Prayer of the Dragon (15 page)

Hostene nodded. “Somewhere in the camp. We had used it that day.” He looked up at Shan in alarm. “The corpse they found today. He was killed with a hammer.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Shan said. “That farmer’s head was struck after he was dead. And not with a hammer. A rock was probably used.”

Beside them, Lokesh was drawing in the dirt again, a sketch of the fern pattern on the man’s back. “Is this a Bon thing?” he asked no one in particular.

“What it is,” Shan finally explained, “is proof that the man was killed by lightning. It doesn’t happen often, even when lightning strikes, but nothing else causes it. It’s called a Lichtenberg figure, something I studied years ago. If anyone had bothered to look, they would have seen that his belt buckle was partially melted. When the farmer left the village he was carrying a heavy iron blade.”

“But you . . . ,” Yangke began, but seemed uncertain how to end his sentence.

“Didn’t tell anyone? If I had, Hostene would still be imprisoned in the stable. And we may learn more if we keep the riddle to ourselves.”

“The riddle?” Hostene asked.

Shan lifted the last rock onto the reconstructed cairn, “After three murders already this summer, why would someone fake another one?” He did not give voice to the new question that had begun to trouble him—why had the gold hidden in this cairn survived when miners had been dismantling cairns for years? “How long had you been camped here?” he asked Hostene instead.

“A week. Abigail was photographing the old rock writings, so they could be translated back home.”

“Old writings?”

Hostene led them up the grassy slope to another outcropping, a short distance above the camp. Behind it he pointed out a natural wind-carved formation that extended above a small ledge. It had a curving, tapering shape, with a vaguely spherical top like a head, an oval center, and two folds of rock at the base that could, with a little imagination, be seen as crossed legs. Lokesh uttered a cry of delight. It was what the Tibetans called a self-actuating deity, a natural formation that approximated the appearance of a sacred figure. The belly of the figure and the slab below it had been adorned with sacred emblems and several lines of a mantra. Dim outlines of painted lotus buds ran in a line below, as they might on an altar. Strands of yak hair, some sections encased in lichen, were wrapped around the neck—all that was left of what many years before had been a necklace.

“The Tara goddess,” Hostene said. “Abigail said the words were a prayer to Tara in her green form. She found several old paintings of the Green Tara on the slopes.”

Lokesh reverently placed some of the small flowers that grew nearby on the goddess’s shoulders, then ran his fingers over the words. They had, until recently, been covered with lichen.

“You cleared away the lichen?” he asked Hostene.

The Navajo nodded. “With toothpicks. And dental probes.”

Shan studied the scene. The dry, dusty earth below the rock showed the indentations where a tripod had stood. “What other equipment did she use?” he asked Hostene.

“A still camera, a video camera, a laptop computer with a solar recharger.” As he spoke, Hostene’s expression grew excited, as if he had just remembered something. He took a step toward the upper slope

“Was the equipment all in your camp that night?” Shan called to his back.

Hostene’s only reply was a quick gesture to follow. In less than a minute they were at the mouth of a shallow cave. “She worried about storms,” the Navajo explained. “She wanted to be sure everything was kept dry, since it couldn’t be replaced out here.”

The equipment he had described lay there, exactly as the small party had left it the night before the murders. A silver video camera lay seemingly undisturbed on a flat rock. Each camera was enclosed inside a clear plastic bag. The computer was in a blue nylon carrying case, and a blue nylon backpack stood on the cave floor. Their value would have been far greater than the camp equipment stolen below.

Shan glanced back at Lokesh, who had lingered at the cave entrance to study the self-actuated Tara. He stepped into the shadows as Hostene opened a pack to check its contents, lifting out a plastic bag of toiletries, then a small blue folder, then a pair of denim trousers. “Clean clothes,” he declared. He extracted and donned a soft hat with a wide brim. As he bent to loop the backpack strap over his shoulder Yangke interceded, taking the pack on his own back. Hostene seemed about to protest but then he scanned the ground behind the young Tibetan.

“Abby’s pack!” he exclaimed. “It’s gone. And her digital camera.”

The Navajo darted to the entrance as if he might catch a glimpse of his niece. When Shan reached them Lokesh had his head cocked, listening to what sounded like a clap of thunder. Yet the sky overhead was clear. The thunder turned into a low, rolling rumble.

Shan stepped outside and glanced at the slope above uncertainly. His heart lurched into his throat. “Avalanche!” he shouted, and grabbed Hostene’s arm. If they did not outrun the tons of rock hurtling toward them it would mean certain death.

Shan pushed the Navajo toward a small ravine a hundred feet away and darted toward Lokesh as Yangke ran past them. Small rocks were already hurtling through the air around them. Shan reached Lokesh, seized his shirt with one hand, and half dragged his friend toward the ravine.

They had nearly reached the shelter of the gully when Shan fell and lost his grip on Lokesh. He half crawled, half rolled into the gully, realizing they had escaped death by a split second.

But Lokesh had stopped a few feet from the shelter and was standing, extending an arm toward the old Tara, as if to beckon her to safety. A moment later a rock smashed the head of the goddess. A stone slammed into Lokesh’s open hand, another struck his arm, and an instant later one the size of a melon hit his shoulder, knocking him off his feet. Rocks exploded against other rocks, propelling sharp shards into the air about them. Shan launched himself toward Lokesh. A small boulder glanced off his thigh, knocking him back. The last thing he saw was his old friend, unconscious, being buried alive.

Chapter Five

THE NIGHTMARE CAME in glimpses, bringing terror such as he had not felt since his early days in the gulag. Lokesh’s belly was awash with blood. A familiar hand, spotted with age, lay lifeless twenty feet from Shan, a splinter of rock piercing its palm. One arm was twisted and thrown backward in an impossible position for the living. Blood-specked stones occupied the space where his legs should be.

Shan’s world was turning red. This was the way the universe looked to the dying, draped in a veil of blood.

“No!” Something flashed inside Shan and with a stab of pain he pushed himself up. “Lokesh!” he cried, wiping his temple on his sleeve, realizing the veil of blood was dripping off his own forehead.

Yangke and Hostene were already trying to clear the rocks away, uncovering Lokesh’s head, bending over him, pulling the stones off him. They carried him inside their shelter.

The old Tibetan coughed. His eyes flickered open but he did not seem to see. “The Tara!” Lokesh’s plea came in a hoarse croak. “Save the goddess!”

Hostene began rummaging in his pack as Yangke placed a rock under Lokesh’s head to elevate it. The Navajo produced a shirt that he began ripping up for bandages. Then he extracted a small metal flask.

Shan took Lokesh’s injured hand, opening the bent fingers, cradling it in his own before, with one swift motion, Yangke extracted the shard of stone. Hostene quickly poured some of the flask’s contents on the wound and they sat for a long, agonizing moment, letting the blood ooze onto the palm before Yangke began wrapping it with the makeshift bandages.

Shan had seen Lokesh pummeled by guards in prison and by hail in the mountains, seen him with the skin flayed from his leg after he’d fallen down a steep scree but had never seen the desperate agony that now radiated from his eyes. As he cradled his friend’s wounded hand he felt numb. It was the same paralysis he had felt forty years earlier holding the hand of his dying father, who had been fatally beaten by the Red Guard. The hard words they had exchanged in the stable echoed in his head.

He was vaguely aware of movement around him, of Hostene examining Lokesh, then gesturing to Yangke, asking him to brace the old Tibetan, of the Navajo removing his belt and wrapping it around Lokesh’s other wrist. There was a sudden jerk, a whimper of pain from the gentle old Tibetan, then Lokesh’s head rolled toward Shan, fixing him with a small forced grin. “The goddess,” he groaned again before he passed out. But the goddess was dead.

Shan became aware that Hostene was trying to pry away his fingers from Lokesh’s arm. “He’s going to be all right, Shan,” the Navajo declared. “No broken bones. Just bad bruises and that hand. His eyes are clear, no serious concussion. His shoulder was dislocated, that’s what hurt him so much. I put it back. An old trick from my horse-riding days.”

As the words sank in, Shan’s paralysis melted away. He began to study his surroundings. They were trapped in the little gully by a wall of loose rocks nearly ten feet high. Yangke, climbing the wall, began to clear away the stones at the top.

“No!” Shan cried, jumping up to tug at the young Tibetan’s leg. “We’re dead! Make them think we’re dead!”

Yangke descended but gave no sign of understanding.

“Before the roar of the rocks,” Shan explained, “there was another sound, an explosion. The avalanche was no accident. It was aimed at us.”

For a moment Hostene and Yangke stared in confusion, then they grasped Shan’s meaning. The avalanche had been an act of murder.

“But they will have seen us escape,” Hostene pointed out.

“No. Whoever did this would not have risked being anywhere below when the explosive detonated. The dust from the avalanche will have obscured the view from above. He must believe we are still in that cave. The explosion was timed to trap us there, or kill us coming out. It would have been successful if Lokesh had not remained outside.”

“So what would you have us do?” Hostene asked.

Shan bent over his old friend. “Sit. Wait. Don’t speak above a whisper. If he was conscious, Lokesh would be praying for the goddess that was destroyed.” He entwined Lokesh’s beads around his limp fingers. As he did so his friend awoke for a moment and beckoned Shan with his head. “The kora,” he whispered, then he lost consciousness again.

Ten feet away Hostene sat with the blue pack between his legs, fidgeting with the small video camera from the cave. They watched the small rectangular screen as a young woman with long black hair gathered at the back in a knot conferred with a thin Chinese man with graying hair beside the Tara that had just been obliterated.

“She always complained when I used the camera for casual shots. We are not tourists, she would say. She only brought it to obtain footage she could use in class,” Hostene explained. He turned toward Lokesh. “What did he mean, before he passed out?”

A kora. Lokesh had disagreed with Shan’s approach to finding the killer, to applying logic and deduction to the mountain, because he thought such tools useless, even misleading. He had his own way of understanding the mountain. “The statue and painted words were once part of a pilgrim’s path.” The little shrine would have been a way stop, probably a place of vigil for pilgrims, a rest station for those following a path laid out by lamas or saints in another century.

“Is that important?”

The words of the fleeing miner came back to Shan. The man murdered earlier that summer had been found in front of an old painting, as had the miner the year before. “It links all the murders.”

“Have there been others?” Hostene asked.

Shan explained. “Four people have been killed. All on the kora, the pilgrim’s path. All have had their hands severed.”

Hostene’s face darkened. He gazed at Lokesh again, then turned back to the camera and adjusted the volume so they could dimly hear a rich, energetic woman’s voice point out the features of the sacred rock. The Navajo’s eyes watched the little screen with affection, pride, and reverence. Once the woman’s head jerked to the left and anger flashed in her dark eyes. Someone off-screen apologized in Tibetan.

“Every day she was here she gained energy,” Hostene said. “She was making a great discovery. Professor Ma wasn’t sure what she meant. Something very old was here, she said. She told us it would be clearer to us in a week or two.”

“Where would she have gone?” Shan asked. “The night of the killings.”

Hostene stared at the screen as if he were watching a ghost.

“The moon was bright. That night as it rose she said there was a reason why many of the Navajo ceremonials are performed only at night. She was still there, by our fire, when I climbed into my sleeping bag.” He looked up at Shan. “If she thought we had all died, she might still be working, finishing her research.”

“Surely she would go home. Or at least go down the mountain, to notify the police,” Yangke interjected.

“Not Abigail. Not this mountain,” the Navajo replied cryptically. “Not this summer. She knew Tibet better than I do. She would have known there were no police who could help. She would continue working, thinking she could evade the killer. Her research was too important to her.”

“But she left all her equipment in the cave,” Shan pointed out.

“Not all of it,” Hostene said. “A digital camera with a small tripod is missing. She likes to travel light. Tashi and I usually carried the other equipment.”

“And she took her backpack,” pointed out Yangke.

“But may not have done so voluntarily,” Shan reminded them. He saw the anxiety in Hostene’s face and tried to force hope into his voice. “We need to keep all possibilities in mind.”

After a moment Hostene said, “The killer doesn’t have her, he can’t have her. She must have been sure we’d all died and so she kept working. It’s her way. She would have returned to the camp, been terrified by all the blood, and run to hide somewhere for a day or two. If she went back and found no sign of us, she knows what Tibetans do with bodies. She also knows she’ll never have another chance to complete her work. She knows what I would want.”

“Then the question is where is she working?” Shan replied.

They continued to watch the video with new, intense interest.

Abigail Natay, even in miniature, was an impressive woman. Like her uncle, she had a quiet strength about her. Shan could sense her confidence, see the fire in her eyes, as she was buoyed on a flood of exuberant commentary. Though the Tibetans had had the technology of the wheel for centuries, they used it primarily for prayer wheels, she explained. They chose to muster armies of monks instead of armies of warriors. Near the end of the scene she seemed to catch herself, glanced at the camera, and self-consciously brushed back a long black lock that had drifted across one high cheekbone.

Shan said, “You mentioned before that Tashi got drunk. Surely you didn’t bring bottles of liquor with you.”

“Just the brandy in my flask,” Hostene replied. “It was the miners. I never actually saw him drinking but twice I saw him come back to camp when he thought we were sleeping, and he was staggering.”

In the next video Abby stood before another smooth rock face, but this one was adorned only with barely legible words.

Yangke leaned forward, studying the image intently. “I’ve roamed this mountain for years,” he said. “But I have never seen this place.”

“You said nothing about a pilgrim path,” Shan said.

The Tibetan’s face clouded. “It’s not well known.”

“You mean the people of the mountain try to keep it a secret. Why?”

Yangke gazed toward the summit. “It’s from another time, another world.”

“Why?” Shan repeated.

“In the country we live in, when Tibetans reveal that something is important to them, those who watch us will destroy it. Besides,” he added after a moment, “the path is lost to us. It disappears into the grass a few miles up the slope. No one has ever found the rest of it. All those who knew its course died when our temple was destroyed fifty years ago.”

“Abby and Tashi would take the camera and disappear for hours,” Hostene said. “She was making new discoveries every day, finding Buddhist things, Bon things, ancient things.” The three men did not need to articulate the question that hung in the air. Had Abigail discovered the route of the ancient pilgrim path?

Hostene checked the bandage on Lokesh’s hand. Shan continued to watch the screen. “I thought you said no one was looking for gold,” he said after a moment. Abigail stood in front of a tunnel framed by old timbers. The camera panned, showing old metal implements, rusting to dust, and an old iron-framed chest whose boards were nearly rotted away.

“I said ‘not exactly,’ ” the Navajo replied. “Some of the very old prayers spoke about mining gold for the gods.” He paused, cocked his head, and looked out over the pile of rocks.

Shan thought he heard an insect at first, singing in the languid heat. Then, for a moment, he thought it was something on the tape. He touched the power button of the recorder. The sound came from just over the high rim of the rocks that had trapped them and grew louder as they listened, resolving into a familiar pattern. Someone was energetically reciting a mantra.

Moments later a scalp of shaggy black hair appeared, then a small surprised face, then shoulders draped in reddish rags. The chant faltered as the man peered at them over the edge, then ducked down. He repeated the motion several times, bobbing up and down, disappearing then returning, as if to get a better idea of the creatures trapped below. He disappeared and the mantra picked up again, this time with the rhythm of a cheerful song.

“Rapaki!” Yangke exclaimed. “Stay here or you’ll frighten him away,” he warned, then began scaling the loose, treacherous pile of rubble.

Shan and Hostene, sitting beside Lokesh’s prostrate form, waited as Yangke spoke in encouraging tones, gesturing as if to a skittish dog. When his words had no effect on the singsong mantra, he began pulling rocks from the top. They would have to clear a path if they were to carry Lokesh safely over the rubble.

After several minutes the strange ragged figure reappeared, veering in and out of view as he lifted and moved stones, gradually approaching Yangke, still chanting, until finally the two men were working side by side. He had the wild appearance of one who lived exposed to the elements, his skin leathery, his hair long and uneven. The rags on his back had once been a robe, though it now bore so many patches of different colors and fabrics that it appeared as if he had tied a quilt around himself.

When Rapaki finally noticed that Shan was slowly advancing toward him, he ducked behind Yangke, then tilted his head to peek around Yangke’s back, grinning, his eyes wide. He ducked in and out as before, using Yangke as his shield. Then he froze, his carefree expression becoming solemn. He had seen Lokesh. He advanced without fear, seeming not to notice Shan, until he stood before Lokesh, studying him, his head tilting one way then the other. Then he spun about and disappeared behind the rocks.

Yangke gazed after him, then with one hand made a corkscrew motion next to his temple. “Totally crazy. I guess we’d be like that too if we’d lived in a cave for nearly forty years.”

But the action of the hermit was not crazy at all. Yangke and Shan were still clearing rocks when Rapaki returned, clutching the stems of a plant that he crushed and placed under Lokesh’s nose. The old Tibetan sneezed, snorted, and woke up. His eyes lit with pleasure at the sight of the ragged figure before him. Rapaki was a figure directly out of the old tales, the hermit beggar with brambles in his hair.