Still, she was enough to turn any man’s head. What was she called? Lewis? Levy? No, Haleevie. Fronah Haleevie, a tantalizing name and a tantalizing girl. He’d find her the next time the Mencius put into Shanghai.
But she had nothing to do with the pickle he’d landed himself in—or his abrupt transformation from lieutenant, U.S.N., to lieutenant commander, Imperial Chinese Water Force. He was deeply humiliated and still angry at the result of his technical violation of naval regulations, which had brought to him “indefinite suspension” from the service, though the commodore had not dared court-martial him. “Detached for administrative convenience,” his senior officers had ruled, unwilling to cite the true cause. Perhaps he had gone too far, but he could not take the commander’s slur on his family lying down. At any rate, he had duly applied for extended leave after the secret hearing. The Navy was probably no more certain than he was of his present status.
That smoke screen helped preserve his reputation but did not put bread in his mouth. Despite the odium of mercenary service, he’d been very glad to join the Manchu Emperor’s raggle-taggle river squadron. Hardly a swanlike frigate with gleaming brightwork and holystoned decks, the Mencius was the pride of that squadron. Since no Chinese officer alive could handle that ugly duckling with her reciprocating engine and her quick-firing Forest guns, the Mandarins had commissioned a foreigner.
He had been offered other employment this afternoon. The terms were astonishingly generous, though the prospects were not exactly glowing. But to what could he look forward in the Imperial Water Force? And the new offer was truly magnificent.
A match flared on the foredeck, where the sailors were playing an endless game of cards, and Gabriel Hyde left the taffrail to shout a sharp command: “Douse that light!” Surprisingly skilled seamen, his patchy crew was about as disciplined as Shanghai pye dogs. Still, they would fight like real seadogs with good leadership.
He could not push his sailors too hard. Like himself, they served primarily for pay, and even less than himself were they bound to strict discipline by their pro forma oaths. Besides, the twenty silver taels paid an able-bodied seaman each year must command less loyalty than his own 3,000 taels, which, he smugly calculated, came to £1,000 sterling or a princely US$5,000.
The offer made this afternoon by the Taiping general called the Four-Eyed Dog beggared that sum: 7,500 taels, $12,500 a year, when President Franklin Pierce himself received no more than $25,000. Gabriel Hyde could not believe his services were worth that much to anyone or that the cocky Taiping general could make good his promise. Finally, he was by no means certain that he could organize and command a flotilla of gunboats for the Taipings.
He had felt he was stepping into a fantasy when he slipped ashore in a sampan, his blue eyes and straight-bridged nose concealed by a boatman’s conical straw hat. Conducted around the besieging Imperial troops by side paths, he had been received in the former Imperial prefect’s yamen by General Wu Ju-hsiao, who had taken Chenkiang three years earlier and since then held off constant government assaults on that eastern outpost of Tienking, the Heavenly Capital, as the Taiping occupiers called Nanking. Chenkiang’s name also proclaimed its strategic importance. It meant the Citadel of the River.
The Taiping general, servant of a cult Hyde considered on a par with devil worship, was surprisingly fluent in pidgin English, the lingua franca of the China coast. Chinese pronounced business as pidgin, very like pigeon. The rebel general had, he boasted, done “big pidgin” as a merchant in Canton before joining the Taipings. His nickname, the Four-Eyed Dog, apparently delighted him.
The stocky general’s puckered features resembled a mastiff’s: the nose small with prominent nostrils, the wide mouth bristling with discolored teeth, and the low forehead permanently wrinkled. Beneath his alert eyes shone livid spots, so that he appeared to possess four bright eyes.
“Have got four piecee eye,” the general chuckled complacently. “Can look see two times bettern mens have got only two piecee.”
The Four-Eyed Dog had discussed the military situation as if they were allies rather than enemies. A major action, he hinted, was impending, a great battle that would crush the Imps.
“Number three year of Heavenly Kingdom begin start.” The General, Hyde knew, meant early 1853, for the Taiping calendar began in 1850. “Holy Soldiers follow longside me and drive out Imps from Chenkiang, where we now sit so fat like Mandarins and so safe like gods.”
His complacency was hardly justified, for a ring of Imperial troops was closing around the fortress city. But the American was accustomed to outrageous Chinese exaggeration and listened with outward respect to the Four-Eyed Dog’s monologue, which alternated between braggadocio and lamentation. In 1853, the general recalled, Taiping strategists had launched a march on Shanghai to join the Small Swords. When the task force was recalled to defend the Heavenly Capital against renewed Imperial attacks, the opportunity was lost. A Manchu general finally retook the South City from the Small Swords in early 1855, and his troops then moved upriver into the Taiping domain.
“Imps only takee South City because have got help from Frenchmens. Cursed idolators!” the Four-Eyed Dog swore. “Damned Froggymen pay prayer to idols!”
Chinese troop movements were interminably slow, and the Manchu advance soon stalled. After driving off the Imperials threatening their Heavenly Capital at Nanking, tens of thousands of Holy Soldiers were now advancing under clouds of yellow-and-scarlet banners. Astonishingly, their chief weapons were spears and swords, supplemented by handmade muskets, blunderbusses, and horse pistols, while their cannon were hollowed tree trunks strengthened with metal hoops. Nonetheless, the Taipings were beating back the Imperial threat to the outlying cities that guarded the Heavenly Capital.
With the Great Kingdom of Heavenly Peace resurgent, the Imperials had to bring their protracted siege of the Citadel of the River to a triumphant close within the next few weeks or fall back. Chenkiang, the gate to the Middle Yangtze Valley, was in grave danger. Yet the Four-Eyed Dog was extraordinarily confident.
For half an hour he extolled the unique virtue and justice of Taiping rule, impressing Gabriel Hyde despite his prejudice. The general then casually made his proposal. If the American would join the Holy Cause, he would hold the rank of commodore and command all the Taipings’ steam-powered gunboats—all, that was, he could manage to purchase. In addition to a munificent salary, he could enjoy a harem of scores of devoted female Holy Soldiers.
“So many beautiful womens,” the Four-Eyed Dog rhapsodized. “Allee same like Heavenly King and Heavenly Princes, you catchee many, many womens.”
The young man from puritanical New England couldn’t quite see himself as the lord of an Oriental seraglio. But he had heard graphic tales of the ardor of Chinese women. A harem of passionate Oriental beauties! They would gasp in Salem when he returned to tell that tale.
The American had not made up his mind, for the Four Eyed Dog had urged: “Takee much time think. No wanchee hurry, no wanchee Commander be rash.” But the ten gold taels he had accepted as a pledge of the Taipings’ sincerity were hidden under his China Coast Pilot beside his sextant and chronometer in his double-locked sea chest.
“Small piecee present,” the general had said expansively. “Good frien’ allee time give good frien’ kumshaw, savee?”
After living for months amid genial graft, Gabriel had not rebuffed the valuable gift, which was not really a bribe. Every officer of the Imperial Water Force gladly accepted kumshaw from his subordinates and anxiously bribed his superiors. Besides, he could not close the door by offending the Four-Eyed Dog.
The crucial issue was: Could the Taipings win? That question perplexed the merchants of the Foreign Settlement, whose self-preservation and self-enrichment both depended upon cool assessment of the rebel dynasty’s prospects. The consuls pondered the same question in the sacred light of national interest. If the Taipings conquered China, Gabriel Hyde’s rank and wealth would raise him far above the
displeasure of the U. S. Navy. Salem did not ask awkward questions of her sons returning from abroad with fortunes to spend. Besides, the Taipings’ fanatical rectitude was appealing to an officer mired in the morass of corruption called the Imperial Water Force.
The bell tower of Chenkiang proclaimed the double-hour of the sheep, 1:00 A.M. on April 1, 1856. The brazen clamor rolled down the shore, where the watchfires of the besieging army raised a curtain of flame against the night. As clouds covered the moon, the tolling resounded across the Yangtze, where the battle lanterns of the war junks illuminated long, scalloped pennants undulating in the breeze. Those lanterns blazed, the war junks’ captains said, to placate their crews’ superstition by driving away demons—and, Gabriel suspected, to proclaim the war junks’ presence to the Taiping flotilla, so that both sides could avoid a clash. Torches flared as the guard changed on the walls of Chenkiang, and loud male chanting rose to the sky: “Tsan-mei! All praise to the Heavenly Father!”
Shivering in involuntary awe as the echoes of the bronze bells and the chanted prayer reverberated over the water, Gabriel Hyde heard the murmur of bare feet across teak decks as the watch changed aboard the Mencius. The quartermaster had obeyed his order not to sound the ship’s bell, though his crew, infatuated like all Chinese by noise-making devices, delighted in striking the hours. Cymbals clashed and gongs boomed on the war junks in response to the enemy’s clamor.
When the echoes died, an oar slapped the wavelets. Gabriel stiffened in watchfulness. In the darkness surrounding the Mencius, his eyes were dazzled by the lanterns of the war junks. He listened intently for almost a minute, but relaxed when the sound was not repeated.
Three minutes later, the oar slapped the water closer to the Mencius, anchored on the fringe of the flotilla. Craning into the darkness, Gabriel saw a white splash among the dainty whitecaps. It was, he concluded with relief, only a fish leaping.
Despite the Four-Eyed Dog’s broad hints, the night was quiet on the Long River. If he commanded an American vessel, he would go below to his cabin, but he could not trust the vigilance of his half-trained crew. He could not even allow himself a cat nap on the quarterdeck.
Resigned to sleeplessness, the American reached into his pocket for a cheroot. His hand was arrested by an emphatic slap on the water. That was no fish, those splashes drawing closer to his ship. He whispered to the bosun, who padded toward the foredeck, kicking the gun crews awake as he passed. A match flared, and an acetylene searchlight lanced the night. The blue-white beam probed the darkness for almost ten minutes. As Gabriel Hyde opened his mouth to order the searchlight doused, yellow radiance flared above the whitecaps. The beam impaled a small sampan in which a fisherman wielding a trident crouched over the lantern that lured his prey to the surface.
The sailors laughed, and one shouted: “Be careful, little brother, the fish don’t get your balls!”
The fisherman waved casually and resumed his scrutiny of the water. His spear darted, and he triumphantly displayed the wriggling carp transfixed by the tines.
A lone fisherman in a cockleshell amid the formidable flotilla appeared strange to Gabriel, but his crew was neither surprised nor alarmed. While fleets and armies clashed, other men stolidly reaped the waters and the land. Farmers plowed hillside plots while cavalrymen sabered each other in the valleys, and cargo junks plodded around the baleful thunder of naval cannon. The people stoically ignored the gory quarrels of Manchu rulers and powermad Chinese rebels.
The sampan drifted downstream, the fisherman silhouetted against the lantern. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the yellow radiance veered toward the southern bank, faded into the distance, and vanished. The nineteen-year-old fisherman rose and stretched before sculling the sampan to the riverbank below the Imperial camp. When the prow grounded, he jumped ashore and strode along the same hidden paths Gabriel Hyde had taken into the Citadel of the River earlier in the day.
“Chen Cheng-hsiang …” he told the first Taiping picket he encountered. “Lieutenant General Chen with urgent intelligence for the Four-Eyed Dog.”
When the bell tower of Chenkiang tolled the double-hour of the monkey at three in the morning, Gabriel Hyde yielded to his bosun’s urging and climbed into the hammock slung between the taffrail and the mizzen mast. The sun would rise at 5:47, and no further danger threatened that night. The Four-Eyed Dog’s hints were apparently intended to throw him off balance. Besides, no Chinaman, not even a general of Holy Soldiers, could resist bragging like a small boy. A few hours’ sleep would fortify him against the inevitable alarms of the coming day, when the captains of the Imperial Water Force would again confer anxiously on strategy—as they had every day for two weeks without reaching agreement.
His seaman’s instinct awoke Gabriel a minute before the battlements of Chenkiang erupted with flame and smoke. The Holy Soldiers were firing their few iron cannon and their long-barreled flintlocks into the Imperial camp outside the city walls. The bombardment roared for half an hour, sharper explosions signaling the self-destruction of iron-hooped wooden cannon. The hail of musket balls and nails, scrap iron and potsherds would mow down all the troops within their limited reach. Those weapons were even more lethal to their crews, often blowing up after a few shots. This morning only Holy Soldiers died, for their enemies were out of range.
The rising sun fringed the gunsmoke clouds with pink. The helmets of the Imperial troops glinted as they ate their breakfasts, occasionally pointing scornfully with their chopsticks at their impotent foes. Laughing at his own response to the empty threat, the Manchu major commanding a battery of three Krupp cannon returned the fire. The shells, Gabriel saw through his binoculars, threw up gouts of red brick dust when they struck the fifty-foot-thick city wall. Doing no damage, their impact only increased the innumerable pockmarks on the face of Chenkiang.
The Taiping volleys halted abruptly. As the smoke blew away, a tide of yellow banners flowed out of the gates of the citadel. Gabriel was astonished. It was madness to advance from the fortress against the long-range Imperial cannon. Gleefully the Manchu major depressed the barrels of his Krupp guns and hurled shells into the rebel mass. Each time a yellow flag toppled, a Taiping officer died, for even sublieutenants flew their personal banners. The insane assault was disintegrating as the Imperials’ bronze muzzle-loaders also came into play.
Sweeping the battle front, Gabriel’s binoculars spied a wave of yellow banners lapping at the Manchu left flank. The Imperial artillery did not respond, for all the guns were trained on the assault from the city. The wave swelled into a torrent, and the Manchu left flank began to crumble. Advancing over the bodies of their fellows, the Holy Soldiers from the fortress engaged the Manchu center while a third assault broke their enemies’ right flank. Within the Citadel the Four-Eyed Dog had obviously received orders to coordinate his diversionary maneuver with the relief forces’ flanking attacks.
The American wondered fleetingly about the lone fisherman in the night before the rattle of musketry on the river diverted him. A fleet of junks flying yellow and scarlet banners was probing the Imperial flotilla. Ignoring the signal pennants whipping on the flagship, Gabriel made his own decision. The war junks could deal handily with the water-borne attack. The Mencius could most effectively utilize her superior speed and her heavier armament in support of the hard-pressed infantry.
Her paddle wheels churning the muddy water, the gunboat slewed past the milling war junks. Smoke billowed from the stovepipe funnel, and soot drizzled on the teak decks. As the gunboat gathered speed, the stays securing the rickety smokestack vibrated like violin strings.
The breeze stirred by the gunboat’s passage ruffled Gabriel Hyde’s black hair. A half-smile revealed his white teeth, and an incongruous dimple twinkled in his right cheek. Laugh wrinkles creased his forehead, and his straight nose crinkled.
“Fire port broadside!” he shouted. “Forward and fantail guns fire at will!”
The gunboat heeled sharply to starboard and skidded across t
he water when the four muzzle-loaders roared. Half-blinded by the smoke, the helmsman wrestled with the big teak wheel as the chocolate-froth wake corkscrewed. The breech-loading guns on the prow and stern barked a constant obbligato. Their shells arched high before the Mencius shook off the water that had poured over the starboard gunwales and returned to an even keel.
The helmsman put the wheel over, and the gunboat slewed back on a reciprocal course. When the starboard battery bore on the Taiping infantry, Gabriel chopped his hand down. Shrapnel flailed the rebel ranks, and officers’ yellow banners fell like daffodils beneath a sickle.
The Mencius steamed alongshore for half an hour, wheeling repeatedly to fire her alternate broadsides while the quick-firing breech-loaders yapped like eager terriers. Gabriel’s blue eyes glowed in the mask of a face stained black by powder fumes, and his lips curved in a lupine grin. Although the Holy Soldiers returned the gunboat’s fire with their clumsy flintlocks, the slow-flying balls whined harmlessly amid the rigging.
Gabriel Hyde was revolted by the slaughter his guns wreaked, and copper bile rose in his throat. His binoculars revealed the lanes his muzzle-loaders’ round shot cut through the flesh of the Taiping infantrymen. The breechloaders’ explosive shells threw up fountains of crimson flesh. This was not a battle but a massacre.
Nonetheless, the Mencius’s guns could not drive the powerful Taiping force from the wide battle front. Since Manchus and Taipings were intermingled, further salvos would kill as many Imperial troops as Holy Soldiers. Gabriel signaled his crew to cease fire before turning his binoculars to assure himself that most of the Taiping Water Force had withdrawn after diverting the war junks from the battle on the shore. The Mencius could only stand off and observe the battles on land and water.
The gunboat remained at her post throughout the day, though the war junks fled downriver. The occasional Taiping vessel that approached the Mencius turned and ran when the quick-firing guns barked. Gabriel Hyde watched the Imperial troops disintegrate under the three-pronged assault. The Four-Eyed Dog must be grinning in delight at his enemies’ rout.
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