Hostene grimaced, but he led the way to a small clearing surrounded by trees. It took Shan only moments to realize he had seen this shrine before. It was the place on the video where Abigail had passed arm and leg bones to someone who spoke English. The painting was the biggest he had yet seen on the mountain, or would have been, had it not been systematically destroyed by the blows of a hammer. Circular indentations were still visible on several pieces of plaster that had resisted. The surviving fragments showed a graceful shoulder here, the eye of a bull there. But between these fragments something new had been revealed. The destruction of the fresco had exposed a much older painting on the rock beneath it, the faded image of a god with a dragon’s head.
“Did she know about this older image underneath?” Shan wondered out loud.
“She couldn’t have,” Hostene said hesitantly. “In any case she would never have destroyed the fresco.”
“But she kept coming back, as if the key to something was here,” Shan reminded him. “Maybe the painting underneath the blue bull is the real key.” He examined the small panels of robed men and demons wearing human skins that formed a frame around the central deity, the dragon-headed god.
“She sat here,” Hostene said, indicating a flat rock, the one Shan had seen in the video. “Filming every detail of the fresco, that day we waited for Ma.”
Shan looked up. “You came here, the day the mine blew up?”
“Yes. Why?”
“What did she do when Ma returned?”
“She became very quiet when he told her what happened. Then, suddenly, she put on her pack and told us to go back to camp and to stay there.”
“Where did she go?”
“I watched. She went in a new direction, where I had never been.” He turned and gestured. “There.” He was indicating the steep black ridge they had just run from. Shan had not forgotten the description he had heard from the fleeing miner. When the mine blew up, Abigail had gone to “the ridge of the ghosts”.
Their troubled silence was interrupted a moment later by another of the spiraling red rockets. They turned and ran.
Several minutes later they peered over a shelf of rock at the lower slope. Men were jogging below them toward Little Moscow. It would be a perfect victory for Chodron if the miners took revenge on the two men the village headman most wanted out of his life.
Shan asked, “What do they call it in those American western movies when angry citizens trap a suspected criminal?”
“A lynch mob,” Hostene replied grimly as he pointed out another set of miners working their way along the slope to the south. Shan pointed toward the summit and began climbing.
It was early evening when they reached his destination, the maze of shattered boulders and broken rock slabs that led to Gao’s fortress. Hostene collapsed onto a rock, gulping from the water bottle he pulled from his pack. The Navajo, though in remarkable shape for his age, had reached his limit. “I thought we would take shelter in the hermit’s cave,” he said.
“We would have endangered Lokesh, Yangke, and the hermit,” Shan said.
Hostene slowly nodded then gazed guiltily at the empty bottle in his hand. “Was that the last of the water?” In his frantic flight Shan had left his pack behind.
“No matter,” Shan said. “There are springs nearby.” But he had no idea when they would be able to walk safely out onto the slope again. On this side of the mountain a mob of angry miners was searching for them. A lynch mob. And despite their frantic hours since entering Little Moscow that morning Thomas’s whispered warning had never totally left Shan’s mind. If Shan ventured to the other side he was to be shot on sight.
Wearily they climbed through the maze, then crawled into the small gap under a stone slab that had tumbled from the top, finding a niche sheltered deep in the debris that afforded a clear view of the sky overhead. Shan helped Hostene arrange his blanket against the wall and, as the light faded, shared the only food they had left, half a dozen kernels of dried cheese.
“What Bing said about me wasn’t exactly the way of it.” Hostene’s voice was aimed toward the stars. “I wasn’t stealing. It was for Abigail.” In a near whisper he explained that his niece had been convinced that the ancient mine they had discovered had to be kept secret from the miners. On an old stone altar near the entrance to the mine, under an overhanging rock, they had seen a copper statue of an old god. It had been hollow, in the traditional style, with offerings inside and what sounded like small stones when they’d picked it up.
“Gold,” Shan suggested.
“Ma and Tashi were certain of it. The first day we were there they left a little offering on the altar. After that, we all did. But the copper statue was stolen one night.”
“I thought the place was a secret.”
“It was supposed to be. Tashi was very distressed. He emptied his pockets and put everything on the altar as if to appease the gods, then when the sun went down he took me to a miners’ camp about a mile away. The miners were asleep. I turned on my flashlight and saw the old statue. When I dashed in to take it, one of the men woke up. He fired a pistol at me. I kept running. But when I reached a safe place and could look, I saw that the back of the statue had been pried open with a chisel. It was empty. The old prayers that would have been inside must have been burned. I didn’t steal any gold. But that’s what they thought I was trying to do.”
“How much later was the mine struck by lightning?”
“Two days later.”
Hostene said no more as he moved about trying to find a comfortable sleeping position.
Bing. Bing was the one who had declared Hostene a thief, and Bing’s hand had reflexively reached for a pistol in his belt. But why, after finding out about the old mine, would he destroy it? Why destroy a depleted mine?
When Shan leaned back, he meant to close his eyes for only a minute or two. But when he opened them it was night, and he could hear Hostene’s heavy regular breathing. Pulling the blanket around the Navajo’s shoulders, he crawled out of their shelter, quietly backtracked, then climbed up one of the leaning slabs to the top of the chasm wall, following its edge in the moonlight to where it opened onto the main slope. He dropped and crawled the last twenty feet then, lying on his belly.
A mile away, toward Little Moscow, lay the long black hulk of the ridge that jutted to the west, the haunted ridge where skeletons gathered around a grave. That afternoon vultures had hung over the ridge. Two days before, a farmer had died there, struck by lightning. Why had he been there? He must have been following someone at Chodron’s order, since no one went up there voluntarily because of the ghosts. No one but Abigail Natay.
It was the hour when Lokesh said the wind scoured the last light from the bowl of the sky, revealing with each gust another hundred stars. A thin silver ribbon, the closest stream, wound its way across the blackened slope a quarter mile away. A bright speck appeared near the horizon, a planet. And another on the ground, a fire. Half a mile below them, a camp had been laid out. The fire, rapidly growing, was much bigger than the miners would need for cooking. It was a warning. Or was it a distraction? Their pursuers sought to lull them into thinking they had stopped for the night but, as he watched, a pair of men were silhouetted against the silver reflection of the stream. Fortunately, they had none of the skills of the old Tibetan wolf hunters who could blend invisibly with the night shadows.
A goat bolted across the shadows, running hard from an outcropping, away from the pair of men Shan had seen. No doubt another pair of searchers lurked near the outcropping. The miners were systematically sweeping the slope above Little Moscow. If they found nothing they would begin searching the gullies in the morning, one by one, sealing each with a guard as they did so. Bing had learned well from his years in the Public Security Bureau.