Chapter Thirty-Five. Children of the Nanyang
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHILDREN OF THE NANYANG
The forgotten temple of Te Lam Kia, the House of the Children of the Nanyang, had been hidden on the smaller island of Pulau Ubin off the north coast, overgrown amidst more quarries and more temples and a slowly dwindling population.
The jetty expanded into a small village, but the sight of the jungle beyond that, and the city a tiny thing on their backs across the water, made Adeline shiver involuntarily as she got off the bumboat.
They walked past houses in the kampong style, sloping zinc roofs atop flat buildings raised slightly off the ground, bicycles propped up against the walls and striped with the shadows of coconut trees.
It was mid-morning; someone was already preparing lunch, the smell of something garlicky wafting through the air.
An old woman in a worn samfu was sitting on a rattan rocking chair just inside one of the houses, while a girl with a mushroom bob played with a panting brown dog.
Opposite a red temple was a large wayang stage, presently empty but also painted red, with white steps leading up to the stage and a banner hung from gold arches depicting the same god with yellow robes and a long white beard.
Adeline could easily imagine it draped in extravagant color, hanging lights making it glow from within as performers in painted faces and silk robes moved across the stage. She could almost hear the music.
“You do know the way?” Tian said as the village vanished behind them.
Now it was pure dirt roads and jungle, some bird cackling overhead.
Ubin was more haunted than most places. It had several cemeteries and several temples in close proximity; the beach they had departed from on the mainland had been the site of another wartime massacre, and the jetty they arrived on had been built by perpetrators of said massacre.
In the city the idea of ghosts didn’t particularly bother her, but here the jungle seemed so vast, and somehow they didn’t feel entirely alone.
“I’ve been here before,” Brother White Skull replied.
“That’s not knowing the way.”
“I know the way.”
A jolt of heat in her chest pulled Adeline’s eyes toward a house a short distance away on a short hill, the chickens in the yard oblivious to her reaction. She looked at Tian and Christina to see if they’d felt the same; Tian’s expression was grim. “I didn’t know this was here.”
“Whose house is that?”
“You heard of the Ubin murder a few months ago?”
Adeline had. Early in the year, someone—multiple someones, the investigators suspected—had broken into the home of an elderly shopkeeper, robbed her, raped her, and disposed of her dead body in the sea. The police still hadn’t caught whoever did it. “That was her house?”
“Must be. You feel it, don’t you?”
Like breathing. She remembered having to reach for it, once, but it came so easily now, as though every street were soaked in some woman’s hurt.
She couldn’t tell sometimes where she ended and they began, or whether that was the way it had always been: girls being made of all the pain that had come before them.
Eventually, Brother White Skull left the path and entered the jungle. There was no obvious indicator as to what had marked the turnoff, and Brother White Skull did not offer the information. He didn’t intend for them to return, Adeline realized.
The mangroves were still thick on this island—where land bled into sea and was neither one nor the other; the water low and brackish with trees still running, but man unable to walk between them.
But they were not headed to the mangroves.
Brother White Skull led them farther and farther inland, into the most tangled part of the jungle.
An owl watched them pass with low round eyes.
There was the faintest smell of salt amidst the fecund wet: they were close enough to the coast, so close to vastness.
It was a trek that could convince you of ghosts or gods.
Adeline felt immeasurably out of place and yet drawn toward something primal.
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—子南地—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’s shoulders.
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.