The Rock Child Read Online Free

Mo-o-on.”
    Strange men hurled their eyes at her. Sun Moon stared back at them. “Look at the celestial heathen,” one cried.
    “Ahoy the Chinee!” someone shouted.
    “Stand back, boys, she’s mine.”
    “She everybody’s! ”
    “Ahoy the whore.”
    Demons, demons . She saw her body being stripped of flesh, stripped to bones. In imagination the demons drank her blood, ate her flesh, and broke her bones.
    I give birth to Mahakala through my brow. She leaps forth, armed with sword and noose, wearing a tiger skin, garlanded with human heads. Her tongue lolls, seeking blood. She decapitates and crushes all the demons. She drinks their blood. Then, intoxicated, she dances and dances and laughs maniacally and dances and dances and laughs .
    Since she could not control her anger, she would embrace the forbidden feeling, yes, would give way to volcanoes of hostility, yes, she would seek redemption in horror.
    Sun Moon turned her face to the men jeering at her and looked straight into their lust-driven eyes.
    Whore! Chinee whore! She understood that word. In Gam Saan, San Francisco, Ah Wan had shown her what happened to the women in the cells—two bits lookee, four bits feelee, six bits doee. “You’re lucky you were sold to the interior,” he said. She still saw in her mind the hopeless, despairing faces of the Chinese teenagers at the windows of their cells, brittle, lightless lanterns of yellow paper.
    She glared at her taunters. Mahakala, fight for me . Fear jangled in her limbs. Sometimes the way past an evil is through it . A Tantric devotee deliberately embraced the forbidden, deliberately violating all five vows of virtue, in order to discover that the clean and the unclean were one. Mahakala, guide me .
    Her nerves flashed rages of fear. She would walk the way of un-chastity. In imagination the touches of her abductors pummeled her, real as blows. She would be hurled into the pit of the unclean, the abyss of horror.
    No! The band around her throat tightened until she gasped for breath, panicky.
    Bracing her bound wrists on the side of the wagon, she forced herselfup awkwardly. Legs against the board, she held her body erect. She stared at the men. Some lost their nerve and cast their eyes down. Other beamed at her with lechery.
    Leering faces flooded her mind, grasping hands, pounding bodies, attacking lingams, her violated yoni . She quavered. Am I strong enough to pass through the violence to peace, through the profane to the sacred? Mahakala, Mother and Creatrix, protect me. Give me strength to fight .
    She dared not frame the further question in her mind. Would I commit the act ultimately forbidden? Would I kill?
    A rage of something—fear? bloodlust?—lightninged up and down her spine. She could not believe that she could follow the Tantras and come to love through murder.
    “Well, boys,” someone jeered, “who’s first?”
    Raucous laughter. Her eyes looked at the middle distance, without focusing, and saw none of them. Instead she forced herself to behold a carved image of Mahakala, skulls around her neck, Mahakala the destroyer, Mahakala the devourer of men.
2
    Tarim picked up a piece of paper from the bar of polished wood, the bar where men drank the whisky that made them crazy. He handed it to her. It was written in Chinese ideograms. He watched her face as she read it.
    She had a noble face, he thought, with high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, and a lovely sheen of bronze skin. He could tell little of her body beneath the nun’s robes, but they would come off soon enough. He wanted her. He noticed the desire in himself, almost with amusement. Even at his age he wanted women as fiercely as ever. And of course he would have her.
    “Shall I read it to you?” he inquired in his soft, hoarse voice. It had been hoarse for twenty years, a throat injury from a knife.
    She snatched it rudely from his fingers and eyed him hard. So you want to prove you can read . She studied it.
    He observed the changes in