Prayer of the Dragon (35 page)

Old Trinle sat near the center of the room, gazing up at another painting, his eyes filled with tears.

“He won’t speak to Dolma about this,” Yangke explained. “He said he never came here before, that it was only for the senior lamas.”

Another fierce protector was depicted, Shan thought at first, though the image was unlike any he had seen before. The god in the center was dragon-headed. Two dozen small demons surrounded it along the sides and bottom.

“It is the druk deity, god of the mountain, the earth god,” Trinle declared in a raspy voice. “This is where the lamas started and finished each pilgrim season. He is the one the fortunate ones meet at the top.”

Yangke said, “All these years, Rapaki didn’t know why, despite his years of meditation, he wasn’t shown the Kora. I think he decided he didn’t have something the god wanted. He kept looking, trying to understand what that thing might be. He had no teachers,” he reminded Shan.

“You must not tell Dolma,” Trinle told Shan.

Shan stepped closer to the painting, not yet comprehending. Yangke handed him the butter lamp. Then he saw.

He had seen paintings of old gods with necklaces and bracelets of human skulls. He had seen images of gods adorned with human skins. Until now he had never seen a god wearing a necklace made of human hands.

“After so many years alone,” Yangke said in an anguished voice, “the mind might go to places . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t think he is exactly a murderer, not the way most people think of murderers.”

Shan said, “Perhaps. But if one has an appetite for hands,” he said, “someone else who
is
a murderer might find it convenient to feed that craving.”

They lingered in silence, unable to break the spell of the deity before them. Yangke lowered himself beside Trinle. Shan found himself staring at the unsettling dragon-headed image.

“I could have learned its secrets,” came a cracking voice, full of remorse. “I could have saved Rapaki,” Trinle said.

In the quiet that followed only the occasional crackling of the lamp could be heard and a sound that Shan had begun to detect in all of Tibet’s deep caves, a strange low resonance that was sound and not sound, something that made him feel small and meaningless, an intruder into a place not meant for mere humans. Lokesh had a name for it—mountain speaking.

“My uncle was the abbot,” Trinle continued. “I was sent to the monks when I was ten, as had been the tradition of our family for centuries. But when I was seventeen I fell in love with a girl who tended the sheep. I would say I was meditating out on the mountain but it was not meditation I sought. We became like man and wife. When my uncle found out he banished me from the temple and took my robe away, saying the only way I could stay near the temple would be if I was digging its holes and tending its gardens. A year later, when the Chinese were advancing, my woman went down to Tashtul, to look for her mother. I never saw her again, never heard from her.

“I think it is true, that this is where the first gods started,” Trinle declared after a long time. “A thousand thousand seasons ago. Once there were more gods than people. People were just made, like artwork, the way later people made paintings of gods.” The old groundskeeper seemed about to weep. “Then there came to be too many people for the gods to tend, too many people who forgot the nature of prayer. The world could no longer be relied upon. And now,” he pronounced in a thin, anguished voice, “I think there may be only one earth god left, a frail old dragon at the top of this kora. When he finds the strength, he prays.”

“What does he pray for?” Shan asked.

The answer came not from Trinle or Yangke, but from a lean, weary figure standing at the entrance to the chamber. Shan had no idea how long Lokesh had been there.

“That,” his old friend said, “is the most important question in all the world.”

Yangke began a whispered mantra. Trinle rose and brushed the dust from the deity’s painted eyes. When Shan turned again Lokesh was gone.

He found Lokesh in the equipment chamber, at the wicker chests, gazing at the old masks. He lifted the headdress of a horned bull god and set it on an adjoining chest. “Trinle and Yangke tried to learn, but they had no proper guidance.”

Shan noted the heavy-bladed instruments beside the yak-tail whips—ritual axes with curving steel at the top, a four-inch blade in the center. An outline in the dust showed one was missing.

“You must return with me,” Lokesh said. “Now that we know what is here, the entire village will surely understand. Gendun says he needs to speak with Chodron, that if he can just sit and meditate with him, Chodron will see the error of his ways.”

Shan could find no answer that Lokesh would comprehend.

“Then you are going up that kora tomorrow. Tell me that by doing so you will not beget more violence and more suffering.” Death did not upset Lokesh for to him it was but a stage before rebirth. It was violence, which fed the imbalance he sought to heal, that he feared.

“I wish I could find such a way,” was all Shan could say.

Lokesh stroked the golden nose of the horned bull headdress. “Return with me. Gendun and I will find a way. When he is healed, the three of us can climb to the summit together.”

“If I return without discovering an answer to the killings, Gendun will be tortured again. To Chodron he is only a weapon to use against me.”

“You know that is unimportant to Gendun.”

“It is important to me.” Shan’s heart felt as if it were in a vise.

Lokesh tilted the bull up so that it seemed to be looking him in the eyes, and spoke to its golden face. “It is a season for killing, Dolma says. She says it is like a storm, that it needs to blow itself out so we can get on with life.”

IN THE MORNING, outside the cave, Lokesh would not speak to Shan, would not look him in the eye.

Dolma transferred some apples and apricots from her own bag to Shan’s pack, handed him one of the pilgrim bags Trinle had brought from the cave. “He says this is not what the track to the gods is for,” she said in a strained voice, “that you must stop this, that you cannot turn it into some sort of contest between predator and prey.”

“We have no choice.” Shan lifted one of the pilgrim staffs and looked at his old friend, who stood on a rock, facing the sunrise.

“He says,” Dolma continued, “that he wished they had taught you better. He says you know that if you follow the upper kora more people will die than if you did not. He says if he has a chance to remove Gendun he will do so. He says he does not know if the old hermitage is safe now, that he will not be able to leave word of where they are going.”

A wave of tremendous sadness surged inside Shan. Was this how he would leave his Tibetan friends, the two men who had become like family to him? They had given him life when he had none. Now it felt as if he was betraying their teaching. He remembered a dream he’d had days earlier in which a phantom saint had told him his life would end on this mountain.

He and Yangke and Hostene had started up the trail, eyes on the summit, when Shan was stopped by the sound of hurried footsteps behind him. It was Lokesh, looking strangely frail. The old Tibetan lifted his beloved gau from his neck, the amulet that contained a prayer signed by the Dalai Lama, and placed it around Shan’s neck. Then he went back to the camp.

THEY WALKED FOR a while before Shan stopped to spread the map out on a rock. Shan had marked each of the pilgrim’s stations they knew of. “It’s a puzzle laid out five hundred years ago,” he said. “One station must point to a spur that goes upward.”

Yangke fixed his gaze on the summit. It had been ringed with clouds all morning, the crooked pinnacle at times protruding from the top like an island floating in the sky. “You heard Trinle. The only ones who survived were the ones who failed.”

“You forget the lamas,” Shan said. “The lamas went up and down.”

“We’re no lamas,” Hostene muttered. He had emptied his leather pilgrim bag and was examining its contents. It held only a flint, an odd Y-shaped piece of wood, a butter lamp, and a coil of yak-hair rope.

Shan studied the maze of ravines before them. “Abigail recorded half a dozen pilgrim stations at this level. Once there would have been more. The most important one would have been the most difficult to find.” He pointed to a clump of trees half a mile away on the table of rock that hung over the ravines.

Yangke’s face darkened. “You must have a death wish,” he said. But then he lifted his pack and began walking toward the trees.

“Why do you think this is the one?” Hostene asked as they halted near the lip of the ravines, directly above Little Moscow. Shan had taken out Abigail’s video camera and was manipulating its controls.

“A pilgrim could get lost for hours, even days, in the ravines. The lamas wanted to make it difficult. They wanted to discourage as many as possible.” He stepped into a shadow near the lip of the ravine, instructing Yangke to warn him if any miners became aware of the intruders above them. When he brought the faded painting beside Bing’s cave into focus, the first thing he saw was a caricature of Chairman Mao someone had painted over the fresco. He began filming, zooming in and out, ducking as two miners lingered in conversation in front of the rock, then filming the empty place where the piece had fallen out of the painting, finally the piece itself, braced against Bing’s front door.

“But you are only guessing this is the key,” Hostene protested. “We should be climbing.”

“It was you who made me understand.”

“Me?”

“Your stick figures. The old gods you went to meet as a boy. The earliest Buddhists in Tibet were followers of the Thunderbolt. That’s what this place was about: the thunder gods, finding the mouth of the thunder gods. If you want to find thunder what do you look for?”

Hostene knotted his brow. “Lightning.”

Shan nodded as he squatted by a tree, out of sight of the ravine now, and replayed the film he had just shot. There had been another video, among those now missing, taken by Hubei’s brother, who could venture into Little Moscow when Abigail could not. He stopped when he reached a frame that displayed the entire painting. The saint in the middle was surrounded by a dragon with a ball-shaped object in its claws. Several sacred signs, including the ritual umbrella at the top left corner, composed of tiny oval marks, could be made out. “The images at a kora station had many purposes,” Shan explained. “One was to provoke contemplation, perhaps create fear. Another, sometimes, was to explain where the pilgrim was to go next. At most stations I think the mantra was for the pilgrim’s soul. This one was for his feet.”

“You lost me.”

Shan pointed to the beast. “When I was young my father taught me twenty different traditional words for dragon in Chinese. But in Tibetan there is only one term, druk. It is also the sound of thunder. Thunder comes from dragons. The druk is also the guardian of treasure.” He pointed to the sphere in the dragon’s claws. “The pearl is the seed of thunder, which is fertilized by the druk.” Here he pointed to the strange shape that appeared as an upside-down mountain on which a miniature demon sat. “These are called
vajra
rocks, like floating islands. Vajra means lightning. The summit of this mountain is like them, cut off from the world, physically inaccessible.”

“So far as we are concerned, clearly,” Hostene said, his impatience mounting.

“Impossible to get to without an umbrella.” Shan traced the dotted lines of the umbrella. “If you draw a line through the center of the pearl, the eye of the dragon, and the single demon, they point directly to the summit of the mountain.” He demonstrated by freezing a wide shot of the painting with the summit in the background, then pointed to the umbrella. “At first I thought it was a primitive image of a white parasol, one of the sacred offerings. But it is more. It points the way.” He pulled out the piece of plaster he had carried since it had fallen on his first visit to Little Moscow and handed it to Yangke. “The ovals that make up the lines are footprints.” He paused at the look of wonder on Hostene’s face.

“We use them, much like this,” the Navajo said. “The path of our holy people—this is how we depict it in our sandpaintings, with little footprints.”

Shan quickly counted under his breath. “Taking into account the pieces of plaster that have fallen out, I estimate the shaft of the parasol is composed of thirty-five to forty ovals, or footprints. The arcs joining it at the top each contain ten prints. It’s an index, a scale. Each of the footprints on the shaft equals ten steps.”