SHADOWS OF THE DARKEST JADE
Sarah Hans
When the Guru asked me to explain the horrors Satindra and I had witnessed, I found that I could make no words to explain what had occurred. When he asked me write the words I still could not explain. Only now, as I lie dying at last, am I able to write, but even so, there are parts of the tale that must remain known only to me. There are things that weigh on a man’s soul that simply should not be shared.
We followed the Silk Road out of Gandhara and down into the plains of the Empire of Han, surrounded by merchants and travelers. The people we met along the Indus River, even many miles beyond prosperous Gandhara, recognized our saffron robes and gave generously to our alms bowls. We sat at their fires night after night, welcomed guests. In exchange for food and a warm place to sleep, Satindra told them of the dharma, mediated their disputes, and blessed them with his quiet strength. I knew, as I sat listening to him retell the tales I had heard a hundred times, that the Guru had chosen wisely when he sent Satindra among the Han, for he had the calm charisma and sagely demeanor that befit a true disciple of Amitabha Buddha.
As we journeyed, the number of other travelers on the road began to dwindle. Eventually, we left the great Silk Road and walked into unknown territory. The road narrowed and wound its way through expanses of rice paddies, where stoop-shouldered peasants laboured in the hot sun.
Unfortunately, the people of the Han Empire had rarely seen monks and, even more rarely, begging monks, and did not know what to make of us, especially as one of us was a foreigner and the other was barely a man, then unable to grow a beard. When we brought out our alms bowls, they scoffed, made offensive remarks about beggars, and some even spat on the ground at our feet. We ran out of our carefully preserved rice ration within a few days of leaving the Silk Road, and were so hungry our steps began to falter.
“Brother Satindra,” I said reluctantly, as we trudged through another hot, dusty day, “we must find food.” I meant to imply that we should steal what we could not beg, though I could not bring myself to suggest it outright.
Satindra nodded. “Amitabha will provide,” he said, with perfect faith, never indicating whether he understood my hidden meaning. “The Guru sent us here to bring the dharma; Amitabha will provide.”
I am ashamed to say that I lost faith, but Satindra never stopped believing. Even as we staggered up to a small, bamboo-and-mud hut, so exhausted we could barely stand, he drew his alms bowl from his robes and said the traditional words of blessing in a voice weak with hunger. The smell of the evening meal drifted out to us, a scent so tantalizing that I moaned aloud.
The girl who came to the door of the hut could have been my sister. She was small and golden-skinned, her jet-black hair tied modestly at the nape of her neck. She wore the simple, cotton garments of all the Han peasants. Her narrow eyes – so like mine! – grew wide, and she turned and ran back into the house, calling to her elders in the local dialect.
I groaned again, this time sure of defeat, certain that we would be turned away and meet our deaths on the dusty road. Satindra turned and looked at me, a small smile curving his chapped lips, and said “Have faith, Little Brother.”
The girl returned with a hugely pregnant woman in tow and behind her followed a little elderly woman with a round, plump face. Both women immediately ushered us into the hut, without any questions or explanations, and just like that, we were saved and Satindra’s faith was proven.
The girl’s name was Jun.The pregnant woman was her mother Bao-Yu and the elderly woman was Jun’s grandmother, Grandmother Mei. The men of the household were off drinking rice wine and gambling, Grandmother Mei explained, so the women could do what they liked, including feeding wandering monks. She explained all this while we eagerly devoured rice and what I can honestly say was the most delicious hot soup I have ever eaten. Grandmother Mei chattered throughout the meal, gesturing with her small, shriveled hands, squinting at us with her beady, black eyes and smiling a toothless grin. Unfamiliar with the local dialect, I only understood about half of what she said and poor Satindra, who spoke only the scholarly language of the Han and none of the rough dialects of the peasants, understood nothing, but we nodded enthusiastically and tried to be a good audience.
Finally, when our appetites were sated, Grandmother Mei asked us to tell our story.
“You will have to excuse Brother Satindra,” I said. “He only speaks the scholar’s tongue.”
“Your accent is strange,” Grandmother Mei said, squinting at me over her plum-like cheeks.
“I was raised in a village near here,” I said, “but I have been away for many years. I remember very little.”
She nodded, sitting back on her pillow, and repeated her request for our story.
I obliged as best I could, using words from the scholar’s tongue and the dialect of my village interchangeably. This seemed surprisingly effective.
“We are monks from a monastery in the nation of Gandhara,” I told her. “Satindra is gifted with languages and I was born in Han, so our Guru thought it would be wise to send us to spread the word of the dharma here. We have walked a long time, seeking the village where I was born. I do not remember the way, because I was very young when I left home.”
Grandmother Mei snorted. “Why did your parents send you away? A healthy, strapping young boy?”
I shrugged. “I was told later, when I was older, that I was sent away because my family was so large my parents were unable to feed all of us.”
The old woman nodded sagely, her head bobbing on her neck. “A few years ago, there was drought. I remember well, there were many families whose children starved.” She clucked her tongue at the misfortune of it all. “Your parents were farmers, then?”
“Yes. My father and mother both worked in the rice fields. I remember four brothers and one sister, but there may be others, who were sent away like me, or who were born since I left,” I said.
“You should be grateful that your mother sent you to live with the monks,” Grandmother Mei chided me, perhaps hearing some sorrow in my voice when I spoke of my family. “She saved you from a life of backbreaking work, toil and sorrow. Instead, you have learned to read and write, haven’t you? And now you travel the world!” She snorted. “It is a lucky thing for you. I only wish that little Jun were a boy so we could send her with you, away from this life.”
I looked at Jun, who blushed and looked away. “Some say that the Amitabha Buddha’s most dedicated disciples were his wife and consorts,” Satindra volunteered, speaking slowly in the scholarly language of the Han nobles.
Grandmother Mei guffawed her skepticism. “The day women are allowed to become monks will be the day we learn to piss standing up,” she declared and then laughed wildly, slapping her small hand against her thigh. Bao-Yun and Jun looked uncomfortable, but smiled obediently at the old woman’s coarse joke. Wheezing with laughter, Grandmother Mei requested tea and little Jun hopped up and began preparing tea for all of us.
“Tell me more about your Amitabha,” Grandmother Mei demanded and, while Jun ground tea leaves and boiled water, Satindra and I – Satindra speaking in the scholar’s tongue and I translating some of the unfamiliar concepts into a more familiar dialect – did our best to explain the dharma.
While we talked, Jun placed an earthenware bowl of tea in her grandmother’s little hands, and the old woman sipped and made appreciative sounds. “It’s too bad neither of you needs a wife; little Jun is an expert tea-maker, already, and she is barely ten years old! Think what a woman she will be in just a few years!”
Satindra and I blushed and looked at the floor. Some orders of Ambitabha’s followers took consorts, but ours did not; we were humble monks dedicated to poverty and chastity. Grandmother Mei chuckled at our modest reaction to her words and said, “Did your mother make tea like this, Little Brother?”
“You should call me ‘Wen’, Grandmother Mei,” I replied. “And yes, she did. I remember the scent of it.” And it was true: the scent of the mint leaves crushed with the tea leaves brought back memories of my childhood and the bamboo house where I had slept chest-to-back with my brothers.
“Then the village of your birth is near here, Brother Wen. You will always know what part of the Han Empire you are in by the taste of the tea, because the leaves taste differently and are prepared differently wherever you go.” She took another sip and sighed contentedly.
My memories stirred as Jun placed a bowl of tea in my own hands. The minty scent and warmth of the pottery clasped in my hands brought me back to that dark, warm bamboo hut with my family. “I don’t remember much about the village, not even the name,” I said softly. “But I do remember a festival, where we burned offerings of tea leaves like this ... the festival of the Jade Crane.”
Grandmother Mei threw up her hands so quickly her tea bowl dropped to the floor, spilling hot liquid across the dirt floor. She shrieked something unintelligible and the eyes that she turned to me were no longer sparkling with kindness and amusement, but rather were full of fear and loathing. Her toothless mouth opened, a black maw, and she made a loud keening sound that raised the hairs on my arms. The change was so abrupt that I had no time to react; no one did. We all just stared at Grandmother Mei for a moment, baffled.
Then the little girl and her mother took action. Bao-Yun put her arms around her mother and began speaking calmly to her, so that gradually, the keening subsided to a low moan. It was still a terrible sound, like the squalling of an infant. Jun, meanwhile, collected the tea bowls from me and Satindra, and began hustling us out of the house.
“What did you say?” Satindra asked, as Jun pushed us from the hut.
“I only said that there was a festival in my village,” I replied. “The festival of the Jade –”
I could not finish this thought, because Grandmother Mei began to shriek again, and little Jun pressed one small hand against my mouth. She shook her head fervently, her narrow eyes so wide that I could see the whites all around her black irises. She pushed us both out of the hut and down the road a little ways, and then ran back into the house.
Satindra and I stood in the dark road for a few minutes, listening to Grandmother Mei’s terrified wailing. It had all happened so quickly that I did not know what to make of it. We stared at each other numbly, then placed our alms bowls back into our robes and began to move down the road, away from the house.
Eventually, the wailing stopped and we heard the sound of footsteps. We turned to see Jun running toward us, a small bag of uncooked rice in her arms. Wordlessly, she pressed the bag into my hands. Her eyes were full of fear, but also compassion, and I thanked her for the generous donation. Then I said, “What did your grandmother say when I mentioned ... the bird?” I asked, careful to avoid using the phrase that had so upset Grandmother Mei.
Jun frowned, licked her lips, and glanced back at the hut, where the firelight spilled out of the open doorway and onto the road. “‘Cursed’,” she said, in a whisper, and the wind seemed to steal the word from her mouth, so that it did not linger, but was whisked away into the night, so that it almost seemed unreal. I wanted her to repeat it, so that I could be sure of what she had said, but instead, she turned and ran back to the house.
“‘Cursed’?” Satindra repeated in the Han dialect. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Yes,” I replied.
To my surprise, Satindra laughed, drawing one arm around my shoulders and patting my back. “Don’t let a superstitious old woman frighten you, Little Brother. Cursed. Ha! If anything, we are blessed. Let’s find a field where we can spend the night.”
We slept under the stars that night and, though I glowered, Satindra remained in high spirits. He detailed the reasons we were lucky: before her fit, Grandmother Mei had blessed us with a generous meal and a chance to share the dharma; the evening was a pleasant temperature, and no storm clouds threatened to interrupt our sleep with rain; we had not been robbed or set upon by criminals; and we knew that soon, we would arrive in the village of my birth, and perhaps even find my family. Two wandering monks could hardly want for more, he said, as we bedded down in a cow field.
The following day, I was melancholic, having slept fitfully. Our morning meditation, where we chanted a mantra as we walked, brought me no comfort. During the hottest part of the day, we rested. Satindra cooked a little of the rice Jun had given us and we ate it slowly, savouring every grain. It tasted of mint and the flavor brought me a confusing jumble of memories.
As we had walked on the Silk Road, we had passed many shrines to local gods. Some of the richest had been statues carved of jade or ivory, housed in pagodas and tended by priests. Travelers had laid offerings of milk, honey, rice, and even meat at these shrines. As we had left the main road, the size of the altars had become less impressive. Every day or so, we passed one of these little shrines, with a tiny, crude stone likeness of some god or another, or simply a collection of pebbles meant to be a marker. There were usually the remains of meager offerings at these smaller shrines, or no offerings at all, because so few travelers passed them.
Now, as we walked farther from the Silk Road and Grandmother Mei’s house, the character of these shrines changed. Though we had ignored the altars previously, I now felt compelled to look at the small statues. The other shrines along this country road had been simple cairns or had little hand-carved animals made of a common stone or wood, something that would have no value to thieves. But the afternoon after our encounter with Grandmother Mei, we passed a shrine with a statuette, carved with great detail, out of what appeared to be some kind of jade.
I crouched in front of the shrine, staring at the dark statuette it housed in what might have been half of a huge, stone bowl, turned on its side. The little statue was black, and mostly in shadow, but when the sunlight hit it just right, it looked green, like the darkest jade. The details of the statue were difficult to discern because it was so dark, but the shape was not human, nor that of any animal I had seen before. I got the impression of bulbous eyes and an elongated head and many arms, like the Hindu goddess Kali, but no matter how I squinted, I could not determine the exact features of the statue. Finally, thinking that perhaps my fingers could make sense of what perplexed my eyes, I reached out and ran my fingers over the stone.
I expected the cool hardness of jade, but instead, the stone was warm, perhaps from the sunlight, and the texture was wet and slippery. I jerked my hand away and looked at my fingers, expecting them to be wet; they were dry, though the sensation of the oily stone remained. I did not want to touch the thing again and could not stand looking at it, so I backed away from the shrine and hurried to catch up to Satindra, who squatted further down the road, waiting for me.
“What’s wrong, Little Brother?” he asked as I joined him, still staring at my fingers. They felt tainted, somehow, as if I had touched something unclean. I had the urge to wipe them on my robes, though they were not actually dirty.
“There is something wrong with the statue in that shrine,” I told him, scowling.
Satindra chuckled. “I think that today, you are determined to find something wrong with everything,” he replied. Thinking that perhaps he was correct, I sighed and resigned myself to our daily trudge.
We walked for several days more, each day passing more of the shrines with the black-green soapstone idols. The road became increasingly pitted and overgrown with weeds, narrowing down to almost nothing, but the shrines seemed only to grow larger, each statue taller than the last.
Even stranger, the number of people we saw along the road dwindled as the idols to the local god grew larger. The fields once full of workers were now empty, the rice overgrown and unkempt, as if the crops had simply been forgotten. The fields that had gone on forever now ended in forest, and the forest was reclaiming those fields.
Eventually, we came upon some simple bamboo huts much like Grandmother Mei’s, but these were empty and beyond them, the forest was dark and forbidding. The remains of cooking fires were still smoldering, in some cases, and half-finished cups of tea sat beside dirty rice bowls that swarmed with ants. After investigating one of these houses, I turned to Satindra and said, “It’s as if everyone has just disappeared. This is unnatural. I don’t like it.”
Satindra tried to laugh off my fears with his usual grace, but failed. His laughter sounded hollow and misplaced in the silent, empty village. “Don’t worry, Brother Wen. I’m sure there is some explanation. We should find a place to sleep.”
Though we were not superstitious men, Satindra and I did not sleep in the village. We ate the last of our rice in a field nearby, where we could to see the huts without being too close to them.
Every night since Grandmother Mei’s, I had slept poorly, my dreams fraught with screaming old women and huge black birds with sharply curved beaks. Now the birds dripped oil and opened their mouths to shriek with Grandmother Mei’s raspy voice, “Cursed! Cursed!” I woke in the night, sweating and tangled in my robes. I looked about for Satindra and found him crouched beside me, awake and alert despite the late hour. His eyes were so wide that I could see the whites even in the darkness that shrouded us.
I followed his gaze to the abandoned village. There were lights moving among the previously empty huts. I started to say something to him, to suggest that we go speak with the villagers, but he silenced me with a hand squeezing my arm. Never had I seen him like this, with every nerve taut and straining, so I bit my tongue. After some time, the lights moved away and Satindra turned to me.
His eyes looked doubly huge with his face so dark. The night around us was eerily silent, not even the wind stirring the fallow rice fields. “I don’t think those were people,” he whispered.
“What do you mean?” I replied, squatting beside him in the dirt so that we were almost at eye-level.
“I saw their faces. They didn’t look right.” He shook his head emphatically.
“What did you see?”
Satindra swallowed hard, as if something large and ill-tasting were caught in his throat. His huge eyes remained fixed on my face, unblinking and intense. “Dakini.”
Dakini is an ancient word that refers to an otherworldly, inhuman being: a god or a demon.
“We should go,” I said.
To my horror, Satindra shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. Though his hands were shaking, he stood, his eyes still fixed unswervingly on me. “This is why we were sent here, Brother Wen. Your people need to hear the dharma. The Guru sent us here to free your people.”
I shook my head and stood up, too. Satindra was a full head taller than I, so I still stared up at him. “No, Brother Satindra! The Guru could not have foreseen this! We cannot go alone; it’s too dangerous. We should return to the monastery ....”
He interrupted me by gripping my arms hard and giving me a little shake, as one would a hysterical woman. “You would dare to question the enlightened Guru?” He released me abruptly and I staggered back.
Satindra whirled away from me and began walking resolutely toward the village.
I watched him for a few moments, debating what to do. The night air seemed to rush into the space left by Satindra’s quick departure, enveloping me in dark, cool silence. And then, beyond the quiet of the abandoned village and the overgrown fields, I heard a sound, faint but persistent. At first, I could not identify it. Then I thought it was the buzzing of insects. Finally, I realized that it was human voices, chanting a repetitive mantra.
I ran after Satindra.
The tracks of the dakini were easy to spot; they had not bothered to hide their movements, and we followed their trail of muddy footprints and broken branches deep into the dark, dense forest, where trees and bushes tugged at our robes and we tripped over huge roots. Here, we lost the trail, because the darkness was too omnipresent, but now we could hear the chanting and the high-pitched, frantic notes of a zither.
The people were in the center of a clearing, where they sang in the darkness without benefit of a fire. I couldn’t see the zither player in the darkness, but I knew he was off to the right somewhere, because I could hear the slithering, off-key notes. He played no tune, just as the chant seemed to have no rhythm. I had thought that perhaps, upon approaching the chanters, we would be able to discern their words, but I realized, as we approached, that the words were gibberish, meaningless, though they repeated them with conviction.
In the dim moonlight, we could see that the villagers were mostly naked, though a few still wore shreds of clothing. They were turned away from us, kneeling on the ground, facing something at the center of the clearing. I had to peek around Satindra’s bulk to get a glimpse of them – it was impossible to walk two abreast in the close forest – but I could see that a few were dancing ecstatically to the tuneless music. The din was horrible and I covered my ears to drown out what I could. It made me feel confused and hopeless, as if the veil between sanity and insanity could be breached by this combination of sounds.
There was a stench that made my eyes water. It smelled like rotten meat, sour milk, feces, and blood all together. I fought the urge to vomit.
Satindra stopped in front of me and I ran into his back. I clawed at him, trying to make him move so that I could look at the people in the clearing, but he was frozen in place. Standing on my toes, gripping his shoulder, I was able to see a little around him, where the moonlight illuminated the dancers. For a moment, I glimpsed with terrible clarity the twisted bodies, arms and limbs akimbo in unnatural positions, scattered on the ground. Among them were the tiny feet of children and the gnarled hands of the arthritic elderly. The dancers moved around and on top of these motionless forms, seemingly unaware of them, naked bodies gyrating horribly, eyes wide and mouths distorted.
Beyond the dancers was the thing they worshiped. It was so tall that it blotted out the stars behind it, dwarfing the huge trees, and I squinted to make out its features. Was that a long, crane-like neck or arms? Was that a deformed head or a stooped back? Like the statues in the altars along the road, it was a thing that could not be seen completely, as if it undulated without moving.
Suddenly, Satindra turned and wrapped his arms around me, crushing me to his chest. His hand held my head against his shoulder. He mumbled something as he held me hard against his robes. I didn’t struggle at first, thinking that perhaps he was frightened and hugging me against him in fear, but soon, I ran out of breath. Crushed against his chest, I could not inhale, so I fought him. Taller and stronger than I, Satindra won easily and, as I thrashed against him, he chanted softly in my ear, “Don’t look, Little Brother. Don’t look at it!”
I awoke some time later back in the village. Satindra sat beside me, guarding me from the possessed villagers lest they return, his eyes wide and unblinking as he stared into the darkness. When I asked him how long I had been unconscious, whether we should go back to the monastery, whether we had any food, his only reply was to repeat his bleak chant: “Don’t look, Little Brother. Don’t look at it!”
These were the only words Satindra spoke throughout our journey back to the monastery in Gandhara. The trek was dismal. Satindra was no longer an inspirational young monk, but instead, a mad, sorrowful man who sometimes screamed at strangers and other times wept uncontrollably for hours.The weather turned foul and we trudged through mud up to our calves. We both grew pathetically scrawny, bones showing through our skin, but the other travelers shunned us because Satindra still moaned his disturbing mantra. We survived on will alone and the rare, meager donations of those truly generous followers of Amitabha who knew their duty, even if the monks to whom they gave alms were dirty and mad.
We arrived on the Guru’s doorstep shells of our former selves. The Guru could get nothing sensible out of Satindra, of course, so eventually, he came to me to ask what had befallen us in the terrible wilds of the Empire of Han. I could make no words in reply.
Now, knowing that death awaits me soon, at last, I can write about the events that occurred, though they seem so much like a dream after so many years. Even now, however, there are parts of the story that I cannot reveal, which I will take to the funeral pyre. These horrors destroyed poor Brother Satindra, who died muttering his cursed phrase to the last, mere days after our arrival in Gandhara. He left me alone to carry the burden of the horror and now, at last, I will be free of it, for perhaps in death, I will at last no longer see the jade crane when I close my eyes, blotting out the stars with its vastness, or hear the chanting of the mad acolytes dancing naked at its feet. There was a time when I sought the peace of enlightenment, but now I seek only the silence of death, where these terrors may be obliterated in nothingness.
Sarah Hans is a resident of the Airship Archon, currently docked in Columbus, Ohio, though on the weekends, she can be found at science fiction conventions across the Midwest. She primarily writes horror and steampunk stories, and you can follow her convention schedule, or read more about her work, at www.sarahhans.com.
The author speaks: Many of Lovecraft’s stories explore the idea of outsiders from a more-civilized realm, often Men of Science, exploring a more primitive, less-enlightened world, where they find themselves doomed by ancient and unfathomable gods. I used Buddhist monks because I am, myself, a Buddhist and I rarely have the opportunity to write about Buddhism in a horror/science fiction/fantasy setting. Inescapable insanity is my favourite of the horror themes Lovecraft mastered and this story was born as an attempt to combine all these elements.