Chapter 9: Renegade

Fifteen months before the Great Comet. The coast.

An older monk from the Southern Temple passed Khandro near Tienhai’s statue and did not look at him. The man had been a junior instructor when Khandro was a student, forty years ago. He used to correct Khandro’s stance on the training courtyard with two fingers on the left shoulder. The touch had been gentle. Khandro remembered it. Today, the man walked within arm’s reach and kept his eyes on the grass.

Over the course of the morning three more from the Southern delegation passed him. Only a nun from the Eastern Temple, who did not know him, nodded.

Dechen found him at the tree line with a cup of tea he had been carrying for an hour without drinking. The sea wind had cooled it.

“Jangbu isn’t here,” she said.

Khandro looked at her. Jangbu had gone to Omashu eight weeks back to find his contact in the trade ministry, the one whose birds had come every season for six years until this spring, when they stopped. He had sent one message from the road, a week into the trip, saying the trade routes south of Omashu were quieter than usual and he would meet them at the festival. But he was not here.

“I heard from Palden before we left camp,” Dechen said. “Palden’s caravan was rerouted from Jinghai because the harbor was cleared for military use. Civilian traffic now goes through a secondary port. He has not been close enough to count ships in two weeks.”

Khandro drank the tea. It tasted like nothing. Palden’s caravan had been their eyes at Jinghai for years. If the caravan could no longer reach the harbor, Khandro had no count on Fire Nation warships and no way to get one.

“Send a bird to the waypoint south of Omashu,” he said. “Tell Jangbu to come back to camp. I do not want him in Omashu when it could be dangerous.”

Dechen left. Khandro walked. The smell of cooking fires carried across the meadow from three directions, mixed with the salt air. Two nuns from the Western Temple sat on a ground cloth nearby with a stack of heavy paper between them.

The Western delegation was smaller this year. Forty-three adults, maybe thirty children. He had counted. Last year it had been closer to sixty adults.

Khandro walked past the Southern Temple’s camp, the walking being the hard part. He had trained at that temple from the age of eight until he was seventeen. Nine years on the same courtyard where these novices learned the Second Breath forms now. He had never been senior enough to enter the archive before the Council dismissed him.

He had left with Zimu and a bag of rice. Every year the festival put him back in the same meadow as the people who remembered the boy he had been. Some of the older monks still knew his face. They gave him nods that were polite enough to be dismissal.

He heard the confrontation before he saw it.

Pemba’s voice carried. It always did. Khandro heard him from thirty yards out and started walking faster.

A cluster of people had gathered near the airball court. Pemba was standing with his arms at his sides and his chin up, facing three Northern Temple novices about his age. One of them had his hands in his sleeves.

“We abandoned our duties?” Pemba said. He was repeating something one of them had said back to them. His voice was tight. “Tell me which duty you mean. The duty to sit on a mountain above the clouds while people starve below? The duty to meditate while the governor takes everything a farmer grows?”

“Your duty was to your people,” the novice with his hands in his sleeves said. He was calm in a practiced way that came from growing up in a temple where raised voices were a spiritual failure. “Instead, you walked away from our temple because some old man told you what you wanted to hear.”

“You’re wrong. Why would I stay with a people who refuses to help starving children?”

A nun at the edge of the crowd turned and walked away, pulling a younger novice with her.

Khandro reached the group and gently placed his hand on Pemba’s arm. Pemba’s mouth closed.

“That is enough,” Khandro said.

Pemba looked at him. His jaw was working.

“Walk with me.”

The novices watched them go. The one with his hands in his sleeves had the expression of someone who had won an argument he had not started. Khandro had seen that expression on the faces of men twice the boy’s age.

They walked along the tree line where the grass turned to dirt. Pemba was rigid beside him, his steps heavy enough to scatter stones.

“They called us renegades,” Pemba said.

“And only repeated what their teachers told them. They do not know any better, Pemba.”

“That makes it worse.”

“It does. Even so, fighting with children at a festival will not change what their teachers say. What it will do is give them one more story about how we bring disorder wherever we go.”

Pemba was quiet for about ten steps. Then he said, “You walked away from your temple. You saw how they failed the world. How can you come back here every year and let them treat you like you were the one who did something wrong?”

They walked past a cooking fire where a family was sharing bread, past a cluster of bison grazing at the meadow’s northern edge, past Thupten sitting alone on the grass with his whole body tilted forward.

“Save your anger for the magistrates and the nobles,” Khandro said. “We are Air Nomads and these are our people. They are wrong about us, yes, but being wrong about us is not the same as being against us.”

A senior monk from the Southern Temple was walking toward them. Khandro recognized him. Wangdu. He handled protocol, disputes, and other things that were beneath the High Monk’s direct attention. He had a round face. He folded his hands when he talked, and it made every conversation feel like a hearing.

“Khandro,” Wangdu said. He stopped three paces away. “You and your group are guests at this festival. We would prefer you conduct yourselves accordingly.”

Khandro looked at Wangdu. He had known this man for decades. Wangdu had been a senior novice when Khandro left the temple, one of the ones who stood in the courtyard and watched him go without saying goodbye.

“We will. You have my word,” Khandro said. The words tasted like the cold tea.

Wangdu nodded once and walked back toward the Southern delegation. Pemba’s hands were fists at his sides.

“Let it go,” Khandro said.

“But he talked to you like you were a child.”

“People talk to me like that in every village we visit. I can handle a monk.” He put his hand on Pemba’s shoulder. “Go find Thupten. Help him with our bedrolls.”

Pemba left. His walk was stiff, his shoulders high. That was fine.

He walked. Gyatso was telling children the Tienhai story. Khandro had heard him tell it before, and each time Gyatso put the emphasis in a different place. This year he lingered on the city falling.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

To Gyatso’s left, a boy with blue arrow tattoos had his eyes on the old monk. Khandro did not agree with the Council’s decision to reveal the Avatar before sixteen.

He was turning away when he noticed the other boy.

This one sat at the edge of the semicircle, about two feet from the nearest child. He looked eleven or twelve, thin, in Southern Temple robes that had been mended at the cuffs. His eyes were on the crowd behind Gyatso, moving left to right, pausing, going back. His body was angled so his back was to the statue and his sight line covered the meadow’s western edge and the tree line. The sea wind moved his robes and he did not adjust them.

His hands rested on his knees with his fingers loose and his weight centered. Gyatso’s voice rose and the boy’s posture stayed the same. He sat like someone ready to stand.

After the meal the boy left the Southern Temple group without a word and walked the perimeter. Khandro lost him for a few minutes when Dechen came back with a question about the contingency routes, and by the time she left the boy was standing near the tree line about forty yards away.

The boy saw him. For a moment they stood forty yards apart on the grass, looking at each other, and then the boy started walking toward him.

Up close he was smaller than Khandro had estimated. His hands were calloused at the base of the ring finger and the thumb pad, in places that did not match any training Khandro knew.

“Are you Elder Khandro?” the boy said.

“I am.”

“My name is Sonam. I am from the Southern Temple.” His voice was level. “I read about the Guiding Wind in our archive.”

Khandro looked at the boy’s face. He had not heard that name spoken at a festival in years.

“The scroll says you brought a Fire Nation princess into the movement and it caused a diplomatic crisis with her brother,” the boy said. “That Sister Rioshon was detained because of your recklessness. But there is a hole in the record. The scroll mentions the symposium once and skips three months to the condemnation by the temples.” He paused. “I think whoever wrote it left something out on purpose.”