by John Hersey
She was gone.
A Legion
A sweet-sour pork roast at the bridge of the brook. A market-day noon at the far edge of the seventh month: too hot to eat the sauced meat. A game of pitchpot under a big mimosa tree. Women are sitting on the bank of the stream, their cotton gowns tucked up around their hips, feet dabbling in the cool water, while some men angle and argue below the bridge, their shouts surely driving off the few puny sunfish and pickerel left in the brook after so many weeks of its having been fished over. In the shade of a willow Mink is at dice with a handful of friends. We stroll. Peace is unusually grand, even for him; his tunic, soaked, clings to his shoulders; he half nods to those who half bow to him. Sheep Wu is at Peace’s side. A slave named Joker, Tu’s man, who has a fair start on being drunk, accosts Peace, and he swaggers and asks when we are going to begin the big business, meaning the war.
“You turtle, Joker,” Sheep Wu savs, “you look so poor and weak and miserable, you couldn’t even kill a man.”
“Ai!” Joker squawks. “Don’t be taking me by my appearance. I can do it. Don’t worry, you Shee’ Wu. I can and will kill a yellow man as freely as eat.”
“Good,” Peace grimly says, nodding his great thatched head.
But here is Ch’eng’s Candy, looking worried. “I know when we begin it, my master and mistress will have to be put to death.”
“Among the first,” Peace says. “You know that.”
“I have to have one of my lieutenant boys do it for me, Peace. I can’t do it myself. Those two raised me from a baby.”
“You must harden up your heart,” Peace says.
“Don’t worry about me,” Candy says, hitching up the cloth cinch at his waist. “When the time comes, I’ll be a knife edge.”
“That will be good, Candy,” Peace says; his voice is mild, but his eyes are furious.
Now we are sitting on a grassy bank—I am ringed with hairy dock leaves, which I tear along the juicy veins—and the responsible men are reporting on their enlistments.
First, Sheep Wu on his trip to Anhwei: “I was down there last market day, to a preaching at the Fragrant Hill of the Three Ox Legs, at a godown there. I have a good account for you, Peace.” But Sheep Wu could not get to the point. “You see, the morning of the preaching I stopped by at the yamen in Pochow, and I came on an old friend, Lin’s Thorn. I knew him as a boy, and he said he would help me. On the way I told him what you said, Peace, that we would meet at the brook to kill the yellow people in four weeks’ time. Thorn says to me, ‘I’m glad to hear it’s going to take place so soon.’ He says to me he’s heartily glad about it. We got down there, and it was still too early for the preaching to commence, so I proposed to old Thorn we could go into a tavern and buy some liquor to melt the men with, when we’d speak to them about the war, and he agreed to it, and we did, we bought it—the money you gave me. There was a lemon-yellow in the tavern, there, she let us in through the slaves’ postern, and we said, two jugs spirits, and she said, ‘Are you smallies going on a spree?’
“And Thorn, he says, ‘We’re going on the grandest spree the yellow people ever saw.’
“She says, ‘You boys be careful, now.’
“And Thorn, he says, ‘We’re going to be most careful, Big Mistress.’
“She could not understand why we laughed almost to bursting, and she shook her head at us.
“Thorn bought some malt taffy from a vendor in front of the tavern there, and then we went up to the preaching, and after the preaching we began it.”
“Well, Sheep Wu,” Peace said, “and how many?”
“I told you I thought I could get a hundred and twenty men down there, didn’t I? Peace, I stayed three days, and I think we got, Lin’s Thorn and Chang’s Full Bowl and I—Full Bowl wanted to be a general, but I told him about that eighteen-arm bitch goddess, that we could only have two arms on our general, so he said he would go by the name or title of Colonel Tall, and he was going to make his men obey him.”
“But how many, Sheep Wu?”
“In three days we got near five hundred.”
A gasp among the men on the grassy bank. A rising excitement as one after another gives his report. Wang’s Judge—enlistments in Twin Hills city, among the slaves building the new prison, and godown boys at the Canal Bund—has not brought his list with him, but he supposes it is four hundred fifty by now. Fan, the mix, has been as far as Tsining to enlist men, a good number, almost three hundred. Bargemen on the canal, over two hundred. Candy had been to the singing tree. Totals from the tips of the provinces of Shansi and Hopei; a large band from the Yellow River.
I see Peace swelling up with his thrill. “Hai!” he says, standing up, towering over us. “I have reports on a thousand men in Twin Hills proper. We have nearly five hundred at the copper pits. I wouldn’t be astonished if many of the poorer yellows—when they see us in triumph—many will join us. We’ll have every slave in Honan—and Anhwei and Shansi and Hopei, too,” Peace says, punching a huge fist into a great palm. He is completely carried away. “I already have a cavalry of four hundred donkeymen from right around the brook. Six hundred foot from Ground Squirrel Bridge, four hundred from around the Peach Temple. I tell you,” he says—and then a long pause; absolute silence; the eternal washing of stones in the stream. “I tell you, my dear brothers, we will have ten thousand men. Now shake hands all around. Give me your hands! We’ll wade to our knees in blood sooner than fail in this thing. Hayah! Whoooo! Give me your hands, my strong boys!”
The men, who have leaped to their feet, are hugging, pounding backs like drums, and crying as they laugh.
Velvet Pleats, Pink Codpieces, and Plums
Off we went again, on a market day, the third morning of the eighth month, to Twin Hills, ostensibly to sell the water chestnuts, bean sprouts, cowpeas, and white cabbages we had grown in our spare-time patches outside our quarter, baskets on our arms, trudging this time along Favorable Wind Brook Road, which was dusty under a haze-huge sun that had relentlessly sweated us for a fortnight, with Peace walking ahead leaning one hand lightly on Mink’s shoulder, and the three handmaidens behind. Yes, Peace had taken a fancy to Mink, whose gambling sharpness and twisted back had made him an ideal doubter; he pricked at the General with skeptical questions that Peace said he needed to keep his toe at the line.
One question that Mink occasionally asked bothered me. “General, why can’t you ever change your mind?”
The baskets were heavy, the air was humid. I was in the grip of an unspeakable disgust. The tobacco plants had been attacked by the midsummer glut of hornworms, and for days and days we had been stooping down, turning back the broad leaves, and picking off their undersides the sap-fat, segmented, wiggling creatures with their stubby middle legs like walking teats, their foul arching horns sticking out of their back ends, making them seem waspish, poisonous, and their ugly hard-mouthed button heads which reared up belligerently when they saw a hand approach. Their thick bodies, with pretty patterns repeated all along, writhed under my closed eyelids when I tried to sleep at night, and my dreams were washed in lakes of their spattering juices. I had moments now of imagining that these sphinx worms were squirming on my hands and in my baskets. This—to give the yellow man a little brass pipe-bowlful of sucking pleasure! Oh, I was ready for Peace’s war.
Thump, thump. We looked back. Here came a ribbish donkey drawing a cask of prized tobacco, which rolled on its own fat-stomach staves, axletreed on wooden spikes at the center of each end to split saplings that were joined together behind the keg with a hickory withe. On a seat of bamboo lashed athwart the shafts in front of the tun was perched a wiry crab-eyed yellow man, his mouth drawn down in what must have been a long habit of misanthropy. He joggled past us without a nod.
Peace knew the man; said, when the rolling tun was well away, that his name was Yang, a small tobacco farmer from along the branch of the brook above Lü�
��s tavern. Had a thin time of it. The agents at the Canal Bund would give him short shrift, would most likely cheat him, buying this keg that he had held until out of season hoping for a better price. A pitiable case—but we would have to kill him, Peace said, because yellow Yang was the owner of three slaves.
I suddenly hated this miserable cipher of a yellow farmer. I could see the sharp shoulder blades sticking out of the loathsome bent back as the keg bumped on stones going down a hill ahead.
Before the edge of the city we turned down a path until, nearly at the canal, on a high airy rise across from White Heron Hill, we came to the formidable quadrangle of the new prison, which was almost finished; indeed, a few white criminals were already locked away—and so was a large supply of arms of the Emperor’s provincial guard.
By prearrangement Peace met, near the main entrance, Widow Chou’s Heaven-Loved, one of the several hundred slaves who had been hired out to Warlord Sun by their owners to build the fortress. Heaven-Loved, who had been enlisted at Sunken Rock on the Yellow River, was lazing on his back with his head and shoulders against the building, half asleep in the sun. At a touch of Peace’s foot on his leg he jumped up.
We walked down into the gulch toward White Heron Hill. For a long stretch nothing at all was said. At last Peace asked, “How are your boys? Are they ready?”
“I have thirty-two to kill the guards and get us in,” Heaven-Loved said. He was quiet, earnest, tense, and very young: only a year or so older than I.
“How many guards?”
“Six by night.”
“That should be easy.”
“More guards inside.”
“We will see to them. Where are the arms?”
“All my squad know the storage hall. They can lead the way.” The sober eyes searched Peace’s face, and almost down to a whisper Heaven-Loved pushed out a single word: “When?”
“The last market-day eve in the month. Listen to me, Captain. You can see the Canal Bund from here. Watch for the fires, wait half an hour after you see them, then begin it.”
Heaven-Loved looked like a man who had taken a huge gulp of raw spirits. He who had been all restraint, murmurs, discretion, suddenly threw up his arms and bellowed, “Ayooo! So soon!”
Peace said, “Hush, son. Don’t begin it unless you get a message the night before; it will be a confirmation. Don’t begin it anyway unless you see the fires.”
The young man was under tight control again. “I understand you, Peace.” The mumbling voice, now strapped down with iron bands, added, “Thank the Lord for you, General.”
We went into town, to West Dragon Street, which began as a narrow path of used tanbark through a boggy stretch, where lay the tanyards of Chu Yü and Ch’en, and then became a dusty street, and as we walked deeper into the city, and under the market sheds as we sold our wares, every slave we met greeted Peace as “General.” I was astonished at the universal knowledge among the whites of the plan.
We climbed to the exquisite yamen up the cart road, and where once there had been deep mud, hard ruts now ran, and puffs of orange dust stirred, and beside the track thistledown blew like a snowstorm.
Peace boldly walked between the flags up the portico steps and waved us along behind him, but Mink would not go up; he was afraid. I looked to Auntie, who shrugged, coughed, and started up; Harlot and I, giggling, followed.
In the empty reception hall, where murmurs echoed like distant lowing of cattle, Peace was greeted by Ku the Usher, a nonagenarian white freedman who since long ago in the reign of Emperor Yung-t’ai had been caretaker of this yamen. Opposites—the huge slave in a field hand’s dirty cotton gown, his feet bare, with his long hair knotted into seven braids, confronting the plump, white-haired, courtly man in black satin breeches and coat, all flaps and skirts, and blue shoes braided with gold, holding a brass ring of keys in one hand and a feather besom in the other.
With the manners of a mandarin, Ku the Usher presented himself to Auntie, Harlot, and me, and he led us on what appeared to be a tour for country cousins. “This throne, my dear friends, was formerly a seat of state used by the first Manchu governors. You can see where the emblem of the Mings has been scraped off….”
He showed us every room in every courtyard. Harlot’s eyes were as big as brimming wine cups, and she and I kept tittering in our terror of being surprised in these echoing stone vaults by a yellow man. Ku treated Peace with what seemed to me a faint contempt.
At last we came to a room where, before unlocking the door, Ku looked both ways, and listened. A key rattled, the door swung back, and in the dim light we saw many, many conical stacks of snaphaunce muskets. Peace’s eyes!
Ku quickly drew the door to, and locked it, and in a whisper that rebounded from the walls he spoke to Peace, his white face suddenly contorted from that of a benign old statesman into a twisting, snarling grimace: “I’m glad to do it, General. The night itself, you’ll find me near the governors’ chair, and I’ll give you the key to the magazine by my own hand, and I hope you slaughter them every last one, General, and I’ll thank you to my dying day, and I’ll bless you, bless you.” The last shred of dignity was gone; the old man began to blubber. We hurried away, leaving him weeping in the dark hall over his years of kowtowing to yellow men.
Now we went to the postern gate of a public tavern down in the town, the Siskin Bird, and bought a bottle of spirits.
In our coolie rags and bare feet we strolled along the yellow people’s fashionable promenade, on an elevated bank of the canal shaded by willows, to the Scholars’ Garden, where Peace said he was to meet Reed-Mat Su, a free white man who had been enlisting among the Twin Hills slaves; he was employed in the garden’s entertainments. Peace led us boldly down the sloping parade ground. We circled the many-roofed temples and came on the far side to a breathtaking view of a series of gardens running in terraces down to the canal, which here was artificially broad and contained several islands feathery with sycamores. Hundreds of yellows in leisure-day finery at open-air tables all around us sipped tea and nibbled at almond cakes and persimmons. We were intimidated and ducked behind some huge cork-spindle bushes and took each a heavy pull at the bottle; then, hot-throated, we walked daintily on bubbles of self-importance straight down to the show ring.
There was Reed-Mat Su, in yellow tights and a puffy-shouldered jacket, skipping about on errands—anchoring the posts for the slack-rope dancers, putting out colored tubs for the tame bears to posture upon. Reed-Mat was himself part of the show: an embodiment of all that the masters believed white men to be, for he stumbled and played stupid, shook his head over the simplest of duties, shuffled lazily, kept his jaw hanging slack, fawned in front of the equestrian acrobats, white men who were naked except for pink codpieces tied on with twisted cloths, and made secretive obscene gestures behind their bare rumps. He was an artist of self-abasement; we, too, laughed at him in helpless fury.
We stood in a good-sized pool of avoidance: the long-haired giant, the crookback, the three rustic women clinging to each other. There were no other slaves in sight.
The pink-pricked bareback riders leaped onto the heaving white hips of the horses going round and round and did somersaults in the air.
Reed-Mat came to us. “You can’t come here,” he said between his teeth to Peace.
“We are already here,” Peace said.
“You are going to get me in trouble.”
“You turtle,” Peace said.
“I can’t talk to you now.”
“Do not talk, son. Give me the list.”
“Here?”
“Do you have it?”
“I have it. But not here. What if they took it off us?”
“I’ll kill any man that touches me.” Peace’s voice was rising.
Mink knocked a fist on Peace’s chest, as if asking to enter. “Not you talking,” he said. “The bottle talking.”
/> At this Peace suddenly became reasonable. “Where can we meet you?”
“Up there, in the slaves’ enclosure, after the magician’s act.”
The riders had finished. The showmaster, a yellow man in old-fashioned warrior costume, with mustaches dripping in narrow lines on either side of his mouth, and holding a long-tongued whip, came stamping over to us. “Send that garbage away from here,” he furiously said to Reed-Mat.
“I am just shooing them,” Reed-Mat said.
“I will give you ten breaths’ time,” the showmaster said to Peace. “Or this.” He raised the whip.
Peace was abruptly servile, apologetic, stupid, slow, honeyed; he spoke with the thickest of country accents—Reed-Mat Su’s caricature in true life, it seemed. And this served the purpose. We retreated. The showmaster and Su exchanged glances and broke into guffaws.
We went to the slaves’ yard, fenced in with palings to hide the waiting smallies from the sight of the carefree yellows in the gardens. Here were carriage boys, hostlers, body servants, in elegant clothes, and they gathered about Peace, who looked like a rough, stinking cowherd beside them, and they gravely shook him by the hand, one by one, and called him “General.” At last Reed-Mat Su came and gave us his list: Auntie tucked it in her bosom, where the bottle was already warmly cradled, supported by her crossed arms.
On the road out to Yen’s we fell in with a company of men on their way home from a day’s pass in town. They were mostly drunk. One had a basket of plums, and Peace reached down and took one. A drunken slave, who had said he was from Anhwei, and who did not know Peace, belligerently asked, “What business have you snatching the man’s plum?”
“We are dear friends, son. He can spare me a plum. He is one of my society.”
But the Anhwei man had an argument in his craw. He grasped Peace’s shoulders and spun him half around and fairly screamed, “What society, now?”