Tian helped Adeline over a crumbling ledge. And then, there, breaking through the greens, the tree that could only be the temple. A great banyan had appeared before them, so tall and spreading it seemed impossible they hadn’t been following the beacon of its canopy all along. Its pillars of fibrous secondary trunks staked out the grove. Each was the span of a tree in itself and yet traceable all the way back to the vast, ancient, original trunk at the center of it all.
The House of the Children of the Nanyang was nestled against this trunk. It was much smaller than Adeline had guessed, what looked like a single modest room. Carved tigers ran along its gable, and a plaque with the three truncated characters—???—hung over the closed double doors. Roots had grown over its frame. They had to duck through the banyan’s dangling arms to come to the door, which opened strangely readily.
The temple, small as it was, was divided into two vestibules built into and out of the tree’s hollow. The first had an alcove with the typical pantheon: the Jade Emperor; the Goddess of Mercy; a Datuk Kong in a green sarong; a facsimile of the island’s Tua Pek Kong, with a long white beard; there was even a pedestal bearing the figures of Ox-Head and Horse-Face, with a posse of other generic hell denizens at their feet. All were faded.
The second, larger room, however, was empty of everything but symbols. Here was where the original host tree would have grown, before the banyan took it over and sapped it out. Carvings had been made in the inside of the trunk and painted in with color: some black, some red, some blue, some what must have once been white. Adeline saw a crocodile and an eye before realizing they were the sigils of all the different kongsi. Hundreds, far more than there could be today. Dead, forgotten.
There were abandoned incense pots on braziers. In the center of the room was a brackish pool of water dug out from the earth itself. Adeline could see no wind or channel for currents, yet it rippled ever so slightly and didn’t fester with insects. Despite the temple’s modesty, Adeline felt watched here. It smelled like rich soil and rusted metal and boat-churned river. On the other side of the trunk, roots spread and grew, all from this singular node.
Over time, the kongsi had forgotten how to return. The elder brothers who remembered had either been killed off—or else simply not needed to remember. People were no longer migrants. They were citizens who didn’t need brotherhoods to feel like they belonged in the land. And beyond that, where the possibilities had once been within this burgeoning port city, now they were the world: imports from the West and travels not for livelihood but luxury, new ideas, new technologies, Singapura opening up to the spring showers of the modern age and asking to be cleansed. What was blood to a bright future? What were old gods to the better world?
To those who remained, however, they were still a power to be used.
Brother White Skull had warned them of the price to directly petition a god. Water, blood, and gold. “You will come with me,” he had said to Tian. “My blood and your gold.” A price shared for shared means; Tian had agreed, so naturally Adeline was to go with her.
With a knife from Khaw, Brother White Skull cut his palm over the pool. He cut deep; blood streamed liberally until he winced and then a minute more, turning the water a faint red. Then Tian loosed from her wrist the thin gold bangle engraved with her zodiac snake, which had been a gift from her grandmother with a warning to never share it with her husband. A woman’s gold was her freedom—Adeline had offered to find an alternative for her, but Tian had turned her down, and had traveled all the way back to the now-abandoned Butterfly house to retrieve it from beneath the floorboard where she had kept her few precious things.
Tian dropped the bangle into the water. The pool didn’t seem deep, but the water swallowed the gold anyway.
“Now we enter,” Brother White Skull said. He stepped into the pool. Adeline and Tian exchanged looks, then joined him. Christina and Khaw had elected to remain.
The water swilled around Adeline’s thighs. It was unpleasantly warm.
“Ready?” Without waiting for a response, Brother White Skull began to chant under his breath. It was a tongue Adeline couldn’t catch, older than anything she knew, but several words were nearly familiar in their shape.God. Bone. Child.Want. Who had taught them to him?
The room began to bleed. The wooden walls bulged as their color darkened, and the air grew thick with the scent of humid copper.
Then they were standing in a chamber of raw striated muscle, spongy and hot even through their soles. The rafters had turned to tendons stretching red and wet from one cartilaginous pillar to another. Adeline pressed her lips shut to keep from gagging at the smell of warm meat. Tian looked nauseated. Brother White Skull was still swaying, the lines in his face changing as he chanted. One moment he was a young girl, then an old man, then a fair lady, then something almost lupine, then a baby’s head on a grown man’sshoulders. His intonations soaked into the flesh, muffling the moment they left his mouth.
Rising to meet it was a pulse. The flesh around them began to expand and contract to the rhythm, which grew louder and louder. A heartbeat—ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Adeline’s hand found Tian’s unconsciously.
Then the flesh before them split. The cut was clean and deep, almost identical to the one Brother White Skull had made on himself, exposing the same strip of bone. No, not just bone. At the heart of the folds of pulsing flesh, a hunched Buddha in her lotus, was an old woman of bones encased in transparent sinews. Though what remained of her face looked centuries old, her bones gleamed white as porcelain, almost dazzling in their wholeness underneath glassy tendons that grew and retracted like curling feelers. Her ribs fluttered like wings as she glided closer to them, the muscle under her feet rippling like a wave rolling it forward.
Adeline recognized her instantly. The crone from her pill fevers. Three Steel had fed her White Bone blood, too.
Tang ki ko.
A high, androgynous voice emanated not from the figure but from the flesh around them, melding with the heartbeat. Adeline was struck by wrongness in her own bones; she should not be here, she thought; it was too thin a place. They were not meant to be so close to the gods.
Brother White Skull bowed. “It has been some time.”
The figure turned her mottled gaze to Adeline and tilted her head. Then, to Tian, and sounded vaguely amused.Butterfly.How far the Lady has fallen.
The White Bone god produced on her palm an unnaturally round peach and offered this to Tian. “Don’t,” Adeline said sharply, but Tian took the fruit and did not eat it, only weighed it from palm to palm listlessly. Adeline found herself looking beyond Tian. Somegravity existed in her shadow. Adeline’s skin prickled, imagining gold eyes against the raw flesh, the smell of fire on skin.
Tian flinched. She drew herself up. Brother White Skull merely watched, letting the interlopers settle their entry. “We don’t come to beg, Old One. We come for your justice as much as ours. There are men exploiting your blood.” In some moment or another, Tian had told Adeline what she had seen when she had become Madam Butterfly: a world like a chrysalis with fire threaded through its glassy veins, and inside the goddess to christen her. Tian hadn’t divulged what the exchange had been, but Adeline had the sense it was not her first time speaking directly to a god. She was betrayed only by the tension in her shoulders.
The god smiled, as much as mottled skulls could smile.The monkey won’t eat.The chrysalis keeps. She extended the hand again. Tian replaced the fruit in her palm. It withered instantly to a pit, which was a single tooth.
“A daughter of ours has betrayed her oaths and fled, Kut Kong. I would release her.”
To sever an oath in the dark without honor.
“She has given up hers.”
Hers is not yours is not mine.
“So indeed.”
