Prayer of the Dragon

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.