Zhu stared at him in confusion. “What? Who?” She pulled away and nearly fell when he let go, her ear exploding in pain.
“The nun! I know you were with one of the nuns!” Prefect Fang spat. “I saw her naked. You were in that storeroom with her! Shamelessly violating the precepts—engaging in sexual contact! Who was it, Novice Zhu? Believe me that I’ll have the both of you expelled—”
All at once Zhu’s fear was pierced by a wild upwelling that she recognized as the distant cousin to laughter. She could hardly believe it. Prefect Fang had seen what he had been so obsessed with seeing. He had seen Zhu’s body, and thought it that of a nun. And yet—even with that luck, she was nauseatingly aware that she hadn’t made it out of crisis. For if she denied the charge of violating the precepts, then who had the naked woman been?
“You won’t answer?” Prefect Fang’s eyes shone: the petty exercise of power was the only pleasure that dried-up body ever felt. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll never be ordained after this, Novice Zhu. When I tell the Abbot what you’ve done, you’ll be nothing.”
He grabbed her arm and began dragging her up the stairs in the direction of the upper terrace where the sacristy and Abbot’s office were located. As she stumbled along beside him, Zhu gradually became aware of a gathering emotion she had last felt, in its true form, on that long-ago day she had knelt over her brother’s body in Zhongli.
Anger.
That rising feeling was so visceral it would have shocked the monks more than any carnal desire. Monks were supposed to strive for nonattachment, but that had always been impossible for Zhu: she was more attached to life than any of them could have understood. Now, after everything she had suffered to live Zhu Chongba’s life, it wasn’t going to be some bitter, dried-up old novice master who held her down so the nothing fate could catch her. You won’t be the one to make me nothing. Her determination was as clear and hard inside her as the sound of a bronze bell. I refuse.
A few uncaring ghosts hovered under the magnolia trees edging the stairways. Their white clothes and long hanging hair made alternating patches of light and shadow in the dusk. As Zhu followed Prefect Fang up one then another of the steep, narrow stairways, it suddenly occurred to her that, at that particular moment, Prefect Fang was the only one who knew about this incident. Her breath caught. Who would question it if he were to meet an accident? Elderly monks fell down the stairs all the time. Prefect Fang was much larger than she was. But she was young and strong. If he never had the chance to struggle—
But for all her anger, Zhu hesitated. She and the other novices broke the precepts all the time, but any reasonable person understood there was a difference between the minor sins like drinking and sexual contact, and murder.
She was still hesitating as they passed through a mid-level terrace where the scent of sun-ripened plums failed to mask a less pleasant odor. The latrine building had been decorated with bobbing lotus lanterns: clearly some novice hadn’t cared too much about pleasing those sponsors who had paid handsomely to have their ancestors’ names pasted on the lanterns so their spirits might receive merit. It wasn’t the only unpraiseworthy behavior this particular courtyard had seen from a novice, either. Those plum trees were the origin of Zhu’s homemade wine, and also where she hid her little cache. The latrine smelled bad enough that nobody ever felt inclined to linger and notice that a clutch of wine jars had replaced all the fallen plums.
The moment Zhu saw the trees, she realized what else she could do. Oh, it would break the precepts. But not that precept. Not quite.
She dug her heels in so hard she nearly yanked Prefect Fang over. “Let me go to the latrine.”
Prefect Fang gave her an incredulous look. “Hold it.”
“Not to piss,” Zhu clarified. “Of course you wouldn’t know. But after you’ve had, ah, sexual contact with a woman it can be beneficial to wash afterward—” She made a descriptive gesture over the relevant area. Then, putting on her most pious expression, she said accusingly, “You wouldn’t want to offend the Abbot by hauling me in front of him when I’m polluted—”
Prefect Fang recoiled, dropped her arm as if it were red-hot, and scrubbed his hand on his robe. Zhu watched him with a feeling of bitter irony. If the thought of a woman’s polluting excretions disturbed him that much, imagine if he knew what kind of body he really touched.
“Go clean yourself, you—you filth,” Prefect Fang snarled. Underneath his performance of disgust and righteous outrage Zhu sensed a simmering prurience. As she went into the latrine, she thought coldly that it was better to be a flawed monk and desire honestly, like Xu Da. Denying desire only made yourself vulnerable to those who were smart enough to see what you couldn’t even acknowledge to yourself.
4
Inside the latrine, Zhu stepped carefully across the excrement-dotted floor slats and gazed up at the ventilation gap between the roof and wall. It was even smaller than she remembered. Before she could doubt her course of action, she leapt. Her outstretched fingers caught the lip; her scrabbling sandals found purchase on the roughly plastered wall; and then she was up. If the effort hadn’t left her breathless, she could have laughed: of all the grown novices, only she with her scrawny, non-male body was narrow-shouldered enough to fit through that gap. In another moment she had wriggled through and tumbled headfirst into the soft ground underneath the plum trees. She jumped up, and as quietly as she could, snapped a low branch off the nearest tree. Her heart raced. Would Prefect Fang hear? To her relief, the snap seemed to have been masked by sounds of merriment drifting from the other terraces. The monks who had opted out of the lantern-launching ceremony had finished their sutra recitations and were enjoying themselves. Zhu thought Prefect Fang would certainly disapprove of that.
She grabbed one of the wine jars from under the trees and, with the branch in her other hand, sprinted for the stairs. Too soon, she heard a furious shout: Prefect Fang had discovered her escape, and the chase was on. Focus erased all Zhu’s higher thoughts. She was prey before the predator, and this was pure survival. Her lungs burned red-hot; her calves ached. The wheeze and whoosh and thud of her laboring body thundered in her ears. She ran with the urgency of knowing that her life depended on it. I won’t leave the monastery. I won’t.
The noise of pursuit faded, but it wasn’t a reprieve. Prefect Fang knew she would be running to the Abbot’s office to beg for mercy. He would be taking a different route to try to beat her there. And if they had been racing there, she didn’t doubt he would win. Prefect Fang was slower, but he had been navigating the monastery’s maze of courtyards for twice as long as Zhu had been alive. He knew every secret staircase and every shortcut. But Zhu didn’t need to win the race to the Abbot’s office. She just had to make it to one particular terrace before he did.
A final staircase, and Zhu flung herself onto the terrace with a gasp. An instant later she heard the slap of sandals coming up the staircase on the other side of the terrace. For all Zhu’s lead earlier, now she barely had enough time to dash into the shadows at the top of those stairs. She braced herself and hefted her branch—and the instant Prefect Fang’s egg-shaped bald head loomed out of the dimness below, swung.
The branch connected with a crack. Prefect Fang crumpled. Zhu’s chest constricted in an agony of unknowing. Had she judged it right? She’d had to hit him hard; if he hadn’t been completely felled he would have seen her, and known what she had done. That would be the worst possible outcome. But if she’d hit him too hard—
She crouched by his head, and was relieved to feel his breath against her hand. Not dead. She stared down at his slack, tofu-skin face and willed him to wake up. The first prickle of panic began in her palms. The longer it took for him to rouse, the higher the chance she would be caught here where she shouldn’t be.
After an excruciating interval, Prefect Fang finally groaned. Zhu had never been so happy to hear from him in her life. Careful to stay out of sight, she helped him struggle into a sitting position.
&nbs
p; “What happened?” he croaked. He touched his head uncertainly, as if he’d all but forgotten what had brought him running. Zhu saw his hand shaking in pain and confusion, and felt her determination flare bright and harsh inside her. It could work. It would work.
“Aiya, you could have hurt yourself,” she said, lifting her voice into as high a woman’s register as she could manage. Hopefully enough to prevent him from recognizing her. “Where were you going in such a hurry, esteemed monk? You fell. I don’t think it’s serious. Have this medicine, you’ll feel better.”
She offered him the jar from behind. He took it blindly and drank, coughing a little as the unfamiliar taste hit the back of his throat. “That’s it,” Zhu said encouragingly. “Nothing like it for a headache.”
She left him drinking from the jar and slipped across the courtyard to the dormitory that flanked the terrace. The oily surface of the window-paper gleamed from within; voices laughed and murmured. Zhu’s heart beat faster with anticipation. She took a deep breath, and shrieked as high and loudly as she could, “Intruder!”
She was already halfway down the stairs when the screaming started. The nuns, rushing out of the guest dormitory, shrilled accusations at such volume that Zhu could hear them as clearly as if she were still in the courtyard. A monk, fallen down with drunkenness! He violated their private space with the grossest lechery in his thoughts; he made a mockery of his oath and was a false follower of the dharma—
Bounding downstairs with a spring in her step, Zhu thought with satisfaction: Now look who’s broken the precepts.
* * *
Zhu and Xu Da stood on the highest terrace and watched Prefect Fang emerge from the Abbot’s office. Zhu saw an old man in a peasant’s short robe, as different in appearance from their former novice master as a disheveled hungry ghost was from himself when he was alive. After Prefect Fang had been discovered drunk in the nuns’ courtyard, the Abbotess had gone to the Abbot in a rage, and he had been immediately disrobed in disgrace. Prefect Fang stood there a moment, uncertain. Then he lowered his head and shuffled down the stairs towards the monastery gate.
He had been innocent, and Zhu had done that to him. She supposed it had been better than what she’d first considered. And it was certainly the outcome she had wanted. She examined her feelings and found pity, but not regret. I’d do it again, she thought ferociously, and felt a pulse of something like exhilaration race through her. This is my life now, and I’ll do whatever it takes to keep it.
Beside her, Xu Da said quietly, “He found out, didn’t he? That’s why you went that far.”
Zhu turned to him in horror. For an instant she had the terrible thought of having to do to Xu Da what she’d just done to Prefect Fang. But then she saw his face was as still as that of a graven bodhisattva—and, like those statues, full of compassion and understanding. Trembling with relief, she realized that deep down, she’d always known he knew. “How long—?”
Xu Da maintained his serious expression, but seemingly not without heroic effort. “Little brother. We shared a bed for six years. Maybe the other monks have no idea what a woman’s body is like, but I do.”
“You never said anything,” Zhu said wonderingly. She felt a piercing nostalgia for all those times he must have protected her, while she had chosen not to realize.
Xu Da shrugged. “What difference does it make to me? You’re my brother, whatever’s under your clothes.”
Zhu gazed up at that face that was more familiar than her own. When you became a monk, you were supposed to leave the idea of family behind. It was funny, then, that she had come to a monastery, and for the first time understood what it meant.
There was a cough behind them. It was one of the sacristy monks, the Abbot’s personal assistants. He bowed slightly to Xu Da and said, “Monk Xu, excuse the interruption.” To Zhu he said sternly, “Novice Zhu, the Abbot sends for you.”
“What?” Zhu was gripped by disbelief. “Why?” Of course Prefect Fang would have protested his innocence to the Abbot, and tried to cast whatever blame he could on Zhu. But what credence could be attributed to the allegations of a disgraced monk? The Abbot would never have taken it at face value. Feeling the first flutter of panic, Zhu reviewed her actions in the latrine and nuns’ courtyard. She couldn’t see the mistake. It should have worked. She corrected herself so vehemently that she thought she might actually believe it: It did work. This is something else—
“Surely it’s not anything serious,” Xu Da said hurriedly, seeing Zhu’s expression. But he looked as sick as she felt. They both knew the truth: in all their years at the monastery, a novice had never had an audience with the Abbot that didn’t end in expulsion.
Before they parted Xu Da gripped her arm in silent comradeship. Now as Zhu trudged down the steps, she did feel regret. I made a mistake, she thought bitterly. I should have killed him.
* * *
Zhu had never been in the sacristy before, let alone the Abbot’s office. Her shaking feet sank into the patterned carpet; the writhing sheen of the rosewood side tables snatched her eye. Doors opened onto a view of the sacristy courtyard’s crape myrtles, their slender stems flickering gold in the emanating lamplight. Seated at his desk, the Abbot seemed larger than Zhu’s distant viewings of him at morning devotions had led her to believe, but at the same time smaller, too. For overlaid on her thousands of mundane memories was that elemental first sight of him standing over her like a judging King of Hell as she lay half-frozen before the monastery gate. It was in response to him that she had claimed Zhu Chongba’s life for the very first time.
Now the weight of his power bore her down to the carpet, pressing her forehead into the thick pile.
“Ah, Novice Zhu.” She heard him stand. “Why is it I’ve heard so much about you?”
Zhu had a vision of his hand poised coolly over her, as ready to strip Zhu Chongba’s life from her as he had been to grant it. A jolt of pure refusal brought her head up, and she did what no novice ever dared do: she stared directly at the Abbot. The effort of even that small defiance was crushing. As their eyes met, she thought it would be impossible for him to miss the desire pouring from her. Her unmonkly attachment to life—her desire to survive.
“This business with Prefect Fang was unfortunate,” the Abbot said, seemingly neither offended nor impressed by her boldness. “It burdens me in my old age to have to deal with such things. And the besmirching of your character that he offered upon departure, Novice Zhu! He had quite the sordid tale to share. What do you say to that?”
Zhu’s heart, which had clenched the instant she heard Prefect Fang’s name, opened in relief. If all the Abbot sought was a denial of Prefect Fang’s accusations—
“Esteemed Abbot!” she cried, and bent back to the carpet. Her voice trembled with a sincerity of emotion, which in the absence of factual truth was all she could offer. “This unworthy novice swears upon the four relics that he has never done anything to deserve the imprecations of Prefect Fang. This undeserving one has always obeyed!”
She saw the Abbot’s immaculately socked feet stroll around the desk, framed by the swaying gold hem of his robes. “Always? Are you not human, Novice Zhu? Or perhaps already enlightened?” He stopped in front of her, and she could feel his gaze on the top of her head. He went on, softly, “It’s interesting. If evidence had not so clearly contradicted my feelings on the matter, I would have believed Prefect Fang never to have taken a drop of wine in his life.”
There was knowingness in his voice. It shot a chill through her spleen. “… Esteemed Abbot?”
“You really threw him into it, didn’t you?” Not waiting for a response, the Abbot nudged Zhu with his toe. “Sit up.”
And Zhu, rising to her knees, saw with horror what the Abbot had in his hands.
Two wine jars. The one Zhu had left with Prefect Fang—and its identical twin, last seen amidst merriment in the novice dormitory. The Abbot considered the jars. “It’s funny how novices break the precepts in exactly the same
ways, generation to generation.” For a moment he sounded amused. Then it was gone, and he said harshly, “I don’t appreciate being made a puppet for another man’s dirty work, Novice Zhu.”
Proof she had broken the precepts, in the Abbot’s hands. Gripped by dread, Zhu could barely understand how she had dared join the other novices in breaking the minor precepts, believing herself to be just like them. Believing she was actually Zhu Chongba. She thought, agonized: Maybe this was always going to be when my fate caught me, no matter what I did.
But even as the thought formed, she didn’t—couldn’t—believe it. “Esteemed Abbot!” she cried, flinging herself down again. “There’s been a mistake—”
“Strange, that’s what Prefect Fang said.” In the Abbot, displeasure was elemental; it was nothing other than the promise of annihilation. In the pause that followed, Zhu listened to the empty sound of the trees in the courtyard and felt that emptiness creep into her, little by little, for all she fought and wept and raged against it.
Above her, the Abbot made a sound so unexpected that at first Zhu had no idea what it was. “Oh, get up!” he said, and when Zhu jerked a look at him she could only stare in disbelief: he was laughing. “I never liked Prefect Fang, that dried-up old papaya. He always bore me a grudge; he thought the most pious monk should have been made abbot.” The Abbot raised one of the wine jars and, meeting her eyes over the lip, drank deeply. “Green plums, is it?”
The Abbot, violating the precepts—Zhu’s mouth fell open.
The Abbot chuckled at her expression. “Ah, Novice Zhu. A pious man would make a poor abbot in these troubled times of ours. Do you think Wuhuang Monastery has survived this long in the midst of Nanren rebellion and Mongol retaliation solely due to the smiling regard of Heaven? No, indeed! I see what needs to be done to keep us safe, and I do it regardless of what a monk should or shouldn’t do. Oh, I know I’ll suffer for it in my next lives. But when I ask myself if future pain is worth it for this life I have now, I always find that it is.”
She Who Became the Sun Page 6