“But you acted as if you didn’t know who was camped here, or what they were doing,” Shan pointed out, speaking Tibetan now.
“I didn’t,” Yangke rejoined. “Not exactly. Tashi would not let me get close to the camp. He wouldn’t tell what his customers were doing.”
“He called them customers?”
Yangke nodded. “He told me they were professors, interested in old things.”
“You said they were holy men. You said they made a sandpainting.”
“They did. They cleaned shrines and made sandpaintings. What was I to think? All the professors in Tibet once were lamas.” The young Tibetan looked away. “I didn’t send for Lokesh and Gendun because of Tashi. I sent for them because of what Chodron says he is going to do to Hostene. I’m not sure the village could survive if he ever. .” His voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.
“You sent for them?” Shan clarified.
Yangke nodded.
“He was lying beside me on top of his sleeping bag that night,” Hostene continued, bracing himself against the rock face. “I do remember something else. Just before I passed out, he groaned. I think he tried to speak but his mouth seemed to be full of water.”
Shan saw Thomas’s photographs in his mind’s eye. A blade had sliced into the younger victim’s back. His lungs had probably filled with blood. He asked Yangke, “Why would Chodron hide Tashi’s identity? Why would he keep it from the villagers?”
“Because of Dolma, Tashi’s aunt. My great aunt.”
A melancholy sigh escaped Lokesh’s lips. “Dolma,” he declared.
Yangke gazed at the ground. “I was hoping he had just run away. There were two bodies.” He cast a guilty glance toward Hostene. “It didn’t necessarily mean one was Tashi. I don’t know how I will tell her.”
Hostene’s sad gaze drifted along the horizon. “As I fell asleep Tashi was talking about how some of the old ones in his village felt this was the most important mountain in all the world. He just knew bits and pieces of the tale. He said no one still alive knew the whole truth. He said dragons and gods, like lamas, were becoming extinct and this was where they were making their last stand. He said if we were lucky we might meet the gods. I think he was a little drunk. But when I awoke, in that stable, with Gendun bending over me and my head still swimming, I thought that’s where I was, in the gods’ hidden home.”
“The words you spoke then to Gendun, what were they?”
“They just came out. I didn’t think them first, if you know what I mean. It was an old prayer to a Navajo mountain god.”
They walked together around the site, staying away from the outcropping where the mutilated bodies had been found. “Did you ever encounter the miners?” Shan asked.
“Never up close. We tried to stay away from them, though I often felt we were being watched. Tashi spoke with them and made sure they knew we meant them no harm. He warned us before we arrived that we would have to avoid them at all costs. He spoke of them as if they were some kind of wild animals that only he could tame.”
Shan extracted the pieces of the carved stick figure from his pocket and handed them to Hostene. The Navajo nodded somberly, as he fit the two pieces together. “It’s called a ketaan,” he explained, his voice filling with emotion, dropping to a near whisper. “An offering figure, always made of wood from the east side of the tree. Used in some of my people’s ceremonies. Abigail would leave them at the base of the old paintings, as a token, as a way of thanking the deities for letting her study them. She asked me to make four the night before, one for each of us, for protection.”
“I don’t understand,” Shan said. “A professor compiling a scientific report doesn’t stop to thank the gods.”
“We started out to make a scientific investigation,” Hostene said. “We never spoke of how that changed after we arrived. One day I started carving a ketaan, the way my father had shown me many years ago. That night, Abigail said if the key to her work was in the ways of reverence then she would never find it without reverence.”
Shan left Hostene staring at the little broken figure. He paced slowly through the camp again, stopping after every two or three steps, examining the slope above and the grass below as he considered Hostene’s words. What had he missed? He wandered toward the stream. He had examined everything, everything but the one surviving stone cairn on the far side of the stream, the only intact one he had seen. Stepping across the narrow waterway, he circled the cairn. It was old, yet not old. The rocks were all lichen covered, but only on the bottom tiers had the lichen grown together, binding the stones. The upper stones showed ragged pieces of lichen that had been pulled apart. With a guilty glance toward his companions Shan begin dismantling the cairn.
He had removed nearly every stone except the old ones at the base when he discovered a piece of folded felt that showed no signs of age. He gingerly extracted it, laid it on the ground, and began unfolding it. It had been carefully arranged, with multiple folds, to hold multiple objects. After unfolding three layers, pieces of parchment appeared, eight in all, each in a separate fold, each inscribed with a prayer. In the final fold were eight small nuggets of gold.
“We didn’t like to take the cairns apart,” Hostene said over his shoulder. “When we did it felt as if we were opening an old tomb. The hidden fabric usually fell apart in our hands, so we always put in new cloth before restoring the cairn.”
Shan considered Hostene’s words a moment. “You mean you opened cairns in order to examine the old prayers inside?”
The Navajo, kneeling beside him, nodded. “Professor Ma and Abigail were making records of old prayers, some of them centuries old by her calculations. She said if we weren’t going to meet any of the old gods, this would be the next best thing. Excavating the deities, she called it. She took photos of the prayers. It felt like we were intruding, but she said it had to be done, it was vital to her work. Some bore symbols. Some bore left-turning swastikas.” He stretched the felt out on the grass. “Tashi said it was all right as long as we respected the old prayers. And Abigail said we must never betray any interest in the gold.”
“But you weren’t looking for gold.”
“Not exactly,” Hostene said. “But Tashi said up here, you can’t separate the gods from the gold.” Shan searched his face for an explanation, but the Navajo was finished.
The others arrived. Lokesh reverently straightened out each prayer in its fold of cloth. Yangke picked up an exposed nugget of gold, then quickly put it down, surveying the slope with nervous eyes. They watched in silence as Lokesh refolded the cloth, then all four joined in rebuilding the cairn around it.
“Did you have a hammer?” Shan asked. “A rock hammer?”
Hostene nodded. “Somewhere in the camp. We had used it that day.” He looked up at Shan in alarm. “The corpse they found today. He was killed with a hammer.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Shan said. “That farmer’s head was struck after he was dead. And not with a hammer. A rock was probably used.”
Beside them, Lokesh was drawing in the dirt again, a sketch of the fern pattern on the man’s back. “Is this a Bon thing?” he asked no one in particular.
“What it is,” Shan finally explained, “is proof that the man was killed by lightning. It doesn’t happen often, even when lightning strikes, but nothing else causes it. It’s called a Lichtenberg figure, something I studied years ago. If anyone had bothered to look, they would have seen that his belt buckle was partially melted. When the farmer left the village he was carrying a heavy iron blade.”
“But you. .,” Yangke began, but seemed uncertain how to end his sentence.
“Didn’t tell anyone? If I had, Hostene would still be imprisoned in the stable. And we may learn more if we keep the riddle to ourselves.”