Portals & Paths: The Nine Gems

Chapter 1: STORM

The rain fell hard, in drops as large as mango nuts, pelting the deeply soaked woolen robes of five men as they moved with the storm. The hooded figures slithered through the sprouting shoots of rice as quickly as the tempest blew through the ancient wood, their bare feet barely sinking in the paddy’s soft mud. The man in lead turned his head to see the others following diligently in tow. A prominent nose caught dancing light from a disappearing moon as the dying rays ricocheted through thousands of crystal beads of water. The leader flicked a twisted finger toward the sky. There was a brief calm in the clamor as the group pressed on through the wet, swollen rice fields edging the wood.

He thought on the journey they had undertaken, having left weeks before the storm that now haunted and hunted them. Suddenly and loudly, thunder broke, pushing back against the old man’s attention. The storm would soon cease to obey him, he knew. Flashes of blue light cast shifting shadows against the wind-bent banyan trees, warnings appearing and disappearing like echoes from a distant past. The tree trunks, worn white and smooth from age, rose and knotted to a broad blind. The foliage wept heavy tears onto the decay covered ground. Roots crawled one over another, a tight web gripping the primordial earth, securing their hosts fast against the wind. Since the First Siandali set foot on the Yellow Lands, the wood had been a sentinel against the tempests careening down from the Great Mountain. But the wood was sad that night and barely held its hope against the storm.

There was a time when the wood had been contented, an age before the Golden City glowed under the sun, the Rathippan warriors sailed the black waters, and Phras killed for stones of green and gold, and even lost loves. Before the vagaries of man and war had consumed the land, there were the trees of the deep forests, alive with brown monkeys, gray elephants and jaguars black as a moonless night. It was a time even before the Great Naga churned the sea and the Dark Isle burned; before the Narika-Matsi swam in anger beneath the waves of the Blue Samudra and the xi-Siandalir stepped off the backs of tortoises onto the soft shores of the Yellow Lands. That was a time before the gods had left the earth. And now humans rarely passed down even myths of the Time Before. But the wood remembered.

The five men advanced past a herd of dull-eyed oxen transfixed in the flooded paddy. Heavy breaths of men and beasts steamed the balmy night air. Their black cloaks, sodden with rain, hung on boney shoulders, and gnarls of dripping hair spilled out their cowls. The scents of rain, earth, sweat and mold competed in a noxious war. Thunder cracked, and a stout ox turned its head to the skies. The giant animal blinked once in the rain, eyed a lone garuda, and made its peace with the heavens. The oxen ambled further into the wood, leaving the men alone in the paddy and alone with their thoughts of the child. The animals sought the safety of the forest. The men entered for other reasons. The leader looked up and motioned to quicken the pace. Overhead, the ancient bird, red as old blood and wings far wider than any man could spread his arms, hovered motionless on the wind, watching the figures below and waiting. The ancient bird was a portent, he knew, from the days of the Time Before. It meant the nagas were near. And, thus, their path was true and dangerous. The man older than the banyan trees disappeared into the dense forest with his cohort.

“We are not alone,” said one.

“We are not,” replied the leader with the large, broken nose. “We will never be until it’s done. We must hurry.”

Barely discernible from the storm, thin, black snakes emerged out of small bubbling holes in the wet earth.

“He knows,” the last in line mumbled in fear.

“He has always known.” The old hermit didn’t stop but simply waved his boney finger. The others were too young to know more. Those who now followed the Hermetic Wicha were too young to remember, too distracted to see, or too wary to act. For too long were the hermits holed up in their caves, ignoring the sun as it rose day after day on a changing land. They had chosen isolation, resulting in very few remaining. And the ones who did remember were too old to care, too dogged to be bothered, or too frail to be useful. How quickly the mind forgets, he thought. Will their bodies remember? Will they come in the end? He shut out those detrimental distractions.

There was a time when hermits counseled kings and blessed both unions and nations. Many years prior, so many that the sum was long forgotten, they were replaced by religious privis carrying the title of Bhikkhu along with dark motivations and hidden allegiances. They came with palms open, liquid tongues, bodies wrapped in silk, and upon their feet leather piked shoes sewn with gilded thread and stuffed with yak hair, the latter adornment indicating they came from the north, above the forest Mel-Qui was passing through with his four novices, none of whom had reached even the fourth ring. But their true origins were unknown. Most hermits believed they came from the White Lands, using magic to brown their skins and hide their true intentions. The Bhikkhu brought heavy books of yellowed parchments bound by brass rings containing, according to them, the secret codices of the Gods, instructions for purity and proper governance of the people. Elephants, burdened with overly large howdahs, carried the foreigners, and their wealth, to Ayutaya City when Mel-Qui served in the court of Phra Aja, the grandfather of the current king, Phra Ram. Once the Golden Prah had accepted their dogmas that came with far more schemes than silver, it was not long before their teachings spread to all but two of the seven nations of the Siandalir. Only the Cloud People remained tethered, and even that, weakly, to the old gods.

Mel-Qui slid his hand into his soaked robe. The cold stone vibrated weakly as he touched it. He’s still alive, he thought. But not for long. Pulling out the stone, the old hermit rubbed the cold hardness and muttered incantations under his breath. Fog rose around the feet of the five travelers.

*****

Pailin stood alone on his porch, alone, listening to the echo of wailing monkeys in the distance. He stared blankly into the night, watching the storm approach like a stalking jaguar, yellow eyes glowing. A thin smile pressed into his cheeks. Gray clouds rolled and then disappeared across the black sky. Occasional thunder boomed in the distance moments after quick flashes of light. His bamboo hut shook slightly. Sparkling droplets of rain were starting to slant with the growing wind. The storm was coming, the boy knew.

This night was both the sixteenth anniversary of his birth and the sixteenth anniversary of his Grammy Raylai’s death. He missed the grandmother he never knew, somehow. He’d had other birthdays, of course, sixteen of them, and sixteen storms. This tempest carried something more solid, however, a palpable density he felt in his chest. Pai, as he was known since childhood, reached out his hand to touch the air. Previous storms chilled him to bone. This one radiated the body warmth of skin. His fingers moved through the emptiness, searching, as if pulled to the heat, like powder flies to the carcass of an animal. Pai breathed in the scent of old, wet earth that filled the village. His expiration came out as silver mist and disappeared into the darkness.

A few lanterns flickered inside the surrounding huts. No one dared venture out. The village of Changmari had lived these sixteen storms. Some remembered that of his birth and of his Grammy’s death, the night and storm no mouth had uttered since. But most had forgotten, choosing distraction in the labors and toils of day. Pai turned and saw an old man staring at him with lost eyes until the light went out and his face transformed into the image of a tiger, teeth bared, stern and serene. Then gone. Pai froze without fear as if the beast had cast a spell trapping the boy in his own body. Later, thunder cracked, and the spell was broken. The storm raged now. Drops of water hitting the ground created a cacophony of drum beats that penetrated deep into his gut, probing for the darkness that resided there. He felt as if he would purge the birthday meal his mother had prepared.

That evening he had eaten rice sweetened with duran fruit, same treat as all previous birthdays. The tart compote and dense grain sat in his stomach, churning into a frothy mix emanating a sweet odor that exited through his nostrils. He felt the sway of dropping into a deep sleep and held the rail to the porch of his hut. Light flashed and the scent of charged air filled the village. His hands pressed harder onto a corner post, lifting his family’s hut six palms off the earth. The smooth-sanded, red rosewood felt safe. It grounded him, rooted, like holding the extensive trunk of the cypress trees that lined the road to the jungle to the north of his village. The boy wrapped his arms around the hard wood and breathed. If he could just stay here, like this, holding the post in the darkness, alone, feeling the wind, hearing the drumbeat and smelling the rosewood. Below, the paths became torrents of dark mud, flowing away from his home and village, vanishing into empty darkness. Pai pulled his simple, black hemp jacket tightly around his neck and looked over his shoulder. The night became cold. Colder.

His mother suddenly appeared behind him, startling him. “The rain comes.”

“Yes,” Pai responded. A bright flash illuminated his round face. Faint freckles peppered his pudgy cheeks and matted hair scraped his shoulders, at a length longer than the other boys wore. His nose was smaller, mouth wider and ears larger as well. Or at least they seemed that way to him. His arms and legs were articulated by short, stubby limbs that made him walk awkwardly, more as an adolescent than young man. Nicknamed Pom-Pai, he learned to hide his bulky body under even bulkier clothing, which only gave him an even larger profile. But his legs were strong, allowing him to kick the rattan takraw ball harder and farther, albeit less directionally, than anyone. Once in flight, few boys got in the way of the heavy buka, and typically only once. One game concluded with an opponent’s concussion.

His most alienating features, however, were deeply set above his high, soft cheeks: mismatched eyes. One sat deep in its socket, brown and speckled as dark dirt, earthly but hiding from the world, wary and worn. But the other eye, the boy’s left, emerged from the depth of his serious and contemplative mind and emitted the indigo of the sky’s last hue of day or the azure of the crystallin waters of Pôhkanaree Pond, constantly shifting and shining with the waves of light passing through. The tiny orb appeared as if his intended eye had been replaced by a sapphire gem at birth, sixteen years ago on the night of his Grammy’s death. The contradiction demanded that he be named Pailin, meaning sapphire in the old tongue, the tongue of the maternal grandmother whom he never knew.

The thunder crashed, almost directly overhead, and Pai returned to staring into the dark, sleepless village of Changmari.

“Grammy loves the rain,” his mother said, ignoring his cue and instead sidled up to her son by the rosewood railing.

Pai shook with the lower vibrational concert of the thunder. He ignored his mother’s confusing words. His grandmother was dead and, thus, incapable of loving anything anymore. A gust of air rushed past the family hut like a charging black bear, nearly knocking the heavy boy off the veranda. The planks trembled. Nausea wanted to erupt but Pai swallowed the sweet and sticky rice back down as he swallowed his spirit.

“There,” his mother said, gesturing to the black sky that abruptly opened and spilled rain in solid slants.

“Yes, mâe-mâe. There’s a storm, and it’s raining. Just like every year on this night.”

“No. There!” A short, stub of a finger tapped the sky. Pai’s mom was of similar physical constitution as her son, short, rotund and freckled, but of dissimilar inner constitution. She, and her mother, Raylai, were often mistaken as sisters, twins even. But she knew her mother and her son shared more in common than their collective profiles.

Pai strained his eyes. “What is it?”

“A prediction.”

“No more of your enchantments, mother.” Pai released an exasperation that intentionally failed to hide his annoyance. “I don’t believe in them. That’s only a bird.”

“Bird? Bird in this storm? When do you see bird in a storm?”

The query stopped Pai dead in his increasingly angry thoughts. She was right, which only served to increase his anger. He saw the giant wingspan silhouetted against the sky. Each year on the morning after this annual deluge hundreds of yellow-crested larks, purple herons and black crows lay dead in the dirt to be ritualistically collected and discarded without word. The thought of a bird navigating this swirling wind hurt his head. As it swooped down at the hut, Pai backed away from the rail in fear of an attack from the creature. When Pai thought he would be impaled by the thick, hooked beak, the red Garuda angled, flapped its broad wings once and shot back to the clouds, disappearing.

“The storm will wake your phâa,” his mother said as rain hitting the thatch roof sounded like the crackle of old rice thrown into a fire.

“Nothing will wake him with his snoring. He wakes the village,” responded Pai. Below him a river of mud began to careen around the posts that strained to hold their ground.

His mother laughed harder than customary and covered her mouth with a pudgy palm.

*****

Far to the north in the Black Wood of Kusakkula, the Kali monkeys beat their chests in answer to the thunderous call from the Great Himalayan. The monkeys shook and clawed the trees until the bark splintered and branches broke as the storm descended on the oily forest. In a flash of lightening, a thousand red Kalir took to the black sky, pelted by rain and panic. Groaning, jaws stretched and red fur spiked, the monkeys flew in fits among the limbs of the tall blackgum trees.

A large Kalir with fat, furry arms and a rusted copper chadah stood on a high branch, eyeing his troops taking flight. He swirled his two curved-swords, sliced the sheets of rain and thought of the coming war. A voice from the darkness rushed down the valleys from the mountain of the Old Gods. The Kali King heard the beacon and obeyed the command he’d been waiting for.

The king took one sword and cut his arm. He watched the first drops of blood slide off his rain-soaked fur. When the gash fully opened, Chompoo raised his arm and sucked on the wound, drinking the warm fluid. The deposed Monkey King bared a single fang and howled louder than the thunder. He shot into the sky as his moan echoed throughout the Golden Shores.

*****

“What’s wrong?” Pai asked, with an uncommon look of worry from the sapphire eye, oddly glowing despite the absence of light.

Before the doughy woman responded, she began hopping around, swiping at her legs. Balanced on her toes, she danced sideways to the sliding door made of bamboo and khā cloth as if entwined with an invisible partner.

The cause of his mother’s retreat tickled Pai’s own legs. Tiny black spiders crawled in long lines from eruptions in the gaps between the floorboards. Lightening flashed. Thunder boomed. Twisted wads of black silk scrambled in grotesque geometry and crisscrossing patterns.

Pai stamped his bare feet and warm wetness squeezed between his toes. Any lit lanterns from the village instantly died in the darkness. His hut swayed in the wind. He fell into the moving madness at his feet. Scrambling to the edge of the porch, the spiders clawed at his ankles and climbed up his calf-length black hemp pants. Attempts to pick and pop them off with his fingernails resulted in red stains on his yellow skin.

Lightening flashed so rapidly that the thunder couldn’t match the tempo.

Wails of monkeys echoed throughout Changmari. The quiet valley with rice paddies carved stepwise into the low, green hills, wild orchids in spectral colors voraciously growing in the high meadows and where elephants ambled among the peaceful and poor inhabitants quickly deformed into dark and muddy rivers, sounds of pain and loss and a stench of decay that scratched skin as it wafted by.

The boy’s heavy body lunged for the railing. His hand, slicked with blood, slipped off the rosewood wetted with rain. Pom-Pei cascaded down the short steps, like a waterfall over rocks, hitting his head on the ground. Dark and dazed, Pai closed his eyes and the world went out of existence.

Fog from the banyan tree wood began to flood the village as Pai lay unconscious by the steps. The mist glowed blue in full moon’s reflection. Seeking other misfortune, the rain and wind had fled, leaving broken acacia and malay limbs, muddy ruts and not a few dead purple herons and yellow sing-song birds. To the north, the Great Himalayan rose, stifling and silhouetting the lessor mountains. The wet snarling of monkeys echoed off the granite peaks covered in snow, quickly raising the rancor.

Pai’s sapphire eye appeared between the slit in his lids and emitted a deep hue that almost appeared black against the rising mist. The spiders were gone. As was his mâe-mâe. The first sensation to present in his body pinged his gut. The sticky rice, he thought. A pulse of nausea traveled to his throat then dissipated. He heard no sound, and the silence provoked a memory of near drowning in Pôhkanaree Pond while fishing with his father as a boy. He shook. Then he felt a burning at his ankles. Looking down he saw the red specks of bites and purple stains on his skin despite the low light. It was no dream. The spiders were real. The storm had come and gone, far faster than previous birthdays.

The boy pulled as much air as would fit into his chest. Oxygen raced to his limbs, tingling fingers and toes. With strength from his thick legs, Pai stood. Fog enveloped his feet. He looked to the grove of banyan trees behind his small home. Undulations of mist, growing larger with each wave, spilled out of the crooked wood. He froze in fear as the roar of angry animals seemed to come from behind him. He smelled wet, greasy fur.

Five white clouds of vapor rose from the blanket of fog, the largest leading. From the mounds appeared faces of ancient men, cloaked in white with silver hair streaming behind. They moved faster than any wind, steady and fluid, as if riding a longtail boat down a rushing river. Pai could not move.

The wall of mist slammed into the boy as Mel-Qui reached out boney arms. An intense pressure sucked the air from Pai’s lungs and thoughts from his head.

Then they were gone, all five figures and the boy called Pom-Pai disappeared into the quieting night.

Chompoo howled in anger.

Pai’s mâe-mâe and phâa held hands and watched from an open window as the mist gently melted into the glistening mud.