Prayer of the Dragon (14 page)

“She started with what she termed the empirical data. Scientific studies of linguistic patterns, DNA strains, dental patterns, earwax, geologic evidence from the ice ages.”

“Earwax?”

Hostene grinned. “I’ve heard it all so many times I could recite it in my sleep. There are two types of earwax, wet and dry. Europeans and Africans almost always have the wet type. People with dry wax are found in pockets all over Asia, especially in cold climates. You can trace population drift by following the groups of peoples with dry earwax in North America.”

“Including the Navajo,” Shan suggested.

“Including all Native Americans. That’s what she calls the macro evidence. The same patterns exist for sweat glands. Tibetans and Navajos sweat far less than the average person of European descent.”

Shan found himself liking the old Navajo, whose quiet yet energetic demeanor reminded him of Lokesh. “So she persuaded you and won you over to her theory?”

“Not at first. When she mentioned things like sweat glands I reminded her it was just another Asian versus European thing, and almost everyone agrees that the American Indians came across the Bering Strait from Asia. No, at first it had more to do with my promise to my sister on her deathbed to watch over Abigail. I know no one who is smarter than Abigail about the things you can learn in libraries. But she is not always so street-smart—about people, about bureaucrats, about the real world. And she has the spirit of a lion. She will never wade first, she always jumps into the deepest water.”

As they finally approached the murder scene Hostene grew quiet. He squatted by the fire pit just as Shan had done earlier, fingering the plastic rubble left from the burnt sleeping bag, then with a grim expression paced along the brown-stained grass.

“We had a tent,” he said, “but we slept in the open most nights. We would talk about the stars.”

“She was with you that night?”

Hostene nodded. “But she was restless. When the moon was bright she would go off and sit on a high ledge, sometimes all night long. Or she would leave before dawn to get the best light to photograph a painting up on the slope. She was troubled about the mountain, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to unlock its secrets before we had to leave.”

“Why this mountain?” Shan asked. “What made it worth the risk?”

Neither man had mentioned the gap in Hostene’s story. No westerner would ever have been granted a travel permit to the region, and no American would ever have been given official permission to conduct research that validated the ethnic or genetic identity of Tibetans as independent of the Han Chinese. His presence was surely as illegal as that of the miners.

Hostene was silent so long that Shan decided he had not heard the question.

“She spent months demonstrating similarities between the root words of the Athabascan language that Navajo is based on and the Tibetan language, even recording native Tibetans and Navajos reading the same passages. She confirmed that the timing of migrations across the Bering Strait were consistent with evidence of dispersions of people from central Asia. Then suddenly it was all about religion.” He paused, squatted, and with a finger drew a figure in the dirt, a three-part line, with an arm extending to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom, with a matching line set perpendicular to it. “Centuries before Hitler perverted the sign, my people were using this in religious ceremonies, in what we call dry paintings, sacred sandpaintings.”

Shan, on one knee, felt someone hovering behind him.

“And for centuries,” a weary but excited voice observed, “the Tibetans have used such a sign.”

Lokesh had followed them. He knelt and drew an identical swastika beside Hostene’s. “In sandpaintings, and elsewhere. It is a symbol for eternity, a sign used for good fortune.” He did not look at Shan.

Hostene responded with a solemn nod. “So we learned. We have sacred mountains that are home to our Holy People. Tibetans have mountains that are the residence of deities. She says the land gods are the oldest, because people who live in high mountain lands have to explain lightning and thunder. The structure of beliefs around the oldest deities would have the best chances of showing connections between our peoples, Abigail decided. And those beliefs far predated the Buddhist’s arrival in Tibet.”

Hostene put a finger in the dirt below the swastikas they had drawn. “Many of my people today draw this shape as we have done. But Abigail traced the earliest references, on old pots and on old pet-roglyphs. She thinks our people used to draw it this way.” He drew another swatiska, this one left facing, turning counterclockwise.

“That,” Lokesh declared, a sense of wonder in his voice, “is the way the oldest ones drew it in Tibet. The Bon people.” He was referring to people with an animist religion who had lived in Tibet long before Buddhism was brought to Tibet from India.

Hostene, nodding, continued. “The paths to our sacred mountains have markings and signs that have been there for centuries, and she wanted to look for parallel markings in Tibet and connect the myths that accompanied them, to trace them back to some common origin. But all the signs she could find had been defaced or destroyed. Sometimes the mountains themselves had been leveled. Then Professor Ma told us he had heard of a place that had never been touched, with very old deity paintings, on a mountain sacred to the Bon.” The Navajo’s gaze drifted toward Lokesh, who was staring at the summit of the mountain.

After a moment Hostene edged around the little grove, then asked Yangke to tell him where he had been found unconscious. He was kneeling at the rock wall when Shan reached him, studying the paintings drawn in blood.

“We stayed up late that night watching a meteor shower,” the Navajo explained in a sorrowful tone. “Our guide showed us a constellation that he said was the Mother Protector of his people. He said when she saw stars shoot out of the constellation his mother always cried out in joy, then quickly recited a mantra.”

“Tashi,” came a mournful whisper behind them. “Tashi the shepherd.”

“Tashi the guide and camp cook,” Hostene said. “Tashi the truck driver. You knew him?” he asked Yangke.

Yangke caught Shan’s accusing gaze and quickly looked away, his face reddening. “It didn’t seem important that you knew,” he said.

“He was originally from Drango,” Shan suggested.

“I told you, I didn’t see the bodies,” Yangke said. “I wasn’t sure he was one of the victims. Until now.”

This was why the shepherd in Dolma’s house had been so nervous about who had died, Shan realized. One of those who had been murdered had been
of
the village, but not
from
the village.

“But you acted as if you didn’t know who was camped here, or what they were doing,” Shan pointed out, speaking Tibetan now.

“I didn’t,” Yangke rejoined. “Not exactly. Tashi would not let me get close to the camp. He wouldn’t tell what his customers were doing.”

“He called them customers?”

Yangke nodded. “He told me they were professors, interested in old things.”

“You said they were holy men. You said they made a sandpainting.”

“They did. They cleaned shrines and made sandpaintings. What was I to think? All the professors in Tibet once were lamas.” The young Tibetan looked away. “I didn’t send for Lokesh and Gendun because of Tashi. I sent for them because of what Chodron says he is going to do to Hostene. I’m not sure the village could survive if he ever . . .” His voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.

“
You
sent for them?” Shan clarified.

Yangke nodded.

“He was lying beside me on top of his sleeping bag that night,” Hostene continued, bracing himself against the rock face. “I do remember something else. Just before I passed out, he groaned. I think he tried to speak but his mouth seemed to be full of water.”

Shan saw Thomas’s photographs in his mind’s eye. A blade had sliced into the younger victim’s back. His lungs had probably filled with blood. He asked Yangke, “Why would Chodron hide Tashi’s identity? Why would he keep it from the villagers?”

“Because of Dolma, Tashi’s aunt. My great aunt.”

A melancholy sigh escaped Lokesh’s lips. “Dolma,” he declared.

Yangke gazed at the ground. “I was hoping he had just run away. There were two bodies.” He cast a guilty glance toward Hostene. “It didn’t necessarily mean one was Tashi. I don’t know how I will tell her.”

Hostene’s sad gaze drifted along the horizon. “As I fell asleep Tashi was talking about how some of the old ones in his village felt this was the most important mountain in all the world. He just knew bits and pieces of the tale. He said no one still alive knew the whole truth. He said dragons and gods, like lamas, were becoming extinct and this was where they were making their last stand. He said if we were lucky we might meet the gods. I think he was a little drunk. But when I awoke, in that stable, with Gendun bending over me and my head still swimming, I thought that’s where I was, in the gods’ hidden home.”

“The words you spoke then to Gendun, what were they?”

“They just came out. I didn’t think them first, if you know what I mean. It was an old prayer to a Navajo mountain god.”

They walked together around the site, staying away from the outcropping where the mutilated bodies had been found. “Did you ever encounter the miners?” Shan asked.

“Never up close. We tried to stay away from them, though I often felt we were being watched. Tashi spoke with them and made sure they knew we meant them no harm. He warned us before we arrived that we would have to avoid them at all costs. He spoke of them as if they were some kind of wild animals that only he could tame.”

Shan extracted the pieces of the carved stick figure from his pocket and handed them to Hostene. The Navajo nodded somberly, as he fit the two pieces together. “It’s called a
ketaan
,” he explained, his voice filling with emotion, dropping to a near whisper. “An offering figure, always made of wood from the east side of the tree. Used in some of my people’s ceremonies. Abigail would leave them at the base of the old paintings, as a token, as a way of thanking the deities for letting her study them. She asked me to make four the night before, one for each of us, for protection.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said. “A professor compiling a scientific report doesn’t stop to thank the gods.”

“We started out to make a scientific investigation,” Hostene said. “We never spoke of how that changed after we arrived. One day I started carving a ketaan, the way my father had shown me many years ago. That night, Abigail said if the key to her work was in the ways of reverence then she would never find it without reverence.”

Shan left Hostene staring at the little broken figure. He paced slowly through the camp again, stopping after every two or three steps, examining the slope above and the grass below as he considered Hostene’s words. What had he missed? He wandered toward the stream. He had examined everything, everything but the one surviving stone cairn on the far side of the stream, the only intact one he had seen. Stepping across the narrow waterway, he circled the cairn. It was old, yet not old. The rocks were all lichen covered, but only on the bottom tiers had the lichen grown together, binding the stones. The upper stones showed ragged pieces of lichen that had been pulled apart. With a guilty glance toward his companions Shan begin dismantling the cairn.

He had removed nearly every stone except the old ones at the base when he discovered a piece of folded felt that showed no signs of age. He gingerly extracted it, laid it on the ground, and began unfolding it. It had been carefully arranged, with multiple folds, to hold multiple objects. After unfolding three layers, pieces of parchment appeared, eight in all, each in a separate fold, each inscribed with a prayer. In the final fold were eight small nuggets of gold.

“We didn’t like to take the cairns apart,” Hostene said over his shoulder. “When we did it felt as if we were opening an old tomb. The hidden fabric usually fell apart in our hands, so we always put in new cloth before restoring the cairn.”

Shan considered Hostene’s words a moment. “You mean you opened cairns in order to examine the old prayers inside?”

The Navajo, kneeling beside him, nodded. “Professor Ma and Abigail were making records of old prayers, some of them centuries old by her calculations. She said if we weren’t going to meet any of the old gods, this would be the next best thing. Excavating the deities, she called it. She took photos of the prayers. It felt like we were intruding, but she said it had to be done, it was vital to her work. Some bore symbols. Some bore left-turning swastikas.” He stretched the felt out on the grass. “Tashi said it was all right as long as we respected the old prayers. And Abigail said we must never betray any interest in the gold.”

“But you weren’t looking for gold.”

“Not exactly,” Hostene said. “But Tashi said up here, you can’t separate the gods from the gold.” Shan searched his face for an explanation, but the Navajo was finished.

The others arrived. Lokesh reverently straightened out each prayer in its fold of cloth. Yangke picked up an exposed nugget of gold, then quickly put it down, surveying the slope with nervous eyes. They watched in silence as Lokesh refolded the cloth, then all four joined in rebuilding the cairn around it.

“Did you have a hammer?” Shan asked. “A rock hammer?”