The Nicholas Linnear Novels (217 page)

On the contrary, Zhuji seemed encysted in time as well as in the Taichang Shan. The sad-looking, poverty-riven, grimy modern-day China was unaware of Zhuji’s existence. It abided as it had for centuries, a cenobitic religious community, wholly self-contained, entirely self-sufficient. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not touched it with its coal- and diesel-smeared hands.

Senjin’s presence was announced by the steely rings of his aura. The whole of Zhuji knew of his imminence even while he strode through the rough, dusty foothills of the Taihang Shan. As a result, the tanjian elders were already in the village square when Senjin entered it from the east.

They greeted him in the language he had been taught by Haha-san. He was welcomed like a long-lost son because, after all, that was precisely what he was. And the next morning at sunrise he began his formal education in Tau-tau.

The tanjian elder assigned to oversee Senjin’s training was named Mubao. He was a tall, willowy man with the hard cast of China’s harsh northern steppes imprinted on his face. In the quickness of his eyes, the darting movements of his head, he reminded Senjin of a hawk.

Senjin was ushered into his chamber, a rock-walled cubicle rimmed with soot. A fire was blazing in a rough-hewn hearth, for it was chilly this time of year in the Taihang Shan. Through a tiny glassless window Senjin could see the cloud-streaked sky, stained red by the advancing sun.

Mubao said nothing. He did not look up. He sat at his bamboo desk immersed in his papers for some time, as if there were no one else in the room with him.

After a time, restless, Senjin stirred. Mubao was up and moving before Senjin knew what was happening. His first instinct was to use his gift, and he sent his dark, metallic aura outward in order to intercept the older man.

Much to his shock, he found that he was imprisoned, encircled by an impenetrable wall, featureless, still as eternity or death. In that moment of immobility, Mubao reached him. Clamping a powerful hand at the base of Senjin’s neck, Mubao forced the boy across the stone room, thrusting his head at the fire.

Flames danced before Senjin’s eyes, the dry heat and coiling, aromatic smoke threatening to choke him. He felt his face grow hot, smelled something burning, realized belatedly that his eyebrows had been seared off.

At last Mubao thrust his head away from the fire, but he did not relinquish his paralyzing hold. “You come here arrogant, ignorant,” Mubao said in his deep, vibratory voice, “ready to use your gift indiscriminately, injudiciously. You are selfish, vain, mistakenly self-assured. You are a danger to us and to yourself. Have you anything to say in your defense?”

The moment Mubao turned him loose, Senjin bridled. The anger gushed through him, a hot and milky substance, as sweet and thick as honey. For an instant he contemplated reaching out with the steely rings of his aura, using what the River Man had taught him to inflict punishment for his humiliation.

Then, like an animal appearing from the depths of a forest, his instinct for survival surfaced. Senjin knew, without quite knowing how, that were he to use his gift in such a fashion, it would strike only that puzzling featureless wall, rebounding back, disabling him.

Then everything changed. Senjin’s aggression dissipated. He averted his eyes and hung his head. “I have no defense,” he whispered hoarsely, “in the face of the truth.” But it was not humility that had overcome him; it was greed. He wanted the power that Mubao obviously possessed, and he vowed that whatever it took to attain it, he would do.

“That being the case,” Mubao intoned, “I now pronounce sentence. You will shave your head, and keep it shaved to publicly show your unworthy nature, until directed to do otherwise. You will work and make your bed in the kitchen, an assistant to the apprentices. You will follow their direction without question. You will perform whatever tasks are set before you no matter how menial for as long as you are in the kitchen or wherever you are directed to go.”

“What about my instruction in Tau-tau?” Senjin asked.

“It has already begun,” Mubao said.

I will not give in to humiliation, Senjin thought.

And there was a great deal to give in to. The apprentices hated him—he was Japanese, after all. They made fun of him, these stupid boys with their stunted auras and their backward minds. Senjin despised them, all the while acceding to their endless demands on him. They made him handle the rotting garbage, spread animal manure with his bare hands on the delicate plantings in the extensive vegetable and herb gardens. Once they even ordered him to dig a new cesspit, and while he was at it, lined up above him at its lip, urinating on him in conceit. Another time, he found a turd in his bed. Routinely, there were insects in his food; he ate them with a great show, relishing their taste as if they were a delicacy.

All this humiliation was meant to make him a better person, but it did not. Senjin was oblivious to the mirror of his self that Mubao was determined to hold up to him. It was as if Senjin were a mythical vampire who had no reflection to be thrown back into his face.

Neither, it seemed, did he have a shadow. The substance of his life at Zhuji had no meaning for him. He might as well have been in prison or in paradise, it was all the same to him. Only his internal questions, ticking like time bombs within his mind, were of any importance. As for the rest, he was as an automaton or more accurately, an exquisitely trained actor whose greatest triumph is the illusion of normalcy his art allows him to create.

So it was that even Mubao, with all his skills and power, was taken in by the master illusionist. He believed, as did all the tanjian elders, that humility was at last coming to arrogant Senjin, that the baseness of his existence in Zhuji was an important lesson well learned.

How wrong they all were, and how ignorant of their mistake they were. Perhaps there was a lesson for them in Senjin’s stay. Their own arrogance in their time-honored methods caused them to treat him as they treated all novices in Tau-tau. But Senjin was unlike any other novice who had been born to their community. But the tanjian elders had, over time, become comfortable with their powers, which had stymied even great Mao. How were they to guess that a mere boy could evade their methodology? They had taken a viper into their midst, and were unable to see themselves in the scales gleaming dully beneath his illusory facade.

Senjin rarely slept for more than an hour or two a night. By day he was the willing slave of the kitchen apprentices who hated him. By night he delivered himself up to Mubao or whichever tanjian elder was involved in the different phases of Tau-tau.

It was not Kshira, the form of Tau-tau that the River Man had been teaching him, though to be sure, there were certain similarities. Senjin saw immediately how the discipline, despite the best intentions, had been corrupted by time, the vagaries of oral transmission, the needs and necessities of the Japanese culture.

What were the questions that neither Haha-san nor the River Man could answer, the questions that had driven him to seek out Zhuji and the tanjian? When he had arrived here, Senjin thought he knew: what had happened to the River Man here? Wasn’t there more to learn than the musings of dead men which passed for philosophy? Where was the Truth in the world, the answer to the universal questions: why am I here, where am I going, what will I become afterward?

But now Senjin knew that he needed to know more even than that. Why am I rage? he kept asking himself, his hands full of manure. Why am I anger? his mouth filled with beetles. Why am I fury? crouched in the night, his dark, metallic aura clamped tightly around him, a bird with its wings bound.

Neither Mubao nor any of the other elders took the slightest notice when Senjin asked them about the experience of the River Man in Zhuji. He had been scheming for some time to find some way to get them to open up, when an opportunity presented itself from an unlikely source.

There was a strictly enforced ban against the younger males and females getting together save for mealtimes, which were always communal. Still, here and there boys and girls managed their trysts. Senjin could never quite figure out whether these clandestine affairs went unnoticed by the elders or whether the lengths to which the couples went in order to hide their meetings were part of the Tau-tau training.

It happened there was a girl who seemed confused by much of the instruction. She seemed never to understand her lessons fully or to perform to the standards set by the elders. As a result, she was reviled and ridiculed in much the same manner as Senjin was.

Her name was Xu, and she was very beautiful. She had porcelain skin and the face of a doll, almost hypnotic in its perfection. It seemed ironic to Senjin that she was so physically perfect yet so inept at her lessons. Senjin, ever the consummate liar, told himself that he was drawn to her because he adored perfection in any form. He saw himself as a sculptor and Xu a half-formed lump of clay from which he could fashion a masterpiece. The truth was that in this strange community, he could not bear his absolute isolation. Yet he could not admit to himself that this inner pain drove him to seek out someone who was very much like himself: reviled, scorned, a beautiful outsider. And it was his own need for companionship that blinded him to her own weaknesses, which in other circumstances he would have despised. He was aware only of Xu’s degradation, and saw in her suffering face his own reflection.

At first he observed her humiliation as the others did, although not enjoying it as they obviously did. But soon her treatment became so painful for him that he was obliged to intervene. He saw the concerted cruelty as a transgression—not against any spoken or implied law of the tanjian, which meant nothing to him—but against his own internal code, which was becoming more manifest to him day by day.

Outside, in the cold surrounding the privies, he watched as Xu was taunted by a group of girls. They began by verbally abusing her. This quickly escalated to pushing and shoving, sending her stumbling over the rocky ground, until she slid into the cesspit he was digging.

Senjin stopped what he was doing. He saw Xu biting so hard on her lower lip that it began to bleed, trying desperately not to cry. She pulled herself into a ball, thrusting herself into the dirt of the pit’s side in a pathetic attempt to hide from the laughing, mocking girls.

These girls were how standing at the edge of the cesspit, bending over, hands on their knees, calling out to Xu. One of them spit in her direction; it struck Senjin on the cheek. This made the girls laugh even more.

“Oh, look,” they cried, “it’s Shit-boy! We didn’t see you digging there, Shit-boy!” Tears of laughter streamed down their faces.

Senjin looked down, saw Xu trembling, staring up at the gob of spittle on his cheek. He saw the tears that she had been so valiantly holding back begin to slide down her face. She wept for him where she would not weep for herself.

Senjin closed his eyes, found that place inside himself where dwelled the dark metallic rings of his aura. This place was distant in both time and place, very near the place where the membrane
kokoro
hung suspended. Now Senjin began his repetitions, and soon the energy he emitted began to excite the membrane, setting it to vibrating.

Now he moved his essence outward, grabbing hold of his aura and casting it into space and time. A moment later the earth gave a lurch in the way a wild boar will convulse when a spear is struck through its back.

Senjin heard screaming, a rumble, and opening his eyes, he observed through slitted lids that the ground had given way beneath the feet of the gaggle of girls, so that now they lay in a tangled heap below the level where he stood. They were screaming and crying in terror.

He laughed, threw down his shovel. “Look, Xu,” he said, “my morning’s work is done. The new cesspit has been dug for me.”

Xu was wide-eyed beside him. He leaped up out of the shallow pit and, bending, drew her upward beside him. He watched, content, as Xu lifted up her skirt, squatted, and inaugurated the new cesspit.

Xu, her self-respect restored, took his hand, leading him wordlessly up along a twisting path. Solemn mountain goats, munching tufts of dried grass, observed their ascent with huge liquid-brown eyes. Jackrabbits bounded out of their way, and once, they caught sight of a thick ruddy tail, then a glimpse of a large triangular head as a fox sought to avoid them.

She took him off the path a distance before it petered out on bare rock, and they moved carefully down the scree. Behind a pair of enormous boulders they came upon a small grassy clearing. It was shielded in every direction, utterly private.

“How do you know of this place?” Senjin said.

“I come here when I want to be alone, when I can no longer bear the taunts.”

“You won’t have to worry about them anymore.”

“Oh, no one else would have done that for me!” Xu said, then immediately blushed.

“You could have done that yourself,” Senjin pointed out. “You didn’t really need me—or anyone.”

“Oh, yes. But I do,” Xu said. Her eyes darted away at him as she spun around. “It’s so beautiful here.” She took a deep breath. “The air is so different high up, so sweet, like a baby’s smell.”

Senjin had other things on his mind. He watched her, wondering how he could change her so that she would reach perfection. But then a sad thought crept into his mind: if he should ever form her into a masterpiece, he would have no choice but to destroy her.

He grabbed her wrist. “Why did you bring me up here?”

“Why?” She seemed confused, as she did when asked to perform with her gift what the elder had just demonstrated. “Oh, to share all this with me.”

“Share all what?”

“Well,
this.
” Xu threw out her arms to encompass everything around them.

“This patch of dirt and rock looks like every other one.”

“No,” Xu said, catching his eyes with hers. “This one is different, special. Like you.” She took his hands in hers. “Because it's
mine
.”

Then, for the first time, Senjin felt her gift. He thought that it must be very weak, although much later, after he had left Zhuji, he began to suspect that perhaps she was expert in shielding the existence of her gift from other tanjian, and he regretted not getting to know her better.