Buddha's money

15

It hadn't been easy to find a horse in the city of Seoul.

These people live together like packed rats, Ragyapa thought. Not like Mongols, who make their homes in yurts, felt tents, on the endless steppes and trackless mountains of his homeland, Mongolia.

It was past midnight curfew, and Ragyapa and his band of followers stood near a children's amusement park. The horse they'd found was only a pony, caged in a wooden pen. Nearby was the small carousel the pony pulled during the day, with smiling ducks and geese and swans for the children to ride on.

Ragyapa patted the little horse on the neck. Its brown eyes rolled up at him nervously.

What a paltry specimen, Ragyapa thought. Not much smaller than the Mongol ponies he had known all his life, but there was no strength in this animal. His legs were spindly and his haunch and forelimbs had no heft to them, not like the muscled creatures who ran wild across the upper plains of the Mongolian heartland.

Still, Ragyapa needed horseflesh and this creature would have to do.

Ragyapa climbed up on the back of the pony. The animal whinnied and staggered beneath his weight. A few of Ragyapa's men smiled at the horse's weakness but none of them laughed. Laughter is not the way of the nomad.

Ragyapa fondled the pony's mane, feeling along the vertebrae beneath the short hair. He pinched when he found the correct spot and felt the vein pulsing beneath his fingers. Deftly, Ragyapa unsheathed his gleaming blade and sliced a thin line through the horse's hide. He squeezed, forcing blood out, then bent and sucked the warm fluid into his mouth.

One of Ragyapa's disciples handed him a wooden bowl. When Ragyapa's mouth had filled with blood, he spit it into the bowl, and leaned down to suck out more.

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.