Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 | Page 105

Rei's voice broke the air, "May I go inside now, sir?"
Hé held the door for him.
Rei remembered Woah, and reached for the stairs. While he was walking, Rei thought about God.
Master Sun was religious, but in a values sort of way. He never prayed or chanted, so Rei had never learned
to prostrate himself towards the unknown, to trust in a God, or Allah. When he reached her, Woah was still
sitting in the Devil's Undergarments. Rei was tired. Twenty-one nautical miles off of Guangdong, he slept.
From the depths of an ethereal sky, the sun leaked light on the sea and sleep loosened it's grip on
Rei's senses. The planks still held back a shimmering, new sea. The rudder still creaked in its corner. It was
morning. There was something about the new day that couldn't be diluted by water. It's naivety and it's
youth, the glory of it's arrival and the arrival of it's glory. In the dark of a new day, Rei saw no Woah. The
small, talkative child had disappeared. Rei sprinted onto the deck.
All of the crew was there. Hé was there and Woah was there, at the front. They stood at the bow
of the ship. The sails were at a high luff. Woah was dressed in silk, her hair braided like noodle dough. Her
feet were in tiny shoes.
Hé knew Rei was there. "We are lowering her. She will be the sea god's new wife. The Dragon
King will let us pass if he has a new concubine." He sensed Rei's words before they left his mouth. "Don't
say a word, boy."
The smell of incense was overwhelming. Rei covered his ears on the splash. There wasn't even any
scream.
The crew had gone inside. "It's Mazuism. Their religion. Mine too, a bit," Hé said. Rei rubbed the
pebble in his pocket like a lifeline.
"But you're Muslim! You're the captain!"
"I am many things, Rei. A captain is one of them. So is a Muslim eunuch. Yet if I tell people that I
am a Muslim eunuch, they apply to me their notions about Muslims and eunuchs. Yes, I am a captain, but
not a commander. The sacrifice was what Woah was brought aboard for, actually."
"How can you justify it? Killing someone, I mean."
Hé glanced over, "Rei, disprove their belief. Then, you can condemn it. Do not try to condemn a
belief, Rei, for it is always valid to the believer. It is an easy, naive mistake."
"So, you think that as long as someone genuinely believes something, it is right?"
"Yes," Hé said. "Faith does not inhibit truth."
Rei sat cross-legged on deck, his mind embroiled in thought. Traveling by sea was an altogether
new experience for him. The Green Eye could affluently bob through seas of fortune as adeptly as a socially
aware merchant might through a gaggle of courtiers, yet that was their full range of movement. Rei had to
trust that the ship travelled. It was a bit like trusting a God. Rei looked at the water meandering beneath the
ship. He tried not to see the water. In his mind's eye, lines of shadow snaked across the bit of ocean. Nodes
in the waves worth more than their sum. Pinpoints of light pushed from one place to another. Energy,
constantly kinetic.
The water became a bath of movement.