Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison Page A

squatted by the man as he poured out bowls for each of them.
    “I don’t understand,” Shan said to Lokesh. “You know who that was last night? A dobdob you said. It is not a word I have heard before.”
    “Not who, but what he was,” Lokesh said with wide eyes. “A monk policeman. A dobdob enforces virtue, enforces respect for the lamas. All the big gompas had them when I was a boy. First time I saw one I thought it was a monster, too. The cheeks darkened with ash. The big shoulders. They put special boards on their shoulders sometimes, under their robes, to make them look bigger than life. I hid behind my father, that first time, until the dobdob was gone. I hadn’t seen one for forty years at least,” the old Tibetan added with a distant gaze. As a former member of the Dalai Lama’s government Lokesh had spent nearly half his life in a gulag prison. “They kept order in the ranks at large assemblies. Enforced rules of the gompa’s abbot. Helped monks adhere to their vows with their staffs and their yaktail whips.” He raised his fist and brought it down with a sudden jerking motion. “If a novice was speaking out of turn, one tap with a staff on his skull would shut him up fast.”
    “But here,” the purba said. “Last night? It’s impossible. They don’t exist anymore.”
    “The ghost of a dobdob,” the dropka said, not with fear, but a certain awe. “He just appeared, punished Drakte, and evaporated, the way spirit creatures do at night. He doesn’t want us here. Next time,” he said to the runner in a somber tone, “next time the purbas need watchers here, they can ask someone else.”
    “A ghost didn’t slice open his abdomen,” Shan said. “A ghost didn’t attack him and chase him over the mountains.”
    “Drakte warned us, said he saw him kill,” the herder whispered. “We saw the one he meant, and minutes later Drakte himself was dead.”
    The purba woman gazed into her bowl. “Drakte was the one who had the idea about runners,” she said in a distant voice, as if she owed him a eulogy. “He arranged for me to train others. He had been in prison for leading a demonstration in Lhasa on the Dalai Lama’s birthday. I met him that day, sang songs with him, saw him get dragged away by the soldiers. Later I visited him in prison, and was there the day he was released. For the first month all he did was find food and bring it to the families of each of his cellmates.” She looked up from her bowl. “What will happen to him?” Her eyes brimmed with tears again.
    “We are making arrangements.” The dropka put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “There is a durtro on top of a mountain overlooking the sacred lake. When the time comes we will take him there.”
    A durtro. The herder meant a sky burial site, a charnel ground where the ragyapa, the body breakers, would cut the body up and feed it to vultures. Three days after death, when the body was properly blessed, Drakte’s remains would be carried to the durtro and chopped into pieces to be returned to the circle of life. Even his bones would be pounded into a paste to be eaten by the birds.
    “Don’t let the Chinese get him,” the purba said in an urgent, pleading voice. “Don’t let them know.”
    The dropka nodded gravely.
    The woman stared at Shan but quickly looked away as he met her eyes. “My name is Somo,” she said nearly in a whisper. It was her way of apologizing, he realized, to show that despite what she thought about other Chinese, she would trust him with her name because Drakte had done so.
    “I am called Shan.”
    She nodded. “I heard about you even when you were in prison.”
    “Were you with Drakte in Lhadrung?” Shan asked.
    Somo shook her head. “Usually in Lhasa. He spent much of his time there, and the lands north of here, where he was born.”
    “When were you last in Lhasa with him?”
    “Nearly three months ago, the last time,” the woman said warily. It had been more than two months ago