Текст книги "Prayer of the Dragon"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Chapter Two

Shan left in the gray light before dawn after glancing through the cracked stable door and over the shoulder of a guard slumped against the inside wall, to confirm that Gendun still maintained his vigil. It was the kind of morning when he and his friends would often slip away to greet the sun, sometimes sprinkling a few kernels of barley for the birds. But the feeling of foreboding that gripped Shan made him wonder if he would ever find such peace of mind again.

A pebble bounced onto the bare earth in front of him, then another. He paused, expecting to spot a sheep on the shadowed slope above, but he saw nothing. Another pebble flew over his shoulder. He heard soft, hurried footfalls on the trail behind him before he could make out the figure hurrying toward him.

“You are not the only one who needs a morning blessing,” Lokesh said when he reached Shan’s side. The first rays of the sun were considered by some of the old Tibetans to be a special gift of the earth deities.

“At the end of this particular trail will be no blessing,” Shan warned.

“The only answer we have found so far is that there are no answers to be found in the village,” Lokesh replied and raced ahead, disappearing around a high rock outcropping.

By the time Shan reached him, Lokesh, who was more than half again Shan’s age, was seated on a high, flat ledge, legs folded into each other, staring at the ragged silhouettes of the eastern ranges as he told his beads in a whisper. Nearby, half a dozen sheep stared at the horizon as intently as did Lokesh himself.

Shan lowered himself onto a slab of rock ten feet away, not wishing to disturb his friend. He knew what to expect, having seen Lokesh in the predawn light with the same joyful expectation on his countenance scores of times before, and though his anxiety at the events of the day before robbed him of his own tranquillity, he drew strength from watching his friend and waiting for the inevitable moment to come.

Lokesh would recite his mantra as the darkness faded, then just before the first rays of light he would abruptly cease, catch his breath and hold it, not inhaling again until the sun appeared. Shan had never seen him fail, never seen him have to draw in another quick breath before the brilliant rays of light appeared. At first he had tried to decipher the strange calculation that Lokesh surely must be doing, then eventually decided there was no calculation, that Lokesh was connected to the natural world in a way he would never experience. Once, coming from a twenty-four-hour meditation, deprived of sleep, Shan had found himself watching Lokesh, not the sun, and for a moment had been overcome with panic that Lokesh would forget to inhale, and the sun would not come up.

Shan was close enough to see Lokesh’s chest freeze and found that he too was holding his breath, watching until a blinding seed of energy materialized on the rim of the mountains. Lokesh acknowledged Shan with his uneven smile, made crooked by the boot of a prison guard years before, then finished his rosary before rising and continuing up the trail. It was one of the many little rituals that defined the lives of the old Tibetans.

They had walked perhaps a mile when they saw a second group of sheep, a dozen rugged, long-haired creatures that sat in the lee of an outcropping above a stream, all intently watching something below. Shan saw the familiar brown mastiff first, on the slope a hundred feet away, as curious as the sheep at the strange sight on the bank of the stream. The figure at the water’s edge was readily recognizable, though the actions of the man in the canque were not.

Yangke was performing what appeared to be a dance, jumping in the air, then kicking out with one foot. His hands were no longer bound by the fittings of the canque, though he was forced to keep a grip on it with one hand to maintain his balance. As they watched, he kicked several times, the last so violently the weight of the collar threw him backward onto the ground. Rising, he made a long sweeping arc with the end of the beam, seeming to scrape the earth, then moved fifty feet downstream and repeated the motions.

“I do not know this ritual,” Lokesh declared in a puzzled tone.

This time Yangke executed a more delicate step, using his toes to separate rocks in a small pile at his feet and coax them along the bank before swatting them into the fast water.

“He practices one of those games people play with sticks and balls,” Lokesh suggested.

“What he practices,” Shan said as he watched Yangke, “is anger.”

The former monk did not turn immediately when his dog barked, but walked a few more feet up the stream, then gave a high-pitched cry, one of the calls used to summon wandering sheep.

As the dog bounded toward them with a wagging tail, Shan bent to pick up a stick lying near the first place they had seen Yangke kicking at the earth. The wood, two feet long and over an inch thick, had been stripped of bark and painted with three thin rings near the top, two red with one yellow between. Shan pulled out the little sticks that had been tossed down by the angry intruder in the stable. The markings were similar but the colors did not match.

“The sheep are apt to roam far this time of year,” Yangke explained as he turned with a show of surprise and greeted the two men.

Shan went to the second place they had seen Yangke perform his strange dance and retrieved a second stick from under some stones that had been kicked on top of it. It bore the same red and yellow colored rings as the first. He held the sticks, tapping the painted ends in his palm as he approached the young Tibetan. “Or perhaps it troubles them to see their shepherd become so upset over a few sticks,” Shan observed.

Yangke walked up the slope to where his dog sat and eased himself down beside the animal, resting one end of his heavy collar on a nearby rock. The dog licked his face and Yangke began stroking its back. “Chodron allows me the use of my hands when I am working with the herds, as long as I work my hands back into the bindings when I go near the village. For him,” the former monk added, “that is compassion.”

Shan lowered himself onto the grass beside Yangke and surveyed the landscape. He saw another painted stake on the far side of the stream, then another a hundred feet upstream. “I met an old lama in prison,” Shan said after a moment, “who always laughed when he heard about Chinese buying plots of land on sacred mountains. He asked who signed the papers for the land deity.” As they watched, Lokesh waded across the shallow, ankle-deep stream and collected the sticks that were still standing.

Yangke kept patting the dog, which watched attentively as Lokesh gleaned a piece of rope, then a ragged piece of canvas from the rocks beside the water. “When I was a boy we would come up the mountain on festival days, with my uncles and aunts and cousins. The children would collect the pretty yellow rocks in the streams and put them inside cairns with prayer flags and mani stones arranged about them,” Yangke explained, referring to the stones that bore inscribed prayers left by the devout at sacred sites. “Each visit we would build one cairn, to honor the golden earth deity that resides in the mountain. Sometimes it would be six or eight feet high.” He paused and gazed into the clear cobalt sky. “After I went down to the world my surviving aunt wrote me letters. When she described how men came and tore down all the cairns, I didn’t really understand. When she said they had changed the course of some of the streams and stopped a waterfall I used to play in, I thought she was making some sort of strange joke.”

Shan watched a soaring bird, a huge lammergeier, as he pondered Yangke’s words, then surveyed the long, wide slope before them. Scattered along the stream were piles of rocks, not the carefully stacked cairns of the devout but what could have been the ruins of cairns. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Gold mining requires roads and enormous machines.” He glanced up at the bird circling overhead. The feather in the vest of the stranger in the stable had come from such a large bird of prey.

“Suppose a mountain was so remote that Chinese survey crews ignored it when they cataloged mineral resources decades ago,” Yangke said. “Suppose a secret base happened to be built on the far side of the mountain that discouraged anyone from venturing too close. Suppose, eventually, a few Chinese discovered streams with nuggets and gold dust, even veins of gold in the rocks, but they knew the army would never permit legitimate mining operations because the secret base was so close. Suppose it became something of a hobby for some of them, a pastime, to sneak across the mountain after the snow melted and extract a few ounces of gold. It wouldn’t take too many years before word would spread and others arrived, who took their work more seriously.”

“Outlaw miners,” Shan ventured. He had heard of such men elsewhere in Tibet, prospectors who operated far from the reach of government taxes and mining regulations. The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away, ran the age-old saying.

“It’s been a closely guarded secret, confined to criminals mostly, men with little to lose, with good reasons to keep out of the government’s sight. They used to hide, from the rest of us and from each other. But they grow bolder every year. Some work the streams with pans. Some use dynamite to open the veins. They arrive after the snow melts and leave in September. Like migrating geese. Except these geese eat the land itself.”

“Why would they bother to stake claims?”

“They respect each other’s workings. They’ve begun to organize themselves, enacting rules for peaceful coexistence with each other and with Drango village.”

“But someone in Drango could inform the government.”

“And what then? The slopes would be crawling with troops. Public Security would ask questions about Drango that no one would want to answer. The Bureau of Mining would descend on us. Municipal administration bureaus. The Bureau of Religious Affairs,” he added with a shudder.

“But you said the two murdered men were holy men,” Shan reminded him.

“I crept as close to their campsite as I dared with this tree about my neck. They had rebuilt a cairn near their camp. These men ignored the streams. They wrote in books and cleaned old paintings. They had started making a kyilkhorwhen they were killed.”

“A sandpainting?”

Yangke nodded. “But maybe they were miners as well. They dug into the rocks and crawled into small caves. But I think they were scared of the others. The other miners camp in the open, to warn competitors off. But the ones who died, they camped in outof-the-way places, hidden places.”

Miners and monks. It seemed to Shan an impossible combination. “Were these sticks used by the dead men?”

“No. They never used claim stakes. These are new. No one has ever staked a claim so close to Drango before. Some of the miners say the village sits on the richest vein of all. Once I had a nightmare in which they blew the village off the side of the mountain to get at the gold.”

Yangke followed Shan’s gaze up the slope. “You’ll just make more trouble,” he said. “Chodron has forbidden anyone to go up there. He warned the villagers against disturbing the deities.”

“Do you and Chodron share the same deities?” Shan asked, immediately shamed by the harshness of his words. He’d felt an unfamiliar surge of anger at the mention of the headman’s name. In the same perverse way that he invoked the old traditions, Chodron was seeking to use Gendun as his minion, to turn the lama’s compassion into something dark and ugly.

Yangke contemplated Shan’s question. “What Chodron and I share is the will to survive.”

“For some, the most difficult thing in life is knowing what they are surviving for,” Shan said, pausing over the mystery not of the killings but of Yangke. He had been born in the village and left it for a monastery, then knowingly returned to Chodron’s peculiar brand of despotism.

Yangke did not reply.

They watched the sheep spread out over the broad, rolling slope, the early sun washing over them, the light breeze bringing a scent of mountain flowers. Shan was falling into a languid doze when thunder suddenly boomed and the earth seemed to tremble. Several sheep bleated and trotted toward Yangke, who pointed to a plume of dust perhaps two miles away. It was not thunder that they had heard.

As Shan watched the settling dust a new sound rose, an alien, crackling whirling that he could not identify. Yangke shouted out in warning. Sheep bleated in alarm. As Shan spun about, a man in a tattered green quilted jacket and a soldier’s helmet painted with black and yellow stripes burst around a rock on the trail, riding a bicycle. The sheep scattered in terror. Shan dove into the grass as the man sped by, laughing, waving a bundle of claim stakes over his head.

Yangke bent and launched a well-aimed stone. Though the rider was already some distance away, it bounced off his back, raising another laugh from the man before he disappeared around an outcropping.

“Something else new this year,” Yangke said in a low, angry voice. “They brought in two or three of those mountain bikes. After so many centuries the sheep trails crisscross the mountain like highways, worn smooth enough for those heavy bikes. The sheep hate them. I hate them.”

Only Lokesh seemed unaffected by the sudden intrusion, and the shadow that settled onto Yangke’s face gradually lifted as he watched the old Tibetan. Lokesh had rearranged the stakes, placing them in a long line perpendicular to the stream, anchoring them with small cairns built around each base, then stringing rope from one to another. He had torn small pieces of canvas from the abandoned tarpaulin and was tying them to the rope. A grin appeared on Yangke’s face and he struggled to his feet, then went to the remains of an old campfire near the stream. Shan was at his side a moment later and saved him the trouble of bending by handing him a stub of charred wood.

Lokesh had begun writing a series of familiar Tibetan words on the cloth scraps. He was turning the miners’ equipment into a battery of prayer flags, erected in a defensive line between the miners and Drango village.

“Lha gyal lo,” Shan said.

The young Tibetan silently opened and shut his mouth, as though trying to remember how to speak the words. “Lha gyal lo,” he finally repeated in a voice that cracked with emotion, then stumbled down the slope to help inscribe more flags.

An hour later Yangke led them onto a long, wide shelf, one of the many tiers that rose like irregular steps for several miles before ending at the base of the jagged summit.

“One of the other shepherds discovered the bodies,” Yangke explained. “They had made camp by the trees,” he said, indicating several gnarled junipers and pines that grew by a small spring, beside a series of high outcroppings that would have shielded them from anyone higher up on the slope. “He did not know about one camp but one of the dogs starting growling as if a wolf was near and then he saw a backpack lying out in the open. He was going to skirt the camp but the dog went in and wouldn’t return.”

“Where is their equipment and bedding?” Shan asked as they approached the grove of trees. There was no sign that anyone had been there except for compacted soil under the trees.

“Gone. I came here two days later, as soon as I could without Chodron’s men seeing me. I found the cold ashes of a small campfire. Lots of dried blood. Boot marks all over. The miners watch each other. If one dies, any equipment that is not looted immediately is gathered up and auctioned to the others. They are like vultures.”

Shan paused and looked back at Yangke. “Do you mean miners have been killed too?”

“It’s a dangerous job,” Yangke said. “And the miners like to take care of their own problems. I hear things from the other shepherds. There was talk about a miner killed last year, another found dead last month. But the miners and I, we stay away from each other.” Exhausted from climbing while burdened by his canque, Yangke settled between two boulders, resting one end of the beam on each. He raised a weary arm to gesture toward a small mound of rocks not far from the trees. “Their campfire was there.”

Someone had tried to obscure the fire pit by stacking rocks over it to make it look like the base of one more cairn. Shan kneeled and rolled away the rocks, then examined the ashes, trying to recognize the mélange of scents released when he stirred them. He closed his eyes to focus on the smells. Burned feathers. Burned plastic. Rice and wild onions, scorched in a pot. Singed butter. Sifting the ashes, he produced a lump of hard blue material, three inches long, then another similar piece. The remains of water bottles or plastic cups or even remnants of a small nylon pack? The ashes yielded nothing else but pebbles, dozens of small gray pebbles. He sifted several onto his palm. They were identical, each less than half an inch long, with a dimple on one side and a corresponding convex curvature on the opposite side. He retrieved more of the little shards, placed one on a flat stone and smashed it with a larger rock. It dented but did not break. The pebbles were made of plastic.

At his side another hand reached into the pit and began retrieving more of them. Lokesh scooped them into a pile as Shan, still perplexed, tossed one in his palm and began pacing in ever-widening circles around the fire pit. The scavengers had been thorough. But on his first circuit he found the stub of a pencil, on his second a little red feather, and, pushed into the dirt by a heavy boot, a silver instrument, eight inches long, as thin as a pencil but ending in sharp curved points at the end. Another dental probe. On the third and fourth, a dozen slivers of wood, all tapered, all a uniform length. Toothpicks. He stepped under the trees, noting the pattern of the pressed earth and pine needles, the imprint of a sleeping bag. The soil beneath the trees was dry and loose. He raked his fingertips through the earth at the edge of the imprint. Pebbles turned up in the little furrows, then a white nugget, as hard as a pebble. Dried cheese, a traditional Tibetan food that, like buttered tea, appealed to few outsiders. But an outsider might have politely accepted the cheese and then discreetly buried it so as not to offend. He tried again, turning up a small stick, bits of quartz, a shard of old bone. It was a camp that had, no doubt, been used before. He rose then paused to pick up a little stick. Its bark had been peeled, a shallow groove cut in one end as if to indicate legs. He extracted the piece he had taken from the comatose stranger in the stable. The two pieces fit together, forming a crude figure that reminded him of the little clay images of saints traditional Tibetans used. This one, like those in the village, had had its body broken, perhaps by the killer.

Shan gripped the little figure, studying the ground, seeing no more signs, then sniffed at it. It had been cut only days earlier. He walked around each of the half dozen trees, and found four stubs oozing sap, then held the stick close to one of the stubs. It was a match, or close enough. Had there been four stick figures? But there had been only three people in the camp. Pocketing the sticks, he took a step, then looked back at the trees. There were many branches that might have served the purpose, but all of the sticks had been cut from the east side of the trees.

When he looked back he saw that Lokesh had laid the plastic pebbles in a row and was counting them in a low voice. As Shan approached he reached one hundred eight.

“Not for a rosary,” Shan said to his old friend. “Not for praying.” He picked up a handful and with a tentative expression began a second line parallel to the first. He laid out the double line for eighteen inches then held up two of the pebbles and showed Lokesh how each curvature fit into the dimple of the next. “A zipper,” he explained.

Lokesh gestured to the pile of gray shards. “But it would be four or five feet long.”

“Do you smell the ashes? A sleeping bag was burned. Nylon and feathers would be easily consumed by the flames. Though why someone would burn something so useful in the mountains I cannot say.”

Shan left the old Tibetan wearing a puzzled expression, continuing to assemble the charred teeth in tandem lines. He paced about the campsite again, noting now the broken twigs of several nearby bushes. He kneeled to study the way the slanting rays of the sun played on the ground. A vague line of shadow, the barest smudge of gray, ran from near the fire, around the outcropping, and up the slope. It was the vestige of a very old path, unused for many decades.

Two other paths were betrayed only by crushed plants and a few boot prints, recently made, going toward separate clusters of large boulders spaced a few hundred feet apart. Shan followed each, confirming that they led to makeshift latrines: two of them.

Finally he found a third path, or rather a track, where, judging from the bent stems, something heavy had been dragged. It led to a cluster of high boulders a hundred feet away.

Yangke rose and walked unsteadily toward Lokesh as Shan reached the entrance to the cluster of outcroppings, a narrow passage between two eight-foot-high flat-faced boulders. With a glance toward his companions Shan stepped between the rocks, then froze. Rope was strung waist-high around most of the small clearing, with squares of white paper taped to it at intervals. The papers held Chinese ideograms, inscribed with a ballpoint pen.

“What sort of prayer flags are these?” a raspy voice asked over his shoulder.

“Not prayer flags, Lokesh,” Shan said in a worried tone as he approached the rope. “Warnings.” As he read the words on the flags he shuddered. Keep out, the first said. Danger, said the second. Special Policeand Murder Crime, read two more. Then, Night Lab Squad.

Feet shuffled in the dirt behind them and Yangke appeared, squeezing sideways through the boulders. “Is this where. .,” he began.

There was no need to announce that this was where the two bodies had been discovered. On the ground before them, inside the rope, were white silhouettes. Two of them were ovals, three feet long. Another, wider, was nearly four feet long. A circle was less than two feet wide, beside a long irregular outline with two appendages that must have been legs, the shape of a human body sprawled on its side. Shan stepped over the rope and knelt at the first outline, the largest oval, rubbing a finger on the white powdery line. He touched it to his tongue. Flour. The discovery caused him to again gaze uneasily at the warning flags. Whoever had strung up the flags was from a place far away from the mountain. Someone who used bleached flour to draw on the earth came from a different world.

Still kneeling, he surveyed the bizarre scene, beginning to grasp that it was not one mystery he faced but several. Layers of riddles that began not with the killings but with the unknown identity of the victims and ended with the unknown hand that had created the facsimile of a criminal investigation scene. Patches of flour dotted the adjoining rocks. Four pieces of wadded-up tape lay scattered about the clearing, the nearest two feet from his knee. He unfolded it. The backing was covered with flour smudged with lines and grit from the rocks. Someone had been playacting, someone who did not fully understand forensic technique, did not know such rough stone was unlikely to give meaningful fingerprints but who knew enough to go through the motions of a forensic investigation.

But the bronze stains on the ground and patterns of stains on the rocks told Shan there had been nothing contrived about the objects outlined in flour. Someone dead, or dying, had been dragged into the little clearing. Someone else had died there, among the rocks, blood spurting in a fan pattern from at least two savage, puncturing blows. He glanced back at Lokesh, hoping that the old Tibetan did not grasp the truth that lay before them. Four silhouettes, two bodies. At least one of the victims had been dismembered.

“There were some vultures,” Yangke said. “I could smell the. . I could smell what the vultures smelled.”

“Where did the bodies go?”

“I don’t know. The vultures frightened me. I didn’t know this was where. .”

“Vultures don’t eat clothing. Vultures don’t eat bones.”

“Who would touch them?” Yangke asked. “Who would want to move bodies?”

It was, Shan realized, one more layer of mystery. “Are there ragyapanearby?” he asked, referring to the fleshcutters who traditionally disposed of the Tibetan dead through sky burial.

“Not for thirty miles.”

“What happens when people die in the village?”

“The old ones want their bodies taken to the ragyapa. The bodies of the others are burned. We have lots of firewood. It’s a more efficient use of resources to burn them, Chodron says.”

Shan turned to Lokesh, recognizing the forlorn expression on his old friend’s gentle countenance. Those who died a violent death were seldom prepared, seldom in the peaceful, focused state of mind that would allow them to make the difficult transition to the next life. In Tibetan tradition such victims of murder often became angry ghosts who destroyed the harmony of the land they occupied.

Yangke seemed to sense something wrong with Lokesh and touched his elbow, gesturing back, toward the opening. The old Tibetan silently retreated.

“Why would they burn a sleeping bag?” Yangke asked as he followed Lokesh.

“Because it was soaked in blood. One of them was attacked in his sleep, then dragged here inside his bag.”

Shan watched his companions retreat with an unexpected ache in his heart. Then he went to work in the little clearing. He examined the bloodstains, tight patterns projecting from a broad, flat rock that had been laid close to a corner of the little alcove. The sprays of droplets had been made by limbs that still had blood pulsing in them. Soon he had collected eight more pieces of wadded tape. The tape itself had fine fibers woven into it, and had none of the blotchy adhesive or chemical smell of the cheap product sold in Tibetan markets. Along the rock walls were tracks with the patterns of expensive boots like those he had seen on the man in the stable. He stood and studied the little clearing, trying to reconstruct the events of the past few days. First had come the killer and his victims, later someone else who, in his own awkward way, seemed to be seeking the truth. What had that visitor learned? Had he taken away evidence? On a rock face on the opposite side Shan noticed strangely raised marks, partial fingerprints in a hard gray substance that seemed to have been extruded from the surface. Two feet away was a narrow V-shaped opening where two of the boulders came together. He probed it with his fingers, pulling out two long cotton swabs, a bent, exhausted tube of industrial glue, and a half-used tube of lip balm. Sexy Sheen, read the label in English and Chinese. He examined the swabs. They were on eight-inch-long sticks, the kind found in a well-stocked medical lab, something seldom seen in Tibetan towns.

When he finished, and emerged from the murder site, Lokesh was handing three sticks to Yangke, who had three more in his hand, all identical, all painted with three bands at the top, one blue then two red.

“I thought you said these people were not miners,” Shan said.

“These have been put here since I visited last. Lokesh found them, arranged to lay claim to this whole campsite and beyond.”

“Do you recognize the colors? Which miner’s are they?”

Yangke’s only reply was to insert the stakes into one of the iron hand straps of his collar, and snap them in half. He opened a small trough in the ground with his heel. Lokesh silently helped him bury the broken claim stakes.

Shan gestured toward the high spine of rock that rose toward the summit, dividing the mountain into eastern and western halves. “I know how hard it is to reach this side of the mountain from below,” Shan said. “But what about from the east side?”

“Toward the summit it gets very dangerous,” Yangke explained. “Lightning frequently strikes there without warning.”

“Lightning?” Lokesh asked, suddenly interested. Earth deities often expressed themselves through lightning.

“In the spring and summer, if there is storm anywhere near, lightning will strike there. Sometimes lightning strikes the summit even without a storm.”

“It’s the tallest mountain for dozens of miles,” Shan pointed out. Neither of the Tibetans responded. “Are there farms on the other side?”

“Just that Chinese place, miles away.”

“You called it a secret base.”

“It has a high wire fence around it. Some white buildings. Very quiet. Few are aware of its existence. Even in Beijing it’s a secret, they say.”

“Not an army base?”

“When I was young I used to slip over the top to look around.

My aunts said it was a Chinese base, full of death. The headman said it was full of poison.”

“Chodron?”

“No, that was his father. I would sit in a shadow on the eastern slope for hours, watching. There were a few soldiers. I would hear them singing sometimes. I wanted to speak with them, maybe get some medicine for my mother, who was sick. The soldiers put grain out for some wild yaks. Wild yaks are close to the deities, our old ones said. I knew they must be kind if they fed the wild yaks. Each day I drew a little closer, like the yaks.”

“They weren’t helping the yaks,” Shan suggested in a tight voice, having often seen what Chinese soldiers did to Tibet’s wild animals.

“No,” Yangke said, looking into the water. “The day I determined to go speak with them, a beautiful white yak approached the grain. I watched since everyone knows that white yaks are especially sacred, an omen of great things to come. At that time I had never seen a gun except the old muskets of our hunters. I had never heard a machine.”