Prayer of the Dragon

away her tears with the sleeve of her denim shirt and extended a hand to Shan, shyly smiling. “Some of the old Tibetans have told me there are things too important to be put into mere words,” she said in a voice husky with emotion. “I guess one of those would be how I feel about your bringing my uncle back from the dead.”

A remarkable opening from a stranger, Shan thought. But she wasn’t a stranger, he reminded himself. She was the familiar image on the video camera screen. He self-consciously accepted her hand. “The old Tibetans would say he still has a destiny in this incarnation,” he said.

Abigail replied, “Your mountain is the most beautiful and terrifying place I have ever known.”

“One thing I have not been able to figure out,” Shan replied, “is just whose mountain this is.” He almost added that sometimes it seemed that if he could only solve that mystery all the others would fall into place.

Hostene and his niece began speaking, sometimes reverting to their native tongue. Abigail showed her uncle the cozy nest of blankets among the stores of supplies where Thomas had hidden her in the inner chamber. A blue nylon backpack lying open near the door revealed a small digital camera, a plastic bag of toiletries, and half a dozen ketaan sticks.

Thomas, downcast and silent, ventured into the granary and settled onto a wooden crate near Shan. “You tricked me,” he repeated.

“You tricked all of us,” Shan rejoined.

Thomas clasped his hands together and stared at them.

Strangely, Shan felt sorry for the youth. “I still need to review your investigation notes,” he ventured, “and I still need to hear how you met her, and when. Was it with Rapaki?”

“I take things to him. Uncle Heinz thinks he’s a good-luck charm, like when a singing bird nests in your eaves. We communicate in pantomime, since I know no Tibetan.”

Shan paused. “But you speak English with Abigail?”

“Sure. Anyway, I saw him a month ago and pulled out a box of sweet biscuits to give him. He started waving in another direction, singing one of his songs. He was showing me Abigail coming up the trail. Like some kind of goddess. Who would have thought of seeing someone like her on this mountain?”

“Then you’d met her before the murders?”

Thomas nodded. “But she won’t speak about them. Maybe knowing her uncle is alive will make a difference.”

Shan asked, “Did you see her this morning?”

“Early this morning, on the way to Little Moscow.”

“You ran away from there to warn her?”

The youth nodded again. “You made sure all of the miners knew she was still alive,” Thomas pointed out.

Shan studied him, worried now. “You mean you’re convinced the killer was there, among the miners?”

“He must be,” Thomas said. “At least that’s my hypothesis. I need a credible theory or my project is a failure.”

Tears starting flowing down Abigail’s cheek as she uttered two names: Tashi and Dr. Ma. She leaned against Hostene’s shoulder again, then gasped as she gazed past Shan.

A figure had materialized in the doorway. Kohler’s hunting rifle was cradled in one of Gao’s arms, and he held one of the small radio units he used to summon soldiers from below. His face, which had at first displayed a mixture of emotions, now showed cold anger. As he neared his nephew, Abigail stepped between Gao and Thomas. “I asked him to hide me,” she said in a level voice in English. “He said he had a safe place where I could rest for a while. I said I would go only if I could remain invisible. He was trying to help me, to protect me.”

Gao studied the Navajo woman in silence, taking in her heavy hiking boots, her scuffed blue jeans, the belt pack from which ink pens protruded, the turquoise pendant hanging from her neck on a silver chain, her long braided hair, her dark, intelligent eyes, full of challenge. “Invisible?”

“I have to finish my work, for which I must stay on the western slope without being noticed.”

Gao looked past the American woman to his nephew. “You deceived us, Thomas,” he said. “You have stolen from me and from the government, which pays for everything here. For what, to be a black marketeer? To disgrace us and never be allowed back to the university?”

Abigail looked from Gao to Thomas, her quick, bright eyes taking everything in. “It was for me,” she declared. “The murderer took all my food supplies. I will gladly pay you back.”

Gao’s steady gaze shifted from his nephew to Abigail. “You misunderstand me. I refer to the goods he has been selling on the other side,” he said. Thomas cast a confused glance at Shan then, understanding, shut his eyes. There was only one way Gao could have found this out. Thomas’s other uncle had told him. Gao, still gazing at the Navajo woman, suddenly became self-conscious about the rifle. He lowered it, putting it behind him. “We have not been properly introduced, Miss Natay.”

“You are Gao Hu Bo, the most famous phantom physicist on the planet.”

Gao seemed unable to restrain his lips from momentarily curling upward. He glanced back at Thomas. “This must stop,” he said to the youth. “Everything. Keep up the playacting and I will arrange for a sergeant the size of a yak to escort you back to Beijing.” He bowed slightly to Abigail and Hostene. “If it is not inconvenient we will dine in thirty minutes. Enough time for a hot shower if you like,” he added to Abigail. Then, still awkwardly keeping the gun out of sight, he gestured Thomas and Shan to the door.

Abigail was radiant when she walked into the candlelit dining room, greeting her uncle with another long embrace and affectionate words in their tribal tongue, smiling at Shan, then asking a surprised Gao where the altar had been in the old dzong before it was converted since, as all Tibetans knew, such places had been garrisoned by warrior monks. She guided the conversation as if she were a hostess to old friends, expressing her regret at not meeting Thomas’s German uncle, entrancing Gao by describing a workshop she had once attended on the cultural aspects of space travel-Russians always insisted on bringing some form of borscht into space, Americans always wanted more privacy in the living quarters. She looked forward to seeing what the Chinese would introduce to the mélange. Gao was fascinated by the theories behind Abigail’s work on the mountain, though quick to point out what a simple thing it should be to compare the writings, the social structure, the dress, and even architecture of the two peoples.

“By definition, that is impossible,” Abigail explained. “The Tibetans became a sedentary civilization long ago. For thousands of years my people were nomads, until only two centuries ago. What I am trying to reconstruct is the prototype, the people who existed before the split, then postulate what would happen once they split, one developing printing, colleges, the substantial social structure that is possible in a fixed and fertile geography while the other, nomadic for centuries, was unable to develop printed books or even a written language, unable to develop a substantial social structure beyond the family unit because they never stayed in one place long enough. It is as if a planet left the gravitational field of a solar system. How do you prove the lost planet once belonged to it?”

Gao seemed to be in his element, offering other analogies from the physical sciences, observing the coincidence that both peoples had settled on the highest plateaus of their respective continents.

“So you are building a model of the Tibetans ten or fifteen thousand years ago,” Shan recapitulated.

“Exactly. Professor Ma and I were developing one. The original people were fierce soldiers. They were deeply philosophical. They were resourceful, adapting to severe environments, and not just in a physical sense. They interacted with earth and sky in a primal way.”

“Spirit warriors,” Shan suggested.

Abigail nodded. “You begin to understand,” she said, and described the reasons she suspected the early Tibetans did not distinguish between physical and spiritual endurance.

Gao studied them both with an expression of curiosity, then excused himself for a moment, bringing back a small cardboard box. “I believe this belongs to you,” he told Abigail.

It was the golden beetle. Abigail, unable to contain her gratitude, grabbed Gao’s hand in both of hers and, as he blushed, pumped it up and down. She explained that it was a family heirloom, a protective charm made by a Spanish artisan for an ancestor who was one of her people’s holy men in the eighteenth century, handed down to his daughter and the first daughter of each generation thereafter. To daughters, because the Navajo were a matriarchal society and the corn beetle was a symbol of fertility.

As Thomas asked to examine the beetle Abigail praised him as demonstrating the intellectual energy of a