Prayer of the Dragon by Eliot Pattison Read Free Book Online

forbidden anyone to go up there. He warned the villagers against disturbing the deities.”
    “Do you and Chodron share the same deities?” Shan asked, immediately shamed by the harshness of his words. He’d felt an unfamiliar surge of anger at the mention of the headman’s name. In the same perverse way that he invoked the old traditions, Chodron was seeking to use Gendun as his minion, to turn the lama’s compassion into something dark and ugly.
    Yangke contemplated Shan’s question. “What Chodron and I share is the will to survive.”
    “For some, the most difficult thing in life is knowing what they are surviving for,” Shan said, pausing over the mystery not of the killings but of Yangke. He had been born in the village and left it for a monastery, then knowingly returned to Chodron’s peculiar brand of despotism.
    Yangke did not reply.
    They watched the sheep spread out over the broad, rolling slope, the early sun washing over them, the light breeze bringing a scent of mountain flowers. Shan was falling into a languid doze when thunder suddenly boomed and the earth seemed to tremble. Several sheep bleated and trotted toward Yangke, who pointed to a plume of dust perhaps two miles away. It was not thunder that they had heard.
    As Shan watched the settling dust a new sound rose, an alien, crackling whirling that he could not identify. Yangke shouted out in warning. Sheep bleated in alarm. As Shan spun about, a man in a tattered green quilted jacket and a soldier’s helmet painted with black and yellow stripes burst around a rock on the trail, riding a bicycle. The sheep scattered in terror. Shan dove into the grass as the man sped by, laughing, waving a bundle of claim stakes over his head.
    Yangke bent and launched a well-aimed stone. Though the rider was already some distance away, it bounced off his back, raising another laugh from the man before he disappeared around an outcropping.
    “Something else new this year,” Yangke said in a low, angry voice. “They brought in two or three of those mountain bikes. After so many centuries the sheep trails crisscross the mountain like highways, worn smooth enough for those heavy bikes. The sheep hate them. I hate them.”
    Only Lokesh seemed unaffected by the sudden intrusion, and the shadow that settled onto Yangke’s face gradually lifted as he watched the old Tibetan. Lokesh had rearranged the stakes, placing them in a long line perpendicular to the stream, anchoring them with small cairns built around each base, then stringing rope from one to another. He had torn small pieces of canvas from the abandoned tarpaulin and was tying them to the rope. A grin appeared on Yangke’s face and he struggled to his feet, then went to the remains of an old campfire near the stream. Shan was at his side a moment later and saved him the trouble of bending by handing him a stub of charred wood.
    Lokesh had begun writing a series of familiar Tibetan words on the cloth scraps. He was turning the miners’ equipment into a battery of prayer flags, erected in a defensive line between the miners and Drango village.
    “Lha gyal lo,” Shan said.
    The young Tibetan silently opened and shut his mouth, as though trying to remember how to speak the words. “Lha gyal lo,” he finally repeated in a voice that cracked with emotion, then stumbled down the slope to help inscribe more flags.
    An hour later Yangke led them onto a long, wide shelf, one of the many tiers that rose like irregular steps for several miles before ending at the base of the jagged summit.
    “One of the other shepherds discovered the bodies,” Yangke explained. “They had made camp by the trees,” he said, indicating several gnarled junipers and pines that grew by a small spring, beside a series of high outcroppings that would have shielded them from anyone higher up on the slope. “He did not know about one camp but one of the dogs starting growling as if a wolf was near and then he saw a backpack lying out