Prayer of the Dragon (27 page)

Gao stared at the little clay image in confusion, as if trying to understand how it had appeared in his hand. Shan thought he was going to pocket the tsa tsa but then, with a look of revulsion, Gao threw it against the back wall, shattering it into a dozen shards.

“If you prefer,” Lokesh offered in the same level tone, “I could teach you some of the words.”

“Be quiet, you damned fool! It’s this kind of nonsense that lured my nephew to his death.”

Shan was about to protest, to point out that the lamas had never even met Thomas, when he realized Gao meant Abigail Natay’s particular form of nonsense. Abigail had fled the safe side of the mountain to continue her work on the ancient shrines. Thomas had followed her.

“Your shining consciousness has no birth, no death.” Lokesh spoke the opening words from the death rite facing the shadows, where the deity lay shattered on the floor.

Anger flared on Gao’s face, followed by despair. He retreated. Shan followed him to the foot of the stairs. “I am only able to search the mountain,” Shan said.

“What do you mean?”

“Something is finishing here. It didn’t start here. There are men up there who are hiding things.” Shan quickly wrote a name on a scrap of paper and handed it to Gao. “He was in Public Security and was stationed somewhere in Tibet, I think. I need to know where he served, what his duties were. And there’s something else.” He leaned forward, speaking close to Gao’s ear. The scientist’s frown grew deeper.

There was movement behind them. Hostene stood on the steps.

“I came here to offer to take you back to my house in the helicopter,” Gao said to the Navajo. “There is plenty of room. You are in no condition to climb the mountain.”

“Even if Shan wasn’t going, I would go back. I won’t let my niece die.”

“When Shan finds her, he will let us know.”

“He’s right, Hostene,” Shan interjected. “We’re aware of your sickness. Don’t make things worse.”

Hostene, confused, searched their faces. “You mean my cough?

I smoked for twenty years. It’s the price I pay. Doctors say my lungs are good enough, for my age.”

“The medicines,” Gao said, “for cancer.”

Hostene sank onto the step. “That’s a private thing,” he said.

“You’ll do your niece no favors by getting sick on the mountain,” Shan said.

Hostene was forced to explain. “An old family doctor put the prescriptions in my name, so no one would suspect that Abigail was ill. What you saw was the extras I was carrying.” He looked up at Shan. “You asked once why completing her work is so urgent for her.”

“What are you saying?” Shan asked, a chill spreading down his spine.

“It isn’t me. It’s Abigail who has cancer. They give her no more than a year to live.”

Chapter Nine

SCREAMS MINGLED WITH Shan’s nightmare of Gendun in tamzing again, growing louder and louder, until he became aware that Lokesh was shaking him. The desperate shouts came from outside, spreading from one house to the next as Drango’s inhabitants caught sight of the flames. The barley fields were on fire.

Few things are drier than a field of barley ripe for harvest. The flames swept inward as if famished, gorging on the paper-crisp stalks. Within minutes every man, woman, and child in the village were in the fields, battling with brooms, buckets, and shovels. Soon some collapsed onto their knees, breaking into helpless sobs. The barley was their life, their food supply for the brutal winter ahead. The tsampa, the gruel, the kernel-laden soup, the fodder that would keep them and their animals alive was disappearing in a wind-driven inferno. Chodron shouted furious orders for more buckets, for a trench to be dug from the stream, but no one seemed to hear him. Another voice rose, younger and surprisingly calm. Yangke was wielding a sickle. Soon a dozen men were following his example, cutting a swath to deprive the advancing fire of its fuel, sealing off a small quadrant of the crop with a fire break.

Shan paused at the edge of the field, surveying the grim scene. The fire had started at the top of the field, feeding on the predawn downdraft from higher elevations, ignited at half a dozen places, probably by someone running with a torch. As he gazed at the devastated village he caught snippets of frantic conversations. Someone said it must have been lightning. Someone else said he had seen a flame suspended in the air, magically moving along the top of the fields, faster than any man could run. Someone, pointing, said Chodron had received an invitation from a demon. Shan followed the gesture, walking toward the granaries, stopping in the shadows when he discovered the village headman standing in the circle of pressed earth, staring at a dead sheep. The animal had had its throat cut and was propped on its haunches with sticks so that its lifeless eyes seemed to be watching the house of the headman. Stuffed in its mouth was an ornate silver pen case. A case Shan had seen before. Tashi’s pen case. He watched Chodron hesitantly open the case. It was empty.

Shan spotted Hostene and jogged to his side. The forlorn cries of the villagers rose in volume. They worked beside Yangke, pulling away the stalks as he cut them, stomping out embers as they landed on the cleared swath of earth. Shan watched as Chodron appeared, running upward. A new field caught with a sudden terrible swoosh of hot air as Shan darted behind the nearest structure.

Chodron’s house was empty, the back door open. The office was still padlocked, but using a stone and a heavy nail he had taken from the stable the night before, Shan began working on the hinges. He quickly popped the pins and swung the door aside.

Inside, he lit one of the candles on the desk. Wiping his hands clean of soot on his trouser legs, he began sifting through the papers on top of the compact desk, then searched the drawers and folders stacked on the table along the wall. This is what Shan had done best in his previous incarnation, finding and interpreting the secrets of the corrupt. He had once been feted as a Hero Worker for deciphering the code in a ledger used by a Ministry of Energy deputy minister to send millions to bank accounts in Hong Kong. Chodron’s files held reports about the harvest, medical care, party meetings, expenses for quarters in Tashtul town, everything but what Shan sought. He puzzled over how Chodron had managed to keep the village official for some purposes, like enrolling its children in government boarding schools, but unofficial for others, like keeping out watchful administrators, census takers, and tax collectors. He eyed the books on the high shelf over the table—Party scriptures, a collection of essays on socialist thought for agrarian communities, even a book dealing with the treatment of fungus in barley. Only one book showed any sign of use.

Chodron was not subtle, though Shan had to admire his daring. The headman had removed the contents of a hardcover copy of
The Quotations of Chairman Mao
and glued a ledger within the boards. He had hidden his secrets in plain sight. The sinner had disguised his transgressions with his bible.

It was an impressive volume, Shan had to admit. For over ten years, Chodron had recorded payments from miners, collected in early September as they passed through his makeshift tollgate on the trail above town. Each year’s entry listed miners’, changing slightly year to year, gradually lengthening until the past year showed payments from forty different names. Two names had been scratched out at the end of the past season, another a month earlier.

He leafed back and forth among the most recent annual accounts. Only the current year and the prior one had any names removed. All the previous years’ entries appeared to have been completed on the same day, with the same pen and same ink, listing name and payment as received. But the last two lists were different. The names had been prepared in advance of the payment date, pursuant to a more organized system, utilizing a list of names provided in advance with payments registered on the payment date. Chodron had become Bing’s partner.

Shan remounted the door on its hinges, tapped in the pins, and stepped outside into a swirl of smoke. He went toward Chodron’s generator, unscrewed the gas cap, and dropped a handful of dirt into the tank. The smoke thickened, conveniently concealing his return to the fields. He located Hostene and took up a position beside him, pulling back the stalks as the men in front swung their sickles.

Shan did not notice when Hostene departed. He became aware that Yangke had paused. Shan followed the young Tibetan’s gaze toward the nearest granary, where a smoke-stained figure stood with two packs in his hands. Shan realized the Navajo was right. They could ill afford to be within reach of Chodron’s fury when the flames had run their course.

Yangke put a hand on Shan’s shoulder. “I will try to find you,” he said in a bone-weary voice. “Lha gyal lo.”

By the time they reached the path above the village the sun had risen above the ridge, and they could see the full extent of the devastation. No more than a tenth of the crop survived. It was the end of life as the villagers had known it. They could not survive without appealing to the township authorities. Then the authorities would arrive to assess their plight. The end would come quickly.

“Who would do such a thing?” Hostene asked.

“Someone who wants Chodron to lose,” Shan said.

“The murderer?”

Shan pointed to a set of bicycle tracks that veered off the trail along the top of the fields. The flame that ignited the barley had moved faster than a man could run.

“Murder,” Shan replied, “is only part of the war being waged on this mountain.” But in the short term, he knew murder would be Chodron’s sole obsession. For if Chodron the harvest manager was deprived of his victory, then Chodron the village magistrate would need an even more spectacular success. Shan tightened the straps of his pack and with grim determination headed up the mountain.

Lightning began to strike an hour later, a single bolt at first, starting at the distant summit, then a dozen more, approaching in rapid succession, shaking the ground, singeing the air, emitting a metallic scent of ozone. A huge dark cloud, nearly black, settled over the mountain, creating an eerie twilight. Now the lighting began in earnest. Most of the bolts were concentrated near the summit but some struck much closer, one less than a hundred yards away. It was as if some angry deity had awakened and begun hammering the mountain.

Shan and Hostene ran for shelter under an overhanging ledge. Hail fell, marble-sized balls that were blown sideways by a sudden gust, slashing at them so hard they had to turn and face the stone, their backs to the onslaught. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had started. Except for the hail it had been a dry storm, the kind that made Tibetans believe in mountain gods.

As the sun emerged, they surveyed the now deceptively tranquil mountainside.

“Why does she lead her killer?” Shan was not even certain he had given tongue to his thought until he saw the old Navajo stare at him in alarm.

“Why do you say such a thing?”

“Each of them has a destination, up the mountain somewhere. They have discovered it is the same one. I think she knows more about how to find it than the killer does. And the killer knows it.”

“You said
her
killer.”

“I am sorry, Hostene, but whoever is doing this won’t release her when they reach their goal. And I think she realizes this. Now I understand why she acts as if she has little to lose. If she’s convinced she’s dying,” Shan continued, “if she truly believes she will be gone soon, then completing her work is everything.”

“Her work,” Hostene repeated. “It’s not work anymore. It’s all part of the same thing now. The guilt she feels toward her dead parents. The need to put things in balance. She came to me that night at Gao’s, in tears. She said something that kept me awake for hours. It was wrong that Tashi and Ma had died too, she told me. The more I thought about it, the more it alarmed me. She was saying she was the one who was meant to die.”

In his mind Shan had been revisiting the videos of Abigail he had watched with Hostene, viewing them not as the work of a brilliant professor but of a troubled woman who knew she was dying. “That’s what she’s been doing all along,” he said softly. “Connecting with lost gods.” A minute passed before he spoke again. “The words she wrote you at Gao’s house. ‘In Beauty before me I walk.’ What is their origin?”

“They’re from our Blessing Way. Our chant to open dialogue with our holy ones.” He gazed out over the tortuous terrain ahead of them and nodded. “She’s become more of a Navajo in Tibet than she ever was as a girl in New Mexico. But no one kills for the old gods,” Hostene observed in confusion.

This was a leap Shan was not prepared to make.

They turned onto the track that led to Little Moscow. The trail was blocked with lashed poles, tied together and jammed against rocks to form a gate. The poles bore patterns of colored stripes at the top, in different orders, as if the miners were sending a unified warning to all trespassers. Beyond the poles, on the trail, was the headless carcass of a sheep.

Shan followed Hostene’s worried gaze back toward Drango village, where the smoke still spiraled high. Fire behind, vengeful miners ahead. It was time, as the Tao te Ching said, to block the passages and close the door. He turned back to Hostene. “I think we should pick some flowers,” he announced.

“You have the balls of a water buffalo, Shan,” he muttered as they arrived at his side. “Two days ago every miner on this mountain wanted both of you dead.”

“Two days ago Thomas had not been murdered. That changes everything. With Dr. Gao watching, who will dare try to eliminate his investigators?”

“Dr. Gao can’t tell the fox from the hens,” Bing shot back. Then he gestured toward the smoke. “How bad?”

“The village stands. The crop is all but destroyed.”

Bing ran his hand through his thick hair, muttered a low curse.

“Not particularly well planned,” Shan suggested. “How will Chodron keep the village fed without calling on the government for assistance? But why should a village need grants of food supplies when it never did before? That alone will set off an investigation. You and Chodron better forget the gold and start planting peas.”

Bing glared at him. “You can’t think
we
had anything to do with it.”

“As you said,” Shan observed, “Little Moscow exists in a bold new world. Where every man can live up to his full potential.”

There was something different about the miners’ town, Shan thought as he followed Bing into it. The photographs of family were stowed away, the little signs setting forth mileage to hometowns gone. The men had eradicated any evidence of who they were when off the mountain. They were growing suspicious of one another. A rooster stood tied to a pole by one lean-to, as vigilant as a dog. The birdcage he had seen on his former visit was gone, replaced by a plank upon which someone had inscribed an old-style charm against evil ghosts. The few miners who showed themselves glanced warily at Shan and Hostene. Shan walked along the perimeter of the town’s central square, pausing for a moment to study the crumbling fresco, noting the small oval shapes that had outlined some of the sacred objects depicted in the painting, squatting for a moment to examine the section that had fallen out and been placed by the entrance to Bing’s quarters, a fragment showing the head of a fanged creature that appeared half human, half lion.

Bing directed them to the central fire, where he poured tea into metal mugs. “We are honored to entertain the ambassadors from the great court of Gao,” he said mockingly. “But there’s nothing more to find here about the murders.”

“Murders?” Shan asked. “I have recognized my assumptions were faulty. I am now doing research into the creativity of entrepreneurs in the socialist market economy.”

Bing raised his cup in salute, gesturing toward his community of miners who were assembling, forming a circle around them. “Here you see the future of China at its birthing.”

Shan swallowed half the contents of his cup. Hostene began extracting items from his pack.

“The miner who was killed last year,” Shan said abruptly. “What happened to him? Were there witnesses? Why did you conclude that his partner had killed him?”