The Running Grave, page 24
‘You four,’ said Jiang, pointing at Robin and three others, ‘you get the harness off the horses, then you rub them down and brush their feathers. The rest will clean the harness when it comes off.’
Jiang gave the grooming group brushes and combs and left them to their job, disappearing into the stable, while behind them, those trying to entice the pigs into the sty called and cajoled, shaking their buckets of food.
‘Did he say feathers?’ asked green-haired Penny, puzzled.
‘He means the hair over their hooves,’ Robin explained.
A yell from the field made them all look round: widowed Marion Huxley had slipped in the mud and fallen. The pigs had charged those holding the buckets: country-born Robin, whose uncle was a farmer, could have told them they should have put the food in the trough and opened the gate between sty and field, rather than trying to lead the pigs in, Pied Piper style.
There was pleasure in doing a physical task, and not being bombarded with questions. The harness they removed from the horses was very heavy; Robin and Penny struggled to take it into the stable where some of their group sat waiting to clean it. The Shire horses stood over eighteen hands each, and took a lot of grooming; Robin had to stand on a crate to reach their broad backs and their ears. She was becoming increasingly hungry. She’d wrongly assumed they’d be given something to eat upon arrival.
By the time the inept pig-wranglers had succeeded in persuading their temporary charges back into their sty and both the horses and their harness had been cleaned to Jiang’s satisfaction, the red sun was sinking slowly over the fields. Becca now returned. Robin hoped she was about to announce dinner; she felt hollow with hunger.
‘Thank you for your service,’ said the smiling Becca, putting her hands together and bowing as before. ‘Now follow me to temple, please!’
Becca led them back past the dining hall, the laundry and the library, then into the central courtyard, where the Drowned Prophet’s fountain was glinting red and orange in the sunset. Fire Group followed Becca up the marble steps and through doors that now stood open.
The interior of the temple was every bit as impressive as the outside. Its inner walls were of muted gold, with many scarlet creatures – phoenixes, dragons, horses, roosters and tigers – cavorting together as unlikely playmates. The floor was of shining black marble and the benches, which were cushioned in red and appeared to be of black lacquer, were arranged around a central, raised pentagon-shaped stage.
Robin’s eyes travelled naturally upwards, towards the high ceiling. Halfway up the high walls, the space narrowed, because a balcony ran all the way around the temple, behind which were regularly spaced, shadowy arched recesses, which reminded Robin of boxes at a theatre. The five painted prophets in their respective robes of orange, scarlet, blue, yellow and white stared down at worshippers from the ceiling.
A woman in long, amber-beaded orange robes was standing on the raised stage, waiting for them. Her eyes were shadowed by the long curtains of black hair that fell to below her waist; only the long, pointed nose was clearly visible. Only as Robin drew nearer did she see that one of the woman’s very dark, narrow eyes was set noticeably higher than the other, giving her a strange lopsided stare, and for reasons Robin couldn’t have explained, a tremor passed through her, such as she might have experienced on glimpsing something pale and slimy watching her from the depths of a rockpool.
‘N ho,’ she said, in a deep voice. ‘Welcome.’
She made a wordless gesture of dismissal at Becca, who left, closing the temple doors quietly behind her.
‘Please, sit down,’ said the woman to Fire Group, indicating benches directly in front of her. When all the recruits had taken their seats, she said,
‘My name is Mazu Wace, but church members call me Mama Mazu. My husband is Jonathan Wace—’
Marion Huxley let out a tiny sigh.
‘—founder of the Universal Humanitarian Church. You have already rendered us service – for which I thank you.’
Mazu pressed her hands together, prayer style, and bowed as they’d just seen Becca do. The crookedly set, shadowed eyes were darting from face to face.
‘I’m about to introduce you to one of the meditation techniques we use here to strengthen the spiritual self, because we cannot fight the ills of the world until we are able to control our false selves, which can be as destructive as anything we may encounter outside.’
Mazu began to pace in front of them, her robes fanning out behind her, glittering in the light from hanging lanterns. Around her neck, on a black cord, she wore a flat mother-of-pearl fish.
‘Who here has sometimes been prey to shame, or guilt?’
Everyone raised their hands.
‘Who here sometimes feels anxious and overwhelmed?’
All put their hands up again.
‘Who sometimes feels hopeless in the face of world issues like climate change, wars and rising inequality?’
The entire group raised their hands for a third time.
‘It’s perfectly natural to feel those things,’ said Mazu, ‘but such emotions hamper our spiritual growth and our ability to effect change.
‘I’m now going to teach you a simple meditation exercise,’ said Mazu. ‘Here in the church, we call it the joyful meditation. I want you all to stand up…’
They did so.
‘Spread out a little – you should be at least an arm’s length apart…’
There was some shuffling.
‘We begin with arms hanging loose by your sides… now, slowly… slowly… raise your arms, and as you do so, take in a deep breath and hold it, while your hands join over your head.’
When everyone had clasped their hands over their heads, Mazu said,
‘And exhale, slowly lowering your arms… and now smile. Massage your jaw as you do so. Feel the muscles’ tightness. Keep smiling!’
A tiny gust of nervous laughter passed through the group.
‘That’s good,’ said Mazu, staring down at them all, and she smiled again, as humourlessly as before. Her skin was so pale, her teeth looked yellow by contrast. ‘And now… I want you to laugh.’
Another ripple of laughter ran through the group.
‘That’s it!’ said Mazu. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re faking at first. Just laugh. Come on, now!’
A couple of recruits forced faked laughs, which elicited real ones from their companions. Robin could hear her own fake laughter over the apparently sincere giggles of green-haired Penny.
‘Come on now,’ said Mazu, looking down at Robin. ‘Laugh for me.’
Robin laughed more loudly, and catching the eye of a mousey-haired youth who was determinedly, though very insincerely, guffawing, found herself amused and broke into real laughter. The infectious sound made her neighbours join in, and soon, Robin doubted whether there was a single person not genuinely laughing.
‘Keep it up!’ said Mazu, waving her hand around at them, as though conducting an orchestra. ‘Keep laughing!’
For how long the group laughed, Robin didn’t know; perhaps only five minutes, perhaps ten. Every time she found her face aching, and reverted to forced chuckles, she found genuine laughter overtaking her once more.
At last, Mazu raised a single finger to her lips and the laughing stopped. The group stood, slightly breathless, still grinning.
‘You feel that?’ said Mazu. ‘You have control over your own moods and your own state of mind. Grasp that, and you have placed your foot on the path that leads to pure spirit. Once there, you’ll unlock power you never knew you had…
‘And now we kneel.’
The command took everyone by surprise, but all obeyed and instinctively closed their eyes.
‘Blessed Divinity,’ intoned Mazu, ‘we thank you for the wellspring of joy you have placed in all of us, which the materialist world tries so hard to extinguish. As we explore our own power, we honour yours, which lies forever beyond our full understanding. Each of us is spirit before flesh, containing a fragment of the force that animates the universe. We thank you for today’s lesson and for this moment of gladness.
‘And now, rise,’ said Mazu.
Robin got to her feet with the others. Mazu descended from the stage, the train of her robes rippling over the black marble steps, and led them towards the closed temple doors. As she approached them, she pointed a pale finger at the handles. They turned of their own accord and the doors slowly opened. Robin assumed someone else had opened them from outside, but there was nobody there.
27
Thunder comes resounding out of the earth:
The image of ENTHUSIASM.
Thus the ancient kings made music
In order to honour merit,
And offered it with splendour
To the Supreme Deity…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘Did you see that?’ breathed Penny in Robin’s ear, as they descended the temple steps. ‘She opened the doors without touching them!’
‘I know,’ said Robin, carefully astonished. ‘What was that?’
She was certain the door opening must have been a trick, using some kind of a hidden mechanism, but the thing had looked unnervingly convincing.
Ahead, in the otherwise deserted courtyard, stood Becca Pirbright. Glancing back, Robin saw that Mazu had retreated inside the temple again.
‘How was the Joyful Meditation?’ Becca asked.
There was a small chorus of ‘it was great’s and ‘amazing’s.
‘Before we go to dinner – ’ thank God, thought Robin, ‘– I’d like to just say a word about another of our spiritual practices at the UHC.
‘This,’ said Becca, gesturing towards the statue in the pool, ‘is the Drowned Prophet, who in life was called Daiyu Wace. I actually had the privilege of knowing her, and I witnessed her performing extraordinary spiritual feats.
‘Each of our prophets, when alive, exemplified a principle of our church. The Drowned Prophet teaches us, firstly, that death may come to any of us, at any time, so we should hold ourselves always in spiritual readiness to rejoin the spirit world. Secondly, her self-sacrifice shows us the importance of obedience to the Blessed Divinity. Thirdly, she proves the reality of life after death, because she continues to move between the earthly and spiritual planes.
‘Whenever we pass her pool, we kneel, anoint ourselves with her water, and acknowledge her teachings by saying, “The Drowned Prophet will bless all who worship her.” By which we do not mean that Daiyu is a goddess. She merely embodies the pure spirit and the higher realm. I invite you now to kneel at the pool and anoint yourselves before dinner.’
Tired and hungry as they were, nobody refused.
‘The Drowned Prophet will bless all who worship her,’ muttered Robin.
‘All right, Fire Group, follow me!’ Becca said, smiling, when all had made the tribute to the Drowned Prophet, and she led them back towards the dining hall, Robin aware of the cool spot of water on her forehead as the breeze hit it.
Fire Group was the last to enter the room. Robin estimated that a hundred people were already sitting at the tables, although there was no sign of any small children, who presumably had been fed earlier. Free spaces were dotted about, so the members of her group were forced to split up and find places wherever they could. Robin scanned the room for Will Edensor, finally spotting him at a crowded table which had no free spaces, so she took a seat between two strangers instead.
‘Here for your Week of Service?’ said a smiling young man with wavy blond hair.
‘Yes,’ said Robin.
‘I thank you for your service,’ he said immediately, pressing his hands together and performing a little bow.
‘I – don’t know what to say back to that,’ said Robin, and he laughed.
‘The response is, “And I for yours.”’
‘With the bow?’ asked Robin, and he laughed again.
‘With the bow.’
Robin pressed her hands together, bowed and said,
‘And I for yours.’
Before either could speak again, music started from hidden speakers: David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. The blond-haired man whooped and got to his feet, as did nearly everyone else. Cheers broke out, as Jonathan and Mazu Wace entered the room, hand in hand. Robin spotted Marion Huxley, the undertaker’s widow, pressing her hands to her face as though she’d just seen a rock star. Jonathan waved at the excited church members, while Mazu wore a gracious smile, the train of her robes sliding over the paved floor. There were many cries of ‘Papa J!’ as the pair climbed up to the top table, where Taio Wace and Becca Pirbright were already sitting. Glancing around, Robin saw Jiang sitting in front of his clean tin plate among the ordinary members. The similarity of Jiang’s and Mazu’s narrow, dark eyes made Robin suspect that he was, at the very least, Taio’s half-brother. As she watched, Jiang’s eye began to twitch uncontrollably again, and he concealed it swiftly with his hand.
Mazu took her seat at the top table, but Jonathan walked in front of it, hands raised, gesturing for the church members to settle down. Robin was once again struck by his striking good looks, and how little he looked like a man in his mid-sixties.
‘Thank you,’ he said with his self-deprecating smile, wearing a wireless microphone that amplified his voice over hidden speakers. ‘Thank you… it’s good to be home.’
Will Edensor, who was easy to spot given his height, was smiling and cheering with the rest of the room, and for a moment, remembering Will’s dying mother, she found herself completely in sympathy with James Edensor, who’d called Will an idiot.
‘We shall replenish our material bodies, and then we’ll talk!’ said Jonathan.
More cheers and more applause followed. Jonathan took his seat between Mazu and Becca Pirbright.
Kitchen workers now appeared from a side door, wheeling along large metal vats, from which they ladled food onto the tin plates. The four at the top table, Robin noticed, were being brought china plates already full of food.
When her turn came, Robin received a dollop of brown sludge that seemed to comprise overcooked vegetables, followed by a ladleful of noodles. The vegetables had been flavoured with too much turmeric and the noodles had an overcooked, gluey consistency. Robin ate as slowly as she could, trying to fool her stomach into believing it had consumed more calories than it had, because she knew the nutritional value of what they were eating was very low.
Robin’s two young male neighbours kept up a steady stream of chat, asking her name, where she was from and what had attracted her to the church. She soon found out that the young man with wavy blond hair had been at the University of East Anglia, which had hosted one of Papa J’s meetings. The other, who was wearing a buzz cut, had been to one of the church-run addiction centres and been recruited there.
‘Have you seen anything, yet?’ the latter asked Robin.
‘You mean the tour of the—?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I mean – you know. Pure spirit.’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, cottoning on. ‘I saw Mazu make the temple doors open, just by pointing at them.’
‘Did you think it was a trick?’
‘Well,’ said Robin cautiously, ‘I don’t know. I mean, it could have—’
‘It’s not a trick,’ said the young man. ‘You think it is at first, then you realise it’s real. You should see the things Papa J can do. You wait. You think at first it must all be a load of bull, then you start seeing what it means, being pure spirit. It blows your effing mind. Have you read The Answer?’
‘No,’ said Robin, ‘I—’
‘She hasn’t read The Answer,’ said the man with the buzz cut, leaning forwards to address Robin’s other neighbour.
‘Oh, dude, you’ve got to read The Answer,’ said the blond man, laughing. ‘Wow.’
‘I’ll lend you my copy,’ said the man with the buzz cut. ‘Only I want it back, because Papa J’s written something in there for me, OK?’
‘OK, thanks very much,’ said Robin.
‘Wow,’ he said, shaking his head and laughing, ‘Can’t believe you haven’t read The Answer. Like, it gives you the tools and it explains – I can’t do it as well as Papa J, you need to read his actual words. But I can tell you first-hand, there’s life after death, and a spiritual war raging here on earth, and if we can win—’
‘Yeah,’ said the wavy blond young man, who now looked serious. ‘If we win.’
‘We have to,’ said the other intensely. ‘We have to.’
Through a gap between the two diners opposite her, Robin spotted the shaven-headed Louise, who was eating very slowly, and kept glancing up at the top table, ignoring the chatter of those on either side of her. There were many other middle-aged women dotted around the hall, Robin saw, and most of them looked like Louise, as though they’d long since abandoned any interest in their appearance, their faces deeply lined and their hair cropped short, though none of them were entirely shaven-headed like Louise. Watching her, Robin remembered what Kevin had said about his mother being in love with Jonathan Wace. Had the feeling survived all these years of servitude? Had it been worth the loss of her son?
One of the people who came to clear away the plates was the teenaged girl Robin had noticed earlier, with the long, mousey, sun-bleached hair and large, anxious eyes. When the plates had been cleared away, more kitchen workers appeared with stacks of metal bowls on their trolleys. These proved to be full of stewed apple, which Robin found very bitter, doubtless because refined sugar was forbidden by the church. Nevertheless, she ate it all, while her neighbours talked across her of holy war.
Robin had no idea what time it was. The sky outside the window was black, and it had taken a long time to dish out food for a hundred people. Finally the bowls, too, were cleared away, and somebody dimmed the overhead lights, though leaving the top table spot lit.
At once, those at the trestle tables began clapping and cheering again, some of them even banging their tin water mugs on the table. Jonathan Wace stood up, walked around the table, his microphone switched back on, and once again calmed the crowd by making a dampening motion with his hands.
