Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison Page B

fiercely embraced. When they finally separated, the girl dropped her bag by the fire and opened its top. Tenzin stepped over and prodded the load with an approving nod. It was dung for the fire, and the mute Tibetan held up a piece with the air of connoisseur, as if to confirm it was yak dung, the best of the fuels typically used on the high plateau. Unlike sheep or goat dung it did not need the constant work of a bellows to keep a flame. Tenzin emptied the girl’s bag, silently raised his own leather sack, carried from his saddle like a treasured possession, and walked out toward the pastures. Shan watched the enigmatic man. It was as if collecting dung had become the escapee’s calling in life, as if the Tibetan with the aristocratic bearing had decided that his role in society would be to keep other people’s fires burning.
    Shan saw that the red-cheeked girl with the braids was watching Tenzin, too. She finally turned and cast a shy, sidelong glance toward Shan, then limped toward a man in a ragged fox-fur hat who was digging with a shovel fifty yards from camp. The man was surrounded by several small piles of earth.
    “I thought the salt was taken from the surface,” Shan said in a perplexed tone. As soon as the girl arrived at his side, the man handed her something and she turned in excitement to run with a crooked, shambling gait to the tent where the old herder stood guard.
    Lhandro followed his gaze, then gestured in the opposite direction. Shan turned to see an old woman sitting on a hill above the camp.
    “Tonde,” Lhandro said, referring to the sacred objects that Tibetans sometimes retrieved from the earth. They could be arrowheads or shards of pottery or carvings in the shape of ritual objects. Once a prisoner in Shan’s camp had found a corroded bronze buckle he had proclaimed to have belonged to Guru Rinpoche, the ancient teacher, and built an altar for it out of cardboard.
    “Holy men have been coming to this place for a thousand years. That old dropka woman, she found a piece of turquoise carved into a lotus flower which she says has great power. Yesterday she said a Chinese airplane came and she used the tonde to scare it away,” he said solemnly, then shrugged. “But she’s nearly blind with cataracts.”
    “Our Anya,” Lhandro continued after a moment, nodding toward the limping girl, “Anya saw her waving her fist at the sky and said it was just a goose that had lost its way from the flock. Now the old woman says if the soldiers come close she’ll call another hailstorm against them.”
    Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance. The army patrol they had seen had been many miles from the camp. The people of the changtang always seemed to have their secret ways of knowing things.
    “Don’t underestimate the tonde,” a voice interjected from behind them. They turned to see the woman in the rainbow-colored apron carrying a leather bucket past their tent. “Some are just pieces of pretty stone, perhaps. But others,” she studied Shan a moment then stepped closer. “They say it was a tonde in the hands of a monk that destroyed that Chinese mountain.”
    “Destroyed a mountain?” Shan asked.
    “In the far south, near Bhutan,” the woman said with a nod. “One of the army mountains. Their slaves had dug it out, and soldiers had arrived with their machines.” The woman meant one of the massive military installations that gulag prisoners were often forced to construct for the People’s Liberation Army, carving out vast networks of tunnels inside mountains, mostly along the southern border. Some had become barracks for entire divisions of Chinese troops, some depots for equipment, others sophisticated listening and command posts.
    “That mountain, they filled it with computer machines and radios and army commanders. But they didn’t know one of the prisoners was an old monk with a tonde that had belonged to that mountain deity. He could talk to that deity and explain what had happened. When