Linnear 03 - White Ninja (57 page)

Then, during his reading, Senjin came across a volume by the sixteenth-century French moralist, Joseph Joubert. In it, he found the way for him, the separatist, the special, the one, to live comfortably in society, side by side with the common man. 'Great minds are those that disguise their limits, that mask their mediocrity,' Joubert wrote and, from that moment on, Senjin lived his life by that rule.

He ceased to insist on competing in everything but, rather, stuck to his areas of expertise and even, on occasion, allowed himself to lose in order not to bring too much attention to himself. He discovered, much to his surprise, that he had little desire to become a leader among his peers, simply because they were so uninteresting to him. He would much rather practise his martial arts, read or discuss philosophy with sensei or debate morality with Shisei.

This last he did with his sister late at night, when they were in bed. Either he would crawl into her bed or she into his. Initially, this was done so they could talk as long as they wished without disturbing Haha-san, who was

attuned to their psychic emanations even, it often seemed,: in her sleep.

In time, the twins came to understand the shared warmth. Senjin found that he liked to be up against her, revelling in the places where women, even ones as physical as Shisei, were soft. For her part, Shisei loved the press of his hard muscles. There was no give anywhere on his body, and she often dreamt of Senjin's form splayed wide to protect her from unnamed dangers. And, often, when they fell asleep in this way, they dreamt the same dream.

But the warmth was not physical alone. Shisei could feel inside herself a strange sensation, as if someone were massaging her spinal chord and brain stem. Much later, she would be stunned to discover this same peculiarly wonderful feeling flooding through her at the moment of sexual orgasm.

In the warm, formless zone they constructed of then-energies, the twins spoke deep into the night of the nature of good and evil. Because they made it so, there was nothing here but their psyches. They created their own colours, generated light without illumination: the heat of the merging of their twin engines.

They were gods without knowing it. Neither good nor evil had yet touched them (so they could view them with a rare kind of objectivity), but these momentous concepts were lurking, just around the corner, in the slowly opening doorway to adulthood.

Senjin was of the opinion that good and evil were; mutable, denned differently from individual to individual; this, he argued, was endemic to the nature of man. He even likened this to a punishment: the Western concept of original sin, theorizing that at some time far in the past, before original sin, good and evil were immutable.

On the other side, Shisei believed that good and

evil were and always would be immutable principles.

This, she told her brother in an impassioned tone, was what made mankind mortal, different from the gods or from Buddha, who could indeed perceive good and evil as arcs of light that bent to his will.

'We are humbled by the gods, by nature, even by the animals, who are closer to the spirits, the energy, that animate the universe than we can ever be,' Shisei said.

'But isn't that what sensei is teaching us, what Kshira is all about?' Senjin said. 'Learning to manipulate the energy membrane of kokoro.'

'That's the problem with you,' Shisei said. 'You see everything in terms of manipulation. Sensei is teaching us to understand our world as we come to understand ourselves.'

'You still don't see it,' Senjin said. 'All understanding is an illusion, the understanding of the self the biggest illusion of all. And do you know why? Because we don't want to know what sightless worms are squirming in the blackness at the heart of our spirits.'

'You don't know how wrong you are. The beautiful spirits are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things",' Shisei said, paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne.

Senjin laughed. 'The fallacy of that,' he said, 'is that we are not living in a beautiful world.'

'Why is it,' she asked, 'that you see everything inverted?'

Senjin had no answer for her. Instead, he reached out and touched her.

After a time, Shisei sighed. 'That feels good.'

He took one long fingernail, scraped it down the centre of her back until he drew blood.

'And this?' he said. 'How does this feel?'

Two years later, when he was seventeen, Senjin disappeared. Shisei knew, of course, where he had gone: Zhuji.

But she told no one, not even Haha-san, who was frantic with worry, because she knew that if Haha-san found out where Senjin had gone, she would dispatch the River Man to bring him back.

Shisei felt her brother's absence with the keen edge of a blade. Her bed was cold and lonely without the hard metallic circles of his aura surrounding her. Oddly, she felt less innocent with his departure, as if this abandonment were a passage for her from the naivety of youth to the disillusionment of adulthood.

There had been no adolescence in the twins' development. Their rigorous training, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, precluded some basic hormonal development as well as effectively isolating them from the normal growth patterns of their contemporaries.

Theirs had been a world apart, an odd kind of paradise where their work was endless and arduous yet in everything else they were pampered as if they were the sole successors to the Emperor.

Shisei felt her twin's abandonment with as much force as Senjin did his mother's. Shisei did not feel abandoned by her mother. She never thought of her parents at all or, when she did, it was of a couple in a motion picture, with a sense Of observation rather than obligation. Besides, she had Haha-san, who was Mother, and the River Man, who was Father.

Still, Senjin's departure shattered Shisei's dream world, and at once she saw how like Haha-san she had become, locked within a hermetically sealed environment, feeding only on herself. This disturbed her. Her pursuit of seishinshugi, the triumph of the spiritual over the physical, was perhaps generated by the knowledge of how weak she was. Oh, yes, she had Kshira, and with it she could do many things. But it could not give her brute strength. For that she was, and always would be, dependent on others. She knew that she needed to find a way to do that while

keeping to a minimum the risk of being dominated.

In the stillness of the night, atone in her bed, hugging a hull pillow to her breast, she thought of Senjin, her brother, her twin, of how she was dependent on him, of how she wanted to be dominated by him. A single tear trembled in her eye.

If it had not been for the River Man's detailed description of Zhuji, Senjin undoubtedly would have ended up in the wrong place. The only Zhuji that anyone knew about was a town perhaps forty-five miles almost due sooth of Hangchow, now known by the revolution-obsessed Chinese as Hangzhou.

But this town, engaged in the manufacture of silk and Dragon Well green tea, was hi an alluvial plain, in the lake country of south-east China, and Senjin was certain that the Zhuji he was searching for was a much smaller mountain village in the northwest.

He finally found the Zhuji of the tanjian, in the north of Hean province, in the Taihang Shan, the mountains fifty miles west of Anyang, the cradle of Chinese civilization.

Even the dung-coloured mountains here seemed bent and worn with antiquity. Zhuji, carved into the heart of the shan, was filled with temples. Like grams of salt spilt from a shaker, the temples were identical, spread across the slopes of the mountains.

But it was not only the River Man's description that led Senjin to his goal: it was Kshira. Kshira enabled Senjin to 'see' Zhuji in the past: over distance and time. And when he came to Zhuji, hidden within the dung-coloured mountains of Taihang, he found no Mao jackets, no maddening modern Chinese bureaucracy, no Communist Chinese exhortational slogans, posters, cant, no inefficient government appointed by Peking.

On the contrary, Zhuji seemed encysted in time as

well as in the Taihang Shan. The sad-looking, poverty-riven, grimy, modern-day China was unaware of Zhuji's existence. It abided as it had for centuries, a coenobium, wholly self-contained, entirely self-sufficient. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not touched this religious community with its coal-and diesel-smeared hands.

Senjin's presence was announced by the steely rings of his aura. The whole of Zhuji knew of his imminence even while he strode through the rough, dusty foothills of the Taihang Shan. As a result, the tanjian elders were already in the village square when Senjin entered it from the east.

They greeted him in the language he had been taught by Haha-san. He was welcomed like a long-lost son because, after all, that was precisely what he was. And the next morning at sunrise, he began his formal education in Tau-tau.

The tanjian elder assigned to oversee Senjin's training was named Mubao. He was a tall, willowy man with the hard cast of China's harsh northern steppes imprinted on his face. In the quickness of his eyes, the darting movements of his head, he reminded Senjin of a hawk.

Senjin was ushered into his chamber, a rock-walled cubicle, rimed with soot. A fire was blazing in a rough-hewn hearth, for it was chilly at this time of year in the Taihang Shan. Through a tiny, glassless window, Senjin could see the cloud-streaked sky, stained red by the advancing sun.

Mubao said nothing. He did not look up. He sat at his bamboo desk immersed in his papers for some time as if there were no one else hi the room with him.

After a time, restless, Senjin stirred. Mubao was up and moving before Senjin knew what was happening. His first instinct was to use his gift, and he sent his dark, metallic aura outwards in order to intercept the older man.

Much to his shock, he found that he was imprisoned, encircled by an impenetrable wall, featureless, still as eternity of death. In that moment of immobility, Mubao reached him. Clamping a powerful hand at the base of Senjin's neck, Mubao forced the boy across the stone room, thrusting his head at the fire.

Flames danced before Senjin's eyes, the dry heat and coiling, aromatic smoke threatening to choke him. He felt his face grow hot, smelt something burning, realized belatedly that his eyebrows had been seared off.

At last, Mubao thrust his head away from the fire, but he did not relinquish his paralysing hold. 'You come here arrogant, ignorant,' Mubao said hi his deep, vibratory voice, 'ready to use your gift indiscriminately, injudiciously. You are selfish, vain, mistakenly self-assured. You are a danger to us and to yourself. Have you anything to say in your defence?'

The moment Mubao turned him loose, Senjin bridled. The anger gushed through him, a hot and milky substance, as sweet and thick as honey. For an instant he contemplated reaching out with the steely rings of his aura, using what the River Man had taught him to inflict punishment for his humiliation.

Then, like an animal appearing from the depths of a forest, his instinct for survival surfaced. Senjin knew without quite knowing how that were he to use his gift in such a fashion, it would strike only that puzzling featureless wall, rebounding back, disabling him.

Then everything changed. Senjin's aggression dissipated. He averted his eyes and hung his head. 'I have no defence,' he whispered hoarsely, 'in the face of the truth.' But it was not humility that had overcome him; it was greed. He wanted the power that Mubao obviously possessed, and he vowed that whatever it took to attain it, he would do.

'That being the case,' Mubao intoned, 'I now pronounce

sentence. You will shave your head, and keep it shaved to publicly show your unworthy nature until directed to do otherwise. You will work and make your bed in the kitchen, an assistant to the apprentices. You will follow their direction without question. You will perform whatever tasks are set before you, no matter how menial, for as long as you are in the kitchen or wherever you are directed to go.'

'What about my instruction in Tau-tau?' Senjin asked.

'It has already begun,' Mubao said.

I will not give in to humiliation, Senjin thought.

And there was a great deal to give in to. The apprentices hated him: he was Japanese, after all. They made fun of him, these stupid boys with their stunted auras and their backward minds. Senjin despised them, all the while acceding tp their endless demands on him. They made him handle the rotting garbage, spread animal manure with his bare hands on the delicate plantings in the extensive vegetable and herb gardens. Once they even ordered him to dig a new cesspit and, while he was at it, lined up above him at its Up, urinating on him in concert. Another time, he found a turd in his bed. Routinely, there were insects in his food; he ate them with a great show, relishing their taste as if they were a delicacy.

All this humiliation was meant to make him a better person, but it did not. Senjin was oblivious to the mirror of his self that Mubao was determined to hold up to him. It was as if Senjin were a mythical vampire who had no reflection to be thrown back into his face.

Neither, it seemed, did he have a shadow. The substance of his life at Zhuji had no meaning for him. He might as well have been in prison or in paradise, it was all the same to him. Only his internal questions, ticking like timebombs within his mind, were of any importance. As for the rest, he was as an automaton or, more accurately,