The Eleventh Tiger

by David A. McIntee

  He rode out the waves of pain and discomfort, welcoming them simply as sensations. They hugged him like long-lost brothers whom he had not seen for a long time. He had forgotten what it felt like to expand his lungs with air and to feel muscles stretch and move.

  He was vaguely aware of another man at his feet. That was appropriate. He wondered whether it was Zhao or Gao who was respecting him so. He tried to remember how to make the mouth form words, to speak to the man, but it had been so long that the knowledge escaped him.

  The man with the eye patch shuffled backwards, and now Qin could see that his hands were solidly tied behind his back. He was something to do with the owner of this body, then; a prisoner of his.

  The man with the eye patch ran, and Qin felt the urge to pursue him and cut him down. It would be a great pleasure to kill a criminal who had been so impudent as to enter his presence. The body still would not obey his commands, and the half-bound man was gone in a moment.

  Every particle of his skin tingled, the robes he wore constraining his chest. The sound of running footsteps echoed in the dimness of the cave. The light from a few fallen torches made him wince, and he wished the tingle of air on his skin would stop. He stretched and took a step.

  He almost fell, unfamiliar with this body’s balance. He didn’t remember noticing the need for balance before. Had he simply been gone so long, or was something wrong with this body?

  Qin looked around, slowly and carefully, and saw two other men in the same kind of robes he was wearing. They staggered as if they were drunk, and he knew they were Zhao and Gao because only the two generals could possibly be experiencing the same sensations and unfamiliarity with their bodies that Qin was.

  For a moment he was overwhelmed by the sense of being in three places at once: Qin, looking at Gao, looking at Zhao, looking at Qin. Somehow - perhaps because of the angles he was seeing them from - he knew that Zhao was the large man with muscles like an ox, and that Gao was now the other man.

  There was a voice, too. No, not a voice... a thought, or maybe just a feeling, somewhere at the back of his mind.

  Somewhere at the back of three of their minds. He didn’t quite catch it, and then it was gone, but he could feel the potential for it to come back.

  It took a few minutes to become used to the legs and arms of this body, and learn to ignore the twinges in its back and the niggles posed by its teeth. By then, he was able to walk around almost normally and joined Zhao and Gao in the centre of the chamber. Above them, mercury flowed and glinted wetly.

  Gao was looking at his hands, his expression still vacant.

  Qin suspected his own was no better. ‘The wizard spoke truth,’ Gao whispered, stumbling over the words with his unfamiliar tongue. ‘I wonder how long -’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Qin said. ‘If this is the time, then this is the time.’

  Then Qin heard the voice that was not a voice booming in his head. From Zhao’s and Gao’s expressions he could tell they heard it too.

  ‘This is not quite the time. This is the prelude.’

  ‘Then the Eight Thousand...?’ Zhao began.

  ‘The window is too short,’ Qin said. But we will need an elite. Perhaps a handful of captains. There is enough for that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Zhao replied, in the echoing voice Qin had just heard come from his own lips. ‘There is enough of a window for that.’

  The two generals, as the abbot had called them, had removed Barbara and Vicki after their audience with the ‘emperor’ and locked them in what used to be some kind of storage cellar.

  The walls were still lined with shelves, and the room smelt of vinegar and dark sauces.

  ‘The First Emperor?’ Vicki prompted. ‘That’s impossible, so who is he really?’

  Barbara gave the girl a smile, but it faltered, empty of the reassurance it should have had. ‘The abbot Cheng spoke about, I assume. And he’s - I suppose “insane” is a cruel word - seriously mentally ill.’

  ‘You must not speak of my Lord this way,’ the thinner general snapped. He was standing on the other side of the door, sneering at the women through a small window. ‘He is the First Emperor, and my brother and I are his generals.’

  ‘The First Emperor? That’s impossible,’ Barbara insisted.

  You know it is.’

  Gao snorted. ‘I do not.’

  ‘And if I took you to an asylum in England I could introduce you to any number of people who think they’re Julius Caesar, or King Arthur, or Jesus.’ Barbara concentrated on what she was saying, to keep the panic out of her voice. ‘He needs help; you must see that.’

  ‘The only ones here who need help are yourselves, and there is none here.’ Gao turned on his heel and Barbara heard him march away.

  ‘I think they’re all crazy,’ Vicki said. ‘Shouldn’t we try to get them to a psychiatric hospital?’

  ‘I don’t know, Vicki. Asylums in even the most civilised European cities of this era were places of torture and terror.

  I’m not sure what good one would do him.’

  Ian had searched everywhere and found no sign of Barbara or Vicki. His stomach churned more and more with the increasing certainty that the attackers had taken them. He rejoined the others, who now included Cheng.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘Barbara’s gone. And Vicki. I’ve looked everywhere.’

  ‘I saw one of them carry off the young girl,’ Three-Legged Tham said.

  ‘And the one I fought was carrying Barbara,’ Fei-Hung added.

  ‘I knew it,’ Ian snarled, kicking over a wooden stool. ‘But who could have done it?’

  ‘Well, I still say Jiang,’ Tham said. ‘He’s petty enough.’

  ‘If it is, I’ll-’

  ‘No, Chesterton,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘You know, that young man was most disagreeable, and I can certainly believe he would bear a childish grudge, but this raid that took the girls was too precise and too powerful for him.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I rather think Mr Jiang would have tried to waylay one of us in the street, or break in and cause trouble on his own. This was more a sort of a military operation.’

  ‘I see what you mean, Doctor,’ Ian agreed slowly. ‘It does look like some sort of commando raid.’

  ‘A commando raid, yes. That’s it exactly, Chesterton. This was a carefully planned raid to snatch the girls and take them away for some purpose.’

  ‘Not to kill them. They’d just have done that here.

  Leverage?’

  ‘On us, you mean? Yes. I think we will hear from the kidnappers soon enough.’

  ‘Not soon enough for me.’

  ‘We still don’t know who they are.’

  ‘I think I might,’ Cheng said.

  Ian and the Doctor both looked at him.

  ‘The abbot who’s split the Black Flag. Jiang was practically worshipping him, and if he’s the one who’s been razing villages he certainly has the experience of warfare.’

  ‘Now, you’ve mentioned this abbot before,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Tell me some more about him, if you please.’

  ‘If your women are in his hands... It might have been better for them and for you if they had just died here.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because the abbot’s insane. I don’t mean eccentric or silly.

  He cut out the eyes and tongue of a friend of mine because he wouldn’t say that the unskinned deer in front of him was a roasted pig. Then he carved out the deer’s still-warm heart and ate it.’ The memory put a cold sweat on Cheng’s brow and between his shoulder blades. ‘He just isn’t human.’

  The Doctor looked sharply at Cheng. ‘Is that so? We’ll see.’

  He turned to Tham. ‘Sir, when Master Wong wrote to you he will have asked if you have heard of other attacks.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of other attacks.’ Tham unrolled a map.

  ‘The first was here, near Shaoshan. Then further south, east of Guilin. They seem to be concentrating on older towns, mona
steries, temples... It makes no sense to me.’

  ‘Tell me,’ the Doctor said. ‘It is yuelaan jit, is it not?’ Tham nodded. ‘Have there been reports of, shall we say, strange occurrences in the vicinity of these places?’

  Tham looked surprised. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact when I passed by Guilin last month the Taoist priests there were swamped with requests for exorcisms.’

  The Doctor steepled his fingers and looked down his nose at the map. ‘Sacred sites, temples and ancient towns. I see...’

  ‘You do?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Yes, I think perhaps I do, but I can’t be certain, of course.

  No, I can’t be certain.’

  ‘It’s just instinct, is it, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes, my boy, instinct.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve got some kind of theory, is there some way to check up on it? To be certain of it?’

  ‘There would be, if I had a geological map of China. I should rather like to see a layout of China’s faults. Fault lines, I mean, and rivers and iron deposits.’

  The gwailo woman, Barbara, was sleeping. Qin remembered sleep, and not with pleasure. With the darkness had come death, each and every night. Lanterns had never held it back long enough. The worst was not falling asleep, but waking, knowing that life had paused and not knowing how or why it had started again. Being sick to the stomach with terror that the next time there might not be a waking.

  The gwailo woman, Barbara, showed no signs of such fear.

  Her face was calm and soft. The softness must hide iron, he thought, to accept that daily taste of death with such equanimity. He had, of course, never seen his own face while asleep, but couldn’t imagine anything less than a contorted rictus, desperately struggling to breathe again with the rising of the next dawn.

  ‘Bring her,’ he told the guard with him.

  The guard opened the store-room door and pulled Barbara out. Qin had her brought to his bedchamber. The woman looked frightened, but unbowed. This was new and therefore interesting to him.

  He sat on a chair and indicated for her to sit too. She sat on the floor, pointedly avoiding the large bed, which still held the scent of womanhood from the three girls he had spent the night with.

  ‘You don’t fear me the way my own people do,’ he said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I’ve met your type before.’

  Such strength of will and mind. He was surprised, as he had been so often since her arrival.

  ‘I do not want you to fear me.’ He paused. ‘I am told you are a scholar of history. A teacher?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what I looked like?’

  6

  Barbara was afraid, though the man she was afraid of was the one who was insane and believed himself to be a historical figure. She certainly wasn’t afraid of a monarch dead for two thousand years.

  She had been doubly afraid when he had her brought to his bedchamber, but the fear had been knocked aside by baffle-ment when he asked his question. She didn’t understand what he meant at first.

  ‘Do you know what I - Qin Shi Huangdi - looked like?’

  For an instant, Barbara thought she saw anguish in his expression and heard yearning in his voice.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure. I know more about European and South American cultures... But I remember seeing a portrait of the First Emperor in a book once. He was quite a large man.’ She hesitated.

  ‘You mean fat.’

  ‘I imagine palace food for the Emperor is richer than for his subjects.’

  ‘Continue, gwailo’, he said quietly.

  ‘He looked severe, unforgiving. He had a longish black beard.’

  The man’s fingers reached up to his own white whiskers.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ the abbot - Barbara didn’t know what his real name was, but it was unlikely to be Qin - said. ‘A foreigner knowing more about me than my own subjects.’ He frowned.

  ‘Of course, it is a spy’s job to know such things.’

  ‘We are not spies.’

  ‘Yet you come to me with fine words, trying to draw my secrets from me.’

  ‘You kidnapped us, remember?’ Barbara said pointedly.

  ‘You have friends. I wish them to do something for me.’

  Barbara felt a slight relief. At least it was not lust that was driving him.

  ‘Then I can complete my work here.’

  ‘Work? Raiding towns, killing... Do you love war so much?’

  she demanded. ‘Does it make you feel like a big man to raze a town, or order people to work or to fight or to die?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said sharply, and somehow the sharpness told Barbara that he was lying. ‘That’s the best thing in life.’

  ‘“The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you,”‘ Barbara said. ‘“To rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” That’s what Genghis Khan said.’

  The abbot left her then and walked out on to the hillside. The sun was sinking, casting a honeyed light across the dusty path and enriching the woodland shadows. If he closed his eyes he fancied he could feel the trees, as if some emanation from them was pressing against him. He could hear his people moving around, attending to their duties and serving him with their loyalty.

  Something spread up from his spine and out across his shoulders, enveloping his chest. It felt like the softest fur -

  sensual, warm, comforting. He vaguely remembered it from long, long ago. It was the best thing in life.

  These were his woods, his trees, his country and his people. If anything other than his love for them could bring him that spreading happiness, he had yet to find it.

  Kei-Ying, Iron Bridge Three and Major Chesterton pored over the military maps in Chesterton’s office. With a practical military problem to solve, Chesterton was able to push the mystery of his duplicated self to the back of his mind.

  ‘From what... Mr Iron Bridge has said I think it’s clear that this abbot and his followers have been coming south for a while.’

  ‘How can we find out where they came from?’ Kei-Ying asked.

  ‘We can retrace the advances of the battle lines. They may have tried to disguise their origins by flanking manoeuvres, but if we have a chronology of which places were attacked -

  or persuaded to join their cause - we should be able to track them back.’

  ‘Good,’ Iron Bridge snapped. ‘Then let’s get on with it, shall we?’

  Ian paced around the main hall at Po Chi Lam, unable to settle. If only there was something he could do, a place he could go.

  ‘Cheng,’ he said. ‘You met this abbot person. Can’t you tell us where?’

  ‘It was aboard a junk. It moves around. I don’t know where it would be now.’

  ‘Can’t we put the word out to these Tigers of yours and have them look for it.’

  ‘We’re foreign to you, not stupid, Chesterton. Of course we’ve done that.’

  Ian resented Cheng’s tone, but knew it was deserved. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just...’

  ‘Barbara is your woman. I understand.’

  ‘Ha!’ the Doctor exclaimed, attracting Ian’s attention.

  He looked from his sheet of calculations to a map from Kei-Ying’s study, ‘I should estimate the focal point will be there,’

  he stabbed a finger on to the map, ‘somewhere in Shaanxi province.’ His lips thinned. ‘Very near to Xianyang.’

  ‘Focal point?’ Ian asked.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ the Doctor said.

  Qin Shi Huangdi was the only name he knew himself by. The face that stared back at him from the mirror had undoubtedly had a different name, but he had no idea what it might be.

  In the mirror he saw Zhao step into the room behind him and kneel.

  ‘My Lord.’ Zhao lowered his eyes to the floor, respectfully.

  The
muscle-bound frame that knelt no doubt also had a different name, as had the lean body of Gao. Qin wondered whether either of them had any inkling of what those names were.

  ‘Yes, General,’ Qin acknowledged.

  ‘The caravan to Xianyang is in operation, my Lord.’

  ‘Good. We can return there shortly.’

  ‘What about the gwailo women?’

  ‘Bring the tall, dark-haired one with us.’

  Zhao hesitated, and Qin could feel his indecision. ‘My Lord, she is a historian and teacher. Your orders are to leave none such alive.’

  Qin looked down at his hands and studied them, trying to remember whether they were similar to, or different from, the hands he used to have. ‘And she will die when I have extracted from her all that I wish to know. She comes with us.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘Who?’ The image of a younger gwailo girl came belatedly into his mind. Another...traveller? As if it mattered whether she was living in China or just visiting. She was nothing.

  ‘Zhao may kill her at his leisure.’

  ‘It shall be done,’ the abbot knew this as certainly as if Zhao had made the promise aloud. When he turned, Zhao was already gone.

  The Doctor led his little group through to a small hall in the eastern wing. The ceiling was high enough for climbing ropes to dangle from the beams. Shafts of sunlight came through what would have been upstairs windows if the hall had an upper floor.

  Picking a grapefruit from a bowl in one hand, the Doctor took a delicate pen in the other and began to draw lightly on the skin of the fruit.

  ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ Ian asked, intrigued despite himself.

  ‘Arranging a little demonstration. Actions speak louder than words, eh?’

  Ian couldn’t deny this. He looked over the Doctor’s shoulder and saw that he was drawing a rough outline of the Earth’s continents on the dimpled skin.

  The Doctor put the grapefruit on to a low stool and positioned it near one wall. Then he pulled a couple of spare pince-nez from his pockets and popped the lenses out of their frames. He called to four young students and handed each of them a lens before sending them up the climbing ropes.