The Geomancer's Compass Read online

  Text copyright © 2012 by Melissa Hardy

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, One Toronto Street, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5C 2V6

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York, P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938775

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Hardy, Melissa

  The geomancer’s compass / by Melissa Hardy.

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-365-0

  I. Title.

  PS8565.A63243G46 2012 jC813’.54 C2011-906507-X

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  www.tundrabooks.com

  v3.1

  For my brother and fellow voyageur in the realms of fantasy, Peter Hardy

  “Nothing is exactly as it seems.

  Nor is it otherwise.”

  NANCY BODWIN, Weeds

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The first clue I got that there was something up with my family was just after I had been accepted at St. Izzy’s in 2018. I had just turned thirteen, a dish served with all the trimmings – acne, braces, hair where before there had been none, and a big dollop of angst on the side. I remember it pretty clearly, despite the hormonal haze. There’s my post-tweeny, pre-adolescent self, all five feet and one hundred pounds of it, supercharged on too much Guarana Fizz. I’m barreling down the big front hall in the house on Pender Street on track to scoring more to rocket boost me through some Extreme Calculus homework. That’s when I overhear my A-Ma – that’s Chinese for paternal grandmother – talking about my great-great-grandfather’s funeral arrangements with my mother and aunt in the living room. He had choked to death on a moon cake two and a half weeks before. What she said was this: “You do know he was born in the back room of a hand laundry in Moose Jaw, don’t you?” Which was a shock. I’d never paid much attention to old family stuff. Trust me, it was like peering into a swamp – stinky with lots of strange creatures that you could barely make out, just swimming around – but I’d always thought the old man had been born in Vancouver, like the rest of us, not in the boonies somewhere.

  “What year was that?” This from my Auntie Ev.

  “The Year of the Sheep,” A-Ma replied.

  Chinese people always talk about what year you were born in. It’s like the zodiac, only with years instead of months. You don’t say, “What’s your sign?” You say, “What year are you?” For example, I was born in 2005, the Year of the Rooster, which is supposed to make me a workaholic who’s not afraid to speak my mind, so there you go. Not that I believe that stuff.

  “Wasn’t that the same year the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed?” my mother asked.

  A-Ma shook her head. “No, he was born the previous year.”

  I poked my head in the door. “Wrong! The last spike was driven in November 1885.” Three heads swiveled in my direction.

  “Miranda! I thought you had homework,” my mother said.

  “My life is homework,” I told her. “That’s how I know that the CPR was completed in 1885. We just finished our transportation module last week.”

  “And?”

  “Do the math.” I crossed over to a Ming-style armchair and plopped myself down. “It’s 2018. If the railroad was completed in 1885 and The Grandfather was born a year earlier, he’d have been a hundred and thirty-four years old when he died.”

  We always referred to my great-great-grandfather, Liu Xiazong, a.k.a. Charlie Liu, as The Grandfather, with an emphasis on the “The.” This had served originally to distinguish him from my grandfather, Ye-Ye, and my great-grandfather, Jeng-Ye, both of whom he had survived by many years. He had been the patriarch, after all, The Patriarch, and Chinese people are all about the patriarch – Chinese Canadians too, especially first- and second-generation ones. And you had to hand it to the old guy. The first of his family born on Canadian soil, he had pretty much single-handedly amassed the family fortune and founded the Liu dynasty, such as that was. The Grandfather was, in short, a big cheese. And not just as far as his family went. The whole Chinese-Canadian community in Vancouver looked up to him. He’d practically run the Chinese Benevolent Association for decades.

  “A hundred and thirty-four years old,” A-Ma repeated. She nodded. “That sounds right.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I said. “Nobody lives to be that old. Not with all the toxins and superbugs. Not with the ozone layer in shreds. Not with germs.” (I have a tiny problem with germs; I don’t trust them, and they are everywhere.)

  “People in Georgia frequently live to be over one hundred,” Auntie Ev piped up from her wheelchair. Before her illness, she played second viola with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; now her hands shook too much for her to hold a viola, much less play it. “The Republic of Georgia, that is, not the American state. It has to do with their diet. Apparently they eat a lot of yogurt.”

  “C’mon, Auntie Ev,” I said. “Living to over a hundred and living to a hundred and thirty-four are very different – like unusual versus impossible.”

  She deflated into glumness, tucked away there in her dark corner of the living room. She had eaten yogurt until it came out her ears, had tried everything, but nothing the slew of doctors and specialists and naturopaths and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners recommended had restored her body to her, or even slowed her rapid slide into paralysis. It was beyond depressing.

  “I know it’s unusual to live as long as The Grandfather,” A-Ma said, “but sometimes people whose life’s work is incomplete find that they must live longer than others; that they need more time to … to wrap things up.”

  My A-Ma’s name was Lin, which means “Beautiful Jade” in Chinese; it suited her, even though she was old. She was the most self-contained, most serene person I had ever known. Utterly Zen-like. She ran the household on Pender Street – and it was huge – like it was nothing at all and tended to our ramshackle and accident-prone family wi
th an air of quiet competence. I’d seen A-Ma upset; I’d seen her sad; but I’d never seen her rattled. I had the feeling that if I ever did, if any of us ever did, we’d panic, come apart at the seams. She was that steady. At the time, of course, I thought she was being ridiculous and pigheaded.

  “Oh, come on. What didn’t he do? He did everything!”

  Because Charlie Liu’s achievements were the stuff of legend, at least in the Chinatown I grew up in. He had started out importing and canning Hong Kong opium; then, when trading in opium became illegal, he imported tea and silk and Chinese medicines instead, all the while investing in real estate, both in Chinatown and in the growing city of Xianshuibu, Brackish Water Port, the Chinese name for Vancouver. The company he founded, Azure Dragon Imports, takes up an entire corner of Chinatown and offers customers everything from calligraphy sets to paper lanterns, from mah-jongg tiles to silk cheongsams, from jade and coral jewelry to statues of the Buddha. And our house – twenty-two rooms built around three courtyards – is more like a small palace than a private home. I mean, you can get lost in there. Trust me.

  “He was very successful,” A-Ma agreed. “But even a successful man can have unfinished business.”

  “Mother Liu.” Mom’s tone was sharp, startlingly so. She usually deferred to A-Ma. Everybody did. But now she scowled at her, raised her eyebrows pointedly, and gave her head a little shake, like she was forbidding her to do something, warning her. She turned to me. “The Grandfather lived as long as he did because of his diet, Miranda. Period. End of story. Rice and a little fish.”

  “And moon cakes.” Auntie Ev sounded rueful. “Let’s not forget the moon cakes.”

  I wrinkled up my nose. Heavy and not very sweet, moon cakes are round pastries filled with lotus-seed paste and salted egg yolks. Not my idea of a yummy treat, but The Grandfather loved them; they were his absolute favorite thing, and he looked forward every year to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival when he could eat his fill of the nasty things. Ever since he had lost his teeth back in the 1950s, the women of the family had been terrified that he would choke on a pastry, and with good reason. Then, this year, bingo. Dead at the alleged age of a hundred and thirty-four. Death by Cantonese delicacy.

  And then this weird exchange took place between my grandmother and my mother, conducted in a kind of hiss, but still perfectly audible. I mean, I was sitting only a few feet away and, despite how loudly I played my tunes even then, I wasn’t deaf.

  “Daisy.” A-Ma leaned over to tug at Mom’s sleeve. “You know full well the child has to know sometime.”

  Mom shook her head. “Not now, Mother Liu.”

  “But we all agree that –”

  “I said no. She is too young.”

  “But we don’t know how much time –”

  “I said she is too young.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Hey. Apollo to Houston. I’m in the room, you know. What are you talking about? What is it that I have to know?”

  A-Ma looked at Mom. Mom scowled, crossed her arms over her chest, and shook her head once again. A-Ma shrugged. “All right,” she said, turning away. “As you wish.”

  “I am her mother.”

  “You are.”

  “And you don’t know, Mother Liu. The situation might change. Right itself.”

  “That is unlikely, Daisy, and you know it.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  “What is going on? What are you talking about?” I demanded, but neither of them would say a word more on the subject. They just sat there with their zipped lips, so I eventually gave up and went back to my original plan to raid the fridge. Time passed and, in the commotion and chaos generated by The Grandfather’s funeral, I would probably have forgotten all about this conversation, or non-conversation, if it hadn’t been for what happened at the cemetery.

  The Grandfather’s funeral was five hours long, start to finish – in other words, interminable. A white hearse led the procession up the winding road along the waterfront to the cemetery where Vancouver’s Chinese-Canadian community had buried their dead since the 1930s. Through its tinted windows, passersby could just make out the yellow-lacquered casket, nailed shut, in which The Grandfather’s dry leaf of a body rested. I knew from A-Ma that he was wearing the burial garments he had chosen in 1949 on his sixty-fifth birthday. Since that time, these garments had lain, carefully wrapped in muslin, in the carved camphor trunk at the foot of the narrow, red-lacquered bed in which he had slept since the death of his wife six decades earlier.

  It was a balmy autumn day, not raining for once, unusual for Vancouver. The air was soft and hazy, and a brisk wind bustled around like an old auntie telling everyone to hurry along, hurry along now. The two teenage sons of Donald Chen, the Chinese undertaker, walked behind the hearse, lackadaisically swirling paper streamers. They were older than me but, in spite of that, they still managed to be completely lame. Maybe all undertakers’ children are lame; maybe it goes with the turf. In any case, every few minutes they would jump up and down on the streamers, whooping half-heartedly. Probably they would have preferred to be home playing Mass Driver or World of Starcraft (I know I would have), but I’ll bet their dad insisted that they be there, doing their streamer gig. He knew his customers – knew that, for old-school Chinese, streamers were an essential element of any funeral. “How do you think I pay for your fancy video games?” he’d ask them. “Where do you think the money for those expensive cross-trainers comes from?” Chinese-Canadian parents are all alike. They want you to know how much things cost.

  Behind the boys crept the white limousine in which A-Ma and I traveled. Of her six grandchildren, A-Ma had chosen me and only me to join her in the lead car (my mom and dad and two brothers followed in another, lesser car, farther back in the procession). I remember being puzzled by this, and a little weirded out. In Chinese-Canadian families, all hopes for the future are usually pinned on the male heir. This meant that, by rights, one of my brothers or male cousins should have been chosen to sit with A-Ma – probably my cousin Brian, who is a few months older than me. Any of the other kids might have felt proud at being singled out; I felt uneasy. The last thing in the world I wanted was to be The Heir, to have all those family and company responsibilities dumped into my lap. I had my future all mapped out and it was going to be great. St. Izzy’s is this insanely difficult private academy with a mission to produce the next generation of computer geniuses. By getting accepted there, I had put myself on a super fast track to work in some of the new markup and metadata languages being developed for Web3D – high-tech, high-level stuff about which my family had no clue – and I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my plans.

  A-Ma pinched me on the arm – not hard. “You’re fidgeting,” she snapped. “Stop it.” She looked very small and neat in her short-sleeved Chinese pantsuit with its mandarin collar and frog buttons. Both her suit and the cheongsam that Mom had insisted I wear were made of white silk brocade. For Chinese people, white is the color of mourning, not black like it is for most Canadians.

  “It’s this stupid dress,” I complained. “It’s itchy.” I’d always been more of a jeans girl – a tomboy who, upon hitting puberty, quickly morphed into a nerd. I wasn’t used to wearing a dress, especially one with such a narrow skirt. “How are you expected to walk in this thing?”

  “Take little steps.”

  I squirmed, tugging at the tight mandarin collar, which was chafing me. “How do you run?”

  She gave a little hoot. “You don’t.”

  I scowled at the Chen brothers. I am, by nature, both prickly and finicky, and physical discomfort only makes that worse. “What do those two nimrods think they’re doing? They look totally pathetic.”

  “Now, Miranda, they are doing an important job.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “They are entangling devils.” She said this as calmly as she might have said, “They are eating freezer pops.”

  This flabbergasted me. “What did you say?”
r />   “I said they are entangling devils.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, sure.”

  “They are.”

  “A-Ma. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  My grandmother only shook her head. “I am being perfectly serious.”

  “Devils?”

  “Devils.”

  “It’s symbolic, right? Traditional?”

  “Traditional,” said A-Ma. “But not symbolic.”

  I sighed. Every year it seemed she became more traditional, more conservative, more Chinese. Even her speech had begun to sound slightly accented, as though English might have been her second language, even though she was second-generation British Columbian. And she was educated. She had traveled. It wasn’t as though she were some peasant from a small village in China. “There are no such things as devils, A-Ma. You know that.”

  “I do not,” she said. “And if you saw what I have seen in my long life, you would think differently.”

  I believed in progress, in science and technology. I believed in germs. Want to believe in something scary that you can’t see? Germs beat out devils every time. I didn’t understand why my grandmother felt so compelled to preserve the old traditions, why she was so superstitious, especially when she knew, or ought to have known, better.

  Take the past several weeks leading up to the funeral, while we waited (and waited) as old Dr. Yu, the geomancer, hemmed and hawed, trying to find a day that, astrologically speaking, was not fraught with danger for the family. How crazy was that?

  And what about the household gods, all those garishly painted statues of deities and sitting Buddhas and Confucian figures that littered the house? A-Ma had insisted that they all be covered with red cloth, but that no one should wear red clothing. Red was a happy color, and funerals were sad.

  She had also insisted that all the mirrors be removed from sight, and that a white cloth be hung in the front doorway. When I asked about the mirrors, she told me that if anyone saw The Grandfather’s yellow-lacquered coffin in a mirror, there would surely be another death in the family right away. As for the white cloth hanging in the doorway, all I could get out of her was “That is how it must be done. Otherwise there will be ill fortune.”