The Book of Bones

by Natasha Narayan

  “I’m tired,” she sighed. “Give it a rest.”

  Rachel shuffled over and soon was snoring gently. But my mind would not rest. I was anxious that we seemed to be following Yin’s whims. Yet at the same time I had no better ideas. She had shown us that her instincts were moving toward something. She was still odd, and my doubts about her were like hard little lumps that would not go away. Yet, yet … If the rest of us were lost in a fog created by the Baker Brothers, she seemed to see a beacon shining somewhere. Some force was guiding her. Could we do better than follow it?

  She was different, this slip of a girl. Not only for her culture, which was so strange to us, but because she lived much of the time in a sort of waking dream. We were learning that China is a society bound in many layers of manners. The Chinese like to keep the door firmly shut on foreigners. My other foreign friends, the Egyptian boy Ahmed and the Indian Maharajah, had odd beliefs too. But I’d never found another person as hard to understand as Yin.

  The next morning, as we rose, some of my foreboding of the night before had evaporated. I decided to trust Yin, for now. We talked, or rather the others talked, while I watched the waters of the Woosung through our bay window. They told Yin the whole story, revealing details we had not mentioned before. How the Bakers had kidnapped us. How they had poisoned one of our number, thereby trapping all of us in their net. We told of the aches and pains that had beset each and every one of us on the boat, though less so since arriving in Shanghai. We had no idea who was sick. Who would die.

  My friends also told her how the Bakers had found a strange elixir in the Himalayas, those snowy peaks that tower above the Indian plains. These waters had miraculously restored their youth to them and concealed their rotten souls in shining new flesh. Now they wanted to “perfect their perfection” and believed the Book of Bones would help them do it. If we didn’t bring this fabled Book back to them, one of us would die.

  Yin knew the Book. She had grown up in its shadow. She’d already realized the Bakers wanted it, so in some ways our story was not new to her. Curled up on the window seat she listened to our story. By her side was an empty bowl. She had not been able to wait for breakfast so a waiter had brought her dumplings, which she had demolished in record time. It was rare, now, to see Yin without her mouth full of the sticky things. Still, they were at least starting to fatten her up a little.

  The only thing about Yin I was beginning to understand was her love of dumplings. The rest of her was still a mystery.

  “We must do what the Baker Brothers say,” she said. “We find Book of Bones. I already say we go Peking. I know someone who help us.”

  “You really think we should try to find this Book?”

  “Yes.”

  After breakfast, and more dumplings for Yin, we decided to set off to book our passage on a junk traveling up the Grand Canal to Peking. This is the oldest man-made waterway in the world and said to be much more splendid than the canal in Oxford, of which I am so fond. But before we set out, there was the matter of Mrs. Glee to attend to. Our governess had slept like a goat. I’m not complaining, but my friend and I had passed an uncomfortable night.

  “She can’t come with us to Peking,” I hissed to Rachel. “First sniff of opium and she would betray us.”

  Even Rachel, good, soft-hearted Rachel, saw the foolishness of dragging our governess along. When we came to tell her our plan, Mrs. Glee was tearful. I backed away and let my friend deal with her.

  “I’ve made a mess of my life,” she told Rachel. “I’m nothing but a burden to you.”

  “How did you get away from the Mandalay?” Rachel asked. Mrs. Glee was always looking for someone’s shoulder to cry on now so it was wise not to give her too much of a chance.

  Mrs. Glee had merely shrugged. I was finding it hard to cope with my former governess. How could someone be so weak? I stood at some distance from the two of them and let Rachel do the talking. I knew my anger was unreasonable. At the same time this whole situation was unfair. Mrs. Glee had been engaged as our governess. She was meant to look after us. Instead she had betrayed us and now we were looking after her.

  I knew Mrs. Glee had had a hard life—the snippets of her story that I’d heard showed that. Still, couldn’t she just try a little bit harder? Luckily Rachel is kinder and more sympathetic than me.

  “Will Mister … um … Lips … come looking for you?” Rachel asked gently. “Vera, tell us. What are you going to do? How can we help you?”

  In the end I left the room to see about getting our trunks. We only had one small one each to be taken by a porter down to the docks. When I returned, the matter was settled between Yin, Mrs. Glee and Rachel.

  Mrs. Glee was to stay in the boarding house. We had paid for her board and food but left no money for opium. She would help the lady who ran the boarding house and try to get better and await our return. Guiltily, at the back of my mind, I wondered if we would come back. On the whole, though, this decision was a huge relief to me, for I found it hard to look our governess in the eye. The thought of dragging her through China as we ventured on our dangerous path had weighed on me.

  It was mid-morning when we arrived at Soochow Creek to book passage on a boat north. A vast floating water-world greeted us. Hundreds—no, thousands—of sampans were roped together, hull to hull. They made a sort of giant, disjointed raft. The river folk, in their wide-legged trousers, some of them bare-chested, hopped from craft to craft. Many lived their lives on water, never venturing onto dry land.

  There was a huge variety of craft on the river—elegant wooden junks with their hulls sitting low in the water, sails fluttering in the breeze, the river gay with multicolored banners and pennants. Modern steamers puffed smoke from their red funnels. The Emperor’s war junks were especially striking. The evil eye was carved on their prows to ward off ill luck and they bristled cannons with red-painted mouths. But though the cannon looked fierce, they were fixed and were armed with useless old-fashioned shot. Any reasonably swift British clipper could outrun their guns.

  “Which of these boats will take us to Peking?” Isaac asked, looking around wonderingly.

  Yin’s tiny frame had already slipped through the throng. She had walked up to one of the junks and was on deck, talking to a sailor. She beckoned us to follow and we climbed up the ladder after her.

  “This man want to see you. He is the captain of ship. He take us Peking,” she said.

  But the sailor, a Chinaman with a high shaved forehead and pigtail hanging right down his back, was frowning. On his shoulder a monkey gibbered menacingly at us. I hated monkeys—ever since my experiences in India with a particularly savage one.

  “No Bignose,” he said to Yin. “No Red Barbarian!”

  The monkey shrilled at us.

  “Good big nose,” Yin replied, smiling winningly.

  “Big nose?” I asked, outraged—for my nose if anything is rather trim and Rachel’s is a beauty. Waldo pushed me and Yin aside and strode up to the captain, puffing out his chest.

  “Looksee, Captain,” he said. “We wantchee make sailee on shipee. You takee Peking, we payee muchee gold.”

  “Why’re you talking so strange?” I whispered to him.

  “Shush,” he said in an aside. “It’s pidgin English. It’s a mixture of Chinese and English, what all the Chinese speak here.”

  “I spik English,” the captain said to Waldo coldly, overhearing his explanation. “No need to speak pidgin.”

  “My apologies,” Waldo said, coloring slightly. Then rallying, he went on. “Why do you call us Red Barbarians? As an American, I must say I find it highly offensive.”

  The captain looked at us icily, but Yin sighed. “The China person likes the old ways,” she explained. “They suspecting foreigners. Say your skin red. Your nose big. You never wash your woolen clothes and you smell bad, of stinky meat.”

  As Yin talked she had become quite animated, as if she agreed with these outrageous opinions. Indeed her eyes were shining w
ith mischief.

  “Our noses are not big. Mine, for example, is very well-formed,” Waldo said stiffly.

  “How could this man insult us like this?” I burst out, a little childishly. “He’s one of the ugliest-looking—”

  “Shush, no make trouble,” Yin interrupted. “You smile and be good and I talk to captain.”

  Reluctantly we did as requested while Yin went off and engaged the man in conversation. She won her way in the end, for we saw silver coins changing hands.

  “You go down there,” the captain lofted a thumb at us.

  Yin indicated to us that we should follow her, so we did, coolies bringing our luggage on board. We went down to the covered portion of the ship, where there were dozens of small compartments that looked strangely like the inside of a stem of bamboo. We were allocated one of these, a watertight cell really, with no window on the world.

  “We’re trusting ourselves to someone who hates us,” I whispered to my friends when Yin had disappeared.

  “You can say that again. Captain Chen is a bigot,” Waldo agreed.

  “The Chinese still think they’re the best country in the world,” Isaac said. “Even though their empire is falling apart, they’re hooked on opium and all their best inventions were centuries ago. They believe England has nothing to teach them.”

  A rushing sound, and much hollering outside, warned us that we were leaving so we rushed out on deck to take a look. We seemed to be part of a flotilla of craft, some proud and shining like our boat, others with pocked holes and dingy sails. The junks moved surprisingly fast, the wind billowing their sails and pushing them onward.

  Yin was looking out at the water, her face shining. How she’d bloomed in the short days since we’d rescued her. A soft fuzz of new black hair was visible at the sides of her face, bristling beneath her new straw hat, and her eyes had lost that inward gaze.

  “Best have company,” she smiled. “There many pirates on the river.”

  “Pirates?!” Waldo and Isaac exclaimed together.

  “Not problem. Many boats together. If pirates chase, we fight!”

  We were huddled together, gazing enchanted at the swirl of frothing water left in the junk’s wake. The movement of this ship was very different to the stately progress of the steamer. You could feel the wind in the sails, the tip and tilt of waves. Unbeknownst to us the captain had crept up behind us and heard everything we had said.

  “Pirate hate Foreign Devil.” He grinned, showing yellow broken teeth. “I speak pidgin! Catchee, killee!”

  Chapter Twenty

  I toppled out of my bunk and crashed onto the floor, yanked out of my dream. The junk was lurching and Rachel and Yin were yelling. Shrieks came from the deck. Waldo appeared at our cabin door, his blond hair sticking straight up in the air.

  “Quick,” he roared. “Trouble!”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I’m not the fortune-teller!”

  We rushed up on deck, where pandemonium reigned. Bare-chested sailors, shouting and cursing, rushed around in the fog rising from the inky waters. Other pig-tailed Chinese clambered up the rigging, sure-footed as cats. A lookout man in the prow cried out:

  “Jeu-dow-li. Jeu-dow-li.”

  “Pirate coming!” Yin translated in a fierce whisper.

  We ran up to the prow. Downriver, stark against the silvery sky, I saw two dark sails. Pirate junks. Dimly I could see the graven eyes on their prows and the stout rope dangling between them just above the water line.

  “This their trick,” Yin hissed. “They trap this rope on our bows or our cable. When they catch us, they jump.”

  A revolver had appeared in Waldo’s fist. Most of our crew were armed, bristling with bamboo spears, cutlasses and pikes. A man handed something to Isaac, who instantly dropped it. It was a glove of stout leather with flails attached to the knuckles. An evil weapon—someone wearing this thing had enormously long fingers, with vicious ends to rip and slash his enemy.

  “Fighting iron,” Yin explained. “You young man, you must fight!” But Isaac was staring at the weapon, aghast.

  “Er, NO … definitely no, thanks,” my friend muttered, backing away. “Busy. Going back to the cabin.”

  “Isaac hang on! We can’t just leave Kit and Waldo,” Rachel yelled but she looked distinctly queasy. Brother and sister are the gentlest folk. Isaac in particular is terrified of violence. But he’d chosen the wrong moment to be a coward.

  “Isaac, wait!” I yelled.

  “Get back here at once,” Waldo hollered.

  Too late. Our friend had vanished.

  The fighting iron gleamed on the deck.

  “I’ll use it.” I darted forward and picked it up. I felt I had to apologize for my friend as I did not want the Chinese sailors to think Englishmen were cowards. The fighting iron was much too big for my hand, but I curled my fingers and kept it on. It was as heavy as a bag of lead. “I want to help,” I puffed. “I’ll take Isaac’s place.”

  With a juddering jerk, the whole ship came to a stop. I fell face forward, just avoiding stabbing myself on the fighting iron. There was a splintering smash as the pirate junk rammed into our ship. Then in fast succession, from the other side of our vessel, another colossal crash.

  The top of my head seemed to come off, my ears buzzed. The deck was raked by dozens of bangs, accompanied a second later by sparkling flashes. Sulfurous yellow light hung about the rigging. As I struggled to my feet something popped right under my nose, showering me with shards and enveloping me in gouts of flame. A minute later a rotten smell engulfed me.

  “Urgh!” I gasped, struggling to hold down vomit. “What is that?”

  “Stinkpots!” Yin yelled.

  I’d heard of stinkpots. Sulfur and rotten eggs in small clay pots, which the pirates let loose to stun the enemy before hacking them to pieces. But I had no time to reflect on this because now hundreds of men were swarming up the sides of our junk. They landed on deck, nimble and jangling with weapons. The battle was on!

  To my relief Rachel and Isaac had disappeared. If they weren’t prepared to fight, then better to hide away altogether.

  I swung viciously at the intruders and caught a pirate a blow against his chest. He went down with a thud but another was upon me. One sailor was doing battle armed with nothing more than a wooden belaying pin, which he was swinging about his body like a great club. There were grunts and shrieks and above it all the rat-a-tat-tat of guns. Then the deep boom of our cannon balls exploding on the pirate boats.

  A spray of blood hit me in the eye. As I gasped, something punched me in the stomach and I went down.

  In an instant Waldo was there, warding off attackers with his revolver. He was shooting in a masterful fashion, to disable rather than kill, aiming for the joints.

  “Kit! Are you hurt?”

  “No. I’m fine,” I lied, although it cost me all my strength. I heaved myself up clutching my stomach. My hands were wet with blood.

  The Chinese crew and the captain were fighting gallantly. I saw that even the captain’s monkey had joined the battle. It was perched on the rigging, armed with some sort of weapon which it was firing wildly on enemy and friend.

  We were battling for our lives. But the enemy just kept coming, swarming like locusts upon us. Suddenly there was a massive rumble right in our midst and a six-foot-high flame flickered into life.

  “What is that?” Waldo roared in alarm, backing against the sides of the junk.

  The flame was as bright as the noonday sun and sizzled with an eerie greenish glow. Before our amazed eyes it snaked down the length of the deck and snickered past my feet with a hiss.

  Along the ship, pirates and crew alike backed away in terror. Many sailors were so horrified that they dropped their weapons. The fighting had stopped, as we all froze, watching the flame roaring down the ship.

  It wasn’t random the way it was snickering this way and that. It formed a pattern and now we could see what it was—a giant eye.
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  “The evil eye. The evil eye,” the whisper ran down the ship.

  It was too much for some of the pirates. Petrified they ran off the side of the deck into the sea. This touched off a frenzy with intruders running amok. Anything, anything to get away from the cursed eye! Pirates swarmed back down the ropes and ladders they’d thrown up, screaming, hollering in terror. Others took running jumps off the sides of the deck.

  Within minutes the pirates had vanished. The battle was over.

  The deck was slippery with blood—a few bodies were strewn among chunks of clothing and gristle. And all lit by the greenish glow of the evil eye. I could not bear to look at the bodies and turned away to watch the pirate junks. Their sails were vanishing across the black water as fast as they’d arrived. Yin and Waldo were at my shoulder, quiet too, for the aftermath of battle was sickening. Of Isaac and Rachel there was no sign.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round, expecting my absent friends. I hoped they were ashamed of themselves. But it was the captain, with his monkey perched on his shoulder. His face was smeared with blood. I turned away, but he was talking in rapid excitement to Yin in Mandarin, a language I cannot understand.

  Yin listened and then turned to me, her gaze troubled.

  “The captain not know this weapon. It help us but he don’t know where it come. Now he worry that ship is cursed.”

  I shrugged, as I had no idea where the mysterious flames had come from either.

  “If it was a curse, it’s a helpful one,” Waldo said. “We were pretty close to losing the ship.”

  Suddenly Isaac and Rachel were in our midst. Isaac was grinning away.

  “What are you so happy about?” I spat. “Not very manly, was it, Isaac? Running away as soon as things got a bit too hot.”

  “I’m no soldier,” Isaac mumbled. “Still, I expect you all to thank me, seeing as I saved your lives.”

  “Thank you?” I snapped. “For cowering in your cabin?”

  But Yin was gazing at Isaac with admiration. “So it you!” she gasped.