Paradise Tales (3 page)

Kai believes in the Chbap to the extent that they are useful. He knows them in their thousands and recites one or two of them each evening as he is massaged by the boy he bought. The boy’s name is Arun, and he gets up early each morning to sweep the monastery floors—and goes to bed late after scattering dust over those same floors to teach him acceptance.

On the day of his fiftieth birthday, Kai’s acolytes present him with a handsome gift.

It is something new and dangerously different. In Kai’s language, the words for “different” and “wrong” are nearly identical.

The gift is a tiny round bronze ball; and if you fill its tank with water and light a fire under it, it starts to spin.

Alone before going to sleep, Kai thinks about this different miracle long and hard. He decides that there is no magic in it. It is as hard and as fair as drought or pestilence.

The Westerners are building whole engines that work like steamballs.

And the Neighbors are buying them.

The state of Kambu is so weak that the King has to pay to keep the neighboring states from invading. Kambu’s King is so powerless that his own army is run by advisers from these states, and so helpless that he enforces their corvées of Kambu labor.

Kambu troops are being used to corral or even kidnap the Chbap-reciting farmers, herding them away to work on a new kind of road in the Commonwealth of the Neighbors.

Hero Kai sits on the beautifully swept floor. His little steamball spins itself to a stop. Candlelight fans its way through the gaps in the floorboards and walls. Everything buzzes and creaks with insects. In the flickering light, Kai thinks.

If only the King were strong. If only the Sons of Kambu stood up as one against the Neighbors. If only there were ten of me. Our army is controlled by our enemies. Our wealth pours out to them and when they want more, they just take it. The King’s magic makes girls pretty, fields abundant, and rainfall regular. It holds back disease and the ravages of age.

The Neighbors make the magic of war.

Kai finds he cannot sit still. He stands on one leg and hops so lightly that the floorboards do not shake. He makes many swift passes with his sword, defeating imaginary opponents.

He loses heart and his sword sinks down toward the floor.

The unquiet spirit spends his strength in cutting air …

Kai takes out an incising pen and cuts a letter to the King in a palm leaf. He fills the grooves with ink-power and burns it so the ink hardens in the grooves but can be brushed away from the surface.

Then he wakes Arun and gives him the letter. Kai tells him to walk to the lake and take a boat to the distant, tiny, capital.

What can a mouse do when caught by the cat?

Do not act until necessary

A year later Kai stands with the farmers in revolt.

His monk robes are gathered up over his shoulders to free his arms and legs. The cloth is the color of fire. His body is hard and lean, as if cut from marble, with just the slightest creases of age across the belly and splotches around his ankles.

His sword is as long and lean as himself.

The Commonwealth of Neighbors is hot and smells of salt and drains. The sea hammers a coast that used to belong to the Sons of Kambu. The rich plains get all the rain that the mountains block from Kambu. Everything steams and rots.

Kidnapped fathers sweat in ranks, armed with hoes and pickaxes. Some of them simply carry rocks.

They have been starved and beaten until they are beyond caring. Families, fields, home are all hundreds of miles away.

They have nothing to lose.

The Road of Fire grins like an unending smile. The lips are burnished tracks of metal that gleam in mathematically parallel lines. The teeth are the wooden beams that hold the tracks in place. The Road of Fire looks like evil.

The Army of Neighbors looks beautiful.

They are naked except for white folded loincloths. Their bodies are hard but round from food and fighting, and their eyes are gray. Their earlobes are long and stretched, bearing heavy earrings.

Every one of them is a holy man.

The Army of Neighbors is famously small and famously bears no arms. For a moment or two the armies look almost evenly matched.

Then the Neighbors start to chant.

They chant and the sound seems to turn unhappily in place. The air starts to whimper. Kai has time to sniff magic. Magic smells of spit.

The eyes in the head of the man standing next to Kai explode. The man howls and drops the rock he had meant to throw.

There is a ripping sound. Kai turns in time to see the skin being pulled from a young man’s body. The air lifts him up and plays with him as he is disrobed of his hide.

A farmer with a lucky mole on his chin is having his intestines pulled rapidly out of his body.

Kai’s sword heats up. It becomes as hot as coals. Everywhere about him men scream and drop their hoes or their shovels.

Kai stands his ground. The sword belonged to his master, and his master before that. Kai holds on to it as it scorches his flesh. He focuses his mind on resisting the heat. His skin sears and heals, sears and heals in repeated waves of agony.

The rebels turn and flee.

The Dogs of Magic hound them. There is a slathering in the air as magic tastes, selects, destroys.

Magic licks Kai.

All of Kai’s skin starts to boil. He can see the fat within bubble. He holds his focus, turns and calmly, somewhat stiffly, walks away. He survives through willpower.

He stumbles down rubble toward cool reeds before having to sit. He steams his way down into damp mud.

In the morning he wakes up after dreams of canoeing on the lake. In a circle all around him plants have burned or shrivelled. The dew steams. Kai hears the clink of hammers on rocks and smells a butcher’s shop.

He stands. Sons of Kambu work in lines, their heads hanging low. They recite.

The happy man is one who knows his limitations

And smiles formally even to a dog

Tears pour down Kai’s face, stinging the singed flesh with salt. He stands still, building a wall in his mind against despair.

Oh, familiar kindly Chbap, why do you have no answer to this? Do you have no song to bring victory and not defeat?

And somehow one comes to mind. Why this one? It’s called the Problem Chbap, the one nobody understands.

Magic is the way of men of power

They do not love kindness and nor does magic.

Magic perfumes the air and sends men to hell.

Push the particles of reality far and fast

And magic will die, succumb to what is likely

In the land where what you put in tea perfumes

And magic is what is ground in the pestle.

Kai stands transfixed. Suddenly it makes sense.

A guard struts forward, howling orders. He is a humble Neighbor without magic. Still contemplating the Problem Chbap, Kai spins on his heel and sends the Neighbor’s head still shouting through the air.

Then Kai spins in the opposite direction and starts to march.

What do you put in your tea? Cardamom.

The Cardamom Mountains.

You will know that the action is right if everything happens swiftly

Kai arrives at his old monastery, still smoldering from heat.

The acolytes and the lay preachers and the old masters touch his skin, and their fingers hiss. His eyebrows flame and sputter, go out and flame again. The acolytes give him water and it boils in his mouth, but he has to drink it. Tears stream out his eyes and evaporate as steam.

An old master says, “You have become a fulcrum for the universe. I’ve cast the yarrow, and you came up all strong lines, changing to weak ones.”

Kai tells them what happened in the lands of the Commonwealth, and of the Problem Chbap.

An acolyte says, “There are many like that. Remember the Dubious Chbap?”

Even trees mislead,

The worn path bends the wrong way

Undo cries the air, undo says the wise men,

And the trees open up.

Kai realizes. These problem Chbap did not make sense to us because we were not listening. These Chbap bring another kind of wisdom. They provide the balance to others.

These Chbap tell us how to fight.

“And how about this one. The masters love to set this as a test.”

The mind observes and makes happen what it wants to see.

This is magic.

The motes of reality coast to what is most likely

And that is called the real.

Steaming, shuddering, fighting the spell, Kai’s mind becomes his sword. For once.

His mind now cuts through a different kind of sandstone wall. This is a wall of beautiful, repetitive images: celestial maidens, virtuous monks, and skilled warriors … all that hardened rooster shit.

Kai says, “There is a machine that destroys magic in the Cardamom Mountains. We have to go and find it and use it on the Neighbors.”

Immediately, ten young strong warrior monks volunteer. “We pack our bags now.”

“No, no, Kai needs to rest,” says one old monk, a rival of Kai.

“He should ask the King’s permission,” says another.

“That old fart!” says one of the warrior monks. “Let him sit at home and make earrings!”

Kai’s voice rumbles from the fire within. “We go now. We go slowly, because if I am distracted I will burst into flame.”

The young men exclaim: we take nothing! Just clothes, swords, stout shoes. A blanket against the cold in the mountains. We will hunt our food and cut it down from trees.

“More like you’ll steal it from the poor peasants,” growls Kai’s rival.

“You mean like the King does?” The thrill of rebellion has made the acolytes forget respect.

They bustle their packs together.

The boy who Kai bought creeps forward. “Can I come as well?” Arun asks. His name means Morning Sun.

Losing focus, beginning to crackle from heat, Kai can only shake his head.

“Please.” Arun begs. “I am so bored here. I learn nothing. I just sweep.”

Eyes closed from concentration, Kai nods yes.

So the acolytes, proud sons of significant people, are joined by the slave. “Boy,” they say, “Carry this.”

Kai growls. “He works for me. Not you.”

The acolytes bow and withdraw. They generally do, when faced with power.

They leave that night in the rain. The raindrops sputter and dance on Kai as if on a skillet.

“Swiftly” in a country without roads or waterways can mean many things.

It means you are welcomed in a village, and feted, and asked to wait so that you can chant at the wedding of the headman’s daughter. You abide some weeks in preparation.

Arun says, “Teach me how to focus against the heat, Master. That way I can still massage your shoulders.”

To Kai’s surprise, he does.

One of the young men falls in love with one of the bride’s sisters. It takes another week to persuade him to leave.

“Swiftly” means waiting out the rainy season as the plains of Kambu are milled into dough. It means the toes of the young men rot as they squelch through mud.

It means they wait all afternoon under a covered bridge as raindrops pound on the roof.

“Swiftly” means being lured into a welcoming village and then held as bandits, accused of theft and berated for rape.

The trial lasts weeks as all the ills of the village are visited on your head. The wretched people really think they can revenge all the wrongs done to them by killing you.

Kai practices forbearance, calmly pointing out that they were not in the village when the wrongs were done. He looks at the headman playing with Kai’s own sword. He waits until the headman tires of admiring it and lays it to one side.

Then Kai stands up and says, “I am so sorry. I am afraid there’s nothing we can do now except become another great wrong done to your people.”

Kai can sing a note that makes his sword throb in harmony. The sword wobbles, weaves, and bounces itself into his hand.

“Many apologies,” he says, and slices a pathway through the villagers, leading his acolytes out the door.

The dry season comes and the rivers shrivel. Kai’s men march far out to the muddy borders of the lake, looking for a boat. They are told it will return from the city of Three Rivers within the week.

You swiftly wait sitting in mud, slipping in mud, catching frogs for supper. Each day, the lake is farther way, and you must walk again further out.

Arun says, “Let me oil and clean your sword, Master, so that it does not rust.”

The hissing sword does not burn Arun’s fingers. Kai thinks: this Arun has talent.

The noble acolytes look at the fish and frogs they have caught. Must they eat the frogs raw?