Prayer of the Dragon (8 page)

“Who is missing from the village?” Shan asked.

“No one,” Dolma replied, puzzled.

When Shan returned to the stable, Dolma followed with a bucket of water. Neither Gendun nor Lokesh acknowledged him. As he settled to the earthen floor Dolma handed him a moist cloth, and together they began washing the comatose stranger’s arms. Shan let himself be drawn into the silent rhythm of the task, sometimes washing the man himself, sometimes wringing out the cloth for the Tibetan woman, aware that what they were doing was usually done for the dead. He paused only once, to check under the overturned bowl. The beetle was gone.

They worked in silence. Then Dolma, distracted, failed to grasp the cloth Shan extended toward her. He followed her gaze. The stranger’s hand had closed around her arm.

“Lha gyal lo!” Lokesh whispered in joy.

“Lha gyal lo,” the old woman repeated and began stroking the man’s hand. They watched as the man’s other hand was slowly lifted. Its fingers started moving, pointing into the shadows as if through his eyelids he sensed things they could not see, pointing here, pausing, pointing there. No, not pausing, Shan decided. Drawing. He was drawing something in the air. When the hand finally settled back onto his chest, the man sighed deeply. And whispered something.

Shan leaned forward, cradling the man’s head now, desperately trying to understand the words.

“Dsilyi neyani. Dsil banaca.”

The words meant nothing to Shan. They were not Tibetan, not Mandarin, Cantonese, neither English, Russian, nor any of the dozen other languages Shan thought he could recognize.

The words continued, still whispered, though in a stronger, even an urgent tone.
“Tsilke nacani! Nigel icla, nace hila!”

Dolma and Shan exchanged a confused look. Gendun had reminded him that there were obscure ancient dialects still alive in remote areas of the mountains. Dolma cupped her other hand around the man’s, cradling it the way a mother might that of a sleeping child.

The man’s eyes opened. Shan feared he was blind for they seemed dull and unfocused. Then they settled on the worn, kind countenance that hovered above him, mouthing prayers. The stranger’s eyes grew round and he hastened his strange, urgent chant, twisting about to face Gendun, a hand reaching out as if to touch the lama. Then it stopped as if he was afraid to test whether Gendun was flesh and blood.

“Qojoni qasle, quojoni qasle!”
he whispered, fear in his voice as he bowed to Gendun.
“Qojoni qasle,”
he repeated weakly, then collapsed, dropping back on the pallet, unconscious again.

When Shan turned the man over, his unseeing eyes were filled with tears.

Chapter Three

SHAN LEAFED THROUGH the wondrous parchment book the now-conscious man had given him, trying make sense of the stick figures that matched the one on the man’s arm, the ancient poems written in Chinese, the prayers in Tibetan, trying to grasp why it displayed a photograph of a young Shan standing proudly in a tight-collared Mao jacket with his newly graduated class of investigators. Why did his foot itch so terribly? he wondered. The man sat across from him, smiling serenely, counting Tibetan beads in one hand, holding a bloody rock hammer in the other.

“Take the book with you,” the man said in a voice that matched Gendun’s for its quiet gentleness. “You will need it where you are going.”

Shan shook his head. “I am not leaving.”

“It is you they have come for. On this mountain your life will end. Tell me this—do you prefer we leave your corpse for the birds or shall we use fire?” There was snow in the saint’s hair, mixed with yellow powder. Behind him in the shadows, two other men appeared, wearing red robes, waving the stumps of arms without hands. As they advanced he saw their faces—Lokesh and Gendun.

The itching in his foot became a terrible burning. Shan pulled up his trouser leg. There was nothing but bone below the knee. A swarm of golden beetles was devouring his flesh.

He awoke gasping for breath, his heart pounding, not aware he had leaped up from his pallet and dashed outside until he stumbled on a rock in the yard behind Dolma’s house. It took him several minutes to recover from his nightmare. He steadied himself by holding onto the flat stones that formed the top of the rear wall. The sky shimmered with stars, lending an eerie glow to the pale houses. A nightjar called. The bleat of a lonely lamb echoed off the slope. All else was as still as death. Shan retrieved his boots from the doorway, and began walking.

Though it was well after midnight, the gibbous moon and the light of a thousand stars illuminated the path. He paused on a ledge overlooking the slumbering village. Only one structure showed any life—the stable where Lokesh had relit the one hundred eight butter lamps whose light leaked between the wind-withered boards. The old Tibetan would not follow him this time. When Shan had left the stable the night before, the door had been barred from the outside by Chodron, locking in Lokesh, Gendun, and Dolma. And a guard had been posted by the entry as well.

Shan walked through the barley fields, the grain a rustling silver lake in the moonlight. He soon found the compacted trail that traversed the slope and fell into the slow, steady jog that some Tibetans used when traveling long distances in the mountains. When, much later, he reached the clearing where the murders had occurred, he lowered himself onto a flat boulder. Something on four legs, a wild dog or wolf, drank at the stream, then lifted its head in Shan’s direction and bolted. Two small animals scurried along the base of the rocks. One of the little owls that frequented the slopes uttered a short, sharp screech.

Not only wildlife seemed to revisit the campsite. After the killer, the shepherds of Drango had come, then Yangke, then the person who had left the crude warning signs and clumsily sought fingerprints, then someone—the killer again?—had returned for the bodies and obliterated a sandpainting. A miner had staked a claim to the site. Someone, either the killer or the miner, had looted the equipment. Holy men, Yangke had called the dead men. Holy men with modern camping equipment. Holy men with crude wooden effigies. What message had they placed in their sandpainting that required their killer to destroy it?

Shan slowly approached the moonlit campsite, reminding himself that this was the way the killer had approached, before dawn, as the owls called. Smoke had probably been rising from the smoldering fire.

What had the dead men said to one another before falling asleep? As great as the mystery of the killer’s identity was the mystery of the victims’. Lokesh would insist that the spirits of the dead, like those of all murdered men, still lurked nearby. Shan found himself scanning the darkened slope. He would have welcomed a conversation with a ghost. His first question would be the one that had gnawed at him since visiting the death site the first time, when he’d seen the lightning snake and a portion of a little wooden figure. Why were these Tibetan things being done in non-Tibetan ways?

He looked back at the grove of trees where the two men had lain before dying. Had they exchanged pleasantries, spoken of family, exclaimed about the endless night sky? Had they, as some old Tibetans believed, seen a meteor just before their deaths? He entered the grove and almost stumbled on a low mound of dirt. Someone had been digging. He dropped to one knee, studying the moon shadows. At least a dozen small holes had been dug since he had been there—dug, then filled in.

He paced in front of the circle of tall rocks where the bodies had been found, surprised at the fear that kept him from walking into the shadows. He jogged past, on unfamiliar ground now, at each moonlit fork taking whichever path went higher. By dawn he was still far from the summit but had reached the last of the long shelves of land below the high, jagged peak. The windswept, barren place was separated from the far side of the mountain by a forbidding fifty-foot escarpment, the stony spine that divided east and west. While studying the escarpment, he drank from a brook and chewed on a piece of hard dried cheese he had saved from the evening meal Dolma had brought them in the stable. Yangke had been right in saying that the worlds of the two sides were separate. This natural barrier was far more effective than any razor wire the army might use. He could see half a dozen spots where the wall had split apart, though from a distance each appeared to be filled with boulders or great slabs of rock that had fallen.

It took him an hour to explore the first three clefts, struggling up the jumble of rocks that filled each, until he was forced to retreat by massive blocks of stone that could not be climbed without ropes. He was about to enter the fourth cleft when he spotted movement half a mile away. A mountain goat had materialized as if out of the wall itself, one of the nimble white creatures native to the ranges. Shan eased into the shadow of a boulder and watched as another shaggy goat appeared, then three young kids and another adult. As the small flock wandered down the slope, languidly nibbling at the lichen-covered slabs, he slipped along the wall. Had he not fixed the point in his mind he could easily have missed the goat’s portal, for it was not one of the clefts he had seen but a narrow shadow behind an outcropping that folded out, parallel to the wall.

The twisting trail was sometimes so narrow both shoulders brushed against stone, sometimes so low between overhanging slabs he had to crouch to continue. After two hundred yards the trail was blocked by a huge mound of rubble that seemed impassable. But then he noticed scattered piles of goat droppings on several boulders and pulled himself up onto the first of the massive rocks. More than once Lokesh had joked with him that those who lived on the fringes of Tibet, as they did, had to be half goat to survive.

He paused after several minutes’ hard climbing to study the scratches and gouges that began to appear on the stones underfoot. Someone had worked with chisels and levers, prying up rocks, levering them this way and that, clearing if not a path then at least a course that could be attempted by creatures less nimble than a goat. Near the crest, at the center of the wide escarpment, two huge fallen slabs created a treacherous pit at least twenty feet deep. A goat might have tried the tiny five-inch lip of rock that followed the side wall but for humans someone had laid a makeshift bridge of juniper poles and twine, constructed like a ladder, with narrow cross pieces every two feet.

The jumble of rocks grew more treacherous, with sharp jagged stones, some scorched by explosives, jutting upward, threatening injury. A huge bird of prey, another lammergeier, soared overhead, interested not in Shan but in the small furry rock pikas that scurried in front of him. He tried to visualize the high-walled path that had once existed underneath him. The dark winding passage would have made a natural
kora
, a pilgrim’s path, which the lamas of earlier centuries laid out not simply to lead to the homes of deities but also to teach the pilgrim something about hardship and humility.

Shan and Lokesh had visited a pilgrim’s shrine on another mountainside earlier that year, reached through a much shorter passage whose walls had been painted with guardian demons. It was to have been the last day of that painted rock shrine. The government was about to destroy it in order to erect a radio transmission tower. Although the engineers agreed to move the painted rock, Lokesh had settled onto the ground as the bulldozer advanced.

“That rock picture is just a bunch of old peeling paint, abandoned by its deity years ago. They don’t understand. Here is what is important,” the old Tibetan had said, patting the path, compacted from centuries of pilgrim’s prostrations. “Here is the sacred thing.” He had not resisted when the machine’s operators lifted him bodily and set him on the ground fifty feet away, then continued ripping up the old path. But he had carried a little sack of the compacted earth with him ever since.

On the far side of the ruined trail he was traveling now, Shan found proof of his speculation that inhabitants of the eastern slopes were aware of the passage. On one side of the entrance to the cleft was an image in faded paint of Tara, the mother protector. Opposite the Tara was an image painted by another kind of pilgrim. In fresh, bright colors, someone had portrayed a four-foot-high Buddha sitting, like a cartoon character, in a miniature convertible car, cigarette dangling from his mouth, sunglasses covering his eyes. He had reached the real world.

The landscape on the eastern side of the mountain was gentle, the slope sweeping outward for miles, interrupted by occasional outcroppings and a few low ridges that jutted like fingers from the main peak, joining with the matching slope of the neighboring mountain to create a wide, lush, and empty valley. Almost empty. In the distance, perhaps five miles away, was a small compound of white buildings, surrounded by half a dozen antenna masts and three huge white saucers that seemed to have been tipped by the wind. Satellite reception dishes.

Much closer to Shan, half a mile away, was the only other visible structure, an old
dzong
, one of the small mountain fortresses that had once dotted the Tibetan countryside. Centuries earlier, its builders had chosen its location well, laying its stonework at the end of one of the long, jutting ridges, where the finger of rock and grass abruptly plunged two hundred feet to the valley floor. Its crumbling five-story stone tower would once have been manned for signal fires. The narrow windows had been designed for archers. Later, after Tibet’s warring kings had been replaced by Buddhist leaders, many such dzongs had become monasteries or hermitages. Now, if Shan could safely enter the ruins, it would be a perfect perch for studying the land beyond.

He hurried across the high meadows, wherever possible using outcroppings to block the line of sight to the distant compound below, knowing that its sentinels could use powerful lenses to scan the landscape. He paused for a moment, ambushed by his emotions again, a voice within shouting that he had to return to the village. He would find Gendun beaten unconscious. He would find Lokesh lashed to a canque. He would reach the stable and find nothing but bloody spoons on the floor. The waking nightmares would not leave him, distracting him so completely he did not realize something vital about it until he was only fifty yards away from the dzong.

The building was inhabited. The narrow windows were glazed. The structure at the base of the tower was new, though built of stone in the traditional boxy, tapered wall style of the original dzongs. Flowers were planted along the walls. Prayer flags flapped in the shadows behind the tower. Not prayer flags, he realized as he ran toward the shadow of another outcropping. Laundry.

“You’re not a soldier,” a voice behind him suddenly declared. “You’re not a scientist. You don’t look prosperous enough for one of those damned miners.” The voice was oddly whimsical. “If I shot you right now, we could call it a socialist experiment and devise a sad, politically correct story of the path that led such an antisocial creature to his inevitable death by a bullet.” The words were spoken in fluid Mandarin, tinged with a Beijing accent.

Shan replied in a level voice as he turned to face the speaker, hands open at his side. “The particular experiment I represent was declared a failure years ago. What is left was considered not worth the price of a bullet.”

He was prepared to confront a soldier, an angry bureaucrat, anything but the figure in front of him. The man was a head taller than Shan, well groomed and athletic, with long blond hair going to gray that covered his ears. Resting in the crook of one arm was a high-powered rifle and a case for a compact set of binoculars hung from the belt that held up his khaki trousers. A brown cashmere scarf was tucked under the collar of his leather jacket, which covered most of a black T-shirt bearing the image of a red dragon over the legend, in English, BORN TO BE WILD.

“Then how do I classify you?” the stranger asked. “Animal, mineral, or vegetable?”

“Perhaps you believe in ghosts?” Shan ventured. He remained still as the stranger circled him, examining him from head to toe.

The man seemed to appreciate Shan’s wit. “I think,” the man said with a grin, “we will just call you the most interesting luncheon guest we have had in weeks.” He gestured Shan toward the dzong.

It was the most extraordinary new construction Shan had seen in Tibet. On the outside great care had been taken to keep the structure’s sixteenth-century appearance, right down to the small mound of mani stones near the door. But inside were touches that spanned the five centuries since. The entryway was flanked by two long portrait scrolls of Chinese emperors, hung over a beige fabric wall covering. Bamboo stalks grew out of an elegant willow green celadon pot. As the stranger left his rifle by the door, Shan leaned over the nearest painting of one of the early Ching emperors wearing a fur cap and yellow brocaded gown embroidered with dragons. It was not a reproduction. From a speaker somewhere behind the planter came the soft, hollow music of a wooden flute.