Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  Huang suffered in silence on the hard bench and cursed the fate that had brought him to this pass. What could possibly be worse than this?

  The crawler was one of a half dozen vehicles in the supply convoy, heading west along the Grand Trunk. Their journey had begun in the transport depot of Fanchuan and carried them through the western extremity of Tianfei Valley, where the Grand Trunk ended at the labyrinthine complex of valleys and canyons called the Forking Paths. They would follow the maps with care through the twisting corridors of the maze until they trundled out the other side. Once on the highlands, they would continue on to the northwest through Fuxi and Nuwa, which along with Mount Shennong made up the Three Sovereigns range, bound ultimately for Far Sight Outpost, garrison of the Green Standard Army, in the shadow of Bao Shan, tallest mountain in the solar system.

  They had climbed out of the Forking Paths, and were just passing the equator, but Bao Shan was still days away, or more. Ever since leaving the well-paved Grand Trunk, they had been traveling on increasingly rough roads, and once they were out on the highlands, the roadway was scarcely deserving of the name. More a rough track through the red sands, pitted and pocked, punctuated here and there by massive rocks. The convoy, able to travel only as fast as the slowest vehicle, made only a fraction of the speeds it had reached on the Grand Trunk, its progress slowed to a literal crawl.

  They stopped for a few hours each night to let the crawlers’ engines cool while mechanics scurried like ticks on a dog, tightening lug nuts and checking gaskets and oiling junctions and performing all manner of frenetic activity, none of which made any sense to Huang. The drivers and guards, thankful for the chance to stretch their legs on solid ground, huddled around chemical fires, passing flasks from hand to hand, laughing at well-worn anecdotes and filthy jokes. There were one or two women in the company, but they seemed as rough-hewn and ill-mannered as their masculine counterparts, as likely to tell a bawdy joke or recite an obscene limerick themselves as they were to join in the laughter when one of the men did the same.

  Huang kept to himself in these evening stopovers, though it wasn’t as if he had much choice in the matter. The closest he came to any interaction with others, beyond perfunctory brief exchanges that couldn’t be avoided on either side, was sidelong glances thrown Huang’s way, or the raucous laughter in response to whispered witticisms, doubtless at his expense.

  “Dinner, sir?”

  Huang started, surprised at the sound. He turned to see one of the guards from the crawler standing a few feet off. Dressed in the uniform of an infantryman in the Army of the Green Standard, the embroidery at his breast indicated the guard was not far at all advanced in rank, despite his obvious age. Though the guard was old enough to be Huang’s father, protocol and custom still demanded he address the younger man as sir. Huang was an officer, after all, a Guardsman of the Second Rank, and however little the others might respect him, they were each of them soldier enough to observe the proper rituals.

  “Hmm?” Huang hummed, eyebrow raised, not having comprehended the question.

  “I said, dinner, sir?” The guard, with a weary sigh, pointed toward the nearest chemical fire. Men and women sat on their haunches around the greenish flames, their skin cast in sickly hues by the weak light, scooping rice and fish heads from bowls into their waiting mouths with chopsticks. The guard held a bowl in either hand and raised one to Huang, unceremoniously.

  Huang was ravenous, but the smell of the meager dinner made him curl his lip in disgust, nostrils quivering. His first instinct was to refuse, reasoning that as bad as the stuff smelled, it doubtless tasted even worse. But he’d not eaten more than a mouthful since they left the transport depot in Fanchuan, and his hunger was getting the better of his tastes.

  “Oh, all right,” Huang said with a labored sigh, snatching the bowl from the guard’s hand. He raised the bowl to his nose, sniffed experimentally, and then reared back, throwing his head to one side. “Aargh.” He shook his head, as though to knock loose the scent from his nostrils. “And you’re quite sure there’s nothing else on hand? Nothing edible?”

  The guard’s sneer slid into a smile, and he shook his head. “No, sir,” he said, chuckling. “And that’s the best of it, too. Real delicacy, that is.” He glanced to the chemical fire, where the audience had lapsed into silence, listening to the exchange intently. “And you’ll excuse my saying it’s only downhill from here, sir.”

  Huang looked at the noxious stuff in the bowl in mounting disgust. “It gets worse than this?”

  The guard stifled a laugh and nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. We won’t get nothing as nice as this once we reach Far Sight Outpost, sir, mark my words.”

  Huang shuddered at the thought of any list of comestibles with undercooked rice and rancid fish heads ranked at the top. The guard gave an abbreviated bow and went to join the others. There were indistinct whispers as the guard related the full exchange to the others, who had caught only snippets at the distance, followed by loud peals of laughter.

  Far from the green light and thin warmth of the chemical fires, Huang crouched down on the red sands and dispiritedly shoveled bits of rice and fish head into his mouth. It was better than starvation, but not by much.

  Huang had never been much of a reader. He had always left that to his younger brothers. Now, one of them had already passed his juren-level examinations and secured a livelihood in the imperial bureaucracy, and the other was bound for a monastic life in one of the lamaseries of the Southern Fastness, while Huang was cramped in a sickly yellow-green crawler and sent off to the western wilderness, to the edge of civilization, to spend the next decades of his life at a military garrison to which, to all appearances, only the dregs of the Green Standard Army were sent. He had begun to suspect that those family connections of his father’s that had resulted in his officer’s commission might have borne some grudge against the elder Huang. Governor Ouyang had not seemed to consider the posting any form of punishment, but then the governor-general had thought Huang a worthy recipient of his own prized saber, so clearly the old man’s judgment could be called into question. In approving the posting, for all Huang knew, Ouyang might have thought he was doing Huang a favor.

  Huang wished that he’d picked up the habit of reading. Or at least had picked up a few books before boarding the crawler. Then he’d have something to do to pass the time. He’d even take his younger brother’s popular novels, each of them the stirring tale of a man or woman who overcomes adversity through dogged adherence to the teachings of Master Kong, exhibiting proper ritual, filial piety, and loyalty to the Dragon Throne, to rise in the bureaucracy and attain some exalted position in the emperor’s service; some of the novels even went further and detailed the sorts of positions these noble workers achieved in the afterlife, serving the celestial government in the afterworld as they had served the Celestial Emperor in life. For that matter, he’d even take his youngest brother’s spiritual tracts, endless meditations on virtues and the nature of truth. Anything would be better that this endless nothing.

  But no, Huang had never read a book for pleasure—and seldom ever for his studies, either—and so now paid the price. In his younger days, he’d amused himself with sport, when he wasn’t indulging his appetites for spirits and women. He tried horseback riding a time or two, in the course in Fanchuan’s Green Stone District, having seen images of the sport sent from Earth, reportedly the emperor’s favorite pastime; but even 250 years after man first came to Fire Star it was not yet a fully terrestrial world. Like most animals horses were still ill adapted to the thin air and low gravity. In another few hundred years, the atmosphere mines in the north might produce enough oxygen and nitrogen to blanket Fire Star in a breathable atmosphere like Earth’s, and the last of the red dust would at last be carpeted in green grasses and forests. The world that Huang knew was habitable but, it often seemed to him, not much more than that.

  Denied the pleasures of the horse track, and lacking the stomach for flying above the
city in kites or balloons as so many young men and women of his class did, Huang was forced to find distraction nearer the ground.

  His parents, of course, hoped that he would lose himself to his studies, as his brothers had lost themselves to theirs. But the only subject that interested him in the slightest was military strategy, and only because it seemed more a game than an intellectual pursuit. More often than not Huang would beg and plead with his tutor to devote an entire session to a round of elephant chess instead of the dry texts on the subject, moving the pieces marked as officers and scholars, elephants and ministers, horses, chariots, and cannons back and forth across the board, to see whether general or marshal would prevail. After a few years Huang bested his tutor more often than not, but even his parents were quick to admit that being adept at games of strategy scarcely made him a scholar.

  With studies failing to hold his interest, Huang turned his attention to sport. He tried a bit of archery and riflery. In the low gravity of Fire Star, firing a rifle without properly bracing yourself could send you flying backward. The first time Huang fired a rifle at the range, he’d paid scant attention to the instructor, and the kick of the recoil knocked him off his feet. His backside had been bruised for weeks afterward, and it hadn’t been a difficult decision to put the rifle aside forever. He’d had marginally better luck with the bow and arrow, but pulling the string back time and again just seemed too much like work; the bow went the way of the rifle.

  It wasn’t until Huang picked up a sword for the first time that he discovered his true calling.

  Fencing wasn’t work. Fencing wasn’t even really sport. Fencing was a pursuit. Better yet, it was an art.

  Huang was a little boy when he first saw a pair of martial artists giving a demonstration in the plaza in Sun-Facing District, near the Hall of Rare Treasures. Looking back on it later, Huang realized that the performers had been little more than beggars who’d picked up some small amount of skill. But at the time, he’d never seen anything like them. They seemed to glide back and forth effortlessly across their hastily erected platform, their blades dancing in their hands, long tassels dangling from the pommels, the sunlight glinting off jewels in the hilt that, while no doubt nothing more than paste or glass, had looked to his young eyes like treasures fit for the emperor himself. And the sounds of the swords meeting each other, ringing like bells, sending sparks flying, resounded in his ears for days and weeks to follow.

  Later, Huang discovered the popular entertainments: the wuxia dramas of swordsmen and brigands, legends from Earth’s history and folktales of the last two hundred years of Fire Star’s colonization. Wandering heroes and knights-errant who faced evil and adversity only with the strength of their arms and their skill with the blade. The river-lake and the world of the outlaw. Brothers of the greenwood—bandits, burglars, and pirates—who maintained order when the authorities became corrupted by vice and decay. Stories like The Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Huang lived in them when he was a boy, returning day after day to the cheaper theaters, oblivious to the world around him. Any nearby stick became a swordsman’s saber, and woe betide any flowering plant that happened to grow in his path; each petal and leaf slashed to the ground was a fallen enemy, a vanquished foe.

  One day, he’d chanced to see a group of children and young adults in a courtyard doing what appeared to be a strange kind of dance, and when he asked his parents, he was told that they were practicing fencing movements.

  Fencing? Huang’s mind had raced. Did they mean with swords?

  Huang had insisted on the spot that his parents enroll him in the class. In the years that followed, while his brothers read their books and his friends soared high over the city with their breather masks and kites, Huang haunted that courtyard, listening closely to everything the instructors had to say, practicing the movements until his muscles ached, fighting bouts in his dreams. In time, he became one of the star pupils, always finishing first or second in the meets, always trading the top spot with his friend Kenniston An, the son of a prominent Fanchuan bureaucrat of Briton extraction.

  Huang’s room in his parents’ house was filled with his fencing medallions, trophies, and prizes. There was a portrait of him and Kenniston in their fencing uniforms, sabers drawn. Crossed swords hung on the wall, surrounded by framed advertising posters for the wuxia dramas he’d spent so many hours watching. The small shelf of books beside his bed was filled almost entirely with fencing manuals.

  He had left all of it behind, the morning that he came to the transport depot. None of it would do any good now. When Kenniston had finished his studies the year before, his parents had sent him off to the military, having determined that their son had no marketable skills to serve the family’s interests. Huang had been horrified at the thought of leaving behind the culture and sophistication of the city for the harsh environs of the outer provinces, but Kenniston seemed not to mind. He’d opted to enlist in the Bannermen, the elite fighting forces trained to fight in any terrain, in any environment, desert or sea, planetside or vacuum. Huang had joked that Kenniston had taken one too many blows to the head in their practice bouts and ended up addled, but his friend had just laughed. Huang would understand when he was older, Kenniston said. One couldn’t play at games forever.

  Huang was only a year Kenniston’s junior and had always gotten his back up when his friend tried to pull rank. Well, now Huang was older, and he wished he knew how to get hold of Kenniston, because he could prove conclusively that his friend had been wrong. So far as Huang was concerned, then and now, he could quite happily go on playing at games forever if the alternative was a lifetime of hard metal benches and the rude laughter of common soldiers.

  But even that would be somewhat bearable if he had something to pass the time. Which led Huang to wonder whether he might not have an easier time of it now had he spent a little more time reading as a child and less time with a sword in hand. And, of course, if he’d brought a book or two to read. As it was, Huang had brought along only the red saber with the firebird etched upon its blade that the governor-general had presented him, which was proving poor distraction aboard the crawler. If only something would happen, he wished, anything to relieve the boredom.

  They were still more than a day away from Bao Shan and Far Sight Outpost when the airship was sighted, high over the horizon. They were just boarding the crawlers after the night’s stopover, the eastern sky violet with the sunrise, when a new star seemed to appear in the south. It was a few moments before it was discovered that the new flickering light in the southern sky was the glint of sunlight on metal, a few dozen miles away, and not from some more distant celestial source.

  There was some little discussion about the airship as the drivers and guards arranged themselves in the crawlers, and the convoy set off to the west. Most presumed that it was one of the airships used for reconnaissance by the Army of the Green Standard, or one of those used by the elite corps of the Bannermen on maneuvers. It might even have been the pleasure craft of some wealthy aristocrat.

  Near midday, though, as the airship drew nearer, it became clear that it didn’t fly any of the eight banners of the elite fighting forces, nor the emerald signet of the Green Standard. And though the sunlight glinted off the bare metal of its engine struts and stabilizers, the fittings and fixtures were hardly those of an aristocrat’s pleasure ship.

  This craft appeared to have been salvaged and rebuilt repeatedly, the fabric of the envelope a patchwork of different colors and materials. The gondola, which hung down in front of the two hulking engines that propelled the craft forward, was constructed of bare steel and unpainted aluminum. Even the small balloons Huang’s friends had used to sail high over the streets of Fanchuan had been more elaborate and baroque than this.

  The guards shifted uneasily on their benches as the drivers debated whether to put on more speed or stop and circle the crawlers in a defensive ring.

  “What is the matter?” Huang asked, his voice croaking as h
e spoke, so long had it gone unused. “It’s just an airship.” He looked from one worried face to another. “Isn’t it?”

  The oldest of the guards shook his head in a dismissive manner, but the youngest leaned over and studied Huang’s face closely.

  “Really?” the young guard asked, asking if Huang’s question was sincere. “You don’t know about the . . .” And here the guard paused for a moment as though concerned that someone might be eavesdropping. “About the bandits?”

  Huang’s eyes widened.

  Everyone had heard the stories about the bandits who were said to prowl the unpeopled wastes, preying on travelers and then returning to their hiding places in the high mountain regions, where the air was too thin to breathe and so cold that a man’s hairs became needles of ice on his head. But these bandits were not the noble brothers of the wuxia dramas. They were men who had turned their backs on civilized society.