Oracle Bone

by Lydia Kwa

  Why was it that ever since Xuanzang’s passing, no one had been coming to him with health complaints, even though he could tell that some of them were not well? For instance, he had observed the pale, wan look on Huili’s face, the sharp and shallow breathing, and the dry, cracked lips—Huili was definitely in need of treatment; but the monk who had been Xuanzang’s main assistant had no time to think of himself. He was now one of the senior monks who had to deal with the Emperor’s wishes. Harelip wished to help Huili. Perhaps he would brew the herbs, bring the bowl to him, and insist. Perhaps.

  He groaned, and looked up at the buds on the peach tree. The sparrow was now on one of the branches. He would go talk to Huili—say that if he wasn’t needed, he would venture out to the market to buy some supplies for the apothecary. His thoughts turned to the Indian sculptor Ardhanari. He’d overheard Huili mention where to find the sculptor. Harelip decided to go to the Western Market.

  Harelip felt a growing sense of lightness as his steps took him further away from the monastery. Today, he wanted to be on his own. It took him more than one double hour of brisk walking to reach the Western Market. The Turkish teashop was at the southwestern corner. When he got there, he sat down at the communal table and ordered some tea.

  “Does the sculptor Ardhanari live nearby?” Harelip asked Hamed, the tea seller.

  “He comes here in the afternoons. Ask him yourself.”

  Harelip tried to suppress his joy at hearing this. He patiently sipped tea and observed the other customers. Hamed sometimes served up renditions of Sufi poetry alongside the tea—as he raised his teapot high in the air and allowed the milky tea to descend in an arc aimed precisely into each small glass, he intoned with a rapturous air,

  You have infused my being through and through

  As an intimate must do

  When I speak, it is always of you

  Even in silence, I yearn for you

  Hamed, aware that one of his customers didn’t know Arabic, translated the poem into Chinese for Harelip. Occasionally, a customer would pipe up and recite other lines of poetry. There were languages spoken in that tea shop that Harelip didn’t recognize. What he understood was the spirit of each shared poem, its energetic recitation and the reverential, almost ecstatic tone. It struck Harelip that sacredness and passion co-existed in these spontaneous recitations. The tone was pure, yet there was heat. He was intrigued.

  Soon after the next drum call, he detected a lovely light fragrance in the air. He turned and saw Ardhanari walking toward the tea stall. Harelip drew in a sharp breath.

  “Ardhanari.” Harelip stood up awkwardly and bowed slightly.

  “You!” There was a sly glimmer of insight in the man’s eyes. “Taking a break from the monastery?”

  “On an errand to buy supplies,” answered Harelip quickly. “Thought I’d pause here for tea.”

  Ardhanari sat at the table across from Harelip and ordered food.

  “Have some,” Ardhanari offered when the flatbreads were served alongside some kind of paste or dip in a bowl. “Very delicious. Try.”

  Harelip liked it. Some kind of beans or peas, perhaps, ground up and blended with oil and a hint of lemon.

  Ardhanari once again comfortably spoke to Harelip in Chinese while speaking to the tea seller in a different language.

  “How many languages do you speak?”

  Ardhanari grinned at him as he continued to eat and answered with his mouth full. “It depends on what level of skill you want. I am most fluent in Hindi. Speak a bit of Turkish, quite a lot of Chinese. A few Mongolian phrases.”

  Harelip beamed at him, impressed.

  After they finished eating and drinking, Ardhanari suggested that they walk over to where he lived. They went a short distance west of the market, and soon passed through the gate into another ward. They went through a maze of alleys until they reached a quaint fountain in front of a small house with a set of terracotta-coloured doors. Harelip followed Ardhanari down a narrow walkway next to those doors to a winding staircase at the back. Ardhanari’s room was on the top floor. A low table sat beneath the tiny window overlooking the street; the table was crowded with small clay figures of animals, pottery shards, and wooden carvings. A pile of sketches on parchment lay in the far corner.

  “Nowhere to sit, except on the bed. Please, don’t stand on ceremony.” Ardhanari stretched his arm out and pointed to the bed. Then, his back turned to Harelip, he lit the coals in the brazier. He stood and looked directly into Harelip’s eyes. “I’m sorry to hear about the death of your Abbot.”

  Harelip lowered his eyes. He suddenly felt tearful and very uncomfortable. He didn’t want to talk about Xuanzang. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “So… do you work at various sites, doing sculptures?”

  “In the summer and spring, I help my uncle at the Dunhuang caves. In winter, I return to the city. Sometimes I travel to other places in the autumn.”

  Ardhanari sat down next to Harelip. “Why have you come looking for me?”

  “I … I … don’t know.”

  Harelip looked down at his boots. He should have taken them off, he thought to himself. There were patches of water on the floor. He looked back up at Ardhanari and blushed. He’d never felt such a powerful attraction before. He felt exposed.

  “Don’t know, huh? That’s a very interesting reason.” Ardhanari smiled and took the monk’s left hand in both of his. He caressed it, intently studying its shape and size, marvelling at the softness, the veins that were visible. He marvelled at the clean fingernails. His were often dirty.

  “Have you ever been with a man?”

  Tears now came to Harelip’s eyes unbidden. He gasped, trying hard to choke back tears. “I have never been with anyone.”

  “Whereas I’ve slept with many men. And some who feel like women inside.”

  Ardhanari’s candour startled Harelip. He had never spoken with anyone who was so forthright and matter-of-fact about carnal desires. He pulled his hand away.

  “I was deemed too ugly for anyone to like me.”

  “Not ugly. Just noticeably different.”

  “How could you say that? You sculpt beautiful statues, figures with refined proportions.”

  “I appreciate other kinds of beauty as well.”

  Harelip stared at Ardhanari, thinking that the man himself was the embodiment of immense physical beauty. “I don’t understand.”

  “Shall I be blunt? There’s beauty within physical deformity. Under the surface. One must look deeper to see beyond the conventions of the mind. That’s what I like about this part of the Foreign Quarter. It has all kinds of unusual types. But unlike the Vice Hamlet in the Eastern Sector. How shall I put it? Here we have men and women who haven’t sold their souls to please others.”

  Harelip felt his body start to tremble. This man possessed wisdom that rendered him fearless and allowed him to be undeterred by Harelip’s deformity. He stared into the embers in the brazier, his face as hot as those lit coals. “I want to break my vow of celibacy,” he said softly. “I don’t want to be so lonely anymore.”

  “Is that why you are here?”

  “No, it’s not, not as if I think of you as my, my …” He was at a loss for words.

  Ardhanari frowned, his beautifully arched eyebrows coming slightly closer together. “Never mind. Let’s not talk anymore.” Ardhanari gently cupped Harelip’s face with both his hands and drew it closer to his own.

  DA CI’EN MONASTERY, SOUTHEASTERN CHANG’AN

  Huili stared at the bolts of colourful cloth stacked up along one side of the candle-lit Translation Hall. “Enough, enough of this! Take these away from here!” he shouted at the top of his voice, shocking the delegation of artisans. “Venerable Master’s dying wish was to have his body wrapped in a bamboo mat and buried on a mountain. Do you think any of us at the monastery could be at peace if we didn’t carry out his wishes?”

  “But—but—what about the Emperor?”

  “Let the Emperor punish me
. The Emperor can no longer override Xuanzang. He might have prevented our Venerable Master from leaving the city, but no, not anymore!”

  Many of the monks smiled and some even shed a tear. The artisans were politely ushered out of the hall, along with all the beautiful tapestries they had brought.

  Xuanzang’s body was bound in muslin and preserved with herbs and oils. It lay in a reed cradle raised on stilts in the hall. Six monks, three on either side of the body, bore it to the back entrance, where they placed it in an enclosed carriage.

  Harelip went up to Huili and whispered into his ear, “Let me go with them. I have some herbs to place alongside the body when it is buried.”

  Huili nodded his consent. Harelip rushed into the apothecary, selected some herbs, and placed them into his satchel. He joined Peerless on horseback while Huili rode his own horse. Two other monks drove the carriage. The remaining monks, totalling close to five hundred, walked behind the carriage in two lines.

  Outside the monastery, people waited for the body to pass by. They lined the main east-west avenue. Many spectators carried branches of peach blossoms or offerings of lit incense sticks clasped between their palms. In the early dawn light, the cold air was suffused with the fragrance of incense. The crowds were silent, their heads bowed low.

  Harelip’s tears rolled down his face. He didn’t bother to wipe them away.

  At the Chunming Gate, Huili halted and raised his hand. The walking monks stopped. Only Harelip and Peerless followed the carriage heading toward Mount Hua.

  Chunfen Jieqi,

  Spring Equinox,

  Second Lunar Month,

  Full Moon

  DA FA TEMPLE, WEST CENTRAL CHANG’AN

  Qilan brought the back of her right hand up to her face and licked it, then wiped her face the way a cat might do. She did this several times, then repeated the motions using her other hand. It was comforting to do this for herself in her private moments.

  It was very late. The drums had sounded the last night watch, but she was still awake on the daybed in her study, after spending many hours reading. Being a third kind of creature—a third thing—was lonely. Other than Abbess Si and now Ling, the other nuns didn’t know that about her.

  When she’d arrived, she was chilled from travelling too long through the woods out in the open, fleeing from their family home. By the time she’d transformed herself back to human form just outside Da Fa Temple, she was drained. She remembered how Old Chen had opened the side door and brought her in to see the Abbess.

  In the infirmary, in her weakened state, she had lost control of herself and changed back into a fox. The Abbess had drawn back in surprise and exclaimed, “Who are you?”

  “I … I … am the daughter of a fox-spirit and a human. I had to escape—a demon threatened our lives.” She didn’t remember what happened right after that, because she must have fainted.

  The Abbess had helped her all these years to cultivate the best of her nature, letting her develop both aspects of herself, granting her access to the rare books and ancient scrolls in the library, which contained mysterious diagrams, and her favourite fables, passed down in apocrypha.

  From that very first day, the Abbess had partitioned off a corner of the temple just for Qilan so that she had her privacy and didn’t have to maintain her human form at all times. It had a bedchamber with an adjoining study that opened to a small courtyard from which she could jump onto the roof and escape to the outside, cross a street, and quickly wind her way through parkland to reach the woods. Qilan needed to travel frequently outside the city walls on her own, in the form of a fox, to hunt small rodents and other prey. She had to eat raw meat whenever she had the chance.

  To her relief, the other nuns had completely accepted the special treatment the Abbess accorded her. Gossip served its purposes. When it became known that Qilan’s father had become possessed by a demon and this had required her to flee her childhood home, there was, of course, a natural sympathy aroused in the others. The nuns soon also appreciated how skilful Qilan was in martial arts. She began to assume responsibilities for teaching them various fighting skills. Many of the nuns weren’t physically strong, but Qilan devised techniques that were suited to their bodies. Over the past eleven years, she had taught the nuns close-hand techniques and immobilization tricks no one had seen before; she showed them ways to use ordinary kitchen utensils as well as their malas and other objects as weapons for defence. Recalling the delight and surprise of the nuns when they succeeded in using their malas as weapons, Qilan snorted loudly.

  She, in turn, benefitted from learning Daoist meditation techniques from the nuns at the temple, and over the past decade, she had been consistently cultivating her inner elixir. She was further indebted to the Abbess for teaching her how to use needles and moxa and how to set broken bones.

  Ling was the first human she had trained who possessed physical abilities as well as refined analytic and intuitive capacities. She was also the only human to whom she taught spells. Qilan felt a passing sensation of emotion—what was this called by humans? Affection? Love?

  She jumped down onto the floor, stretched her whole torso, and yawned, her mouth revealing her sharp fox teeth. She jumped back up onto the daybed.

  Not all fox-spirits were bad. Why did so many humans misunderstand and pull away, failing to distinguish between those who were good and those who had ill intent? The majority of humans relied on hearsay, after all, and didn’t trust their own experience.

  She picked up the scroll she had been reading. It was a copy of Zhuangzi’s Autumn Floods, section 17: “The Way is without beginning or end. Mundane things of this world have their life and death—you cannot rely upon them for fulfillment. One moment empty, the next moment full—you cannot depend upon their form. The years cannot be held off, time cannot be stopped. Time moves beyond the human. Decay, growth, fullness, and emptiness end and then begin again.”

  She yawned again and grunted with pleasure at the warm feeling of relaxation spreading through her whole body.

  Zhuangzi was her favourite human philosopher. He understood that a being had to be free from fears in order to live wisely; a being was constantly evolving. Zhuangzi was mischievous too, which endeared him to her, thoroughly unsentimental and yet compassionate. The fox in her disliked sentimentality—too many humans could be sentimental one moment, and callous the next.

  The realms were rich with mysteries—the most important thing to do was to listen well and conduct oneself with wisdom and virtue. Her eyelids were heavy, and she let herself surrender to sleep.

  She soon travelled to a place that was neither land nor sea. There were many caves on the side of a mountain. She had wings, or at least possessed the power of flight. Swiftly, Qilan entered a cave and once inside followed the familiar scent.

  “Mother,” Qilan cried out.

  “My heart, you have been so patient.” There stood her beloved mother in human form, her fox eyes gleaming, her skin shimmering with golden flecks.

  As they embraced, Qilan’s body was infused with a blissful warmth.

  “Where are we?”

  “Dunhuang. This is the cave where women come to pray to the White Fox goddess for their wombs to be fertile and offspring given to them.”

  “You pick the most interesting places to meet, Mother.”

  “In a few months, on the anniversary of Gui’s possession of your father’s body, you will meet the demon at its lair. Quite unlike the lairs of we fox spirits, that place has energy that saps one’s life force. To enter it is to enter into a realm of absolute cold stagnation and to risk being drained of vitality.”

  “What advice do you have for me, Mother?”

  “You must travel there riding your horse, rather than by extraordinary means. Save your energy for the encounter with Gui. Remember, it is not a question of being conquered or of conquering. The plastron will direct you. Above all, do not fear. There is nothing to fear.”

  Qilan was startled awake. She
sped down the hallway to the library.

  It was chilly inside. The dust in the room made her sneeze. She began to light the coals in the brazier, then realized it would be too slow, so she cast a spell that sent an intense blast of warmth through the room. Satisfied, she went down one of the aisles and looked for the text. She found the manuscript and blew on the palm leaves. They turned themselves, stopping when the section she was looking for was revealed.

  Be like a virgin,

  The enemy opens the door.

  Be like an escaped rabbit,

  The enemy will be unable to resist.

  BOOK THREE

  Ji Ji - Completion

  Liqiu Jieqi, Start of Autumn,

  Beginning of the Seventh Lunar Month,

  New Moon

  THE IMPERIAL COURT AT THE ADMINISTRATIVE CITY, NORTH CENTRAL CHANG’AN

  The official knelt in front of Emperor Li Zhi. His Empress sat next to him, no longer behind the veil since the Lichun Jieqi celebrations.

  “Your Majesty,” began the official, clasping his hands in front of his face. “I have come with a petition from residents of the Vice Hamlet that you send someone there to investigate a series of strange deaths.”

  The Emperor blinked several times. “Wh … what kinds of deaths?” he stuttered.

  The official kept his gaze lowered to the ground. “We have reports that some women in the North Alley area were attacked during the process of giving birth. Their babies were alive one moment and then suddenly, mysteriously, were …” His voice trailed off and he drew in a sharp breath.

  Wu Zhao leaned forward, intrigued. “Speak up, man!”

  The official began to tremble now, his topknot shaking visibly. “Your Highness, as soon as they were born, their bodies became limp and they turned blue. They were dead.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Ten deaths last year. I was told there were others in previous years, but—”

  “Prevarication is not a useful trait in our court!” The muscles in Wu Zhao’s neck were tensed as she glared at the official who held a minor post in the Department of Justice.