This was the method Mongol warriors had used when they'd ridden for many hours and had no time to forage for food. They would feed off the blood of their horse. Leaning down, even as they rode, sucking up the life-giving fluid. In this way, they could ride for many hours-even days. And if the horse died, they'd switch to another. A disciplined troop of Mongol warriors could cover as many as seventy to ninety miles a day.
But now, in these modern times, Ragyapa and his warrior monks would use the blood not for sustenance but for ceremony. To launch the beginning of a great enterprise.
Word had come concerning the whereabouts of the Americans. Ragyapa's disciples were about to be given a mission: Follow the Americans, wait until they found the jade skull of Kublai Khan, and then take it from them.
It was risky and it was difficult but, if the plan failed, Ragyapa still had the kidnapped girl as a hostage. With the girl, he could still force the Americans to turn the skull over to him.
Ragyapa himself would stay in Seoul and guard the pampered child known as Mi-ja.
His lips curled in disgust at the thought of her.
As he sucked up more of the pony's blood, Ragyapa remembered his early days in the monastery, high in the mountains of Mongolia. His mother had given him up when the arthritis had finally overtaken her. He remembered sitting naked, in the lotus position, on a hard wooden floor. And he remembered the yellow parchment of the rolled scroll of the ancient text and how he was forced by the elder monks to sit with his back straight and balance the scroll on his head for hour after hour, without once ever allowing the scroll to fall. And he remembered how there was always someone else in the room. Someone he couldn't see. The old monks used to tell him it was Mahakala, the six-armed Lord of the Demons, watching him to see if he was devout. To see if he could keep the ancient text balanced on his head. Or if he was just another weak soul who would surely fall away from the true path. Fall away from nirvana. Fall toward the sins of the flesh.
And when the aching hours mounted one on top of another, his muscles became tense and his entire body quivered. Finally, the parchment always fell. That's when Ragyapa would feel the whiplike rod, again and again. And when he whimpered, like the undisciplined child known as Mi-ja, the punishment was even more severe. The encircling of the flame until the flesh of his arms began to sizzle. And the cure, which was worse. Embracing the snows outside the monastery, all through the night, until the monks found him blue and nearly frozen in the morning.
All for discipline. Everything for discipline.
Still, no matter how they tried to teach her, the girl Mi-ja kept whimpering.
Ragyapa sucked more blood and spit it out. The bowl was half full now.
Mi-ja was an ugly child. All the contours of her little face even and smooth, nothing distinctive about them, nothing to set her apart from other people. But now she looked better.
The jagged scab where her ear had been seemed to make her skull slightly tilted. Off balance. Yes, a great improvement.
Just as Ragyapa's looks had been improved when a hot knife etched the lines of the ancient jade skull into the top of his head.
A disciple hissed. "Someone is coming."
Ragyapa spat out the last of the blood and slid off the pony. His fellow Mongols crouched in the shadows behind the equipment of the amusement park. Footsteps scraped on gravel. A man appeared beneath the stone archway.
He wore a khaki uniform and a visored cap. Cautiously, he scanned the park. Fondling his big metal whistle, he stepped forward.
Ragyapa couldn't call out, but he knew that his trained monks would take the action that was necessary.
The policeman strolled slowly toward the pony and the small carousel.
As he passed the wooden replica of a small train engine, a man slipped out of the darkness, moving with all the quickness of death itself. Ragyapa saw the flash of the blade and then the policeman's head being jerked viciously backward. There was a gurgling sound and in the glow of the almost full moon, blood spurted across stiffly starched khaki.
"Hold him!" Ragyapa commanded.
He rushed forward, holding the wooden bowl, blood sloshing over its edges.
As the other Mongols held the struggling policeman, Ragyapa lifted the bowl up to the cruel gash in his neck and caught the hot, squirting gore.
The policeman slumped to the ground. One of the Mongols dragged him into the caboose of the wooden train. Ragyapa stared down at the full bowl, satisfied.
When his disciples gathered around him, Ragyapa raised the bowl up to the almost full moon.
"Nothing will stop us," he said, "from finding the jade skull of our ancestor, the Great Khan Kublai."
"Nothing will stop us," the men intoned.
"All power to the Lord Mahakala!"
Ragyapa lowered the bowl to his lips and drank deeply. He handed the bowl to the Mongol standing next to him, who drank and passed it on.
Ragyapa fumbled inside his tunic and pulled out six train tickets. He handed one to each man.
Embossed on each ticket in Korean and English was the name of their destination.
Taejon.
16
Clouds boiled atop the peaks of the Bomun Mountains, far to the south of the city, watching us.
At the Taejon bus station, the milling crowds of Koreans stared at the three tall people moving amongst them. We carried overnight bags slung over our shoulders and the three of us-Lady Ahn, Ernie, and me-all wore blue jeans and sneakers. Ernie and I topped this outfit with bland-looking PX-bought sports shirts, but Lady Ahn brightened up the whole world with a shimmering red silk blouse.
I had trouble keeping my eyes off of her. Although I did my best not to make my attention obvious, she noticed. But I don't think she minded much.
At the ticket window, Lady Ahn purchased three express bus tickers to Ok-dong. I'd never heard of the place but she assured me it was on the coast of the Yellow Sea. When I tried to hand her a few bills, she pushed my money away.
"No," she said firmly. "You help me, I pay."
Ernie leaned against a cement pillar, gazing intently at the women in the crowd. When he occasionally found one he liked, he zeroed in on her like radar honing in on a North Korean fighter jet.
Sometimes the women noticed and turned away. Sometimes they noticed and giggled. But whatever their reaction, it made no difference to Ernie. It was his right to stare, he figured. And until someone hit him in the forehead with a two-by-four, he'd continue to do it.
Before we climbed on the bus, Ernie stopped at a snack stand and bought four double packets of ginseng gum. If we were heading for the wilds, he needed proper provisions.
Outside the windows of the bus, the city of Taejon faded into warehouses and factories and finally into broad fields crisscrossed with the wet patchworks of rice paddies. The bright sunshine turned the tender rice shoots emerald green. Straw-hatted farmers, pant legs rolled up, waded through the muck, hunched over their work as intently as physicists peering through electron microscopes. White cranes rose from the paddies, lifting lazily into the blue sky.
I sat next to Lady Ahn and Ernie sat right behind us, next to an old lady eating watermelon seeds. She popped open a few seeds, sucked out the nut inside, and after a while offered some to Ernie. He accepted gladly and soon she had accepted a stick of ginseng gum in return.
She chattered away happily in Korean, Ernie smiling and nodding occasionally, not understanding a word she said. Actually, she was telling him about her grandchildren, but Ernie didn't give a damn one way or the other.
Lady Ahn was silent for the first part of the trip, the smooth flesh of her forehead crinkled slightly in concentration.
At the front of the bus sat a uniformed stewardess who occasionally made trips down the aisle handing out warm hand towels or lukewarm cups of barley tea. I used the towel to wipe down the back of my neck, because without the rain the morning was beginning to become a little warm.