Jake Maroc - Shan Part 30

"How were you tortured?"

"Silver b.u.t.tons"

But the feng shui man's upheld hand cut Zilin off.

Senlin stared into that long Mongol face and thought she saw someone else. A countenance she knew yet did not know.

"If it is painful," Fazhan said, "think of how a wound aches even as it is healing. Consider that it must do so in order to heal."

"There were shadows," she began. "I remember there were shadows all around. Perhaps they came from the men moving beyond the fires. There were fires burning all around, did I mention that?" Her voice held an odd echoey quality, as if she were speaking to them from some distance away. "The men came at me with the fires at their backs. I could never see them a see their faces. The absence of light and heat gave me clues as to their movement but always firelight was in my eyes. There was an overpowering stench that made me want to gag, There were piles of broken bones. Those were all black and scorched as if they had been roasted in the fires.

"They were the bones of the j.a.panese, the shadows told me. And bones of the Nationalists. A shadow bent down and I felt the pa.s.sage of something. It must have been a weapon because I saw the shadow hold up the severed arm of a Chinese soldier.

" *See,' he said. *See what we do to Nationalist sc.u.m!' And he thrust the hand into the flames. There was a great crackling and hissing as the dripping blood sizzled. And the fingers a the fingers began to move. I began to scream and the shadows began to laugh. I screamed and screamed as I watched the fingers moving even as the fire ate through the skin, even after I realized that the movement came from the fire itself, the heat, the inner combustion. I saw that hand blackening, writhing still as if in the most intense agony.

"When the hand was gone and nothing remained of even the bones, the shadow threw the stump into the night. I heard dogs barking, panting and padding just outside the circle of the firelight.

"Then the shadow grabbed me and untied me. It took me toward the flames. Now I knew the origin of the cloying stench. It was the burning of human flesh. I saw how the soldiers were defiling the Ming corpses a cutting off their manhood and pressing the sides of their jaws so their mouths gaped open a it was hideous, unspeakable."

Senlin's breast was heaving uncontrollably and her words were gasped out almost as if she was being choked by them. She was shivering as if with the ague, but by a commanding gesture the feng shui man held Zilin back from her.

"You said *Ming corpses' just now," Fazhan said.

Senlin started as if he had put a branding iron to her flesh. "I did?"

She blinked heavily. "I don't remember. Of course I meant the j.a.panese corpses. It was the j.a.panese corpses." There was a hollow look in her eyes. "Why would I say Ming? The Ming Dynasty was overthrown three hundred years ago."

Fazhan turned and lit three more josssticks. He placed them beside the first three, already half-burned.

"In sixteen forty-four, to be precise," he said. "By the end of the fifteenth century, the end the Ming Dynasty was in sight. Remorseless Mongols from the north, barbarous j.a.panese pirates along the east coast were constant threats. Chronic poverty caused by the ever increasing popularity of large servant-tended estates. Lower and lower bowed the back of the pitiful peasant until, at length, these inhuman injustices brought on a groundswell of protests and then strikes by the workers in the major mercantile sectors.

"Despite the intervention of a newly formed secret police, the people cried out for justice, banding together. And all the while, the power of the Ming emperors was waning until, by the time of Wanli at the close of the century, much of the dynasty's power had devolved into the hands of the court eunuchs.

"In sixteen twenty-one, shortly after the time of Wanli's death, those who opposed the Mings' rule overran Peking. This internal war was the signal the Manchus had been waiting for. Down from the north they swept. When they reached the capital there was tremendous bloodshed. Eventually, the victorious Manchus proclaimed the Qing Dynasty."

The room was filled up with the curling scent of the josssticks. There was heat as if somewhere out of sight a fire had been lit.

"What do the Ming and the Manchus have to do with Senlin?" Zilin asked.

"In feng shui one deals with many aspects of the world," Fazhan said. "Some are obvious, others are hidden in dark corners. Ordinarily, however, one deals in ru-shr, that which is within the scope of our experience. In these cases, cures are often simply effected since humans have within them the five elements: earth, fire, water, metal, wood. All people possess these five to one degree or another measured upon a scale of one to seventy-two. Imbalances in one or more of these elements are most often the cause of an individual's feng shui problem."

Fazhan took up three more josssticks and lit them. Now there were nine grouped around the jade figurine and the gold Buddha.

Nine, the full figure in numerology. The most fortuitous of numbers.

"Occasionally," Fazhan went on, "very infrequently, one comes upon a subject for which ru-shr is inadequate. When one has exhausted all the known quant.i.ties at one's disposal, one is obliged to seek answers elsewhere. In chu-shr, areas outside one's experience."

Zilin could see through the smoke that Senlin was trembling. She turned to him and said, "Please take me back to the villa. Zilin, I implore you!"

Zilin looked from her pained face to the feng shui man, who stood silent as a statue, the tips of his long fingers touching. For the first time in his life, he did not know which course was the correct one. His mind told him to stay but his heart, torn by what his eyes saw, urged him to take Senlin and flee.

"Zilin, please! There is evil here." Her eyes were wide and staring. She was clearly terrified. "I fear the evil will consume me."

"And so it shall," Fazhan said, "if you leave here now."

"No!" The one word was torn out of her throat.

Fazhan spread his hands. "I cannot stop you from leaving. Neither can Zilin. No one has that right, Senlin. You must understand that. If you do not stay of your own free will there is nothing I can do to save you."

"Save her?" Zilin said. "Save her from what?"

"From whatever is consuming her from the inside."

"What is it?" Zilin asked.

"Chu-shr," the feng shui man said.

Senlin gave a little cry so strangled and full of despair that Zilin took her by the wrist and led her out of there.

Down the long dark corridor he heard sobbing, an eerie echoing sound as if, like the voice Senlin had used to recount the horror that had befallen her, it came from far away.

At the entryway, they pa.s.sed by the spirit mirror. Senlin turned to glance at it and stopped so abruptly that for an instant Zilin was thrown off balance.

"No," Senlin said in another voice entirely. "I cannot leave. Not yet. Not yet. The evil"

They both started as Fazhan appeared. From out of which shadow he had stepped Zilin could not say nor would he wish to try.

"It is time," the feng shui man said. "Earth, fire, water, metal, wood. None of the five will avail us an answer. Chu-shr." He began to lead them in another direction.

"Where are we going?" Zilin said.

*To the edge," Fazhan replied, "of the xin jing."

The garden at night. It was filled with white mulberry trees. The same species cultivated by the weavers and off which the precious silkworm fed.

There was an odd spicy scent about them that was unfamiliar to Zilin. There was a cold silver sliver of moon, the horns of the dragon, so it was said. The height of the feeding cycle for nocturnal predators.

They made nine circuits around the small garden. Nine, in Mandarin, meant long life. Much of Chinese numerology stemmed from the fact that Chinese, in all its varied dialects, was a h.o.m.onymous language. Often numbers sounded like other words and, therefore, took on the significance a.s.sociated with those words.

"The nine is important tonight," the feng shui man said. "Perhaps even crucial. This is the twenty-fourth day of the fourth month. Four twenty-four, the most inauspicious day of the calendar."

Zilin, who knew Cantonese as well as Fazhan did, understood why. The number four in Cantonese sounded like the word die. Thus four twenty-four was die and die again, a number to be shunned at all costs. Why, Zilin wondered, had he decided to bring Senlin here this night?

"Still you are here," Fazhan said, echoing Zilin's thought, "and that is significant in and of itself. If the four twenty-four is the proper time, then so be it. The Tao of perpetual change tells us that only at the apex of the darkness can the first light appear."

Fazhan then led them to the center of the garden. Here there were vines all around, and the luscious scent of roses though, surely, it was too early in the year for such blossoms.

When they were completely enclosed within the bower formed by the overarching white mulberries, the feng shui man placed them as he saw fit. "Senlin," he said, "face this way, toward the slopes of the black tortoise mountain. Zilin, here, this is where you must stand, near the rock formation of the crimson phoenix. And I, here, at the mouth of the green dragon." He nodded his long head. "Now the qi will rise, bubbling like lava, from where it swirls endlessly at the core of the planet.

Senlin was aware of a great darkness before her. "What is this?" she said, pointing.

"The spirit well," Fazhan said.

There was no wind at all, and no clouds to speak of. The dragon's horn moon rode in the firmament as the final enigmatic punctuation on an otherwise blank page.

Now Fazhan began to speak in a kind of rhythmic litany. His words were of no Chinese dialect Zilin had ever heard. Perhaps they were not Chinese at all, he thought, but rather some ancient Tibetan or Indie tongue.

It seemed that the heat that had suffused the room of surras had followed them out into what had once been a cool spring evening. Now it was as hot as high summer. The budding mulberry leaves seemed to droop, and sweat sprang out on all of them.

Zilin looked at Senlin. Her eyes were fixed and staring into what invisible s.p.a.ce he could not guess. As if in some trance she took a step forward, then another until she was at the lip of the spirit well. Her hands came up and by the cold light of the horned moon, he saw her grasp the stones at the well's top. She began to lean over until her face was hanging suspended over the great maw whose inky blackness was beyond color.

Senlin could not breathe. She tried to inhale but it was as if she had entered an airless s.p.a.ce where her lungs refused to work. She no longer heard Fazhan's arcane incantations. Rather, she felt it. His words cloaked her and at the same time began to pull her out of herself. She felt again the sensation she had experienced with Zilin when they had joined their flesh in the storm of the previous night.

The top of her skull seemed to dissolve and somethinga part of herbegan to emerge. Then she felt the pain and knewknewthat there was someone else inside her.

This was the source of the evil, not Fazhan's house or garden or xin jing. It had been this malevolent presence inside her who had sensed a danger herefor itself, not for Senlin.

Senlin's jaws were clenched, her eyes were tearing and there was an agony inside her beyond all understanding. Curved talons raked against her insides, weals of pain sprouted, and she tried to cry out. She could do nothing.

Inside the airless s.p.a.ce over the spirit well's mouth, she swayed and would have collapsed into those infinite depths had not Fazhan woven his invisible web around her.

Now a blinding light shone inside her head and for an instant Senlin was transported back in time to the sacking of Peking by the enemies of the Ming. She relived the atrocities inflicted by the conquerors uponthe vanquished. She was witness to the death of the dynasty, the b.l.o.o.d.y, terror-filled ending. She was the Emperor's consort and she recognized the face of Li Zi cheng, the general who had once been her lover and was now her mortal enemy.

Li Zi cheng ended her Emperor's life with one appalling blow. Then he took her up and threw her across the room. She withdrew a dagger from its sheath against her breast and tried to kill him. But he only laughed and struck her so hard across the face that she let go the weapon. Then he was upon her. He raped her, taking his time about it, his member hard as jade all over again, thrusting viciously into her a second time. When he was through, he ordered all the soldiers in the room to take her. By ones, twos, even threes, they eagerly complied.

She was a long time in dying. At least her physical body had perished. But not her spirit. It had survived and even now it craved revenge. It sought only to destroy. Was there any intelligence within it beyond that one elemental desire?

Zilin knew none of this, of course, until later. But he did see Senlin bent over the well's mouth. He saw her convulsed by awful spasms. He saw her mouth come open far wider than he thought possible in human anatomy.

And he saw the flash of light, blue-white, corrosive enough so that it seemed to sear his eyes. His vision blurred painfully and after that he was never certain whether he saw or merely imagined he saw a a the smoke of centuries curling like that of the nine josssticks in the room of the sutras from out of Senlin's gaping mouth. It seemed to him that it streamed and floated at the same time and that, simultaneously, his nostrils caught a heavy whiff of that same sickly sweet stench that Senlin had described and which Zilin had himself smelled so often during the war. Flesh was burning.

And now the smoke began to curl, forming itself into a shape. The apparition of a young woman made itself manifest. Its eyes were large around, its nose a skeleton's fleshless socket.

There were arms as well, ending in fingersor perhaps, knowing the predilection of the Mings, nailsnearly half a meter long. But the torso was as thin and undefined as a serpent's body.

As an astounded Zilin continued to watch, that reptilian form commenced to entwine itself first around Senlin's shoulders and then around her neck and head.

He cried out but in that instant Fazhan stepped aside so that the feng shui man no longer stood in front of the mouth of the rock known as the green dragon.

Zilin was aware of a rising wind and looked around for its source, for the tops of the high mulberry trees were as still and droopy as ever they had been since the trio emerged into the garden.

It was then that he saw that the unnatural wind, as cold as an icy stream in winter, seemed to have its origin within one of the horizontal crevices that indented the green dragon.

The horrific apparition that was part of Senlin and was also trying to kill her turned its head as it felt the first gust of wind.

Then the water came. Another rainstorm one might have said, except that the water was running horizontally!

Into the face of the apparition the icy water flew. Smoke spinning, water spitting, the rush of a heavy wind and the burning in the trembling, shimmering air.

A howling, a gusting and, in a silence wholly unnatural in its completeness, the apparition was gone, the heat was gone. The garden, still and utterly serene, shone peacefully in the moonlight.

Fazhan picked Zilin up off the ground. Zilin looked the feng shui man in the eye. "What happened?"

Fazhan smiled. Opening his cloak slightly he said, "You see, Great Lion, I still have the row of silver b.u.t.tons sewn inside my clothes. Nothing has changed."

"Did I see"

"Nothing has changed," Fazhan reiterated.

"And Senlin?"

"The garden is yours. Do with it what you will. The spirit well sleeps now."

Alone within the bower of the mulberry trees, Zilin went to where Senlin stood, trembling. She was still gripping the lip of the stone well but as she sensed his presence, she turned and he saw that her eyes were clear.

"She is gone."

Zilin said nothing. He wondered if this had all been a dream.

"The consort of the last Ming emperor. Hu chao."

Zilin knew it was nonsense. Of course it was a dream. She was swaying like a drunkard at the end of a long evening. Perhaps she did not even know what she was saying. He took her up into his arms.

"Her lover became her enemy," she whispered reedily. "He was a general named Li Zi cheng." Her head rested against his chest and he felt her words like the rumbling of faraway thunder. He carried her along the circuitous path out of the garden. Her eyelids were heavy.

It was not until they had returned to the villa and he had put herto bed that Zilin went into his study. Searching along the rows of books, he plucked a history down and leafed through until he came to the period of the decline of the Ming Dynasty.

In 1621, during the sacking of Peking that brought the Manchus to power in China, a rebel army was indeed led by a general named Li Zi cheng. There was likewise a reference to the last emperor's consort, but since a good deal of his power had already been usurped by the imperial eunuchs and he was thus considered by many Chinese scholars to be unimportant, her name was not mentioned.

Zilin went from history to history but no matter how detailed they otherwise were, he could find no trace of the consort's name. But all of Peking was at his disposal and at length an obscure library tome delivered up to him her name.

Hu chao.

III.

FORMATION.

VIVARTA.