2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide

by Maggie Allen

  “I’m not even sure why we need them, Ah Suan. We’ve got all those steam-powered things for the mine.”

  “I’ve told you before, Pa, you got cheated when you bought those.”

  The steam-powered pumps had been bought from the richer tin mines of Perak, but they clogged up badly and needed twenty men to move them besides. Suan believed they must have been sabotaged before the sale. Once, the pumps broke down at the same time. The mine flooded rapidly. Suan’s father despaired. That was when she had the idea of introducing the oto-gajahs to the mine.

  At first, no one dared go near the machines, but since they worked on their own, it did not make a difference that no one wanted to tend to them. Because the oto-gajahs did not break down, and the mine was clear of water, the production of tin increased. The miners were happy, as they had shares in the profits. They ignored the pawang when he complained that the tin elephants were blocking his abilities to sniff out ore.

  Then one day there was a slew of accidents at the mine. The pawang said that the tutelary deities at the Na Tuk Kongs, the altars built to placate the local spirits, were upset by the presence of the tin elephants. The spirits had threatened to harm the miners if nothing was done. Suan laughed it off as a big joke. The miners, however, said that they would strike. After a long negotiation, Suan’s father agreed to send ten piculs of good rice, five chickens, one goat and an undisclosed amount of gold to appease the spirits.

  Later, when Suan descended on the mine to maintain the machines, the pawang said that it was her presence that had angered the spirit of the tin, a seladang, or type of ox. If she persisted on showing up, then a purification ritual must be performed.

  “He’s just making this up!” Suan had complained to her father after the purification ritual. She’d had a rough scrub-down using a loofah, followed by a two-hour soak in a bath full of limes and the petals of a red jungle flower that had to be harvested during a full moon. “He wants me to give up.”

  “Why don’t you?” asked her father.

  “Because I’m right. Also, he challenged me. I don’t want him to think he won.”

  Her father laughed, to Suan’s irritation.

  “You’re both more alike than you think,” said her father. “If you insist on being as stubborn as he is, you can hardly complain. Besides, dear daughter, your current scent is an improvement on oil and smoke, and it does a father’s heart good to be able see his offspring’s face.”

  He had a sense of humor about things then. Lately though, Suan thought, her father had been less amused by her projects. He seemed to view the oto-gajah as a nice diversion, a luxury toy, fine for his little princess to play with, but he saw no place for it in the proper working world of grown men.

  “Pa, about the water pumps, the oto-gajahs can do more than just drain the mines. Look at what one did today.”

  “A man is dead.”

  “Not by my doing! And even if he had survived the crush of soil, the pawang wasted time with his idiotic talk. Imagine, Pa, if someone, trained to work with the oto-gajah was on-site. The outcome would have been much different. Or, better yet, imagine if the oto-gajahs did all the mining. I’m working on a project so that they could pick the untreated ore and ‘eat’ it. The ore will be sorted inside the body. This would require an intricate series of weights and counterweights – I’ve worked it out already, but you don’t want to know about that. Anyway, in the end, you will have a nicely packaged slab of tin, ready for sale. No one needs to get hurt.”

  “Yes, and the miners will have nothing to do. They will be begging your father for work,” said the second wife, who was apparently still in the room.

  “Pa,” said Suan, leaning closer to her father. “I’ve got the plans for an engine that moves faster. You don’t even have to unload the tin slabs at the mine. You start the oto-gajahs digging in the morning, and by nightfall, your tin ore will be in Klang and loaded on the British ships.”

  She thought she had him then. She could see him calculating the profits such a machine would bring him.

  “All I need, Pa, is a little bit of gunpowd –”

  “Husband, remember your decision,” the second wife said sharply. “She needs to learn responsibility.”

  The Capitan sighed. “Go and feed our sons,” he said.

  “But –”

  “Remember your responsibility,” he said to his wife in a tone he would never use on Suan.

  The wife picked up her embroidery and left in a huff. Suan’s father sighed again once she was gone. He rubbed his head under the black cap he wore, a mark of his office.

  “Listen, Ah Suan. Tok Pawang was very unhappy that you did not show him the proper respect today. Be quiet. It does not matter what you think about it. I have told you before, these people work very close to death all day, and if they are superstitious, it is because they have very little to keep them from harm’s way. Sometimes the belief that they’re protected is enough.”

  “But Pa –”

  Her father held up his hand. “Did you know, today, when the earth shifted under the oto-gajah, I was there? I saw the ground move, and I saw that you were on the oto-gajah in the pit. I thought... I thought you were going to join your mother and your brothers. Today, Ah Suan, I felt the same grip on my heart as I felt on the day I last saw them. And that is the reason I cannot let you go into the mine again.”

  Suan bowed her head. She had not considered things that way.

  “Tomorrow,” said her father, “we will close the workshop. Whatever is in it will be sold.”

  “No! Pa –”

  “Your oto-gajahs will be taken apart, and the tin melted and sold –”

  “They’re not my oto-gajahs. They’re Mama’s!” screamed Suan.

  The room was silent, but Suan’s ears were ringing. Her father breathed heavily, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her. But he only looked tired, as he was wont to do lately. He looked old and deflated.

  Very quietly, so much so that Suan could barely hear him, her father said, “The tin will be melted and sold, and the money from the sale will go towards buying your dowry gifts. I’m getting old, Ah Suan. One day, soon, I will die. I endeavored to find you a husband. A rich merchant from China has indicated an interest in you for his number one son. This is lucky, because men of his caliber prefer brides with bound feet, and he did not mind that you have not been kept indoors. After the New Year, you will be married.”

  The strokes of the hammer kept perfect rhythm to Suan’s ragged breathing as she formed the oto-gajah’s ears. She had been working all night, and her limbs alternated from feeling like an anvil to feeling like a feather in the wind.

  She still burned with anger at her father’s words. Lucky, thought Suan. Lucky to be a man’s wife. Lucky to be able to wear embroidered silk, instead of the blue workmen’s cotton. Lucky to have all that she had worked for thrown into the smelting fire.

  Bang. Bang. She struck the tin. There. Done.

  She dropped her hammer and stretched. Her neck and back gave satisfying cracks. The room swayed. She closed her eyes and let the feeling pass.

  She examined the joints of the ears. She had made the ear so it could stretch out over the head to protect the mahout and to intimidate organic elephants. Should she affix the ears to make the oto-gajah whole? In her physical state, she would likely fall off the ladder and break her back. She could just hear her mother’s voice: “You itchy backside, is it? Asking for trouble, is it?”

  She chuckled. Ma was a pragmatic woman. Suan missed her. She even missed her two little brothers, who got in her way by following her like ducklings.

  It was her mother who had started her on the elephant obsession. A man-eating elephant had rampaged through the Kuala Berlumpur neighborhood of Ampang and was brought down by the arquebus of the Malay viceroy’s brother-in-law. The domesticated elephants balked at moving their fallen relation, and no elephant stews could be made, as the monster had eaten the flesh of man. The corpse was left
to rot in a stinking pile.

  The exposed skeleton made Suan scream of ghosts at night. To console her, her mother said, “Ah Suan, do not be afraid, for the white thing that you saw is part of our bodies, too. It holds us up and helps us move.”

  Suan’s mother was a fine puppet maker. She made a creature with only sticks and made it move to teach Suan the principles of motion in animals.

  Then came the fire. After that, Suan was often left alone, as her father saw to his duties rebuilding the town. She wandered the streets of the old place, through skeletons of burned buildings, remembering what they used to look like when she ran through them with her duckling brothers.

  The skeleton of the man-eating elephant survived the fire, and though the ivory was valuable, the locals left it alone. (Superstitions again!) Suan remembered the feel of the skeleton puppet as it danced in her hands.

  Slowly, working on some idea, undefinable at the time, she gathered bits and pieces of usable wood and formed the frame that was the skeleton of her first oto-gajah.

  Suan smiled, remembering the prototype. Clumsy – she spent more time out of it than in it – it was powered by foot pedals and had no covering. Now, gears and pulleys, weights and counterweights were covered with a tough tin alloy, smooth in all places except where plates overlapped at the joints. Instead of pedals, the oto-gajah was powered by a gunpowder engine.

  Too bad this will be the last of the oto-gajahs, Suan thought. Shrugging away her exhaustion, she picked up the ears and climbed the ladder.

  On the northwest side of Ampang, across a field cleared by fire but never rebuilt, was a lake. It had been a mine once, rich in tin ore, but abandoned for reasons no one could recall. Soon it filled with water, and stories abounded of spirits that lurked beneath, waiting to drown unwary swimmers. The area was twice abandoned, as picnickers found safer places for their frolics.

  Suan did not believe the stories. She knew that the hantu, the otherworldly spirits that pulled at swimmers’ legs were nothing more than underwater currents, eddies formed by the uneven shape of the ground beneath the water.

  She guided the oto-gajah to the twice-abandoned place. Dawn had arrived, and the mist settled about her, caressing her with a cool kiss. Mornings usually gave her a feeling of renewal, but now she merely felt damp. Birds sang for the sunrise, and she shouted at them in irritation and smacked at the mosquitoes buzzing about her head.

  Suan cursed her stupidity. The plan had been to hide the oto-gajah so that it would not be sold with everything else. But in the morning light, or perhaps it had been the fresh air that had awakened her, it occurred to her that hiding the oto-gajah would come to naught if she was to be married off to some stranger in China.

  She could go away. Take the oto-gajah and go where they would appreciate her for her skills, where she did not have to pretend to be docile or polite. She could head north by land, go to one of the Perak mining towns. Or she could go to Klang and persuade a ship captain to let the oto-gajah on board. Where would she go then? Malacca maybe? She heard they were quite progressive under British rule.

  Thunder rolled in the distance.

  Suan shivered and regretted that she had not thought to bring extra clothing or food. She heard thunder again, but, looking up, she saw no clouds. She got up, feeling unsettled, and went to the ridge overlooking the town.

  Thunder again, and light, but not from lightning. She saw movement on the road from Rawang. In the still of the morning, shouts carried across the clearing. “Amok! Amok!”

  Matchlocks fired. Ampang was under siege.

  Suan was used to noise, the whoosh of bellows, the patter of rain on corrugated tin roofs, the hiss of the oto-gajah hydraulics, the clangs and complaints of the steam-powered tapioca processing machines, the shouts of the miners at work.

  Nothing prepared her for the screams of the frenzied and the injured, the relentless firing of matchlocks, and the metal on metal of sword and bayonet.

  Waves upon waves of fighters came on foot from Rawang. They were fought by her father’s men, the miners, the Sikh security forces and the Malays from the nearby kampungs.

  Suan knew that the attackers must be the Mai-he-di forces the miners had been talking about the day before. After all, the Ghosts, the rival society of clans, ran their mines from Rawang. The two forces had been responsible for the burning of Ampang and most of Kuala Berlumpur all those years ago, when Suan’s mother and brothers had died.

  She was too scared to move. Should she join the fight? How does one kill? Oh, Ma, what should I do? What are you doing now, Pa?

  She thought of the Malay proverb, “When two elephants fight, the mouse-deer is trampled in the middle.” Thinking about the mouse-deer, Suan sat helpless under the cover of the trees. Morning turned to afternoon. Dusk fell, but the usual jungle sounds of monkeys, birds and insects did not arise. Clashes died down, and cries of war gave way to grunts of exhaustion and pain. The air smelled of gunpowder, and, though perhaps she imagined it, the iron tang of blood.

  The enemy forces retreated, and a cheer arose from town of Ampang. Suan gave a whoop from her protected spot on the ridge. She got up, ready to run down to join her family and friends.

  But a great shriek rent the air, not human, but like metal dragged over stone, the opening of the Gates of Hell. A creature came upon the field, wide and tall as an elephant, its length that of seven elephants lined up tail to trunk. Suan remembered what the miners had said about the naga and the sutra.

  “Tai Lung,” she whispered. King of the dragons.

  The dragon was sluggish, like a snake on a cold night, but it moved forward, always forward, towards the town. It screeched and yowled, a sound that turned Suan’s spine to agar. It had no legs that she could see. People in Ampang, valiant defenders all, threw down their matchlocks and ran.

  The dragon stopped and seemed to be deep in contemplation. Then, shaking its mighty head, the size of a fully grown bull elephant, it emitted a roar. Its mouth opened. Suan heard chugging noises as steam escaped the dragon’s mouth. The chugging increased in volume. A pause.

  The dragon coughed.

  White flame roared forth, so bright in the nighttime that it left pinpricks of pain in Suan’s closed eyes. The town caught fire. Attap and corrugated tin roofs alike exploded. Buildings were aflame, halfway to ashes.

  Pa could fight with guns and swords but not a destructive fire like that, thought Suan. He could only run away, as he had with her when she was a small girl. She could run away now – go, and survive. After all, she was going to do that just a short while ago, wasn’t she? Pa would want her to be safe.

  Oh! Pa. Where are you?

  Suan shook her head. What a silly question. Of course he had stayed in town. He did not know where she was and was probably looking for her.

  How does one fight a dragon? Did the dragon’s presence mean that mythical creatures truly existed? Her eyes seemed to prove that it did. What then, about the ox in the ground that was said to be the spirit of the tin ore? Did she, as the pawang believed, bring this ill-luck amongst her people by acting like an arrogant fool?

  The chugging from the dragon began, as though dragon-fire needed to be built up, like Suan’s fire at the forge.

  Chugging. Like bellows at the forge.

  Suan squinted at the dragon. It did not seem to be doing much. In the light of the fire from the burning town, she saw that the dragon did indeed have legs. It had a multitude of legs. Thin, human legs.

  You cannot fight a myth, thought Suan, but there are many things you can fight.

  “Hold on, Pa, I’m coming!” shouted Suan. “Just stay safe.”

  She leaped on to the oto-gajah and maneuvered to the lake to pick up water with the trunk. Once the tank was full, she charged down the hill towards the dragon, still lying at the edge of town.

  Something about the charging tin elephant must have seemed a threat, because the dragon shifted in the time it took for Suan to cross the clearing. Now the dragon faced the
oto-gajah. Not good, but not bad, either. At least it wasn’t facing Ampang.

  The chugging built to a crescendo as the oto-gajah surged forward.

  Suan screamed out loud, “Let it work, let it work, please, let it work!”

  The dragon coughed.

  Suan flipped a toggle switch and crouched. The oto-gajah’s ears fanned out. Fire spattered on the shield. The dragon-fire seemed to go on forever, surging around her oto-gajah. She hoped, prayed, that the tin would not melt.

  All of a sudden, the dragon-fire stopped.

  Tentatively, she peeked out over the oto-gajah’s dome. The fire had spread in Ampang. Residents were shouting, screaming for buckets and pumps and hoses, but wherever water touched, the flames leapt twice as high.

  Water feeds the dragon-fire, thought Suan.

  The chugging began and built in volume. Suan recognized the pattern. She thought she knew what to do about it. She hoped and prayed that it would work.

  Ha! So that was what Pa meant about holding onto superstitions. It was all people could do in certain situations when everything else was out of their control. She was ready to accord him that win.

  She curled the oto-gajah’s trunk upwards in what some people referred to as the “ready to bestow fortune” position.

  That cough again, the precursor to destruction. Suan hit a lever. A jet of water gushed from the oto-gajah’s trunk into the dragon’s mouth.

  A series of pops emanated from the dragon. Smoke billowed from the head, thick and black and oily, smelling of brimstone, hugging the ground like a waterfall of thunderclouds.

  The dragon screamed with the voices of many men.

  Some said later that the explosion could be heard all the way in Klang, Sungai Ujong and Malacca. The next morning, villagers in Sumatra talked about the bright light that had lit up the Malayan shores like a premature dawn.

  Suan crawled out of the crumpled oto-gajah, which had been thrown head over heels in the blast. The surrounding field was flat, shrubs burnt away, charred twigs now sparkling with fiery fruits.