by P J Tierney
Jade looked away.
‘Please, Jade,’ Jamie said, ‘teach me kung fu. I need to defend myself.’
She ignored him.
He tried again, in a quieter tone. ‘Master Wu said I’ll need to defend the rest of you too.’
Jade looked surprised. ‘He said that?’
Jamie nodded.
She turned away and headed down towards the sand. ‘Start stacking the rocks then.’
Jamie huffed and kicked at a loose stone, sending it tumbling end over end towards Jade’s back. He opened his mouth to warn her, but she’d stepped aside as if she had known it was coming. The stone rolled all the way down into the water, making a huge splash.
‘You might want to start with that one,’ Jade said, jutting her chin towards the water’s edge.
Jamie seethed the whole way down to the water, and averted his eyes when he passed her on the way back up. His arms were at full extension and the heavy stone bounced against his hips with each step. He was barely able to hold onto it.
Jade called out, ‘Like this.’
Jamie twisted awkwardly to see her standing with a stone twice the size of the one he was carrying, out at full reach in front of her.
‘You’ve got to be kidding?’
He repositioned the stone he was carrying up to his chest, then with a great deal of effort he held the stone out from his body. His arms trembled. He quickly turned back to the wall and stumbled just as his strength failed him. He dropped the stone onto the foundations.
He felt her watching. He looked around for a smaller stone, hoping she was far enough away not to notice the size difference. He picked it up, heaved as if he was a weight lifter and got it to his chest. Then he held it out in front of him. He turned to Jade and gave her the most sarcastic smile he could muster. She turned away.
Jamie’s field of vision narrowed as the red mist closed around him. There was a flash of black as Jet dashed between his legs towards Jade. Jamie saw himself smashing the stone down on Jade’s head. He heard the crack of her skull and saw her blood splatter. In that moment of deep, crimson violence he felt powerful.
Jamie dropped the stone and leaned against the wall, feeling woozy. He shook his head till the traces of red mist dissipated. What scared him even more than the blood-soaked image of Jade’s crushed skull was the knowledge that he’d enjoyed doing it.
He wiped his brow with a trembling hand. As he breathed deeply, a sharp, shrill voice shrieked his name. He turned, his fists up, ready for a fight. But as before, there was nothing there.
Jade looked at him quizzically.
‘Did you call me?’ Jamie yelled down to her.
She shook her head. ‘No. And I didn’t hear anything.’
Jamie returned to his stone-stacking task with vigour, keen to keep busy and distract his mind. He also wanted that wall rebuilt. However, he feared it may be too late. Whatever evil they were trying to protect themselves from had already found a way in.
By the time the sun was at its highest point, Jamie had carried at least a thousand tonnes of stone into position, or so it felt. His arms were like jelly, his legs grazed and bruised and his clothes were black with filth. He was woozy from hunger and dehydration.
He leaned against the wall to catch his breath and spied Jade sitting on a rock at the water’s edge. She was leaning forward and staring into the depths, seemingly mesmerised by the waves or what was underneath them. She didn’t move a muscle the whole time Jamie watched her.
Then, just as he was about to go back to the stones, she wiped her eyes and sucked in a long, shuddering breath.
Jade had been crying.
Chapter 5
Back within the walls of Chia Wu, Jamie’s empty stomach led him straight to the back door of the kitchen, where bedraggled chickens pecked at a scattering of rice on the ground. He noticed that the vegetable patch was stripped bare.
He knocked on the screen door, opened it and stuck his head in. Mrs Choo was sitting at the bench with her head in her hands. She hadn’t heard him, and Jamie thought she might be taking a nap.
The kitchen was huge. Round gas burners ran the full length of one wall, with woks the size of tractor tyres hanging above them. A saucepan as big as a cauldron bubbled away on one of the burners, and a freshly plucked chicken lay limply across a platter on the bench. The rest of the kitchen was bare. Rows and rows of shelves reached as high as the ceiling but contained a mere three packets of long dried noodles, a glass jar of furry black fungus, a jar of dried black beans, six cans of lychees in syrup, a big bag of preserved cabbage and two boxes of salty crackers.
Jamie thought better of asking for something to eat. He pulled his head back, but Mrs Choo had spotted him.
‘Oh, Jamie,’ she said, standing up and fussing with her apron. ‘We missed you at lunch. Come in, I’ll fix you something to eat.’
Jamie’s eyes flicked to the empty shelves. ‘It’s okay, Mrs Choo. I can wait till dinner.’
She waved away his protests. ‘We’ll find something.’
Jamie was used to making something from nothing. He’d once made a meal out of a can of sardines and a green papaya. It was foul but edible — just. He looked around the kitchen and did a quick calculation of how many mouths the small amount of food that was left could feed. Not as many as there were at Chia Wu.
‘Are there more supplies coming in?’ he asked.
Mrs Choo twisted her hands in her apron. ‘I’m afraid not. The Penglai boys have gone to sea to restock their fish pens — seems the typhoon wiped them out as well.’ She gave a half-hearted smile. ‘I probably went a little overboard at breakfast, but I just can’t bear to see you kids hungry.’ She patted his hand.
‘I could dive for razorfish,’ he said, thinking that the sandy bottom of the bay would be a good place to find them. Then he was struck by a much better thought. ‘The cove on the southern side is a perfect spot for abalone.’
‘Abalone?’ Mrs Choo said, brightening. ‘With some black bean, that’s bolstering, good for the blood.’ Jamie knew she was thinking of Wing. Then she shook her head. ‘The southern side of the island is far too dangerous, Jamie. We’ll be fine.’ She patted his hand again. ‘There’s fish in the bay and a whole grove of banana trees. We won’t starve.’
She lifted the lid off the bubbling cauldron and scooped a huge ladleful of vegetable broth into a bowl, then she set it on the table to cool. She glanced at Jamie from the corner of her eye.
‘I was hoping to catch up with you,’ she said nonchalantly, which instantly put Jamie on edge. She took a deep breath and looked at him squarely. ‘How is Wing really doing?’
‘He’s all right,’ Jamie said, ‘but the shoulder gives him more pain than he lets on.’
She nodded. ‘He’s brave, like his father. Is he sleeping?’
‘Um, yeah,’ Jamie said, looking away. He didn’t dare admit to keeping Wing awake most of the night with his sleepwalking and bad dreams.
‘I know he’s not eating,’ Mrs Choo said and her eyes filled with tears. ‘He needs broths and herbs to rebuild his strength. And all I can offer is some dried fungus and an old chicken.’ She put her face in her hands and sobbed.
Jamie reached over and touched her forearm. He waited till her cries eased, then said, ‘He’s got a secret stash of food in his room.’
She stopped mid-sob and looked up at him, then smiled through her tears. ‘Look at me, being silly and worried for nothing. With Sifu Fan’s medicines and your healing hands, he’ll be okay, won’t he?’ She looked at Jamie, desperate for confirmation.
‘Of course he will, Mrs Choo.’
Jamie hoped that willpower alone counted for something, because even with Mr Fan’s medicines and Jamie’s healing energy, Wing certainly wasn’t getting any better.
Mrs Choo put the bowl of broth in front of him and he spooned up every mouthful, then raised the bowl to his mouth. His overworked arms shook as he caught the last few drops.
Mrs Choo smiled
. ‘You’re a good boy, Jamie Reign. You’ll look out for him, won’t you?’
Jamie forced a smile to reassure her. And in that moment, witnessing a mother’s devotion to her son, Jamie thought of all that he had lost. He remembered the bare baton in the Celestial Hall where his mother’s silk should be hanging right now.
‘Mrs Choo, do you have a sewing kit?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ she said, reaching below the bench and retrieving a white plastic box. ‘Jade only just returned it this morning. Said she needed an unpicker of all things.’
That night, Jet snuggled into Jamie’s pillow and fell asleep almost instantly. In the morning, Jamie noticed a faint but familiar smell in the air. He tried to place it but couldn’t. He reached out for Jet. The pillow was bare.
Jamie sat up with his heart in his throat. He felt the blanket and looked under the pillow, but he knew deep down that Jet wouldn’t be anywhere in his bed. Jamie swallowed and, very slowly, leaned over the side of his bunk. He was hurt but not surprised to see Jet curled up with Wing, the two of them nose to nose on the pillow, snoring in unison. Jamie felt like crying.
Jamie took a deep breath to fortify himself before checking for signs of what he’d been up to during the night. He almost recognised the strange smell in the air. Jamie checked his hands first; they were clean. He patted down his pyjama top — it wasn’t dishevelled or dirty. And it didn’t smell of smoke. He thought that maybe he was okay. Maybe Jet just liked Wing. He smiled: when you thought about it, they were pretty similar.
Jamie climbed down from his bunk and the smell was suddenly much stronger. He bent to pick up his monkey. As he did, he saw that the cuffs of his pyjama pants were muddy with dirt and sand. And it was then he recognised the pungent smell of stagnant water and dead shellfish. He’d been sleepwalking.
Jamie dressed quickly and without waking Wing, unable to face his friend and the thought he’d done something dreadful again. He tried to convince himself he was all right, that nothing happened during the night, but he knew he’d been back to that cove — he had the smell and the feeling of exhaustion to prove it. He spent the day jumping at small noises and making silly mistakes.
By the afternoon, he was a nervous wreck and so tired that he nearly caused a catastrophe in healing class. Mr Fan had asked them to prepare a powder for the treatment of insomnia. Jamie wondered briefly if it was a veiled allusion to his night-time wanderings, but realised he was probably being paranoid.
Instead of measuring out the three grams of ground ginkgo seeds that the instructions called for, he accidentally used ground aconite root instead. It turned out this was a big mistake. Aconite root contained a deadly poison called aconitine, which could kill you if you simply breathed it in. Jamie only found this out after he’d poured it onto his scales.
Mr Fan went into a slow-motion tizz. Using exaggeratedly slow movements so he didn’t stir up any of the deadly particles, he gestured for them to leave the room immediately.
Outside in the fresh air, Cheng reached over and clipped Jamie behind the ear. Jamie thought he probably deserved it, even though he didn’t think he was entirely to blame. Who in their right mind left a deadly poison lying around in a classroom?
Jamie excused himself from the next class and went back to his room, where he discovered that Jet had found Wing’s secret stash of dried fruit. The little monkey had devoured most of it already and Jamie had to fight him tug-of-war style for the rest. Once he’d restashed what was left in Wing’s sandalwood chest, he opened up his own. He removed the white plastic sewing kit he’d borrowed from Mrs Choo and his mother’s silk banner that had once hung in the Celestial Hall. He laid the two pieces of her silk together, placing the long length that told her story up against the smaller piece that started his. Even with both pieces together the silk seemed shorter than the ones in the Celestial Hall. Jamie ran his hand over the contours of the fraying edge and wondered if there was something missing.
He returned the smaller piece to his sandalwood chest. His mother had wrapped him in it when he was a baby and she had held him close. That piece was his.
Jamie threaded the needle on his first attempt; he’d had a lot of practice mending sails. He folded over the top of the silk where it had torn when his mother ripped it from its baton, then hemmed it with neat and even stitches. When he was done, he jogged to the Celestial Hall, Jet alongside him. The hall wasn’t locked; it didn’t even have doors any more. Inside, he could still smell traces of smoke.
He ran his hand across the edge of a long line of silks, sending ripples through them like a breeze on a still bay. The patterns on the silks were as different as the stories they told. Jamie stopped to inspect a few; he wondered if he would be able to recognise those belonging to the Warriors who hadn’t fulfilled their life’s purpose. They all looked similar to him: a symbol at the top, which probably matched the chop mark on their belt, followed by a series of images that showed highlights from their life. Some silks finished with a slightly altered version of the top symbol; some just petered out.
A silk with an expanse of blank cloth at the bottom caught his eye. Leaning back to look at the top of the silk, Jamie saw this person’s life had started out ordinarily enough. His chop mark symbol looked like a magpie in flight. Jamie remembered from his lessons that the magpie was a symbol of peace. Working down the symbols, he saw that the magpie came to Chia Wu — indicated by the same circular symbol that Jamie wore on his shirt. And that was when the person’s life started to go wrong. There were wavy lines stitched behind the symbols after the Chia Wu mark; maybe they represented water, maybe wind. Then the circular symbol of a raven appeared. Jamie knew the raven was a bird of ill-omen, and that the raven and the magpie were a very bad mix. The next image showed both the magpie and the raven in flight, claws out and swooping into a fight. When Jamie saw the last image, his heart sank. It was stitched at least two metres from the end of the silk and showed both birds lying dead on the ground of Chia Wu. This Warrior’s purpose had gone unfulfilled. Jamie bit his bottom lip as he thought of the life that had been lost. He wondered how Master Wu or Mr Fan before him had let it happen.
Jamie flicked through the banners nearby and found the raven’s. His story was similar, except his silk was filled to the very bottom. This Warrior’s life purpose, as objectionable as it was, had been fulfilled. Jamie shuddered and pushed the silks together till the magpie and the raven were lost among the hundreds lining the wall.
He started again, flicking through them randomly, and he noticed a recurring theme, of Warriors being lost to the raven symbol. What did Jade say? It wasn’t what the bird represented that she objected to, but who … Looking at the banners, it became apparent that whoever was represented by the raven was well and truly evil.
Jamie unfolded his mother’s silk that he’d just repaired and examined it in detail. He breathed a sigh of relief when there was not even the slightest trace of a raven within its stitches.
He found the small gap in the silks where hers used to hang; an empty baton marked the place.
‘Wish me luck,’ Jamie said to Jet.
He tucked the silk through his belt, grabbed four or five of the hanging silks, twisted them tightly together to form a single strong rope and began to climb. He looped the soft fabric beneath his foot as he hauled himself higher, but his arms were tired from training so the going was slow. Jet raced ahead of him, using Jamie’s limbs, then his face and finally the top of his head for leverage.
‘Thanks!’ Jamie spat as Jet’s tail flicked him in the mouth.
At the top of the silks, Jamie swung his legs up over his head to perch on top of the batons. Hoping he’d straddled enough of them to hold his weight, he took a deep breath and unfurled his mother’s silk banner. When he leaned over the empty baton to attach the silk, he saw something that almost made him fall. He gasped. Jet came leaping over to sit on the baton.
‘Get off it,’ Jamie said, pushing the monkey aside and running his fingers acro
ss the cold metal. He blew at the dust, then wiped the baton with the bottom of his shirt. Scratched into the metal was a message from his mother.
Trust no-one & Caution Verse 28X
It made no sense. Jamie brushed the dust off the end of the baton to see if there was more. He shuffled over on his perch to look at the batons either side of hers. He checked the wall, the roof, for anything that might help him understand the text. Nothing.
Jamie knew that what he was really looking for was something personal from her, something to make him special. Mayling was a Recollector, which meant she’d known everything that was going to happen to her and, in turn, to him. She’d known that one day he would be sitting up here reading her words, and it pained him that this cryptic message was all she’d had to say. Mrs Choo could barely speak a sentence without telling Wing she loved him. Was a ‘well done’ or a ‘hi, son’ too much to ask from his own mother? Jamie ran his fingers across the scrawl, feeling the sharp edges, and realised she must have sat right where he was now to write it. Although he was disappointed, he felt close to her too.
He committed the words to memory, then, slowly and somewhat reverently, he pulled the stitched section of his mother’s silk banner over the metal baton. He reinstated Mayling as a Warrior of the Way.
He found Wing and Lucy at the table in his and Wing’s room. Wing was leaning over a textbook and Lucy was thumbing through the now curling newspapers.
‘Where have you been?’ Wing asked. ‘Mr Fan set us a heap of homework for Theory and Tactics.’
Jamie shrugged. ‘I had something I had to do.’
Lucy pointed at a full-page article about a missing child. ‘You should look at this,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I saw it in Master Wu’s office,’ Jamie said, looking at the photo of the blonde-haired girl.
‘Did he show you this?’ she asked, reaching for another newspaper. ‘Two more children missing. They took a dinghy out fishing; two hours later the dinghy washes up with no sign of the kids.’
