Prayer of the Dragon is-5

by Eliot Pattison

  “Did these supplies come from Chodron?”

  “Not a chance. Chodron hates him and would be pleased if he starved to death. He is a symbol of all that Chodron cannot abide.”

  “It would not be difficult for a man like Chodron to get rid of him.”

  “Not as simple as you may think. You don’t understand how small our village is. Rapaki is Dolma’s first son. She only sees him every couple of years, but she won’t let Chodron forget the relationship.”

  Shan sifted through some of the empty cans. Most were small, containing simple, basic fare, but several newer ones contained more expensive items like lychee nuts and pickled onions. Nearest the door were plastic bags whose labels indicated they had held salted sunflower seeds. A small foil pouch had contained chewing gum. Some of the labels were worn, as if having rubbed together in a pack.

  “Why would the miners give him supplies?” Shan asked.

  “I didn’t know that they do. But to some he’s like a mascot, a good-luck charm. And at the end of the summer some of them don’t want to carry extra supplies out.” Yangke squatted before the pile of cans, probing them. “If they left food behind, he would know how to find it.”

  Shan lifted the lamp and went to the far end of the chamber, where he saw newer supplies. An unused pad of paper. A cotton quilt with a pattern of pandas frolicking among clouds. A sealed pack of sweet biscuits. These were not the abandoned supplies of miners.

  “There were stories in the village when I was younger, about Rapaki’s grandfather,” Yangke said as Shan moved back to his side. “He came back from his flock one day very excited about the paradise he would soon live in. Next morning he took a pack of food and left, never to be seen again. People said he had stolen gold from the gods and gone down in the world to spend it.”

  “What,” Shan asked, “was the name of his grandfather?”

  “Lobsang.”

  Shan picked up one of the letters and extended it to Yangke, holding the lamp close. Rapaki had mostly written to the gods. But at least one letter, which appeared newer than the rest, had been addressed to his grandfather.

  “Impossible,” Yangke said in a troubled tone. “Even if he survived to a great age the man would have died decades ago.”

  “One of the great advantages of being Rapaki,” Shan observed as he rose to check on Lokesh, “is that you are not constrained by the possible.”

  Shan let Hostene lead the way as the two of them climbed the slope an hour later. The Navajo had been about to leave the cave to search for his niece by himself when Shan had stopped him, explaining that Yangke would stay with Lokesh. There was no clear path through the complex network of ravines, high meadows, ice-fed springs, and long fields of wind-carved outcroppings, and soon they realized that the best clues to Abigail’s trail lay within the little silver video camera.

  “Can you find these places?” Shan asked as they watched the first few scenes on the tape again. “Sometimes the same painting appears in more than one scene, as if she were revisiting them.”

  “New theories occurred to her, and new interpretations. Sometimes she would be in the middle of studying one painting and find she had to go back to another she had visited two days before. I always offered to accompany her, but sometimes she refused. She said she would have to jog to cover the distance and didn’t want me to risk twisting an ankle. She didn’t think I shared her fervor for her work,” he said remorsefully. “When you spend your life behind a blanket I guess it’s hard to drop it, even to those who come back to the family.”

  “A blanket?” Shan repeated.

  “My wife used to say that in the last years before she died. There were many like me, like Abigail, who lived with the old ways when we were young and then went into the world to pursue careers outside the tribe. We chose other ways to live. On the map I didn’t go far, just a couple hundred miles, but it may as well have been ten thousand. Law school, prosecutor’s office, the state court. An entirely different universe from the one I grew up in. You learn not to speak with anyone about the sacred ways, the old ways, partly because they are secret, but also because they are mocked, because other people want to turn them into trinkets to use in schemes to make money. You learn to pull the Navajo blanket up and never speak about those things. If someone wants to discuss the Navajo you speak about the artists who make the blankets and pots, no more. I had two chants but I didn’t use them for nearly thirty years, except behind my own closed doors, to keep them alive.”

  “Chants?”

  Hostene, fixing his leathery face on the distant clouds, was silent so long Shan thought he would not reply.

  “It is the way we speak with our holy ones. Something like a prayer, something like a song. One can last for days. The chanter recites from memory. The chants are handed down from one generation to the next, taught in quiet, dark places. Abigail said the Tibetans do the same thing. It has a very old feel to it, the learning of such things. I used to get shivers walking into the hogan, the house, of my teacher.”

  “You mean you were a priest?”

  “We have no priests. We have our chanters, the singers. If you need healing for a sickness caused by witches you go to the chanter of the Ghostway. If you want to protect your crop against frost you find the singer of the Starway. You always start with the Blessingway, to open the door to the holy ones.” He glanced self-consciously at Shan, as if surprised by his own words. They were not speaking only of blankets and pottery now.

  “This was what Gendun was doing in that stable,” Shan observed. “For many days, he invoked the gods on your behalf, almost without stopping, every line he spoke different, every line from memory.”

  Hostene scooped up a handful of loose earth and tossed some into the wind. “Kac tcike eigini eigini qayikalgo.” His voice was a whisper, his words aimed at the clouds. He caught himself and looked at Shan. “It is one of the phrases from my second chant. The Mountainway. Holy Young Woman sought the gods and found them, it says. On the summits of the clouds she sought the gods and found them.” His eyes welled with moisture and he looked away.

  Shan said, after a moment, “Your niece was usually shown under trees in the videos, because the paintings were meant to be stops on the kora, resting places for pilgrims, offering water and shade. This high up on the mountain there aren’t many groves.”

  But he had not realized how many there were until the two of them began seeking them out. They spent the rest of the daylight hours investigating a dozen groves scattered across the slope. Shan kept alert for signs of miners. They were approaching the mysterious place called Little Moscow that Yangke had mentioned to him. In late afternoon they paused in the shade of an outcropping to study the videos again, rewinding, fast-forwarding, noting a distinctive rock formation here, a gnarled stump there. A butterfly materialized before them, its scarlet and yellow wings quivering as it alighted on the camera. The Navajo froze. There was sadness in his gaze, as if the creature reminded him of the missing woman, but his eyes were also suffused with the same gentle childlike wonder Shan often saw on Lokesh’s face.

  Shan did what he could to explain the images he recognized on the little screen, although often the Navajo woman on the tape explained them just as quickly. Fierce protector demons dominated many of the rock paintings. Four-armed Mahakala, Shrivi mounted on a horse, Rahula with a bow, dressed in human skins. Devotional images of the early Tibetan kings were depicted. Abigail had learned her icons well, accurately pointing out the details of the ritual hand gesture-a downturned hand in the earth-touching mudra-made by one ancient king, the gesture called Turning the Wheel of Law made by a blue-skinned saint. At several points she paused and drew Navajo images, discussing the similarities between the fierce deities embraced by both peoples and the taboos that had grown out of their beliefs.

  It was midafternoon when Hostene touched Shan’s shoulder, then silently directed him down a nearby side path, into a rough gully that was devoid of any paintings, then into a maze of twis
ting, overgrown paths marked with inconspicuous chalk marks, low to the ground, at each turn, and finally through a narrow slit in two rock walls, onto what looked like a goat path. They emerged into a natural bowl abutting the rock spine that divided the mountain. At the base of the spine was a high pile of jagged stones, recently splintered, some blackened. They were at the old mine, or what was left of it.

  “We could have been killed when the bolt of lightning struck,” Hostene said.

  Thirty feet in front of them was the twisted, scorched iron frame of an old chest. On a rock wall opposite the debris was a large faded painting of a fierce protector demon riding a blue wolf, painted so its eyes seemed to follow the observer as he walked around the bowl’s circumference.

  Shan studied the pile of rocks, the twisted iron, the splinters of old beams thrown across the clearing. “I have never seen lightning do such a thing.”

  “We had nearly finished our work here and were examining a painting of a blue bull god some distance away. Professor Ma said he had left a set of cleaning brushes here. He retrieved the brushes, and when he returned he asked who had moved the equipment. Someone had taken all the old iron pieces, the trunk, straps for a forge, an anvil, old chisels and pry rods and piled them up in front of the tunnel, then added iron pry rods at the top of the pile, strapping three together like a flagpole.”

  “Or, more likely, a lightning rod,” Shan said. He bent and scrutinized one of the scorched rocks, holding it under his nose. “Someone put explosives under the pile and used the lightning as a detonator. Whenever it went off whoever did this would be far away and could have an alibi. And they didn’t care who was nearby when it exploded.”

  Hostene went to the far side of the pile and squatted, pulling away stones frantically, as if something had told him his niece might be underneath. Then, abruptly, he stopped, shuddering, gazing with a weary expression at the destruction.

  “What had you found here?” Shan asked.

  “Words painted on tunnel walls. Tashi and Abigail translated them but I never asked what they said. We had seen so many old writings already.”

  “And gold?” Shan suggested.

  “Not much. Just little nuggets here and there that seemed to have fallen in cracks or behind rocks and been forgotten. Abigail became very angry the first time Tashi touched one.”

  “But he did take some-eight nuggets for the cairn by your camp.”

  Hostene nodded. “Tashi changed her mind. He said it was the right thing to do, that it was what the old monk miners intended. He said it was how you recharged the prayers. That’s the word he used, ‘recharged.’ ”

  “How much gold did you take?”

  “Enough for four or five cairns, I guess. It wasn’t our gold, we all agreed we had no claim on it, that it would be wrong to do anything else with it. It wasn’t stealing. It was in line with what Abigail called the reverence of her work.”

  Shan asked for the camera again, and found a scene of Abigail in front of the mine, speaking of Tibetan artisans who rendered exquisite goddesses out of gold, then of the Tibetan and Navajo shared reverence for turquoise, which they incorporated into both jewelry and holy images. The demon represented in the sole painting at the site was stated to be the main guardian of the powerful land deity that inhabited the mountain. Hostene lingered only a moment after handing the camera to Shan, then went to the head of the trail, impatient for Shan to finish.

  But Shan kept watching. The scene at the mine ended, the screen turned blue for a moment. Then he saw the image of a lichen-covered rock and what might have been a shadowed painting beyond.

  “The camera lesson is done. Stop playing and listen to me,” a female voice declared in English. It was Abigail Natay, but not the careful, patient Abigail. This was an urgent, insistent voice. The camera had been set down but it had not been shut off.

  “This has to be done tonight,” Abigail said. “I finished most of it this afternoon. You know what to do, where to put it?”

  “Yes, if I must,” came a whispered, fearful reply. The man sounded young. He spoke in slow but confident English. He had pulled the camera closer. Abigail appeared, sitting on the rock, her shoulder and one side of her face visible. Long shadows fell across her arm and the rock-strewn ground beside her.

  “Take this,” Abigail said, almost apologetically. As she turned to lift something from behind her Shan glimpsed her front pocket. He pushed the rewind button and found the moment when she turned, then froze the image, staring at it in confusion. Pinned to her shirt pocket was a paper talisman, in Chinese, reminiscent of a charm to guard against evil spirits. It brought the superstitions of his childhood back to him. He studied the ideograph on the paper. It was not a protective charm, he realized. It was a prayer for the soul of one who has been killed by violence, to help it avoid one of the many hells that such victims were susceptible to.

  It made no sense. Hostene had said Abigail could not speak Chinese. She was not there to study Chinese traditions. But then, as he studied the rest of the scenes, nothing made sense. Nothing happened that could be explained by anything he had learned thus far on the mountain. Abigail began extending things toward her invisible companion. First, she handed a small nugget of gold to the man who remained offscreen. Then, from the shadows on her opposite side, she lifted four more items, which she dangled in front of her unknown companion with an expression that chilled Shan. Two sets of bones, two humerus bones fastened to two ulnas, then two femurs fastened to two tibias, each set connected with what appeared to be shoelaces through holes bored at the ends of each bone. Two arms, two legs, as if she were constructing a skeleton.

  “I can’t,” the man moaned.

  “You will,” Abigail insisted. “We have to do this together or all is lost. There is a war on this mountain and you have to chose sides.”

  After a long pause, the man said, “First tell me how many sides there are.”

  Abigail offered a sympathetic smile but did not reply. “Think of your family. Think of the old ones,” she said. Then, impossibly, “Think of Eight Treasures in a Winter Melon.” Surely he had heard wrong. The words described a traditional dish favored by China’s gourmets, eight special ingredients cooked in broth, then poured into a hollowed melon.

  “They’ve starting putting out other things, on sticks. The blood drips down into pools,” the man said.

  Shan’s mouth went dry. He replayed and replayed the exchange again. The sound from the tiny speaker was poor but he dared not raise the volume while Hostene was nearby.

  That was the end of it. Abigail moved offscreen. Shan saw nothing but rocks and dirt and then, as the shadows shifted, the sandal-clad foot of a deity. He fast-forwarded the tape. There was nothing but empty blueness, until the tape ran out. He stared at the blank screen, shut off the camera, and silently returned it to Hostene before gesturing him toward the gully.

  They had just turned onto the main trail when a high-pitched cry brought them to an abrupt halt. A figure on a red bike hurtled around a rock. The hood of a black sweatshirt covering his face, one hand was on the handlebars, the other swung a five-foot-long pole.

  In an instant, the faceless man was aiming at Hostene’s head. The Navajo twisted and leaped. The club landed a glancing blow on his shoulder as he dropped to the ground. Shan stumbled as he ran to help Hostene, and with a kind of war cry the man struck Shan’s knee with his front tire, barely missing Hostene’s head with the pole. Shan pulled the Navajo up, shoving him toward rocky ground where the bicycle could not follow, then grabbed a short stick from the ground. He waited for the rider, feinted one way, ducked to avoid the savage swing of the pole, then shoved the stick into the rear wheel as the man passed.

  The effect was exactly as he had hoped. The stick caught in the spokes, stopping the bike so abruptly the rider flew over the handlebars.

  “Cao ni ma! Fuck your mother!” the man spat in Chinese as he hit the ground. Seeing that his prey had left the trail, he lifted the bike in two hands
and threw it toward them before fumbling for something in his pocket.

  Shan did not linger to see what sort of weapon he had. He grabbed Hostene and dashed behind a boulder, watching as the man recovered his bicycle and rode away.

  As they waited to be sure their attacker was gone, Hostene replaced the videotape with another from his pack and they sat by a bubbling spring, watching a second tape on the camera. On it Abigail described how sacred mountains anchored the Tibetan gods, much as they did in the Navajo belief system. After several minutes the screen abruptly went black. Hostene looked as if he had been struck. He had lost Abigail for a second time. “Battery,” he muttered, and silently stowed the camera in his pack.

  The sun was nearly gone, and Shan was fixing the location of the next grove of trees in his mind so they might reach it in the dark, when a sleek gray shape swooped across their path. He paused a moment to admire the creature and walked on, before realizing that Hostene was not following.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The owl. It’s an omen. We must make camp.”

  “I can find the way to the next grove,” Shan countered. “I can. .” But seeing the way Hostene stared at the patch of sky where the owl had disappeared, he silently began to gather fuel for a fire.

  As they arranged their blankets under an overhanging ledge, Shan asked why the American military had taught Hostene Mandarin. His companion explained that the Navajo were often considered linguists because usually they were raised speaking two languages, that sometimes, as in World War II, the army still assigned the Navajo to speak their native tongue in combat zones in lieu of a code. But Hostene had gone to language school during the Vietnam War to enable him to serve on planes that took off from the United States, refueled in Guam, and patrolled the Chinese coast, monitoring Chinese radio broadcasts.

  “You must think me an old fool,” Hostene said as they lit their fire. “A lawyer and a judge, frightened by a little gray owl.”