rough bandit lifestyle the much-needed touch of a woman.”
Tet Sang snorted. “That’s exactly what you’re not giving. How many meals have you made for us? I mean,” he said, as Guet Imm opened her mouth, “meals we can eat. Food we have to throw away doesn’t count.”
Guet Imm frowned. “Nobody likes a pedant, brother.”
Her eyes flicked towards the pack on Tet Sang’s back, containing the goods he was to deliver. She seemed to derive inspiration from it.
“It’s because I’m a nun, isn’t it?” she said. “You’re scared my stomach is too delicate for your work. You don’t have to worry. I understand what I signed up for.”
Tet Sang shook his head. “You have an overblown idea of what we do.”
Guet Imm looked unconvinced. “So, you’re saying those”—she pointed at his pack—“are completely legal goods? Not even a little bit contraband?”
“What do you want with a group like us, anyway?” said Tet Sang, ignoring this. “There’s a war on. Decent lady like you, you should be working in a shop or a house somewhere, with rice on the table and a bed to sleep in at night. Not on the road with some gangsters who’ve run out of options.”
It was the first thing he’d said that had a real impact. Guet Imm’s head whipped around, her mouth falling open. He’d begun to hope he’d got through to her when she said, “There’s a war on?”
Tet Sang stared back, equally nonplussed. “You didn’t know?”
“Of course not,” sputtered Guet Imm. It was the most flustered he’d ever seen her. “Does everybody know? All the brothers?”
“Of course everybody knows, how do you not notice there’s a war—” Tet Sang cut himself off. “Wait. How long were you in seclusion?”
“I went in when I was fifteen,” said Guet Imm. “Roughly ten years ago.”
“You came out when?”
The light went out of the nun’s face. She said, “They burnt the tokong in the second month.”
It was the fifth month now, so three months had passed. Tet Sang did an internal calculation. The Reformist cause for which the bandits fought had begun to flower in the Tang motherland long before it travelled south to the peninsula. Reformism had become established among the Tang peoples in the Southern Seas only a decade or so ago. Local Reformists hadn’t been considered bandits until after the Yamatese invasion that had put the Protector to flight. For a time, the Protectorate had even supported the Reformists’ resistance against the Yamatese occupation, supplying the Reformists with weapons and military training.
It was only when the Protector retook the peninsula upon the withdrawal of the Yamatese army that the decisive breach had occurred. No longer in need of the Reformists to fight Yamato’s soldiers, the Protectorate had outlawed the movement and begun its purges—jailing Reformist leaders and resettling populations under suspicion of sympathizing with Reformism.
Entire Tang villages were herded onto swampy, infertile land and subjected to armed surveillance, curfews, mass deportations. As for the monastic orders, they had always been centres for Tang education and community. The fact that the orders were prohibited by the rules of their religion from adopting any political affiliation made no difference to the Protector. He was not interested in what the votaries believed but in what they did, and it could not be denied that the orders fed, healed and sheltered Reformists, as they were called upon to do for any ragged outcast who came to them. This was enough for the Protectorate: the Tang orders were being systematically burnt out of their tokong.
For all its efforts, the Protectorate had not yet succeeded in eliminating Reformism. The Reformists—bandits now—had gone into the jungle, where they were harder to purge, though the Protectorate was doing its best.
If Guet Imm had been in seclusion for a decade, shut off from news of the world, it perhaps explained why she had not known all this. Still …
“Didn’t you find it weird when your tokong was burnt down?” said Tet Sang. “That’s not the kind of thing that happens in a country at peace.”
“It’s not like I saw who did it,” said Guet Imm, with uncharacteristic shrewishness. “There was nobody left to explain after I got out of my cell. Of course I knew there were problems. But even when I went to town and got a job, nobody talked about a war.”
“Nobody talks about it. It’s not that kind of war.”
“What kind of war is it, then?” said Guet Imm. She looked like she wanted to hit Tet Sang. “A secret war?