Imperial Fire

by Lyndon, Robert

  Six days passed before the party returned, wearing such long faces that Vallon winced in disappointment. Wulfstan’s mask slipped first.

  ‘It’s fixed. At night the day after tomorrow, two rafts big enough to take every man, horse and sack will put in at a quiet spot about fifteen miles upriver.’

  ‘The Chinese watch us too closely to permit a secret embarkation,’ Josselin said.

  Vallon’s shadow stalked across the walls of his quarters. ‘Shennu, arrange an urgent meeting with the prefect.’

  Next morning Vallon told the governor that he couldn’t remain in Lanzhou. He’d promised his men that they would reach journey’s end before the turn of the year, and he feared they would mutiny or desert if left in limbo for another three or four months. He’d decided to turn back.

  The prefect was horrified. ‘You can’t. I’ve already despatched couriers carrying my personal recommendation that the court receives your embassy. If, as I hope and suspect, the court sends a positive reply and you have left before it arrives, the government will hold me responsible. Please reconsider. Remember that during your stay in Lanzhou, we will meet all your needs. I understand that your men are far from home and miss domestic pleasures. Be assured they will be provided with all comforts.’

  Vallon pretended to be mollified – up to a point. ‘I appreciate your offer. The problem is that the more I satisfy my soldiers’ wants, the harder it will be to dig them out of slothful habits. Lanzhou offers too many attractions for men who haven’t tasted civilisation for the best part of a year. If they have to sit out the winter, I’d rather they did it in a place that offered fewer temptations. Such as Xining.’

  The prefect could barely contain his relief. ‘You’re prepared to take up winter quarters in Xining?’

  ‘Being billeted close to enemy territory will help maintain discipline. The sooner we leave the better. Tomorrow preferably.’

  Delighted to shed responsibility for the Outlanders, the prefect turned to his staff. ‘Arrange an escort.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Vallon said. ‘It will only reinforce the impression that we’re unwanted barbarians. We reached Lanzhou without any help. We can certainly leave it on our own.’

  It was afternoon when they rode out, accompanied by a token escort of a dozen Chinese soldiers and a camel train carrying sufficient supplies to last all winter. Retracing their steps, they followed a tributary of the Yellow River and pitched camp on a tongue of land at the bottom of a gorge. Vallon had cultivated good terms with the escort and they didn’t hesitate when he invited them into his tent to share food and wine.

  They were mellow drunk when two squads of Outlanders burst in, overpowered them and tied them up. Vallon went down to the riverbank with Wulfstan and Shennu.

  Midnight passed. A capsized moon slid across the gorge. Vallon shivered in his cape.

  ‘Do you think they’ll come?’

  ‘We’re paying enough,’ Wulfstan said. ‘Put me in their boots and I’d keep my end of the bargain.’

  Somewhere in the small hours Vallon woke to see a lantern winking up the river. He stood, sloughing off blankets, and made out a boat rowing downstream. It drew level and backed water. A man hailed the shore party.

  ‘That’s the fellow I dealt with,’ Wulfstan said. ‘He knows he doesn’t get the rest of the money until we’re on the rafts.’

  He whistled and the boat put in. Wulfstan handed over a bag of silver. The boat pushed off.

  ‘We might have kissed goodbye to a fortune,’ Vallon said.

  The lantern blinked five times and around the bend floated two flat masses, oarsmen straining to row the lumpen craft into slack water. They nudged the bank and Wulfstan leaped onto one of the rafts. He held out his hand to Vallon.

  ‘Welcome aboard, sir.’

  Before the first rooster carolled, the rafts drifted through Lanzhou without so much as a dog registering their passage. Dawn broke over terraced farmland and four days later, heading north, the Outlanders saw a stone wall tracking the eastern bank, unmanned watchtowers drifting past as regular as heartbeats. The wall appeared again on the opposite shore before wandering away.

  It was a strange journey, the landscape sliding past as if in a dream. Vallon would fix his eyes on a distant landmark thinking it would never arrive, only to wake from a trance to find that the landmark had passed and another had taken its place. The country grew more arid. Dawns broke in acid blues and citron yellows before the wind rose and cast a sickly yellow haze over everything. Towards evening the wind dropped and the sky cleared, heralding glorious sunsets and nights frigid with stars. On the rafts the men hibernated around braziers and pondered where the voyage would lead them.

  Vallon had learned that Greek would be useless in the Celestial Empire and Shennu spent part of the day refining his students’ Chinese. Thirty native oarsmen crewed the two rafts and the foreigners tested their language skills on them with mixed results. Vallon also kept his men busy with daily drills and exercises in arms. The rest of the time they passed playing shatranj, chequers and dice.

  The current bore them north into a desert of dunes salted with snow. Then the river swung east and the landscape flattened into icy steppe where the sun before daybreak threw the earth’s shadow in a dark sphere above the horizon.

  The north wind blew cold enough to weld flesh to metal and the river began to freeze over, lobes of ice creeping out from the banks, winter tightening its clutch so that only a narrow channel remained open. With the channel constricting daily, Vallon ordered his men to row, plying oars constructed from whatever material they could lay hands on.

  A day dawned when the sun didn’t rise in their faces. The river had turned south and the rafts drifted into clearer water. The wall appeared again, winding east like a yellow-grey snake.

  The weather turned milder and for a week the Outlanders continued south without the fear that come morning they would wake to find themselves frozen into the landscape.

  A cry one afternoon brought Vallon out of his makeshift cabin. Every man was rowing the raft to shore.

  ‘It’s the waterfall Shennu warned us about,’ Wulfstan said. ‘The Chinese call it the Kettle’s Spout.’

  Vallon could hear its bass undertones from a mile away and when he’d landed and picked his way onto a headland overlooking the fall, the roar was loud enough to scramble thought. Compressed into a channel only thirty yards wide, the river spewed over a step fifty feet high. A rainbow arched over the torrent and spray freezing as it rose matted Vallon’s eyebrows. He took hold of Wulfstan and shouted to make himself heard.

  ‘We’ll never get down that.’

  Two days later they were on their way again. The Chinese crew, with help from the Outlanders and Vikings, simply dismantled the rafts down to the last ox hide and reassembled them below the cataract.

  The country grew more settled. They passed subterranean towns dug into hillsides of soft loess. Giant waterwheels irrigated fields on both banks. One evening Vallon saw a lamplit boat crewed by three men using trained cormorants to catch fish.

  It must have been soon after the turn of the year when Josselin summoned Vallon late at night to observe a fire burning in the western darkness.

  ‘A signal fire,’ Vallon said ‘And I imagine the only intelligence worth transmitting concerns us. Double the watch.’

  All next day the men scanned the shorelines for any threat. None showed itself. The river widened into a slow-flowing lake. It was very cold that night and at sunrise mist drifted low across the water. Overhead the sky was eggshell blue. On each bank thick hoar frost covered the vegetation, making the landscape look as if it were carved from alabaster.

  A light breeze wafted the mist away.

  ‘Sailing ship putting out from the west bank,’ Gorka shouted.

  Vallon had already spotted it – a two-masted junk with a low bluff bow and a high canted stern.

  ‘Another one heading out from the other shore.’

  A smaller vessel
with a single mast.

  Wulfstan appeared at Vallon’s side. ‘That’s a pincer closing on us if I ain’t mistook.’

  ‘Order the men to arms,’ Vallon told Josselin. The Vikings on the other raft were already struggling into their armour. ‘What can we expect?’ he asked Shennu.

  ‘River pirates are well-armed and ruthless. They leave no witnesses.’

  Vallon’s lips compressed. The enemy ships were still more than a mile away, heeling over in the breeze. There was no getting past them and no time to make shore. He looked for Josselin. ‘Tell the men to cover their armour and hide themselves among the horses and baggage. Make the pirates think we’re poorly defended merchants.’ He strode to the edge of the raft and hailed Hauk. ‘Hide your men. We’ll take the right-hand ship; you seize the other.’

  Hauk raised a hand and his Vikings disappeared behind bales and sacks. Vallon’s men had done the same. The pirate ships were close enough to make out men clustered along their sides.

  Wulfstan trembled like a hunting dog scenting game. Vallon turned an amused glance on him.

  ‘You’re looking forward to a bit of action, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. When you took me in I was grateful that I’d found a comfortable berth, sad that my warring days were over.’

  ‘We’ll need grappling irons. I want to capture those ships, not beat them off.’

  Wulfstan hurried away and returned with two hooked ropes. He handed one to Gorka. Vallon knelt behind a bale of yak hides and watched the ships draw closer. He judged from the pirates’ attitudes that they weren’t expecting serious opposition.

  ‘Are the archers ready?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Chinese crew had commenced a terrified wailing that wasn’t feigned. The sight cheered the pirates and they jeered and beckoned the rafts into their clutches.

  ‘Wait for my order,’ Vallon said.

  The distance had narrowed to three hundred yards and silence fell, magnifying the sounds of slurping water and creaking ropes. Vallon raised his hand. The pirates, dressed in the cast-offs of half a dozen armies, trained small crossbows on the rafts. The captain of the junk Vallon was aiming for stalked the stern deck. A long banner rippled from the vessel’s masthead.

  Vallon dropped his arm and his archers loosed a volley of arrows. Before they could draw again, the pirates responded with crossbow bolts. Another flight of arrows from the Outlanders and another swarm of bolts. The pirates were using repeating crossbows, shooting darts faster than the archers could bend their bows. Against men lacking armour, the darts would have been devastating, but the crossbows were light and most of the bolts bounced off mail or broke.

  Fifty yards to go and the commander of the junk knew something was wrong and shouted commands through a trumpet.

  ‘Stay hidden until the last moment,’ Vallon told Josselin. ‘Concentrate our attack on the bow. Wulfstan, be ready.’

  The junk’s hull loomed up. More bolts fizzed. One of them glanced off Vallon’s armour.

  The raft struck the junk with a pneumatic sigh. Wulfstan and Gorka swung grapples over its side-rails.

  ‘Give them hell!’ Vallon shouted.

  Josselin led the assault, covered by a squad of archers. He scrambled over the junk’s side, swinging his sword like a flail until more Outlanders had boarded. Vallon didn’t follow until his troops had secured the foredeck. From there they advanced towards the stern, each squad a cog in a mincing machine, driving the pirates back. The commander made a desperate counter and was hacked down with three of his men. The remaining pirates milled against the stern transom.

  ‘Surrender or die,’ Vallon cried. He looked for Shennu. ‘Tell them.’

  Vallon took more than thirty prisoners. On the other junk Hauk put every pirate to the sword.

  Vallon tried to stop the butchery. ‘You’ll need some of them to show you how to handle the ship.’

  Hauk dragged a hand across his brow, leaving a bloody smear. ‘I don’t need any damned Chinese pirate to tell me how to sail a ship.’

  The Outlanders tied the raft to the junk’s stern and Vallon set about learning what manner of craft he’d captured. A pirate only too willing to cooperate told him it was called Jifeng, meaning ‘Auspicious Wind’, while her sister ship bore the incongruous name ‘Pleasant Clouds’. Jifeng was more than sixty feet long, her hull a narrow rectangle with a blunt bow, her aft deck canted up. She was equipped with a stern rudder, and amidships a board shaped like a flipper trailed from each side.

  ‘What are they?’ Vallon asked.

  ‘Leeboards,’ Wulfstan said. ‘They’re like adjustable keels that can be used in shallow water. The Arabs use them on their dhows.’

  Vallon followed him below and found the captain’s cabin – just large enough to accommodate a sleeping couch.

  ‘Snug billet,’ Wulfstan said. He turned. ‘She’s a stout craft, right enough. Look at that. Her hull’s divided by partitions. They look watertight to me.’

  Back on deck Vallon studied the sails. They were constructed of eight wooden battens lined with cotton and rigged in a fashion too complicated for him to work out.

  ‘Do you think you can sail her?’

  ‘Give me a day with a couple of Chinese mariners and I could sail her to Norway.’

  ‘Mount the Greek Fire siphon at the bow and the trebuchet at the stern.’

  They kept five of the pirates as crew and put the rest ashore. Most of them had been pressed into service and trotted off like prisoners released from jail. Three days later the river turned east through densely populated farmland dotted with peasants at work in fields already showing the pale green patina of approaching spring. The current had deposited so much sediment that it had raised the level of the river fifteen feet above the floodplain, giving Vallon the impression that he was floating on an elevated plane.

  The Chinese caught up with them at Zhenzhong, throwing a barrage of junks and cables across the river. Vallon offered no resistance and allowed the commander to board. The officer, young and awkward, made a stiff bow.

  ‘General, my orders are to escort you to Kaifeng.’

  ‘I happen to be sailing there myself. I’m delighted to complete my journey under your protection, though I must say it’s come rather late.’

  ‘This ship is now under my command.’

  Vallon closed on the officer. ‘If you want to take command of a pirate ship, you must first capture it. The ship is mine.’

  ‘General, I must warn you…’

  ‘Yes? That you’ll send us back to Lanzhou?’

  ‘General…’

  ‘Gorka.’

  The corporal hurried up holding a small barrel. He opened it to display the pirate captain’s head preserved in salt.

  ‘He went by the name of “Mudfish”,’ Vallon said. ‘An odd name for a pirate. I assume you know that I also killed the brigand Two-Swords Lu.’

  The officer stared at the leprous head. His men craned to get a look.

  Vallon followed up his advantage. ‘Remove your soldiers from my ship and I’ll be delighted to discuss matters further. Alternatively, you can arrest me and drive me into Kaifeng wearing irons like a common criminal. It’s your decision.’

  The officer conferred with advisors before answering. ‘You may proceed to Kaifeng under my close supervision. The matter of the ship’s ownership will be decided there.’

  A knock at evening roused Vallon from troubled thoughts.

  ‘Yes.’

  Lucas opened the door and Vallon’s innards tightened. No matter how many times he saw his son, it was like being confronted by a ghost.

  ‘The capital’s in sight,’ Lucas mumbled, looking everywhere but at Vallon.

  ‘I’ll be right up.’

  Lucas turned away and Vallon felt something tear around his heart. ‘Wait a moment.’

  Lucas paused, shoulders hunched as if anticipating a blow.

  Vallon’s mouth worked. His throat tightened. ‘It doesn’
t matter. Now isn’t the time.’

  Lucas left and Vallon flopped forward, hands on knees, breathing in gasps. He’d been on the verge of trying to justify his crime. Your mother was an adulteress who delighted in the company and caresses of a man who betrayed me and had me thrown into an oubliette lined with human bones. He even stole my sword. Vallon unsheathed the blade and placed his brow against the cold steel. His breathing steadied. No, Lucas was an innocent and innocence was holy. Realisation that he could never seek redemption from his son made him feel sick.

  He dashed water over his face before going on deck to take his first view of Kaifeng. He stared across ten miles of flat farmland at a smoky stain on a dun-coloured plain under a dingy sky.

  ‘Don’t judge it on first impressions,’ Hero said beside him. ‘Kaifeng is home to more people than the whole of the Byzantine empire.’

  Vallon rested his hands on the rail. ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘I know. It’s Lucas.’

  ‘Having him in my company is torture. I’ve got nothing to say to him – nothing I dare say. I find myself opening my mouth to share with Lucas memories of him as a child – the first toy sword I gave him, the day I led him around the garden on a goat. Then I remember that all memories lead to one event and I want to gag.’

  ‘You have blood in common.’

  ‘Yes, the only thing we have in common is my wife’s blood.’

  ‘I’ve told him what terrible circumstances led to that murder. Give him time and he’ll find it in himself to forgive.’

  Vallon slapped the rail. ‘You don’t understand. I don’t want his forgiveness. I’m not a merchant trying to profit from a gullible customer.’

  ‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’

  ‘Am I? I’m a thrice-failed father. After Lucas I adopted Aiken and he couldn’t wait to escape my care.’

  ‘Thanks to you he’s content and brighter than he’s ever been in his life.’

  Vallon hardly heard. ‘And by now, my Lady Caitlin will have given birth to our third child, yet days pass without me giving a thought to wife or children.’