“Oh, you mean sex!” she said. “Would you want me to have sex with you?”
“No!” said Tet Sang.
“Yes?” said Ah Boon.
“Maybe,” said Fung Cheung.
Guet Imm considered it. “I can do that. I’ve never done it before, but it can’t be difficult, right? Even cats and dogs know how to do.
“Of course,” she added, “as a devotee of the Pure Moon, I vowed when I first shaved my head that I would have no profane intercourse with men. If I break my vow to the deity, I must make sure to cleanse myself afterwards. I would need to make a sacrifice each time.”
“We’re very open in this company,” said Fung Cheung. “Everyone can practise their religion, no problem. You ask Rimau; we never eat pork.”
“Correct,” said Rimau, who had fallen asleep last night after three gourds of beer.
“She means,” said Tet Sang, “she’d have to chop off the dick of any man she fucked.”
“That’s right,” said Guet Imm, approving of his acuity. “You’re very clever about our doctrine, brother! Are you a follower also?”
“There was a tokong of the Pure Moon in the town where I grew up,” said Tet Sang.
“Chop off our dicks?” said Ah Boon.
“It’s how I would wash out the sin,” explained Guet Imm. “Using the men’s blood. Strictly, my teacher would say I must do the cleansing even if I didn’t go so far as to have the profane intercourse. Even thinking of betraying my vows is enough! If we are being strict, I should make the sacrifice now you’ve raised the subject.”
She directed a speculative look at Ah Boon’s crotch but shook her head. “But I think that’s too rigid. Let’s see what happens. I am homeless, I have nowhere to go. I’m sure the deity will close one eye on this occasion.
“Of course, if she doesn’t, we’ll soon find out,” she said brightly. “The deity is amazing. There was one time this novice at my tokong stole the joss sticks to eat—she was always a bit weird—and before anyone even found out, her father’s house burnt down! The family lost everything.”
“We can’t take her,” said Ah Boon to Fung Cheung.
But Tet Sang had read the signs right. Fung Cheung hadn’t been that interested in the sex. He’d already made up his mind. He replied:
“You may enjoy Ah Yee’s cooking, but I’m getting fed up.”
“Big Brother, if you don’t want me to cook, I don’t have to do it,” said Ah Yee in a throbbing voice.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Tet Sang. “Your food is disgusting, but nobody else can do it.”
“At least you appreciate me, Second Brother!”
Tet Sang turned to the nun. “This is ridiculous. You can’t come with us. Take your money, get out of here and find another job.”
He grabbed her arm, intending to escort her out of their camp, but it was like trying to shift a boulder. Guet Imm wouldn’t budge. She remained seated, cross-legged like a statue of the Pure Moon in repose.
She shook off Tet Sang’s hand with rather less effort than it would take to bat away a fly. “No.”
Tet Sang looked at his hand, then at her. “No?”
“You’re not the boss,” said Guet Imm. She nodded at Fung Cheung. “Brother is the boss. I knew it straight away, from the nobility of his countenance.”
“I was the helpful one,” Tet Sang reminded her. “The one who gave you money, remember? You said you didn’t trust Ah Lau.”
“I trust him now,” said Guet Imm. “Before, I admit I misunderstood him. I thought, who is this busybody fellow, poking his nose into other people’s business? Nobody asked him to beat up that guy also. Because he wants to show off, I must lose my job.
“But now I see I was wrong. This encounter has shown me his true character. Brother is like a knight-errant of the olden days, rescuing people from corrupt authority. His heart is like beaten gold, as beautiful as his face.”
She gazed at Fung Cheung, her eyes shining.
Tet Sang’s heart fell. Fung Cheung loved being gazed at adoringly—ideally by handsome young men, but a pretty woman would do in a pinch.
Guet Imm reached out a reverent hand, touching Fung Cheung’s shin.
“Brother,” she said, “I know you won’t let me down!”
The addition of the nun to the group was not as disastrous as Tet Sang had feared. She could not in fact cook, which was no surprise in a votary of the Order of the Pure Moon. They were not one of the useful orders that reared goats and taught children mathematics. Every tokong of the Pure Moon that Tet Sang had ever known had been supported by a numerous establishment of servants, whose attendance on the nuns gained them pahala and enabled the nuns to devote their days exclusively to study, meditation and self-cultivation.
To be fair to Guet Imm, she was less useless than most Pure Moon devotees. She managed to part the men from their filthy clothes and launder them, in the teeth of the men’s appalled resistance. She also proved handy with a needle, skilled at leech removal, and knowledgeable about where to find herbs to keep off the mosquitoes.
Even when the group gave in to the inevitable and admitted that Ah Yee must take over cooking duties again if they were not all to be poisoned, there was no suggestion of getting rid of the nun. They had all got used to itching less.
“And you all smell better now,” said Guet Imm. “Well done!”
The group walked in the evenings and mornings, stopping to rest late at night and in the dull intolerable heat of the afternoons. At most, they had four hours of uninterrupted sleep at any time. Some of the group, used to waking in the day and sleeping at night, had found it hard to get used to this when they first joined, but the pattern of their days was not unlike that adopted by the monastic orders, and it did not seem to trouble Guet Imm. She travelled well and did not complain of discomfort, so Tet Sang would not have known that she felt any, had he not noticed her stealing away from the group one night.
After a moment’s reflection, he followed her. They had pitched camp in an abandoned plantation that was slowly being retaken by the jungle. There was more than one kind of danger here, for Guet Imm as much as for the group.
He found her sitting on a log with her shoes off, rinsing her feet with water from a stream. She had not brought a torch with her, but Tet Sang was not surprised that she had not needed it to navigate the scrub in the dark.
He had not made a sound, but she looked up suddenly, her face a pale oval in the moonlight filtering through the canopy.
Tet Sang had all the bandit’s fabled ability to move in the forest without being detected. He was fairly sure he had done nothing to betray his presence, but still he shrank behind a tree.
“What are you doing here, brother?” said the nun. For once, she sounded annoyed.
Tet Sang stepped out of the shadows.
“What’s wrong with your leg?” he said.
But now he could see the state of her feet—blistered and rubbed raw from walking. She shifted away from Tet Sang, bending to pat her feet dry. A wince briefly displaced her frown.
“You should call Ah Boon to look at that,” said Tet Sang, embarrassed. “He can give you medicine. He used to look after people’s cows.”