Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"Blessed Buddha," the woman said in her mournful voice. "The sand." She touched the gau on her neck as she spoke. "He has to return the sands to the nagas, to the water deities."

"But in daylight he can be easily spotted by the patrols," Shan said in alarm, taking a step forward as he considered whether to run and stop the lama. "He could be arrested. Can't he wait?"

The dropka looked at Shan, gazing plaintively toward the mountains across the valley, as if asking the deities why she had to be burdened with such a Chinese. She shook her head. "All that blood. And just as they were finishing, after all the weeks of prayers. At least it hadn't received the final consecration," she said heavily, as if an even greater catastrophe had been narrowly avoided. She gazed down at the solitary figure descending into the empty valley, and shook her head. "When they had finished Shopo would have gone to thank the nagas and tell them what a beautiful thing had been done with their gift, how it had been used to begin patching a god. Think of what he'll have to say to them now," the woman whispered, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

Shan watched the lama's retreating figure a moment in silence. "If there were dogs," he said, "maybe herders were at the head of the valley last night. Maybe someone could find them, and ask them what happened. I must stay with Gendun, but we need to know what happened out there last night."

When the woman gave no sign of hearing, Shan wandered back toward the switchback trail, leaving the forlorn dropka alone, stacking rocks again. He paused before beginning the descent to the hermitage, surveying the vast rugged landscape. Beyond the low spine of mountains on the far side of the valley he saw another range, higher again, the air shimmering behind it, its peaks snowcovered and lit a dazzling white by the early sun. It was how he felt. No matter how he tried, how hard he climbed, whenever he reached a new height, a new understanding, a new connection with his teachers, another mountain rose up, another obstacle presented itself, another mystery blocked his path. Once Lokesh had described it to him as the burden of being Shan. "Things we see as inevitable turns in the path of our lives, you see as enigmas you must stop to understand. It is the way you have of teaching yourself," his friend had added with a tinge of curiosity in his voice. But teaching implied learning, advancing with new knowledge. And Shan's path seemed to be relentlessly telling him how much he did not know.

As he began to turn toward the hermitage he caught movement on the valley floor. A black figure moved impossibly fast along the trail- on foot- so fast another pang of fear stabbed through Shan. Was it the same unnatural creature that had caught up with Drakte in the lhakang? Shan crouched in the low grass and watched in alarm as, far below, Shopo stopped and stared at the approaching figure. The dropka at the cairn groaned loudly and grabbed her horn, then stared at the figure in confusion. Old Tibetans told tales of mystic runners called lunggompas who could travel hundreds of miles in a day by summoning superhuman strength and training their bodies to ignore fatigue.

The figure slowed momentarily as it passed Shopo, then resumed its unnatural gait to ascend the ridge where Shan stood, toward the hermitage. The dropka lowered the horn. The intruder had not harmed nor even challenged the lama with his bundle of sand. Shan sat down on a rock near the path and waited. The runner, clad in a black-hooded sweatsuit, saw Shan from fifty feet away, slowed, then silently approached and sat across from him, cross-legged. After a moment the stranger produced a water bottle from a belt under the sweatsuit, briefly drank, and flipped back the hood.

It was a young Tibetan woman with a thin face and intense black eyes. "You must be the Chinese." She spoke in a stern voice, breathing deeply, though not panting as she should have been after such an arduous climb. After studying him a moment, she reached back to release two braids of hair which had been pinned close to her ears and arranged them, as if suddenly concerned about her appearance. "I am looking for Drakte."

"You're a purba," Shan suggested.

"I am a schoolteacher," the young woman shot back.

"There are no children here," Shan observed quietly.

The woman fixed Shan with a cold, challenging stare. "The Chinese said go to university to become a teacher, become a model for Tibetan youth," she said when he silently returned the stare. "So I went to university. They said run on the track team so we can have a Tibetan endurance runner to compete in China. So I did. I won medals in Beijing and I returned to my home district to be that model citizen." She spoke loudly. She was relating the story to taunt him. "But after a year of teaching they said no more classes in Tibetan. Only speak Chinese, only use Chinese books. And I said no, I will speak to Tibetan children in their own tongue. That is what a model Tibetan citizen does." She raised the bottle and drank deeply. "One day I came to my school and a Chinese teacher had taken my class. They had emptied my office, even took all my medals." She gazed down at the hermitage, then looked back at Shan. "But they didn't take my legs."

"So now you run for the purbas."

"I can go places horses and trucks can't."

"A purba lunggompa."

The woman gave an impatient shrug and pursed her lips in a frown, as if to emphasize that she was not impressed with his wit. After a moment she glanced back at the trail she had climbed.

"Are you being followed?" Shan asked.

"I need to see Drakte," she said.

"He's-" Shan's tongue seemed to grow heavy. He looked toward the buildings below.

Without waiting for another word the woman sprang up, bottle still in hand, and descended the steep ridge with the long leaps of an antelope.

Shan caught up with the woman in the death hut. She was leaning against the wall, drained of color, clutching her belly as she stared at the dead man. Her water bottle lay by her feet, its contents trickling onto the floor. Lokesh and Tenzin sat by the body with a bowl of water and a cloth, reverently washing Drakte's limbs. The brother of the woman on the ridge was lighting sticks of incense. Gendun sat in the shadows, softly continuing the Bardo rites, his eyes closed.

Shan lifted the water bottle. "Did you have a message for him?" he asked in a near whisper.

The woman did not reply. She approached the corpse and knelt, then slowly extended her fingers toward its face, as though to touch Drakte's cheek, but pulled them back before reaching his skin. "Who?" she asked in a cracking voice. "Who saw this happen? Who did this?" Her eyes shot toward Shan. Everyone knew who killed purbas.

"We all saw him killed," the dropka said with a shudder. "A curse was put on him and his blood poured out."

"No one," Shan disagreed. "No one saw him killed. We just saw him die. An intruder came and hit him in the belly with a staff. But not hard enough to make him bleed that way." He returned the woman's icy stare, until she raised a hand to wipe away a tear. "Our sentry above said Drakte was acting strange," he said more softly, "stopping along the valley floor. I think it was because he was already hurt." Shan approached the body and knelt by Lokesh, then lifted the bloodstained shirttail. He had been too shocked to investigate the body the night before. But now he had to understand. He raised the shirt and folded it back to expose the right abdomen. A four inch gout of tissue lay open, surrounded by a stain of congealed blood that ran down his hip. Now he remembered how, when he helped lift Drakte onto the blanket the night before, the purba's abdomen had felt unnaturally hard. Because he had been hemorrhaging internally.

"He was stabbed!" the woman groaned.