“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 sti
ck 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?”
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 interced
ed, 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.
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