Chapter 10: The Possessed | Rajah Versus Conquistador
April 13th, 1521
Enrike departs with a bow, leaving you alone in your payag. The afternoon sea breeze stirs the hanging fabrics as you savor the news he brought: the Kapitan has accepted your invitation. He will come ashore for the water ceremony tomorrow, just as you planned. Your trap is set.
You pour yourself a measure of tubâ, feeling the serpent's satisfied writhing within you. In this moment of triumph, a memory surfaces like a corpse rising from the depths. You were twelve, still untattooed, watching your mother make her final stand against Handuraw. Even now, you can recall how the late afternoon light filtered through the nipa walls, casting strange patterns that seemed to writhe like living things across the gathered baylan.
Your mother had broken every custom by going there. Binukot were never meant to be seen in such places – their power lay in remaining hidden, preserved like precious pearls in their darkened chambers. Yet here she stood in the dying sunlight, her skin shocking white against the bronzed and tattooed flesh of the baylan who surrounded her.
"Return my son," she demanded in her melodious Western accent. You grew up with her voice, so you can hear the rage behind it. But it must have been easy to miss for ears accustomed to the hard-edged Binisayâ of Sugbo.
Handuraw sat unmoved, like a python regarding its prey. Behind her, four other baylan waited in perfect stillness. Even then, you understood the careful ambiguity of their arrangement – no one could say for certain which among them truly led their sisterhood. Some claimed they had no head, like the wilderness itself. Others whispered that they deliberately obscured their hierarchy, knowing that what cannot be seen cannot be struck down.
"You forget, sister," Handuraw's voice carried the same gentle tone she used when preparing sacrificial offerings, "that all power demands its price. Even your precious seclusion was bought with blood – or do you think the walls that keep you pure built themselves?"
Your mother's composure cracked slightly. "Do not call me sister. We chose different paths. The binukot preserve what is sacred. You corrupt it with your sacrifices."
"Preserve?" Handuraw's laugh was soft but carried an edge like a well-honed blade. "You hide in darkness while the world burns. Tell me, precious flower, who will protect your purity when the raiders come? When rival datus seek slaves? Will your unsullied hands hold back their spears?"
Handuraw stood up. She towered over your mother, from whom you inherited your stature and portliness. Even in maturity, Handuraw was tall and broad-shouldered, like her son, Lapulapu. She must have been an attractive woman in her youth, you always thought, imagining her silver hair to be black, her wrinkled skin smooth, and her sagging breasts firm and high on her chest.
"Some of our sons must become more than human," Handuraw continued, her eyes finding you where you sat silent and watchful. "The diwata care nothing for our ideas of good and evil. They demand blood, and if we do not feed them with ritual and purpose, they will take it through chaos and slaughter."
"You speak of diwata," your mother's voice trembled with both fear and fury, "but I see only your hunger for power. My son was meant for greater things than your blood-soaked rituals."
"Greater things?" Handuraw's smile carried centuries of baylan wisdom. "Tell me, what greatness can your way offer? To hide him away like you were hidden? To deny the power that already moves in his blood?"
She unwrapped her shawl that covered her shoulders, revealing the full glory of her sacred tattoos. The patterns seemed to move in the fading light, each mark a testament to some victory, some sacrifice, some power claimed through blood and fire. The atmosphere of the room bent in response to the sacred meaning of the signs covering her skin. As seen through your memory, the baylan grew in size as she reminded your mother, for the last time, of the baylan's power.
"Look well, sister," Handuraw's voice took on the rhythm she used in ceremonies. "You see marks of violence, but each line is a boundary held, each pattern a victory that kept our people safe. While you binukot dream of a world without bloodshed, we baylan ensure our people survive in the world that is."
Your mother tried to meet Handuraw’s gaze but found she could not. "He is my son," she whispered, her authority crumbling like temple walls in an earthquake.
"He was your son," Handuraw corrected gently. "Now he belongs to powers older than either of our traditions. The serpent has chosen him, and not even a mother's love can change that."
When your mother finally fled, her tears falling like rain, you remained seated among the baylan. Even then, you recognized that you were witnessing more than a simple conflict between the woman who gave you life and the woman who forged your destiny. This was the eternal struggle between those who would hide from power and those who would grasp it, between those who dream of gugma and those who embrace death as the price of survival.
When you first heard Paraluman speak of the ancient war between binukot and baylan, you understood finally what hung in the balance that day. But by then, the serpent had long since won its victory, and the boy who might have walked your mother's path was locked away in boxes within boxes, silent as the grave.
***
In the consecrated square, slaves work under Tupas's direction, constructing the platform for tomorrow's ritual. They drape fine muslin cloths over the wooden frame and weave palm branches into decorations. Through your paragahin, the Malaccan had sent word that you shouldn't fear the thunder of their lantakas tomorrow morning – as if you needed reassurance about such displays of power. You watch how your nephew has cleverly arranged the platform to echo your own sacred traditions while serving their foreign ceremony.
The sight of Ban-Sŏn haggling with a Bruneian merchant catches your eye. Like many traders from Siyama, he was born in the southern provinces of the Ming empire but found his fortune in the seas of the south. Each time he visits your port, his wealth and influence have grown. His network now spans three kingdoms, with warehouses in each major port from here to Siyama. You've watched him work his peculiar magic – the way he can calculate complex exchanges in his head while others still fumble with counting shells, how he seems to smell profit in ventures others overlook.
Handuraw taught you to recognize the signs of possession. Ban-Sŏn shows all the marks of the sapian, of one claimed by Sapî, the diwata of trade. His people call it guanyin's blessing, but you know better. You've seen how his eyes light up at the mention of profit, how his fingers twitch when counting coins, how he seems to enter a trance-like state when negotiating complex deals. Like all those touched by Sapî, he dreams in numbers and wakes thinking of ways to multiply wealth.
You recall how he described leaving his farming village in Fujian. Youngest of six sons, with no hope of inheriting land or position. But Sapî had marked him early – while other boys played with tops and kites, he was already trading rice cakes for sweet plums, then plums for copper coins, then coins for silver. His family thought him strange, too absorbed in commerce to properly honor ancestors or seek marriage. They didn't understand that he was already married to a power older than any mortal union. The mortal unions and their fruits soon followed the flowering of his wealth. He took on a timawa as his mistress in your port a few years ago. Their children will likely marry into datu families with their growing wealth.
Your brother, the Bendahara, was similarly claimed in his youth, though by a different force. Where Ban-Sŏn is possessed by trade, Isagani belongs to Kahapsay – the diwata of order, eternal lover and rival of Kagubot, the diwata of chaos. You remember him as a child, arranging his toys in perfect lines, becoming distraught when anything disrupted his careful patterns. While other boys learned to read faces and navigate social currents, he focused on systems and structures with an intensity that bordered on madness.
One incident stands out clearly in your memory. During a feast celebrating a successful raid, you watched your young brother completely miss the subtle power plays happening around him. While datus formed alliances through careful word choice and strategic seating arrangements, the Bendahara was absorbed in organizing the tribute count, blind to how his precise accounting was being used in complex status negotiations. Yet this very blindness made him valuable – his obsession with order meant he could never be bribed or swayed by emotional appeals.
More valuable still was his inability to deceive. Like all those claimed by Kahapsay, he found falsehood physically distressing – it disrupted his careful patterns of thought the way a misplaced object would disturb his childhood arrangements. This made him perfect for the role of atubang.
The office of atubang has been with your people since before your ancestors conquered these shores and drove the Agta to the mountains. It is said that the Agta refuse to bow to any king, and any Agta who shows a hint of dominating behavior will be humbled by the rest of the tribe, or if needed, even killed by them. Since they have no king, they freely speak truth to each other.
Unlike the Agta, your people have datus. Rulers like you have the power over life and death of your subjects. The rules of propriety disallow direct disagreement or contradiction in your presence. Your people approach you with fear, and this fear bends the speech of both ulipon and timawa. Even the datus under you cannot be fully trusted. They are playing their own games of power, which means their speech is bent in ways that serve their own interests and ambitions.
According to baylan lore, the diwatas revealed a solution to Diwahon, the first baylan to speak with the moon, during one of her panganito trances. Datus are to choose one man who shall act as his mirror and shall speak the truth to him under the pain of death. This man shall be like a creek without a spring, for all his words shall come from himself alone, and he shall forget from whose mouths these words first arose. As such, the people shall not fear speaking truth to him, for their words shall reach the datu as if it were from him. This man shall be called "atubang," for he shall face the datu like a mirror and sharpen his mind like the grindstone sharpens the sword.
Datus usually pick one of their younger brothers, usually from the same mother, as their atubang. You were fortunate with Isagani, your mother's only other son. After losing you in Mactan, she convinced the old rahaj to send your brother to the court of Malacca for a few years. Other datus were doing this, so it was not hard to convince your father. By then, your brother had shown a facility for book learning and a distaste for battle. He also had a gift for numbers the same way you have a gift for languages. He found the perfect role for himself in Malacca: the office of the Bendahara. You were already the rajah on his return, and you let him combine both roles – your atubang and the port's Bendahara. His possession by Kahapsay made him perfect for both offices, managing Sugbo's growing wealth with the same precision he used to deliver uncomfortable truths to your face. Since then, he has brought the ways of Malacca to your port – the careful weighing of tributes, the marking of accounts in the manner of the kitab, the settling of merchant disputes through written records rather than through the knife. Where once your father's port relied on memory and reputation alone, now your brother's systems draw traders from distant kingdoms who know their goods and gold will be counted fairly. His success can be seen in how everyone now calls him by his office.
Handuraw explained it to you once: "Kahapsay and Kagubot are the parents of all diwata, locked in eternal dance. Order rises from chaos, chaos breaks down order, and the cycle continues. Most men contain a mix of both forces, but some are chosen to embody one purely." She taught you that true power comes from understanding these forces, from seeing how they move through men's hearts like wind through leaves.
The Bendahara's possession by Kahapsay proved invaluable as Sugbo grew. Trade requires order – consistent weights and measures, reliable records, predictable procedures. Sapî delights in such systems, which is why the merchants who follow her so often seek out men like your brother. Even now, you can see him in the counting house, surrounded by traders from a dozen ports, his precise voice cutting through their babble as he settles disputes with mathematical certainty.
Your attention returns to the black ships in the harbor. The Kapitan's messages confirmed what you had begun to suspect – he shows all the signs of possession by Kahapsay, just like your brother. You see it in his obsession with records and measurements, his rigid adherence to procedure, his drive to bring order to these seas. Through Enrike's drunken revelations, you learned how he survived crossing the great ocean through careful calculations that he refused to abandon even when his men begged to turn back.
Yet there is something else moving in him – the diwata they call Hesukristo. Where most men possessed by Kahapsay reject all that is chaotic or revolutionary, this Kapitan embraces a power that would overturn the very foundations of order. The signs are clear: his drive to convert others, his willingness to risk everything for his faith, his strange marriage of military discipline with the teachings of a diety who chose to become man and die like a slave. This is a diwata you've never encountered before, one that somehow harnesses Kahapsay's love of order to serve Kagubot's hunger for transformation.
The serpent stirs within you, sensing new possibilities. You've learned to use Sapî's possession of merchants to build Sugbo's wealth. You've harnessed your brother's devotion to Kahapsay to create systems that draw traders from distant shores. Even the Kagubot that moves in your own blood, manifesting as the serpent, has become a tool rather than a master.
Now this new power enters your waters, carried by warriors who serve a king beyond the great eastern sea. Your cup bearer refills your drink, and you savor both the familiar bitter sweetness and the excitement of the game ahead. Tomorrow, they declared, the Kapitan will come ashore to perform his ritual of bautismo. You wonder what offerings this strange diwata truly desires, what price it will demand for transforming slave into free, common into noble, death into power.
You smile, feeling the serpent's pleasure at the challenge. Let him come with his ceremonies of water and salvation. You've mastered every diwata that's entered your port – this Hesukristo will be no different. Each power has its price, each possession its purpose. You need only discover how to turn this one to your advantage, as you have all the others.
***
The bells have just struck the hour of Vespers when Magellan emerges from his cabin. From the shore comes the rhythmic beating of ceremonial gongs—a sound that will soon be replaced, God willing, by proper church bells. He finds Father Pedro exactly where he expects, reading his breviary in the fading light.
The crew's eyes follow their captain as he crosses the deck. Some of the older hands remember how these weekly confessions had begun—in the darkest days of their crossing of the deathly serene ocean, when the captain's rigid discipline had been all that stood between them and despair. Now it is as much ritual as the striking of bells, part of the order that governs their floating world.
But this is different. This is Saturday, not their usual Sunday morning before Mass. Tomorrow will bring either triumph or treachery, and Magellan will face it with a clean soul.
Father Pedro has long since abandoned the cramped confessional in the ship's tiny chapel, preferring to hear confessions here on the quarterdeck where the fresh air helps clear both lungs and conscience. The practice had begun during those scorching days in the endless sea when the chapel became unbearable, but the priest maintained it even in cooler climes. "The chaplains of the crusaders heard confessions under open sky," he would say, "and our Lord himself preferred hillsides to temples."
Magellan kneels formally on the deck, making the sign of the cross with precise movements. Let the men watch. Let them see their captain humble himself before God. A father must teach by example.
"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been six days since my last confession." Father Pedro's weathered face betrays no surprise at the change in schedule. They both know what tomorrow might bring. The priest has been busy hearing confessions from the crew all afternoon – Magellan has watched from his cabin as one sailor after another knelt before Father Pedro on the quarterdeck. "Speak, my son."
"I confess to pride in my calculations, in my certainty of finding this passage." Magellan's voice carries the careful formality of ritual. "To anger when questioned. To harsh judgment of those who doubt. And for all my sins in the past against humility and charity…"
A pause, weighted with unspoken concerns.
"There is more troubling your spirit," Father Pedro prompts gently.
"I find myself..." Magellan chooses his words carefully, "...troubled by my own suspicions of the heathen king. Even as he speaks of embracing our Holy Faith, my soldier's instincts warn me of possible treachery." His voice drops lower. "Is it sinful, Father, that I cannot fully trust his protestations of faith? That I continue to watch for signs of duplicity even as we prepare for his baptism?"
Father Pedro's weathered face softens with understanding. "Ah, my son. Again you torture yourself needlessly with these doubts. Did not Our Lord himself tell his apostles to be wise as serpents, though gentle as doves? God called you to be a captain of men, a warrior in His service—not a monk in contemplation." He leans forward. "Think you that the centurion abandoned his Roman training when Christ called him? Or that San Fernando forgot his warrior's craft when leading souls to God?"
"But these constant calculations, this weighing of every word and gesture..." Magellan protests.
"Are the tools God gave you for your holy purpose," the priest interrupts firmly. "The Lord made you a master of navigation, of tactics, of reading the game of power. These are not sins but gifts to be used in His service. Discerning true faith from false shows is part of your sacred duty as a leader of men."
Magellan squares his shoulders slightly, tactical certainty replacing his earlier doubt. "Then perhaps God requires a wolf who knows the ways of wolves, Father. Was I not myself once ruled by ambition and the hunger for glory? Yet grace found me." His voice takes on a familiar intensity. "If this sovereign proves false—if he plays the game of power beneath his shows of piety—then God has prepared another player to match him, one who knows how such games end."
"That may be so." Father Pedro chooses his words with care. "Yet remember always to what purpose God has honed your skills. A wolf who serves the shepherd is still the shepherd's instrument."
"As was San Fernando," Magellan touches the cross at his throat. "As was El Cid. One cannot rule men without mastering the arts of power. Even wolves are called to be saints, Father. And God uses our practiced skills—yes, even our cunning—for His divine purpose."
"That may be true." Father Pedro's tone carries gentle warning. "Yet I have seen too many priests who prowl palace halls like wolves, hunting influence instead of souls. They endanger the Church more than any outward enemy."
"Perhaps that is why God sends us to these distant shores instead," Magellan touches the cross at his throat. "Far from the comforts of court, where faith must be lived rather than performed. Where the Church can be pure again."
"God gives men freedom to choose their path," Father Pedro agrees softly. "And to live with the world those choices create." He studies his captain's face. "You have thought much on this."
"Every hour since we entered this port." Magellan's voice hardens with conviction. "I know what they whisper—that I risk the King's expedition seeking souls when our orders were simply to find the spice islands." His hand traces the red cross of Santiago embroidered on his doublet. "But God did not bring us across the great ocean for mere commerce."
The familiar words of absolution follow, and Magellan crosses himself with the same precise movements. But before rising, he looks up at the priest with an intensity that reminds Father Pedro of those desperate days in the tranquil endless ocean.
"Pray for me, Father. That I might have the wisdom to know God's will... and the strength to do it."
As he stands, squaring his shoulders to return to his duties, Magellan's voice carries the steel of command once more: "Deus vult!"
The old crusader's cry hangs in the air as he descends the ladder. The watching crew quickly find urgent tasks to occupy them, but the image remains: their captain on his knees, then rising with the fire of holy purpose in his eyes.
Let them remember, if tomorrow brings betrayal. Let them remember their captain sought God's grace before battle, as any true Christian knight must do.
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