The Rock Child (3 page)

I give birth to Mahakala through my brow. She leaps forth, armed with sword and noose, wearing a tiger skin, garlanded with human heads. Her tongue lolls, seeking blood. She decapitates and crushes all the demons. She drinks their blood. Then, intoxicated, she dances and dances and laughs maniacally and dances and dances and laughs
.

Since she could not control her anger, she would embrace the forbidden feeling, yes, would give way to volcanoes of hostility, yes, she would seek redemption in horror.

Sun Moon turned her face to the men jeering at her and looked straight into their lust-driven eyes.

Whore! Chinee whore!
She understood that word. In Gam Saan, San Francisco, Ah Wan had shown her what happened to the women in the cells—two bits lookee, four bits feelee, six bits doee. “You’re lucky you were sold to the interior,” he said. She still saw in her mind the hopeless, despairing faces of the Chinese teenagers at the windows of their cells, brittle, lightless lanterns of yellow paper.

She glared at her taunters.
Mahakala, fight for me
. Fear jangled in her limbs.
Sometimes the way past an evil is through it
. A Tantric devotee deliberately embraced the forbidden, deliberately violating all five vows of virtue, in order to discover that the clean and the unclean were one.
Mahakala, guide me
.

Her nerves flashed rages of fear. She would walk the way of un-chastity. In imagination the touches of her abductors pummeled her, real as blows. She would be hurled into the pit of the unclean, the abyss of horror.

No!
The band around her throat tightened until she gasped for breath, panicky.

Bracing her bound wrists on the side of the wagon, she forced herself
up awkwardly. Legs against the board, she held her body erect. She stared at the men. Some lost their nerve and cast their eyes down. Other beamed at her with lechery.

Leering faces flooded her mind, grasping hands, pounding bodies, attacking
lingams,
her violated
yoni
. She quavered.
Am I strong enough to pass through the violence to peace, through the profane to the sacred? Mahakala, Mother and Creatrix, protect me. Give me strength to fight
.

She dared not frame the further question in her mind.
Would I commit the act ultimately forbidden? Would I kill?

A rage of something—fear? bloodlust?—lightninged up and down her spine. She could not believe that she could follow the Tantras and come to love through murder.

“Well, boys,” someone jeered, “who’s first?”

Raucous laughter. Her eyes looked at the middle distance, without focusing, and saw none of them. Instead she forced herself to behold a carved image of Mahakala, skulls around her neck, Mahakala the destroyer, Mahakala the devourer of men.

Tarim picked up a piece of paper from the bar of polished wood, the bar where men drank the whisky that made them crazy. He handed it to her. It was written in Chinese ideograms. He watched her face as she read it.

She had a noble face, he thought, with high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, and a lovely sheen of bronze skin. He could tell little of her body beneath the nun’s robes, but they would come off soon enough. He wanted her. He noticed the desire in himself, almost with amusement. Even at his age he wanted women as fiercely as ever. And of course he would have her.

“Shall I read it to you?” he inquired in his soft, hoarse voice. It had been hoarse for twenty years, a throat injury from a knife.

She snatched it rudely from his fingers and eyed him hard.
So you want to prove you can read
. She studied it.

He observed the changes in her face. The creature felt sorry for herself. Perhaps she thought a hint of an appeal for sympathy, a gesture of
the victimized, would affect him. He smiled to himself.
You do not know me. You will never know me
.

Tarim was of a hardy race, the Uighurs. They lived in East Turkestan, the part of China west even of Mongolia, north of India and Tibet. Yet they shared little with Chinese—the Uighurs were Turks by blood and by tongue, Moslems by faith. Living midway on the great trade route from Europe to Asia, they had been acquainted with every conqueror marching east or west, and had found ways to adapt. They became traders, great traders. They spoke all the principal languages of Asia and the Middle East. They knew the Chinese were only one more invader and interloper. The Uighurs, Turks, would outlast them all.

As a youth Tarim traveled far, apprenticed to his father, who traded the gold and jade from the region’s mountains. Tarim fell in love with gold. He discovered early that he disliked people, especially his family. So he left home to seek gold by trading in the sables of the vast Siberian forests. He acquired fluency in the Russian language, his fourth tongue, and found his way to the Pacific Coast of that land. He made no friends, established no ties. He learned peoples, customs, and religions, and came to despise them all equally. He gave himself a new name, the name of the great river of his rearing, merely because he liked the sound of it. He took what he wanted, and thought of those who did less as weaklings. He grew rich, and always lusted for more.

No one could tell what kind of man he was. Asians thought him a dark European, Europeans a light Asian, and none could say which was his native tongue, for he never spoke Turkish. People despised him, the Chinese because he was not Chinese, the Russians because he was not Russian, and so on, the way of the world, the stupidity of the world. They knew two facts about him—he was very short, and his face was very misshapen, which gave them final reasons to despise him.

Seeing profits in the hides of sea otters, Tarim bought a ship, hired hands, and crossed the ocean to Russian Alaska. In ten years on one of the islands of the Alaskan peninsula, he built a small empire. Then came disaster. The Russians turned the savages on him, drove him out, and stole his life’s work. They were white, they were Christian. He was dark, a heathen, and ugly. What did such a man matter to them?

So at fifty years of age, Tarim came to Alta California, penniless, seeking another fortune in the hills of gold. In the ensuing years, he followed the gold hunters from strike to strike, boomtown to boomtown,
and preyed upon them. He collected money. He played with people, and laid down layer upon layer of his contempt for them.

A year and a half ago he gave birth to a very good idea for making money and debasing people in a single act. Chinese whores were popular in the gold camps, popular and hugely profitable. He would have whores—white, red, black, and yellow. Also he wanted something special, a whore who would be the talk of the camp. He wrote to a man he knew in the Chinese city of Chengdu, a man who would do anything. A nun, he said, a Buddhist nun. He offered a thousand dollars in gold, enough money to buy all the man’s daughters. He knew that nuns sometimes were not virgins, but the gold seekers saw only what they wanted to see. They would behold the brown robes and see a heathen virgin.

Now, as the woman stood before him studying the piece of paper, Tarim had a rare experience. He felt an emotion. He was amused.

“Read it aloud,” he said.

Sun Moon set forth in a clear, steady voice.

“‘I, Sun Moon, a citizen of China, came to Gum Saan, the United States, voluntarily.’”

She eyed him contemptuously. “Lies.” She turned back to the paper.

“‘I acknowledge my indebtedness to Tarim for my passage on the ship
Fast Maisy
across the ocean.’

“More lies.

“‘To repay that debt I indenture myself to Tarim to work …’” Now she had to control her voice carefully.
Just as I feared. In a legal paper.
“… ‘as a hundred-men’s-wife for five years.’”

Her grandmother had taught her first.
Male-female, good-evil, sacred-profane, Sun-Moon, all are one
.

Nevertheless
. She drew herself up. She was tall and slender for a woman of her people, taller than Tarim. She was a Khampa, and had been raised with the pride and haughtiness of those independent nomads and traders. She looked him witheringly in the eye. “No,” she said. “Ah Wan told me I would work serving whisky. I will never work as a whore.”

“Read,” Tarim commanded.

She read the rest silently. Tarim had paid $1,000 for her services for the next five years.
Oh, precious American dollars
. As an indentured servant she would earn no wages. Tarim would provide her room, board, and clothing. For every ten days she was sick, she would serve another
month. If she was sick a month, or conceived a child, she would serve another year.

At the bottom was a character that pretended to be her signature. It wasn’t—she would never sign her name in Chinese characters but in Tibetan ones. What American would know that, though? What Chinese would know it?

She stared at Tarim and said in a low, even tone, “
Kyakpa sö!
” These were the rudest words she could think of, the same as the phrase she heard the Americans use, “Eat shit!”

Tarim cocked his hand.
He is going to strike me
. Even as a child she had never been struck, yet it was half what she wanted.
Fight me. Now. I will rise as Mahakala and drink your blood
. He was old, sixty at least.
I am more than your match
.

She quailed.
Whatever the Tantras teach, I cannot bear to foul my spirit with murder
.

His hands trembled.
Go ahead, hit me
.

With a visible effort Tarim lowered his hand. Yet his spirit roiled and seethed in the ugly afflictive emotions. She felt contempt for him.

Her mind jangled. She reminded herself numbly,
I have compassion for all sentient beings in the suffering that is earthly life
. That was the teaching of her entire existence.
Yet Mahakala destroys and creates, dancing always, laughing madly. And they are the same, to destroy and create, to love and to kill. Rise in me, Mahakala
.

She felt dizzy. She held on to the bar for support.
Who am I becoming?

Calmly, with a false courtliness, Tarim gestured to the bar, the lines of bottles, the furnishings. Though it was only a tent with a false wooden front, he’d made the tavern look well outfitted.

“When the barbarians drink too much, they set aside their manners, their lusts become inflamed …”

She interrupted him. “I need no explanation of that.” She forbade pictures of her drunken abductors to enter her mind. “Whether they’re made mad by whisky or opium.” The Chinese were fond of opium, but her people had nothing to do with it.

She saw Tarim’s nostrils flare a little, and his lip curled.
Fine to be able to read a man’s mind by the signs of his body, and to command it by a small insult
.

He turned his back to her, led the way to the back of the building, and opened a narrow door. “A private room,” he murmured in a tone implying
great good fortune. Beyond his outstretched arm she could see a cubicle with a narrow cot. “Here you will sleep, and here you will serve the barbarians.”

She took a deep breath. First came the fear, then the anger.
The warlike spirit of Mahakala is in me
. That spirit intoned, “I have been abducted. A Chinese court would behead my captors. I am not indentured to you or anyone. I demand to go home.”

Tarim continued as though he hadn’t heard her. “The other drinking establishments have hundred-men’s-wives, white and red and black women, and their business exceeds my own. You will be something special.” He paused. “You will wear the robes. Always.”

He held her eyes, and she saw something even more frightening. His eyes were cold as ice-covered stones. And he was permitting her to see that. He was letting her know.

He gestured for her to enter by the open flap. She stepped through and put her hand on the cot intended for whoring.
Oh, to be alone
.

“Many barbarians actually prefer Chinese flesh.”

Her mind sloshed like water in a swaying bucket.
My chastity may be taken from me, but not my spirit
. She fixed him with her eyes. “I am not Chinese, I am Tibetan,” she repeated.

He looked back at her hard. No, it wasn’t anger in his eyes, it was amusement.

“I will never be a hundred-men’s-wife.”

Tarim chuckled, and closed the door.

Nowhere to run.

During the journey to Canton, she had been drugged, her spirit defeated. On the ocean during the passage, where could she go? When Yoo Wong threw herself overboard, Sun Moon had felt envious. But she couldn’t follow—this precious incarnation as a human being was not to be thrown away; dying prematurely would be ill karma.

In Gam Saan, San Francisco, she remembered Mahakala, the protectress, and began to recover her spirit. She would have risked anything to escape, but Ah Wan kept her bound and got her quickly onto a ship for Oregon. Then she was thrown onto Jehu’s wagon with the rest of the freight headed for the interior. The interior of Gum Saan, a country she had barely noticed on maps. Soon she acquired enough English to find out from Jehu she was in the United States, not Mexico. Now she began to feel the Khampa within her, and the warrior.
Thank you, Mahakala
.

After a week Jehu untied her and let her sit on the bench like a human being instead of lying on the floor with the sacks of flour. Why not—where could she go? She was no longer crossing a wide ocean, true enough, but what troubles faced her: Her English was poor. She didn’t know where she was. If she escaped, she would be helpless. She knew the end—someone would turn her over to a tong. She remembered the women peering out of the windows of little cells, faces paper masks, brittle on the outside, empty on the inside. No, the way of the warrior was to wait.

Now she calculated. She turned all the way around in her tiny room once, then all the way around the other way.
I will wait. I will learn English, learn the country, learn the people
. She sat on the floor, crossed her legs in the lotus position, consciously straightened her spine, took the first relaxing breath …