Linnear 03 - White Ninja (24 page)

'You are still young, So-Peng,' Liang said, 'but now circumstance has forced me to impart to you -1 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 harbour.

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 harbour.

'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 harbour the merlion, hah7 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 harbour. 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 travelling 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 north-east 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 singlehandedly 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 worshipped 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 harbour 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 on to 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 harbour, 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 which 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 sick bed 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 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.

Later, he had been sure that he had dreamt the episode, but the next morning, his sister had awakened from her high fever. Her eyes were clear, the marks upon her skin already fading. Liang, still clutching her daughter's hand, had slept through that entire day.

So-Peng took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. He needed time to comprehend the merging of past and present, to let the scattered pieces fall gently into place.

'You recognized how the two merchants were killed,' So-Peng said after a time, 'because of your father.'

Liang opened her eyes. 'Your grandfather,' she said, and it was as if that were a veiled reminder. She nodded. Her eyes seemed luminous, reflecting not only the streetlights but the last of the pellucid light in the sky far above.

Tau-tau,' she said. "Those throwing stars are made only by tanjian. The other things, the days on which the merchants were killed, the pigs' feet in their mouths, were nothing more than ruses meant to confuse the authorities. Traditional tanjian tricks.'

'Is my gift -?' So-Peng paused because this was difficult to ask; an affirmative answer would hurt him deeply. He began again. 'Is my gift part of Tau-tau?'

'No,' Liang said at once. She felt the tension drain out of him. 'That was handed down from my mother, who was not tanjian-born.'

'What are tanjian doing here in Singapore?'

Tanjian are by nature wanderers,' his mother said.

'Many emigrated to Japan three hundred years ago. Tanjian are never satisfied, always hungry for new territory. Perhaps that is because they have 'nothing of their own.'

'What do you mean?'

Liang sighed. 'Tau-tau is in a way a nihilistic discipline. Tanjian are pitiless, incapable of feeling emotion as you or I know it. As a result, they have no possessions, and are envious of those who do. Also, they are infiltrators. They hire themselves out to do the dirty work others are too honourable or too cowardly to perform themselves. This Tau-tau teaches them.'

Perhaps So-Peng heard something in his mother's tone, or again in the cast of her features. In any event, he felt compelled to say, 'None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore.' He knew that this was the truth as soon as he had said it.

Once again, he felt the expansion of her spirit, witness to its breathing, as enormous as if the earth itself were inhaling and exhaling.

'So-Peng,' Liang said at last, 'when you came to me in my dream before your birth, this was what you said to me, "None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore." Your father and I were not in Singapore then. We were outside Kuala Lumpur, at the tin mines. I had had no thought of moving to Singapore and, after the dream, I had no intention of ever coming here.'

'What happened?'

She smiled. 'Life happened, So-Peng.' Her eyes seemed limpid, as if they had somehow taken on a quality of the water beside which she and So-Peng sat. 'And, in time, I realized that I was not to be merely a creator of life, but a transmitter of knowledge as well. I realized almost as soon as I got here that it had not been coincidence that I had been born into a tanjian family and that years later I would give birth to you. It became clear to me

that the two were connected. I feared that connection, dreading the moment when you would say those words to me, "None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore." '

His mother put her head down. Years later, So-Peng would remember that the city seemed to have grown still all around them. As familiar as he was with Singapore, he found that an impossibility. Yet this is what his memory told him.

'No,' Liang said, 'none of those are the reasons the tanjian are in Singapore. The reason they are here, So-Peng, is to bring me back to my family in Zhuji.'

So-Peng was silent for a long time, and Liang said nothing in order that he might best absorb what she had told him. At last, So-Peng rallied his spirit from the shock it had received. He said, 'But why would the tanjian kill two merchants? You did not know them.'

'Don't make the same mistake that everyone else has made,' Liang said. 'It isn't who the tanjian have murdered, but how they have been killed. The method announces the tanjian presence here. It is a warning to me to obey or die.'

'You mean they took two lives merely to frighten you?'

'That is the tanjian way,' Liang said.

So-Peng was now so stunned that he opened his mouth, shut it without having said a word. His mother looked neither directly at him nor away from him. She seemed to be waiting for him, reluctant to continue until he had gathered himself.