by Sam Abraham
Li looked at Shen, who nodded. “Take us to him,” she commanded. “Oh, and Xie, when we return, you will take care of the woman Jia Anmei. She has poisoned the ears of our people, and is unworthy to accompany us further.”
Xie turned to them and bowed obsequiously to hide the doubt in his heart. “Yes, Lady. I will tell her that she may return to Wuhu.”
“It’s not that simple,” Shen said. “She knows too much to leave this place alive.”
***
The next day, Li boarded a skiff in her simple white dress, and practiced her lines as she floated towards the Gardens in search of passage onto Shanghai.
The Caihong Gardens slum hanging from Shanghai’s western seawall was named for the algae that grew here. Its rainbow colors splayed curtains of green, brown and gold chlorophyta across the seawall’s concrete surface, exhaust ports, and every crevice in between.
Below the algae, the seawall was supported by earthen works. Around the rest of the island, the old edge of the city was the coast, and the seawall had been built at the ocean. But here on the western side, where Shanghai had once been connected to the mainland, tenements had been built a century earlier beyond the municipal border. When the seas crept up their sides and the seawall condemned them to the Floodzone, wooden slat bridges were thrown between the towers, and tin shacks were stacked upon their roofs, until they were a tumor that grew from Shanghai’s concrete skin.
In these hovels lived those unable to get hukou – authorization papers – enabling them to live within the city walls. Despite the demolitions carried out by the Mayor and the erosion of the ocean, the urchins of the Caihong Gardens fiercely rebuilt and maintained their turf. At sea level lived the lowest of the gardeners, trawlers who stretched nets out to catch garbage in the current, and sold it to those above. Higher still were the climbers, anyone agile enough to traverse the rickety go-betweens and carry goods from below. They helped the framers, who assembled new structures, building the slum up even as nature tried to tear it apart. And living in the aerie of the slum, atop a palisade of waste, were the clerics.
All who lived in this New Jerusalem belonged to one fringe sect or another, for many dangers lurked here, and any living at the edge of the sea craved divine protection. So it was the clerics, above all, who knew the languages of capricious gods and were honored in the cradle of the favela. The Neoshiah had their turf on the northern end, where fierce wind clanged against metal shields they had bolted together, and sent tinkling music through rotting buildings. The interior seawall was home to Green Earth Sect and Ten Thousand Bodhis, cramped in any nests they could find. But the biggest sect, older than any of the others, had built their camp on the southern end of the western wall, where the bilge pumps roared and the algae was gold. They called themselves the Martyrs.
Li’s skiff drifted on the gray water to a tangle of kelp, where Xie moored the craft. More boats emerged from the mist, crammed with hundreds of Jade warriors. They made ranks at the waterline as the elite marched with Li up to the roofs of the old tenements. They secured the bridges as Li climbed deftly, up and up and up, hundreds of meters above the water. Shen and Xie followed her as she scaled the tin walkways, watching hungry souls peer at them from dark windows.
So it was that they reached the highest branches of the Gardens, a canopy of cranes. From atop a flimsy overhang, Li saw the seawall far below, and watched its locks let ships pass into the island’s rivers. But what commanded her attention most were the four crosses hanging from cranes on metal strands, as if caught in a steel spiderweb.
A man was nailed to each cross. Their heads hung low, and their bodies leaned out over empty air from spikes that split their palms and ankles. Below them, crammed onto the same warped platform where Li now stood, were thirty men who mumbled as they flagellated themselves.
Shen had warned Li about the Martyrs. They were a death cult, convinced that to live was to suffer, and that joining in union with the suffering Son was to transcend the fall. Many of their followers were those who labored in the locks of the seawall. They were the families of janitors, machinists, and others who had been maimed or killed earning their daily bread. Everyone knew that working the locks was suicide, and only those with no other means to feed their children braved the tiny corridors to clean its humming bowels and sate the appetite of its clockwork parts. For men and women whose every day could be their last, the Martyrs’ message was an opiate indulged.
“Have you come in the footsteps of Christ?”
Li tore her gaze from the dying men and turned to the cleric, a tall, gangly vagrant wrapped in rags. Leaning on a gnarled stick, he peered at her with milky white eyes. “Did you hear what I said, child?” the blind man whimpered in a pitiful drawl. “Show me your heart, that I may judge its purity.”
“I walk in Christ’s path every day,” Li said. “I am His Elder Sister, the vessel of His Holy Spirit.”
The old man drew closer and stroked her face with a twisted hand. He traced the lines that cut across Li’s cheeks, and prayed in a lilting voice as he drew the outline of a fish against the dirt.
“Three nights ago,” the old man revealed to the praying Martyrs in his tympanic Shanghai dialect, “a dream came to me. The closing of one year is upon us, and the birth of a new cycle just beyond. The Son sent his heart to me and put it in my chest and told me that a sign would show me the way.” His congregants gesticulated, swaying and hanging on the words of their preacher. “Now you come here and claim that you hold the Holy Spirit. Well, what is your sign? Why have you come to our sanctum?”
Li remembered the lines she and Shen had rehearsed. “This city is a Great Evil,” Li said. “It is obsessed with ego, and has forgotten the meek. In its decadence, it has built a ladder into Heaven.”
She pointed to the sky, where a thin strip of light, lit up with a spine of orange beads, floated far above the city. She saw the old man scowl as the tail of the satellite elevator sailed across the sky.
“Only God’s grace can save us,” Li said theatrically, spreading her arms. “Yet to the bankers in this city, the bounty of earth no longer satisfies. Grant us passage into this city. Hide our crossing, and we will bring holy justice to men who build Towers of Babel.”
“Whatever you tell your sheep,” the old cleric said, “Christ in Heaven lies beyond any star man can reach in this form.” He turned to the ascetics kneeling on the ground. “Is the path to Heaven on a spaceship?” he yelled. A flurry of moaning laughter broke out. The cleric turned away from Li and put his arms around a paralyzed boy, praying for the four who were sacrificed in the image of Christ.
Li looked at Shen nervously and cried out, “I am the incarnation of Chang’e, Lady in the Moon. I bring you the opportunity for redemption. If joining in the sacrifice of Christ is the path to his grace, then look upon my face and know that I am no stranger to suffering. But spilling your own blood will make revelation come no faster while there are still so many blinded by sin.”
The old man grunted and spat on the ground and said, “The follies of bankers do not concern those who have denounced earthly vice. Your heart is marred by deception. I see too much conflict in it for you to be pure,” he groaned, disappointed. “Take your flock and go.”
Now Li was about to retort, but Xie stepped forward, and put his hand on her shoulder. He knelt down with the old man and the child, so the boy could see his cybernetic eye. Then he rose and wandered through the crowd, focusing on how his metal vision transformed their heat into an amber aura. “When human wickedness caused God to bring the flood that drowned the earth,” he said softly, “were the less wicked granted dispensation? No. Those who had stumbled only a few times were wiped out with those who had steeped themselves in a lifetime of sin. If the waters flood our land again, if people starve because food costs more than gold, because wealthy cities turn their backs on the starving and destitute, it is punishment for the work of our own evil hands. The waters will not recede, and the world will not be saved, un
til the wickedness is washed away and all of our hands are clean. You want a sign? Look around at our drowning world, and tell me God is not speaking directly do you.”
Now the Martyrs began to howl, and even the old man had to pause, for he sensed the One-Eyed Captain’s authenticity. “I think I understand you, stranger,” the old man said. “But if we help you, if we bring your word to those blinded by sin, what then?”
Li looked at Xie strangely for a moment, as if she did not recognize him. But then she remembered her mask, and clasped her hands in her most pious pose. “Then God will know that you are righteous,” she said, “and when I ascend to Heaven, I shall keep the way open like the parting of the Red Sea, that you may follow me to redemption.”
Chapter 50 – Ding (鼎)
Fat Of The Pheasant
So it was that the Martyrs granted passage to the Jade. Xie gathered the flock together, telling them that the time had come to battle the Great Evil. They were easy to galvanize. After all, their tents, made wet by the floodwaters, were empty next to the promise of paradise. As for himself, he had made up his mind long ago about what he would do should Li’s oasis dreams turn out to be nothing more than castles of sand.
As the mists parted, Captain Xie found Jia Anmei and asked her to walk with him. They came to the edge of the floating camp, where the rafts were moored. Xie looked out upon the silver waters and said, “The Jade will depart for Shanghai Island soon, but it has been decreed that you may not join us.”
“By Li’s order,” Anmei spat. Against her better judgment she craved the idea of saving him, and not just because he was, in her eyes, the prodigal son. She remembered how she had kissed him, and how he had rejected her, and wondered whether fate could have been different for them. Could still be different. “Come with me,” she said, pulling him close. “Help me reach out to the Jade from the safety of Wuhu, and show them the light.” Xie brushed her off casually and she looked away, holding her arms in the evening chill. “Why do I feel like I failed?” she said softly.
“Far from it,” Xie said, filled with compassion for her. “You guided us through the desert, such as it is. You were our Moses. But now we are at the gates of the Promised Land, and you have too much left behind to follow.”
She looked up sternly. “That’s not why Moses didn’t follow the people into Israel,” she lectured. “Oh, why do I bother? Listen, Xie,” she said, pointing at him, “if you won’t come with me, if you won’t save yourself, then you should know that you are going to go to Hell.”
“Do you know what Hell is?” he asked, gazing out over tourmaline waves and the garnet fringes of sunset. There was no land in this lavender world. “It is being stranded in the ocean, throat parched and belly empty. It is living with half a face, like half a man. I am already there.”
Anmei slapped him across his jaw. It was not hard, and she glanced at her hand in disbelief that her anger had gotten the better of her, but she continued. “You think this is Hell? You are going to burn in a lake of fire for eternity. Knives are going to comb off your skin forever for leading thousands of innocent people away from their homes and away from the love of the Church. The Jade are a cult, a disgrace of extremist lies, and its sin is upon your soul.” He just stood here with the same forced smile, exasperating her, and she shouted, “Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I cannot deny that I am sinful,” he said softly, “as are you, and everyone on Shanghai Island. We have doubted, we have lusted, we are greedy and vicious. But I see truth now. God is tired of you hypocrites preaching even as you wallow in the pockets of bankers stealing land from your brothers and--”
“It’s not up to us to judge others,” she snapped. “Only to show them the path to grace. Christ does not get tired, or impatient. That’s you, frail and human, obsessed with judging others to hide from the tragedy of your own life. I know about your dead wife and son, and I’m sorry, I truly am. But if you do not change your ways, your judgment will come, and when it does--”
“And in His anger,” Xie interrupted, raising his voice, pretending not to hear her, “He has brought the flood, and an army of the forgotten to purify this world. If Hell is the price for doing God’s will, I welcome the escape from this earthly prison.”
Anmei fumed. “Do you know the risk I took for you? Not for the Jade, for you. I misled Guoanbu. I lied to a government spying on its own people. I told them the bandit Sun was your leader, that discrediting Lao Jinglai would be the end of it. This is how you repay me for saving you?”
“So, you are a spy,” Xie said, “and you want repayment?” Nauseous at her betrayal, he pulled a pistol from his coat and pointed it at Anmei’s head. Then he swung his arm away, and fired a shot harmlessly into the sea. “I was supposed to kill you. You should go before I change my mind.”
She stared daggers into him as she unmoored a raft and floated away, drifting into the mists.
Xie wandered back to the dock of the floating camp as the sky rippled with fans of pink and teal. He considered Anmei’s betrayal, and knew they would need to move before their location was compromised. Reunited with the vanguard, five hundred and twelve of his brothers and sisters, he boasted a little too loudly, “Follow me if you are ready to save Heaven!” and set his skiff loose as the echo of Anmei’s promise haunted him.
Some sang hymns as they launched small boats, but many did not, feeling weary and cold. One who did not cheer was the man called Han, steeped as he was in worry for what was to come, as the fleet of dinghies around him drifted to the border of the Caihong Gardens. Accompanying Captain Xie, Han and the others alighted on a row of submerged rooftops and set the boats loose upon the current. The Martyrs were there, wearing black cloaks and carrying lanterns.
Han was in the middle of the pack, following others as they trudged from the roof path to a floating walkway and into an aluminum tower, and up a spiral staircase and down a long corridor and out a broken stained glass window and across a suspension bridge with wobbly planks and up a hill of dirt packed between two slabs and through a steel door leading to a catwalk above a dusty, candlelit dining hall filled with refugees sleeping on mats, and out a rusted doorway with the hinges blown off until he found himself beside Shanghai’s concrete seawall. The way was narrow. In the distance, over the heads of his brothers and sisters, were faint lights.
Suddenly, Han saw those ahead of him vanish into the seawall. Then he was at a corner of the stone walkway, faced only by salty breeze. He could have thrown himself to the rocks below had he chosen. Out in the harbor, illuminated brightly, were lines of ships waiting to enter the locks.
“Come brother,” a voice called from within. Han turned to what was little more than a service entrance, held open by a man who hid in the shadows. It was Captain Xie, Han saw, and he took his friend’s steady arm and stepped into the wall. Once inside, he was astonished. He had grown up on Shanghai Island, and he had never appreciated the ecosystem that lived within the walls keeping the sea at bay. Han watched giant gears grind into each other behind exposed ceilings with pipes running from dark corners, as the One-Eyed Captain guided Han and those around him into an access tunnel.
“You’re from Shanghai, right?” Xie whispered into his friend’s ear as they climbed a steel staircase. “Grew up in a wealthy house, the son of a rich man? How does it feel to go home?”
“There’s a reason I left,” Han replied. “Now that I’m back, I can’t help but wonder. For all our talk of bankers, how many of our brothers or sisters know one personally? People I used to call my friends work as bankers in Pudong. I wonder what they’ll think of us.”
Xie considered Han as they turned off the stairs into a wide gallery. Electrical stations and water pumps and piston mazes of machinery lined the bunker they crept through. Looking back to make sure his flock was following, the One-Eyed Captain whispered to Han, “Maybe no more or less than you think of me. After all, brother, you are from a rich man’s world.” He decided he did not care how dee
p his words dug. Whether Han called him friend or not, the man was guilty by association.
“But I gave up my birthright,” Han exclaimed. “My father disowned me. I am as poor as any Jade. What does it matter the level of corruption of one’s birth so long as he or she chooses the light?”
Now Xie smiled the most condescending of all ten thousand smiles, and wondered how it had become as natural to his face as his obsidian eye. “Even if I do not know the difference between eagles and pigeons,” the One-Eyed Captain said, “that woman Jia Anmei does. You have gone to school, and you never went hungry as a child. None of your pretending can change that. It is a good thing for you that the prophet has a soft heart, for she keeps refusing my request to purge the city of your ancestors.”
Han faltered, stung by his friend’s callousness as Captain Xie rushed ahead with his flock and never looked back.
By the time Han caught up, the One-Eyed Captain had exited through a door at the other end of the hall, and climbed aboard a ship floating right outside, which consumed the doorway like a cat’s eye around a rat hole. Han followed in the line of pilgrims, across a narrow plank and over the black metal hull. There he saw that the ship was a container barge caught in the hold of the seawall locks.
Han crept into one of the metal containers, stowing away in compartments prepared for them by the Martyrs in secret. He pulled the container door closed behind his fellow Jade, as giant submerged valves opened in the wall, letting water flow out to sea. If anyone were to have opened any of eight crates on the barge, they would have seen a cattle car crushed with stowaways.
But that was the point. The Martyrs saw the Jade into the crates, sealed them and marked them inspected. As the locks equalized, the tanker became a Trojan Horse arriving from the floating wasteland.
The metal box stank of musk and sweat, and Han tried to keep calm and ignore the fetid air. To distract himself, he peered out of ventilation slits cut into the metal containers. He could just barely make out the v-shaped outer wall behind them, pushed closed by water pressure to prevent a deadly breach. As the barge bobbed up and down, he turned and glimpsed the inner levees, pressed tightly together until the water level evened with the city’s rivers.
