Flood of Fire (68 page)

The sight sickened Kesri: in all his years of soldiering he had never seen a slaughter like this one. There were corpses everywhere, many of them with black scorch-marks on their tunics. On some, the clothes were still burning: looking more closely, Kesri saw that the fires were caused by a fault in the defenders' equipment. The powder for their guns was carried not in cartridges, as was the case with British troops, but in rolled-up paper tubes. These tubes were kept in a powder-pouch that was strapped across the chest. In the course of the fighting the flaps of these pouches would fly open, spilling powder over the soldiers' tunics; the powder was then set alight by the wicks and flints of their matchlocks.

Turning to one side, Kesri skirted around the road, to the shattered ramparts of the waterside battery. The Union Jack was flying everywhere now – on the ramparts of Chuenpee and across the
channel, on the fort of Tytock, which had been stormed in a similar fashion by another British landing-party.

Climbing through a breach in the wall, Kesri made his way into the nearby battery. Here too there was ample evidence of a massacre: bodies lay in piles around the craters where heavy shells had exploded; along the bottom of the ramparts lay the corpses of Chinese soldiers who had been felled by crumbling masonry. Plastered against the light-coloured stone of the walls, in bright, bloody splashes, were clumps of tissue and fragments of bone. Here and there splattered brains could be seen dribbling down like smashed egg-yolks.

Almost uniformly the clothes of the dead defenders were scorched with the marks of burning gunpowder. It took no great effort to imagine the panic among the defenders as the flames leapt from tunic to tunic.

In some of the gun-emplacements British marines and artillerymen were hard at work, rendering the big guns useless by hammering spikes into their touch-holes and knocking out their trunnions. Amongst them was a marine who often visited the wrestling pit at Saw Chow.

‘Damned fine set of guns they had here,' said the marine to Kesri, stroking the gleaming brass barrel of a massive eight-pounder. ‘Have to hand it to Johnny Chinaman – he learns fast. Some of these guns are perfect copies of our own long-barrels. We even found some thirty-two-pounders. All newly cast – lucky for us they haven't yet learnt how to use them properly. Look here.' He kicked a block of wood that was wedged under the barrel. ‘These jackblocks kept them from lowering the barrels – that's why so many of their shots went over us.'

In a corner, over a heap of corpses, hung a hastily scribbled sign, in English.

‘What does it say?' Kesri asked.

The marine grinned, wiping his face with the back of his hand: ‘One of our sarjeants put it up. It says: “This is the road to glory.”‘

Turning away, Kesri walked in the other direction. Ahead lay a sharp corner, and on rounding it he found himself in a dim, narrow passageway. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light he saw that there was a Chinese soldier at the far end of the corridor. Kesri
knew from his tall, plumed hat and his high boots that he was probably an officer. He had evidently suffered an injury, for there was a cleft in the armoured plates that covered his torso; blood was dripping through the cracks.

On catching sight of Kesri the soldier raised his heavy, two-handed sword. Kesri could tell from his crouched stance that he was gathering strength for one last charge.

Lowering his own sword, Kesri rested the tip on the ground and raised a hand, palm outward.

‘Surrender! Surrender!' he called out. ‘No harm will come …'

Kesri knew, as he was saying the words, that they were useless. He could tell from the expression on the man's face that even if he'd understood he would have chosen death over surrender. Sure enough, a moment later the man came rushing at Kesri, almost as though he were begging to be cut down, as indeed he was.

When he had pulled out his dripping sword, Kesri saw that the man's eyes were still open. For the few seconds of life that remained to him, the man fixed his gaze on Kesri. His expression was one that Kesri had seen before, on campaigns in the Arakan and the hills of eastern India – he knew it to be the look that appears on men's faces when they fight for their land, their homes, their families, their customs, everything they hold dear.

Seeing that expression again now it struck Kesri that in a lifetime of soldiering he had never known what it was to fight in that way – the way his father had fought at Assaye – for something that was your own; something that tied you to your fathers and mothers and those who had gone before them, back into the dimness of time.

An un-nameable grief came upon him then; falling to his knees he reached out to close the dead man's eyes.

*

On the island of Hong Kong, the sound of cannon-fire, muted though it was by distance, was still menacing enough to keep the gardeners away from the nursery. Through the morning Paulette worked alone, trying to stay busy, watering, pruning, digging – but it was impossible to ignore that distant thudding.

Over the last year Paulette had grown accustomed to hearing sporadic bursts of musketry and cannon-fire in the distance – but
this was different. Not only was it more prolonged, there was a concentrated menace in it, a savagery, that made it difficult to carry on as usual. It was hard not to think of death and dying; of spilt blood and torn flesh. In the midst of all that, caring for plants seemed futile.

Towards mid-morning, when the cannon-fire died away and a pall of smoke appeared on the northern horizon, Paulette broke off to sit in the shade of a tree.

What had happened? What did the smoke portend? She could not but wonder, although in some part of herself she did not really want to know.

In a while she spotted a figure coming up the path that led to the nursery. Training her spyglass on the slope she saw that the visitor was Freddie. She breathed a sigh of relief: with Freddie at least there would be no need to pretend to be cheerful, or brave, or anything like that. He would be content to be left to himself.

And her intuition was not wrong. Freddie greeted her from a distance, with a nod, and seated himself on one of the lower terraces of the nursery, with his back against the trunk of a leafy ficus tree.

For a while he sat motionless, staring northwards with his back to her. She too looked towards the distant clouds of smoke and when her eyes strayed back to him she saw that he had taken out his pipe. Something stirred in her and she went down and seated herself beside him, watching quietly as he arranged his implements on the grass.

‘You would like to smoke, eh Miss Paulette?'

She nodded. ‘I would like to try.'

‘You have not smoked before?'

‘No. Never.'

He turned to look at her, narrowing his eyes. ‘Why not?'

‘I had a fear of it,' she said.

‘Fear? Why?'

‘I feared becoming a slave to it.'

‘Slave, eh?' He gave her one of his rare smiles. ‘Opium will not make you slave, Miss Paulette. No. Opium will make you free.'

He inclined his head in the direction of the distant cloud of smoke. ‘It is they who are slaves, ne? Slaves to money, profit? They don't take opium but still they are slaves to it. For them
opium is just incense, lah, for their gods – money, profit. With opium they want to make whole world slaves for their gods. And they will win, because their gods are very strong, ne, strong as demons? When they win they too will see, only with opium can they escape these demons. Only smoke will hide them from their masters.'

In the meantime he had lit a long, sulphur-tipped match with a flint. Now he began to roast a tiny pellet of opium over the flame. When the pellet was properly scorched he handed his pipe to Paulette.

‘After opium catch fire I will put on dragon's eye' – he pointed to the tiny hole in the bowl of the pipe – ‘and you must suck hard. Smoke is precious, eh, must not waste.'

Once again he held the pellet to the flame and when it caught fire he placed it on the pipe's bowl. ‘Now!'

Paulette put her mouth to the stem and sucked in her breath, drawing the fumes into her body. The smoke poured in like a flood, and when the tide ebbed it left in its wake a startling stillness. Just as smoke drives away insects, these fumes too seemed to have expelled everything that carries a sting: fear, anxiety, grief, sadness, disappointment, desire. In their place was a serenely peaceful nullity, a pain-free void.

Paulette lay back against the slope, resting her head on the grass. In a while, when Freddie too had had his fill, he lay beside her, with his head pillowed on his arms, looking up into the dark shade of the tree.

‘Tell me,' said Paulette presently, ‘how did you learn to smoke?'

‘A woman taught me.'

‘A woman! Who was she?'

‘She was like me, lah – half-Indian, half-Chinese. Very beautiful – maybe too much.'

‘Why?'

‘Sometimes beauty is like curse, ne? For her men would kill, do anything. She needed guards – and I was one. I would bring opium for her to smoke, lah, and one day she ask me smoke with her; show me how, show me secrets. I had smoked before, but I never saw secrets till she show me.'

None of this seemed real to Paulette: it was as if a story had
taken shape in the smoke. In that dreamlike state it did not seem too intrusive to ask: ‘And you – did you love her?'

A long time seemed to pass before Freddie answered. Paulette did not know whether the passage of the minutes was real or not: it was as if the hands of the clock in her head had come to a halt and time had changed into something else.

By the time Freddie spoke again she had almost forgotten what she had asked.

‘Don't know, lah,' he said. ‘Can't say if it was love or no. Maybe it was like this smoke, ne, that is inside us now? It was stronger than feelings – like madness, or death.'

‘Why that? Why death?'

‘Because this woman, she belong my boss, she his concubine. He very big man; he “big brother” for many little brother, like me: his name Lenny Chan. Only if mad will a man love woman who belong to big brother. He will always find out, ne?'

‘Is that what happened?'

‘Yes, he find out and he send his men. They kill her – throw her in the river. Try to kill me too, but I get away. My mother hide me, but they find out, so they kill her too – instead of me.'

He laughed. ‘If Lenny Chan know I am here, I would not be alive for long. But he think I am dead, lah – does not know I have been reborn as Freddie Lee. Let us hope he does not find out.'

*

Jodu and Neel had climbed up the
Cambridge's
foremast early that morning, as soon as they learnt that a convoy of British ships was approaching the Tiger's Mouth. From there they had observed the action through a spyglass.

When the Chinese batteries on Chuenpee opened up they had cheered, confident that the British attack would be foiled. But all too soon, as the British began to bombard the fortifications on both sides of the channel, their confidence had turned to dismay. They had watched in disbelief as the walls of both Chuenpee and Tytock were torn open by cannonballs; their disbelief had deepened as they watched landing-parties setting off from the British steamers, in longboats and cutters, to launch frontal assaults on the gun-emplacements. Such was their vantage point that they had been able to observe the landing-parties as they swarmed over the battlements.
But not until the end did they spot the sepoys who had circled around the hill to attack the gun-emplacements from the rear. This detachment came into view only after the sepoys had come around the slope.

The slaughter that ensued was largely obscured by dust and smoke but Neel and Jodu still had a vivid sense of what was unfolding, because of the increasing number of bodies in the water. Yet the full horror of it only became clear when shoals of charred and blackened bodies began to drift into the channel.

Not one of the British ships, so far as they could see, had suffered the slightest damage.

The speed with which it happened was as astounding as the one-sidedness of the destruction. The assault started at 9 a.m. by Neel's watch; by 11 a.m. British flags were flying on both sides of the channel, atop Chuenpee as well as Tytock. The only remaining threat to the British was a squadron of war-junks commanded by Admiral Guan Tiaifei.

The junks had come under withering fire early in the operation. Outmatched, the squadron had retreated to a defensive position, at the edge of the bay that separated Chuenpee from Humen. Between them and the channel lay a sandbar – an impassable obstacle for the larger British vessels but not for those with a shallower draught.

The British fleet ignored the junks while they were occupied in the twin assault on Chuenpee and Tytock. Only when the forts had been stormed did the warships turn their attention to Admiral Guan's squadron: a number of armed cutters went swarming in for the kill.

But before the cutters could close in they were nosed aside by the gleaming iron hull of the
Nemesis
. Speeding past the boats the steamer went straight into the shallows until finally her cutwater bit into the sandbar. Then, with a fearsome shrieking sound a volley of projectiles took flight from her foredeck – these, Neel realized, were the weapons that Zhong Lou-si had asked about: Congreve rockets, the prototypes of which had been invented in Bangalore. Arcing through the air, the rockets arrowed into the junks, with devastating effect. One of them hit a gunpowder magazine and a junk exploded with a deafening roar. Then it was as if a tide of
fire had engulfed the creek: the entire Chinese squadron seemed to be ablaze.

Now gongs began to ring on the
Cambridge
, summoning the crew to their battle-stations. The entire outer tier of the Tiger's Mouth defences was now in British hands so it seemed inevitable that the victorious warships would proceed to attack the next set of fortifications – the batteries of Humen and North Wantung Island, where the
Cambridge
was stationed.