Prayer of the Dragon (21 page)

“How much later was the mine struck by lightning?”

“Two days later.”

Hostene said no more as he moved about trying to find a comfortable sleeping position.

Bing. Bing was the one who had declared Hostene a thief, and Bing’s hand had reflexively reached for a pistol in his belt. But why, after finding out about the old mine, would he destroy it? Why destroy a depleted mine?

When Shan leaned back, he meant to close his eyes for only a minute or two. But when he opened them it was night, and he could hear Hostene’s heavy regular breathing. Pulling the blanket around the Navajo’s shoulders, he crawled out of their shelter, quietly backtracked, then climbed up one of the leaning slabs to the top of the chasm wall, following its edge in the moonlight to where it opened onto the main slope. He dropped and crawled the last twenty feet then, lying on his belly.

A mile away, toward Little Moscow, lay the long black hulk of the ridge that jutted to the west, the haunted ridge where skeletons gathered around a grave. That afternoon vultures had hung over the ridge. Two days before, a farmer had died there, struck by lightning. Why had he been there? He must have been following someone at Chodron’s order, since no one went up there voluntarily because of the ghosts. No one but Abigail Natay.

It was the hour when Lokesh said the wind scoured the last light from the bowl of the sky, revealing with each gust another hundred stars. A thin silver ribbon, the closest stream, wound its way across the blackened slope a quarter mile away. A bright speck appeared near the horizon, a planet. And another on the ground, a fire. Half a mile below them, a camp had been laid out. The fire, rapidly growing, was much bigger than the miners would need for cooking. It was a warning. Or was it a distraction? Their pursuers sought to lull them into thinking they had stopped for the night but, as he watched, a pair of men were silhouetted against the silver reflection of the stream. Fortunately, they had none of the skills of the old Tibetan wolf hunters who could blend invisibly with the night shadows.

A goat bolted across the shadows, running hard from an outcropping, away from the pair of men Shan had seen. No doubt another pair of searchers lurked near the outcropping. The miners were systematically sweeping the slope above Little Moscow. If they found nothing they would begin searching the gullies in the morning, one by one, sealing each with a guard as they did so. Bing had learned well from his years in the Public Security Bureau.

Not fear but a deep melancholy grew within Shan, punctuated by waking visions of Gendun being tortured, being beaten in tamzing sessions to utter words he would never understand for reasons he could never comprehend. Shan had become the worm in the wood of Gendun’s safe hermitage, the parasite that had edged into the lama’s life. Through his own blind stupidity, through his naive assumption that he could become one of them, he had brought the horrors of the modern world to them.

He found another perch that offered a view of the summit and the quarter moon that illuminated it. His stomach growled, left unsatisfied by their sparse meal. He remembered that Dolma had given him a little pouch of rice. He reached into his pocket and held it in his palm.

It was an old prisoner’s trick. Grains of rice would fall from the sacks inmates were forced to haul into the guards’ mess hall. A single grain on the tongue would swell up into a digestible morsel after several minutes, so that half a dozen grains almost seemed to be a meal. He measured out half the bag onto his palm, returned the pouch with Hostene’s share to his pocket, then stared at the small mound in his hand as it glowed in the moonlight. His stomach growled again. It was the last of his food.

As he looked up at the moon, an owl hooted. He let the grains fall through his fingers onto the rock below, then swept them into a pile in front of him. Placing a single grain on his tongue, he counted out those that remained. Only sixty-three. He quickly, guiltily, pulled the grain from his mouth and placed it on the pile, then separated the grains into three smaller, uneven piles and began counting each of the piles. It was one of the ways he and his father had adapted the old stick-counting method for meditation on the Tao te Ching, one of the ways used by the devout in reeducation camps, where it was deemed a serious moral lapse to have traditional Tao throwing sticks.

Each round of counting yielded one of the lines of a tetragram, which he drew with a finger in the dusty soil at his side. When he had finished he had compiled a solid line over three lines of two segments each. It denoted Chapter Fourteen in a table his father had taught him. When they had first studied it together, his father had told him it was about the geometry of living correctly. Shan whispered the resulting verse to the moon:

The world is a mysterious instrument
Not made to be handled
Those who act on it, spoil it
Those who seize it, lose it

He sat motionless, sensing that a door was opening to a carefully guarded chamber in his mind. He heard the distant voice of his father, a whisper down a long corridor. He forgot his fear, forgot his helplessness, and listened with his heart. Eventually, he became aware of a faint smell, the scent of the ginger his father always carried in his pocket.

He did not know how long he immersed himself in his memories, but the moon was high in the sky before the hoot of another owl brought him back. Abruptly, he lost the sensation of his father’s presence and the dim figures accompanying it who were the monks they had sat with when Shan was a child. He was alone again in the night on a cold, windswept perch, remembering the dangers that waited on either side of the mountain.

His stomach whined again, and he picked up several grains, ready to eat them, then looked at the moon and lowered his hand. He could not eat without reducing the number needed to cast. He tossed them down again to produce another tetragram. This time the pattern was a line broken in thirds over one broken in half, the pair repeated. It indicated Chapter Seventy-One, the verse that had seemed to come up more frequently than any other during his years in Tibet:

To know that you do not know is best
To not know of knowing is a disease
To be sick of the disease
Is the way to be free of the disease

The lives of everyone on the mountain who meant something to him, including the Navajo woman he had never met, hung in perilous balance, and it was impossible that all would escape unscathed unless Shan could solve the terrible riddles of the mountain. But all he knew now was that he did not know. And soon they had to choose between going west, to those who wanted to kill Hostene, or east, to those who wanted to kill Shan. The owl, Hostene’s harbinger of death, landed thirty feet away and cocked its head, as if to remind Shan that he had known the answer to that particular riddle even before he had tallied the rice grains.

EVEN WOLVES HALT to lick their paws. Well after midnight, as Shan watched from the rim again, figures appeared against the light of the bonfire, weary men who settled onto the rocks near the flames. He pushed back and found his way to the bottom of the chasm again and awakened Hostene with a brief touch on his leg. Without questioning Shan, the Navajo rolled up his blanket and followed. Shan handed him the full pouch of rice. “Keep this,” Shan said. “Put a few grains on your tongue as you walk.” He had returned his own sixty-four grains to the pouch. His hunger had disappeared during his final vigil with the owl.

When they stepped into the moonlight Shan explained his plan.

“But this side is where Abigail is,” Hostene protested. “You say there are soldiers on the east side,” he added in a plaintive tone. “If they arrest me they will deport me. I will never see her again.”

“We are doing this for two reasons. First, the miners are in a frenzy. They will execute you and march back to their camp, singing. Second, the key to finding Abigail is the hermit, who has fled from his cave.”

“Rapaki? He doesn’t even know her.”

“There are two people on this mountain trying to unlock the mystery left by the old monks. The hermit knows more about the pilgrim stations than anyone else. I think Abigail and he do know each other. It seems impossible that they never encountered one another.” Shan extracted the empty tin from his pocket. “I found this in Rapaki’s cave.”

The Navajo took the container, turning it over in his hand, holding it up to the moonlight. “Lemon Freshies,” he said in a bewildered tone. “She brought three or four of these from home.”

A bird flew up in the darkness overhead. Hostene put his hands up, palms out, to shield his face. The hands. It was, Shan abruptly realized, how Rapaki would have seen Shan the previous morning. As he walked, he replayed the encounter with the hermit in his mind. Rapaki’s jumble of mantras had had a theme.
Honored by the
waking dead
was part of the most common prayer to Tara.
Face like
the circle of the autumn moon
was part of a ceremony for invoking the presence of Tara. Even the cheating-death mantra the hermit had used was one that invoked Tara. And though Shan had raised his hands to protect himself from the flying stones, he had not understood until now Rapaki’s reaction. Shan’s thumbs had been touching, palms flattened, turned outward. He had unconsciously made a mudra, one that was a special offering to the goddess, invoking the Laughing Tara. Shan and Hostene had been looking for Abigail. Rapaki had been looking for Tara.

Shan said, “In one of her photos, Abigail wore a short necklace with a large turquoise pendant. Did she wear it often?”

“It’s one of her favorites. It was her mother’s. Why?”

“We have to find Rapaki,” Shan said urgently. “And the key to finding Rapaki is Thomas.”

“That boy from the other side?”

“There were other things in Rapaki’s cave—new pencils, a panda-printed quilt, clean paper. He didn’t get them from the miners, he didn’t get them from Yangke, and he certainly didn’t get them all from Abigail.”

Shan led them down the dark, treacherous path in short stages, stopping frequently to mentally revisit the terrain ahead, painfully aware of the jagged shards of stone, remnants of the earlier explosions, that waited below to impale them if they fell from the slippery rocks. Twice he lost his way and they had to backtrack. When they reached the makeshift ladder bridge Hostene balked. Shan waited for the moon to emerge from behind a cloud and, steeling himself, walked back and forth across it to reassure the old Navajo.

Much later, as they rested, looking at the stars, Hostene asked the question that had been often on Shan’s mind. “Why the hands? Why does the killer cut off their hands? Why does he want hands?”

But Shan had no answer.

“What that old miner said,” Hostene whispered later, “maybe he was right. About your hands being the proof of your life.”

They finally reached the opening to the eastern slope an hour before dawn. Shan pointed out the vague shapes of the buildings of Gao’s compound, singling out the little stone hut that stood perhaps fifty yards from the main house, partially dug into the slope. “The road from the base ends there,” Shan explained. “It was an old storage hut, a granary once. Now they keep supplies there.”

“Once we reach it, what?”

“We hide there. Thomas comes and goes. We know he steals supplies, probably from the hut itself. We will find a way to speak with him.” The long night with no more than an hour’s rest had taken its toll on Shan. “At least we can sleep safely for a few hours,” he said wearily.

After advancing on the hut in short bursts between taking cover behind rocks, Shan pressed a tentative hand against the plank door. Relief flooded him as it opened. He paused, noticing for the first time two small metal boxes sitting on the ground between the hut and Gao’s darkened dzong, then stepped inside. He was caught in the beam of a flashlight. Behind him Hostene uttered a startled gasp. Shan had only a glimpse of the green-uniformed figure pinioning Hostene’s arms before the butt of a rifle knocked him unconscious.

OF ALL THE torments suffered by a gulag prisoner, the greatest was that once you entered, you never left. Long after their release, prisoners would cower in alleyways, flinch at the sight of a uniform, compulsively pace out the dimensions of their former cells within much larger chambers.

Since his first day of freedom Shan had fought that compulsion. Now as he lay on a metal cot in the blackness, helplessness washed over him like some dark tide. It was pointless to resist. He was a prisoner again and would be for years to come. Even if he was eventually sent back to his former camp, where he might at least be reunited with his wayward son, there would be the inevitable softening up inflicted on repeat prisoners. His upper arm twitched where the battery cables would be clamped. His fingernails began to ache, as if they remembered what the Public Security soldiers, the knobs, had done.