The Mercenaries (38 page)

The thirty-hundredweight ran dry a quarter of a mile from the river and the Ford soon afterwards. To save time, they simply took the wings to the river and returned to hitch everything to the back of Heloise. Then they set off again, towing the lorry and the car and the generator like a set of circus trailers.

Sammy managed a tired smile. ‘We made it, Ira,’ he said. ‘We’re all right now. There’ll be troops at Siang-Chang.’

The coolies were waiting for them among the reeds, crouched over their rice bowls, and with Ira chivvying them, they took very little time to manhandle the fragile wings to the bank and aboard the raft.

When they’d finished, Sammy looked round. There was still plenty of room on the huge island of logs. He looked at Cheng, his eyes bright.

‘Ask him if he’ll take the lorry and the car,’ he said. Tell him we’ll pay him well if he gets the lot down to Siang-Chang.’

Three minutes later, they were hitching ropes and tackles to the tree at the top of the bank. With Heloise leaning on the end of a rope as a drag, the Ford went down the bank first, its wheels locked and sliding, but as the thirty-hundredweight followed, sparks coming from its brakes, the long-suffering tree came out at the roots at last and the whole lot of them, the lorry, the rope and tackles and a dozen coolies, rolled down with it on to the mud.

The coolies picked themselves up, hooting with laughter, and knocked the mud off themselves, then, like a lot of ants, they bundled the lorry on board the raft and began to cut down swathes of rushes with their sickles and stack them round the vehicles, even tying them to the towering centre section of the De Havilland which stood twelve feet above the decks like a look-out post.

Sammy appeared in the dusk, stumbling with weariness and pain. He was spattered with mud and his sling was filthy.

‘Made it,’ he said with a grin. ‘Every bleddy thing on board except Heloïse. Even the coffee pot. When do we leave?’

‘Cheng says first light,’ Ira said. They have to anchor at night.’

Wang was waiting on the mud with his box of ancient tools and his family lined up as if for inspection, each one of them holding a bundle or a household utensil of some sort. Eleven pairs of slant eyes gravely regarded Ira.

‘Mastah,’ Wang said. ‘Wang come also. Bad men Tsosiehn catchee Wang. Wang help white taipan. White taipan foreign debil. Best Wang stay with white taipan.’

Ira grinned. ‘White taipan think you dead right, Wang. You best down-stream. Get your family aboard.’

Wang grinned and bobbed his head and the family trooped aboard the raft, and Ira doled out Shanghai dollars to the muddy waiting hands on the bank.

There was a mist over the river the following morning, like a white sheet low over the water, obscuring the far bank so that the Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda stuck out above it in the distance like an immense phallic symbol, detached and bottomless. The noise upstream seemed to have died down in the night, and they could see that the gunboat had moved from the bank, smoke trickling from its stack. The ropes holding the raft were unfastened and with a great deal of shouting, the crew began to push off with huge poles. Out in midstream two or three boats heaved it round under the straining backs of their oarsmen.

As it began its first shuddering journey from the shore, swirling slightly as the current caught it and dragged it against the oarsmen, a mob of coolies appeared at the top of the bank--men, women and children--and began to pour past the abandoned and forlorn-looking Heloise, down to the mud-flats. At first, Ira thought the Tsosiehn students had discovered them at last and his heart sank as he waited for the first attempts to cut them off, then a firecracker began to fizz and sparkle in a cloud of blue smoke, popping and spitting and crackling, then another and another.

‘Plenchee joss for Peng Ah-Lun,’ Wang grinned. ‘Debil no catch he.’

Ira saw Lawn’s scared boozy face relax into a smile and he laughed with relief, then more crackers fizzed and sparkled and the coolies on the bank began to jump up and down and laugh, and the captain of the barge found a huge cracked gong and began to hammer at it, giggling and swiping at the children who ran round him, shouting with excited laughter.

The raft was moving faster now and the crackling on the bank grew fainter. Behind them the Chang-an-Chieh had almost disappeared as they moved between high banks. What had seemed at first to be empty countryside turned out to be alive with people, and bridges and dykes kept peeping over the banks and groups of roofs appeared, some with green tiles and some with curved eaves or untidy rush-matting. Occasionally, as the bank dipped, they could see into the paddy fields, where women splashed with buffaloes through the squares of water.

The raft began to move round a bend in the river, the yellow water washing along its edges and slapping over the logs against the wheel of the lorry. The raft-boss was steering with sea-anchors, streaming them out on the quarter to heave the vast log island to starboard, and as Ira watched a boat was laying more of them, its oarsmen encouraged by drummers and what appeared to be a cheer leader in the stem. The raft boss saw Ira alongside him and turned, grinning all over his face.

‘Plenchee good joss, Massah,’ he said. ‘No soldiers now.’

Unwilling to count chickens before they were hatched, Ira was not so sure, and he was not surprised when that afternoon they saw a train of pack ponies, their ears and tails flapping against the flies, trotting along the top of the brown mud bank. Later more ponies appeared, ridden by uniformed men with their rifles slung across their backs, who dismounted and fired two or three shots at the raft which sent everyone diving for cover.

Later, just when they were preparing to anchor for the night, two men in a boat put off from the bank. It was Ellie who drew Ira’s attention to them. Throughout the departure from Yaochow she had worked silently, exhausted but eager to be away, and she looked suddenly old now as she pointed to the shore, something in her face indicating that she’d almost reached the limit of her endurance.

As the boat drew nearer, Ira reached for a baulk of timber and waited near the De Havilland. As he looked round, he saw Sammy sitting up in the back of the thirty-hundredweight, where he’d slept off his exhaustion for most of the day, his young-old face hard, his eyes cold. His grimy fingers clutched Fagan’s Colt.

‘Kwei soldiers,’ he said shortly.

As the boat scraped alongside, the two men scrambled aboard the raft. There was a series of shouted orders and the angry chattering of the raft boss, and Ira saw Ellie shudder and put her hands to her throat. Then one of the soldiers unslung his rifle and pointed it at the raft boss, but before he could pull the trigger, Sammy stood up abruptly in the back of the thirty-hundredweight and fired and the soldier splashed over the side into the water, his rifle clattering to the deck. As the other soldier whirled, unslinging his rifle, Ira swung the baulk of timber and he dropped to his knees and, before anyone could stop him, the raft boss had jumped astride him and, wrenching his head back with a fist twisted in his hair, had slit his throat with a knife from his belt.

‘Oh, God!’

Ellie screamed and, as the raft boss pushed the body overboard, grinning all over his face and wiping his hands on the rushes covering the planes, she turned away, her shoulders heaving. When she lifted her head again, her face was green and there were tears streaming down her cheeks from eyes that were stark with an appeal for mercy.

Nine days later, in a sleety winter rain, the sea anchors swung the raft inshore at Siang-Chang. They had passed through Hwai-Yang four days before, staring across the muddy water at its familiar buildings and crenellated walls and the vast Tien An-Men stairway, all fluttering now with red and blue Chiang flags, and though they had expected trouble, no one had even bothered to look round as the log island drifted by.

As the huge wooden structure turned in the current, touched the mud bank and came to a shuddering grinding stop, the raft boss’s sons were ashore immediately with ropes, and an army of coolies had descended the bank and lined the riverside. There were other rafts in the little lagoon where they had landed, all in the process of being demolished, and a steady stream of coolies were dragging the logs ashore to where they could hear the scream of mechanical saws.

‘Thank God,’ Ellie said fervently. ‘Thank God! ‘

She was cold and filthy from the cheerless days and nights they’d spent on the damp raft, her clothes stained and crumpled, her hair unbrushed, her eyes dark rings of weariness.

Downstream, they could see the gunboat from Tsosiehn, and beyond it, in front of the business quarter of the city, steamers and a great mass of small boats. Then they realised there were hordes of Chinese along the bund as there had been at Tsosiehn and caught the echo of the yelling, and with sinking hearts, picking out the flecks of red and blue in the distance, they realised that the Chiang sun-flags had arrived ahead of them.

The mill manager’s face was glum. ‘All people leave,’ he explained miserably. ‘All white people go.’

‘Here, too!’ Ira felt sick with disappointment. ‘But this is a treaty port! ‘

‘No matter, mastah! All go.’

For a moment, Ira stared down the river at the crowding boats, then without a word, never one to indulge in self-pity, he turned away. It was no good whining when panic and disaster had become commonplace--God helped those who helped themselves--and grim and tired and tireless as Sammy, he began collecting ropes and tickles and clearing away the tarpaulins and reeds from the lorry.

There was a flat muddy field beyond the saw mills and wearily, not speaking much, they heaved the lorry ashore and winched the aircraft through the mill yard. Sammy, his face pale, purple shadows under his eyes, ran through the list of damage, missing nothing.

‘Avro: A few burns and a bloody great rent in one of the wings where they caught it on the tin roof of the sawing shed. De Havilland: Sound as a bell except for a busted longeron strut and a gap in the fabric, and a few tears that the mob made. Nothing we can’t put right in a week or so. Lorry fine. Ford fine. Everything tip-top.’ He paused and his mouth tightened. ‘Only one thing,’ he ended flatly. ‘Lawn’s done a bunk.’

Ira turned, almost expecting to see the old man disappearing over the horizon.

‘When?’ he asked.

‘Wang said he cut and run for the town while we were on the raft shifting the Avro,’ Sammy explained. ‘He got a lift on a cart from the mill. We shan’t miss him.’

‘No,’ Ira agreed. ‘We shan’t miss him.’

But it seemed like a symbol all the same. Despite Lawn’s general unreliability, they’d been able to trust him because he was afraid of being alone. In this job in China, Ira knew now, he’d vaguely hoped to recapture something of the comradeship he’d known in France, something that had been sadly lacking since his return to civilian life, but it had been a shabby farce from the start, and with Lawn’s departure the last traces of trust had disappeared. It seemed to be the beginning of the end, and he shivered a little in the cold.

‘No,’ he said again, staring at the crowding boats downstream. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter.’

There was an English doctor in Siang-Chang, running a small hospital in a weird ornamental building behind the bund that was surrounded by willows and smelled of ether and iodoform. They had to pass through the British settlement to get to it, along a road that divided Chinese streets teeming with colour and reckless sprawling life from the orderly and dignified stodginess of a European-run colony.

The place was stiff with self-righteousness and propriety and was devoid of any concessions to the land that had allowed it to exist. And even here carts stood outside doors as the inhabitants prepared to leave behind them a lifetime’s work, their homes and all their possessions. There were sandbagged gunposts on the corners and, though the treaty power flags flew alongside the company flags over the office buildings to put on a show, somehow they seemed pathetic because the Kuomintang banners overwhelmed them by their numbers.

The doctor, who seemed to be more concerned with departure than with treating patients, was an elderly bachelor whose surgery was a wilderness of wild untidiness--odd shoes, old coats, sweaters, surgical instruments, used razor blades and teacups, and medical books holding up last year’s copies of
Punch
. There were pictures of the doctor sitting in cars and on motor bikes, and even a Ford piston on the table and part of an exhaust pipe.

The doctor kept up a running commentary all the time he was examining Sammy.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Jack him up a bit so we can see him. It’s nothing but a bit of chassis trouble.’

But his face was grave as he raised his head. ‘Healing crookedly,’ he said bluntly. ‘Ought to be reset.’

‘Never mind that,’ Sammy asked harshly. ‘How long?’

‘How long what?’

‘How long before I can get to work again?’

‘Two months. Perhaps more.’

‘Two months!’ Sammy seemed on the verge of tears. ‘I got to get to work. I got to get them aeroplanes flying.’

The doctor was unsympathetic. He was a busy man and was preparing to pull out himself to Shanghai.

‘Whole country’s falling apart,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’

‘Has there been trouble
here?’
Ira asked.

‘None so far, but there
will
be--especially with everybody leaving. Air’s poisoned by propaganda and it’s all lies. Consul’s had a man up here for weeks trying to talk sense into the Kuomintang people. They’ve been firing on British-owned shipping. Sank the
Fan-Ling
last week. All the lower ports were open and she heeled over. Hell of a casualty list.’

He offered a few helpful suggestions about aviation fuel and gave them all the news they’d missed since they’d left Tsosiehn. There were already long streams of refugees outside the city, it seemed, moving off the roads as the Kwei-Chiang soldiers pressed northwards, and Tsu Li-Fo, Baptist General, Pride of the Missionaries, and Warlord of the South-West, seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. His army was dispersed and he was said to be still in hiding in the hills round Hwai-Yang, cut off from escape to the river. Chiang had sworn to get him for his insults and it looked very much as though he were going to. It seemed that the sound of Philippe Tsu’s violin was never going to be heard in European concert halls now because he was probably lying dead in a monsoon ditch, his throat slit by marauding deserters.