Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (24 page)

It hardly mattered. Huang had reached the relative and temporary safety of the cave and now stood just within, helping the other bandits who followed do the same. One stumbled and fell, not from rifle shot but simply from exhaustion, just before the cave mouth, and Huang risked himself to rush back into the hangar and drag the bandit into the cave, while shots ricocheted off the walls and floor around them, kicking up fragments of stone that stung them like shrapnel. It wasn't until Huang and the other were safe within the cave that he recognized who the stumbling bandit had been.

“If we survive this,” the skeletal Ruan said with a grimace that seemed almost like a smile, “remind me to thank you.”

 

Others of the bandits never made it to the cave, felled by the Bannermen's rifles or cut down by sabers and knives as they ran past.

In the end, only a half dozen of them huddled in the shadows a few paces within the cave mouth.

“There's no more coming,” Jue said, breathless, his hands on his knees.

“He's right,” Ruan put in. “This is it. We should move.”

“But where?” another bandit said, eyes wild, blood flowing freely from a cut above his left ear.

“The old mining shaft,” Huang answered, his tone level but firm. “It's the only way out.”

The other bandits exchanged glances, but Jue nodded. “He's right.”

“Here they come.” Ruan jerked a thumb back toward the hangar, where the lead Bannerman was now approaching, pistol in one hand and saber in other, toward the cave, his men following behind.

Huang spared a moment to glare from the shadows at the Bannermen's leader. He realized suddenly that he had lost any compunction against killing, and had no qualms against murder, so long as the person skewered at the end of his saber was the Bannerman with the cross-shaped scar above his right eye. But revenge would have to be satisfied some other time. Now he owed it to Zhao to get the few bandits who remained to freedom.

“Come on,” Huang said, pushing past the others and continuing deeper into the cave. “There's no time to waste.”

 

It seemed an eternity later, but was nearer a handful of hours, when the six bandits managed to remove the last of the rubble blocking the mining shaft's entrance, and looked out on a sight most of them had never thought to see again—the morning. The sun was just rising in the east and cast long shadows across the red sands. And from this vantage point, near the base of Mount Shennong, they could see what had been hidden from them the day before.

A short distance off stood two military crawlers, camouflaged from above by large canopies dyed the same rust red as the surrounding sands. From the skies, they would have been all but invisible, which explained why the airship had failed to notice them. The bandits could only suppose that the Bannermen had tracked them back to the Aerie after some previous raid, then come here in secret and waited for the airship to leave on another foray. Then the Bannermen must have scaled the slopes of Shennong itself and descended on lines through the skylight. Overcoming the ground crew and the other bandits within the Aerie, they had then simply lain in wait for the bandits' return.

They would never know the details for sure, but that seemed the most likely explanation, and it satisfied the curiosity of all concerned.

“So what now, Hummingbird?” Ruan rubbed his sharp chin, his cheeks seeming even more hollow than ever, his eyes sunken in dark rings.

Huang unslung his breather mask and let it fall to one side, then tugged down his goggles and left them hanging around his neck. “I don't have any desire to hang around here, do you?”

The other bandits shook their heads.

“So what do you suggest, Chief?” Jue asked. He'd already accepted Huang's leadership, though it was clear some of the others still harbored doubts.

There were only one or two Bannermen in evidence, maintaining a halfhearted picket around the crawlers, while the rest of their number were still in the Aerie above, tending to the prisoners and their own wounded, or in the cave system trying to track Huang and the others.

“We'll need a ride,” Huang said.

He raised the red-bladed saber, given to him once long ago by Governor-General Ouyang, and again years later by a man who had sworn bloody vengeance against Ouyang's name, and pointed toward the crawlers. Then he glanced to the others, his lips curled in a grim smile.

“Why don't we take theirs?”

 

Gamine was officiating over the third funeral in as many days and wasn't sure how many of them she could handle.

The Society had reached the barren, hardscrabble highlands north of Forking Paths, where the northernmost mountains of the Three Sovereigns range could be seen squatting on the western horizon. On clear days, when the dust storms didn't limit visibility to their hands before their faces, they could even see the misty outlines of Bao Shan towering farther off.

Gamine knew that too many had died when she realized it wasn't the death that bothered her so much as the funerals themselves. But could she help it if the dry, barren ground underfoot seemed no more to want the dead Society followers than the towns and villages to the east had wanted them alive? Unable to burn or bury the bodies, they'd been forced to cover them in sad mounds of sand, which began to blow away and reveal the lonesome corpses beneath even before Gamine had finished reciting the burial verses.

If not for Mama Noh, who stood beside her always in recent days, supporting her both figuratively and literally, Gamine might well have left the dead to rot where they fell, without observance or ritual at all. But Mama Noh knew well how to perform, how to play a part, how to bend the face into the expected expression and go through the motions, even if within there was nothing but numb resignation.

The journey west from Yinglong had been difficult and had taken its toll on the Society of Righteous Harmony, but there were times when Gamine almost felt that, if that was the price of meeting Mama Noh and the rest of the Red Crawler Opera Company, then it just might have been worth it.

 

There wasn't enough food to go around, and less with each passing day. Most of those who had died in the western trek, whatever the immediate cause, had ultimately been defeated by hunger. The Society followers were wasting away, little by little, and it seemed only a matter of time before there was nothing left of them at all.

Yinglong had been only the first community to bar their gates to the Society and to force them away at the end of rifle barrels and blades. Word of the Society of Righteous Harmony preceded them, and in town after town, village after village, the authorities would greet them at threshold and order Gamine and her people to go back the way they had come.

The Society purchased what little food it could afford—and stole or begged what food it couldn't—from the farming communities it passed, but most of the operating farms were Combine plantations, and the foremen were always close at hand to drive the Society away. The Combine felt it had lost too many laborers to the siren call of Gamine's homilies, it seemed, and would not suffer any more to follow.

It had been as they were leaving the Great Yu Canyon behind altogether, heading out onto the highlands, that they first caught sight of the crawler.

Temujin had been sure it was the authorities, tiring of pushing them out of village after village and preferring instead to hunt them down and eliminate the nuisance once and for all.

Gamine had felt a serpent of dread coiling and uncoiling in her gut. She hadn't wanted to believe that Temujin was right but found it hard to dismiss him outright.

The Society was walking in an irregular column, some hundreds of them altogether, walking a few abreast, stretched out over nearly a mile. The crawler approached from the north, a black speck against the violet-tinged late-afternoon sky.

Gamine had suggested that, if it
was
the authorities come to eliminate them, there would be little point in running. Temujin objected that there was still no compelling argument against
trying
, at least.

Then the crawler slowed and stopped just ahead of the Society's column, and it became immediately clear that whom-ever they were dealing with, it was
not
the authorities.

The crawler was of antique design, and though time and the elements had worn down the paint on the hull, its former brilliance was still evident. The crawler was painted nose to tail an arrestingly bright shade of red, like the glow of the sun just before it dipped below the horizon. None of the Society followers could ever remember seeing a military crawler using anything like that sort of coloration. Most military crawlers were painted bland, yellowish green shades, not in such bright red hues.

If the crawler was bright and arresting, though, it was nothing compared to the passengers it disgorged through its open hatches.

They tumbled, they juggled, they danced, they sang. Their clothes were a riot of motley in all shades and colors, their hair twisted in strange spires atop their heads, rings glinting in their ears and on their noses. And at the vanguard, approaching Gamine and Temujin like an advancing storm front, was the largest and most arresting of them all: Mama Noh.

She was a woman of prodigious size and uncertain ethnicity, with bangles around her wrists and ankles, hair piled in a towering hive rising from the top of her head, cheeks colored red and eyes lined with kohl. Her eyebrows and eyelashes had been completely plucked clean, with brows reapplied with paint high on her wide forehead, and the corners of her mouth were stained by the tobacco she always kept tucked between her cheek and gum, spitting out the tobacco-laced saliva into a dainty porcelain cup constantly through the day. The cup, which had once been something like white but which was now stained a deep golden brown, the color of a fresh-baked loaf, was emptied out onto the ground whenever it began to fill, and so Mama Noh left behind her a dotted trail of brownish expectoration in little pools wherever she went.

Gamine supposed that she fell a little bit in love with Mama Noh when first she saw her, even considering how scared she was of this outlandish interloper, but when Mama Noh opened her mouth, all doubts and reservations were forgotten, and Gamine was sure that she'd found a friend.

 

When they'd completed the most recent funereal rites and piled sand as high as possible over the body of the departed, the Society followers returned to their ragged circle of tents to begin preparing the evening meal. The sun rode low in the west while both moons hung overhead.

The Society ate their meals together these days, stretching their meager rations as far as they were able. Watery soups and thin stews were the order of the day, with the bowls filled with little more than slightly discolored water. At least they were served steaming hot, if nothing else, since fire kits to heat the pots were hardly in short supply.

The tents of the camp were arranged, as always, in roughly concentric rings, surrounding a broad clearing at the middle. At one side of this clearing was parked the red crawler that gave the opera company its name, and it was in the lee of the crawler that Gamine and Mama Noh sat now, with the other Red Crawler players mixed here and there with the Society followers.

“Your attentions seemed to drift in the observances, child,” Mama Noh said, then took a delicate, lingering sip of her soup. She held the bowl to her lips and inhaled deeply. Though the provender was humble, still Mama Noh was one who seemed to savor every bite of life, no matter how small or unsatisfying. As she was fond of saying, Mama Noh was convinced that life was a banquet, and that most people, failing to realize it, were starving. “Perhaps, if the need should arise again, one of my people, or even I myself, might take this burden from your shoulders and perform the rites instead?”

Gamine set down her bowl, hardly touched, and shot a dark look at the players' matriarch. “
If
the need should arise?” She shook her head angrily. “
If?!
Lady, it is instead a question of
when
, or even
how soon
! If you ask me, we'll be lucky if we make it through tomorrow without having to bury another of our people. If we make it through two days running, I think I might just have to dance in celebration!”

Mama Noh held her bowl under her nostrils for a moment longer, her eyes half-lidded, as though the scent of the watery soup were the most pleasant thing she'd ever smelled. Then she gently set the bowl on the ground before her folded legs, her bangles jingling.

“Merely a suggestion, my dear child, merely a suggestion.”

Gamine glowered, but after a moment her expression softened fractionally. “I'm sorry, Mama Noh. It's not . . .” She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm. “I just can't help but wonder what we're doing out here.”

“Journeying to the west, it was my understanding,” Mama Noh said with a faint smile.

Gamine sighed. “But to where? We've heard that there are communities out past the Three Sovereigns that might be more welcoming, but are there really?”

Mama Noh's eyes narrowed, and when she spoke again, there was iron beneath her words. “They could hardly be less welcoming than those we left behind in the east, my child.”

Gamine's eyes met Mama Noh's, and she nodded. The Red Crawler Opera Company, Gamine knew, had learned that the authorities in the villages and towns to the north and east seemed to have as little use for tumblers and players as they did for itinerant preachers and their camp followers. The Red Crawler had found itself driven out of towns, not just with rifle barrels, but with rifle shot, and had lost at least one of their number to injuries sustained when a riot broke out at one of their performances. Until they had encountered the Society of Righteous Harmony out on the highlands, the Red Crawler Opera Company had intended to return to Tianfei Valley in the south, however much the prospect failed to excite them—they had left the valley under a cloud some time before, when a few of their number ran afoul of the local authorities, after it was discovered that they were augmenting their earnings as company players with activities of a less savory and not entirely legal character. It might be some time before they could safely return to Fanchuan. Once they had met Gamine and her people, though, the Red Crawler had seen a new road open up before them, and they had requested to join their caravan.