Iron Jaw and Hummingbird

by Chris Roberson

  Huang watched as the bandits fastened the stays of their insulated suits tighter around them and secured their breather masks around their faces. Most wore goggles, so that with the masks in place over their mouths and noses, their faces were almost completely obscured. He looked from the nearest of the bandits to the hatch, a thin and flimsy door of metal with small bars of daylight visible around the edges.

  With a shock of horror Huang realized that the gondola was not pressurized.

  Even as rugged and sturdy as it was, the fabric of his uniform was scarcely suited for the kind of temperatures that the bandits’ insulated suits were evidently designed to withstand. And Huang knew from experience how thin the air got in the upper altitudes, from his one attempt at flying a kite over Fanchuan. Without a breather mask, the thin air would do little more than freeze his lungs; it would be insufficient to sustain him. His death would be slow but exceedingly painful.

  Huang overcame his fears and tried calling out to the bandits. But he found his words swallowed by the mounting drone of the engines.

  “Hey!” he tried again, rocking back and forth on the deckplates, trying unsuccessfully to rise up on his knees. He was on his side, his hands tied behind his back and his legs lashed together. “Hey!”

  He could scarcely hear his own voice in his ears, so loud was the sound of the engines.

  Now he was thrashing back and forth in earnest but succeeding only in rising up far enough that he bruised his shoulder when he fell back on the deck again.

  “Hey! Help me! I don’t have a mask!”

  If he could not feel his throat made raw by the force of his shouts, Huang would not have been able to guess that he was even making a sound.

  Through the grimy windows of the airship, each of them a different size and shape from the last, Huang saw the ground begin to drop away as the airship rose.

  “HEY!”

  Huang wasn’t sure whether his shouts had been heard or whether the bandit chief just happened to finally remember he was there, but Zhao at last turned his way. Then he leaned close to one of the other bandits, pointing in Huang’s direction, and made a few quick motions with his hands. The bandit nodded and then clomped across the deckplates toward Huang.

  As the bandit approached, Huang tried to rise up. It occurred to him that it was just as likely that the bandit had come to toss him out the hatch as it was that he’d come to help. Zhao might have changed his mind about keeping his new “pet,” after all. He tensed, unable to resist, teeth gritted.

  The bandit tugged a spare breather mask from a pocket of his suit, and then crouched down to fit it over Huang’s mouth and nose. Then, distractedly, he tugged what looked like a horse blanket from atop a crate and draped this over Huang’s supine form. Then the bandit went back off to join his fellows.

  Huang was taking short and shallow breaths, but he could begin to feel the warm, thick air of the mask fill his lungs with every inhalation. And while the horse blanket did nothing to prevent his body heat from bleeding into the cold metal of the deckplates, it at least shielded him from the worst effects of the cold air in the cabin as the thin wind whistled through the visible gaps in the gondola’s hull.

  When the airship reached its destination, Huang was near frozen, teeth chattering and lips blue. But at least he was alive.

  Finally, the airship began to descend. Looking up through the portholes from his vantage point on the floor, his eyes bloodshot and stinging from the cold air, Huang could see the peak of a mountain heaving into view. At first, Huang thought that the pilot meant to land the craft on the mountain’s slopes, but then the light dimmed on all sides as the airship continued to drop through the mountain.

  It took Huang a moment to realize what had happened. There was a kind of cave or fissure near the top of the mountain, wide enough for the airship to drop down into it without touching either side.

  How long the airship continued to descend Huang couldn’t say, but the airship was moving slower all the time, so that even if it was for several moments, the distance might not have been very far. All he could say for certain was that the space beyond the grimy windows grew black as pitch, and then after a time began to grow lighter again. He could see rough stone walls dimly through the windows, and as the light grew brighter the walls receded farther away on all sides. It was as though they were descending through a chimney into the larger oven below.

  Finally, with a jolt, the airship came to a stop, and the pitch of the howling engines began to descend as the rotors slowed and stopped. Having become so used to the vibration of the deck and the howl of the engines, Huang found it strange to be surrounded by sudden silence, as though he had been struck deaf. Then Zhao began shouting orders, and the illusion was shattered.

  The bandits kept their masks in place, their thermal suits still fastened, and began to unload their plundered cargo. When a large section of the airship had been cleared, a pair of bandits hauled Huang indecorously from the airship, one grabbing his ankles and the other his shoulders, and stacked him outside on the cold stone floor with the rest of the booty.

  Now Huang had a better view of their new surroundings. His image of a chimney and oven was not far off. They were in a roughly spherical chamber, large enough to dwarf the airship behind him, which was surmounted by a tapering passage that rose up through the living rock. High overhead was a bright patch of daylight.

  The airship had come to rest on the roughly level floor of the chamber, near the exact center. The walls of the chamber were pocked here and there with holes of various shapes and sizes, some too small for a grown man to climb through, and some large enough to admit a dozen bandits walking abreast. The holes reminded Huang of something, and it took a moment before he could work out just what. They were like the bubbles that formed and popped in a vat of boiling tar, or cake batter, or any other viscous liquid that air passed through. Was the chamber the result of volcanic activity, the passages and holes—even the chamber itself—the product of hot gases passing through molten rock?

  Huang hadn’t paid enough attention to his studies to know much about geology, nor remember whether the Three Sovereigns mountains were volcanic or not. But it seemed a reasonable assumption. However, unless the mountain were suddenly to become an active volcano, Huang was hard pressed to think of a reason why that was important to his present circumstances. He had far more immediate concerns than the geological origins of the cave.

  An arrangement of steel, aluminum, and wood had been constructed in the mouth of one of the largest of the holes, right at ground level. It looked to Huang like a metal cork in a jar’s neck, but when part of the assembly swung open, and light poured out from within, Huang realized it was instead some sort of door.

  The air in the chamber was thin, but not as cold as the upper reaches had been, and sound was muffled at a distance. With the door open, the bandits began to shift the plunder from the piles outside the airship through the open door and beyond. They seemed to move almost in silence, since the sounds of boxes and barrels and such hitting the ground did not carry as far as the place where Huang lay.

  Finally, it was Huang’s turn, and once more a pair of bandits lifted him roughly in the air, one at his head and one at his feet. He swayed between them like a rolled-up carpet as they hauled him across the chamber floor to the open doorway. Only a small handful of bandits remained in the chamber now, tending to the airship’s engines and hull, repairing small damages incurred in transit.

  When Huang and his bearers passed through the door, the metal assemblage swung shut once more with a muffled clang. Dropped once more on the floor, Huang found himself in a narrow corridor crowded with bandits and their booty. At the far end of the corridor was another door, which was likewise shut.

  Suddenly Huang’s eyes stung and his ears rang. Sounds grew even more muffled for a moment, and Huang panicked, not sure what was going on. Then his ears popped, and the volume of the sundry noises around him jumped higher, roaring in his ears. He real
ized it was a change in air pressure that he’d been feeling. It was difficult to tell with the breather mask still strapped over his face, but it seemed to him as though the air within the corridor was growing thicker, and warmer, too.

  The door at the far end of the corridor began to swing open, and as it did the bandits pulled their goggles from their eyes and tugged off their masks. They began unhooking the fasteners of their thermal suits, in unhurried, economical motions.

  One of the bandits absently reached down and snatched the breather mask from off Huang’s face, and Huang held his breath for a long moment before taking deep lungfuls of the thick, warm air. It smelled somewhat moldy and stale, like a locker room that had been shut up for a season, but it was better than the crisp thin air of the upper reaches, which was more like a forest of icy knives.

  The corridor was an airlock, Huang realized. And the space beyond, whatever it might be, was heated and pressurized.

  The bandit chief Zhao strode over to where Huang lay, as the other bandits began to transfer the plunder. Huang did not fail to notice that Zhao now wore Huang’s red saber slung from his hip.

  “What do they call you, eh?”

  Huang only blinked, feeling sensation return slowly to his cold-numbed face, feet, and hands.

  “What’s your name, pet?” Zhao barked, his tone growing more severe, and nudged Huang in the side with his toe.

  “H-Huang,” he managed tremulously. “Huang Fei.”

  Zhao shook his head angrily. “No, no, that won’t do. I once labored under a foreman, name of Huang, who cheated me out of my wages. Rat bastard.” He paused and spat in the dust at his feet. “And Fei? Even worse. A man called Fei once stole from me the woman I loved. I’d sooner kill any man named Fei as look at him.”

  Huang shifted uneasily on the cold floor, looking up at the glowering bandit chief. The good humor he wore when Huang had been taken captive seemed to have abated, leaving a more prickly demeanor.

  “What other names do you have, eh?” Zhao poked the toe of his boot again into Huang’s side. “What’s your mother call you, what milk name?”

  Huang lowered his eyes to the ground, and muttered, “Hummingbird.”

  “What’s that?” Zhao leaned over, cupping a hand by his ear. “Didn’t quite hear that.”

  “Hummingbird,” Huang said louder, the color rising in his cheeks.

  Zhao nodded appreciatively. He snatched a knife from his belt, crouched down, and sliced through the bonds on Huang’s feet. Then he hauled Huang to a standing position, though Huang wavered unsteadily on his feet as the blood began slowly to move freely again.

  “Much better.” Zhao clapped Huang on the back, nearly sending him toppling over once more. “Hummingbird is a fine name. That’s it, then.” He turned and shouted to the bandits hauling the plunder. “Our pet’s name is Hummingbird, men.”

  The bandits glanced uninterestedly at Huang and went back to their labors.

  Zhao flipped the knife up in the air before him, end over end, and then snatched it out of midair. He wheeled Huang around, and for a moment Huang thought the bandit chief might stab him in the back. But instead he felt the bonds on his wrists falling away as well, and his arms fell to his sides.

  “Come along, then, Hummingbird,” Zhao said, as Huang tried to rub feeling back into his chafed, bruised wrists. “Get to work.”

  The bandit chief shoved Huang toward a tower of barrels near the wall of the corridor.

  “Even pets work around here, Hummingbird.” Zhao slid his knife back into its sheath, reached down, and picked up a large wooden crate, which he balanced on his shoulder. “If you want to eat, then shift.” Zhao stamped his foot. “Shift!”

  Huang turned dispiritedly toward the barrels, shoulders slumped. Behind him the bandit chief laughed again.

  Perhaps freezing to death in the airship wouldn’t have been so bad, after all.

  The bandits’ mountain home was for Huang in those early hours a confusion of tunnels and chambers and corridors. He went where he was told, lugging heavy crates and barrels and boxes, shuttling from one end of the complex to the other. The bandits all addressed him only as “Hummingbird,” and even then only to bark orders at him or to shout at him to clear out of their way.

  Zhao was usually there in the thick of it, directing traffic, telling the bandits which barrels and crates went where. And when Zhao was away, the authority seemed to fall to the scar-faced Jue, or to the gaunt and skeletal Ruan, who appeared to be the ranking lieutenants in the operation. There were between two and three dozen people in the complex of caves, as near as Huang could work out—men and women, the oldest of them perhaps the age of Huang’s grandparents, the youngest no more than a few years older than Huang himself. When they stripped out of their heavy insulated thermal suits, it turned out that a number of the bandits that Huang had taken for men were in fact women, though they were as rough around the edges as the women Huang had encountered in the convoy. But Huang also noted that Zhao and his lieutenants treated the women in the company as the equals of the men, both in terms of the tasks given them and in the effort expected of them.

  The mountain, Huang learned, was Mount Shennong, the southernmost in the Three Sovereigns range. The cave complex, which the bandits called the Aerie, had originally been constructed by miners boring into the mountain searching for precious ores. The comparatively meager tunnels cut by the miners had eventually intersected with the extensive and naturally occurring passages and caves deeper in the mountain. The original mining tunnels were evidently still to be found near the base of the mountain, though they had been long before sealed off, the only remaining entrance the chimneylike passage the airship had entered, which the bandits called the skylight.

  Many of the bandits, Huang noticed, were missing fingers. Some had only one ear, and a few had none at all. Many were scarred, most were missing teeth, and a few wore patches over one eye. More than a few of the bandits walked with pronounced limps, and one or two had arms that were twisted and gnarled like a crab’s claw, though no less useful for all of that.

  Who were these rough creatures, these men and women who had turned their backs on civilization? It was almost as if they had surrendered their humanity, as the rumors suggested, and as a result their bodies came less and less to resemble those of decent men and women.

  What would become of him, Huang wondered, held prisoner by such creatures?

  It was difficult to judge the passage of time deep within the cave complex of the Aerie, but Huang thought it must have been near nightfall when the last of the plunder was finally squared away and stored, and the bandits gathered together for their evening meal.

  Huang was brought along as well, though with his labors finished the bandits had tied a length of cord securely around his neck and led him like a dog on a leash. His feet were unfettered, but his hands were tied wrist to wrist in front of him. It could have been worse, Huang knew. At least with his hands in front of him, he was able to lift a cup to his lips or feed himself if the opportunity arose.

  The bandits came together in a wide chamber with a high ceiling, lit brightly by lanterns strung up on lines secured to the walls. There were three low tables arranged in a horseshoe shape in the middle of the room, with thin cushions ringing the perimeter of the shape on the ground. The bandits seated themselves around these tables, all facing inward, with the bandit chief Zhao and his two lieutenants at the head table.

  Two of the youngest bandits went to work ferrying to the table steaming bowls of rice and soup, trays piled high with salted fish, plates of dumplings, and what looked like bits of chicken and pork on skewers. There must have been kitchens somewhere in the Aerie that Huang had not yet seen, as once the tables were heavily laden with food an older man and a younger woman appeared in the chamber, their faces beet red and sweating, no doubt from an oven’s heat, their clothes stained with flour, grease, and sauces. They took their place at the end of the table, and then the meal began.

&nbs
p; The food smelled delicious, and for all Huang knew, it tasted so, as well. He couldn’t say for certain, having been tied to the far wall, out of reach of anything edible. He considered pleading, but remembering what had befallen the drivers who had begged the bandits for clemency—had it really only been earlier that day?—he decided it better to remain silent. He crouched against the wall, and then when the muscles in his thighs and calves began to ache, slid down into an undignified but marginally more comfortable sitting position.

  Huang’s stomach rumbled, and his throat ached with thirst. The bandits worked their steady way through the meal, laughing and joking, clinking cups in toasts, singing songs, reciting jokes and obscene poems and infantile riddles.

  Despite finding himself in this strange mountain stronghold, tied to the wall like a dog, Huang couldn’t help but find all of this strangely familiar. Sitting outside a ring of fellowship, on his own. Then he remembered those nights on the convoy, and the jokes and songs and laughter of the guards and drivers. Was this really so different, after all?

  Finally the meal came to an end, and Huang thought he could control his hunger no longer. He rose up on his knees as the bandits climbed to their feet, and held his hands out in supplication.

  The bandit chief Zhao strolled over, patting his full belly with one hand, carrying a bowl in the other.

  “We haven’t forgotten you, Hummingbird,” Zhao said, chuckling. Then he bent down and dropped the bowl clattering on the floor in front of Huang. “Eat up, now. You’ve got to keep up your strength. Tomorrow won’t be near so relaxing as today, I assure you.”

  As the bandit chief strode away, Huang inspected the contents of the bowl. It was half filled with murky water, little puddles of grease floating on the surface around a half-eaten chicken leg, a hunk of stringy pork, and a partially gnawed fish head.