Free Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison Page B

good, right?”
    When no one replied, she continued her story. “That village, or the valley where the village was, was the home of the Yapchi deity. For centuries that deity had lived in a self-actuated statue, a rock shaped like a sitting Buddha. Two eyes had been painted on it in ancient times, so it could better see the world and to remind those who lived in the valley that it was always watching.”
    “And the soldiers took the statue?” Shan asked.
    “Not exactly,” Nyma said in a melancholy tone. “When they finished shelling, the Tibetan soldiers were dead, for they had been too weak to flee. The surviving villagers ran to the deity in the center of the valley, about fifty of them, mostly women and children and old men. The Chinese officer of the Lujun laughed and called for them to surrender. If they agreed to be their porters, to carry the soldiers’ equipment to the Chinese border, he would let them live. When they refused he selected ten soldiers and sent them with swords among the villagers. They slaughtered the people like goats, cut them into pieces, laughing like it was great sport. No one from that Tibetan officer’s family survived.”
    She turned suddenly and stared at the blackness at the back of the chamber, as if she felt she were being watched from inside the mountain. “Only those few who happened to be away from the village survived. A caravan from the village was away at the holy lake. And there was a girl with sheep up on the slopes who watched it all. But the soldiers found the girl trying to reach the bodies. The officer made her watch as he smashed the deity into tiny pieces with a hammer. Then he took the only piece big enough to recognize, the single eye, the chenyi, ” she said, meaning the right eye. “The officer said the eye had witnessed the vindication of the Lujun and he would give it to his general as a trophy.”
    Nyma’s voice drifted off and she looked toward the menacing cloud again. “They ordered the girl to find her mother among the bodies, then bound her to her mother’s dead body, face to face, and left her there. Monks from the gompa on the other side of Yapchi Mountain found her there after three days.”
    There was a long silence as Shan studied first Nyma, then the dark cloud.
    “And your people recorded the story,” Lokesh said over Shan’s shoulder.
    “That little girl, she was my grandmother. She helped to bury them. Our people don’t give the dead to the birds. We give them back to the soil. She helped put them in a big grave. When I was young she used to sit at the grave and recite all the names of the dead to me.”
    The Golok had his chang bottle in midair as Nyma made the announcement. He lowered the bottle, stared at it for a moment. “The bastards,” he offered, as though to comfort the nun, then packed the bottle away.
    “Afterwards,” Nyma added, “people kept watch for the chenyi stone. It was kept in an army museum near Beijing for many decades and a man from Yapchi obtained special charms from lamas and traveled there to bring it back. But the Chinese shot him as a spy. The eye disappeared after the communists came. But we found out that parts of the Lujun were reconstituted into the People’s Liberation Army.”
    “The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade,” Shan suggested.
    Nyma nodded. “After they were assigned to duty in Tibet, people kept a close watch on them. Another man from the village went to speak with the army but he was arrested and went to lao gai, where he died. A secretary saw the chenyi stone on the desk of the colonel of the brigade in Lhasa and sent word. After a few months a letter was sent to Lhasa, signed by all our villagers, asking that it be returned. But the only thing that happened was that the township council sent back the letter and demanded extra taxes from us. Then last year when the Chinese celebrated August First in Lhasa that colonel had it taped to the turret of a tank in the parade.” August First was