The Mandate of Heaven (16 page)

‘Is Hornets’ Nest within?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Captain!’ shouted a sergeant with a proper display of military enthusiasm. It was a watchword among the rebels that Hsiung inspired common peasants to act like soldiers, while other officers inspired them to act like brigands.

He nodded and crossed the cave floor to the house, where more guards bowed. Hsiung strode past them into a chamber the size of a long, low-roofed barn; and like a barn it garnered a harvest. Bolts of silk filled one corner. In another, piles of bronze and silver objects looted over Hornets’ Nest’s long career. There were antiques of great value: tripods and vessels from tombs sealed a thousand years ago. Padlocked chests contained copper, silver and gold coins.

In the centre of the room stood a lacquered throne, also looted. Here, accompanied by secretaries, guards, a pet eunuch, officers and a painted girl who stared fixedly at the ground, lolled a man in dazzling silks: Hornets’ Nest.

For a rebel feared throughout the province, he had unprepossessing features. His face belonged anywhere – a great advantage considering the Great Khan had placed a huge bounty on his head. A decade earlier, his band of Red Turbans had swarmed in their thousands until Jebe Khoja broke and scattered them. Since then Hornets’ Nest had lived a fugitive existence and his once-formidable army shrunk to barely five hundred. None of which diminished the absolute obedience he expected from his followers.

‘Ah, Hsiung! You are last to arrive.’

Was there reproach in the chief’s voice? Hsiung’s face stiffened. He saluted with fists meeting across his chest. His glance flickered as he examined those round him: the usual assembly. Many had been loyal to Hornets’ Nest since he first earned that nickname through his prowess dismembering Mongols, an axe in each hand.

‘Well?’ demanded Hornets’ Nest.

Again Hsiung saluted. ‘Those who it was right to punish have been punished!’

The chief’s expression hardened.

‘Where are their heads?’

Hsiung could hardly admit they were still attached to their owners’ necks. He had been instructed to execute some village elders who were refusing to pay Hornets’ Nest’s grain tax. They had pleaded their people would starve – and when Hsiung ransacked their houses he had to admit they were right, at least until the autumn harvest. It hardly seemed justice to starve a whole village (and Hsiung knew the horrors of famine only too well). Besides, their fawning gratitude had pleased him. Now it seemed that sparing their heads might cost his own.

‘I left them in the village, Sir!’ he bellowed.

Hornets’ Nest nodded as he examined his youngest captain, smiling without a trace of warmth. ‘I have a feeling we might talk about that later,’ he said.

Everyone in the room tried to appear inconspicuous. Hornets’ Nest’s calm was often a prelude to savage violence. This time he merely clapped. Several of his followers flinched.

‘No time for that now! I have special information,’ he declared. ‘Yesterday, a group of the enemy marched through Ou-Fang Village to Lingling. They will return soon with a fortune in taxes and join ships awaiting them at Yulan Port. At least, that is what they think.’

Hornets’ Nest produced a large whisk and lazily swept away an offending mosquito.

‘Where may I attack them, sir?’ asked his most senior captain, a stout man with the bulbous nose of a fierce drinker, who had a reputation for leading from the rear.

‘At Ou-Fang Village,’ said Hornets’ Nest. ‘We shall hide in the houses and rush out.’ He laughed, signalling that everyone should join in. ‘And I’ll give them a sting!’

The chuckling took some time to subside. Time enough for Hsiung to consider the implications of Hornets’ Nest’s plan. In military terms it was sound: surprise the enemy where their missile weapons would be least effective; trap them in a narrow space. The consequences for Ou-Fang, however, a village of seven hundred souls, would be dreadful. If the Red Turbans were victorious, a terrible retribution would follow on the assumption that the villagers had conspired with rebels. And if the Red Turbans lost, exactly the same massacre would follow. In either case, what little goodwill the rebels still retained in the surrounding countryside must surely perish with Ou-Fang Village.

‘Sire!’ he cried, bowing and saluting with his fists. ‘Might not the enemy fight to the end if trapped in a narrow space? Not only would our losses be high, but we might not seize the prize.’

By this he meant the coffers of
cash
, gold and sundry valuables collected in taxes. Hornets’ Nest regarded him suspiciously, but did not speak.

‘Sire! Let us attack them in the ravines east of Yulan Port. First, they will be tired from their long march. Second, they will be tempted to abandon their duty and flee to the safety of the Port. Third, we may surprise them from the forest.’

A few officers nodded their approval. Hsiung added hastily: ‘Sire! It was you who taught me it is a fine place for an ambush. I beg to be allowed to take the most dangerous position in the attack!’

Hornets’ Nest relaxed a little. This was the kind of spirit he liked. Still his apparent calm was unnerving.

‘I will decide in due course,’ he announced. ‘Go now and prepare the men!’

So saying, he stalked off to his personal chambers, followed by the concubine who cast a sharp, backward glance at Hsiung.

The other officers retreated to a hut behind Hornets’ Nest’s house. Here they would drink and boast until midnight about their deeds in the coming action.

Hsiung strode to the cave entrance and inspected the valley below. It nestled between mountain slopes, walled on three sides by cliffs draped with vines and shrubs. On the fourth side, the valley widened as it descended and twisted its way north, still overhung by precipices and greenery.

After his defeat at the hands of Jebe Khoja a decade earlier, Hornets’ Nest had chosen to build his hideout here, attracted by its remoteness and the defensive possibilities of the cave. Certainly it was impregnable as long as one had food and brave men to defend the entrance.

But as Hsiung’s eye descended to the valley floor he noted, for the hundredth time, the disadvantages of their position.

The rebels had constructed a village of wood and thatch houses in the valley, packed close together and easily set alight. In addition, a large natural fissure broke the stony floor of the valley right in the centre of the village. Long ago, when a river had flowed from the cave, it had discharged itself through this fissure into an underground lake, hundreds of feet below the earth. Now the fissure was dry, save for a few trickling streams. Those brave souls who had been lowered on long ropes into the earth’s belly had reported a fairyland of crystals and frightening echoes. Some described it as the gateway to one of the Buddhist hells, hence its inauspicious name throughout Lingling County: Fourth Hell Mouth.

Hsiung’s gaze shifted to the head of the valley where a ditch and low palisade sealed off the camp from attackers. It seemed as much trap as defence: once besieged, the rebels had no escape other than leaping into the fissure and hoping for a soft landing on the stalactites below.

Yet no government troops had ever approached the remote hideaway. Perhaps Hornets’ Nest was right to fear nothing: he, at least, was protected by his cave and cliff. The safety of the camp below was less certain. If it perished the last ember of rebellion around Six-hundred-
li
Lake would fail – and, with it, Hsiung’s purpose in the world.

As he stared gloomily, Hsiung noticed a procession of silver-backed apes following a network of ledges across the cliff face. Similar ledges ran all round the apparently impassable walls hemming the rebel village. Though he could not say why, the monkey paths seemed significant.

At the bottom he found a single soldier waiting for him, an older man, grizzled and scarred. Perhaps his seniority in age explained why he did not bow to Captain Hsiung. Neither did the captain expect it.

‘Ah, P’ao,’ he said. ‘Everything as it should be?’

Sergeant P’ao had changed little since he first adopted Hsiung ten years before. All the change was on the other side.

‘No,’ he grunted, ‘same as always.’

Hsiung glanced round. Luckily no passing soldier had heard the lack of a
sir
.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

Spreading his hands Sergeant P’ao sighed. ‘While you were away a fever set in. See for yourself. Only don’t catch it.’

Hsiung placed a restraining hand on P’ao’s arm and held his eye. For a moment the older man stood firm, then shrank a little.

‘Call me
sir
,’ said Hsiung. ‘Always
sir
.’

A peculiar, lifeless glitter in his eyes argued against defiance.

‘Yes, sir,’ mumbled P’ao.

‘Come then,’ said Hsiung more softly, ‘show me this fever.’

A dispiriting tour followed: filthy huts of bored, hungry men, some shivering on blankets though the day was hot. Yet Hsiung judged torpor and boredom were worse dangers. It was over a year since many had seen action.

He strode over to the huge fissure of Fourth Hell Mouth and gazed down into the void below. Was darkness his only route of escape from this narrow, dismal valley? Unless, of course, he simply abandoned the Red Turban cause and the ever-dwindling band of rebels. Yet where could he go? Back to Hou-ming and the kindness of Deng Nan-shi? No, that way was lost forever. For a moment images of the Salt Pans filled his mind and he began to pace angrily, one hand touching the scabbard of his sword. Back and forth before the dark fissure he paced, dreaming of revenge, until movement on the cliffs caught his attention.

The monkeys again. How easily they swarmed from ledge to ledge! Then he had a disconcerting vision, that the monkeys were men – and men mere apes.

‘P’ao,’ he called. ‘Gather all those fit enough for a parade. I have work for them.’

An hour later scores of soldiers were clambering on ledges round the three sheer cliff-faces surrounding their camp, constructing walkways between gaps with bamboo poles lashed together. All day work parties cut and carried the long saplings from groves far down the valley. Many of the men sang as they laboured. This unexpected noise brought the other officers from their hut behind Hornets’ Nest’s residence. They roared with drunken enthusiasm to see Red Turban soldiers scuttle across the cliffs like apes.

Hsiung, hand on hips in the valley below, grinned up at them. A hot, masterful pleasure filled his soul as he watched hundreds of men obey his commands. Sergeant P’ao stayed close, looking important.

Hornets’ Nest did not emerge that day or the next. But two young men in the gaudy clothes of city bravos visited him, travelling on foot with an escort of the rebel chief’s picked bodyguard. An hour later Hsiung watched them leave in the direction of Mirror Lake.

He crouched in a stand of bamboo, peering down at the road to Yulan Port. Rain fell continually, dripping through the branches and turning the track below into a slick of mud. Heaven itself favoured them, for with each
li
of struggling through the mire, the enemy’s strength must lessen. Soon they would face a pitiless assault led by the bold Captain Hsiung.

He glanced round to inspect the men. All lay hidden, keeping bow and crossbow strings dry. The enemy might be far away for all he knew. Patience must seep from him to his troops. Above all, he must not betray the uncomfortable, fluttering tightness in his gut in case someone called it cowardice.

Still the rain fell. A puddle had formed on a flat limestone boulder near his hiding place and Hsiung watched drops break the surface and bounce. Exhilaration crept from suppressed corners of his soul, wild feelings he revelled in and feared. With them came unbidden images – unwelcome pictures of the past, sometimes distorted, sometimes true, if memory can be more than a flickering shadow. When the dark lights sparkled in his spirit he could hardly tell truth from dream …

Yet he remembered a soft squelch of mud between his bare toes. Long ago. Another incarnation, surely. He had managed to evade Overseer Pi-tou and hurried through a landscape of flame and steam stretching along the lake shore. Blue fires flickered beneath giant, crystal-crusted iron pans. Everywhere the stench of raw, seeping gas. Wretches in rags huddled or toiled according to the whim of those set above them. One thought in his head:
Father! He must find Father amidst this crowd of the damned. That was why he had come. To find Father and set him free.
Back and forth he wandered, asking for anyone named Hsiung, searching all night until dawn returned him to his own bubbling salt pan. So exhausted, he could not dodge the sudden harsh grip on his arm, twisting him to stare into Overseer Pi-tou’s pocked face. Then came his first proper beating. Fists rising and falling while the other members of his work gang pretended to sleep. Afterwards, Pi-tou dragging his limp, cringing body into a nearby ditch …

A noise had startled Hsiung to watchfulness. Long-legged cranes had flapped into the trees on the other side of the ravine and perched, preening themselves in the steady rain. Another memory danced behind his eyes: dusk on the great lake. Standing on the shore, gazing at the vast, burning orb of the sun as it sank behind distant mountains, setting them ablaze. Birds on the lake, chirruping and dipping and piping. Pairs of white cranes cawing and twining long necks in courtship. Lanterns twinkling far out on the waters. No fishermen dared approach the Pans, lest they be seized to replace someone worked to death. The endless peace of sunset spreading across the troubled land. Its beauty made him weep for the first time in years. And one did not weep casually in the Pans, where any sign of weakness invited aggression …