Prayer of the Dragon (38 page)

When their path finally intersected with the end of the arched passage they found themselves on the final flat plain before the summit itself. Outside the arch, on the near side, was a now familiar painting of a dragon deity. On the other side, Bing waited for them.

The former Public Security officer leaned against a rock, the blanket he had stolen from them draped around him. He looked strangely weak, greeting them with only a sour grimace. He made no effort to reach for the pistol that lay at his side. Several feet beyond lay the pilgrim bag in which he had carried away their food supply.

Shan took a step toward Bing, his eyes on the gun. It was the kind of game Bing would play, to see how close you could come before he flipped open the blanket and drew the pistol, perhaps even pulling the trigger. Shan was ready to play, ready to advance close enough to attempt to kick the food bag toward his friends. But then with a chill he saw the blood, still wet, in a circle of stones behind Bing. Bing must have used the gun already.

Shan looked futilely for bodies. Then he feinted toward the bag and darted to the weapon. As he reached it, Bing lashed out with his foot, hooking Shan’s leg, pulling Shan on top of him, squeezing him, at first with a savage strength, as if to break Shan’s ribs, but then steadily, quickly, weakening. Shan fought his grip, squirming, realizing in terror that Bing must have stabbed him, for there was suddenly a spate of blood—on Shan, on the blanket, on Bing’s face. Then there were hands pulling Shan away. As he stood upright, he saw his friends’ faces first. They were drained of color. The blanket had fallen in Bing’s struggle with Shan, revealing why he had not reached for his pistol. He had no hands.

Chapter Thirteen

SHAN DID WHAT he could for the mayor of Little Moscow, offering him water from the bottle Yangke refilled from the spring below, wiping the blood from his face as he slipped in and out of consciousness. A quick scan of the clearing behind him showed two nearly identical blood patterns, sprays with the force of spurting arteries behind them, at each end of a low mound of heavy rocks.

“Tell me what happened,” Shan said as he wiped Bing’s brow. Hostene had ripped two strips from his shirttail and wrapped them around the stumps of Bing’s arms.

“When it happens,” Bing murmured with a dreamy gaze, “you’re not real anymore.

Shan considered the words, trying to understand if Bing was speaking of himself or of the one who had severed his hands. “Was Abigail here?” he asked.

Bing’s mouth twitched. Had he any strength left, he would have grinned mockingly. “She watches,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“She doesn’t care. Living with the gods, it’s all playacting.”

Shan shot a worried glance toward Hostene.

“How did this happen to you?”

“I was exhausted. I fell asleep. I woke to find him standing over me, grinning, singing one of his damned songs. Before I could speak, something hit me on the back of the head. When I came to there were rocks on my arms, so I couldn’t move them. He had already cut off my left hand when . . .” Bing drifted off.

Shan stepped into the little clearing behind him. It seemed like Bing had lost gallons of blood. Even at this altitude, small flies had located it.

He dripped water into Bing’s half-open mouth. “The young miner, earlier this summer,” Shan said as Bing opened his eyes. “Did you kill him, too?”

Bing struggled for his answer. “Define kill,” he whispered.

“Let’s define it this way. Last year you killed a miner, then put his partner’s chisel in his back to show to Hubei, your witness.

The miner had been threatening to undermine Chodron’s business structure, and you had to show you were worthy of becoming the miners’ leader. The perfect answer was to kill him and blame his partner, the man you chased away. Placing the skeleton on the grave wearing the partner’s ring was truly inspired. But then Thomas started telling everyone that he could tell the cause of any death, even what caused a skull fracture. And you must have inflicted such a hard blow to the miner’s head that the weapon would have been obvious as soon as Thomas saw the skull. A hammer leaves a distinctive round indentation when there’s a lot of force behind it. You had to dig up the bones of the man you killed and dispose of them.”

“No miner would go onto that ridge. It was haunted,” Bing said, with a low whistling sound as he inhaled.

“But Thomas was ready to study every bone on the mountain for his project, especially if it might belong to a murder victim.”

“You never tried to go up there,” Bing added. “Why? I was hoping, watching. I could have killed you a dozen ways up there and everyone would have blamed the ghosts.”

“I didn’t need to,” Shan explained. “I’ve seen old burial caves before. I’ve seen what people like you do to them. One man had already died up there. Chodron was so suspicious he sent that farmer to follow you. No doubt he would have been one of your victims too, if the lightning hadn’t killed him first.”

“I was going to show them the skull of some old saint and say it was you. Push a leg bone into one of your old boots. They would have believed me, after everything else that’s happened.”

“A burial cave,” Shan said, “contains lots of old bones. And it’s a perfect hiding place for treasures, like the gold you had begun to buy from the miners without Chodron’s knowledge.”

“How was I supposed to guess she’d go up there looking for her damned gods? There is no evidence left,” Bing added in an oddly defiant tone.

“Because even those old bones became liabilities when Thomas announced he could tell the old from the new. He would have proven your story about the revenge of the ghost was wrong.”

“The little prick. One of those teacher’s pets who always has to show off how much he knows.

“They have artificial hands for amputees,” Bing said with sudden malice. “I’ll get ones with electric choppers. I’ll come looking for you, Shan.”

“You could have just sent Tashi away,” Shan continued. “None of this had to happen.”

“Tashi was the reason it all started. It would have been ungrateful to simply order him off the mountain. Worse, it would have been untidy.”

Shan paused, trying to understand. Bing’s breath began to rasp. He coughed. His breath came in short, shallow gasps. His lungs were beginning to fill with fluid.

“Tashi hadn’t a clue about keeping secrets.” Bing’s throat rattled. “The moment the fool appeared on the mountain, I knew there would be trouble. His services had already been bought and paid for. I gave him a chance, but he couldn’t stay away from vodka. We did him a favor, considering what might have happened.”

“Like the gratitude Rapaki showed you?”

“Too many years with those old Buddhist books, I guess. Nothing was real to him anymore. Everything was a symbol. He would hallucinate sometimes, talk to the paintings, stop suddenly and start speaking to a rock.” Bing’s breathing became labored. “He decided I became . . . one . . . in the end.”

“A demon,” Shan said, filling in for him. “Even though it was you who explained about demons to him last year.”

“He was like a damned cat, appearing out of nowhere, never making a sound unless he was telling his beads. I had no idea he was there, watching last year when I killed the miner. I had to think fast. The man was down but still breathing. I told Rapaki, Quick, help me get him to the painting of the old saint. I knew there was one close by. I said I had a prayer, given me by a saint, which had special powers near the old paintings, a way to identify a demon in human form. If I said the magic words, and the man was actually one of the demons who opposed the gods, then a red eye would appear on the man’s hand.”

“Your laser pointer,” Shan said with a sigh. “Ni shi sha gua.”

Bing gave a hoarse laugh, which triggered a fit of coughing. “I hid it in my hand and said the magic words in Chinese. You should have seen his face that first time, when that miner’s hand lit up with a demon’s eye. Rapaki was terrified. But then he began to smile. He ran away, and I thought that was the end of it. A few minutes later he showed up with that old ritual ax.”

“And now someone has borrowed your laser pointer.”

“Go any further and it will happen to you,” Bing vowed. “Soon everyone you know will have no hands.”

Shan ignored him. “It’s the new age indeed, Bing. High-tech demons. And thieves no longer know the meaning of honor. No loyalty. No gratitude,” Shan added, with a gesture to Yangke.

Bing weakly raised his brows in query.

“You never thanked Tashi’s friend. He didn’t tell Chodron about your lie. He didn’t tell him that you knew where two tons of gold, mined centuries ago, lay near the top of the mountain.”

Bing made an effort to push himself up. He rolled on top of Shan, who fought for a moment, then grew still as he realized Bing no longer resisted, realized the sour breath no longer came from Bing’s mouth, inches away from his head.

“He’s dead,” Hostene declared, and with Yangke’s help lifted the body from Shan.

They helped him to a nearby stream, where he thrust his face into the frigid water. Then, with gravel from the bed, he cleansed his hands and arms until the skin stung. When he was clean, to his surprise, Shan found he was hungry. As they ate, they debated what to do with Bing’s body. Yangke favored leaving Bing spread out by the gateway, to become a skeleton on the pilgrim’s trail. Hostene was inclined to shroud him in the blanket and heave him over the cliff. In the end they wrapped him in the blanket and covered him with rocks in the blood-soaked clearing, though not before Shan had studied the stumps of his arms. Each hand had been severed with two strikes. Each had left the same small nick in the bone.

They removed Bing’s shirt after Shan searched the pockets, ripping it into squares that Yangke inscribed, using a stick and Bing’s own blood, then left the prayer flags anchored with the burial stones. One more shrine to a demon.

“If he had followed the pilgrim’s path,” Yangke declared in a hushed voice, as he and Hostene pushed up the trail, “he would have seen who was lying in wait on this side of the passage.” It was Bing’s only epitaph.

“We can’t leave like this, Hostene,” Shan called to the Navajo’s back.

Hostene halted. Only Yangke turned, confused.

“We can’t go forward like killers,” Shan said.

Hostene leaned heavily on his staff. “You sound like Lokesh now.”

“We can’t go forward,” Shan repeated.

“You saw what happened to Bing,” Hostene said. “I don’t know what to expect now. One person alone could not have done that to him. Someone knocked him out from behind.”

He was afraid that Abigail was involved.

“I don’t know what to expect either,” admitted Shan. “But we know what to expect of ourselves.”

Hostene closed his eyes a moment then walked forward without bothering to see if the others followed him. Their silent procession reached the cliff and he lowered his bag and staff, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out Bing’s gun. “My uncle once told me some of the sacred mountains felt empty to him, as if the gods had left them, because so many men came with firearms to hunt the animals there.” With a long underhand throw he launched the pistol into the air. They watched it fall and get lost in the shadows at the base of the cliff.

They climbed now with grim, silent determination, up steep trails, bracing themselves against powerful downdrafts. They paused at every painting, twice following directions set out in the form of the little footprints and the outlines of sacred objects. Shan and Yangke had to pull Hostene away from a painting surrounded by chalk marks, whose deity, he insisted, resembled one of the Navajo holy people.

When they reached a ten-foot-wide chasm over which two thick yak-hair ropes had been tightly strung overhead, they hesitated.

“I’m not trusting my life to a four-hundred-year-old rope,” Hostene protested.

“It’s not that old. The lamas maintained the kora until they died. And it’s made of yak hair, which lasts despite the weather.” With a businesslike air, Yangke extracted the Y-shaped stick from the bag he carried, straddled the rope with it, grabbed each end in a hand, and slid across, dangling over several hundred feet of emptiness. He tossed the stick back to Shan as Hostene extracted the stick from his own bag. In another minute, both Shan and Hostene were across.

They halted at a narrow canyon intersected by half a dozen trails, each with a small painting of a demon at its entrance.

“Which one?” Yangke asked in a chagrined voice. “We could lose hours going down false trails.”

But Hostene pointed to the flat face of a boulder on which images had recently been drawn in chalk. He dropped to his knees in front of the drawings. “She has done the work for us,” he said. He began to explain how his niece had been trying to correlate Navajo symbols with the primitive symbols on the paintings at the trailheads.

“But what does it mean?” Yangke asked.

“Hunchback God,” Hostene said, and looked up. “The mountain goat god, that was the last one she drew, as if that was the explanation she sought.”

Shan walked in a semicircle along the trailheads. “Only one of these shows goat tracks,” he reported. Taking that trail, they soon reached another pilgrim station, with a small waterfall and beds of moss marked recently by boots.

Where the trail was obvious ahead Hostene pressed forward alone. On a sun-bleached rock with a view of the surrounding ranges for dozens of miles, they found him sitting cross-legged, stripped to the waist, his skin rubbed with dust, in his hand the little leather bag that contained his sacred soil. Yangke clutched his beads and lowered himself into the lotus position. Shan realized they had barely spoken above a whisper all day. It was as if, having left the gateway where Bing died, they had entered a temple where voices should not be raised.

But Shan, gnawed by his ever-present worry for Lokesh and Gendun, could not find a prayer within himself. He sat apart and arranged bits of gravel before him to randomly construct a number for the Tao te Ching. But for the first time in his life, he kept losing count, trying and failing, as if the book in his mind had closed. Instead, he was visited by memories of Gendun in chains, of Bing squeezing him without hands. He kept remembering a note left by an aged lama whom Shan had discovered sitting on a high ledge by a work site the first year of his imprisonment. Shan had gone after the lama after seeing him slip away, hoping to find him before the guards did. He had found the lama—naked, smiling, but dead, having written words with a charred stick on the rock beside him. His death poem read,
All I have left behind is
the water that has washed my skin.

When they emerged later onto a high windswept ledge where several poles were anchored by cairns of heavy stones, Yangke pointed out the threads attached to each, still whipping in the wind. Once they had been prayer flags.

“There!” Hostene said, and trotted to the last of the poles, Shan following behind. It bore a new flag, a red bandanna with flowers printed on it. Written over the printed pattern, in black ink, was a prayer to the Compassionate Buddha. He eagerly scanned the mountain above. “She’s still safe!” he called out, and pointed to a small solitary figure on an exposed shelf of rock high above. It could have been anyone but Hostene was convinced it was his niece.