Текст книги "Prayer of the Dragon"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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“You’ll what, prisoner?” Chodron hissed. “Send a letter to the Party chairman? The lama is mine. And the stranger remains in the stable with him.” Chodron lifted his hand and laughed into the microphone. “Slow down, comrade. I don’t have them in custody yet. We don’t want to spook them into hiding. I know how to smoke out such creatures. Leave them to me.”

“Watch your back,” the officer replied. “Those old ones can turn themselves into dragons.”

The grin on the headman’s face as he shut off the receiver revealed a row of uneven teeth. “Major Ren. Biggest shark in our sea full of sharks. He’s not as subtle as I am. If I use one battery for tamzing, he uses three. Where I might hit you with a baton while you stand, he would first strap you to a table and then use a lead pipe. Perhaps you are acquainted with the type.”

When Shan did not reply Chodron grinned again. As he gestured Shan toward the door a woman outside shouted in alarm, and someone else uttered an anguished cry. Shan ran. Chodron reached the villagers gathered at the base of the sloping fields half a step behind him.

A man was being carried by two of the shepherds. Or what was left of a man. The body was strung from a pole, suspended like fresh game. The two men seemed weary beyond words as they reached the village, but few words were needed. The corpse was that of a farmer. His left temple was soft and pulpy. It had been crushed by a violent blow.

A woman collapsed over the body, sobbing.

“Murdered!” shouted another, fixing Chodron with an angry gaze.

“Another murder!” The fearful cry swept through the crowd.

Several of the villagers, Shan realized, were looking at him. As he stepped forward the crowd wordlessly parted. He knelt as the weeping woman was pulled away from the corpse, quickly examining the man’s pupils, touching the spongy flesh around the wound, confirming that the hands were intact, noting the discoloration on the man’s fingertips, then checking his clothes, pausing for a moment over his strangely misshapen belt buckle. Even Chodron stood silently by as Shan unbuttoned the man’s shirt to look at his skin. A dim red pattern showed on the skin of his left shoulder. One of the farmers helped Shan ease the man onto a blanket that had been spread at his side.

“Ay yi!” came a frightened cry as Shan pulled away the shirt, exposing the man’s back. The pattern continued from the shoulder down the dead man’s back. It was as if a long red fern leaf had been etched onto his skin, radiating upward from the spine just below his heart.

“The gods!” came another alarmed cry as the villagers shrank away. “The deities have touched him!”

“The gods took him!” moaned an old woman. Several villagers murmured nervous agreement.

“Get the lama!” a forlorn voice called.

But the young shepherd who broke away in the direction of the stable was seized and shoved to the ground before he could get very far. “Murder!” shouted Chodron as he stood over the man. “Anyone can see it’s murder,” declared the headman in a loud voice. “Another hammer blow to the skull.” A hesitant expression twisted his face a moment later. He glared at Shan. Chodron recognized his dilemma. The headman could not tolerate the suggestion that a god had marked the man but if, as he had just declared, someone had murdered him with a hammer, the killer could not have been Hostene. The headman barked out orders for the body to be taken to the victim’s home, then summoned Shan to the shadow of the nearest granary.

It took three hours for them-Shan, Yangke, and Hostene-to reach Hostene’s campsite. Although Yangke was carrying a pack containing food for three days, he leaped over rocks, apparently feeling only a slender connection to gravity now that he had been freed of his imprisoning beam. Hostene, having eaten a huge meal in Dolma’s house, likewise seemed a new man. He often paused to ask Yangke questions about why certain boulders were painted red or why mani stones had been left beside one boulder and not another. He stood attentively as Yangke drew in the dirt the bizarre image that had appeared on the dead farmer’s back. When Hostene suggested that it must have been some kind of decoration painted on the man’s body, Yangke insisted it was exactly as he had drawn it, the perfect image of a fern leaf etched into the man’s skin like a tattoo, where no mark had existed the day before. The two men looked at Shan as if for an answer, but Shan kept on walking up the trail.

Lokesh had had his own theory when Yangke had described the mark in the stable. He thought the image was of the spire of a chorten, a sacred reliquary shrine. Shan had not replied, only held Gendun’s hand a moment, for the old abbot had grown faint again.

“See that he eats,” Shan had said. The memory of the lies he had been forced to tell in front of his friends was like an open wound.

“Dolma will do that. I am going with you,” Lokesh had replied.

“No. You must not.” Shan could not recall ever before arguing with his friend but he was not going to expose him to the dangers on the mountain. He knew from experience to trust the deep feeling of foreboding that had been rising within him. “You must stay to help Gendun.”

“You are mistaken, Shan,” Lokesh had said. It was as if the mountain itself were coming between them. “You don’t understand this mountain. Dolma says its deity has been growing weaker and weaker. What you intend could kill it.”

It was the blackest thing the gentle old man had ever said to him. From the way the words had been uttered it seemed they tortured Lokesh’s soul.

Shan did not know how to reply. They were speaking of things for which words were useless. It was possible that Lokesh knew something of Shan’s intentions that he himself did not know. There might have been things about the mountain that Lokesh and Gendun could not explain to him. But there were certainly things Shan had seen on it that they could never grasp, and if the old Tibetans did touch them they would be like moths to a flame. They had sat silently as Hostene had readied himself. Then, leaving Lokesh gazing into Gendun’s nearly unconscious face, Shan had left the stable and barred the door.

DURING THE SECOND half of their trek, Shan and Hostene, aided by a new staff cut for him by Yangke, walked side by side. Shan pieced together the journey Hostene and his niece had made to Sleeping Dragon Mountain. They had landed in Beijing a month earlier, where they were joined by Professor Ma, who had been a colleague of Abigail’s when she had done a six-month exchange tour teaching Eastern religions at Beijing University. Professor Ma had spent several summers studying ruins fifty miles to the south, where he had met the Tibetan guide who had brought them to the mountain.

Abigail Natay was a thirty-four-year-old woman who had spent her childhood in the Navajo lands but had fled to California as soon as she was old enough to leave home, distancing herself from everything tribal as she pursued an academic career.

“Five years ago her father died, then, soon after, her mother, my sister,” Hostene explained. “Before her father’s passing Abigail had refused to go to a ceremony for him. Toward the end, before my sister died, there was a healing ceremony that she made Abigail promise to attend. Abigail resented it but did so, every hour of it. Then she left without a word. But at a later healing ritual for a cousin, there she was, and then at another.”

His sister was dead, but Hostene had mentioned speaking with her at night. With a stab of pain Shan thought of Lokesh, who not infrequently carried on conversations with his long-dead mother. And Lokesh was the only person alive who knew that Shan sometimes sought advice from his father, who had been killed in the Cultural Revolution decades earlier.

“A year later,” Hostene continued, “I discovered she was teaching a course on Navajo culture at a big university on the East Coast. A year after that she took a job at the University of New Mexico. I told her she should get married but she said she was too busy writing a book about the ceremonials of our people. She was offered a job at Harvard and turned it down because she had to be close to the old ones who were her sources.”

Shan paused and picked up a round rock. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot a third of the way down, “is New Mexico. And here,” he moved his finger to the opposite side, “is where we are standing. Her sense of geography is peculiar.”

Hostene said, “She calls her project the crown jewel of her career. Every professor dreams of rewriting history.” Then the Navajo said, after pausing as if to gauge Shan’s reaction, “She is proving that the Tibetan and Navajo people are fruits of the same tree. Long-lost cousins.”

It started, Hostene explained, in a Santa Fe gallery that sold antique art from around the world. “She saw an old blanket there. Abigail was sketching its faded symbols for her work on Tibetan Buddhism when the shopkeeper told her it was actually Navajo, from a very early period. When she argued with him, he urged her to check it out at the Navajo college. I knew many of the professors so I drove her there. It took us half an hour to get past the entrance gate, where there was a map of the college, which had been built in a series of interrelated circles to reflect traditional beliefs about our peoples’ relationship with the holy ones. She photographed the map, saying it matched the structure of a monastery she knew in Tibet and the structure used in many Tibetan mandalas. Six months later she was in Lhasa, learning the language, studying the temples there. That was nearly three years ago, about the time I retired.

“She started with what she termed the empirical data. Scientific studies of linguistic patterns, DNA strains, dental patterns, earwax, geologic evidence from the ice ages.”

“Earwax?”

Hostene grinned. “I’ve heard it all so many times I could recite it in my sleep. There are two types of earwax, wet and dry. Europeans and Africans almost always have the wet type. People with dry wax are found in pockets all over Asia, especially in cold climates. You can trace population drift by following the groups of peoples with dry earwax in North America.”

“Including the Navajo,” Shan suggested.

“Including all Native Americans. That’s what she calls the macro evidence. The same patterns exist for sweat glands. Tibetans and Navajos sweat far less than the average person of European descent.”

Shan found himself liking the old Navajo, whose quiet yet energetic demeanor reminded him of Lokesh. “So she persuaded you and won you over to her theory?”

“Not at first. When she mentioned things like sweat glands I reminded her it was just another Asian versus European thing, and almost everyone agrees that the American Indians came across the Bering Strait from Asia. No, at first it had more to do with my promise to my sister on her deathbed to watch over Abigail. I know no one who is smarter than Abigail about the things you can learn in libraries. But she is not always so street-smart-about people, about bureaucrats, about the real world. And she has the spirit of a lion. She will never wade first, she always jumps into the deepest water.”

As they finally approached the murder scene Hostene grew quiet. He squatted by the fire pit just as Shan had done earlier, fingering the plastic rubble left from the burnt sleeping bag, then with a grim expression paced along the brown-stained grass.

“We had a tent,” he said, “but we slept in the open most nights. We would talk about the stars.”

“She was with you that night?”

Hostene nodded. “But she was restless. When the moon was bright she would go off and sit on a high ledge, sometimes all night long. Or she would leave before dawn to get the best light to photograph a painting up on the slope. She was troubled about the mountain, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to unlock its secrets before we had to leave.”

“Why this mountain?” Shan asked. “What made it worth the risk?”

Neither man had mentioned the gap in Hostene’s story. No westerner would ever have been granted a travel permit to the region, and no American would ever have been given official permission to conduct research that validated the ethnic or genetic identity of Tibetans as independent of the Han Chinese. His presence was surely as illegal as that of the miners.

Hostene was silent so long that Shan decided he had not heard the question.

“She spent months demonstrating similarities between the root words of the Athabascan language that Navajo is based on and the Tibetan language, even recording native Tibetans and Navajos reading the same passages. She confirmed that the timing of migrations across the Bering Strait were consistent with evidence of dispersions of people from central Asia. Then suddenly it was all about religion.” He paused, squatted, and with a finger drew a figure in the dirt, a three-part line, with an arm extending to the right at the top and to the left at the bottom, with a matching line set perpendicular to it. “Centuries before Hitler perverted the sign, my people were using this in religious ceremonies, in what we call dry paintings, sacred sandpaintings.”

Shan, on one knee, felt someone hovering behind him.

“And for centuries,” a weary but excited voice observed, “the Tibetans have used such a sign.”

Lokesh had followed them. He knelt and drew an identical swastika beside Hostene’s. “In sandpaintings, and elsewhere. It is a symbol for eternity, a sign used for good fortune.” He did not look at Shan.

Hostene responded with a solemn nod. “So we learned. We have sacred mountains that are home to our Holy People. Tibetans have mountains that are the residence of deities. She says the land gods are the oldest, because people who live in high mountain lands have to explain lightning and thunder. The structure of beliefs around the oldest deities would have the best chances of showing connections between our peoples, Abigail decided. And those beliefs far predated the Buddhist’s arrival in Tibet.”

Hostene put a finger in the dirt below the swastikas they had drawn. “Many of my people today draw this shape as we have done. But Abigail traced the earliest references, on old pots and on old pet-roglyphs. She thinks our people used to draw it this way.” He drew another swatiska, this one left facing, turning counterclockwise.

“That,” Lokesh declared, a sense of wonder in his voice, “is the way the oldest ones drew it in Tibet. The Bon people.” He was referring to people with an animist religion who had lived in Tibet long before Buddhism was brought to Tibet from India.

Hostene, nodding, continued. “The paths to our sacred mountains have markings and signs that have been there for centuries, and she wanted to look for parallel markings in Tibet and connect the myths that accompanied them, to trace them back to some common origin. But all the signs she could find had been defaced or destroyed. Sometimes the mountains themselves had been leveled. Then Professor Ma told us he had heard of a place that had never been touched, with very old deity paintings, on a mountain sacred to the Bon.” The Navajo’s gaze drifted toward Lokesh, who was staring at the summit of the mountain.

After a moment Hostene edged around the little grove, then asked Yangke to tell him where he had been found unconscious. He was kneeling at the rock wall when Shan reached him, studying the paintings drawn in blood.

“We stayed up late that night watching a meteor shower,” the Navajo explained in a sorrowful tone. “Our guide showed us a constellation that he said was the Mother Protector of his people. He said when she saw stars shoot out of the constellation his mother always cried out in joy, then quickly recited a mantra.”

“Tashi,” came a mournful whisper behind them. “Tashi the shepherd.”

“Tashi the guide and camp cook,” Hostene said. “Tashi the truck driver. You knew him?” he asked Yangke.

Yangke caught Shan’s accusing gaze and quickly looked away, his face reddening. “It didn’t seem important that you knew,” he said.

“He was originally from Drango,” Shan suggested.

“I told you, I didn’t see the bodies,” Yangke said. “I wasn’t sure he was one of the victims. Until now.”

This was why the shepherd in Dolma’s house had been so nervous about who had died, Shan realized. One of those who had been murdered had been ofthe village, but not fromthe village.

“But you acted as if you didn’t know who was camped here, or what they were doing,” Shan pointed out, speaking Tibetan now.

“I didn’t,” Yangke rejoined. “Not exactly. Tashi would not let me get close to the camp. He wouldn’t tell what his customers were doing.”

“He called them customers?”

Yangke nodded. “He told me they were professors, interested in old things.”

“You said they were holy men. You said they made a sandpainting.”

“They did. They cleaned shrines and made sandpaintings. What was I to think? All the professors in Tibet once were lamas.” The young Tibetan looked away. “I didn’t send for Lokesh and Gendun because of Tashi. I sent for them because of what Chodron says he is going to do to Hostene. I’m not sure the village could survive if he ever. .” His voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.

“ Yousent for them?” Shan clarified.

Yangke nodded.

“He was lying beside me on top of his sleeping bag that night,” Hostene continued, bracing himself against the rock face. “I do remember something else. Just before I passed out, he groaned. I think he tried to speak but his mouth seemed to be full of water.”

Shan saw Thomas’s photographs in his mind’s eye. A blade had sliced into the younger victim’s back. His lungs had probably filled with blood. He asked Yangke, “Why would Chodron hide Tashi’s identity? Why would he keep it from the villagers?”

“Because of Dolma, Tashi’s aunt. My great aunt.”

A melancholy sigh escaped Lokesh’s lips. “Dolma,” he declared.

Yangke gazed at the ground. “I was hoping he had just run away. There were two bodies.” He cast a guilty glance toward Hostene. “It didn’t necessarily mean one was Tashi. I don’t know how I will tell her.”

Hostene’s sad gaze drifted along the horizon. “As I fell asleep Tashi was talking about how some of the old ones in his village felt this was the most important mountain in all the world. He just knew bits and pieces of the tale. He said no one still alive knew the whole truth. He said dragons and gods, like lamas, were becoming extinct and this was where they were making their last stand. He said if we were lucky we might meet the gods. I think he was a little drunk. But when I awoke, in that stable, with Gendun bending over me and my head still swimming, I thought that’s where I was, in the gods’ hidden home.”

“The words you spoke then to Gendun, what were they?”

“They just came out. I didn’t think them first, if you know what I mean. It was an old prayer to a Navajo mountain god.”

They walked together around the site, staying away from the outcropping where the mutilated bodies had been found. “Did you ever encounter the miners?” Shan asked.

“Never up close. We tried to stay away from them, though I often felt we were being watched. Tashi spoke with them and made sure they knew we meant them no harm. He warned us before we arrived that we would have to avoid them at all costs. He spoke of them as if they were some kind of wild animals that only he could tame.”

Shan extracted the pieces of the carved stick figure from his pocket and handed them to Hostene. The Navajo nodded somberly, as he fit the two pieces together. “It’s called a ketaan,” he explained, his voice filling with emotion, dropping to a near whisper. “An offering figure, always made of wood from the east side of the tree. Used in some of my people’s ceremonies. Abigail would leave them at the base of the old paintings, as a token, as a way of thanking the deities for letting her study them. She asked me to make four the night before, one for each of us, for protection.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said. “A professor compiling a scientific report doesn’t stop to thank the gods.”

“We started out to make a scientific investigation,” Hostene said. “We never spoke of how that changed after we arrived. One day I started carving a ketaan, the way my father had shown me many years ago. That night, Abigail said if the key to her work was in the ways of reverence then she would never find it without reverence.”

Shan left Hostene staring at the little broken figure. He paced slowly through the camp again, stopping after every two or three steps, examining the slope above and the grass below as he considered Hostene’s words. What had he missed? He wandered toward the stream. He had examined everything, everything but the one surviving stone cairn on the far side of the stream, the only intact one he had seen. Stepping across the narrow waterway, he circled the cairn. It was old, yet not old. The rocks were all lichen covered, but only on the bottom tiers had the lichen grown together, binding the stones. The upper stones showed ragged pieces of lichen that had been pulled apart. With a guilty glance toward his companions Shan begin dismantling the cairn.

He had removed nearly every stone except the old ones at the base when he discovered a piece of folded felt that showed no signs of age. He gingerly extracted it, laid it on the ground, and began unfolding it. It had been carefully arranged, with multiple folds, to hold multiple objects. After unfolding three layers, pieces of parchment appeared, eight in all, each in a separate fold, each inscribed with a prayer. In the final fold were eight small nuggets of gold.

“We didn’t like to take the cairns apart,” Hostene said over his shoulder. “When we did it felt as if we were opening an old tomb. The hidden fabric usually fell apart in our hands, so we always put in new cloth before restoring the cairn.”

Shan considered Hostene’s words a moment. “You mean you opened cairns in order to examine the old prayers inside?”

The Navajo, kneeling beside him, nodded. “Professor Ma and Abigail were making records of old prayers, some of them centuries old by her calculations. She said if we weren’t going to meet any of the old gods, this would be the next best thing. Excavating the deities, she called it. She took photos of the prayers. It felt like we were intruding, but she said it had to be done, it was vital to her work. Some bore symbols. Some bore left-turning swastikas.” He stretched the felt out on the grass. “Tashi said it was all right as long as we respected the old prayers. And Abigail said we must never betray any interest in the gold.”

“But you weren’t looking for gold.”

“Not exactly,” Hostene said. “But Tashi said up here, you can’t separate the gods from the gold.” Shan searched his face for an explanation, but the Navajo was finished.

The others arrived. Lokesh reverently straightened out each prayer in its fold of cloth. Yangke picked up an exposed nugget of gold, then quickly put it down, surveying the slope with nervous eyes. They watched in silence as Lokesh refolded the cloth, then all four joined in rebuilding the cairn around it.

“Did you have a hammer?” Shan asked. “A rock hammer?”

Hostene nodded. “Somewhere in the camp. We had used it that day.” He looked up at Shan in alarm. “The corpse they found today. He was killed with a hammer.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Shan said. “That farmer’s head was struck after he was dead. And not with a hammer. A rock was probably used.”

Beside them, Lokesh was drawing in the dirt again, a sketch of the fern pattern on the man’s back. “Is this a Bon thing?” he asked no one in particular.

“What it is,” Shan finally explained, “is proof that the man was killed by lightning. It doesn’t happen often, even when lightning strikes, but nothing else causes it. It’s called a Lichtenberg figure, something I studied years ago. If anyone had bothered to look, they would have seen that his belt buckle was partially melted. When the farmer left the village he was carrying a heavy iron blade.”

“But you. .,” Yangke began, but seemed uncertain how to end his sentence.

“Didn’t tell anyone? If I had, Hostene would still be imprisoned in the stable. And we may learn more if we keep the riddle to ourselves.”

“The riddle?” Hostene asked.

Shan lifted the last rock onto the reconstructed cairn, “After three murders already this summer, why would someone fake another one?” He did not give voice to the new question that had begun to trouble him-why had the gold hidden in this cairn survived when miners had been dismantling cairns for years? “How long had you been camped here?” he asked Hostene instead.

“A week. Abigail was photographing the old rock writings, so they could be translated back home.”

“Old writings?”

Hostene led them up the grassy slope to another outcropping, a short distance above the camp. Behind it he pointed out a natural wind-carved formation that extended above a small ledge. It had a curving, tapering shape, with a vaguely spherical top like a head, an oval center, and two folds of rock at the base that could, with a little imagination, be seen as crossed legs. Lokesh uttered a cry of delight. It was what the Tibetans called a self-actuating deity, a natural formation that approximated the appearance of a sacred figure. The belly of the figure and the slab below it had been adorned with sacred emblems and several lines of a mantra. Dim outlines of painted lotus buds ran in a line below, as they might on an altar. Strands of yak hair, some sections encased in lichen, were wrapped around the neck-all that was left of what many years before had been a necklace.

“The Tara goddess,” Hostene said. “Abigail said the words were a prayer to Tara in her green form. She found several old paintings of the Green Tara on the slopes.”

Lokesh reverently placed some of the small flowers that grew nearby on the goddess’s shoulders, then ran his fingers over the words. They had, until recently, been covered with lichen.

“You cleared away the lichen?” he asked Hostene.

The Navajo nodded. “With toothpicks. And dental probes.”

Shan studied the scene. The dry, dusty earth below the rock showed the indentations where a tripod had stood. “What other equipment did she use?” he asked Hostene.

“A still camera, a video camera, a laptop computer with a solar recharger.” As he spoke, Hostene’s expression grew excited, as if he had just remembered something. He took a step toward the upper slope

“Was the equipment all in your camp that night?” Shan called to his back.

Hostene’s only reply was a quick gesture to follow. In less than a minute they were at the mouth of a shallow cave. “She worried about storms,” the Navajo explained. “She wanted to be sure everything was kept dry, since it couldn’t be replaced out here.”

The equipment he had described lay there, exactly as the small party had left it the night before the murders. A silver video camera lay seemingly undisturbed on a flat rock. Each camera was enclosed inside a clear plastic bag. The computer was in a blue nylon carrying case, and a blue nylon backpack stood on the cave floor. Their value would have been far greater than the camp equipment stolen below.

Shan glanced back at Lokesh, who had lingered at the cave entrance to study the self-actuated Tara. He stepped into the shadows as Hostene opened a pack to check its contents, lifting out a plastic bag of toiletries, then a small blue folder, then a pair of denim trousers. “Clean clothes,” he declared. He extracted and donned a soft hat with a wide brim. As he bent to loop the backpack strap over his shoulder Yangke interceded, taking the pack on his own back. Hostene seemed about to protest but then he scanned the ground behind the young Tibetan.

“Abby’s pack!” he exclaimed. “It’s gone. And her digital camera.”

The Navajo darted to the entrance as if he might catch a glimpse of his niece. When Shan reached them Lokesh had his head cocked, listening to what sounded like a clap of thunder. Yet the sky overhead was clear. The thunder turned into a low, rolling rumble.

Shan stepped outside and glanced at the slope above uncertainly. His heart lurched into his throat. “Avalanche!” he shouted, and grabbed Hostene’s arm. If they did not outrun the tons of rock hurtling toward them it would mean certain death.

Shan pushed the Navajo toward a small ravine a hundred feet away and darted toward Lokesh as Yangke ran past them. Small rocks were already hurtling through the air around them. Shan reached Lokesh, seized his shirt with one hand, and half dragged his friend toward the ravine.

They had nearly reached the shelter of the gully when Shan fell and lost his grip on Lokesh. He half crawled, half rolled into the gully, realizing they had escaped death by a split second.

But Lokesh had stopped a few feet from the shelter and was standing, extending an arm toward the old Tara, as if to beckon her to safety. A moment later a rock smashed the head of the goddess. A stone slammed into Lokesh’s open hand, another struck his arm, and an instant later one the size of a melon hit his shoulder, knocking him off his feet. Rocks exploded against other rocks, propelling sharp shards into the air about them. Shan launched himself toward Lokesh. A small boulder glanced off his thigh, knocking him back. The last thing he saw was his old friend, unconscious, being buried alive.