Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison Page B

when the eye had been brought to the hermitage, and weeks before that it had been stolen in Lhasa. “Drakte said you did things in prison to help the old lamas there. There was an old official from the Fourteenth’s government you got released.”
    Lokesh gave one of his hoarse laughs and looked at Shan with amusement.
    Somo studied the two men a moment. “You?” she asked Lokesh in disbelief.
    The old man nodded. “I was going to die in that prison,” he said, still grinning, “but Xiao Shan found a different path for me.” Xiao Shan. Little Shan. It was Chinese, but Lokesh sometimes used the term of affection from Shan’s childhood, one used traditionally by an older person addressing a younger one, as Shan’s long-dead uncles once had done.
    Shan stared into his bowl. “I was already dead, and they brought me back to life,” he said, and gazed back at the hut where Gendun still sat with Drakte. The Bardo had to be recited for twenty-four hours after the purba’s death. In their lao gai prison, when an inmate died the oldest lamas took shifts of four hours each, even while breaking rocks on their road crews, reciting the words from memory. Always the oldest, because the younger monks had had their education cut short by the Chinese and did not know all the words.
    “There is no one else,” Lokesh said, as if reading Shan’s mind. “I only know the first hour of the ritual. We have no text to recite from.”
    “I heard someone else, last night,” Shan said. “We can’t wait a day.”
    “There is no one else,” Lokesh repeated.
    Shan looked toward the death hut in confusion. It was true. He had seen no one else. Had it been some strange echo, or Drakte trying to reach out to Gendun?
    “But you can’t stay,” Somo protested. “Whatever Drakte was trying to warn us about—” she glanced at Shan, “it’s too dangerous. That’s what he was telling you last night.”
    As if in answer, Lokesh rose and walked into the small lhakang. Shan followed him inside. Nyma was there, praying by the altar in a low, nervous voice. It sounded almost as though she were arguing with the eye, which had been pushed to the front edge of the altar toward a small wooden box, lined with a felt cloth, which lay open on the floor below.
    When the nun saw Shan her eyes brightened and she rose to stand by the altar, gazing expectantly at him. When Shan did nothing she gestured at the box.
    “Are you scared to touch it?” Shan asked.
    “Yes,” the nun said readily. “I pushed it with a chakpa to the edge,” she explained, as if that was the most she could be expected to do.
    Lokesh sighed and bent to pick up the box. Shan stepped forward, glancing uncertainly at the nun, and set the jagged piece of stone in the box. Lokesh folded the felt to cover it and closed the lid.
    “But we have time,” Shan said. “Rinpoche will not be done until late tonight.”
    Lokesh stepped outside without reply, still clutching the box. The Golok was near the door, tightening the saddle on his sturdy mountain horse. He was leaving, and Shan had never understood why the man had come. But then, to Shan’s dismay, the Golok stepped to a brown horse that now stood beside his own, opened its saddlebag and extended his hand toward Lokesh just as Tenzin and one of the herders rounded the corner of the farthest hut, leading more horses.
    “We should have left at dawn,” the Golok said with an impatient gesture for Lokesh to hand him the box. “Didn’t you listen? The killer is out there, he’s coming for the stone, that purba said so. And you wait around like old women.”
    Shan looked pleadingly at Lokesh as the Golok set the box in the open saddlebag.
    “I do not understand much of this,” his old friend said with a despairing shrug. “But I do understand we must go.”
    “But Gendun,” Shan protested. “He must come with us.”
    Lokesh shook his head sadly. “What he must do now is stay with Drakte. He will go to the durtro, then