get the three of you out of here before sunrise.”
Shan considered the problem only briefly. “What time do your workers arrive?” he asked.
AN HOUR BEFORE dawn, Gao switched on the light in his office and walked purposefully to the window, pointing to the blush of pink in the eastern sky as Shan, then Hostene and Yangke appeared beside him. He gestured toward a table that had been positioned near the window, then closed shut the filmy inner curtain and sat with them. The office manager appeared with a tea tray.
They waited several minutes, talking and gesturing broadly before signaling for the first of three early-arriving workers who were squatting along the wall. Shan rose, approached the wall as if to look at a picture, then flattened himself against it and sidled out of the room. The first worker took his place at the table. Soon the three of them were outside.
Shan watched from the deep shadows until the nearest watcher lit a cigarette with a match, destroying his night vision. Shan motioned to his friends and they headed to the soccer stadium. Soon they were airborne. Shan was ready to wake the dragon.
Chapter Eleven
The fields that had fed the inhabitants of Drango village their entire lives were black and barren. In the charred fields, they crouched on their hands and knees to glean a few intact kernels, sometimes finding an entire seed head that had survived the flames. Their hands and faces were covered with soot, and with their desolate expressions they seemed to be wearing the masks Shan had seen used in ritual plays portraying fleshless puppets of the dead.
Yangke ventured into the village. He returned with a warning that Shan should not seek out Lokesh and Gendun. The villagers were still dazed by the catastrophe that had struck their village, and the only thing they knew for certain was that their troubles had started when Shan and the other outsiders arrived. Gendun was now under double guard because Lokesh and Dolma had tried to move him.
“To where?”
“I don’t know. Away, out of the village,” Yangke replied. “They had him on a litter, but weren’t even able to carry him past the fields. If Dolma wasn’t an elder, Chodron would have had her caned too.”
“Was Lokesh caned?” The words seemed to choke Shan.
Yangke slowly nodded. “Thirty strokes of Chodron’s bamboo rod. He demanded to know where you were.” Yangke restrained Shan, who had taken a step toward the village. “He’s not there. I couldn’t find Lokesh or Dolma. But they said he is all right, that he hardly seemed to notice the cane, that he-”
“-recited a mantra and looked toward the sky as he took the beating,” Shan finished in a hoarse whisper. How many times had he seen it before, in their prison camp? Forty? Fifty? At times Lokesh had difficulty bending, because of all the scar tissue.
“Chodron is furious. His generator is broken. He has no radio contact. He keeps hounding the man who is trying to fix it. Everyone is afraid of him and his men. They’re hiding from him.”
Shan had seen the headman observing when the helicopter left them on the slope above the fields. He must have thought Gao was still with them or he would have rounded them up.
“And Gendun?”
“He sits in Dolma’s house, reciting the death rites when he has the strength. For Thomas. For Tashi. For Professor Ma. The villagers took the farmer who died to the fleshcutters. They asked Chodron who killed him. But he told them they must wait until the festival. No words have been recited by the dead farmer’s family. They know if they perform any act of devotion, Chodron will punish Gendun.”
Shan’s throat was so dry he had trouble speaking. “You saw Lokesh?”
“No. He and Dolma must be locked inside too.” Yangke recognized the furious expression that crossed Shan’s face. “Dolma will have ointments for Lokesh’s back. He will be safe. You can’t go down there.” Yangke scanned the slope above them with a worried expression.
“Hostene has started climbing,” Shan explained. “He wants to be alone. He knows where to meet us.” Shan stood, slung his pack over his shoulder, and starting walking. After half a dozen steps he paused and looked over his shoulder. Yangke had not moved.
“You are going to seek out ghosts,” Yangke said.
“Someone once asked Lokesh what I do,” Shan said. “He told the man I am a confessor of ghosts. It’s the best description I have ever heard. In my experience the only people who can be relied upon always to tell the truth are the dead.”
When they arrived at their destination it was late afternoon. The hermit Rapaki was not in his cave. There was no sign that he had been there since he’d fled during their first visit. Hostene had lit a small fire and balanced one of the hermit’s battered saucepans on two rocks to boil water. Shan could see the Navajo scanning the mountainside. Every hour that passed brought his niece closer to death. He had urged that the helicopter drop them off as high up the mountain as possible. Shan had resisted, explaining that they could not risk being spotted by the miners in Little Moscow or spooking the killer.
Shan lowered himself against a rock at the mouth of the cave and found himself blinking away sleep. A warm southern breeze carried the scent of gentians. A bird warbled from a grove of junipers. When he awoke, less than an hour of daylight was left. Soup was cooking. Somewhere behind him, in the dim cave, Yangke was whispering the soft syllables of a mantra. Hostene sat on an outcropping, watching another of Abigail’s videotapes.
When Shan entered the cave, Yangke ignored him. Had Rapaki returned? Shan lit a butter lamp and squeezed through the narrow opening that led to the chamber the hermit used for refuse. The chaos of trash and stores was gone. Someone had cleared the central part of the room, arranging the debris into piles in the two far corners. For the first time Shan saw that the floor had been painted, probably centuries earlier. There were faint broken lines of color, tiny staggered ovals that led from the eastern wall, defining a wide circle at first, then spiraling inward in a counterclockwise direction, making six-no, eight-ever smaller loops until it ended among images that had been recently ravaged. Since his last visit someone had destroyed the center, roughly hacking at the floor with chisel and hammer, leaving only a few colored shards that offered no clue as to what the focal images had been.
Ovals. Hubei’s brother had learned how to use the video camera so he could film ovals on a fresco Abigail could not reach. Shan explored every inch remaining of the strange pattern, following it outward now, discovering that the outer lines of marks did not exactly form a circle. The outer ring of the circle was broken. Two lines bent and climbed the adjoining wall. With his dim light Shan followed the lines upward. They each ended over his head in jagged shapes that looked like lightning bolts. Here, on the wall in front of him, the oval shapes were best preserved. He held the lamp against the wall and realized the little marks weren’t exactly ovals; they were more like plump figure eights. Footprints. The lines were made up of symbolic footprints. Abigail had been here, had probably helped clean the cave in order to study the old signs on the floor. She had found a map of the pilgrim’s path. This was the place of beginning-for pilgrims, for Abigail, probably for the killer. And now for Shan and his friends.
He followed the ovals back down the wall, unable to make sense of them. Then he stepped back to survey the faded characters on the wall as a group. They were all demons, the most fearful members of the Tibetan pantheon-not protector demons but the devils that had been integral to Bon belief long before the Buddhist saints had reached Tibet. They were the flesh-eating, fanged devils who wore skulls around their necks. The style of the paintings was like none he had ever seen in Tibet, crude yet powerful. But if Abigail was correct in her hypothesis, he should expect to see images unlike any found elsewhere. He followed the spiraling footprints, pausing at each of the demons along the way. When he reached the ruined centerpiece he gazed up, as confused as ever. There was no correlation to the mountain, no connection to the geography outside. It was simply a map to hell.
He took out the tiny piece of plaster he had been carrying with him since his first visit to Little Moscow, when he had been thrust against the fresco. He laid it beside the rows of ovals and walked around it, considering the ever-shifting pieces of the puzzle of the Sleeping Dragon, then studied the lines that led to the images on the wall, trying to identify the demons depicted based on their similarities to more modern images. There was a black bull that no doubt signified the Lord of Death, another signified suffering, others delusion and the impermanence of life. It was a map of the kora, though not a literal map.
