Prayer of the Dragon (6 page)

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.”

“But they had a machine gun,” Shan ventured.

Yangke nodded.

“How do I get there?”

“There is no way, not anymore. Maybe they saw me or some of the other herders. There was only one gap like a narrow gate in a high wall. Soldiers put bombs in the gap and brought the rocks down. The two sides of the mountain can no longer meet. They haven’t for years.”

Lokesh had wandered up the trail to the second set of rock outcroppings. As Shan watched, the old Tibetan tilted his head one way then another, then made a series of hand gestures, ritual
mudras
, beginning with his hands pressed together, pointing outward, the thumbs and forefingers folded inward. It was the sign for water for the face. He was making the mudras for what the devout called the Eight Outer Offerings.

As Shan approached he found his friend at a long, flat ledge, perhaps five feet high, leaning over a rust brown image. To his right was another image, the familiar tapered egg shape of the ritual treasure flask, often depicted in the hands of painted deities.

But Shan had never seen the image on the left before.

“It is lightning,” Lokesh said, “yet not.”

The zigzag line drawn in blood did indeed look like a thunderbolt. Except that at its top, at its thickest part, was a triangular head with two eyes. “Or a snake,” Shan ventured. “Except,” he added, pointing to the two pairs of bent lines near top and bottom, “what serpent has arms and legs?”

“A dragon,” Lokesh concluded in a tone of somber discovery. “A thunder dragon.” He had followed a particularly Tibetan logic. The mountain was famed for lightning. Lightning was born of thunder and, as the older Tibetans knew, thunder came from the throats of dragons. And here they were on the mountain called Sleeping Dragon. Shan found himself gazing toward the summit. More than a few Tibetans believed dragons existed, though, like lamas, they were not faring well in the modern world. Shan had accompanied Lokesh on a race through the mountains the year before after a report of a sighting of one of the sacred creatures.

Shan left his friend’s side to search the ground where the man who was either a saint or a murderer had been found, his fingers bloodstained, with a bloody hammer. He stepped over dried, curled leaves to take in the scene more completely, then walked back and forth. Here there were none of the broken stems he had found elsewhere, no sign that anyone had been dragged, but likewise no sign of the cleated boots the comatose man had been wearing. He examined the small cracks between rocks and the gaps between boulders for a hundred-foot radius, pausing at a flattened circle of earth that showed particles of colored sand. There had been a sandpainting, Yangke had said. From a shadowed crack halfway between the charnel ground and the place where the stranger had been found, he pulled a toothbrush, its bristles stained red-brown. So the saint had not painted the images with his fingertips. It seemed unlikely that he was the one who had painted them.

Something nudged his senses, and he paced along the wall again. The dried leaves caught in the grass. There were none anywhere else, only near the painted images of the flash and the dragon. He bent and gathered several, then sat and probed one. It was not a leaf, it was a flower, one of the dried trumpet flowers that bloomed on the slopes, though the nearest plants were some distance away on the far side of the stream.

“It was an altar,” Lokesh declared. He retrieved some of the flower heads closest to the rock and held them toward Shan. They too were stained with blood.

It took a moment for Shan to grasp his meaning. The body of the stranger had been arranged beneath the painted images, along with the flowers, a traditional altar offering. Or perhaps an atonement. But the bloody hammer did not fit. Had two different people played a part in the killings? The saint had been carried to his place beneath the altar, which would have required two men. One had been devout, in his own strange way. But the other—the cool, calculating one—had dropped the hammer there to implicate the stranger in two murders.

When they neared Drango village they found men with heavy staffs stationed at the outer edge of the fields. They did not greet Shan and Lokesh, did not even acknowledge them as they stepped onto the path that wound down through the barley fields to the village proper. Shan paused and gazed back up the mountain. What were the men watching for?

The young children in the village fled when they saw Shan and Lokesh. A woman churning butter leaped up and darted into her house, dragging her churn inside with her. A small white dog barked at them. Shan approached the stable and froze. The door guard was gone. But a bar had been placed across the door, locking any occupant inside. He lifted the bar and used it to wedge the door open. Inside, only a few pots of butter remained lit, enough to show the man lying exactly as Shan had last seen him. But he was alone. The villagers who had maintained a vigil were gone. Gendun was gone.

Lokesh and Shan exchanged alarmed glances. Lokesh approached the pallet and sank to the floor beside the comatose man. “Go,” he said to a Shan in a hollow, frightened voice. “Find him.”

Shan ran to the house they had slept in. They had never seen its owner, but the night before they had found blankets in the corner of the stable below the living quarters, on rough straw and canvas pallets. Their three pallets were now rolled up against the wall. A shadow moved at the top of the ladder leading to the second floor. When Shan followed, he saw the woman of the house standing at the only window, staring out through the battered pane of sooty, cracked glass.

“At times like this Gendun will forget to eat or drink unless we remind him,” he said to her back. “There are stories of lamas in meditation rising up as if sleepwalking and stepping off cliffs.”

The woman didn’t respond. Finally, she said, without turning, “When the wind blows just right, I can hear the whirling of the prayer wheels on the porch of the old temple.”

“If you are one of the few who can remember the temple perhaps you also remember compassion.” He could not understand the strange breed of people that inhabited Drango village. Why did these Tibetans, alone among all those he had encountered, make him feel so resentful? He recognized her as he came closer. She was the elder from the night before. Chodron had given a name to the widow who owned the house. Dolma.

“I need to talk to one of the men who found the bodies,” he said to her back.

When the widow did not reply he left her staring out the window and began to search the town, trotting up the street, then back, and around the houses on each side, pausing to gaze into the stone-fenced yards behind each. No one protested as he searched for Gendun but no one offered any help. Some yelled at him. One man threw a stone toward him. Most glanced at him and looked away, as if they might will him to leave.

After a fruitless search, he reached the rear door of Chodron’s house. He knocked, then tried the latch. The door opened and he found himself in the lower chamber, facing the Chinese flag. To the left was a heavy plank door, padlocked shut. To the right, the door to the rest of the house was also locked. Shan tapped, then pounded on it, calling first the name of the headman, then that of the lama. He paced around the entry chamber, pausing at a small table beneath the red flag. On it lay stacks of brochures.
Scientific
Principles of Village Management,
one was captioned.
The Power of
Community Socialism
, read another. They were all in Chinese, though he doubted more than a handful of the villagers read the language. Beside the brochures was a little copper bust of Mao Tse-tung. Chodron had an altar after all.

As he left the building he glimpsed a child, the girl who had brought food to Yangke, standing by the nearest stone granary, peering inside. When she discovered Shan at her side the girl gave a yelp of fear and scampered away.

“Gendun!” he cried as he opened the door wider. The lama sat in the middle of the stone floor, a solitary lamp flickering at his knee. His arms were bound behind him, wrapped around the heavy center post. He acknowledged Shan with a weak smile.

“What have they done?” Shan groaned. Across the lama’s cheek was a discolored line of little drops of dried blood. Across the back of his right hand was a similar mark. Gendun had been caned.

“He raised a hand and spoke words I could not understand,” the lama said hoarsely as Shan knelt behind him, untying the ropes.

“Did the man on the pallet strike you?”

Gendun cast a perplexed glance at Shan. It was as if he was unaware that he had been beaten. “His words had the sound of a prayer. I think he spoke one of the old tongues.” There were dialects in parts of Tibet that were nearly lost, that dated back to the centuries before history.

Shan’s heart leaped into his throat as he saw the bent fingers of Gendun’s left hand. They were twitching, curled like claws. “Noooo!” he gasped, and quickly pushed up the lama’s sleeve. A terrible dark panic swept over him as the saw the twin sets of bruises and burns. “Who did this? Why?”

“That one is confused about the way of things. He seemed to think he could inflict pain to show me a new truth.”

They were no longer talking of the man on the pallet. “Chodron? But why? What did he want?”

“He said I must tell the people the beetle had to be returned to the mountain deity.”

“What beetle?”

“A yellow beetle. I said it belongs to no deity I know. He laughed and had men put me in here, and they did those things to me. He said no food and water for a day and night would change my mind.” Gendun stood and stretched, rubbing his discolored wrists, staggered, then nodded vaguely. “The one in the stable is not ready to be alone,” the lama declared, and without another word he left the granary.

Shan quickly found what he was looking for, in a corner behind the door. His hand had closed around his own upper arm without his knowledge. That was where a similar device had been used on him years earlier. A heavy truck battery, with spring clamp cables. In the doorway Shan almost collided with the old widow. Dolma’s eyes welled with tears as she watched Gendun hobble toward the stable. Concealed by the blanket she had thrown over her shoulders was a small wooden pail, holding a jar of water and several cold dumplings. “Lha gyal lo,” she whispered to Gendun’s back.

“Why is Chodron so concerned about a yellow beetle?” Shan demanded.

“It wasn’t always like this,” Dolma said. “The Drango I grew up in would never have permitted harm to befall a lama.”

Shan realized he had asked the wrong question of the woman. “What happened to Drango?”

“What happened to Tibet?” the woman rejoined warily.

“Terrible things happened to Tibet,” Shan admitted. “But what happened here is different. The things done to Tibetans here are done by Tibetans.”

Dolma stepped inside the stone granary and set down her pail. She began smoothing the dirt around the center post, as if to eliminate all signs Gendun had been there. “It was done to save us,” she asserted. “We heard stories of villages that disappeared in clouds of smoke, or had their people relocated to cities. A village on the far side of the mountain was wiped away by big machines. In another village all the men and boys were lined up and shot because one had thrown a stone at a soldier. Our headman was very clever to have saved us.”