CHAPTER
30
The Temple of Divine Return
The odor of cut grass and sweet roasted figs permeated the thuds and grunts of the relayball game and the occasional gasped exclamation or murmur of appreciation from the crowd. Shae picked her way into a section of the low bleachers populated by Kaul Du Academy fans and settled into an empty seat. Glancing over at the scoreboard, she saw that the game was close. The Academy was a martial school where physical prowess was revered, but the wearing of jade was not permitted in professional sports. The opposing team was from a large city school that regularly turned out national league players; they were surely eager to show up future Green Bones.
Shae searched for her cousin and barely recognized him at first. He was no longer the awkward kid she remembered. Anden had filled out with an adult Green Bone’s physique. He was wearing dark shorts and playing first guard, sticking tight to his opponent as the ball sailed into their zone. The other player leapt to kick it to a teammate, but Anden, both taller and faster, smacked it out of the air. The two teens collided and went down in a tangle as the ball bounced into the net. The whistle blew for the ball to be rethrown.
A relayball field consists of seven zones separated by waist-high nets— five rectangular pass zones and two triangular end zones. Each zone is occupied by two players, one from each side, who are not permitted to leave their enclosed space as they attempt to throw, hit, kick, or bounce the ball off their body to their teammates down the field, zone to zone, over the nets to
the opposing team’s end zone, where it is the job of the finisher to put the ball between the guardian’s point posts. As the game is essentially a series of violent one-on-one skirmishes, ample opportunity exists for personal as well as team enmity. As Anden got to his feet, the opponent in his zone glared at him and spat some insult at his back. Anden did not deign to turn around and react. He bent his knees, ready, squinting into the horizontal orange light of the setting sun.
The ball flew straight up from the referee’s hands. Anden jumped to shoulder check the other player, reaching with one arm to seize the ball and hurl it over the net to his teammate in the instant before he was tackled to the ground. Shae stomped her feet appreciatively along with the crowd. She was impressed by her cousin’s grace and aggression on the field, his workmanlike athleticism. He seemed to approach relayball as a duty, not a game—he took little outward satisfaction in a good play and grimaced only faintly after bad ones. Already, she could picture him as a Green Bone, one of No Peak’s Fists.
She was not alone in this. In the row behind her, someone said, “The Academy first guard there—that’s the Mad Witch’s boy, the one the Kauls took in. You can bet the Horn is counting down the days until that one gets his jade.”
“Him and the whole crop of year-eights,” someone else added.
A point was scored by the Academy finisher, and the spectators stomped their feet on the bleachers in approval. The applause was brief and faded quickly back to silence. Sporting events on Kekon were different from how they were in Espenia. Shae had been astounded by how rowdy and jovial the crowds were over there. The Espenians sang and chanted constantly; they cheered and booed, waved flags, and shouted nonsensical instructions at the players and coaches. The Kekonese were no less passionate in their team loyalties, but no one would think to yell at the field or distract the participants. The Espenians, Shae had concluded, believed the athletes were there to entertain the audience; the energy of the crowd was part of the game.
The Kekonese considered themselves separate from the conflict, mere witnesses to a feud waged on their behalf.
Kaul Du Academy won the game narrowly by a single point. Afterward, the players saluted their opponents, then milled by the bench, gathering their equipment. Shae went down and stood at the edge of the small field until
Anden noticed her. He squinted in her direction. Breaking into a broad smile of recognition, he slung his bag over his shoulder and loped toward her.
“Shae-jen,” he said, then flushed, embarrassed at the understandable but awkward mistake. He gave her a brief hug, warm but respectful, then took his glasses out of their case and pushed them onto the sweaty bridge of his nose.
“Sorry. It’ll take me a while to get used to just calling you Shae.”
“You were fantastic out there tonight,” she told him. “They would’ve tied it up if it hadn’t been for that intercept of yours in the last quarter.”
“The sun was in the other fellow’s eyes,” he said, polite as always.
“Do you want to get something to eat? We can do it another time if you’d rather go out with your friends tonight.” The other Academy players were departing. She’d noticed that, even as a member of the team, Anden seemed slightly apart from his classmates. It had been that way for her as well at the Academy, and she didn’t want to deprive him of the chance to be part of the group tonight.
“No, I’d rather talk to you,” said Anden quickly, glancing back at his teammates for only a second. “If you have the time, that is. Do you?”
She assured him that she did, and they walked together from the field. The evenings were cool now, by Janloon standards, and Shae drew a sweater around herself as they wandered Old Town to a somewhat sleepy night market where hawkers sold colorful kites and wooden spinning tops alongside fake gold watches and music tapes, and the smell of spicy fried nuts and sugared beets rose up from the food stalls. They talked about the game, and when they’d exhausted that topic, Shae asked her cousin about school, and he asked her about studying abroad and how she liked her new apartment in North Sotto. Anden was not reticent, but he was not a particularly talkative sort, no more than Shae, so their conversation remained just shy of awkward, both of them trying to think of questions to draw out the other person, both hesitating to fill in the lapses.
A white paper lantern hung over the door of the barbecue restaurant on the street corner, but they waited in line with everyone else. Once seated at a small, yellow, vinyl-covered table on a lamplit patio covered by a sagging tarp, they ate sweet glazed pork and vinegary cabbage from greasy paper baskets. Anden dug in eagerly but couldn’t finish the hefty portions of roasted meat; too much rich restaurant fare didn’t sit well with a stomach accustomed to the modest portions and simple food of the Academy.
“Anden, I’m sorry it took me so long to come see you,” Shae said at last.
“I don’t have a good excuse; I intended to do it sooner but couldn’t get over how awkward it would be to visit the Academy. I’ve been busy job hunting, and before that I was traveling and doing something for Lan. It took me longer than I expected to get settled into a routine.” She stopped offering further rationalizations. The things Hilo had said to her, accusing her of neglecting to show kindness to her family since her return to Janloon—they were true, and some had cut deep.
Anden stared at his hands, fastidiously wiping the sauce from under his nails with one of the moist square towelettes torn from a tiny paper packet.
His brow was drawn down and creased. “Have you seen Lan lately?”
He appeared not to have heard anything she’d just said. “A few weeks ago. He’s busy, I’m sure.” She’d made no recent effort to go to the house.
“When are you going to see him next?”
Shae was surprised. She’d always known her cousin to be courteous, but the tone of Anden’s voice now was almost demanding. “I’m going to the house for dinner in a few days. I’ll likely see him then,” she said. “Why?”
Anden was tearing the remains of his paper towelette into shreds and not looking directly at her. “I thought maybe you could talk to him. See how he’s doing, whether he needs help with anything. Ever since the duel at the Factory, he seems … different. Stressed. You might … I don’t know. Get him to relax a little, maybe.”
Shae raised her eyebrows. She remembered that Anden had always idolized Lan, had always enjoyed a special attention from him. “Lan is the Pillar; it’s not his job to relax,” she said. “If he seems troubled or distant to you, it’s because there are a lot of problems that he has to deal with right now.” Anden was listening but still shredding the towelette, so she said in what she hoped was a more reassuring voice, “Don’t worry too much.”
Anden crumpled the torn towelette and dropped it onto the remaining scraps of his dinner. He spoke hesitantly, “Shae, I think … I think Lan might not be making the right decisions about some things. I know I’m not a Green Bone yet and it’s not my place to say that. But I’ll be getting my jade soon, and I want to help.” His words sped into a low torrent. “I was thinking I ought to talk to Hilo, but he’s got a lot to worry about too, and he’ll just tell me to sit back and focus on school and not second-guess the Pillar. I thought maybe you could—”
Shae broke in. “As much as I hate to admit it, Hilo’s right.” It was a little painful to see Anden already so emotionally invested in the clan and its troubles. “When I was a year-eight, I was like you—I couldn’t wait to graduate and get my jade and be a proper member of the clan. I shouldn’t have been in such a rush. You’re only a student for four more months—so just be a student. Don’t get sucked into clan business so early on when you don’t have to be.” She tried to catch her cousin’s eye. “In fact, you don’t ever have to be, if you don’t want to. Being a Green Bone is only one way of life.
You don’t have to choose it.”
“What else would I choose?” the teen asked, with a surprising amount of sullenness and heat. “I’m not naive. Why would Grandda have brought me into the family, why would he have sent me to the Academy, if it wasn’t so I would be part of the clan someday? And that someday is now.”
“Grandda doesn’t always know best.” Once, she would never have admitted this out loud to anyone. “Lan’s the one who brought you in, and he did it because it was the right thing to do, not because he thought you’d become a useful Fist.” She sighed. “I can tell you’re worried about the war, but—”
“Aren’t you worried?” Anden exclaimed. He flushed at his outburst but seemed beyond caring if he was being rude.
Shae reminded herself that the Mountain had snatched Anden off the street on Boat Day. No wonder he was still furious and scared. She had to admit that the near breach of aisho disturbed her as well; since sending Caun away, she’d become more careful about staying within No Peak territory. She forced the defensiveness out of her voice. “Of course I’m worried. But I’m not involved. I’m not a Green Bone anymore. I made the choice not to be.”
“Why?” A quiet question. It was the first time he’d ever asked her.
She realized she didn’t know Anden very well. When she spoke to her grandfather or her brothers, she fell into old cadences that sometimes made her feel as if she’d never left the island. She didn’t have that familiarity with Anden. They’d gotten along well enough when they were young, but she’d missed out entirely on the last few years of his life, when he’d grown from a solemn, somewhat haunted-looking boy to this young man, the protégé of her brothers.
“The clan is all or nothing, Anden. I did some things on my own that didn’t fit expectations. And I learned pretty quick that wasn’t allowed.” A
humorless smile crept over her lips. “It was a bit more complicated, but you get the gist.”
Anden did not look satisfied, but he didn’t press. His eyes followed the night flies buzzing around one of the dim lamps, then returned to her. “So what do you plan to do now?”
“I have a job offer I’m thinking of taking.” Shae straightened in her seat, glad to share her recent news with someone, though she doubted anyone in the family would appreciate what it meant to her. “It’s a regional business development position at an Espenian electronics company. I’ll be going back to Espenia for company training for a few months, and afterward working part of the time there and part of the time here, and traveling to other places in the world, too. I think it’ll be interesting.”
Dismay rose on Anden’s face. Only with a visible effort did he force it back into a barely neutral expression. “You’re leaving again?”
Shae was nonplussed. “Only temporarily. Like I said, the training is only for a few months. After that, I’ll be in Kekon at least half of the time. I wouldn’t want to live in Espenia year-round, so I think this job will …” She trailed off, guilt and resentment stopping her throat. Anden had just asked her if she would prevail upon Lan on his behalf. He’d hoped that even if she held no official role in the clan and was no longer a Green Bone, that she would still be present and influential, a member of the family war effort that perhaps he could count on.
Hadn’t she just told him that the clan was all or nothing?
“I’m sorry, that was rude of me.” Anden seemed to suddenly rouse himself, to realize that his response had been selfish and inappropriate.
Quickly, “It’s only that I was glad you’d come back and thought I’d get to see you more before you jetted off again. I’m happy for you, though. The job sounds like a really good one, an international businesswoman’s kind of job.
Congratulations, Shae. I mean it.” And even though his disappointment was still palpable, he smiled with such an earnest desire to put things right between them that Shae could not help but soften and wish that she could recover as gracefully.
“It’s fine, Anden,” she assured him. “And I do think we’ll get to spend some more time together. It’s my fault we didn’t do this earlier; I didn’t hear about what happened to you on Boat Day, not until just recently. If I’d known about that, I would’ve—”
Anden shook his head sharply, almost angrily. “That was nothing,” he said. “They didn’t threaten or hurt me. I’m not a Green Bone yet.”
Shae was silent for a minute. Behind them, the counter staff shouted out orders to the cramped kitchen, people chatted and laughed as they stood in line, moths fluttered, trapped, under the green canvas tarp over the patio.
Outside, it was fully dark, but a swollen moon hung over smeared clouds.
Anden said, “I guess we should go.”
“What did you want me to talk to Lan about?” Shae asked. “If something’s really bothering you, I’ll mention it to him next time I see him.
Is it something you’ve been hearing around the Academy?”
“It’s fine,” Anden said, shaking his head again. “You’re right; it’s not something he needs my opinion on. Don’t worry about it.” With deliberate joviality, he pushed back his chair and said, “This place was really good; the best meal I’ve had in months. You remember Academy food, don’t you?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Whatever was gnawing at him, whatever he’d wanted to say, Shae could no longer press him for it. She let him lead their conversation back to lighter topics as they stood up and gathered their things.
They walked to the nearest subway station with meager talk; Anden had gone a little quiet. When they got to the platform and the westbound train arrived, he gave her a brief embrace. “It was good to see you, Shae. Another time soon?” And then the doors were closing behind him and the long screeching cars were carrying him away. Shae watched the lights disappear down the yawning tunnel with the unshakable suspicion that she’d let her cousin down, missed some vital opportunity between them.
Instead of going home, she took the eastbound line and got off at the station that let out almost directly in front of the Janloon Temple of Divine Return.
The street she ascended onto had recently been widened; she certainly couldn’t recall ever seeing so many lanes of traffic in front of the entrance. A six-story office building now butted up against the nearby public square; the side of its new parking structure displayed a billboard for Ygutanian ale. The Temple itself, however, looked exactly the same as Shae remembered, even more ancient and solemn at night than during the day, the carved stone pillars and massive clay roof flickering with deep shadows in the headlights of
passing cars. Shae hadn’t been inside the Temple since she was a teenager, but tonight, feeling unsettled, she felt compelled to walk through its peaked green doors.
The Temple District contained not only the Temple of Divine Return, the oldest Deitist temple in the city, but also, two blocks away, the folk Shrine of Nimuma, and not much farther west, the Janloon First Church of One Truth.
It was heartening to think of Kekonese, Abukei, and foreigners all worshipping within sight of one another, praying on common footing. The charter of the KJA allocated jade to the Deitist temples before any other group, and the clans gave charitably to the upkeep of religious buildings, but penitent oaths eschewed all worldly allegiances and gave sanctuary to all worshippers. Like the area around Wisdom Hall and the Triumphal Palace, the Temple District was neutral ground. Here the clans did not rule.
Shae passed through the quiet courtyard with its rows of devotional trees limned with the soft glow of moonlight, and into the dimly lit inner sanctum where the resident penitents sat in continuous three-hour shifts of meditative prayer. When she saw the circle of green-robed, motionless figures on the low platform at the front of the room, Shae’s step slowed. She wondered how deeply the penitents could Perceive her. Was it possible, with enough jade power, to go beyond sensing a person’s presence and the subtleties of their physical state, to see into their thoughts, into their very souls?
Shae chose one of the kneeling cushions and lowered herself onto it. She touched her head to the ground three times as was custom, then straightened up, her hands on her thighs, her eyes drawn again to the three men and three women penitents, their heads and eyebrows shaved, their eyes closed. Each sat cross-legged with hands resting on the top of a mounted jade orb the size of a small bowling ball. To be in contact with so much jade … Shae was reminded of the boulders she’d seen at the mine pit, the mad temptation to put her hand on one of them. The penitents must possess exceptional training and control. They could probably hear a fly landing on a cushion in the back of the room, or Perceive the people on the street outside, yet they were motionless, breathing slowly and steadily, their faces relaxed. At the end of the three hours, they would lift their hands from their stations, then stand up and glide away as others took their place. Each time, they were battered by jade rush and withdrawal. Shae knew what withdrawal was like and it made her cringe to imagine going through it in shifts, day and night, over and over
again. The penitents believed it would bring them, and humanity, closer to godliness.
Shae let her eyes roam. Above the meditating circle hung the famous mural of Banishment and Return. The original artwork, painted hundreds of years ago, had been destroyed during the Shotarian occupation; what worshippers saw now was a skillful reconstruction based on memory and old photographs. Along the stone walls of the sanctum, fragrant incense candles burned in alcoves devoted to each of the major deities. The gentle trickle of water from the two wall fountains wound into the ambient road noise that intruded through the high open windows. At this late hour, the sanctum was nearly empty; there were only three other visitors kneeling on the green congregational cushions—an elderly man in the back corner, and three rows in front of Shae, a middle-aged woman with her grown daughter, both of them weeping and leaning on each other for support. Shae dropped her gaze to the floor in front of her own cushion, embarrassed to be witnessing their private family anguish. She felt awkward and hypocritical to have come to this holy place at all. She had not practiced the faith in years. She wasn’t even sure she could call herself a Deitist anymore.
The Kauls were nominally religious, of course. There was a sparsely used prayer room in the house, and on the major holidays during Shae’s childhood, the family had dressed in their best clothes and gone to the Temple. Members of their vast and powerful clan would mill about outside until the family car pulled up in front. Then there would be a flurry of saluting and respect- paying. At such times, Kaul Sen was at his best, greeting everyone with the same consideration and magnanimity whether they were the most prosperous Lantern Man or the most junior Finger. After an appropriate time, Shae’s grandfather would lead Shae’s mother, her brothers, her, (and later, Anden) inside, and the crowd of people would follow them in, and the whole sanctum would hum with their hushed voices and the throb of jade energy.
Kaul Sen was always front and center in the first row. His wife knelt on his left. To his right was Lan, then Hilo, then Shae, (then Anden, once he was a Kaul), then their mother. The service would drone on for hours. Learned Ones, the most senior lifelong penitents, would lead the assembled worshippers in the recitations of exaltation for the deities, and then guide the meditation prayers concerning the attainment of the Divine Virtues. During the chanting, Hilo would fidget and make faces, and Kaul Sen would glower
at him. Shae’s legs would go numb. She concentrated on ignoring Hilo.
When she was older, she grew to find the services tolerable. Eventually, she realized the recitations were hopeful and calming. Deitism was a deeply Kekonese faith. There were different sects, from the nationalistic to the pacifistic, but one thing they all agreed upon was that jade was a link to Heaven, a divine but dangerous gift meant to be used piously and for good.
Green Bones had to strive to be worthy people. Virtuous people. People, Shae believed, like her grandfather.
As a child, however, she didn’t ponder spirituality; she thought about how much longer the ordeal would go on. When she slumped or leaned or groaned, her mother prodded her upright. “Sit straight and be quiet,” she admonished. “Everyone is watching you.”
That had been her mother’s entire philosophy of life: Sit straight and be quiet. Everyone is watching you. Well, no one was watching Shae now.
Without a jade aura, she might pass any of her old Academy classmates in the street and not even be recognized. When she’d gotten the phone call from the regional director of Standard & Croft Appliance, it had pleased her to know the job offer had been made in ignorance about her family. Yet she’d felt only a vaguely satisfied relief. Not happiness, not enthusiasm. She had a graduate degree, her own apartment, and a job offer from an international company, one that any of her business school classmates in Espenia would’ve congratulated her on. She was at last the independent, worldly, educated woman who’d risen above the savagery and insular nature of her jade- and testosterone-fueled family. She was supposed to feel free and unencumbered, not lonely and uncertain.
Shae bent her head. She wasn’t sure if she believed in the ancestor gods, or in the Banishment and Return, or even in the idea that jade came from Heaven. But every Green Bone knew that invisible energy could be felt, tapped, and harnessed. The world worked at a deeper level, and maybe if she concentrated hard enough, even without jade, she could communicate with it.
Guide me, she prayed. Give me a sign.