Eliot Pattison - Prayer of the Dragon

“What is he doing?” Shan saw that Hostene had gone to Abigail’s side and been replaced by Gao.

Rapaki folded his tattered robe carefully. Advancing halfway down the slab that extended over the fissure, he dropped it into the hole. The robe fell only a little way down, then was lifted in an updraft, floating in the air fifteen feet, then twenty feet above them, rising, unfolding, appearing like a phantom monk hovering above them.

“The rope,” Shan said quietly to Gao. “Perhaps he could be tied.” The scientist offered a hesitant nod, looking uneasily at the still-hovering robe, and jogged toward the cavern.

As Gao retreated, Rapaki produced a scrap of folded leather from his waistband, unfolded it, and poured its contents into his hand. Pollen. The hermit was sprinkling pollen on his head. Shan reached into his pocket and lifted the little piece of gold he had found below, extending it on his palm. Rapaki saw it, glanced back and forth from the fissure to Shan, then stepped forward and with a small nod accepted the gold from Shan.

“Lha gyal lo,” Shan whispered. He raised his left hand to a forty-five-degree angle, his palm downward, his forefinger down, tucked under his thumb.

Rapaki looked more serene than Shan had ever seen him. “Lha gyal lo,” the hermit repeated in a scratchy voice as he studied Shan’s hand and nodded again. He dropped Shan’s gold into the pilgrim’s bag, then stepped to the end of the slab. As he did so, the wind ebbed and the robe slowly floated down. Rapaki held out the bag at arm’s length, speaking words Shan could not hear, and dropped it into the fissure.

Shan saw no actual movement by the hermit. It was as if the wind simply reached out for him. One moment he was on the slab, watching his bag drop, the next he was in the void, following it, passing his robe as it fluttered downward. His mantra seemed to grow louder as he fell. Shan could still hear it after he dropped from sight, leaving only his robe, empty, floating gently into the shadows.

He did not know how long he stared into the fissure. When he turned, Gao and Hostene were at the altar, anger on their faces, as if Shan had cheated them of something.

“What was that you did with your hand?” Gao asked.

“It was nothing,” Shan said. But it was something. Shan had finally understood everything, and the only thing he could offer was the abhaya mudra, the hand gesture known as Bestowing Refuge.

“He had a bag,” Hostene said. “Why did he take that old bag?”

Shan looked at the Navajo. He could see in his eyes that Hostene understood but needed to hear it said aloud. “His offering. The deity he prayed to seemed to favor necklaces of body parts.”

“The hands,” Gao murmured.

“I tried to stop him, tried to get the evidence,” a new voice said from behind them-Kohler. “But he hit me and tied me up.”

Shan studied the items Rapaki had left on the altar. An agate dzi bead, a traditional good-luck charm. A small silver incense case. And, still in the cloth pouch, something hard and lumpy that Shan recognized from its feel. He handed the pouch to Hostene.

“The beetle!” Hostene exclaimed. It was Abigail’s golden beetle.

Hostene followed as Shan moved to the end of the slab where the hermit had jumped. The Navajo pointed to a small ledge fifty feet below, then another deeper, and another to the side. The first held a rag, a piece of clothing caught in a crack in the rock. The other two held small yellow rocks.

“It’s where the gold went, isn’t it?” Hostene said, “the missing gold. All these centuries, they just brought it up to the bayal.”

Shan nodded as Gao and Kohler approached. “It’s the best use of gold, the old Tibetans always thought. To praise the deities.”

Hostene offered a sad, reverent nod. “It’s over. He’ll kill no more.”

“Not in this world,” Kohler said. Then, remembering Abigail, he turned and jogged back to the cavern.

Gao watched the German for a moment. “Heinz returned yesterday,” he explained to Shan. “He had the helicopter leave him here when he discovered I had been dropped near the summit. He was already here when Rapaki arrived with Abigail, and quickly understood what had happened.” The physicist studied the altar a moment, then gazed into the blackness below. “How does it happen? How does a holy man become deranged?”

“Perhaps the real miracle of modern Tibet,” Shan replied, “is that they are not all like that.”

They were reluctant to move Abigail immediately, and decided to make camp inside the shallow cavern. There was no wood for a fire but the goat trails around the summit were littered with dried dung. Kohler and Hostene set off to gather fuel in a bandanna as Yangke sat with Abigail, a makeshift blindfold over his eyes, his hand cradling Abigail’s as she slept. Probing the back of the cavern, Shan gleaned from the shadows a small iron bowl and two cracked ceramic jars with dried grease inside, butter lamps abandoned long ago.

Soon they had a bowl filled with rainwater simmering with leaf tips. As the tea brewed, Hostene investigated the contents of his niece’s pack. There were four feathered spirit sticks, two little ketaan figures, even some flower heads stuffed into a plastic bag for their pollen. Hostene held up her journal, pointing out several new pages of writing, describing newly discovered shrines but nothing more, nothing about their ascent of the summit, nothing from the days since Thomas had been killed. But then her uncle pointed to where the writing stopped. A dozen pages had been torn out of her precious book.

As she drank her tea, Abigail stirred from her trance slowly, finally holding the warm bowl in both hands herself, rocking back and forth in front of the little fire, staring into her tea. Hostene sat beside her, watching with worried eyes.

“Lha gyal lo,” she said, looking only at Shan, then leaned against her uncle’s shoulder, looking now like a tired and frightened schoolgirl.

“It’s altitude sickness,” Kohler explained. “I’ve seen it many times. The symptoms vary. Sometimes, when the brain swells, the victim loses all sense of reality. He or she might be capable of anything, I guess.” He turned to Gao. “I will go to bring back help.”

“No, Heinz,” Gao said. He had hardly taken his gaze from the chasm since Rapaki had flung himself into it. “We are a blind man, an injured woman, and two old men. We need you and Shan with us for the descent. Only two of the staffs are left. We’ll need them both for the final climb down that chain.”

“Old? You and Hostene? Men of iron don’t get old, even if they corrode around the edges.”

Gao was not interested in glib rejoinders. “We need rest. As you have reminded us, the altitude alone can kill if we are not careful. As for the monk who died, I can’t help but wonder if words should be said.”

“Words?” Kohler shot back. “For a bloodthirsty killer? What do you think he had in that damned bag? He wasn’t taking sweets to his heathen gods. Whatever Thomas was missing was-” The sentence faded as the German saw Gao’s brittle expression. “OK,” he said. “Right. I’ll stay.”

“You don’t understand Rapaki,” came a low, dry voice. It was Yangke, blindfolded, speaking. “He tried hard at first to understand what being a monk meant, but he had no teachers. It is as if he had been asleep for years, fighting through nightmares, and this was the day he finally woke up.”

No one replied. A single tear rolled down Abigail’s cheek. She did not speak, did not offer any explanation, did not look up from her tea again. Hostene hovered near her, his face dark with worry and foreboding.

In the afternoon they tried to sleep. Shan, knowing he would never find slumber, helped Yangke to Hostene’s side, and left the camp with the bandanna to gather more fuel. They weren’t going anywhere that day and it would be a long cold night. He probed each goat trail, many of which petered out into tiny ledges, inches wide, along rock faces impassable for humans. He climbed toward the summit, noting for the first time a small shelf that overlooked both the east and west slopes. Something on it flashed in the sunlight, and he ducked for cover for a moment before warily advancing. He was perhaps two hundred feet away when he recognized it for what it was, and shrank back. Two small shiny solar panels were attached to a metal box with two six-foot poles rising out of it, all camoflauged with gray paint to blend with the rocks. He had stumbled upon a radio relay station for the army base below.