rickitikitarr | 5. voice

[Ricki has been passed over in this week's event- he isn't nearly trustworthy enough for the powers this week to have to begun to reflect his way. So, in the absence of any other mayhem or hysteria, it's been sort of a dragging week for him.

His answer had been to ensconce himself firmly in one of the library back rooms, and to tear his way voraciously through another shelf of the history section. Which leads, quite late one evening, to him activating his feed to explain, in the hushed tones most appropriate for the small hours of the night;]

Some time in the early 1600s in Japan, a young woman had a rather illicit relationship with a Chinese pirate lord. The unlikely pair had a son who they christened Zhèng Chénggōng.

[His accent is so adept as to be potentially noteworthy.]

Our story finds him in the waters between Xiamen and Taiwan. At that time, Xiamen was a young port city, whose traded goods included silver, imported from Spain into China. This trade route was a ripe target for local pirates, in particular, for some reason, the Dutch. They snuck their boats in among the myriad of little islands at the mouth of the Nine Dragons, the Mekong River, or Cửu Long, we called it, where I was growing up. Zhèng Chénggōng, also known as Koxinga, succeeded in fighting about the nastiest kind of warfare you can imagine, for that era. The battles were nasty, but eventually the Dutch fled Taiwan, and the man himself had accomplished this while embroiled in some of the ugliest dynastic struggle imaginable.

A Ming loyalist, he had narrowly survived his own father's terrible betrayal to the Qing family- which I believe, though I haven't been able to ascertain this as being completely true- ended with his father's imprisonment and the then-Emperor being thrown into a well. Zhèng established a small province in the South of Taiwan, where his family held the territory for a little over twenty years, until some business with an illegitimate heir resulted in too much political instability, and the little province was reabsorbed into Taiwan proper.

Oh, here it is- it is rumoured that Koxinga's death was the result of a sudden fit of madness. He had ordered his guards to execute his son. The young man had apparently had an affair with a wet-nurse... of some relative or another, it isn't specific, and when he was disobeyed, Koxinga flew into the sort of rage that could stop a man's heart. He was only thirty seven. That's what one source says; the other just bluntly states malaria.

There was a statue of Koxinga in Xiamen when I was there last, though it may very well be torn down by now. I remember seeing the stonework, but never being aware of the proper story.

[And, now he is, and so is anyone else up late and listening on this drowsy, slow-drifting spacey night.]

It was whispered to me then, somewhat illicitly, that the man had been raised by freed Muslim slaves, and may have practiced that faith in secret, though the books all mention Confucianism.

I do wonder.

[He always feels most imaginative during the very witching hour of night.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No faith is easy.

Surely it's easier to go with the current than swim against it.

It is. But there's a personal component to faith as well. That part's never easy, even if you're in the majority.

True. But I'd be interested in him having this belief because, as a leader of men- more specifically, as the leader of an increasingly evidently doomed resistance movement, he must have relied heavily on identification with and the loyalty of his soldiers. Maintaining that, while hiding his status as the member of that sort of minority...

[That's the extra friction he sees, and the possibility that makes him wonder.]

[Mm. Clearer. She nods invisibly on the other end of the line.]

Could be the kind of thing that drives a man mad.

I really don't know about that one. Malaria delirium seems far more likely- mind you, if we're already in faintly far fetched territory, then why not?

I can't remember if they would have know what malaria was, back then.

Do you subscribe to the belief that belief makes a thing true, to some extent?

Yes, but only to a very gentle extent.

If they believed him mad, maybe it made him so.

Or maybe it was just the malaria after all.

I can see how it would certainly be maddening.

To be thought to be insane?

Yes. It is.

[It sounds like personal experience, but he doesn't know her, and isn't asking. It's too late- or too early in the morning for that. Instead, he thinks, idly;]

I might just go get a cup of coffee and push on through.