Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (19 page)

Temujin, for his part, always said that he knew a con when he saw one, and he never had any patience for any church or holy man. Gamine had taken exception to that in the early days; after all, she said, many people had deep and sincere beliefs that guided their lives. Were all of them simply marks, victims of someone else's con?

But now, some years on, she couldn't help but wonder if perhaps Temujin had been right, and wrong, all at the same time. What if this
was
how religions began, and all systems of belief were in their early days nothing but grifts, just as she and Temujin had begun when first they met Wei? But, and more to the point, what if it didn't
matter
? What if a thing's beginnings weren't as important as where it ended? After all, she should know better than any, having no beginnings whatsoever. If belief began as a con but came in time to be a positive and affecting force in the lives of sincere people who used it to guide themselves to a better existence, did it matter that those who founded the belief didn't share those convictions? If it served a positive end, was it important that it had a negative beginning? Or a neutral beginning, if one was generous?

Gamine wasn't sure, but she was beginning to have definite suspicions.

When the faithful had completed the rhythmic breathing exercises and now stood with their hands folded before them, listening intently, Gamine crossed to the center of the platform and began the homily.

 

There were times when Gamine wished she had more to say. The camp's numbers had swelled recently. It had been not quite three years since a ground quake had disrupted the shipping routes between the northern lowlands and the valley provinces to the south, and almost two years since the drought began. Fire Star was being slowly transformed into another Earth, but it would be long generations before it was lush and green. The drought had ended, but a few seasons without sufficient water in the lowlands had meant the end of many farms. A small number of larger farming concerns were prospering once more—chief among them those owned by the Combine collective—but only at the cost of taking more than their share of the available water and then selling their agricultural goods at wildly inflated prices to the valley provinces. When the owners of the smaller independent farms tried to object, the Combine had sent word—and hefty “donations”—to the governor-general, who had in turn sent the Green Standard Army north to protect the Combine's interests.

Now many former farmers and plantation laborers had joined the ranks of the Society of Righteous Harmony, searching for some meaning in their lives. Master Wei had once provided that meaning through his daily homilies, but he was old and getting older, and more and more Gamine was called upon to perform all of the service herself, including the movements, the homily, and the revelation of possession alike. And while her homilies were perhaps a little more grammatical and less cryptic than much of what the old mendicant used to say, Gamine couldn't help but feel that her own messages were simplistic, perhaps even simple-minded. “Live in harmony with one another.” “Take only what you need.” “Trust the powers.” But if Gamine's religious advice was less sophisticated than she might have liked, those in the camp seemed not to mind.

There were new faces in the crowd, Gamine saw. More people driven from their homes, come to join the Society of Righteous Harmony, desperate for some kind of meaning.

Gamine took a deep breath and did her best to sound as if she knew what she was doing.

 

Huang had been sure he knew what he was doing, but it was beginning to look as though he'd been wrong.

“Life isn't sport, Hummingbird. Sport has rules. In real life, the only rule is ‘Don't get killed.' ”

Huang rubbed his jaw, where a bruise was already rising from Zhao's last blow. The bandit chief held out his hand and helped Huang to his feet. Once he was standing, Huang knocked the red dust from his palms, brushed off his trousers, and then went to retrieve his saber from the place where it had fallen when Zhao kicked it from his hands.

“Try that one again?” Huang asked with a sly grin, and Zhao replied with a nod and a grin of his own.

The two men faced each other, a few paces apart, and raised their swords in defensive postures.

“Remember, now,” Zhao said, waving the point of his saber back and forth before him, “no rules.”

Huang nodded, his eyes wary and unblinking.

Their impromptu fencing strip was in the flat base of a narrow gulley. Once, perhaps billions of years ago, liquid water might have flowed here, carving this channel out of the living rock of Fire Star. But that liquid had dried up long ago, leaving only a dusty red ball of rock. When humans first arrived on Fire Star, a few hundred years ago, the only water to be found anywhere was locked in polar ice, buried beneath caps of frozen carbon dioxide. Miners still worked at excavating this frozen water, returning it to the surface, where it gradually thawed and flowed across the face of Fire Star once more. Someday, in the distant future, there would be rivers and streams again—if the plans of the scientists and artificers of the Dragon Throne were correct—and the lake at the bottom of the Great Southern Basin would grown into a proper sea, and perhaps even the northern lowlands might flood completely and become an ocean. But now the only water to be found here was what humans brought with them or pumped in from reservoirs somewhere far away.

“Come on, then.” Zhao waved the red blade of his saber before him once more, taunting Huang to begin the attack.

Huang took a deep breath, let it out in a measured exhalation, feinted to the left, and then lunged forward, driving his own sword's point toward the bandit chief's chest.

In any proper fencing competition, the attack would have been a scoring maneuver, and Huang would have been declared the winner. He'd used the technique himself many times, and the only opponent who'd ever been able to counter the lightning speed of his feint and lunge had been his friend Kenniston An.

Zhao, though, did something completely unexpected, something that even Kenniston had never tried. Just as the point of Huang's sword drove toward him, Zhao leaned backward and fell
down
.

If he'd been thinking faster, Huang might have seen his brief advantage and taken the opportunity to change the direction of his thrust and stab downward, hitting the reinforced padding of the practice vest Zhao wore and scoring a hit. But seeing his opponent simply fall like a puppet whose strings had been cut unnerved Huang, and the confusion caused a momentary delay in his reaction.

That delay was all the opportunity Zhao needed to turn things to his advantage. Lying flat on his back, the bandit chief scooped up a handful of red sand and, without warning,
threw
it up into Huang's face. In the still air, there was no wind to blow the sand aside, and most of it pelted into Huang's face as Zhao had intended, gritting in his teeth, stinging his eyes, filling his nostrils.

Huang flailed back, momentarily blinded, tears streaming from his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, trying to blink the sand from his watering eyes, while his other still held the hilt of his sword, its point aimed at the sky.

Before Huang knew what had happened, he felt himself falling to the ground, just as Zhao had done. But while the bandit chief's fall had been directed and deliberate, Huang's was simply the result of Zhao sweeping his legs out from under him with a sideswiping kick, knocking him off balance. Huang threw his arms out to either side, unsuccessfully trying to regain his footing, but it was too late. He thudded to the hard ground, his breath knocked from him. He'd lost hold of his sword somewhere and heard it clatter to the rocks a short distance off.

Huang felt a needle's prick on his exposed neck and squinted through the tears and the grit to see Zhao standing over him, the red-bladed saber prodding Huang just below the jawline.

“See, Hummingbird? No rules.”

Huang's cheeks stung red with embarrassment, but he managed a weak smile and nodded. As Zhao helped him to his feet, Huang wondered whether he shouldn't send word to his parents in Fanchuan to clear out his old room and give away all his fencing trophies and medallions, considering that he'd been bested three falls out of four by a man with no formal fencing training whatsoever. Of course, Huang's parents probably thought he was dead by now, after so many years without any word from him, so such a message might complicate matters more than Huang would like. It wasn't that he bore his family any ill will; he just wasn't in any hurry to see them again. Someday, perhaps, but not soon.

Huang was retrieving his blade, and preparing himself for a fifth bout with Zhao, when a bandit raced into the gulley, bringing word from Ruan and Jue that the convoy had been spotted.

“That's enough play for today, I think,” Zhao said, sliding his own red saber into its scabbard. “Time to be back at work.”

 

As they walked up the gulley together, Zhao turned to Huang and fixed him with a familiar grin. “So tell me, Hummingbird: Which is more valuable, the soldier or the elephant?”

Huang shook his head, his expression rueful. He'd come to dread these little examinations, these past few years. “The elephant, I suppose,” he said, knowing there was no point in fighting it.

Zhao narrowed his eyes, still smiling. “Why?”

“Because he can move two points, while the soldier can move only one.”

Zhao raised a finger in triumph. “Are you forgetting the river?”

Huang sighed and shook his head again. “Oh, right. Well ...”

The river, of course, was not any body of water, no more than the elephant was an animal or the soldier a man. Huang had never seen a river outside a lithograph or an elephant outside a zoo. Instead the river was the blank strip that divided an elephant-chess board into two sections, and the soldier and elephant two varieties of playing pieces.

“The elephant is a useful defensive piece, sure,” Zhao went on, “but he can only advance as far as the river's nearest bank. The soldier might only be able to move one point forward, but when he crosses the river, he's promoted and can move horizontally as well, making him a much more dangerous opponent.”

“So the answer is the soldier?” Huang asked.

Zhao smiled. “What do
you
think?”

Huang was thoughtful. “I think it depends.”

It hadn't been long after Huang had thrown in his lot with the bandits that he'd discovered that Zhao shared his passion for elephant chess, and in the quiet hours between forays, the two had taken to playing with a battered set that Zhao had brought with him to the Aerie, a relic of his previous life as a miner. Huang had originally expected to be able to beat the gruff bandit chief easily but had been surprised when Zhao had bested him four games out of five. Even now, years later, Zhao still won their games more often than he lost.

Zhao nodded. “It depends,” he agreed. They continued on for a moment, drawing nearer the channel where the others had gathered. “And what does that tell us about men and machines in combat?”

Zhao had recognized Huang's talent for strategy in those early games and quizzed him on where he'd learned to play. Zhao himself had learned elephant chess from an old master who had ended his days working in the mines, but not before teaching a young miner named Zhao everything he knew about the game. When Huang explained that he'd been taught by his tutor, learning elephant chess instead of the military strategy with which he'd been tasked, Zhao had laughed. He said that Huang had learned more about military tactics than he'd realized from his strategy tutor, if only he'd learn how to apply it. And that had been the beginning of their impromptu examinations as the bandit chief tried to teach Huang how game tactics could be put into real-world practice.

Huang furrowed his brow, trying to apply the lesson about soldiers and elephants on the chessboard to men and machines in the real world.

“Perhaps,” he finally answered, “it means that a crawler is a useful asset, but there are places a crawler can't go. A man on foot, in the right circumstances, can be a more powerful asset.”

Zhao nodded, his smile widening. “Sounds right to me.” He reached over and clapped Huang on the shoulder. “Now come on, let's see what trouble the others have gotten up to.”

 

“So what do you think, Hummingbird?”

Huang and Zhao stood near the lip of the channel, looking down onto the lowlands below. They were shielded from view of those in the convoy, and although the crawlers were some distance away, Huang felt the almost unshakable urge to whisper, as though his words might be overheard.

Huang wasn't entirely sure at what point he had become the chief's sounding board for strategy, but it seemed to have been an outgrowth of their discussions about fencing and elephant chess. Zhao continued his little examinations, quizzing Huang about what the bandits should or shouldn't do in given circumstances. The chief seemed to like his answers more often than not, so much so that in time Huang had become something of a de facto strategist, consulted whenever questions of tactics arose.

“Looks like the intelligence we received was correct,” Huang answered, peering at the line of crawlers in the near distance. “Minimal armament, no defensive posture . . . they aren't expecting any trouble at all.”

“And why should they?” The voice was Ruan's, who crouched against the cliff wall of the channel a few paces off. His eyes were narrowed in his skeletal face, and he regarded Huang coolly. “What are they carrying that anyone could
possibly
want? Compressor components? Elevator cabling? Emergency rations and bales of undergarments? Why would anyone in their right mind even
consider
raiding such a shipment?”