Prayer of the Dragon (16 page)

“Rapaki, Rapaki, Rapaki,” the hermit said as Lokesh was propped against the rock wall. Rapaki paused, gazing at Hostene as though for the first time, then abruptly he jammed a finger into Hostene’s chest, repeating his own name again several times, as if it were a protective mantra. He then studied Shan with the same intense gaze, jumped toward him, jammed a finger into Shan’s chest, jumped back to Lokesh, and began whispering something very quickly under his breath. He rose warily as Yangke approached.

“What is he saying?” Hostene asked.

Shan paused for a moment, confused. Yangke was trying to question the hermit about the avalanche, about whether he had seen anyone on the slope above but Rapaki seemed unable to hear him. “He seems only to speak in song and mantra,” said Yangke.

Soon they had cleared a path sufficiently that they could carry Lokesh across the rubble.

“He has to be taken back to the village, to Gendun and Dolma,” Shan told Yangke.

“We can make a litter, with poles and shirts, then the four of us can carry him.”

“No. Hostene and I must remain here. The murderer must be up here. And his niece, too.”

“It will take all day,” Yangke said with a sigh.

Rapaki materialized at Shan’s side and put his hand on Shan’s arm as he pointed in the opposite direction from the village. Lokesh looked up. Shan recognized the words the hermit now sang, in ever-louder tones, as he pointed with increasing vigor up the slope. It was a healing mantra. Rapaki might have lost all capacity for human conversation but he knew how to convey his meaning to the deities.

Rapaki had not been the first to use the cave they reached an hour later. The soot of butter lamps was heavy on the ten-foot ceiling and stained the upper half of a vast mural on one wall portraying protector demons. They were in an ancient shrine, intended for more than a hermit’s dwelling. Despite his injuries, Lokesh would not settle onto the pallet offered by Rapaki. First he hobbled along the walls, greeting with low exclamations of delight the small statues standing in niches carved in the living rock and the altar made of a heavy beam set on rock pedestals.

“It’s Bon,” Lokesh declared as he gazed at the once-vivid painting. “Very old. For the mountain deity. I do not even recognize some of the demons,” he added as he gazed in confusion at one in the corner. He had once been a monk official in the Dalai Lama’s government and was as intimate with the pantheon of Tibetan deities as any lama. He might not be able to name the crimson-faced deity but Shan had seen it before, on one of the open-air rock faces in Abigail Natay’s video. Below the painting, on a roughhewn block of juniper, was an unbound book, a peche. Loose pages were strewn on the floor around it. Shan kneeled to study the pages. They were old, illuminated in still-brilliant colors.

It was not the old but the new that Shan was seeking. He had begun to wonder how the hermit survived. In the summer, the slopes might be full of berries, even wild grains, but winter in such a place would be brutal. He supposed that like the yaks and goats the hermit must migrate in the winter to a lower altitude. Then he saw a sliver of shadow in a corner. As Rapaki and the others helped Lokesh onto his pallet he picked up a butter lamp and slipped into the narrow opening.

The chamber beyond, adorned with more dim paintings on the walls, had once held butter, barley, and water in orderly arranged ceramic pots, the shards of which could be seen along the far wall. Rapaki’s arrangement was much more modern, and chaotic. The floor was littered with empty cans of beans, fruit, and soup, as well as empty sacks of plastic and muslin. Along one wall were unopened cans, and sacks of rice, not stacked but carelessly tossed in a pile, on top of which was a small round tin. Shan lifted the tin and opened it. It had once held hard candy and was edged with little yellow flowers. Lemon Freshies, it said in English.

There was crumpled paper in the trash heap, thirty or forty pieces, most of them labels from cans, most of those with writing on the white reverse side. Shan flattened one across his knee. At first he thought it was a sketch for a tangka, a sacred painting, for there were figures of deities and sacred symbols along the edges. But most of the paper was taken up by Tibetan words. He struggled through the first half, some of which was crossed out. He could not read all the cramped words but many phrases were familiar. It was a letter addressed to Tara, signed
your secret Rapaki
. Or more exactly, it was a draft of a letter to the deity. He unfolded five more of the labels. They were all similar to the first with minor changes. Some of them, he judged, were many years old.

“I always wondered how he fed himself,” a voice said from the shadows. “He’s gone,” Yangke added. “He took a bag and ran as if he were leaving for good. He suddenly seemed to be afraid of us.”

“Did these supplies come from Chodron?”

“Not a chance. Chodron hates him and would be pleased if he starved to death. He is a symbol of all that Chodron cannot abide.”

“It would not be difficult for a man like Chodron to get rid of him.”

“Not as simple as you may think. You don’t understand how small our village is. Rapaki is Dolma’s first son. She only sees him every couple of years, but she won’t let Chodron forget the relationship.”

Shan sifted through some of the empty cans. Most were small, containing simple, basic fare, but several newer ones contained more expensive items like lychee nuts and pickled onions. Nearest the door were plastic bags whose labels indicated they had held salted sunflower seeds. A small foil pouch had contained chewing gum. Some of the labels were worn, as if having rubbed together in a pack.

“Why would the miners give him supplies?” Shan asked.

“I didn’t know that they do. But to some he’s like a mascot, a good-luck charm. And at the end of the summer some of them don’t want to carry extra supplies out.” Yangke squatted before the pile of cans, probing them. “If they left food behind, he would know how to find it.”

Shan lifted the lamp and went to the far end of the chamber, where he saw newer supplies. An unused pad of paper. A cotton quilt with a pattern of pandas frolicking among clouds. A sealed pack of sweet biscuits. These were not the abandoned supplies of miners.

“There were stories in the village when I was younger, about Rapaki’s grandfather,” Yangke said as Shan moved back to his side. “He came back from his flock one day very excited about the paradise he would soon live in. Next morning he took a pack of food and left, never to be seen again. People said he had stolen gold from the gods and gone down in the world to spend it.”

“What,” Shan asked, “was the name of his grandfather?”

“Lobsang.”

Shan picked up one of the letters and extended it to Yangke, holding the lamp close. Rapaki had mostly written to the gods. But at least one letter, which appeared newer than the rest, had been addressed to his grandfather.

“Impossible,” Yangke said in a troubled tone. “Even if he survived to a great age the man would have died decades ago.”

“One of the great advantages of being Rapaki,” Shan observed as he rose to check on Lokesh, “is that you are not constrained by the possible.”

Shan let Hostene lead the way as the two of them climbed the slope an hour later. The Navajo had been about to leave the cave to search for his niece by himself when Shan had stopped him, explaining that Yangke would stay with Lokesh. There was no clear path through the complex network of ravines, high meadows, ice-fed springs, and long fields of wind-carved outcroppings, and soon they realized that the best clues to Abigail’s trail lay within the little silver video camera.

“Can you find these places?” Shan asked as they watched the first few scenes on the tape again. “Sometimes the same painting appears in more than one scene, as if she were revisiting them.”

“New theories occurred to her, and new interpretations. Sometimes she would be in the middle of studying one painting and find she had to go back to another she had visited two days before. I always offered to accompany her, but sometimes she refused. She said she would have to jog to cover the distance and didn’t want me to risk twisting an ankle. She didn’t think I shared her fervor for her work,” he said remorsefully. “When you spend your life behind a blanket I guess it’s hard to drop it, even to those who come back to the family.”

“A blanket?” Shan repeated.

“My wife used to say that in the last years before she died. There were many like me, like Abigail, who lived with the old ways when we were young and then went into the world to pursue careers outside the tribe. We chose other ways to live. On the map I didn’t go far, just a couple hundred miles, but it may as well have been ten thousand. Law school, prosecutor’s office, the state court. An entirely different universe from the one I grew up in. You learn not to speak with anyone about the sacred ways, the old ways, partly because they are secret, but also because they are mocked, because other people want to turn them into trinkets to use in schemes to make money. You learn to pull the Navajo blanket up and never speak about those things. If someone wants to discuss the Navajo you speak about the artists who make the blankets and pots, no more. I had two chants but I didn’t use them for nearly thirty years, except behind my own closed doors, to keep them alive.”

“Chants?”

Hostene, fixing his leathery face on the distant clouds, was silent so long Shan thought he would not reply.

“It is the way we speak with our holy ones. Something like a prayer, something like a song. One can last for days. The chanter recites from memory. The chants are handed down from one generation to the next, taught in quiet, dark places. Abigail said the Tibetans do the same thing. It has a very old feel to it, the learning of such things. I used to get shivers walking into the hogan, the house, of my teacher.”

“You mean you were a priest?”

“We have no priests. We have our chanters, the singers. If you need healing for a sickness caused by witches you go to the chanter of the Ghostway. If you want to protect your crop against frost you find the singer of the Starway. You always start with the Blessingway, to open the door to the holy ones.” He glanced self-consciously at Shan, as if surprised by his own words. They were not speaking only of blankets and pottery now.

“This was what Gendun was doing in that stable,” Shan observed. “For many days, he invoked the gods on your behalf, almost without stopping, every line he spoke different, every line from memory.”

Hostene scooped up a handful of loose earth and tossed some into the wind.
“Kac tcike eigini eigini qayikalgo.”
His voice was a whisper, his words aimed at the clouds. He caught himself and looked at Shan. “It is one of the phrases from my second chant. The Mountainway. Holy Young Woman sought the gods and found them, it says. On the summits of the clouds she sought the gods and found them.” His eyes welled with moisture and he looked away.

Shan said, after a moment, “Your niece was usually shown under trees in the videos, because the paintings were meant to be stops on the kora, resting places for pilgrims, offering water and shade. This high up on the mountain there aren’t many groves.”

But he had not realized how many there were until the two of them began seeking them out. They spent the rest of the daylight hours investigating a dozen groves scattered across the slope. Shan kept alert for signs of miners. They were approaching the mysterious place called Little Moscow that Yangke had mentioned to him. In late afternoon they paused in the shade of an outcropping to study the videos again, rewinding, fast-forwarding, noting a distinctive rock formation here, a gnarled stump there. A butterfly materialized before them, its scarlet and yellow wings quivering as it alighted on the camera. The Navajo froze. There was sadness in his gaze, as if the creature reminded him of the missing woman, but his eyes were also suffused with the same gentle childlike wonder Shan often saw on Lokesh’s face.

Shan did what he could to explain the images he recognized on the little screen, although often the Navajo woman on the tape explained them just as quickly. Fierce protector demons dominated many of the rock paintings. Four-armed Mahakala, Shrivi mounted on a horse, Rahula with a bow, dressed in human skins. Devotional images of the early Tibetan kings were depicted. Abigail had learned her icons well, accurately pointing out the details of the ritual hand gesture—a downturned hand in the earth-touching mudra—made by one ancient king, the gesture called Turning the Wheel of Law made by a blue-skinned saint. At several points she paused and drew Navajo images, discussing the similarities between the fierce deities embraced by both peoples and the taboos that had grown out of their beliefs.

It was midafternoon when Hostene touched Shan’s shoulder, then silently directed him down a nearby side path, into a rough gully that was devoid of any paintings, then into a maze of twisting, overgrown paths marked with inconspicuous chalk marks, low to the ground, at each turn, and finally through a narrow slit in two rock walls, onto what looked like a goat path. They emerged into a natural bowl abutting the rock spine that divided the mountain. At the base of the spine was a high pile of jagged stones, recently splintered, some blackened. They were at the old mine, or what was left of it.

“We could have been killed when the bolt of lightning struck,” Hostene said.

Thirty feet in front of them was the twisted, scorched iron frame of an old chest. On a rock wall opposite the debris was a large faded painting of a fierce protector demon riding a blue wolf, painted so its eyes seemed to follow the observer as he walked around the bowl’s circumference.