by Daniel Fox
Or—looking more carefully, squinting through the dazzle of sun on water—that might almost be safe, that boat. It might almost be the old man’s fishing boat, that had sailed from Santung with the child to protect it. Tien wasn’t confident to tell one boat from another, even close up, even tied to the wharf, but she had been aboard that one for a while, and this was surely like it.
There was no reason for a boat headed for Taishu to be here now, as though it had crept along the coast for hours and only just turned out to sea—but she wondered, she did wonder.
Here was the temple, and she wasn’t near ready to do what she had come for; and here was a woman standing on the temple steps, staring out at that boat on the water as if waiting for catastrophe, wondering at the delay.
Or, no. Not her, not that. Tien took another look as she came closer: at the body of her, that rigid pose that said she meant to stand there watching the boat until it was entirely gone from her sight, and then maybe stand some more. Until the night came, maybe, and maybe later.
At the face of her, set as rigid as any muscle, as pale and stiff as a sun-bleached bone. A face that showed nothing, that told everything.
This was a woman not waiting, a woman to whom her catastrophe had already occurred.
Tien was wise enough to see that. She saw it daily. Wise enough also to bring the boat and the woman together in her head—two solitudes, like two characters each written on a separate page, making a third if they were only read together—and so to guess at the nature of that catastrophe.
Still, she did have to ask. “Forgive me, but where are your children?”
There should have been soldiers too, a troop sent by the emperor to protect the most precious, most valuable of all his subjects. It was astonishing to Tien that he had been willing to return the children to their mother even under guard, this far from the city and so exposed, with rebels all around.
There was no immediate sign of the soldiers either, nor the women who had accompanied them. Tien did not think they were all in the temple praying.
The woman turned her head, a slow eventual process, as though her mind were a paddy and Tien’s words had to wade through it, the weight of water and the cling of mud beneath.
She turned as though there were pain in movement, pain in every muscle; more in the shift of her eyes, that moment when she was no longer looking at the boat.
As though pain were what she expected, a natural consequence, woven entirely into the fabric of her life.
As though it were dreadful, but didn’t really matter anymore.
She spoke in a voice dulled by too much, one hurt too many. Still a mother, though, still asking questions. “My children? Have you come for them too?”
“Yes,” Tien said, more forthright than she had meant to be. “Yes, we have. By order of the governor in Santung, we are to take them to the city. You too, if you will come.”
“You are too late,” the woman said. “He is too late in sending you. And only a governor, not enough. He could not call them back, even if he had the voice to do it. See there, see the boat? They are on the boat. The old man came for them first.”
“The fisherman?”
She shrugged. “Perhaps.”
Tien was sure now. Sure of this too, though again she did still ask it: “And the soldiers?”
“Yes. They went too. Everyone went.”
“They didn’t argue?” He was only one old man, with a boy for crew.
“How could they? It was the emperor’s order. He had it, he showed it, written and sealed and tied with yellow ribbon …”
two
soldier’s loyalty is not always given to his country, or to his commander.
It can be rooted deep in land or family, community or cause. It can be swift and sentimental, given to an officer, a squad, a comrade; it can be purely and pragmatically for himself, for his own survival.
Shen was born to the old emperor’s service, trained to it. Soldiering was what he did, and he was the emperor’s soldier because all men belonged to the emperor. It was easy, and always would be.
But the old emperor died, of all the impossible things. Shen had thought that he would live forever. Bequeathed to the service of his son, Shen found himself in the middle of a war and losing it. Running away from it, rather, making an endless retreat all across the empire; and wondering often and often how it would feel to be on the other side, a rebel in chase. Wondering often and often why he was not a rebel, why fortune had shaped him so unlucky; and—of course!—why he did not simply slip away one night to find the rebels, to join them, swinging a head or two in one hand as proof of his good faith.
What it was that kept him loyal to a boy he had no reason to believe in.
A man can wonder and wonder inside himself, find no answers, and still not shift. He was the emperor’s man regardless, across the empire and across the sea, in all that great defeat.
Then fortune played with him all unexpectedly, so that he met the emperor and others too, found people to believe in. The emperor, and others too.
And now—well, now he was across the sea again, without orders or permission, the emperor left behind him on Taishu. Shen was still loyal, or he thought so. It was only that there were other loyalties, which seemed to matter more.
The boy who had come to fetch him was possibly more confused than he was. He had been a rebel, almost by default: sucked up by Tunghai Wang’s army somewhere on the march, made into some kind of a soldier. Not a good soldier, perhaps, no fighter, but fit to carry a load or haul a wagon.
Haul a rope, apparently, on some dreadful fire-flinging machine, he and his squad together.
But the emperor came up out of the impossible river and stole their hearts or their courage or their loyalty, whatever it was that had made them rebels before; and he left them with Chung, the boy said.
Shen heard that the other way around, he left Chung with them, with some uncounted number of frightened and dangerous men.
And now the boy wore an imperial sash, Chung’s own; and had come to find Shen and fetch him back across the water to Santung. On Chung’s own initiative, apparently. And yes, that sounded like Chung, and it sat like a warm promise in Shen’s belly.
THEY CROSSED the strait with Ping Wen, unquestioned because anyone who might have the right didn’t have the time to wonder about two random soldiers, in all the urgency and ill temper of that crossing. Disembarking behind the new governor and his scant entourage, Shen followed the boy past wharfs and docks and godowns, all along the river path until it was lost beneath a ruin of stones and mud, where steep paddy terraces had collapsed in the typhoon.
And still on, farther on, scrambling almost on hands and knees over the worst of it with their feet sinking deep into soft sticky mud at every step and their hands finding holds that turned treacherous, that slipped away and left them sprawled and filthy and hauling each other out of sucking traps. Shen almost wanted to suggest it might be easier to swim, except that the river was roaring high.
He did say, “Perhaps we should have brought a boat?”
The boy grinned, smeared a muddy hand across his muddy brow, glanced at the water and shrugged. “Could you row? Against that?”
“We could have waited for the tide to turn.” Tide and current meeting, fighting each other; perhaps they might fight each other to a standstill, as he and Chung could, almost. Shen always won in the end. But Shen’s shoulder was not mended yet; like this, he thought perhaps Chung would defeat him. He was sure he could not row a boat even one mile, even on the quietest water.
ON, THEN. Not too much farther on: just to a bridge, where the guards greeted the boy by name and Shen with guarded nods.
Over the bridge to an island in mid-river, where someone not entirely competent had set up a crude camp. It might have been any army bivouac if it had only used the space more sensibly, reaching all the length of the island instead of crowding down at this end, awkwardly squeezed between the footings of this bridge and
another. That other bridge was gone, but its stone remnants made the campsite even more cramped and uncomfortable, while the farther end of the island was open and empty and ridiculously unused.
Half a dozen men sat around a smoky smudge of a fire, toasting something indeterminate on bamboo skewers. Shen didn’t look too closely. After a year on the road and months on starveling Taishu, he knew too well that some questions are better left unanswered.
Some questions, though, still demand to be asked. His guide-companion looked almost as helpless as he was himself, blinking around at the makeshift tents. “Um, where’s …?”
If he hesitated, it might have been because he didn’t quite know whether to ask for Chung or Master Chung, or even Captain Chung: what respect does a boy owe—among his own comrades—to the man that they’ve surrendered to? When that man is in no way a soldier?
But it might only have been because he saw a tent-flap fall aside, a figure coming out, an answer as the question died away. Or he heard the voice, perhaps, as Shen did.
“Shen! There you are already, I never dared to hope for you so soon!”
And then there was nothing for the boy to do but fall back, join his friends around the fire and hope for a share of whatever was on those skewers, because boys are always hungry. Shen was still mostly hungry himself, though ware betide anyone who thought to call him a boy. Right now, though, he could be satisfied with this, with the hurtle of Chung’s body into his and his own yelp, “Careful! Mind my shoulder …!”
“If your shoulder was a worry,” Chung laughed into his ear, “you should not have brought it here.”
His hands were more careful than his words, gentling Shen into an embrace that left that healing shoulder free, that was still more intimate than Shen would have been by choice in front of strangers.
No matter. Shen could endure it all, the jolt of pain and the curious stares, for the sake of this: a live lithe laughing body in his arms, a certainty where there had been doubt before.
He said, “How do you come to be in charge of … these?” These enemies, he meant, these prisoners, who were seemingly quite free and unwatched, given license even to cross the strait and back. He had heard one version of that tale already; he wanted another, Chung’s own, in case that came out easier to understand.
He wasn’t hopeful.
Chung said, “Who says I’m in charge?”
“I say it. I took one look at your camp here, and I knew. Who else would choose so badly? And house and feed his men so ill, so close to all this city?”
“Well, but it’s hard here.” Chung was still laughing, but he was defensive too. And practical too: “And you’re here now, and your soldiering is better than mine, you can help.”
“I can take charge,” Shen said unequivocally, “when I know what you’re about. But any of these men will be a better soldier than you; they should have scavenged better tents than these, and better food too.”
“They’ve been busy. We found the godown where Tunghai Wang stored all his firepots and their makings, there’s been a lot to carry. And no road. We towed it in the end, a barge on the river and a rope to shore. We’re still storing most of it on the barge, just to be safe. But it was work, and there’s not been time to do much else.”
“That’s why you’re not a soldier. The men’s comfort is the first thing. Whatever you’re here for, the work, that comes after. What are you here for?” And why are we all crowded down this tight little end of the island?
“I’ll show you. If you’ll just let go of me, enough that I can walk …”
It was, of course, Chung who was holding on too tight to let them walk. Disentangling themselves from each other took a little time, thanks entirely to his stubbornness; but soon they were picking their way through the camp and into that wasted open space, the bare bleak rock of this islet.
“The water came right up over here, when the river rose,” Chung said. “We were crowded up on the bridge there, the highest point of the arch and we still got our feet wet. There was nothing left of anything, except one barrel I managed to save …”
That explained why it was all so clean underfoot, scrubbed free of soil and ash and weeds, all the litter of life. It wasn’t as empty as he’d thought, though: there was a line of pots, like storage vessels, and a line of barrels opposite. At the far tip of the island was a structure of sorts, an improvised bamboo frame.
“Why didn’t you build your camp at this end, and keep your stores down among the footings of the bridge, where you could pile them up and not worry?”
“We’d worry,” Chung answered, smiling. “No one wants to let the fire anywhere near the bridge. None of this is any safe at all. What’s in those barrels will burn just on its own, if a flame touches it. Mixed together—well. I’ll show you. That’s better than trying to explain.”
He called back over his shoulder. Men came, eager but careful: handling the barrels with a nervous respect as they filled a pot with this and that, mixed the ingredients with a long and cautious stick, sealed the pot and carried it forward.
The bamboo frame overhung the river, to let them lower a platform down almost to the rushing water.
“This is the only safe way we can do it,” Chung said. “You can’t really watch, but—well, you’ll see.”
Shen frowned at the frail platform. “Can’t you build it better than that?”
“No point. It won’t survive, however well we make it. It just has to hold the pot, just for a minute. Watch.”
The pot stood on the platform and hung against the vertical face of the island, a man’s height or more below where they stood, out of sight to anyone not leaning over. A long wick came back up to Chung’s hand.
“It wouldn’t be this long, of course, if we were using it in war. Just, this is as careful as we can be.”
Here came a man with a smoking firepot. A lidded pot, and he was still wary. Shen had never seen men so scared of what they did themselves.
Here came two men, carrying a construction of bamboo and rope and padding. It might have looked almost like the body of a man beneath a quilt. A wet man, a drowned man; it was dripping, from rain or river or both.
“We call that the dragon,” Chung said. “They wouldn’t let me call it Tunghai Wang, and I wouldn’t let them call it anyone else. So it’s the dragon, which we can all agree about.”
Shen was worried, if these men still held even that much loyalty to their former commander. Still, he was here now. That at least reduced the worry. It was being apart, being helpless that drove him frantic, not knowing what madness Chung was at now.
He said, “Nothing’s going to set that alight, it’s all water.”
“Like the dragon. You wait. You watch.”
The mock-dragon—though it still looked to him a lot more like a man—was hung out from the frame, as high as a man might jump above the pot. Then, bizarrely, everyone lay down flat on the rock. Chung pulled Shen down too beside him, before ever he touched wick to glowing coal and set it aflame.
It burned down below eye-level, below the level of the rock they lay on, and then there was nothing: interminably nothing, a long dragging wait. Bored and restless, Shen pulled himself forward to peer over the edge, see how close the flame was to the pot—
—AND CHUNG screamed, literally screamed as he scrabbled at Shen’s bad shoulder to drag him back again.
“Don’t you understand? It’s going to—”
No, he didn’t understand—or he hadn’t, until that moment.
Chung’s voice was cut off by a vicious flare of light and a brief and dreadful roar, as though Chung had bottled up a fraction of storm in that pot, thunder and lightning both. The frame swayed above them, a rope snapped and flailed wickedly in the air, the mock-dragon bucked and twisted amid a hail of bright flaming points flung from below.
The river hissed like a nest of snakes, smoke billowed slowly up to follow the sparks, but Shen was watching those as they rose, as they faded, as …
&nb
sp; · · ·
ALL AROUND him, men were covering their heads with their arms. Shen was slow still; Chung had to reach out and pull him in tight, wrap his own arms around both their heads together.
Even the dragon when she flew, she came back eventually to earth.
There was a patter of little impacts all around them. Something stung Shen’s leg, even through his trousers: stung first, and then burned.
When Chung would let him, he sat up and reached to rub at the soreness, then to find what had bitten him: a hard sharp hot little shard of blackened pot.
Bewildered, he turned and saw the mock-dragon.
Splintered, shredded, torn half apart by a blizzard of those little vicious impossibly burning things—and impossibly set aflame too, although its ripped innards were still running with water. Steaming as they smoked.
“Chung. What have you done …?”
“Oh, I didn’t really do much. It was Tunghai Wang who set his machines here and gave them the firepots to fling. I just happened to be here with Yu Shan and the emperor when one of the pots rolled into a flame and exploded. See, if you just throw them, they break open and the mixture inside catches fire from a fuse, and that’s what burned our friends so badly; but if you light the fire inside an unbroken pot—well. This. They erupt. Every little shard is lethal. And they’re hot enough to spread the fire too …”
They were. The frame too was aflame, and men were hurling water to douse it.
“Chung, that’s—that’s wicked …”
“Yes.” He beamed at Shen, like a man who has finally learned to soldier. “Let me practice more, let me build a machine to throw them with and learn how short to cut the wicks, so that they explode before they strike, and then we can give the emperor a weapon to win any war …”
three
iao liked these people, these clansfolk.
He wasn’t so sure about their home, a closed valley among remote hills; this was far and far from any life he knew. Anything he valued.