number three, and below that chu, river. "It's going to the sky birthing, for the Green Tara," he said, still in his bright tone, then he returned the bottle to the sack and started down the trail again.