This drew laughs from the other Han members of the militia, and when the Nippon repeated herself in another language—Espan?—the rest of the unit joined in.
Except for the axman, who jerked his hand up for silence. “That boy is a touch brown to be yours,” he said once the chuckles subsided. He pointed at Bolin, currently hiding behind Chase’s legs. “Or his.”
Da noticed that the Anglo’s fingers were creeping down his side, towards the holstered blunderbuss that had been his reward for helping with the bandits those weeks ago. Upon Chase’s request, Da had even reshaped the muzzle to look like a dragon.
Things would get messy if that decorative maw came to bear.
“My wife died in childbirth,” Da said. “She was Chata—”
“What’s the profit in this?” the Nippon woman interrupted, looking at the axman.
He glared at her. “We’re not off duty yet, Haru.”
“And you’re married to an Afrii. Your children don’t look a thing like you, which is all the better for them. Guo has two boys by an original woman, and Huang and Coyotl will be bunkmates by tonight at the rate they’re going.” Some of the militia playfully jostled two of the men in front, a Han archer and a native spearman. Both pushed back good-naturedly.
The Han axman grunted. “What’s your point?”
“My point is who cares?” Haru nodded at Chase. “Unless you’re white, in which case you probably care a lot. But I’m not, and I need a drink. So let’s move on.” She turned to Da. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Da said dully as the little Nippon inclined her head and strode toward the causeway. The rest of the gente parde followed, including the disgruntled axman.
“Did they hurt Bolin?” Jie asked after the militia passed beyond earshot.
Da looked back at the cart and saw his sister raise her head above the rear window’s sill. She was clutching the elder Bolin’s bow. Could she even draw it? The bamboo braces only offered support for standing and sitting, not loosing arrows.
“He’s fine,” Chase said in his vastly improved Mandarin. He lifted the boy through the window and into Jie’s eager arms; maybe she couldn’t have fired the bow, but she always found the strength to hold little Bolin.
Da watched the Anglo lower his hands and worry at something in his pocket—probably the metal molding of a small child he’d dropped when he’d tried to escape early on, before he’d been spored. Jie had restored the figurine to Chase a few weeks ago as another reward for his subsequent service. He seemed to treasure the piece, even above his new gun. Why?
Da was mildly curious to know, and he could have ordered Chase to tell him. But the less he invoked the puppet spores, the better. The oxen were proof of that. “I’m going to check on the animals,” he announced. “Then we’ll go into the city for supplies.”
“Weren’t you going to play a song for Bolin?” Jie chided.
“I promised him, didn’t I? After I check on the animals. Can you try to map Amadi and Isaura?”
She hadn’t been able to of late. Hopefully the block was temporary, a short-term fuzziness brought on by her current cold. But it felt too much like how she’d lost control of her mirroring when she first fell ill. For a while, it flickered in and out. Then it was just gone.
“I’ll look,” she said anyway, as she always did when he asked. Last she’d had a true sighting, the Afrii and the Espan had still been on the east coast, working their way south. Hopefully that Chata bandit had lived to deliver his message and expand on the note. Either way, Da doubted they’d changed course. The fearsome stories Chase had told about “The Black Resurrection” suggested Amadi would never give up. (And that the spores hadn’t worked on him because he could heal any injury—or infection.) But it would be comforting to reconfirm the pair’s heading. He’d staked everything on that …
“He’s in there,” Jie said, pointing to one of the only houses that hadn’t fallen into chaos in this strange original village.
“It doesn’t look like the best time to be visiting,” Bolin observed. Men and women were digging inside of most of the other houses. Digging and laying bodies in the holes. “Is it because of what happened on the pyramid?”
Da pursed his lips. “Maybe. If they speak Anglo, can you ask about supplies?”
Bolin nodded.
While their guide knocked on the first house’s door and called out, Da leaned closer to Jie and lowered his voice. “What do you see now?”
“More of the same.”
“Tell me anyway.”
She repeated what she’d told him on their way from the pyramid, about the new images she’d seen. The Afrii fighting like a man possessed. The white woman facing down a host of originals. Jie holding the toddler close. She sounded like she was still trying to put the pieces together.
He already knew how they fit. “And you still see us all meeting in Huancavelica?” That’s where she’d seen the gray-skinned teenager, another lynchpin in her visions. Jie thought she’d mirrored him before, that he was the wu who could transfer properties.
“Yes. What do you think it means?”
“An awful decision,” he murmured.
“Why’s that?”
“No supplies,” Bolin said, returning to the cart. “Not while all this is going on.”
Da nodded. “It’s to be expected. Would you follow the path to the south and scout the next two miles? I want to find a safe place to sleep. We’ll catch up.”
Bolin grunted and climbed onto his horse. The time it would take their guide to carry out his task should be just long enough for the spores to replenish.
“Jie,” Da said once Bolin had left, “you know I love you? That I’d do anything to save you?”
She gave him an odd look. “Of course, but why are you asking …” A new image flashed across her eyes: Da, breathing into her mouth and then stealing into the house. “You can’t—”
“I’m sorry,” he said, sporing her a split-second after she’d predicted it. “But this has to be done.” It burned him to watch her eyes glaze over, the images that had animated them for so many hours receding at the same pace, like the afterglow of a sudden bright light. Yet there was no other choice. She wouldn’t have agreed to what he was going to do next, what he had to do. “We need to draw them to Huancavelica,” he whispered as he made sure she was secure in her seat. “And they won’t come on their own.”
But he didn’t slip down from the cart for several minutes. Not until he’d finished the thought again and again in his head, then said it aloud for courage while he ripped a blank piece of paper from the front of one Jie’s novels and found a writing brush. “They’ll come for the boy,” he whispered once more as he took the first steps towards the house. “They’ll do anything for the boy.”
As he would for Jie …
Da circled to the front of the cart and patted the elder Bolin’s horse. At least the harness he’d grown from a pair of vines seemed to be holding; the horse had been leading the oxen for a week now without issue.
The oxen had reason to complain, however. Their mouths both dripped with the spores’ purple phlegm—which the militia had miraculously failed to see—and today their spittle was shot through with red tendrils.
Because the flaw was back.
He thought he’d solved it, been so sure. But they’d had to flee the Forbidden City before he could confirm that he’d rid the puppet spores of their parasitic elements. And now … Now he just had to pray the consequences wouldn’t prove as dire, or that they at least didn’t translate to humans.
Not that he’d had much choice when it came to the oxen. Even setting aside the race south with Amadi and Isaura, Jie didn’t have time for a leisurely jaunt to Huancavelica. She needed the beasts to be fast, to be willing to push themselves beyond their plodding limits … If only he had his dragon, the magnificent creature he’d grafted together in the Forbidden City before the Emperor lost his mind and nerve.
Bolin’s horse whinnie
d, and Da gave him an appraising look. Maybe it was time to start grafting again.
“Da!” Chase yelled from the cart. “Jie sees!”
Da spun around and darted into the back of the vehicle. His sister held the map, and her eyes were distant. It was working again. “Where are they? Have they reached Panma yet?” According to the map, it was the smallest strip of land separating the great oceans, and the logical place to cross to the west side of the New World.
“No,” his sister said in what he’d come to think of as her seer voice, watery and mystical.
He sighed in relief.
“They’re here,” she said, pointing to the dot labeled “Metica City” on the map. “On the eastern causeway.”
Chapter Seven
Little Samurai
“He doesn’t speak Mandarin,” Isaura told Amadi as she exited another handsy merchant’s store. “No one here speaks god-damned Mandarin but the god-damned Han, and they don’t speak god-damned Espan.” Pollas en vinagre, every one of them.
Amadi winced, started to say something that might have been “Calm down,” but seemed to think better of it. Wisely. It hadn’t gone well the last time. “We’ll find someone,” he said instead. “Try another merchant. They have the most reason to talk.”
Isaura scowled. They’d tried two officials and five merchants already today, and learned all sorts of things about the dynamics of Metica City. It was still mostly inhabited by Quecxl’s people, the Meticans. The Han population was growing, as sailors from Manila decided not to make a return trip and resettled throughout New Espan—the Han neighborhood in Metica City had become large enough that some were starting to call it “Chintown.” And the Espan merchants resented the influx of Han rivals, particularly into the professions of barber and goldsmith.
They’d also seen how wondrous the city itself was. Built on an island in Lake Tecxo, Metica City was laid out symmetrically and filled with canals and pyramids and beauty. Aqueducts supplied fresh water, the marketplace had exotic goods of all descriptions, and despite recent signs of flooding—owing, one merchant had told Isaura in a conspiratorial whisper, to Cortez’s poor management of the dikes the Meticans had built to manage the lake’s waters—the streets were wider and in better condition than any Isaura had seen, in the New World or the Old.
But much of it was under construction, as Cortez sought to tear down the Meticans’ glorious legacy and erect an Espan capital in its place. Laborers were everywhere, the noises of demolition and rebuilding were omnipresent, and no one seemed to speak enough of both Mandarin and Espan to translate the awful note from Shoteka’s kidnappers.
Isaura resisted the urge to crumple the paper into a ball and toss it into the closest canal. She couldn’t destroy the note yet. Once she found out what it said, however … balling it up and drowning it was probably too kind a fate. There needed to be shredding involved. And fire.
She glanced at the canal again. It looked less crowded than the street. Yet again, she regretted leaving Quecxl’s canoe beached in a sheltered cove on the east side of the lake. They could have used the boat in the city, and they’d expended enormous amounts of energy bringing the vessel this far. Fording from the coast had required her to channel a constant stream of water under the canoe so Amadi could drag it (tirelessly, as always) through forests and over the highlands. Why hadn’t they just brought the boat a little further?
Fetching it wasn’t worth the effort, though. Not when she still needed to translate the hideous note and determine if anyone had seen a Han cart in a city filled with Han and carts.
She ground her teeth, a bad habit she’d fallen into of late. Two days they’d been in Metica City already, and they were getting nowhere.
“Espan?” she asked without any real hope as a Han urchin scurried past.
To her surprise, the grubby boy stopped and cocked his head.
His reaction was just as unexpected to three Metican laborers carrying a long beam behind him. Their lumber nearly brained the child, missing his forehead only because Amadi dove in front of the men and scooped the boy out of the way.
After she’d shot the laborers a dirty look and made sure the urchin was unhurt, she elaborated her question: “You speak Espan?” she asked slowly.
He shook his head, and her heart sank.
Then he tapped her side—just below the spot still tender from the gunshot wound she’d taken on the Messippi—and gestured to the south, away from the market and towards what one of the merchants she’d spoken to that morning had described as “the filthiest Metican district in the city.”
“You know someone who speaks Espan?” she clarified. “Someone who speaks Mandarin too?”
The boy nodded, gestured again to the south, and held out his hand.
“Ah,” Isaura said. “Yes, I’ll pay you once you take me to this person.” She reinforced her meaning by holding up a peso and putting it back in her purse.
He frowned. Yet when she didn’t reproduce the coin, he shrugged and walked in the direction he’d pointed.
The route he led them wasn’t one they could have followed without his example. After a few blocks, he turned off the main road and wound through a labyrinthine series of alleys. Twice they had to splash through shallow canals, and at one point Isaura thought the boy had taken them in a circle. But once they emerged onto another broad road, she saw that they were in a new neighborhood.
Most of the buildings here were still in the Metican style, and many bore the siege scars Cortez had largely erased from the city’s central areas. It appeared his “Espanification” process was moving slower here, if at all. Perhaps the efforts had been stalled by Naysin’s mass-immunization. Had the Day of Black Pus reached this far south? How many had …
No—she didn’t have time for guilt. At this particular moment, the boy was all that mattered, and he was pointing at a small house that had suffered a partial burning at some point. He darted inside before Isaura could ask him if they’d reached their destination.
“Careful,” Amadi cautioned her when she began to follow. “I saw tricks like this in Ghelwa: an innocent child leading a white person into a trap. Let me go first.”
“Just stay close,” she called over her shoulder as she opened the heavily charred door.
The interior was in better condition than the exterior suggested. The walls’ adobe bricks were blackened here and there, but the floor was swept and tidy. Reed mats for sleeping ringed the single main room in orderly fashion. Polished fox figurines and a mirror adorned the small shrine in the corner.
And there were children everywhere.
Han, Metican, Afrii, and even Espan boys and girls filled the house. The smaller ones were playing, but most of the older ones were preparing food, grinding corn on a flat stone or baking tortillas on a clay dish mounted over the fire.
“What is this place?” Isaura breathed, overcome by the sight of so many happy, beautiful children, some only a few years older than Shoteka.
“A place you shouldn’t be,” one of the Han children replied in perfect Espan. This must be the linguist she’d been brought to see.
Isaura studied the girl … and realized she wasn’t a girl. Although she was shorter than most of the older children, the potential translator had the body and bearing of a young woman.
“Ju-long says you owe him a peso,” she reminded Isaura.
“That I do—if you can read this.” Isaura produced the coin and the note.
The young woman held out her hand. Isaura gave her the note, but the woman kept looking at her until she relinquished the peso as well.
The young woman eyed the payment for a moment, then tossed it with remarkable accuracy across the room and into a large vase, where it clinked against what sounded like other coins. Her throwing hand completed its follow-through by pointing at a side door. Shamefaced, Ju-long nodded and stepped through it.
“I didn’t mean to get him in trouble,” Isaura offered.
“He’s not in trouble.”
The young woman held up the note. “He just needs a bath.”
“Ah … Can you read it?”
The young woman wrinkled her nose. “Not well.”
Isaura pressed her hands together, trying to squeeze away her impatience. “Why not?”
“I recognize some of the kanji, but most of this is hanzi.” The young woman looked up and shrugged. “I’m Nippon, not Han.”
It was all Isaura could do not to scream.
“But I can take you to someone who can read this.” The young woman held out her hand again. “For two more of those pretty coins.”
Two of the last pesos Isaura had. Most of what she’d saved from dowsing over the past few years had eroded during the journey south, spent on food and supplies when she and Amadi had passed by friendly villages on the coast. But she could always dowse more wells. What she didn’t have right now was the knowledge she needed.
“You’re lucky these children are adorable,” Isaura said as she pulled the coins out.
“They’re lucky they’re adorable,” the young woman said, accepting the money and flipping it into the same vase. “If they weren’t, I’d come to my senses and spend more time in a saké shop. All right, my little samurai,” she called to her charges. “I’m going out. Sofia, you’re in charge.”
An Espan teenager murmured something that might have been “Yes, Sensei” before returning to her work of pounding a tortilla flat.
After repeating herself in two more languages, the young Nippon woman strode to the main door and stood on her tiptoes to pull down the polearm hanging above the frame. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Isaura filled Amadi in during the trek to the Han neighborhood. The Nippon said little beyond introducing herself as “Haru,” but she carried her polearm with familiarity, and in the sunlight, her clothing seemed more martial than it had in the house.
Isaura considered the woman as they walked. Was this Haru both a warrior and a caretaker of orphans? And what was a Nippon even doing in Metica City?
The Black Resurrection Page 7