Casca 18: The Cursed (5 page)

As it happened, when he awoke the position of his sack was not one of Casca's immediate concerns.

His main concern was to stay well out of sight, which he did by crouching behind the bed, while through the space beneath the curtain he stared at the elaborately studded boots which were all he could see of the man who stood in the outer room talking roughly to the
Ju family.

The boots were of blue velvet, studded with brass rivets, with thick rope soles. The heels carried spurs that came to a single long point. The boots were about the size that Casca would wear himself. The man's exceptional height was added to by the elaborate spiked knob atop his leather helmet. From his position Casca could hear a horse snorting and stamping outside in the street.

The visitor announced himself as the representative of the warlord Zhang Jintao who was visiting the village to consult with the community elders about circumstances in the countryside, and to exact tribute.

Casca heard
Ju Liqun bleat that the insatiable tax gatherers of the ever hungry and heartless emperor had already taken everything of value.

The collector answered with grunts of disbelief and disinterest, and
Liqun quickly abandoned his act and went to the counter. He produced a small rosewood box and handed over the pile of coins that it contained.

The
extortioner took the money with one hand while a backhand swing of the other arm swept Ju Liqun into a corner.

Songzhen
ran to the most obvious of the family hoards, a broken teapot atop the stove. She brought it to the tax gatherer and emptied its coins into his outstretched hand.

As the last coin fell she was hurled to join her husband on the floor.

"Stupid people," the collector snarled, "do you think we can protect you from your enemies without money?"

He drew his heavy sword and pointed it at the children, who cowered against the wall.

"Look at this sword. It is all that stands between you and the greedy emperor and the even greedier foreign devils. Without our swords to protect you, you would have long since starved. And now you try to cheat us of our just stipends."

Sword in hand, he started for the room where Casca was hiding. As he moved past the sack curtain
Songzhen's terrified shriek turned him for a moment, and he was just turning back when Casca's feet caught him in the chest as he came up from behind the bed and tumbled across its width, utilizing all the momentum of his somersault in the kick.

The
extortioner went down backward and his sword clattered to the floor.

Casca sprang from the bed and hurled himself onto the fallen man.

But he was not there, and Casca crashed heavily to the floor. The big man kept rolling, then sprang to his feet, his retrieved sword in hand.

"Oh shit," Casca panted, rolling frantically in his turn as the sword came down to cut deep into the floor where he had been.

"Ah ha," the warrior shouted, "a foreign devil is harbored here. I will have some questions once I have killed him."

With confidence he moved closer. As he raised the sword Casca shouted: "Zhang Jintao will have your head if you harm me."

The warrior paused. His stupid little eyes looked worried. How could a barbarian know Zhang Jintao? It did not occur to him that Casca had just heard the name from his own lips. How could a barbarian speak Chinese? "You know the warlord Zhang Jintao?"

Casca made a quick assessment of the man. A typical tax collector, pea sized brain in a giant body.
Easier to fight the brain while he could get away with it. "Take me to him," Casca demanded imperiously.

"I will take him your head," the warrior replied and commenced to raise his sword again. .

"And you will surely lose your own. I have a message for Zhang Jintao from the Baron Chung Wei."

Perfectly true
, Casca thought to himself.
I was Baron of Chung Wei under the Emperor Tzin. Sure, it was more than a thousand years ago, but I don't want to sow confusion and further addle this ape's head.

He smiled at the thought.

The tax gatherer was totally confused. Surely the barbarian was lying. But he could not risk his warlord's displeasure. And why was the foreign devil smiling? He motioned with his sword for Casca to precede him.

Casca stepped through the doorway and saw Deng
Ziyang jerk the edge of his hand across his throat in the universal gesture.

His mind was racing as he tried to weigh his chances of escape once outside the house, or the even less likely chance of his being able to outwit the warlord once he met him. The old man's gesture decided him, and he turned back toward the warrior, who was just a pace behind him, the point of his sword a few inches from Casca.

Casca pointed to his satchel, noting as he did so that it had been moved. "I have some valuables in this room," he said.

"Aha." The giant turned, and as he did Casca drew his knife and drove it into his kidneys with all his force, pushing the big man farther into the room.

He staggered and almost fell, but turned on his buckling knees and swung his heavy sword for Casca's throat.

But Casca had hung back. The sword missed, and Casca leaped forward to reach under the sword arm and drive his knife deep into the
extortioner's heart. He pitched forward onto the floor, a comical look of amazement on his stupid face.

Deng
Ziyang spoke from the doorway. "The only thing to do, or we were all dead. But now, my esteemed friend, we must move fast. We must hide the body of this stinking Korean, and his horse too."

"Korean?"
Casca asked.

"Of course Korean.
No Chinese is so big. Many warlords hire stupid Korean mercenaries as tax collectors. They hate Chinese anyway, so they are especially brutal to us.”

The old man's voice had taken on a note of authority and evident enjoyment to be involved in some action.

Casca realized that Deng was also enjoying the prospect of recovering from the corpse not only the Ju family's money, but everything that the collector had extorted from the villagers that day. Many of the village families would recover their tax contributions and reward Deng Ziyang for them.

Indeed,
Liqun and Songzhen had already removed the extortioner's belt and pouch, and were now busy taking off his clothes, while Deng Ziyang studied the contents of the pouch.

Casca picked up the shirt of heavy blue cotton and realized for the first time how lucky he had been with his two knife thrusts. The shirt was of two layers of cotton, lined with small scales of hardened leather to form a sort of
armor to protect the wearer from sword slashes.

Casca's thrust to the kidneys had gone under the length of the shirt, and his second thrust had found one of the gaps between the leather scales.

He shrugged his way into the shirt and found it a tolerable, if rather tight fit. He added the leg pieces and the small apron made of the same material. He took the belt and pouch from Deng and smiled to see the old man's face fall, then light up as Casca emptied the pouch on the floor. There was a knife in a sheath on the right side of the belt, the sword scabbard on the left.

By now
Ju had removed the studded boots and Casca stepped into them, the thick rope soles adding a couple of inches to his height. He put on the leather helmet and pulled the peak down over his eyes.

"Good enough to get by if I don't come face to face with any of the warlord's other men."

He crossed the small front room and went out into the street to look at the horse. It was a fine animal, in good condition, with a splendid saddle. A leather socket held a bamboo lance about eight feet long, and from the pommel hung a round cane shield and a face guard.

The guard was in the form of a mask, made of a number of small metal plates riveted together to resemble a man's face with eye slits, a nose pierce, and a hideously grinning mouth.

Casca went back into the Ju house. In the back room the naked body lay on the floor and Casca studied its bulk distastefully. Killing a man never troubled him, but he had an ingrained objection to the tedium of disposing of bodies. Especially when it had to be done in secret.

Dead bodies, he knew, were heavy; they stank; and they were almost impossible to carry unobserved even in the dark if they were lucky enough to be able to wait for darkness.

While he was pondering the problem he saw Songzhen returning to the room with a broad bladed Chinese cooking knife in her hand. Ju Liqun and Deng Ziyang struggled to turn the body onto its face, and she squatted beside it and began to slice through the backs of the knees. As she pushed the severed legs aside her husband wrapped them in pieces of sacking.

She wielded the cleaver like an
ax to cut through the hip joints and then went to work at the shoulders, and lastly chopped through the neck. She carried out the whole operation as disinterestedly as she might have butchered a pig.

The rumble of iron wheels on cobblestones alerted Casca that Deng had brought his two wheeled cart to the door, and he watched as the family carried out the sack wrapped dismembered body and stowed the individual bundles under the grass and manure where he himself had hidden the previous day.

They carried out the task in full view of the people passing in the street. Much smarter than waiting for darkness, Casca thought.

But what was he to do with himself, and the horse?

"Where will you bury the body?" Casca asked Deng.

“Bury?"

"Well, what are you going to do with it?"

"Why, just dispose of it like any other garbage, of course."

"Of course.
But where?"

"Anywhere.
Here. There. What difference?"

"You mean you're just going to throw the bits about the countryside?"

Deng's puzzlement showed in his face. "What else?" "Well, isn't that unhygienic?"

"Hygienic?"

The hell with it
, Casca thought.
What the hell do I care what they do with the bits
. Aloud he said: "And the horse?"

Again Casca saw the look of bewilderment at his questions, which, for Deng, were not questions.

"Horses are to ride."

Goddammit, the old bastard's right.

As the idea registered Casca was already on his way. In a moment he was out in the street untying the horse's reins and vaulting into the saddle.

He paused just long enough to take the face guard from the pommel and put it on. Then he dug his heels into the horse's flanks.
"Let's go, let's go. C'mon horse, we're getting out of here."

The horse reared slightly,
then took off at a fast canter that carried Casca to the village gates before he had time to think more about it.

The startled gate guards made as if to run into the road.
To leave the village any faster than a walk was a serious, punishable offense. Two more heavily armed men, whom Casca took to be part of the warlord's force, looked on amused.

One of the guards was moving, arm upraised, into the direct path of the horse, when some survival instinct alerted him that this horse and rider were not going to stop for anything.

He stopped stock still where he was, and as Casca thundered by, he used his upraised arm to salute.

"Who was that?" his startled comrade asked.

"You want to know, you run after him," was the reply, and the two guards tacitly agreed to forget about the masked rider.
So one of the warlord's men had left the village. So what? The sooner they all left, the better.

But Casca heard one of the other armed men laugh and shout to his comrade: "Hu Wei's in a hurry as usual."

Half a mile or so beyond the gates Casca slowed his mount to a comfortable canter.

The animal loped along with Casca enjoying the ride immensely. All around him the countryside unfolded. The road ran through groves of cypresses and teak trees. In what Europeans called the thirteenth century the great Kublai Khan, whose empire extended from the islands of the China Sea to Poland, had decreed that roads be planted with trees to provide shade in summer and covered with road markers for the benefit of
travelers when the ground might be blanketed with snow. His edict had been followed ever since, for the astrologers told that those who plant trees are rewarded with long life.

Small green fields were intersected by shallow irrigation ditches. Peasants in blue smocks and cone shaped hats were at work with draft animals. Low, steep mountains broke the sky in the near distance.

This was the road along which Casca had traveled from the river port of Tsungkow.

"Sure beats the
cowshit express." He laughed heartily.

A new plan was formulating in his mind as he rode the long slope to a crest in the road. He would ride all the way to
Tsungkow, where he would contact the Irish missionary priest who was the British consul's local intelligence agent. He would send a dispatch to Hong Kong that the situation had deteriorated drastically, that the village of Shou Chang had been occupied by the warlord Zhang Jintao, and the people were hacking each other to pieces over involvement with foreign devils, and that he had barely escaped with his life by killing one of the warlord's men and fleeing on his horse.

The consul would readily believe this
behavior of the Chinese and would accept Casca’s assessment that all foreigners were now in grave danger and that all hell was about to break loose.

In
Tsungkow he would sell the horse and saddle and Hu Wei's weapons and take a river boat to Chaochow to make his way eventually to Hong Kong.

And to hell with secrecy.
The intelligence mission was over. Once in Tsungkow he would abandon all pretense and declare himself a British soldier and so claim the protection provided by the treaties. He would travel in luxury to Hong Kong, charging the queen of England with the expense, and the emperor of China with his protection.

What he got for the horse and arms and what he still had in his pouch would nicely complement his sergeant's pay. And if the consul wanted to retrieve what he had cached at
Ju Liqun's house, well, Casca would be happy to lead an armed force to the village of Shou Chang to recover it.

There was going to be great strife between the village and Zhang Jintao over the disappearance of his tax collector, surely a sufficient uproar to satisfy the consul's predictions of dire troubles. And the
appearance in the village of a British army force might well set off enough fireworks to ignite the whole countryside and get the consul the attention from Whitehall that he so earnestly craved.

Yes, Casca thought, it should all work out pretty nicely for me.

The thought was still running through his mind when he suddenly found himself flying through the air over the horse's head.

And when he came to alongside the horse, still struggling to rise on a broken leg, his last thought rolled through his mind again.
But somehow this time it didn't seem to fit quite so neatly. There were all sorts of jagged edges to the idea, like the splintered pieces of bone he could now see showing through the flesh of his horse's leg.

And there seemed to be altogether too much noise.

Gradually the focus of Casca's mind cleared and he recalled the horse stumbling on the rutted roadway. Then he realized that he was not alone. Not at all alone, he discovered with a start as he recognized the noise as men's voices and the stamping of hooves, and saw the many horses' legs around where he lay in the road.

His horse snorted violently,
then lay still, and Casca realized that one of the riders who surrounded him had driven a lance through its heart.

A painful throb started up in his head, and another in his left wrist. Through the pain, the voices that he could hear started to become clear.

His eyes roved over the horses and riders before him. They were almost identical with the imperial knights who had greeted him at the Jade Gate on his first visit to China in the time of the Roman Emperor Nero.

The horses' heads and necks were protected by padded silk. Gilded rivet heads told Casca that the silk was lined with interlocking metal plates. The saddle flaps, great disks of studded leather, protected the flanks, and a padded silk crupper covered the hind parts. The bridles were of leather, ornamented and protected with numerous tiny lacquered metal shields. The riders' gloves were of the same material, three shields to each finger, a dozen or so on the back of the hand, and more on the cuffs, which extended up the arms over the sleeves of
armored shirts.

One rider was covered from neck to ankle in gold brocade embroidered in green and edged with black velvet. Hundreds of gilt rivet heads studded the brocade, securing the metal lining plates, and there were shoulder pieces in the shape of gilded dragons. His iron helmet was decorated with raised scrolls of gold, set with ruby, turquoise, and pink coral. Casca recalled that this indicated that he was an imperial baron, an official of the second class.

No mean thing to be a baron, even second class, thought Casca, who had once been one. There were only twelve thousand of them in all of China.

A long lance rested in a leather socket, beside it a round shield of studded leather, and a huge bow, the back of which was of horn, the ends bound in sharkskin. Casca remembered these bows, much larger than anything ever used in Europe, with an immensely heavy pull, extraordinary considering
the small size of the archers. The quiver held many arrows, most of them about three feet long with heavy iron heads.

There was only one modern touch
– the gun that hung in a holster alongside the lance. The gun barrel was about five feet long, but it ended in a pistol grip that would surely need two hands to hold. The end of the barrel was exposed, and there seemed to be no sight, but Casca could see that it was inlaid with flowers in gold and silver for its entire length.

A weapon or an ornament?
he wondered.

"You're sure he's one of
Zhang ]intao's extortioners?"

"The worst of them, Baron Ying.
His size is unmistakable, and we have many reports of that fiendish mask and that huge body in action. He's a foul animal. Not Chinese, thank the gods."

"What is he then?"

"Don't know. I've never seen his face. Some who have say he's Korean."

"Well, let's have a look."

There was a creaking of leather as one of the riders dismounted and the mask was jerked down from Casca's face.

"Blue eyes!
Does Zhang have a British devil for his tax collector?"

Casca looked around him. He tried to rise, but when he put his weight on his hands immense pain shot through his left wrist, taking his breath away.

He struggled to his feet. What the hell to say? "Greetings, noble baron," he said to the man he took to be the leader.

"Silence dog
," the leader snapped. He motioned to the man standing beside Casca. He went to his horse and returned with a long leather whip.

Fire seared through Casca's neck as the thong wound around it. He grabbed the thong and tugged, yanking the man off balance and pulling him toward him. With his good hand he clubbed him on the neck, knocking him to the ground. He drew his sword and backed away.

One man on foot, four men on horseback. Not good odds, but the only odds going.

With his left hand Casca tried to unbuckle Hu's heavy sword belt. If he could get his
Webley in his hand he could adjust the odds a little more favorably. It might be small and the barrel lack ornament, but he would back it against the baron's giant pistol.

But his injured left hand made no impression on the heavy buckle.

The leader looked at him in some amusement. "The dog has some spirit, anyway." He drew his lance and pointed it at Casca's chest. The other three riders drew their weapons and moved their horses to surround him, while the man he had felled got to his feet and faced him, sword in hand.

"Put down your sword," the leader said. "You are our prisoner."

"I prefer to die here," Casca answered, and slashed at the man on foot, who parried the blow skillfully and lunged at Caca. The mounted men looked on as they fought.

"But we are not going to kill you." The leader spoke easily. "We have need of what you can tell us, and you are going to tell us."

Torture had never been a strong point with Casca. He hated to have to suffer it, didn't even care to inflict it. Better to die on the sword.

But then he felt the jab of a lance at his back, not quite heavy enough to pierce his leather
armor.

He swung to face the horseman just in time to parry another thrust of the lance.

From behind a sword struck him on the shoulder, and again his armor saved him a cut. But the next lance thrust from behind found a gap in the leather scales over his shoulder blade and he felt a spasm of pain shoot through his right arm, almost enough to make him drop the sword.

He swung the heavy sword in a furious arc and drove back all of his attackers. He continued to swing the weapon in a figure eight, turning all the time so that none of the attackers came close.

Indeed they didn't try. They watched in amusement and waited for him to tire.

It wouldn't be too long, Casca realized as he felt warm blood oozing from his wounded back. He leaped at the man on foot, aiming a downswing of the blade at his head.

But the man retreated, then riposted skillfully, forcing Casca to yield ground to back into another lance and collect a wound in the buttock. He started forward only to be met by the skillful swordsman and be driven back onto the lance again.

Then another lance pinked him in the arm and the sword fell from his grasp.
Before he could reach for it the swordsman was standing over it.

In furious humiliation Casca drew Hu's knife and charged at the baron, intent on dragging him from his horse and killing him or being killed in the attempt.

But the swinging shaft of another rider's lance caught him in the throat and stopped him in mid rush.

He opened his hand so that the knife lay on his palm and swung overarm to hurl the knife at the baron's throat. But his wounds sent a spasm through the arm as he threw, and the knife went wild.

He stood glowering, four lances and a sword pointed at him.