Chapter Ten: Source Point Conception — Part 6

The Warrior Past Subtext, Memory Transference: Part 4 . . .

“If you return, it will be as a prisoner of the Temple, and you will live only by the rules of our temple.” Alon said. “Your daughter and the children of your clan are forbidden to you.”

The bugs had left, taking the body of the Priestess with them. She had died, apparently, or she too would have been omitted. “I will force from her the demons, or she will die.” Jaya said.

“You will not touch her, ever. You are forbidden even to suckle her. Your tribe is gone and you are alone. You are alone, Jaya, as I turn my back to you now. Your future, should you choose to have one, is in Jun, as we both know you will bear no more children after her. No one in the temple will have you, after they hear of your vicious nature.” Alon paused, and then added, as a promise he would keep, “Harm to her is harm to yourself.”

Alon knew his daughter would be well cared for in the temple. There were a couple of girls temporarily under the care of the temple priests, both of whom could wet nurse a second child along with their own, to help pay for the care they were receiving. Alon saw to it that Jun suckled from both of them until she was well of age, and Jun had the protection of the priests always around, always watching Jaya, who by order of the Master Alon, would always have a home in the temple, should she want one. Jaya had followed Master Alon, sadly, though for what cruel reasons Alon could not imagine.

If the memories had stopped there Bamboo might have been able to recover, but they didn’t stop coming, and his mind, weakened already by the power of Nikkei’s Sight, collapsed inward, caught in the final indignities of Jun’s childhood perceptions. He bore the weight for Nikkei, who could not stop transmitting even if she wanted to. The thoughts ripped into him as great and terrible pain. The memories tore at Bamboo, continuing despite the pause of moment, the pause between chaos and calm that was ever so much a part of Jun’s life.

Despite the calm of her day-to-day life, Jun was used to being scolded. Her elders were nervous of her abilities, her mother, though forbidden to come near her, was terrified that Jun would become a demon, and all of the adults in her life both worried and praised her in mixed, often unpredictable doses. The child was smarter than others. Her speed and endurance, her grace and skill, and her ability to learn were bordering on prodigal. At such a young age of seven, she was composing music, practicing advanced mantras and kattas with her father, and speaking in three languages. Jun was close to mastery of martial arts training forms that would normally have been out of her reach for years to come.

While her friendship with Swift earned her the respect of the Priesthood, who saw such an alliance as an example of Jun’s ingenious linguistic skill, it drove her mother to new levels of hate and loathing. Jaya, whom Jun suspected was crazy, hated Swift. Jun whistled the Bug language as if it were her own, would compose pictures of light, showing the Bug where to dance to make the pictures happen. Through it all, her father encouraged her, despite the concerns of others. One evening, while Jun practiced the protective shapes with Swift, forming the basic grids of protection that would keep what the Bugs called ‘history’ from harming her, calm turned to chaos.

Jaya had been watching Jun slowly gain the forbidden knowledge, and on that night she could control her hatred for her daughter no longer. Jun remembered the glyph of protection even as her mother beat her, and using her limited focus, did the best she could to protect herself. The defenses worked, but not directly, as Jun had expected. Her glyph sent a signal of energy to her father, and urged Swift’s kind to come to her aid as well. The sight and sound of the glyph merely enraged Jaya to further violence. Swift was confused not only by Jun’s call for help, but by the need for it. He was too young and inexperienced with hume psychology to understand Jaya’s irrational behavior. The pictures in Jun’s head were coming faster now, and with more detail than Swift had ever imagined possible. Swift was trying to ask her questions that Jun was too young to have an answer for, and the picture of the glyph simply kept getting louder.

This was not the first such attack by Jaya. Many years before, Jun had been caught by her mother talking to a ghost. Jaya had watched for some time to be sure they were talking, to be sure that it wasn’t an imaginary friend. Jaya became spiteful then, wanting to destroy the child, and outwardly blamed Alon’s blood for the spawning of a demon. It had taken a swift, vicious strike from Alon to stop the beating in its tracks. Jaya had spent a good amount of time in the hospital, her ribs broken. Jaya’s nose had never healed quite right from Alon’s one lost moment of rage, and Alon had felt, in that moment, that his chance at enlightenment might well have been taken from him. This time, Alon was too far away from initial confrontation to arrive early into the beating.