The Poppy War
Page 19
“Yes.”
“What happened to you was common in the era before the Red Emperor, back when Nikara shamans didn’t know what they were doing. If this had continued, you would have gone mad. But I am here to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m going to keep you sane.”
Rin wondered how someone who regularly strolled through campus without clothes on could say that with a straight face.
And she wondered what it said about her that she trusted him.
Understanding came, like all things with Jiang, in infuriatingly small increments. As Rin had learned before the Trials, Jiang’s preferred method of instruction was to do first and explain later, if ever. She learned early on that if she asked the wrong question, she wouldn’t get the answer she wanted. “The fact that you’re asking,” Jiang would say, “is evidence that you’re not ready to know.”
She learned to shut up and simply follow his lead.
He carefully laid out a foundation for her, though at first his demands seemed menial and pointless. He made her transcribe her history textbook into Old Nikara and back. He made her spend a chilly fall afternoon squatting over the stream catching minnows with her bare hands. He demanded she complete all assignments for every class using her nondominant left hand, so that her essays took twice as long to finish and looked like a child had written them. He made her live by twenty-five-hour days for an entire month. He made her go nocturnal for an entire two weeks, so that all she ever saw was the night sky and an eerily quiet Sinegard, and he was wholly unsympathetic when she complained about missing her other classes. He made her see how long she could go without sleeping. He made her see how long she could go without waking up.
She swallowed her skepticism, took a leap of faith, and chose to follow his instructions, hoping that enlightenment might be on the other side. Yet she did not leap blindly, because she knew what was at the other end. Daily, she saw the proof of enlightenment before her.
Because Jiang did things that no human should be able to do.
The first time, he made the leaves at his feet spin without moving a muscle.
She thought it was a trick of the wind.
And then he did it again, and then a third time, just to prove he had utter control over it.
“Shit,” she said, and then repeated, “Shit. Shit. Shit. How. How?”
“Easily,” he said.
She gaped at him. “This is—this isn’t martial arts, it’s . . .”
“It’s what?” he pressed.
“It’s supernatural.”
He looked smug. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”
“I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?”
“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”
He made the wind howl at his command. He made trees rustle by pointing at them. He made water ripple without touching it, and could cause shadows to twist and screech with a whispered word.
She realized that Jiang showed her these things because she would not have believed them if he’d merely told her they were possible. He was building up a background of possibilities for her, a web of new concepts. How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
Power dictates acceptability, Kitay had once told her. Did the same apply to the fabric of the natural world?
Jiang reconfigured Rin’s perception of what was real. Through demonstrations of impossible acts, he recalibrated the way she approached the material universe.
It was easier because she was so willing to believe. She fit these challenges to her conceptions of reality into her mind without too much trauma from adjustment. The traumatic event had already occurred. She had felt herself consumed by fire. She had known what it meant to burn. She hadn’t imagined it. It had happened.
She learned to resist denying what Jiang showed her because it didn’t square with her previous notions of how things worked. She learned to stop being shocked.
Her experience during the Tournament had torn a great, jagged hole through her understanding of the world, and she waited for Jiang to fill it in for her.
Sometimes, if she bordered on asking the right question, he sent her to the library to find the answer herself.
When she asked him where Lore had been practiced before, he sent her on a wild goose chase after all that was odd and cryptic. He made her read texts on the ancient dream walkers of the southern islands and their plant spirit healing practices. He made her write detailed reports about village shamans of the Hinterlands to the north, about how they fell into trances and journeyed as spirits in the bodies of eagles. He had her pore over decades of testimony from southern Nikara villagers who claimed to be clairvoyant.
“How would you describe all of these people?” he inquired.
“Oddities. People with abilities, or people who were pretending to have abilities.” Other than that, Rin saw no way that these groups of people were linked. “How would you describe them?”
“I would call them shamans,” he said. “Those who commune with the gods.”
When she asked him what he meant by the gods, he made her study religion. Not just Nikara religion—all religions of the world, every religion that had been practiced since the dawn of time.
“What does anyone mean by gods?” he asked. “Why do we have gods? What purpose does a god serve in a society? Vex these issues. Find these answers for me.”
In a week, she produced what she thought was a brilliant report on the difference between Nikara and Hesperian religious traditions. She proudly recounted her conclusions to Jiang in the Lore garden.
The Hesperians had only one church. They believed in one divine entity: a Holy Maker, separate from and above all mortal affairs, wrought in the image of a man. Rin argued that this god, this Maker, was a means by which Hesperia’s government maintained order. The priests of the Order of the Holy Maker held no political office but exerted more cultural control than the Hesperian central government did. Since Hesperia was a large country without warlords who had absolute power over each of its states, rule of law had to be enforced by propagation of the myth of moral codes.
The Empire, in contrast, was a country of what Rin labeled superstitious atheists. Of course, Nikan had its gods in abundance. But like the Fangs, the majority of Nikara were religious only when it suited them. The Empire’s wandering monks constituted a small minority of the population, mere curators of the past, rather than part of any institution with real power.
Gods in Nikan were the heroes of myths, tokens of culture, icons to be acknowledged during important life events like weddings, births, or deaths. They were personifications of emotions that the Nikara themselves felt. But no one actually believed that you would have bad luck for the rest of the year if you forgot to light incense to the Azure Dragon. No one really thought that you could keep your loved ones safe by praying to the Great Tortoise.
The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.
“And so religion is merely a social construct in both the east and west,” Rin concluded. “The difference lies in its utility.”
Jiang had been listening attentively throughout her presentation. When she finished, he blew air out of his cheeks like a child and rubbed at his temples. “So you think Nikara religion is simply superstition?”
“Nikara religion is too haphazard to hold any degree of truth,” Rin said. “You have the four cardinal gods—the Dragon, the Tiger, t
he Tortoise, and the Phoenix. Then you have local household gods, village guardian gods, animal gods, gods of rivers, gods of mountains . . .” She counted them off on her fingers. “How could all of them exist in the same space? How could the spiritual realm be, with all these gods vying for dominance? The best explanation is that when we say ‘god’ in Nikan, we mean a story. Nothing more.”
“So you have no faith in the gods?” Jiang asked.
“I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,” she replied. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.”
She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating.
Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be.
But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response.
He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: “If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?”
“But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?” Jiang countered. “Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Rin.
“Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.”
Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library.
And came back with more questions still. “But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?”
“Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I know you want power.” He tapped her forehead again. “But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?”
Under Jiang’s orders, Rin spent more time in the library than most fifth-year apprentices. He assigned her to write essays on a daily basis, the prompt always derived from a topic they had arrived at after hours of conversation. He made her draw connections between texts of different disciplines, texts that were written centuries apart, and texts written in different languages.
“How do Seejin’s theories of transmitting ki through human air passages relate to the Speerly practice of inhaling the ash of the deceased?”
“How has the roster of Nikara gods changed over time, and how did this reflect the eminence of different Warlords at different points in history?”
“When did the Federation begin worshipping their sovereign as a divine entity, and why?”
“How does the doctrine of separation of church and state affect Hesperian politics? Why is this doctrine ironic?”
He tore apart her mind and pieced it back together, decided he didn’t like the order, tore it apart again. He strained her mental capacity just as Irjah did. But Irjah stretched Rin’s mind within known parameters. His assignments simply made Rin more nimble within the spaces she was already familiar with. Jiang forced her mind to expand outward into entirely new dimensions.
He did, in essence, the mental equivalent of making her carry a pig up a mountain.
She obeyed on every count, and wondered what alternative worldview he was trying to make her piece together. She wondered what he was trying to teach her, other than that none of her notions of how the world worked were true.
Meditation was the worst.
Jiang announced in the third month of the term that henceforth Rin would spend an hour each day meditating with him. Rin half hoped he would forget this stipulation, the same way he occasionally forgot what year it was, or what his name was.
But of all the rules Jiang imposed on her, he chose this one to observe faithfully.
“You will sit still for one hour, every morning, in the garden, without exception.”
She did. She hated it.
“Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Feel your spine elongate. Feel the spaces between your vertebrae. Wake up!”
Rin inhaled sharply and jerked out of her slump. Jiang’s voice, always so quiet and soothing, had been putting her to sleep.
The spot above her left eyebrow twitched. She fidgeted. Jiang would scold her if she scratched it. She raised her brow as high as it could go instead. The itching intensified.
“Sit still,” Jiang said.
“My back hurts,” Rin complained.
“That’s because you’re not sitting up straight.”
“I think it’s cramped from sparring.”
“I think you’re full of shit.”
Five minutes passed in silence. Rin twisted her back to one side, then the other. Something popped. She winced.
She was painfully bored. She counted her teeth with her tongue. She counted again starting from the opposite direction. She shifted her weight from one butt cheek to the other. She felt an intense urge to get up, move, jump around, anything.
She peeked one eye open and found Master Jiang staring directly back at her.
“Sit. Still.”
She swallowed her protest and obeyed.
Meditation felt like a massive waste of time to Rin, who was used to years of stress and constant studying. It felt wrong to be sitting so still, to have nothing occupying her mind. She could barely stand three minutes of this torture, let alone sixty. She was so terrified of the thought of not thinking that she wasn’t able to accomplish it because she kept thinking about not thinking.
Jiang, on the other hand, could meditate indefinitely. He became like a statue, serene and tranquil. He seemed like air, like he might fade away if she didn’t concentrate enough on him. He seemed like he’d simply left his body behind and gone somewhere else.
A fly settled on her nose. Rin sneezed violently.
“Start the time over,” Jiang said placidly.
“Damn it!”
When spring returned to Sinegard, when the weather was warm enough that Rin could stop bundling up in her thick winter robes, Jiang took her on a hiking trip into the nearby Wudang mountain range. They walked for two hours in silence, until noon, when Jiang chose to stop at a sunny alcove that overlooked the entire valley below.
“The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms.
“Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?”
“I’m getting high,” said Jiang. “You’re watching.”
He lectured as he crushed the poppy seeds in a small stone bowl with a pestle. “None of these plants are native to Sinegard. These mushrooms were cultivated in the forests of the Hare Province. You won’t find them anywhere else; they do well only in tropical climates. This cactus grows best in the Baghra Desert between our northern border and the Hinterlands. This powder is derived from a bush found only in the rain forests of the southern hemisphere. The bush grows small orange fruit that are tasteless and sticky. But the drug is made from the dried, shredded root of the plant.”
“Ah. The law.” Jiang sniffed at an unidentified leaf and then tossed it away. “So inconvenient. So irrelevant.” He looked suddenly at her. “Why does Nikan frown upon drug use?”
He did this often: hurled questions at her that she hadn’t prepared answers to. If she spoke too quickly or made a hasty generalization, he challenged it, backed her up into an argumentative corner until she spelled out exactly what she meant and justified it rigorously.
Rin had enough practice by now to reason carefully before uttering a response. “Because use of psychedelics is associated with blown minds, wasted potential, and social chaos. Because drug addicts can give very little to society. Because it is an ongoing plague on our country left by the dear Federation.”
Jiang nodded slowly. “Well put. Do you agree?”
Rin shrugged. She had seen enough of the opium dens of Tikany to know the effects of addiction. She understood why the laws were so harsh. “I agree now,” she said carefully. “But I suppose I’ll change my mind after you’ve had your say.”
Jiang’s mouth quirked into a lopsided grin. “It is the nature of all things to have a dual purpose,” he said. “You’ve seen what poppy does to the common man. And given what you know of addiction, your conclusions are reasonable. Opium makes wise men stupid. It destroys local economies and weakens entire countries.”
He weighed another handful of poppy seeds in his palm. “But something so destructive inherently and simultaneously has marvelous potential. The poppy flower, more than anything, displays the duality of hallucinogens. You know poppy by three names. In its most common form, as opium nuggets smoked from a pipe, poppy makes you useless. It numbs you and closes you off to the world. Then there is the madly addictive heroin, which is extracted as a powder from the sap of the flower. But the seeds? These seeds are a shaman’s dream. These seeds, used with the proper mental preparation, give you access to the entire universe contained within your mind.”