The Nicholas Linnear Novels (185 page)

“What will happen to him?” the flat-faced boy asked.

“I will take him away,” So-Peng said.

“But we’re used to having him around,” the flat-faced boy said.

So-Peng said nothing, continued to stroke the dog’s flanks. The animal put its head on his arm, sighed contentedly, closed its eyes.

“I don’t want him to go,” the flat-faced boy said suddenly. “I think— Hey, we can take care of him.”

“Yeah,” So-Peng’s brother chimed in. “We’d
all
take care of him, wouldn’t we?”

“Yeah!” they all cried.

“Maybe we could train him or something,” another boy said.

“Like a watchdog!” another of So-Peng’s brothers continued.

The boys were together now, milling in the street, excitedly discussing their plans for the dog. So-Peng put the animal down. It sat, staring at him, its tail wagging.

Suddenly, the boys turned to So-Peng. “What do you think?” the flat-faced boy asked him.

“It isn’t up to me,” So-Peng said. “He isn’t my dog.”

“Well, he isn’t ours either,” So-Peng’s brother said.

“Do you have to take him away?” the flat-faced boy said. With the anger dissolved, his face reflected only his tremendous need for love and attention.

So-Peng smiled. He patted the dog’s head. “Maybe I could leave him here—just for a while—to see how you do with him.”

The boys clustered around the dog, stroking its head and flanks. Its tail wagged faster and faster.

The flat-faced boy came up to So-Peng. “We don’t really hate each other, Elder Brother,” he said, using the Chinese honorific. “That was just talk.”

So-Peng took the boy’s fist, opened it up. The stone he had picked up when the threat of violence was in the air rolled into the street.

“Words,” So-Peng said, “are often only the beginning.”

“I would not have thrown the stone, Elder Brother.”

So-Peng knelt down next to the flat-faced boy. “I know that you would not have wanted to.”

After a time the flat-faced boy said, “I think I understand.”

So-Peng looked at the flat-faced boy. He did not need his power in order to know what the boy needed. It was so basic. “When I was your age,” he said, “I longed for an older brother to talk to. Alas, I had none.”

“Oh, I know what you mean!” the flat-faced boy cried. Then, as he was about to go on, he lapsed into silence.

So-Peng rose. “Next week I’ll need some help on a job I’m working on weekends. Think you’d be interested?”

The flat-faced boy nodded eagerly. Once more he was too overcome to speak.

“I’ll come for you in the morning—early.”

“There’ll be no need, Elder Brother,” the flat-faced boy said. “I’ll be here at sunrise.”

So-Peng laughed. “An hour after will suffice.”

So-Peng went back through the gate. The garden was empty and still. Wondering where his mother was, So-Peng reached out with his mind. When he found her, So-Peng gasped. He felt waves of what he could only suppose was panic emanating from her.

He went immediately into the house, to the bedroom she shared with her husband. She was packing her bags.

“Where are you going, Mother?”

She whirled around. There was color in her cheeks, and she brushed several stray strands of hair off her face. She was an extraordinarily handsome woman, powerful of visage, rather than merely beautiful. Her long, narrow head was faced with high cheekbones and oddly deep-set eyes. Her ears were small and were of some pride to her, as were her feet and hands, which were delicate and tiny and very capable.

“A tortoiseshell was cracked in a fire, the pieces read by a
fengshui
man. It was foretold that you would come to me here,” she said, looking at him gravely. “If you did not come, I would know that the
fengshui
man lied, that you were not the chosen.”

So-Peng looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

She gave him a sudden, dazzling smile. “Let us go elsewhere to discuss this,” she said.

She led him outside to the garden, which she knew would be deserted at this time of the evening. They entered Singapore’s soft amethyst twilight. The rank scent of the mangrove swamps to the north mingled with the cloying attar of the flowers, hung in the heavy, breathless air. In the distance dogs barked at the encroaching shadows. One by one the streetlights were being lit by a dark-skinned Malay boy on a ladder, whose glossy head So-Peng could just see over the brick wall.

Liang and So-Peng sat across from one another on lacquered rattan chairs.

“When you were still inside me,” she said, “I could feel you reaching out to me, not with your hands, but with your mind. I saw colors—
your
colors, the shadows of your still-forming mind. After you were born, I experienced this phenomenon more strongly, and I knew that you had inherited my gift. Thereafter, I encouraged this gift inside you, exercising it, you might say, allowing it to grow as you grew.”

“I remember,” So-Peng said. “It was a link between us that no one else could share. I could speak to you without opening my mouth, and hear your response without using my ears.”

Liang sat in a very yang manner, in a way that So-Peng’s father should have sat and didn’t. It was as if
she
owned the house and everything in it. So-Peng, observing this, realized that he would not be surprised to find that this was, indeed, the case.

“You are still young, So-Peng,” Liang said, “but now circumstance has forced me to impart to you—I pray not prematurely—the full truth behind your gift. You may think now that it is a blessing, but it can so easily turn into a curse. Used for the wrong reasons—greed, envy, lust—it can be a force for great evil. Allowed its freedom, it can come to dominate your life. You must know that you cannot see into all other minds as you do into mine—or I into yours. The link is the key; two people, not one, are required. Do you understand me?” Liang waited for his affirmative nod. “Your gift may be used on its own—as no doubt you have already discovered. But it can be a trap, leading to arrogance—once you come to rely too heavily on your gift, you will blind yourself to the instances when it gives you a false reading or no reading at all. You will begin to tell yourself what you want to hear, not what your gift allows you to see and hear.”

Outside in the street, beyond the garden’s brick wall, So-Peng could hear the clip-clop of a horse-drawn carriage, the brief chatter of voices. This intrusion of the banal seemed to lend Liang’s words even more weight, as a black velvet background will enhance the glitter of a diamond.

He rose, wandering close to the wall. He put his hands out, pressed them against brick and climbing vines. He began to understand now why as a child he had been reluctant to use his gift, why he had always felt as if he carried a burden within himself that weighed upon his mind, a profound enigma.

Liang, aware that her son’s spirit was too restless to be contained within the sanctuary of the garden, suggested that they take a walk. They went silently through the teeming streets until they came to Queen Elizabeth Walk and the harbor.

Liang watched her son for some time. At length she responded to his silent question.

“I cannot tell you where I am going, So-Peng,” she said, “only that I must go.”

He was thinking of the puzzle, that her leaving must be part of it. If he solved the puzzle, he thought, perhaps she would not have to go.

They stopped by an iron railing that protected strollers from a fall into the water from the high embankment. So-Peng leaned upon the black rail, staring out at the patterns the flames of the streetlights made upon the surface of the harbor.

“Who are the tanjian?” he asked.

Liang smiled. “Why do you think I would know that?”

“Because I think you know
what
they are.”

The reflection of the flames on the water seemed like spirit lights, and in this close and magical atmosphere So-Peng could imagine emerging from the harbor the merlion—half-land beast, half-sea creature—that was said to be Singapore’s protector.

“I imagine,” Liang said, “that you have heard all the stories about my heritage. I am, or I am supposed to be, Malay, perhaps part Malay, part Chinese—Hakka, Teochew, even Sumatran. The truth is”—she looked at her eldest son—“that no one knows me.”

“Not even father?”

She laughed good-naturedly.
“Especially
not your father.”

Liang had three basic qualities from which all the ruffles and furrows of her personality stemmed. She was giving, she was sympathetic, and she was self-controlled. Years later, when his studies were more complete, So-Peng would discover that, as far as the Tao was concerned, these qualities could be reduced to a single syllable,
Da.
And
Da
was the voice of God.

“I never rail against the gods,” Liang said. “Neither do I blame those around me if they have sinned or are evil. It is my children whom I care about, and it is you, So-Peng, whom I care about the most.”

A small boy emerged from the crowd along Queen Elizabeth Walk. He ran to the railing, stuck his head between the ironwork to stare down into the water.

“Do you know that you came to me full-grown in a dream on the day before you were born?” Liang said. “I saw your face, I spoke to you, I knew your heart. That is how I know now what course your life will take, just as I know my part in it.”

The small boy climbed up the railing in order, So-Peng supposed, to get a better look at something he had seen in the harbor. So-Peng thought again of the legendary merlion of Singapore, and wondered if that was what the boy had seen.

He returned his attention to his mother, who said, “Now is the time when you must put all your energies into learning, so that by the time you are thirty you will be secure in your career. So that at forty you will have no more doubts about the world. So that at fifty you will know the will of heaven. So that at sixty you will be prepared to heed it. So that at seventy you will be able to follow the dictates of your heart by traveling the path of the righteous.”

He looked at Liang. “How am I to accomplish all this, Mother?”

“That is entirely up to you,” she said. “But I will tell you a story that may be of some help to you. In Zhuji, the village in northeast China where I was born and brought up, there was a temple inhabited by the most peculiar monks. They claimed to be descendants of Chieh, the terminator—or so he was called by many, a monarch so degenerate that he single-handedly caused the destruction of his dynasty, the Hsia. This was a very long time ago, nearly two thousand years before Christ, as the Westerners reckon time. Chieh, it is generally thought, undid all the good accomplished by the Yellow Emperor, who ruled nine hundred years before him.

“The monks were unconcerned with how the world at large viewed their infamous forebear. They were practitioners of Tau-tau, a composite form of martial arts that they contended was created by the decadent king, Chieh. They were known as tanjian, the walkers in stealth.

“These tanjian monks worshiped no god, save if you believed that Chieh was a god. Some did; others still do.” Liang paused, as if she wanted to gauge the effect of her words on her son.

“How did you come to know so much about the tanjian monks?” So-Peng asked.

“I knew them well,” she said, “because I lived with them.” She was watching her son’s eyes, reading him. “My father was a tanjian monk.”

They heard a tiny shout. The small boy, who had been attempting to walk atop the highest rail, had slipped, toppling into the harbor waters where the calm surface belied the strong, swirling currents.

People came running, but it was a long way down. They began to signal frantically to a lighter. But it was still quite a way off and it was clear from the boy’s thrashing that he could not swim.

So-Peng climbed up onto the railing, preparatory to jumping in, but his mother put her hand on his arm, restraining him with her typically firm grip. “It is too dangerous,” she said.

“But Mother—” He saw the look in her eye and fell silent. He felt the whisper of a wind, cool and invisible as it rippled out from his mother’s mind.

Liang was now concentrating fully upon the thrashing child. So-Peng thought for an instant that he saw her eyes glowing, but perhaps it was merely the reflection of the streetlights.

In the harbor the child who had been struggling unsuccessfully to keep his head above water now burst upward as if held by an underwater hand. He looked about him, terrified and at the same time filled with a kind of wonder as he bobbed upon the surface, immune to the treacherous currents.

So-Peng was aware of a thin line of perspiration rolling down the side of Liang’s face. His own mind was vibrating in the backwash of her powerful aura.

The lighter, close now, slowed, and one of the crew threw a line to the child. A moment later the child had been pulled to safety. The crowd that had gathered on the quay broke into spontaneous applause.

Liang turned away, allowed whatever breeze there was to dry the sweat on her face. She seemed very calm, and So-Peng was aware of an unnatural stillness enfolding them as if in a healing blanket. They sat on a backless stone bench, and Liang closed her eyes.

He should have been stunned at what his mother had just done, but he wasn’t. He remembered a time many years ago when one of his younger sisters had fallen gravely ill. The doctor had come, had done what he could, and had left shaking his head. So-Peng recalled him saying in a whisper at the door, “She will surely die. Make her comfortable, and pray. That’s all you can do now.”

Of course, thinking about it, there was no way that So-Peng could have overheard the doctor’s words. What he had picked up were the reverberations of those words in his mother’s mind.

Then he had watched as Liang had knelt beside the sickbed and, taking her daughter’s tiny hand in hers, had grown absolutely still. There was a clock upon the mantel at Liang’s shoulder, and So-Peng was sure that for the first time and only time it had failed to sound the passing of the hour. He had felt the house bathed in concentric circles of warmth and light, and had felt his mother’s spirit expanding.