Lion City

by Ng Yi-Sheng

  The media, however, was full of their news. Who were they? What were their names? Planeloads of news crews flew in from across the globe. Delegations of scientists and theologians arrived to quiz them, piecing together their social structure, offering a glimpse into the undiscovered world that lay beyond our own.

  What captivated us, however, were the policy debates. On screen and online, pundits clashed over what should be done with them on our soil.

  How many were there?

  About a million.

  Where could we house them?

  There were a surprising number of options. Some had gills and could thrive underwater. Others had wings and could nest in trees. Many were small and dextrous enough to build their own hives and spin their own webs. Larger ones had claws to dig their own burrows. Quite a few confessed that they would be content to dwell in our sewers and storm drains.

  What work could they do?

  What none others in the land could accomplish. They could walk through fire and endure temperatures approaching zero on the Kelvin scale. They could withstand extreme pressure and the emptiness of a vacuum. When tested, a majority scored above average in logical, mathematical and interpersonal intelligence. Nor did they frequently need to eat, sleep, wear clothing, urinate, defecate, procreate, or breathe.

  But they would never assimilate.

  They were steadily learning English, Malay, Mandarin and the major Chinese dialects. Guards reported that they were amiable, kind to animals and sensitive towards our religious and ethnic traditions. On the rare occasions when they had to be fed, it was discovered that they enjoyed both durian and curry. One senior guard had even received a proposal of marriage. She had accepted.

  You see? They had come to steal our women.

  They were here to find a home. Also, the guard was 57 years old.

  About three weeks in, a bout of violence broke out on Beach Road. A band of university students, out celebrating a recent victory in bocce, claimed to have seen one of the newcomers harassing a young woman at a kopitiam, and had leapt to her defence by pummelling him to a bloody pulp with their fists. It later emerged that the victim of the attacks was not in fact a refugee, but a child with elephantiasis. The young woman was his mother.

  In the end, say what we might, the message was clear. However talented, charming and benevolent these creatures were, they would remain unwelcome. Even the most tender-hearted amongst us had to concede that once we let them in, our lives would change. Not for the worse, but for the better, some argued. But for most of us, change was what we feared most of all.

  The government registered this with good grace, and dismissed all foreign journalists and researchers from the camps. A good lot had left already, for the news had grown stale over the course of the month, and the monsters were not nearly as exotic as they once were.

  One last press conference was held, not at the Istana, but at one of the central internment camps. Flanked by bodyguards, the PM noted the exemplary behaviour of the beings in custody, as well as the many valuable contributions they might have made to our culture and economy. Yet ours was a young nation, he said, and a small one. For the sake of social harmony, he had but one choice: to send our friends onward, to seek new homes elsewhere.

  He then announced that the visitors would now bid us a fond farewell. A representative stepped up to the podium. She was three metres tall, with grey skin and leaf-green hair and a tail that fanned out like a scaly peacock. Yet when she opened her mouth, her voice was so familiar in its cadences that we might have mistook it for our own.

  Her message was brief. She thanked us for our hospitality, and was sorry her people could not stay longer. She praised the beauty of our land and our traditions, citing a story found in several of our holy books. Once, two strangers arrived at the gates of a city. They were taken in by an alderman, who offered them protection from an unruly mob, and would have sacrificed even his children for their sake. His actions were wise, for those travellers were angels, and his people were thereby blessed.

  “The name of that city was Sodom,” she said. “But we are no angels, or else not anymore. We are the fallen. We cannot demand such a privilege. It is our lot to be outcasts.”

  She stepped down into the crowd, her form dissolving into the mist of foreign shapes that filled the room. As one, they bowed their heads, united in mourning and in anticipation, for their transport had come.

  The haze descended again that night. We heaved a sigh of relief as it took its passengers.

  It has not lifted since.

  The Crocodile Prince

  I.

  The Sultana was proud. She had ruled her island for a dozen years, and in that brief span of time, she had made it glorious. She had built mighty citadels and thoroughfares, fragrant pleasure gardens and mosques, where her subjects might wander with bedazzled senses. She had chased out the conquerors who had occupied her palace for generations, yet had done so with such cunning that they had vowed to remain her allies forever.

  Most importantly, she had won the love of her people. Where she walked, they scattered blossoms of jasmine and orchid. When she ate, they rushed to sample her curries to prove they were untainted by poison. True, she had her enemies, but they could cause little trouble locked up in her dungeons. They were crazed scholars and mountebanks, forgotten by all but their wives, who came each week to wail for them in their moon-white veils.

  Yet if you asked the Sultana to name her greatest achievement, she would bow her graceful head and say, “I thank God for the fortune I have had in the birth of my son.” Her courtiers would smile at such motherly pride, but they knew it was not misplaced.

  After all, the Prince was a true gentleman: courteous in his manners, charming in his speech, and meticulous in his dress. His tutors reported him intelligent beyond his years, and his ustaz never failed to praise his high moral character. Other dynasties’ offspring might go carousing and whoring in the night; this Prince, however, was born to lead.

  But the Sultana worried. She had observed that her son had few friends, and cared little for the world around him. He seemed content to cloister himself in the great libraries of the city, emerging only for prayers and food.

  Thus she resolved that on his eighteenth birthday, the Prince would go into the jungle. This was a ritual followed by almost all the young men of the island: an initiation into the ways of the warrior, held amidst the sweltering rainforests of the north. Her courtiers lauded this ruling, for how could a Prince be better trained to serve his subjects than by suffering their travails? And how should he learn to love his country but by sleeping with his face against its soil?

  Tongues wagged only in the marketplace, where old women gathered to barter cardamom for cumin. They knew the lore of the jungle, and how hazardous it could be for an innocent prince. The boy would be in danger, they said, not only from tigers and gunfire, but from spirits.

  Nonetheless, when his eighteenth birthday came, the Prince descended from his mother’s carriage at the edge of the jungle displaying neither fear nor consternation. The Sultana had prepared herself for this moment, and was about to counsel him with words of wisdom. Yet to her surprise, she found herself struck mute.

  “Goodbye, mother,” he told her. Silently, he kissed her hands, then turned to join the throngs of young men disappearing into the woods, now lit by fireflies as the twilight dissolved into darkness.

  II.

  After the departure of the Prince, the Sultana smiled bravely and returned to the palace. For the next few months, she busied herself with training her new vizier, meeting trade delegations, and disputing the best methods of dealing with piracy in the eastern seas.

  From time to time, however, she would confer with her spies. What they told her filled her heart with gladness. The Prince was thriving in the wilderness, they said. As if by instinct, he knew how to break the shell of the coconut to drink its sweet water, how to trap and slaughter the python to dine on its fresh meat. Other boys, even thos
e who had grown up in the jungle’s shadow, gazed in awe at his natural skill with the bow and arrow, the rifle, the kris.

  Yet the truth was that the Prince was troubled. Each night, as his spies and sergeants slept, he lay awake in his tent, listening to the call of the crickets and cicadas. Strangely enough, he did not miss the palace, nor the city, nor the stacks of books in his room which learned clerics had pressed into his hands. No, what bothered him was desire.

  Something had awakened in him that first night in the jungle, during the first rite of his initiation. By firelight, he and his newfound brothers had been ordered to strip off their garments, so that they stood bare, royal and commoner alike, equal on the black spongy earth.

  The hair had then been shorn from their heads, so that their scalps resembled the skin of plucked chickens. Thereupon they were commanded to plunge into the western river to cleanse themselves.

  Bobbing breathless in the water, the Prince was shocked by the sensation of another boy’s bare flesh pressed against his own, by another boy’s hands groping against his bones, by another boy’s feet kicking at his feet. He rushed out of the river, shaking, into the clearing where bales of clothes and hair were being tossed into bonfires, bright sparks spiralling upwards into the night.

  From then on, the Prince had cautiously avoided the communal baths. He chose instead to visit the river in the dead of the darkness, scrubbing the sweat and grime from his body until his skin felt tender as a child’s. He soon learnt the way by touch, guided by memory, the moonlight and fireflies, so that he could leave and return to the camp without awaking the attention of the sentries who stood yawning at its gates.

  To comfort himself while bathing, he would chant songs to himself: half-remembered folk tunes his nursemaid had taught him, or religious melodies from his ustaz. This kept the darkness at bay, and prevented his thoughts from turning to the ghostly tales the boys liked to exchange by lamplight, or worse, to the bodies of the boys themselves, which had so lately shared the same water in which he stood.

  Some nights, his mind played tricks on him. “Where is he, my beloved kid goat, the one who eats yam leaves?” he would murmur to himself, fingers rubbing the insides of his joints. Then, out of the darkness, an echo voice seemed to reply, “Where is he, my heart, like a peeled egg?”

  He did not, of course, believe in spirits. So this phantom voice did not frighten him. He knew it was a mere rustle of the reeds in the wind, or a distant memory blended with the gurgling water.

  Yet he found himself growing oddly attached to its presence. On nights when the voice did not appear, he suffered from sharp pangs of loneliness that ate away at his insides. Some evenings, however, he would step into the water and hear it break into song at once, as if it had been waiting specially for him. Those nights, he found himself tossing fitfully on his bedroll, his skin trembling with a bewildering, tantalising joy.

  It seemed only natural that the voice would one day begin to speak.

  “Why do you come here alone?” it said.

  “I enjoy my solitude,” the Prince replied. He was not going to be honest immediately, not even to a disembodied voice.

  There was a pause, then it spoke up again.

  “I’ll leave, then.”

  “No! You misunderstand me. I appreciate your company.”

  “So I’m different?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  This question perplexed the Prince. Obviously, it would not do to tell the voice it did not exist, so he chose to remain silent.

  Far from taking offence, the voice laughed.

  “I imagine it’s because you can’t see me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And if you can’t see me, I’m not real.”

  Once again, silence.

  “And if I’m not real, there’s no harm if I do this—”

  Suddenly, the Prince felt pressure on his right breast, as if a leaf had drifted down the river and become stuck to his nipple. He moved his hand to peel the leaf away, but found it had come into contact with a body.

  It was a boy’s body, warm and slender, but firm, with strong muscles in its chest and abdomen. It had hands, and they were holding him close. It had a cock, and it was pressed against his own, hot against the chilly current of the river.

  The voice laughed again. “Would you mind very much if I kissed you?” it asked.

  The Prince said nothing. And at that moment, the sky opened with a crack of thunder and it began to rain. Yet it was only an hour before daybreak when he stumbled back into camp, half-delirious with pleasure, collapsing onto the bedroll of his tiny tent.

  III.

  The moon was full as the Sultana rode to the jungle. Guided by the hand of her most trusted spy, she stepped gingerly through the underbrush and the mud, making a steady progress towards the western river.

  She had known for months that something was amiss, given the contradictory nonsense that her minions dared to call intelligence. “The Prince laughs more.” “He has grown weary.” “He has failed a test of marksmanship.” She had even been considering a purge of the service, till her faithful one knelt before her and related a tale so fantastical it could only have been true.

  Seated with the spy on the banks of the river, she received a tiny bottle formed of polished stone. “Dog’s blood,” he whispered as he tipped the contents into his palm, then dipped his finger into the fluid and marked the Sultana’s eyes.

  She shuddered, and blinked. The veil of the spirit world had dissolved before her, and for the first time, she observed the hidden commerce of the rainforest. She saw the demon women perched like owls in the treetops, the headless apparitions wandering through the lichens, the lanterns carried by the processions of the ants. She saw the faces of the old bearded men that yawned in the bark of every tree trunk, and the faces of young maidens that laughed under the stones.

  She would have cried out in horror at this menagerie of impossible creatures, this city on her island over which she had no dominion. Yet she bit her lip, and did not speak. Instead, she waited while the full moon rose into the sky. Then, as the crickets roared in the distance, she glimpsed two sights that transformed her blood into a torrent of ice.

  First, there was her son, grown leaner, yet stronger, stepping from the jungle into this river of ghosts. He stripped off his sarong and laid his kris in the grass, then began wading to the river’s centre.

  Second, by the opposite bank, a crocodile had appeared. But this was no ordinary crocodile. It was white: alabaster, pearl-white, from its snout to its ridged back to the tip of its tail. Its eyes glowed like twin crystals as it reared its body from the water.

  Before the Sultana’s eyes, the animal began to change. Its smooth belly split open, and a pair of hands emerged, then a pair of lanky arms, slithering out from the suture. Finally, the body of the crocodile fell away, and out of its waxen skin there came a young man, as tall and as handsome as her son. He strode to where her son stood in the centre in the river, and the two fell into one another’s arms.

  The Sultana did not move. Instead she waited, statue-like, until the lovemaking had ended, and the two bodies parted ways. The spy then gave the signal, and she pulled back the bow she had hidden in her robes, and fired an arrow at the heart of the crocodile spirit.

  The creature gave a piercing scream and fell back into the water. At once, the Prince turned. His eyes followed the body of his lover, now borne away by the current, sinking below the waves. Then he saw his mother, and his face was a mask of anguish in the moonlight.

  He lunged to the bank, his arm reaching for his kris. But for this, too, she had been prepared. She spoke a word, and the forest erupted with fire. The palace’s army of spies descended upon the Prince, bearing a hundred flaming torches. They gripped him by the wrists and ankles, they bound and gagged him and bore him to the jungle’s edge, where the royal carriage waited to bring him home.

  In a moment, no one remained at the water’s edge but the Su
ltana. She touched her eyelid: already, the apparitions had begun to fade, as the dog’s blood trickled away, dried by the warmth of the fires, washed by her furious tears.

  “Was this well done?” she wanted to ask. But it was not wise for a ruler to live with regrets. Thus she strode purposefully through the forests, towards the naked body of her son.

  IV.

  Her first command was to have the northern jungle razed to its very roots, and the western river filled in with concrete. In their place, she ordered the construction of endless rows of factory blocks.

  In a proclamation to the people, she declared their common aim: that their land should become a modern kingdom, led by her own enterprising vision. The old mosques, she said, would be cleared to build handsome offices, and the grand bazaar demolished and replaced with a spectacular hall of glass and iron where traders were licensed and prices were non-negotiable.

  As for the Prince, she waited seven months. She then selected a team of the island’s finest physicians, who assembled in the infirmary and dosed him with a powerful sleeping draught. Rinsing their scalpels in alcohol, they cut open his belly and peeled aside layers of muscle and mesentery until they beheld the object that had been steadily growing inside him for the greater part of the year.

  It was a colossal egg, cream-coloured, smeared with blood and vernix, roughly the size of a calf liver. The doctors laid it reverently on a silver tray and presented it to the Sultana.

  “Open it,” she instructed them. This was not difficult, as the shell was as brittle as paper. Inside was a baby boy, perfectly formed, the mirror image of the Prince himself as an infant, save for one detail. His skin and hair were chalk-white: the inheritance of his crocodile father.