Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (18 page)

A handful of the miners now returned with the bandits to the airship, evidently deciding to join the bandits' ranks. And they were not alone.

When Zhao and the others reached the airship, bruised and bloodied from their encounter with the soldiers, some supporting or even carrying their wounded fellows, they were surprised to find Huang sitting on the edge of the open hatch, a rifle across his knees, an insensate soldier sprawled in the dust before him.

“What's this now, Hummingbird?” Zhao looked from the fallen soldier to Huang with a slight smile tugging the corners of his mouth. “Our pet has slipped his leash, but instead of flying he stays and presents us with a mouse he's caught. Is that it?”

Huang stood and slung the rifle onto his shoulder. He noted that Ruan and a few of the others had their weapons at the ready, wary of any move Huang might make against them.

“I didn't fly because I have nowhere to go.”

Zhao narrowed his eyes and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder, indicating the column of dust on the horizon that followed the retreating Green Standard crawlers. “What about that lot? They'll be back soon enough, in greater numbers, if I know their type. They won't want to tell the governor-general that they failed, so they'll return with enough guns to do the job right next time. You can always join them, since they're your sort and all.”

Huang shook his head angrily. “They have nothing to do with me, Zhao.” He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “If it's all the same to you . . .” He swallowed hard and nodded. “I'd just as soon go back to the Aerie.”

Zhao arched an eyebrow. Beside him, scar-faced Jue wore an amused grin.

“But not as your damned pet,” Huang went out, standing straighter, chin held high. “I'll be a bandit, if you'll have me.”

A smile began to spread across Zhao's face. The bandit chief glanced at Jue, who only shrugged in response, and Ruan, who scowled angrily.

“Fair enough!” Zhao surged forward and clapped a hand on Huang's shoulder. “You're one of us now, ancestors preserve you.” Zhao grinned broader. “But you're still Hummingbird, all right? Your other names are just too damned unpalatable.”

Huang allowed himself a tight grin and nodded. “Hummingbird it is.”

WEI WAS SNORING IN THE CORNER WHEN THE REPRESENTATIVE from the camp arrived, so it fell to Gamine to receive her.

“So you'll be performing both the homily and the revelation, then?” The woman glanced from Gamine to the aging mendicant propped up on cushions on the tent's far side, his eyes shut and his mouth open, tongue lolling.

Gamine smiled reassuringly. “No need to fear, sister. I discussed the topic of today's lesson with Master Wei over the morning meal, and I shall be happy to repeat it to the others.”

The woman, old enough to be Gamine's mother—grand-mother, even—looked at her and sighed with relief. “Oh, thank you, Iron Jaw. It's so much nicer when you . . .” She broke off and shot a guilty look at the old man. “That is, these last few seasons Master Wei has . . . Well, he's gotten . . .”

As the woman struggled to find the right phrase, Gamine came to her rescue. “Master Wei tires easily, of late.”

The woman nodded eagerly. “Exactly.” She took another deep breath and looked at the old man, his chest gently rising and falling, and shook her head sadly. “It happens with the aged, sometimes. They . . . forget things.”

Again Gamine flashed her most comforting smile. “Perhaps. But then, perhaps Master Wei is only forgetting things not worth remembering, his mind on more . . . elevated matters?”

Unconvinced, the woman managed a weak smile. Then, bowing to the slumbering mendicant, and with a deeper bow in Gamine's direction, she drew back the tent flap and went to carry word to the rest of the camp.

Before the tent flap fell closed, Temujin lurched in, a half-full jar of wine in his hand. He stumbled, throwing his arms out in both directions in an attempt to regain his balance, sloshing wine onto the rug-covered floor. He made it a few steps across the tent, more a series of half-controlled falls than proper walking, and then collapsed onto a low stool beside a table.

“And what did that old sow want, as if I didn't know?”

“She came to ask about the service,” Gamine answered.

“Of course she did,” Temujin said with a sneer. He lifted the jar to his lips and sloshed most of what was left into his open mouth. Then he thumped the jar onto the table. “She's worried the old nick-ninny is too addled to do the job, is she?”

Gamine narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “She's concerned about Master Wei's well-being, I'm sure, just as the rest of us are, the powers preserve him.”

Temujin wiped his straggly mustaches dry on the back of his hand and fixed Gamine with a squint-eyed stare. “Seems to me you make pretty free with this taradiddle of yours, hop-o'-my-thumb, even when there's no marks about to hear it. ‘Powers' this and ‘virtues' that and ‘harmony' the other thing.”

“And it seems to me that you are drunk, old man.”

For a brief moment a proud smile started to spread across Temujin's face, and he began to nod, but then the smile slid into a frown, and he narrowed his eyes. “And what's it to you if I'm in my altitudes, at that, my little sprite? A man's due his rewards after hard labor, is he not?”

“And what hard labor would that be?” Gamine asked with a slight smile, amused despite herself.

“All this nonsense!” Temujin waved his arm in a wide circle, nearly toppling the jar to the floor, indicating the camp beyond the tent's thin walls. He wavered on the stool, listing from one side to the other and back, eyes half lidded. “I've pulled some long cons in my time, girl, but nothing so long as this gaff's been on. Three years now? And what have we to show for it but drafty tents and watery soups and a few hundred more mouths to feed? Where's the payoff we always talked about? Where's the big score? I'd swear if I didn't know better that you'd come to believe all this flimflam yourself.”

“You're drunk,” Gamine repeated, narrowing her eyes, her smile fading. “And a fool.”

“I'm drunk.” Temujin nodded, then jerked a thumb toward the old man snoring in the corner. “And the old fumbler's lost his wits. And you?” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared down his nose at her. “You act like you forgot that all this is a dodge and started believing your own grift. So which of us is the biggest fool, hmm?”

That said, Temujin lurched to his feet, snatched up his wine jar, spilling the little that remained on the rugs underfoot, and then propelled himself gracelessly toward the tent flaps.

“The services start in a short while,” Gamine called after him, her tone even. “Try not to bungle your entrance this time, would you?”

The old beggar spun on his heel like a weather vane, nearly falling over, and with his hand over his heart bobbed his head in a mockery of a bow. “As you wish,
Iron Jaw
. As you wish.”

Temujin turned and stumbled through the tent flaps, leaving Gamine alone with her thoughts, the wine-sodden rugs, and the old man snoring indecorously in the corner.

 

Gamine climbed the steps to the wide platform atop the scaffold and looked down at the uplifted faces of the faithful gathered at the center of the camp. There were more of them now than ever, and more new faces joining them every day.

It wasn't just Gamine, Temujin, and Wei sleeping rough by the side of the road anymore. The camp had grown until it numbered nearly a hundred tents arranged in irregular concentric circles, the pinkish orange sands mounting in low drifts on their eastern sides. At the center of the circle, near the trio of tents that Wei, Gamine, and Temujin had made their own, was a roughly built scaffold, constructed of cast-off timbers, discarded aluminum sheets, and other odds and ends. Before the scaffold was a broad, open space, and it was here that all their followers now gathered.

Gamine remembered when she and Temujin had first joined Wei on his travels three years before, when they'd made do with a bare patch of dirt at the edge of market squares. Wei would preach his rambling sermons about the “powers,” as he called them, figures drawn indiscriminately from fiction and religion, legend and mythology. Gamine would come onstage after the homily was done, professing her belief, and then proceed to demonstrate her virtue by reciting passages from novels, operas, and plays, as though possessed by the spirits of those characters. Scenes from
The Miner's Journey
or
Water Margin
or
The Journey to the West
. Or, depending on the makeup of the audience, she might assay a few scenes from the Briton myth-play
Robin Hood
, about a man who stole what the poor needed from the rich, or episodes from the story of the Vinlander culture hero Paul Bunyan, a woodcutter who supposedly stood against the invading armies of the Dragon Throne centuries before. Then, once Gamine had recited long enough to establish possession by the powers, Temujin would come forward to test her mettle and her resolve. It was nothing more than a pulled punch and faked reaction, but the act so impressed audiences that Gamine would forevermore be known to all of them only as the girl with the jaw of iron, or simply as Iron Jaw.

At first, they had simply gone from village to village as the mood struck them, staying only long enough to garner a few filling meals and comfortable beds from the newly converted, and then moving on to the next village when it began to appear that they might have overstayed their welcome. Temujin was primarily in charge of their movements in those days, using his well-honed instinct and practiced eyed to gauge the patience of those who supplied as charity that which the three drifters could never afford to buy. Wei, who was somewhat addled and out of touch even in his best days, simply did as he was told, and if he harbored any doubts about the man and girl who had joined him on his journeys, he never voiced them. As for Gamine, she paid careful attention, watching the audiences even more closely than they watched her, always working on improving the act. But as her timing and delivery improved, her position in their little grouping subtly begin to shift, so that in time she was giving instruction and orders as often as she was receiving them.

It wasn't clear at what point their trio grew. One day there were only the three of them, and the next they had gained a handful of camp followers. A few men and women from one village had elected to follow the three when they picked up stakes and moved on to the next town.

Temujin at first objected, with the grifter's logic that the only thing that followed a confidence man were stray dogs, the authorities, and his reputation, all of which would only bite him in the end. Gamine, though, pointed out that having the camp followers in tow would only help their grift when they reached the next village. Rather than Temujin and Gamine having to work to fan the flames of interest, the camp followers would spread the word for them, telling the locals in the next village all about the holy man and the miraculous girl with the iron jaw.

If she'd known then what would happen, would she still have pressed Temujin to allow the camp followers to come along with them? Gamine wasn't sure, but the question nagged at her, as did Temujin's accusation that she'd started to believe in the powers herself, if only a little.

But who could have guessed, in those early days, that the camp followers wouldn't have gotten tired of following them from village to village, from town to town? And more, that they would not be alone but would be joined by more followers, and more, until they were no longer a few travelers on the road but a whole caravan on the march?

What had begun as three people pulling a short con, in town after town, had grown in the intervening years into a full-blown religious movement. And though Master Wei was the nominal leader of the camp now calling itself the Society of Righteous Harmony, most all of the few hundred followers now looked to the girl they called Iron Jaw for guidance and direction, even when the old man wasn't off somewhere asleep or mumbling to himself.

Just as their handful had become a movement and the Society of Righteous Harmony had taken shape, the rough structure of their early performances had become gradually codified and regimented, so that it was now a strictly ordered sequence, followed with great devotion.

It was perhaps Gamine's own devotion that surprised her most, though. She and Temujin had joined up with Wei as a dodge, seeing an easy way to bilk meals, coin, and shelter from the farmers and villagers of the northern plains. But if Temujin was still motivated by a desire for a full purse and belly, Gamine's own motivations had shifted somewhere along the way. Perhaps it had started on the day that she realized she didn't feel guilty anymore. When she was up onstage with Wei, preaching the good word of the powers to people, it didn't feel like she was cheating or stealing; it didn't feel like a con. It had started to feel
real
. When she looked into the smiling faces of their listeners, heard the things they said about how belief in the powers had changed their own lives for the better, Gamine couldn't help but think that she was doing something genuine, something of worth. This wasn't a con anymore; this was a
service
. This wasn't an audience of marks, much less victims; this was her
congregation
. That she got meals and shelter out of it made it just that much more appealing.

As Gamine went through the rites—greeting the other members of the Society in their hundreds, hearing their antiphonal response, and then leading them in the ritualized movements and rhythmic breathing that supposedly helped the followers attain the mental and spiritual state necessary to receive the homily—she thought back to her years living in the Chauviteau-Zong residence. Thinking about Madam Chauviteau-Zong was sometimes confusing, since Gamine's thoughts about her former mistress were somewhat ambiguous. She still harbored thoughts of revenge, but her thirst for vengeance had waned in recent years. Instead, when she thought of her mistress's home in Fanchuan now, she most often thought about the lessons she'd learned there. The instruction Gamine had received from her tutors had, of course, covered the basics of organized religion, and she had been familiar with the creeds and credos of all of the major systems of belief from a very early age. But Gamine's familiarity with religion was like that of a person who had only heard a recipe described but had never tasted it. Or, as Temujin might say, like that of someone who had heard about another's injuries but never broken a bone. The two clearly had very different experiences with belief and very different views on the relative usefulness of religion.