Prayer of the Dragon (37 page)

“Abigail!” Hostene shouted, as if she might be near. Then he called again, and again, his last word like a cry of pain.

Bing grinned. “Is it really true, old man, that you came all the way from America for this?” he said.

“Is it really true,” Hostene shot back, “that you could kill so many in cold blood?”

“I am nothing compared to him,” Bing said, and pointed to Shan. “This is the man who has killed an entire mountain. If we had women and children on board we should have sent them away in boats the second we saw his face.” He stood, his task finished. “It was Shan who unleashed the real destruction. That son-of-a-bitch Ren never studied economics. He doesn’t know shit about the market economy. The miners have kept out of his sight for all these years. But now that Shan has him so fired up, he’ll make arrests, interrogate people, turn over every stone on the mountain. Ren will destroy a thriving enterprise that supports scores of people, then call himself a hero and return to his one-room apartment with a certificate from a grateful bureaucracy to hang on his wall.”

Shan’s chest tightened. Chodron must have repaired his sabotaged generator. “What is the major doing?”

“It’s what he’s not doing. Not leaving Tashtul when he was scheduled to. Not allowing the helicopter he summoned from Lhasa to depart. Not letting any of his men take leave. Not allowing anyone onto the trails into the mountains. Not letting anyone know the responses he is getting to your photographs that he e-mailed to every army and security office in Tibet. He is methodical and deadly.”

“Let him come,” Yangke said. He was rubbing his head now. “Let him arrest you as a killer.”

“When Ren comes, nothing on the mountain will continue as before. Not in Little Moscow. Not in your village. Just remember, it was Shan who brought him down upon you. It will start in earnest when Ren finds an illegal lama in shackles. Ever see a shark when it tastes fresh blood?” Bing bent over Hostene and Yangke, expertly patting them down. “Empty them,” he said to Hostene, pointing to his pants pockets. Then lightly pressing his pistol barrel against Shan’s chin, he patted down Shan as well. “And that one,” he said, pointing to one of Shan’s pockets. He quickly sorted through the little pile they’d made, tossing Hostene’s pocketknife over his shoulder, taking all their matches, pausing over Shan’s shard of plaster before dropping it onto the ground.

“All Tashi wanted was his freedom,” Yangke said.

Bing shrugged. “I liked Tashi. I miss Tashi. The drunken artist, like a character in some old play. He always told jokes. No one jokes anymore. I’ll have to pay for my entertainment now. Tashi will be hard to replace.” He glanced back at Shan and grimaced. Sometimes birds too were surprised by the songs they sang.

“One thing I don’t understand,” Shan said. “Tashi was going to smuggle the gold over the border. But how was he going to get it off the mountain without Chodron finding out?”

“I know your type so well, Shan,” Bing said. “God, how well I know you. I was responsible for ten barracks of prisoners like you—pathetic, morose creatures with no vision, only bitterness about the past. They would sit in reeducation classes and copy out slogans from little red books like robots, praising the Chairman, reading aloud apologies printed in other books, using someone else’s words. Never a one among them with the balls to stand up and say, Fuck the Chairman, screw the Party secretaries, and screw the limo drivers who brought them to town.”

“I tried at first,” Shan replied in a weary voice. “They sent me to a special hospital for the criminally insane.”

“Unfortunately,” Bing said soberly, “you are the sanest person I have ever met.”

Hostene picked himself up and began refilling his bag. “I’m going after Abigail,” he said. “You’d better shoot me now if you mean to stop me.”

“I like this old fool,” Bing said, gesturing at Hostene with his pistol. “He reminds me of the old Tibetans. In the town by my prison barracks there were some monks who had resigned their robes. You know, they’d been forced to marry, forced to break their vows. They made the best drinking companions. They’d bet on which lower animal forms they would attain in the next life.”

Bing glanced up toward the summit, then eyed his prisoners. “Here’s my dilemma,” he said to Shan. “We had a celebration in the early summer, got drunk, and shot at cans and at pikas. Like a fool, I used every bullet for this gun except the five left in this clip. Tell your friend to forgive me, but I am unable to waste a bullet on him.” He kicked one of the ropes to Shan. “Tie them back to back to that post. Then I’ll do you.” He glanced toward the summit again.

He paused, stepped to Hostene, and held the pistol barrel before his chest. “Do not even think of following. If I see you again, I will shoot her. As much as I like her, I will shoot her, and for the rest of your life you will know you caused her death.”

“You don’t know the route, Bing,” Shan warned as he was tied to the iron ring below the anvil. “It’s too dangerous. The path punishes those who don’t respect it.”

“You have it bad, Shan. You wouldn’t stand up to those who ruined your life, and now you want to kowtow to a bunch of monks who died five hundred years ago.” He pointed to a line of shadow that ascended along the nearest wall toward the summit. “Look close and you can see there are smudges of color along that trail. There’s no secret to the path those monks laid out. Only follow the paintings and don’t step off a cliff.” He draped one of their blankets over his shoulder.

Before he departed, Bing checked the tightness of the ropes. “Here’s a plan,” he said, mocking them again. “One of you must die. Then he comes back as a rat and chews the ropes through to free the others.” He was still laughing as he disappeared around the end of the rock formation.

They sat, bound by ropes, seeming to drift on a tide of fear and helplessness.

Hostene said, after a long silence, “Colors may represent directions. For the Navajo, white is east.”

“To the Tibetans too they signify direction,” Yangke observed with surprise.

“But also elements,” Shan said. “Red meant fire, white meant metal, green meant wood. And it is wood you must focus on. The post,” he explained. “If you can pry it out of the ground you can slide the rope over the end and have enough slack to free yourself.”

With Shan’s coaching, Hostene and Yangke learned how to coordinate their movements in order to pull the old post out of the ground. Minutes later they were all three free.

No one seemed willing to speak about their next step. Yangke stared at the skeletons. Hostene repacked and shouldered his bag with a determined expression, then seemed to reconsider. Shan began mentally cataloging the reasons for turning back, starting with Bing and his five bullets, followed closely by the likelihood that Ren’s helicopter would soon appear. While he was silently composing a speech to persuade his companions to retreat, Yangke began studying the skeletons’ arrangement, lifting some skulls as if looking for old friends.

Hostene, sensing Shan’s gaze, upended his bag. Its sole contents were a coil of rope, a flint, his prayer-stick feather, and a piece of wood. A look of wonder appeared on his face. There had been an earlier pilgrimage he had failed to complete on which his long-dead uncle had given him a rope, a flint, a feather, and a piece of wood, then asked him to go meet the gods. Hostene slowly repacked his bag, then stood, retrieved his staff, and began to walk in the direction Bing had taken. The sun was beginning to set. The little plain below was already in shadow.

“No,” Yangke called out. “You cannot leave yet. We have to spend the night here. We have to understand what the message of the colors means, and sleep with the skeletons. It’s what the pilgrims were meant to do.”

For a moment it seemed Hostene might bolt but he lowered his bag and grimly nodded.

Using one of the iron scraps as a striker they lit a fire, though a small one, for they felt like intruders. With nothing to cook, nothing to eat or drink except their single bottle of water, they stared at the flames in silence, each man lost in thought. At last Yangke rose, holding one of the burning sticks of juniper. Shan thought he was using it as a torch but instead he extended it at arm’s length, first low, then high, as he walked around the wheel of skeletons. He was spreading the juniper smoke to attract the deities.

Hostene began studying the ground around them, stepping out into the fading sunlight, pausing to examine scraps of wood. Shan joined the search, studying the collection of skeleton hands, finding footprints in many directions as well as several stripped leaves of fragrant herbs. He was collecting the leaves when Yangke gave an excited cry.

Hostene was already at Yangke’s side when Shan reached them, pointing at white marks on the stone wall overhang. At the top was a jagged streak of lightning, then two of the stick-figure gods, then a row of Tibetan sacred objects. Leaning against the wall were two eight-inch-long pieces of juniper, scraped flat, decorated with black-and-white patterns. Shan picked up one of the sticks. It had been lightly coated with white chalk, then a jagged black line running its length had been inscribed with a charred stick. The other stick held the same pattern but instead of black on white the pattern was white on black.

“Prayer sticks,” Hostene explained. “Thunder prayer sticks.” Lifting the second stick to examine it more closely, he exposed a final sign in chalk on the rock behind it, an oval with eight appendages with a smaller flat oval for a head. A beetle. Beside it was the chalk image of a sacred lotus blossom. It was as if Abigail were introducing the two worlds, Navajo and Tibetan, to each other.

Shan extended the leaves in his hand toward Hostene, dropping them into the Navajo’s palm. “Medicine herbs.”

The Navajo sniffed the leaves, then stared at them. “Some days she has pain in her abdomen. Once I found her doubled up behind a rock. She said it was nothing, told me to leave.”

Yangke showed Shan that under the skulls at the hub of the skeleton wheel was a pattern of colored marks. Red, white, green. They were working to keep their small fire alight when an eerie humming sound rose from nearby. Yangke braced himself, looking wide-eyed at the skulls as if to see which of them was speaking. Shan rose and followed the sound.

In the light of the early moon Hostene was standing on a flat boulder, whirling a piece of wood tied to a length of the yak-hair rope over his head. It made a low ululating roar that varied in pitch as it moved through the air, reminding Shan uncannily of a Tibetan throat chant. He became aware of Yangke at his side, and the two of them sat and listened until the Navajo stopped.

“It’s called a bull roarer in English,” Hostene explained as he showed them the flat piece of wood, triangular at one end, that he had fashioned with his knife. His voice was somber and low, that of a monk in a temple. “In my people’s tongue it is called the thunder speaker. It’s used in many of our ceremonies. Thunder drives away evil. It summons the Thunder People.”

“But the Thunder People,” Yangke whispered, “they are dangerous.”

Hostene looked out at the stars. “They are like your protector demons. The Thunder People have the power to find lost things. They know every inch of the sky.”

Hostene showed Yangke and Shan how to propel the bull roarer over their heads, letting its weight carry it around in a circle.

Hostene did not enter the alcove with the bones. He stayed by Abigail’s chalk marks, a blanket wrapped around him. Three times an owl called, and each time Hostene rose and used the bull roarer as if in defiant reply.

Shan settled against a rock near the fire and, despite a terrible feeling of foreboding, drifted into a fitful sleep. An hour later he woke up shaking from a nightmare. He had been falling down a seemingly endless hole, passing skeletons on ledges that cringed in fear as he floated by.

As he walked out into the moonlight Hostene spoke from his vigil by the chalk marks. “I had a dream too,” the Navajo said in a haunted tone. “Abigail was a ghost and was gliding over the mountain in the arms of an ancient lama who was explaining the old ways to her. I kept calling to her but she ignored me. When they swooped close I jumped and grabbed the lama by his robe. She turned to me. ‘You need to accept it, Uncle,’ she said. ‘This is the way I was meant to learn. This is how I walk in beauty.’ ” He looked up at Shan, moonlight lighting his melancholy features. “When I pulled the lama ghost around to face me, it was Gendun.”

In the morning Shan arranged his friends according to what he called the pattern of the colors, the only solution that made sense to him of the dozen he had considered in the night. They erected the wood post and Hostene stood beside it. Green for wood, in the tradition of Tibetan ritual. Yangke stood at the anvil. White for metal. Shan stood at the furnace. Red for fire. Extended, the line they made intersected a thin, sharp shadow perhaps one third of the way up the trail that climbed the slope above them, the trail Bing had taken the evening before. They retrieved their bags and staffs and started walking.

Half an hour later they reached the shadow, a cleft that could easily have gone unnoticed by someone watching his footing on the precarious trail. They entered the shadow and followed a passage through a spine of rock into a small garden on the other side, a bowl where a spring formed a pool surrounded by ferns.

They relaxed in this oasis, drinking and washing, cautiously sampling the little berries growing on low vines, then they followed the path up the spine of rock, realizing that the arch they had seen from below was yet another passage through the rock, though not one intended for the pilgrims.