Nothing Sacred Part 10

"No, but you are still weak from the loss of your baby. Sometimes ladies very weak for a very long time after that."

"I suppose so."

She sat down on the floor beside the table-which was an old tabletop propped up on two big stones. Brushing her thin black hair back from her face she said, "I have to tell you something. I have to tell you I am sorry I did not come to see you earlier that day, the day you lost your baby. I was on duty.

If I had come sooner I maybe save the baby."

I shook my head. "Dolma, that's all over with. Don't worry about it."

"But, Viva, I know how you feel. I too have lost my child. I cannot have more children." She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. "I never have spoke to you how it was with me before I come to this place. I am from a good family that lived in Shigatse. My father was a relative of the Panchen Lama. We were not wealthy people, for the soldiers had taken all wealth from every Tibet person, but even so, we are a good family and when I fell in love with an interpreter for the Chinese, my family was angry with me."

"I can imagine.""They dared make no objection to my boyfriend, though, because they feared the soldiers. My family lost many people already to the soldiers-three of my brothers and my father's brother's entire family were killed in the rebellion after the Panchen Lama was murdered. So, although I knew they did not want me to, I married my interpreter and moved away with him, and quickly became pregnant with my first child. I was very frightened. My mother and sisters were far away. No women in the city to which we moved would talk to me for they feared my husband would inform on them. All people were afraid of each other for fear of informers. I was so afraid. Who would help me with my baby, I asked my husband? The midwives were forbidden to practice on pain of death. Our Tibet doctors were killed or sent to work in the mines or forests where hard work calloused their hands so that they could not diagnose illness by the pulses anymore. The medical colleges were teared down and all the books burned-many years of knowledge gone in a few years. All of these things I said to my husband and he understood and held me and told me that all would be well. He would find a Chinese doctor for me. My husband did not know what would befall me, Viva. He had been working with the foreigners in important government affairs and he knew little of day-to-day things, of what our conquerors were doing to the women of our people. Because I was cut off from my friends, and had been a maiden before, I knew nothing of the danger myself and went blindly into the office of the Chinese doctor who was supposed to examine me and see if my baby was all right.

"He had a table with many instruments but I thought little of it until he began to examine me, to poke at me inside with things. And all at once I felt a horrible, tearing pain. I momentarily thought this was because I was pregnant and so tender in that region, but then I felt a rush of blood and something came out of me and I fainted. My husband came for me, and the doctor was very angry with him but when the doctor had finished speaking to him in Chinese so rapid I could not follow, my husband was very angry too. He did not stop to clean me, but carried me home. I knew before I left the office that the doctor had killed my baby. I saw it lying there, in a basin, not yet a child. I would have taken it to bury but this was not permitted. Later my husband told me that we would have no more children, that the doctor had changed me so that I no longer would be able to become pregnant. He said the doctor told him this was population control, the same as had been practiced in crowded parts of China for many years.

"My husband begged my forgiveness, weeping with shame and rage as he told me these things. He was also afraid that I might die. The doctor was wrong, he said. The rule was that each couple was allowed one child but I had had no children. Our only baby had been murdered that day. And besides, Viva, there were always too many Chinese and always too few Tibet people. Always we have too few people to work our land. But the conquerors treated us as if we were animals sp.a.w.ning without thought or care. And now I can have no children. I have not forgiven my husband, although I know it is not his fault, but that day, I did the same thing to you-by accident-but by my neglect I caused you to lose your child. It is possible I may not return from this trip and I wanted you to know this thing before I go. I wanted to ask your forgiveness, as I have no right to do."

Her gla.s.ses were a salt-streaked mess by that time and her nose red and soggy. What could I do?

Tell her my baby had not meant to me what her baby had meant? She'd never understand. Besides, I would have had some trouble talking. My throat kept constricting, seeing poor Dolma on the table, her baby in the basin, my baby on a cold stone floor, both in pools of blood, neither having had a chance at life. I didn't want that baby. I am glad not to have to deal with it and I would have prayed to be relieved of it if I had known I was carrying it. But just the same, some of my tears were for poor little Buzzard Junior, whatever he or she would have been. Women in NAC had fought for the right not to bear children if they chose and here was Dolma, not allowed to give her baby life. I didn't know what to say to her, what to do, so I did what Grandma and Grandpa would have done and gave her a hug.

About that time we heard the m.u.f.fled report of the rifle. We stared at each other for an instant.Dolma's face was naked and pinched, her black hair spiked up on her forehead from rubbing her face with tear-wet hands, her nose bearing red marks where her gla.s.ses, which she'd pulled off to polish on her shirttail, usually rested.

Another shot, the sound like that of a bone breaking inside a pillow. We sprinted down the hall and to the surface.

Guards and prisoners both were running, jumping up and down at the foot of the compound, beyond the canopy. Someone was shouting, "Fools! Fools! Catch them!"

I ran forward, surer with each step that my roommates had made their break without me. And then I saw them, tall men in orange pajamas, running with armed guards before and behind them, toward a panicking cl.u.s.ter of s.h.a.ggy brown animals.

The yaks darted this way and that in a panic, and bolted down toward the valley floor.

All I could think of was meat. Fresh meat, hot fresh meat, and it was escaping. I was so intent on the herd I didn't see Thibideaux s.n.a.t.c.h the rifle from the nearest guard, didn't pause to wonder that he aimed the rifle not at the guard, but ahead of the yaks, at the opening to the pa.s.s, turning the beasts back toward us again, as he and the guards and the other prisoners went whooping down the hill like so many wild Indians on a buffalo kill.

We pelted after them, slipping and sliding down the hill. Three carca.s.ses lay amid the boulders and ice chunks remaining from winter.

The guards who tried to fire into the herd were blocked by those with sense enough to circle it, so that guards and prisoners soon had the frightened animals captive within a small ring. Thibideaux calmly handed the gun back to a guard, s.n.a.t.c.hed a knife from another guard, and began skinning out one of the killed yaks before the guy whose knife it was realized what he was doing and put a rifle against his neck, just to remind him he was still in custody.

Samdup, Two-Gun Tsering's husband, took charge and ordered the women and children to keep the herd circled, which we did, while the men hefted the largest rocks they could carry into a circle, making a corral for the animals.

It was quite a day, and that night we all feasted on fresh yak and were able to send Dolma and the pack train off the next morning with full bellies.

PART FIVE.

TEA, EARL GREY, AND SNOW LION.

Of course, it was the yaks and the blood that must have drawn the snow leopard that mauled Merridew down from the mountains.

Within a couple of weeks, Dolma's train returned empty and starving, and minus three of the guards, who had taken the rations of some of the others to hike back into the guerrilla camp and try to learn what had happened. Dolma sat with me in the library, moving awkwardly from exhaustion and the pain of frostbitten fingertips and cheeks. Behind her thick gla.s.ses, her eyes were dull, too tired to focus on the pages of the books. We had one wall of shelves restored by then, with some gaps to fill in as we found volumes to fit them. But there was a clear s.p.a.ce on the floor about six feet square and since I hadn't had computer access in Dolma's absence, I had been taking notes from the Foxfire Books on gardening.

Dolma licked her cracked lips now and then. The yak her party had taken with them had been wolfed down, the people were so hungry for meat. We had been on strict rationing of the remaining meat, and of course it would have been folly to kill the other animals, since they could be used, once they settled down to breeding, for b.u.t.ter, cheese, milk and eventually more meat. Yaks were very rare in Tibet now, Tea had told me. It was miraculous that these had found their way into our valley. Consequently, Dolma, who had gone back to half-ration momos in one week, was hungrier than I was, since I had had a small piece of yak with my supper momo every day since she left. Even at that it did not amount to as much food as a full ration, and I felt like s.h.i.t for holding out on her about the vegetables, and wished I could find a way to share them with her without betraying the other prisoners. It was us against the guards, after all, I kept telling myself. But it didn't help.

I had sifted out most of the English books but there were others-loose, ripped pages of rice paper and parchment, on which were handwritten or block-printed letters, and interspersed among them were splintered and broken boards I took to be covers. Two walls in the library room were devoted not to shelves but to foot-deep cubbyholes in the wall, about two feet square. Dolma was no help with the text.

She did not read Tibetan, she told me, only Chinese. Although her native tongue was still spoken among her people, it had been forbidden by the Chinese to teach Tibetan in school, so while she spoke only very little Chinese, she read and wrote better in that language, and in several others, than she did in her own. Her English had improved tremendously since we'd started working together, as had my Tibetan.

The library almost looked like a library again. Sorting loose pages by language, I was able to collate most of the English-language books by t.i.tle and page number and some of them, the whole ones, I had alphabetized, wrapped with thread, and replaced on the shelves. The same with the German, French, Russian, and j.a.panese texts. I was rather hopeless in Greek, but at least had all the texts together, and the Hebrew was likewise just a jumble of pages. The Sanskrit texts I fared a little better with and thought I had the Upanishads pieced back together.

I would have slept there if I could. The night after I found the files, everybody was full of yak meat.

My grandma would have claimed it was all that blood in the red meat that made my cellmates so feisty.

The Colonel jumped me almost as soon as I walked in the door. "Warrant Officer, I saw you come out of headquarters with that woman guard. You looked mighty chummy. Have you been fraternizing with the enemy?"

"Sororalizing a little maybe," I told him. "It's a little difficult for two women to fraternize."

"Don't get la-di-da with me, soldier," he said.

"What the Colonel really wants to know, Viv," Marsh translated, "is if you've been sleeping with Taring.""Why? Do I look especially well rested? As if I've been sleeping all day?" The sarcasm was acknowledged by Marsh and Thibideaux, ignored by the Colonel, and missed by Danielson, and I added, "Boys, the only one who's been on top of me lately is the Colonel here, who is on my back, and I sure do wish you'd get off it, sir. There are women guards too. I could accuse you of the same thing."

"That's preposterous and you know it," the Colonel said.

"Yes, Viv, don't be ridiculous," Marsh said. "You know we're out there in the field in plain view of everybody. Now, if we were working inside rooms away from the rest of the camp, we might consider ...".

He was being sarcastic too. He'd already told me he'd done his best, within safe limits, to discourage Wu's interest in him.

The Colonel wouldn't let me alone, however, and lectured me on loyalty throughout yoga. Finally I snapped, "Dammit, I'm not f.u.c.king Taring or anybody else and have no intentions of doing so. I sleep down here and if you don't mind, I work all day tomorrow too, the same as the rest of you, and I'd like to get some sleep now." I abandoned my cobra position, turned over and ignored them, feeling like the guest of honor at a bear-baiting. I did not tell them what I found on the computer and decided, that if the Colonel thinks, when I do tell them, my withholding information is also betrayal, he could go f.u.c.k himself.

As for my supposed dallying with Tea, that was ridiculous. Tea had not visited the library for any length of time since Dolma and I began working there. He spent most of his time on the restoration work and although I helped him with that a couple of days a week, I usually spent my below-ground time with Dolma.

But today he came to visit, looking carefully around and threading his way through the piled pages and covers to the table. Dolma rose, stepped over three of my piles to one she had sorted before she left, fished something from the middle of the pile, and handed it to him. He accepted it with a little bow of thanks and a murmured "Much obliged," as he tucked the largish, brown-covered book under his arm. I couldn't see the t.i.tle, but it occurred to me that I was not the only one with secrets.

Tea looked pityingly at Dolma and asked her in Tibetan if she was not allocated a rest day after returning from the pack train. She said she was but she had thought I would need her help. She hated to be away so long, but now she realized-this as they exchanged rather covert glances with the barest flitting of the eye in my direction-that she was too tired to remain. He nodded and she left the library.

His back was to me as he surveyed what we had accomplished with the antique Tibetan books, which were short rectangular pages sandwiched between slabs of wood. The deep cubbyholes in one wall were intended, I discovered, for stacking these odd-shaped (for a Western book) volumes, and Dolma and I had stored all of the intact Tibetan books we'd recovered so far on these shelves.

He lifted one of the books in both hands, as if it was a small injured animal, and stroked the words with one finger. His face was very intent and I felt as if I was interrupting something private. I found myself almost whispering, as if I was in a church or a real library, the old kind with all books and no taped or filmed information, "Do you understand what that says?"

"No," he said, "I am not understanding, but I do recognize this language. It is an ancient and secretive one, being used in past times by scholarly religious persons for the transmission of arcane knowledge and holy wisdom."

"Really?" I asked, leaning closer to study it, though of course it looked like complete gibberish tome. "I wonder if anybody here understands it?"

He shrugged and tenderly replaced the book not on one of the piles but on the shelf from which it must have come. "It is possible."

"If there was a book here that explained how to learn this from regular Tibetan, and I could learn to read regular Tibetan, maybe I could figure it out..." I said.

"You would want to learn of dead religions and superst.i.tious mambo-jumbo?" he asked, his voice both teasing and sad.

It was my turn to shrug. "It's not like I had any pressing appointments, unless the commandant has made one for me with the firing squad. I haven't noticed the cavalry riding to my rescue ... Tea, tell me, is it true that once you guards are a.s.signed here none of you ever leave either?"

"Yes, it is so," he said.

"But why? I mean, doesn't the isolation get to you? Don't the guards miss their families?"

"All soldiers here either have no families or their families are with them here."

"Still, the deprivation ... Is this a punishment post then?"

"Oh, no, it is a privilege to work here. Great selectiveness is practiced in choosing those who come to this place."

"Even among prisoners?" I watched his face closely when I asked this.

But he didn't seem to take it seriously. He patted me on the shoulder and said, "Oh, yes, indeed, Viv, only the very finest from all the prisons are chosen to come to this place. To lift the rocks on this soil is a very great honor for all foreign demons."

"This foreign demon is extremely honored then," I said, bowing with mock ceremoniousness, "especially since I was pulled right out of the field without going to another prison first."

"Ah, but it is your destiny that you are meeting our good doctor and she is seeing at once that you are belonging here."

"As opposed to belonging back home in Tacoma, as opposed to belonging in another prison camp, or as opposed to dead?" I asked.

"Why, as opposed to all," he said, as if surprised that I should ask. "For right as rain you are here, right?"

That was indisputable.

"Well, do you think anyone is going to mind if I have a shot at these?" I asked, nodding at the pile of pages. "I know it's not supposed to be as enn.o.bling an activity as hauling rocks and your bosses have been trying to destroy books like these for over a century but surely even they are a little curious ..."

He looked as if he was about to argue with me for a moment then said, "Oh, you bet your bottom dollar they are being curious, okay. Go right ahead. But be providing written transcripts of your translations. We are an information-gathering endeavor here.""Speaking of which," I said. "I'd like to get another look at the graphics files of this place in earlier times. I have trouble relating the rooms we're uncovering to the landscape outside."

"Wal, I can be doing better than that, little lady," he said. "I can be taking you topside and be scouting out this terrain with you."

That wouldn't get me computer access, I thought, and might set my cellmates' tongues to wagging again, but on the other hand, maybe Tea would know a cauliflower if I arranged for him to trip over one.

After he paced with me around ruins and boulders, showing me where the rooms we had already uncovered were, where the still-buried medical college had been and so on, we trudged down the hill and he pointed out when we stood above the isolation cells and the storage rooms. For a change the rain had not confined itself to nighttime, and a light drizzle put a chill in the air and hung curtains of mist over the valley and in patches on the hill, so we almost b.u.mped into other prisoners and guards periodically on our trek. The mountains might as well have been prairie for all we could see of them.

"There was a shrine, there, on the sh.o.r.es of the sacred lake," he said, pointing his chin to the bottom of the hill. He had switched into Tibetan as he guided me, and he sounded much more intelligent and less goofy than he did in English.

"Can we walk down there?" I asked.

He shrugged and we half slid down the wet path toward the bottom of the slope. Since we couldn't see the ground in most places, my hopes of helping him find the vegetable patches were unrealized.

As we neared the foot of the hill, Tsering's daughter was carrying what appeared to be a mani stone to a large boulder, beside which she had begun a pile. The Colonel was working about ten yards from her pile, breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer. Wu and the doctor promenaded nearby, although their attention was not on the Colonel but apparently on another group of prisoners half concealed by the mist.

I heard it first-a noise I could not readily identify-something like the whine of a plane going down, something like a cavern opening in the earth, echoing and eerie. And then a movement at the top of the boulder caught my attention, and what little light there was glinted off the bared teeth and open throat of a speckled furred face, ears peeled back. The animal had made that awful sound. Below the boulder, the girl dropped her mani stone and the Colonel stood up, taking a breath and letting his eyes rest on her just as the cat sprang.

Tea and I sprang at the same time, but I would never have believed the Colonel could move so fast.

As if he had levitated, he was suddenly between the cat, poised in midair, and the child, now on the ground and shielded by the Colonel's crouching body as he swung his sledgehammer upward, at the cat's descending chest.

The lion's roar choked off as the hammer hit slammed into the outstretched chest, but the huge paws came down churning and the great teeth closed on the Colonel's head as he fell back, belly up, sandwiched between the child he was trying to protect and the mauling lion.

I leapt forward, I suppose thinking I'd pull the lion from him with my bare hands, but Tea jerked me back. I rounded on him and tried to fight him off and then heard the crack of a shot and saw Wu, poised, her pistol smoking. The lion's head lolled sideways, a bullet between the eyes, the left side of the Colonel's head still between the jaws.

I don't know who was screaming the loudest, me, the kid trapped under Colonel Merridew and thedead lion, or Two-Gun Tsering, skidding down the muddy hill to land on her knees beside the Colonel.

She pushed him away and tugged at the thin little arm protruding from beneath him, extricating her daughter enough to cradle the girl in her arms and rock her.

I shrieked for someone to get Thibideaux and ran to the Colonel. Dr. Terton beat me there, using Wu as an orderly as she began examining and trying to position the injured man, haplessly attempting to disengage him, without further injury, from the squalling child and the dead lion.

Tea showed the most presence of mind. Calmly, almost as if in a daze, he pried the beast's jaws tooth by tooth from the Colonel's head. The doctor, Wu, and I began staunching the wounds with cloth torn from our clothing, applying pressure to gushing holes in the man's scalp, arms, and legs where they'd been torn by the beast's claws. Thibideaux shoved me aside and with a few hurried words to the doctor, he, Marsh, and Danielson lifted the Colonel and carried him up the hill toward the dispensary, the doctor hovering beside them.

I rose too, but Tea remained on the ground, the lion's head on his thighs, her udders quivering against his shins as he stroked the scraggly fur over her desiccated ribs. "A snow lion," he told me.

"Starving. If only she had first gone for the yaks."

MERRIDEW.

I wrote my last entry and waited alone in the library until I thought the medical people had had time to do the most immediate repairs, then I asked Tea to take me to the dispensary. It was a very small room set in the only remaining portion of the old medical college, separate from the headquarters rabbit warren.

I hadn't waited long enough. Thibideaux, bristling and protective, still worked over Merridew, whose wounds were many and deep. By the time I arrived bleeders had been clamped off and sutured, and a few skin flaps had been thoroughly cleaned and st.i.tched back in place, but overall, the poor Colonel was a swollen, disfigured, b.l.o.o.d.y mess.

"Well, there's good news and bad news," Thibideaux told me. "The good news is he's alive and the cat missed his eyes, his jugular, his vocal cords and his guts. The bad news is one ear is pretty well a lost cause, we got no idea how bad his head is hurt inside, and he busted a leg. Not even mentionin' all the blood he's lost."

"Why aren't you sewing those up?" I asked, pointing to some pretty deep-looking wounds.

"So the bugs can drain. We don't have any drugs and he'll die for sure if those get infected, so we gotta leave the wounds open. We do this in the field all the time." His mouth twisted down. "They usually die anyway."

"Dr. Thibideaux has been taking excellent care of his friend," Dr. Terton said from the doorway where she stood, composed and quiet-seeming, her slight form not even significantly blocking the light. "I have a salve or two that may help the healing process as well." From a bag that resembled an old pillowcase she extracted a pair of antique plastic jars of the sort that were mostly destroyed when the means for degrading plastic was first introduced to the relief of refuse management specialists everywhere. "If you will be good enough to apply this to the wounds, I will help Colonel Merridew manage his pain."Thibideaux said nothing, to my surprise, while she held her hands above Merridew's head, closed her eyes, and started to hum.

Although Dr. Terton seemed highly regarded by Tea and seemed to have a soothing influence on Wu that made her more reasonable than otherwise, I had not forgotten the trick the doctor played on me with her hypnosis, which caused me to overextend myself on the hike to the prison camp, and the pain that followed as soon as I reached it. So I said, "Dr. Terton, the Colonel is comatose. He doesn't need you to hypnotize him so that when and if he wakes he feels the c.u.mulative effect of all this pain. That's the way your treatment works, isn't it? It's certainly the way it worked with me. Thibideaux, are you going to let her do this?"

"You're forgettin' where we are, Viv. This is the boss lady you talkin' to now. If she wants to vivisect him there's not one h.e.l.l of a lot we'll be able to do, d.a.m.n her."

"There's two of us," I growled but then I realized that of course Thibideaux was right. My incarceration in solitary had been long ago. I had not been interrogated for some time. This prison had been relatively easy on me, even compared to the experience of the men. My work with Tea and Dolma was much more satisfying than the GAG program and the limited functions I performed for NACAF.

Here in one place were all the books I'd been trying to check out for years, in all the languages of the world, and I would throw it all back in a fit of John Wayne pique, not so much because I wanted to protect the Colonel, which I did to some extent, but mostly because I was still p.i.s.sed at the doctor for betraying my trust.

She didn't even look up at me, but asked, gently mocking, "Did you expect, having entered a profession that involves killing others, that you would personally escape pain, as your countrymen do safe on their own continent, having exported their own pain to visit it upon us?" Then she resumed her humming and Thibideaux turned his back on me to apply salve to the wounds that would most benefit from it.

When he was done, she said, "Dr. Thibideaux, I have done what I can, but we have yet a bit of a vigil. You must return to your cell and sleep, so that you may relieve me later."

"Okay. Fine. Come on, Viv."

"Viv will remain with me."