Chapter 25: Zau contemplates the future
Zau’s chûn was moored in the turquoise waters off of Po Toi Island south of Hong Kong. Zau, green robe with yellow lining draped around his shoulders sat at the table on the deck, woven shade pulled back, looked upon the gem of an island, peculiar boulders shaped like beasts and monks interspersed with verdant greenery. He wished he could swarm ashore in dragon form as he had done first centuries ago, accept the obeisances of the peasants who lived there, be fed croakers and carp, the health-giving seaweed soup they were renowned for.
But the world did not allow his natural form and natural behaviours any more. He was constrained more and more by cameras in phones, CCTV and, of course, the desecration of the sea. Soon, however, he would reverse his robe, assume the ascendant position his power and venerable age demanded, the yellow no longer a hidden promise but external statement that he was new royalty of a world in which humans had relearned their places, where they once again crouched in the dark in fear of monsters. A world in which their prying technologies no longer ruled, no longer soured the seas against him and his kind, no longer fouled the skies his more distant relatives and friends inhabited as humans walked upon the earth.
He would be the elegist of the technical age of humanity, but his would not be a pandering and insipid mouthful of praises, but a rendering in bleak poetry of the horrors that humans had created, of their arrogant supplanting of their betters and of the fitting punishment that they had received, a punishment of return to being prey, not predator, nomads upon a green earth instead of locusts on a stripped bare plain.
The commerce he had grown to enjoy would diminish, but the bounty of the land and sea would increase ten-fold. No money lenders necessary for his wealth, no computers necessary for the counting and storing of it, no eddies and rapids of finance to navigate. His chûn would return to sail, his Tesla replaced with horse drawn carriages, or perhaps human-drawn ones.
The video screens these humans used would flicker, die, become functionless slabs of glass and plastic. Instead, there would be reredos depicting the revenant pantheon behind altars devoted to more useful forms of worship, reverence devoted to present deities and powers, to creatures whose whims and furies must be satisfied and placated, present puissance preempting the inventive fantasies of imaginative apes.
The opulence of his abode would diminish somewhat. Hot and cold running water, climate control, food preservation with cold, and indirect and flickerless light depended upon the very thing he was going to take away from the world. Some of these he could replace for himself with magical replicas, others with the labour of human slaves and servants, but the attention required to direct them, to ensure that they remained cowed and compliant, to align their will to his comfort would be greater, and the results less perfect. So be it. He had swum a route around the world, in frigid currents under ice and in seas so hot and salty they practically boiled. He would spend more time in his natural form, his muscular, lithe and scaled body ignoring the variances his human simulacrum would find less bearable. Instead of negotiating with humans, occasionally indulging his older appetites, he would dine on their flesh openly again.
A gray sparrow slipped slantwise from the sky, landed upon the cross bar above him, cocked its head at him. He looked up at it, gestured for tea and food to be brought. When the fragrant steam was rising from the tiny cups, he nodded to the bird, and it fell into the chair, a serene and mature Han woman in a cloud-gray pien-fu. She nodded her kau tau, reached for her tea, inhaled a wisp of steam, sipped a tiny sip.
“Old friend, why do you wear the colour of indefinite direction, of lack of luster? Our plans progress. Soon the world will be ours again, seas and sky safe. It is a time for cautious rejoicing, for joy in the rebirth of a world more suitable for us. I would have expected the colours of the earth or the verdant plants upon it, not this colour of discord.”
She sipped her tea again, raised her eyes to his and held them as her garment shifted slowly to bone white, minutes passing in which the countless deaths he was wishing upon feeling and thinking beings were expressed in the only language that she had.
“I do not understand. I will not understand. My daughter’s life is worth a billion of these clever rodents. My ancient right to rule beneath the waves is worth another billion. Your ancestral right to fly skies unvexed by stinging pollutions, not heated into violent storm upon violent storm is worth another billion.”
She merely looked at him, infinite shades of white, the colours of mourning, contracting, withering flowing across her pien-fu.
“This is not a loss, this is a gain. They are not something to mourn, they are something to rule, to cow, to rip into shreds and consume.”
A single tear formed slowly, welled over after an eternity, slid down her ageless cheek. And suddenly, a white sparrow was winging its way across the sea, away from Zau, away from Po Toi, away from life.
Zau was left behind, an old man huddled on a boat in a vast sea, a warming robe over his frail shoulders, a chill upon his heart. He strove to shake free of it, to return to his visions of blood and worship, obeisance and gluttony, but his inner eye saw only shades of white.