Prayer of the Dragon (36 page)

“To where?”

“The umbrella points the way,” Shan said again. On the video screen, directly beside the fresco was a series of small shadows, alternating up the ravine wall, though several had been destroyed by miners’ chisels. “Climbing holes. Start directly over those holes and walk in a straight line for, say, four hundred paces.”

“A pilgrim was supposed to comprehend this?” Yangke asked.

“Only a few. The most persistent. A pilgrim might spend weeks on a kora. Some would sit at a painting like this for days.”

“The most contrite,” Yangke suggested. “The most desperate.”

Shan followed his gaze, then quickly stowed the camera away. Hostene was moving along the rim of the ravine at a steady trot.

It took them a long time to find the second marker. They crept to the opposite side of the rim, above the painting, taking care not to be seen by those below, then walked three hundred fifty paces, debating the length of a Tibetan’s stride centuries earlier. They fanned out, each man counting off another fifty paces. Finally, they discovered another painting, nearly faded to oblivion, this one depicting the thirteen possessions of an ordained monk, with the monk’s staff drawn in tiny footprints pointed almost directly up the slope. The painting map called for another six hundred paces, toward a now familiar grove of trees. They found themselves in front of the ruined fresco with the ancient painting underneath. The footprints were tiny along the border surrounding the serpentine god, but Shan found them, and understood finally why the larger fresco had been constructed over the painting. No one had made it to the upper path for seventy years. The lamas had hidden the way by blocking the ancient explanation from view. In the early twentieth century more than a few oracles had predicted calamity for Tibetan Buddhists, and begged that their treasures be safeguarded. The lamas had tried to protect the mountain in their own way. But the person who had hammered away the plaster had not been interested in protecting anything.

“Abigail knew,” Shan said to Hostene. “She kept coming back here.”

The Navajo nodded. “She suspected. But she would never destroy the fresco.”

“No,” Shan agreed as he bent over the details of the little demon panels along the side of the painting. He pointed in turn to the tiny swords in four little hands, all pointing in exactly the same direction, and began counting the ovals. “Five hundred paces,” he said a few minutes later, and pointed in the direction indicated by the swords.

They soon found themselves in one of the gorges at the foot of the summit and began passing small ravines with narrow, snaking walls that sprang out like fingers from the base of the summit. Shan began noticing black smudges near the entry to each ravine. He squatted and touched one. Soot.

“What does it mean?” Yangke asked.

“Someone made it this far but didn’t know where to go next. He tested each ravine, then marked it with scrapings from a butter lamp.”

Lichen was chipped away from the corners of several rocks, some with new growth appearing. They had been stripped a year or more before, no doubt by someone in search of another painting. Yangke pointed out small piles of ashes at regular intervals, and held some under his nose. Someone had been burning incense to attract the help of the deities.

“Look for fresh tracks,” Hostene suggested.

After twenty minutes Yangke gave a low whistle. They found him before an undulating, wind-carved rock. “A self-actuated demon,” the Tibetan declared. It took a moment for Shan to recognize in the ridges of the stone the shape of one of the tiger demons used by the Bon monks, even longer to notice that the colorations below the stone were not patterns of lichen.

Yangke knelt and began pointing to the barely readable letters. “Worm,” he said, then “god.”

“Becomes,” Shan made out, then stumbled over vague markings that were too far gone to read.

“Worm. Becomes god,” Yangke said in a puzzled voice. “Trinle said something about that.”

The words echoed in some dusty chamber in Shan’s mind. “Even the lowly worm eventually becomes a god,” he announced. “It’s a saying the oldest lamas use in teaching.”

The three men exchanged perplexed glances, then began searching the two ravines closest to the faded message.

“Nothing,” Yangke reported after several minutes.

Shan bent to the Tibetan’s boot and touched it. His finger came away with grains of black sand. “There are no sand deposits up here,” he observed.

“You’re wrong,” Yangke said, and led them down the passage to a small sand-filled depression.

Shan kneeled, running the sand through his fingers. “This was brought here.”

“What does it mean?” Yangke asked once more.

Shan removed his pack and rolled up his sleeves. “It means we become worms.”

Using their hands as shovels, they soon exposed a low hollow in the stone below ground level, then a narrow tunnel running through it filled with sand, a tunnel that, oddly, seemed to have been carved not by chisel but by water. Shan offered encouragement to a hesitant Hostene by explaining that this had been where Abigail had asked for her supplies from town to be left.

“But Abigail can’t have come through here. The sand hadn’t been disturbed,” Hostene pointed out.

As he spoke, a sharp back draft of wind shot off the face of the mountain. In seconds it had refilled their excavation by several inches, answering his question.

When they reached the other side, they scraped the sand from their clothes. Directly opposite them on the rock wall was an image of another demon, his yellow eyes still vivid enough to be unsettling. Shan silently gestured them onward and a moment later they were at the base of the unattainable summit, looking up with disbelief into a fold in the cliff face. The builders of the path had indeed shown worms how to meet gods.

The color began draining from Hostene’s face. Yangke paced nervously back and forth, shaking his head.

A chain of huge hand-forged iron links, each as long as Shan’s forearm, hung in a long channel that seemed to have been gouged out of the rock wall. The chain was anchored to the rock near their feet by a thick iron staple and to the side of the mountain by long iron pins, which held it steady sixteen inches from the rock face.

“There’s no end to it,” Yangke said, looking up.

“It’s just in shadow,” Shan said, struggling to keep his voice calm. The end of the chain vanished into blackness nearly two hundred feet above them, where there might be an overhanging cave.

“It’s so old,” Hostene said. “The chain can’t be safe.”

“It’s survived from the age of Tibet’s great bridge builders,” Shan suggested. “Special forges turned out chains like these for suspension bridges. Most of them lasted for centuries.” He studied the big, uneven links uncertainly. They showed little evidence of corrosion or rust. “This one has been mostly protected from the elements.”

“How old do you think it is?”

“Three, maybe four hundred years.”

Hostene stared at the shadows above with a bleak expression, then lowered his pack. “We can’t take everything.”

“We are meant to carry what the pilgrims carried,” Yangke said. “A blanket, a staff, our bags.”

“Abigail would have carried more,” Hostene remarked.

“Perhaps not much more,” Shan said, gesturing toward the deeper shadows at the very base of the summit, where there was a small patch of color. Under a blue nylon parka they found a small mound of objects. A handful of ballpoint pens bound by a rubber band. A small cooking kit. A sweatshirt. A water bottle. Hostene opened his pack and began making his own pile, including the video camera. Shan watched for a moment, then began sorting through his own possessions.

Helping each other, the three soon had rolled their leather bags into their blankets and fashioned carrying straps out of the yak-hair rope. Hostene and Shan stared at the staffs, so awkward for a climb up the chain, then followed Yangke’s example, securing them in the carrying straps around their necks.

They stood, gazing up, realizing how easy it would be for any of them to fall to his death. Seeing the fear on Hostene’s face, Shan was about to suggest they reconsider when Yangke set a foot into the first of the links and began climbing.

At first they seemed to totter between heaven and hell, one moment reaching upward for the uncertain shadows above, the next slipping, fearfully clutching the metal to keep from falling onto the sharp rocks below. The links were rough and misshapen but wide enough for a foot or, when fatigue struck, for an elbow to be pushed through so that, locking arms, they could safely hang long enough to catch their breath. The old chain bore their combined weight without complaint.

As they climbed Shan began seeing a pattern in the clumps of vegetation that clung to the wall beside the chain, interspersed with open holes chipped in the rock, several of which contained bird nests. This kora was much older than three or four centuries. Before the chain’s construction, holes had been chiseled in the rock as handholds to help pilgrims climb the wall.

They climbed together into the high channel of smooth rock. It had once been a waterfall, Shan realized, as he entered the vertical tunnel, a watercourse inside the mountain that had, by the hand of man or nature, been diverted, leaving the tunnel and a smooth vertical track for the chain, which reached its upper terminus alongside an open ledge. They had found the bed of the old stream. The rock wall of its bank sloped away at the top, leaving a five-foot gap between it and the side of the mountain. Hostene and Shan climbed upward, overlapping themselves on the upper chain. Yangke, who had preceded the older men, tried to reach the trail leading up the mountain with an extended foot.

“I cannot jump that,” Hostene said anxiously as he gazed down at the rocks far below.

Shan, with his head at Hostene’s ankles, studied the rock wall. Then he took the staff from his back and began probing a small patch of shadow that was darker than the rest, inches below the path. The end of the staff sank in nearly a foot. Shan threaded the staff through the opposite link in the chain and thrust it back into the wall.

Yangke, watching from above, announced that he had located another hole, four feet above the first. They soon had a precarious but firm walkway, with a rail to hold onto for the crossing. After some energetic coaxing of Hostene by the young Tibetan, they all made it across. Yangke lit his butter lamp with his flint and began walking up a gently sloping tunnel.

They had left the world behind, below. They were following Abigail and the killer into another world. The vertical gap they had bridged on the ancient chain felt as if it had been miles in length. There were acrid scents unfamiliar to Shan here, and images on the walls that he had never seen before of vengeful demons given movement by the flickering light. This was the land of deities, where men were outsiders, where men were playthings, their bones used to construct altars.

Their pace hastened as they approached the daylight at the end of the tunnel. Finally, they reached an opening framed in well-worked, sun-bleached cedar wood, carved with the signs of paradise. A short railing extended down one side. Yangke uttered a sigh of relief, handed his lamp to Hostene, and darted toward the outside stairs just as Shan recognized words written on the side wall of the cave that had recently been underlined in white chalk. The opening lines of the death rites. Shan shouted in alarm and leaped forward as Yangke fell off the side of the mountain.

Chapter Twelve

WITH A TERRIFIED cry Yangke twisted about, his arms thrashing, desperately grabbing at the narrow rail with one hand but inexorably sliding downward. There was only one stair step past the end of the tunnel, though the rail extended another two feet to give the illusion of a flight of stairs. For four hundred feet down there was only air.

Shan thrust his staff forward. A firm hand closed around his belt at the small of his back. As Hostene gripped him from behind, Shan reached out for Yangke with the pole. The younger man seized it and Shan pulled. Then a downdraft hit Yangke and pushed him outward. It was as if the mountain were wrestling Shan for him. Shan and Hostene pulled together, Yangke got a foot on the single step, and with a final heave they managed to pull him inside.

The three men sat on the floor of the tunnel, gasping. “I—I lost it, I lost the bag,” Yangke confessed when he had regained his breath.

It took Shan a moment to understand. Yangke’s bag had slipped off his shoulder, his staff had fallen out of his hand. He had lost the kit that every pilgrim needed to survive on the mountain.

“You’re with us,” Shan said, hoping he was conveying more confidence than he felt. “We have enough to share.”

He held the lamp high as he retraced their steps, chiding himself for not having noticed how the rock walls and floors had changed in the last hundred feet. The rock had been chipped away, not worn by water. Shan pointed to the fresh white chalk marks that highlighted the words from the death ritual.

“Abigail!” Hostene exclaimed.

Shan walked to the point where the floor changed and began tapping the walls with the end of his staff. He discovered a section that was hollow. A wooden panel had been painted to look like rock. Hostene found an edge and starting pushing. The dry iron pintles hidden inside the panel’s edge groaned and it swung open. They were back in the course of the waterway.

As the panel swung closed behind them they lit the other two lamps and began following a twisting passage where the water had once followed a seam of softer mineral. But where, Shan wondered, was the snowmelt that had once rushed through the tunnel?

They emerged onto a small plain, surprisingly flat, sheltered by low ridges of rock, with smaller rocks scattered across the open ground, the dark summit looming above, closer now. Shan pointed to a nearby shelf of rock that overlooked the plain. “We should rest and study the slopes above while it is still light,” he suggested. He heard no argument from his exhausted friends nor a syllable of surprise when they discovered another painting on a sheltered wall behind the shelf.

Yangke, suddenly full of energy, paced along the width of the painting. “This one is different,” he declared and looked up at Shan. “Astrologers have painted this.”

The central figure was called the astrological tortoise, its head that of a fiery demon, its clawed feet holding ritual implements. At the top was a cluster of flames—to the right an iron sword, to the left a tree, at the bottom waves, indicating water. In the belly of the tortoise was a circle divided into nine spaces by two pairs of perpendicular lines, each space with a number.

“Looks like a word game,” Hostene said over Shan’s shoulder.

“It’s called a
mewa
square,” Shan said, then explained its significance to the Tibetans, beginning by translating the numbers in the nine spaces. Four, nine, two were the numbers in the top row, then three, five, seven, and finally eight, one, six at the bottom. Whether added up horizontally, vertically, or diagonally each row totaled fifteen. “It’s used to tell the future,” he said. “It depicts perfect symmetry. The base of three times the central five equals fifteen. The central five is midway between the numbers on either side and above and below it. But nine is its most important number. The central five times nine yields forty-five, which is the total sum of all the digits in the square. Nine is the perfect number. Any number multiplied by nine creates a number the sum of whose digits is invariably a multiple of nine. The square is used to calculate horoscopes.”

“Which must be why there are nine segments,” Hostene remarked.

Shan followed the Navajo’s gaze. He saw what had drawn Hostene’s eye. The smaller rocks that seemed scattered from the lower perspective could now be seen to have been arranged deliberately. There were not a lot of them, so their placement was not obvious, but from where the three men stood now the stones clearly defined nine separate squares.

Shan and Hostene stared from the plain to the painting, examining the tortoise again, watching as Yangke climbed down and began walking among the squares.

“The Emperor Yu,” Shan murmured as Yangke wove an erratic course through the stones.

“Emperor?”

“It’s an old story, from before history. The Tibetans borrowed many things from India and China, where the early astrologers wrote on tortoiseshells and bones. The mythical Emperor Yu received a tortoiseshell from the deities, inscribed with the magic square. He then traveled the nine provinces of his kingdom in the sequence of the numbers.” Shan traced a finger over the tortoise’s belly to demonstrate, pointing to the script that looked like an Arabic number three leaning to the right, then to another Tibetan digit that resembled a three with a tail. One, then two. It’s called the Nine Paces of Emperor Yu. My father told me the pattern is used in the West also, but there it is called the Seal of Saturn.”

“But we can see what’s before us. It’s obvious we have to keep climbing to the summit,” Hostene said, leaning on his staff. “And there is only one trail up,” he added, pointing to a long thread of shadow on the ridge to the east of the plain. “Why waste time walking zigzags on these squares?”

“Because the devout do not question their prescribed fate,” Shan replied as he started to climb down to the plain. “Because all life is a zigzag.”

“Abigail is up there,” Hostene said to his back but his protest had no energy.

“A teacher of ancient religions would recognize the square, and she would have done what was intended,” Shan countered.

Hostene followed Shan out onto the plain.

Assuming that the top of the square would lie to the north, Yangke led them to the section corresponding to the number one. He dropped to his knees, extended his arms, and lowered his body to the ground, then pulled forward as he folded his body up.

“I don’t understand,” Hostene said.

Shan watched the Tibetan and gave a hesitant nod. “Yangke is right. We must be pilgrims in all respects. The pilgrim would proceed by prostrations.” He saw the frustration on Hostene’s face. “Some pilgrims still travel hundreds of miles this way, taking months to reach a shrine. We,” he said as he dropped to his knees, “only need repeat the Nine Paces of Emperor Yu.”

It was a slow, laborious process. On the third square, Yangke sneezed as he inched up from the dust of the reddish gravel that was scattered about the square. On the fifth square Shan paused for a moment to look at the white dust that suddenly appeared on his hand. At the edge of the last square, where their prostrations finished, there was an small overhanging shelf of rock that, from the perspective of someone walking by, would have obscured the words painted on the flat wall underneath. But they were prostrate pilgrims, and saw it.
Om nidhi ghata praticcha svaha
, they read.

“A mantra used in offering rituals,” Yangke said. “It refers to the sacred treasure flask.”

“But we could have just come here directly. It is the only way,” Hostene complained as they joined the short steep path that led to a bulging rock formation in the broad shape of a treasure flask.

“No,” Shan said, “there was a reason.” He halted and studied the squares again, the colored stains on his hand, the discolorations on all their knees. “It is the colors.” To Hostene’s obvious chagrin he walked back onto the squares. Some—but not all of them—bore faintly colored soil or fine gravel, noticeable to the pilgrim with his face on the ground but so subtle as not to be obvious to the casual glance. “A sequence,” Shan observed, “red, white, and green.”

“Why?” Yangke asked.

“I don’t know,” Shan admitted. “The treasure flask will tell us,” he suggested, and led them back to the trail.

The climb to the flask rock was arduous. They were reaching an altitude where the thinness of the oxygen might affect them. Hostene had to pause often, leaning on his knees, and seemed about to collapse onto a rock at the side of the trail when he uttered a cry of glee. As Shan ran back to him Hostene pointed to a white chalk mark on the rock. Drawn hurriedly, in the shape of the Emperor Yu’s paces, it showed that Abigail had been there.

What they found under the wide overhanging rock behind the flask tower was not an homage to the gods but a memorial to the frailty of man. Men had labored there, for there was a blackened, shaped hole in the rock wall that appeared to have been a small furnace. There were bits of cast iron on the ground, a lichen-covered iron shape on a stone pillar that proved to be an anvil with an iron ring attached to its base, a few feet from a weathered juniper post in the ground holding fragments of what had been a large bellows. But Shan’s companions’ attention was focused elsewhere.

On a large slab beyond the furnace lay a dozen skeletons arranged like the spokes of a wheel, skulls at the hub. On a small, narrow shelf beyond, deeper in shadow, were twenty separate skulls. On a lower shelf, five feet off the ground, lay skeleton hands and arms, mixed with the weathered hands and paws of protector demons from ritual costumes.

Hostene, who shied away from owls and even from talk of death, stood as if petrified in front of the display. Yangke, however, seemed fascinated. “Pilgrims,” he declared in an awed whisper as he leaned his staff against the wall and pointed to the hands. “From centuries of following the path. Can you feel their—” His sentence ended in a terrified gasp as one of the demon hands reached out, grabbed his wrist, and jerked him toward the wall. His head struck the rock and he slumped against the wall, then slid lifelessly to the ground. Breaking out of his trance, Hostene darted to his side. Yangke’s staff rose and slammed against the Navajo’s back, knocking him off his feet.

Shan leaped forward, then froze. A pistol had materialized in the floating demon hand, aimed directly at him.

Shan said, fighting to keep his voice level, “Those who built this place, Captain, would have told you that bringing a weapon here would damage your spirit.”

“It wasn’t to enrich my soul that I followed you up here.” Bing stepped into view. The hands, Shan realized, were not arrayed on a shelf carved into the rock but atop a squared-off boulder whose back was totally obscured in shadow. One of Bing’s arms was covered by the costume of a demon, a long black glove-like device with bones of whitewashed wood affixed to it over the hand. Switching the pistol to his bare hand, the mayor of Little Moscow pulled off the glove with his teeth and tossed it into the shadows.

“Damn, you’re slow,” Bing said. “Performing all that mumbo jumbo below, when any fool could see you had to come this way.”

“Is that when you passed us?” Shan asked. From a position of prostration they would have seen nothing. “You made it from the chain without a staff?”

“I have the legs of a frog, my mother used to say.”

“I did not see you at Little Moscow this morning,” Shan observed.

“I was waiting at the painting.”

Shan understood. “You destroyed it, but you still did not understand what lay beneath.”

“When I saw you up on the rim above the town this morning, I knew you’d get to the painting sooner or later.”

“Like Abigail Natay.”

“Like the American woman,” Bing agreed.

Shan bent over his friends. Hostene was still conscious, although he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Yangke, who was beginning to stir, had a jagged cut on his forehead.

Shan rose and paced around the skeletons, ignoring Bing’s gun. “This is what happens,” he said.

“Happens to whom?”

“You should go back, Captain. You should go back now, or else promise to help us find the Navajo woman. The people who built this path intended the wrong minded to stay on it forever.”

“You make it sound like I’ll encounter three-hundred-year-old pilgrims still wandering about,” Bing sneered.

Shan gestured to the skeletons. “Something like that.”

Bing kicked the nearest of the pilgrim bags that lay on the ground before kneeling and upending it, without taking his eyes off his prisoners. “And what about you, Comrade Shan? Are you so saintly that you need not worry?” He picked up an apricot and took a bite, the juice running down his chin.

A small ache rose in Shan’s heart. “Me? I am beginning to realize I can only live between worlds. I’m not sure the deities take much notice of me.” The words had been uttered without conscious thought, as if something in the shrine had pushed them from his heart directly to his tongue.

Bing laughed derisively. “As much as I’d like to stay and hear the contrite confession of another prisoner,” he said in a mocking tone, “I haven’t got time. Where are the other packs?”

“There’s only one more. We lost one.” Shan pointed to his own bag by the old anvil. Bing kicked it toward the one he had already emptied and upended its contents. He drained one of their two remaining water bottles, then began filling his pockets with their meager rations.