“So you’ll be performing both the homily and the revelation, then?” The woman glanced from Gamine to the aging mendicant propped up on cushions on the tent’s far side, his eyes shut and his mouth open, tongue lolling.
Gamine smiled reassuringly. “No need to fear, sister. I discussed the topic of today’s lesson with Master Wei over the morning meal, and I shall be happy to repeat it to the others.”
The woman, old enough to be Gamine’s mother—grand-mother, even—looked at her and sighed with relief. “Oh, thank you, Iron Jaw. It’s so much nicer when you . . .” She broke off and shot a guilty look at the old man. “That is, these last few seasons Master Wei has . . . Well, he’s gotten . . .”
As the woman struggled to find the right phrase, Gamine came to her rescue. “Master Wei tires easily, of late.”
The woman nodded eagerly. “Exactly.” She took another deep breath and looked at the old man, his chest gently rising and falling, and shook her head sadly. “It happens with the aged, sometimes. They . . . forget things.”
Again Gamine flashed her most comforting smile. “Perhaps. But then, perhaps Master Wei is only forgetting things not worth remembering, his mind on more . . . elevated matters?”
Unconvinced, the woman managed a weak smile. Then, bowing to the slumbering mendicant, and with a deeper bow in Gamine’s direction, she drew back the tent flap and went to carry word to the rest of the camp.
Before the tent flap fell closed, Temujin lurched in, a half-full jar of wine in his hand. He stumbled, throwing his arms out in both directions in an attempt to regain his balance, sloshing wine onto the rug-covered floor. He made it a few steps across the tent, more a series of half-controlled falls than proper walking, and then collapsed onto a low stool beside a table.
“And what did that old sow want, as if I didn’t know?”
“She came to ask about the service,” Gamine answered.
“Of course she did,” Temujin said with a sneer. He lifted the jar to his lips and sloshed most of what was left into his open mouth. Then he thumped the jar onto the table. “She’s worried the old nick-ninny is too addled to do the job, is she?”
Gamine narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “She’s concerned about Master Wei’s well-being, I’m sure, just as the rest of us are, the powers preserve him.”
Temujin wiped his straggly mustaches dry on the back of his hand and fixed Gamine with a squint-eyed stare. “Seems to me you make pretty free with this taradiddle of yours, hop-o’-my-thumb, even when there’s no marks about to hear it. ‘Powers’ this and ‘virtues’ that and ‘harmony’ the other thing.”
“And it seems to me that you are drunk, old man.”
For a brief moment a proud smile started to spread across Temujin’s face, and he began to nod, but then the smile slid into a frown, and he narrowed his eyes. “And what’s it to you if I’m in my altitudes, at that, my little sprite? A man’s due his rewards after hard labor, is he not?”
“And what hard labor would that be?” Gamine asked with a slight smile, amused despite herself.
“All this nonsense!” Temujin waved his arm in a wide circle, nearly toppling the jar to the floor, indicating the camp beyond the tent’s thin walls. He wavered on the stool, listing from one side to the other and back, eyes half lidded. “I’ve pulled some long cons in my time, girl, but nothing so long as this gaff’s been on. Three years now? And what have we to show for it but drafty tents and watery soups and a few hundred more mouths to feed? Where’s the payoff we always talked about? Where’s the big score? I’d swear if I didn’t know better that you’d come to believe all this flimflam yourself.”
“You’re drunk,” Gamine repeated, narrowing her eyes, her smile fading. “And a fool.”
“I’m drunk.” Temujin nodded, then jerked a thumb toward the old man snoring in the corner. “And the old fumbler’s lost his wits. And you?” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared down his nose at her. “You act like you forgot that all this is a dodge and started believing your own grift. So which of us is the biggest fool, hmm?”
That said, Temujin lurched to his feet, snatched up his wine jar, spilling the little that remained on the rugs underfoot, and then propelled himself gracelessly toward the tent flaps.
“The services start in a short while,” Gamine called after him, her tone even. “Try not to bungle your entrance this time, would you?”
The old beggar spun on his heel like a weather vane, nearly falling over, and with his hand over his heart bobbed his head in a mockery of a bow. “As you wish, Iron Jaw. As you wish.”
Temujin turned and stumbled through the tent flaps, leaving Gamine alone with her thoughts, the wine-sodden rugs, and the old man snoring indecorously in the corner.
Gamine climbed the steps to the wide platform atop the scaffold and looked down at the uplifted faces of the faithful gathered at the center of the camp. There were more of them now than ever, and more new faces joining them every day.
It wasn’t just Gamine, Temujin, and Wei sleeping rough by the side of the road anymore. The camp had grown until it numbered nearly a hundred tents arranged in irregular concentric circles, the pinkish orange sands mounting in low drifts on their eastern sides. At the center of the circle, near the trio of tents that Wei, Gamine, and Temujin had made their own, was a roughly built scaffold, constructed of cast-off timbers, discarded aluminum sheets, and other odds and ends. Before the scaffold was a broad, open space, and it was here that all their followers now gathered.
Gamine remembered when she and Temujin had first joined Wei on his travels three years before, when they’d made do with a bare patch of dirt at the edge of market squares. Wei would preach his rambling sermons about the “powers,” as he called them, figures drawn indiscriminately from fiction and religion, legend and mythology. Gamine would come onstage after the homily was done, professing her belief, and then proceed to demonstrate her virtue by reciting passages from novels, operas, and plays, as though possessed by the spirits of those characters. Scenes from The Miner’s Journey or Water Margin or The Journey to the West. Or, depending on the makeup of the audience, she might assay a few scenes from the Briton myth-play Robin Hood, about a man who stole what the poor needed from the rich, or episodes from the story of the Vinlander culture hero Paul Bunyan, a woodcutter who supposedly stood against the invading armies of the Dragon Throne centuries before. Then, once Gamine had recited long enough to establish possession by the powers, Temujin would come forward to test her mettle and her resolve. It was nothing more than a pulled punch and faked reaction, but the act so impressed audiences that Gamine would forevermore be known to all of them only as the girl with the jaw of iron, or simply as Iron Jaw.
At first, they had simply gone from village to village as the mood struck them, staying only long enough to garner a few filling meals and comfortable beds from the newly converted, and then moving on to the next village when it began to appear that they might have overstayed their welcome. Temujin was primarily in charge of their movements in those days, using his well-honed instinct and practiced eyed to gauge the patience of those who supplied as charity that which the three drifters could never afford to buy. Wei, who was somewhat addled and out of touch even in his best days, simply did as he was told, and if he harbored any doubts about the man and girl who had joined him on his journeys, he never voiced them. As for Gamine, she paid careful attention, watching the audiences even more closely than they watched her, always working on improving the act. But as her timing and delivery improved, her position in their little grouping subtly begin to shift, so that in time she was giving instruction and orders as often as she was receiving them.
It wasn’t clear at what point their trio grew. One day there were only the three of them, and the next they had gained a handful of camp followers. A few men and women from one village had elected to follow the three when they picked up stakes and moved on to the next town.
Temujin at first objected, with the grifter
’s logic that the only thing that followed a confidence man were stray dogs, the authorities, and his reputation, all of which would only bite him in the end. Gamine, though, pointed out that having the camp followers in tow would only help their grift when they reached the next village. Rather than Temujin and Gamine having to work to fan the flames of interest, the camp followers would spread the word for them, telling the locals in the next village all about the holy man and the miraculous girl with the iron jaw.
If she’d known then what would happen, would she still have pressed Temujin to allow the camp followers to come along with them? Gamine wasn’t sure, but the question nagged at her, as did Temujin’s accusation that she’d started to believe in the powers herself, if only a little.
But who could have guessed, in those early days, that the camp followers wouldn’t have gotten tired of following them from village to village, from town to town? And more, that they would not be alone but would be joined by more followers, and more, until they were no longer a few travelers on the road but a whole caravan on the march?
What had begun as three people pulling a short con, in town after town, had grown in the intervening years into a full-blown religious movement. And though Master Wei was the nominal leader of the camp now calling itself the Society of Righteous Harmony, most all of the few hundred followers now looked to the girl they called Iron Jaw for guidance and direction, even when the old man wasn’t off somewhere asleep or mumbling to himself.
Just as their handful had become a movement and the Society of Righteous Harmony had taken shape, the rough structure of their early performances had become gradually codified and regimented, so that it was now a strictly ordered sequence, followed with great devotion.
It was perhaps Gamine’s own devotion that surprised her most, though. She and Temujin had joined up with Wei as a dodge, seeing an easy way to bilk meals, coin, and shelter from the farmers and villagers of the northern plains. But if Temujin was still motivated by a desire for a full purse and belly, Gamine’s own motivations had shifted somewhere along the way. Perhaps it had started on the day that she realized she didn’t feel guilty anymore. When she was up onstage with Wei, preaching the good word of the powers to people, it didn’t feel like she was cheating or stealing; it didn’t feel like a con. It had started to feel real. When she looked into the smiling faces of their listeners, heard the things they said about how belief in the powers had changed their own lives for the better, Gamine couldn’t help but think that she was doing something genuine, something of worth. This wasn’t a con anymore; this was a service. This wasn’t an audience of marks, much less victims; this was her congregation. That she got meals and shelter out of it made it just that much more appealing.
As Gamine went through the rites—greeting the other members of the Society in their hundreds, hearing their antiphonal response, and then leading them in the ritualized movements and rhythmic breathing that supposedly helped the followers attain the mental and spiritual state necessary to receive the homily—she thought back to her years living in the Chauviteau-Zong residence. Thinking about Madam Chauviteau-Zong was sometimes confusing, since Gamine’s thoughts about her former mistress were somewhat ambiguous. She still harbored thoughts of revenge, but her thirst for vengeance had waned in recent years. Instead, when she thought of her mistress’s home in Fanchuan now, she most often thought about the lessons she’d learned there. The instruction Gamine had received from her tutors had, of course, covered the basics of organized religion, and she had been familiar with the creeds and credos of all of the major systems of belief from a very early age. But Gamine’s familiarity with religion was like that of a person who had only heard a recipe described but had never tasted it. Or, as Temujin might say, like that of someone who had heard about another’s injuries but never broken a bone. The two clearly had very different experiences with belief and very different views on the relative usefulness of religion.
Temujin, for his part, always said that he knew a con when he saw one, and he never had any patience for any church or holy man. Gamine had taken exception to that in the early days; after all, she said, many people had deep and sincere beliefs that guided their lives. Were all of them simply marks, victims of someone else’s con?
But now, some years on, she couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Temujin had been right, and wrong, all at the same time. What if this was how religions began, and all systems of belief were in their early days nothing but grifts, just as she and Temujin had begun when first they met Wei? But, and more to the point, what if it didn’t matter? What if a thing’s beginnings weren’t as important as where it ended? After all, she should know better than any, having no beginnings whatsoever. If belief began as a con but came in time to be a positive and affecting force in the lives of sincere people who used it to guide themselves to a better existence, did it matter that those who founded the belief didn’t share those convictions? If it served a positive end, was it important that it had a negative beginning? Or a neutral beginning, if one was generous?
Gamine wasn’t sure, but she was beginning to have definite suspicions.
When the faithful had completed the rhythmic breathing exercises and now stood with their hands folded before them, listening intently, Gamine crossed to the center of the platform and began the homily.
There were times when Gamine wished she had more to say. The camp’s numbers had swelled recently. It had been not quite three years since a ground quake had disrupted the shipping routes between the northern lowlands and the valley provinces to the south, and almost two years since the drought began. Fire Star was being slowly transformed into another Earth, but it would be long generations before it was lush and green. The drought had ended, but a few seasons without sufficient water in the lowlands had meant the end of many farms. A small number of larger farming concerns were prospering once more—chief among them those owned by the Combine collective—but only at the cost of taking more than their share of the available water and then selling their agricultural goods at wildly inflated prices to the valley provinces. When the owners of the smaller independent farms tried to object, the Combine had sent word—and hefty “donations”—to the governor-general, who had in turn sent the Green Standard Army north to protect the Combine’s interests.
Now many former farmers and plantation laborers had joined the ranks of the Society of Righteous Harmony, searching for some meaning in their lives. Master Wei had once provided that meaning through his daily homilies, but he was old and getting older, and more and more Gamine was called upon to perform all of the service herself, including the movements, the homily, and the revelation of possession alike. And while her homilies were perhaps a little more grammatical and less cryptic than much of what the old mendicant used to say, Gamine couldn’t help but feel that her own messages were simplistic, perhaps even simple-minded. “Live in harmony with one another.” “Take only what you need.” “Trust the powers.” But if Gamine’s religious advice was less sophisticated than she might have liked, those in the camp seemed not to mind.
There were new faces in the crowd, Gamine saw. More people driven from their homes, come to join the Society of Righteous Harmony, desperate for some kind of meaning.
Gamine took a deep breath and did her best to sound as if she knew what she was doing.
Huang had been sure he knew what he was doing, but it was beginning to look as though he’d been wrong.
“Life isn’t sport, Hummingbird. Sport has rules. In real life, the only rule is ‘Don’t get killed.’ ”
Huang rubbed his jaw, where a bruise was already rising from Zhao’s last blow. The bandit chief held out his hand and helped Huang to his feet. Once he was standing, Huang knocked the red dust from his palms, brushed off his trousers, and then went to retrieve his saber from the place where it had fallen when Zhao kicked it from his hands.
“Try that one again?” Huang asked with a sly grin, and Zhao replied with a nod and a grin of his own.
The two men faced each other, a few paces apart, and raised their swords in defensive postures.
“Remember, now,” Zhao said, waving the point of his saber back and forth before him, “no rules.”
Huang nodded, his eyes wary and unblinking.
Their impromptu fencing strip was in the flat base of a narrow gulley. Once, perhaps billions of years ago, liquid water might have flowed here, carving this channel out of the living rock of Fire Star. But that liquid had dried up long ago, leaving only a dusty red ball of rock. When humans first arrived on Fire Star, a few hundred years ago, the only water to be found anywhere was locked in polar ice, buried beneath caps of frozen carbon dioxide. Miners still worked at excavating this frozen water, returning it to the surface, where it gradually thawed and flowed across the face of Fire Star once more. Someday, in the distant future, there would be rivers and streams again—if the plans of the scientists and artificers of the Dragon Throne were correct—and the lake at the bottom of the Great Southern Basin would grown into a proper sea, and perhaps even the northern lowlands might flood completely and become an ocean. But now the only water to be found here was what humans brought with them or pumped in from reservoirs somewhere far away.
“Come on, then.” Zhao waved the red blade of his saber before him once more, taunting Huang to begin the attack.
Huang took a deep breath, let it out in a measured exhalation, feinted to the left, and then lunged forward, driving his own sword’s point toward the bandit chief’s chest.
In any proper fencing competition, the attack would have been a scoring maneuver, and Huang would have been declared the winner. He’d used the technique himself many times, and the only opponent who’d ever been able to counter the lightning speed of his feint and lunge had been his friend Kenniston An.
Zhao, though, did something completely unexpected, something that even Kenniston had never tried. Just as the point of Huang’s sword drove toward him, Zhao leaned backward and fell down.
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird Page 14