Prayer of the Dragon (41 page)

He did not know how long he stared into the fissure. When he turned, Gao and Hostene were at the altar, anger on their faces, as if Shan had cheated them of something.

“What was that you did with your hand?” Gao asked.

“It was nothing,” Shan said. But it was something. Shan had finally understood everything, and the only thing he could offer was the
abhaya
mudra, the hand gesture known as Bestowing Refuge.

“He had a bag,” Hostene said. “Why did he take that old bag?”

Shan looked at the Navajo. He could see in his eyes that Hostene understood but needed to hear it said aloud. “His offering. The deity he prayed to seemed to favor necklaces of body parts.”

“The hands,” Gao murmured.

“I tried to stop him, tried to get the evidence,” a new voice said from behind them—Kohler. “But he hit me and tied me up.”

Shan studied the items Rapaki had left on the altar. An agate
dzi
bead, a traditional good-luck charm. A small silver incense case. And, still in the cloth pouch, something hard and lumpy that Shan recognized from its feel. He handed the pouch to Hostene.

“The beetle!” Hostene exclaimed. It was Abigail’s golden beetle.

Hostene followed as Shan moved to the end of the slab where the hermit had jumped. The Navajo pointed to a small ledge fifty feet below, then another deeper, and another to the side. The first held a rag, a piece of clothing caught in a crack in the rock. The other two held small yellow rocks.

“It’s where the gold went, isn’t it?” Hostene said, “the missing gold. All these centuries, they just brought it up to the bayal.”

Shan nodded as Gao and Kohler approached. “It’s the best use of gold, the old Tibetans always thought. To praise the deities.”

Hostene offered a sad, reverent nod. “It’s over. He’ll kill no more.”

“Not in this world,” Kohler said. Then, remembering Abigail, he turned and jogged back to the cavern.

Gao watched the German for a moment. “Heinz returned yesterday,” he explained to Shan. “He had the helicopter leave him here when he discovered I had been dropped near the summit. He was already here when Rapaki arrived with Abigail, and quickly understood what had happened.” The physicist studied the altar a moment, then gazed into the blackness below. “How does it happen? How does a holy man become deranged?”

“Perhaps the real miracle of modern Tibet,” Shan replied, “is that they are not all like that.”

They were reluctant to move Abigail immediately, and decided to make camp inside the shallow cavern. There was no wood for a fire but the goat trails around the summit were littered with dried dung. Kohler and Hostene set off to gather fuel in a bandanna as Yangke sat with Abigail, a makeshift blindfold over his eyes, his hand cradling Abigail’s as she slept. Probing the back of the cavern, Shan gleaned from the shadows a small iron bowl and two cracked ceramic jars with dried grease inside, butter lamps abandoned long ago.

Soon they had a bowl filled with rainwater simmering with leaf tips. As the tea brewed, Hostene investigated the contents of his niece’s pack. There were four feathered spirit sticks, two little ketaan figures, even some flower heads stuffed into a plastic bag for their pollen. Hostene held up her journal, pointing out several new pages of writing, describing newly discovered shrines but nothing more, nothing about their ascent of the summit, nothing from the days since Thomas had been killed. But then her uncle pointed to where the writing stopped. A dozen pages had been torn out of her precious book.

As she drank her tea, Abigail stirred from her trance slowly, finally holding the warm bowl in both hands herself, rocking back and forth in front of the little fire, staring into her tea. Hostene sat beside her, watching with worried eyes.

“Lha gyal lo,” she said, looking only at Shan, then leaned against her uncle’s shoulder, looking now like a tired and frightened schoolgirl.

“It’s altitude sickness,” Kohler explained. “I’ve seen it many times. The symptoms vary. Sometimes, when the brain swells, the victim loses all sense of reality. He or she might be capable of anything, I guess.” He turned to Gao. “I will go to bring back help.”

“No, Heinz,” Gao said. He had hardly taken his gaze from the chasm since Rapaki had flung himself into it. “We are a blind man, an injured woman, and two old men. We need you and Shan with us for the descent. Only two of the staffs are left. We’ll need them both for the final climb down that chain.”

“Old? You and Hostene? Men of iron don’t get old, even if they corrode around the edges.”

Gao was not interested in glib rejoinders. “We need rest. As you have reminded us, the altitude alone can kill if we are not careful. As for the monk who died, I can’t help but wonder if words should be said.”

“Words?” Kohler shot back. “For a bloodthirsty killer? What do you think he had in that damned bag? He wasn’t taking sweets to his heathen gods. Whatever Thomas was missing was—” The sentence faded as the German saw Gao’s brittle expression. “OK,” he said. “Right. I’ll stay.”

“You don’t understand Rapaki,” came a low, dry voice. It was Yangke, blindfolded, speaking. “He tried hard at first to understand what being a monk meant, but he had no teachers. It is as if he had been asleep for years, fighting through nightmares, and this was the day he finally woke up.”

No one replied. A single tear rolled down Abigail’s cheek. She did not speak, did not offer any explanation, did not look up from her tea again. Hostene hovered near her, his face dark with worry and foreboding.

In the afternoon they tried to sleep. Shan, knowing he would never find slumber, helped Yangke to Hostene’s side, and left the camp with the bandanna to gather more fuel. They weren’t going anywhere that day and it would be a long cold night. He probed each goat trail, many of which petered out into tiny ledges, inches wide, along rock faces impassable for humans. He climbed toward the summit, noting for the first time a small shelf that overlooked both the east and west slopes. Something on it flashed in the sunlight, and he ducked for cover for a moment before warily advancing. He was perhaps two hundred feet away when he recognized it for what it was, and shrank back. Two small shiny solar panels were attached to a metal box with two six-foot poles rising out of it, all camoflauged with gray paint to blend with the rocks. He had stumbled upon a radio relay station for the army base below.

Half an hour later, the bandanna full and tied shut, he found another ledge with an open view to the south and east. He stepped to the edge, resisting the temptation to sit with crossed legs for an hour and let the wind scour him. But he did not dare leave the camp for so long. The army’s secret installation below was in plain sight, no more than two miles away. Above the base was a huge steeply slanting wall of rock, with a strange pattern of pockmarks. He knelt, shielding his eyes, as he studied it. Not pockmarks. Steps had been constructed along ancient goat paths, and the army had used howitzers to destroy them. The devout had not all died at the top. For centuries they had had a way to descend after visiting the mountain god into the lush, fertile valley below, which would have seemed like a paradise to a pilgrim who had navigated the old Bon kora. For a brief moment he was buoyed with the hope that there still might be a safe way down. But no, the army had shown its usual thoroughness. Great slabs had been blown away by artillery shells in a dozen places. Not even a goat could make it down.

“I can see why the gods decided to live here.” The smooth, confident voice came from directly behind Shan.

Shan let the cloth slide through his fingers, catching it by the loose gathered ends. A red flowered bandanna loaded with dung, the perfect weapon for the battle he had been drawn into. He did not face Kohler, but turned sideways, to maximize the force of his swing. “The lost gold, Heinz,” he said in a conversational tone, “it all went down that hole long ago.”

“Lost gold?”

“The gold Bing died trying to find.”

“Bing? Was he one of those miners?”

“We called Lhasa, looking for you.” He raised the bag of dung from his side. “Your old friend moved away over a year ago. That woman in your apartment, the one who has the hotel calls routed to her, does she go to India too?”

“You must be giddy, Shan. I warned you about the altitude.”

Kohler advanced in small steps toward Shan. Behind Shan, inches away, was a five-hundred-foot drop. Shan pulled out the slip of paper with the private number he had obtained through Lhadrung. Kohler, perplexed for the moment, took it.

“Gao knows you lied, though he won’t admit it yet. He knows if he called that number right now she would give him the same message. It’s only a little lie, but with a man like Gao, once doubt begins it can’t be stopped.”

Shan dashed past him. Kohler grinned, opened his hand, and let the wind seize the paper on his open palm. “Gao knows I have business in India. Gao knows I have girlfriends.”

“You dispatch trucks from Tashtul to India. It would take a special driver, and special papers. There would be fees to pay, bribes even. Customs officials are notorious. A lot of trouble for some little trinkets.”

“It’s the new world order. Converting Western appetites into Eastern cash.”

Kohler did not follow when Shan started down the trail. After ten steps Shan looked back. The German was astride one of the high boulders, looking toward the smudge of color on the southern horizon, the distant Himalayas, the white sands of India beyond.

In Shan’s absence Hostene had used the spirit feathers, placing them in a semicircle against the rock to encircle the place where he sat with Abigail. Abigail had begun a transformation back to the woman Shan had first met at Gao’s storehouse, washing away her third eye, removing the jewelry and ceremonial vestment that had covered her denims. Gao was sleeping. Yangke, his blindfold bandage still in place, was working his beads with a low murmur.

Kohler said nothing when he returned. He helped with the camp work, then sat on a rock beside Gao when the older scientist awoke, speaking of the weather, their company business, of arrangements for Thomas’s burial, of suggestions for the boy’s funeral service. He had made a bowl of tea for the older man, offering some of his spare clothes to cushion Gao’s seat on the rocks.

“Heinz, look!” Gao suddenly exclaimed with ridiculous hope in his voice as he pointed upward. “It’s Albert and his father! The young one is flying!”

The announcement seemed to jar Kohler. He paused, then raised a hand, squinting, pointing like an eager boy as the two birds disappeared toward the western slope. “It would take days for us, but they can get home in five minutes,” he said. He exchanged an awkward smile with Gao. But something seemed to have broken inside him.

THEIR STRANGE, OTHERWORLDLY day was coming to a close. They were finishing their domestic chores, stacking fuel for the night fire, arranging what blankets they had around Abigail and Yangke, when Shan saw a solitary figure pacing around the fissure. He caught up with Gao, and walked with him silently for several minutes.

“You never did answer my question,” Shan said eventually. “About where Kohler spent his time in rehabilitation.”

Gao paused, bent, and picked up a tiny yellow stone that had fallen at the edge of the fissure. He held it between his fingers, examining it intently for a moment. “It’s just a bunch of molecules that were randomly arranged this way because they happened to be in the right place at the right time in some pool of magma four billion years ago.”

“Maybe that’s what’s at the bottom of the abyss,” Shan observed. “A pool of magma, to give the gold a chance to become something useful, like iron.”

“In Tibet, even molecules can be reincarnated to a higher form,” Gao said with a sad smile, and tossed the little nugget into the hole. They walked along the edge. Stars were coming out.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Gao said suddenly. “Heinz attended a symposium in Japan. His expenses were submitted for reimbursement twice. There was an investigation, which found half a million dollars missing from laboratory funds. There could have been many explanations, we had a large staff. But he was responsible for the ledgers, so he was accountable. The clerk who worked for him was killed in an accident early in the investigation so there was no hard evidence. But someone had to pay. Heinz was sent to a reeducation labor camp.”

A reeducation camp was the softest form of punishment. Which meant that Gao must have interceded.

“His first month there he had a misunderstanding with a Public Security officer, who had to be hospitalized. Before I knew about it they had shipped him away. It took me a month to locate him.”

“A hard-labor prison,” Shan suggested. “A gulag camp.”

“It never should have happened. You know how it goes. A man like Heinz attracted abuse in the gulag.”

“He was sent to western Tibet,” Shan ventured. “To Rutok.”

In the dim light Shan could barely see Gao’s stiff nod. They walked in silence, continuing around the fissure. Two of the cairns they passed had human bones lying before them.

“What did the hermit think he was going to find?” Gao asked eventually. “Where exactly did he think he was going?”

“The bayal? It’s always warm there. He would land on a soft rainbow, surrounded by flowers and birds. Fountains of sweet water. Compassion and wisdom. His uncle went there forty years ago. He has gone to join him.”