Prayer of the Dragon (4 page)

The old woman tightened her hands. They covered something inside her blouse. She was wearing a
gau
around her neck, Shan realized, a prayer box, the only one he had seen among the villagers.

Chodron ignored Lokesh. “The punishment will be carried out according to our custom. If he is still alive afterward he will be taken to the nearest road. For as long as the village has been here it has punished its own wrongdoers. The true test of a leader, like that of a barn beam, is when a storm wind blows. I will not retreat from my duty.”

“We have seen what you do with beams in Drango,” Shan said.

Chodron clenched his jaw. “I caught Yangke stealing from my house. He confessed in front of the village and I read out the traditional punishment. Some argued that he should be taken to the county seat, to Tashtul, that he was not subject to our decision because he had lived so long away from the village. I gave him the choice. I said I would write a report and send him with it to Public Security, which already has a file on him. I reminded him there were many prisons ready for people like him—new prisons are being built all the time. The next morning he asked me to put the wooden collar on him. As for this stranger, how do you think they would deal with a double murderer down in the world? Do you truly wish me to summon the authorities? They will send a helicopter, with soldiers carrying machine guns. If you continue you give me no choice.”

Shan’s mouth went dry. “Continue? I just arrived.”

“Your presence and that of your two friends has caused people to speak behind my back. Many who were weaned of their prayer beads years ago secretly ask your lama for blessings. Half my people realize that this man is a murderer but the others call him a saint. We had plenty of lamps in that stable already but the day after your lama arrived, people insisted there be one hundred eight,” Chodron said with scorn. That was the sacred number, the number of prayer beads on a string and the number of lamps traditionally placed on altars for special ceremonies. “My people speak to perfect strangers about our private affairs. My authority is in question. Our village’s progress is in jeopardy.”

“Do you know who Gendun is?” Shan asked.

“I have heard of someone called the Pure Water Lama who wanders the hills like some lonely old goat. I have no idea what he does.”

“What he does,” Lokesh said, “is collect delicate blossoms in old cracked jars.”

The words elicited a hungry gaze from one of the old men.

Chodron ignored the comment. “I have heard of this lama. I have also heard of talking yaks and mountains that fly.”

“Gendun is here,” Lokesh said, “because these people need him. If he had been aware of what was happening here he would have come long ago.”

Chodron glared at Lokesh. “Do you truly believe you can descend upon our village and destroy all we have struggled to build?” Anger flared in his eyes. “I know now why you sent for this man Shan behind my back. You thought having a Chinese with you would change everything. You thought our people would be so scared of a Chinese that you could simply order us to release that killer.”

“The village needs to understand what took place,” Lokesh protested. “It needs to stop fearing—”

“I am not frightened,” Chodron interrupted. “I know your dishonorable kind. One of his arms will show what he is.”

Lokesh slipped his prayer beads from his wrist and extended them toward the genpo. “Take these to understand
our kind
.”

Shan put his hand on his friend’s arm to quiet him. He rolled up his sleeve and turned the inside of his forearm into the light of the fire. One of the old men moaned. The old woman covered her mouth with her hand. The elders might know little of the outside world but they knew enough to recognize the row of numbers tattooed on his skin. Shan understood why Chodron’s demeanor toward him had changed. The herders who had traveled with Shan and seen him roll up his sleeves at mountain streams must have disclosed that he was tattooed with a number.

“Tell me this, prisoner,” Chodron asked triumphantly. “Do you have your release papers?”

The question hung in the air for a long time. Somewhere a dog barked. A lamb bleated.

“No,” Shan admitted. He had not escaped but his release had been unofficial.

He was vaguely aware of movement at his side but did not see what Lokesh was doing until the old Tibetan had thrust his own bared arm into the firelight, displaying a similar line of numbers.

“Shan is the reason I did not die in prison. He forced my jailers to release me,” Lokesh explained. “From the hour he was thrown past the barbed wire into our camp Shan has helped Tibetans.”

“You are welcome to join him,” Chodron replied in a chilly voice. “You can help each other back to the hole you slithered out of.”

“Or else?” Shan asked, repressing his anger as he struggled to understand the strange power Chodron held over the village.

Chodron’s thin lips curled into a smile. “Or else it will be like old times when the headman presented proof of the crime, then exacted the punishment with the blessing of our abbot. You will cure my people of this reactionary notion that saints may walk among them. You will restore my people’s confidence by giving me the proof I need to demonstrate my authority.”

“We will not lie.” Shan stated.

“Only affirm the truth,” Chodron replied. “Stand with your lama tomorrow morning and declare that man is a killer and all three of you can be twenty miles away by sunset. You are the ones who created our problem. You are the ones to correct it.”

“The Tibetans I know do not gouge out eyes or throw men from cliffs.”

“Those
you
know!” Chodron spat. “You are an outsider. A criminal. Do not presume to instruct us in our traditions.”

In the silence that followed, the wind surged for a moment, fanning the flames, tossing open the back door of Chodron’s house. Shan saw a blush of color in the dim light, red with dabs of yellow. An altar? The pattern of color coalesced. Chodron had hung the flag of Beijing at the rear entry.

Shan studied the elders for a moment. “Where are the children?” he asked abruptly.

“Children?” Chodron shot a wary glance toward the elders. The old woman cupped her hands and stared into them. The oldest—a frail man with a white, wispy beard—cast an empty, longing look at Shan. The genpo rose and stood between Shan and the elders.

“I have seen none between the ages of perhaps five and eighteen,” Shan continued. “Tell us where you’ve sent them.”

“Away,” Chodron muttered.

“Chinese school,” Lokesh said, grasping Shan’s meaning. “Where they lose their Tibetan names. Where they are forced to speak only Chinese and sing the songs of Beijing. Where they are taught the Dalai Lama is a criminal.”

Chodron offered no denial.

“How many times have
you
gone to school, Chodron?” Shan asked. At schools for municipal leaders, the curriculum was established by senior Party members. Chodron spoke and dressed like a farmer but at his temple the lamas were Party bosses.

“Who are you?” Chodron snarled. “Why were you in prison?”

Shan ignored his question. “What bargains have you made in order to keep Drango the way it is?”

Lokesh extracted a cone of incense from a pocket and dropped it into the embers at the edge of the fire. The man with the white beard stared at the thin plume of smoke, absently extending his fingers into it.

Chodron’s countenance grew rigid. “You shall give the village the affirmation it needs,” he declared. “The headman always carried out severe punishments with a lama at his side. Your lama will stand with me when the sentence is executed, to give me his blessing. Meanwhile, we keep your lama. If he does not restore order by joining me at the appointed time, then I will speak to Public Security about outlaws in robes. Our herders now know where you hide.”

The gray-haired woman set her bowl down and turned her face away.

Chodron added as he took a step toward his house, “But
if
the deities are truly on your side, they will take the killer into their embrace and never let him wake.”

“So the way he proves his innocence,” Shan said, “is by dying?”

Chodron rejoined in a mocking tone, “Death is but a reward to the virtuous, isn’t that what you teach? But if he awakes . . . We will deal with him after the harvest. Before our festival. You have seven days.”

“Please understand,” came a voice as dry as straw. The gray-haired woman finally spoke. “Look at our village. We live on a diet of promises and fear. Chodron has preserved our ways the best he knows how. All we want for Drango is justice, our own justice. You must give us justice.”

Lokesh and Shan exchanged a melancholy glance. Justice. It was a topic they had long ago worn out, a word that had acquired a strange, alien ring to Shan’s ears. He had once thought he could obtain justice for Tibetans. But Lokesh had taught him better, shown him that the government cared little about crimes committed among such remote people. For such Tibetans there was only truth, and the terrible consequences of truth.

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
kyilkhor
when 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.