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 by spectacles; 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, I thought you 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 souls than 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