Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 | Page 104

Circumambulation
Hong Kong Academy, Boberski, Will - 11
Hé sat on the deck breathing in the air, eating it like it was all that he needed, gulping it like a drowning
man. In his opinion, launch was not a time to be spent preparing. Tonight, everyone was on deck, his
orders. Captain's orders. His voice, Captain's voice. It was getting rather confusing. Which one was he -
himself, or Captain? He was both in the eyes of the world. Hé glanced at the crew on the deck fidgeting. It
was a fine evening. "Are you afraid of your complexions, men? Come, grasp the air." Hé expected the very
best out of them, and therefore he took the very best out of them.
It was Smithy who noticed first, "There's banging downstairs."
Hé turned, "Alright, see what you can do. It'll be the child. She's old enough not to need mother's
milk now." Smithy slipped through the hatch and descended the ladder. He unlocked the door, and Rei's
hands jumped back from the edge. "Kid, what do you need?" asked the smithy.
"There's a child down here, sir. Is she supposed to be here?"
Smithy stuck his head through the door, glancing at Rei and Woah. "Two kids, eh? The little one
is fine. You, come with me." He extended his arms and Rei ducked under them.
Rei had nothing to fear. He was safe on board, as was the porcelain shipment. If his pot came, he
came. The pot was him. He was his pot, Lady. He was on the lists, alright.
The Green Eye's current porcelain shipment had come from a small village. In that small village
there lived a boy, apprenticed under a master, Master Sun. The boy's first pot had been sent away in that
very same porcelain shipment. Rei was that boy, and he was onboard with his pot.
Navigator had brought maps to the deck, but Hé ignored them. He didn't need the Emperor's edict
to know where the Green Eye would go. It was the direction towards which he knelt every day. Anyway, it
was too nice of an evening to study charts. The waves foamed at their tips lightly like dogs running too hard
to keep up. They were fourteen nautical miles off Guangdong.
The Green Eye had four decks. One needed to navigate every one of them to get up from the
Devil's Undergarments, the hold. Doors lay wide open and tightly closed and locked. The hold held a
bosom of life, a cradle of color and senses. The smell of the ship's cargo already pervaded the Green Eye:
aromatics, dried fish, damp skin, smoke, drying glaze and musk. Rei could also feel different scents: currents
of sweat, perseverance, diversity and practice along with wood, making a savory, sensuous aroma quite
unlike any other, even the smell of the workshops of Master Sun.
It was a mixture of cultures and smells, but the Green Eye was more than the sum of its parts, the
sum of these pieces. Certainly, Rei thought, it was its parts, but it was also its parts and the combination of
its parts combined.
The sky was rent a deep vermillion as if it had been split by a mighty blade. In the twilight, it
looked as if the Green Eye was sailing through blood. Rei's first thought when he climbed to the top deck
with Smithy was that the deck didn't fit. It overhung the rest of the ship, and the rest of the ship came up in
unexpected places.
Glancing at Rei, Hé almost chuckled, for this boy had snuck on, disobeying a rule that no one
disobeyed, yet he was clearly enjoying the evening, obeying one command everyone else had refused to
acknowledge. Keep breathing, boy, Hé thought. Keep breathing.
Hé gave his verdict quickly. He was no judge, and only the feeble gestures of a moral compass
needle inside him indicated a correct course. "Why are you looking at me?" Hé asked. "Look at the sunset.
This boy is fine."
As Hé retreated belowdecks, Rei sat on the deck, cross-legged. Light embraced dark in those few
hours when they could be together, and the moon rose to moderate the interaction. If one didn't watch
carefully, Rei thought, one might almost confuse a full moon and the sun as being one and the same.
Enveloped in twilight, Rei wondered again about Woah. He thought of playful laughter on the
docks and smiles so mutual they were one. She was so young, too young. So why was Woah there?
The cabin door opened, and Rei momentarily lost his balance. Hé emerged, a small bowl in his
hand. He sat a distance from Rei, on the bow. Placing the bowl on the deck, Hé filled it with water from a
hip flask and pulled a needle from his pocket. Whittling the needle on the bowl's rim, a screeching sound
echoed through the floorboards. The deck vibrated with the sound when he placed the needle in the water.
It twisted slightly, before poking the horizon, where the sun had retreated to a realm of echoes beyond even
the reach of the sea. To the left of this direction, Hé knelt, his back bending low, throwing his arms out
before him so that the Buddha necklace around his neck almost touched the ground. As Hé's words floated
by, Rei's ears grasped one word: Allah.