Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

‘I’m sorry if I came off as like, a total bitch,’ Chloe said, extending a conciliatory hand to Sharaf. She knew that she should not have been the one to make an apology, but she had taken William’s words to heart and wanted to make peace for the sake of the mission and the unity of the group.

  Sharaf, however, stared at her hand as if it was a twisted stick on which some pungently offensive substance had been smeared. William, however, stepped up to Sharaf and pointed at Chloe’s hand.

  ‘You’re going to make yourself look even more of a fool in front of the rest of us if you don’t shake it,’ he said softly. ‘Please brother … think with your rational brain, not your temper.’

  His eyes like red coals in the deep sockets of his skull, and his jaw jutting with dangerous wrath, Sharaf snatched Chloe’s hand, gave it a quick and almost vicious squeeze, and then turned and stormed off into the jungle without another word. When he was gone, everyone breathed out sighs of relief, and the tension that had been so tightly packed in the air evaporated like a fog hit by summer sun.

  ‘Chloe,’ William said to the teen, ‘I know that Sharaf hasn’t exactly made the best first impression on you. By nature he is arrogant and abrasive, and he loves conflict and has a short temper. I know that you have a quick temper too, and this right here is a recipe for disaster. To be fair, I didn’t make the best first impression on you either, and that was definitely my fault … but we got past that, and here we are, friends now, yeah?’

  Chloe nodded.

  ‘Do you think you could look past Sharaf’s, er, abrasiveness and arrogance, considering what’s at stake?’

  ‘Yeah … I can.’

  William smiled and the storm clouds were blown as if by a sudden gale from his face, the darkness giving way to the usual blue-sky radiance he wore on the outside; the old façade that masked the ever-present sadness within. Only in his eyes did the sorrow remain, as it always did.

  ‘Come my friends, my brothers, my sisters,’ he said, turning now to the group. ‘Let’s enjoy our coffee break and talk of times past, and good times to come. It’s rare that so many of us are all gathered together in one place, and while our purpose is severe and circumstances are dire, that’s not to say we can’t celebrate a wee bit on our moments off, no? I’ve got a flask of whiskey here; what do you all say to a few shots thrown into your coffee? We’ll turn these cups of java into Irish coffees, eh lads and lasses?’

  ‘Yes!’ Zakaria shouted, jumping with sudden enthusiasm. ‘Salut! Come, William, take out that fine liquid and let us drink to the purpose and mission of the Rebels!’

  Sharaf, at this point, returned from the trees, his temper now cooler, and he walked up to Zakaria and wrapped his arms around the huge man’s torso, embracing him tightly. After that he kissed both of Zakaria’s grizzled cheeks and focused an affectionate gaze into his friend’s eyes.

  ‘It really has been much, much too long, Zakaria,’ he said, his voice shelled of its former jaggedness. ‘Far too long. Come, let us walk and talk. We have so much catching up to do.’

  ‘Yes, yes. We have much of which to talk.’

  The pair of them sauntered over to William, who poured a few shots of whiskey into their coffee mugs with a cheeky grin. Both men then walked away, talking and chuckling with the familiar ease and bubbly joy of old, close friends. Ranomi and Kimiko also took a shot each, and they too wandered off to chat.

  ‘Thanks for sticking up for be back there,’ Chloe said when only her and William remained. ‘Especially, um, after all that mean stuff I said to you before about being a junkie and a bad influence and stuff.

  ‘Think nothing of it, lass,’ William said as he poured a shot of whiskey into his own coffee. ‘I deserved most of what you said anyway. Shall I make yours an Irish coffee too?’

  Chloe shook her head.

  ‘I’ve been in too many foster homes with alcoholic assholes to ever want to touch that shit,’ she said, staring with undisguised revulsion in her eyes at the whiskey.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘One of my foster dads got into heroin for a while, and when he came off it, he literally took weeks, no, more like months to recover. His withdrawal process was like, one of the most terrifying things I ever saw when I was a kid. He went through hell, and more. And he kept having cravings for years afterwards. I got moved to another foster home, but I heard that he got developed a habit again, but that it ended up killing him.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that … and I understand, after hearing that, why you were so antagonistic towards me initially.’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t feel like that anymore. I just, uh, I just wanted to ask if you’re … if you’re okay now. And if you go off alone into the jungle so often, and come back looking all, well, messed-up … is that from the withdrawal? Or is it something else? I … I might just be a teenager, William, but we’re friends, right? If you’re, you know, if you’re like sad and you need someone to talk to, you don’t have to literally keep it all bottled up inside. You can talk to me if you need a sympathetic ear.’

  William beamed a sad smile at her, the crinkles at the corners of his mouth and the crow’s feet around his eyes radiating warm gratitude.

  ‘My body is over the withdrawal,’ he answered, speaking softly, ‘my beastwalker blood has seen to that. But my mind … the memories … there’s a lot of old sadness, a lot of … deep pain. That’s where the addiction comes from, at its core. And that’s a harder battle to fight than the physiological one, lass. But I’m doing my best. And I really appreciate you saying that, I truly do.’

  Chloe beamed a glowing, broad smile at him – the kind of grin of genuine delight that rarely brightened her face in these trying times.

  ‘That’s what friends are for, right?’

  William chuckled, even though an aged sadness swirled its glossy sheen around his eyes.

  ‘Aye Chloe … that’s what friends are for.’

  Her smile inched its breadth slightly wider and higher across her face.

  ‘Can I ask you another question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why um … why did you stick up for me?’

  William imbibed a long, slow swig of his Irish coffee before answering, staring past Chloe into the knotted mess of greenery beyond as he spoke.

  ‘The truth is, lass, you remind me of a younger, better, more innocent me. Someone I once was. An idealist, a dreamer, before everything went to shit, and before I … grew up. You represent all that’s good in the world, all the best potential of youth, to change the world, to uproot society and turn it on its head. You’ve got that rare fire in you, Chloe, you’ve got rebellion in your blood and the potential for revolution in your bones … and if that’s not worth sticking up for, what the hell is? It might be too late for me, given everything that’s happened, but by God, if there’s a chance for someone else, I’ll fight for it with everything I’ve got. Everything I’ve bloody well got left lass … and you’d better believe that.’

  Chloe stared at William in silence for a few moments, and then she suddenly lunged forward and wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug. William, surprised, froze for a moment, but then he returned the embrace with gentle affection.

  ‘Thank you,’ Chloe murmured as she stepped back, tears welling in her eyes. ‘Thank you, William.’ Before he could respond, though, she turned and ran off into the jungle. William sensed that she did not want to be followed, so he let her go, a tornado of emotion raging in silent chaos within him. He sat and drank his Irish coffee on his own, thinking deeply on many things. After around half an hour, Chloe, Kimiko and Ranomi returned to the clearing.

  ‘I still can’t stand that idiot Sharaf,’ Ranomi muttered. ‘It’s a pity we’re so desperate for numbers that we had to involve the likes of him.’

  ‘I know,’ Kimiko muttered.

  ‘What animal form does he shift into?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘A hyena,’
William laughed. ‘It shows, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Why on earth is Zakaria so fond of him?’ Chloe asked. ‘Those two seem like oil and water, but they literally act like two long-lost brothers.’

  ‘Oh, they go back a long way,’ William answered. ‘A very long way.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Nine hundred years or so.’

  Chloe raised her eyebrows with surprise.

  ‘Nine hundred years! Holy shit!’

  ‘And what, pray tell, brought a Knight Templar and that arrogant moron so close together?’ Ranomi asked, a single eyebrow raised sceptically.

  ‘War, of course,’ William answered.

  ‘They fought together?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘No, no. Against one another. But Sharaf made Zakaria what he is: one of us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, it’s a long story but the crux of it is this: he defeated Zakaria’s army in battle, executed most of Zakaria’s close friends by decapitation, and sold Zakaria into slavery.’

  44

  WILLIAM

  Chloe stared at William, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging slack, while he simply continued sipping on his coffee, quite blasé about everything he’d just said.

  ‘So Sharaf isn’t just an asshole, he’s … he’s downright evil!’ she gasped. ‘He’s a murderer and, like, literally a slave trader!’

  ‘Was, lass, was. That was all in the past, a very long time ago. And life punished him for his sins, as surely as it’s punished all of us who have lived long and tragic lives.’

  ‘But he, he literally sold Zakaria into slavery!’ Chloe spluttered. ‘That’s just, that’s like Nazi-level evil, it’s—’

  ‘It’s history, lass. While we’re privileged enough today to be able to look back at history through the enlightened lens of hindsight, you can’t judge people from past ages by the standards we use today. Look, what he did was objectively evil and utterly wrong, and I’m not going to defend his past actions. What I’m trying to say, though, is that in those times, that’s pretty much how everyone behaved, and slavery, as disgusting as it was, was just what happened to the losers of battles and wars. As ludicrous as this may sound to you, what Sharaf did then doesn’t make him a monster – it simply means that he lived by the average cultural norms of his time, which is how the vast majority of people who have ever lived have operated.’

  ‘How … how can you say that?!’ she gasped, incredulous. ‘Are you seriously trying to justify—’

  ‘Not at all,’ William interrupted. ‘If you’d just let me finish before working yourself into a frenzy of indignation, you might learn something,’ he continued, flashing her a playful wink.

  ‘Um, okay,’ she said, not sounding too convinced.

  ‘You see Chloe, contrary to what many believe, I don’t think that most people are actively mean, violent or evil, necessarily. Even if they do happen to be part of societies, caught up in activities, ideologies and systems that are, by our standards, evil. Most humans, I think, are merely neutral individuals. Yes, they’re neither good nor evil, but instead they’re short-sighted, self-centred and genuinely unable to comprehend realities outside of the very narrow scope of what their society has imparted upon them, and what they have personally experienced in life. And these myopic viewpoints they hold to be their “truths” will be tinted, always, by the coloured and largely irremovable spectacles of whatever culture they belong to and were raised in; the spectacles that are put on in childhood, and rarely, if ever, taken off again.

  The fact that most people are merely neutral creatures, colourless sponges, if you will, who simply absorb the water in which they’re raised, together with all its impurities and pollutants, without question is, if you really think about it, something quite terrifying. Because that’s how it was that Sharaf – who at his core, despite his arrogance and propensity for conflict, is not an evil person – came to slaughter an army and sell people into slavery. That’s how so many otherwise neutral people throughout history have unwittingly supported systems, cultures and traditions of extraordinary evil, brutality, and savagery. Sharaf, when he killed people, when he sold people into slavery, was merely regurgitating the views, actions and opinions he had been raised with, views that had been reinforced in him through the company he kept and the culture he grew up in. And now, after this admittedly long-winded rambling, which I do apologise for – it’s the whiskey in my coffee which is to blame, I do believe – comes the point I’ve been trying to make, in a somewhat roundabout manner. While we can’t judge too harshly the great mass of people throughout history who have mostly blundered their way through their little lives wearing the blinkers of their time and culture, and blinding themselves, from the cradle to the grave, of any views which might turn their entire worlds on their heads, we can and should celebrate the rare heroes who went against the grain, who ripped the cultural wool from their eyes, who peeled away the cataracts of tradition and blind obedience to the ghostly voices of the past, opened their eyes to new truths and said, “no more! Things have to change!”. Because those people, throughout the ages – rare, brave folk like you and your friends, with your Environmental Club – they’re the ones who are the real heroes of human history. Sharaf was an unfortunate product of his time – nothing more, nothing less – but he overcame the cultural conditioning and blind obeisance to tradition that made him what he was, and he rose above it, and became someone better. Look, don’t think I’m letting him off the hook, or suggesting that he wasn’t responsible at all for his choices and actions; he absolutely was, in a way, as are all of these people who quietly, unquestioningly do evil things because they’re sanctioned by their cultures, traditions and societies. I’m sure many of them knew, on some level, that what they were doing was wrong. Save your anger, though, for the systems that moulded them rather than the individuals themselves. Just remember that no matter how small you might feel as one individual among billions, lass, you absolutely can stand against the great horde, and you can make a difference. Hell, the only people in history who actually have made significant positive changes to humankind’s trajectory are those who have done exactly that. And thanks to people like them, people like you, Chloe, hopefully others will be able to rise up and change what they are and who they are … and eventually dismantle the systems that produced them.’

  Chloe’s frown had morphed into a smile while William was speaking, and now it was a wide grin of inspired understanding.

  ‘I get it William,’ she murmured. ‘I get it…’

  ‘I knew you would, lass, I knew you would,’ he said, mirroring her warm smile. ‘Remember, everything is more complex than it seems, and people are the most complex creatures of all. Always keep that thought in mind before you’re quick to judge someone.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Come Chloe,’ Ranomi said. ‘We still have a lot of training to get through.’

  ‘Aye, we all do,’ William said, ‘so let’s not waste any more time standing about and wagging our jaws.’

  They headed out of the clearing into the jungle, quietly afire with a fresh sense of purpose. Above them, though, the sky was darkening with tight-packed banks of black storm clouds, and beyond the distant hills, thunder boomed its ominous rumble across the earth.

  ***

  31st October. Silom District, Bangkok, near KSM Nightclub

  The bassy thumping of the KTM 690 SMC R motorcycle engine drummed out a groove of muted aggression beneath William while he waited for the traffic light to change, and the hypnotic pulsing of the big engine whisked his thoughts out of the present, to a distant time and place.

  The eyes of his mind peeled away the layers of yellowed plastic, one by one, in which long-forgotten vistas had been shrink-wrapped; he saw mountains, their serrated peaks as jagged as any predator’s canines, tearing the grey-mottled skin of clouds from the sky to expose the deep azure of its raw flesh. A vast silence lay draped over the land like an invisible sheet, its corners tucked behind th
e stabbing spires and sheer slopes of these Himalayan peaks. And there, taking in the magnificence of this view, William stood atop the roof of an ancient monastery built, like an eagle’s eyrie, into the cliffs. From this perch he stared over the edge of the roof, looking down a thousand-metre drop that ended in the river below, which looked from this height like nothing more than a metal ribbon carelessly discarded on pebble-strewn ground. The immensity of the height worked its sorcerer’s magic on his mind; vertigo sucked at his body with the relentless pull of a freshly opened vortex into space, and it was all he could do to stay upright. Indeed, his bare feet, with their toes curled around the very last of the roof tiles, already seemed to be creeping inexorably over the edge.

  A gravelly, soothing voice spoke with gentle reassurance into his ear from behind.

  ‘Look down into the abyss. Stare Death in his hollow eyes and tell him that you are not afraid.’

  The Teacher.

  ‘But guru ji, I … I am afraid. I’m bloody well terrified, in fact. One s-, slip, an’ I’ll tumble o’er the edge tae my doom!’

  ‘You won’t slip though, will you?’

  ‘By Jove I might!’

  ‘It is a matter of control, William. Control of body, control of mind, control of soul. Observe to your left that eagle as it rises upon the currents of air, circling ever higher. Look, young cub! We can hardly see her now, so high is her form above the earth!’

  William peered up at the sky. He could only just make out a tiny black dot in the far distance, circling in an upwardly spiralling gyre. The Teacher’s eyes shone with a pure, intense delight, a fierce and powerful zest for life, for existence, for everything around him.

  ‘Can you see her feathers, rippling in the wind?’ he asked, staring with awe and joy at the distant bird. ‘Can you perceive the angle at which she positions her wings to catch the rising drafts of air?’

  ‘N-, no. No, ay’ course not, guru ji! All I can see is a speck in the sky. No man could make out those details at this distance.’

  ‘Use your tiger vision. With your tiger eyes you’ll be able to see it as clearly as if you were just a few feet away.’