Chapter 20 - The Nor’easter
May, 1764 - China’s East Coast
The moment when we lose ourselves is only revealed to us in retrospect as we are falling into the abyss, when we dare not even hope for salvation.
Zi was born of the wind and the waves during the worst storm of the century in 1746. Her father fished her out of the ocean when she was a newborn. He found her wrapped in a blanket and floating in a basket. He took her back to his small fishing village along the east coast of China.
Zi loved her parents dearly. Zi also loved the water and the occasional typhoons that roiled the ocean. During the worst of storms, Zi would stand outside to soak it all in. The wind danced around her.
Ten years later everything changed. One dark fall night, Zi was awakened by chaos. She entered her parent’s room and saw her mother on the ground. She didn’t fully understanding what the men around her were doing. It was her mother’s cries that had awakened her. A body clothed in her father’s robe lay near the doorway. Its head was missing.
Suddenly, a large man came from behind her and scooped Zi up in one hand and walked toward the front door. He held something she could not see in his hand. Outside in the moonlight, she watched the man toss her father’s head onto a pile. Zi screamed and screamed. To silence her, the man struck her in the head with the butt of his sword knocking the little girl unconscious.
Zi awoke the next day shackled in the hull of a slave ship headed to Japan. There were other children chained beside her. Some of them she knew, but most of them she didn’t. Her village had not been raiders’ only stop. Slavery had been banned in Japan some years earlier, but the practice continued among the elites in the more rural areas. The hugely profitable human trafficking market tempted anyone with a vessel worthy of the high seas. Zi and the other captives on this ship would be warehoused until they could be sold.
The ship had encountered a persistent head wind which made progress slow. They sailed for days as the vessel tacked back and forth. The closer they got to their destination, the fiercer the winds became. The crew became frightened as supplies dwindled. After a while, they decided that a sacrifice was needed to appease the seas.
Zi watched as one of the crew members dragged a girl up to the deck. The frightened girl had been one of Zi’s playmates. From below, Zi could hear the girl’s cries. Each one was more gut wrenching than the one before. Soon, Zi’s friend went silent and blood dripped down the stairs. The crewmen tossed the girl overboard and waited for the seas to calm. Down in the hold, Zi wept. Outside, it rained.
The next night the head winds were stronger than ever. The crew decided to try another sacrifice. Two of the men came for Zi. They tried to pull her away from the wall. Each time they pulled her, she resisted. The whole ship lurched. The men regained their footing and tried again. Each time, Zi fought them and the waves rose up. The ship was cast towards its side. At last, the men gave up. Later, they returned with several other sailors to demonstrate to them how each time they struggled with the frightened young girl, the ocean would rise up against them.
The men began shouting, “Majo!”
The men unchained her and dragged her up to the deck despite the rolling of the seas beneath them. The more afraid she became the more the waves battered the ship. The ship rocked back and forth as the men tried to throw her overboard.
The captain saw the commotion and intervened. He saw with his own eyes how the waves roared beneath a clear sky. He heard the fear in his men’s voices. To calm the situation, the captain proposed setting the girl adrift in one of the raiding party boats. The crew feared retribution from the evil spirit they thought Zi was serving. So, they let the captain place the young girl in a boat and set her adrift.
Zi floated upon the sea alone. She was lost and the boat had no sail. The oars were too heavy for her to heave. She wanted to go home, but there was no home to which she could return. Her condition seemed hopeless.
When she was thirsty, rain fell. Zi opened her mouth to drink. Still, she drifted. On the second day at sea, hunger set in. By the end of the third day, delirium overtook her. In her altered state, Zi had a vision. A voice from heaven told her to reach her hand into the sea. She did and grabbed a large fish. It was so large that she had trouble pulling it into the boat. That night, after she’d eaten she slept deeply. Zi dreamed that she was going to Japan. In the morning, a fresh breeze arose out of the west creating a current that pushed her boat towards the western shore of Japan. Two days later, she reached her destination.
Zi made her way to town. She found herself relying on the kindness of others. Most people, when they saw that she was Chinese, looked the other way. Eventually, she made her way to a fishing village. Zi could be persuasive when given the chance. She used that skill to convince one of the fishermen to allow her to assist him in exchange for food and a place to lay her head. Since Zi had helped her fisherman father since she was four or five years old, she knew what to do. She quickly gained her employer’s trust. To help keep her safe, he dressed her like a boy. Only the fisherman, his wife, and their young son knew the truth.
Zi was horrified by the sight of others from her country working as slaves, but she kept her pain hidden. This arrangement lasted for three years, until one rainy day the fisherman’s son, who had grown jealous of the favor Zi had earned in his father’s eyes, told Zi’s secret to one of the local Shogun’s soldiers, including how she’d escaped the Shogun before at sea. The soldier went straightaway to tell his superiors.
The fisherman’s son confessed to his father what he had done. Upon hearing the news, the father gathered Zi and took her to the docks. He found a ship bound for the New World. He paid the ship’s captain half his family savings to take Zi with him to the New World. He explained to the captain that he was not paying him to transport Zi but, rather, to protect her. The captain agreed and decided to make Zi his cabin boy.
The hours until the ship set sail were anxious ones. From the captain’s quarters, Zi could see her protector in the harbor casting his net. At long last the rain ended, the clouds parted and the ship set sail. As the ship moved into the harbor, Zi saw them. The Shogun and his men in their boats entered the harbor, searching from boat to boat for the fisherman. One of the other men on the water, pointed him out. The soldiers boarded the fisherman’s boat and dragged him off of it. As her ship moved slowly out of the harbor, Zi watched as the men interrogated the fisherman. They struck him in the face. He pointed towards the hills. They clearly did not believe him because they struck him again. Zi cried out in anger. When she did, a huge wave formed in the ocean and moved towards the troops and their boats. The wave picked up all of soldiers in their boats and dashed them into the docks. Zi screamed and jumped up and down in panicked horror. Her wave also carried the fisherman into the unforgiving coastline.
The captain rushed in and fell to his knees wrapping his arms around the quivering Zi. He attempted to comfort and still her. After a time, Zi stopped shivering, but she remained at the window silently staring back into the harbor. Hour after hour she stood there, well into the evening, until the lights along the coast line were no longer visible.
The captain rose from his writing desk and kneeled down beside the young girl. He spoke to Zi perfectly in her native tongue.
“You are among friends, now,” he said.
As Zi calmed down, so did the winds and the sea.
The Captain continued, “No harm will come to you. You are special, but you are not alone. I am taking you to a safe place called New Orleans. It will take a long time to get there by sea. There, you will have friends and will have no need to worry.”
“Is this a slave ship?” Zi asked.
“No.”
Zi couldn’t decide whether to believe the captain or not, but something inside her said it was okay to trust him. In the coming months, Zi learned a decent amount of French as she got to know the ship’s crew and her captain, Henri.
Months
later, the ship made a brief stop in Haiti. There, Zi saw poverty and oppression like she’d never seen before. She also had her first encounter with the ‘Espérons que des Abandonnés’, a Haitian End of Days cult. A few short days after that, Zi finally found herself in New Orleans. Everything she knew lay in dust ten thousand miles away. In New Orleans, she found a new family – a family of people who, like her, had secrets. Zi tried to put her past behind her. Elisa took her in, and after some time and lots of questions, Elisa shared her faith with Zi. The concepts were foreign to her, but she listened. She wanted to please Elisa.
At fourteen, Zi met a runaway slave named Sam. He was sixteen, but he looked and claimed that he was eighteen. Sam was an attractive boy of mixed blood. His mother was from China. His father was from Haiti. Two years earlier, he’d managed to stowaway aboard a ship bound for New Orleans. He found work at the same fish house as Zi. The work was hard, but didn’t last all day. He left work with the sun still high enough for him to work on his paintings. The hours were also perfect for Zi who wanted to continue her studies at the feet of Elisa, who’d taken her in. Sam carried the day’s catch from the wagon to the cleaning stations which were staffed mostly by women, one of whom was Zi. Sam spoke French quite well, but Zi was taken aback by his Chinese. His dialect was very similar to Zi’s own. His mother could not have been born too far away from where Zi had been raised.
She felt comfortable with Sam. She told him many things about her past. Zi shared what happened to her in her village and how she watched helplessly as her adoptive Japanese family was slaughtered before her eyes. She cried as she told him about the guilt she felt because her parents died trying to protect her. But, she could not share how she caused the tidal wave that killed the fisherman in Japan who took her in once she arrived there. She’d often cried at the realization that if either family had turned away from her, they’d still be alive. Their mercy was repaid with their blood.
Sam trusted Zi, too. He shared the horrors he’d seen with his own eyes and those his parents told him of as well. They both swore that they’d rather die than return to a life of oppression. They longed for a world free from hatred. The commonality of their experience gave them a feeling that they were destined to be together. They quickly professed their love for one another. Despite this, Zi did not share anything about her gifts or her friends who watched over her in New Orleans.
One day, Zi arrived at work to find that her bin was empty and that Sam was nowhere to be found. Her co-workers had no answers. Zi ran into the street desperately seeking some clue to Sam’s whereabouts. She asked some of the shop owners and street vendors near the docks if they’d seen anything. Everyone she asked claimed to have seen nothing. Then, she asked an older gentleman selling delicate flowers from a bucket. Though his disheveled appearance gave Zi pause, his words were clear and rang true to her. The man told her that bounty hunters the night before had captured an Asian-looking black boy with curly hair and dragged him onto a slaver’s ship headed back to Haiti. The ship left port before sunrise.
When she heard this, Zi hiked up her dress to her knees and ran to the pier. She held the crumpled ends of her skirt in each hand as she ran down the pier. Zi found a free dingy, untied it, and called upon her gift. A wind rose behind her and a current beneath her vessel that carried her down the Mississippi towards the gulf. Just over an hour later, she caught up to the slave ship in the bay of New Orleans. The sailors on deck were astonished and frightened by her approach. She had no sail or oars and yet her dingy moved as though an unseen hand pulled it along. Without warning, a fierce updraft over the starboard side of the ship lifted petite, teenaged Zi up and onto the deck. She demanded that they bring up to the deck the mulatto runaway slave they’d just picked up in New Orleans. All of the sailors pointed to the bay. They said that the boy had jumped overboard as they entered the bay and had drowned trying to swim to shore. Zi sensed that they were telling the truth. She called a second mighty wind that carried her back to her dingy. As her boat proceeded towards the marshlands, Zi glanced at the slave ship and, with a mere gesture, called forth a fifty-foot wave that capsized the ship. Zi did not look back after that. Zi was hopeful that she would find Sam. The fact that the sailors did not see Sam surface, did not surprise Zi. He had faked his own death in Haiti. As part of his plan to escape his enslavement, Sam fell off of a fishing boat. He had the ability to hold his breath for long periods of time. He swam underneath the boat to freedom on the far shore. Zi held out hope and searched along the marsh frantically until, at last, she found him. Sam’s lifeless body was tangled up in the reeds. He’d almost made it. Zi jumped from her dingy and dragged him back aboard. She rocked him back and forth as she recounted how three times she had given her heart to love and three times her hope had been crushed by the cruelty of men. Zi cried bitterly.
Through her tears and sobbing, she heard her name being called, “Zi.”
She turned to see Elisa.
Elisa asked, “Qu'avez-vous fait?”
Elisa already knew what Zi had done, but she needed to hear Zi acknowledge it.
Even though Zi had taken no vow of allegiance to the Circle Knights, her actions would not go unnoticed or unpunished by the Elders. She would not stand before the twelve for immediate judgment. They’d assign someone to deal with Zi.
Elisa said, “You must go. You will not be safe in the open.”
Zi knew about the Elders and their harsh ways towards those like themselves. Elisa would attempt to convince the Elders that this was a one-time event driven by the passion of a young girl. Besides, she was not of age to be accountable anyway. Then, Elisa chastised Zi.
“We do not have the luxury of responding to the passions of our hearts against mortals, no matter the crime,” Elisa said. “Go, now. I will do what I can to help with the Elders.”
Elisa hugged Zi. She reminded her protégé of her training. She nodded and the young girl closed her eyes and stilled herself. A moment later, her body became ash and began to dissipate into the gentle breeze bound for whichever corner of the earth that sorrowful wind should take her. Even the Circle Elders know not from where the wind comes or where it goes.
Zi did indeed take to the wind as Elisa suggested, allowing it to take her wherever it might blow. In the subsequent years without her mentor present, Zi’s life was also like the wind, shifting and hard to grasp. She would avenge the fisherman who saved her, by slaying the Shogun and all of his sons. She fell into witchcraft and somewhere along the way became consumed with the end times, believing that they were imminent. Word of Zi’s deeds reached Elisa even in the Pit, taking her soul to an even deeper level therein.
Thus, sending Zi away was one regret that haunted Elisa daily.
THE BOOK OF
CHASE