Linnear 03 - White Ninja (56 page)

One day, he just disappeared. Perhaps, so brave in battle, he could not bear to be eclipsed in its aftermath. He lived his life near the edge, was not otherwise content. Perhaps he, too, had served his purpose in impregnating the twins' mother, and was no longer needed.

Not true. Senjin and Shisei needed him.

"The waterfall,' Senjin prompted the River Man.

'Yes,' Shisei said. 'What happened after the waterfall?'

The waterfall. To the River Man the waterfall was

the apocalypse, the twilight of the gods, Armageddon.

It was at once the end and the beginning. Like a nexus

point in time, all paths led to the waterfall and away

from it. ,

For many years, the twins dreamt of the waterfall as if it were alive, a presence suspended in the twilight of their room.

'It was the samseng, the tong leader, Tik Po Tak who pulled the murderer So-Peng from the boiling waters at the base of the falls,' the River Man said. "The body of Zhao Hsia, weighted down by the force of So-Peng's projected will, never reappeared.

'So-Peng said, "The tanjian we both sought is dead."

'The vile pair returned to Singapore, congratulating themselves on the success of their mission. But everything had changed in the weeks they had been away.

'A rival samseng had taken advantage of Tak's absence to stage a bloody coup in Nightside, the area of Singapore where Tak had held sway. And So-Peng's mother was gone. Terrified by the consequences of what she had done, of pitting one son against the other, she had apparently fled into the dense forests of teak and sandalwood far to the north.'

That was the end of the story, as far as the River Man was concerned. To the twins he had merely tantalized them, and they tried in every way they could think of to get sensei to go on with the story. It had no ending,

he had told them, but they were unsatisfied with such a nebulous answer.

And as far as Senjin was concerned, this was another reason why he was determined to travel to Zhuji. It was in China that he became convinced the end of the story would be revealed to him.

Shisei had other desires. When she dreamt of the waterfall, it was composed not of rushing, turbulent water, but of a forest of bright faces. These faces, all young, all beautiful, were turned in her direction. They were looking at her, not in the way of observing, but with the kind of adoration reserved for celebrities or movie stars. Yet she was neither. But she knew - this was still in her dream - that she required this adoration of the forest of bright faces as a flower needs water or sunlight in order to survive. Without this adoration, there was only an unutterable darkness, filled with fear.

But it was not, as might be supposed, loneliness that Shisei feared - after all, she had Senjin always and forever a part of her spirit. It was that she would never get enough love.

Senjin loved her; but what about anyone else? Haha-san had nursed her, nurturing her, attending to her bask desires. That was duty; but was it also love?

It was not yet clear to Shisei that Haha-san lived in agony, that this agony determined not only her actions but, far more importantly, what lay beyond the actions. Haha-san's agony was like a living thing, an evil-tempered pet or a revolting disfigurement that Haha-san humped around with her wherever she went.

It was as if this inner agony were Haha-san's own twin, the entity to which she was most intimately connected/ It had made of her a freak locked within herself, an automaton subject to irrational bursts of emotional violence.

This violence, a projection of Haha-san's will, took

many forms. For Shisei it usually began with an intense itching inside her head, as if a nest of spiders had crawled inside her mind. Then bright flashes of light would blind her, so that in the beginning before she learned to anticipate tiiis part she would fall to her knees or, if she were in the middle of playing, stumble painfully against some piece of furniture.

But these preliminary manifestations were nothing compared to what was to come: a recreation of the horrors of post-Mast Nagasaki with its stink of burned flesh, its sight of bloated, charred bodies, shrieking wounded, its choking taste of ash composed of human bones and waste, all filtered through Haha-san's disturbed psyche, magnified, warped, embroidered by her own peculiar terror, anguish and rage.

Think of the worst nightmare monster, then imagine it come to life, stalking you through your house, passing through walls and closed doors, seeking you out wherever you hid. Think of it finding you, entering your mind, filling it with hideous images, impressions of terror, despair and death.

The children were affected differently by these chaotic disgorgings of psychic violence. Senjin would run outside, enraged that his environment had been invaded. Here was the origin of his demon woman, soft and seductive on the outside yet, within, seething with malefic destructive force. In the rain and the snow he would curse Haha-san, and vow some day to wreak a terrible vengeance on her. But Shisei, as if paralysed by the onset, could not get herself to leave the house. She would lose control over herself, her own essence contracted into a tight ball, as if her will to resist was subverted by her need to submit to what she believed were the definitions of her life with Haha-san and sensei. She would cower in her room, trembling in fear as each new assault inexorably sought her out. Her eyes were squeezed shut as she prayed for an end.

She endured the monstrous horrors until the fiery psychic attack subsided, and the house returned to a semblance of normality, although always she could hear the crockery continuing to vibrate on the open shelves in the kitchen. For a long time after the attack ended, no one dared go near Haha-san, even sensei.

Gradually Shisei became convinced that these outbursts, terrifying in their power and unpredictability, were a result of some failing on her own part (why else, she reasoned, would they seek her out?), that it was irrefutable evidence that she was somehow unworthy of being loved.

When Senjin fell ill or was overtired and Haha-san pulled him to her pillow-like breast, he felt himself unable to breathe, suffocating in her endless warmth, the smell of milk and sugar. But when Shisei climbed upon Haha-san's lap, she revelled in the proximity of that slowly beating heart which put her to sleep within minutes no matter how agitated her state had been. This inevitable passivity (which came from Shisei's overwhelming desire to please Haha-san and thus gain her elusive love) endeared her to Haha-san who, despite her perseverance over suffering, must have found Senjin's aggressive squirming at her breast unsettling. Her duty was to pacify the children and, when she could not, once again her anxiety blew through the house like a storm.

Ironically, Haha-san's emotional violence led indirectly to the birth of Shisei's own philosophical outlook on life: the struggle to attain seishinskugi, the triumph of the power of the spirit over the physical. Two other factors influenced Shisei: the fear that she would never get enough love to survive; and the fact that she was female, therefore inferior to any male. And it was a male, her twin brother, Senjin, who she was constantly pitted against in her lessons with the River Man.

At night, pointing over his head, sensei would say,

'Look there.' Obediently, the twins would crane their necks, staring into the star-filled sky. 'You are looking outward,' sensei would say, 'yet what you see is in the past. That light, all those lights from the stars, is millions of years old. It took that long to reach us here on this planet. You look outward and see inward.

'This is the essence of Kshira, the language of the sound-light continuum. It is the opposite of eternity because Kshira is never at rest. Take the lesson of the stars to heart; it is the essence of everything I will teach you. The stars are far away both in distance and in time. In a sense, the two are the same. The past - your past and mine -are in another place as well as another time.

'It is the same with the days. Man has names for the different days, but Kshira tells us that there is only one day. It returns again and again, and so may be influenced.

There is a membrane at kokoro, the heart of things. It is not an organ that beats, thum-thum, thum-thum, as your heart or mine does. It is a field of energy that can be influenced by manipulation of the forces inside ourselves.

'The paths are twofold: ritual and meditation. Ritualized actions and meditative thoughts. Both focus energy, harnessing it into a concentrated beam that may be beaten against the membrane of kokoro, exciting it, exerting an influence. The paths must be repeated over and over. And the longer these repetitions go on, the more the membrane kokoro is excited, the more energy is created.'

Firelight played across the River Man's face, making it seem to change aspect with each flicker. 'As an example...'he intoned, his eyes closing, his face becoming placid.

The twins, with their extraordinary gift, could feel the emanations, much as So-Peng had felt his mother's force: concentric circles of light that were nevertheless devoid of illumination. The atmosphere became heavy, aqueous. The stars still dazzled, but now it seemed to the

avidly watching twins that their light was being reduced from a shower to a drizzle.

Abruptly, overhead, the stars winked out, a wind, damp and chill, sprang up, and it began to rain lightly. In a moment, it stopped. The fire sizzled and cracked as if filled with bones.

The River Man opened his eyes. 'You see what Kshira can do,' he said softly.

'You made a cloud,' Senjin said.

'Now the night is dear again,' Shisei said.

The River Man smiled. 'I did not make a cloud. That is beyond the powers of any human creature. But Kshira tells us that there are always clouds, even when they are not apparent to the eye. Clouds are part of nature and nature is entirely in flux. Always. Clouds are always forming or dissipating, always there. This is true of everything in nature. One needs but to gather up the requisite energy, focus it against the membrane of kokoro, cause an action to gain a reaction.'

The River Man stood up. 'But I used only thought to generate the energy, one path, and I told you that there are two.' He disappeared into the darkness, returning a moment later with a stoat. The twins had seen stoats many times in summer, their thin brown coats unmistakable in the underbrush. Now, in winter, the stoat was covered in a long silky pelt. It was a magnificent creature.

It squirmed in sensei's arms, clearly terrified, until with a twist of his thumb and forefinger he broke the stoat's neck. Then, producing a small knife, he set about skinning it. He did it not as a hunter might, in the most efficient way, but in long, protracted cuts that were so stylized that their ritualistic nature was evident even to the children.

The stoat's skin came off in thin, bloody strips which sensei carefully arranged like the petals of a flower. Senjin and Shisei could see that his eyes were almost fully closed;

just a thin line of white was visible, and they knew that the meditation, the focusing of energy had begun anew.

Now the two paths, ritualistic action and meditative thought, were combined, and the twins shivered as they felt the first harsh gusts of the gale whipping the tops of the trees. Leaves spun in the night air, and the tree frogs ceased their croaking. There was no sign of the nocturnal insects: fireflies, crickets, or midges.

The night grew black, as if a vast blanket were being pulled across the stage of the heavens, blotting out the starlight. The rushing of the nearby river coalesced with the rushing of the moisture-laden wind to give the impression that the entire world was suddenly in flux.

A moment later, the twins started as a ferocious clap of thunder cracked almost directly above their heads, and the world seemed to tremble beneath them. There was no lightning that they could see, but the thunder continued, short and sharp, very close, very loud.

They became aware of a kind of fabric, perhaps the very membrane of kokoro that the River Man had described to them, its dark vibrations, like beats upon a drum, the cause of the instability that flooded the sylvan river valley.

It was only when the downpour began that the River Man's eyes opened fully. He grinned at them.

'This is your power,' sensei said. 'The power of Kshira, the Way of the Two Paths.'

Time passed, and Senjin dreamt of Zhuji. Soon Haha-san had her own curriculum for them. She began to teach them the strange language that she had used to sing them lullabies when they were younger. It was, she told them, the language of the tanjian.

Senjin now began to see a purpose to his hard, exacting work. The search for the ending of the story of the two brothers, So-Peng and Zhao Hsia, had become a passionate obsession.

The River Man was nothing if not thorough. He delivered to the twins volumes encompassing a broad range of philosophical, theological, moral, political and ethical thought. These included the great minds of Western, as well as Eastern civilization.

The twins, precocious in all aspects of their development, gorged themselves on literature. They continued with their lessons in Kshira. But as for their interaction with the outside world, Senjin soon knew that something was wrong.

He automatically assumed that he would be better at everything than any of the other boys his age. He wasn't, and this crushed him. He could not understand how he could be so smart and so talented in some areas, yet utterly ignorant and inept in others.