Текст книги "Prayer of the Dragon"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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“Abigail,” Hostene uttered in a hoarse voice. “He thinks Abigail is the Green Tara.”

“The one thing of Tara’s she doesn’t have,” Shan observed, “was the long beaded necklace Hubei was to buy in town.”

“So she is safe,” Hostene said.

“Safe from the pilgrim,” Shan said, “but not from the killer.”

Later, he found Hostene on a high rock, gazing toward the dark silhouette of the summit.

“When I was young, just a teenager,” the Navajo said as Shan settled beside him, “my mother’s uncle, a famous chanter, took me on a quest to meet the gods. He was planning to teach me what he knew, so my generation could keep the sacred knowledge alive. He brought me to one of our sacred mountains, gave me a rope, a flint, a feather, and a twisted piece of fragrant wood he had found on his own quest when he was a boy, and told me to climb to the top and stay up there for five days, fasting, and the gods would come to me. I climbed along a path with sacred symbols painted on rocks, guides, painted a long, long time ago. There were pieces of bone and feathers and red cloth jammed in rock cracks or on thornbushes, left by those who had gone before me. I reached the top and sang for a while, some simple words he had taught me. I sat and threw stones and watched birds. I started to sing rock-and-roll songs. After three days I climbed down the other side and hitchhiked to a town to see a girl I knew.

“My uncle came for me. He waited for two days at the bottom, saying prayers for me. He said a coyote had finally told him what I had done. He wasn’t angry. Just sad the gods had not shown themselves to me. Later I got a motorcycle and rode all over the American West, taking odd jobs, hanging out in bars, and worse. I had my arm tattooed to mock my old relatives. My uncle kept trying to contact me because he was dying. He told my mother I had the makings of a great chanter, that I was one of those who were needed to keep the important things alive. I never answered his letters or returned his phone calls. He died before I returned.”

Hostene stared into the heavens. “This is how the world ends, my wife said once, how great civilizations fall to pieces. The old things meant to be passed down, they are the best things distilled out of thousands of years of experience. But somehow in the last century we decided our own lives were too important, that fast cars covered with chrome, and television, and computers made us better than our ancestors. That’s the lie that kills the great things.”

“When I finally settled down and learned my two chants, I was going to have the tattoo removed but then I decided to keep it, to remind me of my shame.” Hostene stared at the summit again. “Now that she needs me, what do I know about being a pilgrim? What do I know about gods?”

“People here aren’t dying because of gods,” Shan said. “They’re dying because of gold.”

Shan was alone before the little fire when a hand reached out of the shadows for him. Yangke gestured him into the cave. Then, lifting a butter lamp from the floor, he silently led him down the corridor Shan had taken before, to the chamber with the pilgrim’s equipment. But they continued until they reached what appeared to be the end of the tunnel, a chamber smelling of old incense, whose ceiling was blackened with the soot of butter lamps.

Old Trinle sat near the center of the room, gazing up at another painting, his eyes filled with tears.

“He won’t speak to Dolma about this,” Yangke explained. “He said he never came here before, that it was only for the senior lamas.”

Another fierce protector was depicted, Shan thought at first, though the image was unlike any he had seen before. The god in the center was dragon-headed. Two dozen small demons surrounded it along the sides and bottom.

“It is the druk deity, god of the mountain, the earth god,” Trinle declared in a raspy voice. “This is where the lamas started and finished each pilgrim season. He is the one the fortunate ones meet at the top.”

Yangke said, “All these years, Rapaki didn’t know why, despite his years of meditation, he wasn’t shown the Kora. I think he decided he didn’t have something the god wanted. He kept looking, trying to understand what that thing might be. He had no teachers,” he reminded Shan.

“You must not tell Dolma,” Trinle told Shan.

Shan stepped closer to the painting, not yet comprehending. Yangke handed him the butter lamp. Then he saw.

He had seen paintings of old gods with necklaces and bracelets of human skulls. He had seen images of gods adorned with human skins. Until now he had never seen a god wearing a necklace made of human hands.

“After so many years alone,” Yangke said in an anguished voice, “the mind might go to places. .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t think he is exactly a murderer, not the way most people think of murderers.”

Shan said, “Perhaps. But if one has an appetite for hands,” he said, “someone else who isa murderer might find it convenient to feed that craving.”

They lingered in silence, unable to break the spell of the deity before them. Yangke lowered himself beside Trinle. Shan found himself staring at the unsettling dragon-headed image.

“I could have learned its secrets,” came a cracking voice, full of remorse. “I could have saved Rapaki,” Trinle said.

In the quiet that followed only the occasional crackling of the lamp could be heard and a sound that Shan had begun to detect in all of Tibet’s deep caves, a strange low resonance that was sound and not sound, something that made him feel small and meaningless, an intruder into a place not meant for mere humans. Lokesh had a name for it-mountain speaking.

“My uncle was the abbot,” Trinle continued. “I was sent to the monks when I was ten, as had been the tradition of our family for centuries. But when I was seventeen I fell in love with a girl who tended the sheep. I would say I was meditating out on the mountain but it was not meditation I sought. We became like man and wife. When my uncle found out he banished me from the temple and took my robe away, saying the only way I could stay near the temple would be if I was digging its holes and tending its gardens. A year later, when the Chinese were advancing, my woman went down to Tashtul, to look for her mother. I never saw her again, never heard from her.

“I think it is true, that this is where the first gods started,” Trinle declared after a long time. “A thousand thousand seasons ago. Once there were more gods than people. People were just made, like artwork, the way later people made paintings of gods.” The old groundskeeper seemed about to weep. “Then there came to be too many people for the gods to tend, too many people who forgot the nature of prayer. The world could no longer be relied upon. And now,” he pronounced in a thin, anguished voice, “I think there may be only one earth god left, a frail old dragon at the top of this kora. When he finds the strength, he prays.”

“What does he pray for?” Shan asked.

The answer came not from Trinle or Yangke, but from a lean, weary figure standing at the entrance to the chamber. Shan had no idea how long Lokesh had been there.

“That,” his old friend said, “is the most important question in all the world.”

Yangke began a whispered mantra. Trinle rose and brushed the dust from the deity’s painted eyes. When Shan turned again Lokesh was gone.

He found Lokesh in the equipment chamber, at the wicker chests, gazing at the old masks. He lifted the headdress of a horned bull god and set it on an adjoining chest. “Trinle and Yangke tried to learn, but they had no proper guidance.”

Shan noted the heavy-bladed instruments beside the yak-tail whips-ritual axes with curving steel at the top, a four-inch blade in the center. An outline in the dust showed one was missing.

“You must return with me,” Lokesh said. “Now that we know what is here, the entire village will surely understand. Gendun says he needs to speak with Chodron, that if he can just sit and meditate with him, Chodron will see the error of his ways.”

Shan could find no answer that Lokesh would comprehend.

“Then you are going up that kora tomorrow. Tell me that by doing so you will not beget more violence and more suffering.” Death did not upset Lokesh for to him it was but a stage before rebirth. It was violence, which fed the imbalance he sought to heal, that he feared.

“I wish I could find such a way,” was all Shan could say.

Lokesh stroked the golden nose of the horned bull headdress. “Return with me. Gendun and I will find a way. When he is healed, the three of us can climb to the summit together.”

“If I return without discovering an answer to the killings, Gendun will be tortured again. To Chodron he is only a weapon to use against me.”

“You know that is unimportant to Gendun.”

“It is important to me.” Shan’s heart felt as if it were in a vise.

Lokesh tilted the bull up so that it seemed to be looking him in the eyes, and spoke to its golden face. “It is a season for killing, Dolma says. She says it is like a storm, that it needs to blow itself out so we can get on with life.”

IN THE MORNING, outside the cave, Lokesh would not speak to Shan, would not look him in the eye.

Dolma transferred some apples and apricots from her own bag to Shan’s pack, handed him one of the pilgrim bags Trinle had brought from the cave. “He says this is not what the track to the gods is for,” she said in a strained voice, “that you must stop this, that you cannot turn it into some sort of contest between predator and prey.”

“We have no choice.” Shan lifted one of the pilgrim staffs and looked at his old friend, who stood on a rock, facing the sunrise.

“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 vajrarocks, 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.