Prayer of the Dragon

Natay, but not the careful, patient Abigail. This was an urgent, insistent voice. The camera had been set down but it had not been shut off.

“This has to be done tonight,” Abigail said. “I finished most of it this afternoon. You know what to do, where to put it?”

“Yes, if I must,” came a whispered, fearful reply. The man sounded young. He spoke in slow but confident English. He had pulled the camera closer. Abigail appeared, sitting on the rock, her shoulder and one side of her face visible. Long shadows fell across her arm and the rock-strewn ground beside her.

“Take this,” Abigail said, almost apologetically. As she turned to lift something from behind her Shan glimpsed her front pocket. He pushed the rewind button and found the moment when she turned, then froze the image, staring at it in confusion. Pinned to her shirt pocket was a paper talisman, in Chinese, reminiscent of a charm to guard against evil spirits. It brought the superstitions of his childhood back to him. He studied the ideograph on the paper. It was not a protective charm, he realized. It was a prayer for the soul of one who has been killed by violence, to help it avoid one of the many hells that such victims were susceptible to.

It made no sense. Hostene had said Abigail could not speak Chinese. She was not there to study Chinese traditions. But then, as he studied the rest of the scenes, nothing made sense. Nothing happened that could be explained by anything he had learned thus far on the mountain. Abigail began extending things toward her invisible companion. First, she handed a small nugget of gold to the man who remained offscreen. Then, from the shadows on her opposite side, she lifted four more items, which she dangled in front of her unknown companion with an expression that chilled Shan. Two sets of bones, two humerus bones fastened to two ulnas, then two femurs fastened to two tibias, each set connected with what appeared to be shoelaces through holes bored at the ends of each bone. Two arms, two legs, as if she were constructing a skeleton.

“I can’t,” the man moaned.

“You will,” Abigail insisted. “We have to do this together or all is lost. There is a war on this mountain and you have to chose sides.”

After a long pause, the man said, “First tell me how many sides there are.”

Abigail offered a sympathetic smile but did not reply. “Think of your family. Think of the old ones,” she said. Then, impossibly, “Think of Eight Treasures in a Winter Melon.” Surely he had heard wrong. The words described a traditional dish favored by China’s gourmets, eight special ingredients cooked in broth, then poured into a hollowed melon.

“They’ve starting putting out other things, on sticks. The blood drips down into pools,” the man said.

Shan’s mouth went dry. He replayed and replayed the exchange again. The sound from the tiny speaker was poor but he dared not raise the volume while Hostene was nearby.

That was the end of it. Abigail moved offscreen. Shan saw nothing but rocks and dirt and then, as the shadows shifted, the sandal-clad foot of a deity. He fast-forwarded the tape. There was nothing but empty blueness, until the tape ran out. He stared at the blank screen, shut off the camera, and silently returned it to Hostene before gesturing him toward the gully.

They had just turned onto the main trail when a high-pitched cry brought them to an abrupt halt. A figure on a red bike hurtled around a rock. The hood of a black sweatshirt covering his face, one hand was on the handlebars, the other swung a five-foot-long pole.

In an instant, the faceless man was aiming at Hostene’s head. The Navajo twisted and leaped. The club landed a glancing blow on his shoulder as he dropped to the ground. Shan stumbled as he ran to help Hostene, and with a kind of war cry the man struck Shan’s knee with his front tire, barely missing Hostene’s head with the pole. Shan pulled the Navajo up, shoving him toward rocky ground where the bicycle could not follow, then grabbed a short stick from the ground. He waited for the rider, feinted one way, ducked to avoid the savage swing of the pole, then shoved the stick into the rear wheel as the man passed.

The effect was exactly as he had hoped. The stick caught in the spokes, stopping the bike so abruptly the rider flew over the handlebars.

“Cao ni ma! Fuck your mother!” the man spat in Chinese as he hit the ground. Seeing that his prey had left the trail, he lifted the bike in two hands and threw it toward them before fumbling for something in his pocket.

Shan did not linger to see what sort of weapon he had. He grabbed Hostene and dashed behind a boulder, watching as the man recovered his bicycle and rode away.

As they waited to be sure their attacker was gone, Hostene replaced the videotape with another from his pack and they sat by a bubbling spring, watching a second tape on the camera. On it Abigail described how sacred mountains anchored the Tibetan gods, much as they did in the Navajo belief system. After several minutes the screen abruptly went black. Hostene looked as if he had been struck. He had lost Abigail for a second time. “Battery,” he muttered, and silently stowed the camera in his pack.

The sun was nearly gone, and Shan was fixing the location of the next grove of trees in his mind so they might reach it in the dark, when a sleek gray shape swooped across their path. He paused a moment to admire the creature and walked on, before realizing that Hostene was not following.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The owl. It’s an omen. We must make camp.”

“I can find the way to the next grove,” Shan countered. “I can. .” But seeing the way Hostene stared at the patch of sky where the owl had disappeared, he silently began to gather fuel for a fire.

As they arranged their blankets under an overhanging ledge, Shan asked why the American military had taught Hostene Mandarin. His companion explained that the Navajo were often considered linguists because usually they were raised speaking two languages, that sometimes, as in World War II, the army still assigned the Navajo to speak their native tongue in combat zones in lieu of a code. But Hostene had gone to language school during the Vietnam War to enable him to serve on planes that took off from the United States, refueled in Guam, and patrolled the Chinese coast, monitoring Chinese radio broadcasts.

“You must think me an old fool,” Hostene said as they lit their fire. “A lawyer and a judge, frightened by a little gray owl.”

Shan said, as he pulled out some of the cold mutton dumplings Dolma had packed, “The only fools are those who do not obey what their hearts tell them. I often made camp with Lokesh because he thought he saw a face in a rock or believed a pika was trying to tell him something.”

“It’s not exactly that I”-Hostene struggled for words-“I never. . it’s just that here we are on the sacred mountain with my niece trying to connect with the sacred things and. .” He shrugged. “To our old ones, an owl was a harbinger of death.”

“Whether we do it for the old ones or for Abigail or for the owl or because my legs ache,” Shan replied, “this is where we will make camp.”

Hostene smiled gratefully. “We don’t do well with death, my people. For centuries we lived in hogans, round houses made of logs and earth. If someone died in a house it was abandoned and a new hogan built. Ghosts were to be avoided at all costs. My father would undergo a purification rite whenever an owl flew close to him. He said otherwise someone in the family would die.

“When my sister was dying, she talked to Abigail about her birth, things that her mother said she must know. Abigail wasn’t born in a hospital like she’d always thought, but in a hogan. They never mentioned it before because when she was a teenager, they realized she would have been embarrassed. An old singer was there to bless her first breath. The first thing she tasted was corn pollen mixed with water, to make sure the holy people were aware of her and blessed her too. They used a special cradleboard for her, one that had been in our family for ten generations. Then, when she laughed, we had a welcoming ceremony.”

“Laughed?”

“It is our old way. You know a baby is truly a human, and that it will live, when it laughs out loud. A feast is held and gifts are given by the parents to all their friends, especially rock salt, to honor Salt Woman, one of our Holy People. Special amulets were given to Abigail as an infant, which she was to keep all her life. A small pouch with soil from each of our sacred mountains, small stones from secret places, other things no one may speak about.”

Hostene searched the dark sky and shivered, pulled his blanket over his shoulders. “But when she was young, maybe five or six, a terrible thing happened. Her family was visiting that same old singer, the hataali. When they were outside she found his sacred objects used in the ceremonies. She put his ceremonial