The Secrets of Jin-Shei (31 page)

“You are not focusing your mind,” her teacher would remonstrate, gently but inexorably. “Focus. The light of your spirit should be a fine and a sharp one, not diffuse and distracted and floating about like a butterfly. You have to focus your wandering.”

“I
am
focusing, Xsixu-
lama
,” Nhia said.

The priest called Xsixu shook his head. “There are two kinds of wandering, my child. The first is easy, and may be done by any spirit advanced enough to be sent out. It involves simply seeing, skimming over beauty, watching lakes and mountains and cities, admiring the architecture of great Temples, following rolling rivers to the ocean, or just visiting distant relatives or friends. But when you do this your mind is lost, and possessed by the things it sees and touches. It is empty. You can travel all over the
world, see all its wonders, exhaust your body and your spirit, and you have achieved nothing, nothing at all. You weaken your own vital energy without having achieved a thing.”

“But I am not …”

“Hush, child. You are. You are at the Palace, with the Court. You are at the Guard compound, with your friend. You are everywhere but here.”

“You said there were two kinds of wandering.”

“The second,” said the priest, “is the pilgrimage you must make deep, deep into yourself—into the deepest and darkest mysteries of your very soul. It is the search for the Perfect Truth, the search for the word which will illuminate your path into the Way like a torch. It is the cloudlike wandering, and it is the key to entry into Shan, the Realm of Pure Spirit, the highest of the three Heavens of Cahan. It awakens you, and makes of you the perfect illumination, a light unto others. You become an Immortal, and you guide others to follow in your footsteps.”

“Ah, Xsixu-
lama
,” Nhia sighed, “I will never be …”

“You could be, child,” came the unexpected response. “Leave the worldly things behind you and come with me now. Let us go where our spirits take us and drink from the Fountains of Cahan today. Your breathing. Control your breathing. Close your eyes, empty your mind, forget about the world,
forget
.”

For a moment, just before she obeyed him and closed her eyes, allowing herself to drift into the white light of the meditative state which she had learned to call up at will, Nhia thought she glimpsed the features of Xsixu change subtly, flow into something else, something naggingly familiar. His eyes had deepened, become more compelling, glittering dark orbs which were almost hypnotic in their power and which were so familiar, so
familiar,
if only she could stop and think for long enough to place them … but then she was into the light of the spirit, and his was a companion light, ethereal, disembodied, with no haunting eyes to distract her.

Xsixu insisted that Nhia spend at least two hours in meditation every day. He did not demand that they be spent under his direct supervision, but he would ask pointed questions if she had meditated outside his immediate presence in order to make sure that she was working toward the goals which he was pointing her toward. He was a hard taskmaster, harder by far than the gentle elderly priest she had been assigned as her teacher before Xsixu had taken over, and under his strict daily tutelage she
found herself reaching and passing milestones that she had never believed herself capable of achieving.

He would send her away with teachings that she would write down in a special notebook in spidery
jin-ashu
script, to think on and puzzle over for hours afterward. It would keep her awake at night, tossing and turning in her bed, worrying at his words for hidden meanings. She would get distracted every so often, remembering the maddening but elusive familiarity of those compelling eyes, and then remind herself sternly about his words on cloudlike wandering and resolutely shy away from thinking on anything that specific.

“Cultivate the inner self,” Xsixu would tell her. “Focus on what you are. Do not let your mind and your spirit run wild—you will lose your nature, and your destiny, in the myriad distractions that the world offers you. Concentrate. Taste the waters of the Fountains of Cahan.”

Or, again, “You have two minds. One is like dark, deep waters, mysterious, subtle, pure, quiet, containing no wild or distracted thought. It is not distracted by external glitter, or internal feelings like anger or frustration. It reflects, and when you dip things beneath its surface it absorbs and understands. The other is like the wind. It is in contact with external forms and shapes, and is pulled into whatever shape those things desire, pushed into forever seeking beginnings, and ends, and reasons, and never bringing anything to a conclusion because it is so stirred up by everything around it, restless and directionless. You must live in your water mind, not your wind mind. Look, look where your spirit lives and endures.”

And, on a third occasion, “The true way to meditate is to have your mind as firm as the mountains, as impossible to move as the mountains, as focused as you can be—at all times of the day, whatever you are doing, walking, eating, lying down. Let nothing enter through your senses—your eyes, your nose, your ears, your mouth—that will distract you from your goal. Your mind must be focused. You must not be thinking about your mind being focused, because if you are thinking this, then it is an external thought and your mind is no longer focused on the primary idea. Cheating is easy, but pointless. Free your spirit, and you can travel among the stars.”

“Nhia,” Tai said when Nhia tried to convey some of these ideas to her over cups of green tea, “you are starting to sound like you’ve gone straight from childhood into the ranks of the Immortals. Your teacher scares me.”

“He scares me too,” Nhia admitted. “Never before has anyone asked me to be so wholly myself, without giving in to anything that comes from outside of me. I don’t know if I can abandon the world to the extent that he wishes me to do it.”

“He sounds like he wants you to forsake everything that is not him and of his world,” Tai said. “Your friends, your work, your daily life and living—nothing must be there but a sense of Cahan. Nhia, he scares me. He is asking you to
die.
”

“Of course he isn’t, Tai,” Nhia said, laughing. “Dying isn’t what this is all about.”

“But he wants you to forget all about everything else … all about Liudan, about Yuet, about me … to be not Nhia, but a spirit-of-Nhia, alive and not alive, beyond our reach.”

“You don’t understand,” Nhia said airily.

She was dismissing Tai’s unease, trying to diminish it by making it sound unimportant. This belittling of genuine concerns, casting them into oblivion by declaring them irrelevant, was not the kind of mistake Nhia had made before. She had made a point of always treating people’s problems as though they were real, as though they mattered, even when they had been trifles and easily solved. That care was part of what had made her a teacher, made her wise. Tai said nothing, but felt a flutter of disquiet touch her heart.

While Yuet battled with the demons of death and disease and Liudan juggled her Court to gain another week of grace, Nhia sank into the Temple, allowing Xsixu’s words to echo in her mind in his presence and out of it, teaching herself the inner calm that he demanded. She was weak and frail—she knew this because she could not achieve the perfect peace, could glimpse the mountains of the Immortals of which she had so often told in her teaching tales but always dimly, their shapes blurred and distorted, as though she was looking at them from under water.

The first time she made her breakthrough into pure clarity of spirit, she exploded through veils of cloud like a winged spirit. She, Nhia, of the clubbed foot—the clumsy one, the one who would never have grace, would never skip, would never dance—she flew through the skies like an eagle, fell and swooped through air so clear that her cry of joy caught into a sob that was almost pain. She was so thoroughly terrified by the sharpness of the experience that she fell out of her meditative trance, gasping for breath, and found herself being supported gently by Xsixu while she
fought for breath. His one hand was at her shoulder, keeping her seated in an upright position, and the other was gentle but firm against her back, between her shoulder blades. Just like once, another hand …

Nhia gasped for breath again, but this time it had nothing to do with her revelation or her achievement.

She knew.

She knew the eyes that had been taunting her from the edge of her consciousness for days. They belonged to the same man who had supported her before, on other occasions where her frail body had betrayed her, in just such a manner as he was doing right now. She knew the eyes; she knew the long-fingered, steady, aristocratic hands.

She blinked to clear her watering eyes, and turned her head to stare at the man whom she had known as Xsixu—the man who looked nothing like Ninth Sage Lihui of the Imperial Court.

Until this moment.

Xsixu’s face seemed to shift in her mind, and flow, and the eyes that had haunted her days glittered suddenly in the features that she remembered. His black hair was still tied back in a workmanlike queue, his skin still smooth and with no trace of wrinkles, but just for an instant Nhia got an impression of looking down a vortex of uncounted years, of an immeasurable age, an ancientness of spirit that almost terrified her.

“You?”
she whispered. “How long has it been you?”

“All the time, dear child,” Lihui said. “Since almost the very beginning. I persuaded the Temple to let you teach. When you came here to study you had a Temple teacher only for the barest beginning, just enough to start you off and make you interesting. Since then, all the teachers you have had have been me.”

“Why the disguises?” Nhia gasped.

“Are you all right now?” Lihui inquired solicitously, and when she nodded he sat back, releasing her. “Why the disguises? My dear child, if I had stepped in as your teacher—as myself—right from the start, you would have believed that nothing you achieved had come from yourself. You had to learn to trust
yourself,
not the teacher you thought had all the answers.”

“But I am nothing …”

“Sweet girl. Whatever you will yourself to be, you can be. Have you understood nothing? Tell me, what did you see, just now, when you fell out of your sky?”

“You know?” Nhia gasped.

“What you felt, I felt. I am your teacher. I know your nature.”

Nhia found she was crying now, really crying, and could not seem to make herself stop. “Wings. I had wings.”

“I know,” Lihui said, his voice gentle. “I knew from the first moment I crossed your path. You were just a promise, then—an empty cup. All I did was make sure that you were filled.”

“With
what?
”

“Your destiny,” Lihui said. “You are an Empress’s companion now, and the Temple’s treasure. You do not need Xsixu anymore.”

Nhia looked up, her face streaked with tears. “But I have only just begun to understand. I still do not even know what I am.”

“Oh, I know what you are,” Lihui said. “But when I said you no longer need Xsixu, I did not mean you should give up your studies. Indeed, not. You are at a critical juncture now, and you need the guidance of a mentor and teacher more than ever. All I meant was, Xsixu has taught you everything that Xsixu had to teach. From now on, you learn from me.”

Nhia could only stare at him, speechless.

“You need no book learning,” Lihui said. “You know now that what you need for true understanding lies not within words imprisoned on a page. You must search for meaning, and for the principles behind meaning—and once you have comprehended the principle, discard it, and take the true meaning into your heart. Once you have grasped that, the mind will leave the external distractions, and you will know the Three Heavens of Cahan. I, Lihui, Ninth Sage of the Circle, promise you this.”

“What do I need to do?” Nhia said

“Tomorrow you come to my house. The Temple has done what it can for you. Tomorrow you become my disciple.”

“I do not know where you live,
Lihui-lama
,” Nhia said after a heartbeat of silence.

“Do you not?” Lihui said with an odd note of challenge. “I think you will find that you do. I do not want to tax you, you have had a breakthrough today. I suggest you take the rest of the day and meditate on your experience—but do not try to transcend again, not alone, not yet. That will come, in time. Tomorrow.”

He rose to his feet with the grace of a dancer, bowed to her, and left her.

It was an hour later, maybe more, that Nhia left the Temple teaching
precinct, walking as though in a dream. Lihui. Lihui had been her teacher all along. A part of her wanted to go to somebody with this, to Tai and her gentle understanding, and a part of her shied from revealing it to anyone at all, not now, not yet. She lit a taper at the little altar in her room, and prayed to the Lords of the Four Quarters, the guardians of human destiny, for guidance. She received none. All she got back was a sense of danger, and also an exhilaration so vast that she could hear its wings beating, like those of the eagle she had briefly been.

She did not go to Tai. She did not sleep. She sat up at her window staring at the sky above Linh-an, watching the stars come into the sky, and then fade into morning.

When the sun was fully up Nhia dressed with care, in a silk inner gown and a Court brocade outer robe, and stepped outside into the street. She stood for a moment, emptied of externals, as Lihui had told her she must be, waiting to be filled with the knowledge of where to go to find him. With a sense of wonder she realized that he was right—that a path shaped itself in her mind, like a map, and she set her feet on it and walked, almost blind, into Linh-an’s busy streets. People saw the rapt expression on her face and made way for her, as though she were royal; there was something around her that glowed, the inner light that was of Cahan.

Then someone jostled her, and it shattered, the whole illusion, falling into pieces around her feet like glass shards. Nhia looked around, bewildered, lost; she was in a part of Linh-an she did not know well. A woman with no legs, pulling herself along on an ingenuous cart, stopped by her side.