Thirteen Orphans

by Jane Lindskold

  “Did you bring your set?”

  “I did.”

  “Good. I don’t want to use Albert’s, not until we know more.” Auntie Pearl glanced at her watch. “I think I should stay here, at least for tonight. Let me call the front desk and see if I can get a room.”

  Brenda watched as her father went into the bedroom and came out with a box like, but unlike, the one that held the tiles Auntie Pearl had taken from Albert Yu’s office. The lid of this box was ornamented with the stylized image of a rat. The other, of course, was decorated with a cat.

  For a last, blessed moment, Brenda could pretend that they were simply going to play a three-handed game. Then her father opened the box and took out something that looked like a compass, except that it had a much more elaborate graph drawn on the surface. He held the device in his hand, slowly turning as the needle turned.

  “That way is north,” he said. “Breni, help me orient the table so one side faces directly north.”

  “Okay, Dad, but why does it matter? Mah-jong directions aren’t real—they’re not even right. East and west are reversed.”

  Gaheris grinned. “Or south and north are. It’s a matter of perspective, but I know what you mean. On the ‘real’ compass, the directions are north is on top, then south on the bottom, with west on the left, east on the right. Mah-jong flips that, so east and west change places. All the more reason for making sure north is properly aligned.”

  Brenda didn’t argue further, but she felt reality flee as Gaheris carefully shifted the table so that the four sides were precisely oriented to the compass points.

  Auntie Pearl hung up the room phone with a click.

  “Are we ready?” she said.

  “Ready,” Dad agreed.

  Brenda wished she could agree. All she could manage was silence.

  As Pearl came over to join Brenda and Gaheris, she noticed that the earlier uneasiness had returned to Brenda’s expression. Well, there was nothing like doing something—anything—to distract an unhappy mind.

  “All right, Gaheris, spill out the tiles and we’ll all build the wall. Brenda, have you seen this mah-jong set before?”

  “A couple of times,” Brenda admitted. “We had a plastic set to play with, but Dad brought this one out sometimes, just to let us look at them.”

  Gaheris would have, Pearl thought, looking to see which of his children was to follow him as Rat. Two sons and a daughter, just like my family, but I bet his reaction to learning his daughter would follow him was very different from my father’s.

  “The tiles are made from bone and bamboo,” Pearl continued, and shot a glance at Gaheris from beneath her lashes lest he give away precisely what type of bone. Brenda was not ready for that. “The bone holds the carving, and the bamboo protects the bone. Each element has symbolic significance as well, but that can wait.”

  “Lots of things seem to wait,” Brenda muttered.

  “Isn’t that the way of life?” Pearl agreed pleasantly. “Now, you told me earlier that you knew about building the wall to start a game. That is the first step for what we are going to do as well. However, there is a different reason for building this wall than to avoid cheating in a gambling game.”

  Pearl reached out and touched the tiles lightly, shuffling them, the motion just a bit sluggish because of the loose fabric beneath the polished bone.

  Gaheris did the same, and, after a moment, Brenda reached over and joined in. Their hands were very different: Pearl’s with their elegant nails, the knuckles slightly swollen from arthritis; Gaheris’s narrow and long, the nails neatly trimmed; Brenda’s a feminine version of her father’s, the nails short and a little ragged, traces of old polish near the cuticles.

  “What’s the reason for building the wall then?” Brenda asked after a moment. “I mean, if not to keep someone from cheating?”

  Pearl stopped shuffling and started building the wall. The other two followed her lead almost automatically.

  “Like the altered directions I heard you and your father discussing a moment ago, it has to do with Chinese cosmography,” Pearl said. “The majority of ancient Chinese descriptions depicted the world as a square—or a cube. That detail depended on which theorist was doing the describing. Cube or square isn’t important. What is important is that whatever the description, those doing the describing agreed on one thing. China was in the center of the square.”

  “Lots of cultures were like that, weren’t they?” asked Brenda. “I mean Galileo got in a lot of trouble for not putting the Earth at the center of the universe, right?”

  “Lots of cultures were—and are—egocentric,” Pearl agreed, “but few went so far as the Chinese. Their word for what Westerners came to call ‘China’ translated as ‘center country’ or more eloquently, Middle Kingdom. Even more poetically, the translation could be extended to mean ‘Celestial Kingdom’ or ‘Heavenly Land,’ because by an extension of that same cosmography, by being placed at the center, China was directly under heaven and so specially blessed.”

  Gaheris added, “Brenda, remember when I showed you the Chinese character that means ‘middle’ or ‘center’?”

  “The rectangle with the line through it,” Brenda said. “The same as on the red dragon tile.”

  “We’ll get back to the red dragon later,” Gaheris promised. “What I want you to remember is that the character that we translate as meaning ‘center’ isn’t simply made up from a random assortment of lines. It is a drawing of how the entire universe was perceived as being shaped.”

  Brenda drew a finger around the now completed square they had constructed from the double-stacked mah-jong tiles.

  “So when we build this square out of the tiles, we’re building the world—the universe?”

  “That is correct,” Pearl said.

  Brenda looked at how the square was positioned on the printed fabric. “The way we’ve built the wall puts the cat inside the world, and the other twelve outside. Is that deliberate?”

  “It is. The Twelve were exiled, shut out of the world. The Cat left, but he was not formally exiled. Therefore, he is still inside the world.”

  Gaheris cleared his throat. “That pattern also permits the twelve animals to remain correctly oriented as to their symbolic directions. Squeezing the cat in would have thrown everything off.”

  Brenda looked as if dozens of questions were competing to get out of her mouth, but she only said, “What do we do next?”

  Gaheris smiled at his daughter. “Because randomness has its benefits in divination as well as in gambling, the next thing we do is roll dice to break the wall.”

  “Just as if we’re playing mah-jong?” Brenda said. “Well, if we’re going to do that, we need to choose seats. Usually we draw winds for that, but the wall’s already built. Do we bust it up and start over?”

  Pearl shook her head. “When working an augury, it is best that those involved sit in the direction most closely associated with their zodiac animal.”

  Brenda looked very much like she wanted to ask, “Associated directions?” but she kept her lips pressed tightly shut.

  Gaheris spoke into the uncomfortable pause. “North is the direction associated with the Rat, so I will take that chair. Auntie Pearl?”

  “The Tiger’s direction is east-northeast,” Pearl said. “Since Gaheris has north, I will cover the east. Brenda, can we impose on you to be both south and west?”

  Brenda moved to the chair opposite her father in reply.

  Gaheris rolled two dice.

  “High roll starts,” he said, both in invocation and explanation. “Four.”

  Pearl rolled a seven. Brenda rolled a nine, and therefore was the one to start. She looked uncertainly between the others.

  “Start like you’re playing mah-jong,” Gaheris prompted.

  Brenda rolled the two dice in the center of the square. They came up a three and a five, totaling eight. Pearl had played so many games, cast so many auguries and even more complex spells that she knew
where the wall would break, but she waited patiently as Brenda counted off the walls, starting in front of herself, and moving counterclockwise in the approved fashion.

  “ … Six, seven, eight,” Brenda concluded. “East rolls next.”

  She picked up the dice and handed them politely to Pearl. The younger woman’s earlier trepidation seemed to have ebbed. Her dark brown eyes were bright and interested.

  Pearl rolled the dice. They came up twelve. She added twelve to nine, then counted off from the wall in front of her, until she reached the twenty-first pair—which happened to be in the wall directly in front of her.

  “As in a usual game, we remove this pair of tiles, and the pair beside them,” Pearl said, following words with appropriate action.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Brenda said, “about the rules for breaking the wall. Doesn’t all that adding eliminate the lower pairs completely? I mean, you’re never going to roll a one, because you’re rolling two dice, but adding together means you’ll never get lower than four, and that would be so rare as to be almost impossible.”

  It was the same question Gaheris had asked when Pearl had taught him, and he gave the same answer.

  “Overlap covers the eliminated sets,” he said. “You said you knew tarot cards.”

  “A little.”

  “Well, a tarot reading starts by pulling out the signifier for the person for whom the reading is being given, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So that eliminates that card, and all its meanings. It seems to me that could be rather important, since the signifier is usually selected from among the face cards.”

  “But there are other cards with the same basic meaning,” Brenda said, “and a good reader keeps that in mind.”

  “Exactly. The same principle applies here,” Gaheris said. “There’s lots of duplication in a mah-jong set. There are four of each tile in each of the three suits. There are four of each of the four winds, and four of each of the three dragons. Only the flower and season tiles are unique, so, for that reason, we grant them extra emphasis if they appear in a reading.”

  Brenda blinked as if pressing the information into her memory, then nodded. “Okay. So we’ve broken the wall. What next?”

  “Next,” Pearl said, “we deal out the tiles, except instead of dealing hands out to each player as we would if we were playing mah-jong, we place one tile on each of the animals. We begin with the rat, who is the first animal in the zodiac, and end with the cat.”

  “We don’t use those first tiles, the ones we used to break the wall?” Brenda asked.

  “No. Those are used later if needed. Gaheris, since we’re using your mah-jong set, you place the tiles.”

  Gaheris did so, moving quickly, and not pausing to look at the results until he had placed the thirteenth tile. The pattern that developed was not precisely reassuring.

  Pearl stared at the arrangement. She read it through, then read it again, knowing that in this case the numeric value of a tile could be ignored, that only the suit mattered.

  Rat: bamboo. Ox: character. Tiger: bamboo. Hare: bamboo. Dragon: character. Snake: character. Horse: character. Ram: character. Monkey: character. Rooster: dot. Dog: dot. Pig: character. Cat: character.

  Pearl’s brow wrinkled with confusion as she absorbed the significance of the reading. Then, with the automatic force of long habit, she smoothed the confusion away lest she get wrinkles.

  “Auntie Pearl,” Gaheris said, “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “You understand,” Pearl said. “You simply do not want to believe, any more than I want to believe. This makes no sense—or perhaps it makes too much sense.”

  Brenda interjected. “There’s something weird here. I get that. I mean, that’s a really weird array for a random drawing, but it’s not impossible. I mean, even drawing mah-jong is not impossible. Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”

  Pearl shook her head in disbelief. She touched the character tile that rested on the ox with one fingernail.

  “In this type of reading, the character suit,” she explained, “stands for overwhelming danger.”

  “Is that a polite way of saying ‘death’?” Brenda asked.

  “No. It means just what I have said: a tremendous danger that has not resulted in death touches the people on whom a character tile rests.”

  Gaheris interrupted. “Breni, death readings are rather more difficult to do with this system, for reasons I will explain later. What these tiles are saying is that of the Twelve, seven are in overwhelming danger.”

  Pearl nodded. “The dots resting on the dog and rooster show that they are threatened, a state milder than indicated by the character suit. Bamboo shows that Hare is fine for now, as are Tiger and Rat.”

  “That’s a relief,” Brenda said. “I mean, since you’re the Tiger and Dad’s the Rat.”

  “You haven’t mentioned Cat,” Gaheris interjected. “Cat is severely threatened, too, but you and Brenda saw Albert just a little while ago.”

  “It is possible,” Pearl said, “that whatever is threatening him has not yet materialized.”

  “But you don’t believe that,” Gaheris said.

  “No,” Pearl agreed. She could see Brenda studying her and knew she was going to need to offer more detailed explanations. “Another thing that is very strange is that I believe Albert had been doing a similar reading to this one when he was disturbed. Two tiles lay next to Cat when I was picking them up. One probably fell from the wall when the table was knocked into, but both were dots tiles.”

  “Showing that when Albert Yu did this reading,” Brenda said, “he was like the Dog and the Rooster—facing a threat, but not in real danger.”

  “Yes,” Pearl agreed. “He was threatened then, but now Albert is no longer threatened—according to this reading, the threat has materialized. He is in danger of his life—or worse.”

  4

  Brenda didn’t need to be told that whatever this threat was had nothing to do with the fact that someone who seemed to be a perfectly healthy, even happy Albert Yu had spoken to her not more than a few hours ago, and had given her a half-pound box of expensive chocolates.

  She took another wedge of truffle from the plate. Dark chocolate with toasted almond. Pure bliss.

  “Something worse,” Brenda speculated aloud. “Like how Albert Yu didn’t know why we were there, or why the mah-jong set should be important to him. Something has touched his mind, his memory, even though his body’s still around.”

  Pearl nodded. “That’s what I think. The advantages of such a tactic for someone who wanted to render the Twelve ineffective would be astonishingly high.”

  Brenda decided to test her own guesses. “You’ve been talking about my being the next Rat. That means there’s some sort of mechanism in place to allow for inheritance of the abilities. Right?”

  “Right,” said Gaheris with a crisp, approving nod. “That’s why readings for ‘death’ are hard to do with this system. The individual may die, but the Rat or Tiger or whoever remains.”

  Brenda nodded to show she understood, but she didn’t want to lose her train of thought, tenuous as it was. She feared that if she thought too hard about all of this, the inherent craziness would destroy her ability to believe in any of it.

  “Kidnapping someone could cause lots of problems,” Brenda went on. “I mean, remember how I wanted you to call the police when we found Albert Yu’s office all messed up? Try and pull off twelve kidnappings without the FBI finding connections between the people involved. It might take a while for them to do so, but I bet they’d find them.”

  “Definitely,” Dad replied. “In many cases, the connections would be obvious. Auntie Pearl is a friend of our family. She has been something of a professional mentor to the current Rooster. I do business with both the Dragon and the Pig.”

  Brenda started moving restlessly in the limited space offered by the suite. “Okay. The same restrictions would apply for murder, but the consequ
ences would be even worse. I mean, murder gets the law interested, especially when famous people like Auntie Pearl are involved.”

  “Or Albert Yu,” Dad said almost grudgingly. “And several of the rest of us at least qualify as pillars of our communities.”

  “Fatal accidents might work,” Brenda said, “but twelve accidents that don’t get taken for something else … that would be tough. Tougher given that even if the law was fooled, that doesn’t mean the other members of the Twelve would be. And you keep track of each other, or at least some of you do of some of you.”

  Auntie Pearl raised a hand in almost regal interjection.

  “Murder or fatal accidents would offer another problem,” she said, “one you touched on before. Inheritance. Murder would not eliminate the member of the Twelve. It would simply pass their abilities to their heir apparent. In a few cases, that could provide a great inconvenience. The Hare’s heir …”

  Pearl noted the inadvertent pun, but went on, “Her heir apparent is a small child, no more than two or three years old, ineffective as a tool, and if something happened to her mother, she would be very carefully watched.”

  Brenda felt a sinking sensation blended with apprehension that turned the chocolate truffle’s lingering sweetness sour on her tongue.

  “I’d be almost as useless,” she said, “but a lot more vulnerable. I mean, I know nothing about any of this or almost nothing. If someone had come after Dad, say, a week ago …”

  Brenda shivered. She’d been going after this as an intellectual problem, like something the professor might present in an ethics class. When she thought about something happening to Dad, suddenly, she found it hard to think at all.

  She moved over to where Gaheris stood staring down at the mah-jong tiles and pressed up against him as if she were about six, not a grown woman in college. He put his arm around her and squeezed, and Brenda had a sudden insight as to why her dad might have taken so long to bring up this whole Rat thing. It would be admitting there would be a time that he, like his own dad, wouldn’t be there, when he’d need to pass a responsibility along to her.