Bone Mountain (46 page)

Half a dozen pallets lay unrolled along the rear wall of the chamber beside one of the piles of kettles and pans Shan had seen tied together at the village. Nyma ventured through a doorway that led to a room dimly lit with butter lamps, and motioned for the men to bring the litter forward. The second chamber they entered was larger than the first, perhaps fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long, with an open air hole in the roof. Two openings without doors led to small rooms that appeared to be meditation cells. An old faded thangka of the Medicine Buddha hung between the cells. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness Shan saw several shapes rise from the shadows where they had sitting by the back wall. Lhandro’s parents were there, and Tenzin, with the three purbas who had been waiting for him at Yapchi. In a corner behind the purbas was the equipment he had seen in the canyon by the village. At the back wall Lepka was examining several large, very old clay jars that appeared to contain dried herbs.

Lokesh and Tenzin did not hesitate as Lin was laid on a pallet. As Shan’s old friend bent over Lin’s limp form Tenzin collected all the lamps in the room and placed them beside the pallet. Winslow appeared and produced his electric lamp as Lokesh placed three fingers along one wrist, then the other, then the neck.

“Why bring a hostage?” one of the purbas asked with barely concealed anger. “We can do nothing with a hostage. All he can do is betray our secrets.”

Lokesh looked toward the door, then back to the fiery Tibetan. “I don’t understand. Is there a hostage?”

“This damned officer,” the purba growled.

Lokesh knitted his brow in confusion. “Ah,” he sighed after a moment. “No one brought a hostage. We brought a man who needs our compassion.”

The purba with the green sweater, who had been speaking with Winslow, turned to Shan in disbelief. “You took him out of the rocks? You dug him out of his own grave?”

Lhandro’s father hobbled over, lowered himself to the floor, and began helping Lokesh as he washed Lin’s face, rinsing the cloth in a bowl of water and wringing it out for Lokesh. “You should be grateful to this man,” the aged rongpa said.

“Grateful?” the purba spat.

“He is the one who made everyone run so fast. If he had not,” Lepka said, “some of us would have been below when those rocks fell, instead of those unfortunate soldiers.”

The purba groaned in exasperation, wheeled about, and left the chamber.

Lokesh toiled hard over Lin, washing him, massaging the hand of his broken wrist, repeatedly taking his pulse. As Nyma went outside to look for better splints, Lokesh looked into Lin’s ears and mouth, then listened again, his eyes closed, at the pulse on Lin’s neck and finally, removing the colonel’s boots, at each of his ankles. He washed the wound on Lin’s head once more, with a grim expression. Injuries to the crown of the head were especially unfortunate, for that was where, if it had to migrate from the injured flesh, the spirit would depart the body.

“I will make tea, for when he wakes,” Lhandro’s mother offered.

Lokesh’s face was strangely clouded. “This one will not wake for a long time, if ever,” he said, then rose stiffly and left the room.

Ten minutes later Shan found him sitting near the front edge of the small plateau, watching the sun set over the Plain of Flowers. Shan studied his friend, trying to understand the melancholy confusion on his face.

“The best healers at Rapjung were those who did not even begin studying medicine until they had spent years of learning as a monk, getting thoroughly familiar with their inner Buddha,” said the old Tibetan. “They said that no healer could restore the balance of health in a patient unless there was also balance in the spirit of the healer.”

Lokesh almost never complained, but when he did it was always about his own shortcomings. To think that somehow Lokesh felt himself at fault for not being able to deal with Lin’s injury brought a stab of pain to Shan’s heart. “I remember the lamas in our barracks saying once that if left to ripen to its true nature a soul will inhabit a body for many decades, then one day pop off like a ripe fruit,” Shan said, following Lokesh’s gaze toward the Plain of Flowers as he spoke. “But they also said that if left to grow in the wrong places spirits could became so rotten they will tumble off prematurely.”

Lokesh offered a slow nod in reply.

They watched the sun disappear. The horizon glowed in a brilliant line of pink and gold under a distant layer of clouds.

“It isn’t that it may be his time to die that disturbs me,” Lokesh said quietly. “It’s just that he is dying and I know no medicine, I have no words, I know not even what hopes to express for a man like that, or how to reach his spirit if he dies. There must be millions of Lins in the world and it pains me to so little understand them. I can make no connection with them. Not with me, not with the earth, with the world I know. How can I address the essence inside?” Lokesh sighed. “It makes me feel so incomplete, Xiao Shan. There can be no healing when such gaps exist.”

Shan, too, had no words. It pained him deeply to think that the wise, kind old Tibetan was made to feel incomplete by a man like Lin.

They sat in silence as night fell. Shan began to realize how unique the little plateau was, sheltered from the north winds by the immense tower of rock behind it, open to the south, with a view for dozens of miles over the low ranges to the west and south, and beyond them, the starkly beautiful changtang. In Tibetan tradition it would be considered a place of great power. “The hermits who came here,” he said at last. “Were they from Rapjung?”

“It wasn’t exactly a hermitage. I knew it, or knew of it. There were two places on this side of the mountains, in the high lands above Rapjung. For centuries, every summer the medicine lamas came to them, because of their power as mixing places. There was a place they called the mixing ledge at the edge of a huge cliff, and another nearby called the herb shelf.”

“Mixing places?” Shan asked.

“There are medicines that take hours to mix right, because special prayers have to be said over them, special sanctified tools used, with very precise portions to be mixed, in correct sequence, to keep the earth power in them. Once a batch was begun, the mixing could not stop. And for certain medicines the lama had to be in the correct state of mind, which meant they would come and sit in cells or sit out under the night sky until they reached the proper level of awareness. In the summer, I think, with that mountain wall behind to reflect the light, the full moon must shine on this place like no other. The mixing ledge was said to have a healing power of its own, as if the place itself was a medicine.”

They watched the vastness of sky and land before them as it surrendered to shadow. Eventually a woman’s soft voice called out, close behind them. “There is food.”

Shan turned to see Nyma. She seemed uninterested in eating and sat on a nearby rock. “Where will we go?” she asked after a long silence. When neither of her companions answered, Nyma replied to her own question. “The Mountain Combat Brigade is on the other side of the mountain,” she said in a brittle voice. “They will think we killed those soldiers. That dobdob is stalking us, probably waiting somewhere on the mountain right now. Down below is Norbu gompa, with all those howlers. Some of my people feel such hate. Some want to go back and sabotage that oil camp.” She looked at Shan. “They have no hope. They have only anger left.”

“You know where that would lead,” he warned, “if there is armed resistance, even the hint of it, the army will come and stay. Martial law will be declared, and a man like Lin will run the district, for years.”

“Sometimes today I have felt anger, too,” she confessed. “Our village. Our precious village…”

In their frantic flight up the mountain Shan had not considered why she had taken off her robe. To blend in better with the others who were being chased, he had assumed at first, but now he remembered the woman running out of the house at the last minute, pausing to hang a brown cloth on a peg. “Your robe,” he said. “You left it to burn.”

“It’s not mine,” Nyma said in a hollow voice. “I am finished with that lie. I am not a nun. If my people had a real nun maybe none of this would have happened.”

A small, sad moan escaped Lokesh’s lips.

“You can’t—” Shan began. “They need you.…” But the words choked away as a wave of helplessness washed over him. He saw her turn her head toward the chain of peaks that ran to the west.

A loud hollow croaking noise came from above, the sound of a night-hawk.

“We could follow those peaks into the main range of the Kunlun Mountains. We could follow them for a thousand miles, follow them for months, maybe not see any other person the entire time,” Nyma said, with longing in her voice.

Nyma’s distant gaze caused Shan to piece together the mental map of the region he had been constructing in his mind. Suddenly he realized where they were, and he knew Winslow would soon reach the same conclusion. They were only two or three miles from where Melissa Larkin had fallen to her death.

*   *   *

Lokesh was asleep beside Lin when Shan and Winslow left the next morning. The American had been studying his map when Shan had finally gone inside to eat the night before, and the two men had not spoken, but Shan was only a few steps behind when Winslow left at dawn and began climbing the long western arm of the mountain.

“You should have stayed and rested with the others,” Winslow suggested when Shan caught up with him.

“I need to see for myself,” Shan replied.

“But Larkin is my business,” the American observed.

“But this mountain,” Shan said, “this mountain has many secrets still to tell us. Not just about Larkin.”

“I thought everything was finished yesterday.”

Shan nodded with a grim expression. “Some things were finished. But I think something else started.”

The American’s only response was to point to a massive blue sheep, a bharal, standing majestically on a ledge above them, leaning so far over the edge it almost seemed to be floating in the air. Winslow stared intensely at the animal and Shan remembered his story of being called by something to climb up a mountain and retrieve a small stone. The American began jogging up the trail, as if worried he was going to miss something.

Shan caught up with Winslow several minutes later at a strange nook in the rock, a slight recess in a high cliff face, where water seeped out of the mountain fifty feet above and flowed down the nearly vertical wall, not in a waterfall but in a broad, thin glistening sheet of moisture, nearly thirty feet wide, covered with moss and small ferns, falling onto a shelf of stone that appeared to have sloughed off the cliff eons earlier to form a sheltered alcove. Not falling onto the rock itself, Shan saw as he approached. The water fell behind the slab and flowed under it. The effect was of a perfectly level dry shelf bounded by a lush, living wall of plants, protected from the wind but open to the sun. More plants grew in pockets of soil on the shelf itself, plants he had not seen elsewhere on the mountain.

“Look at this,” Winslow said in a tone of wonder, and Shan joined him on the other side of a large squarish boulder near the edge of the fallen slab. There were half a dozen flat rocks, each about eighteen inches high and a foot wide, arrayed in a semicircle before three evenly spaced indentations in the stone floor, each of them half-spheres about a foot wide and eight inches deep.

“Who … what was … how did this get made?” Winslow asked, with wonder in his voice.

Shan knelt at one of the indentations, touching its surface. The stones and holes were not perfectly shaped. They did not appear to be manmade, but they must have been—for mixing medicine. He turned to see the American rubbing his fingers along the flat back of the boulder that shielded the semicircle of stones. The surface, though partially encrusted with lichen, was covered with Tibetan script carved into the rock.

“The herb shelf,” Shan whispered, and explained to Winslow what Lokesh had told him, how medicine lamas had once used the mountain.

Winslow seemed deeply moved by the place. He kept rubbing his fingers over the ancient script. “They knew so much,” he said, “so much that we don’t know. That we’ll never know.”

Shan sat, tentatively, on one of the stool stones, as lamas had once done. A gentle breeze stirred over the shelf, filled with unfamiliar smells. He smelled something like mint, and something like fennel, mixed with more acrid odors. The power of the place hung over it like a mist, though not in any frightening way. He felt strangely relaxed, and intensely aware. It was a place where healing began.

Winslow called Shan to a patch of moss below the shelf. It had been pressed down recently, by feet, and by reclining bodies.

“Two people,” the American said as he squatted by the moss to study it. “Not last night, but recently.” He turned and scanned the landscape urgently. Above Rapjung, in a small meadow less than five miles from where they now stood, they had seen two people who sought herbs, the ghost lama and his attendant. The American sprang up and began walking quickly, almost jogging, up the trail.

Twenty minutes later Winslow stopped and looked at a patch of snow high on the slope above them. “Why would Zhu hide?” he asked abruptly. “Why would he sneak around in the mountains without telling Jenkins?” He moved on, without waiting for a reply, walking rapidly until they reached the crest of the long ridge they climbed, where he flattened his map on a boulder. A high cliff jutted out to the west of them, forming a huge vertical wall that ran several hundred yards before cascading downward to the gorges below.

“We never asked where Zhu’s team was,” Shan said, “where they were when Zhu saw her body. We asked Jenkins about Larkin’s team, but not about Zhu’s.” He studied the landscape. The cliff was the place Zhu had indicated on the map, the place where Larkin had fallen. Someone could have watched Larkin from the slope they had walked up, or from the flat ridge that ran parallel to the cliff, the one on which they stood. But not anyone on official venture business, for the ridge was outside the boundaries of the concession Jenkins had drawn on Winslow’s map. Neither Larkin nor Zhu would have been inside their company’s concession.