Part 21 (1/2)

”Not that we know of. So far. If you would submit to several morea”

She got out of there, fed up with their enigmatic replies. They were like ancient Greek oracles: they opined and said nothing; left you to manufacture your own fears in private.

Three separate crews were hard at work repairing her father's junk. Three Oaths had borrowed a junk from his vast fleet and, mooring it near the first one in Aberdeen Harbor, had installed himself and his family on the unfamiliar vessel. This was where he had brought Bliss when he had taken her home from the hospital.

He had said nothing to her about Jake or his whereabouts until they were aboard. Though she had queried him several times in the hospital, < three=”” oaths=”” had=”” managed=”” to=”” avoid=”” any=”” answer.=”” she=”” had=”” enough=”” worries=”” without=”” adding=”” to=””>

”Where in j.a.pan?” she repeated.

”That I do not know, bou-sehk.” He shrugged. ”Tokyo, most likely. That is where his Yakuza friend is, neh?

”Mikio Komoto? Yes.”

”Yakuza murdered the Jian. He has gone to find out why.”

For the first time Bliss became aware of the extraordinary tension emanating from her father. That is normal, she thought. s.h.i.+ Zilin was everything to him.

She had fought not to think about the Jian during those moments in the hospital when she had been lucid. Most of the time she had slept, drugged and insensate. At other times it seemed as if she was drifting through clouds of dreamstuff so tangible she wanted to reach out and feel them. She dreamt of light and sensation; she dreamt of floating, of flying. And of spheres more vast than her imagining. Spheres which spun in stately time within the bosom of a spangled blackness deep and wide.

Often she would awake certain that one of the spheresthe closest to herhad about its terrain a disturbingly familiar cast. Then, with a start so palpable it made her shudder, the familiarity was brought into focus: the face of s.h.i.+ Zilin just before she placed the pillow over it.

Compulsively, then, she would race away from the image, engaging the doctors or, if he was available, her father, in conversation. Speaking about anything at all so long as it kept her away from the image.

But once, she dreamt of the image. And in that moment became aware of the expression on the Jian's face as it was occluded by the white cloud of the pillow. His eyes were closed, of that she was certain.

Yet she was just as sure that he was watching her. How was that possible?

She thought of da-hei, the great darkness where all that was incorporeal about man resided.

She wondered if Buddha would ever forgive her for what she had done. But s.h.i.+ Zilin had asked it of her as a favor. She was saving him from a.s.sa.s.sins' bullets.

Now, for the first time since the incident, Bliss wondered how the Jian knew that they were coming; knew even before the walla-walla b.u.mped against the junk's hull. If he knew, she thought now, why didn't he act to save himself? Surely he had time to get us both off the junk.

”Bou-sehk!”

Heard Three Oaths's voice as if from a great distance.

”You did not answer my question.”

I did not hear your question, Father, she thought.

”Are you all right?”

She opened her mouth to answer him, though, indeed, she did not know the answer. Instead she was overcome. The strange emotion inside her that had been stirring like a snake in spring, emerging from slothful hibernation, gyred upward. And in its ascendancy it transported her.

Once again she was stretched over the skin of the heaving South China Sea as she had been when she had been bent over the dying Form of s.h.i.+ Zilin.

She saw the black bulk of the tankers, newly from the Strait of Malacca, full of flaming dark oil. She heard the sea erns calling, saw :heir great flecked bodies dipping and gliding on the air currents above her. Below she heard the deep drawn-out symphony reverberating through the ocean current. Carried for miles on end, the whale schools communicated in an ancient arcane song. Elemental and powerful, their speech filled her up as if she had been an empty vessel, waiting upon the bosom of the sea.

And in their cries was recognition, just a flash, a white-hot instant of revelation that shook her to her core. It froze her consciousness even while it galvanized the inner heart of her mind. She saw and felt it once the source of this strange emotion. She felt her qi linked and she thought, All G.o.ds bear witness this cannot be happening. I must belosing my mind!

”look like?”

A mi tuo fo!

”seen a ghost.”

Felt herself being shaken and at last her eyes focused on her father's concerned face. ”By the Celestial Blue Dragon,” he said, ”you've gone as white as milk. Are you ill?”

Buddha, she thought. Buddha protect me from this madness. ”I'm not” She put her hand to her forehead. ”I'm not feeling at all well in fact.” She stood on wobbly legs. ”Will you excuse me?”

She clutched at the railing, her body bent over. She tried to vomit and could not.

”Bou-sehk!”

She wanted to stop this feeling of being in two places at once. The South China Sea beckoned with all its thrumming animal sounds.

What is happening to me? she thought wildly. She clutched at her head as her qi plunged downward into the depths of the water, listening to the atonal symphony. Listening a ”Art is truth,” Fo Saan had said to Jake. ”Art takes nothinga blank page, a white canvasand makes of it something affecting. Art can only be defined by the emotion it engenders in the viewer. It does not presuppose; it does not contend. Like the great seas and rivers of the world, art is one of the Lords of the Ravines. Its power comes from keeping low.”

It was Fo Saan who trained Jake in the ways of the mind and of the body. It was Fo Saan who, unbeknownst to Jake, had been sent by s.h.i.+ Zilin to do just that when Jake was just a boy of seven. Fo Saan in his own way had been a part of the yuhn-hyun, the inner circle. He had also been responsible for training Jake's childhood playmate, Bliss.

It had been Fo Saan who had taught Jake about cham hai, sinking in, and its ultimate phase, ba-mahk.

”There will come a time,” Fo Saan had said to his young pupil, ”when you will find yourself contending against shadows. Perhaps you will know your enemy, perhaps not. In any event, his intention will be hidden from you. You will strike out here! There! But you will strike nothing. Only shadows.

”Then you must heed my words and seek to become one with the Lords of the Ravines. You, too, must keep low.”

This was what was in Jake's mind when he told Three Oaths Tsun that he was going to j.a.pan. Of course his anxiety for the safety of Mikio Komoto was a major factor. But Jake was acutely aware that the yuhn-hyun was under attack. He did not know who his enemies were or what their ultimate goal was. The time that Fo Saan had foreseen for him had at last come and by taking himself away from Hong Kong, from the center of the arena of contention, he was keeping low. Hopefully then, he would gather to him the power of the Lords of the Ravines.

Fo Saan's bright b.u.t.ton eyes dominated Jake's dream as he slept on the flight out of Kai Tak airport. He had slept fitfully for weeks, and not at all since his father's death. And his fight with the dantai, though effecting no permanent damage, had taken a lot out of him both physically and emotionally. The thought that a Yakuza clan was involved in his father's a.s.sa.s.sination made no sense. It chilled him to the bone, for his connection with the j.a.panese underworld was directly through Mikio. Had the raid signaled a sinister turn of events in the Yakuza war? Was Mikio already dead, the victim of a rival's katana?

Fo Saan: ”You are no longer a child; no longer safe.” He takes Jake by the hand and leads him into the night. The skies are pellucid so that the stars seem a shower of sparks raining down upon the earth. The bowl of the heavens is alight and afoot.

”Where are we?” Jake asks.

”Upon the mountain.”

”Where are we going?”

”Up.”

They walk for a very long time. Above their heads the blazing stars wheel in their predetermined arc. An owl hoots and, flapping its powerful wings, takes flight. Its predatory head, filled with enormous orange eyes, scans the darkness before the bird plunges downward to the earth.

The man and the boy both hear the sharp crunch of tiny bones breaking with an almost suprareal clarity.

”Shan,” says Fo Saan, ”from shan do the dieh loong, the earth dragons, greatest of all the species, get their power.”

”From this mountain?” Jake asks. ”From any mountain?”

”Ask the winds and the water,” Fo Saan says.