“I don’t know why you’re so angry,” said Guet Imm pettishly. “It’s not like I was going to do it without a sign from the deity. In the end, I realised that was not her intention.”
“What was her intention?”
Guet Imm did not answer this directly.
“I only became certain of who you were when you tied my sarong,” she said.
Tet Sang frowned. “A nun wouldn’t know how to tie a sarong. Look at you.”
“No,” said Guet Imm agreeably. “You must have learnt before you entered the Order. But when you did it, I saw your pendant.”
Tet Sang’s hand went to his chest, touching the small lump under his robes—the jade pendant he wore next to his skin, carved in the shape of the Pure Moon making the gesture of teaching. Anyone could wear a Pure Moonpendant, and often did, the deity being especially popular among the poor, the sick and women, but the pendants sold to laypeople invariably displayed her in the posture signifying compassion. It was her votaries who wore the image of the Pure Moon in the act of transmitting her wisdom.
“The deity must have been getting impatient,” Guet Imm was saying. “It was very slow of me! I should have realised earlier you used to be a sister.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” said Tet Sang. “Do I look like a religious?” He’d let his hair grow out; his face was brown and leathery from the sun. Certainly, no one looking at him would suspect him of ever having had a shaven head or worn grey votarial robes. The pendant he could have stolen, after all.
“No,” said Guet Imm. “You look like a disreputable bandit who should cut his hair. But it’s not your looks. You’re moonlight on the water, brother. I should have known what you were from the start.”
Tet Sang had meant to keep denying it, but the compliment took him off guard. There was no higher praise a devotee of the Pure Moon could give than to say of a person that they reflected the light of the deity. The last time he had received the commendation, it had been from the Abbot at Permatang Timbul.
The memory was sudden and extraordinarily vivid—the Abbot’s elusive smile; her watery eyes, magnified byspectacles; Tet Sang’s surprise and pleasure. The particular smell of the tokong rose in his nostrils, made up of the mingled scents of sandalwood smoke, burnt paper, food cooking in the kitchens and green growing things. For they had had gardens, grown their own vegetables and fruit. Everyone had worked in them, votaries and laypeople alike…
It was like being stabbed. Tet Sang barely noticed the sting of Guet Imm’s follow-up: “At least, Ithoughtyou were good,” she was saying. “At that time, I didn’t know you were selling off the deity’s relics to the highest bidder.”
“You want to know what happened at Permatang Timbul, why the mata came after us?” said Tet Sang abruptly. “I’ll tell you. They found out the Abbot was helping bandits. She would have done the same for the mata if they came to her sick and hungry,” he added. “But that didn’t matter. And that wasn’t all. The Protectorate suspected the bandits were using the tokong as a meeting place. They thought there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.”
“Was there?” said Guet Imm.
Tet Sang shrugged. The insinuation against the Abbot could not offend. He was already full up on anger, with no space left for more. “Who knows? The bandits had their own agenda. But the Abbot wouldn’t have colluded. She was very orthodox. She didn’t believe in getting involved in politics.”
Despite his fury, Guet Imm’s stillness was calming.There were no pointless exclamations of surprise or sympathy to fend off.
“Your Abbot was one of the thirty-nine?” she said.
“There was no warning,” said Tet Sang. “The mata came in the afternoon, when everyone was praying. The Abbot was resting; she was almost ninety. They ransacked the Abbot’s office and took her out into the courtyard. Not that they meant to kill her. They wanted to interrogate her, but”—a smile twisted his lips—“she fought. One of the young fellows panicked and shot her.
“It was not the worst tragedy that day,” he added. This was what he had told himself time and again, reminding himself to be measured in his grief. “She had a long life already. Most of the people who died were younger, not votaries. They were the people who helped in the kitchens, the gardens, the poor people the tokong took in.… Half the religious were away, visiting another tokong.”
“Including you?”
Tet Sang shook his head. “I was there when it happened.”
He’d gone to the Abbot when the mata left her for dead, but she hadn’t actually died in his arms. She had made him promise he would look after the tokong’s treasures, so he had had to leave her.
He had wondered, later, if it had been the survival of the treasures that had really concerned her. She had always been a thoroughly human Abbot, more concerned with soulsthan things. If not for the promise he’d made her, he would not have hidden in the narrow space behind the main altar. He would not have stayed put, cramped and sweating, as the sounds of the slaughter came to him. When finally the screams had stopped and he’d smelt smoke, heard the roar of the fires the mata had set, he might have decided to allow the flames to consume him, as they would consume the only home he had known.
Instead, he had thought of the treasures and run.
“I don’t think the mata intended to destroy the tokong,” said Tet Sang. “That was in the early days, before the Protectorate really started targeting the orders. But the raid went wrong. The mata had to cover up their uselessness. Later, they put out some story about finding bandits hiding in the tokong, said there was a big fight and the bandits set fire to the place so they could get away. The Protectorate posted notices in town, warning people. They said,That’s what happens when you help bandits.”
“What happened to the other votaries? The ones who weren’t there.”
Tet Sang shrugged. “The smart ones disappeared. The ones who went to the Protectorate when they came back and found the tokong destroyed got resettled. One or two got executed for conspiring with bandits.”
Guet Imm did not ask if they had been guilty. She must have known that that was of no importance.
“The bandits thought we were conspiring with themata at my tokong,” she said. “They thought we were spying on them and reporting back to the Protectorate. That’s why they came after us—at least, I think so,” she added. “There was nobody left to ask when I came out. They stopped bringing me food; that’s how I realised something had happened. But it took me a while to notice. By the time I came out to check, more than a week had passed.”
