Free Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison Page A

away. Nyma sighed with relief and pushed her mount toward the opening.
    Shan doubted there was any land on the planet with more natural caves than Tibet. Certainly there was no land where caves were so integrated into the story of its people. There were cave hermitages, cave shrines, even entire gompas built around caves. Centuries before, Guru Rinpoche, the most revered of the ancient teaching lamas, was believed to have deposited sacred objects and scriptures in caves throughout Tibet. Tibetans still kept watch for forgotten caves that might harbor some of the Guru’s sacred treasures. And many of the local protector deities that watched over valleys and mountains were said to make their homes in caves.
    Although the cave was low and wide at its mouth, it quickly narrowed into a small tunnel. The horses seemed to understand what was expected of them, and as soon as their riders dismounted the animals scurried to the back of the entrance chamber. Lokesh arrived and began helping Tenzin loosen the saddle girths, speaking in comforting tones to the animals as the Golok and Nyma settled onto rocks at opposite sides of the entrance. Dremu lifted his bottle and gulped noisily, not offering it to anyone else.
    “You knew about the army having the eye,” Shan said to Dremu and Nyma. “Both of you knew.”
    “I told you,” the Golok said with a wide grin that exposed several of his yellow-brown teeth. The only thing Dremu had told Shan was that he could die a hundred ways.
    “Why would the army want an old stone eye?” he asked Nyma.
    “Most people in the northern changtang know about the army and the eye.”
    “I don’t. I’m not sure Gendun did.”
    “It was a long time ago. From an invasion,” Nyma offered in a reluctant voice.
    “You mean the stone was taken as some kind of trophy fifty years ago,” Shan said, referring to the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army.
    “Not that invasion,” Nyma sighed.
    Shan sensed movement behind him and saw Lokesh standing at his shoulder now.
    “It was when a Chinese army came to drive the Thirteenth out of Tibet in the Year of the Female Water Hare,” Nyma explained. She meant the invasion early in the twentieth century. When, Shan recalled, imperial troops had marched into Lhasa, leaving a bloody swath across eastern and northern Tibet in an effort to unseat the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.
    “Terrible things happened,” the nun continued in a brittle voice. “Chinese soldiers under a General named Feng razed gompas and buried the monks alive, hundreds of monks. Butcher Feng, they called the General. After several years the Tibetan army finally organized a defense and pushed Feng back. There was a terrible fight at the Turquoise Bridge in Lhasa, where the Lujun Combat Division was driven into retreat by Tibetan soldiers. The Lujun were the crack troops of the Chinese army. They were humiliated and wanted to avenge themselves. But the generals ordered the Lujun home because their Empress Dowager had died and more soldiers were needed to keep order in Beijing. The troops marched up the old northern route—the Changlam, it was called—annihilating gompas, killing all monks and nuns they encountered on the way.” Nyma hesitated a moment, studying a dark black cloud that had appeared on the horizon. “They were on the Changlam, two hundred miles north of Lhasa when they learned that the home of the senior officer of the troops that defeated the Lujun in Lhasa was a village only twenty miles to the west. They marched on the village and when they found the villagers treating wounded soldiers, they set up cannon and destroyed it. Only one house survived.”
    The nun stood, staring more intensely at the black cloud, which was rapidly approaching. Suddenly she bent and darted to the edge of the outcropping. The Golok belched toward the nun, then raised his bottle in salute.
    After a moment Nyma walked back to the cave. “They haven’t moved,” she announced. “That’s