Authors: Eliot Pattison
After they had laid the first layer of stones Lokesh paused and picked a sprig of the plant that grew around the stone slab, looking at it quizzically. “Chigu Rinpoche said that the whole function of the healers was to translate the power of the earth into the life force of the human.”
Winslow studied Lokesh a long time, then slowly picked up a rock and continued building the little stack of rocks as Shan began carrying more stones from the slope above them.
Lokesh paused again. “We learned how to dig roots in the reverent fashion here, at this spring, learned how to push aside the soil a little at a time, taking time to coax the earth, always leaving some so the plant could grow back. Chigu Rinpoche said we learned about ourselves by digging into the soil. He said we should dig inside the earth to find the earth inside us.” Lokesh raised some soil in his hand and let it trickle into his other palm. “It was a teaching mantra he used. Inside the earth, for the earth inside.”
When they had finished Lokesh nudged Shan and pointed toward the top of the ridge above the ruins. “People are up there,” the old Tibetan announced.
Shan studied the slope and saw nothing except a large black bird circling high overhead, riding the updraft. Winslow glanced up the hill with a skeptical expression, then scanned the top of the ridge with his lenses.
“You see them?” Shan asked in a slow, careful tone. His old friend’s senses, like his emotions, were usually in a delicate balance. What he might have sensed was a memory of people on the slope, decades earlier, or perhaps he had seen the back of a fleeing antelope. Not infrequently Shan had followed his old friend when Lokesh had sensed the presence of a spirit creature, only to sit and contemplate a rock where Lokesh insisted the creature had taken refuge.
Lokesh rubbed his grizzled jaw then turned with a sheepish grin toward Shan and continued down the trail. Shan silently followed, knowing that once they completed the circuit they would be climbing back up the slope.
An hour later, after having returned to the camp and consumed a meal of cold tsampa rolled into balls, they were nearly at the top of the slope when they paused at a flat rock that overlooked the long plain. Winslow, who had refused Shan’s suggestion that he remain at the camp and rest, pointed to two small clouds of dust at the southern and western ends. “Those scouts from Yapchi,” the American said.
“The Tara Temple, the Maitreya Chapel, the Samvara Temple,” Lokesh said suddenly, and Shan saw that he was pointing at empty places among the ruins, speaking of what he had seen, or maybe still saw, at the gompa. “The chora,” he said, referring to the debating courtyard, “the inner herb garden, the north garden, the north kangtsang and the bark-hang,” he added in a contemplative tone, referring to a hall of residence and the printing press.
Lokesh’s finger hovered in midair as if he had forgotten something. “All those prayer flags in the trees,” he said in a distant voice. “It’s like a festival.”
Shan looked back down on the ruins. There were no prayer flags except for a single modest strand by Gang’s shrines, and no trees except the small juniper grove outside the gompa grounds. Lokesh was in another time, another place. Shan was never embarrassed for his friend, or fearful of his sanity. But today Shan felt a certain envy for the old Tibetan.
He put his hands inside his coat pockets. Something brushed his left hand and he pulled out the sprig of brush he had taken from the burnt patch of earth, and extended it to Lokesh. The old Tibetan took it and placed the sprig under his nose. He looked at Shan with surprise in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said with a grateful smile.
Shan studied his friend as Lokesh clasped the sprig inside his cupped hands and pushed his hands against his nose, his eyes closed. “It’s medicine?” he asked.
Lokesh nodded, his eyes still closed. “Not ready for picking, but from a healthy plant. Chigu and I would gather this sometimes out on the plain. It’s called birds foot, for the way the stem branches out.”
Shan pictured the scene as he and the American had found it, where he had plucked the stem. The plant had been growing only in the protection of the shallow bowl. Maybe the dobdob had not tried to burn the plain. Maybe he had only tried to burn the medicine plants. But why? He remembered the salt camp, where the herders were hiding the injured woman from healers. And the woman on the trail, who had rejected Lokesh’s offer of healing.
They reached the top of the slope to find a long rolling meadow that extended nearly a half-mile across the crest and at least two miles to the east and west. Above them, only a few miles away now, loomed the huge shape of Yapchi Mountain, standing guard over the Plain of Flowers to the south and Yapchi Valley to the north.
Shan and Winslow stepped aside for Lokesh to lead them into the maze of game trails that crisscrossed the meadow. But his friend shrugged and stepped backwards, gesturing for Shan to continue in the front. It was an odd dance they had done often in their travels. It didn’t matter who led, Lokesh was saying, for they would always find what they were meant to find, and eventually arrive where they were meant to be.
Shan felt an unexpected exhilaration as they moved along the rolling meadow. The wind blew steady and cool, but not uncomfortably so. Small pink flowers grew close to the earth. From across the meadow came the trill of a lark.
They walked slowly along the rolling meadow, Shan randomly selecting new paths where the game trails intersected, until they came to a long low ledge of rock that bordered a large meadow, protected on the north by a towering wall of rock. The bowl, nearly three hundred yards across, was filled with a low heather-like plant, and larks—more larks than he had ever seen in one place, fluttering among the growth. As Shan led his friends through a gap in the ledge he heard the hushed, urgent sound of voices and a hand came out of the shadow of the rock to hold his arm.
He pulled back with a shudder, imagining the dobdob had found them again.
“You have to get down,” a woman whispered.
Shan bent to see five Tibetans—three middle-aged herders, a slightly younger woman, and a boy—sitting in the shadow made by an overhanging ledge. “If they see you they will run,” the woman said. She did not seem surprised to see three strangers, only concerned they might frighten away the objects of their attention. Wild drong, Shan suspected, or maybe some of the rare blue sheep that roamed the mountains.
The Tibetans wore the thick chubas of dropka, heavily patched with swatches of leather and red cloth. Two of the men wore dirty fleece caps, the other the quilted, flapped green cap issued to soldiers for winter wear. The woman clutched a large silver and turquoise gau in one hand, with the other on the arm of the boy, who watched the meadow with round, expectant eyes.
Not even the appearance of the lanky American distracted the dropka for long. They stared quizzically at Winslow for a few seconds, and the boy pulled on the woman’s shoulder to make sure she saw the goserpa. But when Lokesh and Winslow settled in beside the herders, as if they, too, had come to see the creature the dropka awaited, the boy’s attention shifted back to the meadow.
Shan sat beside Winslow, his back to the rock, covered in shadow, then leaned forward to speak. But no one returned his gaze, nor seemed to even notice him. It was more than expectation in their eyes, Shan saw, it was a deep, even spiritual excitement. They sat, the wind fluting around the rocks, larks calling, brilliant clouds scudding across an azure sky. Two of the men began low mantras, fingering their beads. Suddenly the boy pointed toward the far side of the meadow, near the wall.
Shan saw nothing, though the dropka uttered tiny gleeful cries. The two men increased the pace of their mantras, joined now by Lokesh. He became aware of movement at the edge of the wall’s shadow, a great hulking shape standing on four legs near the shadow. From so far away he could not tell whether it was a yak, a large sheep, or even a bear. Then a second shape, a human figure in a red robe, emerged from the shadows, and the first shape rose up on its hind legs. The man’s features could not be seen from such a distance, but the stranger walked in short steps, leaning on a tall staff. Shan sensed the man was not merely old, but ancient.
Lokesh had stopped his mantra. His face was as excited as the boy’s, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I recognize this place now,” he whispered in a very still voice. “We would come here in summers. Pitched a white tent and stayed many days, a week sometimes. Chigu Rinpoche said the larks sang the herbs here.”
Sing the herbs. An image of larks offering lullabies to young plants flashed through Shan’s mind.
“It’s true,” a child’s voice said. But Shan turned to see that it was the woman speaking, with the tone of a young girl. “It’s all true, isn’t it?” she said to Lokesh, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Remember this,” she added solemnly to the boy and hugged him. “Remember that it was spoken that this was one of the places where they came in the old days, that today you saw one of them come.”
Sometimes, Shan’s father had told him, people can live eighty or ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a single true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look.
It was one of those rare true things they were glimpsing now. An ageless medicine lama gathering his herbs, a medicine lama who shouldn’t exist, in a field that had been forgotten for half a century, rising up like a ghost to confirm that once there had been wise, joyful old men who gathered plants so they could translate the magic of the earth to its people.
They watched, the sound of the whispered mantras becoming almost indistinguishable from the low sound of the wind on the rocks. The low, bent shape in the shadows did not move, and Shan realized it might be a helper, a protector for the old one, crouching, on guard against the world outside. The medicine lama wandered among the flowering plants, stooping sometimes, sometimes rising with a sprig and looking skyward, as if consulting with the air deities about his find.
Then suddenly, with a low moan, as if struggling mightily to contain himself, the boy burst up with his hands in the air. “Lha gyal lo! Lha gyal lo!” he shouted with joy, just twice before his mother pulled him backwards and clamped a hand over his mouth.
But the sound had carried over the meadow, echoing off the rock face, and the lama and the hulking shape darted toward the deeper shadows. The old man halted for an instant, peering toward the rocks where they sat. Then, like a deer at the edge of a wood, he merged into the shadows and was gone.
They waited a quarter hour for the ghost lama to return, exchanging uncertain glances, as if none were sure now of exactly what they had seen. Then the herders rose and silently filed away from the rock, following one of the game trails that led southward down the wide ridge.
It was impossible, Shan kept telling himself as they slowly walked back to Rapjung. The medicine lamas had all died. The soldiers had cleared out the surrounding hills years earlier. With all the patrols, all the pacification campaigns, it did not seem possible even one could have survived. Lokesh offered no suggestion, no theory of how now, after decades, one of the old lamas could appear in the hills. He just followed Shan, lost in a strange reverie, or perhaps in his memories of Rapjung as it had existed fifty years earlier. Several paces behind Lokesh, came the American, also silent, seemingly numbed by what he had seen.
Again and again Shan replayed the scene in his mind. It wasn’t that a lama had survived all these years in the mountains, he realized; the dropka had come because of something new, because they had heard of a miracle. Someone else had seen a ghost lama, he suddenly remembered. The herders by the hermitage the night Drakte had died. One of the old lamas had arrived, had returned. From where? Why? And why now, when the eye was on its journey, when Drakte had died and the army was scouring the land, when a dobdob, protector of the faith, was attacking devout Buddhists, when an American had gone missing?
Shan had no answers. He had only foreboding. Although he knew little, he knew enough to be frightened.
No one asked where they had been when they arrived at the camp. Several of those who had completed the kora had just returned themselves, having meditated at the hermit’s cave or the drup-chu shrine. As the Yapchi men went to check on the sheep, Nyma sought Shan out.
“It happened again,” the nun said. “The poor girl.” Shan looked up from the sheep whose pack he was tightening. “She just fell over on the trail and began shaking, and beating the earth with her hands and feet.”
“Anya?” Shan asked, realizing he had seen the girl lying under a blanket by the fire.
“Nothing happened. No words. Sometimes it’s like that,” Nyma murmured.
The words chilled Shan. She was talking about the oracle.
“I told that monk, hoping he could help,” Nyma continued. “But he seemed angry at my words. I think his head is still hurt from that attack.”
Shan followed the nun’s gaze toward Padme, who sat resting against the ruins of the wall, at a place apart, writing in his small notepad.
They ate in silence and drank tea as the sun set, the company in quiet contemplation after a day on the kora.
Lokesh did not speak until he spread his blanket near Shan to sleep.
“It is a good sign, a wonderful sign, for a medicine lama to appear in the herb meadow,” the old Tibetan said, in a tone that said he was still not certain the man had been flesh and blood. “And a monk on the Plain of Flowers. That dobdob will not hurt us. Things will get better, you’ll see.”
But in the early hours of the morning, a scream woke Shan. He sat up as Lokesh gave an agonized groan. The restored shrines of Rapjung were engulfed in flames.
C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
The dry, brittle wood of the elegant little lhakang cracked and spat, burning as hot as a furnace, throwing off sparks that spiraled far into the night sky. No one could get close to the flames, or even close enough to the adjacent assembly hall to keep the fire from spreading to it. Gang’s wife held the caretaker back, tears streaming down her face, the young boy holding his father’s left wrist out as though trying to show it to someone. The skin on Gang’s palm was a mass of welts, the back of the hand scorched red and black. A small soot-stained figurine lay at his feet. He had saved the little Buddha from the altar.