Prayer of the Dragon is-5

by Eliot Pattison

  “He says,” Dolma continued, “that he wished they had taught you better. He says you know that if you follow the upper kora more people will die than if you did not. He says if he has a chance to remove Gendun he will do so. He says he does not know if the old hermitage is safe now, that he will not be able to leave word of where they are going.”

  A wave of tremendous sadness surged inside Shan. Was this how he would leave his Tibetan friends, the two men who had become like family to him? They had given him life when he had none. Now it felt as if he was betraying their teaching. He remembered a dream he’d had days earlier in which a phantom saint had told him his life would end on this mountain.

  He and Yangke and Hostene had started up the trail, eyes on the summit, when Shan was stopped by the sound of hurried footsteps behind him. It was Lokesh, looking strangely frail. The old Tibetan lifted his beloved gau from his neck, the amulet that contained a prayer signed by the Dalai Lama, and placed it around Shan’s neck. Then he went back to the camp.

  They walked for a while before Shan stopped to spread the map out on a rock. Shan had marked each of the pilgrim’s stations they knew of. “It’s a puzzle laid out five hundred years ago,” he said. “One station must point to a spur that goes upward.”

  Yangke fixed his gaze on the summit. It had been ringed with clouds all morning, the crooked pinnacle at times protruding from the top like an island floating in the sky. “You heard Trinle. The only ones who survived were the ones who failed.”

  “You forget the lamas,” Shan said. “The lamas went up and down.”

  “We’re no lamas,” Hostene muttered. He had emptied his leather pilgrim bag and was examining its contents. It held only a flint, an odd Y-shaped piece of wood, a butter lamp, and a coil of yak-hair rope.

  Shan studied the maze of ravines before them. “Abigail recorded half a dozen pilgrim stations at this level. Once there would have been more. The most important one would have been the most difficult to find.” He pointed to a clump of trees half a mile away on the table of rock that hung over the ravines.

  Yangke’s face darkened. “You must have a death wish,” he said. But then he lifted his pack and began walking toward the trees.

  “Why do you think this is the one?” Hostene asked as they halted near the lip of the ravines, directly above Little Moscow. Shan had taken out Abigail’s video camera and was manipulating its controls.

  “A pilgrim could get lost for hours, even days, in the ravines. The lamas wanted to make it difficult. They wanted to discourage as many as possible.” He stepped into a shadow near the lip of the ravine, instructing Yangke to warn him if any miners became aware of the intruders above them. When he brought the faded painting beside Bing’s cave into focus, the first thing he saw was a caricature of Chairman Mao someone had painted over the fresco. He began filming, zooming in and out, ducking as two miners lingered in conversation in front of the rock, then filming the empty place where the piece had fallen out of the painting, finally the piece itself, braced against Bing’s front door.

  “But you are only guessing this is the key,” Hostene protested. “We should be climbing.”

  “It was you who made me understand.”

  “Me?”

  “Your stick figures. The old gods you went to meet as a boy. The earliest Buddhists in Tibet were followers of the Thunderbolt. That’s what this place was about: the thunder gods, finding the mouth of the thunder gods. If you want to find thunder what do you look for?”

  Hostene knotted his brow. “Lightning.”

  Shan nodded as he squatted by a tree, out of sight of the ravine now, and replayed the film he had just shot. There had been another video, among those now missing, taken by Hubei’s brother, who could venture into Little Moscow when Abigail could not. He stopped when he reached a frame that displayed the entire painting. The saint in the middle was surrounded by a dragon with a ball-shaped object in its claws. Several sacred signs, including the ritual umbrella at the top left corner, composed of tiny oval marks, could be made out. “The images at a kora station had many purposes,” Shan explained. “One was to provoke contemplation, perhaps create fear. Another, sometimes, was to explain where the pilgrim was to go next. At most stations I think the mantra was for the pilgrim’s soul. This one was for his feet.”

  “You lost me.”

  Shan pointed to the beast. “When I was young my father taught me twenty different traditional words for dragon in Chinese. But in Tibetan there is only one term, druk. It is also the sound of thunder. Thunder comes from dragons. The druk is also the guardian of treasure.” He pointed to the sphere in the dragon’s claws. “The pearl is the seed of thunder, which is fertilized by the druk.” Here he pointed to the strange shape that appeared as an upside-down mountain on which a miniature demon sat. “These are called vajra rocks, like floating islands. Vajra means lightning. The summit of this mountain is like them, cut off from the world, physically inaccessible.”

  “So far as we are concerned, clearly,” Hostene said, his impatience mounting.

  “Impossible to get to without an umbrella.” Shan traced the dotted lines of the umbrella. “If you draw a line through the center of the pearl, the eye of the dragon, and the single demon, they point directly to the summit of the mountain.” He demonstrated by freezing a wide shot of the painting with the summit in the background, then pointed to the umbrella. “At first I thought it was a primitive image of a white parasol, one of the sacred offerings. But it is more. It points the way.” He pulled out the piece of plaster he had carried since it had fallen on his first visit to Little Moscow and handed it to Yangke. “The ovals that make up the lines are footprints.” He paused at the look of wonder on Hostene’s face.

  “We use them, much like this,” the Navajo said. “The path of our holy people-this is how we depict it in our sandpaintings, with little footprints.”

  Shan quickly counted under his breath. “Taking into account the pieces of plaster that have fallen out, I estimate the shaft of the parasol is composed of thirty-five to forty ovals, or footprints. The arcs joining it at the top each contain ten prints. It’s an index, a scale. Each of the footprints on the shaft equals ten steps.”

  “To where?”

  “The umbrella points the way,” Shan said again. On the video screen, directly beside the fresco was a series of small shadows, alternating up the ravine wall, though several had been destroyed by miners’ chisels. “Climbing holes. Start directly over those holes and walk in a straight line for, say, four hundred paces.”

  “A pilgrim was supposed to comprehend this?” Yangke asked.

  “Only a few. The most persistent. A pilgrim might spend weeks on a kora. Some would sit at a painting like this for days.”

  “The most contrite,” Yangke suggested. “The most desperate.”

  Shan followed his gaze, then quickly stowed the camera away. Hostene was moving along the rim of the ravine at a steady trot.

  It took them a long time to find the second marker. They crept to the opposite side of the rim, above the painting, taking care not to be seen by those below, then walked three hundred fifty paces, debating the length of a Tibetan’s stride centuries earlier. They fanned out, each man counting off another fifty paces. Finally, they discovered another painting, nearly faded to oblivion, this one depicting the thirteen possessions of an ordained monk, with the monk’s staff drawn in tiny footprints pointed almost directly up the slope. The painting map called for another six hundred paces, toward a now familiar grove of trees. They found themselves in front of the ruined fresco with the ancient painting underneath. The footprints were tiny along the border surrounding the serpentine god, but Shan found them, and understood finally why the larger fresco had been constructed over the painting. No one had made it to the upper path for seventy years. The lamas had hidden the way by blocking the ancient explanation from view. In the early twentieth century more than a few oracles had predicted calamity for Tibetan Buddhists, and begged that
their treasures be safeguarded. The lamas had tried to protect the mountain in their own way. But the person who had hammered away the plaster had not been interested in protecting anything.

  “Abigail knew,” Shan said to Hostene. “She kept coming back here.”

  The Navajo nodded. “She suspected. But she would never destroy the fresco.”

  “No,” Shan agreed as he bent over the details of the little demon panels along the side of the painting. He pointed in turn to the tiny swords in four little hands, all pointing in exactly the same direction, and began counting the ovals. “Five hundred paces,” he said a few minutes later, and pointed in the direction indicated by the swords.

  They soon found themselves in one of the gorges at the foot of the summit and began passing small ravines with narrow, snaking walls that sprang out like fingers from the base of the summit. Shan began noticing black smudges near the entry to each ravine. He squatted and touched one. Soot.

  “What does it mean?” Yangke asked.

  “Someone made it this far but didn’t know where to go next. He tested each ravine, then marked it with scrapings from a butter lamp.”

  Lichen was chipped away from the corners of several rocks, some with new growth appearing. They had been stripped a year or more before, no doubt by someone in search of another painting. Yangke pointed out small piles of ashes at regular intervals, and held some under his nose. Someone had been burning incense to attract the help of the deities.

  “Look for fresh tracks,” Hostene suggested.

  After twenty minutes Yangke gave a low whistle. They found him before an undulating, wind-carved rock. “A self-actuated demon,” the Tibetan declared. It took a moment for Shan to recognize in the ridges of the stone the shape of one of the tiger demons used by the Bon monks, even longer to notice that the colorations below the stone were not patterns of lichen.

  Yangke knelt and began pointing to the barely readable letters. “Worm,” he said, then “god.”

  “Becomes,” Shan made out, then stumbled over vague markings that were too far gone to read.

  “Worm. Becomes god,” Yangke said in a puzzled voice. “Trinle said something about that.”

  The words echoed in some dusty chamber in Shan’s mind. “Even the lowly worm eventually becomes a god,” he announced. “It’s a saying the oldest lamas use in teaching.”

  The three men exchanged perplexed glances, then began searching the two ravines closest to the faded message.

  “Nothing,” Yangke reported after several minutes.

  Shan bent to the Tibetan’s boot and touched it. His finger came away with grains of black sand. “There are no sand deposits up here,” he observed.

  “You’re wrong,” Yangke said, and led them down the passage to a small sand-filled depression.

  Shan kneeled, running the sand through his fingers. “This was brought here.”

  “What does it mean?” Yangke asked once more.

  Shan removed his pack and rolled up his sleeves. “It means we become worms.”

  Using their hands as shovels, they soon exposed a low hollow in the stone below ground level, then a narrow tunnel running through it filled with sand, a tunnel that, oddly, seemed to have been carved not by chisel but by water. Shan offered encouragement to a hesitant Hostene by explaining that this had been where Abigail had asked for her supplies from town to be left.

  “But Abigail can’t have come through here. The sand hadn’t been disturbed,” Hostene pointed out.

  As he spoke, a sharp back draft of wind shot off the face of the mountain. In seconds it had refilled their excavation by several inches, answering his question.

  When they reached the other side, they scraped the sand from their clothes. Directly opposite them on the rock wall was an image of another demon, his yellow eyes still vivid enough to be unsettling. Shan silently gestured them onward and a moment later they were at the base of the unattainable summit, looking up with disbelief into a fold in the cliff face. The builders of the path had indeed shown worms how to meet gods.

  The color began draining from Hostene’s face. Yangke paced nervously back and forth, shaking his head.

  A chain of huge hand-forged iron links, each as long as Shan’s forearm, hung in a long channel that seemed to have been gouged out of the rock wall. The chain was anchored to the rock near their feet by a thick iron staple and to the side of the mountain by long iron pins, which held it steady sixteen inches from the rock face.

  “There’s no end to it,” Yangke said, looking up.

  “It’s just in shadow,” Shan said, struggling to keep his voice calm. The end of the chain vanished into blackness nearly two hundred feet above them, where there might be an overhanging cave.

  “It’s so old,” Hostene said. “The chain can’t be safe.”

  “It’s survived from the age of Tibet’s great bridge builders,” Shan suggested. “Special forges turned out chains like these for suspension bridges. Most of them lasted for centuries.” He studied the big, uneven links uncertainly. They showed little evidence of corrosion or rust. “This one has been mostly protected from the elements.”

  “How old do you think it is?”

  “Three, maybe four hundred years.”

  Hostene stared at the shadows above with a bleak expression, then lowered his pack. “We can’t take everything.”

  “We are meant to carry what the pilgrims carried,” Yangke said. “A blanket, a staff, our bags.”

  “Abigail would have carried more,” Hostene remarked.

  “Perhaps not much more,” Shan said, gesturing toward the deeper shadows at the very base of the summit, where there was a small patch of color. Under a blue nylon parka they found a small mound of objects. A handful of ballpoint pens bound by a rubber band. A small cooking kit. A sweatshirt. A water bottle. Hostene opened his pack and began making his own pile, including the video camera. Shan watched for a moment, then began sorting through his own possessions.

  Helping each other, the three soon had rolled their leather bags into their blankets and fashioned carrying straps out of the yak-hair rope. Hostene and Shan stared at the staffs, so awkward for a climb up the chain, then followed Yangke’s example, securing them in the carrying straps around their necks.

  They stood, gazing up, realizing how easy it would be for any of them to fall to his death. Seeing the fear on Hostene’s face, Shan was about to suggest they reconsider when Yangke set a foot into the first of the links and began climbing.

  At first they seemed to totter between heaven and hell, one moment reaching upward for the uncertain shadows above, the next slipping, fearfully clutching the metal to keep from falling onto the sharp rocks below. The links were rough and misshapen but wide enough for a foot or, when fatigue struck, for an elbow to be pushed through so that, locking arms, they could safely hang long enough to catch their breath. The old chain bore their combined weight without complaint.

  As they climbed Shan began seeing a pattern in the clumps of vegetation that clung to the wall beside the chain, interspersed with open holes chipped in the rock, several of which contained bird nests. This kora was much older than three or four centuries. Before the chain’s construction, holes had been chiseled in the rock as handholds to help pilgrims climb the wall.

  They climbed together into the high channel of smooth rock. It had once been a waterfall, Shan realized, as he entered the vertical tunnel, a watercourse inside the mountain that had, by the hand of man or nature, been diverted, leaving the tunnel and a smooth vertical track for the chain, which reached its upper terminus alongside an open ledge. They had found the bed of the old stream. The rock wall of its bank sloped away at the top, leaving a five-foot gap between it and the side of the mountain. Hostene and Shan climbed upward, overlapping themselves on the upper chain. Yangke, who had preceded the older men, tried to reach the trail leading up the mountain with an extended foot.

  “I cannot jump that,” Hostene said anxiously as he gazed down at the
rocks far below.

  Shan, with his head at Hostene’s ankles, studied the rock wall. Then he took the staff from his back and began probing a small patch of shadow that was darker than the rest, inches below the path. The end of the staff sank in nearly a foot. Shan threaded the staff through the opposite link in the chain and thrust it back into the wall.

  Yangke, watching from above, announced that he had located another hole, four feet above the first. They soon had a precarious but firm walkway, with a rail to hold onto for the crossing. After some energetic coaxing of Hostene by the young Tibetan, they all made it across. Yangke lit his butter lamp with his flint and began walking up a gently sloping tunnel.

  They had left the world behind, below. They were following Abigail and the killer into another world. The vertical gap they had bridged on the ancient chain felt as if it had been miles in length. There were acrid scents unfamiliar to Shan here, and images on the walls that he had never seen before of vengeful demons given movement by the flickering light. This was the land of deities, where men were outsiders, where men were playthings, their bones used to construct altars.

  Their pace hastened as they approached the daylight at the end of the tunnel. Finally, they reached an opening framed in well-worked, sun-bleached cedar wood, carved with the signs of paradise. A short railing extended down one side. Yangke uttered a sigh of relief, handed his lamp to Hostene, and darted toward the outside stairs just as Shan recognized words written on the side wall of the cave that had recently been underlined in white chalk. The opening lines of the death rites. Shan shouted in alarm and leaped forward as Yangke fell off the side of the mountain.

  Chapter Twelve

  With a terrified cry Yangke twisted about, his arms thrashing, desperately grabbing at the narrow rail with one hand but inexorably sliding downward. There was only one stair step past the end of the tunnel, though the rail extended another two feet to give the illusion of a flight of stairs. For four hundred feet down there was only air.