When he emerged onto the open quaysides, he stopped and took in the fleet lying at anchor there. It looked smaller than when last he had seen it, on the day he had bidden farewell to Baracha and the others on their journey home. The swarms of men-of-war that had previously been harboured there were largely gone now, save for a few remaining squadrons. The rest were heavy transports, the vessels surrounded by scores of rowing boats ferrying last-minute supplies and personnel from the quaysides. In their midst, the massive hulk of the imperial flagship loomed over them all.
He stood there watching helplessly as the foot-slaves bore Sasheen’s palanquin across a gangplank, and onto a large barge that awaited them in the water. The rest of the Matriarch’s entourage followed, and then the gangplank was pulled onboard, and long sweeps emerged to push the barge away from the wharf. It began to row out towards the flagship.
People brushed past him, though Ash barely noticed their touches. He didn’t stir, his eyes filled with the sight of the barge heading out into the deep water of the harbour. All along the quayside the crowds were waving their Holy Matriarch off, shouting blessings on her forthcoming victory. Ash shot a hungry glance about him, seeking some way to follow her: a free rowing boat he could procure, perhaps, or a space on one of the boats already going back and forth between the fleet and the quay.
Chancy madness, he knew, born from his own desperation.
Easy, he said in his mind. Calm yourself.
Once more Ash made his way through the press with his bundle of weapons, and found a quieter spot against the brick wall of a warehouse. He looked out to sea, hoping for some inspiration to strike him.
Gradually the crowds dwindled, until it was mostly only those involved in the loading of the fleet who remained. The sun arced higher in the sky, its heat carried away in a breeze that was playing off the water. In ones and twos, the ships of the fleet completed the loading of their stores and set off for the open sea, pulled by their own sweeps or by rowing boats and ropes.
The flagship itself began to depart, drawn towards the harbour mouth by its own minor fleet of small vessels. Ash forced himself to remain seated.
For a while he studied the majority of vessels still at anchor, the lack of movement on many of their decks. He turned his attention to the chaos still apparent along the dockside. Tempers were running high, various captains along with their crews arguing with quartermasters as they tried to procure what supplies they still required.
At this rate, Ash pondered, many of those ships would be setting off in darkness. He leaned back, pulling his hood further down over his face. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes.
Without hurry, the autumn afternoon faded towards the onset of twilight.
There was a story told of the Great Fool, that Honshu sage of the Dao who had decried all dogmas, yet had himself become a religion after his own death. Every Roshun apprentice was taught the story during his training.
While walking in the mountains along the source of the Perfume River, the Great Fool’s newest follower, the branded woman Miri, had asked of him: How does one remain still, great master?
In reply, the Great Fool had cast a stick into the rushing torrent, and bade his followers to watch as it floated along with the flow.
But I am not a stick of wood, Miri had replied with frustration. How can I flow with the stream so naturally?
The Great Fool had tapped her forehead once, lightly.
By allowing your mind to be still.
It was a paradox that had impressed Ash when he had first heard it as a Roshun in training, for he’d been in great need of a saviour back then. Cast into exile with his fellow comrades, his family lost to him and with no hope of ever returning home, he had needed, desperately, something in which to tame the bleakness in his heart, and the runaway thoughts in his head that told him to end this life of his that was no longer worth living. And so he had embraced the Roshun way of stillness, and it had saved him.
There was another story, one the Great Fool had himself used to instruct his followers, which Ash remembered too from that time.
A madman is held in a cage, with a blinded tiger as a companion.
For as long as he can remember, the madman has been walking from one side of the cage to the other, circling the tiger as it circles him, the animal snarling in hunger. For as long as he can remember, he has been leaping aside from its blind attacks, or standing silently in a corner watching it work its slow way around the bars. Never has it stopped this ranging about, so powerful are its desires.
One day, the madman finds he can no longer carry on this way. He stops his pacing. He turns his back on the tiger. He sits down and waits to die.
He falls asleep, or so he assumes – for when he opens his eyes again, all is different.
The door of the cage is hanging open. At long last, freedom beckons him.
The madman steps outside. He sees how everything is one in this place of all-consuming light. He sees how the bars of his confinement have been dividing his vision into narrow vertical slices for all this time. He looks to the tiger still prowling the cage. He sees how he has attached a name to it, and an identity, and a story of all the times they have shared together. He sees too how immature and petty, how strong and noble, the tiger truly is.
It is then that the man steps back into the cage with his earnest companion. The animal wishes to devour him even now; it still fears for its lasting survival.
But it does him no harm, for he is the master here.
He is sane.
It was in this way that Ash was no longer certain of himself. He no longer knew if he was flowing skilfully with the Dao in clear and detached purpose. Perhaps, in his grief, he had lost the Way.
How to know, though? How could he ever know the right way from the wrong way, when everything seemed equally as dark and unclear to him now?
Just breathe and go with it, the Chan monks of the Dao would have said. So Ash inhaled the cool night air deep into his lungs, and exhaled in a single long release all the pressure and confusion that was caught up within him; and from his stillness he launched himself from where he sat, springing up like a man on fire and sprinting through the darkness across the hard paving of the quayside, out onto the wooden planking of a jetty, pounding all the way to the very edge of it, where he leapt with a whoosh of breath and dived headfirst into the sea.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Breach
The procession of cloud-men walked along the cobbles with their black robes flapping in the wind and their voices loud as they chanted the solemn words of the death rite. Clatters sounded from the occasional coin dropped into their begging bowls; incense trailed grey and pungent around their shaven heads. In the hands of the oldest monk, following at the very back of their procession, a wooden aeslo clapped together like the jaws of a mouth, beating a slow and steady rhythm that was a jolt to the senses every time that it sounded.
Bahn offered nothing as they passed by. It wasn’t that he wished to refuse them a donation; he simply couldn’t rouse himself enough to perform the simple act of it. He was standing as though buried ten feet within himself, looking out through a bramble of whispered thoughts in a weariness that had become familiar to him now.
All he desired just then was to skip his duties this afternoon, and catch a rickshaw back to their home in the north of the city, and climb into bed, and pull the blankets over his head, and shut out the world until morning.
He had been plagued with this lethargy for a week now. Achieving sleep had always been a nightly struggle for Bahn, his head spinning with reflections and concerns. Yet now, no matter how much sleep he was able to manage, whether three hours of tossing and turning or ten hours of total oblivion, he would still wake feeling lifeless and drained.
It was all he could do to watch indull silence as the monks rustled along the street between the lines of onlookers paying their respects; and after them, the pale mourners who followed, the small jar of ashes cradled in a young man’s arm, his even younger wife next to him, barely able to walk without support.
