A Long Tango across a Canopy of Whispering Leaves Read online

  Month 2020 Volume 10 No 6

  A Long Tango across a Canopy of Whispering Leaves

  by

  Nin Harris

  The return of the last Festival King was not mere rumour.

  Half a dozen heralds from Marip preceded his return, with a new summons from the Steward. Dusk-skinned youth dressed in flowers and skin-tight fluorescent blue breeches had read the proclamations from east to west. The Steward was returning the last Festival King. A new Festival King would be crowned at the duels. In the summons were also the names of four hopefuls, chosen from amongst the descendants of former Kings.

  Melur’s name had been one of them. It was not a surprise to Melur who had been sleeping within the weave of the forests’ consciousness for twenty-five years since the disappearance of her lover. For those years, the Festival had been Kingless. It was a gap that was unprecedented for the Mykologosia. There had been Festivals for as long as there had been humans inhabiting the sentient mushroom dwellings, and there had always been Kings. But now, there was to be another duel. And if Melur was chosen, she would be the one duelling her lover, as they had both promised each other that night.

  Melur stared up at the ceiling which she had painted with elaborate scenes from the stories from various hikayat. Gallant and heroic in the garb of a panji, there was the woman warrior of Hikayat Panji Semarang, disguised as a man on a horse as she rode to rescue her lover, her moustachios smartly positioned against the nut-brown contours of her face. She painted the Princess of Gunung Ledang, dressed in fine songket as she upbraided the Sultan of Malacca who was heartless enough to want to spill his son’s blood for her hand in marriage. She painted Tun Teja, who had been coerced away from her home to marry yet another Sultan of Malacca. In the centre of the ceiling, she painted the holy Jentayu bird, iridescent and white. She had used the luminescent artist’s paints that had been manufactured in the Mishgalaveri Vale and sold by the art supplies shops that crammed together on Eldritch Street.

  Post-midnight and ante-sleep, the warrior princesses and holy birds multiplied on the ceiling, dancing across her line of vision with their gestures. They would manifest in the air around her and listen as she whispered to them her secrets, and as she wove into them spells with the aid of their sentient fungi home that had shaped itself in accordance to the dreams and wishes of the family it had allowed to inhabit its part-mechanical, part-organic depths. Melur’s creations watched over her as she slept, as they always had since she had learned that when she painted pictures, they would come to life. Sleep however could not come when the Festival King was returning in the morning, and not even her ethereal companions could distract her from the dragonflies that clustered within her, filling her both with panic and with a long-banked desire. Sleep could not halt the messages the forests wove into her unconscious, nor her battle with those forests – a battle that had continued for a quarter of a century.

  #

  Long before the Festival King defeated his opponent and was awarded the living crown of the three sentient forests of Yrejveree, Melur had known him as a quiet bicycle artisan who lived down the street. She worked in the restaurant next door run by their cousins, serving up a mixture of Minangkabau and Nyonya food to various hungry workers who made their living in that quarter. Yorick Lam had never wanted to be a Festival King, but the forests had chosen him. He had won the annual duel for the Kingship with a look of profound surprise. The switch in his hand had transformed the old Festival King into a wizened woodwork creature that crept back into the embrace of the sighing trees of the forests that curved around the Mykologosia. That was unexpected – but it was a season of change for more than one person; the forests also sang their susurrating song inside Melur’s head from that day onwards, haunting her with memories of Yorick and of their last tango together as humans.

  “Have I become a murderer?” Yorick Lam had asked Melur when she ran to him, raining kisses and tears upon his brow. He had knelt there in the arena, weeping ichor and tree sap as the living crown wove itself around his brow. He leaned against her form and cried into her belly as she stroked his hair, her fingers entangled every now and then by the writhing crown that filled her head with the susurrus of the three forests. If she could, she thought, she would hold the forests back. If she could, she would be a buffer, seeking to protect him from the remote darkness that banked in his eyes. An alien darkness, one that drove a wedge between them.

  “No,” Melur had said then, her voice strained as she pressed against the weight of millions of forestal entities encroaching upon her grief-stricken mind, “You were not to know that the rules had changed again. None of us could have guessed that the forests would claim the festival for itself.”

  Later, the festivities spilled into the streets, lanes, and the back-lanes of a city-state that had grown around mechanically-augmented sentient fungi the size of houses, of mansions, of castles. Melur and Yorick found themselves back in Clearing Seven, where all of the weekly tango lessons they had attended had been run by an Argentinian woman who supplied beeswax candles and soaps to more than one shop in the Mykologosia. Flowing into the position of the apilado, Melur and the Festival King could hear and feel each other’s breath, and their hearts beat almost in unison. Their eyes locked as their limbs moved with the practiced rhythm of familiarity. Proximity was as natural as the slide of skin over sanguine flesh and ivory-white bone. They had been neighbours, and then dance partners. They had been friends who had slipped easily into the routine of lovers.

  They slid into the embrace of the abrazo abierto with the ease of familiarity, his hand around her waist, hers on his upper arm. The relaxed proximity was a familiar one, but it was charged tonight with the frisson of a thousand whispers moving up and down Melur’s bare skin.

  As she shivered, Yorick said, “The forests dance with us tonight, and that’s quite an embrace”.

  “Yes, I can feel them, with every step we take,” Melur admitted.

  “Arboreal chaperones, I’ve never been so curtailed,” Yorick looked down at her upturned face, the blunt contours of his already weather-beaten features lit up in the enjoyment of the tango. He laughed, but there was a tinge of panic in that laugh. Soon, their shared intimacy lapsed into a watchful silence as the alien awareness that simmered within his irises wove and unwove filaments of what used to be Yorick before Melur’s eyes.

  “My father repaired bicycles in Ipoh long before we all moved here,” he said apropos of nothing, this new Yorick who seemed to shift more than one consciousness as they danced. It was almost as though she had never known his family history, but this version of her lover seemed to be untethering himself from the past with every breath, with every syllable dropped. As though they were conversing for the first time. To alleviate her sadness and dim fear, Melur decided to play along with the conversation, hoping the normalcy would turn Yorick back into the man she had loved for so long.

  “How many centuries ago was that?” she asked, taunting him ever-so-slightly as though they were at their weekly dance lessons.

  “Well, I’m not that old, and you know it!” His laughter curled around them, a rueful note against the music that was their cue for the volcada.

  Yorick was still laughing when she rested her weight on him in a half-lean. He twirled slightly further away than recommended for the figure, causing her to almost stumble. It felt deliberate – an unkindness Yorick had never visited upon her in all of their dance classes together.

  There was a breathless moment when she wondered if he was going to drop her. His eyes were liquid danger stirred through with seduction, but they were not just his eyes anymore. Thousands u
pon thousands of tree-spirits crowded brown irises. She felt them pressing against the inner walls of her skull. Melur willed the consciousness of those tree-spirits away. This dance was theirs, and it had to matter. She allowed him to bend her body and sway them left, and then right, in curved precision as they transitioned into the media luna. The tension between their bodies was a familiar tension that would reach across the years they knew each other, the years they had lost each other, and the fateful day when they danced their final duel, twenty-five years later.

  Being a Festival King had transformed him, in a way that she desired to be transformed.

  “Well, it is a valid question. Kings of the Festival are supposed to be theoretically immortal,” she said even though she had the proof within this abrazo that her lover was now indeed immortal. The proof shivered up and down her arms; it filled them both with an electricity beyond their usual chemistry. She felt her heartbeat recede and then spike in an oddly staccato rhythm. She felt as though air was thickening within her lungs, turning into liquid sap. And yet they danced, even as the Festival King transformed, and even as she herself was being transformed. Still, they carried out the semblance of normalcy.

  What else could old lovers do on a night like this?

  “It’s all theoretical and only theoretical these days. The crown passes to the next King, so it is the idea of the King that remains immortal, not the human representatives. Before either of us were born, Kings would die at the end of their term. Aila stopped that law, as with other laws she considered barbaric. But what happened just now, oh heavens, Melur. What happened earlier? I…did not expect that.”

  Ah. The old Yorick reknit himself into the partner who trembled against her fingers even as they danced, his eyes burning into hers with a desperate intensity that emoted save me. Please save me. If only she knew how, thought Melur then, a thought that would haunt her for a quarter of a century. Melur shivered even as he leaned his forehead against hers.

  “My grandmother lived,” she said.

  Melur’s grandmother had been the King long before the last Festival King had absconded with the ceremonial sceptre and the teakwood crown. There were black and white photos of Fatima Salleh dressed in a smart tuxedo, smoking a cigar while wearing the writhing living crown jauntily on her neat head, sporting flapper curls which accentuated her high cheekbones and her kohl-lined eyes. Fatima ruled the Festival every year until the end of her five-year term, and was seen around the Protectorate sporting various smart tuxedos with that crown. When her reign ended, she returned the crown to the Festival Council, but everyone remembered her as the most glamorous and most beloved Festival King who ever lived.

  Yorick’s exhalation against her brow was as pensive as the elegant melody that dipped and arced around them as they moved, fluid as nights of repressed desire. “I remember her. Fatima Salleh, our radiant King in tuxedo and tails. Yes, she lived, and none of us will ever understand why. Perhaps she was simply too beautiful to kill. But every deposed Festival King after that lived. Every one of them. Until this afternoon. Until…whatever that was, happened.”

  Oh, the hurt, this hurt of always feeling never up to the mark.

  Melur flinched against the remembrance of jibes that asserted that she was not as lovely as her grandmother or her mother. But those jibes had not been Yorick’s, had never been his. And he was too contorted by his own grief to notice the pain that wracked her own form, a surprise even to herself. But there were other surprises. Yorick, whether the new Yorick or the one she loved, was not insensitive to her needs.

  He said, “You have her eyes. And that jaw. And your beauty is of a different sort. Incandescent with passion and with need. You have always undone me with your fire. You’d make an unforgettable Festival King. Are you duelling to be king next term?”

  Even now, he read her so well. Even now, with the forests crowding his eyes as much as they crowded Melur’s own head with their whispered incantations. Or perhaps the deal had already been sealed when she ran towards him as he knelt in that clearing, weeping. A two-for-one kind of deal, one might say.

  “No, I don’t think I’ll be ready next term,” Melur had said, doubt laced through her movements in tandem with his, their bodies sliding with ease into the rhythm set by the band that played on the side of the clearing, colourful paper lanterns raining eldritch patterns of light cut by shadows against the serious faces of the musicians.

  “But you want to be king, don’t you?”

  He read the wish in her eyes so clearly. She wondered if her need was so transparent, or if that was just the forests speaking through him, speaking into her.

  “When I’m ready, yes.”

  “When you’re ready,” he echoed. “When you’re ready, my Melur, I will be there. God help me, and forests willing, I will be there.”

  “And I will be ready to fight for you,” she replied, her tone half-fierce as her hands gripped his upper arms so desperately, that he winced in pain.

  Yorick disappeared that night, along with the living wildwood crown that had writhed upon his brow even as he had led Melur into their final embrace, and a kiss that was meant to last a quarter century.

  She would be haunted by that dance in her dreams both while asleep and while awake – cooking various Minang and Hainanese dishes in their cafe, serving it, and listening to the susurrus of the wind troubling the trees of Nemorosium Somnium.

  Where are you, Yorick?

  She would whisper this to herself, even as the trees sang to her about an arboreal surrender.

  #

  Kenanga was stirring chicken congee on the stove when Melur entered the kitchen the next morning. Her sister looked up in acknowledgement, her eyes reddened with the tell-tale signs of tears. Her brother was busy slicing spring onions to garnish the congee, a strained look on his usually cheerful face. A small stack of julienned young ginger was arranged at the edge of his wooden chopping board. Melur placed the fresh bunch of coriander she had picked from the vegetable herb garden lot they shared with four other families who lived around Clearing Five-Zero next to Raslan’s chopping board.

  A bowl of salted eggs waited for her attention on the opposite end of the long kitchen table. Grabbing a small knife, she halved, and then quartered the eggs in their shells.

  “Can’t you run away from this, Kak Melur?” her brother Raslan asked, his face made longer by his grim expression of woe.

  “Where would I run?” Melur asked.

  “Aila’s estate would be a good idea. She’d know what to do,” said Kenanga.

  “Look, I appreciate your concern, but much of the speculation is just that, speculation. There’s no real evidence to suggest that there will be fights to the death. Why would the Steward…,”

  “He has a grudge against the Guardian, remember?”

  “And she’s been mostly absent these past five years,” Raslan said as he rose up and grabbed the bowl full of deep-fried anchovies and peanuts.

  Melur said, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You know I want to become the Festival King.”

  “I rather wish you didn’t, Melur. There are other ways to honour our grandmother, sayang,” Kenanga said as she ladled the congee into rice bowls. “Please don’t do this. You’re our eldest sister, you’re all we have.”

  “This isn’t about Nenek, Kenanga. I want to be Festival King. For myself,” said Melur who was tight-lipped from trying to keep the constant sussurus in her head at bay. She sounded selfish, she thought to herself. Sounded like she was giving up her family on a whim. But – she had a twenty-five-year-old commitment.

  “I just don’t understand why it means so much to you,” Raslan said as he poured steaming milk tea from one enamel mug to another in a long stream of liquid for their morning teh tarik. These familiar acts of morning domesticity, oh how they hurt. They were a reproachful reminder of how these communal acts of making breakfast had bonded them after they had lost their parents.

  “None of you ever could. But I don’t
blame you. I don’t really understand it myself, but I feel it, the same way I feel the forests thrumming inside me,” said Melur, finally voicing what had been unvoiced for so long.

  “The forests? Like what --,” Raslan began, then stopped. His eyes shuttered in dismay and quiet horror.

  “It happened when Yorick became Festival King. I’ve known since then. I’m sorry,” said Melur.

  Around them the fungi home they lived in seemed to shudder as she said the words, then they were embalmed in the sound of rustling leaves.

  “Well,” said Kenanga, sighing. “There’s that. You’ve always been the most attuned to our home, so perhaps this goes beyond either my understanding or Raslan’s. I feel so – helpless. Is there nothing we can do?”

  “Yes, there is one thing you can do, Kenanga.”

  “What is that?” both her siblings said in unison before they stared at each other.

  Melur inhaled, not even pushed to chuckle at the moment. “You can trust me,” she finally said.

  Kenanga nodded, even as she pulled Raslan into a half-hug, half-chokehold.

  “Owww, that hurts, kakak!”

  “Don’t you dare do anything foolhardy next.”

  “Sumpah, Kakak, I won’t. I’ve never been particularly adventurous, anyway.”

  They sat down to eat the chicken congee with frothy teh tarik, liberally sweetened with condensed milk and with a one-inch froth that gave the siblings identical tea moustaches. As they ate, they were silent. Melur wondered if they were all similarly thinking about their Hainanese mother, long-perished in one of the assassinations that took place thirty years ago. Their father, a stoic Minang Malay man had outlived his wife by only five years before his heart expired on him. Five years was too long a time to outlive the love of his life, he had whispered before he closed his eyes for the last time.

  She lifted her head to meet her brother’s eyes. He took a deep breath and nodded at her once before leaning over to grab her hands with a fist. “We can’t lose you too, Melur. We only have each other. Try your best not to—I don’t even know what I am asking. But try. Try. Please!”