Mouse said, “Silence. Work.”
At the edge of the meadow they off-loaded. The sun was low; short grass gleamed yellow-green, and the hills lay pink. Jake sniffed the air: it was dry, and bore a hint of dung and a hint of hay. He rolled his shoulders, and made circles with his head, to ease his neck muscles.
He tied the long split reins, each end to another pony’s. Finally the five were tied in a circle, heads in, with enough slack to walk and graze. “I need water,” he said to Mouse.
“After the ponies,” Mouse said. “You talk too much altogether.”
Beer, Jake recollected. About four cold beers now, on an empty belly in a dry body. A good buzz, that would be.
Mouse’s nose was almost aquiline. Mixed blood. His accent was western, a man of borders.
Momo. Someday we will take Momo in our two hands and break him. And that Hao-k’an.
Jake lay flat on the grass, and dozed. Old Tu and old Kao chased each other through his mind. He felt his back mellow, and heard himself snore.
At Ugly’s call he started, and jumped. Then he was ashamed and angry, and said to himself, God damn slave.
He untied one knot, to open the circle and make a line, and with himself at one end and Mouse at the other the ponies clopped and whickered toward the well.
“We are rich in water,” Ugly called. He motioned Jake to work.
It was an old-fashioned hide bucket with an old-fashioned windlass, and braided rawhide for rope. The trough surprised Jake: an oil drum sliced in two the long way, and the halves laid end to end. Jake cranked and poured, and cranked and poured. He saw no markings on the drum.
The elder spoke in a border tongue, and laughed. Ugly answered in the same tongue.
Jake worked half asleep. He saw a palace with fountains, and marble pools, and tables heaped with succulent fruits, and women who were all melons and peach fuzz. Low in his swollen throat he hummed as he drew water, hummed and groaned, hummed and groaned in a chant, in a rhythmic chant, and then it was not so bad, with the vision of flesh and fruit, and the chant to work by, and his eyes half shut; and tonight they would give him food, and let him drink.
And they did: he stuffed himself with mutton, and drank countless cups of tea, and then they led him to the ponies and tied his hands behind his back, and tied one foot to the circle of reins. When they had returned to the women, he hopped up with great effort; the horses grazed, and brought him crashing down. He stood again; but what then? He could not mount. Suppose he could: how ride five ponies strung together in a circle? He could loose the reins, with his teeth. No: he tried, and was dragged on his face.
He lay on his side in the dark. And if he cut one free, and mounted, and cantered down the road? To what? They would check; he would have an hour’s start at most; they would track him, and take him, and chop off his right hand.
So he slept. He slept on his belly, and the five ponies dragged him gently here and there all through the night; but he slept. In the late watches he thought he heard a flute.
“A shame you could not join us,” Ugly said cheerfully next morning. They were pushing south with full bellies, well-watered ponies, skins and canteens topped off. Ugly had made ceremonious farewells, presenting two coins to the elder; Jake recognized the old Mexican dollars. Two bucks Mex. “With these people anything goes after dark.”
Jake was glum. Half the day long his saddle moved like a woman, and Ugly was not making life easier with this talk.
“Old man God knows what I put it into last night,” Hao-k’an said happily. “In winter these people bring sheep in.”
“What people are they?” Jake spoke without thinking, and quickly hunched away from Momo; but Momo was weary and full.
“Qazaq blood, some Mongol and Chinese,” Ugly said. “Since the rovings and transferrals of the war there has been much mixing. It was kind of you to watch over the ponies.”
Jake cursed softly. Ugly laughed. Jake said, “Why do you rob caravans but pay villages?”
“The walls of a caravan are not in repair,” Ugly said.
“You’re afraid of a place with walls?”
“Afraid!” Their eyes met again. Ugly’s were full of scorn. “No. I mean that the caravan passes but the village bides.”
“What does that mean?”
“We need villages,” Ugly said. “We need places to rest, places to water, places full of poor people who welcome us, who sell us their souls for a copper because we are wiser than the government and more honest than the police and safer than the army. Besides, they have nothing worth stealing. Furthermore, they will say nothing. If K’uang knew they had sheltered us he would wipe them out.
“So if we come this way again we will have no need to skulk. We are like fish, and the people are the ocean.” He roared laughter suddenly, and rubbed his pony’s neck affectionately; the pony caracoled, and neighed.
“What joke is that?”
“You would not understand,” Ugly said. He repeated it to the others; they all laughed.
Without warning, Momo bashed Jake. “Tomorrow,” Momo promised. And again he thumbed the tip of his sudden knife.
“Save that for K’uang,” Ugly said.
Mouse groaned. “K’uang.”
“He’ll be along in a hurry,” Ugly said, “unless this big-nose is lying. Though by now he may be dead, or suffering dysentery.”
“Ah yes,” Mouse said happily. “Or cataracts.”
“Or a severe paralysis of the virile member,” Hao-k’an offered.
“Or all of those,” Ugly said solemnly, “and he would still come after us.”
“These glasses are unusually fine,” Momo said. “As good as the Japanese. We could set up shop.”
“Shop!” Ugly snorted. “We sell off what we have, and we move.”
“I would like to lay a bit for my old age,” Momo said.
Ugly said, “I think we will all manage to avoid old age.”
23
Ch’ing’s heart was broken, and he raged at Chu-chu and Hsü-to each night. “The boy was a son to me,” he cried. “I killed him. I took money from that cursed foreigner.”
“We all killed him,” Chu-chu lamented. “We did not keep a narrow heart and a wide eye.”
The caravan was in Ha-mi, safe now; Qomul in the western tongue, a city, a true city, over ten myriads of people, a hundred thousand and more. Chu-chu’s heart was eased by the sight of mosques. Also the city’s pleasures beckoned after so long on the trail, but the pleasure was thinned without Chin Tan-te’s moon-face, and his laughter and japes.
The men patronized public baths, restaurants and other places of amusement, some of them in flowery lanes. Ch’ing stayed with the caravan, and brooded. Time was money, yet he must wait for Major K’uang, who had ordered Captain Nien, by wireless, to detain the caravan of the House of Wu.
Ch’ing had not long to wait. K’uang had sped out of Pao-t’ou, promoting every man in his patrol, in lieu of furlough. Corporal Shih, who in any honest army would be an officer, was now a sergeant, with a corporal to help him, and the rest upper privates. K’uang drove them hard; they saddled early and rested late, and trotted in the cool hours, and clopped into Ha-mi only three days after the caravan.
“And how do you know that the foreigner is dead?” K’uang asked Master Ch’ing.
“Yüüü,” Ch’ing said. “What else?”
“Ransom. Possibly collusion. The Tiger’s Assistant—if it is truly he—is a notoriously sensitive man, and above all sensitive to silver and gold. I want to know precisely where they struck.”
“Precisely is difficult. It was west of Ming-shui, an hour or so west, descending toward the middle plain, in the bed of the dry stream there, and we had passed through a cut.” He hissed gloomily. “It is all cuts there, in the bed of the stream, and high banks and plenty of places for villains to hide.”
“Yes, I know,” K’uang said. “But Ming-shui is a place to begin.”
“And from there?”
&
nbsp; “Toward the Jade Gate Gap. We’ll find them. A whisper here, a shout there. We’ll find them.”
“The foreigner paid me one hundred dollars U.S.,” Ch’ing said. “The House of Wu offers that much for information or apprehension.” It was an apology to K’uang, and a hope for the future; Ch’ing was greasing the mouth of the idol with fat.
“It was surely two hundred,” K’uang said.
Ch’ing was silent.
“You will advance it to me,” K’uang said softly. “I need it to keep my men going. There is nothing left to commandeer. My requisitions are rejected: foreigners and foreign weapons, but the generals sell them to the Communists against the day of defeat and bargaining. No one hears a K’uang. There are no supplies for a K’uang.”
After a moment Ch’ing said, “I agree with all that. Thus has it always been.”
“Not always,” K’uang said dreamily.
“But I fear that you will follow other scents; or that you will be reassigned.”
“Ah, no,” K’uang said, “and you may believe me: this I will do if nothing else ever. After all,” and his tone grew dry and delicate, “the security of these great roads is my responsibility. What befalls you on these ancient paths of trade is to some extent in my hands.”
“That too is true,” Ch’ing said sourly. “And there was always something slanting about that foreigner. Very well, very well, two hundred it is, and I expect a full accounting.”
“You will of course be given that,” K’uang said smoothly, though both men knew that the matter would never come up again. “And henceforth, if an unworthy military man may presume to advise the greatest of caravan masters, henceforth be wary of passengers, and of merchants like Kao. You knew they were crooked.”
“One does not ask,” Ch’ing said.
“And consequently one’s goods are stolen and one’s friends killed.”
“That had nothing to do with Kao, or with the foreigner.”
“We do not know that,” K’uang said. “Can K’uang scrub the country clean when Ch’ing trades in filth?”
“I will not again,” Ch’ing said fiercely. “No more foreigners! Not the slightest foreigner ever! Not even a Korean! Not even a Cantonese!”
24
One evening the bandits came to a river, a narrow yellow river in a broad brown bed, and they turned west. Jake had been theirs for a week only; it seemed months. He was afraid most of the time, not of beatings or death but of slavery, with chains and whips. He had been trained to disregard fear, so he wore it well, as others wore secret scars or false teeth. But he could not rid himself of it.
He drifted into reveries of throat-cutting; or picked them off one by one at three hundred yards as they fled across the dunes. He garroted Momo. No, strangled him. Bare hands. His hands closed on Momo’s neck, grappled, crushed: bones cracked. Momo’s eyes jutted. They jutted like … like breasts, and that was another reverie. Through the hot stench of ponies he tasted Mei-li; his throat closed, and his heart was sore.
Across the river he saw ancient watchtowers and the ruins of a wall. The muscles of his back griped. He saw a tower every few miles for some days, and the low mounds of old wall. Doubtless interesting to the traveler of scientific bent, but some other time. Often Jake’s head ached. He did his work, spoke little and was often smacked, but nobody seemed homicidal. One night Ugly offered him a cigarette. Jake had much to ask but held his tongue. He nodded thanks. The smoke seared. Momo said, “Tomorrow,” and jiggled his brows. Far to the south, beyond the dun foothills, Jake saw majestic mountains.
The Jade Gate Gap connected Kansu and Hsinkiang. Jake liked it another way: China and Turkestan. Outside the pass a huddle of shacks and yurts had grown—since the war, Ugly said—to a village, occupied mainly by merchants, outlaws, whores and deserters from various armies. It was uncertain sanctuary: once inside, a bandit was fairly safe, though K’uang and Nien came prying from time to time and occasionally left a detachment to harry and annoy.
The men who watched Jake ride past might have been anything; they wore the baggy clothes and summer boots of the shepherd, the bandit, the horse doctor, the small trader.
They snickered at Jake, and called him Russian. Ugly rode scornfully, and stared hard. Watchers looked one look and away: the scars, and the stony eyes. Momo, Hao-k’an and Mouse ignored the spectators but rode tense and alert.
Even bound and doubled over, Jake felt the difference: his bunch were bandits, who knew no home and laid it on the line each day. But these observers in doorways were grifters, they were bartenders and discount brokers, and they were brave behind your back; he felt like a better man than any of them. Trussed and pinioned, chafed and galled, his back cramped and twitching, he was better than these street rats, and would rather be Jake. It was a crazy feeling and he could not analyze it.
He wondered if there was another white man here, and decided that he hoped not.
They jogged past shuttered shacks, and the shutters opened, and women peered out. Some of the shacks were roofed with canvas, tarps lashed tight through grommets. Some with sheets of metal: the war had not passed this way, but its trash had—materials, weapons, deserters, stolen trucks and jeeps. A familiar smell rose to Jake’s nostrils: fires, dung, cooking oil and a ball of yen for sweetening: the smell of a city.
He wondered suddenly if he could be discounted, if Ugly could sell him now for half what a slaver could make on him later. The thought chilled him. He had never believed any of this, that he was a prisoner in the middle of nowhere and no better than a donkey. He did not want these bandits to leave him. He believed it all now. He knew just where he was, it was the Yü-men Kuan on his map, and it was not a place to be nameless and homeless and friendless.
He wished that Momo would make teeth, and whack him.
The village was a warren, and reeked. Ugly seemed to know his way. They fetched up at a wineshop with a large courtyard and stables, and Ugly kept them in the saddle while he palavered with the landlord. Casually, not seeming deliberate, the bandits eased their ponies rump to rump, and turned one pair of eyes to each of the four winds. Ugly palavered in Chinese, some tones reversed in the west, the song rising where it should fall, but Jake could follow: Ugly wanted the ponies seen to, and he was rapping out orders like an old cavalry sergeant.
There was plenty of water, Jake heard, and a little feed, mainly reeds and dried grasses, also dried peas. Gold? The gentleman would pay in gold? Then the feed was his. Also a stableboy of the first talent. There were no rooms in the wineshop, only rude benches and tables, but a square of sleeping floor could be reserved for five; or they could sleep in the stables with their ponies. There was mutton. There were women. There was no rice. There were other travelers, a group from Ch’ing-hai, some Tibetans with them; also some gentlemen from Kashgar hoping to slip eastward.
The stableboy was trotted out, and proved to be five-days-in-the-week-up-here. He goggled and giggled. His head was shaved and shiny. Ugly showed displeasure. He would hire another also, and if anything befell the ponies, the jolly landlord would find his teeth trickling into his large intestine from both ends.
The landlord stiffened, and Jake admired him for it. “No need to talk like that,” the man said. “One cannot run a wineshop here without help, and I have plenty, and they are rough ones. No one fools with me. Your ponies are safe, Hu Ch’iao Kuei.”
Ugly’s eyes widened; he sniffed. “So you know me.”
“Who does not?” The landlord bowed. “The Tiger’s Assistant has no need to show claws and snarl. Men do his bidding with pleasure. But I too am known; I too stand straight.”
“That is true,” Ugly said. “I see it. You are not a slanting man. What is your honored name?”
“My unworthy name is Ying,” the landlord said.
“Then tell this boy to love these horses, Ying, and to help us off-load, and in half an hour we want mutton in sauces, with ginger; also much tea, steamed dough and jugs of wine. Not small cruets but jugs.”
Hao-k’an hummed, “Women.”
“The yellow wine is very expensive,” Ying said. “Kumiss is cheaper.”
“Yellow wine,” Ugly said firmly. “Oh, and this one, this one is a prisoner. We tie him to a post. Now, where does one commit nuisance around here?”
25
By dark, Jake was an old toothless dog. He was allowed to do a human thing or two like empty his bladder; he swallowed mutton and steamed dough, and drank tea. Then he was tied to a post at the inner end of the tavern. Potboys passed him bearing platters, and soon enough he was hungry again. His hands were tied behind him, and the rope was looped about the post; with care he could slide his way down and sit on the floor, and by bracing hard and edging upward he could stand again. The post was a couple of feet across, one huge rough-cut log.
The wineshop was made of wood, mud, stone and odds and ends. Part of a Quonset hut. One wall had formerly been a log raft, or half a roof. On each table a small oil lamp flickered. Jake sat in deep shadow and was left alone for some time. The ceiling was a patchwork, what he could see of it: planks, sheets of metal, canvas.
His four friends had claimed two tables and benches, and stacked their gear against the wall. In the dim light, sullen and heavy, Jake was not sure who or what he was, not sure if he was thinking the word wall, or the word bulkhead as he had been trained to call it, or the Chinese for wall, or if it was only that there was a picture of a wall in his slow mind. He was confused by now, and afraid that he had been dulled by captivity. Sometime soon there would come a moment when he must not be slow of wit. A moment of opportunity or a moment of danger. That reminded him of something or someone, but he could not remember what or who.
He sat like a tame chimp and watched the travelers. Ying had called them gentlemen: a courtesy title. These were thieves and murderers. Some Tibetans, those round fellows with the brimless hats? And some from Kashgar. Jake heard languages. Laughter rose and fell, men cheered and coughed, belches rang. “Huo chi!” That was Ugly, calling a waiter. Mouse was sucking at a long wooden pipe. Jake envied him; opium would help now. Momo sat sneering faintly, as if he wanted to assassinate everybody in the room. Hao-k’an was lost in memory and mutton.
The Chinese Bandit Page 16