Prayer of the Dragon is-5

by Eliot Pattison

  Shan thrust his staff forward. A firm hand closed around his belt at the small of his back. As Hostene gripped him from behind, Shan reached out for Yangke with the pole. The younger man seized it and Shan pulled. Then a downdraft hit Yangke and pushed him outward. It was as if the mountain were wrestling Shan for him. Shan and Hostene pulled together, Yangke got a foot on the single step, and with a final heave they managed to pull him inside.

  The three men sat on the floor of the tunnel, gasping. “I–I lost it, I lost the bag,” Yangke confessed when he had regained his breath.

  It took Shan a moment to understand. Yangke’s bag had slipped off his shoulder, his staff had fallen out of his hand. He had lost the kit that every pilgrim needed to survive on the mountain.

  “You’re with us,” Shan said, hoping he was conveying more confidence than he felt. “We have enough to share.”

  He held the lamp high as he retraced their steps, chiding himself for not having noticed how the rock walls and floors had changed in the last hundred feet. The rock had been chipped away, not worn by water. Shan pointed to the fresh white chalk marks that highlighted the words from the death ritual.

  “Abigail!” Hostene exclaimed.

  Shan walked to the point where the floor changed and began tapping the walls with the end of his staff. He discovered a section that was hollow. A wooden panel had been painted to look like rock. Hostene found an edge and starting pushing. The dry iron pintles hidden inside the panel’s edge groaned and it swung open. They were back in the course of the waterway.

  As the panel swung closed behind them they lit the other two lamps and began following a twisting passage where the water had once followed a seam of softer mineral. But where, Shan wondered, was the snowmelt that had once rushed through the tunnel?

  They emerged onto a small plain, surprisingly flat, sheltered by low ridges of rock, with smaller rocks scattered across the open ground, the dark summit looming above, closer now. Shan pointed to a nearby shelf of rock that overlooked the plain. “We should rest and study the slopes above while it is still light,” he suggested. He heard no argument from his exhausted friends nor a syllable of surprise when they discovered another painting on a sheltered wall behind the shelf.

  Yangke, suddenly full of energy, paced along the width of the painting. “This one is different,” he declared and looked up at Shan. “Astrologers have painted this.”

  The central figure was called the astrological tortoise, its head that of a fiery demon, its clawed feet holding ritual implements. At the top was a cluster of flames-to the right an iron sword, to the left a tree, at the bottom waves, indicating water. In the belly of the tortoise was a circle divided into nine spaces by two pairs of perpendicular lines, each space with a number.

  “Looks like a word game,” Hostene said over Shan’s shoulder.

  “It’s called a mewa square,” Shan said, then explained its significance to the Tibetans, beginning by translating the numbers in the nine spaces. Four, nine, two were the numbers in the top row, then three, five, seven, and finally eight, one, six at the bottom. Whether added up horizontally, vertically, or diagonally each row totaled fifteen. “It’s used to tell the future,” he said. “It depicts perfect symmetry. The base of three times the central five equals fifteen. The central five is midway between the numbers on either side and above and below it. But nine is its most important number. The central five times nine yields forty-five, which is the total sum of all the digits in the square. Nine is the perfect number. Any number multiplied by nine creates a number the sum of whose digits is invariably a multiple of nine. The square is used to calculate horoscopes.”

  “Which must be why there are nine segments,” Hostene remarked.

  Shan followed the Navajo’s gaze. He saw what had drawn Hostene’s eye. The smaller rocks that seemed scattered from the lower perspective could now be seen to have been arranged deliberately. There were not a lot of them, so their placement was not obvious, but from where the three men stood now the stones clearly defined nine separate squares.

  Shan and Hostene stared from the plain to the painting, examining the tortoise again, watching as Yangke climbed down and began walking among the squares.

  “The Emperor Yu,” Shan murmured as Yangke wove an erratic course through the stones.

  “Emperor?”

  “It’s an old story, from before history. The Tibetans borrowed many things from India and China, where the early astrologers wrote on tortoiseshells and bones. The mythical Emperor Yu received a tortoiseshell from the deities, inscribed with the magic square. He then traveled the nine provinces of his kingdom in the sequence of the numbers.” Shan traced a finger over the tortoise’s belly to demonstrate, pointing to the script that looked like an Arabic number three leaning to the right, then to another Tibetan digit that resembled a three with a tail. One, then two. It’s called the Nine Paces of Emperor Yu. My father told me the pattern is used in the West also, but there it is called the Seal of Saturn.”

  “But we can see what’s before us. It’s obvious we have to keep climbing to the summit,” Hostene said, leaning on his staff. “And there is only one trail up,” he added, pointing to a long thread of shadow on the ridge to the east of the plain. “Why waste time walking zigzags on these squares?”

  “Because the devout do not question their prescribed fate,” Shan replied as he started to climb down to the plain. “Because all life is a zigzag.”

  “Abigail is up there,” Hostene said to his back but his protest had no energy.

  “A teacher of ancient religions would recognize the square, and she would have done what was intended,” Shan countered.

  Hostene followed Shan out onto the plain.

  Assuming that the top of the square would lie to the north, Yangke led them to the section corresponding to the number one. He dropped to his knees, extended his arms, and lowered his body to the ground, then pulled forward as he folded his body up.

  “I don’t understand,” Hostene said.

  Shan watched the Tibetan and gave a hesitant nod. “Yangke is right. We must be pilgrims in all respects. The pilgrim would proceed by prostrations.” He saw the frustration on Hostene’s face. “Some pilgrims still travel hundreds of miles this way, taking months to reach a shrine. We,” he said as he dropped to his knees, “only need repeat the Nine Paces of Emperor Yu.”

  It was a slow, laborious process. On the third square, Yangke sneezed as he inched up from the dust of the reddish gravel that was scattered about the square. On the fifth square Shan paused for a moment to look at the white dust that suddenly appeared on his hand. At the edge of the last square, where their prostrations finished, there was an small overhanging shelf of rock that, from the perspective of someone walking by, would have obscured the words painted on the flat wall underneath. But they were prostrate pilgrims, and saw it. Om nidhi ghata praticcha svaha, they read.

  “A mantra used in offering rituals,” Yangke said. “It refers to the sacred treasure flask.”

  “But we could have just come here directly. It is the only way,” Hostene complained as they joined the short steep path that led to a bulging rock formation in the broad shape of a treasure flask.

  “No,” Shan said, “there was a reason.” He halted and studied the squares again, the colored stains on his hand, the discolorations on all their knees. “It is the colors.” To Hostene’s obvious chagrin he walked back onto the squares. Some-but not all of them-bore faintly colored soil or fine gravel, noticeable to the pilgrim with his face on the ground but so subtle as not to be obvious to the casual glance. “A sequence,” Shan observed, “red, white, and green.”

  “Why?” Yangke asked.

  “I don’t know,” Shan admitted. “The treasure flask will tell us,” he suggested, and led them back to the trail.

  The climb to the flask rock was arduous. They were reaching an altitude where the thinness of the oxygen might affect them. Hostene had to pause often, leaning on his knees, and
seemed about to collapse onto a rock at the side of the trail when he uttered a cry of glee. As Shan ran back to him Hostene pointed to a white chalk mark on the rock. Drawn hurriedly, in the shape of the Emperor Yu’s paces, it showed that Abigail had been there.

  What they found under the wide overhanging rock behind the flask tower was not an homage to the gods but a memorial to the frailty of man. Men had labored there, for there was a blackened, shaped hole in the rock wall that appeared to have been a small furnace. There were bits of cast iron on the ground, a lichen-covered iron shape on a stone pillar that proved to be an anvil with an iron ring attached to its base, a few feet from a weathered juniper post in the ground holding fragments of what had been a large bellows. But Shan’s companions’ attention was focused elsewhere.

  On a large slab beyond the furnace lay a dozen skeletons arranged like the spokes of a wheel, skulls at the hub. On a small, narrow shelf beyond, deeper in shadow, were twenty separate skulls. On a lower shelf, five feet off the ground, lay skeleton hands and arms, mixed with the weathered hands and paws of protector demons from ritual costumes.

  Hostene, who shied away from owls and even from talk of death, stood as if petrified in front of the display. Yangke, however, seemed fascinated. “Pilgrims,” he declared in an awed whisper as he leaned his staff against the wall and pointed to the hands. “From centuries of following the path. Can you feel their-” His sentence ended in a terrified gasp as one of the demon hands reached out, grabbed his wrist, and jerked him toward the wall. His head struck the rock and he slumped against the wall, then slid lifelessly to the ground. Breaking out of his trance, Hostene darted to his side. Yangke’s staff rose and slammed against the Navajo’s back, knocking him off his feet.

  Shan leaped forward, then froze. A pistol had materialized in the floating demon hand, aimed directly at him.

  Shan said, fighting to keep his voice level, “Those who built this place, Captain, would have told you that bringing a weapon here would damage your spirit.”

  “It wasn’t to enrich my soul that I followed you up here.” Bing stepped into view. The hands, Shan realized, were not arrayed on a shelf carved into the rock but atop a squared-off boulder whose back was totally obscured in shadow. One of Bing’s arms was covered by the costume of a demon, a long black glove-like device with bones of whitewashed wood affixed to it over the hand. Switching the pistol to his bare hand, the mayor of Little Moscow pulled off the glove with his teeth and tossed it into the shadows.

  “Damn, you’re slow,” Bing said. “Performing all that mumbo jumbo below, when any fool could see you had to come this way.”

  “Is that when you passed us?” Shan asked. From a position of prostration they would have seen nothing. “You made it from the chain without a staff?”

  “I have the legs of a frog, my mother used to say.”

  “I did not see you at Little Moscow this morning,” Shan observed.

  “I was waiting at the painting.”

  Shan understood. “You destroyed it, but you still did not understand what lay beneath.”

  “When I saw you up on the rim above the town this morning, I knew you’d get to the painting sooner or later.”

  “Like Abigail Natay.”

  “Like the American woman,” Bing agreed.

  Shan bent over his friends. Hostene was still conscious, although he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Yangke, who was beginning to stir, had a jagged cut on his forehead.

  Shan rose and paced around the skeletons, ignoring Bing’s gun. “This is what happens,” he said.

  “Happens to whom?”

  “You should go back, Captain. You should go back now, or else promise to help us find the Navajo woman. The people who built this path intended the wrong minded to stay on it forever.”

  “You make it sound like I’ll encounter three-hundred-year-old pilgrims still wandering about,” Bing sneered.

  Shan gestured to the skeletons. “Something like that.”

  Bing kicked the nearest of the pilgrim bags that lay on the ground before kneeling and upending it, without taking his eyes off his prisoners. “And what about you, Comrade Shan? Are you so saintly that you need not worry?” He picked up an apricot and took a bite, the juice running down his chin.

  A small ache rose in Shan’s heart. “Me? I am beginning to realize I can only live between worlds. I’m not sure the deities take much notice of me.” The words had been uttered without conscious thought, as if something in the shrine had pushed them from his heart directly to his tongue.

  Bing laughed derisively. “As much as I’d like to stay and hear the contrite confession of another prisoner,” he said in a mocking tone, “I haven’t got time. Where are the other packs?”

  “There’s only one more. We lost one.” Shan pointed to his own bag by the old anvil. Bing kicked it toward the one he had already emptied and upended its contents. He drained one of their two remaining water bottles, then began filling his pockets with their meager rations.

  “Abigail!” Hostene shouted, as if she might be near. Then he called again, and again, his last word like a cry of pain.

  Bing grinned. “Is it really true, old man, that you came all the way from America for this?” he said.

  “Is it really true,” Hostene shot back, “that you could kill so many in cold blood?”

  “I am nothing compared to him,” Bing said, and pointed to Shan. “This is the man who has killed an entire mountain. If we had women and children on board we should have sent them away in boats the second we saw his face.” He stood, his task finished. “It was Shan who unleashed the real destruction. That son-of-a-bitch Ren never studied economics. He doesn’t know shit about the market economy. The miners have kept out of his sight for all these years. But now that Shan has him so fired up, he’ll make arrests, interrogate people, turn over every stone on the mountain. Ren will destroy a thriving enterprise that supports scores of people, then call himself a hero and return to his one-room apartment with a certificate from a grateful bureaucracy to hang on his wall.”

  Shan’s chest tightened. Chodron must have repaired his sabotaged generator. “What is the major doing?”

  “It’s what he’s not doing. Not leaving Tashtul when he was scheduled to. Not allowing the helicopter he summoned from Lhasa to depart. Not letting any of his men take leave. Not allowing anyone onto the trails into the mountains. Not letting anyone know the responses he is getting to your photographs that he e-mailed to every army and security office in Tibet. He is methodical and deadly.”

  “Let him come,” Yangke said. He was rubbing his head now. “Let him arrest you as a killer.”

  “When Ren comes, nothing on the mountain will continue as before. Not in Little Moscow. Not in your village. Just remember, it was Shan who brought him down upon you. It will start in earnest when Ren finds an illegal lama in shackles. Ever see a shark when it tastes fresh blood?” Bing bent over Hostene and Yangke, expertly patting them down. “Empty them,” he said to Hostene, pointing to his pants pockets. Then lightly pressing his pistol barrel against Shan’s chin, he patted down Shan as well. “And that one,” he said, pointing to one of Shan’s pockets. He quickly sorted through the little pile they’d made, tossing Hostene’s pocketknife over his shoulder, taking all their matches, pausing over Shan’s shard of plaster before dropping it onto the ground.

  “All Tashi wanted was his freedom,” Yangke said.

  Bing shrugged. “I liked Tashi. I miss Tashi. The drunken artist, like a character in some old play. He always told jokes. No one jokes anymore. I’ll have to pay for my entertainment now. Tashi will be hard to replace.” He glanced back at Shan and grimaced. Sometimes birds too were surprised by the songs they sang.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Shan said. “Tashi was going to smuggle the gold over the border. But how was he going to get it off the mountain without Chodron finding out?”

  “I know your type so well, Shan,” Bing said. “God, how well I know y
ou. I was responsible for ten barracks of prisoners like you-pathetic, morose creatures with no vision, only bitterness about the past. They would sit in reeducation classes and copy out slogans from little red books like robots, praising the Chairman, reading aloud apologies printed in other books, using someone else’s words. Never a one among them with the balls to stand up and say, Fuck the Chairman, screw the Party secretaries, and screw the limo drivers who brought them to town.”

  “I tried at first,” Shan replied in a weary voice. “They sent me to a special hospital for the criminally insane.”

  “Unfortunately,” Bing said soberly, “you are the sanest person I have ever met.”

  Hostene picked himself up and began refilling his bag. “I’m going after Abigail,” he said. “You’d better shoot me now if you mean to stop me.”

  “I like this old fool,” Bing said, gesturing at Hostene with his pistol. “He reminds me of the old Tibetans. In the town by my prison barracks there were some monks who had resigned their robes. You know, they’d been forced to marry, forced to break their vows. They made the best drinking companions. They’d bet on which lower animal forms they would attain in the next life.”

  Bing glanced up toward the summit, then eyed his prisoners. “Here’s my dilemma,” he said to Shan. “We had a celebration in the early summer, got drunk, and shot at cans and at pikas. Like a fool, I used every bullet for this gun except the five left in this clip. Tell your friend to forgive me, but I am unable to waste a bullet on him.” He kicked one of the ropes to Shan. “Tie them back to back to that post. Then I’ll do you.” He glanced toward the summit again.

  He paused, stepped to Hostene, and held the pistol barrel before his chest. “Do not even think of following. If I see you again, I will shoot her. As much as I like her, I will shoot her, and for the rest of your life you will know you caused her death.”

  “You don’t know the route, Bing,” Shan warned as he was tied to the iron ring below the anvil. “It’s too dangerous. The path punishes those who don’t respect it.”