Seeker’s Curse

by Alex Archer

  “How about the police?” Pan asked Lal. “Are they looking for us?”

  “Not specifically, although they would surely like to question you. I don’t really advise letting them, you know? But they’ve got the idea the guerrillas are in with a foreign gang, probably artifact smugglers. They blame them. Although strings have been pulled from a higher level, and they haven’t been able to hold anyone. Even the injured ones brought in for treatment at government clinics.”

  Annja set down her tea. Her stomach had suddenly turned sour. “So the Maoists are working with the smugglers,” she said. “Doesn’t that make the odds against us pretty bad?”

  To her surprise Lal laughed. “There are Maoists and there are Maoists. Some in the government are probably tangled up in the smuggling. But others know our country needs tourism to survive. No one knows the value of a dollar like a Communist! So while somebody used influence to get the injured bandits cut loose, the Party at the highest level isn’t going to go along with anything that might scare off the tourists. Not gunplay in a tourist destination, nor wholesale looting of national treasures.”

  “But they seem to be willing enough to plunge the country back into civil war,” Pan said, sipping his own tea.

  Lal shrugged. “That is politics. When did they ever bring anything but sorrow and pain? And then again, there’s Jagannatha. He’s incorruptible. But he’s also shadowing us. It is probably only on the orders of his own Party superiors that he hasn’t yet made a major effort to wipe us out.”

  “Why’s that?” Annja asked. She shot Pan an uneasy look. This just keeps getting better, she thought glumly.

  “He hates and fears foreign influence on our country. He says that if we open ourselves to the Westerners they’ll enslave us, suck us dry and discard us.” Lal shook his head. “Lots of people who don’t care for the Maoists or their dogmas agree with that. Even among the religious.”

  “What do you want to do, Annja?” Pan asked.

  “I have a job,” she said. “So that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “What about the people of the countryside?” Pan asked. With a bit of a shock Annja recalled he was a seasoned counterguerrilla fighter.

  She knew how important the support of the populace—or their hostility—was to guerrillas. Although human habitation had thinned considerably in the countryside surrounding the market town, on the way in, the expedition encountered surprising numbers of homes and small farmsteads tucked among the steep-walled valleys. Surprising, at least, to a foreigner who even now, after resting for hours in the safehouse, had to struggle to pull in each breath.

  “Up here most peasants are devout followers of what you’d call Tibetan Buddhism. The lamaseries have a lot of influence. That means the Communists are unpopular, the way they ridicule the people’s beliefs as superstition.”

  “What about Jagannatha?” Annja asked.

  Lal pulled down the corners of his mouth in an unhappy expression. “As I said, he does not disrespect the old beliefs. And he treats the peasants well. Not the way most of the guerrillas do, not to mention the Party men from the cities who call the shots. The people are not hostile to him, as they are the other Maoists. But not many actively assist him.”

  Pan had his teacup to his lips. He grunted. “It only takes one to betray us.”

  Lal laughed. “You’re on a great spiritual quest,” Lal said. “Did you really think it would be easy?”

  It came to the tip of Annja’s tongue to say, “No, we’re on a scientific quest, not a spiritual one.” But she chose not to let the words pass her teeth. Why antagonize a good friend—and invaluable ally? she thought. There was more to her reticence than that. But she didn’t choose to dwell on it.

  “So what’s next?” she asked.

  “We go high up,” Lal said promptly, “though not very far as the crow flies.”

  “You know where there’s another hidden shrine?” Pan asked in surprise.

  “Oh, no, Sergeant Katramados. Since you both have shown yourselves worthy, you now must pass to the next stage of your quest.”

  AT FIRST IT SOUNDED like a bird cry to Annja’s ears—high-pitched, with a breathless quality to it. It ran on and on from unseen heights, so that its echoes joined it even before it ceased.

  Trudging along snow packed down on top of layers of older snow, the new Sherpas hired from the bazaar town—for even Magars from lower levels found the going hard this high up the flank of the mighty White Mountain—began to mutter and roll their eyes in apparent fear. Some made complicated gestures that Annja gathered were meant to avert evil.

  She was glad that, once leaving the precincts of the bazaar town and the rule of law—however imperfect its coverage—they had broken out the long-arms taken from Jagannatha’s guerrillas. The weight of the M-16 slung over her own shoulder was comforting. The fact Pan carried a similar weapon reassured her, as did the AKM whose additional ten-pound weight Prasad added to his already heavy load without seeming to notice.

  They carried a number of extra magazines and boxes of ammunition. Trinkets, spices, camping gear and hashish weren’t all one could purchase in the Nepali bazaar. Lal had bought the ammunition in certain select markets. By devious means they had been paid for on one of Annja’s credit cards.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked Prasad, who walked in front of the procession. Footprints showed others had come this way since the last snow fell the night before. Prasad still scouted to make sure the way was safe, to watch out for hidden ice or overhanging snowbanks that might drop to swallow up the travelers.

  To their right the canine-tooth shape of Dhaulagiri hung over them like an alien planet. The downslope fell away to their left with what Annja understood to be deceptive gentleness. If you lost your footing and went down, you’d be lucky to stop yourself. There was the risk of causing an avalanche that would bury you. Or you might just keep going, sliding or rolling helplessly until, several hundred yards down, you shot out over a sheer five-hundred-foot drop.

  The mountains were getting serious now.

  “Was it the bird cry that bothered them?” she asked.

  “The cry has frightened them,” Prasad said. “But it was no bird.”

  Among the porters Annja heard a word frequently enough to pick it out of the otherwise meaningless syllable stream. It sounded to her like “bonmanche.”

  “Well, what then, my friend?” Pan said. “Don’t leave us in suspense.”

  “Bonmanche,” Prasad repeated.

  Pan cocked an eyebrow. “Yeti?” he said.

  Annja restrained herself from rolling her eyes. She didn’t want to trample on local religious belief. “I hope it won’t make them reluctant to continue,” she said.

  Prasad shrugged. “They knew they might encounter danger, as well as hardship. But spiritual dangers strike deeper fear than mere physical ones do.”

  “Spiritual?” Pan asked.

  “The bonmanche is a highly spiritual creature as well as a physical one,” Prasad said. “Did you not know?”

  “Ah…no. No, I didn’t,” Pan said.

  He looked to Annja, who shrugged.

  They trudged on. The porters’ body language stayed skittish.

  The landscape around them turned blue as the sun declined toward the great peaks to the west along the unseen valley of the Myagdi River. There was little vegetation in evidence here; all Annja could smell was snow and chilled gray stone. Packed snow several inches deep crunched beneath her hiking boots. Lal and Prasad had assured her they would face no technical climbing. At least on the current leg of their journey.

  She gave Pan a surreptitious look through her wraparound UV-blocking sunglasses. It was getting late in the day to wear them, but they were essential against the glare, practically buzzing with ultraviolet radiation, that fell like steel rain from the daytime sky and ricocheted like bullets into unprotected eyes from ice and white snow. At the moment she was glad she wore them for another reason.

  By slow d
egrees she felt Pan withdrawing from her. She was confused. Just when they seemed to be really coming together, suddenly came an unexpected emotional retrograde.

  A conflict stirred inside her. She did feel longings, and they went—except for rare, brief interludes—unrequited. The encounters she’d had mostly had the effect of whetting her appetite for some kind of deep relationship. Something that would endure.

  Yet her lifestyle all but precluded that. Her only real continuing contacts were primarily professional. Her strongest continuing bonds these days were with those cranky and unpredictable ageless men the sword brought into her life: Roux, her sometime mentor, and dashing billionaire financier Garin Braden, who was sometimes her deadly enemy and sometimes her most valuable friend—depending, it seemed, on what side of the bed he’d gotten out of on any given morning. She occasionally saw her friend Bart McGilley, but things had been strained between them as he clearly sensed she was keeping secrets from him—and she was.

  But Pan had the same independence of mind and spirit she rejoiced in, many of the same interests and a lively and agile mind. Although a manly man by any standard, he seemed to lack most of the ingrained male chauvinism that afflicted not just most modern Mediterranean men, but cops, soldiers and special operators—all of which he was. He showed Annja genuine respect, as well as, she thought, affection.

  The fact they’d fought side by side, and saved each other’s lives, may have had something to do with it.

  Now she felt Pan pulling back. Her consolation, if it was that, was that he didn’t seem to be drawing away from her so much as into himself. She was beginning to fear she would lose him all the same.

  Possibly to madness. The dreams were coming more frequently and stronger. Lying in his pallet next to her in the Gaine safehouse the night before, he had stirred and muttered to himself in his sleep in the dialect of his Macedonian hill village. Then again in the small, cold hours before dawn, she had awakened again to find him sitting up, arms around his knees, staring fixedly at nothing in this world.

  Is he in danger of losing himself to memories of someone he never was, and a place he’s never been? she asked herself. Had he seen her sword? No easy answer came. Nor could she see her way to asking him.

  The path veered out of sight around a fairly sheer shoulder of what seemed to be mostly granite. Another lesser peak rose ahead, across what looked like a narrow valley. Lal slipped cautiously around the boulder, then signaled the others to follow.

  The procession wound around. They entered a valley slanting steeply up the mountain. The path wound up the right side. To their left a stream poured down the center of the narrow valley in gleaming, burbling zigs and zags.

  The mountain the curve had put at their left blocked the lowering sun. The temperature dropped perceptibly, just from moving into the mauve shadows. Annja did up the front of her parka. A child of the hot, humid Mississippi Delta, she’d been astonished to learn that in really cold climates it wasn’t keeping warm that was the real problem, unless you were just completely unprepared. It was heat management. If you bundled up too tightly you could get overheated in a frighteningly short time, exhaust yourself, fuddle your wits and finally pass out. Worse case you could die.

  Beside her Pan walked along, his face thoughtful, even somewhat sad. She compressed her lips and shook her head, wishing she could reach out to him.

  “How much farther?” she asked Prasad as the trail crested and wound right again.

  Even as she asked she became aware of an orange glow ahead. They came around a bend and Annja’s breath caught in her throat.

  “We are here,” he said.

  Before them stood a lamasery. It was three stories of dark wood and gray stone and sweeping eaves with demon faces carved in every beam end. The faces seemed alive, from the motion of the leaping flames of the thousand torches that surrounded the place. From the middle of the roof a giant bonfire danced high against slopes covered in dark hemlock forest.

  “Behold,” Prasad said, “the Lamasery of Fire.”

  23

  “Wow. So you’re American,” the fresh-faced young man with the saffron robe and the shaved head said. “It’s good to see somebody from back home. Good to hear the accent, you know?”

  Pan and Annja exchanged looks. Annja shrugged.

  They stood in a sort of flamelit courtyard before the steps to the main entrance. All around them torches hissed; they sounded to Annja like the wind blowing through a stand of saplings. Slow fat flakes had begun to fall from clouds that had closed in with alarming swiftness low overhead. The smell of burning resin in the black smoke that twined like snakes from the torches was almost overpowering.

  “I am,” she said. “I’m Annja Creed. This is Sergeant Pantheras Katramados of the Hellenic police.” She would have introduced Prasad and Lal, but they and the porters hung back by the large wooden gates as if this did not concern them. She felt strange acting like some lady of the manor with her retinue of servants. But she felt bound to respect their wishes to hang back.

  “Wow,” the young man said. “That’s Greek? You’re sure a long way from home. Pleased to meet you, Ms. Creed, Sergeant. I’m Dzogchen Rinpoche. I know that’s kind of a tongue twister, so you can call me Ricky.”

  “Ricky,” Annja echoed faintly.

  Ricky smiled. “Welcome to the Lamasery of Fire. Now, if you’ll all follow me, we’ve got rooms waiting for everybody. Once you’re settled in we can eat and talk. You must be famished. I know I am.”

  He turned and walked back between the huge double doors of the monastery. Inside through a short foyer Annja could see a high-raftered room lit by many torches burning in sconces along dark wooden walls.

  He just looked like an all-American kid to Annja. Maybe part Japanese. But all American.

  She and Pan found themselves sitting in a room with a fire roaring in a great hearth and many oil lamps hung from standing black-iron candelabra. It’s a relief they don’t have torches in here, too, she thought.

  Lama Ricky sat on a little dais facing Pan and Annja, who sat cross-legged on carpets on the floor. Silent shaved-headed acolytes in red or saffron robes laid out a variety of covered porcelain dishes between them. At their host’s gesture they began to open the pots. Through curls of steam they saw heaps of rice, steamed vegetables, something in a sauce that suggested curry.

  As they served themselves with copper spoons Pan said, “Forgive me, please, but Ricky seems a very strange name for a monk high up a mountain in Nepal.”

  The young man grinned. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I used to be plain old Richard Yamazaki of Cleveland, Ohio, back in the day. But then I started having these strange dreams and waking visions. One day these dudes showed up at my door and claimed I was the thirty-fourth generation of the Dzogchen Rinpoche. A tulku.”

  “Tulku?” Annja asked between bites. It was some kind of vegetable curry, spicy and delicious. It let her know she was indeed famished.

  “Yeah. The thirty-fourth reincarnation of a bodhisattva.”

  “Bodhisattva?” Annja echoed. “Sorry. I’m a bit out of my depth here.”

  “It’s one who has attained enlightenment, and has vowed to continue returning on the wheel of reincarnation to help enlighten all beings, isn’t it?” Pan asked, raising a cup of hot buttered tea to his lips.

  “Got it in one,” Ricky said, bobbing his bald head. “There were these prophecies that predicted my incarnation. The previous Dzogchen Rinpoche left behind a song that predicted where I’d be found. That is, him come back and everything. So they tracked me down and set me a series of tests. I was shown a bunch of books, prayers beads, ritual stuff like that. It turned out what I picked was what belonged to him—to me—they told me, in a former life.”

  He drank from his own teacup. “I see by your eyes you think it sounds crazy. Well, it seemed pretty crazy to me, at first. But it all turned out to fit. So here I am.”

  He shook his head. “But that’s not important. It’s n
ot why you’re here. That’s all about your journey.”

  “You know about us?” Pan asked. Suspicion lent an edge to his voice.

  But the tulku didn’t seem offended. “Sure,” he said. “Old Omprakash down south in Lumbini set Ms. Creed on a course to here. He let us know to expect you both.”

  “But I never told him about Pan—about Sergeant Katramados,” Annja protested. “I didn’t even know he’d be joining me.”

  Ricky laughed. “Omprakash is totally a wise old dude. Very powerful spiritually. He knows things.”

  Pan continued to frown. “The local population feeds the monasteries,” Annja told him softly. “Don’t you think the grapevine reaches here?”

  Her companion’s craggy face didn’t exactly soften, but it did unclench a bit. His shoulders relaxed slightly. Their host ate rice from a bowl held close to his mouth with chopsticks and gave no sign of having heard the comment. But his dark eyes danced.

  She was glad to see Pan coming out of his own head, even if it was to get a touch paranoid with their host. He’s been brooding so much on the past, she thought. By effort she suppressed the further thought, his imagined past.

  “You’ve got me confused,” Pan said, settling back on his heels.

  “Good,” Ricky said. “If you think you’ve already got it all figured out, how can you learn anything?”

  “Well, I’m willing to admit I don’t know what’s going on,” Annja said. “Especially if it’ll speed things up a bit.”

  Ricky’s expression surprised her. He didn’t look offended. Nor did he show the same easy grin he had to almost everything else. Instead he looked almost worried.

  “Don’t be so eager to rush into the future,” he said. “You don’t know what it might hold.”

  “We all die,” Pan said, drinking. “I know that much.”

  “And you should know that’s not necessarily a career-ending injury, Pantheras,” the lama said.

  Oh, great, Annja thought. Feed his obsession. Way to go. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Ricky shrugged a saffron-clad shoulder. “You know. What goes around, comes around.”