Read Prayer of the Dragon for Free Online Page B

cobalt sky. “After I went down to the world my surviving aunt wrote me letters. When she described how men came and tore down all the cairns, I didn’t really understand. When she said they had changed the course of some of the streams and stopped a waterfall I used to play in, I thought she was making some sort of strange joke.”
    Shan watched a soaring bird, a huge lammergeier, as he pondered Yangke’s words, then surveyed the long, wide slope before them. Scattered along the stream were piles of rocks, not the carefully stacked cairns of the devout but what could have been the ruins of cairns. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Gold mining requires roads and enormous machines.” He glanced up at the bird circling overhead. The feather in the vest of the stranger in the stable had come from such a large bird of prey.
    “Suppose a mountain was so remote that Chinese survey crews ignored it when they cataloged mineral resources decades ago,” Yangke said. “Suppose a secret base happened to be built on the far side of the mountain that discouraged anyone from venturing too close. Suppose, eventually, a few Chinese discovered streams with nuggets and gold dust, even veins of gold in the rocks, but they knew the army would never permit legitimate mining operations because the secret base was so close. Suppose it became something of a hobby for some of them, a pastime, to sneak across the mountain after the snow melted and extract a few ounces of gold. It wouldn’t take too many years before word would spread and others arrived, who took their work more seriously.”
    “Outlaw miners,” Shan ventured. He had heard of such men elsewhere in Tibet, prospectors who operated far from the reach of government taxes and mining regulations. The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away, ran the age-old saying.
    “It’s been a closely guarded secret, confined to criminals mostly, men with little to lose, with good reasons to keep out of the government’s sight. They used to hide, from the rest of us and from each other. But they grow bolder every year. Some work the streams with pans. Some use dynamite to open the veins. They arrive after the snow melts and leave in September. Like migrating geese. Except these geese eat the land itself.”
    “Why would they bother to stake claims?”
    “They respect each other’s workings. They’ve begun to organize themselves, enacting rules for peaceful coexistence with each other and with Drango village.”
    “But someone in Drango could inform the government.”
    “And what then? The slopes would be crawling with troops. Public Security would ask questions about Drango that no one would want to answer. The Bureau of Mining would descend on us. Municipal administration bureaus. The Bureau of Religious Affairs,” he added with a shudder.
    “But you said the two murdered men were holy men,” Shan reminded him.
    “I crept as close to their campsite as I dared with this tree about my neck. They had rebuilt a cairn near their camp. These men ignored the streams. They wrote in books and cleaned old paintings. They had started making a kyilkhor when they were killed.”
    “A sandpainting?”
    Yangke nodded. “But maybe they were miners as well. They dug into the rocks and crawled into small caves. But I think they were scared of the others. The other miners camp in the open, to warn competitors off. But the ones who died, they camped in outof-the-way places, hidden places.”
    Miners and monks. It seemed to Shan an impossible combination. “Were these sticks used by the dead men?”
    “No. They never used claim stakes. These are new. No one has ever staked a claim so close to Drango before. Some of the miners say the village sits on the richest vein of all. Once I had a nightmare in which they blew the village off the side of the mountain to get at the gold.”
    Yangke followed Shan’s gaze up the slope. “You’ll just make more trouble,” he said. “Chodron has