Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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For a change, he did not munch his teeth at me, but regarded me narrowly. “You are right. These mountains are reliably solid. So?”

“So if the brass balls were to be securely tucked into tight crevices of the high peaks along both crests above a valley, and all ignited at the same and proper moment, they should set loose a mighty avalanche. It would thunder down from both sides and completely fill the valley and mash and bury every living thing in it. To a people who have for so long felt safe among these mountains, even sheltered and protected by them, it would be a cataclysm immense and unexpected and inescapable. The avalanche would come down upon them like God’s boot heel. Of course, as the Wang has said, it would be necessary to arrange that all the foe be congregated in that one valley … .”

“Hui! That is it!” Ukuruji exclaimed. “First, Bayan, you have heralds make that proclamation proposed by my Royal Father. Then, as if that had given you mandate for a full-scale assault, you send your whole force into the likeliest valley, the mountains alongside it having previously been seeded with the huo-yao balls. The Yi will think you have taken leave of your senses, but they will take advantage of it. They will filter down from their hiding places and collect and cluster and prepare to assault from your sides and rear. And then—”

“Honorable Wang!” the Orlok bleated, almost pleadingly. “I should have to take leave of my senses! Not enough that I commit my entire five tomans—half a tuk—to be surrounded by the enemy. Now you wish me to condemn my fifty thousand men as well to a devastating avalanche! What good for us to wipe out the Yi warriors and have all Yun-nan prostrate before us, if we have no troops of our own left alive to take it and hold it?”

“Hm,” said Ukuruji yet again. “Well, our troops would at least be expecting the avalanche … .”

The Orlok refrained even from dignifying that with a comment. Just then, one of the serving chabis came out of the Pota-lá onto the terrace, bringing a leather flask of arkhi to refill our drinking horns and skull cups. Bayan, Ukuruji and I were sitting now with our eyes pensively fixed on the tabletop, so my gaze was caught by the bright garnet sleeves of that young Bho man dispensing the liquor. Then my eyes, idling on those movements of color, caught the similarly idling gaze of Ukuruji, and I saw his eyes quicken with light, and I think the garnet sleeves inspired in both of us the same outrageous idea at the same instant, but I was glad to let him do the expressing of it. He leaned urgently toward Bayan and said:

“Suppose we do not risk our own men to bait the trap. Suppose we send the worthless and expendable Bho … .”

YUN-NAN

1

IT had to be done either quickly or in a secrecy so strict that it would have been almost impossible to sustain. So it was done quickly.

The first thing done was the posting of pickets all around the Ba-Tang valley, alert day and night to stop any Yi scouts from sneaking into the area, or any already planted Yi spies from sneaking out with word of what we were up to.

I have seen animal flocks march willingly to a slaughter pen when led by a Judas goat, but the Bho required not even that much cajolery or duress. Ukuruji merely outlined our plan to the lamas he had evicted from the Pota-lá. Those selfish and heartless holy men were all too anxious to do anything that would get the Wang and his court out of their lamasarai and themselves back into it—and the Bho would do anything their holy men told them to do. So the lamas, evincing no fatherly concern for their Potaist followers, no feeling for their fellows, no loyalty to their own country or reluctance to aid their Mongol overlords, showing no qualms or scruples whatever, made proclamation to the people of Ba-Tang that they must obey every order the Mongol officers gave them, and go anywhere they might be sent—and the mindless Bho complied.

Bayan immediately had his warriors begin corralling every able-bodied Bho in the city and environs—men, women, boys and girls of sufficient size—and begin outfitting them with cast-off Mongol arms and armor, giving them the more worn horses for mounts, and forming them into columns complete with pack animals and yurtu-carrier wagons, Bayan’s own orlok flag, the yak tails of his sardars, other suitable pennants and guidons. Except for the lamas and trapas and chabis, only the very oldest, youngest and frailest Bho were spared to be left behind—plus a few others. Ukuruji kindly excepted the several culled-out women he had been keeping for the enjoyment of himself and his courtiers, and I likewise sent Ryang and Odcho safely to their homes, each with a necklace of coins to help her further her career of bedding toward a prospect of wedding.

Meanwhile, Bayan sent heralds under white flags of truce riding southward to bellow over and over, in the Yi language, something like this: “Your traitor spy in the capital of Kithai has been exposed and overthrown! You have no more hope of standing under siege! Therefore this province of Yun-nan is declared annexed to the Khanate! You are to throw down your arms and welcome the conquerors when they come! The Khan Kubilai has spoken! Tremble, all men, and obey!” Of course, we did not expect the Yi either to tremble or to obey. We merely trusted that they would be enough bemused and distracted by those heralds arrogantly riding through the valleys that they would not notice the other men flitting furtively along the mountaintops—engineers finding the best places to secrete the brass balls, and then hiding near them, ready to fire their wicks on a signal from me.

In case the Yi had any watchers of excellent eyesight posted far beyond our pickets surrounding Ba-Tang, the whole bok was struck and the yurtu tents collapsed, and all that equipment and the wagons and animals not going with the pretended invasion were hidden away. All the thousands of real Mongol men and women moved into the evacuated buildings of the city. But they did not don the drab and dirty civilian clothing of the displaced Bho. They—and I and Ukuruji and his courtiers as well—stayed clad in battle dress and armor and accouterments, ready to move out on the track of the doomed columns as soon as we got word that the trap was sprung.

It was necessary to send some real Mongols along with those decoy columns of mock Mongols, but Bayan only had to call for volunteers and he got them. The men knew they were volunteering to commit suicide, but these were warriors who had bested death so often that they firmly believed their long service under the Orlok had imbued them with some power always to do so. Any few who survived this latest perilous mission would simply rejoice in Bayan’s having once again proved their indestructibility, and the dead would not reproach him. So a band of the men rode at the front of the simulated invasion army, playing on musical instruments the Mongols’ war anthems and marching music (which the Bho, for all their willingness, would not have known how to play), and, with that music, setting the alternate canter-walk-canter pace for the thousands behind. At the tail end of that army had to ride another troop of real Mongols, to keep the columns from straggling, and also to send couriers back to us when the Yi—as we hoped—began to congregate for their assault.

The Bho knew very well that they were posing as Mongols, and their lamas had commanded them to do so with a will—though I doubt that the lamas had told them it was probably the last thing they would ever do—and they entered into the pretense most heartily. When they learned that they would be led by a band of military musicians, some of them asked Bayan and Ukuruji, “Lords, should not we chant and sing, as real Mongols do on the march? What should we chant? We know nothing but the ‘om mani pémé hum.’”

“Anything but that,” said the Orlok. “Let me think. The capital of Yun-nan is named Yun-nan-fu. I suppose you could go clamoring, ‘We march to seize Yun-nan-fu!’”

“Yun-nan-pu?” they said.

“No,” said Ukuruji, laughing. “Forget about shouting or chanting.” He explained to Bayan, “The Bho are incapable of enunciating the sounds of vand f.Better have them not voice anything at all, or the Yi may recognize that deficiency.” He paused, struck by a new idea. “One other thing we might have them do, though. Tell the leaders always to lead the column to the right around any holy structure, like a mani wall or a ch’horten stone pile, leaving that on their lefthand.”

The Bho made a feeble wail of protest at that—it would be an insult to those monuments to the Pota—but their lamas quickly stepped in and bade them obey, and even took the pains to say a hypocritical prayer giving the people special dispensation on this occasion to insult the almighty Pota.

The preparations took only a few days, while the heralds and the engineers went on ahead, and the columns moved out as soon as they were finally formed up, on a beautiful morning of bright sunshine. I must say that even that mock army made a magnificent sight and sound as it left Ba-Tang. Up front, the band of Mongol musicians led with an unearthly but blood-stirring martial music. The trumpeters sounded the great copper trumpets called karachala, which name could rightly translate as “the hellhorns.” The drummers had tremendous copper and hide drums like kettles, one slung on either side of the saddle, and they did marvels of twirling and flailing their mallets and crossing and uncrossing their arms as they hammered the thunderous beat for the march. Cymbalists clashed immense brass platters that flashed a flare of sunlight with every stunning ring of sound. Bell players beat a sort of scampanio —metal tubes of various sizes arranged in a lyre-shaped frame. Between and among the louder, blaring noises could be heard the sweeter string music of lutes made with specially short necks for playing while riding.

The music moved on and gradually diminished as it blended into the sound of the thousands of hoofs clip-clopping along behind, and the heavy rumble of wagon wheels, and the creak and jingle of armor and harness. The Bho, for once in their lives, looked not pathetic or contemptible, but as proud and disciplined and determined as if they had actually been going out to war, and on their own account. The horsemen rode rigidly upright in their saddles and facing sternly forward, except to do a very respectable eyes-right when they passed the reviewing Orlok Bayan and his sardars. As the Wang Ukuruji remarked, the decoy men and women did indeed resemble genuine Mongol warriors. They had even been persuaded to ride using the long Mongol stirrups—which enable a hard-riding bowman to stand for better aim with his arrows—instead of the short, cramped, knees-up stirrups favored by the Bho and the Drok and the Han and the Yi.

When the last column’s last rank and its rear guard of real Mongols had disappeared downriver, there was nothing for the remainder of us to do except wait and, while waiting, try to maintain, for the benefit of any putative keen-eyed watchers from afar, the illusion that Ba-Tang was an ordinary, nasty Bho city going about its ordinary, nasty Bho business. In the daytimes, our people thronged the market areas and, at twilights, gathered on rooftops as if praying. Whether we ever really were spied upon, I do not know. But if we were, our stratagem could not have been discovered by the Yi down south, for it worked exactly as planned—up to a point, anyway.

About a week after the leavetaking, one of the rear-guard Mongols came galloping to report that the decoy army had got well within Yun-nan, and was still proceeding forward, and the Yi apparently had been fooled by the imposture. Scouts, he said, had seen the scattered individual snipers in the mountains, and outpost groups of them, beginning to collect together and to move downhill like tributary streams converging to become a river. We waited some more, and in another few days another rider came galloping to report that the Yi were unmistakably massing in force behind and on both rear quarters of our mock army—that, in fact, he had had to ride most evasively to get around the gathering Yi and get out of Yun-nan with that information for us.

So now the real army rode forth, and—though it moved as discreetly as possible, with no marching music—that must have been a reallymagnificent sight to see. The entire half a tuk surged out of the Ba-Tang valley like an elemental force of nature on the move. The fifty thousand troops were divided into tomans of ten thousand, each led by a sardar, and those divided into the flag-captains’ thousands, and those into the chiefs’ hundreds—each riding in broad ranks of ten in files of ten—and each hundred riding far enough apart not to be suffocated by the dust kicked up by those ahead. I say the departure must have made a magnificent spectacle, because I did not get to see it go past me. I rode out well ahead of it, in company with Bayan, Ukuruji and a few senior officers. The Orlok, of course, had to go first, and Ukuruji was in the forefront because he wished to be, and I was there because Bayan ordered me to be there. I had been provided with a special, immense banner of brilliant yellow silk, and I was to unfurl that at the proper moment to signal for the avalanche. Any trooper could have done the signaling, but Bayan insisted on regarding the brass balls as “mine,” and their employment as my responsibility.

So we cantered a good many li in advance of the tuk, following the river Jin-sha and the broad, trampled track beside it that was the spoor of the mock army. After only a few days of hard riding and spartan camping, the Orlok grunted, “Here we are crossing the border into Yun-nan Province.” A few days farther on, we were intercepted by a Mongol sentry, one of that army’s rear guard set to wait for us, and he led us off the river route, taking us to one side of the line of march and around a hill. At the far side of that hill, in late afternoon, we came upon eight more of the Mongol rear guard, where they had made a fireless camp. The captain of the guard respectfully invited us to dismount and share some of their cold rations of dried meat and tsampa balls.

“But first, Orlok,” he said, “you may wish to climb to the top of this hill and look over. It will give you a view down this valley of the Jin-sha, and I think you will recognize that you have come just in time.”

The captain led the way, as Bayan, Ukuruji and I all made the climb on foot. We did it rather slowly, being stiff from our long ride. Toward the top, our guide motioned for us to crouch and then to crawl, and at last we only cautiously poked our heads over the grass at the crest. We could see that it was well we had been intercepted. Had we followed the river and the tracks for a few hours more, we should have rounded the other side of this hill and entered the long but narrow valley opening before us, in which our mock army was camped. The Bho, as instructed, were behaving more like an occupying force than an invading one. They had not erected any tents, but they had camped this evening as nonchalantly as if they had been invited by the Yi to Yun-nan and were welcome there—with innumerable camp fires and torches twinkling throughout the twilit valley, and only a few guards negligently posted around the camp perimeter, and much movement and noise going on.

“We would have ridden right into the camp,” said Ukuruji.

“No, Lord Wang, you would not,” said our guide. “And I respectfully suggest that you subdue your voice.” Keeping his own voice low, the captain explained, “All down the other side of this hill are the Yi, lurking in force, and at the entrance to the valley, and on the farther slopes—in fact, everywhere between us and that camp, and beyond. You would have ridden right into their rear, and been seized. The foe are massed in a great horseshoe, around this end and both valley sides of the decoy camp. You cannot see the Yi because, like us, they have lighted no fires and they are concealed in every available cover.”

Bayan asked, “They have done so every night the army has camped?”

“Yes, Lord Orlok, and each time increasing in their numbers. But I think tonight’s camp will be the last that mock army will make. I might be wrong. But, as best I could count, today was the first day the foe have not added to their numbers. I think every fighting man in this area of Yun-nan is now congregated in this valley—a force of some fifty thousand, about equal to our own. And, if I were commanding the Yi, I should deem this rather narrow defile the perfect place to make a crushing assault on what appears to be a singularly unapprehensive invader. As I say, I might be wrong. But my warrior instinct tells me the Yi will attack at tomorrow’s dawn.”

“A good report, Captain Toba.” I think Bayan knew by name every man of his half a tuk. “And I am inclined to share your intuition. What of the engineers? Have you any idea of their disposition?”

“Alas, no, Lord Orlok. Communication with them would be impossible without revealing them to the enemy. I have had to assume and trust that they have been keeping pace along the mountain crests, and each day newly placing and readying their secret weapons.”

“Let us trust they did it this day, anyway,” said Bayan. He lifted his head enough to make a slow scan of the mountains ringing the valley.

So did I. If the Orlok was going to persist in holding me responsible for the secret weapons, it was to my best interest that the things do what I hoped they would. If they did, some fifty thousand Bho were going to perish, and about that many Yi as well. It was a considerable responsibility, indeed, for a noncombatant and a Christian. But it would mean winning the war for my chosen side, and a victory would show that God was also on our side, and that would allay any Christian qualms about wholesale slaughter. If the brass balls did not perform as warranted, the Bho would die anyway, but the Yi would not. The war would have to go on, and that might cause me some Christian pangs of conscience—killing so many people, even if they were only Bho, to no purpose at all.

But what mainly concerned me, I must confess, was the satisfaction of my curiosity. I was interested to see if the flaming-powder balls did work, and how well. Certainly, I said to myself, I could see a dozen vantage points on the mountains where, if I had been doing the placing, I would have laid the charges. Those were outcrops of bare rock, like Crusader castles towering up from the forest growth, and showing clefts and checkerings where they had been split by time or weather, and where, if they were suddenly split farther asunder, the slabs ought to topple and fall and, in falling, take other chunks of their mountains with them … .

Bayan grunted a command, and we slithered down the hill the way we had come. At the bottom, he gave orders to the waiting men:

“The real army should be about forty or fifty li behind us, and also preparing to stop for the night. Six of you start riding toward it, this instant. One of you pull off to the trailside every ten li, and wait there, so your horses will be fresh tomorrow. The sixth rider should reach there before sunrise. Tell the sardars not to start marching again. Tell them to wait where they are, lest the dust of their march be visible from here, and spoil all our plans. If all goes as planned tomorrow, I will send Captain Toba riding next and riding hard, and you will rush the word on in relays to the tuk. The word will be for the sardars to bring the whole army on, at a stretch-out gallop, to do the mopping up of any remnants of the enemy that might be left alive in this valley. If things go wrong here, well … I will send Captain Toba with different orders to impart. Now go. Ride.”

The six men left, leading their horses until they should be well out of hearing. Bayan turned to the rest of us.

“Let us eat a little and sleep a little. We must be watching from the hilltop before first light.”

2

AND we were there: the Orlok Bayan and his accompanying officers, the Wang Ukuruji, myself, Captain Toba and the remaining two men of his troop. The others were each carrying a sword, a bow and a quiver of arrows, and Bayan—ready for combat, not parade—was toothless. I, since I had the unwieldy flag-lance to handle, had no other weapon but my belt knife. We lay in the grass and watched as the scene before us slowly became visible. The morning would have to be well advanced before the sun would show itself above the mountaintops, but its rise lightened the cloudless blue sky, and that light gradually reflected down into the black bowl of the valley, and it sucked a mist up off the river. At first, that was the only movement we could see, a milky luminescence drifting against the blackness. But then the valley assumed shape and color: misty blue at its mountain edges, dark green of forests, paler green of the grass and undergrowth in the clearings, silver glitter of the river as the obscuring mist evaporated. With shape and color came movement also: the horse herd began to stir and mill a little, and we could hear an occasional distant whicker and neigh. Then the women of the bok began to arise from their bedrolls and move about, blowing the banked camp fires into flame and setting water to heat for cha—we heard the distant clink of kettles—before waking the menfolk.

The Yi had often enough, by now, watched that camp awaken to know its routine. And they chose this moment for their assault: when there was light enough for them to see their objective clearly, but only the women were astir and the men still asleep. I do not know how the Yi signaled for the attack; I saw no banner waved and heard no trumpet blown. But the Yi warriors moved all in an instant and all together, with admirable precision. One moment, we watchers were looking down an empty hill slope at the bok in the valley; we might have been at the top of an empty amphitheater, looking down the unpeopled seat-shelves at a tableau on the distant stage. The next moment, our view was blocked by the slope’s being no longer empty, as if all the amphitheater’s shelves had magically and silently sprouted a vast audience in tier upon tier. Out of the grass and weeds and bushes downhill of us, there sprang erect a taller growth—leather-armored men, each with a bow already bent and an arrow already nocked to the string. So abruptly did it happen that it seemed to me that some of them had arisen from right before my face; I fancied I could smellthe half dozen nearest; and I think I was not the only one of us lurkers who did not have to repress an impulse to start up, too. But I only widened my eyes and moved my head enough to gaze about, seeing all around the valley amphitheater that suddenly visible and menacing audience, standing in thousands, in horseshoe rows and tiers—man-sized where they were near me, doll-sized farther away, insect-sized on the more distant valley slopes—all those ranks quilled and fringed and fuzzed with arrows aimed at a central point that was the stage-tableau encampment.

That had all happened in near silence, and far more quickly than it takes to tell. The next thing that happened—the first sound made by the Yi—was not a concerted, ululating battle cry, as a Mongol army would have made. The sound was only the weird, whishing, slightly whistling noise of all their arrows loosed at once, the thousands of them making all together a sort of fluttering roar, like a wind soughing along the valley. Then the sound, as it diminished away from us, was repeated, but fragmented and doubled into an overlapping noise of whish-whish-whish as the Yi, with great rapidity but no longer simultaneity, plucked from their quivers more arrows—while the first were still in flight—and nocked them and loosed them, meanwhile running full tilt toward the bok. The arrows went high against the sky and briefly darkened the blue of it, even as they dwindled in size from discernible sticks to twigs to slivers to toothpicks to whiskers, and then arced lazily over to become a dim, shady haze that drizzled down on the camp, looking no more dreadful than a gray patter of early morning rain. We watchers, being out behind and near to the archers, had seen and heard that first movement of the assault. But its targets—the standing women and horses and recumbent men in the bok—would probably have noticed nothing until the thousands of arrows began showering down and among and around and into them. No mere haze or fuzz at that extremity of their flight, the arrows were sharp-pointed and heavy and moving fast from their long fall, and many must have fallen upon flesh and struck to the bone.

And by then the ranks of the Yi nearest to the camp were running into the outskirts of it, still making no warning outcry and heedless of their own fellows’ arrows still falling, their swords and lances already flashing and stabbing and slashing. All the time, up where we were, we watched the Yi warriors still new-sprouting from our hillside and all the mountainsides around, as if the valley greenery was incessantly blooming over and over again into dark flowers that were standing archers, then shedding those and letting them run down toward the bok, then blossoming with more of them. Now there was also noise, louder than the wind-and-rain sound of the arrows—shouts of alarm and outrage and fright and pain from the people in the camp. When that noise began and surprise was no longer enjoined, the Yi also began to bellow battle cries as they ran and converged on their objective, now at last allowing themselves the yells that raise a warrior’s courage and ferocity and, he hopes, strike terror into his foe.

When all was clamor and confusion down in the valley, Bayan said, “I think now is the time, Marco Polo. The Yi are all running for the bok, and no more are springing up, and I see none held in reserve outside the combat area.”

“Now?” I said. “Are you sure, Orlok? I will be highly visible, standing here and waving a flag. It may give the Yi reason for suspicion and pause. If they do not drop me with an immediate arrow.”

“No fear,” he said. “No advancing warrior ever looks back. Get up there.”

So I clambered to my feet, expecting any moment to feel a thumping puncture of my leather cuirass, and hurriedly unfurled the silk from my lance. When nothing struck me down, I gripped the lance in both hands, raised the banner as high as I could, and began waving it from left to right and back again, the yellow shining bright in the morning light and the silk snapping briskly. I could not just wave it once or twice and then again drop prone, on the assumption that it had been seen from afar. I had to stand there until I knewthat the distant engineers had seen the signal and acted on it. I was mentally calculating:

How long will it take? They must be already looking this way. Yes, they would have known where we had to come from, at the rear of the enemy. So, from their hiding places, the engineers are peering in this direction. They are scanning this end of the valley, alert for a moving dot of yellow among all the ambient greenery. Now—hui! alalà! evviva!—they see the distant, tiny, wagging banner. Now they scramble back from their lookout positions to wherever they earlier secreted the brass balls. That may take them some moments. Allow a few moments for that. Very well, now they pick up their smoldering incense sticks and blow on them– ifthey had the good sense to have them already alight and waiting. Perhaps they did not! So now they must fumble with flint and steel and tinder … .

Allow a few more moments for that. God, but the banner was getting heavy. Very well, so nowthey have their tinder glowing, and now they are wheedling into flame a pile of dry leaves or something. Now they have each got a twig or an incense stick afire, and now they are bearing those over to the brass balls. Now they are touching the fire to the wicks. Now the wicks are burning and sputtering and the engineers are leaping up and running hard for safe distance … .

I wished them good luck and much distance and safe shelter, for I myself was feeling exceptionally exposed and visible and vulnerable. I seemed to have been flaunting my flag and my bravata and my person for an eternity already, and the Yi must be blind not to have spotted me. Now—how long had the Firemaster said?—a slow count of ten after the wicks were lit. I counted ten slow wags of my big, rippling yellow banner … .

Nothing happened.

Caro Gesu, what had gone wrong? Could it be that the engineers had misunderstood? My arms were weary of the waving, and I was sweating profusely, though the sun was still behind the mountains and the morning was not yet warm. Could it be that the engineers had waited to see my signal before even placingthe balls? Why had I entrusted this enterprise—and now my very life—to a dozen thickheaded Mongol rankers? Would I have to stand here, waving more and more feebly, for another eternity or two, while the engineers leisurely did what should have been done already? And how long after that would it be before they even began lackadaisically to rummage around in their belt purses for flint and steel? And during all that time, must I stand here flailing this extremely eye-inviting yellow flag? Bayan might be convinced that no warrior ever looked back voluntarily,but any of those Yi had only to stumble and fall, or be knocked sprawling, so that his head turned this way. He could hardly fail to see such an uncommon battlefield sight as I presented. He would yell to his companion warriors, and they would come pelting toward me, loosing arrows as they came … .

The green landscape was blurred by sweat running into my eyes, but I saw a brief flicker of yellow at the corner of my vision. Maledetto! I was letting the banner sag; I must hold it higher. But then, where the flick of yellow had been, there was now a puff of blue against the green. I heard a chorus of “Hui!” from my fellows still prone in the grass, and then they leapt up to stand beside me, cheering “Hui!” again and again. I let the flag and its lance drop, and I stood panting and sweating and watching the yellow flashes and blue smokes of the huo-yao balls doing what they had been intended to do.