Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (11 page)

With studies failing to hold his interest, Huang turned his attention to sport. He tried a bit of archery and riflery. In the low gravity of Fire Star, firing a rifle without properly bracing yourself could send you flying backward. The first time Huang fired a rifle at the range, he'd paid scant attention to the instructor, and the kick of the recoil knocked him off his feet. His backside had been bruised for weeks afterward, and it hadn't been a difficult decision to put the rifle aside forever. He'd had marginally better luck with the bow and arrow, but pulling the string back time and again just seemed too much like
work;
the bow went the way of the rifle.

It wasn't until Huang picked up a sword for the first time that he discovered his true calling.

Fencing wasn't work. Fencing wasn't even really sport. Fencing was a
pursuit
. Better yet, it was an
art
.

 

Huang was a little boy when he first saw a pair of martial artists giving a demonstration in the plaza in Sun-Facing District, near the Hall of Rare Treasures. Looking back on it later, Huang realized that the performers had been little more than beggars who'd picked up some small amount of skill. But at the time, he'd never seen anything like them. They seemed to glide back and forth effortlessly across their hastily erected platform, their blades dancing in their hands, long tassels dangling from the pommels, the sunlight glinting off jewels in the hilt that, while no doubt nothing more than paste or glass, had looked to his young eyes like treasures fit for the emperor himself. And the sounds of the swords meeting each other, ringing like bells, sending sparks flying, resounded in his ears for days and weeks to follow.

Later, Huang discovered the popular entertainments: the
wuxia
dramas of swordsmen and brigands, legends from Earth's history and folktales of the last two hundred years of Fire Star's colonization. Wandering heroes and knights-errant who faced evil and adversity only with the strength of their arms and their skill with the blade. The river-lake and the world of the outlaw. Brothers of the greenwood—bandits, burglars, and pirates—who maintained order when the authorities became corrupted by vice and decay. Stories like
The Water Margin
and
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Huang lived in them when he was a boy, returning day after day to the cheaper theaters, oblivious to the world around him. Any nearby stick became a swordsman's saber, and woe betide any flowering plant that happened to grow in his path; each petal and leaf slashed to the ground was a fallen enemy, a vanquished foe.

One day, he'd chanced to see a group of children and young adults in a courtyard doing what appeared to be a strange kind of dance, and when he asked his parents, he was told that they were practicing fencing movements.

Fencing? Huang's mind had raced. Did they mean with
swords
?

Huang had insisted on the spot that his parents enroll him in the class. In the years that followed, while his brothers read their books and his friends soared high over the city with their breather masks and kites, Huang haunted that courtyard, listening closely to everything the instructors had to say, practicing the movements until his muscles ached, fighting bouts in his dreams. In time, he became one of the star pupils, always finishing first or second in the meets, always trading the top spot with his friend Kenniston An, the son of a prominent Fanchuan bureaucrat of Briton extraction.

Huang's room in his parents' house was filled with his fencing medallions, trophies, and prizes. There was a portrait of him and Kenniston in their fencing uniforms, sabers drawn. Crossed swords hung on the wall, surrounded by framed advertising posters for the
wuxia
dramas he'd spent so many hours watching. The small shelf of books beside his bed was filled almost entirely with fencing manuals.

He had left all of it behind, the morning that he came to the transport depot. None of it would do any good now. When Kenniston had finished his studies the year before, his parents had sent him off to the military, having determined that their son had no marketable skills to serve the family's interests. Huang had been horrified at the thought of leaving behind the culture and sophistication of the city for the harsh environs of the outer provinces, but Kenniston seemed not to mind. He'd opted to enlist in the Bannermen, the elite fighting forces trained to fight in any terrain, in any environment, desert or sea, planetside or vacuum. Huang had joked that Kenniston had taken one too many blows to the head in their practice bouts and ended up addled, but his friend had just laughed. Huang would understand when he was older, Kenniston said. One couldn't play at games forever.

Huang was only a year Kenniston's junior and had always gotten his back up when his friend tried to pull rank. Well, now Huang
was
older, and he wished he knew how to get hold of Kenniston, because he could prove conclusively that his friend had been wrong. So far as Huang was concerned, then and now, he could quite
happily
go on playing at games forever if the alternative was a lifetime of hard metal benches and the rude laughter of common soldiers.

But even that would be somewhat bearable if he had something to pass the time. Which led Huang to wonder whether he might not have an easier time of it now had he spent a little more time reading as a child and less time with a sword in hand. And, of course, if he'd brought a book or two to read. As it was, Huang had brought along only the red saber with the firebird etched upon its blade that the governor-general had presented him, which was proving poor distraction aboard the crawler. If only something would
happen
, he wished, anything to relieve the boredom.

 

They were still more than a day away from Bao Shan and Far Sight Outpost when the airship was sighted, high over the horizon. They were just boarding the crawlers after the night's stopover, the eastern sky violet with the sunrise, when a new star seemed to appear in the south. It was a few moments before it was discovered that the new flickering light in the southern sky was the glint of sunlight on metal, a few dozen miles away, and not from some more distant celestial source.

There was some little discussion about the airship as the drivers and guards arranged themselves in the crawlers, and the convoy set off to the west. Most presumed that it was one of the airships used for reconnaissance by the Army of the Green Standard, or one of those used by the elite corps of the Bannermen on maneuvers. It might even have been the pleasure craft of some wealthy aristocrat.

Near midday, though, as the airship drew nearer, it became clear that it didn't fly any of the eight banners of the elite fighting forces, nor the emerald signet of the Green Standard. And though the sunlight glinted off the bare metal of its engine struts and stabilizers, the fittings and fixtures were hardly those of an aristocrat's pleasure ship.

This craft appeared to have been salvaged and rebuilt repeatedly, the fabric of the envelope a patchwork of different colors and materials. The gondola, which hung down in front of the two hulking engines that propelled the craft forward, was constructed of bare steel and unpainted aluminum. Even the small balloons Huang's friends had used to sail high over the streets of Fanchuan had been more elaborate and baroque than this.

The guards shifted uneasily on their benches as the drivers debated whether to put on more speed or stop and circle the crawlers in a defensive ring.

“What is the matter?” Huang asked, his voice croaking as he spoke, so long had it gone unused. “It's just an airship.” He looked from one worried face to another. “Isn't it?”

The oldest of the guards shook his head in a dismissive manner, but the youngest leaned over and studied Huang's face closely.

“Really?” the young guard asked, asking if Huang's question was sincere. “You don't know about the . . .” And here the guard paused for a moment as though concerned that someone might be eavesdropping. “About the
bandits
?”

Huang's eyes widened.

Everyone had heard the stories about the bandits who were said to prowl the unpeopled wastes, preying on travelers and then returning to their hiding places in the high mountain regions, where the air was too thin to breathe and so cold that a man's hairs became needles of ice on his head. But these bandits were not the noble brothers of the
wuxia
dramas. They were men who had turned their backs on civilized society.

“Bandits?” Huang repeated. He leaned forward to peer out the small, dirty window set in the crawler's sidewall. “Do you really think it could be?”

Huang turned back around to see the guard's answering sneer. “What
else
?”

Mouth hanging open, Huang looked back through the grimed window and watched the airship drawing ever nearer. It was hard to tell at this distance, but the long black objects slung underneath the gondola appeared to be some form of armament. Firing them would kick the airship back in the opposite direction, unsteadying it, but that would come as little comfort to the crawler hit by the blast. The crawlers were designed for mobility, not heavily armed for combat, and it wouldn't take a very large caliber cannon to do considerable damage.

Huang tightened his grip on the red saber. So much for boredom.

 

Huang stood at the center of the ring of crawlers, fighting the urge to run and hide.

“You all right, sir?”

Startled, Huang turned. Beside him stood the older guardsman who brought him his meals. The man had a pistol in his hand, cocked and ready, and was studying Huang with a worried expression.

“Y-yes, of course,” Huang answered, perhaps too quickly. He tried to look calm and composed and knew he was failing miserably.

The guardsman nodded to the saber hanging at Huang's hip. “You know how to use that, sir?”

It was then that Huang realized that he was the only one of the two dozen or so drivers and guards assembled within the circle of the crawlers not to have a gun, sword, or knife in his hands. With an awkward motion, he reached over and grabbed hold of the saber's hilt, drawing it from the scabbard.

“Oh, yes,” Huang said, with some measure of confidence. “I know how to use a blade.”

The guardsman shrugged and turned away.

From overhead, one of the sentries posted atop the crawlers shouted down to the massed defenders that the airship was drawing nearer. It seemed to Huang as though it had been hours since the crawlers had pulled off the dirt track of the roadway onto a relatively level clearing, and the six vehicles laboriously maneuvered into position, forming a near-perfect circle, with the tail of one crawler abutting the nose of the next and so on. Now that he stopped to think about it, though, he realized it could not have been more than a matter of minutes altogether. Still, the waiting seemed interminable, standing with the others in the protection of the defensive ring, counting the moments until the bandits attacked.

“Here it comes!” shouted one of the sentries, and Huang looked up to see the ragged airship hovering into view overhead. A hatch was open on one side of the gondola, and men in breather masks and insulated suits with rifles and long knives in hand began to pour out, rapelling down on cables. Huang could hear a faint noise, like the howling of distant wind, and realized he was hearing the bandits' howls and war cries even through the thin air.

As the bandits slid down on their cables and lines, directly into the defensive ring of crawlers, it occurred to Huang to doubt the wisdom of gathering all of the convoy's defenders
inside
an enclosed space. A circle of crawlers might have been an effective defense against attackers approaching overland, but it was suddenly clear to Huang that the tactics only served to hinder defenders facing attack from the air.

It was too late to do anything about it now, though. The first of the bandits hit the red sands, long knives flashing in the sun, and rushed toward the defenders.

Huang tightened his grip on his saber's hilt and tried to resist the urge to run and hide.

 

As Huang watched the defenders close with the bandits, it felt more like he was back in his parents' house in Fanchuan sitting over a game of elephant chess than being in a battle himself. He charted the ebb and flow of the battle with an almost unreal sense of detachment, as though it were something happening to someone else.

Huang noted that there were maybe a dozen of the bandits, so numerically at least the odds favored the defenders.

A body thumped to the ground at Huang's feet. It was one of the sentries from atop the crawlers, sputtering his last breath as blood foamed from the gunshot wound in his neck. Huang looked up and saw another of the sentries spasm in agony as sniper fire from the airship above lanced into him. In his detached fugue Huang fancied he could almost see the airship wobble with the recoil of the rifle's fire, but he was rational enough to know that the force of the rifle firing wouldn't be enough to move the airship more than fractionally. Still, the force of the bullets striking the sentries was clearly more than sufficient to remove
them
from the board.

Another sentry fell from his perch into the center of the ringed crawlers and managed to rise up on his knees, leaning heavily on the rifle he still held clutched in one hand. One of the breather-masked bandits rushing by paused just long enough to drive the point of his long knife down into the fallen sentry's shoulder, and as he kicked the rifle out from under the sentry and whipped free the gored blade of his knife, the sentry collapsed forward like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Huang watched the sentry's blood spill out onto the red sand, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. He had seen blood, of course. It was a rare fencing tournament that did not see some scratch or cut, with blood welling up to the surface. But never before had he seen so
much
.