Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (35 page)

“This isn't real either. I'm sure we're still drugged,” Nadia murmured.

“Are we all seeing the same thing? I see a park,” Alexander added.

“So do I,” said Nadia.

“And I. If the three of us see the same thing, it isn't a vision. This is a trap, perhaps the most dangerous of all,” Dil Bahadur warned. “It will be best if we do not touch anything, and walk through quickly.”

“So we're not dreaming? This looks like the
Garden of Eden,” commented Alexander, still slightly groggy from the golden dust of the previous room.

“What garden is that?” asked Dil Bahadur.

“The Garden of Eden appears in the Bible. It was where the Creator placed the first man and woman. I think nearly all religions have such a garden. Paradise is a place of eternal beauty and happiness,” his friend explained.

Alexander first thought that what he was witnessing might be virtual images or film projections, but then he realized it couldn't be modern technology. The palace had been constructed many centuries before.

Through the fog filled with delicate butterflies came three human figures: two girls and a youth, all radiantly beautiful, with silken hair ruffled by the breeze; they were dressed in airy, embroidered silks and had large wings of golden feathers. They moved with extraordinary grace, calling to them with open arms. The temptation to go to those translucent creatures and surrender to the pleasure of being carried off by their powerful wings was nearly irresistible. Alexander took one step forward, hypnotized by one of the maidens, and Nadia smiled at the youthful stranger, but Dil Bahadur had enough presence of mind to catch his two friends by the arms.

“Don't touch them,” he begged. “That would be fatal. This is the garden of temptations.”

But Nadia and Alexander, beyond reason, tried to break free from the hands of the prince.

“They aren't real, they're painted on the wall, or they're statues. Ignore them,” he repeated.

“They move and they're calling to us,” Alexander murmured, enchanted.

“It's a trick, an optical illusion. Look over there!” Dil Bahadur cried, forcing them to look toward one corner of the garden.

Lying face-down on the ground across a pot of
painted flowers lay the lifeless body of one of the Blue Warriors. Dil Bahadur led his friends there. The prince bent down and turned the body over; they all saw the horrible way he had died.

The warriors of the scorpion sect had come into this fantastic garden as if in a dream, drugged by the golden powder, which made them believe everything they saw. They were brutes who had spent their lives on horseback; they slept on the hard ground and were accustomed to cruelty, suffering, and poverty. They had never seen anything beautiful or delicate; they knew nothing of music, flowers, fragrances, or butterflies like those in this garden. They worshipped serpents, scorpions, and bloodthirsty gods. They feared demons and Hell, but they had never heard of Paradise or angels like the ones they were seeing in this final trap of the Sacred Passageway. The closest thing to intimacy or love they knew was the rough camaraderie they shared. Tex Armadillo had had to threaten them with his pistol to keep them from wandering through the bewitched garden, but he had not been able to prevent one of them from yielding to temptation.

The man had reached out and touched the hand of one of the beautiful, winged damsels. He felt the cold of marble, except the texture wasn't smooth like marble, it was rough as sandpaper or ground glass. He pulled back his hand in surprise, and saw the scratches in his palm. That instant his skin began to crack and pull open, and his flesh dissolved as if it were burned to the bone. The others ran to him when he screamed, but there was nothing they could do: the lethal poison had already entered his bloodstream and moved up his arm like corrosive acid. In less than a minute, the poor wretch was dead.

Now Alexander, Nadia, and Dil Bahadur were standing before his corpse, which in the
intervening days had dried like a mummy from the effect of the poison. The body had shrunk; it was a skeleton with black hide stuck to bones that emitted a lingering odor of mushrooms and moss.

“As I said, best not to touch anything,” the prince repeated but his warning was no longer necessary. After seeing the corpse, Nadia and Alexander had wakened from their trance.

At last the three young people were in the Chamber of the Golden Dragon. Although he had never seen it, Dil Bahadur immediately recognized it from the descriptions the monks had given him in the four monasteries where he had learned the code. Here were the gold-sheathed walls covered with bas-relief gold engravings of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the pure gold candelabra holding beeswax candles, the delicate oil lamps with shades of filigreed gold, the gold incense burners with myrrh and other exotic scents. Gold, gold everywhere. The gold that had spurred the greed of Tex Armadillo and the Blue Warriors left Dil Bahadur, Alexander, and Nadia completely indifferent; they thought that the yellow metal was actually rather ugly.

“Perhaps it would not be too much to ask what we're doing here,” Alexander said to the prince, unable to avoid the sarcasm in his tone.

“Perhaps I am not sure myself,” Dil Bahadur replied.

“Why did your father tell you to come here?” Nadia wanted to know.

“Possibly to consult the Golden Dragon.”

“But the dragon was stolen! There's nothing here but that black stone with the quartz inset; that must be the base where the statue stood,” said Alexander.

“That
is
the golden dragon,” the prince informed them.

“What is?”

“The stone base. The thieves spoke of taking a very valuable statue, but in fact the oracle's predictions issue from the stone. That is the kings' secret, which even the monks in the monasteries do not know. That is the secret my father told me and that you must never repeat.”

“So how does it work?”

“First I have to chant the question in the language of the Yetis, then the quartz in the stone begins to vibrate and emits a sound that I must interpret.”

“Are you pulling my leg?” asked Alexander.

Dil Bahadur didn't know what that meant. He didn't have the least intention of pulling anyone's leg.

“We'll see how it works. What do you want to ask it?” inquired Nadia, always the practical one.

“Perhaps most important would be to know my karma, so I can fulfill my destiny without straying from the path,” Dil Bahadur decided.

“We risked our lives only to learn what your karma is?” Alexander joked.

“I can tell you that: You are a good prince and you will be a great king,” was Nadia's comment.

Dil Bahadur asked his friends to sit quietly at the back of the room, and then he approached the platform where the paws of the magnificent statue had rested. He lighted incense burners and candles, then sat with his legs crossed for a time that seemed very long to Nadia and Alexander. He meditated in silence until his anxieties were calmed and his mind cleansed of all thoughts, desires, and fears—and curiosity. He opened inwardly like the lotus flower, as his master had taught him, to receive the energy of the universe.

The first notes were barely a murmur, but the prince's chant quickly changed to a powerful roar that burst from the earth itself, a guttural sound
his two friends had never heard. It was difficult to imagine the sound was human; it seemed to issue from a huge drum in the heart of an enormous cavern. The harsh notes rolled, ascended, fell, acquired rhythm, volume, speed, then faded . . . only to rise again, like the waves of the sea. Each note shattered against the gold walls and was returned multiplied. Fascinated, Nadia and Alexander felt the vibration deep inside them, as if it were born of them. Soon they realized that a second voice had been added to the chant of the prince, a very different voice: the answer, originating in the small section of yellow quartz set in the black stone. Dil Bahadur fell silent in order to listen to the stone's message, which lingered in the air like the echo of great brass bells tolling in unison. The prince's concentration was absolute; not a muscle of his body quivered, as his mind grouped the notes by fours and simultaneously transposed them into the ideograms of the lost language of the Yetis, which he had been memorizing for twelve years.

Dil Bahadur's song lasted more than an hour, which to Nadia and Alexander seemed only a few minutes; the extraordinary music had transported them to a higher level of consciousness. They knew that for eighteen centuries this chamber had been visited only by the kings of the Forbidden Kingdom, and that no one before them had ever witnessed the ceremony of the oracle. Mute, eyes round with amazement, the two young people followed the rising and falling tones of the stone, not understanding exactly what Dil Bahadur was doing, but sure that it was something miraculous, with deep spiritual meaning.

Finally, silence fell over the Sacred Chamber. The section of quartz, which had seemed to glow with light from within during the chanting, turned opaque, as it had been in the beginning. The
prince, drained, sat motionless for some time, while his friends waited, not wanting to interrupt him.

“My father is dead,” Dil Bahadur said finally, standing.

“Is that what the stone said?” Alexander asked.

“Yes. My father waited until I was here, and then was free to abandon himself to death.”

“How did he know you were here?”

“My master, Tensing, told him,” said the young prince sadly.

“What else did the stone tell you?” Nadia asked.

“It is my karma to be the next-to-the-last monarch of the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon. I shall have a son, who will be the last king. After him, the world and this kingdom will change, and nothing will ever again be the same. To govern with justice and wisdom, I shall have the help of my father, who will guide me in my dreams. I shall also have Pema, whom I am going to marry, and Tensing, and the Golden Dragon.”

“You mean the stone, because there's nothing left of the statue but ash,” Alexander noted.

“Perhaps I did not understand clearly, but I believe it will be recovered,” commented the prince, signaling that it was time to start back.

Timothy Bruce and Joel González, the
International Geographic
photographers, had carried out Kate's orders to the letter. They had spent that time traveling to the most inaccessible parts of the kingdom, guided by a short, stocky sherpa who carried the heavy equipment and tents without ever losing his calm smile or unvarying pace. The foreigners, in contrast, were faint from the effort of following him, and from the altitude, in which they could scarcely breathe. The photographers, who knew nothing about their companions' exploits, arrived with great
excitement to tell of their adventures with rare orchids and panda bears, but Kate didn't show the slightest interest in their tales. She floored them with the news that Nadia and her grandson had contributed to eliminating a criminal organization, rescued five kidnapped girls, captured a band of dangerous bandits, and placed Prince Dil Bahadur on the throne—all this with the help of a tribe of Yetis and a mysterious monk with mental powers. Timothy and Joel did not open their mouths again until it was time to board the airplane to return to their country.

“One thing is for sure, I'm not traveling with Alexander and Nadia again,” declared the writer, who still hadn't recovered from recent alarms. “They attract danger like honey draws flies. I'm far too old to be so scared.”

At that, Alexander and Nadia exchanged knowing glances, because they had decided that they were going with her on her next reporting assignment, no matter what. They would not miss the chance to experience another adventure with Kate Cold.

The young people had not shared the secrets of the Sacred Chamber with Kate, or of the miraculous piece of quartz, because they had sworn never to tell. They limited themselves to saying that Dil Bahadur, like all the monarchs of the Forbidden Kingdom before him, could go there to hear predictions about the future.

“In ancient Greece there was a temple in Delphi where people went to hear the prophecies of an oracle,” Kate told them. “The words she spoke in her trance were always puzzling, but the people who came to the oracle found meaning in them. Today it's known that a gas, probably ether, escaped from the ground at that spot. The priestess was dizzied by the gas and spoke in code; the rest was imagined by her naïve clients.”

“This isn't the same thing. What we saw can't
be explained by gas,” her grandson replied.

The writer laughed dryly.

Alexander smiled. “Our roles have been reversed, Kate. Once I was the skeptic who didn't believe anything unless I saw the proof, you were the one who kept telling me that the world is a mysterious place and that not everything can be explained rationally.”

His grandmother couldn't answer because she was laughing so hard that she started coughing and was nearly choking. Her grandson clapped her on the back a few times, a little harder than necessary. Nadia went to get a glass of water.

“It's too bad that Tensing has left for the Valley of the Yetis, otherwise he could have cured your cough with his magic needles and prayers. I'm afraid you're just going to have to give up smoking, Grandmother,” said Alexander.

“Don't . . . call . . . me . . . grandmother!”

The afternoon before leaving for the United States, after attending the king's funeral service, the members of the
International Geographic
expedition met in the palace of the thousand rooms with the royal family and General Kunglung. The monarch had been cremated, according to tradition, and his ashes had been divided into four antique alabaster vessels the country's premiere soldiers had carried on horseback to the four cardinal points of the kingdom, where they were scattered on the wind. Neither his people nor his family, who loved him so, wept over the king's death; they believed that weeping obliges the spirit to stay in the world to console the living. The correct thing to do was to show happiness so the spirit can be content to go live out another turn of the wheel of reincarnation, evolving in each life until finally it reaches illumination and heaven—or Nirvana.