Death Trance Read Free Page B

daggers and the blades would not penetrate their skin. But this was not an ordinary sanghyang trance. This was a very different kind of trance, if it was a trance at all. The silence in the courtyard was so deep that Michael could almost have believed the pedanda had deceived him. He wondered if perhaps in some unknown way he had failed his initiation and let the old priest down. Perhaps the only honourable course of action left to a student who disappointed the pedanda was suicide, and perhaps this was what he was being offered now.
    Michael hesitated, and as he did so, a scraggly looking jungle cock stalked into the courtyard, lifted its plumed head and stared at him.
    The pedanda said, 'You are afraid? What are you afraid of? Death?’
    'I'm not sure,’ Michael replied uncertainly.
    'To be irresolute is a sin.’
    'I'm afraid but I don't know why. I'm afraid of you.’
    'Of me?’ smiled the priest. He lifted his hands, their long, twisty fingernails gleaming. 'You have no need to be afraid of me. You have no need to be afraid of anything, not even of death. Come, let me show you what death is.’
    Michael glanced down at the kris in his hand. Then he looked back questioningly at the pedanda, who shook his head. 'Do not strike now. The question has passed. The question will arise again later, never fear, perhaps in a different way.’
    The priest rose to his feet gracefully. For one moment he stood staring at the mask of Rangda, with its embroidered covering. Then he turned and glided across the courtyard, back through the paduraksa gate, across the outer courtyard and into the street. Michael followed him closely, aware of a strange slowness in the way in which his limbs responded, as if he were wading through warm and murky water. The streets seemed to be deserted except for the cigarette ends that glowed in doorways, the murmur of deep, blurry voices and a soft rustling sound that filled the air.
    The pedanda guided him along to the end of the street. Michael felt as if he were pursuing a figure in a dream. He was conscious for the first time in over a year that he was half-Western, that he was only half-entitled to know the secrets the pedanda was revealing to him. Although he had advanced even farther in his spiritual studies than most full-blooded Balinese boys, he always felt that he was holding something back, some small, skeptical part of his spirit that would always be white.
    Now the pedanda reached a bronze door set into a crumbling stone wall. He opened it and Michael followed him through. To his surprise, he found himself in a small cemetery thickly overgrown with weeds and garish green moss, curtained with creeper that hung from the trees, silent, neglected, its shrines broken and its pathways long choked up, but elegant all the same, in the saddest and most regretful of ways. The high wall surrounding it must have at one time shielded the graveyard from the sight of every building around it, but now the little cemetery was overlooked by three or four office blocks and an illuminated sign that read 'Udaya Tours.’ In the middle distance, a scarlet sign said, 'Qantas.’
    The pedanda stood still. 'I have never shown you this place before,’ he said. 'This is the graveyard for a hundred and fifty families who died in the puputan, slaughtered by the Dutch and by the rajas. Families without names, children without parents. They were cremated and so their antakaransariras were freed, but they have remained here out of sorrow.’
    Michael walked slowly between the lines of weed-tangled shrines. The carving on each stone was sinuous and curving in the style of Ida Bagus Njana, depicting demons and dancers and ghosts and scowling warriors. Each shrine represented one dead family.
    Then he stood still, uncertain of why the pedanda had brought him here. The Qantas sign shone brightly: an uncompromising message that the past was long past and that Bali was now regularly visited by 747s as well as by demons.
    When