Prayer of the Dragon (2 page)

“But someone did send for you,” Shan stated. He had been on a solitary meditation and had returned to their secret mountain hermitage to find both his friends gone. Later, two teenage herders had arrived, panting from their race across the ranges, with an urgent message from Lokesh for Shan to accompany the youths to Drango.

Shan sat beside his friend, wondering at the weakness in Lokesh’s voice, worried that he might be ill. He followed Lokesh’s gaze along the rock wall that enclosed the nearest field. Nearly two hundred feet away, where the wall turned to accommodate a windblown juniper, was a sight so strange it took a long moment for Shan to comprehend it.

A woman in a traditional aproned dress was feeding a man of perhaps thirty, patiently placing small morsels in his mouth, pieces of fruit perhaps, or clumps of tsampa. The man was incapable of feeding himself because his arms were clamped by a five-foot-long beam of wood that encircled his neck.

“A
canque
,” Lokesh explained. “I have not seen such a collar since I was a boy. Until now that man has stayed on the slope above town.” A large brown dog, one of the mastiffs used to guard the sheep, appeared from behind the canque-bearer, gazed at Shan and Lokesh, then toward a small flock on the slope above, before settling beside the man.

Shan had never seen such a device but had heard of it in the tales prisoners in their gulag had told on long winter nights. Old Tibet had had no prisons, and almost no criminals. When punishment had been necessary it varied according to local practice. Lesser criminals were sometimes locked into such devices, then released, to carry their prison with them. “Surely,” Shan said, “it can’t be . . .” His question died on his tongue. Can’t be real? But he saw it, was witnessing the ordeal the man faced to avoid starving. Can’t be permitted? The government paid little attention to such remote communities.

“Crime is rare in Drango,” Lokesh said. “But when a crime is committed, the headman decides on the punishment. He has an old book he consults. Thieves are sentenced to the collar.”

Shan was beginning to understand his friend’s anguish. “And killers?”

“There has never been a murder in anyone’s lifetime. They consulted their book. They are not fully decided but they are making preparations.”

“Preparations?”

“They have resolved that if the stranger dies or continues in his blissful state it will prove he is joined with the gods. If he awakens . . .” Lokesh looked toward the shadows behind the nearest house, where a man bent over a grinding stone. His voice cracked as he explained. “They are sharpening spoons.”

“Spoons?”

“If he awakens they will either throw him from the cliff or gouge out his eyes.”

A chill ran down Shan’s spine. He stared around the quiet little village. “That is why you have not tried to heal him,” he concluded.

“If I wake him, I condemn him to their punishment.”

The air itself seemed to have grown colder. Shan pulled the collar of his quilted jacket more tightly around his neck. “What is known of the ones who died?”

“Two men from away, they say,” Lokesh told him. “Some villagers found the man who is in the stable up on the mountain, propped against a rock as if meditating. He was sitting close to the bodies. An image of a sacred vase was drawn beside him.” It was what a hermit might do—sit at the base of a high rock with the drawing of a sacred image nearby on which to focus his meditation.

“No writing?”

“Only the vase, and another sign they could not understand. It was drawn in blood. Chodron says the killer drew it to show remorse, that it is as good as a confession. His fingers were covered with blood, and there was a hammer at his feet.”

“A hammer? Were the corpses bludgeoned to death?”

“They will not show me the bodies,” was Lokesh’s reply. He explored his pockets and extracted a withered apple, stood, and ventured toward the pair at the end of the rock wall. The woman leaped up, tipping walnuts from her apron. She grabbed one of the straps of the man’s collar, urging him to his feet. He heard Lokesh offer the apple as he might to a skittish horse, speaking in a gentle tone about a large boulder above the pasture that, he suggested, had the appearance of an earth spirit’s habitation.

With what appeared to be a well-practiced motion, the man twisted the collar, breaking the woman’s grip, and turned toward Lokesh with a friendly expression, nodding toward the boulder, speaking in a voice too low for Shan to hear. The woman gathered the spilled nuts in her apron and scurried away. The dog advanced, sniffed Lokesh, wagged its tail, and settled between the two men as they sat in the shade of the solitary tree.

Shan pulled the bundle of sticks that the intruder had hurled at the unconscious man from his pocket.
Stickman
. And another name had been spat out by the intruder.
Bloodwalker
. The thing that had been burned in his memory surfaced. Years earlier, when he had shuttled through prisons in western China, before being finally transported to Tibet, that epithet was used by hard-core gulag criminals to describe assassins within their ranks. With new foreboding, he rose.

Lokesh and the canque-bearer were so deeply engaged in conversation that neither took notice when he sat beside them. The man seemed to have discovered that Lokesh had a healer’s knowledge, and was discussing the herbs used to strengthen orphaned lambs. Shan noticed a pot and a fire pit with a small pile of twigs and dried yak dung for fuel nearby. In the shadow of the wall was a rolled blanket and a stout stick, two feet long, peeled of its bark and carved with lotus blossoms. A slab of wood had been wedged into the stones halfway up the wall, and on it lay several hollow reeds. On the grass beneath the slab was a large, flat stone on which lay a rectangular sheet of paper weighed down with pebbles, a sheet from a
peche
, a traditional unbound Tibetan book.

Shan realized that the two men had stopped speaking. He met the silent gaze of the villager. “I did not mean to invite myself into your home,” he apologized.

The man’s eyes smiled as the fingers of one hand gestured toward the objects by the wall. “ ‘This fine stone mansion of meditation was built by me, a beggar.’ ” He was reciting from Milarepa, Tibet’s great hermit poet. “ ‘When the wind blows, my students, the sheep, offer me their fleece blankets,’ ” he added amiably. Before Shan could reply, he added, “And you are the Chinese wizard who dissolves prison bars and reaps truth from crow-picked fields.”

Shan searched the man’s face, expecting but not finding signs of mockery. “My father always said I was burdened by too much curiosity,” he offered. “When I was a boy I was given a small clock. By the next day I had unfastened every screw, every pin, every spring to discover the magic that made it work.”

“At an early age breaking through the illusions of time and reality,” the man in the collar observed.

“At an early age,” Shan corrected, “never being trusted with another timepiece.”

The man’s laughter was subdued, and Shan did not miss the wary way he glanced toward the buildings.

“I am named Yangke,” he offered. “Poet shepherd of Drango.” He studied Shan a moment, leaning forward to look under the brim of his hat. “Once I, too, aspired to be a monk. I had heard of the old one with the joyful eyes who helps the hidden lamas,” he said, “and of the elusive lama who is seen in the moonlight above Lhadrung Valley with a phantom from the gulag at his side. Even of the exiled Chinese inspector who sometimes does impossible things to help Tibetans. But I did not realize the phantom and the exile were the same. The herders sent by your friend to Lhadrung thought they were fetching one more outlawed lama, which terrified them. But a former investigator from Beijing, that scared them even more. You are from a different place altogether,” the man observed. “I have read about oracles from other worlds who walk among us to explain things the rest of us cannot fully comprehend.”

“I have heard much about oracles, too,” Shan said. “They are melancholy, sickly souls whose heads are filled with too many voices. They are consumed by the miracles they reveal.”

Yangke made a motion with his shoulders, curtailed by the canque, that Shan took to be a shrug. “But unlike the inhabitants of Drango, you will not shy away from miracles,” he said.

As Shan and Lokesh exchanged a glance, images flashed through Shan’s mind. Aged lamas, imprisoned most of their lives, nursing Shan’s broken mind and body back to health after he had been discarded, sent to the gulag. A Tibetan in their prison losing his foot after leaping into the path of a truck to save an injured bird. Gendun and his outlawed monks secretly working in their caves to illuminate prayer books for future generations, risking imprisonment or worse, when they could be safe in India. “Ever since I arrived in Tibet,” Shan rejoined, “I have lived from one miracle to the next.”

“
Lha gyal lo,
Victory to the gods,” Lokesh whispered, his habitual exclamation of joy. The old Tibetan extracted a small worn pocketknife from his pocket and began slicing pieces of the apple to feed to Yangke. As he worked, a little girl appeared, stepping sideways to keep Lokesh and Shan in front of her, and set a bowl of buttered tea on the slab of wood that was anchored to the wall. She placed one of the hollow reeds in it, then backed away before scampering off. Yangke looked uncertainly at his guests. At an encouraging gesture from Lokesh, he hobbled to the tray on his knees and began drinking through the reed straw.

“Tell us of the miracles of Drango village,” Shan said when he had drained the bowl.

“A sturdy, shining ferry across the ocean of existence,” Yangke declared. His playfulness was genuine but so too was the melancholy that hung over him. “The biggest miracle is our abandonment,” he continued. “Everywhere people try to forget the world but seldom does the world forget a people. We have lost all our chains.”

“Not every chain,” Shan observed.

Yangke grinned. “My imprisonment has released me. I have become a tree, and the tree has become rooted in the teachings. I watch the sheep and memorize sacred texts. On the day I am able to prostrate myself again, my body will open up like a ripened fruit and a ball of fire will shoot out.”

Shan gestured toward the shabby little village. “The temple where you acquired your learning is well hidden.”

“My temple and I,” Yangke replied acidly, “had no further use for each other.”

And that, Shan suspected, was the closest to the mark any of their arrows had landed. Although Beijing was allowing Tibet to slowly rebuild a few monasteries, one of the ways it kept control was by periodically purging the ranks of monks who threatened dissent.

“This paradise of yours had no need of a lama until a murderer struck?” Shan asked.

“This paradise I returned to,” Yangke corrected, “can barely grasp the notion of one man killing another, let alone the horrible thing that they discovered. These are things not of our making but they will be our unmaking. For all its many faults, Drango is worth preserving.”

“Just as Gendun is,” Shan declared. “We must get him away from here.” Perhaps Drango might be worth preserving but it felt like a trap to Shan.

Yangke looked toward the stable. “I have known of him for years. They call him the Pure Water Lama because he was ordained before the Dalai Lama left.”

“He is unregistered,” Shan said, “like Lokesh and me. But as a senior lama, defying the government, he is in greatest danger. A bounty has been placed on him,” Shan added with a guilty glance toward Lokesh. The only time Gendun ever chastised Shan was when Shan expressed concern for him. Before Shan had introduced him to the mysteries, and suffering, of the outside world, Gendun had not left his hidden complex of caves where he was safe. “He will not leave here of his own will now, and when Public Security comes they will seize him and make him disappear forever.”

Yangke’s face sagged.

“None of us know anyone here,” Shan continued. “Why did someone send for Gendun and Lokesh?”

“You just said it. He is an outlaw.” Yangke turned to Lokesh, who was stroking the dog’s back. “For Drango it is only safe to deal with outlaws. Is it not true that in the old days the monasteries had their own police and judges who dealt with monks who performed criminal acts?”

Lokesh leaned forward, suddenly very interested. “Senior lamas, sometimes abbots, would sentence sinners among them to penance,” he confirmed.

“The ones who died so terribly last week, they were like holy men. And they too were outlaws. Just like the one in the stable.”

The big dog rose, growling. Yangke glanced back toward the village, his muscles tensing.

“Apricots!” an eager voice called. “Fresh from the orchard!” A compact man in a tattered fox cap jogged toward them, shouting as if trying to drown out anything Yangke might be saying.

“Chodron,” Lokesh muttered. It was the
genpo
, the village headman, carrying a small basket.

Yangke struggled to his feet and turned his back on the approaching man. “Forgive me for what I have done to you,” he said to Shan and Lokesh. “And all I am going to do. Lha gyal lo,” Yangke added. Then, the dog at his side, he hurried toward the grazing sheep, staggering as he tried to keep his heavy collar balanced.

The jovial air of the headman seemed to increase when he learned Shan’s name. He pushed his square, fleshy face under the brim of Shan’s ragged hat as if to confirm that there were indeed Chinese features in its shadow. Forcing some of the fruit into Shan’s hands, gesturing for Lokesh to follow, he escorted them down, into a small shed behind the main street where three pallets were arranged on the rough plank floor. Beside Shan’s frayed backpack rested a familiar canvas sack embroidered with sacred signs that Lokesh used for journeys, and the tattered work boots Gendun wore under his robe when traveling.