“That’s some recommendation,” said Guet Imm. “I’m okay. It’s a small thing only. I’m not used to walking so much, but my feet will toughen up.”
Tet Sang knew he should leave her alone. Nobody had asked her to come along. If her feet hurt, it was her own fault.
“I thought the votaries of the Pure Moon were taught healing arts,” he said. “What do you call it? ‘Shaping the air’?”
“Very good!” said Guet Imm snappishly. “You know a lot, brother, but you don’t know everything. We can’t use the deity’s gifts for selfish purposes. The five fingers of her hand are only to benefit other people.”
“Healing your feet is to benefit us,” said Tet Sang. “We have an appointment to get to. You have to keep up. We can’t afford to get slowed down.”
Guet Imm’s gaze was steely.
“You don’t need to worry, brother,” she said. “I’ll keep up.”
She sat there with her head held high, her eyes on his, until he went away.
He did not let the incident bother him, though they were taking longer than they should to get to Sungai Tombak, where they were to make delivery of the goods. After the hue and cry Fung Cheung had raised at the last town, Tet Sang had insisted on taking a circuitous route, avoiding their usual haunts.
The Protectorate’s posters might not have borne a very good likeness of Fung Cheung and his men, but they had got the names and descriptions more or less right. You never knew whether a chancer hoping for a reward might turn them in. These were uncertain times, and hunger a powerful incentive even for the faint-hearted.
It was only prudent to go the long way round. Tet Sang refused to feel guilty about it. Guet Imm was evidently determined not to be pitied, anyway. Her gait never faltered during the day, though she still crept away in the evenings.
She made it easier not to feel sorry for her by refusing to talk to him for a time, while taking pains to be especially nice to everyone else. She struck up a particular friendship with Ah Hin, who had always had urgings towards religion.
“If not for my mother, I would have joined an order,” he was wont to say wistfully. “But how to support her as a monk? Begging and chanting prayers, maybe you can get rice for yourself, but not for your family. Life could have been different. I would have been educated if I followed a god.”
Being illiterate, he had restricted his religious endeavours to wasting his hard-earned share of the group’s earnings on donations to the religious orders and buying charms and trinkets from monks. To nuns, he had never paid attention before. But after Guet Imm had accompanied them for some time, Ah Hin realised that she did not rise earlier than everyone else to sit, cross-legged and unmoving with her eyes shut, for no reason.
“Sister Guet Imm,” he said after he had watched her, rapt, for half an hour, “you were meditating!”
Guet Imm looked puzzled. “Yes? It’s one of the five fingers of the deity’s hand. Emptying the gourd—meditation—is the first finger, the most fundamental. Everything follows from that. Filling the gourd, planting seeds…”
Ah Hin wasn’t listening. Excited, he rummaged through his possessions and produced a small crumpled booklet, printed in red ink.
“The Abbot gave me this at the last tokong we passed. The last tokong that was still standing,” he corrected himself. “They followed a different deity, but … can you read it to me, sister?”
Guet Imm read out the title: “Scriptures of the Baby God.” She flipped through the tract, nodding.
Her prohibition on profane intercourse with men aside, the Pure Moon was not a jealous goddess. Tet Sang had once known a votary of her Order who had snuck out every fifth-day to make offerings at other houses of worship—those dedicated to the gods of the Malayu and the Damilans as well as the Tang pantheon. She even went to the Protectorate’s churches: “Safer to keep all the gods happy,” she’d said pragmatically.
“Rather than I read to you,” said Guet Imm, “isn’t it better if I teach you how to read yourself?”
“Oh, no,” said Ah Hin, taken aback. “I’m not clever, sister. I went to school one whole year and I learnt how to gamble only.”
“Doesn’t matter whether you’re clever or not,” said Guet Imm. “With the deity’s help, all things can be done.”
She appropriated one of the group’s torches and attended patiently to Ah Hin every evening as he read aloud, stumbling over the red words. The tract recounted the adventures of a boy god, a troublesome infant who spent more time subduing dragons and taming seas than preaching about ethics or spiritual cultivation.
It was a good story, with plenty of fighting. The group found the Baby God far more sympathetic than they would have found the Pure Moon. Their complaints about Guet Imm’s annexation of the torch died down, and Ah Hin’s education was stimulated by the brothers’ objections to his halting pace.
Tet Sang was the one member of the group who did not enjoy their story-time sessions. Perhaps to the others it was natural to see a woman with her head bent, her nape deceptively vulnerable and her lashes casting shadows on her cheeks, as she devoted herself to a man. No doubt the scene recalled memories of the mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins who had once tended to them.
Tet Sang had come to the group with a different set of memories. He knew how dangerous it could be to assume that either women or mystics were harmless.
There was no reason to worry, he told himself. It was not a good time for Tang religious orders, and the Order of the Pure Moon had suffered as much as the others from the Protectorate’s purges. Without her tokong, the nun depended on the group for her livelihood. She would do nothing to jeopardize that.
Still, he thought it his duty to warn Ah Hin.
“Better be careful around that nun,” Tet Sang said one morning. “You don’t know what her intentions are.”
Ah Hin gave him a wounded look. “You’re always so suspicious, brother. Why don’t you like Sister Guet Imm?”
“It’s been two weeks,” said Tet Sang. “We don’t know anything about where she’s from or what she’s done. Just because she’s a religious doesn’t mean she’s sincere. You know what they say about devotees of the Pure Moon.” There were rumours about the powers the deity granted her followers, and the wise were cautious where magic was concerned.
Of course, the wise also did not tend to become roving contractors.
“I never thought you of all people would be prejudiced,” said Ah Hin reproachfully.
“You’re the one who called her a witch!”
“I didn’t know sister then,” said Ah Hin. “It’s not right to suspect people because of their past. It’s like if we didn’t trust Ah Yee because he used to rob people’s houses.”
“We didn’t trust Ah Yee! He wasn’t allowed to keep watch by himself until he was with us for more than a year.”
“You sound like a mata,” said Ah Hin, ignoring this. “Talking bad about the tokong, saying the orders are conspiring with bandits. Shouldn’t we of all people sympathize with the monks and nuns? We also are misunderstood.”
If Tet Sang hadn’t known better, he would’ve thought Guet Imm had bewitched the group. They all liked her now. Even Ah Boon had got over his pique about the fact that she would only sleep with him if she could castrate him afterwards. Tet Sang wasn’t sure how she’d won him over, until he saw Guet Imm showing Ah Boon some herbs she was drying over a fire.