The Concubine's Daughter

by null

  She sent a message asking Toby to come to the Villa Formosa as soon as he could be spared from his duties. They met in the Pavilion of Joyful Moments, where she tried to find the words that she must say. She took his hand. “There is something that I must tell you. I ask that you listen with your heart and do not question what I must do.”

  She lifted his hand, to hold it against her cheek. “The gods could not have chosen one more gentle or of greater strength than you. But I must take a path that none can follow, to a place no one can share. My only hope is that I may soon return to you.”

  His arms closed about her. “Then marry me, Sing … be my wife and let us take this path together, as Ben and his Li-Xia once did.”

  “It is not possible. This is not the time for happiness.” There was no hesitation in her reply, and he knew it to be final. “If you would help me, please speak of this to Miss Bramble and to Angus. Thank them for their many kindnesses to me, but tell them I must complete a journey that was begun long ago.”

  She reached up to him, her fingers in the sunshine of his hair. “There are things from my past that are beyond your help. I love you too much to speak of it, so you must trust me.” She took an envelope from the jadeite table; it was sealed with the chop of the Double Dragon. “I shall be gone for one hundred days. If I do not return by then, you must give this letter to Angus. He will know what to do.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Di-Muk

  No road led to Po-Lin, the Temple of the Precious Lotus. Built a thousand years ago on Lantau Island, it was among the largest Buddhist temples in Asia. Its grandeur had been added to over the centuries, changing it from a humble mountain shrine and burial ground to a monastery housing over a thousand monks. Upon its mist-shrouded peak, the Pagoda of the White Pearl was seldom visited even by the monks of Po-Lin. Only the abbot and his chosen priests could enter its forbidden chambers.

  It had taken under two hours for Sing to cross the water on the ferry and climb the thousand steps leading to the monastery. A nun approached her, a small birdlike woman in a faded robe once the rich color of fresh saffron. The little nun bowed a welcome as though Sing were expected, then showed her to an antechamber outside the main temple.

  Sing waited alone until Abbot Xoom-Sai entered the chamber assisted by two sturdy elders, who set him down upon a bench of stone. His head shaven, his body swathed in a robe of deepest purple, he looked at Sing with a smile of welcome on a timeless face, his eyes curious and benign.

  Sing kowtowed before him, placing at his feet the bamboo cylinder containing the eight precious scrolls. The abbot’s face was in shadow as he unfolded the letter from Master To, inspecting the seal closely, running fingertips over the indented wax.

  When at last he spoke, his words were for her alone, as though for that moment she was a child again, beneath the pear tree, listening to the patient voice of Master To. “Stand up, Red Lotus: You are a true disciple of the White Crane. Your master, To-Tze, was well known to me; he passes on his powers with great faith in you. This letter tells me that you were the only one to be trusted with the Precious Set of Eight; that you would find me when the time had come for the Crane and the Tiger to face each other.”

  He was silent for a moment, his eyes closed as though in a trance. “You must prepare well. Your enemy is very angry and very strong; his power is in hatred and his weakness is in rage.”

  He spoke as if he could see the scene unfolding before him. “First he will send yan-jing-shi, the snake… . In his heart he is a coward. Only if you prevail will the Tiger show himself.”

  “I ask that I may be allowed to reside here while I prepare, Great Lord.”

  “That you may do, Red Lotus. You will sleep in a place that is the battleground of the spirit. Your bed of stone will give no comfort, but you will find rest from the ninth hour until you are awakened by the voice of Buddha. The day begins at the hour of three, when the moon has reached its zenith, when body, spirit, and soul are open to all things. You will meditate alone, eat nothing except the food prepared for you by the nun Lu, drink nothing but water from the spring. You will train alone before the Pearl Pagoda. Call upon the spirit of the Crane and make ready to do battle with yan-jing-shi, who will come in the night.”

  It always began with the same dream. Cloud pictures skimmed over the lake from the Rock of Great Strength: Plank boats sailed peacefully beneath their piles of reeds; sampans sat still as grasshoppers in midsummer. Farther up the slope, the breeze sang to her through the bamboo like the harps of heaven. This place was the home of her soul. She stood transported by the joy of it.

  The pale outline of the mountains suddenly darkened. The tree peonies closed their petals, to wither and drop as if in the path of a great fire. Birds lost their song in the groves. A shadow cast itself across the lake, black as oil, swallowing her perfect world. She stood at its edge, safe at first, spellbound by its menace. Venom crept like acid, devouring the fragile lace of lichen on the ground. Her feet were bare, the feet of a child, firmly rooted upon the rock, connected to its hidden forces as they leaped and flew, spun and and turned, at one with the air. The voice of Abbot Xoom-Sai spoke to her clearly, calmly, telling her to stand her ground, reminding her that all things lived and were one in the Way of the Tao, that their energy was her energy, their strength, her strength.

  At first the dreams were short and the blackness easy to repel, inching toward her and then slipping away like the tide of a dark sea. With every disciplined muscle in her body, she clung to the safe, sun-warmed surface of the rock. As if it sensed her power, the oily mass would withdraw, shrinking to become the glistening coils of yan-jing-shi.

  Sing would see the poisonous white of its belly against the bile-green scales rising before her. Another voice would reach her … the voice of a boy, harsh with impatience to become a man. “See! I have tamed the foot well … faster and more deadly than the king of all snakes.” She saw the snake’s flicking shoelace tongue, the toadstool yellow of its gaping mouth, the blood-smeared jaws of the herd boy as he tore the spearhead-shaped head from the flailing body. “You owe your life to me, Red Lotus. One day I may claim it.”

  Suddenly, as though stabbed by a pin, Sing would wake up, her eyes wide and her senses sharp as an executioner’s blade. The words of Ah-Keung lingered in the dark, the rock hard and cold beneath her whirling feet. The dreams came every night—closing in on her, cold as death against her feet, sucking the chi from her legs until they grew numb and she could no longer feel her connection to the rock. She was back in the typhoon, exposed to the sheets of lightning and the screaming winds; seeing the bloodied face of Ruby, her plastered hair and frightened eyes reaching out to her as they tumbled into darkness in each other’s arms.

  Ah-Keung seemed to float before an altar in a windowless room. The two yellow flames from the candles were motionless, lighting the contents of a tray, as the Forceful One concentrated on the revenge he had carried in his heart for much of his lifetime. No matter how much the upstart girl had learned, the arts of Black Oath Wu had shown him more.

  The force of the black Tao transformed night into day, light into darkness. It could turn quietude into chaos, poison the strongest mind with steady drops from the prettiest snuff bottle. It could weaken and devour the bravest heart, capture and possess a human soul.

  Ah-Keung’s lips moved soundlessly as he recited words from the suspended tablet only he could read, its characters long lost in the dungeons of a violent history. He was naked. The candlelight illuminated the intricate tattoo of the striking cobra that climbed the length of his spine, at its head the symbol of yin and yang turned upside down; on his chest the snarling face of a charging tiger.

  He lost all sense of weight, transported in a state of mental levitation. In the tray of ash, drawn in the blackened remains of a flaming curse, a single character appeared: Red Lotus. Stretched across it, gleaming in the yellow buds of light, lay the strands of his enemy’s hair. His body shook as they flared to flame, th
en curled to nothing. From the surrounding blackness a gust came, whirling the ash, obliterating the name forever.

  A smudge of light began to appear in the horror of Sing’s nightmares. The pale shape grew closer until she awoke, her heart racing as the face of Ah-Keung invaded her mind with the gold-ringed, lidless eyes of a cobra. Sing knew she was in grave danger. She heard the words of Master To: Only you can break the link. You must withstand. To fall in the path of the Tiger is to perish. She called upon all she had learned to combat the fear that threatened to wrap her in the sticky silk of the bird-eating spider, to feed upon her sanity as it had drawn the vivid colors from the hummingbird.

  Food had become unnecessary, and when sense told her she must try to eat she could not force it past her throat. Her body lost all trace of energy. Inside, she turned to ice, but her skin was slick with sweat. Dragging everything she could find to cover herself, she lay shaking in every nerve and muscle, every toughened sinew in her body disconnected from her wasting limbs. She could not rise, feeling the creeping warmth of her urine turn cold. At last she felt her link with the Rock of Great Strength snap like a single strand of silk; and she fell, silently screaming, into the maelstrom of Ah-Keung’s making.

  The elders carried Sing’s unconscious body to the Pagoda of the White Pearl to do battle with the powers of darkness. The Abbot Xoom-Sai watched as she was carried up the narrow stone steps to the eighth and topmost chamber, and laid upon an ancient tapestry of mystic signs in the center of the circular space. A setting sun cast orange light through a small diamond-shaped window set in its walls.

  Prayer cloths hung like flags from the high, domed ceiling. From a corner, lit bright as bronze by the fading sky, a statue of the Buddha in meditation looked down on the bed where she lay. On the small altar before it, an iron incense burner bristled with burned-out joss sticks. The abbot replaced them with eight fresh sticks, lighting each in turn, then passed thick candles to his trusted elders.

  “She must be surrounded by light at all times, the flames lit with our prayers. It is in darkness of hidden forests that this evil dwells.” Abbot Xoom-Sai began to pass his hands inches above Sing’s shivering body. Through half-closed eyes he conjured her aura: The colors of her life-force were dimmed, oppressed by a malignant shadow. “This one has been cursed by the darkest of powers. It is filled with a great hatred. A powerful evil.” His hands stopped above her forehead and his fingers began to tremble. “She has great strength, but her enemy is also great.”

  His low voice seemed to fill the chamber with faint echoes, his purple robe to blaze in the last of the daylight. One hand, still trembling with the force of the vibrations it had detected, moved to her throat, reaching to touch the jade amulet around her neck. The abbot’s fingers closed around it until his fist shook violently and he let it go as though burned. Carefully, he unfastened the chain and held it dangling for them to see.

  “The evil began here. It is this that has been used as a key to the doorway of her soul.” He took it to the altar and laid it at the feet of the Buddha. “Send for the hook-maker … ask him to come without delay.”

  Sing remained in the Pearl Pagoda for thirty days and nights before she became conscious of her surroundings. It seemed to her that she had never known anything but the blackness of the pit, felt anything but its slimy walls, or seen anything but the eyes of the cobra. The darkness echoed only with the taunting laughter of Ah-Keung: “Tell me, Red Lotus, where are the powers of the White Crane now?”

  Then, slowly, the blackness began to fade and the eyes of the snake grew dim. A pinprick of blue light appeared above her and gradually increased in size until it surrounded her in a bright bubble of pure light. She could feel it dry the damp chill of her sweat. The patch of summer blue became framed by a dome-shaped window. A single puff of white cloud floated in it, light and soft as a blown feather.

  Sing felt the hot flow of tears and lay for a long time looking only at the little cloud. It seemed to grow bigger, to have movement of its own, coming closer and closer until she saw it was a great white bird whose wings rose and fell with dreamlike slowness. It soared and dived through the sky with majestic grace and boundless freedom.

  She heard the voice of Master To calling to her and tried to rise. To her joy, she found she could move lightly as air. The pain that had come with the darkness was gone. The nun who sat beside her, spooning the foul-smelling mixture patiently into her mouth, saw the eyelids flutter and open. The taste of the herbal medicine was rank in Sing’s mouth and nostrils. The nun wiped it from her chin and set the bowl aside. Even the slight rustle of her movement was comforting to Sing after the bedlam of the pit.

  The abbot leaned over Sing, his brown arms and shoulders bare as he spoke to her quietly. “The worst of the battle is over, Red Lotus. Soon you will be strong enough to defend yourself. This is the one who will show you how.” The abbot stepped aside.

  The face that was lowered close to hers was so masked in wrinkles that only the searching brightness of its eyes showed life. “I am the hook-maker,” a voice said in a thin whisper. “You are returned to the light. The amulet is purified. When you are ready to meet your tormentor, it awaits you at the feet of the deity in my hut by the sea.”

  From the peak above the temple of Po-Lin, Red Lotus stood with her face lifted to the sky, using the power of her mind to surround herself with a golden light. Behind closed eyelids, she concentrated on breathing deeply the rarefied air off the sea, noting with satisfaction the unhindered ebb and flow of its circulation through her body. Lost to everything but the slight sounds of wind stirring the scant tufts of grass, she willed the oxygen through her lungs, following the upright channel of her spine and into her lower belly to energize her core, then back again to complete the cycle in gradual silent exhalation that would nourish her heavenly chi.

  To stand so completely alone on this, the highest point in all the offshore islands of Hong Kong, the night breeze upon her limbs and in her hair, gave her soul the freedom it must have. She had meditated there since dawn, as she had each day for a month since climbing from the pit. The gentle movements of Pa-Tuan-Tsin, the Precious Set of Eight Silk-Weaving Exercises, restored flexibility to her limbs, returning new strength to every muscle and refreshing her bloodstream. At night, if thoughts of Ah-Keung came to her, she would surround his face with a ring of fire and watch his image be consumed by the flames of his own hate.

  With each day Sing felt her powers growing to a level she had never known. She was ready.

  The hook-maker had lived on Lantau Island longer than anyone else, making fishhooks from the bones and claws of animals, barbs of sea-shell, and the beaks of birds bound into slivers of petrified driftwood, each one carved with ancient characters that, he claimed, no fish could resist. The fishermen believed his hooks were charmed, for they always caught the finest fish; and when a storm swept the islands, the sampan with his hooks aboard was sure to reach land safely. So great was his magic that some began wearing his hooks around their necks as talismans to attract good fortune and keep away demons. The hook-maker charged nothing for his work, accepting only fish and other food as payment.

  His advice was sought on every problem and his blessing on every birth, marriage, or death among the boat people of Silvermine Bay. But it was in the destruction of evil spirits, the chasing of demons, that the hook-maker had his greatest power. So great were his forces for white magic that even the abbot of Po-Lin asked for his help in desperate cases.

  Wood smoke from the hook-maker’s hut was blowing on the offshore breeze as Sing approached it. She had run down the mountain to the sea without stopping, springing from rock to rock to rock in the plunging stream, taking the firm sand of the foreshore in long easy strides. Arriving at the hut, she greeted the hook-maker, watching the old man’s crooked fingers fashion the delicate detail of a charm. He sat on a log of driftwood, its texture as seamed and weathered as his skillful hands.

  He squinted up at her. “I see you a
re strong again, Little Sister. How can I help you?”

  She seated herself on the log beside him. “The dream came again last night, si-fu. No longer in the form of yan-jing-shi, but as lo-fu, the tiger.” She watched his gnarled hands carving with infinite patience. “I know the one who does this thing. He will not be so easily defeated.”

  “To defeat an enemy is never easy,” the hook-maker said after a while. “I have come to know the heart of this Forceful One. He bears the venom of the cobra and the teeth of the tiger. Such a one knows only victory or death.”

  “I fear for those close to me. If he tests my strength and fails again, he may turn his venom on them, to bring me to him.”

  He nodded, setting aside his work and looking at her closely. “It may be so. You are strong again, but so is he.”

  “I must face him, si-fu.”

  The old one nodded “This is his intention. What he cannot possess with the mind he must destroy. To him it is a matter of honor.”

  Sing withdrew a slip of red paper, unfolding it and laying it before him. “I have written this message in the old style. I ask you to lay your hands upon it. To bring him to me. There can be no peace for me until this is done.”

  He picked up the red paper filled with flowing calligraphy, reading it carefully. “You are indeed a maker of fine images. How can such a challenge be ignored? It is written in the way of tradition, from one disciple to another of the same master.”

  “I have come for the blessing of your protection and for the amulet, si-fu.”

  “It is ready, Little Sister. Come inside.” The inside of the hut was cool and almost dark, taking her back to the hut of Master To. The hook-maker crossed to a recess in the wall where the sparks of joss sticks illuminated the fiercely warlike figure of Kuan-Kung. From its neck, the hook-maker removed the amulet of the White Crane. Holding it between his palms, he bowed three times to the god of war, then turned and brought it to the light from the doorway.