They halted at a narrow canyon intersected by half a dozen trails, each with a small painting of a demon at its entrance.
“Which one?” Yangke asked in a chagrined voice. “We could lose hours going down false trails.”
But Hostene pointed to the flat face of a boulder on which images had recently been drawn in chalk. He dropped to his knees in front of the drawings. “She has done the work for us,” he said. He began to explain how his niece had been trying to correlate Navajo symbols with the primitive symbols on the paintings at the trailheads.
“But what does it mean?” Yangke asked.
“Hunchback God,” Hostene said, and looked up. “The mountain goat god, that was the last one she drew, as if that was the explanation she sought.”
Shan walked in a semicircle along the trailheads. “Only one of these shows goat tracks,” he reported. Taking that trail, they soon reached another pilgrim station, with a small waterfall and beds of moss marked recently by boots.
Where the trail was obvious ahead Hostene pressed forward alone. On a sun-bleached rock with a view of the surrounding ranges for dozens of miles, they found him sitting cross-legged, stripped to the waist, his skin rubbed with dust, in his hand the little leather bag that contained his sacred soil. Yangke clutched his beads and lowered himself into the lotus position. Shan realized they had barely spoken above a whisper all day. It was as if, having left the gateway where Bing died, they had entered a temple where voices should not be raised.
But Shan, gnawed by his ever-present worry for Lokesh and Gendun, could not find a prayer within himself. He sat apart and arranged bits of gravel before him to randomly construct a number for the Tao te Ching. But for the first time in his life, he kept losing count, trying and failing, as if the book in his mind had closed. Instead, he was visited by memories of Gendun in chains, of Bing squeezing him without hands. He kept remembering a note left by an aged lama whom Shan had discovered sitting on a high ledge by a work site the first year of his imprisonment. Shan had gone after the lama after seeing him slip away, hoping to find him before the guards did. He had found the lama-naked, smiling, but dead, having written words with a charred stick on the rock beside him. His death poem read, All I have left behind is the water that has washed my skin.
When they emerged later onto a high windswept ledge where several poles were anchored by cairns of heavy stones, Yangke pointed out the threads attached to each, still whipping in the wind. Once they had been prayer flags.
“There!” Hostene said, and trotted to the last of the poles, Shan following behind. It bore a new flag, a red bandanna with flowers printed on it. Written over the printed pattern, in black ink, was a prayer to the Compassionate Buddha. He eagerly scanned the mountain above. “She’s still safe!” he called out, and pointed to a small solitary figure on an exposed shelf of rock high above. It could have been anyone but Hostene was convinced it was his niece.
“It doesn’t matter now,” said a downcast voice. Yangke had arrived at their side. The figure in the distance darted from view. Shan gazed at Yangke in confusion. A rumbling in the distance grew in volume. Shan’s heart sank. By the time he gathered his senses and started pulling Hostene toward the shadows a helicopter was already there, screaming past them, hovering as if searching for a landing place, then shooting around the head of the rock.
A full armored squad could fit in the helicopter, and Ren was unlikely to arrive with less. They would have automatic weapons, grenades, sophisticated detection devices, Shan explained. The sound of the machine diminished, then sharply increased, indicating it had deposited its load somewhere nearby and ascended again. At least the knobs would take Hostene and Abigail off the mountain quickly. There would be doctors. Yangke, without papers, should try to hide, retreat, and reach Lokesh and Gendun. Shan might be a sufficient meal to satisfy Ren’s appetite for a day or two. But Drango village was doomed. Shan knew how to resist interrogators, might hold out for maybe a week or even two. But eventually, whether they resorted to drugs, electricity, or just batons, he would be forced to speak. He was the one Ren sought. And if Shan did not fall into his trap, Ren would ferry more loads of soldiers to the mountain.
But when Shan reached the clearing where the helicopter had landed, he found only a solitary figure in black with a pack at his feet. Dr. Gao was inspecting a painting of a protector demon.
“I haven’t sent his body back,” the scientist announced in a flat voice. “It still lies in that morgue in Tashtul. I sat with it before I left. Every day I write a different letter to Thomas’s parents. Every day I rip it up. ‘I regret to inform you that your only son was laid out on a stone and butchered.’ ‘I am saddened to report that our plans to land a family member on the moon have been canceled.’ ‘I am sorry but the outlaws who run the far side of the mountain have taken our young prince.’ ”
“I supposed you would phone them.”
“I can’t. Heinz will do it when he returns. Heinz is good at such things.”
“How did you know to come to the summit?”
“You told me, before. If the American woman was still alive she would keep going up the mountain, you said. This has always been about that American woman, hasn’t it? Abigail. It started with her.” Gao’s voice was that of a rational scientist speaking about a colleague’s expedition.
But it wasn’t about Abigail, not for Gao. It was about Thomas, and the utter failure of a man who, in all his esteemed career, had never known failure.
“I don’t know what you expect, Gao.”
“My expectations,” Gao sighed, “have meant very little lately.” He pointed to the demon, and a chalk drawing of a thunder snake beside it. “Explain this.”
Before Shan could do so, a low, steady voice rose from behind them. Hostene and Yangke had joined them. “The world begins with thunder,” Hostene said. “The early Tibetans said so. The Navajo said so. Abigail came to confirm this with the deity that lives inside the mountain.” Gao cast a worried glance at Shan. Hostene was beginning to sound like a lama.
Gao turned to the Navajo. “The altitude is affecting your brain, Hostene. I brought medicine for that.” Then he faced the painting. “And where exactly does this earth deity live?” He seemed to fear the answer.
“In the paradise at the top of the mountain,” interjected Yangke.
Gao looked up, not toward the summit but to the east, as if wondering if he might summon his helicopter back. Shan set off up the trail.
As they walked, Gao quizzed Shan relentlessly about his experiences on the mountain, making him repeat the puzzles they had encountered before he heard their solutions, then falling silent as Shan told him about Bing’s death.
“Did he know my nephew?”
“He did.”
Gao nodded. “Thomas would not have been drawn into a trap by a total stranger.”
“Your nephew knew more people on the mountain than you might think.”
“I keep reminding myself,” Gao observed in a brittle voice, “that I live a fairy-tale life in a make-believe castle, unconnected to the world.”
“When I said that,” Shan offered, “I did not intend to hurt you.”
“You are an escaped prisoner with a meaningless life,” Gao replied in a hollow tone. “How could you hurt me?”
“I meant-”
Gao interrupted with a raised hand. “No more.”
“No more of that,” Shan agreed. “But now I have a question for you. Did you bring your satellite phone?”
As Hostene and Yangke ate some of the grain bars Gao produced from his pack, Shan and Gao sat on a rock and tried the number for Heinz Kohler. Gao held the earpiece so Shan could hear. An automated reply reported that the receiving phone was switched off.