Prayer of the Dragon is-5

by Eliot Pattison

Chodron passed Shan and went to an object at the foot of the wall. Tossing off the felt blanket that covered it, he revealed a small generator, connected to wires that led into the house. Shan gazed at three villagers who stood silently at the garden wall. They winced as the generator sputtered and sprang to life with a low hum.

  The headman seemed to expect Shan to follow him through the inner door. Chodron gestured him toward a chair in front of the table that served as his desk. He did not offer Shan the black tea that he poured from a porcelain pot into a tall mug.

  “I remember going to the circus as a boy,” Shan recounted after a long pause, “and exclaiming to my father that the most amazing men alive must be the jugglers. He said, “Look closely. None of the jugglers are old because eventually they begin dropping pins. Then no one remembers all the great magic they once made, only the dropped pins.”

  “I have no time for your idle banter. Yesterday you proved I cannot trust you up on the mountain. I want you to write out your explanation for the murders. Today.” Chodron flipped on the switch of a gooseneck lamp and began sifting through papers.

  “It may become difficult for you to keep control of both the villagers and the miners,” said Shan. “Perhaps you only need show your authority to rule the particular type of villagers bred in Drango. But you’ll have to produce value for the miners.”

  “It is well documented that former hard-labor prisoners suffer from a variety of mental ailments.”

  “There is only one plausible explanation as to why the miners remain undisturbed by the government. You protect them. In most years such a service must be quite valuable, considering all the taxes and regulations they avoid.”

  “You haven’t got a shred of evidence. You are playing with your life, prisoner.”

  “With such a difficult juggling act to perform perhaps you have not had time to catch up on Chinese history,” Shan continued. “A pity, as you would soon learn that for centuries the most serious crime in China has been corruption. Murderers simply had their heads cut off. Sometimes they might even be allowed to buy their freedom. But those who stole from the emperor were always condemned to death by a thousand slices. Sometimes the criminals were paraded around entire counties and at each town pieces were removed from their bodies. Today, entire offices of the Public Security Bureau are dedicated to searching out corruption. It is such a problem that every lead is energetically followed. The PSB compiles the proof. They only need someone to point them in the right direction.”

  Chodron sipped his tea, looking bored.

  “You lost a miner yesterday,” Shan continued. “He followed a different trail down. It was longer than the regular trail but it kept him out of view of Drango village. He said to tell you he left your tribute on the trail. Still steaming, courtesy of his mule.”

  The grin that had begun to form on Chodron’s face slowly faded and was replaced by a resentful glare.

  “Why should the miners keep paying you tribute if you can’t stop a murderer?”

  Chodron set down his tea and picked up a pamphlet on his desk. “This begins to sound like a negotiation,” the headman grunted.

  “I want the stranger freed to go up the mountain with me. I want Yangke freed of his collar and allowed openly to assist me.”

  “Impossible.”

  “You fail to appreciate that your survival depends upon a delicate balance. You are not the only one who can call in troops.”

  “You wouldn’t dare. You’d be back in prison in six hours. It would be my word against a felon’s.”

  “I meant Dr. Gao. The true king of the mountain.”

  Chodron grew very still.

  “What if Dr. Gao thought the peace of his retreat was being disturbed?” Shan asked.

  “You know nothing about Gao except what some miner told you.”

  “I was his guest yesterday. His photo gallery is much more impressive than yours. I noticed his beetle collection.”

  “You? He would have you thrown out with his rubbish.”

  “In the past we knew many of the same people in Beijing. Only in our retirement years have our paths diverged.”

  “Yangke’s punishment was fixed. The lesson is lost if I relent.”

  “August 1,” Shan suggested. “You are preparing for the national holiday. There is a long tradition of granting amnesty to prisoners to honor our noble founders.”

  Chodron stared into his mug. “You can’t wander into my town and give me orders.”

  “I prefer to think of it as giving sound political advice.”

  Chodron tossed the pamphlet toward Shan, leaned back, and flipped a switch on a box. Dials and needles, lit from within, sprang to life.

  “Drango village calling,” he said into the peglike microphone in front of the box, after reciting a series of numbers.

  Shan began to understand the expressions on the faces of the villagers. They were afraid of the generator, they feared the radio. It wasn’t guns, tanks, or helicopters that were Beijing’s most potent tools in occupied Tibet. It was little black boxes like these, hundreds of them scattered across the far-flung land.

  “Wei,” a woman’s voice said, in the universal telephonic greeting. “Municipal Affairs. Uncle Chodron, is it you? How is my favorite drunkard? When will you bring us some of those delicious apricots?”

  For a moment Shan was deaf to the banter that followed. The pamphlet, entitled Ax to Root for internal distribution among Party members in Tibet, announced a political campaign. The time has come to destroy the persistent roots in the countryside that are pulling the people back into the old traditions of despotism and servitude, it read. This was Party code for the old monks and lamas who wandered the countryside. Old men and women being given shelter in the mountains and farming villages, soliciting money for temple construction, tempting children to become hooligan monks are violating the decrees of the Bureau of Religious Affairs. The government was about to pursue a zero-tolerance policy. All such individuals were to be identified and surrendered to Public Security.

  “Ax to Root,” Shan heard Chodron say, and listened as the woman on the other end uttered a happy exclamation, then transferred him to another office. “I caught scent of some old cultists.” The headman stared at Shan as he spoke.

  The understated energy in the authoritative voice at the other end disturbed Shan as much as the ice in Chodron’s eyes. It was, unmistakably, the voice of the Public Security Bureau. “Lhasa has been assigned a quota,” the man said. “Major Ren is coming soon.”

  Shan did not miss Chodron’s reaction at the mention of the officer. “How soon?” the headman asked.

  “Not for a few days. Let me arrange a helicopter today and I can offer the cultists to him. We like to feed our jackals well when they go hunting.”

  Chodron smiled as he covered the microphone with his hand. “Your lama stays with me,” he told Shan. “You report to me what you find, only me. If you go up the mountain and don’t report back within, say, three days I will give him up to Public Security. Try to get Gao involved and he goes to Public Security. Embarrass me in front of my village again and he goes to Public Security.”

  Shan looked down at the floor. “If you hurt him-”

  “You’ll what, prisoner?” Chodron hissed. “Send a letter to the Party chairman? The lama is mine. And the stranger remains in the stable with him.” Chodron lifted his hand and laughed into the microphone. “Slow down, comrade. I don’t have them in custody yet. We don’t want to spook them into hiding. I know how to smoke out such creatures. Leave them to me.”

  “Watch your back,” the officer replied. “Those old ones can turn themselves into dragons.”

  The grin on the headman’s face as he shut off the receiver revealed a row of uneven teeth. “Major Ren. Biggest shark in our sea full of sharks. He’s not as subtle as I am. If I use one battery for tamzing, he uses three. Where I might hit you with a baton while you stand, he would first strap you to a table and then use a lead pipe. Perhaps you are
acquainted with the type.”

  When Shan did not reply Chodron grinned again. As he gestured Shan toward the door a woman outside shouted in alarm, and someone else uttered an anguished cry. Shan ran. Chodron reached the villagers gathered at the base of the sloping fields half a step behind him.

  A man was being carried by two of the shepherds. Or what was left of a man. The body was strung from a pole, suspended like fresh game. The two men seemed weary beyond words as they reached the village, but few words were needed. The corpse was that of a farmer. His left temple was soft and pulpy. It had been crushed by a violent blow.

  A woman collapsed over the body, sobbing.

  “Murdered!” shouted another, fixing Chodron with an angry gaze.

  “Another murder!” The fearful cry swept through the crowd.

  Several of the villagers, Shan realized, were looking at him. As he stepped forward the crowd wordlessly parted. He knelt as the weeping woman was pulled away from the corpse, quickly examining the man’s pupils, touching the spongy flesh around the wound, confirming that the hands were intact, noting the discoloration on the man’s fingertips, then checking his clothes, pausing for a moment over his strangely misshapen belt buckle. Even Chodron stood silently by as Shan unbuttoned the man’s shirt to look at his skin. A dim red pattern showed on the skin of his left shoulder. One of the farmers helped Shan ease the man onto a blanket that had been spread at his side.

  “Ay yi!” came a frightened cry as Shan pulled away the shirt, exposing the man’s back. The pattern continued from the shoulder down the dead man’s back. It was as if a long red fern leaf had been etched onto his skin, radiating upward from the spine just below his heart.

  “The gods!” came another alarmed cry as the villagers shrank away. “The deities have touched him!”

  “The gods took him!” moaned an old woman. Several villagers murmured nervous agreement.

  “Get the lama!” a forlorn voice called.

  But the young shepherd who broke away in the direction of the stable was seized and shoved to the ground before he could get very far. “Murder!” shouted Chodron as he stood over the man. “Anyone can see it’s murder,” declared the headman in a loud voice. “Another hammer blow to the skull.” A hesitant expression twisted his face a moment later. He glared at Shan. Chodron recognized his dilemma. The headman could not tolerate the suggestion that a god had marked the man but if, as he had just declared, someone had murdered him with a hammer, the killer could not have been Hostene. The headman barked out orders for the body to be taken to the victim’s home, then summoned Shan to the shadow of the nearest granary.

  It took three hours for them-Shan, Yangke, and Hostene-to reach Hostene’s campsite. Although Yangke was carrying a pack containing food for three days, he leaped over rocks, apparently feeling only a slender connection to gravity now that he had been freed of his imprisoning beam. Hostene, having eaten a huge meal in Dolma’s house, likewise seemed a new man. He often paused to ask Yangke questions about why certain boulders were painted red or why mani stones had been left beside one boulder and not another. He stood attentively as Yangke drew in the dirt the bizarre image that had appeared on the dead farmer’s back. When Hostene suggested that it must have been some kind of decoration painted on the man’s body, Yangke insisted it was exactly as he had drawn it, the perfect image of a fern leaf etched into the man’s skin like a tattoo, where no mark had existed the day before. The two men looked at Shan as if for an answer, but Shan kept on walking up the trail.

  Lokesh had had his own theory when Yangke had described the mark in the stable. He thought the image was of the spire of a chorten, a sacred reliquary shrine. Shan had not replied, only held Gendun’s hand a moment, for the old abbot had grown faint again.

  “See that he eats,” Shan had said. The memory of the lies he had been forced to tell in front of his friends was like an open wound.

  “Dolma will do that. I am going with you,” Lokesh had replied.

  “No. You must not.” Shan could not recall ever before arguing with his friend but he was not going to expose him to the dangers on the mountain. He knew from experience to trust the deep feeling of foreboding that had been rising within him. “You must stay to help Gendun.”

  “You are mistaken, Shan,” Lokesh had said. It was as if the mountain itself were coming between them. “You don’t understand this mountain. Dolma says its deity has been growing weaker and weaker. What you intend could kill it.”

  It was the blackest thing the gentle old man had ever said to him. From the way the words had been uttered it seemed they tortured Lokesh’s soul.

  Shan did not know how to reply. They were speaking of things for which words were useless. It was possible that Lokesh knew something of Shan’s intentions that he himself did not know. There might have been things about the mountain that Lokesh and Gendun could not explain to him. But there were certainly things Shan had seen on it that they could never grasp, and if the old Tibetans did touch them they would be like moths to a flame. They had sat silently as Hostene had readied himself. Then, leaving Lokesh gazing into Gendun’s nearly unconscious face, Shan had left the stable and barred the door.

  DURING THE SECOND half of their trek, Shan and Hostene, aided by a new staff cut for him by Yangke, walked side by side. Shan pieced together the journey Hostene and his niece had made to Sleeping Dragon Mountain. They had landed in Beijing a month earlier, where they were joined by Professor Ma, who had been a colleague of Abigail’s when she had done a six-month exchange tour teaching Eastern religions at Beijing University. Professor Ma had spent several summers studying ruins fifty miles to the south, where he had met the Tibetan guide who had brought them to the mountain.

  Abigail Natay was a thirty-four-year-old woman who had spent her childhood in the Navajo lands but had fled to California as soon as she was old enough to leave home, distancing herself from everything tribal as she pursued an academic career.

  “Five years ago her father died, then, soon after, her mother, my sister,” Hostene explained. “Before her father’s passing Abigail had refused to go to a ceremony for him. Toward the end, before my sister died, there was a healing ceremony that she made Abigail promise to attend. Abigail resented it but did so, every hour of it. Then she left without a word. But at a later healing ritual for a cousin, there she was, and then at another.”

  His sister was dead, but Hostene had mentioned speaking with her at night. With a stab of pain Shan thought of Lokesh, who not infrequently carried on conversations with his long-dead mother. And Lokesh was the only person alive who knew that Shan sometimes sought advice from his father, who had been killed in the Cultural Revolution decades earlier.

  “A year later,” Hostene continued, “I discovered she was teaching a course on Navajo culture at a big university on the East Coast. A year after that she took a job at the University of New Mexico. I told her she should get married but she said she was too busy writing a book about the ceremonials of our people. She was offered a job at Harvard and turned it down because she had to be close to the old ones who were her sources.”

  Shan paused and picked up a round rock. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot a third of the way down, “is New Mexico. And here,” he moved his finger to the opposite side, “is where we are standing. Her sense of geography is peculiar.”

  Hostene said, “She calls her project the crown jewel of her career. Every professor dreams of rewriting history.” Then the Navajo said, after pausing as if to gauge Shan’s reaction, “She is proving that the Tibetan and Navajo people are fruits of the same tree. Long-lost cousins.”

  It started, Hostene explained, in a Santa Fe gallery that sold antique art from around the world. “She saw an old blanket there. Abigail was sketching its faded symbols for her work on Tibetan Buddhism when the shopkeeper told her it was actually Navajo, from a very early period. When she argued with him, he urged her to check it out at the Navajo college. I knew many of the professors so I drove
her there. It took us half an hour to get past the entrance gate, where there was a map of the college, which had been built in a series of interrelated circles to reflect traditional beliefs about our peoples’ relationship with the holy ones. She photographed the map, saying it matched the structure of a monastery she knew in Tibet and the structure used in many Tibetan mandalas. Six months later she was in Lhasa, learning the language, studying the temples there. That was nearly three years ago, about the time I retired.

  “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.