She took up a pile of colouring sheets.
‘Yew can do us a nice picture of a prophet,’ she informed the class, and she passed half the pile to Robin to hand out. ‘Thass mine,’ Shawna added carelessly, pointing to a colourless shrimp of a girl, before barking ‘git back on yer chair!’ at Qing, who started to wail. ‘Ignore ’er,’ Shawna advised Robin. ‘She’s gotta learn, that one.’
So Robin handed out colouring sheets, all of which featured a line drawing of a prophet of the UHC. The Stolen Prophet’s noose, which Robin might have expected to be omitted from colouring pictures for such young children, hung proudly around his neck. When she passed Qing’s desk she surreptitiously bent down, prised the plasticine off the floor and handed it back to the little girl, whose tears somewhat abated.
Moving among the children to offer encouragement and sharpen pencils, Robin found herself still more disturbed by their behaviour. Now that she paid them individual attention, they were unnervingly ready to be affectionate to her, even though she was a complete stranger. One little girl climbed into Robin’s lap unasked; others played with her hair or cuddled her arm. Robin found their craving for the kind of loving closeness that was forbidden by the church pitiful and distressing.
‘Stop that,’ Shawna told Robin from the front of the class. ‘Thass material possessiveness.’
So Robin gently disengaged herself from the clinging children and moved instead to examine some of the pictures pinned up on the wall, some of which had clearly been drawn by older students, as their subject matter was discernible. Most depicted daily life at Chapman Farm, and she recognised the tower like a giant chess piece which was visible on the horizon.
One picture caught Robin’s attention. It was captioned Aks Tre and showed a large tree with what appeared to be a hatchet drawn on the base of its trunk. She was still looking at this picture, which had evidently been drawn recently given the freshness of the paper, when the classroom door opened behind her.
Turning, Robin saw Mazu, who was wearing long scarlet robes. Total silence fell inside the classroom. The children appeared frozen.
‘I sent Vivienne to the stables to fetch Rowena,’ said Mazu quietly, ‘and I was told you’d removed her from the task I set her.’
‘Oi was told I could choose moi own helper,’ said Shawna, who looked suddenly terrified.
‘From your own group,’ said Mazu. Her calm voice belied the expression of her thin white face with its crooked near-black eyes. ‘Not from any other group.’
‘Oi’m sorry,’ whispered Shawna. ‘I thort—’
‘You can’t think, Shawna. You’ve proven that time and again. But you’ll be made to think.’
Mazu’s gaze ranged over the seated children, alighting on Qing.
‘Cut her hair,’ she told Shawna. ‘I’m tired of seeing that mess. Rowena,’ she said, now looking directly at Robin for the first time, ‘come with me.’
53
A yang line develops below two yin lines and presses upward forcibly. This movement is so violent that it arouses terror…
The I Ching or Book of Changes
Light-headed with fear, Robin crossed the classroom and followed Mazu outside. She wanted to apologise, to tell Mazu she’d had no idea she was transgressing by agreeing to accompany Shawna to the classroom, but she feared unwittingly making her predicament worse.
Mazu paused, a few steps outside the classroom, and turned to look at Robin, who also halted. This was physically the closest the two women had ever been and Robin now realised that, like Taio, Mazu didn’t seem to care much for washing. She could smell her body odour, which was poorly masked by a heavy incense perfume. Mazu said nothing, but simply looked at Robin with her dark, crookedly set eyes, and the latter felt obliged to break the silence.
‘I – I’m really sorry. I didn’t realise Shawna didn’t have the authority to take me from the stables.’
Mazu continued to stare at her without speaking, and Robin again felt a strange, visceral fear tinged with revulsion that couldn’t be entirely explained away by the power the woman held in the church. Niamh Doherty had described Mazu as a large spider; Robin herself had seen her as some malign, slimy thing lurking in a rockpool; yet neither quite captured her strangeness. Robin felt now as though she was staring into a yawning abyss of which the depths were unseeable.
She assumed Mazu expected something more than an apology, but Robin had no idea what it was. Then she heard a rustle of fabric. Glancing down, she saw that Mazu had raised the hem of her robe a few inches to reveal a dirty, sandalled foot. Robin looked back up into those strange, mismatched eyes. A hysterical impulse to laugh rose in her – Mazu couldn’t, surely, be expecting Robin to kiss her foot, as the girls who’d let the toddler escape from the dormitory had done? – but it died at the look on Mazu’s face.
For perhaps five seconds, Robin and Mazu stared at each, and Robin knew this was a test, and that to ask aloud whether Mazu genuinely wanted this tribute would be as dangerous as revealing her disgust or her incredulity.
Just do it.
Robin knelt, bent quickly over the foot, with its black toenails, grazed it with her lips and then stood up again.
Mazu gave no sign that she’d even noticed the tribute, but dropped her robes and walked on as though nothing had happened.
Robin felt shaken and humiliated. She glanced around to see whether anyone had witnessed what had just happened. She tried to imagine what Strike would say, if he’d seen her, and felt another wave of embarrassment pass over her. How could she ever explain why she’d done it? He’d think she was mad.
At Daiyu’s pool, Robin knelt and mumbled the usual observance. Beside her, Mazu said in a low voice,
‘Bless me, my child, and may your righteous punishment fall upon all who stray from The Way.’
Mazu then got up, still without looking at or speaking to Robin, and headed towards the temple. With an upsurge of panic, Robin followed, with a presentiment of what was about to happen. Sure enough, on entering the temple, Robin saw all her former high-level associates, including Amandeep, Walter, Vivienne and Kyle, sitting in a circle on chairs set upon the shining black pentagon-shaped stage. All looked stern. With an increase of her awful foreboding, Robin saw that Taio Wace was also present.
‘Rowena had taken it upon herself to do a different task to the one she was assigned, which is why you couldn’t find her, Vivienne,’ said Mazu, climbing the stairs to the stage and sitting down in a free seat, spreading out her glittering blood red robes as she did so. ‘She has paid the tribute of humility, but we will now find out whether that was an empty gesture. Move your chair into the centre of the circle, please, Rowena. Welcome to Revelation.’
Robin picked up an empty chair and moved it to the centre of the black stage, beneath which lay the deep, dark baptismal pool. She sat down and tried to still her legs, which were shaking, by pressing down on them with palms that had become damp.
The temple lights began to dim, leaving only a spotlight on the stage. Robin couldn’t remember the lights being lowered for any of the other Revelation sessions.
Get a grip, she told herself. She tried to picture Strike grinning at her, but it didn’t work: the present was too real, closing in upon her, even as the faces and figures of those surrounding her grew indistinct in the dark, and her lips were tingling strangely, as though contact with Mazu’s foot had left some acidic residue.
Mazu pointed a long, pale finger and the temple doors banged closed behind Robin, making her jump.
‘A reminder,’ said Mazu calmly, addressing those in the circle, ‘Primal Response Therapy is a form of spiritual cleansing. In this safe, holy space, we use words from the materialist world to counter materialist ideas and behaviours. There will be a purging, not only of Rowena, but of ourselves, as we unearth and dispatch terms we no longer use, but which still linger in our subconsciousness.’
Robin saw the dark figures around her nodding. Her mouth was completely dry.
‘So, Rowena,’ said Mazu, whose face was so pale that Robin could still make it out, with those dark, crookedly set eyes shining. ‘This is the moment for you to confess to things you may have done, or thought, about which you feel deep shame. What would you like to reveal first?’
For what felt like a long time, though was doubtless only seconds, Robin couldn’t think of anything to say at all.
‘Well,’ she began at last, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silent temple, ‘I used to work in PR and I suppose there was a lot of focus on appearances and what other people—’
The end of her sentence was drowned in an outbreak of jeering from the circle.
‘False self!’ barked Walter.
‘Deflecting,’ said a female voice.
‘You can’t blame your profession for your behaviour,’ said Amandeep.
Robin’s thought processes were sluggish after days of manual labour. She needed something that would satisfy her inquisitors, but her panicked mind was blank.
‘Nothing to say?’ said Mazu, and Robin could just make out her yellowish teeth in the gloom as she smiled. ‘Well, let’s see whether we can find a way in. Since entering our community, you felt entitled to criticise the colour of my hair, didn’t you?’
There was an intake of breath all around the circle. Robin felt a wave of cold sweat pass over her. Was this why she’d been demoted to farm worker? Because she’d wondered to Penny Brown why Mazu’s hair was still jet black in her forties?
‘What,’ said Mazu, speaking now to the rest of the circle, ‘would you call somebody who judged another person’s looks?’